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Author: John ONeill

Vintage Treasures: Wondermakers, edited by Robert Hoskins

Vintage Treasures: Wondermakers, edited by Robert Hoskins

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Cover art: uncredited (left) and FMA (right)

Robert Hoskins was a pretty familiar name on paperback racks in the 1970s. He was a senior editor at Lancer Books from 1969-1972, and during that time published and edited five volumes of the prestigious Infinity SF anthology series. Overall he edited over a dozen science fiction anthologies, including First Step Outward (1969), Swords Against Tomorrow (1970), and Against Tomorrow (1979). He also wrote ten novels, including three for Roger Elwood’s Laser imprint.

Between 1969-1979 he produced roughly 30 paperbacks, an extraordinary period of output. After 1979 he vanished, and frankly I don’t blame him. If I had to write and package 30 books in 10 years, I’d probably avoid the publishing industry for the rest of my life too. Hoskins died in 1993, and his eyes were probably still bloodshot. His entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia says “Hoskins’s books made no claims to be anything more than entertaining action adventures,” which I think is a fair assessment.

In 1972 and 1974 he produced two odd reprint anthologies, Wondermakers: An Anthology of Classic Science Fiction and Wondermakers 2. My best guess is that these were aimed at the academic market; a big clue is the ad on the back page encouraging Teachers, Librarians and School administrators to “Send for your free Fawcett catalog today!” The rather stiff intro by Robin Scott Wilson opens with “It has become commonplace for students of science fiction to assert the antiquity of the genre,” and that’s as far as I got before I dozed off. The text on the back covers (see scans below) drones on about “Science Fiction’s development” and something about “Man’s questioning, searching beyond the boundaries of his immediate present and into the future.” I’ve never seen books that sound so much like my high school English teacher in my entire life.

But setting aside the dull packaging, these are actually pretty interesting. How many anthologies do you know include Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Theodore Sturgeon, and James Blish under one cover? That’s just the first one; Wondermakers 2 is even more intriguing.

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John DeNardo on the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Reads for April

John DeNardo on the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Reads for April

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Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth-small The Last Emperox-small Creeping Jenny-small

One thing about a global pandemic… at least it doesn’t interfere with my reading time. Book stores may be closed and book sales may be down, but books continue to be published, and I continue to enjoy them. And the always dependable John DeNardo at Kirkus Reviews showed up on time (as always) to give us his read on the best SF and Fantasy for April, making sure I’m kept abreast of the month’s top releases. Here’s a few of his recommendations.

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 438 pages, $26.99 hardcover/$14.99 digital, April 7)

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Ten years after a group of ordinary teenagers, the Chosen Ones, were trained by the government to fulfill a prophecy of killing an all-powerful entity called the Dark One who was decimating entire cities, things are far from normal. While the world has largely moved on, the five heroes — still the world’s most popular celebrities — are having a rough time. One of them, Sloane, suffers from PTSD, and is harboring secrets. When one of the Chosen Ones dies and the others gather for the funeral, they discover that the Dark One’s ultimate goal was perhaps more sinister than they or the government could ever have imagined.

WHY YOU MIGHT LIKE IT: YA author Roth’s first adult novel looks behind the usual superhero tropes and examines the psychological impacts of fading fame and having served one’s purpose.

I’m a sucker for a good superhero tale. Veronica Roth is the author of the international bestselling Divergent Series and Carve the Mark.

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Network Effect is the First Full Novel in the Martha Wells’ Epic Murderbot Saga

Network Effect is the First Full Novel in the Martha Wells’ Epic Murderbot Saga

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Covers by Jaime Jones

Martha Wells exploded into the big time with Murderbot. Black Gate readers, of course, know and love Martha from her Ile-Rien tales “Holy Places,” “Houses of the Dead,” and “Reflections,” which originally appeared in the pages of our print magazine (and her Nebula-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer, which we serialized online in its entirely here.) But the world at large didn’t truly know her the way we did until the first Murderbot tale All Systems Red appeared in 2017, sweeping all the awards — including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus — and kicking off one of the most successful SF series of the 21st Century. Sequel Artificial Condition (2018) won the Hugo and Locus, and she declined the nominations that came her way for the third and fourth installments (there’s a tradition of Black Gate writers declining Hugo Awards, beginning with Matthew David Surridge, but that’s another story.)

