Wow. This may be the finest SF anthology I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the best I’ve come across in many years.

Editing an anthology — especially a reprint anthology — is a delicate balancing act. You want to include the very finest stories you can, of course. But you’d prefer not to fill your book with tales your readers have seen a dozen times over.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a book that manages this as well as The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Starting with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (published 1844) and ending with Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” (2008) it spans 164 years of science fiction publishing, including some of the finest SF stories ever written — Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931), James Patrick Kelly’s “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995) — alongside dozens I’ve never read. Virtually every major SF and fantasy short fiction writer of the last 164 years is represented, from H. G. Wells, C.L. Moore and Stanley Weinbaum to Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe and Charles Stross.

The Wesleyan Anthology has a grand total of six editors, which tells you right off the bat it’s an academic endeavor targeted at libraries and school curriculum. All six are editors for Science Fiction Studies, DePauw University’s long-running critical journal, and they do a fine job of introducing the tales. Now, academic anthologies like this usually don’t appeal to me. They typically devote a considerable page count to proto-SF of the late 1800s or early 1900s, and that stuff puts my feet to sleep.

Not this time.  By the fifth tale we’re already into the 1930s, and the editors pay proper respect to both the Golden Age of SF — the Campbell authors of the 1940s like Asimov and Simak — and the earlier pulp writers of the mid-30s such as Hamilton and Leslie F. Stone. They’ve even plucked some tales from the pulps that I’ve never heard of, and that takes some effort.

I first laid eyes on The Wesleyan Anthology at Wiscon last year when SF author Richard Chwedyk showed me his copy with some wonder and amazement. Alice bought me my copy for Christmas, and I’ve been slowly (very slowly) making my way through it. The Wesleyan Anthology is $39.95 for 787 pages in trade paperback, and is published by Wesleyan University Press. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

John DeNardo and his team at SF Signal know when they have a good thing going.

Take for example the genre-defining 2010 Sword & Sorcery Panel Podcast, recorded at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio and featuring the official brain trust of modern S&S: Howard Andrew Jones , Ryan Harvey, Bill Ward, James Enge, Jason M. Waltz, Sam Sykes, John R. Fultz, Alex Bledsoe, Matthew Wuertz, and the ever-humble John O’Neill.

How do you top that? I know — impossible, right?

Well, all credit to Patrick Hester and Jaym Gates at SF Signal for making a terrific effort. In episode 108 of the SF Signal Podcast they’ve assembled a knock-out line-up of heavy hitters to discuss Sword and Sorcery for the modern reader. Including:

• Lou Anders — publisher and editor of mega-publisher Pyr
• Violette Malan — author of The Mirror Prince and many others
• James L. Sutter — Paizo editor and author of Pathfinder Tales: Death’s Heretic
• Scott H. Andrews — author, and editor of the splendid Beneath Ceaseless Skies

The podcast features original music by John Anealio. Part One is now available here.

Manly Wade Wellman is responsible for the creation of a number of supernatural sleuths, occult detectives and werewolf punchers, including Judge Pursuivant. But, arguably one of the more well-known of Wellman’s coterie of heroes is John Thunstone. Big and blocky, with a well-groomed moustache and eyes like flint, Thunstone is an implacable and self-described ‘enemy of evil’. He hunts it with the verve of a Van Helsing and strikes with the speed and viciousness that puts Anton Zarnak to shame.

Well read and well-armed against vampires, werewolves and all things dark and devilish, Thunstone seeks out malevolent occult menaces in a variety of locales. The sixteen stories and two novels have settings which range from the steel and glass corridors of Manhattan to the mountains of the rural South, or the pastoral fields of England. He faces off against Inuit sorcerers, demonic familiars and worse things in the name of protecting the Earth and all its peoples from the hungry shapes in the dark that would otherwise devour it and them.

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While Robert E. Howard is perhaps best known for creating Conan, he had his share of occult investigators of one stripe or another. There was Steve Harrison of River Street, Solomon Kane with his fiery Puritanism and cat-headed ju-ju staff and, of course, John Kirowan.

Kirowan is of an age and appearance with a number of Howard’s other characters, being tall, slender, brooding, and black haired — a Celt of the modern age. Sorrow hangs about him like a shroud, and his history is tragic. Though few agree on what form said tragedy might have taken, all believe that it has something to do with the years that he spent studying the occult arts in the black hills on Hungary and the secret places of Inner Mongolia.

What is known for certain is that Kirowan renounced these studies, and assumed the guise of a sceptic. But, when the nightmarish denizens of diabolical realms intrude upon the lives of his friends and companions, John Kirowan shows his true colours, and the haunted wanderer once more thrusts himself between the innocent and the devils in the dark.

