Black Gate

Nights Black Agents (Berkley Books, May 1980). Cover by Wayne Barlowe

Nights Black Agents was Fritz Leiber’s first first collection — and in fact his first book. It was originally published in hardcover by Arkham House in 1947, when Leiber was 37 years old.

It collects six stories published in Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, plus one tale from a fanzine, and three new stories — including the long Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella “Adept’s Gambit.” Needless to say, it was very successful, and enjoyed a series of hardcover and paperback editions that kept it in print for over three decades.

Nights Black Agents launched Leiber’s writing career, and he followed it with some three dozen more collections (and many novels) before his death in 1992.

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Horrors in Hiding, Horrors Unseen, and Horrors Unknown (Berkley Medallion, February 1973,
June 1974, and February 1976). Covers: Vincent Di Fate (x2), uncredited

A few years back I wrote a trio of Vintage Treasures pieces about a series of Berkley Medallion paperback horror anthologies from the mid-70s, all edited by Sam Moskowitz (with an assist from Alden H. Norton).

Horrors in Hiding (February 1973)
Horrors Unseen (June 1974)
Horrors Unknown (February 1976)

The last two were the final anthologies Moskowitz produced. I was planning to investigate one of Moskowitz’s classic science fiction anthologies this weekend — maybe Masterpieces of Science Fiction (1967), or Under the Moons of Mars (1970) — but by midnight Friday I was deep into a stack of his horror anthologies again. I’m mesmerized by those creepy covers, what can I tell you.

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The Bantam Spectra Élisabeth Vonarburg: The Silent City (August 1992),
In the Mothers’ Land (December 1992), and Reluctant Voyagers (March 1995).
Covers by Oscar Chichoni, Oscar Chichoni, and Stephen Youll

I left Canada to attend grad school at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign in August 1987, and when I did I lost touch with much of the vibrant Canadian SF scene. There were a few Canadian authors celebrated in the States — folks like Charles de Lint, Donald Kingsbury, Julie Czerneda, Peter Watts, Guy Gavriel Kay, and a handful of others — but they were the exception. I had to get used to not hearing favorite Canadian acts on the radio (like The Box and Gowan), and I gradually got used to a lack of Canadian representation in bookstores as well.

That’s why it was such a delight to see French Canadian author Élisabeth Vonarburg experience a brief but marvelous period in the sun in the mid-90s, when Bantam Spectra translated three of her most famous novels into English, and brought them to the attention of grateful American readers.

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