Book Review: Lore of the Witch World

Book Review: 'Lore of the Witch World' by Andre Norton

4 / 5 Stars

'Lore of the Witch World' (223 pp) is DAW Book No. 400 / UE1634. It was published in September, 1980 and has cover art by Michael Whelan.

This is a compilation of novelettes and short stories Norton wrote from 1972 - 1972 and published in anthologies like the Flashing Swords series.

I won't give a synopsis of each entry in the compilation, save to say it includes 'Spider Silk', 'Sand Sister', 'Falcon Blood', 'Legacy from Sorn Fen', 'Sword of Unbelief', 'The Toads of Grimmerdale', and its sequel, 'Changeling'.

Needless to say, all of the stories take place in the landscape of the Witch World, and all feature women as protagonists, albeit by no means in the 'chain mail bikini' mode. 

The women protagonists in these stories often are introverts and outcasts of one sort of another, and unsure about how to use their ESP gifts; plots usually hinge on a confrontation of some kind which forces the heroine to free her latent psychic powers in the face of grave peril. 

Perhaps reflecting the fact that much of Norton's fiction primarily was intended for the Young Adult market, these confrontations are completely bloodless (any violence that takes place is either simply alluded to in a vague manner, or depicted off-screen). The contests between the protagonist and her enemies are waged psychically, and often are rather tedious.

The stories are well-written, although the reader will need to be prepared for sometimes stilted language (women are not impregnated, but 'Filled'; people are 'wrath-hot'; ESP is referred to as a Talent; etc.). To be fair, this was commonplace in fantasy writing during the 70s, and Norton was not the worst offender. 

Summing up, while there is a note of mildness in these stories, they work well as examples of fantasy writing from a time when the genre was starting to gain momentum and move into styles more varied than the pastiches of sword-and-sorcery, or Tolkein, that were the mainstays of most published material. Fans of Norton's Witch World realm will want to have a copy of this book in their library.

Doom 2099 double-page spread

Doom 2099
Double-paged spread by Pat Broderick, penciller, John Beatty, inker, John Costanza, letters, and Christine Scheele, colorist 
from Doom 2099, issue 3, March 1993, Marvel Comics Group

Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus, Volume 1

Savage Sword of Conan
The Original Marvel Years Omnibus
Volume 1
by Roy Thomas

Well, there went a big chunk of my 2018 Tax Return..........

So, here's the deal: if you want the contents of the Marvel / Curtis Savage Sword of Conan (SSOC; 235 issues, August 1974 - July 1995) black-and-white comic magazine, as well as the first five issues of the black-and-white comic magazine Savage Tales (May 1971 - July 1974) that featured Conan and other REH characters, you can:

-try and buy more-or-less intact copies of the original magazines from dealers, often for very steep prices;

-purchase the 22 trade paperback compilations of SSOC issued by Dark Horse from 2008  - 2016;

-or purchase this new 'Omnibus' collection from Marvel, which apparently is going to compile all 235 issues of SSOC, and the first five issues of Savage Tales.

Well, I decided to spend some money on Omnibus Vol. 1. 

The photo below should give you an idea of how it looks size-wise compared to the original magazine and a representative volume of the Dark Horse compilation:

At 1072 pages, Vol. 1 includes the contents of the first five issues of Savage Tales, as well as SSOC 1 - 12 and the cover art from a reprint package 'Super Special' from the Summer of 1975.

Along with the comics, you get the covers in full color; the letters pages; the advertisements; and the photoessays that were used to pad out each issue.

As with all the Marvel 'Omnibus' books, this one is well-made, with glossy paper, crisp reproductions, and a strong binding that is necessary for a book that weighs 6 pounds.

In his Introduction, Roy Thomas reminiscences about the creative and editorial chaos that accompanied the creation of Savage Tales and then SSOC, chaos occasioned by the sometimes capricious and arbitrary decision-making processes of editor Stan Lee.

But there's no denying that these early issues were the best in the series. Now that you can see the artwork reproduced on glossy paper, it's all the more impressive what talents like Barry Windsor-Smith, Alfredo Alcala, and John Buscema (among others) were able to bring to each issue.

Thomas states that Lee's major ambition with SSOC was to compete with the Warren magazines, and in this regard, Lee succeeded. Indeed, I would make the case that comics publishing as a whole has yet to match the caliber of the work presented in those early issues of SSOC.

