Tor Double #22: Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas and Karen Haber’s Thieves’ Carnival

Tor Double #22: Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas and Karen Haber’s Thieves’ Carnival

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Cover for The Jewel of Bas and Thieves’ Carnival by Luis Perez

This volume represents the third collection of linked stories. While Robert Silverberg wrote In Another Country to take place at the same time as C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season and Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacekeeper was a more traditional sequel to L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If, Karen Haber provided a prequel to Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas. Although Haber’s Thieves’ Carnival appears first in this volume, I’m going to stick with my norm of reviewing the earlier published story first.

The Jewel of Bas was originally published in Planet Stories in Spring 1944. It is the final of three stories by Leigh Brackett in the Tor Double series. The story opens with Ciaran and Mouse, a raggedy couple who has recently gotten married. Leaving the city they have known for their entire lives, Ciaran convinces Mouse that they should take a shortcut he has heard of across the Forbidden Plains, despite its foreboding name and its reputation for causing people to disappear.

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Goth Chick News: Is Warner Bros Ready to Knife Universal?

Goth Chick News: Is Warner Bros Ready to Knife Universal?

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If you’ve been watching the horror landscape this year, one thing’s obvious: in spite of the fact that Universal all but created the genre, Warner Bros. has horror by the throat. The Conjuring: Last Rites just claimed the highest global opening ever for a horror film, knocking down big names like IT and IT: Chapter Two. Meanwhile, three of 2025’s other biggest horror box office winners, Sinners, Final Destination: Bloodlines, and Weapons, are also WB projects.

Now the studio seems to be going for more than Universal’s jugular. They’re pushing for Oscar recognition.

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Sword & Planet from DMR Books: Henry Kuttner and Howie K. Bentley

Sword & Planet from DMR Books: Henry Kuttner and Howie K. Bentley

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Startling Stories, May 1947; and Lands of the Earthquake by Henry Kuttner
(DMR Books, June 2017). Cover art by Earle Bergey and Logon Saton

Lands of the Earthquake/Under a Dim Blue Sun is a “Double” novel, in the tradition of the old Ace Doubles. It contains a long novella by Henry Kuttner called Lands of the Earthquake, and a shorter novella by Howie K. Bentley called Under a Dim Blue Sun. Both fit the Sword & Planet mold (S&P).

The publisher here is DMR books, and it’s printed in the old paperback size that I like. You can find DMR Books online or on Amazon. The cover art on the Kuttner piece is Logon Saton.

The Kuttner piece was first published in 1947 in Startling Stories but has not been reprinted until now. It involves a modern Earthman, William Boyce, being transported to a fantasy land where time stands still but physical space moves. This temporarily brings different lands close enough to each other to interact.

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Back Into the AI Debate

Back Into the AI Debate

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Image courtesy of Pixabay, found under the “authentic only” search (not AI)

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

This post is going to be a little “old lady yells at clouds” today, so prepare!

With the news that Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude Chaptbot, was sued and settled for their large-scale theft of books in order to train its AI model, I have been reading a glut of articles both for and against the use of AI, specifically to write fiction novels. Naturally, not being AI (I swear!), I’m firmly against. The theft of creative works to train these programs, and the environmental damage required to get the up and keep them running aside (and those two reasons alone are strong enough, I feel, to abandon AI) I don’t think AI belongs in creative fields; some aids, perhaps, some tools, yes. But I don’t think creating AI that can “write” a novel is in any way valuable.

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By Crom, it’s Cimmerian September: Roy Thomas & “Out of the Deep”

By Crom, it’s Cimmerian September: Roy Thomas & “Out of the Deep”

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Cimmerian September (nod to Michael K. Vaughan for coining that) continues here at A (Black) Gat in the Hand. Spooky season is right around the corner, so let’s combine a little horror with our Conan (albeit, of the Marvel variety). I have been reading Savage Sword of Conan lately. But earlier this year, I finished my reading of the first 115 issues of Conan the Barbarian. Those comprised Roy Thomas’ first run of the series, as he left Marvel. I wrote previously about how he brought Conan to Marvel.

He adapted several non-Conan stories, such as “The Marchers of Valhalla,” The Lost Valley of Iskander,” and “Black Canaan,” among many others.

“Sea Curse” appeared in the May, 1928 issue of Weird Tales. It recounted the death of a young girl and an ensuing curse, in the small coastal village of Faring. That same year, he also wrote another tale set in Faring, but it was rejected by both Weird Tales, and Ghost Story. There was also a short poem called The Legend of Faring Town, which first appeared in 1975.

