I sat down to enjoy one of Lawrence Block’s Andrew Shaw softcore titles from Nightstand, College for Sinners (1960)—as most of the Shaws are enjoyable—and was surprised, perhaps disappointed to discover that the little novel is a direct rip off of one of Robert Silverberg’s titles for Bedstand books, Campus Love Club by David Challon (1959), reprinted in 1962 by Midwood as Campus Sex Club by Loren Beauchamp.

Both books are set in a thinly disguised upper Manhattan institute, Metropolitan College in Silverberg’s novel, unnamed in Block’s, but obviously Columbia University.  Both are about a sexually awkward young man who gets the chance to join an exclusive sex club of undergraduates, called The Libertines(the book was reprinted in 1973 by Greenleaf’s Reed Nightstand as The Libertines).

The Shaw book is not an exact word-for-word replica of the Silverberg Challon book—College for Sinners is told in the third person while Campus Love Club is told in the first, the former a bit more humorous in the narration than the later.  In both books, the protagonists, eager to lose their virginity, employ the services of a Harlem streetwalker; in Silverberg’s, the prostitute does not speak any English and in Block’s, the woman talks in street slang, calling her john “baby” every other sentence.  However, both protagonists are so nervous they are incapable of an erection, thus they do not lose their virginity. Later, both young men in each book take out a campus tramp, a girl who never says no, and are deflowered in that manner.

Note the peculiar similarities when membership of both clubs is explained

“Membership is limited to fifteen—five sophs, five juniors, and five seniors. Each September the juniors and entitled to sponsor five new men for membership…Membership is limited to undergraduates, and you can’t remain a member for more than three years” (Campus Love Club, p. 68-70).

“We have twelve members, no more, no less.,  Four each from the sophomore, junior, and senior classes. Two men and two women.  Each year four members graduate and four new sophomores are invited to join the society.” (College for Sinners, p. 64)

While the group in College has six men and six women, the group of fifteen men in Campus has a sister group of women comprised of fifteen from Chesley College, an all-girl’s school that is connected to Metropolitan.

Both sex clubs have an apartment in Greenwhich Village for orgies—dues are $20 a month in Campus, $50 a year in College.  Sexual arrangements are the same: no female member may deny sex for a male member, and vice versa. No one spends a night alone.

Both books have similar consequences and wrap-ups.

So what happened here?

I asked Silverberg if anyone knew he was David Challon back then and he said no – in fact, seems only the past 10-15 years that many of Silverberg’s pen names in sleaze have come to light (there is no mention in a 1978 bibliography, which only lists a handful of Don Elliott books).

Did Lawrence Block pick up the Challon novel and like it so much that he did his version – seemingly plagiarized – and figured no one would ever notice?

No one ever has, until now.

But what the hell, eh…does it matter?

This will be a curious footnote in the history of paperback publishing,

Sequel to Silverberg’s “Gilgamesh the King”. I don’t own a copy of the first book, and hadn’t read either for over a decade, so my memory of the first is pretty hazy at this point. However, the all seeing eye of Google confirms my impression that this one is different in tone to the first. It’s set in a shared universe used by several writers, but I’ve never read any of the works by other authors, so from my perspective this is simply a sequel to a previous stand-alone.

The novel is set in the Afterworld, the dream-like place where everyone goes when they die. There is no escape from the Afterworld — one can be killed there, but only to be revived again, sometimes within minutes and sometimes not for decades. For some, the Afterworld is Hell; for others, it is simply the place where they are now, different to life, better in some ways and worse in others.

The novel is set in the present day, so Gilgamesh the Sumerian has been in the Afterworld for a very long time indeed. The novel follows his wanderings in his quest to be re-united with his friend Enkidu, a journey that turns out to be as much about self-discovery as anything he had intended to do. But there are rumours that there exists a way back to the Land of the Living, and Gilgamesh is gradually drawn into the attempts to find that way. Along the way he meets a good many other historical figures, and one of the themes of the novel is the way in which history distorts real people and turns them into myths they barely recognise as themselves.

There’s a lot of philosophy in this novel, but it’s by no means dry. Indeed, it’s often very funny. And it works well as a stand-alone, without knowledge of the first book. Definitely worth trying.

at LibraryThing
To the Land of the Living at Amazon UK
To the Land of the Living at Amazon US

This is by far the oldest (and oldest seeming) story in the collection; ‘Amanda And The Alien’ is set datelessly in the future, was originally published in 1983 and is redolent of at least a generation before that. Amanda is your average American teenage girl whose plans for the evening are to “get blasted on her stash of choice powder and watch five or six of her parents’ X-rated cassettes.” The leap from analogue to digital has been so profound that it does make it hard for relatively recent SF written in the previous era to weather the credibility gap. Instead of realising her plans, Amanda instead spots an alien down the mall and takes it home to protect it from the Government. The alien has escaped from a facility where it was being held due to its deadly bodyshifting habit. Amanda recognises that it is an alien and not in fact a young woman because the alien can’t grasp fashion as instinctively as a teen girl:

“Your face paint is San Jose but you’ve got your cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern.”

Silverberg is a long way from being a teenage girl as well though and I was reminded of the fact that Philip K Dick thought that in the future all women would be topless secretaries with spraypainted breasts. His future is a mix of these unlikely fashions and cultural signifies from the previous decades: the cassettes they listen to are “Abbey Road and a Hendrix one and a Joplin and such” and the alien trips off oregano – “It can really make you fly”. There is a hippy whiff to ‘Amanda And the Alien’ that even in 1983 must have been stale.

The story – such as it is – consists of Amanda teaching the alien the ways of the world, getting it to swap into the body of her duplicitous boyfriend, having sex with it and then getting bored and shopping it to the police. Silverberg’s point is presumably about jaded youth but that is a pretty lame point for a middle-aged man.

Quality: **
Wit: **

An early Nightstand, their 41st published book, reprinted in 1973 as Nowhere Girl, is about 26-year-old divorcee Carol, who has moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles (a large home in Pacific Palasades) to start her life over, single and confused about the ways of sex — she was virgin when she was 22 and married her older ex-husband.

She’s aware of the image a newly divorced woman her age conjures up — sexually available, lonely, on the rebound.  She does not want to be that; however, she finds herself jumping into all kinds of sexual sitautions the day she moves into her new place…

There’s the painter across the hall, who gets get drunk; he’s short and dark and odd looking but she lets it happen and then feels bad the next day. She later models nude for him and they become casual lovers. He is the second man she has ever been with, and finds him an excellent lover. “I never knew it could be that way,” etc.

She picks up a 19-year-old sailor in the city who first mistakens her for a hooker. She’s lonely and curious…

She wanders to North Beach to check out the beatnik scene.  She goes to a club above a small bookstore. This scene is almost word-for-word a similar scene in a Loren Beauchamp novel, The Fires Within — Silverberg has admitted he re-processed scenes from one book to another in his “My Life as a Pornographer” essay. In both scenes, the wandering lost women get drunk, get picked up by several bearded beatniks and a silent girl, go to a pad, pound on bongos, drink wine, dance, and have an orgy.

Then there is a chamber music composer who lives downstairs — six feet five tall, thin, curious, when he plays his music for her, he wants her to whip him with a riding crop, scatch him, beat him, abuse him…and to her surprise, she does.  She does not feel dirty about it, but is curious why a man would want this.

She gets drunk and meets a lesbian and goes to bed with the woman, and again feels guilty after her twilight experience (a similar scene from several Beauchamp and Elliott books).

So Carol runs the gambit of sexual experiences in the free-lovin’ San Francisco, while her ex-husband feels remorse and wants her back.  he comes to see her, drunk, and asks her to marry him again, and then tries to rape her, but the painter saves her.

She starts to drink more and more, confused with her life; angry with men, she plays with the composer, orders him around, treats him like shit, getting her revenge on the male sex, but the guy likes it…

I’ve never been  disappointed with a Silverberg sleaze novel, whatever pen name he uses; he was/is a craftsman and tells entertaining stories. As noted elsewhere in this blog, most are above average, some average, and some are gems of literature.  This one is average, but worth reading.

Tiempo de cambios es una novela de ciencia ficción, sí, pero ahonda en un tema controvertido desde el origen de lo que llamamos civilización: la defensa de la libertad individual frente a los límites impuestos por la sociedad con el fin de mantener el orden.

En un mundo en el que está prohibido compartir los propios sentimientos, exteriorizar las emociones y un «te quiero» forma parte de la lista de actos ilegales, un individuo, Kinnal Darival, descubre la forma de escapar de los márgenes impuestos. Ajeno al precio que tendrá que pagar por semejante osadía, consigue de un comerciante una especie de droga que le permitirá romper con estas barreras.

Tiempo de cambios es la historia de un rebelde en un sociedad prefabricada, un alegato a la libertad que bien se ha ganado el Premio Nebula.

Premio Nébula 1971, Mejor Novela (Ganador)

Welcome to our second author interview! I’ve recently been reading some stories that combine brilliant invention with skillful pacing, deftly-drawn characters, and the most beautifully-evoked worlds of wonder I’ve encountered in some time. I remember when I was eight or nine years old and saw The Golden Voyage of Sinbad at a matinee one summer day — and loved it so much I saw it again within a week — and read the novelization — and then went on to seek out and read Arabian Nights, which was where, my parents explained, Sinbad came from. These stories I’ve been reading this week have taken me back to those times. The visceral wonder we feel when immersed in stories tends to diminish as we go through life. But these tales have allowed me to be nine years old again — what higher praise can there be for a fantasy story? But don’t let my talk of childhood fancy-flights mislead you: there are depths to these stories as well: thrills to satisfy a reader’s inner child, richness to satisfy a reader’s inner adult — there’s plenty there for both.

The author is John R. Fultz. He writes fiction for Weird Tales and Black Gate, and has written for comic books such as Zombie Tales and Cthulhu Tales; and his graphic novel of epic fantasy, Primordia,  will be released in hardcover sometime during the next several months. A much-shortened form of his bibliography is as follows:

“The Persecution of Artifice the Quill” — Weird Tales #340

“When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye” — forthcoming in Black Gate

“Return of the Quill” — Black Gate #13

“The Vintages of Dream” — forthcoming in Black Gate

“Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine” — Black Gate #12

Unquestionably, this is a long interview. I looked carefully for things I might cut, but in the end, I”m offering the whole thing because it’s all worthwhile. If it’s too much to read in one sitting, by all means, come back to it — make a week-long excursion of it — but do read the whole thing sooner or later: you’ll be glad you did.

Instead of tagging each question with the traditional “FSD,” I’m leaving them numbered so that you can easily find your place again if you take a break. Without further ado, then, I give you John R. Fultz, sorcerer of the pen. . . .

1. Readers of this blog always seem eager for lists of books they should be reading. I know “fantasy” is a broad and diverse field, but are there a few books/authors that you think anyone interested in fantasy absolutely should read?

Man, I love giving recommendations for fantasy readers. As you can imagine, I have my own list of All-Time Greats. Everybody has read Tolkien, so I’ll skip that (but SILMARILLION is my favorite). I think any person who loves fantasy should definitely seek out and read:

 - Tanith Lee’s TALES OF THE FLAT EARTH series  (One of the most beautiful and lyrical series of books ever written. Lee is the Queen of Fantasy and her books are sheer fantasy perfection.) I also recommend her VENUS series, and her latest epic THE LIONWOLF trilogy.

- Lord Dunsany’s THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER, and any of his short stories (Dunsany really was a wizard with a quill pen…his writing is breathtakingly gorgeous.)

- Clark Ashton Smith’s ZOTHIQUE, HYPERBOREA, and POSIEDONIS tales (CAS was the master of Dark Fantasy before that term was even invented—such a combination of wild imagination, dark/weird sensibilities, and sheer poetic brilliance of style.)

- Darrell Schweitzer’s MASK OF THE SORCERER and its sequel THE BOOK OF SEKENRE (Darrell is one of fantasy’s best kept secrets…true geniuses are often overlooked and this is the case with Schweitzer…his writing IS sorcery…he weaves a spell about his readers that you’ll never want to break.) I also recommend any of his collections such as WE ARE ALL LEGENDS, NIGHTSCAPES, and REFUGEES FROM AN IMAGINARY COUNTRY, etc.

