Locus, August 2014

by Locus Publications

  New and Notable continue after ad.

  Martin, George R.R. & Gardner Dozois, eds. Rogues (Bantam 6/13) The latest big cross-genre anthology from the heavyweight editorial duo includes 21 stories about rogues, rakes, thieves, and swashbucklers in the genres of fantasy, SF, and crime. Includes a story by Martin set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, a Kingkiller Chronicles story by Patrick Rothfuss, and a Neverwhere story by Neil Gaiman, plus work by Garth Nix, Cherie Priest, Connie Willis, Carrie Vaughn, and more. ‘‘Great stories that slice through the restrictions of genre.’’ [Adrienne Martini]

  Pratchett, Terry & Stephen Baxter The Long Mars (Harper 6/4) In this third volume of the Long Earth sequence, the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption is driving the population of Datum Earth – where humankind originated – ‘‘stepwise,’’ to parallel versions of Earth that are mostly uninhabited. Meanwhile, a Navy commander explores distant (and ever-more bizarre) versions of the Long Earth, and the inventor of the original ‘‘Stepper’’ technology embarks on an exploration of parallel versions of Mars.

  Tim Pratt, Heirs of Grace (47North 6/14) Locus’s own Tim Pratt pens this cheeky contemporary fantasy novel about a recently graduated artist who unexpectedly inherits a big house in the North Carolina mountains – and finds it full of magical junk that attracts monsters and relatives she didn’t know she had. Originally published as an e-serial (2/14). ‘‘Tim Pratt’s writing just keeps getting better and better…the writing is tight and sassy without wasting one word – and he makes it seem easy.’’ [Adrienne Martini]

  Shea, Kieran Koko Takes a Holiday (Titan 6/13) This debut novel by the noted satirical story writer is a rollicking humorous dystopia about a former corporate mercenary – the eponymous Koko – forced to come out of retirement to escape enemies sent to the far-future brothel she runs to kill her. First in a series. ‘‘Shea has created an intriguing, 400-years in the future world that is gritty and violent, yet totally grounded.’’ [Adrienne Martini]

  van Eekhout, Greg California Bones (Tor 6/14) This first book in an urban fantasy trilogy is set in the world of story ‘‘The Osteomancer’s Son’’, in an alternate Southern California where magic can be extracted from the bones of extinct mythological creatures. Thief Daniel Blackland, son of a murdered osteomancer, puts together a motley crew of criminals to pull off an impossible heist: breaking into the magic-rich vault of the tyrannical Hierophant himself. The author ‘‘showcases his wit and humanity as well as his knack for character, and he works the magic that the best writers can: the story feels alive just a few pages in.’’ [Adrienne Martini]

  Gordon Van Gelder, ed. The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume Two (Tachyon 6/14) The second volume in this reprint anthology series draws 27 of the best stories from the long history of F&SF, the earliest from 1950 and the latest from 2011. Includes stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein, Zenna Henderson, Ken Liu, Stephen King, and more, with a foreword by the editor and an introduction by critic Michael Dirda. ‘‘F&SF has frequently been the most reliable place in the genre to find quality speculative work written to a high literary standard.’’ [Gardner Dozois]

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  THIS MONTH IN HISTORY

  August 2, 2055. Luxury liner. Brunei Air inaugurates new Sharia 777 service. Men fly First and Business Class; women in Coach.

  August 28, 2088. Shoppers’ fallen star. Charlotte’s MVP center Harriet ‘‘Bruce’’ Wayne is killed in a skydiving accident. Bought (and renamed) by Ikea in 2079, the Charlotte Shoppers are the first all-gay NBA team and the first to have a female starter.

  August 11, 2104. March on Washington. Protesting new Educational Opportunity Administration, which replaces selective college admissions with national lottery, rampaging Ivy alumni overturn twelve trash cans. Four arrests.

  August 20, 2113. New New Madrid quake. Eleven-pointer topples Memphis Memorial Tower, straightens Mississippi River, and kills estimated 210,000, including Chevron Danceathon host Aristide Glum.

  –Terry Bisson

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  Author, editor, and pulp magazine scholar FRANK M. ROBINSON, 87, died June 30, 2014. Robinson lived in San Francisco, and had suffered from health problems in recent years, including heart trouble.

