Blue Champagne’s a novella that sits roughly in the Anna-Louise Bach timeline, although only features her as a side character in her early days as a lifeguard in the environment for the story, a huge spherical body of water in space. If Persistence in Vision looked at the deaf and blind from a science fictional point of view, Blue Champagne looks at the severely paralyzed from the partial perspective of a woman who uses a device to be able to move after an early accident left her paralyzed. The story comes from the perspective of a male lifeguard who she becomes interested in, who is also casually paired with Bach and through the story not only do we learn about her accident and how she became mobile again but about a very unique technology, perhaps similar to virtual reality in a way, that might allow a computer to capture the moment someone falls in love. Interwoven are issues of fame and relationships in a future where sex has long ceases to be a taboo, one of the major aspects that tends to find these stories mixed up with the Eight Worlds lineage. Another great one from Varley, in fact I suspect this one didn’t make the Reader due to its length more than anything else.

The other two Varleys here are minor shorts, one a unique take on nuclear war (from an anthology regarding such if I’m not mistaken) and the other a cute series of letters between author and publisher decrying the need for the new (then) word processing software just hitting desktops.

Zoran Zivkovic’s Time Gifts was, I believe, his first work translated into English and seems to be a novella length story cut into four parts about three different people displaces in time visited by a mysterious figure who gives them a greater perspective on the outcome of their lives work by way of an unusual time machine. Each of the three are affected in the same way and the fourth and concluding part tie them all together in a metafictional way that probably won’t work for everyone, indeed, it was one of those stories conscious about the writer itself and I’m not sure there are all that many ways to get away with that. In the end it posits a lot of interesting questions, which continues to make Zivkovic’s work of interest to me.

Ellen Datlow’s latest anthology covers the influence of H. P. Lovecraft’s work on many of today’s more literary and between-the-genres sort of writers and as such, it was one I was greatly looking forward to, after all, so much of post-Lovecraft Cthulhu pastiches are poor, ridiculously imitative or overall too self conscious to capture anything of the style that makes Lovecraft such a beloved horror writer despite his many detractions (and today that would be misogyny, racism and verbosity, at least the first two unfortunate products of his era). Of course with Datlow in the driver’s seat we’re coming from a much more modern viewpoint in many of these stories and I was happy to see there aren’t any poor ones here and a few well worth writing about. I’ve read a few prior reviews of this anthology and I appear to be one of the first who really admired Anna Tambour’s “Sincerely, Petrified,” perhaps a story more resonant for those who’ve ever visited a petrified forest. Although it was perhaps one of the least (overtly) Lovecraftian stories in the book, I thought it was devastatingly clever as we look through the viewpoint of a conspiracy of two people, a professional and amateur scientist who become later embroiled in their own myth used to scare forest theives from stealing petrified wood. On the other hand I seem to be in full agreement with previous reviewers that Caitlin R. Kiernan’s House Under the Sea (one of the book’s four reprints) was outstanding, the thoughts of a Lovecraftian scenario after the fact from a man peripherally but heavily, emotionally involved with a cult’s leader. Like all great Lovecraft the grandness and coldness of the universe is only seen in fleeting glimpses and is so much creepier for the sake of it. This is the type of story that will make me want to get more familiar with the author’s other work. The third of the really brilliant stories was Laird Barron’s “Catch Hell,” a story about a couple, perhaps on the last legs of their relationship, who visit an out of the way rural Washington hotel in what seems like an innocent getaway but ends up being the result of occult interests on the part of one of the couple. I almost wish I had read this story 10 or 15 years ago when the story’s dovetailing of occult/satanic mythology with Lovecraftian pagan horror would have really frightened me, but all in the same it was brilliantly constructed with the type of heated and horrifying ending that seems to be rarer in modern literary horror (on the other hand I get a little weary of the tying in of hermeticism with satanism, but I’ll put that aside for now). Oh and I almost forgot, perhaps my favorite story of the lot, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s science fictional take on a future where the incursion of extra-dimensional horrors is a very practical problem, fought with a near-symbiotic relationship between a man and his “Mongoose,” another alien, mysterious being whose name perhaps reflects almost everything about the story. This was the kind of milieu I wish a whole series was written for, it seems too perfectly constructed for a novellette alone.

To be honest there’s just a lot of really good stories that don’t quite come up to the previous four. I’ll take a new Michael Shea short any day, and “The Recruiter” with its story about an old man who makes a bizarre deal with a lich is true to form. Marc Laidlaw’s “Leng” mixes Tibetan motifs with the famous Lovecraftian “Lost World” and mycology to superb effect and fantastic imagery, certainly I’ve never read anything from Laidlaw I didn’t really like. Even the classic sorts of Lovecraft tales here, including the Arctic “Mountains of Madness” turns like Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Crevasse” and Holly Phillips’ “Cold Water Survival” are well done and capture the right spirit (impending doom, mystery and vastness rather than lists of  books), not to mention the Innsmouthian “In the Black Mill” by Michael Chabon and the slighty “Whisper in the Darkness” like “Din of Celestial Birds” by Brian Evenson, a title perhaps the old Mahavishnu Orchestra could have used. And I’d be remiss not mentioning the collection’s final short, which is one of the most unique and original takes on Lovecraft here, the story about a few survivors in their last moments reflecting over the oncoming Cthulhian apocalypse. Nick Mamatas does a lot with very little here and it would be a shame to forget this, especially given that it follows Barron’s tour de force.

A great collection overall and a credit to everyone that it’s writing much better than usually found in Lovecraftian collections without verging too purple. It’s tough territory to mine, but even the stories I don’t mention do well with it.

I’m actually about three posts behind in terms of noting books I’ve read in the last month or two, in fact looking back I’m kind of surprised how many words I’ve crunched of late, I can’t remember the last time it was so effortless. And I’m about to take some time off of work for the  holidays, so I suspect the run will be fairly interrupted. So I hope to finish a couple of these before I totally forget about the books.

