Category Archives: Uncategorized

Forgotten Book: Iroshi by Cary Osborne (1995)

Posted on by
3

Cary Osborne's Iroshi transports the ronin story to space.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 185th in my series of Forgotten Books.

This week’s selection is certainly a Forgotten Book. I have had a copy for about 20 years, except for a brief period after I sold my library, after which I acquired another copy. Cary Osborne has been a friend for more than 20 years and she is one of the nicest people I know. That said, I am ashamed to say I did not actually sit down and read Iroshi until last week. I had it and it was around, but I didn’t get the compulsion to read it versus some other books.

So, confessions aside, I read Iroshi the other day and really enjoyed it. It is not a perfect novel. It is a first novel, and it has some of the regular problems associated with those books. But, it was enjoyable.

Laicy Campbell is a young woman on Siebeling, one of the many inhabited mining planets around the galaxy. Her father took off one day and left Laicy’s mom and family flat. They took in wash and did other chores to get by. At 12, Laicy started in on martial arts. Her instructor, Robert Crowell, taught her for five years in the various fighting styles. Where she excelled was in kendo, working with swords. After the five years, Crowell sent her to Earth to train with his old master, Mushimo. The training was long and arduous and involved reading and understanding the zen of what she was doing, in addition to the forms. One of the things she was trying to master with Mr. Mushimo was achieving the void.

While at Mushimo’s there is an attack of ninja warriors. Ninjas were supposedly long gone from Earth. Laicy and Mushimo defeat them with the aid of another helper/student Akiro. Mushimo sends Laicy into a room filled with swords and tells her to pick one. She hears the voices of the swords, and one in particular calls to her, drowning out the others. It is Mushimo’s ancestral sword going back many generations. He gives it to her, saying he has no heirs to pass the tradition on. Soon he dismisses her and gives her a credit disk with more money than she can imagine. She decides to wander, using the name Iroshi. She hears that Mushimo has died and left his entire estate to Crowell, her former teacher.

She soon acquires a reputation as a badass who picks fight and rarely loses. She finds herself on the planet Rune, another arid mining world. She senses a call to the desert and finds an abandoned town with a hidden water source and other secrets. Those secrets include the bodiless souls of the former inhabitants who are able to guide her. Chief among these spirits is one called Ensi who is particularly bonded to her. Her old master Mushimo is also among these spirits. Together they want Iroshi to establish the Glaive, a kind of warrior guild that she will administer, and to see that others are trained in the proper ways of the masters. She is again attacked by nameless assassins who fail to stop her.

This ends Section 1 of the book. Section 2 takes place eight years later. The glaive is becoming a political force throughout the galaxy and Iroshi, as its leader, has become a powerful person. Her facility on Rune is attracting attention, which includes that of Mushimo’s two sons, whom he disowned earlier. They want to stop her and seize the property that their father has given to Iroshi and Crowell.

The fight for Earth and control of the fortune takes the second half of the book. I didn’t find it as compelling as the first half, but I did not dislike it either. The break seemed a little forced to me, but I wasn’t the one writing it.

Overall, the melding of a female Ronin warrior and a space traveling society and zen religion was a little odd, but I thought it worked. There are currently three books in the Iroshi cycle – Iroshi (1995), The Glaive (1996) and Persea (1996). They are all back in print right now as ebooks. Cary Osborne’s website indicates that she is working on a fourth Iroshi book to be titled Beyond the Void.

After reading Iroshi, I know I will pick up the other volumes in the series, although I will possibly wait until the fourth one appears, so I can get the sense of closure that reading an incomplete series does not give you. Hopefully, it will not be 20 years before that happens.

If this sounds like your cup of sake, give Iroshi and the other titles a try. I don’t think you will be disappointed. But, fair warning, your mileage may vary.

Series organizer Patti Abbott usually hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: Tarzan and the Trappers (1958)

Posted on by
2

Who can resist the promise of "wild jungle action?"

