'Doc Savage' issue No. 1 ('First Wave', DC)

DC just launched the first issue of another of their ‘First Wave’ imprint titles, this time it’s a series devoted to the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage:

Things start off without much of a preamble as Doc, piloting his airship, encounters some deadly lightning attacks on his skyscraper in the heart of New York City:

I’m unsure about this latest series for Doc Savage. The placement of Doc in the modern era seems a little unconvincing despite the studied use of the Art Deco motifs to the illustrations. While the effort to start things off from page one with a great deal of action is understandable from a point-of-sale marketing standpoint, the book doesn’t do much to try and orient the reader as to exactly who Doc and the Fabulous Five are, settling for some dialogue-mediated self-disclosures by Doc, even as he’s plummeting down an elevator shaft with two kids in his arms. 

I’m concerned that for younger comics readers, who may have little in the way of advance knowledge of the Doc Savage canon, this series will come across as just another effort by DC to try and get something out the door before their licensing rights lapse.

The book also includes a supporting strip, ‘Justice Inc.’,  starring the other major Street and Smith character authored under the house name ‘Kenneth Robeson’: ‘The Avenger’. The artwork, atmosphere, and storyline for this supporting tale are well done, coming across as something from a Vertigo imprint title; this section of the book actually impressed me more than did the main feature.

Unfortunately, previous efforts over the past four decades at a successful Doc Savage comic, by a variety of publishers, were mixed financial successes. Hopefully this iteration by DC will break the trend, but it’s too soon to tell. I will go ahead and pick up the second issue of ‘Doc Savage’ and see if writer Paul Malmot can do something new and noteworthy with the franchise......

Book Review: Systems

Book Review: 'Systems' by W. T. Quick

3 / 5 Stars

William Thomas Quick is the author of nearly 30 novels, many of them ‘Clan of the Cave Bear’ – style romances written under the pseudonym Margaret Allan.

A second-generation cyberpunk author, Quick wrote a number of well-received novels during the late 80s and early 90s, with ‘Dreams of Flesh and Sand’ (1988) and ‘Dreams of Gods and Men’ (1989) his best-known efforts in the genre.
 

‘Systems’ (Signet, 251 pp, 1989, cover illustration uncredited) takes place in the San Francisco area early in the 2030s.  Josh Tower, formerly a covert operative in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), now earns a living as a ‘datahunter’ for corporate clients. As he and his pregnant wife are returning from dining out, their air taxi suffers a malfunction and crashes to the ground. Tower endures a painful recovery from his injuries to find himself a widower.
 

Bereft and depressed, Tower tries to make sense of the disaster by looking into the online databases for clues to the nature of the accident; he soon discovers that the accident may have been deliberate. His inquiries lead him to a small, nondescript corporation called Condor Securities. His efforts to delve further into the nature of Condor Securities elicit a strong reaction from what seems to be a rogue element of the DIA. In short order Tower finds himself on the run from a squadron of killers, anxious to eliminate the one man who may know too much about a plot to undermine the world economy.
 

‘Systems’ is a near-future  thriller with some cyberpunk frosting, more like the novels of Dean Ing (whom Quick salutes in his Acknowledgement) than a novel akin to that authored by Gibson, Sterling, Shirley, or Jeter.
 

This is not a bad thing; with the exception of a few too many passages wherein various characters muse a little too long about the Meaning of It All, the narrative flows along at a good pace with plenty of gunplay and some rather gruesome scenes of violence. Tower is by no means a superman, and his escape from his pursuers never easy or taken for granted, and the clandestine organization devoted to snuffing him out sports a collection of suitably malevolent assassins. 

The technology of the 2030s is reasonably well extrapolated based on the state of computing technology at the time the book was written, and the plot machinations that Quick introduces later in the novel are unsurprising but never contrived.
 

Readers interested in a more action-oriented, early cyberpunk novel will want to give ‘Systems’ a look.

Preview: Killraven Meets 'Marvel Zombies' ?!