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Last summer I played around with Fraser Ronald’s RPG Sword Noir, a fun new game of hardboiled crime fiction in worlds of sword & sorcery.

Readers familiar with Fraser’s story in Black Gate 15, “A Pound of Dead Flesh,” will instantly get what Sword Noir is all about. The story centered on two legionnaires tangled up in a plot to cheat a very powerful necromancer, who quickly find themselves caught in a lethal web of secrets and betrayals. It’s a terrific sword-and-sorcery action piece, with characters who find skill with a sword is only slightly less critical to their survival than the ability to think on their feet — and quickly read a bad situation.

Sword Noir captured the same aesthetic in a wonderfully concise set of role playing rules, offering guidelines on crafting compelling adventures for players interested in unraveling labyrinthine plots in dark urban settings.

As the author described it: “Now is the time for your characters to walk down mean streets, drenched in rain, hidden in fog, and unravel mysteries, murders, and villainy.” (See Fraser’s complete overview in his most recent post for the Black Gate blog here).

Sword Noir was a wonderfully inventive system, and it was obvious Fraser had great ambitions for it. The fruit of those ambitions arrived this month: Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death, a role-playing game of Viking adventure.

While it’s based on the underlying system from Sword Noir and the Sword’s Edge System, Kiss My Axe turns its attention to the heroics of the great Norse sagas, and the mechanics have been altered to provide more vivid and exciting combat.

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Wow.

Wally Wood is one of my all-time favorite artists.  When Scott Taylor asked me to provide my list of nominees for his Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years post, I had Wood right near the top.

Wood died over 30 years ago, but his influence on SF and fantasy art in the 1950s — especially his groundbreaking work with EC comics, and the more than 60 covers he did for Galaxy magazine — was staggering.

Virtually all of Wood’s EC work has been now been collected, in handsome volumes showcasing his brilliant art for Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Tales from the Crypt, and many others, as have his covers for Marvel, DC, and other top-tier comic publishers.

But Wood first made his name in now-forgotten science fiction comics of the 50s such as Strange Worlds, Captain Science, and Space Detective. Now Vanguard Publishing has collected a fabulous trove of nearly two dozen complete tales from this era, dating from 1950 to 1958, in a thick oversized volume titled Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction (click on the image at left for a larger version).

Strange Worlds is an absolutely beautiful production, 224 pages mostly in full-color. It is edited by J. David Spurlock and designed by Mark McNabb. The paperback edition is $24.95, and I got mine from Amazon for just $16.47, after the Amazon discount. It’s also available in a slipcased Hardcover Edition for $69.95.

The book also includes an extensive gallery of some of Wood’s best covers from the 1950s, as well as a complete story from the pre-Marvel Journey Into Mystery (”The Executioner,” Oct 1956, from issue 39), and a sampling of his full-page Sky Masters of the Space Force comic strip from 1958, with art by Wood and Jack Kirby.

Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction is my most exciting purchase of the last six months. I have no idea what the print run was, so I strongly advise you to get your own copy before it sells out.

I stumbled on the new line of Armchair Fiction science fiction and horror reprints late last year, and finally ordered a few in December.

Armchair claims they’re “dedicated to the restoration of classic genre fiction,” and they mean it. So far they’ve published 39 “Double Novels” — two short novels packaged together, modeled after the fondly-remembered Ace Doubles from the 50s and 60s — plus 15 single novels, and six short story collections.

Much of what they’ve publishing has been out of print for decades, including work from Fritz Leiber, Murray Leinster, Robert Sheckley, Mack Reynolds, Jerome Bixby, Keith Laumer, Edgar Pangborn, Richard S. Shaver, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Leigh Brackett, Raymond F. Jones, Poul Anderson, and many others.

When a vintage press is inclusive enough to reprint the work of Richard S. Shaver, author of the infamous “Shaver Mysteries,” you know they’re serious. Trust me.

I’ve been very pleased with the books I’ve received so far — they’re quality productions, probably print-on-demand, although POD has gotten so polished these days I can’t even be sure. They’re glossy paperbacks, with excellent cover reproductions (most taken from 50s SF magazine covers and Ace Doubles), about the size of a trade paperback, and reasonably priced at $12.95.

They have 15 new releases for Winter 2012, including fiction from Clifford D. Simak, Rog Phillips, Stanton A. Coblentz, Jack Sharkey, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Belknap Long, Don Wilcox, and other neglected science fiction and horror writers.

