Browsed by
Author: John ONeill

Take a Daily Trip Back to the Future with Galactic Journey

Take a Daily Trip Back to the Future with Galactic Journey

Comments 0 Comment

Galactic Journey logoRich Horton and Matthew Wuertz have been writing retro-reviews of vintage SF magazines for Black Gate for years, and they have a lot of fans. In fact, it seems to me there’s a steadily growing interest in classic SF, and SF magazines, and a fresh crop of websites popping up to feed that interest. One of the best I’ve found is Gideon Marcus’ Galactic Journey, which reviews SF magazines as they appeared, 55 years ago.

Step through a portal that leads 55 years to the past. 1961: A youthful President named Jack Kennedy promises to reinvigorate America. Formal relations with Communist Cuba have been severed. The first American Mercury flight, piloted by a chimpanzee, anticipates an impending manned mission. Science fiction is a burgeoning field in print and on screen. It is the world of the Galactic Journey.

Jaunt back five and a half decades and dive into the sci-fi and Space Race headlines of the day. See the world through the eyes of a fan with a vintage time frame, but a progressive mindset.

At the Hugo-recommended Galactic Journey (www.galacticjourney.org), you’ll experience the world of day by day, exactly 55 years ago. You’ll stroll down memory lane — or be immersed in a whole new world. Read the in-depth articles on each satellite launch, with behind-the-scenes looks at the people who made them fly. Enjoy the thorough, slightly snarky, and never dull reviews of fiction and films, with links to copies of the reviewed works so you can follow along at home. Live an entirely different time without leaving the comfort of your screen.

Gideon covers F&SF and Analog every month, and the bi-monthly Galaxy and IF in alternating months. He’s looking for reviewers to cover Amazing and Fantastic. The blog has been active since October 2013, starting its coverage in late 1958.

…

Read More Read More

March 2016 Apex Magazine Now on Sale

March 2016 Apex Magazine Now on Sale

Comments 0 Comment

Apex Magazine March 2016-smallIt’s a pretty star-studded line up this issue of Apex, with fiction from Lavie Tidhar, Elizabeth Bear, Jason Sanford, and Travis Heermann. Jason Sizemore gives us the complete scoop in his editorial.

Our three original works this month are all over the place thematically. In Lavie Tidhar’s novelette “Agent of V.A.L.I.S.”, the protagonist is a forgotten science fiction writer who gets involved in an adventure containing Philip K. Dick, Jesus Christ, and an all-powerful sentient AI. Jason Sanford’s story “Death Flowers of Never Forgotten Love” posits what if we had the technology to alter our memories of the recently deceased. “Screaming Without a Mouth” by Travis Heerman mines the unsettling fog of J-horror with modern technology in a memorable and depressing manner — a story that our readers will recognize as belonging in no other publication than Apex Magazine.

We welcome Elizabeth Bear back to our pages with “Dolly.” Her reprint about emerging sentience and a murder is a recent classic of the genre.

Russell Dickerson interviews cover artist Vincent Sammy about how to create horror within art without resorting to over-the-top gore. Andrea Johnson questions author Travis Heerman about the use of an epistolary format and productivity. Rounding out the issue are five great poems from five great poets: Rodney Gomez, Caleb J. Oakes, Matthew Chamberlin, Annie Neugebauer, and David Barber.

Our podcast this month is “Death Flowers of Never Forgotten Love” by Jason Sanford.

Here’s the complete TOC, with links to all the free content.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Brutal Pantomimes by Rhys Hughes

New Treasures: Brutal Pantomimes by Rhys Hughes

Comments 0 Comment

Brutal Pantomimes Rhys Hughes-smallRhys Hughes is an amazingly prolific short story writer with dozens of collections to his credit, including The Smell of Telescopes (2000), Nowhere Near Milk Wood (2002), and Bone Idle in the Charnel House (2014). His novels include The Percolated Stars (2003), The Young Dictator (2013), and Captains Stupendous (2014).

His latest is a handsome new collection of 10 stories (most previously unpublished) from Egaeus Press, with a cover by František Tichý and interior illustrations by Jacques Callot. Check it out.

Brutal Pantomimes contains ten tales of absurd exoticism, weird adventure and wild fantasy from the shockingly prolific and highly acclaimed Rhys Hughes. Most of the stories, novellettes and novella included have not previously been published and some are regarded by their author to be amongst his best works.