Subterranean put out a three book omnibus a little while ago collecting three of Jack Vance’s books and as most Vance releases these days the texts are from the big Jack Vance Integral Edition project. I used to have access to a library copy of the whole series for a while, I’m not sure why we lost it as I probably had a year off from even checking out books when it happened, but I had gotten pretty close to reading everything in the IE I might have trouble finding elsewhere. A few exceptions were Bad Ronald and the Dark Ocean; which fortunately were released as Print on Demand titles so I own one with the other on the way, but I’m having to check out older versions of The House on Lily Street and The View from Chickweed’s Window (which I suspect are probably not terribly different from the IEs as they were released later in the game). But showing up at the library was the Reader which contains The Languages of Pao (which I already a while back in the IE version) and these two, Emphyrio and The Domains of Koryphon, so I decided to check these out to get back into Vance after a gap of some time.

Emphyrio is most definitely one of Vance’s best works, certainly his best novel that isn’t part of a series. It’s tight, measured, well contained, and surprisingly epic in scope. It posits a tightly controlled and tyrannical society where a woodworker and his son live, often beat down by the nosy and meddlesome officials. Naturally, as often with Vance, both characters are very self sufficient and clever and after attending a puppet show, the son shows signs of wanting more than his current life, with his father in quiet support. What happens over time is a number of circumstances and events are set up, both coloring the planet’s society and giving the protagonist a method to finally get off world. But it’s less a science fiction story than a mystery at this point as he more or less unravels exactly what is behind the society by managing to decipher some earlier mythical documents. Many authors would take twice the length to tell such a story, but Vance, as always, is economical and visionary.

The Domains of Koryphon is later and the imagination perhaps even more vivid although the story as such is less mystery and more a planetary adventure or romance. Issued originally as the Gray Prince it demonstrates Vance’s unparalleled skill in world building, or at least in every case where he does it, I’m drawn in by the way humankind (and even aliens in this book) has reconstituted a planet to its own devices. The books sets up with the sort of explanatory prologue that rarely works in the fictions of others and then places a number of characters in the midst of a mystery when the father of two dies in a crash. Cultures clash and there’s definitely a depth to the planet’s society and history that really gives it vividity (not to mention great descriptions, one of Vance’s many strengths) but to some extent it was maybe a bit of a lark and a little thin in places. But there’s still so much to like and I still came away from it thinking I was elsewhere for a while. I love the way bizarre cultural ethics and bartering are set up, which tend to be even unusual for the protagonists, and the consequences of these. And of course the fact that most of Vance’s characters are competent and able. This is also somewhat notable for having one of Vance’s rare female protagonists although this thread seems to almost be dropped halfway through as the three main men take off on the expedition to solve the mystery.

I finally finished Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. I started it ages ago and even saw the movie of it in the middle somewhere which struck me as being a lot different (in particular the end point which in the book was fairly ambiguous but ended up in the movie like a “Soylent Green is people” moment). In fact I felt Dick really captured a very Californian manner of drug patois that the movie obscured by missing the riffing dialogue style and even while reading the latter half, I couldn’t picture Keanu, Woody et al in any of their characters places. Don’t get me wrong, I think Dick was cracking to some extent at this point (after all VALIS and the Gnostic stuff was up next) but at the same time he was on that fence where he captured something particularly unique and subtle about paranoia and a future United States where its tendrils have extended themselves well into law enforcement and just about everything else. Dick may be one of the hippest of the SF world in these days and ages, but at least what I take from his books seems to often be what Hollywood almost always misses, a lack of concretization, letting the ambiguity and complexity of a situation speak for itself.

I’ve been reading the huge Ramsey Campbell short story collection “Alone with the Horrors” also for what seems like ages, but when I picked it up again I was well into his evolution and surely enough the work gets better as it goes. Campbell’s crazy subtle which can’t possibly be for everyone, his is the horror that hides in the cracks, that’s implied, glanced at, but, however no less inexorable than it is when it’s graphic elsewhere. There’s so many stories they’d be too hard to cover in their entirety but some of the scenes I’ll never forget, like the end of ”The Companion” in a carnival at night as the protagonist rides one of the scary rides only for the final ride to begin with one of the most chilling endings ever in a horror story. I couldn’t do it justice, but it was severely creepy. The kids in “The Apple” whose innocent pre-adolescent torturing of a neighbor has its consequences, the horror of which is no less hidden in that it hides behind a costume during a Halloween party. The slow decay of a nephew who’s uncle mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a mysterious ship in a bottle and the redolent atmospheric doom that closes in around him.  A teacher frustrated with his students begins to hallucinate impending catastrophes. Several stories where buildings or topographies become hypnotic and deadly labyrinths.  If the legacy of a man’s writing is partially how long his work stays with you then Campbell has to be commended with a fine legacy as I remember bits and pieces of many of the stories, some unforgettable. So many of them start with almost dull, “normal” situations where one thing about them starts to slow and turn black, while the psychological effects are never shied from. Sometimes what is most frightening is what is implied rather than splattered.

And of course several more Leiber shorts: Be Of Good Cheer, a reply from a government official to a woman who is concerned about the direction the world is going with robots taking over. “The Square Root of Brain” about a Hollywood Party filled with conspiracy theorists interspersed with dictionary definitions. And, “Princess,” a poetic short short where a man in the far future and his daughter traverse a gigantic bridge from the Earth to the Moon. It ends fairly bizarrely but is beautifully written.