  Frank Malcolm Robinson was born August 9, 1926, in Chicago IL. After graduating from high school in 1943, he worked as a copy boy at the Chicago Herald-American, then as an office boy at Ziff-Davis and Amazing, until he was drafted into the Navy (where he served as a radar technician in WWII, 1944-45, returning for the Korean War in 1950-51). Between stints in the Navy, he earned a BS in physics at Beloit College WI in 1950, and afterward a MS in journalism at Northwestern University in 1955. He worked at a number of magazines, serving as assistant editor at Family Weekly (1955-56), then at Science Digest (1956-59). He was managing editor at Rogue (1959-65) and Cavalier (1965-66), had a brief stint as editor of Censorship Today (1967), and was a staff writer for Playboy from 1969 to 1973, after which he became a freelance writer. In the ’70s he was a speechwriter for San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk (the first openly gay elected official in California), and had a small role in the 2008 biopic Milk.

  F. Towner Laney, Frank M. Robinson, Phil Bronson (1943)

  Robinson’s early SF sales began with ‘‘The Maze’’ (Astounding 1950) and ‘‘The Hunting Season’’ (Astounding 1951). His first novel, The Power (1956, filmed in 1967), was an extremely successful SF thriller – one of the first of that genre. In the ’70s and ’80s, he co-wrote a number of technothrillers (most with SF elements) with Thomas N. Scortia: The Glass Inferno (1974, filmed as The Towering Inferno), The Prometheus Crisis (1975), The Nightmare Factor (1978), The Gold Crew (1980), and Blowout! (1987). He also co-wrote political novel The Great Divide (1982) with John Levin and spy thriller Death of a Marionette (1995) with Paul Hull.

  Robinson returned to SF, and solo writing, with The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991), SF thriller Waiting (1999), and medical thriller The Donor (2004). His short fiction has been collected in A Life in the Day of… and Other Short Stories (1981), Through My Glasses Darkly (2002), and The Worlds of Joe Shannon (2010).

  Robinson was one of the foremost collectors of, and experts on, pulp magazines. His books on pulp magazines include illustrated histories Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (1998, with Lawrence Davidson), Hugo Award winner Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History (1999), British Fantasy Award finalist Art of Imagination (2002, with Randy Broeker and Robert Weinberg), and The Incredible Pulps: A Gallery of Fiction Magazine Art (2006).

  Robinson was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2001, and received a Moskowitz Archive Award in 2008. He won an Emperor Norton Award in 2004. Earlier this year, Robinson was named the recipient of the Special Honoree Award by SFWA.

  FRANK ROBINSON: THE FINEST HUMAN BEING WHO EVER LIVED by Harlan Ellison

  There may be a few others still extant who knew Frankie longer, knew him better, who shared his life a tot more closely, but I put my metal against any other’s as to who loved him more worshipfully than I. He saved my life. He taught me Life Lessons unparalleled. Now he is away from us, and there are not words… There are whining sounds, and tears, but no words or a sufficiently Shazam-sized mountain on which to carve them. His stature was Poseidon, his heart as big as all-outdoors, his wisdom and memory nonpareil. He was a terrific writer and as sensational an editor anyone could wish to aspire to emulate.

  Half the people who write today, who have Big Reps, would be shoveling yams in Dubai for coupons and a cuppa brine, were it not for Frank M. Robinson.

  Harlan Ellison, Frank M. Robinson, William F. Wu (1984)

  This is about Frankie, not about me, so it doesn’t matter when and where and how we first ran into each other, nor do my self-referencing ‘‘we did this’’ and ‘‘he said that’’ matter. All obits – particularly in this genre – al
l mark the importance of the principal, in this case Frank M. Robinson, with humblebrags about how they read Frankie first when they were ten years old, and his story in Astounding changed their lives and cleaned up their complexion. I got all that, and, well…forget it.

