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Author: John ONeill

Vintage Treasures: Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy edited by Lin Carter

Vintage Treasures: Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy edited by Lin Carter

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Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy, Volume 1 (Ballantine Books, 1972). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo

Over the decades we’ve spent a lot of pixels at Black Gate talking about Lin Carter’s groundbreaking Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. He was under contract to produce a book a month for editors Ian and Betty Ballantine, and that’s exactly what he did for five years and 65 titles, almost all reprints of out-of-print fantasy novels and original anthologies. For the most part my favorites are those marvelous anthologies, including The Young Magicians, Golden Cities, Far, Discoveries in Fantasy, and others.

In 1972 and 1973 Carter produced the first two volumes in what he’d hoped would be an ongoing series, Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy. They each included four novellas, accompanied by his usual fine introductions, and it’s a tragedy he was unable to produce any more before the Adult Fantasy series was discontinued when Random House bought Ballantine. In his opening essay, Four Worlds of Wonder, Carter explains his focus on longer fantasy.

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Strange Diseases, Vengeful Ghosts, and Lovecraftian Horror: September/October 2022 Print SF Magazines

Strange Diseases, Vengeful Ghosts, and Lovecraftian Horror: September/October 2022 Print SF Magazines

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September/October 2022 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by 123RF, 123RF, and Bob Eggleton

I was at the launch party for Randee Dawn’s debut novel Tune in Tomorrow at Worldcon this month (with the most amazing TV-shaped cake — seriously, check it out), when I spotted the also-amazing Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I was hoping for the chance to catch up, but long before that happy event the party became so crowded that Jacob Weisman and I, who’ve both managed to dodge COVID for the past two years, nervously ducked out and ended up talking in relative quiet on the Hyatt skyway.

Some time before midnight Sheila found us as she made her weary way to her hotel room. We pulled over some chairs, and soon there was a small crowd of us gossiping about short fiction on the skyway over North Stetson Avenue (ironically enough, overlooking the exact location of the opening scene of my novel The Robots of Gotham).

One of the things Sheila shared was that, despite all my expectations to the contrary, the print SF magazines — including Asimov’s and Analog — are doing very well, thank you. The pandemic played havoc with distribution, and for the last few years all the attention (and award nominations) has gone to online magazines like Uncanny and Clarkesworld, but Asimov’s subscriber base has proven remarkably steadfast, and is even growing. I’ve been used to a steady stream of bad news, and general gloom and doom around the print mags for years, and it was wonderful to hear they have plenty of life in them yet.

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Vintage Treasures: The Starhammer/Vang Trilogy by Christopher Rowley

Vintage Treasures: The Starhammer/Vang Trilogy by Christopher Rowley

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Starhammer, The Vang: The Military Form and The Vang: The Battlemaster
(Del Rey, 1986 – 1990). Covers by David Schleinkofer and Stephen Hickman

I’m a huge fan of modern science fiction, and I find no shortage of new novels and and series to coo over here. But there are times when I miss the old-school SF of last century, rooted in the Cold War paranoia of the 50s and 60s. The Golden Age of invaders from space, all-consuming blobs, and gooey alien parasites that have their sights set on your lower G.I. tract.

In the late 80s Christopher Rowley, author of the popular Battle Dragons series from Roc, had a hit with his Vang novels, a space opera/alien parasite hybrid. Clearly inspired by the author’s love of Alien and pulp-era SF by A.E. Van Vogt, Jack Vance, Eric Frank Russell, and others, the trilogy — Starhammer, The Vang: The Military Form and The Vang: The Battlemaster — had the sweep of epic space opera crossed with the gritty realism of James Cameron’s Colonial Marines.

The story of The Vang begins when the asteroid miner Seed of Hope, illegally prospecting in a Forbidden Sector of the Saskatch system, finds a billion year-old vessel containing an alien horror, the last vestige of a race nearly annihilated in an ancient conflict that convulsed the galaxy. It’s an encounter that will plunge humanity into a desperate war of survival.

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High-spirited Mayhem: The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

High-spirited Mayhem: The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Foundryside-small Shorefall-small


Foundryside, Shorefall, and Locklands (Crown and Del Rey, 2018 – 2022). Cover designs by Will Staehle

Robert Jackson Bennett is the author of the Divine Cities trilogy (City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles), as well as the BFA and Shirley Jackson Award winner Mr. Shivers. Locklands, the closing novel in his Founders series, was released at the end of June and, in keeping with tradition, we baked a cake here at our rooftop headquarters to celebrate the successful wrap of another quality fantasy trilogy. (Apropos of nothing, we badly need a gym in the rooftop headquarters…)

Former Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar called Foundryside, the first volume in the trilogy:

Absolutely riveting… A magnificent, mind-blowing start to a series… I felt fully, utterly engaged by the ideas, actually in love with the core characters… and in awe of Bennett’s craft.

It came in fourth in the annual Locus poll for Best Fantasy Novel, and was selected as one of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018 by The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog. Here’s how they described it at the time.

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New Treasures: Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms edited by John Joseph Adams

New Treasures: Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms edited by John Joseph Adams

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Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms (Grim Oak Press, March 8, 2022)

I owe my professional writing career to John Joseph Adams.

I published four stories in Black Gate magazine, all under the name Todd McAulty. I wrote one novel, The Robots of Gotham, and before I could really start to shop it around John purchased and published it under his John Joseph Adams imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. That was the first time I’d ever been paid for my fiction, and with that one sale, John made me a professional writer. He subsequently bought several of my short stories for Lightspeed magazine, including one I really wanted to call “Sixty Ton Killer Robot,” but John wisely retitled “The Ambient Intelligence.”

