While George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen novel When Gravity Fails is perhaps his most famous work, his lesser known novel The Wolves of Memory remained his favorite. In it, he introduced readers to Sandor Courane, an Everyman and Effinger stand-in who struggles as he swims against the currents of Fate. In life and in his multiple deaths, Sandor Courane serves as the unifying force in this collection of Effinger’s stories, starting with The Wolves of Memory and getting ever cleverer and more off-the-wall from there.

When we first meet Courane, he must face down TECT, the self-aware computer that has come to control the Earth and its colonial planets. Exiled to Planet D, Courane races to solve the debilitating disease that attacks each of the planet’s residents, even as his own memory begins to fade. Unfortunately, his only source of information about the illness is TECT, itself, and the computer’s agenda doesn’t seem to line up with Courane’s.

In the seven other stories contained in A Thousand Deaths, Courane becomes detached from what is reality and what is story as Effinger expertly plays with narrative conventions. However, these aren’t simply the whims of a SF writer; they are the frameworks the Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated author uses to answer questions about existence no one else even thought to ask.

Introduction to Slippage by Harlan Ellison

The Fault In My Lines

Where to open the fissure: the earthquake or the heart attack?

The earthquake. It is officially listed as a 6.8-magnitude temblor by the U.S. Geological Survey’s geophysicists at the Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.

The Northridge, California “thruster.” It hit at precisely, exactly, 4:31 a.m. on Monday the
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17th of January 1994. It had been a pretty lousy year through the 16th, and 1993 hadn’t been too cuddly, either. Let us not even talk about ’92.

But as rusty as those first sixteen days of the new year had been, they were nothing but sunny days on the beaches of Ibiza by comparison to 4:31 in the dead black morning of January 17th.

First, there was the sound of it. Oh, yeah, trust me on this: first, you hear it coming. You don’t know that’s what the hell you’re hearing, but you catch the sound of it hurtling toward you before your bones and back teeth pick it up.

Let me try to tell you what it sounds like.

Because just the sound of it can scare your hair white, (Mine started to fall out in the months following.)

The unimaginative say it sounds like a train coming toward you. Bullshit. Nothing like a train. I used to ride the freights, like a bindlestiff, when I was a kid. Trains have a decent sound to them. A good sound. Tough, but willing to accommodate you. This damned thruster had absolutely nothing in common with a train. Then there are those whose best analogy is, “It was a deep rumbling noise.” Yer ass. A deep rumbling noise is what you get out of your stomach when you’ve had too many baby-backs and hot links. A cranky bear makes a deep rumbling sound. The radiator. The water pipes trying to carry the load. Krusty the Klown makes a deep rumbling noise. I’ll tell you precisely what that muther sounded like:

Ever see one of those Japanese samurai movies featuring the masterless ronin who travels around with his baby son in a wooden cart that rolls on big wooden wheels? The Lone Wolf and Cub films? What they call the “baby cart” series?

Okay, then: are you familiar with “corduroy roads”? They were common and plentiful in this country up until about forty years ago. Mostly, you could find them in backwoods or rural areas, where dirt roads were still in use, macadam hadn’t made its inroads, superhighways were distant myths, and country roads were used for hauling heavy loads. So, to make them capable of supporting the weight of a tractor pulling a backhoe, or a fully loaded hay wagon, logs were laid transversely, producing a kind of ribbed look–something like those speed bumps in parking lots that make you slow down–and the buried logs gave the dirt road the topographical surface of the cotten cloth we call corduroy.

When you drove down such a road, there was a metronomic bump-bump-bump sound. I’m trying to be specific here, trying to describe the indescribable. Explain the color red to someone blind from birth.

What it sounded like was this: a gigantic wooden-wheeled baby cart, as big as a mountain, bump-bump-bumping down a corduroy road. Underneath you. Deep underneath you.

I was awake at that hour. I was upstairs here in my office, working. On the second floor of the office wing I designed and had built some years ago. Walls floor-to-ceiling filled with reference and non-fiction books I might need when working, arranged alphabetically by subject. Several thousand books, mostly hardcovers. And an open central atrium that looks down on the first floor of the office wing. And my desk and typewriter over here next to the French doors that give onto the balcony and a view of the San Bernardino Mountains thirty-seven miles away across the San Fernando Valley. My office looks out due north toward those mountains.

At 4:31 in the morning, the thruster zazzed laterally across the Valley floor, west to south, reached the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains (at the top of which my home sits)…and had nowhere to go but up.