Network Effect, the first full-length Murderbot novel, is one of the most anticipated books of 2020, and it arrives in less than three weeks. I’ve heard plenty of glowing reports from folks who received advance copies, but my favorite came from Martha’s fellow BG writer C.S.E. Cooney, who wrote:

Finished reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot 5 Network Effect aloud to Carlos and Sita.

From time to time, I’d come across a sentence that would make me — and then Carlos too, and then my mama, in solidarity — just yell out: “MAARRTHHAA!!!”

Anyway. That was my second read, and it just keeps getting better.

Network Effect will be published by Tor.com on May 5, 2020. It is 352 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Jaime Jones. Read Chapter One of All Systems Red at Tor.com.

When Disney Meets Mad Max: Aftermath: an Adventure Book Game by Plaid Hat Games

When Disney Meets Mad Max: Aftermath: an Adventure Book Game by Plaid Hat Games

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Gen Con 2020 is, as of this writing, still scheduled to take place July 30 – August 2, 2020. But now that other major events, such as the massive San Diego Comic Con have been canceled due to the threat of the coronavirus, I expect it won’t be long before Gen Con is canceled as well. I hope it isn’t, but frankly I think the only thing keeping it on the schedule at this point is blind optimism.

I’m enormously grateful I was able to attend Gen Con last year. It was terrific fun, for one thing, and incredibly eye-opening. I’ve been immersed in gaming culture since I started playing Avalon Hill games in high school, and I spend a lot of time keeping up with new releases and hanging out at the local Games Plus auction. But I had no idea –really,  no freakin’ idea — of the true scale of this industry until I wandered the massive Exhibit Hall at Gen Con. Too large to take in in a single day, the Exhibit Hall (and all its various annexes, sub-rooms, and spillovers halls) is something that every game fan should experience once in their lives. It is jaw-dropping in both scale and diversity.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re standing in a packed stadium with tens of thousands of t-shirt-wearing gamers, and thousands of booths stretching in all directions. But once the wonder of it all starts to wear off, there are always games that stand out. One of those for me was Aftermath, by Plaid Hat Games. Copies were not available at the convention, but a quick internet search assured me it would be in production by October. I waited impatiently, and ordered one as soon as I could.

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Future Treasures: Shorefall, Book 2 of The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

Future Treasures: Shorefall, Book 2 of The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Cover design by Will Staehle

It’s a damn tough time to be publishing new books, with virtually every bookstore in the country closed and Amazon drastically increasing shipping times for books and other non-essential items. So I very much appreciate those authors and publishers who continue to do it. Lord knows I need good books more than ever these days.

Shorefall, the second volume in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders Trilogy, arrives next week from stalwart fantasy publishers Del Rey, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, former Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar called first volume Foundryside “Absolutely riveting… A magnificent, mind-blowing start to a series.” It was selected as one of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018 by The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog; here’s what they said:

The author of the Divine Cities trilogy (a nominee for Best Series at the 2018 Hugo Awards) begins a new trilogy that’s as fun to read as its world is well-imagined. The city state of Tevanne runs on magic and pillage, as the four dominant merchant houses exploit the lands around them (not to mention the poor denizens who crouch outside their walls in a precarious shantytown known as Foundryside), as their scrivers create incredible machines and accomplish feats that look a lot like magic by way of intricate sigils that bend and break the laws of reality. Sancia Grado is a Foundryside thief who comes into possession of Clef, a sentient golden key — and is pursued by police captain Gregor Dandolo, reluctant scion of one of the richest houses. The unwitting Sancia falls into a scheme to destroy the power of the scrivers; putting a stop to it will bring her and Dandolo together as unlikely allies in the greatest theft theft in history, with the lives of everyone in Tevanne on the line. Read our review.