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 163rd in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

Welcome back, my friends. It seems like forever since I got to tell you about films and shows you did not want to remember.

I have been incredibly busy. Since the last posting, I accepted a new job, visited Alpine, Texas, where the job is located, placed an offer on a house, gave my own house some serious cleaning so it could be shown to potential buyers, loaded up 250+ boxes of books, movies and the like and got them into the garage (with some much needed and appreciated help from close friends), had the rear window of my one year old car destroyed by hail because said boxes were in the garage, drove to Austin with a taped up window during a rain storm to prevent having to wait a month for replacement, attended a work conference in Corpus Christi and moved into a dorm apartment in Alpine while waiting for the house to sell so we can buy the other house.

Get your programs right here! You can’t tell the score without a program!

As a result of all the scrambling, watching films and reading books have not been high on my priority list! But now things are settling down. Still need to sell the house and buy the new one and move stuff out here, but all that is doable. Consequently I have told Sanford that I should be back on a more reliable schedule of providing these little columns. We shall see.

This week I decided to watch an old Tarzan movie starring Gordon Scott. I had never seen many of his outings as the jungle lord, but I thought he looked the part and acted semi-literate as opposed to the Johnny Weissmuller monosyllabic Tarzan, whom I watched and enjoyed as a kid.

This “film” was made in 1958 and released in Iran (if we can believe IMDB) but was not shown in the U.S. until 1966. I put the quotes around film because this is a conglomeration of three television pilots later re-edited into a very episodic release. The pilots were presented to the three networks at that time and no one chose to bite, so producer Sol Lesser tried to recoup some of the money.

The plot is pretty standard TV fare – white hunters invading tribal lands and killing or capturing animals for zoos and trophies. Tarzan stop bad men. Then, the brother of the bad man wants to hunt down Tarzan with the help of an evil guide looking for the treasures of a lost civilization. City found; no treasure. Bad guys stopped.

As a holdover from the Weissmuller days, we have a lovely Jane (Eve Brent), who does little, and a son, Boy (Rickie Sorensen), who provides some young interest and is always available as a potential captive/hostage. Cheetah the chimp (billed as Chetah) is possibly the best actor in the group, particularly in the final half of the film. Scatman Crothers makes an appearance under the name Sherman Crothers as Tyana, one of the tribal chiefs.

I watched this because I recently saw the preview for the new Tarzan film due this year. (Previews for that look good, so I will be watching.) And also because I have a signed Gordon Scott photo of him as Tarzan. (Thank you Barry and Terry for that wonderful gift so many years ago!) While Scott, who made six Tarzan movies between 1955 and 1960, is better than some of the many actors who played the role, he’s not particularly memorable in this outing.

So, be warned this isn’t a spectacular Tarzan film. Watch at your own risk. As always, your mileage may vary depending on your nerdiness. Ungawah!

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Moment of Wonder: The Shock Breakout of a Supernova

Posted on by
Reply

NASA has shared some amazing footage of Mars, Pluto and the moons of Saturn. But this may be its recent money shot.

The space agency’s planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has for the first time captured the flash of an exploding star’s shockwave using optical wavelength, or visible light. Astronomers call this brilliant flash a “shock breakout.” They only last about 20 minutes and are essentially the opening salvo of a dying star going supernova.

A team led by Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame, analyzed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies to obtain the the photometric observations used to create this video animation.

“In order to see something that happens on timescales of minutes, like a shock breakout, you want to have a camera continuously monitoring the sky,” Garnavich says. “You don’t know when a supernova is going to go off, and Kepler’s vigilance allowed us to be a witness as the explosion began.”

Sit back and enjoy the light show.

Moment of Wonder: The Rings and Moons of Saturn

Posted on by
Reply

Saturn's rings and three of its moons.

When I was a kid, the mystery of Saturn’s vast rings had me in their sway. I did a number of school projects on our solar system’s second-largest planet and even attempted to draw a comic book chronicling the adventures of its alien inhabitants.

