Browsed by
Category: Books

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

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

Comments 10 comments

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.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh

Future Treasures: Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh

Comments 2 comments

Stephen Leigh has had a long and successful writing career. I bought his debut novel Slow Fall to Dawn forty year ago. It turned out to be the opening volume in the Hoorka trilogy, an epic tale of space-faring assassins, recently collected in the handsome DAW omnibus volume Assassin’s Dawn.

In the four decades since Leigh has published some 20 novels and over 40 short stories, including six volumes in the Ray Bradbury Presents series and, under the name S.L. Farrell, the Cloudmages Trilogy and three volumes of the Nessantico Cycle.

His latest, Amid the Crowd of Stars, is a far-future tale of alien infection on far-flung planets. It arrives in hardcover from DAW next week. Here’s an excerpt from Publishers Weekly‘s starred review.

Leigh (A Rising Moon) puts an inventive spin on a familiar trope in this provocative tale of first contact set in the far future. Long before the novel’s start, a devastating meteor strike cut Earth off from other colonized worlds, forcing the now isolated colonists to biologically adapt to their adopted outposts. Now Earth starship Odysseus visits one such outpost, the planet Canis Lupus, for the first time. The crew finds a populace eager to visit the ancestral home world they never knew — but potentially harboring diseases lethal to earthlings. As Terran exobiologist Ichiko Aguilar explores the planet, she discovers a culture divided into Mainlander clans and the Inish: archipelago settlers whose bond with the arracht, a sentient aquatic species indigenous to Canis Lupus, represents first contact between humanity and extraterrestrial life…. Exploring big ideas about interplanetary travel, this finely crafted sci-fi saga is full of both surprises and charm.

Amid the Crowd of Stars will be published by DAW Books on February 9, 2021. It is 352 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming science fiction and fantasy titles in our Future Treasures posts.

An Abhorred Monster: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

An Abhorred Monster: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Comments 5 comments

Like most people these days, my first encounter with the patchwork creature from Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein (1818), was through adaptation. I truly cannot remember whether it was a moulded plastic Halloween mask, a comic strip, James Whale’s 1931 movie Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) that I saw first. Which one doesn’t matter — that green-makeup-painted face with flat head and neck bolts was an image that was everywhere: comics, cartoons, a giant statue on top of a bar & grill on my hometown of Staten Island. In each case, Victor Frankenstein’s creation was presented as a lumbering, platform-booted monster. At some point, I learned that Shelley’s was a very different creature than that which Whale had created for the screen, but that knowledge was unable to dislodge decades of Whale’s iconic image.

While normally presented as a horror story — and there are great, horrific elements in the book — it is really one of the first science fiction novels. Victor Frankenstein is a warped version of the Enlightenment man, rejecting the supernatural entirely, pursuing material and empirical knowledge to the point “no man was meant to know”. The Creature, foreshadowing countless androids and cyborgs, is tormented by the question of his standing in the universe as a man-made being. I thoroughly enjoyed this terrific, if slightly flawed, book.

I imagine most people know the basic story of Frankenstein‘s creation. As part of a storytelling contest between herself, her lover, the poet Percy Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and Byron’s sidekick, Dr. John Polidori, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley conjured a scientist obsessed with creating life. The poets’ tales were never finished, but Polidori wrote one of the first vampire tales, “The Vampyre” (1819). Shelley’s idea was potent enough to turn into a full-length novel.

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

Mary Shelley from her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein
…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Hendrix Does It Again with The Final Girl Support Group

Goth Chick News: Hendrix Does It Again with The Final Girl Support Group

Comments 0 Comment

Final Girls

Back in 1992, medieval history researcher Carol J. Clover wrote Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Fascinated by film as just another iteration of the ancient art of oral storytelling, she theorized that horror fans are not closet sadists who relate to the violence and terror of the films. Instead, Clover argued the reverse: that horror films are designed to align spectators not with the (most often) male tormentor, but with the tormented female’s suffering, pain, and anguish. The “final girl,” as Clover calls the victim-hero, endures before finally rising up to vanquish her oppressor, with horror fans cheering her on.

