Friday, March 21, 2014
Ebooks by Roger Zelazny, Dennis Etchison, and a Huge Collection of Time Travel Stories Edited by the VanderMeers
iBooks has released an ebook edition of Roger Zelazny's short story collection THE LAST DEFENDER OF CAMELOT. This one includes some terrific mid-career and later work from Zelazny, including the title story, award-winners like "Home Is the Hangman" and "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai," and more. No reader of science fiction and fantasy should miss Zelazny's work -- he was one of the finest writers ever to come out of the field. You'll find the best of his earlier short fiction in the collection THE DOORS OF HIS FACE, THE LAMPS OF HIS MOUTH; that collection includes the classic "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (described by Theodore Sturgeon as "one of the most beautifully written, skillfully composed and passionately expressed works of art to appear anywhere, ever"), the title story, "The Man Who Loved the Faoli," and others. The earlier collection isn't available for the Kindle yet, unfortunately, but you can get it in trade paperback (a bit pricey, but worth every penny and more).
Also available now for Kindle is another collection of short horror stories by Dennis Etchison, THE DEATH ARTIST. This one includes gems like "The Dog Park" and "No One You Know." This is the third of his short story collections to be ebooked by Crossroad Press; the others are THE DARK COUNTRY and RED DREAMS. All three are brimful of grim dark delights.
And finally, we have THE TIME TRAVELER'S ALMANAC, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. This is a big (close to a thousand pages) collection of time travel fiction, and there is a LOT of good reading gathered here. That said, I'm of two minds about this one.
The quibble first. The strange thing about THE TIME TRAVELER'S ALMANAC is what it omits -- for instance, Heinlein's "All You Zombies" is absent, and there are no selections from Fritz Leiber's Change War stories, ditto Alfred Bester's "Disappearing Act" or "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," and nothing from Jack Finney, whose "I'm Scared" and "Where the Cluetts Are" (among others) would be ideal selections. Not only are these writers omitted, but unless I missed a long passage somewhere they go unmentioned in the preface and introduction. Strange gaps these, in an anthology meant to demonstrate the full range of the time travel story, and I'm surprised to see no recommended reading list on the contents page to fill those gaps.
End of quibble -- after all, no anthology includes everything and most of the omissions I mentioned will already be familiar to the sf audience. As I said up front, there's a LOT of good reading here -- classic stories like Kuttner & Moore's "Vintage Season," Matheson's "Death Ship," Sturgeon's "Yesterday Was Monday," and Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" are present, as well as work by writers like Connie Willis, Karen Haber, Gene Wolfe, Joe Lansdale, Norman Spinrad, Nalo Hopkinson, George R. R. Martin, Pamela Sargent, and many more. The VanderMeers have put together just the kind of great big grab-bag anthology I described a few months ago, and if you like time travel stories you should buy this book immediately; you'll find familiar classics and chances are you'll find quite a few good stories you'd missed reading before. A must for the sf shelf.
And in case you missed it, the VanderMeers put together an essential collection of weird fiction a couple of years ago. Titled, appropriately, THE WEIRD: A COMPENDIUM OF STRANGE AND DARK STORIES, the book covered a century of weird fiction with selections ranging from Lovecraft to Borges, and if you like dark fantasy this one too is a must.
Get the books mentioned here:
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Defender-Camelot-Roger-Zelazny-ebook/dp/B00J39D86W
http://www.amazon.com/Doors-His-Face-Lamps-Mouth/dp/0743413296
http://www.amazon.com/The-Time-Travelers-Almanac-VanderMeer-ebook/dp/B00FCQS2LQ
http://www.amazon.com/Weird-Compendium-Strange-Dark-Stories-ebook/dp/B006TXZD3G
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Artist-Dennis-Etchison-ebook/dp/B00J49UX28
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Country-Dennis-Etchison-ebook/dp/B00FWBJLB6
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Dreams-Dennis-Etchison-ebook/dp/B00GYOJCIC
Saturday, March 1, 2014
The Other Iron River, and Other Stories -- Expanded Edition
Just a brief commercial announcement:
I've just added quite a bit of material to my short story collection The Other Iron River, and Other Stories. The original ebook release contained three stories -- it now has fifteen, three of which are new to this edition.