The recent photos coming back from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have helped rekindle that fascination (although I’ve long since given up any aspirations of being a comic artist). Yep, those vast rings still hold plenty of mystery.

Take, for example, this photo Cassini snapped of three of Saturn’s moons — Tethys, Enceladus and Mimas — straddling the rings.

In this configuration, Tethys (660 miles across) appears above the rings, while Enceladus (313 miles across) is just below at the center and Mimas (246 miles across) is located to its left.

For those keeping track of such things, the craft acquired the shot at a distance of 837,000 miles from Enceladus. Tethys was 1.2 million miles away and Mimas was approximately 1.1 million miles away.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

 

Moment of Wonder: Scott Kelly, astronaut and photographer

Posted on by
Reply

Unless you’ve been lost in orbit, you’ve probably heard about Scott Kelly, the NASA astronaut who returned to Earth yesterday after an astounding 340 days in space. His trip, the longest completed by a U.S. astronaut, is expected to yield important data on the effects of long-term life in space on the human body.

During Kelly’s 5,000 trips around the planet on the International Space Station, he had time to document his journey on social media using #YearInSpace. The stunning photographs he posted afford those of us stuck on Earth an opportunity to dream big.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Forgotten Book: Walking Wolf by Nancy Collins (1995)

Posted on by
3

Walking Wolf is a short novel but one full of wonders and magic.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 177th in my series of Forgotten Books.

It is no secret that I am a fan of the weird western. I’ve written a couple of weird western short stories over the years. I am also a fan of Nancy Collins. I first met her at a convention in New Orleans when Sunglasses After Dark had just come out. It was a wonderful inventive vampire novel featuring Sonja Blue, who would later star in several more novels.

Later we were both nominees for the John W. Campbell Award at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 1991 which was won by Julia Ecklar. Other nominees that year included John Cramer and Michael Kandel.

That’s pretty much were our similarities end. Nancy went on to write a bunch of novels and comic books and stuff. I occasionally produce a short story.

Walking Wolf is a werewolf novel set in the old west and is also the name of the main character. Walking Wolf, the character, is found as an orphan by the Comanche Indians and raised as one of them. At first he has no idea of his identity and abilities. Through his eyes, we get a view of the plains Indians in the mid 19th century. He is raised as an Indian brave and finds himself a friend in Quanah Parker who would later become a fierce chief even though he was half white.

He becomes apprenticed to Medicine Dog, the shaman of the tribe who recognizes Walking Wolf as a skin walker or shape shifter. Walking Wolf does not even know what he is or what he is. One day when hunting buffalo he shifts into wolf mode and astounds the tribe, especially Flood Moon, the girl he intends to marry. Where she had been friendly before, she has no desire to be a shape shifter and she attempts to kill him which results in her death.

Walking Wolf is ashamed of his action and feels he must learn more about himself, So he decides his name is Billy Skillet and he sets out to see the West. He teams up with a Reverend Near in the small town of Vermillion. The Reverend is not a nice person and he attempts to have Billy be his slave while he kidnaps and rapes young girls which he blames on Billy. Billy escapes and the town in destroyed. Billy next meets Professor Praetorius, a charlatan selling snake oil in his medicine show. He has a pinhead which he brings out when sales are tough to show for a nickel. Billy and Praetorius get along well until some folks who tried the snake oil with bad results. Everyone gets lynched which does not work well for the Professor or the pinhead. Billy, however, cannot be killed in this way, but it does hurt.

He soon finds himself in the company of The Sundown Kid, a vampire gunslinger who tells Billy information about the werewolves who had immigrated from the Europe. Unfortunately he is being hunted by a supernatural bounty hunter named Witchfinder Jones, who wears a wolf pelt that Billy instinctively knows is the pelt of his father. Jones also has a wallet made from a woman’s teat that is from Billy’s mother. Jones travels with silver bullets and other paraphernalia. Jones is to become Billy’s nemesis and to be a constant antagonist.

