A Gender Fluid Future on the Moon: John Varley’s Steel Beach

A Gender Fluid Future on the Moon: John Varley’s Steel Beach

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Steel Beach (Ace Books, August 1993). Cover by Todd Cameron Hamilton

My hot take for 2026: books are ephemeral.

Old news, perhaps, but did any spec-fic writer know this better than John Varley?  In 1992’s Steel Beach, he positively revels in his own unimportance while offering blistering, adroit editorials on everything from indolence to anatomy. But who remembers this book today? And how many remember the name John Varley?

I first encountered Varley’s Nebula-winning short, “The Persistence of Vision,” on a 1988 cross-country camping trip. The Terry Carr-edited Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1 was and is chock-full of good material, but it was Varley’s story that haunted me, in part because it tacitly asks readers whether they would put out their own eyes for love – and I must confess that I didn’t like the question, much less my reflexive, fully sighted answer.

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Forgotten Authors: Henry J. Kostkos

Forgotten Authors: Henry J. Kostkos

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Amazing Stories, August-September 1933, cover by Leo Morey

This week starts a brief period where these explorations are going to be shorter, for many of these authors have little biographical information available.

In the 1972 anthology Clarion II, Damon Knight included an essay entitled “Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye,” using the author, along with J. Harvey Haggard, as an example of an author he once read and was invested in, but whose name no longer meant anything to modern readers. At the time, both Kostkos and Haggard were alive (Haggard would be alive for another 29 years).

Henry J. Kostkos was born on June 11, 1900.

Kostkos and his wife, Mary, had two children, Miriam and Maureen. Kostkos worked for Western Electric as an electrical engineer as well as for Bell Labs in Chicago and Ohio. He worked on display mechanisms developed by Bell Labs for their associated telephone companies. At various times, he ran his own contracting business in New York and in Chicago.

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Dark Muse News: Sword & Sorcery Chain Story (#24-#28)

Dark Muse News: Sword & Sorcery Chain Story (#24-#28)

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In August 2025, we hailed the emergence of a second Chain Story project championed by Michael A. Stackpole. This is a Sword & Sorcery-focused, contagious set of connected (“chained”) stories.

Each is:

  • A standalone tale
  • Readable in any order
  • Free to read! (for at least three months from its posting date)
  • Interconnected via a theme involving a Crown

We round up groups every several weeks, but check the Chain Story website for the latest. Here we highlight the latest set of five, Episodes 24-28.

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Why the Hell Am I Running Another Uncanny Magazine Kickstarter?

Why the Hell Am I Running Another Uncanny Magazine Kickstarter?

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Uncanny Magazine cover collage Year 13 (issues 67, 68, and 72). Covers by Paul Lewin, Katy Shuttleworth, and Galen Dara.

This wasn’t my original plan for this guest post. The day before writing this, I was interviewed for the Functional Nerds podcast. During the interview, cohost Tracy Townsend brought up my recent Uncanny Magazine editorial where I said, “Nobody would call a yearly referendum about whether or not your business should exist a stress-free process.” Tracy wanted to know why I kept doing this if that’s the case.

So, why the hell am I running another Uncanny Magazine Kickstarter?

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 4: The Hunter

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 4: The Hunter

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Parker’s first appearance: The Hunter (Pocket Books, 1962)

What is it?

Parker begins!

He’s angry. He’s determined. He’s out for blood. And he’s got big hands!

He’s walking across the George Washington Bridge into New York, scaring motorists who glimpse him out the window as they drive by.

Later he will decide he wants the money that was taken from him. At the moment, however, he just wants revenge.

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What I’ve Been Watching – July 2026

What I’ve Been Watching – July 2026

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I haven’t shared what I’ve been watching, since February. Nothing earth shattering, but I’m sure you occasionally wonder. So…

Back in January, I canceled all my subs except for Prime (keeping BritBox within that one). RokuTV and Tubi are regulars for me now, along with Prime, and I’ve got my DVDs (VHS hasn’t come back into play yet.

I don’t watch much sports anymore, and no brand new shows – I have an antenna, but no recording capability. I’m pretty content with the new normal. I’ve always been a re-watcher, and that helps fill the gap. But I’m still adding in some other stuff. Frankly, I’m happy without all the subs.

