Cover art: John Russell Fearn’s Red Men of Mars

Here’s some interesting cover art from the early 1950s: Red Men of Mars (Hamilton & Co., London, 1950), the third book in British science fiction author John Russell Fearn’s four-novel Mars series. The artwork is by Terry Maloney, who died in April 2008.

An Interview with SF&F author Ruth Nestvold

The website of the Nebula Awards has a neat interview with SF&F author Ruth Nestvold, whose short story “Mars: A Travelers Guide”, published in the January 2008 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, has been nominated for a Nebula Award. Here’s a snippet from the interview:

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz: Tell us a bit more about your story, Mars: A Traveler’s Guide? What was the inspiration behind this story and what did you hope to achieve?

Ruth Nestvold: The gestation period for my stories tends to be very long, so it’s hard for me to pinpoint any one source. [...]

For “Mars,” one of the inspirations was that I like to play with new ways of telling a story, something that probably at least in part comes from my work in hyperfiction, fiction in hypertext. This story is like doing that _without_ the hypertext.

Another one of the inspirations, believe it or not, was a little lecture Michael Swanwick gave at a workshop a few years back entitled “How to win a Hugo.” (Really!) I didn’t do what he said, but the idea stayed with me. What Michael told us to do was to have a character stranded in a hostile environment in our solar system and have him or her solve the problems that arise using science. I just turned it around a bit and had the science take over and not solve the problems.

Ruth Nestvold is an American writer living in Stuttgart, Germany. She has a Ph.D. in English literature. Her short fiction has been published in several venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Baen’s Universe, and Strange Horizons, as well as several anthologies.

Nantucket bookstore catches ironic financial breeze, outruns gale of Googlenomics

As many readers, journalists, authors, newspapers, publishing companies, booksellers, and libraries struggle to weather the new economics of the online world created by technological behemoths like Google and Amazon, one quaint, independent bookstore down on the island of Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod, has caught an ironic financial breeze and managed to outrun the destructive gale of Googlenomics.

Founded in 1968 by retired Madison Avenue graphic artist Henry Mitchell Havemeyer and his wife, Mary Allen, Mitchell’s Book Corner, a landmark located in a historic building at 54 Main Street, is a full service bookstore that stocks titles in all subject areas and offers the most extensive selection of books about Nantucket, the whaling industry, and the island’s genealogy.

In 1978, the Havemeyer’s daughter, Mimi Havemeyer Beman, whose maternal uncle was once president of the Doubleday Book Company, assumed stewardship of Mitchell's Book Corner and continued to operate it for the next 30 years. In January 2008, Beman sold the historic building in which the bookstore resides for $3.2 million to ReMain 54 LLC, a real estate entity controlled by a woman named Wendy Schmidt. Schmidt, a summer resident of Nantucket and president of the Schmidt Family Foundation of Palo Alto, California, is married to Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt.

While purchasing the historic building at 54 Main Street, Wendy Schmidt also struck a legal agreement with two employees of Mitchell’s Book Corner, Mary Jennings and Lucretia Voigt, to operate the bookstore. According to an article in the August 31, 2008, issue of The Boston Globe newspaper, Jennings and Voigt “rent the space at significantly below-market rates, and they are forbidden, by contract, to ever move the store. Schmidt retains ownership of the Mitchell's name, but the two operators essentially own the business and all its inventory and are solely responsible for its profit and loss.”

In an article in the January 9, 2008, issue of The Nantucket Independent newspaper, Wendy Schmidt was quoted as stating in a press release: "Nantucket is fortunate to have many vibrant local businesses. Local opinion leaders have pointed out the importance
of buying local. They have noted that a dollar spent at a Nantucket business like Mitchell's returns about 45 cents to the island's economy and benefits the community through a multiplier effect.
We are pleased to help make sure a successful, established business like Mitchell's has a home on Main Street where it will continue to contribute to our community and Nantucket's downtown retail environment."

The same Nantucket newspaper article quoted former bookstore owner Mimi Havemeyer Beman as saying: “I am so pleased that
the bookstore can stay. Being in that spot so long and being so successful there worked against me for selling the building. To
see the building go to other than the bookstore made buyers of the building reluctant because they'd have to kick the bookstore out to put in another business. It was such an anchor on Main Street. [...]
I was facing giant repairs and the bookstore doesn't make enough,
so this is ideal because you still have the bookstore with the same mission and you have someone treating the building with tender loving care, bringing it into the 21st century and preserving the character of Nantucket architecture."

