Bloodtide

'Bloodtide' (1982)

Lydia Cornell (left) and Mary Louise Weller (right) in the 1982 film 'Bloodtide'

Book Review: The Face of the Waters

Book Review: 'The Face of the Waters' by Robert Silverberg

3 / 5 Stars

'The Face of the Waters' first was published in hardcover in 1991. This Bantam Spectra paperback edition (436 pp.) was published in November 1992 and features cover design by A.I.R. Studio, Inc.

The planet Hydros is a 'water world' completely covered in seawater. The indigenous 'Gillies', a race of humanoid salamanders, have erected artificial islands constructed of sea plants. Anchored to the sea bed by the plants' roots, these islands are the only abovewater platforms on the entire planet.

Hydros supports a small population of humans who, either voluntarily or involuntarily, have chosen to migrate to the planet despite the knowledge that there are no mechanisms for off-world transport; those arriving on Hydros are destined to stay there till they die. 

The Gillies reluctantly allow humans to erect small settlements on Gilly islands. The humans, devoid of much in the way of technology and weaponry, are obliged to observe the strictures imposed by the Gillies.

Lead character Valben Lawler is the physician of the human colony on the island of Sorve. In his early forties, Lawler is by nature a solitary individual, whose main concern outside of medicine is the legends and history of Earth, the quasi-mythical Home of Mankind. 

In the opening chapters of 'The Face', a crisis confronts the humans on Sorve. A transgression against the Gillies has led them to order the humans into exile. With no hope of forcibly defying the Gillies' ultimatum, the 78 humans on the island are obliged to seek shelter elsewhere. 

Lawler is traumatized by the abandoning of the only home he ever has known, but he joins the other 77 exiles, dispersed aboard six sailing ships, on the dangerous trek across the ocean to find another island that is willing to accept them.

But as the Sorve Island refugee flotilla is to discover, the dangers awaiting them among the waves and spray of Hydros are unlike any they ever could imagine............ 

'The Face of the Waters' is at heart a horror novel, one that will tell you "who will survive, and what will be left of them !" The opening chapter makes this clear, and after reading that chapter, I was poised for an action-centered tale of the survival (?) of the Sorve flotilla against all manner of hostile sea-creatures. And indeed, throughout the book Silverberg does relate life-and-death encounters between the humans and the fauna and flora of the seas of Hydros. 

Unfortunately, Silverberg, as he does with many of his other novels, dilutes the narration of 'The Face' with regular, and lengthy, philosophical ruminations by Valben Lawler and his acquaintances among the ship's complement. Silverberg even arranges to have a doubting Catholic priest aboard Lawler's ship, so the two men can have deep conversations about metaphysics and eschatology. 

Silverberg's prose style is as smooth as ever, but as chapter after chapter unfurled, the denouement seem artificially delayed by the presence of so much narrative padding. And while I won't give anything away, the novel's final chapters were a letdown, delivering to the reader a confrontation between Humanism and Pantheism, that made the privations of the flotilla and the Sorve refugees seem more than a little contrived.

Summing up, 'The Face of the Waters' is a Three-Star science fiction novel. It would have benefitted from being at least 100 pages shorter, and being more focused, plot-wise. Those with the necessary degree of patience many find the book rewarding, but if patience isn't your strong suit, then 'The Face' probably is not for you.

Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years

Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years

Bondi, 2007

Bondi Digital Publishing was a firm founded by David Anthony and Murat Aktar in 2004 as a producer of DVDs of archived magazines, releasing these DVDs in a higher-end, boxed set format. 

In 2007 Bondi published Rolling Stone Cover to Cover, Playboy Cover to Cover: the 50s, and Playboy Cover to Cover: the 60s. Alas, that was it for Bondi Digital Publishing; while in a 2007 interview Anthony hinted at additional magazine archiving projects, the company later suspended operations. 

In 2022 a firm called Pugpig announced they had acquired Bondi Digital. Pugpig makes digital archives of content for publishers (such as High Times, Esquire, and Creem), so they can sell access to this content as part of their subscription model.

It's possible to get the Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover DVD set for very affordable prices. The item is packaged in a study gateway box that has magnetic closures. There are four DVDs, one with the installer program / Bondi Reader app, while the other three cover select intervals in the publishing history of the magazine (1967 -1983, 1984 - 1995, 1996 - 2007)

I use Windows 10 on my PC, and while I could install the Bondi Reader app, it wouldn't work. So I downloaded a patch that is available at this link. After installing the patch, I could load a content DVD and access it without any problems. Further information on troubleshooting the Rolling Stone set is available here.

Along with the DVDs you get a trade paperback book that provides a chronological overview of the high points in the magazine's history.

As for the DVD content, well, it was generated using scanning technology as it was in the mid-2000s, so it's not going to be very crisp or legible. Indeed, looking at the magazine pages on my 32-inch monitor takes some fiddling and zooming in, particularly with the older issues from the 60s and 70s and early 80s. Things improve as the 80s progress. But with no file, will the DVDs provide what nowadays is considered 'high resolution'. 