It’s no surprise that John and I are pretty aligned. We both love fast paced adventure SF and fantasy in colorful settings. Also robots! (Yeah I know. Everybody loves robots.) John is a prolific anthologist, with nearly 50 anthologies under his belt in the last 15 years or so, including the popular Wastelands and The Apocalypse Triptych volumes, and I’m always on the lookout for his latest. So I was excited to see Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, a fat volume of original stories from the top fantasists working today, including Kate Elliott, Carrie Vaughn, Tobias S. Buckell, James L. Cambias, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Jeffrey Ford, Becky Chambers, Theodora Goss, and many others.

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Vintage Treasures: The Naphar Trilogy by Sharon Baker

Vintage Treasures: The Naphar Trilogy by Sharon Baker

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Quarreling, They Met the Dragon, Journey to Membliar, and Burning Tears of Sassurum
(Avon, 1984, 1987, and 1988). Covers by Wayne Barlowe, Paul Lehr, and Ron Walotsky

Sharon Baker died in Seattle in June 1991, at the much-too-young age of 53. She began writing in her 40s, while she was busy raising four sons. In a Gale Contemporary Author interview in 1986 she said

I felt like a car appliance [and] to remind myself that I was not, I signed up for a weekly writing class… On good days, I no longer feel like an appendage of my station wagon or anything else. I feel like me. And I like it.

Her first novel was Quarreling, They Met the Dragon, published in 1984, and it drew immediate attention. In Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss praised it as evidence of “An original mind at work on an ingenious world.” Gene Wolfe said “Sharon Baker is better than good… [she will be] one of the field’s most important author’s by the close of this decade,” and Publishers Weekly compared her to Samuel R, Delany.

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New Treasures: Ymir by Rich Larson

New Treasures: Ymir by Rich Larson

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Ymir (Orbit, July 12, 2022). Cover by Arcangel

Rich Larson has enjoyed a vanishingly rare career phenomenon. He’s vaulted into the top rank of modern science fiction almost solely on the strength of his short fiction.

This used to be more common. In fact, it used to be the way to do it — you published a few dozen short stories in genre magazines, maybe got a series going, attracted a few sly looks from publishers, and next thing you know you had a book deal and a real writing career. That doesn’t happen any more. At least, not the way it used to.

Except for Rich Larson, apparently. He burst onto the scene in 2012, and sold over 100 stories in the next six years — more than one per month. In 2016 Gardner Dozois called him “one of the best new writers to enter science fiction in more than a decade.” Since then he’s been focusing on longer work, and in July of this year he published his third novel Ymir. Publishers Weekly says “The nonstop action and violence keep the pages flying. Fans of finely crafted, high-intensity sci-fi stories will enjoy.”

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Vintage Treasures: New Arrivals, Old Encounters by Brian Aldiss

Vintage Treasures: New Arrivals, Old Encounters by Brian Aldiss

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New Arrivals, Old Encounters (Triad/Granada, August 1983). Cover by Tim White

New Arrivals, Old Encounters was Brian Aldiss’s 17th collection, an incredible accomplishment no matter how you slice it. It contains ten stories published between 1966-78, plus two originals.

The book is crammed full of classic Aldiss, including spacefarers who return after a century to find a radically transformed Earth, a society that worships computers, the Tahiti underworld, dream research, the future of human evolution, and missionary clones on a distant planet. There’s adventure, thoughtful speculation, dark comedy, and bleak satire all wrapped up in a tight package, as only Aldiss could do it.

Thomas M. Wagner wrote a detailed (and highly enthusiastic) review 25 years ago for SF Reviews; discussing each of the tales. Here’s the highlights.

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Future Treasures: The Wraithbone Phoenix by Alec Worley

Future Treasures: The Wraithbone Phoenix by Alec Worley

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The Wraithbone Phoenix (Black Library, August 30, 2022). Cover uncredited.

Black Library’s new Warhammer Crime imprint has caught my eye recently. I heartily enjoy their Warhammer 40K novels — and we’ve covered them at Black Gate fairly extensively over the past 20 years — but there’s only so much bleak far future military SF you can include in your regular diet.

Or is there? In the last two years Black Library has branched out with new Warhammer Horror and Warhammer Crime imprints, which re-focus the galaxy-spanning genocidal conflicts of the Warhammer 40K era into far more personal tales of urban crime and supernatural intrigue, and they have reinvigorated my interest in the rich and consequential milieu. Some of the most exciting and well-crafted far-future SF of the past few decades has been published under the 40K banner, and I’m excited to see that tradition carry on with a new generation of talent.

The latest release to pique my interest is The Wraithbone Phoenix by Alec Worley, which arrives in trade paperback and audio formats next Tuesday. It’s the second tale featuring Baggit and Clodde, a fast-talking ratling and his ogryn pal, following the popular audio title Dredge Runners.

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New Treasures: The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien

New Treasures: The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien

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The World Gives Way (Orbit, May 3, 2022). Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

Here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters there are few things as exciting as a good science fiction debut. (Maybe our Friday zeppelin races? Let’s call it a tossup.)

Marissa Levien’s The World Gives Way is one of the year’s strongest debuts. It made The New York Times list of Best Science Fiction Books of the Year, and Lacy Baugher at Culturess calls it “bleak, beautiful science fiction done right.” A.S. Moser at Strange Horizon says it’s “brave storytelling that uses the distorted mirror of science fiction to best effect.”

But my favorite review came from Martin Cahill at Tor.com, who calls it “incredible… The World Gives Way socks [readers] in the gut.” Here’s an excerpt.

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