That second story, “Out of the Deep,” finally found print in the November, 1967 issue of Magazine of Horror. Whereas “Sea Curse” is a tale of revenge, this one is a sea monster story. And the reason I chose this of the two is because Roy Thomas adapted it for Conan the Barbarian.

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Blazing New Trails: The What Rough Beast? Campaign, and an Interview with Author Bryn Hammond

Blazing New Trails: The What Rough Beast? Campaign, and an Interview with Author Bryn Hammond

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Waste Flowers and What Rough Beast? A Tale of Goatskin, written by Bryn Hammond, both with cover art from Goran Gligović

Black Gate has been tracking the inception and growth of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, starting with Micheal Harrington’s 2022 interview with Oliver Brackenbury (champion and editor of NESS), through 2023 with NESS’s first two magazine releases (also Greg Mele’s review of #1), and then into 2024 with NESS’s first book “Beating Heart and Battle Axes and its two-novella combo book Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, and (deep breath)… most recently… NESS‘s publication of a NEW Jirel of Joiry tale! (2025).

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Mummy Issues, Part II

Mummy Issues, Part II

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Isis Rising: Curse of the Lady Mummy (Tom Cat Films, January 18, 2013)

A new 20-film watch-a-thon project. All previously unseen, all free to watch. The twist for this one is that I typed the word ‘mummy’ into Tubi’s search engine, and just chose the first 20 films that showed up. I already know this is going to be terrible, and I’m really interested to see if any of the films I’m going to watch will score higher than 5 out of 10. Here goes…

Isis Rising: Curse of the Lady Mummy (AKA Tomb of the Mummy) (2013) – Tubi

Once again I am tricked like the feeble-minded fool that I am by a film with the word ‘mummy’ in the title, and no mummy in the film.

A hokey, green-screen prologue tells the sordid tale of King Osiris, his sister and wife, Isis, and his jealous brother Seth. Seth fancies Isis (his sister-in-law and sister), so he has Osiris killed and chopped up. However, Isis is a witch of sorts, and vows to reassemble Osiris before she herself is murdered.

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Tor Double #21: Roger Zelazny’s Home Is the Hangman and Samuel R. Delany’s We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line

Tor Double #21: Roger Zelazny’s Home Is the Hangman and Samuel R. Delany’s We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line

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Cover for Home Is the Hangman by Martin Andrews
Cover for We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line by Wayne Barlowe

The twenty-first Tor Double is the first time both of the authors in a collection are repeats. It includes the second (and final) Samuel R. Delany story, We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, and the second of three Roger Zelazny story, Home is the Hangman. Delany first appeared in Tor Double #4 and Zelazny in #12. It is also unique in that it is the first time one of the stories (Delany’s) includes a dedication to the other author (Zelazny).

We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line was originally published as “Lines of Power” in Fantasy & Science Fiction in May, 1968. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award.

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Goth Chick News: Guillermo del Toro (Finally) Premieres His Beautiful, Bombastic Monster Mash

Goth Chick News: Guillermo del Toro (Finally) Premieres His Beautiful, Bombastic Monster Mash

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Frankenstein (Netflix, October 17)

After nearly two decades of whispering sweet nothings to Mary Shelley’s corpse, Guillermo del Toro has finally exhumed his long-gestating dream project, Frankenstein, and stitched it together with a cast that reads like my fantasy dinner party: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, and Charles Dance. The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on August 30, and will lurch into select theaters on October 17 before unleashing itself globally on Netflix on November 7.

So, what’s the verdict? Critics are calling it “visually stunning,” “emotionally charged,” and “a feast for the eyes.” Jacob Elordi, who plays The Creature, is getting serious praise for bringing a quiet, soulful intensity to the role, while Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein is described as “enormously fun to watch” as he descends into madness with prosthetics, a fake leg, and an ego that could rival Voldemort’s.

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The Heroic Fantasy of Mike Sirota

The Heroic Fantasy of Mike Sirota

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Journey to Mesharra, Book 3 of the Ro-Lan series by Mike Sirota (Zebra Books, 1980). Artist uncredited

Mike Sirota (1946-) has written quite a lot of books in SF and Fantasy, including some Sword & Planet novels. He’s still writing and is currently working on a comedy/Sci-fi series.

I first encountered Sirota’s work in a book called Berbora, which I’d call Sword & Sorcery rather than S&P. Somewhat later, I found his five book Dannus series, so named after the main character. They are definitely S&P and are listed below.

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