Today I received my contributor's copy of the March 2012 issue of Cover of Darkness, which contains my dark fantasy story, "Ship."  This story is among my personal favorites, and I'm glad it is finally in print.

This issue also contains "Killing Cormac," by my fellow Clarionite Corie Ralston, an excellent author in her own right.  You can order a copy of the issue here: http://www.sdpbookstore.com/coverofdarkness.htm

Jason

Lately, when I go to science fiction conventions, I browse the book booths in the dealer's room to see if there are any used books that catch my eye.  Much of the time I wind up buying one or two of those Ace Doubles that were published back in the 1960's, those books that are really two books in one -- you read one book, and when you're finished you turn it over, and there's another book, most often by a completely different author.

Of the doubles that I've bought, I have read The Secret of ZI, by Kenneth Bulmer, paired with Beyond the Vanishing Point, by Ray Cummiings; and The Off-Worlders, by John Baxter, paired with The Star Magicians, by Lin Carter.  These books are of varying quality, to the point that they give me hope that I may yet get my novel published.

Beyond the Vanishing Point, for instance, is a novel that presents itself as science fiction, but its premise is scientifically ludicrous, even to a layman like myself: the characters shrink to microscopic, nay, subatomic size...by sucking on pills.  I am not kidding.  And the plot is of the basic rescue-the-damsel-in-distress type, so the story as a whole does not have all that much to offer.

Its companion story, The Secret of ZI, is considerably better.  At story's start, the Earth was invaded and colonized centuries before by a race from the planet Alishang (a race which, disappointingly, looks no different from humans).  As might be expected, some humans have organized an underground rebel force intent on overthrowing the Alishangians.  Our hero, Rupert Clinton, is not a member of that rebel force.  But he knows a secret, something that imperils the Alishangian hold on Earth, and both sides know he knows it.  Alishang wants to capture him to discover this secret, and the rebels want to silence him to keep the secret safe.  And so, his life endangered by both sides, Rupert Clinton goes on the run.

As I said, this is a much better story, with a well thought out premise.  Still, the end was disappointing.  Rupert, you see, doesn't have to outwit anyone, or even fight his way out of his peril.  All he has to do is...outlast something.  Once it is gone, the threat to his life dissipates, and he is safe.  Not much of a climax.

Then there's The Off-Worlders, by John Baxter.  This had some interesting ideas, but it was still a bit of a jumble.  The human colonists of a planet called Merryland (yes, Merryland) long ago fought and won a war to sever ties with their mother planet Earth.  Then, in order to further distance themselves from their Earth origins, they decided to 1) worship Satan instead of God, and 2) forsake all technology, reverting back to an agrarian existence.  With that first choice, Baxter seems to be implying that God and Satan are interchangeable --  Chapter 2 begins with a Satanic inversion of the Lord's Prayer, and later on the main character sneaks out to attend a secret Christian sex orgy -- but his claim seems strained to me.  Our hero, one David Bonython, finds himself on the run (hand-in-hand with a girl from the orgy, of course) from authority figures who discovered forbidden technology in his family's home (they have already killed his family), and off-worlders who want to get heir hands on that technology.  But yet again, the hero doesn't do all that much to get out of his situation.  In a sense, the story just sort of resolves itself, with almost no imput from the hero.

And finally, there's The Star Magicians, by LIn Carter.  Of all the stories listed here, this was the most derivative.  Its prose alone puts it just ONE STEP above The Eye of Argon in terms of quality.  "By Thaxis' blood," says one character on more than one occasion.  How big a step is that from "By the surly beard of Mrifk!"?  Not very big, I'd say.  There are also pronouncements like, "Beware that cunning worm," and "Aye, you yellow-livered leach!"  And the story ends with a very much literal deus ex machina (actually, it's a dea ex machina, since we're dealing with a goddess here, a Green one), with an entire intersteller invasion force destroyed by the giant hand of the Green Goddess, and its warlord commander turned into a glass statue.  Afterward, the hero, who had taken only a spectatorial role in this climax, is told to be fruitful and multiply with one of the warlord's slave-concubines, who also happened to be a spy and acolyte for the Green Goddess.

I'm sure not all the stories in these Ace Doubles are this bad.  In fact, one of the stories is by Ursula K. LeGuin.  Maybe I'll read that one next.