If you're one of those who'd already bought it, Amazon should be sending out either the update or an email notice so that you can download the newer version some time in the next few weeks. If you haven't already bought it, now's the time. The Other Iron River will be left at its original price of 99 cents for a week; next Saturday (Mar 8) I'll be raising the price to 2.99, so grab it while it's cheap.
The pieces included are mostly short ghost, fantasy, and horror stories, and I like to think that some of these stories have a nice Jack Finney/Twilight Zone feel to them. Check them out if you get a chance, and I hope you'll enjoy them.
And here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/Other-Iron-River-Stories-ebook/dp/B0045JLQKA
Don't like ebooks? After I've played a bit more with formatting for CreateSpace, there will be a print edition of this title; once it's available, I'll announce it here.
And bests to all.
I've just added quite a bit of material to my short story collection The Other Iron River, and Other Stories. The original ebook release contained three stories -- it now has fifteen, three of which are new to this edition.
If you're one of those who'd already bought it, Amazon should be sending out either the update or an email notice so that you can download the newer version some time in the next few weeks. If you haven't already bought it, now's the time. The Other Iron River will be left at its original price of 99 cents for a week; next Saturday (Mar 8) I'll be raising the price to 2.99, so grab it while it's cheap.
The pieces included are mostly short ghost, fantasy, and horror stories, and I like to think that some of these stories have a nice Jack Finney/Twilight Zone feel to them. Check them out if you get a chance, and I hope you'll enjoy them.
And here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/Other-Iron-River-Stories-ebook/dp/B0045JLQKA
Don't like ebooks? After I've played a bit more with formatting for CreateSpace, there will be a print edition of this title; once it's available, I'll announce it here.
And bests to all.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Submitted for Your Approval: Rod Serling Ebooks
If you think of Rod Serling, you think first of The Twilight Zone. Chances are you think of Night Gallery next. And if you're old enough, or if you're one of those who pays more attention to the writing credits than to directors, you may think too of the film adaptations of Seven Days in May and the original Planet of the Apes, and of Serling's earlier works for television such as Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight.
You don't think books; Serling wrote television (and when he was at the top of his game, there were few writers in the medium who could equal him).
But yes, he wrote some books as well. Not many, but there were a few, and they're available again as ebooks. With one exception, those books were collections of short stories he based on his television work. Three of them were adaptations of some of his Twilight Zone episodes; two were adaptations of some of his scripts for Night Gallery. The exception was a collection of three novellas called The Season to Be Wary.
When I started buying paperback books, his collections of short stories adapted from Twilight Zone episodes were on the racks and I grabbed them immediately. To my mind, the TZ books suffered a little from what might be called Novelization Syndrome, in which a story written for one medium is translated to another and loses some of its energy in the translation. (If you've read playwright William Inge's first novel, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, you can see something similar operating there -- Inge's narrative sometimes reads more like stage direction and director's notes than prose fiction, as if he'd originally imagined the work as a play rather than a novel.) Serling had already conceived these stories and told them properly as short films and it seemed to me that they lost something in the move to narrative prose. But those books included adaptations of some of Serling's finest work for the series, among them "The Shelter," "Walking Distance," and "A Stop at Willoughby," and they retained enough of their impact to make the books well worth the time.
Serling didn't walk away from short fiction after doing the TZ adaptations. In 1967, he published a book of three novellas, The Season to Be Wary. The novellas were not adapted from television scripts, but they had the energy and the feel, the themes and the twists, of Serling's best work for Twilight Zone (and two of the three were adapted a couple of years later for segments in the pilot film that launched Night Gallery); these novellas show a writer becoming as comfortable working in narrative prose as he was working in screenplays, and as Mark Olshaker notes in his introduction to the recent ebook edition they offer a tantalizing glimpse of the future Serling might have had as a novelist.
Six Serling titles are currently available as ebooks; they are: Stories from the Twilight Zone; More Stories from the Twilight Zone; New Stories from the Twilight Zone; Night Gallery; Night Gallery 2; The Season to Be Wary. You can find all of them in Amazon's Kindle store; if you're not a fan of ebooks, you can get the three TZ titles as trade paperbacks at this time and chances are trade paperbacks of The Season to Be Wary and the Night Gallery collections will soon be available too.
