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New Treasures: The Best of R. A. Lafferty, edited by Jonathan Strahan

New Treasures: The Best of R. A. Lafferty, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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Two years ago, when The Best of R.A. Lafferty was published by Gollancz SF Masterworks, I wrote an excited New Treasures article that began like this:

Fabulous! Lafferty is one of my favorite short story writers, and far too much of his work — virtually all of it, really — is either long out of print, or available only in very expensive collector’s editions from Centipede Press. The prospect of a generous collection of his best short fiction in a compact and affordable trade paperback edition… seemed too good to be true.

It almost was. The Gollancz edition was very hard to acquire in the US (and it still is). Fortunately Tor Books saw fit to reprint the book as part of their own Tor Essentials line earlier this month, and it’s now widely available in a handsome and affordable trade paperback edition. Here’s the publisher’s description.

Tor Essentials presents science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.

Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, a winner of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-2002) was an American original, a teller of acute, indescribably loopy tall tales whose work has been compared to that of Avram Davidson, Flannery O’Connor, Flann O’Brien, and Gene Wolfe.

The Best of R. A. Lafferty presents 22 of his best flights of offbeat imagination, ranging from classics like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” and “The Primary Education of the Cameroi” to his Hugo Award-winning “Eurema’s Dam.”

Introduced by Neil Gaiman, the volume also contains story introductions and afterwords by, among many others, Michael Dirda, Samuel R. Delany, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Robson, Harlan Ellison, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, and Patton Oswalt.

This is a joyous, wonderful, and wholly surprising book that belongs in the collection of every serious science fiction reader. Here the complete Table of Contents.

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L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series #3: Ozma of Oz

L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series #3: Ozma of Oz

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I’ve been doing more reading with my 10-year old niece and book 3 of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series was a real treat. While I’d seen the Wizard of Oz of course, Ozma of Oz was the first book I’d read and luckily it can be read entirely fine with nothing more than the 1939 movie as an introduction. This book was also my introduction to the otherworldly art of John R. Neill.

Ozma of Oz was published in 1907, and as I’ve noted in my previous posts, L. Frank Baum’s series is really the first major American fantasy world. The story begins with Dorothy travelling with Uncle Henry on a steamer to Australia. A storm picks up and Dorothy is washed overboard.

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Vintage Treasures: Nebula Award Stories 17 edited by Joe Haldeman

Vintage Treasures: Nebula Award Stories 17 edited by Joe Haldeman

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Nebula Award Stories 17 (Ace Books, 1985). Cover by Jeffrey Ridge

I’ve covered a few noteworthy anthologies here in the last few weeks, including Isaac Asimov’s surprising Tin Stars, and Donald A. Wollheim’s excellent 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. It’s sharpened my appetite for good anthologies, and when I found Nebula Award Stories 17 in a small collection of vintage paperbacks I bought in eBay last month, I knew I’d found my next weekend read.

The Nebula Awards anthologies have been published continuously for over five decades, ever since Damon Knight launched the series in 1966 to raise money to fund the Nebula Awards for the Science Fiction Writers of America. Volume 17 was the first (and only) one to be edited by Joe Haldeman, who by then had won a Nebula for his groundbreaking novel The Forever War (1975), and would win it again for the novella “The Hemingway Hoax” (1990), the short story “Graves” (1993), and the novels Forever Peace (1998) and Camouflage (2004).

Nebula Award Story 17 appeared in hardcover in 1983, but wasn’t published in paperback by Ace until 1985. It contains stories still remembered warmly today, including William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic,” made into a Keanu Reeves film in 1995, Poul Anderson’s Hugo and Nebula-award willing novella “The Saturn Game,” Michael Bishop’s Hugo and Nebula nominee “The Quickening,” an excerpt from Gene Wolfe’s classic novel The Claw of the Conciliator, and a lot more. There are two stories from Terry Carr’s Universe 11, two each from Omni and F&SF, and the rest from magazines and anthologies like Asimov’s SF, Analog, and More Wandering Stars. Here’s the complete TOC, and a look at some of the magazines the stories originally appeared in.