- A. A. Attanasio’s THE DRAGON AND THE UNICORN, and its many sequels (A retelling of the Merlin/Arthur mythos that is unlike anything ever written about these characters. A.A.A. has a way of opening the universe and making you understand how magic really DOES work, all while mesmerizing you with the mythic power of his narrative.)

- Brian McNaughton’s THRONE OF BONES (McNaughton was a genius of weird fiction—this book is to ghouls what DRACULA was to vampires. The strange, ghoul-haunted word of Seelura he created will linger in your mind long after you finish this one.)

- R. Scott Bakker’s PRINCE OF NOTHING trilogy…including THE DARKNESS THAT COMES BEFORE, THE WARRIOR-PROPHET, and  THE THOUSAND-FOLD THOUGHT. (Bakker has reinvented the Epic Fantasy and done it in a way that isn’t a thinly veiled version of Tolkien’s work. He is a philosopher by trade, and the metaphysical aspects of his fiction are woven with a blood-and-guts earthiness that creates a fantasy epic somewhere between David Carradine’s KUNG FU and Frank Herbert’s DUNE, as filtered through ARABIAN NIGHTS. These books are exactly what you’re looking for if you’re tired of business-as-usual fantasy series.)

- Robert Silverberg’s NIGHTWINGS is one of the greatest fantasies ever written as well, even though you might call it science-fantasy. Full of brilliant imagination, wild spectacle, and transformational wisdom, it is the kind of book you never get tired of re-reading.

- I recommend any of Thomas Ligotti’s books (the greatest living horror writer in the world), and most of William Gibson’s books (Yeah, he’s sci-fi, but he’s just such a damn good writer it doesn’t matter.)

- A year or so ago, I finally gave in and discovered the genius of George R.R. Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series. I couldn’t believe it was as good as all the hype! But it is. He is a master of character, and he makes you fall in love when he wants, makes you hate when he wants, and always makes you want to see what happens next with his cast of all-too-human heroes and villains. Very realistic take on medieval fantasy that uses a less-is-more approach with magic.

- Jeff VanderMeer’s AMBERGRIS series is one of  the best things to come along in the last five years or so. CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN, SHRIEK: AND AFTERWORD, and the just-released FINCH offer a fresh new take on the weird-fantasy genre that straddles the line between fantasy and horror (and a few other genres as well). Brilliant stuff.

 I’ll stop here or else I’ll never finish…

2. Your work that I’ve read is fantasy in the grand tradition of such writers as Clark Ashton Smith, the pre-Tolkien mode that calls to mind the exotic flavor of Arabian Nights. What is it about such settings (deserts and opulent, decadent walled cities — and the moldering crypts beneath them) that appeals to you?
 

Good question, Fred! There are a few influences that led me back to that pre-Tolkien mode of fantasy, as you call it. One was of course Robert E. Howard’s CONAN and KULL tales (I prefer the KULL tales, but love them both.) I grew up reading this stuff in both novel and comic book formats. Another was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ MARTIAN TALES series…the John Carter of Mars books.  I grew up in the 1970s, which was a Golden Age for fantasy, and particularly for “sword-and-sorcery” fiction. Later I discovered Clark Ashton Smith’s tales of lost kingdoms such as Zothique, Hyperborea, and Posiedonis, and I couldn’t get enough of his writing.

There’s just something so intriguing about the “lost world” concept. Think about the ages of pre-history that are now lost to us. How many empires, kingdoms, and nations existed in the dim eons of earth that we will NEVER know about? I also buy into the concept of inherited racial memories, to a point, as well as the concept of Reincarnation. I believe I was an inhabitant of Atlantis, possibly during the time it sank beneath the waves. I’ve always had dreams and lurking fears of colossal tidal waves, and I’m very mistrustful of the ocean and its wrath. I also believe I was at one time (or many times) a citizen of the Roman Empire. I’m simply fascinated by the Ancient World…the parts of it we know about, and even moreso the parts we will never know about.

When I discovered Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH, it opened an amazing doorway for my imagination. She set her tales in a “time when the earth was still flat.” The laws of the universe were very different…the gods were ethereal beings who cared nothing for man, and the demons were more like beautiful demigods who went around seducing mortals and causing strife. Her characters in this series are so mythic and primordial—they tap into the archetypal consciousness. I think all really good fantasy taps that ancient wisdom that lies inside our consciousness, often buried so deep it is never consciously acknowledged.

Reading Tanith Lee (which began with a dog-eared copy of DEATH’S MASTER I stumbled across in a used bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky) made me want to focus on a broader and more ancient scope than your typical “medieval England” type of story. Also, I came to the realization that nobody can ever be Tolkien, so why should anyone try? I’d rather go back into the murky haze of primordial existence and create my own kingdoms from ancient models and myths. And do something new with them, of course. Always try to do something new with them.

All fantasy writers create new worlds, so in the end you are drawing from various sources real and unreal. Why look at the whole of history and pre-history and stop at the medieval ages? Keep looking back and you’ll find way more bizarre epochs to explore and utilize as you craft your own fantasy milieu. Sometimes you can look forward, too…but that’s another question.

3. Have you ever set a story in the popular medieval British Isles-type milieu? If not, or not many, did you make a conscious decision to avoid that sort of setting?
 

As mentioned in the previous answer, I’m much more drawn to the Greco-Roman inspired settting, or the Ancient World type of environment. Not to say I won’t ever write something set on the British Isles, or my version of it. But I feel that has been done so much, and so well, that there’s really no need for me to do it. I’ll read Tolkien and Attanasio instead.

4. For me, stories almost always grow out of place — a cave, an overgrown garden, a huge vehicle of some sort, a rural community, a barn — and the story reveals itself from there. How does it work for you? Where does a story idea usually begin?
 

It varies from story to story. That’s the mystical, exciting part of writing—when the idea first blossoms in your mind…a little sprig taking root in the fertile soil of IdeaSpace. Sometimes I’m inspired by a piece of art, or a setting, or a stray line I’ve read somewhere. I’ll take inspiration wherever I can get it. But I can tell you when I have a story, and where I always look when I’m moving forward: Characters. For me, stories begin and end with Characters. Alan Moore said something that really struck a chord with me, so I’ll paraphrase his wisdom: When you drop well-defined characters into a well-defined setting and let them run like rats in a maze, doing whatever they would naturally do…you have a plot. Especially when you have very different characters with contrasting goals and interests.

I think a LOT about my setting…as most fantasy writers have to. But I think a lot about my characters as well. The characters are going to be my readers’ link to this fictional world, and so they become my link as well. I never worry about “What will happen next?” because I just ask my character. The rule I follow is: Characters always behave according to their inherent natures. Just like real people. You can usually predict what your friends or family members will do in any given situation—because you know them so well. That’s how you have to know your characters.

One of my joys in writing is when my characters come into conflict with each other. Maybe it’s because conflict is the very heart of all Drama. Or maybe it’s me working out subconscious/emotional conflicts that I can’t handle on a conscious level. Whatever…it doesn’t really matter, but all characters are extensions of the writer’s psyche. Put them in a box and let them play. But make sure it’s a fascinatingly designed box! So I always come back to character. Keep in mind that your setting in itself can be a character as well…some settings make demands on characters that they cannot ignore.

When I have the basic idea for a story—which can come from anywhere—it “floats” there until I come up with a character (or characters).Once I have them, the idea starts to really grow and blossom, and before you know it I have a story ready to be written.

5. You’re an amazingly productive writer. Can you tell us something about your process? How does writing fit in around your full-time day job? When and where do you get it done? Do you write first drafts by hand or on a keyboard? Do you seek any input before you send things out?
 

Well, I go through productive periods and non-productive like everyone else. One thing I like to tell people (including my students) is that “Not Writing is a very important part of Writing.” I mean, the first thing you have to do before you write something is THINK about it. Thinking isn’t actually writing…but then again it IS. I think, therefore I write.

I teach English for a living, and right now I’m teaching 8^th grade level in the Bay Area. During the regular teaching year there is precious little time for writing. However, that doesn’t stop me from thinking! I try to keep my mind open for good ideas. They never spoil. Some writers carry ideas around for years before they turn them into stories or novels. The great thing about being a teacher, though, is that I get summers off to focus on my writing. Not to mention extended vacations over the winter holidays, and a Spring Break. There are assorted 3- and 4-day weekends during the year as well. These are the times when you’ll find me hitting the keyboard and getting my writing done.

Sometimes, though, I get inspired and nothing can stop me. For example, after attending this year’s WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION (my first ever), I came home so inspired that I’ve hammered out three new stories this month. While teaching! I’ve never done that before, so either I’m getting better or I’m just hella-inspired. Now, when the holidays hit I usually go back to Kentucky and visit relatives and friends—that’s a time when I won’t get any writing done either because it’s all about airports, highways, and the usual Yuletide celebrations. Which are great—it’s nice to have a couple weeks at the end of every year to “unplug” and just enjoy life for a little while. Again, those times can birth a bunch of new ideas, though, so I’m always ready.

Sometimes an idea will come to me and I’ll pull out my cell-phone, which has a recorder function, and speak the “nugget” of my idea right into my phone recorder. I’m like Dale Cooper on TWIN PEAKS speaking his thoughts to Diane. I might make two or three more “Messages to Self” before I put something on paper.

I think of ideas as “seeds”—let them grow in the mind until I just can’t stand it anymore. Then I’ve got to get it out of me. That’s when I sit down and hit the keyboard. Sometimes I’ll write longhand notes first—but whenever I can I prefer to just go right to the keyboard. I may write a page or several pages of notes—the Prewriting Process—before I actually write the first line of a story. I see the First Line as a gateway. Once I decide on what I think the “perfect” first line will be, I can “enter” the story-world completely. But I can’t start typing the story itself until I’ve figured out what the opening sentence will be in my head. A good opening sentence always leads you on to more good sentences.

Sometimes I finish the story in a single sitting. Those are great blasts of inspiration, but also the results of much mental planning beforehand. Once I know what the END is going to be, I can start the story. Sometimes I have only a general idea of the end, and other times I know EXACTLY what the ending will be. Sometimes I write out a bullet-list of events (i.e. Plot Points), and other times I keep it all in my head…a “general direction” rather than a plan, to use Bradbury’s terminology.

For longer stories, I’ll write them in shifts. But I usually can’t concentrate on much else until my current “project” is done. I always stop at natural breaks in the story…I’ll keep typing until I’m physically exhausted because I have to reach a good “resting place” before I can stop. Then I’ll come back the next day and finish it.

Writing novels is a whole different challenge from writing short stories. If you have a few weeks or months to build up momentum, you can really dive into it. That was the case with me last summer when I wrote SEVEN PRINCES. I had a general direction, but I wanted the characters to determine what actually happened from chapter to chapter. This was a new approach for me—with previous long-form works I always outlined them. This time, I wanted to let the characters and their world “breathe.” I knew where it was all heading, but not how I would get there. But the characters led the way, and often surprised me on the journey. Part of novel writing is being able to TRUST your writer’s instinct, your subconscious creator, if you will, to not lead you astray. My point of view is that if you follow the characters first and foremost, you’ll never write yourself into a corner. Realize that the characters are living these stories, you’re just chronicling.

I know that sounds like madness, but all writers are mad to a degree. But it’s a wonderful, joyous madness! Hahahahahahahah!

Someone said writing a short story is like walking a tightrope from beginning to end. Whereas writing a novel is like balancing SEVERAL things on tightropes and guiding them all toward the same ending. That’s a valid analogy. Writing short stories gives you a short-term thrill of completion, and you can really explore big, madcap ideas…just let your imagination soar. With a novel, you have to create a set of parameters, or story rules, and stick to them. That’s the thing about building momentum–the faster you go the harder it is to change course. So make sure you’re heading in the right direction. The way I do that is by following my characters, wherever they lead me.