If we're lucky, these volumes will be followed by ebooks gathering some of Serling's other work for television. In the late 50s, a collection was published that included Patterns, Old MacDonald Had a Curve, The Rack, and Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Serling's comments on each -- it would be nice to see that one available again. Ditto some of his other scripts, such as A Storm in Summer and Slow Fade to Black. (And I for one would pop instantly for an ebook containing both the television and the feature film scripts of Requiem for a Heavyweight with any available notes from Serling.) Contemporary audiences know Serling mostly through Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, but there's a lot of terrific work by Rod Serling that doesn't get as much air time these days as it should; here's hoping that we'll see some of those scripts restored to print as well.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Some Recent Short Story Releases
Every so often, book discussion threads take up the popularity (or unpopularity) of short stories. And there's no doubt that novels sell better, and take up far more space on the store racks. There's no book store in the town where I live; the local racks are at Wal-Mart and one of the large grocery stores, and when I scan them I seldom find any books of short stories at all unless one of Stephen King's collections has been reissued.
It wasn't always like this. When I started buying paperbacks, there were plenty of collections to be found. Among the writers whose short story collections graced the racks then were: Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Fredric Brown, Richard Matheson, Stanley Ellin, C. M. Kornbluth, Jerome Bixby, Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John O'Hara, Cornell Woolrich, Irwin Shaw, Richard Yates, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. You couldn't move in the paperback aisle without tripping over anthologies edited by Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl, or Damon Knight. And that's not considering volumes from publishers like Signet Classics offering collections from classic writers like Poe, Hawthorne, James, Twain, Kipling, and others. As I noted in an earlier post, this was the kind of selection to be found on the racks at one of the neighborhood pharmacies. To find large selections of short stories these days, you'll have to hit a good-sized bookstore.
But the advent of the ebook reader means that short stories are easier to find in ebook formats than they often are on most of your local racks. Among recent ebook releases, you'll find: The Best of Joe Haldeman, which includes a wonderfully creepy Vietnam War horror story called "Graves," and this story alone is worth the price of admission; Jack Finney's About Time, which gathers most of the best stories from his two earlier collections -- several of these stories would have made fine episodes of the original Twilight Zone, and while a few of its selections like "The Third Level," 'I'm Scared," and "Of Missing Persons" may be familiar, there's a lovely lesser-known short fantasy here called "Where the Cluetts Are" which is one of Finney's best; The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories, Nightshade & Damnations, and The Best of Gerald Kersh, all by Gerald Kersh -- Kersh is having a nice revival at the moment, with Faber Finds and Valancourt bringing back several long unavailable novels and short story collections as print and ebook releases; E-Reads has published two collections of John Brunner's short stories, From This Day Forward and Out of My Mind -- the latter includes some of Brunner's best dark short works, such as "The Totally Rich," "The Last Lonely Man," and "The Nail in the Middle of the Hand;" Dennis Etchison's first collection of short horror stories, the award winning The Dark Country; John O'Hara's New York Stories; James Everington's new collection of weird stories, Falling Over; two more volumes of Robert Silverberg's collected short fiction, Hot Times in Magma City and We Are for the Dark.
Novels may sell more copies, but there's a LOT of fine short fiction out there and it's easily available on any ebook reader.
It wasn't always like this. When I started buying paperbacks, there were plenty of collections to be found. Among the writers whose short story collections graced the racks then were: Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Fredric Brown, Richard Matheson, Stanley Ellin, C. M. Kornbluth, Jerome Bixby, Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight, Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John O'Hara, Cornell Woolrich, Irwin Shaw, Richard Yates, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. You couldn't move in the paperback aisle without tripping over anthologies edited by Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl, or Damon Knight. And that's not considering volumes from publishers like Signet Classics offering collections from classic writers like Poe, Hawthorne, James, Twain, Kipling, and others. As I noted in an earlier post, this was the kind of selection to be found on the racks at one of the neighborhood pharmacies. To find large selections of short stories these days, you'll have to hit a good-sized bookstore.