(Pause. Know-nothings who live in parts of the country where they endure sub-zero weather, tornados, floods, killing pollution, drought, blight, sand storms, provincial bigotry, ultraconservative censorship, hurricanes or Jesse Helms, have been known to remark, “How can anyone bear living in Southern California with all those earthquakes? They must be really stupid not to flee the state!”

(And go where?

(It’s the same everywhichplace these days, folks. New Orleans or Pittsburgh; Kankakee or Kansas; Eugene, Oregon or Oklahoma City. If the twister don’t get you, the rabid militia will.

(L.A. is okay. I like it here. But I’m no dope. Long before the thruster, I had hired both seismic engineers and structural experts, as well as soil analysts, to tell me how safe I was here on the crest of the North Benedict Canyon slope. Core drilling had been done, and I was heartened to learn that the house sat solidly, a mere five feet above bedrock. Of even more salutary note was the advisement that not only was the house secure just five feet above bedrock, but the seam ran north-south, in line with the house. Meaning: not even the worst of the “rolling” temblors we knew so well in Southern California could trouble me overmuch. If the rolling came, it would not affect the solid cut under me. I was sanguine. And when the Landers quake hit a few years ago, I barely felt it, despite all the serious damage done in other nearby areas. I was sanguine. “The only way you’re going to be in any trouble,” said an engineer from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena–a reader of my work who had offered to bring in some ground-testing equipment as a favor–”any trouble at all, is if the whole damned mountain collapses.” I was sanguine.)

The fault line came diagonally across the Valley, got to the base of the mountains, had nowhere to go…so it went up.

The house was lifted with a 4g thrust. It takes only 6 gravs to throw a rocket to the moon.

I heard it coming, and I bolted from my typing chair, and got across the office to the deco stairwell before the first wave hit. The house, and everything in it, went straight up. I was lifted off my feet and thrown across the stairwell, crashing face-first against the south wall of the second-floor landing. The right side of my face smashed into a framed photo of the blind Borges in Baltimore in 1983, sitting at the foot of the memorial to Edgar Allan Poe, running his fingers over the bronze commemorative plaque, paying homage, one great fantasist to another. I hit it so hard it shattered the glass and broke the frame.

Then I was thrown sidewise, as the second wave struck. Thrown left down the winding deco staircase–everything now in pitch darkness–all electricity had gone out across the city–and bent double over the pony wall, cracking my forehead on the leading edge of a Lucite shelf holding pewter figurines of The Ten Greatest Inventions of History.

And then the main torque hit.

I was picked up and thrown forward, never touching the final flight of steps from the lower landing to the first floor. I was picked up and flipped heels-over-head to land flat on my back, missing the edge of the pool table by perhaps two inches. If I had been two inches to the right, it would have blasted open my skull; nothing less than a human omelette.

But before I could rise, off the wall to my left, a heavy painting slightly larger than 3′x3′ wrenched itself off its hanger, and crashed down on me.

(Pause: charming little ironies of near-death experiences. The painting is a surreal rendering of a large stone mausoleum with ominous faces perceivable in the walls. It sits on a hill under a dark blue, threatening sky. Carved into the lintel of the building is the legend 6000 SA MO BL. The painting is called “Six thousand, same old bull.” The irony is that 6000 SA MO BL is an abbreviation for 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, the location of the cemetery crypt and mausoleum in Los Angeles where, among others, Al Jolson is buried. The painting weighs a ton. Well, that’s figuratively speaking. It’s heavy, because it has a double pane of glass on it–the second pane having stars painted on the inside surface, thus giving a very deep-dimensional look to the already eerie landscape–and when 6000 SA MO BL ripped loose, it plummeted and hit me full in the face, breaking my nose, blacking both my eyes, ripping open gashes in my face.) Knocking me unconscious.

Not for long, I guess. It was dark, the earth was still growling, I was woozy–maybe a concussion already, I don’t know–and even if there had been light, I couldn’t have seen anything. Too much blood in my eyes.

I started to pull myself to my feet, using the edge of the pool table, when the next wave struck; and this time it threw every book on the upper level out of the bookcases, hurled them over the railing, and down on me in the open space below the atrium. I was struck by hundreds of reference books, knocked to my knees, and then clobbered unconscious for the second time.

