The bibliography of science fiction pornography released

The title says it all. This is done very well and exhaustively, it seems, by Kenneth R. Johnson, published via Phil Stephensen-Payne's website. Merits a look, I'm sure.

Paul DiFilippo on the VanderMeers' new massive anthology

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have compiled a massive anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction, which indeed looks big. Paul DiFilippo dissects it here and gives it a highest praise. The intro on the anthologist's work resonates with me, as there's been some discussion on the new curator culture. I've been drawn into that discussion (over here in Finland, that is), but I merely think of myself as an anthologist, nothing more (and nothing less!).

(I'll promise to get back to blogging once the vacations end!)

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Battle Beyond the Stars

Science fiction can be pretty stupid at times, especially olded science fiction, the stuff with zap guns and space ships. But it can also be pretty entertaining, as proves the Roger Corman-produced Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) that I saw last night on a 35 mm film. I'd seen it before on television, but never on big screen.

At core, the film is indeed stupid: John Saxon plays a maniacal tyrant, who wants to destroy or enslave whole planets. One of the planets, Akir, wants to fight, and a young man is sent to find some hired guns to help them. Battle Beyond the Stars is a riff on The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven (with even one of the actors of the latter film, Robert Vaughn recreating his role as a lone gunman), but more essentially it's a Star Wars copy, with lesser space fights and less fictional mythology. The film races along fast, but the scenes are loosely jointed. The battle scenes are clumsy and a bit confusing at times.

But on the good side are many things: John Sayles' funny and clever script with lots of sexual innuendo that's largely missing from George Lucas' Star Wars, many nice actors in bit parts (Sam Jaffe, George Peppard, Vaughn), Sybil Danning in a goofy role as a female warrior, and good music from Howard Shore. Sayles' script shows his feminism also in the female computer of the hero's space ship, she's clearly an grumpy older lady who takes no shit from no one. Too bad she doesn't make it in the final battle.

Though nothing great, Battle Beyond the Stars was a good-humored film and I left the cinema grinning to myself. And oh, by the way, I thought I spotted Sayles playing one of the doll-like androids in Sam Jaffe's space station, but IMDb doesn't mention him.

Huge amount of links to other reviews on Todd Mason's blog here.

Science fiction westerns

I'm editing a collection of my writings on genre and pulp literature. Included is an essay on horror and sci-fi western hybrids. I'd added some comments in English at the end of the text, possibly snatched from the Fictionmags or other e-mail list discussions, but I won't be incorporating them into my essay (or at least all of them), it's long enough as it is. But here they are, for your reading pleasure:

Did you ever read FOR TEXAS AND ZED by Zach Hughes? (Popular Library, 1976) It's my all time favorite in the SF-about-Texas sub-genre, and it's a pretty good story to boot!

From the jacket copy:

"Spacemen from Texas on Earth had settled this remote planet centuries ago. While the rest of the galaxy was being divided between two vast warring empires, Planet Texas preserved its
independence, created its own unique civilization, developed its own advanced technology. But now all that Planet Texas was and all that it believed in were threatened, as the super-powers of space moved in for the kill."

William Rotsler's space western novel (THE FAR FRONTIER?)?

Eric Frank Russell, "The Illusionaries," PLANET STORIES 11/51, reprinted in Andre Norton's anthology SPACE PIONEERS.

David Drake's Hammer Slammer spinoff, The Sharp End, though set in a galaxy far far away, was structured along the lines of Sergio Leone's western, Fistful of Dollars.

PERTWEE, HIRAM
Julian F. Grow:
The Fastest Gun Dead (ss) If Mar 1961
The 7th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F, ed. Judith Merril, Simon &
Schuster 1962
The Sword of Pell the Idiot (nv) F&SF Apr 1967
The Starman of Pritchard’s Creek (nv) If Dec 1968
Bonita Egg (nv) F&SF Sep 1969
Formula for a Special Baby (nv) F&SF Dec 1969

Phyllis Eisenstein's "In the Western Tradition". Wonderful story. (A time viewer story, one of my pet categories.) F&SF, March 1981

William F. Wu's story and novel of a robot in the west: "Hong's Bluff" and HONG ON THE RANGE.

I dug out Eric Frank Russell's "The Illusionaries" (PLANET STORIES 1951, reprinted in Andre Norton's anthology SPACE PIONEERS), and that's the category it falls into also. Aliens land on
earth, are accustomed to enslaving lesser species by controlling their perceptions, try it on humans and it works fine, but decide that they can't make it work, get in their spaceship, and check out.
The end of the story suggests that the humans have been creating an illusion for the aliens and invokes Wyatt Earp and Jesse James.

