Code Name: Slaughter Five from Eerie magazine

'Code Name: Slaughter Five'

from Eerie No. 70, November 1975

A downbeat 'overpopulation' horror tale, with art by Leopold Sanchez and story by Gerry Boudreau, and a vintage 'Soylent Green' sensibility.....

Book Review: To Stand Beneath the Sun

Book Review: 'To Stand Beneath the Sun' by Brad Strickland 

3 / 5 Stars

‘To Stand Beneath the Sun’ (256 pp.) was published in April, 1986 by Signet / NAL; the cover artist is uncredited.

‘To Stand’ belongs to the sub-genre of sf in which a spaceman finds himself marooned (or imprisoned) on a planet where the sex roles are reversed, with womyn as the rulers and men relegated to a second-class status. Other examples of this approach include Cynthia Felice’s ‘Double Nocturne’, David Brin’s ‘Glory’, and Linda Steele’s ‘Ibis’.

The premise of ‘To Stand’ involves a colony starship named the Galileo, launched 5,000 years previously from a depleted and desperate Terra. The starship’s crew and passengers are in stasis until the ship reaches a suitable destination. 

However, while still short of its original destination, a malfunction sends the ship into orbit around an earth-like planet named Kalea. A portion of the ship’s stasis chambers are jettisoned down onto the planet below, and those passengers who survive the landings establish a colony, albeit one endowed with a medieval level of technology. 

As the narrative commences a geologist named Tom Perion, still in stasis within his chamber aboard the Galileo, is abruptly ejected from the ship; his chamber splash-lands in the oceans of Kalea, where, by good fortune, a sailing ship rescues him.

Perion is bewildered to learn that his rescuers are an all-female crew. It turns out that in the 1700 years since the arrival of the first colonists jettisoned onto the surface of Kalea, various sociological and demographic events have combined to render the population skewed towards a preponderance of women. 

Men are considered too precious to engage in traditionally manly pursuits, and are relegated to lives as sybarites, tasked with the not altogether disagreeable duties of fathering children from rotating harems of shapely young women.

Author Strickland doesn’t veer into Gor Fanboy territory, and keeps his narrative centered on Tom Perion’s efforts to find a place in this female-dominated society, and to rescue the Galileo, still circling Kalea, albeit in a dangerously low orbit.

Perion’s hopes rest on discovering if other stasis pods, landed elsewhere on the planet, have functioning electronics that will allow him to contact the mother ship, revive its crew, and import the ship’s technology into the increasingly fractious society ruling Kalea.

But, not only does the stranded spaceman have to convince his skeptical female rescuers that the ‘Silver Star’ crossing the heavens each night is in fact a spaceship, built and flown from a planet light-years away, but Perion’s entanglement in a conflict between rival trade houses triggers a blood feud.

Can TPerion find an intact stasis pod amid the inhospitable wastes of northern Kalea ? And will he reach the pod before a team of mercenaries finds, and eliminates, he and his female companions ?

‘To Stand’ is a very readable sf novel. Main character Tom Perion, while subject to occasional moments of poor judgement, maintains a necessary self-deprecating attitude even as he maneuvers his female overseers into complicity with his plans to contact the Galileo. 

While the middle segments of the novel tend to drag a bit, as author Strickland gives way to overlong exposition on various details of Kalean society, the latter third of the novel consists of a prolonged, well-paced chase sequence.

‘To Stand Beneath the Sun’ is worth picking up from the used book shelves.

'Superhero' by Angus McKie

from the May 1982 issue of Heavy Metal

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

'Heavy Metal' magazine, April 1978

 

April, 1978, and 'With A Little Luck' by Paul McCartney and Wings is in heavy rotation on the airwaves.

The April issue of 'Heavy Metal' is on the stands, a genuine success as its first year of publication comes to a close. Robert Morello provides the front cover illustration.

Major advertisers are still some years away from buying ad space, but one mail order company - 'Moondance Productions' - is at least willing to purchase a full-page ad for Conan paperbacks and posters, and - get this - a record album of Harlan Ellison stories, narrated by The Man Himself ! 

This is how you got hold of sci-fi media in the days before the internet and amazon.com....