Everything after that, for two years, was recovery, rebuilding, and lamenting the loss of art and possessions I’d spent a lifetime gathering. No need to dwell on it, I’ve conveyed the part that’s pertinent to this book. So now we can move on to the heart attack.65

Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories
by Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison celebrates four decades of writing and publishes his seventieth book with this critically acclaimed, wildly imaginative and outrageously creative collection. The award-winning novella “Mefisto in Onyx” is the centerpiece of this brilliant collection which also includes screenplays, an Introduction by the author, interspersed segments of autobiographical narrative and such provocatively titled entries as “The Man Who Rowed Columbus Ashore,” “Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You,” “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich,” “Chatting With Anubis,” “The Dragon on the Bookshelf,” (written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg) “The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams,” “Pulling Hard Time,” and “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral.”

Read Ellison’s provocative introduction here.

Haven’t had your fill of Ellison’s books?  See a complete listing of over 30 E-Reads titles here.

One of E-Reads' two-in-one e-book packages

Drawing from our rich trove of short story collections by leading fantasy and science fiction authors, E-Reads has launched a new short story program, offering a pair of stories in one package for 99 cents.

The first packages of doubles will come from the works of such masters of their genres as Poppy Z. Brite, George Alec Effinger, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough and John Norman.

Brite: Mussolini and the Axeman’s Jazz & Are You Loathsome Tonight?

Effinger: The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything & Target: Berlin!

Scarborough: Mummies of the Motorway & Scarborough Fair

Norman: The Calpa & Notes Pertaining to a Panel in Salon D

Watch our special story page for announcements of more gems from our collection.

Locus, the trade publication of the fantasy and science fiction world, reports the sad news that Martin H. Greenberg – “Marty” to all who knew and loved him – died June 25, 2011 at the age of 70 after a long battle with cancer.

Though anthologizing the work of others may not seem like an art form, Greenberg made it one, collecting, culling, packaging and thematically organizing stories like a skilled music arranger who kept an infinite register in his head on which he could draw with ease. As impressive as the list of anthologies provided by Wikipedia* may seem to the layman, it represents a fraction of those he actually produced, estimated in the thousands by those who even try speculating on his prolific output. He is a multiple Lifetime Achievement Award recipient for the depth and amazing variety of his contributions to popular literature (though he was also a serious academic).

Marty was as sweet-natured and complaisant as anyone I have ever known in or out of the publishing industry, and if a good name is to be cherished above all treasures on this earth, as we are told in the scriptures, Marty leaves us with one we can only hope to emulate. But he also leaves us with the concrete evidence of his industry and energy, a fifty foot shelf of collected stories made memorable and perhaps even immortal, stories that might otherwise have failed to escape obscurity.

You can read about him in Dean Wesley Smith’s Eulogy.

From Locus‘s announcement:

“Greenberg held a doctorate in Political Science (1969) and taught at the University of Wisconsin — Green Bay until his retirement in 1996. He founded book packager Tekno Books, which produces about 150 titles per year and has over 2,300 published books translated into 33 languages. Greenberg received four genre Lifetime Achievement Awards: the Milford Award in science fiction, the Solstice award in science fiction, the Bram Stoker award in horror, and the Ellery Queen award in mystery.”

* Martin Greenberg’s biography and bibliography in Wikipedia

Richard Curtis

Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions is a new collection of stories by Fritz Leiber. Assembled here is a selection of Leiber’s most horrific tales, many of which are previously uncollected and have been virtually unobtainable for decades.

During his more than fifty years of writing, Leiber was an acknowledged master of the weird tale and the stories in this collection include works originally published in magazines from the 1940′s onward, including such venues as ‘Unknown,’ ‘Thrilling Mystery,’ ‘Startling Stories’ and ‘Fantasy’ and also works published over the decades in such places as ‘Rogue,’ ‘The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,’ ‘Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine’ and the acclaimed horror specialty magazine ‘Whispers 13-14.’

Besides Smoke Ghost (1941), the stories include Cry Witch! (1951), I’m Looking for Jeff (1952), Ms. Found in a Maelstrom (1959), The Button Molder (1979), Dark Wings (1976) and (Original to this volume) The Enormous Bedroom (2001).

From the riveting Spider Mansion and The Phantom Slayer from Weird Tales to the more recent Lie Still, Snow White and Black Has Its Charms from rare, small-press magazines, this collection provides a stunning overview. While much of Leiber’s seminal science-fiction and fantasy remains in print, his work in the field of supernatural horror has been sadly neglected until now. Edited by John Pelan and Steve Savile.