The Charles De Lint works takes me well into the Newford series, including his second novel (and first that wasn’t a children’s work – this is something of the opposite of that) and about halfway into “The Ivory and the Horn.” It’s interesting reading this stuff alongside Fritz Leiber as De Lint works in the urban fantasy and horror genre Leiber is credited as inventing, that way of meshing the real and supernatural so that the border kind of creates a nice bit of ambiguity to it. De Lint’s a more sentimental writer than Leiber, at least this early on, it seems to me De Lint gets less sentimental as he goes. I had trouble with the first Newford collection “Dreams Underfoot” on this account, some of it was a little too obviously emotion tugging, to the point where I felt a bit manipulated, perhaps the only time I felt that way in this group was with the novel From a Whisper to a Scream. This is an urban horror about a ghost stalker where a number of different characters from a Native American detective to a freelance photographer to a homeless young girl thread together to end up fighting a growing nemesis in the poorest area of town that seems to be the cause of the Friday Night slayings. It’s actually a bit mainstream-ish in a way, certainly a lot more than the Newford shorts are, written kind of like a thriller, but it was absorbing and quick enough to put away, although it was the first in a number of stories where abuse seems to be the central motivation of many of the city’s characters, something that started to wear a little with me over a couple hundred pages. That is, there’s a similarity among many of De Lint’s characters this early, usually a young female teenage or early 20s s0mething living past her means in poverty due to the need to escape a troubled childhood or stepparent. Certainly a resonant theme, but something a lot more obvious when read closer together.

The Newford stories do take on quite a bit of myth and poetry by the time of The Ivory & The Horn. “The Bone Woman” absorbs a Native American myth with a lot of subtlety, here the climax is hinted at rather than broadcasted and it’s all the better for it. “Mr. Truepenny’s” is a neat dream short where the protagonist realizes her childhood dreamplace has been neglected and is true for more than her. Short but certainly resonant for those with an intense dream life.  “Waifs & Strays” introduces another young woman, Maisie, barely making ends meet who has adopted several strays, animals and a mentally handicapped man, who juggles her responsibilities under great stress only to realize she hadn’t been following her path (another common De Lint theme, the sort of new age concept that’s a big influence on this stuff). “The Wishing Well” is a strong novella that includes character mainstay and always endearing artist Jilly Coppercorn, who’s friends with the main character Brenda, another classic barely-making-ends meet De Lint character, who deals with anorexia, smoking and overspending and whose habits take a sharp turn for the worse after an encounter with a wishing well. Reality and the supernatural blur very nicely here with the type of ambiguous ending that really has resonance after the reading. “Dream Harder” is a romantic short short about a man who unknowingly brings in a stray of his own, an angel with a secret broken wing, but little does he know his time with her is much shorter than he thinks. “Pal o’ Mine” is  a very sad Christmas story about the fate of the nonconformist and depressed, narrated by her best friend. “Dead Man’s Shoes” returns to a character in “Waifs & Strays” (and Jilly again) who tracks down the mystery of the death of an otherwise feared homeless man who she begins to dream of only to find his fate holds a terrible secret. And finally another short short “Coyote Stories” about the tales of a Native American and the resulting revival it brings to his people. All in all a consistent and entertaining string of shorts, all that have a deep emotional resonance and a sense of the romantic much more tempered than his early work and all the better for it. And it takes me up to the next Newford novel, one I’m waiting in the mail for before I return to more Ivory shorts.

The next group of John Varley shorts all post date The Ophiuchi Hotline but many deal with characters and situations from the book. “Good-bye Robinson Crusoe” is the story of a young man – physically – and his emergence into his teen years in a bubble world that seems to resemble the Pacific islands (or Carribean – I forget). In a future where sex has long lost its taboo nature, he comes out of innocence when his world is visited by an offworlder he becomes embroiled with while being confused at the moves of a long time friend. But even though he knows he’s much older than his physical age, which can be changed at will, the full story has yet to emerge.

“Lollipop and the Tar Baby” revisits the outer solar system Black Hole Hunters from The Ophiuchi Hotline via the viewpoint of a youngster born during one of these long journeys who finally finds one of the rare black holes only to find out it’s sentient. “Equinoctial” also revisits a theme from Ophiuchi, that of the symbiotes that live in Saturn’s rings and what happens when one of the humans is brutally separated from her symbiote while she gives birth to quintuplets. The story is her search to find them all again, which means finding another symbiote. At this point Varley’s just on top of his game, these are all tight, brilliantly constructed stories that really envision a deep far future vision.

“The Barbie Murders” is the second of his stories to feature detective Anna-Louise Bach on a future moon that so resembles the Eight Worlds moon that the series, originally not intended to be a crossover, has almost been dragged into the canon by fans. But they certainly all take on different tones, using a more informal and less neutral language. In this short, Bach is tasked to find out a murderer in a colony of identical clones. Bach is pregnant and just about due in “The Bellman” a story written for the long promised and never materialized final version of Harlan Ellison’s last Dangerous Visions collection (written in 78, finally published in The John Varley Reader in 2003). It’s good it finally arrived as it’s as strong as most of the stories from the period taking Bach on a crime mystery that finds her abducted and left totally to her own skills to get out of a syndicate that wants her baby for the most nefarious of purposes.

“Options” returns to the Eight Worlds and in this story the long bandied about and common ability to have sex changes is taken to its earliest formation where many are still quite uncomfortable with the idea. A married woman with children slowly decides she’d live to try life as a man only to find resistance from her husband, but she goes ahead with it anyway. “Beatnik Bayou” brings back one minor character from Ophiuchi, but is about the education of a young teen just finally emerging into adulthood on a bubble created as part of the bayou. The story is about his changeover from one teacher to another, after the initial set up finds them all in court over a woman who tries extreme coeercion to get the boy’s prior teacher to teach her own child.