Most of this issue is taken up with ‘Paradise 9’, a lengthy, free-form strip which apparently was created by the artists of Metal Hurlant as a congratulatory present to the editorial staff of Heavy Metal for completing their first year of publication. Each of the major Metal Hurlant artists - Moebius, Duillet, Nicollet, He, Clerc, Macedo, etc. - contributed a couple of pages or so.

 

Among the better singleton strips in the issue is 'The City of Flowers', by Druillet and Picotto.  A neat little cautionary tale about 'heavy is the head wearing the crown'..... 

 

Book Review: Blood Red Angel

Book Review: 'Blood Red Angel' by Adrian Cole

3 / 5 Stars

Saddled with an awful cover illustration (by Duane O’Myers), that looks like it was destined for a romance novel, ‘Blood Red Angel’ (377 pp.) was released in November, 1993.

Adrian Cole is an English author of fantasy and sf for the adult and juvenile markets. He has published several multi-volume series: ‘The Omaran Saga’, ‘Dream Lords’, and ‘Star Requiem’, as well as standalone novels.

‘Blood Red Angel’ takes place on an un-named world where the landscape is in perpetual twilight under an immense bank of clouds called the Skydown. The major city in this subdued terrain is Thousandreach, with towers stretching thousands of feet into the sky; in their palaces at the apex of these towers, above the Skydown, a coterie of decadent aristocrats – who have long since mutated beyond human form – rule the land as ‘Lightbenders’. 

A hierarchy of Elevates, Skryers, and Providers - minor bureaucrats, lordlings, and wizards -  live in the lower levels of Thousandreach, serving their masters among the Lightbenders in the hopes of ultimately joining their patrons as members of the omnipotent exalted.

A warp (known as the Overlap) in the space-time continuum serves to temporarily open portals to adjoining worlds, whose populations are raided by the Providers. The fate awaiting these abducted peoples, or ‘Externals’, is not pleasant: they are to be converted into sustenance for the ravenous Lightbenders. 

Armies of specially created flying men – the ‘Angels’ of the book’s title – are used by the Elevates to keep order, and track down and recapture escaping Externals.

As the novel opens, a young man named Ruarhi, from what may be Celtic-era Britain, finds himself captured by servants of the Providers and transported to the world under Skydown. 

He struggles to escape his captors, and to discover a way back to his own world; his efforts are paralleled by those of a Blood Red Angel named Arterial, who becomes a hunted outcast from his clan.

Gradually, the two plot threads coalesce, as Ruarhi and Arterial join forces in an uneasy alliance with a rogue Elevate in a plan to overthrow the Lightbenders, and bring freedom to the oppressed masses toiling in the dank underworld of Thousandreach.

In some ways ‘Blood Red’ is a ground-breaking precursor to the ‘dark fantasy’ novels and series of China Mieville (‘King Rat’, ‘Perdido Street Station’), Alan Campbell (‘Scar Night’), and Tim Lebbon (‘Echo City’). 

Like those novels, ‘Blood Red’ is a lengthy work, highly descriptive in nature, with a narrative that deliberately avoids the optimistic character of traditional epic fantasy novels, to focus instead on a morbid and depressing landscape whose inhabitants eke out their lives in ignorance of the great forces that have shaped their destinies.

And, like the dark fantasy novels of Mieville, Campbell, and Lebbon,  ‘Blood Red’ suffers from weaknesses in terms of pacing. The central section of the novel stalls rather badly, as the author devotes considerable text to detailing the machinations and intrigues among the bureaucrats of Thousandreach. 

The climax of the novel also suffers from too much exposition, as the author is unable to resist inserting one new plot development after another, draining excitement from the final confrontation with the Lightbenders.

Readers with the patience for a deliberately-paced, expansive dark fantasy novel may want to check out ‘Blood Red Angel’. Those who like their novels to have a more condensed character, will probably want to pass on it.

'Brain Food' by Michael Fleisher (script) and Jun Lofomia (artist)

from the April 1980 issue of Vampirella

A neat take on the 'Cannibal Holocaust' theme of many of the 70s sleaziest, greatest, low-budget films.