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The latest installment of the franchise, 'Marvel Zombies 5', picks up on the storyline used in Zombies 4, in which a reluctant Machine Man was drafted into action in order to eliminate a zombie infestation in yet another alternate Marvel Universe. 

The first issue of Zombies 5 takes place in the setting of the old Marvel western comics, and involves well-known characters like the 'Two-Gun Kid' and 'Kid Colt'. 

The issue ends with a one-page preview of the second issue of 'Zombies 5', showcasing none other than Killraven and the 'War of the Worlds' storyline - ! It will certainly be interesting to see one of the PorPor Blog's favorite 70s icons make the Zombie scene....

Killraven: Amazing Adventures No. 27

Killraven: 'Amazing Adventures' No. 27 (November 1974)

The cover for ‘Amazing Adventures’ No. 27 (November 1974) is uncredited but judging by the intricate style of the artwork and the ‘cosmic’ background, it’s probably Jim Starlin (and maybe the illustration was originally designed for an issue of ‘Captain Marvel’ or ‘Warlock’ ?).

‘The Death Breeders’ is scripted by Don McGregor, and Craig Russell provides the artwork.

The book opens with Killraven and company iceboating on Lake Michigan, where they are attacked by giant lampreys (?!). This is less cheesy than it sounds; as the scan’s I’ve posted below indicate, it’s a harrowing battle that sees poor Grok the mutant nearly exsanguinated...

This issue introduces Volcana Ash, a woman with the attributes of Medusa and the Human Torch. She leads the rebels to Milwaukee, where the Martians have set up a colony of human slaves who are treated most heinously. It’s Killraven’s intent to free the wretched slaves, but the Martians have other plans…

This issue is a welcome change from the rather mediocre efforts of the previous several installments of ‘Amazing Adventures’. Russell’s artwork is dynamic and shows attention to detail, and McGregor’s plot provides as much brutality and bloodshed as a Code-approved book could allow in 1974.

The Marvel Bullpen page trumpets the forthcoming hardbound book ‘Origins of Marvel Comics’, as well as a new magazine called ‘Nostalgia Illustrated’ (?!) which seems to have been yet another a spur-of-the-moment effort by Stan Lee to cash in on the nostalgia craze then gripping the popular culture.

Editor Roy Thomas’s essay refers to the staff’s pastimes in that Summer of '74:

“Steve Englehart and Gil Kane were basking languidly by their swimming pools – and maybe sneaking a fast dip or two between deadlines.”

Book Review: Dying for Tomorrow

Book Review: 'Dying for Tomorrow' by Michael Moorcock

2 / 5  Stars

‘Dying for Tomorrow’ (192 pp., DAW Book No. 282, 1978) first appeared in Britain in 1976 as ‘Moorcock’s Book of Martyrs’. The striking cover illustration is by Michael Whelan.

‘Dying’ collects 7 short stories that appeared in print earlier in Moorcock’s writing career, during the 60s, and 70s, in SF magazines such as New Worlds.

In the first story, ‘A Dead Singer’, Mo - an unemployed roadie - travels the back roads of Britain in a camper van; his meanderings are spurred by a foreboding assortment of recreational drugs, and Mo’s conviction that Jimi Hendrix, returned from the dead, is traveling alongside him in the van. 

This is a downbeat tale that perfectly captures the disillusionment that gripped so many erstwhile 60s flower-power children as they confronted the reduced expectations of the early 70s. It’s able to stand alongside Harlan Ellison’s ‘Shattered Like A Glass Goblin’ as a cruelly accurate portrayal of the squalor and self-inflicted misery that came with the dying years of the hippie movement.

The next entry, ‘The Greater Conqueror’, is a sword-and-sandals tale of a mercenary named Simon, seeking fame and fortune in the Middle East at the time of Alexander the Great. Simon becomes involved in a seemingly hopeless fight against occult forces seeking to use Alexander as a portal for the conquest of the world. Published in 1962, this is one of Moorcock’s earliest short stories and while the prose lacks polish it’s a serviceable enough adventure tale.

