Recently Read: Skylark Three by E. E. Smith

Years ago I reread and reviewed The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith (1890-1965), a seminal work of science fiction for one salient fact—it was the first ever depiction of a starship. It was written well over a hundred years ago and first published in 1928, serialised by editor Hugo Gernsbach in Amazing Stories, and it must have been an immediate hit because the second novel appeared, also in Amazing, from August, 1930.

I have the Panther/Granada paperback editions from the early-mid 1970s—the very same copies I bought when I was a preteen. The Chris Foss covers were major selling points, paintings that just jumped off the shelf at the browser and said ‘buy me!’ That was the glory days of Foss’s productivity: he could churn out three covers a week, so much in demand was his work—it characterised his generation, in a sense. His paintings certainly spoke to the young me with a sense of not just futurism but of the most up to date sort, a compelling vision that lent credence to the work between the covers (not that his paintings ever really depicted what was going on in the book).

The cover of Skylark Three shows a great space vessel in the act of blowing up as three very different craft race by, implicitly an act of battle. Fair enough, there are space battles in the book, and with the visual hook dispensed with, as well as the nostalgia, what’s under the covers?

A most interesting sojourn, to say the least, made curious and oh, so much a period piece, for the simple fact this novel was written 95 years ago. It reflects then-current American society—strong moral values, a willingness to get tough when the need arises (as it frequently does), women who fetch food and black people don’t seem to exist. What else would it depict? It moves on from the stereotypes in the first novel in a way, because the woman accompany their husbands as functional members of the ship’s compliment, taking part in its operation (as well as fetching food). To be fair, Seaton’s wife is show to be a brilliant classical musician, taking he violin with them into the depths of space, a surprising artistic interlude amongst the unremitting technicality of the piece.

Smith, considered the founding father of the “space opera” subgenre, wrote almost compulsively in the vernacular of his times, and sometimes the reader puzzles over the slang of 1930. The characters talk so quaintly to our ears, and not the formal, over-verbose 19^th century way so familiar from the writers of the previous generations, but in a strange admixture of both precision and slang that must have been how the mass market expressed itself in those days. It underlines the way H P Lovecraft thought (they were born in the same year), for he was writing at the same time and his characters and narrative sound precisely nothing like this, even when he is dealing with his contemporary United States.

In Skylark Three, Smith takes is heroes Seaton and Crane and their wives, Dorothy and Margaret, back into the depths of space, to the system of the multiple green suns near the heart of the galaxy, into the midst of war and terror. A new power has emerged, destroying wherever it touches—the Fenacrhone, travelling from far across the galaxy bent on universal conquest. It is up to Seaton (the acknowledged ‘Overlord’ of the planetary systems since his last visit—yes, a white American is the unquestioned ruler of multiple civilisations!) to convince the many races of the cluster of the green suns to work together to resist this scourge, and he recruits the best science and industrial capacity of each to this end. He ends a war between old adversaries, visits multiple planets with strange civilisations (Smith had a lot of fun creating them), and orders the construction of a new vessel to replace his now clearly obsolete Skylark II.

Smith was a scientist, a chemist by training like Isaac Asimov, and it is clear that his mind ran on through tracts of technical thought, addressing concepts that would become familiar much later in time. Star Trek, 35 years later, drew on concepts well known to Smith’s readers—the tractor beam, for instance, directed energy weapons, force fields, and of course faster than light travel. The manipulation of matter, its interchange with energy, is also depicted, though in different terminology, as we see “force” beams and “orders of force” levitating objects, assembling them from raw materials and so forth.

A prime tool is the “educator,” a machine of alien derivation, which allows the transfer of knowledge, experience and empirical data between minds (shades of the “BIG RAT”in Gerry Anderson’s 1968 series Joe-90, which formed the central gadget of a whole show). The characters use the device to absorb instantly the language of any alien race they encounter, and to provide knowledge of English to other races, as well as acquire the technical and scientific knowledge of the finest minds out there, thus improving their own ship over and over. This neatly avoids the elephant in the room of so much TV science fiction—why almost all the alien races and isolated cultures we ever encounter not only look fundamentally the same as ourselves but speak fluent English, most of them with American accents...