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Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak is a man of mystery. With a jagged streak of silver running through his black hair from his temple to the base of his skull and his exotic features and peculiar mannerisms, Zarnak is almost as outré as the enemies he fights. With a startling knowledge and a somewhat sinister history, Zarnak battled evil in three stories penned by Carter — “Curse of the Black Pharaoh”, “Dead of Night”, and “Perchance to Dream” — as well as in a half dozen or so more contributed by the likes of Robert M. Price, CJ Henderson, Joseph S. Pulver Sr. And James Chambers. All of these stories, for those interested, are collected in Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak: Supernatural Sleuth from Marietta Publishing.

Like the pulp characters Carter based him on, Zarnak is something of a Renaissance man. Educated at a number of prestigious universities, including the Heidelberg (where he studied theology with a certain Anton Phibes, according to “The Case of the Curiously Competent Conjurer” by James Ambuehl and Simon Bucher-Jones), the Sorbonne and Miskatonic University, he is an accredited physician, musician, theologian and metaphysicist. He speaks eleven languages and has one of the finest and most complete collections of occult literature in existence. His home drifts like a soap bubble between Half-Moon Street in London, No. 13 China Alley in San Francisco and a cursed apartment building in New York; always decorated in oriental splendour, it is filled to bursting with esoteric paraphernalia, including a hideously decorated mask of Yama which always hangs in a place of honour above Zarnak’s desk.

And, as the saying goes, ‘so a man’s home, his mind’ — Zarnak is the proverbial odd duck. By turns consoling and caustic, arrogant and affectionate, and almost inhumanly ruthless, Zarnak is no comforting Judge Pursuivant or soothing John Silence. He is singularly and irrepressibly Zarnak.

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Karl Edward Wagner was a man fascinated with monsters and, by most accounts, tormented by an overwhelming host of personal demons. A bearded and brawny hard-drinking Southerner who typed with two fingers like his childhood idol Robert E. Howard, he is perhaps best known for his iconic sword-and-sorcery character, Kane: a red-haired, black-hearted warrior whose love of battle and lust for knowledge combine into one all-consuming will to power. Wagner himself was an unlikely combination of savage and savant, his rough outlaw biker exterior sheltering a deep love for tales of imagination and wonder. At one time a practicing psychiatrist pursuing a doctorate in microbiology, he left that field for a writer’s life. He went on to edit numerous anthologies (including DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror from 1980 to 1994), co-found his own short-lived press, and pen several novels and collections. Most of Wagner’s original work is currently out-of-print. Centipede Press is releasing two hardcover collections of his short horror fiction this year. Hopefully, this will re-kindle interest in the man’s work, making it more available (and more affordable) for those who wish to read it.

I was first introduced to Karl Edward Wagner’s work through his R.E. Howard pastiche, Conan: The Road of Kings, a ripping good tale any fan of the barbarian hero should read. From this I moved onto the Kane material, tracked down in musty used bookstores or acquired through well-placed eBay sniping. Over the holidays I managed to find one of his horror collections stuffed into a shop’s bottom shelf. It is Wagner’s first horror collection, In a Lonely Place, and through it I discovered yet another impressive facet of the late author.

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Team Black Gate at WFC 2010: Editor John O'Neill, Contributing Editor Bill Ward, blogger James Enge, Rogue Blades editor Jason Waltz, Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones, blogger John R. Fultz, and blogger Ryan Harvey.

At the 2010 World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio, author and publicist Jaym Gates assembled the world’s greatest literary minds together to discuss Sword & Sorcery. Meaning me, plus some other guys.

In a moment of foresight for which future generations will doubtless be profoundly gratefully, Jaym and SF Signal’s Patrick Hester recorded all the brilliant insights (plus what those other guys said) on state of the art podcast equipment. SF Signal has now published the entire podcast in three parts.

Participants included moderator Jaym Gates, Howard Andrew Jones (author of The Desert of Souls), Black Gate blogger and Writers of the Future winner Ryan Harvey, BG Contributing Editor Bill Ward, World Fantasy Award nominee James Enge, Rogue Blades publisher and editor Jason M. Waltz, Tome of the Undergates author Sam Sykes, Seven Princes author and BG blogger John R. Fultz, The Sword-Edged Blonde author Alex Bledsoe, fan Matthew Wuertz, and literary genius and future leader of the free world John O’Neill.

The far-ranging panel covered the roots of sword & sorcery, the classic canon, what makes a story S&S, and much more. It runs for roughly 90 minutes, ’cause all those other guys wouldn’t shut up. SF Signal has thoughtfully broken it into three podcasts, so the concentrated literary brilliance won’t make your head explode.

They are here: Part I, Part II, and Part III.  Caution: professional authors on a closed course. Do not attempt conversation like this at home.