Black Gate

Back in December I talked about a few of my favorite anthologies, The Good Old Stuff (1998) and The Good New Stuff (1999), which collected some of the best adventure SF from the last century, alongside Gardner Dozois’ detailed and affectionate commentary. Dozois followed up with another fine pair of anthologies focused on deep space exploration and the far future, Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons and The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future, both published in 2000. All four were released in trade paperback from St. Martin’s/Griffin, and the set is the equivalent of a Master’s level course in SF of the 20th Century.

In 2001/02, Dozois produced a final two anthologies in this format, exploring two more common themes in 20th Century SF, terraforming and advanced human evolution:

Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (459 pages, December 2001, $17.95) — cover by Chesley Bonestell
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (463 pages, January 2002, $17.95) — cover by Nick Stathopoulos

Like the first volumes, they include Dozois’ lengthy and highly informative intros to each story. Together with the first four, these books form the basis of a very solid library of 20th Century science fiction.

…

Read More Read More

We lost David Hartwell on January 20th. This is our third article in a series that looks back at one of the most important editors in our industry.

When I think of David Hartwell, I think chiefly of his forte — the massive retrospective anthologies like Foundations of Fear and The Science Fiction Century that gave deep insight into the changing nature of our field. But David also produced a small number of mass market paperback anthologies, especially early in his career. The two I want to look at today are The Screaming Skull and Other Great American Ghost Stories (1994) and Bodies of the Dead and Other Great American Ghost Stories (1995), both published by Tor.

Mass market anthologies like this really don’t exist today, chiefly because modern audiences weren’t raised on short stories the way I was. But I’m very glad they did when I was a young reader haunting bookstore shelves in the 80s and 90s. Cheap enough to be a quick impulse buy, they were a great way to get introduced to a wide variety of authors — and a lot of fun to read, I might add.

…

Read More Read More

Back as a starving college student when I haunted the used book stores, I came across a dusty hardcover edition of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, thus discovering the only book that ever scared the crap out of me.

Of course as a lifelong devotee of the horror genre, I had certainly read stories that gave me the creeps before then. But with Ghost Story I was introduced to a whole new threshold of terrifying. Why? Because Straub had the ability to turn a beautiful, sunny day in December, or an ordinary afternoon in a grocery store parking lot, into scenes more blood-curling than any in a crumbling graveyard on a moonlit night in October.

Since that initial introduction, Ghost Story is my go-to read every fall, getting me in the perfect mood for Halloween.

And I confess. It still scares the crap out of me.

Apparently I am far from alone in this as — if we forget about the film version (and please do) — the novel continues to appear on “best of” lists to this day, being widely considered one of the greatest horror novels of all time.

So I was particularly excited to learn that this week Berkley Books is releasing Ghost Story in a new trade paperback edition, as well as in eBook format for the very first time.

…

Read More Read More

In the early 50s, everyone was busy trying to prove how grown up science fiction was. That it wasn’t just kid’s stuff, pulp tales of alien invasions that only appealed to fourteen year-old boys. The earliest genre anthologies on the market — like Groff Conklin’s The Best of Science Fiction (1946) and Healy and McComas’ Adventures in Time and Space (1946) — strained to show the ambitious side of SF, its respect for science and the unique way it examined the future.

In 1953, Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds decided to take a very different approach, displaying instead the fun side of SF in their classic anthology Science Fiction Carnival. It collected stories showing “a sharply sardonic view of our future” from Murray Leinster, Richard Matheson, William Tenn, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Eric Frank Russell, and many others.

…

Read More Read More