Black Gate

No one out there today is doing the work Hank Davis is doing — collecting vintage SF and fantasy into handsome mass market anthologies.

Yes, Paula Guran (Street Magicks, Weird Detectives) and Neil Clarke (Galactic Empires) are producing great reprint anthologies — but they both focus almost exclusively on 21st Century authors. Davis is the one serious editor left still plumbing the pulps and vintage SF magazines of the mid-20th Century, and putting authors like Murray Leinster, John W. Campbell, and Poul Anderson into mass market. His recent books (including Things From Outer Space and In Space No One Can Hear You Scream) include some of my very favorite recent anthologies.

While we’re on the topic (and since it’s, y’know, timely), I should also mention he’s also the only SF editor in recent days to do Christmas anthologies, like A Cosmic Christmas and A Cosmic Christmas 2 You.

His first anthology of 2016 was Worst Contact, a collection of tales of alien contact gone wrong. It contains two of my all-time favorite SF stories, Terry Bisson’s brilliant “They’re Made Out of Meat,” the story of an alien survey team that makes a profoudly disturbing discovery on the backwater planet Earth, and Fredric Brown’s chilling and powerful “Puppet Show,” in which the US Army is called in to greet a strange alien and his donkey walking out of the desert.

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Inkshares is a crowdfunded publisher, with kind of an oddball business model. They publish only those books that have a successful crowdfunding campaign — i.e. those that meet a designated pre-order threshold. Inkshares says this is “democratizing publishing” by having readers select what gets published, and they do claim to edit, design, print, distribute and market any book that meets their threshold.

I can attest to at least two aspects of that claim: the book I’m holding in my hands, Ricardo Henriquez’s The Catcher’s Trap, is thoroughly professional in design and layout — which makes it two steps above most small press titles that cross my desk, anyway. They also have a nice selection of blurbs on the back, and they sent me a review copy… so they seem to be no slouches in the marketing department either. The release that accompanies the book proudly claims they’ve published 61 titles since launching in February 2014; that ain’t bad at all.

But are the books any good? Really, that’s the question. The Catcher’s Trap looks intriguing enough. I should probably try it, but I’m not gonna. You try it.

The Catcher’s Trap was published by Inkshares on November 8, 2016. It is 241 pages, priced at $13.99 in trade paperback and $4.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Marc Cohen. Click the images above for bigger versions.