Robert Jackson Bennett is also the author of the BFA and Shirley Jackson Award winner Mr. Shivers, The Troupe, American Elsewhere, and Vigilance (as well as possibly being Chris Pratt in disguise). Here’s the publisher’s description for Shorefall.

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New Treasures: Shadows & Tall Trees 8 edited by Michael Kelly

New Treasures: Shadows & Tall Trees 8 edited by Michael Kelly

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Cover by Matthew Jaffe

Canadian Michael Kelly is a Renaissance Man of modern Weird Fiction. He’s an accomplished author, with a novel and three story collections under his belt, including last year’s All the Things We Never See. He’s also the publisher behind Undertow Publications, one of the leading — maybe the leading — houses behind the modern Weird Fiction resurgence.

And in his spare time he’s one of the most important editors in modern horror, with over a dozen anthologies to his name, including five volumes of Year’s Best Weird Fiction and seven of his widely acclaimed Shadows & Tall Trees. In her annual summation in Best Horror of the Year, Ellen Datlow puts it succinctly: “Shadows and Tall Trees epitomizes the idea of, and is the most consistent venue for weird, usually dark fiction.”

The long-awaited eighth volume arrived last month and, like the previous installments, it’s packed with fiction by the top writers in the field, including Steve Rasnic Tem, Simon Strantzas, V.H. Leslie, Alison Littlewood, Brian Evenson, M. Rickert, and many others. It’s already gathering positive press; here’s the highlights from Matt’s review at Runalong the Shelves.

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Vintage Treasures: Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov

Vintage Treasures: Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov

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Nightfall and Other Stories (Fawcett Crest, 1970). Cover artist unknown.

I’ve been buying small collections recently, and writing about some of the more interesting items here. Two months back I was unpacking a box of 70s paperbacks, and I made a genuinely interesting find: a copy of Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov.

Asimov was one of my heroes. There was a time in the 70s and 80s when he was science fiction, the embodiment not just of what was best in modern SF, but its living history. Asimov was one of John W. Campbell’s early discoveries in Astounding, part of that famous group of brilliant writers that shook up the genre and remade it from the ground up. He began his career as a teenage writer for the pulps in the late 30s, and produced some of the most important SF of the 20th Century in his early years, including the cycle of futuristic mysteries starring Susan Calvin that became I, Robot, the decades-long bestseller Foundation and its sequels, and many, many others.

A generous selection of those tales are collected in Nightfall and Other Stories, including the title story “Nightfall,” selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America as the best science fiction story of all time in 1968, when it was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964. “Nightfall” is the oldest story in the collection, but there are plenty more from Asimov’s most productive period in the magazines, including “Breeds There a Man…?”, the Multivac tale “The Machine That Won the War,” and “Eyes Do More Than See.”

It’s an understatement to say that Nightfall and Other Stories was popular. It was required reading among SF fans, back in the days when kids hung out in cafeterias at lunch and talked about books. Like Dune, Starship Troopers, and The Lord of the Rings, it was simply expected that you were conversant with it, and could keep up with a conversation that referred obliquely to the stories. I’m sure there were a handful of other collections that were accorded similar respect… but I can’t think of any at the moment.

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Future Treasures: The Girl and the Stars by Mark Lawrence

Future Treasures: The Girl and the Stars by Mark Lawrence

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The Girl and the Stars-smallBack in 2011, just before his breakout novel Prince of Thorns arrived and catapulted him to the front ranks of modern fantasy, we published one of my favorite guest posts, an article by Mark Lawrence on the rejection letters he used to get from Black Gate. He’s come a long way since then, with multiple bestselling series, including a complete trilogy in rapidfire succession last year: One Word Kill, Limited Wish, and Dispel Illusion, on May 1, May 28, and November 14, 2019, respectively.

You’d think after that he’d need to take a few months off, maybe. But no. He’s hitting the shelves again next week, with the first installment of a new epic fantasy series which shares a setting with his Book of the Ancestor trilogy (Red Sister, Grey Sister, and Holy Sister), though taking place thousands of years earlier. When a young outcast is tossed into the Pit of the Missing by her people, she find herself in an ancient maze of tunnels under the ice. There she find a lost community of discarded people… and something much more dangerous, deep under the ice. Here’s the description.