  Frank would love the way I’m writing his hommage here. Y’know why I know that? Because it’s the way Frank and I spoke to each other for more than sixty (60) fuckin’ years. Good times, bad times, we laughed at how silly we both were, and what a loathesome dickhead Bill Hamling was and…

  I get maudlin. Frankie hated that. Explanation, not excuse. When Frank and I talked, as often as twice a week sometimes, he would tell me stuff you need not know: you’re 2 weeks late, and $2 short. You should’ve known him, it should have been your obligation to read him and know who he was, and be uplifted and bettered and ennobled by a familiarity with FRANK M. ROBINSON, not pretend to crocodile tears now that he’s dead. He was a superlative human being, a good and reliable friend, a human being who gave a goddam about the rest of this miserable race we call ‘‘human,’’ no matter color, gender, sexual persuasion, or nationality. He carried crippled consciences for decades, was better than those who came to him with outstretched hands, and he was as a finer writer than his chivalrous humility would allow him to know. Flogging That Weary Trope into the ground: ‘‘His like never was, before we were permitted to know him, and his like will never again be.’’

  One never knows one walks with gods, till they go away.

  –Harlan Ellison

  FRANK by Robert Silverberg

  We met cute – standing side by side in the men’s room of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel at the 1953 Worldcon. He was one of the best of the new SF writers of that bright era, I was a teenage fan just on the threshold of a writing career, and we introduced ourselves to each other right then and there and inaugurated a friendship that would last 60 years. Frank had gone the teenage-fan/eager-young-writer route himself, seven or eight years earlier, so he knew exactly what my position was and how I felt about it. His own career had been delayed several years by military service both in WWII and in Korea – the luck of good timing allowed me to avoid that, too young for one war and shielded by college during the other – but by 1950 he had begun to make his mark as a writer, starting off with a story in Astounding, no less, the top magazine of the era, and going on from there with a long string of brilliant work. Over the next couple of years we corresponded, and he offered some useful tips on dealing with the editors; and by the time we met again, at the 1955 Worldcon in Chicago, I was launched as a pro with a bunch of sales to every magazine then going, and he had just finished writing his magnificent first novel, The Power, a powerful tale of a mutant superman that would establish him commercially – it came out first in the semi-slick magazine Blue Book and then in hard covers, both of which set it apart from the usual SF novel of the day, and shortly afterward was made into a TV special and then a Hollywood movie.

  We were out of touch for a while, Frank following an editing career in Chicago with such magazines as Science Digest, Rogue, and Playboy, and I busying myself in New York with an inordinately prolific output of novels and stories. But by the early 1970s we both had migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, he in the midst of things as a key figure in the San Francisco gay community, I living across the bay in more conventional suburban surroundings, and we saw each other frequently thereafter. It was a happy friendship. Frank spread happiness wherever he went. Another novel, The Glass Inferno, which he wrote in collaboration with his friend Tom Scortia and which became an enormously successful movie under the title of The Towering Inferno, brought him considerable wealth, which allowed him to indulge in his great hobby of collecting rare pulp magazines, but he remained the same amiable, unassuming, fairly shy man I had known all those previous years. I remember fondly the visits to his lovely house at the edge of the Castro district, the spaghetti dinners he provided, the tours of his remarkable collection of mint-condition pulps (some of which wound up in my own collection when he decided late in life to put them up for auction – magazines I had coveted for more than 30 years, and which will always have a special value for me because I know they were Frank’s.)

  Robert Silverberg, Richard A. Lupoff, Frank M. Robinson (2010)

  He was a lovable man, warm and good-hearted, and it was always a treat for Karen and me to spend time with him, whether on a planned visit or (as sometimes happened) after simply running into him in the city or at the airport where we were both about to take off for the same convention. His hearty, booming voice, his distinctive Chicago accent, his omnipresent smile, his equally omnipresent cap (I think I saw him bare-headed no more than two or three times in those 60 years) – they will mark our memories of Frank forever. It was a pleasure and a privilege to have known him and our loss is a great one.

  –Robert Silverberg

  FRANK M. ROBINSON: AN APPRECIATION by Robin Wayne Bailey

  Early Sunday morning, June 29, 2014, my longtime friend and mentor, Frank Robinson passed away. It was Gay Pride Weekend in San Francisco, and Frank must have appreciated the timing. He had the largest parade in the country to send him out.

  I first met Frank 35 years ago when I was selling my first stories. Wilson ‘‘Bob’’ Tucker introduced us. Those two men, Frank and Bob, became the grandfathers I never had. Bob taught me what it meant to be a fan, but Frank taught me how to be a professional. ‘‘Stop thinking of yourself as a science fiction writer,’’ he told me, ‘‘and start thinking of yourself as a writer.’’