The verdict ? Scrape your dollars together, eat nothing but Ramen for a week if you have to, and grab a copy of Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus Volume 1. 

Because the sad truth is that the speculators will buy up their copies, and a year from now, when the book is out of print, they will show up at amazon selling the book for several hundred dollars. It's best to act now, rather than later.............

Weird doings at Warren Publishing

Weird Doings at Warren Publishing

After finishing 'James Warren: Empire of Monsters', I did some additional online digging into the circumstances of the lawsuit filed by Bill DuBay's nephew Ben DuBay against Stephen King.

This in turn led me to the '20th Century Danny Boy' blog, hosted by Daniel Best. Best has somehow gotten hold of some of the depositions associated with the lawsuit, and posted them to his blog.

One of the more interesting of these depositions is that of former Warren magazines editor and writer Jim Senstrum.

For those of you who don't want to scroll though the lengthy deposition transcript, here are some provocative statements from Senstrum regarding how things really worked at the Warren offices in the 70s and early 80s.............. 

The scene: it's January 6, 2018, and Senstrum is being questioned first by Vincent Cox, the lawyer representing the Defendant, Stephen King, and then by Ben DuBay, representing himself as the Plaintiff. 

(My remarks are in italics.)

Theft in the office:

Cox: And why were you, as you say, canned ?

Senstrum: Well, it was very embarrassing and it's still a sore point with me today. Dubay had accused me of stealing his wallet. Dubay had a habit of leaving his wallet all over the place. He often put it into his desk drawer. I've seen him leave it at restaurants and -- anyway, he was absolutely certain that I had stolen his wallet and I couldn't believe it. My jaw dropped down to the floor. I could -- I was absolutely gobsmacked and I couldn't believe it then and he fired me. I was so shocked I couldn't even say anything. I said, "Listen, that's not something I do."

And a couple of days later he came back and apologized. I don't know if he ever believed that I did it or not, but there was also -- at that time there was a woman in the front office who was stealing money from -- fans and readers of Warren Publishing would buy things through -- in the back there there was a catalog of things that he sold: Posters, toys, back issues of magazines and things like that. And back then it wasn't unusual, since it was just a couple of dollars or something like that, for people to put money into -- into the envelope and then they would send them the magazine or whatever the order.

Well, this woman who was -- it was her job to open up mail and, you know, take the orders and hand that off to the guys in the back – apparently was stealing. And the way they caught her was they sent her some money themselves. They mailed something to themselves and they caught her and fired her.

I have no idea if she had anything to do with it, if it was the help or Bill just lost his damn wallet. I don't know. He did apologize a couple days later and say, "Why didn't you punch me in the face," and believe me I really wanted to, but I did not.

Bill DuBay's Christmas Bonus:

Senstrum: I remember the episode -- he (i.e., DuBay) told me that he was expecting this Christmas bonus. He was so looking for this Christmas bonus that Jim Warren was going to give him and Jim Warren -- it came Christmastime, he took him into his office and he opened up a mini fridge and he gave him some bacon and this was his Christmas bonus and Bill was incensed.

He was so angry at him and I don't know if -- I know that there are -- he -- after that he began – I presume it was just facetious, but he was telling me about plots on how he could kill Jim Warren and he said, "Well, I can take a bolt out of his chair or maybe I can put something in his food or something and" -- never seriously, I must tell you, but that is how he put it, his anger was that much.

Work-Life Balance at Warren magazines:

Ben DuBay: Thank you.

So just to confirm, you did have a beef with James Warren?

Senstrum:  To the extent that he was, I thought, abusing his artists and writers. I know that there was at least one artist who he decided not to pay, the fellow had died and that is why Steve Ditko left because he refused to pay Rocco -- I forget his last name.

He refused to pay him -- since he died he refused to pay him for the story. And I had also seen what Jim Warren, himself, had done with the production department at Warren by making people work late hours for no extra pay and it was -- it was an abusive system there.

Jim Warren could be very charming, but he could also be kind of a dick.


Fear and Loathing from the unauthorized reworking of 'A Boy and His Dog':

Ben DuBay: Now, did contact Harlan Ellison by phone before or after you quit?