And Mary Jennings, one of the bookstore’s new owners, was quoted as saying: "Having the support of the community means so much to us. It's an incredible opportunity. It's so important that Main Street keep its backbones that are so important to the community. It would have been a shame if something had happened to Mitchell's. Nantucket is lucky in a sense; independent bookstores are a dying breed all over the country. It's very important that they stick around, discovering new authors, keeping the quality of literature high and keeping people reading."

Today, Mitchell’s Corner Bookstore is located in temporary quarters while the historic building at 54 Main Street undergoes a green renovation, including the addition of a new second floor for the bookstore. Check out this six-minute video in which Mary Jennings and Wendy Schmidt discuss the importance of the green renovation and local book stores to Nantucket's community.

Interested in reading some books about Nantucket? Start with these 341 books, compliments of Google's online digital library!

“Fields of Mars”, a pulpy new short story of seduction by Scott Wilson

Fans of pulpy, well told tales might enjoy reading
“Fields of Mars” (2009), a new short story by Scott Wilson that was recently published online at Well Told Tales. It’s a story of seduction in the Gas Fields of Mars. Here are the opening lines:

It was nearly dusk when I drew close to the Gas Fields, and already the scarlet vapors were about, riding across the sunken levels like restless ghosts in a graveyard. Though I had set forth in a mood of wild delight, I had sobered in the lonely ride across the fields of Mars and was now uneasily edgy and somewhat frightened. ...

Review of C. L. Moore’s collection Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith

British science fiction critic Paul Kincaid has written a detailed review of Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith (2008, Paizo Publishing), a collection of thirteen classic science fiction short stories written by C. L. Moore predominately in the 1930s starring her interplanetary adventurer Northwest Smith. Moore's collection contains five stories set on Mars:

• "Shambleau" (Weird Tales, November 1933)

• "Scarlet Dream" (Weird Tales, May 1934)

• "Dust of Gods" (Weird Tales, August 1934)

• "The Cold Gray God" (Weird Tales, October 1935)

• "The Tree of Life" (Weird Tales, October 1936)

In concluding his review, Paul Kincaid writes: “For all that, the Northwest Smith stories have a raw power that makes them enduringly readable. They represent the peak of 1930s pulp fiction, and if their plot lines and two-fisted hero seem out of place compared to today's fiction, that also makes them fascinatingly different.”

Note that I recently bought C. L. Moore's Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith (2008) from Paizo Publishing.

New novelette: "Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin" by Mary A. Turzillo

"Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin", a new novelette by Mary A. Turzillo, appears in the April 2009 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. While I haven’t had an opportunity to read the story yet, I understand that the plot revolves around the Martian colony of Gari Babakin and a deadly infection of toxoplasmosis. Here are the opening lines:

"Earthlings were coming to attack the cats this very afternoon. And where was Benoit?

Had she really considered licking his earlobe while he was reporting on the new cheese flavonoids? As if he were a surly tomcat, like this handsome furball now rubbing her legs?

Ah, Lucile, she thought, so impulsive we are! The boy's not all that sexy; he never combs his hair or gets it cut, or even washes it often.

He had a certain something, though. Think how he lashed out at the Earth inspectors who came through a year ago trying to murder the feral cats in tunnel M. The inspectors wanted to vent that corridor and let the cats die of decompression. Benoit put them in their place. ..."

If you're not afraid of spoilers, check out detailed reviews of "Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin” by Jim Steel of The Fix: Short Fiction Review and Lois Tilton of the Internet Review of Science Fiction, as well as brief reviews by Stephanie Young, Sam Tomaino of SFRevu, and Wendy S. Delmater. According to Delmater, Turzillo's novelette has “the sensibility of a good Pink Panther flick, but with some real science behind it.”

Speaking of real science, Jan Messersmith’s blog post about the parasite Taxoplasma gondii is worth reading, too.

Authors Guild responds to protest by Reading Rights Coalition over attempt to mute Amazon's Kindle 2 e-reader

Here’s the opening paragraph in a statement from the Authors Guild in response to a protest held yesterday afternoon in New York City by the Reading Rights Coalition, a nonprofit organization that represents millions of disabled people who cannot read print, over the Authors Guild’s attempt to mute the text-to-speech function in Amazon’s new Kindle 2 e-reader:

“April 7, 2009. Today, the National Federation of the Blind led a protest in front of the Guild's offices in Manhattan. This protest stems from Amazon's announcement in February that it would allow publishers to disable the voice-output feature of its Kindle 2 after we had objected that the feature threatened audio markets, violated authors' copyrights and exceeded the e-rights licenses that authors granted publishers. ..."