Moorcock’s best-known short story is ‘Behold the Man’, in which a neurotic British Jew named Karl Glogauer travels in a time machine to the Palestine of 28 AD. No one has heard of a great prophet named Jesus, but the local populace think that Glogauer, a strange visitor from some far-off realm, may be someone special in his own right…..This story remains a provocative and well-crafted examination of the intersection of history, myth and religion more than 40 years after its first appearance.

‘Good-bye, Miranda’ is a short (three page) tale of a girl haunted by a rejected suitor.

‘Flux’ is a sardonic retelling of the H. G. Wells classic tale ‘The Time Machine’. In a near-future European Union facing economic and social collapse, the multi-skilled genius Max File is sent 10 years into the future to see what happens, and how it might be corrected. Things go awry and Max finds himself in times and places far beyond the scope of his original mission.

‘Islands’ is an unconvincing story about a schizophrenic young man who seems to experience multiple possible realities simultaneously in time.

‘Waiting for the End of Time’ is a very New Wave-ish tale of the last pair of humans on the last city on the last planet in the galaxy, on the last day before the implosion of the galactic center eliminates all life and matter. There is much metaphysical prose. Like so many New Wave stories that tried to present Entropy as Art, it hasn’t aged well.

In summary, ‘Dying for Tomorrow’ contains a few memorable tales, but on the whole, this collection confirms that Moorcock’s best efforts at fiction tend to be in the novel-length format. Unless you’re a Moorcock completist, ‘Dying’ can be skipped.

Slow Death comics No. 3

'Slow Death' comics No. 3



‘Slow Death’ No. 3 (1971) features a cover illustration by Richard Corben, who also provides the (untitled) lead entry in the comic. Corben also contributes ‘Heirs of Earth’, a grimly funny little two-page story. Two of the longer pieces in the book come from Larry Weltz (‘The Sleeping Continent’), and Jaxon (‘Gene Shuffle’).

But the best entry in Slow Death No. 3 is another small masterpiece from Jim Osborne, which I have excerpted here, titled ‘Harbinger’. The entire four-page comic contains neither dialogue balloons nor text narration, but is nonetheless very successful in building up a feeling of religious awe and dread.

In utilizing a drawing style reminiscent of an engraving, Osborne’s piece is a homage to Lynd Ward (1905 – 1985), whose work I was vaguely familiar with from the children’s books I read in the 60s and 70s.

Ward does not get much attention nowadays, but in his time (1920s – 1970s) he was one of the premiere book illustrators and graphic artists in the US. He employed a distinctive style in his illustration, and devotees of graphic art will want to be acquainted with Ward’s body of work.

(Who says reading trash like underground comix won’t teach you something ?)

Book Review: Dark is the Sun

Book Review: 'Dark is the Sun' by Philip Jose Farmer

4 / 5 Stars

‘Dark is the Sun’ (Ballantine SF, 1980, 405 pp) is the paperback version of the novel that first appeared in hardcover in 1979; it features a fine cover illustration by Darrell K. Sweet (depicting, left to right, Sloosh, Aejip, Deyv, Vana, and Jum the dog).

It’s 15 billion years into the future, and Earth is peopled by primitive tribes who wander amidst long-forgotten machines and structures; a variety of quasi-human species descended from past genetic engineering projects; and plenty of dangerous animal and insect life. The planet has been physically moved, by technologically gifted elder civilizations since decayed, into an orbit far from the remains of the Sun, which is now nothing more than a Dwarf Star.

The galaxy, and perhaps the universe as well, are contracting and a ‘heat death’ is imminent in the next few centuries - if not sooner.

Deyv, a young man of the Turtle Tribe, is unaware of the colossal events taking place in remote space; instead, he is worried about leaving his tribal homelands on a mandatory Vision Quest to seek a mate. This means trekking into jungles filed with all manner of monsters and hostile tribes. To make things worse, once his quest is underway, Deyv loses his Soul Egg- a potent talisman- to a thief. If he cannot recover his Soul Egg, Deyv will be condemned to life as an outcast.