The last three stories here are the few I hadn’t read from from Varley’s first two collections. Manikins wrapped up the Barbie Murders collection, a very early short that’s one of the few that didn’t work for me, and happens to be the one I can’t remember much about. “In the Hall of the Martian Kings” brought me some deja vu, I’d wonder if I’d read it somewhere before, about a crew on Mars whose air bubble is burst when the water shed from the camp awakens the native Martian life. The survivors, left to fend for themselves in an unlikely situation, end up finding out that the slowly growing life seems to have a connection to Earth. Really a brilliant piece of work this one. “Air Raid” inspired the movie and book Millenium (the one with Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson of all people) that I’d seen way back when, however the short is much leaner, intense and hectic and less “Langoliers”-like than the movie that followed, as future people raid a plane about to crash in a manner that would hint at Kage Baker’s Company series down the line. Finally, the title story of the Persistence of Vision collection and perhaps the best story here or at least one of them, about a drifter’s encounter with a colony of the blind and deaf in the New Mexican desert, a completely self sufficent and unusual colony who have adapted several languages and a society that is so complex that he finds himself more and more distanced as he lives in the colony. Later he comes back to it after some time after missing it only to find a mystery at the heart that can’t be discovered without a major change. It’s a Hugo, Nebula, Ditmar and Locus winner, which probably says it all and it’s certainly great to read those that live up the awards. Tons of great stuff, I couldn’t really even wait to check out Blue Champagne from the library to read the few in there I didn’t have.

And finally a rather early (I think his second) short short from TED Klein, the esteemed editor the Twilight Zone magazine in the 80s and a pretty impressive writer on his own, that I found in the Microcosmic Tales collection edited by Amazon and including a Fritz story I needed. This one’s about a future NASA’s breakthrough in sending a future scientist back in time only for him to be unable to recount their breakthroughs in any practical manner to the past. Perhaps a bit obvious overall, but still kinda neat.

This line of Fritz Leiber stories takes me from roughly July 1951 to somewhere in 1953 (as well as one a decade later). A few of the stories in this order are not here as I read them earlier, either as part of library check outs or the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series.

“Appointment in Tomorrow” or “Poor Superman” by the time it made The Best of Fritz Leiber is one of those 1950s stories obsessed with the McCarthy era and the whole impending nuclear war that always strikes me as dated in the modern age where the USSR was dismantled and the epithet “socialist” apparently meaning “liberal” in the modern age, which I guess shows to some extent that McCarthyism maybe never went fully away. One of Leiber’s obvious interests is the whole war between science and magic, a theme visited in his Gather, Darkness! novel originally written in 1943. Here it’s all mashed up as a future US is dominated by an organization with a supercomputer. However much is not as it seems as the story unfolds the secret story of the country being controlled by a group of people not interested in science and the scientists who have finally had enough and attempt to confront them. I honestly found it tough to keep interest in the story as it definitely verged on the preachy side.

“A Pail of Air” I liked a lot better, the Earth pulled out of its orbit by a “dark star” ends up killing most of its inhabitants due to the freezing of its atmosphere, except for a small family living in a somewhat preprepared building who periodically dons space suits to bring back frozen oxygen in pails. Of course the young boy whose perspective we see from sees an unusual light on one of his trips implying he’s not alone…

“When the Last Gods Die” is one of those Leiber short shorts that reminds me something of Lord Dunsany’s work, sort of vast epic and poetic but ultimately not terribly filled out. “Dr Kometevsky’s Day” wasn’t great, a futuristic short where the eponymous Dr’s prophecies about planets disappearing appears to be coming true when the moons around Mars disappear and a group of people, all married, notice it. I found that the group marriage concept was probably better explored in a previous story “Nice Girl with 5 Husbands.” ”The Foxholes of Mars” was also very short and more like Last Gods, having to do with a future war and its effects. “Yesterday House” I’ve totally forgotten without a reminder, but I remember liking it quite a bit (will have to come back and fresh).

“I’m Looking for “Jeff”" is a creepy ghost story about a woman’s ghost who only certain people in a tavern see who seems to cause trouble with those who do. Her goal like many a spectre is to unleash revenge on the man who killed her, the eponymous Jeff, via the seduction of another bar patron. This one might have fit right into Night’s Black Agents had it not been written so late. And finally “The Big Holiday,” a surprisingly upbeat short short about the inhabitants of an off world town and what they do periodically to celebrate. This takes me up to right before The Green Millenium novel, which will give me a chance to pause a while with Leiber.

Two more, from library books, first the short short “X Marks the Pedwalk,” about the war between pedestrians and drivers and the rules of road rage and what happens when it’s taken a step too far and the attempts to change the rules. It just ain’t like it used to be… Second, “Time in the Round” from Galaxy May 57 (and the Third Galaxy Reader), another future vision where entertainment comes in the form of viewing past time events and a trio of kids who decide to view it, one too young and bloodthirsty who manages to circumvent the strictures keeping him out and the resulting chaos.

So I’ve got to mention the video game Borderlands, which was something of an addiction for a couple of weeks, a loot heavy first person shooter/role playing game hybrid on a planet that’s something like a futuristic wild west. Many of the NPC characters had almost redneck-like accents that were hilarious, particularly the car boss Scooter, who was virtually classic and amazingly I never got tired of. It’s a simple story, you’re trying to find the pieces of a key to open an alien vault that supposedly has secret weaponary or some such thing. Honestly the whole finale really wasn’t much to my taste, but I think maybe I hadn’t upgraded my weaponary enough to make the penultimate stage of the game all that fun (I honestly took off running when I was close enough to the vault). Then I though the boss was too difficult at first, but fortunately there was a teleport I could use to go reload and come back. When I did I figured out that all I needed to do was use a certain area of the map for cover and the boss was pulverized no problem. I also found the car battles a lot more difficult than the straight shooting ones. But for the most part it was just extreme fun throughout the game, one of those “alright just one more mission” games that keep you up late. At the time I’d even put Lost Planet on hold to play it and then after this reading got the best of me, after I got lukewarm with Dragon Age: Origins. But I assume I’ll return to that one when the latest reading frenzy ebbs.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, it’s actually pretty easy to get into the mood when you start hitting gold and starting with this installment I have definitely hit a rhythm. The Planet Savers is the very very first Marion Zimmer Bradley Darkover book, a series that is very large and one which I’ve never seemed to find much consensus on as to how good it really is. What it basically turned out to be was something of a mountain climbing adventure as a group of humans and Darkover natives attempt to find a cure for a periodic disease on the planet. As it turns out the protagonist is hiding something of a mystery in his own being that actually turns out to be fairly fascinating in the end. I expected to like this a lot less than I ended up which bodes well for later books in the series. It’s definitely a product of the time period or at least the influence of the classic age of science fiction when not everything had to be some sort of deep psychological and layered manifesto, and sometimes I tend to appreciate that. “The Waterfall” was a short story thrown in the same omnibus from a bit later down the line, 76-ish, that was a bit of witchery in a way and kind of creepy as a member of Darkovan nobility seduces a guard on an escapade, which doesn’t work out too well for the guard in the end.