The speed of light is mentioned, though no relatavistic effects or consequences. Perhaps, when the publisher gave Smith a free hand to update his narratives for their re-release in later decades, he found incorporating Einsteinian cosmology either prohibitively difficult, or that it simply forbade the possibility of his narrative, and he sidestepped the issue by ignoring it. Indeed, Smith acknowledged his Skylark novels to be science fantasy, in contrast to his 1930-31 novel Spacehounds of IPC, (completed immediately after Skylark Three) which takes place entirely within the solar system and was, he felt, his only work of genuine science fiction. (Readers did not respond so well to it for this very restriction, however, and no sequels followed.)

Interestingly, amongst all these concepts, the word computer never appears, though he describes automated systems which to us seem obviously computerised.

The thing that jumps off the page, however (after his often erratic narrative to dialogue balance—early chapters seem almost entirely composed of the latter) is attitude. Seaton, the polymath, though not the most brilliant mind on the ship, is a self-appointed master of worlds, willing to scheme the destruction of a whole civilisation to save others—redeemed by his humanistic inability to do so at the last moment: that task he left to a friend from a warrior race who had no compunction about pushing the button. Would we call that a cop-out today? Smith certainly revelled in the absolute destruction of a malevolent foe: every last ship in space, one by one, then incinerating their homeworld. Finally, when the eponymous Skylark Three actually takes flight, he details a racing voyage out of the galaxy on the trail of a vessel bearing survivors of the evil Fenachrone to a new world in a distant galaxy to begin again, bent on returning one day to annihilate all competition in the home galaxy. The outcome is of course their inevitable destruction. This, we would call today, genocide—and it was done by the hero.

That’s the difference a century makes, but consider the time in which he was writing. This is the same general era in which Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his Venus novels, and I think I see a parallel, inasmuch as that both writers were observing the insidious rise of fascism. The Nazi Party in Germany was parading and trumpeting and throwing its weight about, eventually taking power in 1933, and writers were using fiction as a way of saying something about it. Burroughs highlighted the armies and secret police forces, the evils redolent in such rogue states, while Smith, just a few years earlier, described technology coming to the rescue, stopping very dead indeed an entity bent on doing what Hitler did, but on a galactic, even universal scale. In that light, perhaps the nature of the story is understandable, reassuring its readers that the will to defend against an implacable enemy really did exist.

One last bit of nostalgia begs to be mentioned. When I reached Chapter 3, there was a bookmark in the volume, just a business card, for an engine rebuilders. The phone number has too few digits, not even the eighth digit added to all Australian phone numbers in 1976 or so. That bookmark must indicate where I got up to when I read the book as a preteen, before finding it too heavy going and moving on to something else. I doubt that business has existed in a great many years. I put the card back where I found it, and there it shall remain, another piece of history that is now much older than the novel was when I bought this edition. Passage of time, eh?

Mike Adamson

 

Keeping Output High

 

I have sorely neglected this writing blog but there’s a good reason—my output has never been higher nor more focused. In short I’ve been busy with the business of writing, and forgot to update my commentary in the process!

Just before Christmas I delivered my H P Lovecraft anthology to the publisher (keeping their ID under my hat at the moment, at least until the Kickstarter goes live), who have launched a horror enprint and seem to be doing very well with it. And very soon I’ll be delivering my second Sherlock Holmes anthology to the same company as produced the first, with my next writing priority being to finish my second Sherlock Holmes novel for them also. Taken together, those three projects are about a quarter of a million words.

A few days ago I worked up a ‘to-do; list of future writing projects. Two of the three projects above headed that list, then other projects ran on—and on—and on. I projected writing over the years 2025 to 2027 inclusive, and came up with something like eighteen book projects, being both novels and anthologies. This is a tremendous amount to contemplate in a three year period, but it’s not all to be built from scratch.

Three new Sherlock Holmes anthologies are already half or more filled. One is an SF collection requiring only two stories to finish it. One is a novel needing only a couple of chapters and an epilogue. Another is a novel to be derived from an existing movie script, another a finished novel to begin the rounds after a final polish pass... That cuts it down to something like about three projects to work up from scratch in any one year, and that’s doable.