There is always some kind of plan. Even if it’s all in mind (for shorter pieces), or a few lines of plot points, or a complete loose outline. Outlines inevitably change once you start to write, and often they become irrelevant when you’re in the middle of the story…but that’s okay because they give you what you need: a direction in which to travel.

With my SEVEN PRINCES novel, I had a general idea of where things were headed, but I consciously planned out only one chapter at a time. It was like strolling through fog, only able to see the next step or two ahead of me. My characters calling to me from somewhere in the mist, and me trusting they would lead me where we all needed to be. They did.

6. Descriptions, dialogue, action sequences, exposition of background. . . . Do you have a favorite part of a story to write? How about a least favorite?

My favorite part of a story to write is usually one of two things: Dialogue or  Mystical/Magical/Surreal moments. In long-form works (longer stories or a novel) I relish exchanges of dialogue. It’s where my characters come to life and express themselves, and I really enjoy letting them interact and seeing where a scene takes me. It’s great when they surprise you, or when you write some dialogue and go back later and say “Damn, I don’t remember writing that at all!” The character was in charge; you were just transcribing.

My other favorite part of writing a story probably explains why I like fantastic fiction so much. I love writing pieces/scenes/sequences where “normal” reality is abandoned and the characters are caught in a mystical experience such as a dream-state, a spell of sorcery, an invasion of the “other,” or visions of surreal enlightenment. In short, I love to warp reality. I can’t really do that too well in my terrestrial life—but in my fiction I can twist the fabric of existence. My goal is always to create a unique experience for the reader. When I read Darrell Schweitzer’s sorcery sequences, they often take me to a trance-state, something like transcendental meditation. He literally boggles my mind! This is why I tell people that Darrell’s writing IS sorcery. A. A. Attanasio can do that as well, but he makes the most fantastical magic event seem as natural as a summer rain. Tanith Lee can transport me with the sheer beauty of her prose imagery, as can Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany. On the darker side, nobody warps readers’ consciousness like the Master, Thomas Ligotti. Once again, it’s like a spell has been cast, and you’re experiencing something that goes beyond simple eye-to-brain cognition. It’s like LSD without taking drugs. I love writing scenes that transcend mundane reality. I may not be as effective at it as those authors I mentioned, but they are my role models for doing this in my own fiction. Of course, there are many other authors who weave such spells on their readers, but these are just a few of my favorites. In short—I want to mess with your mind, dude!
 

7. Can you tell us about your revision process? How much editing do you do?
 

When I’m involved with crafting a story I’m constantly editing it. Write, edit, write, edit. I’ll “spot-edit” continuously, in between extended bouts of writing the actual prose. I “live with” the story for a day or a few days, and things “pop out” at me—things I have to fix, or things I forgot to put in, or things that need to be changed for consistency. Later, after the story is finished and I’ve taken some time away (usually less than 24 hours), I’ll go back and do a Complete Edit. That’s where I read the entire story onscreen and cut/add anything that needs to be fixed, smoothed out, or altered. I always try to cut myself mercilessly. Any word, phrase, or sentence is expendable in order to achieve the overall effect of The Story.

For me, the most difficult part of stories is perfecting the opening. I detest a boring or “blah”opening. I usually don’t read stories unless they grab me in the first paragraph. Who’s got the time for that anyway? I’ve got a lot of stuff to read! So I usually go over and over and over my opening paragraph (s), trying to make it absolutely perfect. The opening sequence of a story should be as precise and effective as a well-written poem. Every word counts. And since editors usually judge your stories by their openings, you have to show them you’ve “got it” right there in the first one to two paragraphs. I’m the same with songs on the radio—I can tell from the opening, or the first few bars, if I’m going to sit through that song. The “lead” of a story should be a grabber; that’s my philosophy. So I obsess over my opening paragraphs to excess. It seems to work!

8. Your roots are rural Midwestern, like mine, but most recently you’re a Californian. How has region affected your writing? How about geography?

Yeah, I grew up in Kentucky, lived in Chicago for a little while, and I’ve been a Californian since 1998. The first nine years out here was in Southern California—Orange County. This month marks my two-year anniversary of moving north to the Bay Area. California on the whole has been incredibly inspiring to me. It has definitely affected my writing in many ways. California has elements of all climates and peoples here. It has amazing history. Most of all it has an appreciation for the creative arts that the Midwestern environment seems to have in short supply. For example, if you say “Hey, I want to be a writer” in Kentucky, people will generally tell you to “Get a real job—you can’t make a living as a writer.” They’re more practical. The same goes for music, and other creative endeavors. On the other hand, if you tell someone in California you want to be a writer, they will automatically take you seriously and ask what you’re working on (or what you’ve written). Out here the business of entertainment and creativity is a real, economic power. People take writers and artists seriously the way they never did when I was a boy growing up in Kentucky. And there’s a reason for that: There simply aren’t that many opportunities for artists in that part of the country. If you want to be a writer, you really need to go to California or New York. Of course there are exceptions, but Cali is motion pictures and New York is publishing. And those two worlds are inseparably intertwined. The creative climate of California is what I enjoy most. People here are very impractical—in a good way!

9. Has there been a proudest moment in your writing career so far?
 

I think it was when I sold my first short story to WEIRD TALES, back in early 2004. The story was “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” and it ran in WT #340, which came out in ’05. I had literally been trying to sell stories to WT for fifteen years! Back in college, when I took creative writing courses, I used to read the Schweitzer/Scithers version of WEIRD TALES and I sent off stories to them. Darrell always wrote me the most insightful rejections. Every few years I’d try again, and I got better by little increments. It’s funny—when I was writing “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill” I just knew somehow that this was the story that would finally get me into WEIRD TALES. And it was. I had always said “If I can sell a story to Darrell, I will have figured out how to write.” Because we’re talking about an editor who won a World Fantasy Award for his editing—not to mention one of the leading scholars/reviewers in the fantasy/horror genre.

Selling that first story inspired me to keep writing short stories, and I ended up selling two more Artifice stories to WT, then I started selling to BLACK GATE. Along the way, I got my graphic novel PRIMORDIA published as well, then sold some other comics scripts. Earlier this year I sold my first non-fantasy story to SPACE & TIME Magazine. It was a contemporary weird-horror story called “Behind the Eyes.” It was another milestone because I’ve never wanted to write ONLY fantasy. Fantasy will always be my first love, but I do write other things as the inspiration strikes.

10. Can you remember your earliest attempt at writing, perhaps when you were very young? What, if anything, was the common link with what you’re writing now, as an adult?
 

When I was in 7^th grade I wrote a story about a knight who refuses to listen to everyone at court when they tell him NOT to go fight a dragon that is terrorizing the land. The young knight, full of arrogance and hungry for glory, goes out and assaults the dragon in its cave. The last line of the story reveals that the knight was promptly killed and devoured by the dragon. The point being that he should have listened to his elders and let the damn dragon alone. My English teacher liked the story so much that she read it to the entire class one day. That must have been a turning point in my life. It gave me something to be proud of when I really needed it. It validated my interest in writing, as well as in fantasy fiction. It might be the first time I ever thought of myself as a “writer.” In my own career as a teacher I love recognizing and encouraging young writers. I guess I’m paying it forward. Thank you, Mrs. Kimberlaine!

11. Is there a particular element or aspect that you think the best fantasy stories have? As a reader, what do you read for?
 

A sense of wonder. That’s it for me. I’m stealing the words of the great Robert Silverberg, but it’s so true. Whether I’m reading fantasy, sci-fi, or horror, I want a sense of wonder, something strange, beyond the mundane, something incredible and impossible coming to life inside my imagination. In college I read Silverberg’s WORLDS OF WONDER, which was a guide to writing science fiction and fantasy, but also included amazing stories from classic writers like Damon Knight, Henry Kuttner, Jack Vance, and Brian Aldiss. It was huge influence on me, and responsible for my writing a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel in longhand during the course of my last two years of college. It wasn’t particularly good, but terrific fun, and I proved to myself that I could do it. One of the things Silverberg talks about in that book is the “sense of wonder” that sci-fi and fantasy stories should have. I couldn’t say it any better.

The other element that is so important is good characters. If you can’t relate to the characters, you’re not going to enjoy the story. Silverberg is a master at infusing a sense of wonder with believable characters who seem real, even in the depths of impossible realities.

Thirdly, a writer’s style means a lot to me. Tanith Lee’s fiction reads like sex feels. It’s superb. Lyrical, poetic, full of images that stun the mind and thrill the soul. Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti do the same thing, but with a much darker mood. It’s all about creating fantastic imagery that evokes that crucial sense of wonder.

12. Is there a map of the world in which your Zang Cycle is set? Do you write with a map spread out beside you, or is a map even necessary?
 

The map of the Zang Continent exists only in my mind, but it’s pretty well formed there. I took a cue from Brian McNaughton, who believed that if he drew a map for his Seelura Cycle (in THRONE OF BONES), it might rob his creation of all its mystery and wonder. So there is no physical Zang map.

However, I DID create a map for my novel SEVEN PRINCES. The characters therein are lords and ladies of several lands, some of which are a thousand miles apart. There are also the movements of armies and travelling individuals to consider. So I created a map and constantly continued to revise it as I wrote the novel. I’ve learned from this that maps are WAY more important to fantasy novels than to cycles of loosely-related short stories that share the same world.

13. The use of magic is a central aspect of your stories, much moreso than the use of swords. Is that a fair statement? What are the challenges of writing about magic and characters who are sorcerers?
 

Yes. Some people call some of my stories “sword and sorcery,” but I came up with the term “pen and sorcery” because Artifice the Quill, main character of the Zang stories, isn’t a warrior—he’s a writer! He starts out as a novelist and evolves into a traveling playwright. The conceit is that he is learning a form of sorcery that reveals itself through his performances…a great metaphor for how Art can change the world. The series of Artifice tales explores the concept of Sorcery as Art, and Art as Sorcery.

I’ve always thought wizards/sorcerers/magicians were way more interesting than sword-swinging warriors. I’d rather see two sorcerers have a duel than two swordsmen. The possibilities are endless with magic and sorcery…Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone is so exciting and enduring because he combines the best attributes of the warrior/swordsman archetype with the best of the sorcerer/magician figure.

However, any kind of character can be compelling if it is well written. Some of George R. R. Martin’s characters are practically powerless, but yet they are ultimately fascinating. Maybe my preference for magical characters goes back to my quest for the “sense of wonder” I spoke about. At the same time, Jeffrey Ford pointed out at the WFC how you can find magic in the real world; it exists all around you in the winds and movements of birds among the clouds, etc. The world of nature is the ultimate magic. He has a good point. Attanasio is the only fantasy writer I’ve read who manages to combine Nature and Sorcery to the point that the mundane world and supernatural world are ONE AND THE SAME. That’s why everyone should seek out and read THE DRAGON AND THE UNICORN, to see how he pulls this off.

I don’t really like the term “sword-and-sorcery” when it’s applied to my fiction. I don’t like limits. There are other authors whose work gets labeled like this, and for most of them it’s not fair because they have way more going on than S&S would imply.

We had a great panel about writing sorcerer/magician characters at the WFC. One thing we all agreed on: You have to give your sorcerers limits of some kind. But that’s not hard to do because as I pointed out, simply HAVING sorcerous/magical power is going to cause a whole host of problems. It’s also interesting to note that most of literature’s sorcerer/magician characters end up as tragic figures…all their cosmic power does them no good in the end. Elric, Merlin, Drusas Achamian (from the PRINCE OF NOTHING series)…even Gandalf doesn’t live a particularly happy existence in LotR.

I think Sorcerers and Magicians and Wizards have an immortal mystique about them, and that’s what makes them such great characters to write and read. They know things…sometimes terrible things…they are the keepers of the universe’s darkest mysteries.

14. Imagine that, about 170 years from now, you’re being discussed by a panel at the World Fantasy Convention. “John Fultz was a writer who ______.” What would you like to be remembered for?

Oh, wow, I can’t think of how to answer this without sounding like a jerk.  It’s a nice image though. I certainly hope my works survive me…

15. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to add?

Let’s see: Right now I’ve got two stories coming up in future issues of BLACK GATE, and a post-apocalyptic horror tale in the forthcoming DAW anthology CTHULHU’S REIGN. You can also pre-order the PRIMORDIA hardcover at Amazon.com, but I’m not sure exactly when it will be released.