But the advent of the ebook reader means that short stories are easier to find in ebook formats than they often are on most of your local racks. Among recent ebook releases, you'll find: The Best of Joe Haldeman, which includes a wonderfully creepy Vietnam War horror story called "Graves," and this story alone is worth the price of admission; Jack Finney's About Time, which gathers most of the best stories from his two earlier collections -- several of these stories would have made fine episodes of the original Twilight Zone, and while a few of its selections like "The Third Level," 'I'm Scared," and "Of Missing Persons" may be familiar, there's a lovely lesser-known short fantasy here called "Where the Cluetts Are" which is one of Finney's best; The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories, Nightshade & Damnations, and The Best of Gerald Kersh, all by Gerald Kersh -- Kersh is having a nice revival at the moment, with Faber Finds and Valancourt bringing back several long unavailable novels and short story collections as print and ebook releases; E-Reads has published two collections of John Brunner's short stories, From This Day Forward and Out of My Mind -- the latter includes some of Brunner's best dark short works, such as "The Totally Rich," "The Last Lonely Man," and "The Nail in the Middle of the Hand;" Dennis Etchison's first collection of short horror stories, the award winning The Dark Country; John O'Hara's New York Stories; James Everington's new collection of weird stories, Falling Over; two more volumes of Robert Silverberg's collected short fiction, Hot Times in Magma City and We Are for the Dark.
Novels may sell more copies, but there's a LOT of fine short fiction out there and it's easily available on any ebook reader.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Jack Finney Finally in the US Kindle Store
If you're over a certain age, chances are you read Jack Finney when you were in high school. If memory serves, his wonderful short science fiction story "Of Missing Persons" could be found in high school literature textbooks for some time -- I know that's where I first read it. I don't know if that story is still being included, but if it isn't that's sad for a number of reasons, one of which is the thought of kids who maybe don't care to read all that much finding themselves caught up in a story that is perhaps the archetypal Twilight Zone episode.
In his non-fiction book on horror from 1950-1980, Danse Macabre, King spends a few highly complimentary pages on Finney, pointing out the affinity between Jack Finney's fantasies and Serling's television classic. And he's right -- if you want short stories that embody the feel of the Twilight Zone, I can't think of anyone better. Some come awfully close, but Finney nails it.
This isn't to say that Finney owes a thing to Serling. Finney was there first.
He was a writer with quite a range; his work included science fiction and fantasy classics like The Body Snatchers (better known by its movie title of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Time and Again, crime novels like Five Against the House and Assault on a Queen, and the marvelous short stories you'll find collected in About Time. His work was often filmed and chances are you've run across adaptations before (Good Neighbor Sam, Maxie, four movies based on The Body Snatchers, and the two crime novels already mentioned), and some day Robert Redford may actually get a film version of Time and Again into production.
In short work such as "Of Missing Persons," "I'm Scared," "The Third Level," "The Face in the Photo," "Where the Cluetts Are," and others, Finney sets his stage with perfectly ordinary surroundings and ordinary people and then introduces the fantastic in a matter-of-fact manner that makes everything that follows as convincing as a piece of solid reporting; it's an approach that you find in the best Twilight Zone episodes and in the work of other excellent fantasists like Richard Matheson.
Most of his crime novels are out-of-print, but here in the US, Simon & Schuster has kept a number of his fantasy titles available. The Body Snatchers, Time and Again and its sequel From Time to Time, Three by Finney (including Marion's Wall, The Night People, and The Woodrow Wilson Dime), and the selection of his short stories About Time have all been in print as trade paperbacks for years.
In November all these will finally be issued as ebooks here in the US. If you enjoy excellent fantasy, if you loved Twilight Zone, you'll want to grab these immediately if you haven't read them already.
I've only two criticisms about the Finney ebook releases: 1) They've been too long in coming, and 2) Where Finney's short fiction is concerned, I wish S&S was doing what Gateway has done for the UK Kindle releases and issued The Third Level and I Love Galesburg in the Springtime; the stories in About Time are taken from those collections, and it would have been nice to see both of those released for Kindle here in the US as well as in the UK. But Finney's work is finally coming to Kindle, and that's great news for any fan of sf and fantasy.
And a reminder: this month will see the release in both ebook and paperback formats of two short story collections by Gerald Kersh. Faber Finds will release The Horrible Dummy, and The Best of Gerald Kersh (Valancourt has already reissued the excellent Nightshade and Damnations in paperback with an ebook in the works but not yet available).