My fervent hope is that a professional agency will be in the mix before too long, and some of these projects can enter the professional stream. Of course, that doesn’t mean the top-end semi-pro endeavour will falter in the slightest, and it will be my great pleasure to continue to send a considerable output to market via that stream.

This all comes down to an output of something like a quarter of a million words per year, not counting incidental short story submissions and placements. But I would have to say that the burgeoning of the book side of things has already toned back the short story aspect. It’s far more productive and far less frustrating to work up a book for a publisher who is eager and waiting for it, than to continue to swim upstream on the rejection roundabout, wondering if you’ll ever see a professional payday.

I’ll post my annual roundup of stats on January 7^th, marking nine years since I launched this writing endeavour, and there’ll be some telling numbers on the way things have shaped up lately.

Cheers, and thanks for reading,

Mike Adamson

Recently Read: The Alternate Martians by A. Bertram Chandler

Here is a novel I first read as a child of ten years or so, and indeed it was the same copy. We have a 1965 Ace first edition, in poor condition (this will probably be the last time it's ever subjected to a reading, and there are better copies out there to be had). I last read it probably some decades ago, and had only a few memories to draw on, but this was the sequel to Chandler's The Coils of Time, which I reviewed in February, 2017, so it was a logical choice.

Chandler (1912-1984) was one of our favourite science fiction writers in the far-off days of childhood. Not that he was writing for children at all, some of his material was probably a bit strong for kids in retrospect, but standards were far less, well, prissy, in those days, and we got to read the books on the shelf.

Chandler was fascinated by what today we call the Multiverse concept, and explored it several times. I first heard of the notion in Science Fiction Monthly in 1974, when it was described by the old term “parallel worlds,” or “moving sideways in time,” and it would seem the latter was the concept that struck Chandler. The precept established in the previous novel was that a machine designed for time travel might, due to its own imperfectly understood nature, send a traveller sideways as surely as backward, thus accessing another stream of reality. In that event it was to a Venus where planetary catastrophe had not unfolded as it did for our Venus, giving rise to a habitable world on which a neo-Burroughsian adventure could unfold. The degree to which Chandler was devoted to the vintage science fiction of Wells and Burroughs can be gauged by the sequel, which constitutes a full-blown homage, with some original twists for good measure.

The original characters make an expedition from Science City on Venus, to Mars, taking the “Time Twister” machinery with them, with the object of trying to discover if writers like Wells and Burroughs—Leigh Bracket is also mentioned by name—were not simply creating their fantastical visions of these places, but remembering them, a kind of distorted telepathic vision transmitted across the membranes separating parallel universes (“coils of time” as Chandler called them). The intention was to send a small party through the device into this other reality to explore. However, interference from the ship's inertial drive, operated simultaneously with the time machine, sent not just the explorers through, but the entire ship...

The world in which they appear is a hostile one. Lowell's canals exist, pumped water from the high latitudes feeds cities closer to the equator, but the inhabitants of this planet are drawn from two sources—War of the Worlds (Wells's Martians, with their tripods, handling machines, heat rays and gas weapons) and the other Martians of John Carter fame, the six-limbed green ones, like Tars Tarkas. Then there are the humans, kept as slaves (and food) by the “Masters,” the tentacle-bearing, owl-eyed things that drive the tripods. These humans are the resilient Cockneys of London, scooped up by the Martians in their rampage and transported back to Mars because they were useful.

This delightful mishmash avoids being a pastiche because it paces a new spin on every aspect. Bill Carter and Delia Doris are crude but true-hearted Cockney tearaways living in rags in the Martian deserts, and Well's bacterial apocalypse for the invaders is seen to be an embellishment upon the time-spanning memory, the wishful thinking of the author—the alternative would of course have been a pessimism that made the original tale not worth telling.

The theme is revolution, the arrival of visitors from a parallel universe the catalyst for change that will rage across the planet as the oppressed humans and green Martians rise up and sweep away the stagnant, indolent overlords. Regular heroic fare, then, filled with swords and violent, brutal action—stories as they were told long ago.