Thanks, Fred!

Thank you, John!

When pop culture historians and critics write about the lesbian paperback pulp era in the 1950s-60s,  the same names are often use das examples: Vin Packer, Randy Salem, March Hastings, Valerie Taylor, Paula Christiansen, etc., with such classics in lesbian pulp Spring Fire, Three Women, Baby Face, Women’s Barracks,  and so on.  Seldom is the name Sloane Britain mentioned, the pen name of Midwood-Tower editor Elaine Williams, although as both a writer and editor, Williams/Britain etched her own legacy in the history of early commercial lesbian fiction.

Williams started with Midwood in 1959, when the company first formed, acquiring and editing novels by Lawrence Block (Shekdon Lord), Donald Westlake (Alan Marshall), Robert Silverberg (Loren Beauchamp), Orrie Hitt, and Mike Avallone, among others.  It’s not clear when she left Midwood, if she did, but she committed suicide in 1964. Seems her family did not approve of her gay lifestyle and had disowned her, a matter she hinted at in her fiction.  She was 33.

She published her first novel with Newsstand Library in 1959, a paperback house out of Chicago: First Person–Third Sex was a deeply personal account of a third grade teacher’s discovery of her “third sex” passion and desire of a “twilight woman.”  It was reprinted in 1962 by Dollar Double Books as Strumpets’ Jungle (see above pic) , back-to-back with Any Man’s Playmate by James L. Ruebel.

Also in 1959, she published with Beacon Books, The Needle, a story about a bi-sexual heroin addict prostitute.

Her next novels for Midwood were 1960’s Meet Marilyn and Insatiable, like The Needle, written commercially for the market; These Curious Pleasures (1961), however, has the same autobiographical, first-person narrative that her first novel does. In fact, the narrator’s name is “Sloane Britain,” perhaps Williams’ indication that this book is based on her own life, rather than the writer’s imagination. 1961 also saw That Other Hunger. Both books sported cover art by Paul Rader.

Other titles were Ladder of Flesh plus two posthumous short novels published as Midwood Doubles: Summer of Sin and Peep Booth.  Three titles, Ladder of Flesh, That Other Hunger, and Unnatural,  were reissued in the late 1960s with new titles: Taboo and Delicate Vice.

Both First Person–Third Sex and These Curious Pleasures break away from the genre norm of lesbian paperbacks in that they end on a gay-positive note, rather than having the protagonist meet with tragedy for her sins of the flesh or meet a male she falls head over heels with, marries, and lives forever after in heterosexual marital bliss.  Publishers such as Fawcett Gold Medal, Beacon, and Nightstand often required this so the Postal Inspector would not prosecute for mailing obscene material in the U.S. Mails — if the lesbian character meets a horrible end or goes insane over her unnatural lust, or repents from sin and finds true love in the arms of man, then the books were deemed to have social value as morality and cautionary tales; if the books ended on a positive note with women loving women, that, in the 1950s-60s, was considered perverted and sick.  Homosexuality was still considered a mental disease that could be cured with medicine, psychology, or religion…

Lesbian paperbacks were initially marketed to male readership, often written by men under female pen names–the writing was often obvous, with the male point of view, although some men (such a Lawrence Block and Orrie Hitt) wrote so convincingly as women and lesbians that even to this, some readers have misten Block’s Jill Emerson and Hitt’s Kay Addams as being bonafide females.  On the other hand, writers such as Robert Silverberg (Marlene Longman) and Gil Fox (Kimberly Kemp, Dallas Mayo) were not as adept at capturing the lesbian voice and experience — Silverberg has stated he just relied on his fantasies and imagination whereas Fox, in an interview with Lynne Munroe, stated that he would watch romantic scenes in movies and imagine two women doing/saying the same, and would write from there.

In his essay, “How Can You Put Your Name on Books Like That? or Make Mine a Midwood” in Paperback Parade #32, prolific author Mike Avallone reveals that Williams accepted a manuscript from him:

…a lady editor at this very new Midwood snapped up ADAM GREENE  as if Avallone was the new F. Scott Fitzgerald, expediated an advance of five hundred and fifty dollars, and asked for aother novel. (p. 50)

Adam Greene was an attempt at a mainstream literary novel by crime and thriller writer Avallone that he had not been able to sell for its sexual content. It was welcome at Midwood and published as All The Way.  She acquired several more books from Avallone until she suddenly vanished.

I should say here that the first lady editor died under mysterious circumstances — suicide was suggested. I didn’t know, really. She was only a nice, low telephone voice to me named Evelyn [sic]. (p. 54)

While he never met his editor, at an office party he notes meeting “lesbian author Sloane Britain,” an attractive woman who had no interest in men but had exquisite and big “manly hands.”

In an interview with Lynne Munroe, Gil Fox states:

[The] first editor was Elaine Williams, who wrote as Sloane Britain. Her family refused to accept the fact that she was a lesbian, and she committed suicide.

While men certainly purchased and read lesbian paperbacks for twisted entertainment, these books found an unexpected underground audience among the housewives and teen girls across the country: women with secret longings who discovered they were not alone and other “women” had similar feelings and experiences and doubts that they had.

Perhaps some found a kindred soul in Williams/Britain’s First Person–Third Sex. The narrator, Paula, does not discover she’s gay until she’s twenty-one.  Before that, she’d had sexual encounters with men but couldn’t understand why she derived no pleasure from it, figuring she had to fall in love and get married before the true joys of sex were apparent.

Paula does comprehend, at age 15, the allure of her body and how she can manipulate men.  Lying about her age, she gets a waitress job in a diner; the older man is always eying her and she’s aware of it, as well as the looks of customers.  She doesn’t make enough money at the job to buy all the material possessions she craves, so she tells her boss that she will let him have her but it’ll cost $30 (pretty pricey for what would have been the mid-1950s, when your common streetwalker charged $5-10 and call girls went for $20/hour or $100 a night).  Her boss is a miser and won’t do it but she continues to taunt him, not wearing a bra, bending down in front of him, so he finally gives in.  They have sex twice a week and she makes an extra $60 on top of her weekly salary of $40.

She also carries on with the fry cook, a young Hispanic man who can’t afford the $30; she charges him $10 because he at least is young and good-looking.  She cannot, however, reach orgasm with these men, or even find pleasure in the act, as much as she tries.  It’s just a teen girl’s means to afford new clothes and jewelry and goes on for a year until her boss catches her with the cook and things get violent.

After college, Paula roommates with Janet, also a young school teacher. They get hired at the same school and are close friends.  Janet had regular dates but Paula has no interest; she dates no and then but just to do something, not interested in having a relationship. Even when she does have sex with a man, she still feels nothing.

In the summer, the two go off to summer jobs in different states.  Janet has a whirlwind romance while Paula is seduced by another cap counselor, Karen, who sees in Paula what Paula does not know: that she is gay.  Paula discovers orgasmic ecstasy with Karen, and is happy juts to lay in bed and talk as well.  Paula is okay with the realization of her lesbianism — she’s also possessive.  Karen is proiscuous and is carrying on with another girl at the camp, and is open for more lovers, even sharing them with Paula.

Karen tries to subdue her jealousy, tries to act like she is a free-loving dyke, but is doesn’t bode well, and she leaves the camp with a starined ending with Karen.

Back to rooming with Janet, Paula sees Janet in a new light: as an attractive female she’d like to have sex with.  She fights herself from making advances on Janet, afraid it might ruin their friendship.

Later, Paula takes a trip to Manhattan to visit Karen and is introduced to life in Greenwich Village, where gay men and woman openly cavort, there are many shops catering to the lesbian fashion, as well as gay bars and clubs.  Needless to say, Paula realizes she could live here and feel free to express her sexuality in public.

Janet meets Paula’s New York friends and notices something; she confronts Paula and asks if Karen is gay, and this is when Paula admits she is also gay, and she is okay with it, even if it does ruin their friendship.

Janet surprises Paula not by condemning her but by taking Paula’s hand and leading her to the bedroom, saying she feels the same — Janet is more bi-sexual than strictly lesbian, and a new chapter in their relationship opens.

The next weeks were the happiest in my life. No longer did I have to hide my love for Janet as if it were something I should be ashamed of [...] The only thing missing that would have made my happiness complete was the belief that it would last. (p. 142)

This presents a problem:  can they both be roommates and lovers, especially since Janet sees men and Paula has possessive issues?  Such matters of sexual and intimate jealously has been explored in Jill Emerson’s Warm and Willing –although written by a man (Lawrence Block), the novel reveals that the intricate pettiness and fallacies of lesbian relationships are no different than the heterosexual experience. Jealousy is also explored in March Hastings’ The Drifter, which may have been edited by Williams at Midwood. (It is interesting to note that March Hastings, pen name for Sally M. Singer, published a number of novels with Beacon and Newsstand Library, and then went exclusively with Midwood in 1960.  So did Singer’s lover, Randy Salem, pen name of Pat Perdue.  Did Williams, also with Beacon and Newstand, bring these women authors over?)

Yes at first, no later. Janet turns out to be the more possessive one, although it seems to be a ruse, for all of Janet’s insistence that they are one another’s property, Janet turns out to be the one who steps out on the relationship, with both women and men.  The revelation for Karen is deeply painful, yet almost inevitable “in the strumpet’s jungle” of the sexually active of the late 1950s.  Paula bears his soul to Janet:

“…I was in love with Karen but I have a confession to make. I was attracted to you for a long time.

“When we decided to live together I decided that nothing could make me happier than sharing the little details of daily life with you. This summer I realized that I wanted more from our relationship.  It seems strange to say that my relationship with Karen made me love you more.  What I mean is that through her I learned how beautiful a woman could be  when she gave you her love…on all levels.” (p. 148)

Still, Janet’s sexual needs outside their love ruins what they had.  They depart friends, in tears, and Paula has a hardened heart as she awaits the next woman to come into her life.  The next summer, Karen leaves to a camp again but Paula does not; she heads to New York and lives in Karen’s place for three months.

I don’t know if I expected to find someone in New York.  It didn’t matter. I was in no hurry. All I was sure of was that someday, somewhere, I would find the woman who loved me as I loved her [...] I don’t know her name or what she looks like or anything about her. Only that as I write this she, too, is waiting. (p. 191)

Is that woman Allison in These Curious Pleasures?

“Sloane Britain” in These Curious Pleasures works as a secretary in a New York TV producer’s office. She has a room in the Village and a number of part-time lovers; she also likes to cruise the bars, seeking one-night stands with strange women.

She is essentially Paula with a new name as Elaine Williams is Sloane Britain: remade in New York as a dyke in search of good sex and maybe, if the cards are right, love.

Sloane meets an actress that her boss hires for a new TV pilot, Allison.  There is an immediate connection between the two women; Sloane is confused but Allison says she knew Sloane was gay the first second, she has a way of telling.

A note on the boss: Harry “Happy” Broadman seems to be a thinly veiled rendition of Midwood Books publisher Harry Shorten — Shorten, Broadman.  Happy, as Sloane calls her boss, is unpredictable, at one moment yelling incoherently on a tirade, the next moment calm and collected.  She has learned to deal with herboss’ eccentricites.  Was Harry Shorten like this?  Descriptions of him by his authors seem to indicate this is so.

It was three in the afternoon and Happy hadn’t shown up at the office.  What a day it had been.  His numerous lad friends called frst on his private line and then, when they didn’t get an answer, they called back on the office phone. They drve me nuts with their questions. (p. 34)

So how did an editor publish a novel with such a portrait of her boss within the boss’ own publishing company?  It seems that Harry Shorten never read the sex books he published, coming from a background of comics (the money he made in that field was used to start Midwood).

The relationship between Sloane and Allison begins slowly then goes whirlwind — Allison doesn’t want things to get serious until the pilot is shot, so her work will not be affected by romance.  Frustrated, Sloane reacts to this by going to see one of her part-time lovers, including a girl whom she has not seen in three weeks; Sloane just knocks on her apartment door, unannounced, and the girl lets Sloane in to spend the night.  Sloane’s aggressiveness almost seems…manly. She goes on a dark prowl. She is sardonic, too.  While out dancing, Allison asks Sloane why she always speak in clipped, glib sentences like a character out of a detective novel.