Senstrum: After. Bill would not let me near the phone and I was not going to use a Warren phone. Rumor was that the Warren phones were bugged and I was not going to call from there. So when I got my last check, I went to the bank, I cashed it and I went over to Grand Central Station, I went to a pay phone and I called Harlan then.

It was about three or four days after his initial getting a hold of Budd Lewis, who then contacted me right away.


The last days of Warren magazines:

Cox: Q: Okay. And do you have any understanding as to why it was that Warren Communications went bankrupt?

Senstrum: As I understand it, it is not the story that Jim Warren tells everybody about him being sick.

I don't know for a fact, but I can only tell you what Bill Dubay told me and that is that Jim Warren, frankly, just got bored and he stopped coming in and -- he enjoyed having parties on his -- I think it was in Long Island and I remember the story about him spending $10,000 in fireworks. Again, all of this from Bill Dubay himself. And he would miss meetings with distributors.

I think he was more interested in maybe moving into movies and things like that. But as far as I can determine, he was just bored and -- I mean, when I was hired as editor for the -- and Bill was moved up to assistant publisher, I never saw him not once. He never came into the office.

Book Review: James Warren: Empire of Monsters

Book Review: 'James Warren: Empire of Monsters' by Bill Schelly

5 / 5 Stars

'James Warren: Empire of Monsters' (352 pp) was published by Fantagraphics Books in March, 2019. It contains lots of black-and-white photographs, and an eight-page, full-color insert of the covers of various Warren magazines.

Born the only child into a Russian-Jewish family in Philadelphia in 1930, James Warren Taubman grew up with an ambition to make a name for himself. And despite some early setbacks, he indeed did make a name for himself, as the founder and publisher of an empire of magazines that just about every Baby Boomer holds near and dear to his (and her) hearts.

(As of early 2019, Warren had retired from the publishing business, and was rumored to be working on an autobiography.)

‘James Warren, Empire of Monsters: The Man Behind Creepy, Vampirella, And Famous Monsters’ is not only a very readable biography of the founder of those magazines near and dear to the hearts of all Baby Boomers, but also an informative account of the magazine publishing business in the postwar era.

Author Bill Schelly provides plenty of anecdotes and interviews that help illustrate the world that Warren worked in, where a hard-edged business sense was necessary for survival due to the nature of magazine sales and distribution in the era when the Mob controlled the industry, and only the major publishers, like ‘Time’ and ‘Life’, could afford to send out auditors to collect accurate statistics on sales and returns.

The book is not a hagiography; Schelly presents both good and bad opinions of Warren. To some he was a generous man who mentored their careers and aspirations, while to others, he was a devious and unscrupulous individual. Whether the truth lies in between these two points of view is for the reader to decide.

Schelly is particularly good at detailing the last days of Warren Communications, Inc. in 1982, when Warren mysteriously removed himself from the day-to-day operations of his company and the staff struggled with the ensuing nightmare of declining sales, declining revenue, and angry phone calls from unpaid artists and writers. Schelly's account of the auctioning of a warehouse full of Warren content is a sad and depressing coda to the collapse of Warren's empire.

[One thing I recommend is to peruse the Endnotes, where Schelly provides further little insights that will bring some surprises even to dedicated Warren fans.......for example, I had no idea that Ben DuBay, the nephew of since-deceased Warren editor Bill Dubay, is suing Stephen King...........?! ]

The verdict ? If you're a fan of Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, and Famous Monsters of Filmland, then you will want to have this book in your library. Even those who are not Warren fans, but retain and interest in magazine publishing and the history of postwar American pop culture, will find the book engrossing. 

Visions by Walter Hopps

Visions
Introduction by Walter Hopps
Pomegranate, 1977

Along with Eschatus by Bruce Pennington, and Beauty and the Beast by Chris Achilleos, another must-have book in the library of every 70s stoner was Visions, from 'hippie' art publisher Pomegranate (96 pp., 1977).

Visions profiled the works of seven artists: Sheila Rose, Bill Martin, Cliff McReynolds, Gage Taylor, Thomas Akawie, Nick Hyde, and Joseph Parker, who together comprised what has been referred to as the 'California Visionary' school of art. 

Some of these artists were active in the poster movement that took place in San Francisco in the late 60s, and flourished in the 70s: for example, McReynold's 1975 painting The Arrival was one of the 'trippy' posters advertised in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine. Others, like Gage Taylor, not only embraced poster art, but exhibited their works in galleries devoted to 'visionary' or 'New Age' art.