Chandler's professional background as a merchant sea captain comes through very strongly. His space vessel is run on merchant marine lines, with bridge, engine room, staffing requirements—and every malady of the sea trades made manifest in space: owners versus master, liability issues, crew versus automation, civil regulations, autocratic minor functionaries throwing their weight around, a Scottish engineer who thinks he knows better than the Captain... It's rather heartwarming to see the real maritime experience of the mid-20^th century perpetuated into the future—somewhat naive perhaps but it certainly spoke volumes about human optimism.

How Chandler treats women is another matter, and here he is a product of his time. There are only two main female characters, both stunningly beautiful (of course) and treated on a umber of occasions in an inherently dismissive way by narrative or dialogue. This novel was published in 1965, when women were still bound by pedantic male social custom, and to act out of the ordinary in any significant way was somewhere between risque (think Bond women, maybe?)  and unacceptable/unbelievable, so for these women to be pilots, explorers, fighters, and self-assertive, was actually quite forward-moving. For this reason, I'm prepared to forgive the broader cultural narrative of the age showing through.

The Alternate Martians was published in an Ace Doubled (M-129) back to back with Chandler's Empress of Outer Space, another great read from a great age of space opera. Can it still be found? I'm aware of at least one reissue in a new edition, and there are copies of the original to be had fairly cheaply on eBay. As with The Coils of Time, it is a work to be read in light of the age when it was written, and enjoyed as enthusiastic storytelling, with some clever twists.

Mike Adamson

A Tradition of Evil

I can hardly believe I didn't post in July, and that August is nearly out!

The big news is of course that my Sherlock Holmes novel A Tradition of Evil went on sale early this month (official release date was August 1^st) though even as we enter the last week of the month Amazon is still listing it as “temporarily out of stock.” Many folks have received their Kickstarter copies, and some have been able to order direct—Amazon UK, for instance, I believe has stock and ships promptly.

Here's the buy link for Amazon US:

https://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Tradition-Mike-Adamson/dp/B0CD91X511

The book also has a Goodreads page, which you can find here:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195503549-sherlock-holmes

Some weeks on there are no ratings or reviews, which is a bit disappointing as it seemed there was considerable interest at first, but it's not yet translated into feedback. Amazon looks for fifty reviews (good or bad makes no difference) before they begin to promote the product themselves, and that of course is the gateway to desirable extra sales.

It feels amazing to have a book out there, and to see copies in both hardback and paperback is quite the validation of one's efforts over so long. I'm looking forward very much to coming to grips with my second Sherlock Holmes adventure, once a couple of other projects are done and dusted.

In other news, NewMyths have picked op my “Middle Stars” story “Gaming Aquarius,” a sequel to “Wharf Rat” which they publish a couple of years ago. This is my fortieth placed story in the cycle, and I'm closing in on sixty on paper. Unfortunately, it will be 2025 before they can get the story out to readers, so keep an eye on their website about the end of next year.

Things have otherwise been quite. I'm bringing together an anthology of my vampire stories (they're receiving a pro edit at this time) and hopefully Hiraeth will be releasing this one in the not too distant future. Also, I'm working on my novel Venatrix again, with an eye to completing it before launching back into a full scale Holmesian outing.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

A Magical Number?

 

“It was seven years ago, this very day, that Mr Marley left us...” Or...

“Marley was dead—as dead as a two-year-old un-responded submission.”

Okay, I couldn't help the Dickensian reference, but it really has been seven years—today—since I made my first story submission in earnest. Late in 2015 I made a few experimental submissions to test fire the method, and I'd had a few unpaid placements in the previous two years which encouraged me to get serious about the game, but January 7^th, 2016, is the date inscribed in my memory as the day I really launched my bid to be a writer.

Maybe seven is the charm—they used to call it a magical number in the ancient world, and with the seventh year complete I have in some ways positioned myself for success to come. This is my annual review of progress/state of play post, and 2022 has been an interesting excursion in many ways.

