Category Archives: New books

The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension

27 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Released back in April 2018, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siecle. Not just a book of the history of mathematics, but a survey of the cultural influence of the new discoveries at the time when Lovecraft was a youth and young man…

“the volume describes an active interplay between self-fashioning disciplines and a key moment in the popularisation of science. It offers new research into spiritualism and the Theosophical Society and studies a series of curious hybrid texts. Examining works by Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and others, the volume explores how new theories of the possibilities of time and space influenced fiction writers of the period, and how literature shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn.”

Dune Encyclopedia

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

I’m pleased to see there was a good encyclopaedia for Dune, back in the 1980s, Dune Encyclopedia. It was written as if ‘in-world’, and as such felt free to elaborate new ideas on the background and character back-stories. Today it can be understood as a possibly-correct history, with errors and misunderstandings made by some of the ‘historians’ involved. This is because Herbert himself later contradicted some of the elements in the Dune Encyclopedia, with his later Dune books.

Note that the new Dune Companion book from McFarland is apparently a stinker, and is to be avoided.

After a little digging and testing I find that the reading order for unabridged audiobook readers is:—

1. Book 1: Dune. The unabridged audiobook reading by George Guidall is the best one to listen to. Also, note that the Scott Brick audiobook version is apparently abridged for some reason.

2. Interlude: “The Road to Dune”. A quite short work by Herbert that sits between the first two novels, to be found in his short-story collection Eye. There appears to be no audiobook of this, so it would need to be read in ebook form. Said to take the form of “a guidebook for pilgrims to the planet Arrakis”. (Update: A Scott Brick / Audio Renaissance audiobook titled “The Road to Dune” was released in 2012 – some say 2005 – but apparently it does not actually contain “The Road to Dune”!).

3. Book 2. Dune Messiah. The unabridged audiobook reading by Scott Brick et al.

4. Book 3. Children of Dune. The unabridged audiobook reading by Scott Brick et al. is the most listen-able.

There is also a Book 4, God Emperor of Dune. It’s by Frank Herbert, rather than some later cash-in writer. But it is widely said to be a rather depressing and dour coda to the original trilogy. It also departs heavily from the style of the core trilogy. As such, you may well be happy with just the original trilogy.

Note that each of the three core books appears to have “Deleted Scenes & Chapters from…” fannish ebook floating around the Internet, which might be looked at after each novel. Some of these are in audio as part of “The Road to Dune” audiobook mentioned above.

Howard Days: recording of a panel on the Lovecraft – Howard letters

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

From 2015, a one-hour panel discussion by scholars of the two-volume A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.

Part of Ben Freiberg’s fine and seemingly comprehensive collection of recordings of the ‘Howard Days’ panels and speeches. ‘Howard Days’ look excellent and, as as I’m never likely to get to Texas, a big thanks to Ben for placing clear recordings online.

Shadows Over Baker Street – the worthy stories

23 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

Which stories might I want to read in Shadows Over Baker Street, the well-known Sherlock Holmes-Lovecraft mash-up anthology? I rarely glance at such anthologies and, even when I do, I’m not someone who slogs through all stories. Roll on the day we get ‘the Spotify for stories’ and can do our own remix anthologies. In the meantime I just want the best in any given anthology or collection, and am prepared to do 30 minutes of research to find out which stories are deemed the best.

Nor do I care for ‘sidelong stories’, of the sort that often pad anthologies by strapping a minor character into some tangentially connected setting. For instance, Shadows Over Baker Street has a reportedly good story featuring Sebastian Moran on a tiger-hunt in India. But neither the setting or the minor character appeals to me. I don’t read Sherlock Holmes stories for their jungle settings.

Let’s see what the reviews say about the book:—

Baker St. Dozen has a biting review from a sceptical Sherlockian perspective. They only strongly commend the following stories, which use the expected setting and approach:

* Steven Elliott-Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.

Kirkus has its usual snippy review, though this one is less cutting than usual. They note:

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.

The latter is singled out by Kirkus as a “stunning” and “ingenious reworking of the familiar incident of Holmes’s misadventure at the Reichenbach Falls”. An Amazon review also claims it to be darkly comic, if one reads it in the right way.

The Harrow Review has:

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Steven-Elliot Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* James Lowder, “The Weeping Masks”.

Innsmouth Free Press singled out:

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.

Note that several of the more fannish reviewers, who I also consulted, also disliked Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”. Apparently for its too-whimsical approach. You either love it or hate it, it seems. My own reaction to it takes the form of a short Holmes pastiche story “The Case of the Purloined Prose”.

I then skittered over the Amazon reviews, but failed to spot claims for as-yet un-noticed gems in the collection. F. Gwynplaine Macintyre’s “The Adventure of Exham Priory” did have another bit of acclaim in one such review.