Enter one of my favorite authors Grady Hendrix and his upcoming new novel The Final Girl Support Group. If you’re trying to place the name you’ve definitely read about him before, here at GCN, when I talked about his previous releases, Paperbacks from Hell, My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör, to name a few. As he often does, Hendrix recognized a trend, as horror franchises went back to visit their “final girls” with characters such as Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the latest Halloween installment, and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream. When you think about it, nearly ever horror movie has a version of a “final girl,” and Hendrix decided to tell us a story about what happened to them “after.”

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C. M. Waggoner

New Treasures: The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C. M. Waggoner

Comments 0 Comment

C. M. Waggoner’s debut novel was Unnatural Magic (which we covered here almost exactly a year ago). Her latest, published last month by Ace, is set in the same world. I admit I’m very intrigued by the description for The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry, the tale of a down-and-out fire witch and a young gentlewoman who team up to stop a deadly conspiracy.

Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt — again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.

Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn. With the help of a bird-loving necromancer, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and an ill-tempered reanimated mouse named Buttons, Delly and Winn are determined to get the best of an adversary who wields a twisted magic and has friends in the highest of places.

Come on, I know that description is like nothing else you’ve ever read. (Romance, undead, and a reanimated mouse named Buttons! That’s a winning combo right there.) Martin Cahill at Tor.com is very taken with this book:

Waggoner’s characters absolutely shine… Agatha Christie in design and Pratchett-esque in execution… The plot… is [a] daring sequence of events that kept me enthralled and rooted to my seat for hours on end. A protection job turns into a murder mystery, turns into a revenge quest, turns into a courtship, turns into something like Breaking Bad by way of “let’s burn it down from the inside,” and ends up somewhere around the end of a Shakespearean comedy and tragedy combined.

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry was published by Ace Books on January 12, 2021. It is 384 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover art and design is by Jess Cruickshank. Read the complete first chapter at Tor.com.

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

Would You Spend $44 on a Collection of 30 Vintage DAW Paperbacks?

Would You Spend $44 on a Collection of 30 Vintage DAW Paperbacks?

Comments 44 comments

Would you spend $44 on these 30 vintage DAW paperbacks?

I buy a lot of paperbacks on eBay.  I mean, a lot. But believe it or not, I don’t spend a lot of money. I’ve gotten in the habit of buying small collections; because shipping costs work out better and I spend much less per item. I haven’t done the math recently, but I budget anywhere from $0.25 to $0.50 per book when I go hunting, and usually stick to it.

Of course, there are plenty of expensive paperbacks on eBay. Crazy-priced paperbacks, if you want to go looking for them. But eBay is also a clearing house for hundreds of individuals dumping collections en masse, often with very little description, and if you’re willing to dig a bit and take a chance, you can find bargains every day of the week. (And every hour of the day). In fact, eBay has become my go-to site for bargain-basement vintage paperback collections. Someday collectors will stop dying off, and their put-upon spouses will stop dumping their collections on auction sites at rock-bottom prices as they clean out the attic, but today is not that day.

I can’t remember the last time I spent more than $25 for a lot of paperbacks. But last month I scrambled all over myself to hit the buy button on the lot above: 30 vintage DAW paperbacks priced at $44.

Sure, I love DAW. And I’m happy to welcome all these books into my collection, But if you look carefully, you’ll see exactly why I wrecked my monthly collecting budget to acquire these books — and would’ve been happy to spend a lot more. I didn’t buy this lot because it’s a fine assortment of books (though it is). I spent the money because of one author, and one author only. Do you know which one?

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Out Past the Stars, Book Three of The Farian War by K. B. Wagers

Future Treasures: Out Past the Stars, Book Three of The Farian War by K. B. Wagers

Comments 2 comments


The Farian War trilogy K. B. Wagers (Orbit Books). Covers by Stephan Martiniere

You know what I appreciate? When a trilogy wraps up with three books, and the author doesn’t decide to extend it indefinitely. That’s what happens next month with Out Past the Stars, the final novel in K.B. Wagers’ popular The Farian War series. At least according to John the Librarian’s Booklist review, anyway.

