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Author: John ONeill

Vintage Treasures: The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy

Vintage Treasures: The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy

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The City, Not Long After (Bantam Spectra, February 1990). Cover by Mark Harrison

Bantam Spectra was, without a doubt, the imprint where the action was at the end of the last century. Founded by Lou Aronica in 1985, it published some of the very best science fiction and fantasy of the 80s and 90s, including David Brin’s The Postman (1985) and The Uplift War (1987), William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1989), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars (1993 – 96), and a little book titled A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (and its sequels). The imprint was eventually retired in 2009, but not until it had published hundreds of fine books and launched a great many careers.

Pat Murphy published two memorable books with Bantam Spectra, both in 1990, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning collection Points of Departure and the Mythopoeic and Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated novel The City, Not Long After, a postapocalyptic tale of a depopulated San Francisco.

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New Treasures: Kagen the Damned by Jonathan Maberry

New Treasures: Kagen the Damned by Jonathan Maberry

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Kagen the Damned (St. Martin’s Griffin, May 10, 2022). Cover design by Bob Grom

Jonathan Maberry is a prolific guy, with dozens of science fiction and horror novels under his belt — including ten volumes in the popular Joe Ledger series, which Brandon Crilly described in his Black Gate review as “filled with a host of deeply-imagined heroes and villains… Every novel features some sort of established horror premise and gives it a mad science twist.” As a fervent supporter of mad science, that’s definitely an endorsement I can get behind.

Kagen the Damned is Maberry’s first straight-up adventure fantasy, and it looks like a winner. Publishers Weekly calls it “gripping… peppered with figures from European folklore and monsters from the Cthulhu mythos,” and Fantasy Book Critic describes it as “a violent pulp read, fast and furious, with fantastic ideas and creepy mythos.” In true adventure-fantasy style, it’s the first installment of an epic fantasy series, and that’s okay by me. Here’s an excerpt from the notice at Kirkus Reviews, which labels it “a vibrant, textured, and exciting admixture of subgenres.”

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Vintage Treasures: Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard

Vintage Treasures: Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard

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Life During Wartime (Bantam Spectra paperback reprint, July 1991). Cover by Mark Harrison

In April 1986 Lucius Shepard published his famous novella “R&R” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It was the tale of young David Mingolla, an American draftee reluctantly fighting a war in a near-future Central America, where psychics predict enemy movements and soldiers are fed a cocktail of experimental combat drugs. It was an immediate hit, nominated for a Hugo Award and winning the SF Chronicle, Locus, and Nebula Awards.

Shepard expanded it into Life During Wartime in 1987, his most successful novel, nominated for the Locus, Dick, and Clarke awards. I read it in the summer of 1988 and found it filled with haunting scenes. It’s perhaps the most memorable SF depiction of war I’ve ever seen, a scathing indictment of American interventionism, with insane A.I’s (who still make more sense than the war), secret psy-ops, a Heart of Darkenss-like trek through a twisted and lethal jungle, and the dark secret of the war’s origins waiting for Mingolla at the end of his harrowing journey.

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Adventures in Supernatural Dystopia: The Edinburgh Nights Novels by T. L. Huchu

Adventures in Supernatural Dystopia: The Edinburgh Nights Novels by T. L. Huchu

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The Library of the Dead and Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments (Tor Books, June 2021 and April 2022)

Tor Books seems to have a hit on its hands with the Edinburgh Nights novels by Zimbabwe author T. L. Huchu (who writes non-genre novels under the name Tendai Huchu). The opening book The Library of the Dead hit the bestseller lists in the US, and expectations were high for the second, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, which arrived in April.

The international press raved about the first book. The Times called it “A fast-paced, future-set Edinburgh thriller… mixes magical mysteries with a streetwise style of writing,” and SFX labeled it “One of the strangest and most compelling fantasy worlds you’ll see all year.” But my favorite coverage was Stuart Kelly’s thoughtful review in The Scotsman, which said, “Contemporary fantasy, at its best, is both escapist and urgent: this does both admirably.” Here’s a longer snippet.

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Vintage Treasures: The Budayeen Trilogy by George Alec Effinger

Vintage Treasures: The Budayeen Trilogy by George Alec Effinger

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The Budayeen Trilogy: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss
(Bantam Spectra, 1988, 1990, and 1992). Covers by Jim Burns (When Gravity Fails), and Paul Youll & Steve Youll

George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen trilogy, sometimes called the Marîd Audran trilogy, is one of the enduring early classics of cyberpunk.

It had its birth in his short story “The City on the Sand,” originally published in the April 1973 issue The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was his first story set in the futuristic walled city of Budayeen, the city in the sand, a place of dark shadows and even darker inhabitants. Eventually Effinger set nine tales in Budayeen, including his most famous story, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winner “Schrödinger’s Kitten,” and all three of his most popular novels: When Gravity Fails (1987), A Fire in the Sun (1989), and The Exile Kiss (1991), featuring the street-smart detective Marîd Audran.

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A Lush Visual History of Science Fiction: Futures Past by Jim Emerson

A Lush Visual History of Science Fiction: Futures Past by Jim Emerson

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The first two issues of Futures Past, a Visual History of Science Fiction, edited and published by Jim Emerson

Way back in the 90s, before most of you young whippersnappers were born, Jim Emerson had a very fine fanzine called Futures Past, covering the birth of modern science fiction. He published four issues, each covering one year of SF history, from 1926-29.