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Ghost Lovers with Educated Minds: Ghosts of the Chit-Chat, edited by Robert Lloyd Parry

Ghost Lovers with Educated Minds: Ghosts of the Chit-Chat, edited by Robert Lloyd Parry

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Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (Swan River Press, December 2020).
Cover by John Coulthart

Ghosts of the Chit-Chat
Edited by Robert Lloyd Parry
Swan River Press (255 pages, December 2020)
Cover by John Coulthart

There are books and BOOKS. And this one is of the latter. Not simply an anthology of supernatural  and ghost stories, but also the faithful, fascinating description of a Society (or Club) flourishing at Cambridge University, the Chit-Chat, members of which included famous authors of dark fiction such as Montague Rhodes James, the three Benson brothers and others.

The volume includes profiles of the more distinguished members, their activity at Cambridge and their consequent literary achievements. For each of these writers,  examples of their fictional output are featured. 

MR James’ work is represented here by the two “ghost” stories he read at the Chit-Chat meeting on October 28, 1893 ( “The Scrap-book of Canon Alberic” and “Lost Hearts”) in slightly different versions from those included in his subsequent collections. The stories are too well known to require any specific comment in the present review.

EF Benson’s contribution is “ The Other Bed,” a classic ghostly tale conveying a strong sense of dread, set in a hotel room where a suicide had taken place.

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Eternity vs. Infinity: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity

Eternity vs. Infinity: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity

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The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov; First Edition: Doubleday, 1955.
Cover art Mel Hunter.

The End of Eternity
by Isaac Asimov
Doubleday (191 pages, $1.95, Hardcover, August 1955)
Cover art Mel Hunter

Just as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, which I reviewed here last time, was one of the latter novels of Clarke’s early period (which I defined as everything from his first novel Prelude to Space in 1951 to 2001 in 1968), so is The End of Eternity one of the latter novels of Isaac Asimov’s early period (which I’ll define as everything from his first books I, Robot and Pebble in the Sky in 1950 through the 1960s, before Asimov “returned” to writing science fiction with the first of his later novels, The Gods Themselves, in 1972). (We can see that Asimov’s and Clarke’s early and later periods were virtually contemporaneous, since Clarke also “returned” to SF with Rendezvous with Rama in 1973.)

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Future Treasures: Transgressions of Power, Book 2 of The Broken Trust by Juliette Wade

Future Treasures: Transgressions of Power, Book 2 of The Broken Trust by Juliette Wade

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Mazes of Power and Transgressions of Power (DAW, 2020/21) Covers by Adam Auerbach

I admit I got a little excited by the release of Mazes of Power last year, mostly because it’s set in a thousand year-old cave city (and if I have to explain why that’s so cool, we can’t be friends). But the series has become even more interesting with the impending release of the sequel, Transgressions of Power, arriving in hardcover in two weeks. Here’s an excerpt from the starred review at Publisher’s Weekly for the opening volume.

Wade’s excellent high fantasy debut, the first in the Broken Trust series, invites readers into an intricately constructed and morally ambiguous world full of complex political maneuvering and familial pressure. For centuries, the cavernous city of Pelismara has housed the 12 Great Families that comprise the noble class of the city’s strict caste system, who cling to the glory of a long-faded golden era. When a mysterious illness known as Kinders fever kills the city’s Eminence, the 12 families vie to fill the power vacuum. It’s up to 17-year-old Tagaret to represent his family in the competition to become heir to the throne, but his sociopathic brother Nekantor’s twisted attempts to help their family ascend to power threaten to tear down everything… The impressively winding plot, layered worldbuilding, and psychologically acute characterizations are sure to hold readers’ attention. Wade is an author to watch.

The sequel picks up the tale of the deadly battle for succession, in which brother is pitted against brother in a desperate bid for power. Transgressions of Power will be published by DAW Books on February 23, 2021. It is 480 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover, $14.99 in digital formats, and $29.99 for the audio version. Read the first seven pages of the first book here.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming science fiction and fantasy here.