 

Book Review: Icerigger

Book Review: 'Icerigger' by Alan Dean Foster

3 / 5 Stars

‘Icerigger’ (313 pp.) was published by Ballantine / Del Rey in March 1974; the striking cover is by Tim White. Succeeding volumes in the ‘Icerigger’ trilogy are ‘Mission to Moulokin’ (1981) and ‘The Deluge Drivers’ (1987).

Ethan Fortune is a salesman earning a comfortable living among the civilized worlds of the galaxy. While traveling aboard the liner Antares, a series of encounters with would-be kidnappers results in Fortune, and other passengers, crash-landed on the surface of the nearby planet Tran-ky-ky.

Tran-ky-ky is an ice world, its surface covered by land masses and frozen seas; a ‘warm’ day is one in which the temperature hovers around 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Not surprisingly, the little band of Antares passengers are in severe straits. Fortunately their crash attracts the attention of the planet’s humanoid inhabitants, a race of unique cat-people known as the ‘tran’.

The tran are featured in Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s 1979 paperback ‘Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials’:

 

Ethan Fortune, and a roustabout named Skua September, soon find themselves the de facto leaders of the stranded party of Terrans. The hospitable tran ensconce the Terrans in their citadel within the city of Wannome, and Fortune and September get to work asking their hosts for directions to the nearest offworld outpost. But with the medieval level of technology on Tran-ky-ky, getting from Wannome to the Federation outpost at Brass Monkey, a journey of several hundred miles, is by no means an easy task.

And things aren’t helped by the fact that The Horde, a migratory army of barbarian tran, will soon be descending on the city of Wannome. And if Ethan and Skua can’t help the tran defend their city, their chance to get off-world will be forever lost…..

‘Icerigger’ is a very capable sf adventure novel with ‘old school’ flavor. The icy world of Tran-ky-ky, and its cold-adapted feline race, are interesting creations, and Foster imbues his human and tran characters with varied personalities. Ethan Fortune and Skua September regularly find their wits and improvisational skills taxed by desperate combats and narrow escapes.

‘Icerigger’ isn’t perfect; Foster tends to get more than a little stilted and even cutesy with his dialogue, and some parts of the narrative rely on contrivances to get our heroes out of a jam.

But to be fair, ‘Icerigger’ doesn’t try to be a profound Speculative Fiction Novel as was often the case for some sf works of the mid-70s. Rather, this book is recommended for readers who want to sit down with an engaging, fast-paced novel that aims primarily to entertain.

Heavy Metal magazine April 1982

'Heavy Metal' magazine April 1982

 

The April 1982 issue of 'Heavy Metal' features a front cover by Jim Burns titled 'Zipper', and a back cover by Luis Rey titled 'Safari Between the Ears'.

This issue provides the latest installments of Corben's 'Den II', Segrelle's 'The Mercenary','Incal Light' by Jodorowsky and Moebius, 'Nova II' by Garcia, and 'At the Middle of Cymbiola' by Renard and Schuiten.

The Dossier is expanded to five pages and features reviews of 'Private Eyes', the latest album by Hall and Oates, as well as the Police's 'Ghost in the Machine' and the eponymous first-album  release by the TomTom Club. These reviews come late after the release of these albums, reflecting the comparatively slow reaction time of print media back in the 80s. 

Thing's aren't helped by an editorial decision to use a contrived 'New Wave' approach to formatting the layout in The Dossier section; the 'Heads or Tails' column is illegible.....

Overall, this is a mediocre issue. The serial comics are given only a few pages each, and the magazine is taken up with too many inflated essays. 

In one essay, 'J. G. Ballard: Visionary of the Apocalypse', Toby Goldstein travels to England to speak with that author. Goldstein's writing has the pretentious quality of a grad student thesis:

With the arrival of the mid-sixties mental/physical/social/moral revolution, J. G. Ballard adjusted his milieu to pit so-called civilized invention against primeval ego needs. The personal apocalypse had begun.

In a lengthy Editorial, Brad Balfour informs us that he detests the term 'sci fi' because it gives the genre a puerile connotation, and negates the pathbreaking fiction produced by Disch, Dick, and Ballard. 

Somehow Italo Calvino, and (inevitably) William Burroughs, are name-dropped in case some actual Literary Critics may be reading, and need to be persuaded that SF is Legitimate Art.

I've posted scans of one of the passable single-shot strips, 'The Moment' by Harry North.