Scrolling through the files on the DVD, I recognize why I was never a big fan of Rolling Stone. I couldn't stand the magazine's deification of people like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Hunter Thompson, Bruce Springsteen, Bono Vox, old black bluesmen.........its willingness to jump on the superficial and trendy.

That said, there are worthy articles in every third or fourth issue. Those published in the 70s and 80s, before there were internet-based protocols for vetting content, are likely to have more than a little specious content. But that's how it was in those long-ago days, when you couldn't simply sit down and fact-check a story using the internet.

Summing up,  Baby Boomers who are nostalgic for the pop culture of their youth are going to be interested in Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover. It's not the most accessible package in terms of compatibility with modern technology: you can't read it on a tablet, or a smartphone, and reading it on a laptop's smaller screen is going to be tiring. But if you're willing to access the content on the larger screen of a PC, then investing in the box is a worthwhile idea.

Book Review: The Book of Skulls

Book Review: 'The Book of Skulls' by Robert Silverberg

1 / 5 Stars

'The Book of Skulls' first was issued in hardcover by Charles Scribner's Sons in December, 1971. Numerous paperback editions have been published since then, including this Bantam Books edition (196 pp.) from January, 1983, which features a striking cover illustration by Jim Burns.

‘The Book of Skulls’ represents an effort by Silverberg to access the mainstream novel readership as it stood in the early 1970s, namely, the people who belonged to the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, rather than the people who belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club. With ‘Skulls’, Silverberg plainly hoped to emulate the tales of youthful misadventures that proved so successful for Larry McMurtry with ‘The Last Picture Show’ from 1966; Jules Feiffer’s play ‘Carnal Knowledge’, made into a 1971 film; and the novels of Philip Roth (Eli Steinfeld, a character in ‘Skulls’, is essentially a younger version of Roth’s frustrated, self-conflicted Jewish males).

‘Skulls’ is set in the early 1970s. In the opening chapters we are introduced to the four characters: Eli, Oliver, Timothy, and Ned. All are students and roommates at an unnamed Ivy League university in New England. We learn that while poking around the dustier shelves in the basement of the university library, Eli came across a medieval manuscript titled Liber Calvarium, i.e., The Book of Skulls. According to the manuscript, by completing the Trial of the Skulls it is possible to achieve immortality. There is a catch, however: four people must apply for the ritual, and one of them must die at the hands of the others, and one must die by his or her own hand.

Signet edition, 1972

Would you be willing to wager your life for a 50:50 chance at immortality ? The four boys think that, yes, they would, so as the novel opens, they are on a Spring Break road trip from their university to a remote location in the Arizona desert, where they hope to find the House of Skulls. Once there, Eli, Ned, Timothy, and Oliver will proceed with the Trial, each hoping it’s someone else who winds up with the shorter end of the stick…………. 

‘The Book of Skulls’ has an intriguing premise but sadly, Silverberg doesn’t do much with it. 

The narrative is rather awkwardly constructed around revolving first-person discourses by each of the four protagonists. Silverberg adopts this procedure in order to expend considerable text on internal monologues, which inform the reader that the boys only are partially convinced that the House of Skulls, and the Trial of Skulls, even exist, but intend to satisfy their curiosity on the matter. When, on page 94, the boys finally do reach the House of Skulls, the remainder of the novel soon exhausts itself in chronicling the boy’s innermost fears and desires over the cost-benefit ratio of their eschatological enterprise. This temporizing simply pads the narrative, and doesn't do much to advance the storyline.

The novel’s prose style is dense and overwritten, couched in a kind of breathless hipster argot marked by run-on sentences that are compacted into paragraphs that can approach two and one-half pages in length. Readers will have to negotiate phrases in Latin, allusions and expositions on all manner of highbrow topics, and words like: 

muniment: an archived document or record

uncial: medieval script

geniza: the area of a synagogue or cemetery where manuscripts or documents are stored

incipit: the opening words of a medieval text

circumvolutely:  referring to rolling around or encircling something. While 'circumvoluted' is listed by Merriam-Webster online, 'circumvolutely' isn't listed....?!

By the time the denouement of ‘The Book of Skulls’ finally appeared I was so fatigued from plodding through all the verbiage that I observed the fate of Oliver, Timothy, Ned, and Eli with indifference. 

The verdict ? 'The Book of Skulls' fails to engage, neither as a mainstream novel, nor as one of Silverberg's more adventurous excursions outside the sci-fi genre. 

National Lampoon March 1974

National Lampoon

March 1974

March, 1974, and according to the Billboard Hot 100, the single atop the charts is 'Seasons in the Sun' by Canadian folkie Terry Jacks.

Looking through the pages of the March issue of the National Lampoon, we see advertisements for various LPs: 

Puzzle was a progressive rock / fusion band from Chicago who signed to Motown in 1972, and released two albums: Puzzle in 1973, and The Second Album in 1974. Their second album is available for listening here. 