She also cruises the lesbian bars in the Village, rejecting women based on hos they dress or their taste in literature.  No one at the production company knows she’s gay — it’s not something she  hides, she just has no need to mix her private life with work, until Allison shows up.  Men — actors, directors, producers — constantly ask her out, but she politely turns them down or suggests she’s in a relationship and not available.  She wishes this were true.  Like Paula, she is searching for that one woman she can love, a woman to love her back, and she sees this future in Allison.

Then something bad happens.  With the pilot finished and ready to market, Happy throws a large party at his Long Island estate.  There’s a lot of drinking and some drug use going on.  An actor and the director of photography, both stoned out of their reasonable minds, corner Allison in a bedroom and rape her.  Sloane hears Allison’s cries for help and goes in the room; she tries to stop the rape but one of the men hold her back as the other assualts the woman Sloane loves. It is a moment of horror for Sloane: she has to watch Allison violated and there’s nothing she can do about it.

After, Sloane holds Allison and soothes her; Allison is shaking, crying, she has never really been with men, she has never experienced forced sex.

Sloane wants her to go to the cops and report this but Allison refuses — she is career ambitious. She’s an unknown actress and this pilot could be a career break; the two rapist are well-known and respected in the field and if she smeared their names, if she put them in jail, she would become blacklisted in the entertainment field, and the tabloids would afford her the wrong kind of publicity.  The best thing, she feels, is to recover and forget — the two men don’t even remember what they did, based on how they act the next day.

Although watching Allison’s rape was horrid for Sloane, it works out for her need for Allison — Allison stays with her for two weeks and Sloane nurtures the actress. Their relationship gets deeper, the sex is tender and loving.

Much like Paula and Janet in First Person–Third Sex, the relationship starts off good as the two live together, but it doesn’t take long for the little green monster to poke its head out of the mist of the lesbian psyche.  As Sloane and Allison interact with other lesbians in the twilight jungle, Sloane becomes jealous of the way other women look and flirt with Allison, and how Allison responds.

Despite all the problems and a short break-up, the novel has a happy ending — Allison gets a job on a TV show in Hollywood and has to move to California. Unable to see her life without Allison, Sloane says goodbye to her job and Greenwich Village life and goes west, young lady, with the gal she loves.

We kissed for a long time. Not one of those kisses where we teased each other. Just a matter of contact that would take the place of words that would say I need you, I love you, you give me strength, I want you near me always. (p. 185)

Both these novels are elegantly written, emotionally charged, and deeply personal — autobiographical revelations that there is a universality of love and lust’s many avenues and streets.  “She died too young,” said Midwood author Joan Ellis, talking to Lynn Munroe.

Indeed she did.

In the lesbian journal Ladder, Marion Zimmer Bradley (who wrote lesbian novels under a variety of names) examined the output of Sloane Britain and both praised and condemned her work, according to Susan Styrker in Queer Pulp (Chronicle Books, 2001).  Williams/Britain’s  First Person–Third Sex was lauded as “one of the best books” of 1959 for its honesty, as was These Curious Pleasures (“excellent writing and characterization”) but The Needle and Woman Doctor were written off as paperback trash that succumbed to genre demands of sleaze fiction.

Woman Doctor is about an unethical shrink who seduces her female patients; MZB viewed this as beneath serious lesbian literature and Britain’s earlier work.

A final note stated:

Sloane M. Britain died, by her own hand, in her New York apartment in early 1964.  In spite of the gradually declining and cynical characters of her later books, we feel that the literary world has lost a promising talent.  She might well have escaped the rut of hackwork, and written something well worthwhile. We’ll never know. (Queer Pulp p. 61)

Talk about cynical!  But true.

Yet how many sleaze paperback writers actually did escape hackwork? Did MZB with her fantasy and SF?  Some will say no.  Did Lawrence Block and Robert Silverberg?  They remained genre authors.  Evan Hunter?  The Blackboard Jungle suggests so.  Some, like Gil Brewer and William Knoles, killed themselves because they were unable to make that escape and the literary break-through they hoped for.  Elaine Willaims/Sloane Britain killed herself because of the disapproval of her open twilight sexual identity — the gradual cynicism of her later books reflected such.  Her character Paula and her alter-ego Sloane may have found peace, acceptance, and love on the page, something Elaine Williams could not acquire in life.

One of Malzberg’s least known books, it has had three editions: this 1971 Belmont Tower edition, a 1977 edition with an art cover, and a 1980 “price breaker” plain cover edtion from Leisure Books.

A note on publisher history: Belmont was once an independent paperback house that specialized in faux sexology studies and popular culture, as well as second rate science-fiction and mysteries. They merged what was left of Midwood (Tower Publications) and became Belmont Tower, then later merged with Lancer Books and formed an inprint, leisure Books — not the same Leisure imprint from Greenleaf/Cornith.  Lesiure still exists today as Dorchester Publishing (which published a number of curious books by Linda DuBrieul), which supposedly still has the rights to all these old books, Lesire mainly publishers a popular horror line, romances, thrillers and westerns now.

The Spread is pure black comedy, and a nasty criticism of the sleaze rag era of the 60s-70s, the other half of the biz that went along with the books: nudie mags and newspapers under the guise of adults news and entertainment…

The narrator is the publisher of The Spread, a dirty little tabloid that had made him somewhat wealthy, although he has the usual problems of paper and printing prices, getting printers to publish his rag, greasing the hands of local authorities to keep from being raided, and paying authors.

His wife hates that he publishes smut, but she also knows she lives in good comfort because of it.

This narrator is like many Malzberg first-person story-tellers: sardonic and possibly insane; thus, he is unreliable and as far as we know, he could be telling a big lie from an insane asulym, or inside some virtuial reality program that is used for psychoanalysis (I had so hoped that would be the surprise ending of Southern Comfort, written as Gerrold Watkins, but that wasn’t the case).

He does crazy shit like call the people who place kinky sex ads in his paper; he calls them from his office and disguises his voice and harrasses and makes fun of them.  Why?  For the hell of it. Because he’s nuts.

He’s also doing his secretary, like any sleazy boss would — he spreads her out on his desk, so the title has double-meaning.

This is a funny book, really.  If you’re not used to Malzberg’s dark sense of humor, found in his Olympia titles and much of his “science-fiction,” you may just think the narrator is an asshole.  Well, he is, but he’s an asshole with a social agenda, such as his diatribe when he does a talk show with a Catholic priest who’d like to burn all copies of The Spread as an act of purity and censorship.

The books also got the same treatment, as religious do-gooders would often raid newstands and drug stores that sold sleaze. Sometimes they’d simply buy out the stock so no one, like kids, would get their hands on it.  Did the sellers care, as long as they got paid?  Did the publishers, as long as they got their money?

And it’s not unhead of for certain interest groups to pay a publishing entity to not publish certain things.  The government, back then and now, just uses coresion and threat of prosecution.

The Spread’s publisher stands for the first amendment and freedom, or so he presents his outer self, while his inner self slips deeper into madness.  And what Malzberg does here is simuilar to Orrie Hitt’s Taboo Thrills — a criticial take on those in a free America who believe freedom of speech and press and life is select and conditional, rather than expansive and blanketing. It’s like that old saying: “All men are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

(In Hitt’s book, also published as Wilma’s Wants and Warped Woman, a group of do-gooders buy out the nafrrator’s books in town and burn them in a public display of protest against sex.)

I was reminded by a reader of this blog that I have been neglecting Malzberg, when I had started this blog initially to discuss the softcores by Malzberg and his buddy Rob Silverberg, as notes to two monograophs I am doing for Borgo Press and have been lagging on.  So — more Malzberg to come.

I may even create a separate Barry Malzberg blog that will discuss and examine all his work, not just sleazecore, including his SF, crime fiction, non-fiction, collaborations, and what he’s been up to today.

Also: this blog will eventually morph into a bigger book, American Softcore, down the line.

I am writing an essay for a Prager encyclopedia, Queers in Popular Culture, about Midwood editor/writer Elaine Williams akls Sloane Britian, and her place as both in the lesbian pulp paperback era. I will post a watered down veriosn here, as sepearte book entries.

The last of Robert Silverberg’s Loren Beauchamp books here, I have read and reviewed them all; all were for Midwood except one, The Wife Traders, which was for Boudoir Books and was a truncated version of David Challon’s Suburban Sin Club, discussed here.

Nurse Carolyn is a somewhat dark tale of a naive young nurse in white, Carolyn Wright, taken down the dark path of wealth and S/M.  The first edition, above, has one of Paul Rader’s best art; Rader also did the cover for the second edition, which is less striking but still Rader.

We first meet Carolyn as a quasi-sexually liberated nurse at Netherlands Hospital, engaged to a young go-getter intern named Dick. (“I love Dick” obviously double-entendre when she says it.)

For two days she took care of a diabetic and multi-millionaire, Cornelias Baird.  He has requested her to be his private nurse at his Long Island estate, at $125 week and free room and board.  For the late 50s, which this is set, that was pretty good wages for an R.N.  The hospital hates to see her go — they have a nurse shortage — but Baird is on the Board of Directors, his family has given gifts to the hospital since its inception, and Baird has suggested he would build a new wing for taking Carolyn away.

To Carolyn, this is only a five-month job where she can save the  money to help with her eventual wedding to Dick.  She does not suspect anything nefarious–Mr. Baird is in his late 50s, and although handsome and tall, he is also sickly and very thin (six-foot-five and 160 lbs).  He seems very old-world and gentlemanly, but behind that mask is a perverted sadist at heart.

He has 12 house staff, several pretty young women in their late teens-20s as “maids.”  One pulls her aside and tells Carolyn to run away fast before it’s too late, before she becomes a sexual slave of depravity like they all are.  Carolyn doesn’t believe it…

The weird thing, Baird looks like an older version of her first love, four years ago when she started out as a nurse, a young rich boy who won her heart and virginity, only to find out he was using her for sex as he was engaged to a high society debutante, marrying her:  Carolyn discovered this truth in the paper.  For Baird, Carolyn is the spitting image of his long dead first wife from the roaring 20s — Carolyn herself is shocked to see how much she resembles the portraits on the wall of his old wife.

One day, Baird talks her into stripping into her undies to play hand ball; one night, he talks her into drinking champagne on the 30th anniversary of his wedding; she gets drunk and he pretends she is his long dead wife and she pretends he is the young man who broke her heart…in a dark and sad moment, they have drunken sex, caught in their own depraved sin fantasies…

There is something seductive about Baird…as much as she tries to tell him no, or quit, his soothing voice hypnotizes her, as it does to the other women on staff, so they all do his bidding to please his sexual needs, such as putting on S/M shows (“carnivals” he calls them) with the maids being whipped then fucked by the limo driver/aide  (a big black guy) and the butler (a genteel man).

Soon, Carolyn forgets Dick and falls in love with Baird, despite his age and health.  Is it his millions, the diamonds and pearls he lavishes on her, the promise of inheriting  his vast fortune if she marries him?  She can put up with his sex shows, a voyeur fetish  he picked up from France in the 1920s; she can watch, but she does not want to participate.  When he demands she put on a lesbian show for him, with one of the other staff women, she refuses, and he gets mad and threatens to fire her — forget his love, he has to have what he demands, and he is not used to being told no.

Is this an erotic play on the nurse genre?  I haven’t read any nurse books. I remember my grandmother had a few Avalon hardback nurse novels on her shelf and looking at them when I was a teenager and finding them sappy and romantically silly, books for girls and women with nurse fantasies in the General Hospital sense.  There was a time when nurse novels were a big thing (1940s-70s) — writers like Peggy Gaddis wrote scores of them, like  Nurse Ellen, as well as more racier Beacon titles like Dr. Prescott’s Secret.

The nurse genre may have a recent infusion of life on TV, with the success of Nurse Jackie on Showtime and Mercy on NBC, about a group of nurses and their loves and woes (perhaps akin to The Young Nurses by Harry Whittington?).