All of Quinn Yarbro's vampire novels are historicals as well, and "In the Face of Death" is set muchly in the West of American Indians and San Francisco pre-Civil War ... and in the South during the war.

Howard Waldrop, with "Night of the Cooters" (Omni, April '87; also in the Waldrop collection NIGHT OF THE COOTERS, and in Kevin J. Anderson's GLOBAL DISPATCHES anthology) which has Texas Rangers battling H.G. Wells' Martian invaders -- of WAR OF THE WORLDS fame -- at the same time they are landing elsewhere on Earth (1898?). A gem.

SF/Westerns:
Anybody yet mention Jonathan Lethem, _Girl in Landscape_ (1998), which makes complicated (but perfectly recognizeable) play with _The Searchers_ .

WiIliam Tenn's story "Eastward Ho!" which, I think, was about the Indians crowding the white man out of America.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Moscow – Cassiopea (1974)

This is a Soviet science fiction film in which six teenagers - three boys, three girls - are sent in a spaceship to Cassiopea to investigate who's sending out radio code. The film is a first of the two, the sequel is called Teens in the Universe! In Finland, the sequel's been called "The Robots of Cassiopea".

This is a fun movie. It's goofy for sure, but it's also very sincere and not badly made at all. There are actually some very nice scenes in space, and the futuristic design of the spaceship itself is pretty good. There are also some surrealistic or hallucinogenic scenes in which the teens use the virtual reality provided by the spaceship to entertain themselves during the long trip. The film is also played as a comedy and a love movie between some of the kids.

I'm not sure if this is available in the English-speaking countries, but you can watch it in YouTube with Russian titles:


There's also this, using footage from the sequel (which I have yet to see):


More Overlooked Films here. At least pretty soon, I hope.

Book haul

I'm not huge on science fiction, but I like to read books in that genre once in a while (hell, I've even written a book in that genre!). I seem to be most interested in the noirish American science fiction of the fourties, fifties and sixties and would happily say that Philip K. Dick and Alfred Bester are my two favourite SF writers. Here's a picture of the books I found at a new thrift store here in Turku, Finland (Pansio, to be exact). There were at least two boxes of old SF paperbacks for euro a piece. I snatched these, but will probably go back for more. The Elmore Leonard doesn't really belong there with the other books, but it could be the first book I'll be reading of these.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Himmelskibet

Himmelskibet is a big-budget Danish science fiction film made in 1918. It has big sets and lots of extras. See for yourself. This is a longish clip from the Marx expedition in the film, with the music by the Norwegian Kolar Goi.

This came up in the movie quiz our team kept. One of the members of our team had made three questions about obscure Nordic horror and science fiction films (Reptilicus, anyone?) and I wanted to make it four. After some Googling, I found this. It's a very nice clip and you simply want to take a look at it, even though it's not the whole film. 

More Overlooked Films here. 

George "Jerry Cotton" Nader's gay porn sci-fi novel

James Reasoner has written about the German pulp series (or Romanhäfte, as the actual term is) in his blog here and here (and here). Just today a friend of mine posted this on Facebook: the 1979 cover for George Nader's science fiction novel Chrome that's about the gay robots of the future! (Or some such, I'm not actually quite sure.) The cover is, shall we say, weirdish - and not very erotic.

And just what does this have to do with Jerry Cotton, you ask. Well, George Nader was the guy who played Jerry Cotton in the German-financed and German-directed movies in the sixties and seventies. I once tried to watch one, but couldn't get very far.

Old Finnish fantasy and science fiction

More on the books I read during our vacation trip:

We carried Aili Somersalo's Mestaritontun seikkailut with us to read it to kids before bedtime. It didn't go very well (Kauto especially got bored with it) and the book is still unread. I was reading it also to myself, because I've been interested in the book for quite a while: it was originally published in 1919 and is a classic piece of Finnish fantasy. Well, it's a fairy tale and not fantasy by strict genre standards, but there is still a good touch of high adventure and romance in the book. The book tells about Mestaritonttu (Master Tomte or something to that effect), who decides to take a leave from the Fairyland where he's been serving as the king's master. He wanders around, ends up in a strange place and gets mixed up in a fight between some witches and the king of the sea. There's also a maiden who's under a spell and locked up in a stone.