Thus, for those who don’t want to slog through all 480 pages of what is widely regarded as a very patchy collection, Shadows Over Baker Street appears to boil down to…

* Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”.
* Steven-Elliot Altman, “A Case of Royal Blood”.
* Brian Stableford, “Art in the Blood”.
* James Lowder, “The Weeping Masks”.
* F. Gwynplaine McIntyre, “The Adventure of Exham Priory”.
* Simon Clarke’s “Nightmare in Wax” – this ends the volume, and does get occasional tepid mentions in the reviews.

Only half a dozen. Still, the book is now on Kindle for just 99 pence (about $1.30). Even just for a handful of such crossover stories, that’s not a bad price.

Finally, talking of Cthulhu and Sherlock, avoid this new book series like the plague. Great covers, but bloody awful books from both a Lovecraftian and Sherlockian perspective. And just plain bad writing too.

Revenant: “Fearful Sounds” special issue

22 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

A new 2018 issue of the open access journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural is a “Fearful Sounds” special issue on supernatural sonics.

Looking back over the contents of their two earlier issues, I see that the essay “‘Stop All The Clocks’: Elegy and Uncanny Technology” also fits with the same theme, albeit with reference to establishment authors rather than to weird writers.

They have a page offering Guest Editing Opportunities for complete themed issues.

The Art of Mike Ploog

22 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

≈ Leave a comment

The Art of Ploog (2015), a comprehensive 9″ x 12″ retrospective of the career of a very fine comics artist, who mostly did weird and horror work with an very polished and recognisable style. Still in print, for now. Many will remember Mike Ploog best for drawing The Planet of the Apes, Man-Thing, and his own Weirdworld in the 1970s for Marvel. Also for strips in Heavy Metal and Epic in the 1980s. He was also a storyboarder for the likes of Carpenter’s The Thing and The Dark Crystal.

Original art from Marvel’s Weirdworld.

Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others

21 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

Newly listed on Amazon, Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others. It weighs in at 630 pages, and is pre-ordering now for shipping “30th September 2018” in paperback. It’s rather costly on Amazon UK at £30 (nearly $40 + shipping). No price listed at Amazon USA, but it’s likely to be slightly cheaper for USA buyers direct from Hippocampus, which currently has the book at an introductory $25 plus shipping. It may even be cheaper for UK buyers to get it via Hippocampus, despite the shipping cost.

The book has the usual annotations from Joshi and Schultz, and in addition to the Moe letters…

“The volume also contains Lovecraft’s extensive correspondence with Bernard Austin Dwyer, a weird fiction fan who engaged in wide-ranging discussions with Lovecraft on such subjects as cosmicism, Lovecraft’s upbringing, and political developments in the 1920s and 1930s. [And includes] a rare weird tale by Dwyer.”

I have a biographical chapter on Dwyer in my latest Lovecraft in Historical Context (#5) book, “”A mighty woodcutter”: on the trail of Bernard Austin Dwyer”. It has lots of new discoveries. Lovecraft corresponded with Dwyer from early 1927, and had with him… “a long and interesting correspondence” that lasted constantly for years. Dwyer was about the only one of the Lovecraft circle whom he felt truly shared his own cosmic outlook…

“It is not every macabre writer who feels poignantly & almost intolerably the pressure of cryptic & unbounded outer space. […] Among the individuals of my acquaintance, it is rarer than hen’s teeth. You [C. A. Smith] have it yourself to a supreme degree, & so have Wandrei & Bernard Dwyer; but I’m hanged if I can carry the list any farther.” (Selected Letters III, page 196)

Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, REH, Scholarly works

≈ Leave a comment

I spotted a scholarly ebook that’s new to me, Brian Leno’s Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation (2015). The title essay originally appeared in The Cimmerian, noting some of the concepts and ideas that Robert E. Howard absorbed during his Lovecraft correspondence, and then deftly wove into his fiction. It goes on to suggest that Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell” (written late 1934) was a story intended as a semi-satire and one-upmanship of HPL’s themes…

“Pigeons From Hell” was surely meant to be Howard’s response to HPL’s claims that New England was the setting for horror. By recalling his earlier exchanges with Lovecraft, he set out to prove that an old southern house, peopled with his distinctly southern imagination, can become much more terrifying than Lovecraft’s New England home in “The Picture in the House,” with its not-so-scary occupant’s ramblings about cannibalism.”

I’m fairly sure I read this essay some years ago, when it was free on The Cimmerian. I thought it broadly plausible — but rather doubted the strong suggestions that Lovecraft would have been ‘offended’ by reading the story. Amused and itchily tickled to occasional laughter, more likely.

I’ll pass on the book’s middle essay, on Howard’s comedic westerns. But the third and last essay has some interest, examining the possible sources of Howard’s “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”. My forthcoming book on some of Tolkien’s earliest sources has led me deep into such northern materials.

