Beyond the Gates of Dream by Lin Carter from 1972. I picked this up at a used book sale because it looked like a quick read.
I first ran across Lin Carter around 1970 as a co-author and co-editor, with L. Sprague de Camp, of the Conan series being published by Lancer books. This was, I think, most people’s intro to Robert E, Howard’s barbarian hero. Today, lots of folks really dislike de Camp’s tinkering with Howard’s work and clamping down on any other publication of Howard’s works. Some of that spilled over onto carter. I have to admit that now that I’ve read Howard’s unadulterated versions of the King Kull stories, I don’t think that Carter’s “editing” (which frequently amounted to outright rewriting) was really called for, and didn’t improve things (Lin Carter’s is the only editorial hand in the Lancer King Kull collection).
I’m not a huge fan of the by-Carter-only books I’ve read. I do respect him for editing the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which brought back into the limelight a lot of forgotten fantasy (like Cutcliffe-Hyne’s The Lost Continent and the works of Clark Ashton Smith), as well as introducing new writers.
The book is a real mishmash of styles and genres, beginning with Carter’s first published work (in collaboration with Randall Garrett) Masters of the Metropolis, which is a hilarious send-up of early science fiction, especially Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+.
This is followed by a far-future SF story and a fantasy that were meh, and Carter’s first posthumous “collaboration” with Robert E. Howard, the Conan story The Hand of Nergal, which I haven’t re-read in ages. It’s okay, but it looks less like Howard now than it did to me when I first encountered it.
The next piece was a humorous SF story, Harvey Hodges, Veebelfetzer, in which the outlandish aliens all speak in different Terran ethnic dialects. the 1969 story reads as if it owes a lot to Robert Sheckley’s 1953 story Potential, only with the FTL drive psychic capability called “Veebelfetzer” instead of Sheckley’s “Pusher”.
Two more stories round out the collection.
Actually, the most interesting parts of the books are the semi=-autobiographical interludes ostensibly introducing the stories. A good quick read.
On the advice of an ex-sailor who I talked to about getting background on submarines, I picked up a copy of Whale’s Tails by Bruce J. Schick, an ex-submarine captain. It’s a slim collection of stories about Life on a Diesel Sub, and is delightfully unexpurgated. I just started this one.
On audio, I finished Stephen King and Richard Chizmar’s Gwendy’s Button Box, which wasn’t at all what I’d expected from the title. Maybe I should have. As I’ve remarked before, King is being more honest and upfront about where he’s stealing his inspiration from these days (in Elevation his hero is Scott Carey, which will be a big red flag to anyone who’s familiar with Richard Matheson’s novella and screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man). In this case, King went back to Matheson, because his story has a lot in common with Matheson’s 1970 story Button, Button, which was made into a Twilight Zone episode of the same name (in the 1985-6 reboot) and into the 2009 film The Box. See what he did there? (In the film, Frank Langella’s character even wears the same black hat that the parallel character does in Gwendy) An interesting and well-done read. very different from Matheson’s story, even if it does take inspiration from there.
Now I’m listening to Agatha Christie’s Cat among the Pigeons