Read the entire statement from the Authors Guild.

Magazine cover art by Sci-Fi artist Frank R. Paul

Thanks to a recent post by Steve Davidson of the blog The Crotchety Old Fan, I was able to browse an awesome gallery of early science fiction magazine cover art by legendary Sci-Fi artist Frank R. Paul, who will be inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle later this year. The gallery, maintained by Hugo Award-winning SF&F artist Frank Wu, includes several covers about Mars and Martians, such as:

• A scene from H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898), depicted on the cover of the August 1927 issue of Amazing Stories

• A scene from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel The Master Mind of Mars (1928), depicted on the cover of the 1927 annual issue of Amazing Stories

• A Martian, depicted on the cover of the September 1965 issue of Fantastic Stories

• A scene from Stanley D. Bell’s story “Martian Guns” (1932), depicted on the cover of the January 1932 issue of Wonder Stories (Pictured above)

Reading Rights Coalition to protest Authors Guild’s opposition to text-to-speech feature in Amazon's Kindle 2 e-reader

The next battle in the war over the text-to-speech feature in Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-reader will be fought tomorrow afternoon in New York City. According to a statement from the Reading Rights Coalition, a nonprofit organization that represents millions of disabled people who cannot read print, the Coalition will “protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 which promised for the first time easy, mainstream access to over 255,000 books. Hundreds of disabled Americans (the blind and people with dyslexia, learning difficulties, spinal cord injuries, seniors losing vision, stroke survivors) will march to demand that the Authors Guild reverse its decision.”

The informational protest will take place outside the headquarters of the Authors Guild in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m.

If you support the Reading Rights Coalition but cannot attend the protest, consider signing a petition: Allow Everyone Access to E-books. At the moment 1,786 people have signed the petition. The goal is 10,000 signatures.

The Bird of Time, a novel by Wallace West

The Bird of Time, a novel by Wallace West (1959)

At left: Paperback (New York: Ace Books, 1961),
#F-114, 224 p., 40¢. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

"A running chronicle of the conflict between the ancient feathered folk of Mars and the brash expansionists of Earth. ... It is entertainment from start to finish, with only snatches of the serious aspects of dying Mars and bull-headed Earth. Go along with the author and enjoy the story." -- P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Science Fiction

And here’s the blurb from inside the front cover:

When the first expedition from Earth arrived on Mars they were not greeted with open arms. Not only had the Martians long ago learned all they wanted about Earth -- they wanted nothing to do with us.
To quote their welcoming committee:

“You Earth people don’t know your own history. You have always been incorrigible. When Mars was younger, we drove you back to your own planet, whereupon you tumbled into savagery for a gratifyingly long time. The really intelligent Martians then emigrated to the ends of the universe to avoid a second encounter. In fact we are not interested in playing cowboys and Indians with your people.”

But Earthmen are incorrigible and Martians are obstinate, and the result is an adventure-packed novel that spans two planets and several stars and is great science-fiction all the way.

An editorial note inside the front cover states that The Bird of Time is "based upon material originally copyrighted in 1936 by Street & Smith Publication, Inc., 1949, 1952, 1953 by Thrilling Wonder Stories." According to an entry in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, The Bird of Time is a fix-up of four stories by Wallace West: “En Route to Pluto” (Astounding Stories, August 1936), “The Lure of Polaris” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949), “The Bird of Time” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1952), and “Captive Audience” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1953).

Three Mars stories nominated for 2009 storySouth Million Writers Award

Three science fiction/fantasy short stories about Mars have been nominated for the 2009 storySouth Million Writers Award for Fiction. The award is sponsored by the online literary journal storySouth and is presented to the
“best online fiction of the year.” Both the award and the journal are the brainchild of SF&F writer and editor Jason Sanford. Here are the three Mars stories:

• "Is There Life on Mars?" (2008), by Kyle Hemmings, published online at Juked.com in April 2008

• "The Film-makers of Mars" (2008), by Geoff Ryman, published online at Tor.com in December 2008

• “Willpower” (2008), by Jason Stoddard, published online at Futurismic.com in January 2008

More than 300 other online short stories have been nominated for the 2009 storySouth Million Writers Award for Fiction. Preliminary judges are in the process of reading the nominated stories and sending their selections to Jason Sanford, who will post the list of notable stories by April 15th. Then, Sanford will post the top ten selections around May 1st, at which time fan voting for the best story begins!

