Sunday, April 2, 2017

Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull issue 2

Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull
First Comics, 1986
Issue 2 (July 1986)
art: Rafael Kayanan and Rico Rival, story: Gerry Conway


(Issue 1 is available here).

Issue 2 of 'Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull' saw Alfredo Alcala depart as inker, but he was ably replaced by Rico Rival, another talented Filipino comics artist, who previously had worked in the Planet of the Apes Marvel / Curtis black and white magazine in the 70s.



Thursday, March 30, 2017

Book Review: The Wind's Twelve Quarters

Book Review: 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Volume II'
by Ursula Le Guin

1 / 5 Stars

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Volume II (138 pp) was published by Panther Books (UK) in 1978. The cover artwork is by Peter Gudynas.

All of the stories in this anthology first were published in various sf magazines, digests, and story collections from 1970 – 1974, so they appeared at the height of the New Wave movement.

Each story has a brief Introduction from Le Guin, in which she relates some details about the story’s concept. Many of the entries in Wind’s revolve around what she refers to as her ‘psychomyths’, i.e., subjects that lend themselves to the allegorical storytelling that dominated much of the New Wave era.

My capsule reviews of each story:

Things: this story was titled ‘The End’ when it first appeared in Orbit 6 (1970). It’s the best entry in this collection. A brickmaker living in a coastal town subconsciously seeks to survive an impending disaster. Moody and atmospheric, it works due to its more ‘traditional’ short story structure, and less as a work of Speculative Fiction.

A Trip to the Head: a ‘psychomyth’ about a man recovering from amnesia. About as unrewarding a New Wave story as I’ve ever read. And that says........something, I think.

Vaster then Empires and More Slow: a team of neurotic, quarreling colonists (there’s a New Wave trope for you !) are dispatched to survey a promising,  Earth-like world. While written as a conventional ‘Hainish’ story, this tale has some remarkably stilted dialogue. For example:

I felt a strong anxiety with a specific spatial orientation. But I am not an empath. Therefore the anxiety is explicable in terms of the particular stress-situation, that is, the attack on a team member in the forest, and also in terms of the total stress-situation, that is, my presence in a totally alien environment, for which the archetypical connotations of the word ‘forest’ provide an inevitable metaphor.

The Stars Below: fleeing a Church-sponsored purge of the scientific class, an astronomer takes refuge among a group of miners. His worldview comes to adapt to his subterranean existence. This is one of the more accessible stories in the collection.

The Field of Vision: after a Mars expeditionary team examines what appears to be an ancient shrine, they are stricken with various neurological ailments.

Direction of the Road: the first-person narrative of ……….an oak tree. 


I’m not kidding. 

(This was heady stuff in the New Wave era).

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: this of course is one of the most well-known short stories to emerge from the New Wave movement. It was not unusual to find 'Omelas' in ‘regular’ short story anthologies used in introductory literature classes in college during the 70s. It’s an allegory about a city where the presence of peace and prosperity comes with a secret price. It remains an effective tale, although its prose could politely be termed ‘lumbering’ (for example, one paragraph is two and one-half pages long…………)

The Day Before the Revolution: this story is set in the Odonian world of Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed. It deals with the remembrances of an infirm elderly woman, whose actions as a revolutionary helped bring about a victory in the Class Struggle.


Summing up:

When I think of William Gibson's short story collection Burning Chrome (1986), any of the stories in it is superior to any appearing in the LeGuin anthology.

When I think of Bruce Sterling's short story collection Crystal Express (1989), any of the stories in it is superior to any appearing in the LeGuin anthology.

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Volume II demonstrates that the more sophisticated approach to writing triggered by the New Wave movement could never, on its own, rescue short stories whose plots were contrived or superficial.This volume is for LeGuin completists only.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

I Got My Mind Made Up (You Can Get it Girl) by Instant Funk

I Got My Mind Made Up
(You Can Get it Girl)
by Instant Funk
March, 1979


It's the week of March 17, 1979.........and I Got My Mind Made Up (You Can Get it Girl) by the Trenton, New Jersey disco / R & B band Instant Funk, is the Billboard Soul chart number one single.

