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Vintage Treasures: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Vintage Treasures: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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Year's Best Horror Stories 13-smallI’m still working my way through the fabulous collection of pulps, digest magazines, and paperbacks I brought back from the Windy City Pulp & Paperback show in April.

I found the artifact at left mixed in with a delightful assortment of 80s horror paperbacks near the back of the Dealer’s Room. It’s the 13th volume of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, which Karl Edward Wagner took over from editor Gerald W. Page in 1980 with the eighth volume.

The Year’s Best Horror was a long-running paperback horror anthology published by DAW. Like Donald Wollheim’s World’s Best SF and Lin Carter and Arthur Saha’s Year’s Best Fantasy, both also from DAW, it was a staple on bookstore shelves through the late 70s and early 80s, and served as a terrific introduction to a wide range of new and established writers every year.

For young readers new to science fiction, fantasy, and horror, DAW’s annual Best collections were a terrific way to explore the field. They were ubiquitous, extremely well edited, and — best of all — marvelously inexpensive.

Wagner edited fifteen installments in the series, until he drank himself to death in 1994. The last one was volume XXII, and the series died with him.

If you want to collect DAW’s World’s Best SF and Year’s Best Fantasy, you’re on your own, relegated to tracking down tattered paperbacks in the collector’s market — and paying a pretty penny when you found them. Karl Edward Wagner Year’s Best Horror volumes, however, established an early and enviable reputation as a treasure trove of high-quality horror… so much so that Underwood Miller made the unprecedented decision in the early 90s to collect them  in hardcover omnibus editions, three per volume, under the title Horrorstory — and what gorgeously packed volumes they were.

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Love in War and Realms Beyond Imagining: The Fish, the Fighters and the Song Girl by Janet Morris and Chris Morris

Love in War and Realms Beyond Imagining: The Fish, the Fighters and the Song Girl by Janet Morris and Chris Morris

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The Fish, the Fighters and the Song Girl-small

“Your commander reaches for yonder stars and gods do eye him. And there are more Fates in the wide worlds of men than those whom he has aided.” – from The Fish, the Fighters and the Song Girl.

The Fish, the Fighters and the Song Girl
Janet Morris and Chris Morris
Revised Author’s Cut, published by Perseid Press (386 pages, May 24, 2012, $24.95)
Cover art: Peter Paul Rubens, “The Consequences of War” (detail), 1637-1638

The team of Janet Morris and Chris Morris once again grace us with another excellent collection of Homeric Heroic Fantasy, featuring Tempus, Niko and their Sacred Band of Stepsons. This compilation is comprised of both new stories and earlier tales, herein revised from the original Thieves’ World® series, stories such as “What Women Do Best,” “Power Play,” and “Sanctuary is for Lovers.” Brand-new tales, written especially for this book, include “Shelter from the Storm,” “Lemnian Deed,” “Ravener, Where Art Thou?” and the title story.

All the magic, action, adventure, humor and human drama I’ve come to expect from Janet and Chris Morris are here in spades, and there are enough revelations and plot twists along the way to keep you on your toes.

This collection takes place after the Morris’ masterpiece, The Sacred Band, and gives us more of the history of the Sacred Band as Tempus takes his Stepsons and Thebans north, a world away, into unexplored regions and a mythic country. Though they are courageous, these fighters, they are no strangers to fear. Though they are warriors, hard and tough, they are not immune to love and compassion, to decency and common humanity.

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Future Treasures: Thrones & Bones: Frostborn by Lou Anders

Future Treasures: Thrones & Bones: Frostborn by Lou Anders

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Thrones and Bones Frostborn-smallLou Anders is the editorial director of Pyr Books, one of the most exciting publishers on the market for adventure fantasy fans. Last month, while talking about the latest upcoming title from Pyr, I described Lou as “the closest we have to Lin Carter in the field today: an editor with impeccable taste and boundless energy, who has also been a tireless champion for sword & sorcery.”

Here’s a secret: one of the reasons I described Lou as “tireless” is that — just like Lin Carter — he’s also a talented fantasy writer in his own right. His debut novel Frostborn, an adventure-filled Viking-inspired middle grade series featuring two charming and humorous heroes, arrives in two months from Crown Books. Keep an eye out for it — you won’t want to miss it.

Meet Karn. He is destined to take over the family farm in Norrøngard. His only problem? He’d rather be playing the board game Thrones and Bones. Enter Thianna. Half human, half frost giantess. She’s too tall to blend in with other humans but too short to be taken seriously as a giant.

When family intrigues force Karn and Thianna to flee into the wilderness, they have to keep their sense of humor and their wits about them. But survival can be challenging when you’re being chased by a 1,500-year-old dragon, Helltoppr the undead warrior and his undead minions, an evil uncle, wyverns, and an assortment of trolls and giants.

Readers will embark on a sweeping epic fantasy as they join Karn and Thianna on a voyage of discovery. Antics and hair-raising escapades abound in this fantasy adventure as the two forge a friendship and journey to unknown territory. Their plan: to save their families from harm.