If you love Leiber’s stories you can follow up Smoke Ghost with The Black Gondolier, and from there you can select some novels from his author page.

George Alec Effinger was a true master of satirical science fiction. Before his death in 2002, he gained the highest esteem amongst his peers for his pitch-perfect stylistic mimicry and his great insight into the human condition. Despite a life filled with chronic illness and pain, Effinger was a prolific novelist and short story writer, earning multiple Nebula and Hugo Award nominations.

Live! From Planet Earth represents a very special look at the many works of this unique genius. These 22 short pieces have been specifically selected and introduced by his fellow writers and editors including Neil Gaiman, Gardner Dozois, Michael Bishop, Barbara Hambly, Jack Dann and Mike Resnick. Each writes movingly about his or her memories of Effinger and his legacy.

Included are “The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything” in which Earth is visited by benevolent aliens who happen to have annoying opinions about everything. “Everything but Honor” goes along as a black physicist time-travels to 1860 to murder a Civil War general. Also included here are Effinger’s O. Niemand stories, which perfectly mimic the styles of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Twain. The results are a tour de force sure to please existing fans and make new fans of anyone who reads them.

When is eight an irrational number? When it happens to be the number of stories in this strange and wonderful collection by George Alec Effinger.

For instance…

The death of a pet fish signals an ominous threat of wordwide tragedy… Delta Company “plays” out a war light years away… A running back for the Cleveland Browns gives his all to relive a night from his past…

In Irrational Numbers, as with much of his work, author George Alec Effinger straddles the line between allegorical fantasy and science fiction. It’s a vein Effinger mines for a deep, meaningful understanding of human nature. Challenging and disquieting in the way only the best fiction can be, this collection of eight magnificent pieces will have readers clamoring for more.

George Alec Effinger was a true master of satirical Science Fiction. Before his death in 2002, he gained the highest esteem amongst his peers for his pitch-perfect stylistic mimicry and his great insight into the human condition. Despite a life filled with chronic illness, Effinger was a prolific novelist and short story writer, earning multiple Nebula and Hugo Award nominations.

To the motto “Information want to be free” add “Information wants to be short.” Shorter e-books – or, more properly, e-stories, e-novellas and e-articles – are a definite trend, the latest manifestation of which is Kindle Singles (See After Dropping Shorts, Amazon Launches Singles)..

For one thing, short is more appropriate for our life style, which is a nice way of saying our national attention span has shrunk to the time it takes to read something in its entirety on a bus or subway – or in the john. Russell Grandinetti, VP for Amazon’s Kindle content, calls it “print on a diet,” according to Jenna Wortham in the New York Times.

For another thing, short is ideal for cell phones. “The physical dimensions of mobile devices are, in some ways, quite limited,” Wortham points out. “So it’s important to exploit the advantages that the devices do have.”

And writers love short because they have a lot of it in their trunks that they’re dying to unload or recycle.

Read Wortham’s Shorter E-Books for Smaller Devices.  It’ll only take you a minute.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times

Amazon’s first (but far from last) foray onto publisher turf was Amazon Shorts. Established in 2005, it acquired original stories and nonfiction, excerpts of forthcoming books and miscellaneous offerings by well known authors and sold them cheaply. Many authors and agents participated, showcasing or previewing their work there, but in time the doors were closed to new submissions as the company focused on Kindle.

Though processing the occasional royalty check for forty cents was always an adventure for our bookkeeper, it was fun while it lasted. But in Digitworld nothing fun lasts forever: today content providers received an email from Amazon announcing it was closing Shorts and reverting rights to authors. However, authors in the program interested in keeping their works in the program can transfer them to Kindle.

Social historians who wish to drill down to life in Internet BK (Before Kindle) might enjoy a blog written at the time Shorts was introduced.

Here’s the pertinent part of Amazon’s announcement followed by a video instructional on uploading your Shorts (or anything else you want to self-publish) into Kindle:
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Dear Amazon Shorts Author:

We appreciate your client’s participation in Amazon Shorts. As you know, Amazon Shorts launched prior to the release of the Amazon Kindle and our Digital Text Platform (DTP). Due to these technology changes, we are discontinuing the Shorts program effective June 1, 2010. At that time, all Amazon Shorts will be removed from sale and distribution rights will revert back to the authors. We very much want to continue to offer your client’s Shorts to Amazon Kindle customers. Below you will find the steps for transitioning your client’s Shorts to our Kindle platform so that customers can continue to buy and read this work.