Billy reverts back to the Indian ways and becomes Walking Wolf again. He meets the famous from the period, including Custer, Sitting Bull (whom he regards as an uncle), and more. As an outcast in either world, Walking Wolf offers a differing view of the world around him. He does not age in the same manner as normal people.

This is a good novel, rather short but filled with lots of wonder and magic. I enjoyed pretty much everything about it. Think Lawrence Talbot (theWolfman) as Little Big Man and you have an idea of what this one was like.

Originally published by Mark Ziesing in a nice hardcover edition with a wonderful J. K. Potter cover, It is currently available in e-book form or as a trade paperback. So, if you find this intriguing, it’s available. I think it’s well worth a try.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Film: Phantom Lady (1944)

Posted on by
1

Cornell Woolrich's Phantom Lady is an engaging mystery film, just not a great one.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 155th in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

I really love the novels of Cornell Woolrich, whether writing under that name or William Irish or George Hopley. For a while, I had a very nice collection of first editions of his work including a beautiful copy of Phantom Lady. But I took the money and ran a long time ago.

Woolrich was a master of suspense and tension, particularly in his novels, though some also comes through in his films. Check out my review of Jacques Tourneau’s The Leopard Man which was based on Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi. It features one of the most terrifying scenes ever put on screen and that scene is straight out of the novel.

But, let’s talk about Phantom Lady. Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) is a successful engineer in a bad marriage. On his anniversary he and his wife have a fight and he storms out of the apartment. He goes to a local bar where he meets a lonely woman with a gaudy hat. They make small talk and he invites her to go to a show. When he asks her name, she demurs, saying that they should enjoy the night with no names and no history. They take a cab to the show where a drummer tries to get her attention and the headliner Monteiro (Aurora) is seen wearing the same hat. Monteiro is obviously furious.

Henderson returns home to find police Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez) waiting. Henderson’s wife has been strangled with one of his neckties. Henderson isn’t worried about being arrested for the crime because he didn’t do it. But when the police question the bartender (Andrew Tombes) he says Henderson was alone. So does the cab driver. And when Monteiro is questioned, she remembers nothing about the Henderson’s companion and the hat the argued about isn’t even among her costumes.

Henderson finds himself on trial for murder and, with no alibi, he is quickly convicted and sentenced to die. The only one convinced he’s innocent is his secretary, Carol “Kansas” Richmond (Ella Raines), who is in love with him. She cannot find any other way to help him, so she shadows the bartender. When he makes a casual slip about being paid, he tries to attack her and ends up getting killed in traffic. At that point, Carol suspects she is on the right trail.

She begins to track down the drummer (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who admits that he was paid $500 to forget what he saw. Carol calls Burgess, but by the time he gets there the drummer is dead. At this point, the film gives away the identity of the real killer, something which was not disclosed in the book until the very end.

Scott’s friend, Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone) has been in South America and when he returns he agrees to help Carol solve Scott’s problem. Together they find the Phantom Lady and the hat, but the murderer is still about and Carol is in deep trouble.

This was a good film, just not the great film which might have been made from the book. In glorious black and white, it has many of the features of a good noir film but somehow falls flat. The tense moments just don’t quite come across that way, until the point at which Carol confronts the killer. Part of the problem is the source material. Woolrich novels sometimes rely on coincidence and, as in this case, you have to buy that people are willing to let a man die after being paid to forget something. Somehow I tend to have a better opinion of people than that. Of the four, one should have broken down.

When reading the books, the breakneck pacing gets you through. With the film, that pacing isn’t there and the flaws emerge.

I still like this film, though, and I still love the work of Woolrich. I’m hoping you do to. TCM runs this film fairly regularly and you should check it out when you can. It’s not Out of the Past or Double Indemnity, but it’s still worthwhile.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Films: THEM! (1954)

Posted on by
Reply

Yes, you've seen it before, but why not revisit those mile-deep catacombs?