This song is an under-appreciated classic of the disco / funk era. If you are unaware of it, then you need to listen.

To achieve full immersion in the funk, I recommend viewing the segment on Soul Train featuring 'I Got My Mind Made Up'.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Book Review: The Gates of Heaven

Book Review: 'The Gates of Heaven' by Paul Preuss

4 / 5 Stars

'The Gates of Heaven' (210 pp) was published by Bantam Books in May, 1980. The cover artwork is uncredited.

'Gates' was the first novel for Paul Preuss (b. 1942), who went on to author a number of science fiction novels over the period from 1980 - 1993, many of them novels in the 'Venus Prime' series franchise. 'Re-entry' (1981) is a sequel to 'Gates'.

'Gates' opens in the Nevada desert, the site of Project Cyclops, a longstanding SETI program. It's August, 2037, and technician Lynn Nishihara is expecting an otherwise pedestrian night shift at the project's HQ. 

However, Nishihara is stunned when she detects a faint, but unwavering signal emanating from the vicinity of the star Tau Ceti, twelve light-years distant. The Cyclops staff are dumbfounded when amplification of the signal reveals a woman's voice....a distraught woman named Rebecca Meerloo.....a member of the starship Actis, which disappeared near Jupiter in 2026.

The news galvanizes the space program: how did the Actis travel the twelve light-years to Tau Ceti......and has its crew discovered a habitable planet in the Tau Ceti system ?

Colorado resident Michael Ward, a misfit genius, finds the news of the Actis's discovery intriguing, but his attention is focused on more mundane matters: trying to avoid being fired at his job with the Mathematics Instructional Committee, a nonprofit devoted to science and engineering education. Ward's habit of getting sidetracked by mathematical puzzles irrelevant to his duties at the Committee has strained his relationship with his supervisor, a bureaucrat named Franklin Muller.

Little does Michael Ward know that his doodlings with topology are going to be the key to understanding the fate of the Actis.....and the most ambitious project in the history of Mankind. For where the Actis went, others intend to follow........and Michael Ward will find himself among the crew selected to travel through a black hole........

In 1980, the year The Gates of Heaven was published, hard sf was making a comeback from over a decade of neglect (a consequence of the advent of the New Wave movement). 

The comeback was sparked by James Hogan's 1977 novel Inherit the Stars, followed by books by Charles Sheffield (The Sight of Proteus, 1978), Robert L. Forward (Dragon's Egg, 1980), and Gregory Benford (In the Ocean of Night, 1977; Timescape, 1980). 

When regarded in company with these works, Gates stands on its own as a very readable hard sf novel. The science content frames, but does not overwhelm, the narrative, the lead characters are well-drawn, and the novel's prose style (save for some occasional 'character introspection' passages) is clear and direct. 

When combined with the fact that Gates is of short length (210 pp), Paul Preuss's first novel is a reminder that, in the modern era of lumbering, 500-page space operas (and here Alastair Reynolds comes readily to mind), it's possible to write a genre novel that is concise and fast-moving. 

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The Land of Nod from Open Space Issue 1

The Land of Nod
by Barry Malzberg (story) and Ray Lago (art)
from Open Space (Marvel) Issue 1, December 1989



Open Space was an effort by Marvel to revive the sf anthology comic book concept, one that, by the late 80s, had pretty much died out. 

Open Space was printed in a square-bound 'prestige' format, with a thicker paper stock for the cover and interior pages. It also had a correspondingly higher price of $4.95 an issue, which was rather pricey at that time. 

The cover artists for issue 1 were Frank and Laura Kelly Freas.

It seemed like a favorable time to revive the concept; the Great Comic Book Boom of the early 90s was getting underway, and there seemed to be no limit to the amount of titles that comic shops were willing to display on their shelves. And, unlike the older anthology titles like DC's Strange Adventures, which tended to reprint stories first published in the 50s and early 60s, the new series from Marvel was not bound by the Comics Code.



Unfortunately, Open Space ceased publication after four issues (in 1999, Marvel capitalized on the popularity of Alex Ross by releasing an 'issue Zero' one-shot special). Which was a shame, because it had a good roster of writers, many of them stalwarts of the sf world.