I have to claim “The Ophiuchi Hotline” as the book that really started my reading in earnest. In fact I’m not totally sure I hadn’t read the book in my childhood as it gave me some deja vu and I know I did read quite a bit of Varley back then, probably before I more fully understood the adult themes in his writing, such as the Gaean trilogy. Ophiuchi is the first novel in the Eight Worlds series following a half to a full dozen short stories and it’s about at this time that Varley’s writing is peaking like noone’s business. The whole series really does strike me as a viable future universe where things are so advanced that human sexuality is totally different and cloning abundant (and actually doesn’t even seem particularly dated today). It starts with the protagonist in jail and facing execution for cloning crimes only to be broken out by a shady politician who needs her for research. Deaths are abundant and through the book the protag becomes more than just one operating person. In many ways this is the book that threads together a lot of the Eight Worlds concepts, such as the symbiotes that live in the rings of Saturn; the large underground environments found under the surface of Pluto; the Ophiuchi Hotline itself, a transmission from a different star that’s been feeding humanity most of its future technology for quite some time and has just sent an invoice for its services; and the outer solar system hunt for black holes, the primary means of generating energy for a humanity that has been ousted from its planet by gas giant-based invaders. I’ve since gone on to read the next several stories that all concentrate on some of these specifically (not to mention even characters from the book) so it’s all on my mind. It was impossible not to rocket through the book it was so good, a credit to Varley’s smooth and measured prose. No wonder he was one of the great writers of the 70s and 80s and now I seem to be in the peak of the work and it’s like one home run after another. Few writers are this good on novel #1.

The Zelazny story is a short work based on the Faust myth, basically Faust wanting out of his deal and the resulting state of affairs. I found it a touch confusing but it was colorfully rendered. Wouldn’t have picked it up had it not been in an anthology another Leiber story was in.

And a short step to video games. Wolfenstein, of course, was one of the very early first person shooters, in fact I seem to remember playing the very original even before it was a FPS way back when. Return is an Xbox title and for both the Xbox and the 360 probably the most primitive game I own, somewhere betweem, say, Quake 4/Doom 3 and the previous games in those series. It was fun enough, sure, like most of these games, but the graphics seemed very dated and for once distracting. Course I got to play through some of this with the nephews so it’ll be a bit more memorable than it might have been otherwise. And it managed to unlock the previous Wolfenstein 3D when I finished it so that might be fun later. Oh and I should mention it was terribly easy, even the bosses were little problem.

And finally, Crowley’s Book of Thoth, his latter work on his own tarot set which, for some reason, tends to scare a lot of people, even including people who use other tarots and for some reason I just don’t get why. Maybe I’m just getting too skeptical about this stuff to think of it in terms of Ouija poltergeists and such. Book of Thoth is terribly advanced though, definitely past my ability to truly get what I could out of the book. As it is with most western occultism, everything is couched in symbols, often symbols within symbols, so it definitely read as graduate work, not to mention every few pages saying something like “this can only be truly understood by the most advanced members of the OTO.” Whatever you might say about Crowley he had an almost genius level understanding of a dozen world occult schools to the point where he was synthesizing them into one system, which is something very prevalent in his tarot. In just one card one might encounter tantric, Greek mystery school, kabbalah, alchemic and several other concepts all meshed into one card. Everything has meaning, the colors, the directions, facial expressions, you name it. Of course the issues that held me up as a previous Golden Dawn student are his embellishments on the system based on his Book of Law experiences and the whole change of an Aeon paradigm, which struck me as needing an extraordinary amount of faith to go on, but that’s the thing about Crowley in general, you study him enough and you’re likely to gain surprising and revelationary insights on symbols that show his teachings to be a lot more subtle and well thought out that one might have originally thought. I’m just at the point now where I’d rather be living my life than being embroiled in such intense esoteric work, which strikes me as totally all consuming at this point and nearly as faith based as any other religion.

First, the new Magma is out. Oh happy day. I’d state the title but my Kobian spelling and umlauting is awful. But if it’s anywhere near a fraction as good as KA is (and considering I’ve heard the whole thing live anyway I suspect it will be), I’ll be very, very happy. They’re still one of the greatest bands of any age and I ordered my CD post haste. Can’t wait. Besides, a skit in Kobaian by Christian, Stella and Vander? Is this the first crack in the exterior? Are those age lines in Christian’s scowl or a hint of a smile?

Second, video game crack is Borderlands. As my pad gets messier and my obligations and other dreams are pushed aside, as I neglect friends and family, as even the new Dragon Age: Origins waits untried, all I can think of is just 30 more minutes please. OK maybe an hour. Oh how did I ever live without a tivo. Is it full yet? No. good.  Oh did that expensive incense stick just burn all the way through without me noticing it? Oh wait that was a few days ago. Let me shoot just one more skag. OK and those bandits. But I could get a much better shotgun. Mine can electrify but the one I have for level 22 is even better. No, I don’t need sleep anymore, they’ll just have to put up with the snoring at work. But wait maybe I can buy a second 360 for work, if I just keep the volume down. Kee-hee another varmint toast. OK I need y’all to clear out, I’ve got a lot of things I need to catch up on and no please don’t turn on the lights…

Am getting a lot of reading done of late.Which is kind of cool, because I go through huge phases where I get very little done, it’s almost as if I have to start a phase to really get things going. And I’m not really sure what got it started this time, maybe some of the easy to read Lansdale stuff helped. It’s almost as if I start to read easier once I get some momentum.