In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown. Yaz’s people call it the Pit of the Missing and now it is drawing her in as she has always known it would.

To resist the cold, to endure the months of night when even the air itself begins to freeze, requires a special breed. Variation is dangerous, difference is fatal. And Yaz is not the same.

Yaz’s difference tears her from the only life she’s ever known, away from her family, from the boy she thought she would spend her days with, and has to carve out a new path for herself in a world whose existence she never suspected. A world full of difference and mystery and danger.

Yaz learns that Abeth is older and stranger than she had ever imagined. She learns that her weaknesses are another kind of strength and that the cruel arithmetic of survival that has always governed her people can be challenged.

Our previous coverage of Mark Lawrence’s work includes Red Sister, The Red Queen’s War trilogy, and a 2014 interview with Howard Andrew Jones.

The Girl and the Stars will be published by Ace Books on April 21. It is 384 pages, priced at $27.00 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme. Reac an excerpt from Chapter One here.

See all our recent coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy here.

New Treasures: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

New Treasures: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

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The Sound of Stars-smallThe cover blurb on Alechia Dow’s debut novel The Sound of Stars is “Can Their Love of Books and Pop Music Save the World?”, and I’ve never seen a more obvious question in my life. Every science fiction fan knows books and pop music are the only damn things keeping the world together. Duh.

Still, The Sound of Stars has a few surprises. It’s the story of a human teenager and a lab-created alien invader who team up for an epic journey with a bag of books and their favorite albums, while the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, and that’s not exactly the kind of plot summary I write every day.

It was released in hardcover last month, and Zoraida Córdova at Tor.com called it “a charming sci-fi novel… [set in] a delightful futuristic New York full of pop culture and impossible moral dilemmas,” and Kirkus Reviews says it’s “A promising debut that begs for a sequel.” Here’s a slice of the feature review from Kirkus.

When the spaceships came to Earth, there was confusion and then conflict — large numbers of humans died and the Ilori took over. Seventeen-year-old Ellie Baker managed to hold onto a trove of forbidden books, but her mother is falling into alcoholism and her father receives injections that make him an obedient Ilori servant. Lending books from her secret library makes Ellie feel less helpless even though she risks death for her transgression. Morris (or M0Rr1S) is a labmade, created to appear human and part of a unit sent to Earth to prepare for the true Ilori, who are susceptible to the Earth’s pollution. Although his father is a high-ranking true Ilori, disdainful of feelings, Morris harbors a secret love of human music. He uses his knowledge of Ellie’s secret library to convince her to collect music for him, and their bond deepens when he saves Ellie from execution… A promising debut that begs for a sequel.

The Sound of Stars was published by Inkyard Press on February 25, 2020. It is 432 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Mary Luna. Read the complete Prologue and first chapter at VickyWhoReads.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Captured at Capricon: Stories Of The Restoration by K.M. Herkes

Captured at Capricon: Stories Of The Restoration by K.M. Herkes

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Covers by Niina Cord, Rachel Bostwick, and Nicole Grandinetti

It’s always a pleasure to discover an exciting series by an author from your home town, and that’s exactly what happened to me at Capricon 40 back in February. Capricon is a long-running and very friendly con here in Chicago, with imaginative programming and a great Dealers Room, and one of the highlights for me this year was the Bad Grammar Theater booth.

Bad Grammar is a local reading series, and their booth in the Dealer’s Room this year was manned by Chicago authors Brendan Detzner, R.J. Howell, Megan Mackie, and K.M. Herkes. I spent a lot of time chatting with that friendly bunch, and ended up taking quite a few of their books home with me. One of the most intriguing was Controlled Descent, the opening novel in K.M. Herkes’s Stories Of The Restoration series. When I asked her to describe it, what she said was both so punchy and original that I asked her to write it down for me, and she did.

I write broken heroes who achieve victory through cooperation. — K.M. Herkes

I can’t be the only one who finds that particular brand of heroism strongly appealing.

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