The ending to Nurse Carolyn is probably far more darker than the typical nurse and doctor novels. This one ends in tragedy and blood and depraved emotions.

A fairly good read, on a scale of 1-10 of all Silverberg’s Beauchamps, I would give it an 8.  The best of the Loren Beauchamp novels are, by far, Connie and Meg (both bestsellers for Midwood), then Love Nest (a dark tale of womanizing), Wayward Wife (reprint of Thirst for Love by Mark Ryan), Unwilling Sinner (reprint of Twisted Love by Ryan) — two books Slverberg said he was not paid for by Bedstand, so re-sold to Midwood with slight changes in character names, which was also the case with Campus Sex Club, reprint of Campus Love Club by David Challon (in a few days, I will talk about Lawrence Block/Andrew Shaw’s plagaraism of that book with College for Sinners). A Fire Within was okay; And When She was Bad somewhat typical…

While Sin on Wheels has another great cover by Rader, and is hard to find, I thought the story was disappointing, as reviewed here.

Nurse Carolyn was also reprinted, with minor changes, in 1967 by Cornith/Greenleaf’s Companion  series, as Registered Nympho, under the Don Elliott pen name, with a cover that might be closer to the story than the two Midwoods, although Carolyn is not exactly a “nympho” per se.

A dark story here, about revenge best served cold, a Bedstand Book by Robert Silverberg writing as Mark Ryan.

Ted Dennis is a successful copy writer on Madison Avenue at age 32. All is well except his sex/married life — his wife of six years had major surgery four years  back and has low energy and a zero sex drive.

One day, walking down the street, Ted crosses paths with a woman from his past: Carol.  Ten years back, when she was 18 and he was 22, he was going to marry her, then two days before the wedding he got cold feet and called it off, and enlisted in th Army to escape ever confronting her.  He has felt guilty about this all these years and is surprised Carol is not mad — in fact, she had forgiven him, she tells him over lunch, and the old spark seems to still be there as they immediately check into a hotel room and have nostalgic sex.

Over the next two weeks, he meets Carol at the hotel room during lunch, and after work, them goes home.  She had two bad marriages and ha always been in love with Ted, she says, and he finds he still loves her. They make plans: he will divorce his frigid wife and marry Carol, and make up for the past 10 years.

She was a virgin with him; ten years of sexual experience and she has become a dynamo.

He takes her to the Caribbean on a free trip from one of his clients, an airline.  All is story-book perfect, until his divorce lawyer puts a private eye on Carol and finds out she’s a hooker.

Ted has never been to her apartment in Queens — she says it’s too shabby and she is embarrassed and prefers the hotel rooms.  Seems she really uses the place to meet 8-10 tricks a night; on slow nights, she goes to the local bar and picks men up.  She picks up the private eye who has sex with her and describes her body marks to make Ted think it’s true…then he spies on her and watches men come and go…

Finally he goes to her apartment to confront her. She admits it’s true: she’s a whore.  She blames him.  When he left her at the alter, rumors spread about her and she ran away. She had no money and had to sell her body.  She liked the money.  She was making $100 a day.

She tells him their chance meeting was not chance. She had planned it.  She had been wanting revenge all these years.  She figured the best revenge would be to seduce him with her expert bedroom talents, get him to marry her, and then systematically ruin his life be sleeping with all his friends and colleagues, and then abandon him.

Now that she can’t, she gets her pimp to beat him up…

Ted comes home, a bloody mess, and tells his wife the whole story…

A cautionary, moral story?  A dark story indeed — and is revenge a dish best served cold, as pondered in the previous book I reviewed here, Brutal Passions?

Not much science fiction (or much fiction in general) involves archaeology. The first one I read was Nightfall. It was originally a long short story by Isaac Asimov, which was later turned into a novel co-authored with Robert Silverberg. The idea of the prehistory of other worlds is fascinating, but it doesn’t really go very far here. On the other hand, there’s also some psychology, propaganda, journalism, mythology and cult religion, so maybe there wasn’t room.

The only other archaeology / science-fiction book I’ve ever read was Engines of God by Jack McDevitt. In both cases, archaeologists discover some past periodic destruction, which turns out to be coming back their way soon. Very dramatic; not something that comes along too often, even in fiction.

A big story over the past few days has been the Staffordshire hoard, possibly the biggest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found. Discovered in July, the hoard was declared treasure on 24th September; BBC reports and a Wikipedia article were created the same day. An exemplary official website was set up, with reports, a catalogue, links to photos on Flickr, and even an educational game to see an Anglo-Saxon village. When part of the hoard was put on show in Birmingham, there were long queues. Discussions have already begun to find the hoard a home, and this is where it get really fascinating.

The hoard is thought to have belonged to a Mercian king. The capital of Mercia was at Tamworth, so should the treasure live there? The current council is based in Stafford, but the major modern regional centre of Mercian lands is actually Birmingham. So where should it live? And that’s before they’ve pulled the funds together to buy it! The find has sparked imaginations: some  interviewees even referred to themselves as the heirs of Mercia.

Archaeology does have an impact on modern life and modern people. It’s not just for foreseeing impending destruction.

Another Hollywood novel with a writer as a narrator…but this wrter is not a screenwriter but a pulp hack.

Silverberg had the first Nightstand (1501) with Love Addict, reviewed here, and had the first Midnight Reader (401) with Lust Queen.

I love the “waterbaby” Robert Bonfils cover, a companion to Robert Carney’s Anything Goes.

Joey Baldwin writes detective and science-fiction books and makes an average living. Then his agent gets him a lucrative gig: ghostwrite the autobiography of a 50s star, Mona Thorne, who is making a come-back.  He stands to get $15,000 for the initial job, with a possible $50K more with foreign, film, and other rights.  Big money for 1961!

He’s about done with a sticky divorce and wants to marry his girlfriend, Lisa.  He has to leave her for a few months to go to L.A. and write the book. He assumes he will be put up in a hotel but Mona Thorne wants him to live at her Pacific Palasides estate…and, he finds out the first night, be her sex toy.

This is no Norma Desmond/Sunset Boulevard gigolo situation.  Mona is in her mid-30s, well-fit, well-endowed, tanned, sexy, and likes kinky things in bed.  Joey likes doing kinky stuff he’d never ask Lisa to do.

So begins their business arrangement: breakfast early, work on the book, pool and marinis by four, dinner, Hollywood parties, sex all night, and so on…

L.A. people find Joey fascinating since he’s not a screenwriter. When people ask, “What studio are you with?” they cannot get their minds wrapped around the fact that Joey is not in the game.

The book opens like it’s Silverberg’s autobio:

I was busy making the typewriter move. My fingers were writing as if they had their own private case of St. Vitus Dance, and every time they twitched more nice black marks appeared on the white paper in the machine. I was 40,000 words into the new detective novel… (p. 5)

Writers who have never worked on a manual typewriter do not understand what a physical task it was to use the machine, pressing down on keys, putting paper and carbons in, changing ribbons, matching one’s typing skills to the keyboard of any given typer…some old writers, like Harlan Ellison, still write on manual machines, never having graduated to an electric one (Ellison didn’t like how they hummed) or computer…Silverberg is on a computer now, and online, having embraced the 21st Century…I understand that T.C Boyle still writes on the old Sears typewriter he had when he was first writing.

Joey meets a lot of typical Hollywood characters — the miscle boy models, the shady producers, the jealous actresses…at one party, Joey meets a down to earth TV announcer on a kid’s network and has a quickie outside with her. She also has “small breasts,” unusual in sleaze where all women are at least 37-42 D cups.

Mona gets outrageously jealous over his sex fling…but gets over it…but when Lisa comes to visit him, she loses her mind…

Mona is petty, insecure, clingy, cannot take rejection for a big famous rich star…Silverberg does a good job showing how the famous lived isolated, lonely lives for the most part, outside their films and publicity shots.  I have seen the same with well known actors I have met in Malibu (staying at the home of a certain big produce once and getting to know the neighbors like Bruce Willis, etc.)…one thing Silverberg did’t mention that I find funny is how so many film/tv stars are short…they’re all so damn short..

This is one of the better Don Elliots, I think, up there with Sin Servant, Love Addict, and Convention Girl.  It’s also a dark story of greed and petty jealousy, with quite the violent outcome with a nice Hollywood iroic twist about commercial marketing of tragedy.

Just about every Cornith/Greenleaf/Nightstand/Hamling writer was John Dexter and J.X. Williams at one time or another, the two main house names.  John Jakes was the first Williams, it’s unknown who was the first Dexter but there is some rumor it was Lawrence Block, who didn’t want to hone up to it.

Robert Silverberg did a few as Dexter, such as this one, Sin Festival (NB # 1572) and The Bra Peddlers, reviewed here. As Dexter, he also wrote Stripper! and Sex Thieves.

Like Snavely’s The Big Flick (reviewed below)  this is a film industry novel, but about the process of getting a movie out there after it’s done.  The movie here is Helen of Troy, and the production company is at Cannes to sell it to European distributors.  At Cannes are Cal Warner, the publicist for Jupiter Films, Elayne, an actress in the film, and Mr. Ronwieser, the studio mogul.

Warner’s job is to drum up buzz — a fake romance between Elayne and a French actor, Elayne’s swimming nude, etc.  She’s a nympho and needs sex often and sometime she keeps her happy, sometimes he doesn’t.

Warner meets a French actress, Jeanette, desperate to go to Hollywood.  To get a contract, she has to have an “interview” with Mr. Ronweiser — that is, have sex with him.  He’s a short, elderly, disgusting man who liked “kinky” sex (it’s never said what) and Jeanette feels dirty for doing this for her dream, as many actresses wind up feeling.

Elayne is jealous of Jeanette because something is developing between Warner and the French actress.  In one day, though, she has sex with three men — Ronwiser, an old flame she meets at the festival, and Warner.

Part of Warner’s job is to also find women for her boss to fuck.  He’s a $35K  a year yes man (about $350K back then) and he’s starting to hate it.

The novel is set in the first week of the Cannes Film Festival, with colorful French Riviera settings. Silverberg catches the atmosphere and the reality of film distribution, publicity, and what it takes well — there’s more to just writing a screenplay and making a movie; once it’s done, you need to get people to see it, buy it, review it, want it.

But something falls short here…I have not yet read a Silverberg softcore I did ‘t finish or like, but this one falls into the average category, with a somewhat sappy romantic ending after an explosion of seedy, drunken violence.

On a personal note, I had a short documentary (“Life in Zona Norte”) screen at Cannes, at the Palace K Theatre on May 16, 2009, and later exhibited in the Short Film Corner.  Cannes is the tops, with Sundance and Tribeca, but never what you expect.

I’ve been to many other film festivals and they are a lot like how Sin Festival depicts — no art, it’s all about commerce and publicity,  with a lot of parties, drinking, sex, and sex for favors going on at night.

Want to get laid by hopeful actors at a film festival? If you’re a director or producer, it helps…as a writer, who knows, maybe if your film is in pre-production and you can get them a part…

Carnal Cage is a reprint of Passion Trap (same cover), Nightstand #1521 and the eighth book Silverberg did for Wm. Hamling.

Ah, another academic in trouble because of sex, not unlike Sin Professor. In this case, Jay Blackett is working on his Ph.D. in 18th Century plays and teaching low level (90A) freshman comp courses reserved for T.A.s and instructors.  He’s at Columbia Univ., by the way, and much of the action takes place at his room on 114th Street, the seemingly same building in Campus Love Club, possibly the same 114th Street digs Silverberg and Harlan Ellison lived in during the mid-50s pulp fiction hey day.

Prof. Blackett has been dating another Ph.D. candidate, Susan, but she’s somewhat frigid — in fact, she is afraid of sex and always comes up with excuses to not get into intimate situations with Jay.

So Jay finds an outlet in Nancy, a “low rent” waitress in an all night diner on 115th Street (I think I know the place!).  Nancy likes to get drunk and have wild sex, which is what Jay needs for release, but she is hardly the kind of girl he can bring to academic and faculty functions, or take to the opera and discuss literature with.  He tries to get her to read Othello but she would rather read the true confession magazines she likes.