Deyv finds himself teaming up with a mutant centaur named Sloosh, and an attractive cannibal (!) girl named Vana. Together with Deyv’s unique pets Aejip and Jum, the party sets off to find the Soul Egg thief. But they soon discover that the thief has an agenda of his own, and there are revelations about the Earth, and its fate, that will require their utmost attention…if Man is to survive the coming collapse of his Universe.

By 1979, when he published this novel, Philip Jose Farmer had been producing at least one, (more often several) SF and fantasy adventure novels per year for more than two decades. This experience is put to good use with ‘Dark Is the Sun’. It’s meant to be pure escapist entertainment, an adventure in the ‘Barsoom’ genre founded by E. R. Burroughs, but with a more sophisticated and engaging prose style.

Farmer knows what he is doing: his writing is very readable and the characters, both human and unhuman, are interesting and offbeat. Many of the creatures and landscapes of the far-future Earth are drawn with imagination and an eye for the bizarre. The perils that beset our adventurers are many and keep the narrative rolling along at a good clip.

Somewhat inevitably the pace starts to drag a bit in the book’s middle third, and the novel could have been 50 pages shorter in length. But I got the sense that Farmer was having a lot of fun with his characters and was reluctant to cut the thread short.

‘Old School’ SF authors like Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, and the underrated Edmund Cooper could do this sort of thing so effortlessly that it’s easy to assume that it required unremarkable effort and training on their part. But in fact, more and more as I read contemporary SF and fantasy novels, many featuring lengthy narratives dealing with complex world building and large casts of characters, it’s clear that conceiving and writing a Readable Novel is considerably harder than many aspiring novelists think it is. These guys knew how to do it, and they made it look easy.

‘Dark is the Sun’ is a fun read, and I recommend it to every SF fan.

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

 

'Talapalca' by He
(from the January 1978 issue of 'Heavy Metal' magazine)

A comic set in the time of the ancient Incas. Some very good pen-and-ink artistry from French artist Dominique He.

Book Review: The 1973 Annual World's Best SF

Book Review: 'The 1973 Annual World's Best SF', edited by Donald A. Wollheim

 

2 / 5 Stars

‘The 1973 Annual World’s Best SF’ (1973) is DAW Book No. 53. The cover art is by Jack Gaughan.

Somewhat confusingly, this volume is a continuation of the ‘World’s Best Science Fiction’ series published by Ace books, and edited by Wollheim, from 1965 to 1971. 

[After a dispute with the management of Ace books, Wollheim left the company in 1971 to found DAW Books. The 'Annual World's Best' incarnation started up at DAW with the 1972 edition].

All the stories in this anthology saw print in 1972, mainly in the pages of mainstream digest publications such as Analogue and Fantasy and Science Fiction.

In his Introduction, Wollheim displays a surprising amount of rancor towards the New Wave movement, which by 1973 was at its apogee. A body of literature that, as far as Wollheim was concerned, was “…laden with snide, open-ended, implausible, and sometimes plotless writing - and occasionally works that are offensively and pointlessly obscene.” 

Wollheim was particularly angered by the disparaging attitude on the part of many New Wave practitioners towards the ‘Old Hands’, i.e., established SF writers like Asimov, Clark, Anderson, Pohl, etc.

He has little praise for Damon Knight’s ‘Orbit’ anthology series (which expressly showcased New Wave content), and is less than impressed with Harlan Ellison’s second major New Wave anthology, ‘Again, Dangerous Visions’.

With his ‘1973 Annual World’s Best SF’ Wollheim clearly hoped to give heightened exposure to previously published tales by the ‘Old Hands’, and select newcomers. So how well does a seemingly anti-New Wave anthology, released at the height of the New Wave era, come across nearly 40 years later ?