In 2014 Jim resurrected his fondly-remembered zine as a 64-page digital magazine, with gorgeous full-color pages. The first issue covered 1926, the year Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories. Futures Past Vol. 1 illuminated the Birth of Modern Science Fiction, covering all the highlights of science fiction publishing in magazines and books.

A Kickstarter intended to fund full-color print versions of the new version in 2014 wasn’t successful. Undaunted, Jim funded the project himself, and earlier this year I was surprised and very pleased to receive a print copy of Futures Past, Volume 2 in the mail. Covering the year 1927 and the Dawn of the SF Blockbuster, this 144-page publication is a love letter to a forgotten era, when a brand new literary genre was being born in the pages of pulp magazines, books, and on the silver screen.

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New Treasures: The Best of David Brin

New Treasures: The Best of David Brin

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The Best of David Brin (Subterranean Press, July 31, 2021). Cover by Patrick Farley

Subterranean Press has done a flat-out fabulous job of producing memorable single-author collections over the last decade.

For one thing, Subterranean mastermind William Schafer has terrific taste. He edited a delightful small press magazine (titled, appropriately enough, Subterranean) for many years, and demonstrated admirable skill at selecting and editing short fiction. For another, he’s been working at it tirelessly for decades, and it shows. He’s produced dozens of Best of retrospective collections from many of the top SF, fantasy and horror writers in biz, including Lucius Shepard (two volumes!), John Kessel, Walter Jon Williams, Elizabeth Hand, Elizabeth Bear, Michael Marshall Smith, Harry Turtledove, Greg Egan, Chaz Brenchley, Alastair Reynolds, Gregory Benford, Nancy Kress, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Joe Haldeman, Kage Baker, Neal Barrett, Jr., Robert Silverberg, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Swanwick, Larry Niven, and many others.

And thirdly — these are really gorgeous books. They’re generously sized hardcovers, published in both deluxe limited formats and very reasonable-priced trade hardcover editions, usually around 40 bucks retail. The one that grabbed my eye recently was The Best of David Brin, released just last year. It’s a feast of a book, just the thing I need to settle down with after a long and tiring week.

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Magic, Dinosaurs, and Mad Scientists: The Tensorate Series by Neon Yang

Magic, Dinosaurs, and Mad Scientists: The Tensorate Series by Neon Yang

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The Tensorate Series (Tor.com, September 21, 2021). Cover by Yuko Shimizu

I love omnibus volumes. They’re the safety blanket of the fat fantasy market. Let’s face it, if your plane’s going down over a desert island and you can only grab one book, you’re gonna secure yourself a thick omnibus, right? Of course you are. Heaven knows how long it will take until that stately cruise liner arrives to rescue you. I plan all my book purchases with this in mind, and it’s worked out well so far.

It’s great to see Tor.com start to produce omnibus editions of their popular novellas. They did it with Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti. The did it with Andy Remic’s An Impossible War novellas, and Sarah Gailey’s American Hippo stories. They did it with Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour. They did it with…. well, actually, I think that’s it. But what the hell, it’s a start.

Late last year Tor.com published a tidy omnibus volume of all four of Neon Yang’s Tensorate novellas, a series that has been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Locus awards, and it was such a great value I snatched it up immediately. I’m ready for the plane to go down, Captain.

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Alan Brown on Cordwainer Smith’s Classic Norstrilia

Alan Brown on Cordwainer Smith’s Classic Norstrilia

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First paperback release of Norstrilia (Ballantine, 1975), with the infamous “dog-derived undergirls”
back cover text (they “smelled of romance all the time.”) Cover by Gray Morrow

For the past six years Alan Brown has had an entertaining biweekly series at Tor.com on our favorite topic — vintage SF & fantasy. He’s covered Keith Laumer’s Bolo, Poul Anderson’s Flandry of Terra, Andre Norton’s The Beast Master, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, David Brin’s Startide Rising, and about a jillion others.

Last week he took a look at Cordwainer Smith’s classic 1975 novel Norstrilia, originally published as two shorter works, The Planet Buyer (1964) and The Underpeople (1968). According to fannish legend, Smith’s publishers at Pyramid Books in the 60s felt it was too long, so he obliged them by breaking it up into two smaller novels. It was eventually published in the original format, under the title Norstrilia, by Lester del Rey at Ballantine Books in 1975.

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Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 4 & 5, edited by Isaac Asimov

Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 4 & 5, edited by Isaac Asimov

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The Hugo Winners, Volume 4 and Volume 5 (Doubleday, April 1985 and April 1986). Covers by Kiyoshi Kanai and Tita Nasol

Last week I looked back at three of the finest science fiction anthologies ever published, The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1, 2, & 3. The first two volumes, included in my introductory order with the Science Fiction Book Club in 1976, were essentially my introduction to science fiction, and they bear much of the responsibility for turning me into a lifelong fan of SF — and especially short SF.

Asimov eventually edited nine volumes of The Hugo Winners before his death in 1992. Each was enriched with his signature breezy and light-hearted story introductions, which portrayed the entirety of the American science fiction community as a tight-knit clubhouse of friendly and brilliant eccentrics. There may have been an element of truth to that at the start (the number of Americans who made a living as full-time SF writers was surprisingly small in the 60s and 70s), but by the 80s Asimov no longer knew the majority of authors he was introducing personally, and it showed.

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