In his non-fiction book on horror from 1950-1980, Danse Macabre, King spends a few highly complimentary pages on Finney, pointing out the affinity between Jack Finney's fantasies and Serling's television classic. And he's right -- if you want short stories that embody the feel of the Twilight Zone, I can't think of anyone better. Some come awfully close, but Finney nails it.
This isn't to say that Finney owes a thing to Serling. Finney was there first.
He was a writer with quite a range; his work included science fiction and fantasy classics like The Body Snatchers (better known by its movie title of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Time and Again, crime novels like Five Against the House and Assault on a Queen, and the marvelous short stories you'll find collected in About Time. His work was often filmed and chances are you've run across adaptations before (Good Neighbor Sam, Maxie, four movies based on The Body Snatchers, and the two crime novels already mentioned), and some day Robert Redford may actually get a film version of Time and Again into production.
In short work such as "Of Missing Persons," "I'm Scared," "The Third Level," "The Face in the Photo," "Where the Cluetts Are," and others, Finney sets his stage with perfectly ordinary surroundings and ordinary people and then introduces the fantastic in a matter-of-fact manner that makes everything that follows as convincing as a piece of solid reporting; it's an approach that you find in the best Twilight Zone episodes and in the work of other excellent fantasists like Richard Matheson.
Most of his crime novels are out-of-print, but here in the US, Simon & Schuster has kept a number of his fantasy titles available. The Body Snatchers, Time and Again and its sequel From Time to Time, Three by Finney (including Marion's Wall, The Night People, and The Woodrow Wilson Dime), and the selection of his short stories About Time have all been in print as trade paperbacks for years.
In November all these will finally be issued as ebooks here in the US. If you enjoy excellent fantasy, if you loved Twilight Zone, you'll want to grab these immediately if you haven't read them already.
I've only two criticisms about the Finney ebook releases: 1) They've been too long in coming, and 2) Where Finney's short fiction is concerned, I wish S&S was doing what Gateway has done for the UK Kindle releases and issued The Third Level and I Love Galesburg in the Springtime; the stories in About Time are taken from those collections, and it would have been nice to see both of those released for Kindle here in the US as well as in the UK. But Finney's work is finally coming to Kindle, and that's great news for any fan of sf and fantasy.
And a reminder: this month will see the release in both ebook and paperback formats of two short story collections by Gerald Kersh. Faber Finds will release The Horrible Dummy, and The Best of Gerald Kersh (Valancourt has already reissued the excellent Nightshade and Damnations in paperback with an ebook in the works but not yet available).
Saturday, August 24, 2013
A Few Words about Elmore Leonard
Many moons ago, Dean Koontz published a book called How to Write Best-Selling Fiction. At the end of that book, Koontz included a chapter discussing writers any aspiring novelist was advised to study. There were a lot of prominent names in that chapter, and some names that were not yet nearly as prominent as they became later; one of them was Elmore Leonard.
At that time, Leonard was not yet a best-seller, but it was clear that he had all the makings. In his comments on Leonard, Koontz said (if memory serves) that one day some smart publisher would lay a large stack of dollars on Leonard and ask him to deliver the ultimate novel about city street types, and Leonard would deliver because there was nobody better at that kind of book.
I hadn't yet read Leonard then, and didn't know the name, but I recognized some of his western titles (Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, "3:10 to Yuma"). Not long after that, Avon Books gave a push to the paperback release of Leonard's City Primeval; I picked up a copy and read a few chapters. A few chapters was enough to get hooked, and Leonard went on the buy-this-guy-on-sight list, and with good reason.
There's a story, can't recall where I saw it, about Leonard's time as an advertising copywriter; he'd listen to customers -- in this case people who actually drove the pickup truck being advertised -- and a customer made a comment Leonard wanted to use in the ads, but they wouldn't let him: "You don't wear that sonofabitch out -- you get tired of looking at it and you go buy a new one." Leonard had an ear for good dialogue right from the start, and he excelled at creating it. Leonard's ear for dialogue is unsurpassed, and his people -- good guys and bad guys alike -- are so bloody interesting that you have to hang around to see what they do next. In the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino there's a line that sums up quite a few of Elmore Leonard's characters: "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have fucked with? That's me." That's also a hefty number of Leonard's people, hero and villain, male and female alike. And unlike so many fictional heroes and villains who seem to have more than a touch of comic book about them, Leonard's people -- from the leads down to the two-line walk-ons -- feel like the kind of people you'd find sitting on the next bar stool. They feel like people you see every day on the street and you never really notice them unless you cross them somehow. And Jeez, are they fun to watch.