Frostborn, the first book of Thrones & Bones, will be published by Crown Books on August 5, 2014. It is 310 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital version.

New Treasures: Space Opera edited by Rich Horton

New Treasures: Space Opera edited by Rich Horton

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Space Opera Prime Books-smallHallelujah! Rich Horton’s Space Opera anthology is finally here. And it’s massive.

I’ve been waiting for this book since it was announced over six years ago, back in April of 2008. Rich shared his proposed table of contents at the time (and it was groundbreaking enough to be picked up as a news story at places like SF Signal, and listed at ISFDB), but the volume was eventually canceled. I thought that was the end of it, until I saw it back on the Prime Books schedule last year.

I am delighted to finally have it in my hot little hands. The project has become much more ambitious over the years. Did I mention it was massive? Rich’s original TOC listed 11 stories — the finished product has twice that many, from authors like Greg Egan, James Patrick Kelly, Chris Willrich, Kage Baker, Jay Lake, Alastair Reynolds, Ian McDonald, Aliette de Bodard, Robert Reed, Ian R. MacLeod, and many others.

Rich also provides a fascinating introduction, exploring the genesis of the term “space opera” in early SF and the way perceptions of it have changed over the years — as well as a survey of overlooked classics. Here’s a taste:

The term space opera was coined by the late great writer/fan Wilson (Bob) Tucker in 1941, and at first was strictly pejorative… Even so, much work that would now be called space opera was written and widely admired in that period…. most obviously, perhaps, the work of writers like Edmond Hamilton and, of course, E.E. “Doc” Smith…

It may have been Brian Aldiss who began the rehabilitation of the term with a series of anthologies in the mid-70s: Space Opera (1974), Space Odysseys (1974), and Galactic Empires (two volumes, 1976). Aldiss, whose literary credentials were beyond reproach, celebrated pure quill space opera as “the good old stuff,” even resurrecting all but forgotten stories like Alfred Coppel’s “The Rebel of Valkyr,” complete with barbarians transporting horses in spaceship holds. Before long writers and critics were defending space operas as a valid and vibrant form of SF…

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Galaxy, September 1972: A Retro Review

Galaxy, September 1972: A Retro Review

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Galaxy September 1972-smallI don’t usually look at magazines quite this recent in these reviews… though now that I think about this, this issue appeared well over 40 years ago! It’s a fairly significant issue in context, though coming from a period in Galaxy’s history usually disparaged.

This period was the editorship of Ejler Jakobsson, which extended from 1969 to 1974. He succeeded Frederik Pohl, and preceded Jim Baen, two extremely important figures in SF editing. Indeed, the only other editor of Galaxy before Pohl was H. L. Gold, yet another absolutely central SF editor. So Jakobsson was bound to have a hard time being compared to that crowd. A number of writers complained that Jakobsson was an editorial meddler (ironically, the same complaint was often made of Gold).

I confess I have never thought much of Jakobsson’s reign myself. I began reading Galaxy in October 1974, shortly after Baen took over. And I loved Baen’s Galaxy. The few issues of Jakobsson’s I’ve seen before this one have been rather dull.

I often have read words to the effect that he knew little or nothing about SF, but that’s not quite true. He was Finnish and emigrated to the US in 1926, aged 15. In the ’40s, he worked on the magazines Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and indeed edited the latter for a couple of years starting in 1949. But he had been out of the field since that time – so perhaps it was more accurate to say he knew little about then contemporary SF.

He did have a couple of important assistants: Judy-Lynn Benjamin was Managing Editor and Lester Del Rey was Features Editor. (Del Rey and Benjamin married later, of course, and co-founded the Del Rey Books imprint.)

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Meet You In The Bar

Meet You In The Bar

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talesLast week I introduced the topic of the bar story and I saw from the comments that I struck a popular chord.

As I mentioned, the bar story is an example of a framing device, a literary tool which enables a writer to link a series of stories, in this case by having them told by people who have gathered together in a bar. The question of whether the “club story” qualified as a “bar story” came up, and on thinking it over, I realized that it did. For purposes of tale-telling – to say nothing of drinking – one’s club is essentially the same as one’s local.

This week, I’d like to talk in a little more depth about the anthologies edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, Tales From The Spaceport Bar (1987) and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (1989).

As they tell us in the preface to Tales,  the editors were inspired to collect these stories by what they call “that magnificent old cliché with chairs” the spaceport bar – as depicted in the scene from Star Wars (Episode IV, for those of you who weren’t around at the time). The preface also gives us a more detailed history of the sub-genre of “bar story” than I gave you last week.

I think we can all agree, however, that the important contents here are the 22 stories, not the preface. Many, if not most, of the stories are examples of framework “bar stories”, like Larry Niven’s “The Green Marauder” from his Draco’s Tavern series, “Elephas Frumenti” from the Gavagan’s Bar series of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, “Strategy at the Billiards Club” from Lord Dunsany’s Joseph Jorkin series, or Spider Robinson’s “The Centipede’s Dilemna” from Callahan’s Bar.