Here's the raw data:

In the last seven years, I have made 2849 submissions (401 in the last 365 days). I have 196 placements (14.53:1submission/acceptance ratio, up from, 15.11:1 last year, which was am improvement on 16.008:1 the year before, indicating a steady positive decrease over time, regardless of all other factors). I currently have about 70 stories out, and my record is around 105-110, though to be fair there must have been a fair few multiple submissions and dead/in limbo subs among that lot. These figures also indicate 2583 rejections, giving a rejection/acceptance ratio of 13.178, also an improvement for the third year running (down from 13.52:1 in 2021, and 14.27:1 the previous year).

During the calendar year 2022, I made 368 submissions, scoring 32 placements (even with 2017 and 2020). This is an acceptance rate of 11.5%, down from 2021's 12.375%, but still well above 2020's 7.67%. Covid isolation has gone by (indeed, the world is behaving like the pandemic is over—funny, a hundred people are dying a month from this disease in my state alone, but, horrifyingly, society has normalised that), which might account for fewer people reading. But outlets continue to fold as well, reducing market breadth, though new magazines come along as brave publishers give it a go.

Average time between acceptances in Year Seven was up from last year's 9.125 days to 11.4 days, a sign of harder times all round. I've gone through dead patches so long I would be forgiven for wondering if I would ever see an acceptance again! But in real terms it's about the same as 2020's 11.7, which was an improvement over the previous year.

Professional placements, what are they? I don't believe I've had one in the last year...

On the face of it, productivity has been somewhat low, just 33 stories this year, totalling, however, 175, 871 words, a major jump on last year's 104, 309 words (and not far behind 2020's 186, 585). There are at this time two stories unfinished, straddling the New Year period, and it must be remembered in these totals that this year I have extended into novels, with over 50, 000 words of a near future SF project committed to digits, plus an entire mystery novel of 78, 500 words completed, edited and submitted in the same period—more about this in due course. Totalled up, this is around 400, 000 words of output in the past twelve months, which I'm pretty sure is the record for me.

I have 287 stories registered at Submission Grinder, and some 420 in my personal list (this includes work on pseudonyms).

As with last year, the standout in 2022 is again my success as a writer of Sherlock Holmes. I'm continuing to write (two new stories in prep at this time), and have appeared in seven Belanger anthologies to date, with acceptances for two more, and a second placement with Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. Strand Magazine actually solicited a second story from me (still waiting to hear back about it), and I was recently invited to submit to the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories anthology series, a charity collection coming out around quarterly in support of the Undershaw School, for children with learning disabilities, run out of a house that once belonged to Conan Doyle. This is a great honour, the tables of contents of these anthologies are a who's who of major talents, and I could not be happier.

My Sherlock Holmes output for 2022 was 62, 392 words, not counting the two still in prep, and I may as well reveal that the 78, 500 word novel I completed during the year is also a Holmesian excursion. I expect to have good news about that one in due course.

My total accepted word count stands at about 987, 000 words—I really wanted to pass the million mark, and the 200th acceptance before the end of 2022, but the market seems sluggish at this time. Perhaps this is to be expected, in view of the cataract of crises pouring over the world these days, from floods to wars, and disease to monolithic corruption.

In terms of period mystery, The Inspector Trevelyan Mysteries is continuing to develop, about half a dozen stories so far, plus two Sherlock Holmes crossovers (they are contemporaries). I have high hopes of an anthology at some point, and very possibly a Trevelyan novel too.

Also during 2022, I was invited to write a jacket blurb for a horror collection, Howls from the Dark Ages, published by the Horror Obsessed Writing and Literature Society, a group in Centennial, Colorado. I did a most enjoyable online Q&A with their members in August, 2021, and was invited to submit to their disaster horror anthology, Howls from the Wreckage, due out soon.

On the table with Hiraeth Books are two anthologies, a full collection of my Lucinda Crane, Vampire/Hunter stories, and a volume of three novellas of historical fantasy—more about those when things mature.

That's where I stand at the end of Year Seven, on the brink of the two hundredth acceptance and the millionth word past the post, with a novel and single-author collections in progress. I hope one year from now I'm reporting some real developments on all fronts!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Header pic: Image by Nile from Pixabay.