I recently bought and watched a DVD of The Spiral Staircase (1946), starring Dorothy McGuire.  I had read nothing but good things about this film, both online and in movie books: "Dorothy McGuire gives what many consider to be the performance of her career."  "One of the great all-time Hollywood chillers."  And when I finally saw the movie, I was not disappointed.

The story premise isn't exactly new: does the phrase "the killer is already in the house" ring a bell?  But doing something that has been done numerous times before is not a crime in itself; the crime is doing it badly.  ALIEN, for instance, has your basic seven-hapless-victims-versus-unstoppable-killing-machine plot (lifted virtually intact from IT! The Terror from Beyond Space, one of your typical 1950's scifi B-movies), but it has excellent, suspenseful direction by Ridley Scott, great acting by a cast led by Sigourney Weaver, and 30-plus years on it's considered a classic.  The same can be said for The Spiral Staircase: a small town in New England has been plagued by a series of murders.  All the victims are women, and all had some sort of physical deformity.  The movie opens with one of these murders: a young woman with a limp is dressing in her bedroom and the murderer watches her from within the closet.  All we see of the murderer is one of his eyes.  All we see of the murder itself is the woman's upraised hands.

After the murder we meet our protagonist, a young woman named Helen (played by Dorothy McGuire), who works as a caregiver for a bedridden matriarch (played by Ethel Barrymore in all-out grand dame mode) of a well-to-do family.  Helen is a mute, having been traumatized years before when she helplessly watched her house burn down with her parents inside it.  Of course, her muteness makes her a potential target for the murderer.  Naturally, everyone locks their doors and shutters their windows with a murderer on the loose.  The matriarch exhorts Helen to flee immediately, for she is fond of Helen, as she is fond of almost nobody else, including her own family.  But you know what they say about the best laid plans...

This is a movie that must be watched very closely.  It doles out clues, and if the viewer puts them together they can figure out who the murderer is before the big reveal.  It also gives hints as to what is going to happen.  A casual, off-the-cuff remark by one of the characters provides a big indication of how the story will resolve.

I haven't seen Deborah McGuire in anything else (I have a DVD of Gentleman's Agreement, but I haven't watched it yet), but she gives a damn good performance in The Spiral Staircase.  Since her character utters no words, she must communicate through facial expressions and body language, and McGuire does an excellent job of it.  It is a challenge that any actor worth their salt would want to undertake, and she rises to the occasion. 

If you're a fan (as I am) of older movies, you may recognize some of the other stars.  Elsa Lanchester is about as far from the Bride of Frankenstein as she can get as one of the kitchen maids.  Those who remember Kent Smith from Cat People (1943) will recognize him as the doctor in whom Helen takes a romantic interest.  And Ethel Barrymore got a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as the elderly matriarch, and deservedly so.  Her character is tired, she is bedridden, she is disappointed in what remains of her family, but it is very clear that there is a lot of fight left in the old bird.

Just now I used the last of a box of five thousand staples that I bought at a local Rainbow Foods some time ago.  Since I use my stapler exclusively  to put together those little postage-stamp sized books that I give out at sf conventions -- or as close to exclusively as makes no real difference -- that should give you an idea of how many of my books are out there.

Fly, my pretties, fly...

I have a box, of the kind normally used to hold checkbooks, that I use to contain copies of my postage-stamp sized trilogy, The Morgoriad.  The box holds 84 copies of my trilogy.  And I have filled it six times.  And now that I've bought another box of 5000 staples, I'll have the checkbook box filled a seventh time by the time Convergence rolls around, and I'll also bring copies of my postage-stamp sized scifi double books.  Also, I've started printing QR codes on the inside covers that grant access to my website, various stories that are posted online, as well as games I have published.  We'll see how that works out.

See you at Convergence.

My story "Emissaries from Venus" (which is sort of a sequel to H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds) is now in the current issue of Bruce Bethke's Stupefying Stories, published by Rampant Loon Press.  There is no paper version of this publication, but you can download a copy for your Kindle at one of these links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007T3N0XK
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007T3N0XK
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B007T3N0XK
https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B007T3N0XK
https://www.amazon.it/dp/B007T3N0XK
https://www.amazon.es/dp/B007T3N0XK

For your Nook at this link:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1106464110?ean=2940014126892

And from Apple (eventually) at this link:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/bruce-bethke/id450044830?mt=11

I'll post these on my website later.  Let me know how you like it!