A Wonderful Picture of a Far-flung Community of Writers: Quark, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker

A Wonderful Picture of a Far-flung Community of Writers: Quark, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker

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The 4-volume Quark anthology series, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker
(Paperback Library, 1970-71). Covers by Russell FitzGerald, Ira Cohen, Roger Penney, and Martin Last

These four volumes of Quark came out in 1970-71. The publisher killed the Quark enterprise after a year mainly because they weren’t selling, but also because of a really ill-thought-out review that Ed Bryant, who had a story in the first issue, wrote about the journal, in which he praised Marilyn and me, but went on and on about what a schlock publisher Paperback Library was.

Ed eventually submitted a novel to Paperback Library, and I happened to be in the office just after it came in. Cathy, our editor showed me his cover letter and read me her rejection note. His letter began, “You probably never heard of me, but I am an SF writer and…” Her answer back started off:

Dear Mr. Bryant,

You sell yourself short. I’m very much aware of who you are. What I don’t understand is why you hope to be published by a publisher you consider…”

and a), b), c) and d) she quoted back to him all the scurrilous things he had written about Paperback Library in his review. I felt sorry for Ed. He’d been my student at Clarion a few years before. But Ed’s was the review that made the publisher, Hy Steerman, decide that he couldn’t win for losing, and scuttled the paperback journal after the fourth issue.

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New Treasures: The Best of Michael Marshall Smith

New Treasures: The Best of Michael Marshall Smith

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I don’t pay a lot of attention to the limited edition small press genre market here because, well, most of their output is overpriced and aimed squarely at collectors. The exception is Subterranean Press, who do fabulous work — and routinely produce much more reasonably priced editions of their high-end volumes.

The latest author to get the Subterranean treatment is Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares (1996), Bad Things (2009), and many other novels, and more than half a dozen short story collections, including What You Make It (1999), and More Tomorrow & Other Stories (2003). The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is a mammoth 568-page retrospective that gathers 30 of Smith’s best stories from his lengthy and successful career. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls it a standout collection:

This standout collection showcase Smith’s facility at imbuing genre tropes with humanity. Every entry offers something unexpected, while grounding inventive paranormal situations in recognizable emotion. Smith.. crafts a plausible sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” with “Window of Erich Zann,” successfully transplanting the tale from Europe to Haight-Ashbury and exploring the protagonist’s capacity to see into a terrifying alternate reality. Smith’s first published short story, “The Man Who Drew Cats,” which won the British Fantasy Award in 1991, offers a searing window into domestic violence…

Here’s the publisher’s description.

In 1990, British-born author Michael Marshall Smith burst on to the literary scene with his first story “The Man Who Drew Cats.” It won the prestigious British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, and he went on to win the award again the next year. In a career that has now spanned three decades he has written nearly 100 short stories, published more than a dozen best-selling novels around the world, and scripted numerous movie and television projects. Now, to celebrate his three decades as a writer, The Best of Michael Marshall Smith brings together thirty of his most emotive and powerful stories (including all his award-winning short fiction), along with extensive story notes by the author.

Featuring evocative heading illustrations by Les Edwards, this career-spanning collection includes such memorable tales as “Hell Hath Enlarged Itself,” “More Tomorrow,” “To Receive is Better,” “What You Make It,” “Later,” “The Dark Land,” “What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night,” “Always,” and many others, in their definitive versions.

By turns touching, disturbing, and frightening, these stories are not limited by theme or genre, but reveal a writer always in command, and whose imagination knows no bounds. The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is the ultimate compilation of the author’s work, and stands as a testament to his mastery of, and commitment to, his craft.

The Best of Michael Marshall Smith was published by Subterranean Press in a deluxe hardcover edition on December 31, 2020. It is 568 pages, priced at $44 in hardcover and $6.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Stefan Koidl; the interior story heading illustrations are by Les Edwards. Order directly from the Subterranean website.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Wandering a Monster-Ridden World: The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Wandering a Monster-Ridden World: The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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The Expert System’s Brother and The Expert System’s Champion (Tor Books, 2018-21). Covers by Raphael Lacoste

British author Adrian Tchaikovsky has been steadily making a name for himself since he burst onto the scene with his 10-volume epic fantasy Shadows of the Apt. He’s followed that with several ambitious new series, including the Echoes of the Fall fantasy trilogy and the far-future hard science fiction Children of Time series. His latest is a sequence of tales in Tor.com’s prestigious novella line, opening with The Expert System’s Brother (2018). Liz Bourke gave it an enthusiastic review at Locus Online.