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Hardboiled Pulp: More Than Just a Man’s World

Hardboiled Pulp: More Than Just a Man’s World

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nogoodfromacorpsecorpse 2The world of hardboiled pulp is certainly male-dominated, but there have been female authors who have given the masters of the sub-genre a run for their money. Leigh Brackett is certainly the best known female hardboiled writer, if only for her screenplay adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1945) for director Howard Hawks’s acclaimed film featuring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. Brackett also adapted Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1973) for director Robert Altman’s deconstruction of the genre with Elliott Gould as Marlowe. Less well-remembered is the hardboiled novel that won Brackett the chance to first adapt Chandler, No Good from a Corpse (1944).

From the outset, it is clear this is Chandler territory. Brackett’s tough guy private eye hero Ed Clive (named for Brackett’s husband and fellow pulp author, Edmond Hamilton) is very much in the Marlowe tradition and the Los Angeles setting only enhances the authentic feel. More than the trappings, it is the fact that Brackett writes convincingly as a man (particularly in her observations of women as objects of lust who are never to be entirely trusted) that is the most startling. One understands Howard Hawks’s surprise when he hired Brackett as a screenwriter on the strength of this book and found out she was a woman. Murder, blackmail, sultry singers, and beatings and shootings aplenty make No Good from a Corpse an unsung classic of pulp detective fiction.

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Goth Chick News: Comic Aficionados, Prepare to Have Your Minds Blown

Goth Chick News: Comic Aficionados, Prepare to Have Your Minds Blown

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Shifter graphic novel-smallWhen attending an event as gi-normous as Chicago’s C2E2, if you come upon a booth with a crowd so large you can’t get close enough to see what is going on, it can only mean one of two things.

Either the girls from Gorilla Tango Burlesque are promoting their Star Wars: A Nude Hope girlie show again or someone is demonstrating something truly amazing.  And though Black Gate photog Chris Z was hoping for the former, in this case it was the latter.

Comic fangirls and boys, allow me to introduce “augmented reality” comics.

To start with augmented reality, or “AR,” is defined by the Mashable tech site as:

A direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory inputs.  As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality.  Unlike virtual reality which replaces the real world with a simulated one, augmented reality is in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) information about the surrounding real (or in this case “comic”) world of the user becomes interactive and digitally manipulate-able. Artificial information about the environment and its objects is overlaid on the “real” world.

Translated, this means by downloading a free companion app and pointing your tablet or smartphone’s camera at pages in an AR comic, you can literally watch the art get up off the page and interact with you.

And this is what drew the insane crowd to the Anomaly Productions booth at C2E2.

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The Joy of Outlining

The Joy of Outlining

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Final Cover-255
My name is M Harold Page, and I’m an outliner!

My name is M Harold Page and I’m an outliner!

Some creative writing forums greet this kind of statement with all the dismay of children being reminded there’s homework to do:

Only writing in flow — “pantsing” — is creative! Outlining is dull, hard work and mechanistic! Etc. Etc. (Oh the angst! I am blocked again…)

The “hard work” whinge just tells me people don’t know how to type. Writers type. If you can’t touch type, go learn.  Touch typing liberates you to treat your text as disposable — to casually “murder your darlings” — takes the physical grind out of writing — which has to be one of the real causes of the dreaded “Resistance” — and enables you to use outlining tools without begrudging every keystroke.

As for the creativity. Let me show not tell.

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Quick, Engrossing and Weird: A Review of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Quick, Engrossing and Weird: A Review of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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Jeff VanderMeer Annihilation-smallWhen I first read about Annihilation, the opening novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, it was described as a cross between Lovecraft and the television show Lost. Given VanderMeer’s well-known and impressive status in the SF&F field and since I’m such a sucker for anything described as “Lovecraftian” — and since I also loved Lost (at least the first few seasons) — I waited with eagerness for it to arrive in the mail.

As soon as it did, I plowed through it in about four hours — it was a quick and engrossing page-turner. It is very much a “weird” book, filled with many mysteries and queer goings-on.

The story centers on a small expedition that sets out to explore Area X, an expanse of southern coastland that has evidently been “captured” (it’s difficult to describe exactly what has happened in Area X) by some sort of unexplained anomaly, making entering and exiting the area very difficult.

The expedition in question is peopled by four unnamed women, designated by only their respective professions: the Anthropologist, the Psychologist, the Surveyor, and the Biologist — our viewpoint character. Their purpose is to collect data about Area X and report back to their government agency, The Southern Reach.

We know that this particular expedition is the most recent in a series of unsuccessful missions. We are told that previous expeditions either failed to return, ended badly in some way, or had group members who returned traumatized with little or no knowledge of their trips to Area X.

This setup is intriguing on its own. But the mysteries begin to pile upon one another very quickly as we progress into the story.

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