Links and New Releases

I’ve got a couple of links and new releases to share. For starters, Smashwords are running their annual end-of-the-year sale. Lots of e-books at drastically reduced prices, including several of mine.

Furthermore, I’ve got a new story out in issue 6 of Whetstone Magazine. It’s called “The Vault of the Nine Sigils” and features a lost city, a greedy rogue, a mysterious sealed vault and monkeys. You can download of issue 6 of Whetstone Magazine here and read mine and twelve other great modern sword and sorcery tales by Howard Andrew Jones, Chase A. Folmar, Turlough Lavery, Matthew X. Gomez, Rev. Joe Kelly, Oliver Brackenbury, Robert O’Leary, Michael Burke, Jimmy Stamp, Owen G. Tabard, Jon Carroll Thomas, B. Harlan Crawford and J. Thomas Howard. Also check out the great cover by Meagan LeMay.

I’m also over at Galactic Journey again, where I review Outlaw of Gor by John Norman as part of the December 1967 Galactoscope and also discuss the 1967 sex education film turned box office hit Helga..

I reviewed the first two Gor books, Tarnsman of Gor and Outlaw of Gor for Galactic Journey and it has certainly been an interesting, if frustrating experience. For while the Gor books are infamous for their BDSM content, the first two books start of with lengthy and extremely dull infodumps, which you have to get through to get to the spicy stuff. Furthermore, the sexual content of Tarnsman was fairly mild, though Outlaw dials up both the BDSM stuff and the misogyny, which is interesting, since the consensus seems to be that the Gor series didn’t go off the rails into full-blown BDSM erotica with a heavy dose of misogyny until the sixth book. However, the misogyny already creeps in in the second book IMO. Also, considering how badly written and infodumpy the first two Gor books are, I honestly wonder why the series ever became as popular as it was. Whether you want Edgar Rice Burroughs style planetary adventures or sex, there were better places to find both even back in 1967.

In general, it seems as if 1967 is the year that the sex content in SFF books goes up and some of it becomes weird and outright icky. Because SFF books published in 1966 that were considered shocking at the time like Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein with their poly relationships are not really shocking to a modern reader. Even the first Gor book is fairly tame by modern standards. In 1967, however, you suddenly get things like the utterly terrible Chthon by Piers Anthony a.k.a. “incest is the only real love” or Outlaw of Gor a.k.a. “all lesbians need is to be enslaved by a real man”.

In other news, I also have an essay in issue 67 of Journey Planet: “Anthropocene Ruminations”, guest-edited by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk of the most excellent Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog. My essay is about renewable energy in the home and that for some reason science fiction barely acknowledges what is already possible right now with technology that we have, let alone what will be possible in twenty or fifty years. Other contributors to this issue include Victoria Paterson, Camestros Felapton, A.L. Yakimchuk, Juan Sanmiguel, Jason Sanford, Paul Weimer, Victoria Carter, Collin Horn, James Bacon, Nicholas Pallaris, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Christopher J. Garcia, Stephen Griffith, Marshall Boyd and Gautam Bhatia. You can read and download the issue here.

Finally, I also have a piece out in issue 442 of The Drink Tank about “Crime Fiction 1950 – 2000”, edited by Christopher J. Garcia and Chuck Serface. My article is about the German pulp detective G-Man Jerry Cotton and appears alongside Christopher J. Garcia writing about the works of Robert McGinnis, the Cadfael Chronicles by Ellis Peters, Gregory McDonald’s Fletch and Roger Rabbit, Chuck Serfaces weighing in on the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Helena McCallum praising the works of Seishi Yokomizo and Joe Price talking about crime fiction as morality plays. You can read and download the issue here.

That should be plenty of reading material for tonight.