HIGH TIDE

This was a total surprise to me when I discovered it a couple weeks ago. I was in high school when Jessie’s Girl exploded. And of course, Rick Springfield was Dr. Noah Drake. I didn’t even watch General Hospital, and I knew that.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, March 1923 (Volume 1, Number 1) Part 2

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, March 1923 (Volume 1, Number 1) Part 2

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Weird Tales volume 1 number 1 boasts 26 separate pieces of fiction, one of which is continued in the next issue. As you’d expect from an anthology, some stories are better than others. None reach the heights of the fiction the magazine would publish later. But a few are at least interesting in their own right.

I’m going to look here at each story, which means this post is going to run long. After I’m done going piece-by-piece, I’ll write about the collective effect of the issue, and how it reads as a whole. But there are over 100,000 words of fiction to discuss before I get there.

Three of the longest pieces lead off the issue. The second story is the cover feature, and the third story’s the first part of the serial. The opener, though, is “The Dead Man’s Tale,” by Willard E. Hawkins. So the first story of the first issue of Weird Tales lets us know right in its title to expect the unexpected: here dead men do tell tales.
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Severed Arms and the Angel of Death: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Severed Arms and the Angel of Death: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories XV (DAW Books, October 1987). Cover by Michael Whelan

It’s been awhile, but given a nudge from John O’Neill I’m back with the ongoing perusal of DAW’s Year’s Best Horror series.

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XV was the fifteenth in the lineup and the seventh volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d. 1994). This book was copyrighted and printed in 1987 and represents the best short horror in the field for 1986. Michael Whelan’s art appears for the twelfth time as a cover for the series. Whelan’s art here depicts a gruesome scene of a severed, but wrapped, human arm in the meat drawer of a refrigerator. A sign of horror trends in the mid- to late 1980s?

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Forgotten Authors: Harry Stephen Keeler

Forgotten Authors: Harry Stephen Keeler

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Harry Stephen Keeler

Harry Stephen Keeler was born in Chicago on November 3, 1890. His father died when he was two and his mother subsequently remarried. After her new husband, who was a gambler, lost Keeler’s mother’s savings and mortgaged the family home that was left to her by Keeler’s father, he killed himself. Keeler’s mother subsequently remarried again, but her third husband died of illness when Keeler was only 13 years old.  Following the suicide of his first step father, Keeler’s mother took in boarders, mostly theatrical workers, to make ends meet and keep the family home.

The trauma of losing a father and two step fathers by the age of 13 appears to have had an impact on Keeler’s mental state and his mother had him committed to an insane asylum when he was a child. He apparently had multiple sessions in the asylum, including one that ended with his discharge on July 29, 1914, when he was declared recovered and had his property and voting rights restored.

Keeler often skipped school to attend to a paper route, but eventually he managed to earn a degree in electrical engineering from the Armour Institute. From 1912 to 1914, he worked in a steel mill in Chicago. He began writing in earnest in 1913, publishing his first short story that year. 1914 saw him publishing his first piece of crime fiction, the novella “Victim No. 5.” His early fiction appeared in magazines such as Argosy and Top-Notch Magazine.

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From Woking to Ansby: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

From Woking to Ansby: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

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The High Crusade (Berkley Books, October 1983). Cover by Tom Kidd

The High Crusade is one of the earlier novels in Poul Anderson’s long career: serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the summer of 1960 (just as it was changing its title to Analog), published in book form that same year, and nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961, though it lost to A Canticle for Leibowitz. It remained popular and is still in print. In a lot of ways the story is a romp, but it also has themes that Anderson returned to more seriously in later books.

The High Crusade starts out as an alien invasion story, of a form going back to H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds: A spacecraft lands in England, and mysterious beings emerge from it, wielding advanced weapons and killing people to show their power. We have the same contrast between human and alien military technologies. But in this story, Anderson plays a trick he loved to do, especially early in his career (in stories such as “Journeys End” and “The Man Who Came Early”): he reverses the expected outcome from earlier stories.

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