According to the blurb for Lovecraft’s Southern Vacation there’s also discussion in the book on “Did he [R.E. Howard] or did he not see the 1933 film King Kong before his death in 1936?”, but I can’t see that on the contents page on Amazon ‘Look Inside’. Presumably it emerges as part of one of the essays?

Also of note, in recent Howard ebooks, is Don Herron’s 630-page The Dark Barbarian That Towers Over All. I see that was released on the cusp of 2014/15. This packages the former essay books The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph — both on Robert E. Howard of course — as a new $5 ebook. For good measure there are also another half dozen or so new essays. It looks promising.

New revised edition of the Arthur C. Clarke biography

18 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books

≈ Leave a comment

There’s a new revised edition of the definitive biography, Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary, which was slipped out at the end of December 2017. Clarke was ‘Lovecraft inspired’ in a number of ways. Though these days the phrase ‘Lovecraft inspired’ is devalued by a tidal wave of cash-in and axe-grinding dross, to the extent that it’s now almost an insult. Which means I’m forced to qualify the phrase by saying that Clarke did it before others, subtly and in the best possible way. For discussion of the Lovecraft influence on Clarke see, for instance, “2001: A Lovecraft Odyssey” in the latest Lovecraft Annual journal (2018), and parts of Robert H. Waugh’s fine chapter on Lovecraft’s influence on science-fiction, in Lovecraft and Influence (2013).

Sadly the release of this new ‘500-page monolith’ edition of the Clarke biography has had the effect of erasing the previous Kindle ebook edition, and the book is now only available in paperback. Hopefully there will be a new Kindle edition in due course.

I recently edited a bumper Clarke tribute edition of Digital Art Live, the magazine for science fiction artists, which brought him back into my range of current interests. The magazine was published a while ago but I still find Clarke a fascinating personality in his own right, not simply because of the mild Lovecraft influence. Nearly everything he wrote before about 1977 is still very readable and enjoyable. His later work does tend to become more ponderous, discursive and technical, and for a first-timer to start on Clarke with the likes of the Rama books would be a mistake. But I recently heard Imperial Earth, The City and the Stars, Dolphin Island and a number of other novels and stories in unabridged audiobook readings, and they’re all still excellent. I had of course read all of Clarke, to about 1984, long ago — but on revisiting I was pleased to find that his stories were still fresh and lively.

For interested readers I should note that Clarke also published autobiographical books: Astounding Days is his fannish autobiography and has much to say on the era of the pulps and their fandom (also available as an audiobook); his Ascent to Orbit is the scientific autobiography, woven among a collection of his engineering and scientific articles; and his The View from Serendip includes a number of autobiographical pieces on his tropical home in Ceylon, scattered among various articles he wrote for magazines and a general audience. There are also several self-penned books specifically on his reef diving, including The Coast of Coral (Australia), The Reefs of Taprobane (Ceylon), and The Treasure of the Great Reef (treasure diving). There are even a couple of biographical books by others which are studies of the making of the famous movie 2001, of which the most recent is Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the making of a masterpiece (2018). So far as I’m aware there’s not yet an annual Journal of Arthur C. Clarke Studies, but there probably should be in the next few years.

I’m especially fascinated by Clarke’s writing on one his great loves, the ocean. Personally I’d welcome a new book collection, along the lines of ‘the best of Clarke’s writings on oceans and coasts in his non-fiction, autobiography and topographical fictional descriptions’. And ideally as an audiobook read over music and ambient environmental sound FX. And perhaps with a few new biographical essays on things like: his ocean diving and expeditions; his place in the historical context of that time (Jacques Cousteau, the Sea-lab missions, use of the sea by NASA to train astronauts for space weightlessness, etc); and his apparent behind-the-scenes involvement in shaping the early marketing profile for Ceylon’s coastline among western tourists and divers. Such a book might have had a tiny audience a few years ago, but today it might get a little more traction in our newly emerging era of advanced ocean exploration and sustainable coastal aquaculture.

Crypt of Cthulhu 111

16 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

≈ 1 Comment

Crypt of Cthulhu 111 (Michaelmas 2018) is now on pre-order.

Contents:

Disturbing and Disquieting Editorial Shards by Robert M. Price.

Sadiva’s Lover by Gary Myers.

The Many Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith by Scott Connors.

Asperger Syndrome in R. H. Barlow’s “The Summons” by Charles D. O’Connor III.

Through the Gates of the Prepositional Phrase by Donald R. Burleson.

H. P. Lovecraft and the American Stonehenge: Hokum, Pseudo-archaeology, & the Imagination by Darrell Schweitzer.

The Muddle in High Street by Timothy Burall.

Maal Dweb of Xiccarpth by Will Murray.

R’lyeh Reviews.

Mail Call of Cthulhu.

Poems by Randall D. Larson and Charles Lovecraft.