If you've not read his novels yet, chances are you've caught some of the films, among them Jackie Brown (from the novel Rum Punch), Get Shorty, Mr Majestyk, Out of Sight, and Hombre. Good as those movies are, the books are better, fast and lean and often funny and scary at the same time, and never dull, and Leonard brought this off with amazing regularity over a career that spanned nearly 60 years.
When John D. MacDonald's work began to appear in hardcover, there were several quotes that appeared regularly on the dust jackets. One was from Gerald Walker, saying that MacDonald "knows everything dangerous that there is to know about people." Another was from Kurt Vonngut, who said that "To diggers a thousand years from now . . . the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen." Both quotes could, I think, be fairly applied to the work of Elmore Leonard as well.
RIP.
At that time, Leonard was not yet a best-seller, but it was clear that he had all the makings. In his comments on Leonard, Koontz said (if memory serves) that one day some smart publisher would lay a large stack of dollars on Leonard and ask him to deliver the ultimate novel about city street types, and Leonard would deliver because there was nobody better at that kind of book.
I hadn't yet read Leonard then, and didn't know the name, but I recognized some of his western titles (Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, "3:10 to Yuma"). Not long after that, Avon Books gave a push to the paperback release of Leonard's City Primeval; I picked up a copy and read a few chapters. A few chapters was enough to get hooked, and Leonard went on the buy-this-guy-on-sight list, and with good reason.
There's a story, can't recall where I saw it, about Leonard's time as an advertising copywriter; he'd listen to customers -- in this case people who actually drove the pickup truck being advertised -- and a customer made a comment Leonard wanted to use in the ads, but they wouldn't let him: "You don't wear that sonofabitch out -- you get tired of looking at it and you go buy a new one." Leonard had an ear for good dialogue right from the start, and he excelled at creating it. Leonard's ear for dialogue is unsurpassed, and his people -- good guys and bad guys alike -- are so bloody interesting that you have to hang around to see what they do next. In the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino there's a line that sums up quite a few of Elmore Leonard's characters: "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have fucked with? That's me." That's also a hefty number of Leonard's people, hero and villain, male and female alike. And unlike so many fictional heroes and villains who seem to have more than a touch of comic book about them, Leonard's people -- from the leads down to the two-line walk-ons -- feel like the kind of people you'd find sitting on the next bar stool. They feel like people you see every day on the street and you never really notice them unless you cross them somehow. And Jeez, are they fun to watch.
If you've not read his novels yet, chances are you've caught some of the films, among them Jackie Brown (from the novel Rum Punch), Get Shorty, Mr Majestyk, Out of Sight, and Hombre. Good as those movies are, the books are better, fast and lean and often funny and scary at the same time, and never dull, and Leonard brought this off with amazing regularity over a career that spanned nearly 60 years.
When John D. MacDonald's work began to appear in hardcover, there were several quotes that appeared regularly on the dust jackets. One was from Gerald Walker, saying that MacDonald "knows everything dangerous that there is to know about people." Another was from Kurt Vonngut, who said that "To diggers a thousand years from now . . . the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen." Both quotes could, I think, be fairly applied to the work of Elmore Leonard as well.
RIP.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
After Re-Reading Some Stories by Robert Silverberg...
For a long time science fiction and fantasy lived in the short forms. These days, novels get the press and the attention, but for quite a few years, sf & fantasy were creatures of the pulp magazines, and most of the prominent writers came out of the magazines. Out of the short forms. Many of the writers we regard as the giants in sf began their careers in the short fiction markets. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, C. M. Kornbluth, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Philip K. Dick....
And Robert Silverberg. After too much time away from his work, I had occasion to revisit some of the short work reissued by Subterranean Press and Open Road. I hadn't read some of these in nearly twenty years -- they hold up wonderfully, and a number of the stories I revisited are even better than I remembered.