Detail from 'The Arrival' by Cliff McReynolds, 1975

Walter Hopps was the curator of 20th-Century American Art at the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts from 1972 to 1979. His Introduction in Visions is a textbook example of the pretentious prose style that was a standard feature of any 1970s art, music, and film critic:

Akawie is further removed from a Pharaonic orthodoxy by his incongruous, ecumenical inclusion of sinuous Art Noveau decorative motifs within the frame of his historically derived design, recollected from his youth among the movie palaces and exotic architecture of Hollywood. In general, Akawie's affinity with Egypt is more vibrational than archaeological, and he explores this esoteric symbolism as vocabulary, rather than as personal belief.

Turning from Hopps's verbiage to the artworks on display in the pages of Visions, it's immediately clear that (with the exception of Sheila Rose, whose paintings seem bland and simplistic when compared to the other artists) its profilees are meticulous craftsmen, dedicated to cramming their pieces with detailed renditions of every aspect of their hallucinatory landscapes.

Unfortunately, the rather small dimensions of Visions (10.7 x 8.3 inches) means that my scans of the printed artwork really can't adequately communicate these intricate details. 

In a perfect world, the artists profiled in Visions would have received considerable more notice and fame than they otherwise earned. That, however, doesn't detract from the trippy, hallucinatory, surrealistic excellence of the work presented in the book. 

If you are a devotee of this type of art, then a copy of Visions - which can be had from your usual online used book vendors for affordable prices - very much deserves to be in your library.

Nuclear Disaster Novels: A Compilation

Nuclear Disaster Novels
A PorPor Books Blog Compilation

With the 40th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident just a few days away, I thought I would showcase novels written about nuclear disasters.

I haven't read all of these novels, but for those I have read, the links to my reviews are here:

Epicenter

Nerves

The Orange R

In the Drift

The Prometheus Crisis


( 'Nerves' is the worst of the bunch; I'd give it a wide berth)

Book Review: Elleander Morning

Book Review: 'Elleander Morning' by Jerry Yulsman

3 / 5 Stars

I remember joining the Science Fiction Book Club in 1985 and choosing this as one of my selections, mainly on the basis of its being advertised as an alternate history novel. 

So how does it stack up when re-read more than 30 years later ? 

'Elleander Morning' (278 pp) was published in 1984 in hardcover by St Martin's / Marek. A mass market paperback edition was released in the U.S. in 1985 by Tor Books, and in the UK, by Orbit / Futura. 

Jerry Yulsman (1924 - 1999) was a freelance photographer, who wrote several guides and manuals on the topic. In addition to 'Elleander Morning', he wrote a novel, 'The Last Liberator', about the Ploesti bombing raid of World War II, based on his own personal experience of the raid as a crewman aboard a US Army Air Force plane. Yulsman also apparently may have written a 1971 nonfiction book (as 'Jerry Yulsmon'), titled 'Oh, Copenhagen !', about 'the new Danish pornography'.

The book is set in 1983, only it's not 'our' 1983. It's a world in which the Second World War never happened; Soviet Russia was defeated by a multinational coalition in 1953; and the Germans were the first to detonate an atomic bomb (in Antarctica, in 1980).

A young American woman named Lesley Morning learns that her father - from whom she had been estranged - has died, and travels to London to handle his estate. There she is given a curious set of books that belonged to her grandmother, a woman named Elleander Morning.

One of the books is a privately-printed pornographic memoir of a Victorian gentleman. The other is the two-volume Time-Life History of the Second World War, copyrighted 1970.

Perusing the pages of the History of the Second World War leaves Lesley Morning stunned and horrified. Is the book a hoax ? If so, it's one of the most elaborate hoaxes ever perpetrated. 

As Lesley Morning sets out to discover the truth behind a war that never took place, the impact of the books sets in motion events that will come to threaten the security and safety of the entire world.............. 

'Elleander Morning' is a very readable book, with most of the chapters - which alternate between two different timelines - short and straightforward. The plot unfolds without much in the way of contrivances.