New RPG: MARS - Savage Worlds Edition

Adamant Entertainment, a design studio that makes Role-Playing Games (RPGs) and related products, recently released a new sword-and-planet campaign setting titled MARS: Savage Worlds Edition. “From character creation, to creatures, to tips on the planetary romance genre, MARS: Savage Worlds Edition features everything you need to get started telling savage tales of adventure beneath the moons of Mars." Here's a detailed description of the new RPG:

"Welcome to Mars!

Not Mars as it is -- airless, most likely lifeless, with only the faintest hints of what might have once been a damp, if not necessarily lush and living, world billions of years in the past. No, this is Mars as it should be and as it was once imagined to be -- an ancient, dying, but not yet dead world, a world where a vast canal network reaches from pole to pole, bringing water and life to vast and fantastic cities. A Mars where albino apes run a vast empire in the last surviving jungle, a world where warrior tribes of Green Martians raid the outlying cities of the canal dwellers, a world where, in places dark and quiet and forgotten beneath the surface, ancient and terrible intellects plan dark and dire deeds.

It is a Mars of sky-corsairs, of duels with blade and blaster, of vile plots, fantastic inventions, daring rescues, arena battles, and spectacular stunts. It is a Mars where ancient cities can be discovered and their lost treasures plundered, a Mars where a trek across the dry sea bottoms can yield amazing discoveries, where terrible monsters roam the rocky wastes.

It is the Mars of pulp fiction and Saturday morning serials.

It is now yours."

Check out the map!

Google's plan for out-of-print books is challenged

Google's Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged
The New York Times, April 3, 2009
By Miguel Helft

SAN FRANCISCO -- The dusty stacks of the nation’s great university and research libraries are full of orphans -- books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian. Google has been scanning the pages of those books and others as part of its plan to bring a digital library and bookstore, unprecedented in scope, to computer screens across the United States.

But a growing chorus is complaining that a far-reaching settlement of a suit brought against Google by publishers and authors is about to grant the company too much power over orphan works. [...]

Read the entire article in The New York Times.

Nominated for Nebula Award, Ruth Nestvold’s short story “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” now a free aural delight

Thanks to the hard work of the folks at the audio science fiction magazine StarShipSofa, you can listen to a reading of “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide”, a short story written by Ruth Nestvold that was published in the January 2008 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and which has been nominated for a 2008 Nebula Award. You can download the audio through iTunes or as a mp3 file (about 18 minutes).

Also, thanks to the generosity of Gordon Van Gelder, editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, you can read Ruth Nestvold’s “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” online for free.

Risqué cover art: Cyril Judd’s novel Sin in Space

A few weeks ago, Charlie Jane Anders of the SF blog io9 posted a gallery of risqué cover art. One of the covers was Sin in Space: an Expose of the Scarlet Planet, a revised novel by Cyril Judd (a joint pseudonym used by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril) that was published in 1961 by Beacon Press, a publisher which was known for "sexing up" books to improve sales. "A rocketing, sensational exposé,” Sin in Space was largely published in 1952 by Dell Publishing under the less racy title Outpost Mars. Note the difference between the front and back covers of the two books.

New book: Paizo reprint of Leigh Brackett’s classic tale The Sword of Rhiannon

Paizo Publishing has released its reprint of The Sword of Rhiannon (2009), a classic tale of planetary romance written by Leigh Brackett that was first published in the June 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories as
"Sea-Kings of Mars". The latest book in Paizo’s Planet Stories series, Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon has
an introduction by British science fiction author and editor Nicola Griffith. Here’s a description, taken directly from Paizo’s website:

“Matthew Carse was a Martian archaeologist turned looter, selling priceless historical relics for his own gain, until the sword of a fallen god sent him hurtling back in time to a Mars still lush with life. Captured by the cruel and beautiful princess of a degenerate empire, Carse must ally with the rebellious Sea Kings and their strange psychic allies in order to defeat the tyrannical people of the Serpent. Yet even if he can conquer the enemy’s alien super-science, Carse still faces an even greater danger -- the dark god that lurks inside his own skin.”

Earlier reprints of The Sword of Rhiannon were reviewed by Keith Graham's Book Blog, noted SF&F critic Rich Horton, and SpecFic writer Brandon Bell. SF megafan Blue Tyson gives this tale 4.5 out
of 5 stars. I concur, for this is one of my favorite Martian SF works!