Silverberg got his start in the 1950s, writing for the pulps, and by his own admission a lot of the earliest work wasn't particularly memorable; but with stories like "Warm Man" and "Road to Nightfall" and others, that began to change, and soon he was a writer to watch. Silverberg was extraordinarily prolific, producing novels and short stories at an unbelievable pace -- that would mean nothing if the stories were simply forgettable hack work, but consider some of the novels and stories that he published in the 60s and 70s: Thorns, Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, Up the Line, Hawksbill Station, To Live Again, The Second Trip, The Book of Skulls, "To See the Invisible Man," "Flies," "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," "Passengers," The Masks of Time, A Time of Changes, Nightwings, "To the Dark Star," "Sundance," "Good News from the Vatican," "Born with the Dead," Tower of Glass, and so many more. If you're familiar with the sf of the period, you know those titles.
Silverberg produced some of the darkest gems in all of science fiction. In "Passengers," the earth has been invaded by aliens; silent and invisible they float among us and for their amusement they ride their helpless human hosts, taking them over and controlling their actions until they weary of them and release them and move on to others. In "Flies," Silverberg's entry in Harlan Ellison's landmark anthology Dangeorus Visions, an astronaut returns to earth; the victim of a fatal accident in space, he has been revived and reconstructed by aliens who send him back changed, a cold observer with an intense interest in pain. The Book of Skulls presents four students seeking a cult in the desert southwest, a cult that may hold the secret to immortality -- but only groups of four may begin the path, and immortality is granted to only one; the other three will not survive. Dying Inside gives us David Selig, whose only real connection to others is his ability to read minds, and his ability is quickly fading.
Silverberg's output wasn't limited to fiction; he wrote non-fiction as well, including The Realm of Prester John, The Mound Builders, Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, and If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem. NonStop Press has recently published his book of essays Reflections and Refractions and the autobiographical Other Spaces, Other Times.
For an example of Silverberg at the top of his form, check out the recent ebook edition of Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas and read "Born with the Dead." It's set in a world in which the dead can be restored to life to walk the world again, keeping to their own society of the revived and remaining aloof from the living; the protagonist has lost his wife -- she has been revived and he will not accept that she is no longer a part of his life, and he begins to intrude into the deads' society, a society that will not suffer intrusion. "Born with the Dead" was the centerpiece of the special Robert Silverberg issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1974. It's one of his strongest stories, and once you've read it, you'll want more.
One nice thing about ebooks is that "more" is easy to come by. Subterranean Press is in the process of issuing Silverberg's collected short fiction, both in print and in ebook, and the ebook editions of these volumes are very modestly priced. Most of Silverberg's novels are available as ebooks as well. Silverberg's body of work, spanning nearly six decades (his most recent book, Tales of Majipoor, was published in May), is one of the most impressive in modern science fiction.
For a nice appreciation of Silverberg, check out Barry Malzberg's chapter on him in Breakfast in the Ruins (a book well worth the time of any aficionado of sf); in that chapter, Malzberg says that Silverberg's work was proof that you could " ...write science fiction, yes, rigorous, well-plotted, logically extrapolative science fiction but bring to it the full range of modern literary technique....You really could do this stuff to the highest level of literary intent and it would be better science fiction precisely because of that." Spot on.
In speaking of Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish wrote that Sturgeon was the finest conscious artist that science fiction ever produced. If there are other contenders for that title, Robert Silverberg is one of them. If you haven't read him, pick up the recent ebook edition of Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas, or the Subterranean Press volumes of his collected short fiction, or Dying Inside, or The Book of Skulls, or Downward to the Earth, and enjoy the fruits of one of the great careers in science fiction.
And Robert Silverberg. After too much time away from his work, I had occasion to revisit some of the short work reissued by Subterranean Press and Open Road. I hadn't read some of these in nearly twenty years -- they hold up wonderfully, and a number of the stories I revisited are even better than I remembered.
Silverberg got his start in the 1950s, writing for the pulps, and by his own admission a lot of the earliest work wasn't particularly memorable; but with stories like "Warm Man" and "Road to Nightfall" and others, that began to change, and soon he was a writer to watch. Silverberg was extraordinarily prolific, producing novels and short stories at an unbelievable pace -- that would mean nothing if the stories were simply forgettable hack work, but consider some of the novels and stories that he published in the 60s and 70s: Thorns, Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, Up the Line, Hawksbill Station, To Live Again, The Second Trip, The Book of Skulls, "To See the Invisible Man," "Flies," "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," "Passengers," The Masks of Time, A Time of Changes, Nightwings, "To the Dark Star," "Sundance," "Good News from the Vatican," "Born with the Dead," Tower of Glass, and so many more. If you're familiar with the sf of the period, you know those titles.