A Foray Into Horror

Horror is one of those genres which melds into others with ease—it's a sense of scene, emotional content, the provocation of reactions from the beholder. One might say that all writing is those things, but which reactions you're after determines your tone. I have always felt horror was not my natural genre—science fiction and fantasy come much more easily. But by the same token I can say I'm a big fan of the Alien franchise, which, certainly the original, is pure Gothic horror formula, and of the writings of Howard, Lovecraft and Smith, which embrace horror in many of its aspects, cosmic—, body—, and so forth. So maybe horror isn't that much of a stretch.

For some while now I've been in touch with the Horror Obsessed Writing and Literature Society (HOWLS), of Centennial, Colorado. On Sunday, August 8^th, 2021, I had the pleasure of communicating on a message board with their members, and for an hour answered a wide range of writing questions as fast as I could type—I answered every point, I'm glad to say! I was also asked to write a cover blurb/endorsement for their anthology Howls from the Dark Ages, a volume of historical horror, which was another new experience!

However, I was also invited to contribute a story to their forthcoming anthology Howls from the Wreckage, a collection of disaster-themed horror, and this gave me a chance to flex the horror muscle in terms of composition. It's true, I've produced a number of pieces in the past which stray into the genre. The Moth and the Candle, in Dies Infaustus, Gorgon's Deep in Myths, Monsters, Mutations and Fear of the Dark, in Aurealis #104, and dramatised on No Sleep Podcast, Season 14, Ep. 25 are all maritime horror with a sci-fi edge, and I have other pieces unpublished. My fantasy piece The Dreamer in the Dark in Strange Wars has as much horror as many a Howard piece, while my early sci-fi outing Petrichor, in Wordland 8: Time We left (which seems to be no longer available) and Galaxy Anthology Series #5 certainly qualifies. So it was perhaps predictable that I would approach horror from the standpoint of both science fiction and mythology, to offer context to the chills.

There are many forms of horror, but I remember an editor once describing the nature of the field from his perspective. He said “When I read horror I want to be frightened—not disgusted.” This harked to the growing trend in horror writing to wallow in body horror, be it mutilation, torture, disease, sexual perversion or whatever, which perhaps grew out of an inevitable staleness in the old tropes. You can only dwell on vampires, werewolves, mummies and so on for so long before they lose their creepy edge, if for no other reason than mere familiarity, and the chill of fear so craved by the reader must come from fresh sources. Still, the distinction between fear and disgust is a worthy one, I feel, and a line a writer should be aware of when choosing their material, and the audience they're playing to.

The fresh writer finds new takes on old tropes—the haunted house will never go out of fashion, but such a story demands a new twist, a fresh context, something which whispers to the reader in expected ways. It needs to “say something new,” though far be it from me to use that expression critically, as I understand just how few truly new ideas there are. Not that many years ago a major US writing body issued a statement that, in their opinion, there were no new stories and could not be any, which may be interpreted as an encouragement for people to lose the attitude that a story is not worth publishing unless it somehow does the impossible. But, all the same, the onus is on the writer to try. None of us want to merely regurgitate other writers' ideas, much less their storylines, (no matter how inspired by them we may be) but no few come up with stories entirely independently, only to discover, perhaps many years later, that they were not as original as they had believed. Does that make such work necessarily a poor story, though? No!

Be that as it may, with horror I guess I try for the evocation that throws a particular kind of shadow over one's soul—the awe that comes from encountering the unknown, and the fear that goes hand-in-hand with it, which can then be met with courage by protagonists with whom the reader might identify. This formula can be applied to a wide range of genres, of course, so perhaps it's impure horror. I don't really know! But I'll be happy if what I produce finds resonance with a decent part of the readership.

Where might my horror writing go in future? Pure horror in a supernatural vein is always on the cards, perhaps occult detective outings (more about that in other posts), and there was an idea for a horror novel at the back of my mind a year or two back... We'll see where the market leans!

Header: Royalty free image, Stefan Keller art, from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/fantasy-spirit-nightmare-dream-2847724/