If there were a tradition of publishing reprints old Finnish fantasy, this should go high up in the list. It's been reprinted many times, but as it's a bit slow, young kids won't necessarily like it nowadays, and the reprint should be targeted at mature readers who are interested in the history of the genre. And one could hope the text for the reprint would be taken from the first edition of the book, published under the pseudonym Aili Tarvas. The cover shown above is by Onni Mansnerus, who did the illos for the 1940's reprint. They are very nice.

There were fantasy elements also in the short stories of the author who's best known as Larin-Kyösti. [The article behind the link is actually in English, take a look!] I had an old collection of his short stories with me and I read some of the ones that were more genre-oriented. I don't think Larin-Kyösti had any particular genre in mind, but there were elements of fantasy and fairy tale in many of the stories, and I got to thinking one could do a collection of fairy tales and fantasy stories of old Finnish writers, of those who were are not normally linked to either genre. Of Larin-Kyösti's stories, particularly "Metsän henki / The Spirit of the Forest" would work perfectly in this kind of a book. Of the other stories, "Paholaisen soitto / The Devil's Music" is a fast-paced fantasy of the Devil visiting a church.

Into Jyläskoski was a pretty obscure Finnish writer who worked casually from the 1950's to the 1970's (publishing then one non-fiction book about booze smuggling in Finland). I've seen one or two of his short stories in various old Finnish fictionmags, but he was never a full-time writer. He published two novels in his lifetime, and one of them was a science fiction novel, called Marsion radiolentäjät / The Radio Pilots of Mars. It was published in 1955 with good illustrations by Olli Ålander. It's a pretty boring YA book, but it has a storyline one could use in a writing project and set a story of a set of stories in the same universe: the Martians have come to Earth in the early 20th century and have decided to reside in the Himalaya mountains. From there they abduct people to help them with their further attacks.

In Jyläskoski's book three young kids are abducted in the beginning of the novel and as they are all radio amateurs, the Martians put them to work as radists. There's not much sense in the book (it's never really shown what actual threat the Martians pose to people on Earth) and as it's also slow-paced, it was pretty tasking to read it to the end, but I struggled.

I also had Jalmari Vaula's fairy tale Udina from the late 1940's with me, but I never got around to reading it. Last winter I read Vaula's paleofiction novel, Kuolemanlaakson kurimuksessa / The Death Valley Maze (1952) and despite its silliness I enjoyed its fast pace and no-nonsense story telling. Now I'll have to get back to reading work-related stuff, which, unfortunately, means Robert Harris and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Hopefully Isabel Allende's novels are better.

Sorry, no pictures from Into Jyläskoski's Martian novel - the Photoshop program won't open anymore in our computer! I'll try to get something worked out, and I'll write a longer piece on the book later on (in Finnish).

Michael Moorcock: Katso ihmistä/Behold the Man

A change of pace: I wrote a review for the recent Finnish translation of Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man. The book is Katso ihmistä! in Finnish, which is the literal translation of "Ecce homo".

The book is originally from 1969; the original novella from the New Worlds magazine came out in 1966, and I just heard that there's some padding in the book Moorcock didn't want to do. It's still pretty powerful in just about 160 pages, even though while padding the narrative Moorcock has resorted to techniques that seems outdated now, like using very short, repetitive paragraphs that have no obvious relation to the plot.

The book's about one Karl Glogauer who's had a somewhat hideous life, living without a father and with a cold, distant mother, being abused in school and at a summer camp, and in his adult age being without a direction and without love. He's given an opportunity to travel back in time and he chooses to go to 29 A.C. to witness the crucifixion of Christ. There's cruel, brutal and clever irony in the outcome. Jesus never had to deal with Glogauer has: the poor man has the history of the world on his shoulders.

If you've never read this before, you should definitely check it out. It's a realistic historical novel, a thought-provoking science fictional novel and a philosophical study at the same time. And to buy it is to give more power to the book's Finnish publisher, the small but potent Vaskikirjat, who earlier brought Silverberg's Gilgamesh the King and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend to Finland.

The Finnish cover of the book, by M-L Muukka, doesn't give away the ending of the book, like many US or UK covers seem to do.

Bud Webster's Past Masters

Here's a site, maintained by Phil Stephensen-Payne, linking to all of Bud Webster's science fiction-related Past Masters columns he's written for the Helix magazine (which is, I think, now defunct). You'll get essays on H. Beam Piper, Leigh Brackett etc. (The site is still preliminary, I believe, but looks pretty okay to me.)