Posted below is 'The Land of Nod' by Barry Malzberg, from the 'first' issue of Open Space. It features a surprise ending, and some good artwork from Ray Lago.













Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Bernie Wrightson 1948 - 2017

Bernie Wrightson 1948 -2017

Legendary comics artist and writer Bernie Wrightson passed away on 19 March, 2017. He was 68 years old, and had been battling brain cancer.

Anyone who read comic books, Heavy Metal, and the Warren magazines during the 70s and 80s is familiar with Wrightson's accomplished artwork; it was part and parcel of the sci-fi landscape in those days. 

I will always remember 'Captain Sternn', from the June, 1980 issue of Heavy Metal, as one of the highlights of the early days of that magazine, and indeed as one of the best strips ever to appear in its pages.

In more modern times, his work on the 1988 series Batman: The Cult, and later, on the 1997 series Batman / Aliens, helped make both series particularly memorable.

I recommend picking up the 2011 hardcover volume Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson as a very affordable, very impressive showcase of his artistry.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Book Review: Tangents

Book Review: 'Tangents' by Greg Bear
2 / 5 Stars

'Tangents' (260 pp) first was published in hardback in 1989; this mass market paperback version was published by Questar / Popular Library in August, 1990. The cover illustration is by Jim Burns.

Most of the stories in this anthology first were published in the 1980s in magazines like Omni, while others are appearing in print for the first time in this volume.

'Tangents' leads off with an Introduction in which Bear states his thoughts on the popularity of sf, why he has chosen to write in this genre, and some brief background remarks about the stories in this collection.

My capsule summaries of the contents:

Blood Music: Misfit genius Virgil Ulam is doing very interesting things with white blood cells, such as merging them with microscopic logic circuits. The problem is, Virgil is doing this without Proper Oversight..... 

This story first saw print in Analog in 1983, and it was a touchstone story in what was then the emergent genre of Cyberpunk. Bear later expanded the story into a novel. It's one of the two best entries in this anthology.

Sleepside Story: A competent tale about a young man forced to confront the mysterious Miss Belle Parkhurst, who lives in an elegant - and very dangerous - part of the city. When this first saw print in 1988, the genre of 'urban fantasy' didn't really exist, making this a forerunner in that genre. 

Webster: lonely spinster Abigail Coates looks to a dictionary for advice on finding a boyfriend. An offbeat take on the 'Pygmalion' fable.

A Martian Ricorso: a trio of astronauts stranded on Mars are witnesses to an unusual event involving the planet's long-dormant life forms. 

Dead Run: John the truck driver transports souls to Hell, taking roads not known to you and I. An overly labored, unconvincing attempt at imparting humanism to the themes of Evil and Redemption.

Schrodinger's Plague: a faculty member decides to play out a real life version of the famous physicist's thought-experiment. 

Through Road No Wither: two Nazi officers find themselves lost on a foggy back road in France; they approach a dilapidated hut for directions from an elderly woman who is not as she seems. This is one of the worst tales in the anthology, too vague to be successful.

Tangents: Pal the latchkey boy meets the eccentric mathematician Peter Tuthy. The result will change the nature of reality.........This story stands alongside 'Blood Music' as an example of Bear at his best in the 1980s, as well as being another touchstone entry in the Cyberpunk canon.

Sisters: A very earnest effort at showcasing humanism's worth in the face of disruptive technology; in this instance, it's in the near future, when genetically enhanced super-children are the norm. Letitia, the main character, is cursed (so to speak) with being 'normal'.

The Machineries of Joy: this is an essay that Bear wrote for Omni magazine, which never published it. In the Fall of 1983, Bear toured the country to cover the emerging field of computer graphics. Anyone who was into sf cinema in the early 80s will find nostalgia in Bear's encounters with the teams working on graphics for The Last Starfighter; descriptions of pixels, wireframes, vector animation, rasterization, and anti-aliasing; and predictions of Virtual Reality in the opening decades of the 21st century.  

The verdict ? In my opinion, while there aren't enough outstanding entries in 'Tangents' to make it as rewarding as similar anthologies for other Cyberpunks, the presence of 'Blood Music' and 'Tangents' arguably makes this volume worth picking up.