Ironically, the first entry, Poul Anderson’s ‘Goat Song’, is a determined effort by an Old Hand to write something with a New Wave flavor. The plot takes the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and transplants it into an SF milieu; the first –person narrator, a Harpist, asks an omnipotent computer to revive his dead wife. The story suffers from Anderson’s exertions to be Profound; the prose style is clumsy and overwrought, there are too many stanzas of archaic poetry, and the computer, called ‘SUM’, too clearly derived from Harlan Ellison’s ‘AM’ in ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’.

James Tiptree, Jr (i.e., Alice Sheldon) provides ‘The Man Who Walked Home’, about a recurring apparition that may represent a man trapped in a time portal of some kind. The story focuses on the reactions of various people as, over the centuries, they convene at the location in Idaho where the apparition manifests itself on a yearly basis. The story’s time travel element is unconvincing, and overall, ‘Man’ didn’t impress me as a ‘year’s best’ candidate.

Michael Coney contributes ‘Oh, Valinda !’, a tale set in the polar regions of the planet Cantek. Some profit-minded Earthmen have enlisted a Cantek native to help them transport an iceberg through the ocean to a port where fresh water is badly needed. The story is meant to be a reflection on the pollution of the Earth’s polar regions and the effect of encroaching civilization upon the Eskimos living there. Featuring some rather unusual but well thought-out alien biology, it’s one of the better entries in the anthology.

Wollheim introduces Frederik Pohl’s novella ‘The Gold at the Starbow’s End’ as “…probably the best single piece that this very talented writer has produced in the last few years.” The story alternates between the observations of the crew of the first starship to Alpha Centauri, and the politicians and scientists back on Earth who are anxious to trumpet its accomplishments as a Cold War triumph. It’s not a bad story, but whether it’s one of Pohl’s best efforts at short fiction is open to debate.

Clifford Simak provides ‘To Walk A City’s Street’s’, in which a man with unusual abilities is forced by government agents to wander the seedier district of a city. There is a surprise ending.

T. J. Bass contributes ‘Rorqual Maru’, an entry in his ‘Hive’ series of stories and novels. In a far-future Earth depleted of most of its resources, genetic engineering and severe overpopulation have resulted in the advent of the Nebish, a species of Homo sapiens of small size and hesitant bearing. When a genetically engineered great blue whale – the Rorqual Maru- chances on abundant supplies of plankton, the Nebishes find themselves in competition with a race of long-forgotten, genetically engineered aquatic humans to lay claim to the harvest. This story served as the basis for Bass’s 1974 novel ‘The Godwhale’.

W. Macfarlane (a Google search for more info about the author was unsuccessful) provides ‘Changing Woman’, about an American Indian woman who takes a job as a cartographer for a mysterious project operating from a secure redoubt in northern California. The story’s prose suffers from too self-conscious an effort by the author to be arty and stylish; witness this example of dialogue:

“Birdeena Ora Oza Yadon, sweetie…” her boss was hesitant.

“Are you using your forked or unforked tongue ?”

‘Willie’s Blues’, by Robert J. Tilley, takes the trope of the White Boy Who Worships Jazz and A Special Negro Jazzman in Particular, and melds it with a conclusion about the moral implications of time travel. I have to admit I hate Jazz, and I also can’t stand white urban liberal hipsters who swoon over Jazz, but even so, this story came across reasonably well.

Vernor Vinge contributes ‘Long Shot’, the most ‘hard’ SF tale in the anthology. It’s about an AI that is chosen to direct a lengthy journey to a distant star. Vinge does a good job of giving the reader a sense of the challenges confronting an interstellar mission.

Phyllis MacLennon provides ‘Thus Love Betrays Us’, in which a Terran biologist is marooned on a dismal, fog-shrouded planet. His efforts to befriend a member of the native population have unforeseen consequences.

All in all, 'The 1973 Annual World's Best SF' is a middling example of an anthology. There are three or four memorable stories, but too many other entries are rather lackluster and indicate that, at least as far as 1972 was concerned, the Old Guard was still trying - with only mixed success- to deal with the challenge posed by the advent of the New Wave.