Their single, 'Mary Mary', is a nice little pop song.

Carly Simon strikes a pose in a maternity dress for her album Hotcakes, from which the single 'Haven't Got Time for the Pain' was a major hit.

Panasonic provides an ad for a proto-boombox called the 'RQ-448S Cassette Tape Recorder with FM/AM radio'.

The March issue of the Lampoon is not very good. It's theme is the 'Stupid Issue', but the humor is too Henry Beard, and too highbrow, to really connect with the reader.

The comic book parody takes aim at an easy target, Classics Illustrated, and Plato's 'The Republic'. The parody is one long, rather dull wink-wink joke about Plato's followers......dainty dudes, all.

At least we have.....boobies !

The black-and-white comics lodging in the back of the magazine are competent, if not overly inspiring, here in the March issue.

All in all, the March, 1974 issue of the Lampoon was not all that special. 

And that's how it was, fifty years ago.............

Byron Preiss appreciation

Byron Preiss Appreciation

Byron Preiss (1953 - 2005) was a major influence in the effort to persuade publishers to pair science fiction and fantasy content with graphic art, back in the 1970s and 1980s.

photo by Travis T. Shuler, from https://www.facebook.com/groups/byronpreiss/

Here's an article by Edo Bosnar about the impact Preiss's books had on genre publishing, back in the days when the sci-fi enterprise just was starting to become the commercial juggernaut it is today. 

Not all of Preiss's efforts were overly memorable; much of the 'Weird Heroes' franchise turned out to be too cheesy to appeal to me neither back in the 1970s, nor when read nowadays. 

But there were more than a few Preiss productions, such as 'The Complete Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination', 'The Illustrated Harlan Ellison' and 'Empire', that were real assets to the field of fantastic literature. They ensure Preiss's place as an innovator in genre publishing.

Book Review: The Encyclopedia of Horror

Book Review: 'The Encyclopedia of Horror' edited by Richard Davis

2 / 5 Stars

'The Encyclopedia of Horror' first was published in 1981 by Octopus Books. This large trade paperback edition (192 pp.) was issued by Hamlyn in the UK 1987.

Richard Davis (1945-2005) was a major editor and advocate for horror fiction in the UK, editing the seminal 'Year Best Horror Stories' series in both Britain and the U.S. 

I had high hopes for this book, as usually these UK volumes on pop culture feature high quality illustrations, and tiny-type, informative text written by acknowledged experts in the field. Unfortunately, 'The Encyclopedia of Horror' falls short of its aims.

While some of the illustrations indeed are of high quality, many of the black and white movie stills used in the book have been tinted with pink or red colors. Others have selected features retouched (below). All of this is distracting and gimmicky.

The book is made up of chapters devoted to prominent aspects of horror media, as it stood in 1981. Thus we get Frankenstein; vampires and werewolves; the Devil and Satan; ghosts ('The Supernatural'); and zombies ('The Undead'). A final chapter, 'Travelling Beyond', covers sci-fi.

Inevitably, the contributions to the Encyclopedia suffer from the overly wide scope of the book. There is only so much space that can be devoted to each topic, and thus the contributors are pretty much left to shape their chapters according to their own attitudes about what is noteworthy. Thus, the book is something of a hodgepodge in terms of depth of coverage.

As a result, Tom Hutchinson in his chapter on 'Evil Monsters', which is intended as an overview of the phenomenon of horror, winds up expatiating on the trope of the monster from the era of Western mythology, up to the movie Alien. His overview focuses too much on philosophical and psychological analyses to be effective.

The chapters on Frankenstein, and vampires and werewolves, are a bit more engaging, but their authors (Michel Perry and Basil Copper, respectively) can really do no more than provide a superficial recitation of the vast body of books and films dealing with these subjects.

'The Supernatural', by Michael Ashley, is perhaps the best chapter in the book. Ashley wisely decides to concentrate on something manageable, and that is supernatural fiction from Geoffrey Chaucer all the way up to the late 1970s, and the works of Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. While there probably isn't much here that will be new to aficionados of the genre, newcomers will find this chapter to be informative. 

Douglas Hills' chapter on horror in science fiction, 'The Beyond', is competent, but like much of the other contributions to the Encyclopedia can't do much more than provide a skimming of the large amount of relevant media.

'The Encyclopedia of Horror' concludes with two appendices. One provides an essay on horror comic books, most of these published in the USA. There is a comic book cover gallery and a listing of titles. The second appendix lists the more prominent horror films issued up to 1980.

Summing up, 'The Encyclopedia of Horror' is one of those volumes that by its very nature arguably was predestined to fail. I can't see it offering enough novelty and insight to be of value to the serious fan of horror in films and print media. I do think it could be of value to those new to the horror genre, albeit with an acknowledgement that its 1981 publication date makes it necessarily dated. Accordingly, I'm fine with assigning the book a Two Star Rating.