  He exemplified that lesson. Frank moved with astonishing ease from novels to short stories, from thrillers and mysteries to science fiction and back again. He frequently blended genres. His first novel, The Power, and later, Waiting, both mixed science fiction and mystery-thriller to potent effect. He gave us two nonfiction masterworks with Pulp Culture and Science Fiction of the 20th Century.

  There are facts I suppose I should recount. That Frank worked as an office boy at Ziff-Davis in Chicago and knew Ray Palmer when he was only sixteen; that George Pal turned Frank’s first novel, The Power, into a major motion picture starring George Hamilton, Michael Rennie, and Suzanne Pleshette; that Frank’s first collaboration with Thomas N. Scortia, The Glass Tower, along with a very similar novel called The Tower by Richard Stern, made Hollywood gold when Irwin Allen turned both books into the block-buster film, The Towering Inferno; that he had one of the most incredible pulp magazine collections in the world; that he was ‘‘The Playboy Advisor’’ for four or five years. He once joked to me that the two most successful sex advice columnists of all time – himself and Dan Savage – were both gay men.

  He was a quiet and unassuming activist who never sought the spotlight. I once asked him about that. He said, ‘‘I just don’t carry a bull-horn in my pocket.’’ He didn’t need a bull-horn. Frank had the Power of Words. In underground newspapers, he chronicled the early gay rights movement in Chicago. As a speechwriter for San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk, he helped change the world.

  I’ll never forget the morning he called me up, shouting into the phone, ‘‘Robin! They‘re making a movie – and I’m in it!’’ Frank sounded like a little kid that morning. Okay, a little kid with a really deep, rumbling voice, but a kid. As he explained, the producers first approached him about serving as a technical advisor. Then they made him an extra. Then in a key scene James Franco began feeding him lines. Those lines eventually wound up on the cutting room floor, but they were enough for SAG membership. Those were happy days for Frank. He called every other evening with news from the set or to tell me he was cooking fried chicken for Sean Penn or that Dustin Lance Black was in his living room. Frank was star-struck without every quite seeming to realize that he was one of the stars.

  I called Frank one of my grandfathers. We were strolling around the Castro during my first visit to his home years ago and Frank eventually guided me into A Different Light, one of the major gay bookstores in the
neighborhood. The clerk, who knew Frank, asked if I was his grandson. Frank barked a short laugh. ‘‘Hah!’’ But I looked at him and asked meekly if it was okay if I called him ‘‘Grand-dad’’ in front of his fans. Frank grinned a crooked grin and answered in a low voice, ‘‘Okay – but not too loud and not in public.’’ It became our personal joke.

  I stayed at Frank’s home many times and traveled with him on several occasions. In June, I saw him for the last time, following the San Jose Nebulas event just a few weeks before his passing. They were bittersweet hours because I sensed I would not see him again. While some friends made dinner, we sat on a couch and talked. He held my hand the entire time, which was uncharacteristic – Frank was never much for open affection. He said himself that he was of that generation when it was hard to do so.

  I feel this loss acutely. His unpublished memoir sits here on my desk with a personal note, ‘‘Well, what do ya think?’’

  I think I shall miss him dearly. I think I’m over my word-limit.

  –Robin Wayne Bailey

  FRANK M. ROBINSON by Richard A. Lupoff

  In the spring of 1956 I had recently earned my bachelor’s degree and had received my orders to report to the United States Army. I filled that brief window reading science fiction, and when I spotted an issue of Bluebook on a newsstand with an outer-space scene on the cover, I was quick to fork over my twenty-five cents.

  Inside the magazine was a complete novel, The Power, by an author whose name was unfamiliar to me, one Frank M. Robinson. I still remember reading that novel, sitting at my desk, and the chill that I got when I read the final sentence.

  It was 15 years before I met Frank for the first time, and we became friends and remained friends for the next 43 years. The last time I saw him was two days before his death. I’d carpooled with a mutual friend, Richard Wolinsky, who told me that Frank had said he’d like to see me. By then Frank had gone home from the hospital in order to end his life in familiar surroundings rather than in the sterile confines of an ICU.