Enjoy pirate shenanigans, a globe of the Earth that is a voodoo doll, the dubious gifts of a Greek god, impossible angles, improbable sciences, impractical philosophies, a rare tropical yeti in a submarine and so much more. Featuring an introduction by Michael Cisco…

The book is a lithographically printed, 256 page sewn hardback with colour endpapers and cover by František Tichý, as well as illustrations throughout by Jacques Callot. It is limited to 300 copies.

Brutal Pantomimes was published by Egaeus Press on February 6, 2016. It is 256 pages, priced at £32.00 (including postage). The cover is by František Tichý. Order directly at the Egaeus Press website.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Win a Copy of The Emperor’s Railroad, First Book of The Dreaming Cities by Guy Haley!

Win a Copy of The Emperor’s Railroad, First Book of The Dreaming Cities by Guy Haley!

Comments 0 Comment
The Emperor's Railroad-small The Ghoul King-small

Two weeks ago we had a look at Tor.com‘s impressive catalog of recent fantasy titles, and gave away free copies of each of their March releases. Today, we’d like to do something just as exciting: give you a chance to win one of three advance copies of Guy Haley’s new novella The Emperor’s Railroad, the opening installment of a terrific new adventure fantasy series, The Dreaming Cities.

What’s it about? Zombies! City States! Prehistoric beasts! Mutants and machine relics! Check out this awesome description.

Global war devastated the environment, a zombie-like plague wiped out much of humanity, and civilization as we once understood it came to a standstill. But that was a thousand years ago, and the world is now a very different place.

Conflict between city states is constant, superstition is rife, and machine relics, mutant creatures and resurrected prehistoric beasts trouble the land. Watching over all are the silent Dreaming Cities. Homes of the angels, bastion outposts of heaven on Earth. Or so the church claims. Very few go in, and nobody ever comes out.

Until now…

How do you win a copy? Easy! Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “The Emperor’s Railroad.” That’s all it takes! Three winners will be drawn at random from all qualifying entries, and each will receive one of our precious advance proofs.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Machines That Kill, edited by Fred Saberhagen & Martin Harry Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Machines That Kill, edited by Fred Saberhagen & Martin Harry Greenberg

Comments 2 comments
Machines That Kill-small Machines That Kill-back-small

Today’s Vintage Treasure is a fine example of a recently extinct species: the mass market anthology.

Allow me a moment to mourn the loss of this beautiful and now-vanished creature. In days gone by, mass market anthologies thundered in vast herds across bookstore shelves, terrorizing lesser tomes. A single bookstore ecosystem could support a vast number of anthologies with a spellbinding array of thematic plumage, from horror to romantic fantasy to sword & sorcery and far future SF. In recent years, publishers such as DAW kept a dwindling number of anthologies alive in captivity for breeding purposes, but these efforts generally resulted in weak-blooded specimens about cats and unicorns. Today, the only relatives of the mass market anthology that survive are its larger cousins, the trade paperback and small press hardcover.

But not so long ago this creature strode proudly across the publishing savannah, introducing the curious to new writers, helping readers discover a wide range of different voices they might not otherwise encounter. The one I want to talk about today is the 1984 Ace paperback Machines That Kill, edited by Fred Saberhagen & Martin Harry Greenberg.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight by Liane Merciel

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight by Liane Merciel

Comments 0 Comment
Pathfinder Hellknight-back-small Pathfinder Hellknight-small

Liane Merciel is the author of Dragon Age: Last Flight and The River Kings’ Road. Her first two Pathfinder Tales novels, Nightglass and Nightblade, both followed the adventures of Isiem, raised as a wizard-priest of the dark god Zon-Kuthon in the grim nation of Nidal.

For her third Pathfinder Tales novel she switches setting to the city of Westcrown, and introduces us to the devil-blooded Jheraal, a member of the brutal organization of warriors known as the Hellknights, dedicated to maintaining law and order at any cost. When a serial killer starts targeting hellspawn like Jheraal and her child, Jheraal is forced to partner with a paladin and a cunning diabolist to defeat an ancient enemy to whom even death is no deterrent.

Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight will be published by Tor Books on April 5, 2016. It is 418 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jason Rainville. It also includes a 14-page sneak peek of Tim Pratt’s upcoming novel Liar’s Bargain (sequel to Liar’s Blade and Liar’s Island), and 13 bonus pages of ads for other Pathfinder novels and game books, which were a lot of fun to flip through.

March 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now on Sale

March 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now on Sale

Comments 0 Comment

Lightspeed March 2016-smallThe cover story for the March 2016 Lightspeed is Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station, Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0.” You have to admit, as title’s go, that one’s pretty darn good. The cover artist is Reiko Murakami.

The ebook-exclusive reprint this month is Mark W. Tiedemann’s novella “Miller’s Wife,” which originally appeared in Black Gate 4. Here’s what Rich Horton said about it when he reviewed it in the January 2004 issue of Locus.

The centerpiece of the Fall issue of Black Gate is Mark Tiedemann’s impressive novella “Miller’s Wife.” Egan Ginter is fleeing another failed relationship in the big city; he hopes a couple weeks at a friend’s house in the Ozark town of Saletcroix will heal him. But something odd is going on — Saletcroix’s valley is dying, and a bad run of luck is plaguing the townspeople… Tiedemann maintains the suspense very well, and resolves the story just that little bit unexpectedly to make it memorable.

Rich made “Miller’s Wife” his Recommended Story of the Month.

In his editorial, John Joseph Adams talks about the impressive success Lightpseed and its sister magazine Nightmare have had in the 2016 Awards season.

…

Read More Read More

The Library of America Publishes Ross Macdonald

The Library of America Publishes Ross Macdonald

Comments 5 comments
Ross Macdonald Four Novels of the 1950s-small Ross Macdonald Three Novels of the Early 1950s-small

The Library of America has been busy as all get-out recently, pumping out archival quality omnibus volumes of Kurt Vonnegut, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Philip K. Dick, H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, David Goodis, and other 20th Century genre authors. The latest beneficiary of all this attention is hardboiled crime fiction writer Kenneth Millar, who published under the name Ross Macdonald.

The first volume, Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s, packed in four novels featuring popular private detective Lew Archer:

The Way Some People Die (1951)
The Barbarous Coast (1956)
The Doomsters (1958)
The Galton Case (1959)

Here’s a look at the original paperback editions (click for bigger images).

…

Read More Read More

Series Fantasy: The Duelists Trilogy by Julia Knight

Series Fantasy: The Duelists Trilogy by Julia Knight

Comments 2 comments
Swords And Scoundrels-small Legends And Liars-small Warlords and Wastrels-small

Every time a fantasy series successfully wraps up, we bake a cake.

This week we celebrated the completion of Julia Knight’s Duelists trilogy, published by Orbit in quick succession late last year, all with covers by Gene Mollica:

Swords and Scoundrels (400 pages, $14.99/$9.99 digital, October 6, 2015)
Legends and Liars (400 pages, $15.99/$9.99 digital, November 10 2015)
Warlords and Wastrels (400 pages, $15.99/$9.99 digital, December 15, 2015)

What’s so special about The Duelists trilogy? It’s an adventure fantasy series “full of ruffians, scoundrels and rogues,” and I absolutely love the series description. Here’s Anna Gregson talking about the books on Orbit’s website.

…

Read More Read More

Ramez Naam’s Apex Wins 2016 Philip K. Dick Award

Ramez Naam’s Apex Wins 2016 Philip K. Dick Award

Comments 0 Comment
Apex Ramez Naam-small APEX by Ramez Naam-back-small

Ramez Naam’s novel Apex, the third and final volume in the Nexus Trilogy, received the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award yesterday.

The Award is given each year to a distinguished original science fiction paperback published for the first time in the U.S.A. It’s named after Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Valis, and many other groundbreaking SF novels — most of which were originally published in paperback.

The judges also issued a special citation to Archangel by Marguerite Reed.

Apex was published by Angry Robot on May 12, 2015. It is 608 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The previous volumes in the Nexus Trilogy are Nexus (2012) and Crux (2013). Nexus, the opening book in the series, was also an NPR Best Book of the Year, and won the Prometheus Award and the Endeavour Award.

Read the full award announcement at the Official Philip K. Dick Awards Home Page.