However, as a 'science fiction' book, it's something of a middling effort. The means by which an alternate timeline comes to place owes less to a scientific explanation, and more to the rather gimmicky mechanisms that are found in the time travel novels of Jack Finney. There also is quite a bit of semi-pornographic content (Yulsman apparently wrote a number of Sleaze novels under a pseudonym) that doesn't contribute all that much to the novel, but serves to pad the page count.

As well, author Yulsman seems to have been more intent on making 'Elleander Morning' a romance novel with sci-fi trappings, rather than a sci-fi novel with a romantic theme. In this regard it can be argued that 'Elleander Morning' paved the way for the supernatural and fantasy romance genres that are so prominent nowadays.

Summing up, if you like a sci-fi novel with a heavier than normal melodramatic content, then you may like 'Elleander Morning'.

Kiss Love Gun

Love Gun
Kiss
1977
cover art by Ken Kelly

Meltdown: A Race Against Disaster at Three Mile Island

Meltdown
A Race Against Nuclear Disaster at Three Mile Island
by Wilborn Hampton
Candlewick Press, 2001

It's been 40 years since the accident - some may call it a near-disaster -  at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania, which began in the early hours of March 28, 1979.

My reminiscences of the accident were posted back in March of 2009, where I also posted reviews of fiction, such as Michael Swanwick's In the Drift, dealing with nuke plant disasters.

For the 40th anniversary, I decided to read an account of the accident by Wilborn Hampton (b. 1940), who was a UPI reporter in 1979. Although Hampton was a foreign affairs reporter, and did not normally cover domestic events or science and technology, he was dispatched to Three Mile Island on March 30 to assist another UPI reporter with what was turning out to be a major story.

Metropolitan Edison's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant at the time of the accident. Literally located on an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River, the plant's reactor containment buildings are the two cylindrical structures in the middle of the photo. The cooling towers are the large white structures located on the left- and right- hand sides of the photo.

'Meltdown' is not a technical history of the accident, but a personal reminiscence of reporting on the event 'as it happened'. The book is an illustrated narrative, providing black and white photographs and diagrams in accompaniment to the author's spare, declarative text. 

A couple of worthwhile observations emerge from the pages of 'Meltdown'. One is that the plant operators could not 'see' what was taking place in reactor No. 2 in the sense of walking into the building and peering through a reinforced glass panel at the reactor core. In reality the core was a featureless stainless steel container lodged inside the containment building. 

The only thing the TMI plant personnel 'knew' about the condition of the reactor was what they saw on the gauges and multicolored light panels inside their control room. In fact, when an instrument in the containment building showed that the temperature within the core had reached 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (as Michael Swanwick noted, hotter than the surface of Venus) the Metropolitan Edison staff refused to believe it - they thought the reading was due to a malfunction of the instrument. It's an indication of the confusion that governed the the handling of the accident.

Another observation is that there was continual uncertainty about how bad things would get. Some experts warned that it would be only hours before the hydrogen bubble (estimated to be 1,000 cubic feet in size) within the core would trigger an explosion that would render much of Pennsylvania uninhabitable for centuries. 

Others insisted there were days within which to try and eliminate the bubble by running water into the core and venting built-up gas into the atmosphere. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh was forced to consider both points of view before declining to order an evacuation of the 200,000 people living in the vicinity of TMI.

Another observation deals with how the press covered major stories back in '79. Hampton writes about lugging his portable typewriter around with him; back in those days there were no laptops. There was also no internet, so people were reliant on the press and government statements to learn what was going on. 

And of course, while coverage of disasters such as hurricanes and tornadoes and terror bombings can include photographs and video of the carnage and its aftermath, there was no real 'visual' sense of what was taking place at TMI. The best the media could do was present rather bland footage of the exterior of the plant, and press conferences held by various state and federal officials (including President Jimmy Carter). 

Hampton's final chapter covers the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and discusses the issues associated with nuclear power, all of which remain relevant today: Exelon, the current operators of TMI, plans to shut down reactor No. 1 this year, but there are calls from some Pennsylvania officials to continue operating the reactor as a preferred source of clean energy in an era of global warming. 

Summing up, 'Meltdown' stands the test of time as a readable overview of the accident, an overview designed to be informative to a nontechnical audience. I can't say that Baby Boomers will find the book nostalgic in the regular sense of the word, but it will bring you back to a specific time and place, particularly if you lived in the Northeast back in the Spring of '79.