Jason

The Woman in Black is a movie based on a very short novel of the same name by Susan Hill.  I had already read Hill's other ghost novel, The Man in the Picture, a few years ago, having bought it at Borders who were selling it prominently during the Halloween season.  The Woman in Black was listed in Hill's biblography, and her author blurb said that it had been turned into a play that had been running in London since 1983 (second only to Agatha Christie's The Mouse Trap), so I wanted to get my hands on this novel as well.  But it was hard to find until recently, when it appeared in bookstores to promote the Daniel Radcliffe movie.  I bought a copy and then read it in a little over a week.  (I read The Man in the Picture in one night, but that was when I had more time for such things.)

Having read both of Hill's ghost novels (she has written numerous other works, but I haven't read them), I can tell you this: her ghosts (both female) are as malicious, vengeful, spiteful, and above all as unreasonable as hell.  (I think it was one of M. R. James's rules of writing ghost stories that the ghost had to be malicious.)  They inflict horror and suffering on people who have done nothing to deserve it, simply because they can, and because they have an unslakable thirst for revenge.  The ghost in The Man in the Picture, for instance, was in life a young woman who was jilted by her fiancee.  She throws such a fit that her family brings in a priest to perform an exorcism.  The priest tries, but in the end he throws up his hands and says, "I can't exorcise someone who doesn't want to be exorcised."

The ghost in The Woman in Black is just as intractable, though for a different reason.  That much of the novel's spirit is transfered very competently into the movie.  From the very first scene, you understand on no uncertain terms that this ghost (played by the ironically named Liz White) is not just angry, she's enraged.  An entire small English village lives in terror of her, and she displays no signs of showing mercy.  Like the ghost in The Man in the Picture, her thinking seems to be I can't be happy, so neither can anyone else.

But in a great many aspects, the movie departs significantly from the book.  For instance, the protagonist in the book, Arthur Kipps, is a young lawyer who is engaged to be married, while in the movie, as played by Radcliffe, he is a young widower whose work as a lawyer has declined in quality since his wife died in childbirth, and his boss is sending him to the remote English village of Crythin Gifford to settle the affairs of a recently deceased old woman as part of a last-ditch effort to salvage his career.  There are other differences: in the movie, Sam Daily (played by Ciaran Hinds), one of Crythin Gifford's wealthier citizens, has a wife who is very much in tune with the spirit world, whereas in the book she is not.

On the whole, however, the spirit of the book lives on, whole and healthy, in the film.  Both book and film tell an old-fashioned ghost tale that is low on gore and high on chills, made all the more horrifying because the ghost is so unreasoning in her malice -- when your enemy is already dead and can't be stopped by physical means, the only thing you can possibly do is reason with her, and when she won't (or can't) listen to reason, what the hell can you do?  There's a scene in the middle of the movie where the audience can see the ghost in the distance, but Arthur is oblivious, and all you can do for the minute or so that this scene endures is wonder what the hell she's going to do to him -- exactly the sort of creepy scene that all ghost tales should have.  There are toys and dolls in the nursery of the old woman's house that (with a little help from some very clever photography) are used to significantly up the creep factor.  And in the climactic confrontation scene, there was one point where I was genuinely scared (though I didn't scream and jump out of my chair like some of the teenagers who sat nearby).

But since the circumstances of the movie are different from those of the book (especially regarding Arthur's widowhood and his having a son), the movie's ending is likewise different.  It's ambiguous, in what might be a happy sort of way.  It left me wondering if maybe, just maybe, the Woman in Black was capable of mercy after all.

Lister Matheson was the director of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's Workshop when it was still headquartered at Michigan State University (I attended Clarion in 2001).  He passed away last January 19th at the age of 63.

Lister was a good friend, and a Scotsman through and through, fond of wearing kilts and Hawaiian shirts (though I don't remember seeing him wear both at the same time).  I shall remember him fondly.  And since I think he would like being remembered this way, I will relate a joke he once told me:

Question: How do you turn a German beer into an American beer?

Answer: DRINK it.