Silverberg produced some of the darkest gems in all of science fiction. In "Passengers," the earth has been invaded by aliens; silent and invisible they float among us and for their amusement they ride their helpless human hosts, taking them over and controlling their actions until they weary of them and release them and move on to others. In "Flies," Silverberg's entry in Harlan Ellison's landmark anthology Dangeorus Visions, an astronaut returns to earth; the victim of a fatal accident in space, he has been revived and reconstructed by aliens who send him back changed, a cold observer with an intense interest in pain. The Book of Skulls presents four students seeking a cult in the desert southwest, a cult that may hold the secret to immortality -- but only groups of four may begin the path, and immortality is granted to only one; the other three will not survive. Dying Inside gives us David Selig, whose only real connection to others is his ability to read minds, and his ability is quickly fading.
Silverberg's output wasn't limited to fiction; he wrote non-fiction as well, including The Realm of Prester John, The Mound Builders, Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, and If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem. NonStop Press has recently published his book of essays Reflections and Refractions and the autobiographical Other Spaces, Other Times.
For an example of Silverberg at the top of his form, check out the recent ebook edition of Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas and read "Born with the Dead." It's set in a world in which the dead can be restored to life to walk the world again, keeping to their own society of the revived and remaining aloof from the living; the protagonist has lost his wife -- she has been revived and he will not accept that she is no longer a part of his life, and he begins to intrude into the deads' society, a society that will not suffer intrusion. "Born with the Dead" was the centerpiece of the special Robert Silverberg issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1974. It's one of his strongest stories, and once you've read it, you'll want more.
One nice thing about ebooks is that "more" is easy to come by. Subterranean Press is in the process of issuing Silverberg's collected short fiction, both in print and in ebook, and the ebook editions of these volumes are very modestly priced. Most of Silverberg's novels are available as ebooks as well. Silverberg's body of work, spanning nearly six decades (his most recent book, Tales of Majipoor, was published in May), is one of the most impressive in modern science fiction.
For a nice appreciation of Silverberg, check out Barry Malzberg's chapter on him in Breakfast in the Ruins (a book well worth the time of any aficionado of sf); in that chapter, Malzberg says that Silverberg's work was proof that you could " ...write science fiction, yes, rigorous, well-plotted, logically extrapolative science fiction but bring to it the full range of modern literary technique....You really could do this stuff to the highest level of literary intent and it would be better science fiction precisely because of that." Spot on.
In speaking of Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish wrote that Sturgeon was the finest conscious artist that science fiction ever produced. If there are other contenders for that title, Robert Silverberg is one of them. If you haven't read him, pick up the recent ebook edition of Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas, or the Subterranean Press volumes of his collected short fiction, or Dying Inside, or The Book of Skulls, or Downward to the Earth, and enjoy the fruits of one of the great careers in science fiction.
Ebook volumes so far of Silverberg's collected short stories
Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas
And in old business:
Earlier posts in this blog noted that Gerald Kersh reissues would be coming from Faber Finds. Sergeant Nelson of the Guards is available for pre-order in Amazon's US Kindle store, and the short story collections The Best of Gerald Kersh and The Horrible Dummy & Other Stories were listed for pre-order just this morning (Aug 4). Don't miss 'em. And don't miss the Kersh titles from Valancourt Books -- Fowlers End, and Nightshade & Damnations.
A number of John D. MacDonald titles that weren't in the initial flood of non-TravisMcGee-series titles this past June will be released as ebooks in January; among them are Cape Fear (aka The Executioners), A Flash of Green, The Neon Jungle, Condominium, and The Last One Left. There are still a number of MacDonald's books that haven't been ebooked, but at this rate it looks like there's a good chance that all of JDM's titles may be available as ebooks by the end of 2014.
And a brief commercial: my new short story "Wasps" is in the Amazon Kindle store. Find it at
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