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 149th my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

Welcome to 2016! I wanted to start this installment off on a good note so, when I got up that morning and turned the TV to TCM, what should appear? THEM! was coming on in ten minutes! And, yes, I know this is not a “forgotten” film. It is quite definitely well known, at least among film fans of my age grouping.

And, just like The Thing From Another World from two weeks ago, this one has James Arness in it. Growing up with Gunsmoke on TV as a kid, I have always liked Arness’ easygoing style.

THEM! Has an all star cast, which is amazing for the science fiction/horror film of the day. Along with Arness, you have James Whitmore, an Academy Award nominee in 1949 for Battleground and Edmund Gwenn who won an Oscar in 1947 for Miracle on 34th Street. That’s some star power. But then the supporting cast included soon-to-be-bigger names and character actors like Fess Parker (soon to be Davy Crockett), William Schallert and Olin Howlin as a drunk. Leonard Nimoy has a small part as a radio operator.

Originally set to be in color and 3D, Warner Brothers slotted THEM! back into black and white. And it is wonderful in that format. Two New Mexico State Police troopers, Ben Peterson and Ed Blackburn (Whitmore and Chris Drake, respectively), find a young girl (Sandy Descher) wandering in the desert. She is nearly catatonic. They find her home, a trailer, a few miles away. It has been ripped apart. Her family is missing.

Soon the troopers pass by a general store and find a similar type of destruction, including a shotgun that is mangled and the body of its owner. Strange tracks are found. Peterson leaves with the girl to make a report, leaving Blackburn to guard the store. A bad move for Trooper Blackburn, as he soon is killed by giant ants.

Giant ants have evolved in the New Mexico desert as a result of atomic bomb tests. Scientists Dr. Harold Medford (Gwenn) and his daughter Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon) confirm that the strange tracks belong to ants. The group is joined by FBI agent Robert Graham (Arness) who develops an attachment with Pat Medford.

The crew tracks down a nest of giant ants in the desert and drops cyanide gas into the hole while the insects are inactive. Later the army sends in a crew with Pat and they find that the ants inside the nest are dead. However, Dr. Medford notices that a chamber contains some hatched eggs, but no bodies. The eggs were for queens and Pat is concerned that the queens have hatched and flown away to establish new colonies. Two queen eggs were noted, so a nationwide search is established to look out for unusual activity and reports of flying ants or flying saucers.

This leads to a psycho ward in Brownsville with a small craft pilot (Parker) who saw one of the queens heading into Mexico. And from there to a ship in the Gulf that has ants on board. The next big report comes from Los Angeles where a boxcar with 40 tons of sugar has been ripped apart. Nearby searches find drunk Jensen (Howlin) who has seen the ants from his window at a recovery ward. But, of course, no one believes anything he says. This leads to confrontations in the sewers under LA. Just exactly where I’d want to be fighting giant mutant ants.

THEM! is a wonderful film, well paced with good performances and decent effects. Plus, Bronsilau Kaper provided the movie soundtrack and that is always a plus!

Sure you’ve seen it before! But it’s worth seeing again and it got my year off to a great start. (I later went to see the new Star Wars that evening, so it stayed pretty enjoyable). I hope your New Year’s Day was as good.

Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Moment of Wonder: Up Close With a Monster of the Deep

Posted on by
Reply

On Christmas Eve, a Japanese diver caught the most recent — and what may be the most vivid — video footage of one of Earth’s monsters of the deep: the giant squid.

Akinobu Kimura swam alongside the 12-foot creature after it was spotted in Toyama Bay, northwest of Tokyo. The footage below captures what the New York Times poetically describes as the massive invertebrate’s “ballet of pink and white tentacles.”

The giant squid, or Architeuthis, can grow more than 40 feet in length, so this specimen — impressive as it is — is merely a runt. Until 2005, no one had even captured still photos of the elusive cephalopod in the wild. Kimura’s footage is courtesy of Reuters.