Anyway up front continues my digging in to the Fritz Leiber canon roughly chronologically. Roughly, because I’ve read the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser series twice (except for the seventh collection) and sometimes I have to read some later stories out of order when checking books out from the library. Also, some stories are very hard to come by. “Cry Witch!” brings me current through Spring 1951, barring three stories I haven’t been able to find. There was a really great series of collections going via Darkside or Midnight House press, but there’s been no word on what’s going on with these for several years. These were The Black Gondolier, Smoke Ghost, Horrible Imaginings and Day Dark, Night Bright. I gloomed on to these in time to grab the last two and fortunately there’s a trade paperback of Gondolier, but Smoke Ghost is now prohibitively expensive and the next volume of the series, which I believe was to be One Station on the Way, never came out as if the company just lost interest. I have no idea why and would not only love to see it but see a paperback of Smoke Ghost. The three stories I’ve missed through Spring 1951 are “They Never Come Back” (8/41); The Black Ewe (5/50); and “Martians, Keep Out!” (7-8/50) The first and last were due in Station, the middle was in Smoke Ghost and I haven’t been able to find any other source for them. However I suppose it must be said the rarer stories like this turn out to be pretty minor in the long run. But I find it bizarre that companies like Wildside Press continue to release the same stories that can easily be found in the old collections for affordable used prices when there’s still so many stories that are virtually impossible to find.

The thing is, Leiber’s imagination is truly a sight to behold. I always get the impression reading various stories that he’s often one of the first to play with an idea that later becomes a horror or SF cliché. He also seems to be one of the earlier writers to write seriously about sexuality. “Coming Attraction” posits a future where the taboo on female nudity has changed so the face is now veiled even when the body isn’t. And a British man in New York takes an interest in what seems to be a troubled woman in this future where wrestling appears to be the sport du jour. It seems uncommonly prescient in the present of WWF and the ongoing meddling in the Middle East. I’m not sure the story totally falls together all that well, but I believe this one’s considered one of Leiber’s best and there’s certainly enough of  a reason why with a sad and tragic climax as a result of the dystopia.

“The Dead Man” rings like a precursor of movies like the Reanimator although to be true this is a Weird Tale that obviously had Lovecraft as a major influence. A journalist’s friend has made an amazing discovery in terms of how hypnosis can change the physical state of the rare human being, in this case a man who the protagonist suspects is having an affair on the the friend’s wife. In showing him his experiments tragedy ensues as the friend attempts to put the experimental subject to a temporary death via hypnosis only to be unable to revive him. The story moves forward a couple years as the two meet up again only for the friend to finally remember the signal he had forgotten to revive the patient. When he does finally remember it sets of a chain of events that results in a grisly finale, one that reminded me of a horror movie or two.

“Nice Girl with Five Husbands” is a bizarre little time travel story, a man is whisked a hundred years into his future and runs across what is a sort of polygamist community that couldn’t possible be explained, something of a utopia where morals are completely changed. Yet again Leiber toys with a possible future where sexual ethics are completely different and the protagonist is left with only a memory and mystery in the end.

And “Cry Witch!” which reminds me a lot of my earlier RA Wilson read in terms of the theoretical sexuality of witches. Here a man recounts a tale of finding love in a small village only to realize that the woman he loves is apparently in affairs with just about everyone else. The man attempts to take the woman for himself and moves her outside of the village only to realize after a while that things haven’t changed and he’s been enchanted not to notice. And in the end he perhaps realizes he can’t quite escape the enchantment. This was a story also in “Smoke Ghost” that I managed to find in an anthology called “The Black Magic Compendium,” it apparently exists in no other Leiber collection.

Not only have I been back on the Leiber wagon, but I finally managed to finish what for Mr. Shepard is probably his longest work, an expansion of the classic novella “R&R” and a near future war story about a man who has been trained for psychic warfare and is basically set adrift in a Central America in what seems to be something of a never ending war. While the book almost seems to be a mosaic of different stories, as if R&R seems to be a separate entity, it’s almost a minor point as the language here is just unbelievably rich and evocative, not only recounting a deeply exotic, near-tropic jungle environment in rich detail, but doing the same with the characters, looking at them in utterly unflinching terms as the protagonist finds love and manages to analyze it in a number of different ways as the couple move south to Panama City in order to find the heart of the war and perhaps peace. It’s something of a philosophical treatise in some ways and never seems to forget that war is hell, and that no matter the excuses the various characters use to rationalize their atrocities, that there really is no excuse in the proliferation of human suffering. The juxtaposition of war and environment is much like the descriptions of the landscape itself, vistas of beauty strewn with the detritus of war and suffering. It’s an intense read and undoubtedly anyone with a heart will come face to face with the idea that Americans really never see the full picture of the ravaging of capitalism on the third world outside its borders nor that the original of an ongoing massive war can result from the petty squabblings of two famillies. I doubt it will be long before a book like this is considered literature. And it also manages to freak you out about butterflies which is no mean feat.

Switching to a video game, Dead Space on Xbox 360 has to be considered a landmark of horror science fiction, it was virtually one of the more frightening and harrowing games I’ve ever played. There were literally days where I wouldn’t touch the thing due to the anxiety it caused, the entire game was a series of scare tactics. The plot is you’re  on your way to a mining ship sending out a distress call only to find out that the whole ship has been taken over by horrific alien life forms that mutate nearly everything they come across. The source, an alien artifact taken on board the ship. The graphics are incredible and disgusting all at once, undoubtedly Giger-influenced and the range of the ship is astounding from claustrophic corridors to huge open zero-gravity spaces and all points in between. It’s almost impossible to recount the various activities one undergoes besides laying waste to some of the thorniest and nastiest creatures ever witnessed in a game as one has to resort to blowing off limbs as the hideous aliens come popping out of vents or dropping down behind you at all points of the game . It’s almost enough to give you a heart attack at times and there’s hardly a moment where one wonders if you’ll ever have enough ammunition to deal with what’s about to come at you. Later in the game there are some huge rooms where you walk in and the door shuts and the game throws EVERYTHING at you that insist you strategize carefully, not only in what weapons you’ll use but how to freeze the fast moving ones and where to stand etc. And the bosses in this game are just terrifying, a tribute to the collective genius of the staff here, with dimensions that are just off the chart. When you finally get to the end you’re almost cheering from the relief involved not having to play again while realizing what a great time you had in the end. This is the type of thing the cliché “not for the squeamish” was written for. Most sci-fi horror movies have nothing on this game.