Nancy is possessive, and wants to see Jay a lot, maybe have a relationship.  She gets drunk and verbally nasty with him, only to come back sober and apologize.  She might not be bright, but she has a body he cannot resist.

Susan finds out jay has been having a girl in his room and she realzies she may lose him if she doesn’t warm up, so one day on a picnic she has some beers and they go skinny-dipping.

Nancy tells Jay about her psycho ex-boyfriend whose in the army and will be discharged soon, and wants to come find her and marry her.  She says he will kill her if she says no or if he find sout she’s been with another man.  Jay thinks she’s making it up for attention but the ex shows up and murders Nancy.  Defending himself with a knife, Jay kills the crazy ex, more on accident, when the dumb grunt charges into the kitchen knife (a similar scene is in Suburan Sin Club).

This was a quick read. I have not yet picked up a Silverberg sleaze novel I didn’t finish; they are all entertaining, some better than others, some gems of genius and some so-so.  I would give this one a B+.

Which are the As and A+s?  I would say:

Love Addict

Man Mad

Woman Chaser

Connie

Thirst for Love (aka Wayward Wife)

Love Nest

Sin Servant

Immoral Wife

Convention Girl

Party Girl

Gang Girl

Sin Girls

I can’t say I’m a huge Silverberg fan. I’ve read many of his books and short stories, and I’ve enjoyed them. But I’ve never made an effort to seek out those of his works I’ve not read – as I have done with some other writers. To be fair, Silverberg is one of the stalwarts of the genre. He’s had – and still has, of course – a fifty-four year writing career, and has mostly produced good books and stories. During that more-than-half-a-century, he has won four Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards.

Silverberg’s most well-known creation is, arguably, the world of Majipoor, on which he has set seven novels, two novellas and a short story. The first of these is Lord Valentine’s Castle, published in 1980.

Majipoor is a big planet – in fact, it was inspired by Jack Vance’s novel, Big Planet – with four enormous continents. The world has been settled for thousands of years and has a population of some sixty billion; but it is now something of a backwater, and rarely visited by people from other planets. It is home to several races – humans, Skandars, Ghayrogs, Vroons, Su-Suheris, Liimen, and Hjorts. There are also the native Metamorphs, from whom the humans took the world, and they now live in a reservation. Majipoor is ruled by four potentates – the Coronal, who is the executive arm of government and rules from his castle atop the thirty-mile-high Castle Mount; the Pontifex, the legislative arm, who lives in the Labyrinth; the Lady of the Isle of Sleep, who through dreams provides the world’s moral framework; and the King of Dreams, who punishes wrongdoers, also through dreams.

Lord Valentine’s Castle opens with a man called Valentine on a ridge looking down upon the city of Pidruid, on the western shore of the continent Zimroel. He doesn’t know who he is, or how he got there. A passing boy, taking cattle to market in Pidruid, approaches him and the two enter the city together. Within a couple of chapters, Valentine has shown an uncanny natural ability at juggling, and joined a juggling troupe. The Coronal – also called Valentine – is due to appear shortly in Pidruid on the Grand Processional all coronals take shortly after ascending to power.

The name is not a coincidence. Valentine the juggler soon learns that he was Coronal Valentine but, by some art or science never explained, his mind has been swapped into another body and someone else has taken his place as coronal. The more of his memory Valentine recovers, the more he determines to take back his throne. So he travels across Zimroel to its east coast, and there takes ship to the Isle of Sleep, in order to persuade the Lady (who is always the mother of the coronal) of his true identity. And after succeeding in doing that, he continues on to the eastern continent, Alhanroel, to first gain the Pontifex’s support, and then march on Castle Mount and throw down the usurper.

And that’s pretty much the plot. Silverberg intended that “the book must be fun” – “all light, delightful, raffish…” And in that respect he succeeds. Valentine encounters obstacles on his way, but he overcomes them. He has exciting adventures – some of which seem a little too much, such as being swallowed by a legendarily giant sea-dragon while en route to the Isle of Sleep.

But then, Lord Valentine’s Castle is not a book to take seriously. It has a simple plot and a hero who prevails. It is, above all, colourful – Valentine’s journey east is very descriptive. And everything he sees and meets is exotic. And we know it is exotic because Silverberg has given it a made-up name. Although not all names, it has to be said, actually work all that well. “Niyk-tree” isn’t too bad, nor is “blave”; but “stajja” and “dhiim” just look like typographical accidents.

What strikes me most about this book is not the acknowledged debt it owes to Big Planet, but the debt it owes to Vance. Silverberg is channelling Vance. He does it well, because Silverberg is nothing if not a master craftsman. But, all the same, Lord Valentine’s Castle often feels a little like there’s too much Vance in it, as if Silverberg has crammed several novels by Vance into one book – which at 506 pages (in my 1982 Pan paperback; not the cover shown above) probably is equivalent to several novels by Vance…

Unlike some of the other books I’ve read in this year’s reading challenge, I didn’t regret rereading Lord Valentine’s Castle. I quite enjoyed it. It’s mind candy, but the sort of mind candy a friend might bring back from a trip to a foreign country – still fluffy, but with an exotic flavour to it. It’s a good book to read on a dull journey. And, like many books of its type, its general shape will linger – that the world of Majipoor is so big, Castle Mount and the Fifty Cities on its slopes, the overall story of the book but not Valentine’s individual adventures… and that it all ends happily. It had been a good twenty years or more since I last read Lord Valentine’s Castle, and still it felt comfortably familiar. Which is no bad thing sometimes.

When Robert Silverberg wasn’t Don Elliott at Nightstand, he was sometimes John Dexter, like every other writer in William Hamling’s stable was at one point or another.  People must have thought Dexter — like Don Pendelton  or Ellery Queen — was the most prolific pulp writer in the galaxy.

While Joan Ellis’ Gay Scene had bra models, The Bra Peddlers is about Madison Avenue ad men scheming to sell a new product from Venus Bras: the Up-Cup, a falsie bra that will make flat-chested woman rise, or women who are too big squished down to conventional, less “cow-ish” size.  The material, when touched with clothes over, will fool any person that it’s a real breast — they even have nipples!

Ted Griffen gets the account, moved from sporting goods — it’s a big promotion, and he’s in line to take over the company when the Boss retires, or keels over.  Thing is, he soon finds out that part of the unspoken deal is that Ted’s wife will sleep with the Boss whenever he feels the urge.  Seduced by big money and a future mansion, Ted and his wife, Hazel, agree to this, much to Hazel’s dismay.  But she fears her husband may get fired if she says no, and she does want a better life for her kids.  This is a common softcore theme: women sleeps with the boss or clients so better her husband’s job position…one of Silverberg’s Mark Ryan books, Company Girl, is about this, which I will get to next month, I hope…

Besides, she has cheated on Ted and he knows…she doesn’t know that he has regular extra-marital sex: there’s his secretary, who comes in and lays on the couch when he needs it…Ted justifies sex this way: with his wife, it’s about ten years of marriage and love; the secretary is just for tension release in his high-tension job.

There’s the occasional woman here and there, too, like one of the senior copywriters, now on the Up-Cup account, who wants to re-kindle an affair that ended three years ago.  Ted has no interest, so this woman sets out to destroy him.

Another copyrighter, a 26-year-old “frigid virgin,”  breaks down at the Christmas party after too much booze, wondering what is wrong with her, why he goes frigid whenever a man tries to make her.  Plus, she feels digusted by the whole advertising biz and the lies they push on the public.  All she wants is to be a houswife and mother, but how will she ever get a husband and have kids when she is afraid to try sex, or has no desire for it?

Ted, drunk too, says he will de-flower her in his office for her own good.  At frst she resists but then gives in, and feels disgusted after.  Over the holiday weekend, she commits suicide.

There seem to be a lot of suicides (Sin Servant, Convention Girl) or attempted suicides (Connie, Unwilling Sinner, Party Girl)  in Silverberg’s softcores, not unlike the suicide in Thorns and other SF works.

The Bra Peddlers is not as good as his other Mad Ad men novel, Woman Chaser, reviewed here, but it is a good, very swift read. I got through it during the one and a half hour train ride to Tijuana. Like Woman Chaser and Orrie Hitt’s Tell Them Anything, reviewed here, these books all read like epsiodes of AMC’s Tv show, Mad Men.

After the suicide of the copywriter, Ted does start to garner a conscience and guilt…and when a lab report comes back that indicates the material in the Up-Cup may cause breast cancer, he decides not to bury the info — but Venus Bras and his Boss do: they are willing to take the chance of harming women in favor of the revenue the product will bring in.

Yep, Ted loses his job. He doesn’t care.  He goes home.  His wife thinks he was fired because sh erefused to sleep with the boss anymore, but he tells her otherwise.  They decide to give their marriage a second go without the temptations of money and material things.

The 1973 Reed Nightstand reprint is The Venus Affair by Jeremy Dunn (John Dexter’s 70s name).

A monster 60th-anniversary issue.

“The far shore”, Elizabeth Hand Philip, a former ballet dancer, is let go from his teaching position at his dance company in the cruel reality of the dance business. An old friend invites him to spend the off-season as caretaker at her lakeside campground. What he discovers there is not Swan Lake, but might be something from a related tradition.

“Bandits of the trace”, Albert E. Cowdrey A humorous historical mystery in deepest Appalachia combines cops and robbers, mysterious cyphers, dangerous men and women, and a dash of fantasy for flavor. Very fun reading.

“The way they wove the spells in Sippulgar”, Robert Silverberg A tour-bus trip through Majipoor, with a character study of religious believers as a subthread. Probably more enjoyable for those already familiar with Majipoor, but still worthwhile for readers like me who don’t know the giant planet.

“Logicist”, Carol Emshwiller A schoolteacher is confronted by the harsh reality of war. As usual in Emshwiller’s stories, the emotional pain of the protagonist’s position is conveyed strongly. But the way the protagonist’s rigid thinking is expressed in multiple-choice questions felt more gimmicky than revealing.

“Blocked”, Geoff Ryman Our protagonist, Channarith, a Cambodian casino-owner, and his family are fleeing to a vast underground city along with the rest of humanity. They are afraid of an alien invasion, or a comet, or maybe just environmental collapse brought on by human activities. Ryman pays special attention to Channarith’s relationship with his three adopted children and their mother, who has married him mainly because he can afford to take a family underground. A new look at a not uncommon sf idea.

“Halloween town”, Lucius Shepard Halloween is a town at the bottom of an Appalachian gorge so deep and narrow its practically subterranean. Clyde Ormoloo has moved there after a workplace accident gave him the power to see people’s inner character, if the light is strong enough. In Haloween he encounters an amusing bunch of characters, some of whose inner character is at least as vile as the “topsiders” Clyde hoped to avoid. Definitely an imaginative story in an imaginative setting.

“Mermaid”, Robert Reed There’s no mermaid in the story, just Jake and his pathological relationship with his unnaturally young-looking girlfriend. When Jake runs into another man in what looks like a similar relationship he tries to intervene. It’s not obvious if he’s trying to protect the other girl, or if he sees the other man as a future version of himself. The story had a kind of dreamy what-will-happen next feel that kept me engaged, but I never really figured out what was going on, leading to disappointment by the end.

“Never blood enough”, Joe Haldeman A mysterious death on a lightly populated colony planet full of dangerous and not well-studied fauna. It starts out like a whodunnit mystery, but doesn’t end up that way. In fact, the ending doesn’t resolve or solve any of the mysteries thrown up in the story, making this feel like the introductory chapter of a novel instead of a complete short story.

“I waltzed with a zombie”, Ron Goulart A story about “the only movie ever made starring a dead man.” An fun, atmospheric story about early 1940’s Hollywood, with a plot that feels like a 1940’s film.

“The president’s book tour”, M. Rickert Something has eliminated all vegetation in the p.o.v. narrator’s town, and also caused the townspeople’s children to be born with grotesque deformities. The tone expresses vague political dissatisfaction, and vague unhappiness about the environmental situation. But it’s all vague. The roots of the environmental catastrophe are never explained. Which is a significant distraction from the main point of the story, related to how the townspeople come to accept their children as they are.