I saw this movie over the New Year's weekend.  And I found it a highly entertaining, very enjoyable movie (I thought the actress playing Mrs. Watson was cute).  But I respectfully submit that the character played by Robert Downey Jr. is not Sherlock Holmes.  He is Captain Jack Sparrow with an Oxford education.

I have spoken.

I have come to a conclusion about magic tricks: you don't have to be ignorant of how a trick is done to be amazed by it.  Nor is being ignorant of how a trick is done a guarantee that you won't be bored.  A magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat?  I don't know how it's done but, been there, seen that.  Yet I remember seeing an article in the latest incarnation of LIFE magazine with photos, taken in a park, of a forty-foot marionette that was manipulated and moved around the park by means of a gas-powered forklift-like vehicle that stood behind and above the marionette.  Everyone could see the strings (they were more like two-inch thick cables, if I remember correctly), everyone could easily see how the magic trick of bringing the marionette to a semblence of life was done...and yet everyone was amazed. 

Movies are another sort of magic trick (or perhaps I should say "illusion"): a series of pictures, each motionless in themselves, are displayed in rapid succession to give the semblence of motion.  Most people know how this is accomplished, and there are all too many movies that are boring.  But when done right, a movie can surprise and amaze.  Martin Scorcese demonstrates this in the first scene of Hugo, his most recent movie based on the picture book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick: at first the viewer sees the inner workings of a clock, gears rotating and meshing, pendulums swinging to and fro.  You can tell it's CGI (yet another technolgical marvel that can nevertheless be boring if not done, or used, correctly), but as the scene progresses, it changes.  The axis of the largest gear slowly becomes the Arc de Triomphe in the city of Paris, France.  And the clockwork dance that whirls around it becomes the nighttime Parisian traffic.

When I first heard of Hugo, I thought it was just another Harry-Potteresque tale like the ones that have been cropping up in the wake of J.K. Rowling's monstrously successful books.  But that is not quite the case here.  The main charater, Hugo Cabret (played by Asa Butterfield), is indeed an orphan, and he encounters much adversity as he ekes out an existence in the dark corners of a Paris train depot (he has been oiling and maintaining the depot clocks, for no pay, ever since the disappearance of his stinking drunk uncle, who took him in after the death of his father).  He is constantly on the run from the police (in the person of a station inspector played by Sacha Baron Cohen, who gives the part a slightly comic turn -- one can only wonder what Peter Sellers would have done with the part) because he has to steal to eat.  And he gets in trouble with an old man named Georges (played by Ben Kingsley), one of the people he steals from.  See, Georges runs a little toy shop in the confines of the train depot, and Hugo has been stealing toy parts -- gears, specifically -- because he needs them for a project he's been working on.

That project is a humanoid clockwork automaton that Hugo's father had been repairing and left unfinished.  Before his death, Hugo's father had a sort of hobby of digging old clocks and other clockwork mehanisms out of museum store rooms or garbage heaps, dusting them off and fixing them up.  Hugo wants to fix up this particular automaton because it's all that his father left behind.  And the automaton is apparently designed to write something.  Hugo thinks that if he gets it working again, it will relay to him a message from his father from beyond the grave.

When Georges learns of the automaton, he reacts strangely: he regards Hugo with resentment, though Hugo can't understand why.  In fact, Georges actively tries to sabotage the repair process.  But Hugo finds an ally in Georges' goddaughter Isabelle (played by Chloe Grace Moretz, who does very well here, as she did in Let Me In), and together they work to get the automaton repaired, and to determine what its connection might be to Georges.

I won't reveal any more, because that would spoil the surprise (that would be the true sin here, not revealing how the trick is done).  I'll simply say that this is a movie about movies -- specifically about the magic movies can conjure when they're done right.

Many of you have seen the postage-stamp-sized books that I put out at SF conventions (they go like hot cakes, too).  Well, now it seems  that Charlotte Bronte beat me to the punch when it comes to making tiny books.  At the age of 14, no less:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/08/charlotte-bronte-manuscript-_n_1082192.html?ref=books&icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-nb%7Cdl5%7Csec3_lnk2%7C111090

A 1.4" x 2,4" book containing a short story by the teenage Charlotte.  I hope they publish facsimiles of it.  :-)

A photo of the book can be seen here:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=51647