The title of The Expert System’s Brother makes one expect a cyberpunk world, but the landscape initially seems like that of fantasy. Gradually, the reader becomes aware that what seems like a fantasy setting is in fact science fictional one: a setting where the inhabitants have forgotten how they came to live the way they do.

Handry has always lived in a village called Aro. He has a sister, Melory, and a small community, but when he’s 13, he’s involved in an accident. The village’s Lawgiver (one of a handful of people, like its doctor, who has a ghost inside her skull that gives advice and commands) is casting out a troublemaker, a process that involves physically severing that person from the community by the use of a specially brewed substance. When the ac­cident happens, Handry gets some of that substance on him…

Handry now becomes a wanderer, drifting from village to village… At the town-village of Orovo, he learns some more about the world: a ghost-bearer (the bearer of an architect-ghost) has been gathering and feeding the Severed in order that they may do the difficult and dangerous work of helping the now-overcrowded village-town set up a new village… Handry falls in with another Severed called Sharskin… a man who discovered a place he calls the House of the Ancestors, and who believes that the Severed aren’t made lesser than the other people, but are in fact made more: restored to their original state, before the ancestors fell from grace and gave their descendants over to the rule of the ghosts…

The Expert System’s Brother has an engaging voice. Told in first person from Handry’s point of view, it showcases Tchaikovsky’s growing ver­satility as a writer of long-form science fiction, depicting an interesting world with compelling characters.

The second volume, The Expert System’s Champion, arrived last week. Here’s a look at the back covers for both books.

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Vintage Treasures: Swordsmen in the Sky edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: Swordsmen in the Sky edited by Donald A. Wollheim

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Swordsmen in the Sky (Ace, 1964). Cover by Frank Frazetta

I’ve been on something of a Don Wollheim kick recently. I looked at his 1989 Annual World’s Best SF two weeks ago, and last week I explored a collection of 30 DAW paperbacks he published in the 70s, including two rare Imaro volumes by Charles Saunders.

We’ve examined a few of Wollheim’s older anthologies in the past, but I couldn’t recall writing about one of my personal favorites, Swordsmen in the Sky, his hugely influential 1964 collection of science fantasy tales by Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, and others. I scanned the cover, drafted a quick piece, and checked for previous references to it — and that’s when I discovered a delightful review by none other than Charles Saunders himself, published right here at Black Gate, in the very early days of the BG blog. Here’s a taste.

Two of the stories Wollheim selected — Poul Anderson’s “Swordsmen of Lost Terra” and Leigh Brackett’s “The Moon that Vanished — are classics in the sense that they continue to fascinate with each re-reading, even though they were first published in 1951 and 1948, respectively. Anderson’s story is set in a far-future Earth that no longer spins on its axis, with Celtic culture surviving that catastrophe. Were it not for the scientific explanation for the seemingly magical power of the lead character’s bagpipes, “Swordsmen of Lost Terra” would qualify as sword-and-sorcery…

“The Moon that Vanished” is set on Brackett’s version of Venus, which was probably the best of all the fictional imaginings of that planet before space probes revealed the lifeless and hellish face hidden beneath its clouds. This story of a quest not for gold but godhead has proven more than equal to the test of time. Take away its interplanetary aspects and this story, too, is pure fantasy, if not sword-and-sorcery.

“People of the Crater,” by Andre Norton, takes place in one of those remote corners of our planet that will never show up on Google Earth. The titular crater is located in an unknown, mist-shrouded region of Antarctica, filled with strange creatures, sleeping gods, and magical science….

I was 18 years old when I first spotted Swordsmen in the Sky at the local train station’s book-rack during the year the anthology was published. The forty cents needed to purchase a copy jingled in my jeans. My sense of wonder was primed for fulfillment. Little did I know that the little paperback I carried out of that station would be a precursor not only to many other books I would subsequently read, but the ones I would write as well.

I have to tell you, it was a wonderful surprise to stumble on a forgotten BG contribution from Saunders, so recently after celebrating his work here. Read the while thing right here.

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