Zoran Zivkovic’s “The Fourth Circle” was the Serbian’s (I hope I got that right) debut novel in his original language, although it made it as a translation some time after that. It’s a bizarre piecemeal sort of science fiction book that throws together alien races and historical and fictional characters into a soup that progresses like a mystery. It hops around not only from the perspective of the aliens but primarily that of an artificial intelligence and a monastic like figure who works with an artist as they encounter mystery in the symbolism of the circle. Gradually these point of views are mixed in with four different scientists, including Archimedes and Stephen Hawking, including a wild and hilariously outlandish sequence where the immobile Hawking is drawn into a bizarre fantasy of his nurse’s. Later in the book the point of view switches to Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. Watson, a milieu where strangely enough the author of the Holmes books Arthur Conan Doyle is actually a part of, surmising a slightly different world. All of the pieces come together quite well in the end, nothing particularly surprising from a science fictional point of view but not unsatisfying either. Certainly I look forward to checking out some more of the author’s work as this struck me as wildly imaginative if not quite perfectly realized.

Robert Anton Wilson’s Sex, Drugs and Magick is a 1998 revision of one of his oldest books, which basically acts as survey of mostly psychedelic drugs and how they connect to sex and religious acts through the ages. It contains Wilson’s major strength which is a certain cross-subject way of connecting various strands of esoteric information as well as not taking extreme moralistic stands on any particular subject. Most interesting were the historical surveys of the original Hashishans, the Salem witches and such where some hypotheses are made on what was actually happening with them and what drew down negative authoritarian interests on them and such. Mostly what is concentrated on was the connection of psychedelics and sexual encounters and how these connections were responsible for profound almost Hindu-like religious visions and that this search was largely responsible for the 60s counter culture and for so many people trying to expand their consciousness. Having read a lot of later Wilson work, which while interesting, gets somewhat repetitive at times being that they consist of essays (sometimes the same work in different books), it was interesting to read a non-fiction work that was a lot more meaty. It still seems to me that he often concentrates on the work of the figures he adores (Tim Leary, Aleister Crowley, Buckminster Fuller, Wilhelm Reich etc) to the detriment of others that might add some color to the procedure (he’s the type of guy who once said as far as horror is concerned H. P. Lovecraft was the very best and you don’t need to read anyone else), narrowing down his own vision in a way that seems contrary to his missives about keeping an open mind and not making extreme all or nothing statements, but overall these are issues far less important than the interesting connections he makes, particularly on subjects that still seem vastly taboo in this culture. His consistent observations that scientists have basically abandoned these fields of research is still something I’m in full agreement with and he demonstrates quite well how this hold up has led to a proliferation of false information on a number of subjects, particularly due to the dominance of certain religious beliefs. Thought provoking overall, something Wilson rarely fails at being.

Borrowed the Subterranean collection from Lansdale through the library system. I’d already read one of the substantial novellas in here already (“…Foldout…”) which shortened the read considerably, but I found this to be a much better collection than the previous one I’d read (Bumper Crop). For one thing this contains two stories following Preacher Jebidiah Rains, his character from Dead in the West who seems to have a mission from God to fight supernatural evil in the Wild West of the time. I particularly liked the collection’s final story, “The Gentleman’s Hotel” which has Rains taking on a different group of werewolves which have basically eaten up a small town. But the best story is the novella “White Mule, Spotted Pig” where Lansdale takes your somewhat typical small town idiot as a protagonist who gets an idea to win a mule race to make his fortune which leads him and two sidekicks on a search for a slightly legendary white mule who apparently befriended a pig and only runs when the pig does. No typical surprises here, but I can never get enough of the quasi-redneck patter that goes on between characters and the whole raunchy sort of tone that Lansdale does all too well. Not really a bad story in this one.

Finally started picking up the old Fritz Leiber canon again after quite a while. In fact I think I missed talking about one or two stories previous to these none of which I remember, but I’m somewhere in late 1950 now, a very prolific year for Leiber. “The Ship Sails at Midnight” is a story about a group of self-professed Bohemians who meet a waitress who ends up having a profound influence on their art and lives, only for it to become obvious early in the story that there’s something unearthly about her. “The Enchanted Forest” entails a humanoid named Elven who while trying to escape being hunted by the human race crash lands on a planet that is mostly thorny forest. As he burns his way through the forest on a trajectory to find a city, he ends up running into what seems like the same clearing with two couples who treat him completely differently on each encounter. The reason for it all is something of a psychological experiment on human beings that ends up acting on the humanoid sort of like old faerie stories. “Later Than You Think” is a short piece where a future archaeologist ends up finding intelligent life well in the past. Part theory of the rise and fall of a species, it has one of those almost Twilight Zone like twists at the end, letting you know exactly what species it is the archaeologist found.

Right now I’m still tackling more Leiber and enjoying Lucius Shepard’s Life During Wartime, which just has some incredible prose and description, something of a, perhaps, flawed masterpiece (as a lot of novella turned novels tend to be). But it strikes me in terms of sheer vision to be a lot more resonant than much of what I’ve read lately. The descriptions of Central America are just so vivid they pop off the pages.

I go through weird phases in my reading and I’m realizing that one of the best things I can do to start a new phase is by reading something that’s easy to read. Lately I’ve gotten about 100+ pages into Alastair Gray’s Lanark, but its very Kafka-esque feel to it has left me cooling towards the book despite its set up of an intriguing mystery and out of order narrative structure and ultimately cooling me down on reading.