“Another life”, Charles Oberndorf As a young soldier, our protagonist met his first love, a woman soldier; and a good friend, a hermaphroditic prostitute, on a base station near the front in an ongoing war. After soldiers die, they’re typically restored to new bodies and returned to the war. But mysteriously our narrator finds himself in a new body, but with no money and no connection to the military. Years later, he recounts these stories to his longtime partner, who’s chosen to forgo restoration and die of old age. A really excellent story, exploring truly speculative space in human relationships.

“Shadows on the wall of the cave”, Kate Wilhelm Years ago, Ashley was playing with her two cousins in a cave on their grandparent’s farm when the younger cousin mysteriously disappeared. She hasn’t been back to the farm since, but now her grandfather has passed away, and she has to return. The best part of the story is excellent characterization of both children and adults. The plot is sensible as far as it goes, but the explanation of the cousin’s disappearance is just a backdrop for those other story elements, not something that can bear any scrutiny or carry any weight in the story.

I was a bit hesitant to jump into the middle of Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor series, but Majipoor Chronicles made the perfect landing spot and I liked it a lot. Akin to Arabian Nights, it is a set of short stories that are linked together by the novel’s plot and Majipoor so it’s also a good stand-alone. As Hissune discovers the planet-world’s history spanning thousands of years and its diverse lands and people so does the reader.

In Majipoor Chronicles, 14-year old Hissune is a clerk in the House of Records located in the Labyrinth. Feeling forgotten by Coronal Valentine, who had given him the position, and trapped in his subterranean station, Hissune seeks consolation by forging his way into the Register of Souls. With the push of a button he is free to explore the memories and “the minds of folk long dead, explorers, pioneers, warriors”, and even Majipoor’s leading officials, the Coronals and Pontifexes.

“Hissune’s mind is opening now in all directions, and the Register of Souls is the key to an infinite world of new understanding. When one dwells in the Labyrinth one develops a peculiar sense of the world as vague and unreal, mere names rather than concrete places: only the dark and hermetic Labyrinth has substance, and all else is vapor. But Hissune has journeyed by proxy to every continent now, he has tasted strange foods and seen weird landscapes, he has experienced extremes of heat and cold, and in all that he has come to acquire a comprehension of the complexity of the world that, he suspects, very few others have had” (213).

The sci-fi/fantasy series is set in the distant future when Old Earth is no longer inhabitable due to overpopulation, crime, and other forms of destruction. Human colonists have since settled on the large planet-world of Majipoor, fighting with the aboriginal Metamorphs and forcing them onto reservations. Along with tension between the natives, other alien races have also come to settle. Majipoor is neither a utopia nor a dystopia. Aside from legalized theiving, if one is a guildmember, crime of any kind is practically non-existant.

“He had never seen violence before. He had never heard of an instance in his lifetime of the deliberate slaying of one human by another. That it should have happened on his ship, by one of his officers upon another, in the midst of this crisis, was intolerable, a mortal wound” (112).

“‘We do not kill,’ Lavon said. ‘Our barbarian ancestors took each other’s lives, on Old Earth long ago, but we do not kill. I do not kill. We were beasts once, but that was in another era, on a different planet’” (113).

Should one perform an atrocious crime, the King of Dreams will eke out punishment through their unconscious mind. The government is unique in that the man assuming the position of Coronal is chosen by the Pontifex. When the Pontifex passes away, the Coronal takes up the role of Pontifex, chooses a new Coronal, and moves from his mountain castle down into the inner depths of the Labyrinth, where he remains until his passing. It’s a duty that is occasionally seen as a prison sentence.

My first glimpse of the three dimensional world was “the Seventh Shrine” in Legends, an anthology of novellas edited by Silverberg. It interested me enough that I later purchased Majipoor Chronicles when I came across it. Now I look forward to reading the rest of the series before the next book is added and more by Silverberg aka David Osborne, Robert Randall, Calvin Knox, etc. in general and having written since the fifties there’s a long list to choose from. The man of many pseudonyms said in August that he needed to read Chronicles again before he could start writing so there’s some time yet.

Majipoor series chronologically:

• “The Book of Changes” (2003, in Legends II)
• Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997)
• Lord Prestimion (1999)
• King of Dreams (2000)
• Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980)
• Majipoor Chronicles (1982)
• Valentine Pontifex (1983)
• “The Seventh Shrine” (1998, in Legends)
• The Mountains of Majipoor (1995)
• “The Sorcerer’s Apprenctice” (2004, in Flights)

That’s #2 for the Sci-fi Challenge.

Not a review yet, but a note to note that I have finally located a copy of this book and glad I did.  I see that it is a collection of a couple of novellas and short stories, similar to Illicit Affair by Mark Ryan Bedstand, 1960).  I wonder if it was Sileverberg’s or Bedstand’s idea to publish a collection rather than a novel for both?  These are all previously published works from various pulps and men’s magazines in the 50s.

I have one fnal Challon to locate, Suburban Affair, and then my David Challon/Robert Silverberg collection will be complete –

French Sin Port (Bedstand, 1959)

Campus Love Club (Bedstand, 1959)

Campus Hellcat (Bedstand, 1960)

Suburban Sin Club (Bedstand, 1960)

Suburban Affair (Bedstand, 1960)

Man Mad (Chariot, 1959)

Sin Girls is Nightstand #1514, the 13th book William Hamling published in early 1960, written by Robert Silbverberg. Seems Hamling wanted a female pen name.  The second Marlene Longman, however, Lesbian Love, was penned by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and tends to be pricey among colletors, up to $200 as seen here.

Harlan Ellison wrote the purple prose cover copy, and I am sure he had a laugh when composing this:

This is the most powerful novel you will ever read on the subject [lesbian desire], written by a woman who is, hersefl, A TORMENTED LESBIAN!

Robert Silverberg: tormented lesbian!! At the Silverberg Yahoo Fan Group,  Silverberg himself commented: “That blrub is incorrect…I was the happiest of lesbians.”

Sin Girls is the story of Leslie — nice pun there, and one woman says, “Hey, that’s a man’s name!”  It opens with Leslie awakened by a nightmare she has every night, remembering the man who raped her when she was a teenager, taking her virginity violently.  She is in bed with a one-night stand in a hotel that caters to lesbians looking for intimate encounters.  In the morning, the other woman says how much fun she had and hopes they will hook up again, but Leslie informs her that she only has one-nighters: no emotional entanglements, no names if she can help it.

Leslie is cold-hearted, seeking only physical relief. It’s a front.  We find out she was not always that way; she has become distant and aloof  from a scarred heart broken too many times.  First, there was the rape, and her boyfriend’s not wanting anything to do with her after (similar to the set-up of Connie by Silverberg’s Loren Beachamp). The rape left her afraid of men, so she turns to women — the common lesbian element (along with a bad loveless marriage and incest) in lesbian pulp fiction by men, sometimes women (March Hastings).

Her first serious lesbian affair is with Laura, a woman 10 years her senior. They live together in what seems like dyke bliss.  Then Leslie has an affair with another young lesbian in Laura’s gay social cirle (with a lot of bull dykes and beanik queers), they get caught, and Leslie gets tossed out on the street.

She later moves in with three teenage girls who dress in leather jackets and jeans.  They have orgies every night, doing round-robin pussy eating, etc. (although not decribed as crudely, of course).  She finds the girls too cruel and sadistic to other people and leaves.  She has a series of short flings, the crosses paths with an older woman who runs an escort agency that caters to rich lesbian women.  Leslie is a gay call for a year, traveling all over the world with herisess and widowed dykes.

While in the Caribbean with a woman who likes to be whipped and flogged before sex, Leslie meets a young college football hero on vacation and falls in love.  She is “weary” of lesbian sex and wants something different.  She denounces her gayness and goes straight, intending on marriage, ending thus:

All that mattered was that the long nightmare was over, that she lay with a man and that with each move of his body he brought her closer to fulfillment, and that she was forgiven and that the bright sun  now rising overthe Caribbean heralded a bright new day, a brand new life just beginning… (p. 191)

This was typical of lesbian fiction — in order to not face obscenity charges, lesbianism was treated as a deviant disease, and the lesbian could not find happiness in the end with a same-sex partner — she had to either come to a horrible conclusion for her unnatural sins or repent her evil ways and find truth and beauty in the arms of an Alpha Male with a nivce big hard dick that provides “fulfillment.”  The nightmare here is Leslie’s years of lesbiana, and she is “forgiven” of such horrors by going to a man for salvation.

This also happens in Silverberg’s other lesbian novel from 1959, Twisted Loves by Mark Ryan, that I previously discussed.

Let us not cry homophobia today — this was a market demand and condition of the times, when being gay was “strange” (hence “queer” later on), referred to as “twilight women” and “the third sex” engaging in “the third theme” or walking down “the 3rd street.”

There were some other Silverberg lesbiana tales from Cornith/Greenleaf, like Flesh Boarder and The Initiates, with lesbian encounters in many other books, like Party Girl, Fires Within, Wayward Widow, etc.  Silverberg’s lesbians always look the same: mannish,smal breasts, short dark hair.  In two books, the same dyke shows up who writes children’s books as a profession.

There is also Diary of a Dyke, a 1966 title from Cornith’s Pleasure Reader series, from Phenix Publications, one of the many shell companies Hamling used to keep the feds scrambling. (Sorry, no cover scan).  Diary of a Dyke is a journal over 3 months as a woman who likes sex with girls tries to denounce her gayness by sleeping with a lot of men, but she still prefers girls.  It’s a funny book, and at first I did not think Silverberg wrote it — in “My Life as a Pornographer,” he states he stopped writing softcore sleaze in 1964-5, yet there are many 1966-7 Don Elliots, either books that were in a pipeline or Silverberg just stopped his two-novels a month output but still penned the cccasional smut book for money or a need to whip one out.  Silberberg says no other writer used the Don Elliott name the way others did with J.X. Williams, Andrew Shaw, and Don Holliday.

There is also the bogus case study “non-fiction” book Twilight Women by L.T. Woodward, M.D., a pseudonym Silverberg used for a dozen books from Monarch Books, Lancer, and Belmont.  This one, like the other Woowards, is really a collection of short stories made to look like a doctr’s case histories of patients he has treated — in this case, women who are lesbians and need to be cured.  Each story delves into the why and how each woman went gay, or is bi.

I plan to devote a long blog, and a whole acadmeic essay, on the many faux sexology books published in the 60s, riding the tail of the success of the Kisney and Masters and Johnsons Reports, quetsioning the ethics of such, and whether or not such presentations of fiction as fact was “dangerous” or irresponsible — but hey, where there is a market…

…plus, I have done the same with my Dr. Mundinger-Klow titles for Olympia Press, so, er. um…..!

I have a huge stack of lesbian sleaze here that I will blog about over the next two months — Lawrence Block published a lot of lesbiana as Sheldon Lord, Dr. Benjamin Morse, Lesley Evams and Jill Emerson (his first sale was a lesbian book to Beacon in 1958, and many of his Midwoods had lesbian themes).  And I have lez books by real gay women like Randy Salem, March Hastings, Vin Packer, as well as William Coons’ pen name, Barbara Brooks.

There are two booksellers who have jacked-up prices for this title ($75 and $95 — c’mon!) and both state there is “speculation” that Donald Westlake ghosted this one.

I asked Robert Silverberg last week if this was so, because he had mentioned hat he did have one Don Elliott ghosted when he was unable to meet the deadline.  He said no, this was not the book in question. “Sins of Seena is mine, I have a copy right here,” he wrote.  He did not, however, say which book is the ghosted Elliott.

Maybe the ridiculous prices on this book will go down now.  Do these booksellers really think anyone is going to pay that kind of money for a book?  In this economy? Sheeee-at. (Myself, I never pay more than $50 for any vintage book, and most are in the $10-30 range.)

As for speculation on which Elliott is the ghosted item, I think contenders are Sin Doll (as Dan Eliot), The Lady from Soho (originally Sin Club), and Diary of a Dyke – these three don’t seem to coincide wth Silverberg/Elliott’s usual style.