Penguin SF covers

Here's another link from the Forbidden Planet blog: the science fiction covers of Penguin paperbacks. Some very cool stuff included.

The year's best book haul

We took a day off, Elina and I, last Friday and jumped on a train and travelled to Salo (which is half an hour away from Turku) and hunted its thrift stores (and the only second hand book store which didn't yield much). And I came back with over 60 books.

The story requires to be told. We were at Fida, the local store of the Christian thrift store chain (much like Oxfam in the UK), and it seemed there wasn't much of anything, certainly not in the way of books - the usual thrift store stuff, handbags from the nineties, boring T-shirts and way too large jeans. But then I noticed the door to the warehouse was open. I noticed there were some cardboard boxes with books. They didn't look interesting, but I decided to look around a bit more. I noticed there were some paperbacks in boxes, leaning against the wall, stacked over each other. The paperbacks seemed to be in English, and they seemed to be old.. and then I noticed they were science fiction paperbacks. Names: Moorcock, Piers Anthony, Andre Norton, Asimov... you name it.

I checked further, from what I could see. I managed to take some out of the boxes. Edmond Hamilton, Kornbluth-Pohl, Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner... very much old stuff, Pyramids and Ballantines and Beacons, with covers by Richard Powers and others. Also newer books, DAWs and such. My heart beat fast, when I walked to the manager of the store and asked whether I could take a closer look. The guy - mustachioed, with stupid looking eyeglasses - said they are not for sale. "Why?" I cried. "They haven't been checked and put on the shelves." "What do you think if I'll take a look and buy a bunch and save you some trouble? Look, I'm not from here, I don't know when I'll be coming back", I tried. It seemed at first I wouldn't be able to turn his head - and actually I couldn't, since he let me go through only four of five boxes. There were at least eight! "How much do these cost?" I asked, my sweaty hands holding British Panther hardbacks from the fifties: H.J. Campbell, Roy Sheldon, H.K. Bulmer... "Paperbacks 40 cents, but hardbacks cost more", said the guy. Then my eyes hit on a Panther paperback, from 1952, by A.V. Clarke and H.K. Bulmer. Space Treason. I gotta have this!

Then the guy let me take a look. He didn't like it, since, as he said, this put other customers in an inequal position. Like I care. I thought about saying to the guy that no one in Salo will buy any of these, but refrained. I also refrained when he said that they'll be throwing away the trash, such as the witchcraft books. Then I delved into the books.

Came up buying over 60. For 40 cents a piece. Nice ladies at the cashier said that the old English-language hardbacks are also 40 cents a piece. And they gave me discount! I paid 25 euros for the whole bunch. And what great finds there were: J.T. McIntosh's World Out of Mind (Perma 1953), Pohl-Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (Ballantine 1955; well, not in a very good shape, but still), de Camp and Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter (Pyramid 1960), Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (DAW 1973)... These are just some examples that I picked up from the stack. Space Treason seems to be scarce and commands 50$ at Abebooks... Vow! Some of the books were in an extremely good shape, some not - and some had been damaged while in the warehouse!

I've been thinking that I should've said to the manager of the store: "I'll buy them all" and pay, say, 150 euros for the whole bunch (and think later how I'll get them back home to Turku), but maybe I'll make another trip to Salo in the coming weeks. Now, if they'd been crime novels of the same era... I'd be in hospital from a stroke. But when I'd've managed to crawl back, I'd've said: "I'll buy them all." (At least I should've taken all the books that hinted at witchcraft or some such "trash", so they wouldn't've get discarded and thrown into garbage.)

I have no idea what these books were doing in a little town like Salo. It must've been some local science fiction aficionado who's been buying books from the fifties on and concentrated on the English language. Nevertheless, this was a thrilling experience.

Science fiction pornography

Ken Johnson has compiled a bibliography of science fictional and/or fantasy pornography. It's available here. I'm not an expert in this area, but the biblio (or rather, index) sparked some critical comments on the Fictionmags e-mail list. Some books mentioned that are not found in the list are:

QUEEN KONG (James Moffat, Everest 1977)
WEREWOLF VS THEVAMPIRE WOMAN (Arthur N Scarm, Guild-Hartford 1972)
VIRGIN PLANET, Poul Anderson
TIDES OF LUST; EQUINOX, Samuel Delany
TARA OF THE TWILIGHT, Lin Carter
John Norman's Gor books (it's really strange that these are missing)
ARDOR ON AROS, Andrew Offutt