So I found out that finally after a good eight years or so Texan maestro Joe Lansdale has finally released a new Hap and Leonard book, Vanilla Ride, and sure enough I finished it in a good three days. After all, the classic banter between the two tough guys, a liberal white straight man and a Republican black gay man, is just a lot of raunchy fun and in Vanilla Ride it’s not only this duo that returns but several ancillary characters all of which are well drawn enough to welcome back. Anyway it rips right on through, one of the friends’ own friends needs a favor for the two to go rescue a relative from the clutches of hillbilly cocaine dealers which leads them straight into a mix up with the local mob and FBI, as the former ends up sending groups of assassins after the guys after they end up rescuing the unwilling relative and leaving embarassed low lives in their wake. As usual it’s a solid read, amusing, dirty, graphic, violent and a hell of a lot of fun, and I’m pleased to hear Lansdale has got a follow up in the works, it’s a series I’ll never want to end.

Bumper Crop, on the other hand, is a short story collection that doesn’t quite measure up to the brilliant High Cotton, or at least it’s chock full of 3-4 page stories that are often pastiches or quick set ups. Fun yes, but very few of them had the brutal and fascinating impact of the longer work found in other collections. In fact the several longer ones, such as the opening “God of the Razor,” are definitely the more interesting stories in the batch. But I will say that even at their least impressive, they always manage to be quickly readable. Anyway these two quick starts have helped kick off another reading binge, so I’m finally starting to make more significant dents on my pile, but more about that later.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the latest game I’ve been playing on the Xbox. My first attempt at the Japanese Role Playing Game with Lost Odyssey had me hanging the game up for a while after disc 3 of 4, after getting dreadfully tired of the game’s tedious combat system. Star Ocean has a more visceral and live combat system that’s a lot more interesting, necessary when such a thing gets infinitely repetitive in such a game. It also doesn’t hurt to have Motoi Sakuraba riffing away on a Hammond B3 substitute most of the time, he’s definitely still pushing out the progressive rock tracks for the soundtrack here.

Like most of the JPRG’s I’ve read about or even Lost Odyssey you’ve got an overly melodramatic, young male lead as the protagonist who is quickly joined by his childhood friend and likely later romantic interest. The plot is basically nuclear war on earth sends a bunch of spaceships out searching for new planets and such, only for the protagonist’s ship to be pushed off course by a mysterious meteor crashlanding them on the first of many planets. Graphics are pretty amazing all around, certainly evocative and like Lost Odyssey the game progresses through cut scenes, some of them as much as 30 minutes in length often making one’s heart move rapidly wondering if one will make it to the next save point before a freeze or electric malfunction happens. These cut scenes, while well done and fairly fun to watch are also dreadfully cheesy, particularly as you progress through the game adding new characters to your party for a total of eight in the latter stages of the game.

Unfortunately if you want to get a lot out of the game you really do need a guide for assistance as there are so many secrets in the game that I found myself realizing I had missed a ton of them just by realizing this later in the game before I decided to use one. Resources are mostly gathered via mining and harvesting points, of which you realize you have to go back to over and over and over again to complete side missions or create important items of which there are literally hundreds. Often even large side missions remain hidden until you return to a place you wouldn’t even normally think of except for the handy guide including a large cave section outside the town on one of the universe’s main planets. I honestly can’t imagine the time it took for the people who write these guides to eke out all these secrets, not to mention the many personal interactions between the crew that are sussed out by talking to certain characters at the right place and time.

But not only all this but you realize by the time you get to the end of the game and the final boss section and subsequent 40 minute end cut scene that it’s really not the end of the game, oh no, there’s actually a secret dungeon that can be opened at the end (by a ring that also sends you, yet again, all over your known universe opening chests for new equipment that you could never get during the actual game itself) that’s intensely more difficult than any in the game and then, apparently, there’s one after that that holds the game’s uberboss that’s somehow even more difficult to the point that one needs to amp up all their characters to 200 levels, when the natural game, even when grinding like crazy, only gets you to say the 70s and 80s. You have to give to the creators that for those who love this game they’ve really given you plenty to chew on (not to mention a massive Colloseum system that also can’t be beaten until after the end of the game). Personally I find there’s diminishing returns at this point as instead of intriguing missions, cut scenes and such really all you’re left with is the never ending combat system, which as fun as it is I’m not sure it quite will last long enough for me to stagger through unsaveable, difficult later dungeons.

But overall, unlike Lost Odyssey (so far perhaps), Star Ocean was fun enough to get me through the main game and certainly it was a lot of cheesy fun while it lasted. I did miss a lot though, including not being able to fulfill a lot of side quests on a certain planet that, shall we say, doesn’t last in its current condition throughout and not understanding the on ship private action system to trigger more than one of the final character scenes, but I bet I could find those on youtube were I interested enough. Overall though, I’m not sure the JPRG is quite my style, certainly there are some aspects I like but I definitely go for the Bethesda or Bioware styled RPGs more, probably because the character interactions aren’t quite so eyerollingly embarassing at times. Then again while maybe 40 minute cut scenes are really pushing the envelope I think there’s something to be said for getting to the movie segments as they definitely add more story to it. Unfortuantely in Star Ocean’s case it wasn’t anything more than the usual fantasy inspired space opera motif at work, but hey occasionally I’m a sucker for a huge battle in space or dramatic pre-boss spectacle so it overall was worth the effort. But even though I’ve still got a couple JRPGs on hand to play (not to mention the two in question here that still have more plan on them both), I feel it’s unlikely I’ll need to buy anymore.

Just gotta say it, Jim Parsons was robbed of the Emmy on Sunday by Alec Baldwin. After watching the Big Bang Theory Season 3 premiere, even more convinced. Ratings on Monday even surpassed its lead in, Two and a Half Men, of late the #1 comedy on TV. Seriously why aren’t you watching Big Bang Theory yet?!?! Downright funniest show since Seinfeld.