Hail, Star of Indrana, seeks to broker peace between the Farian and the Shen, a task made unimaginably more difficult when she meets the Farian gods and discovers they’re not what everyone has long believed. Now, an ancient, dangerous enemy is hunting them down. To preserve peace and save her empire, Hail must discover the truth behind centuries’ worth of lies and avert an all-out war. But the cost might be more than she can bear, just when she was hoping to finally put violence behind her… The story is a compelling mix of action and politics, but Wagers’ strength is crafting character-driven science fiction, and it’s on full display. Everyone, including the villains, are complex and compelling. Relationships, both old and new, are rich. Wagers offers a well-earned, heartfelt, and hopeful conclusion to the Farian War series.

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog called the opening novel “A perfect blend of political intrigue and realistically-conveyed action…. [with] Kick-butt women, space battles, complex relationships, and fiendish plots.” Here’s the details for all three.

There Before the Chaos (465 pages, $15.99 trade paperback/$9.99 digital, October 9, 2018)
Down Among the Dead (448 pages, $16.99 trade paperback/$9.99 digital, December 3, 2019)
Out Past the Stars (400 pages, $16.99 trade paperback/$9.99 digital, February 23 2021)

The series was published by Orbit, with covers by Stephan Martiniere. We looked at the first two here. See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

A Modest Little Magazine: Whispers edited by Stuart David Schiff

A Modest Little Magazine: Whispers edited by Stuart David Schiff

Comments 11 comments

Assorted issues of Whispers, 1973-87. Issues #1, 2, 4, 9, 13-14, 15-17, 17-18, 19-20, and the final issue, 23-24.
Covers by Tim Kirk (1,3), Stephen Fabian (2,9,13-24,23-24), John Stewart (13-15,16-17), and Kevin Eugene Johnson (19-20)

When I started Black Gate magazine, I drew inspiration from small press magazines of the 70s, 80s and 90s that I deeply admired. It was a a fairly short list, but it included W. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook, the Terminus Weird Tales edited by George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt and Darrell Schweitzer, and Stuart David Schiff’s Whispers.

Whispers was near-legendary by the late 90s, when I was getting serious about starting my own magazine. The last issue had been published in 1987, but in its 15-year run it published original fiction and poems by Stephen King, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Karl Edward Wagner, Roger Zelazny, Michael Shea, Manly Wade Wellman, Ramsey Campbell, William F. Nolan, David Drake, Ellen Kushner, Steve Rasnic Tem, Carl Jacobi, Hugh B. Cave, Phyllis Eisenstein, Joseph Payne Brennan, Dennis Etchison, Robert Aickman, Glen Cook, Charles L. Grant, Gerald W. Page, Lisa Tuttle, Richard A. Lupoff, Janet Morris, and many, many others.

It also published original artwork by many of the greatest horror and fantasy artists of the 20th Century, including Michael Whelan, Stephen Fabian, Lee Brown Coye, Allen Koszowski, Vincent Di Fate, Charles Vess, Hannes Bok, and numerous others.

One of the many inspirational things about Whispers — apart from its phenomenal success — was that it was virtually a one-man operation. Stuart Schiff grew his tiny magazine from humble beginnings as essentially a slender black-and-white fanzine in 1973 into one of the most influential horror mags of the century, with a spinoff line of paperback anthologies, limited edition hardcovers, magazines supplements, and of course a Best of collection.

…

Read More Read More

Notes and Quotes: Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range (1957)

Notes and Quotes: Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range (1957)

Comments 8 comments

The Deep Range (Signet, 1974). Cover art uncredited

Here’s a relatively quick take on a 1950s novel I reread this past week — not as long or as polished as my other Black Gate reviews have been. (I’ll be resuming those in February.)

The Deep Range was the 8th of 11 novels of Clarke’s early period, which I’ll define as everything before 2001 in 1968. (The 11 counts both Against the Fall of Night and the revised version The City and the Stars, and includes his non-SF novel Glide Path.)

This is Clarke’s major novel of the ocean, set in a future that herds whales and farms plankton for consumption by humans. I think the theme of harvesting whales for their meat would make the novel awkward to reprint today, but I see there have been editions from Warner Aspect in 2001 and from Gollancz as recently as 2011. There are countries that still harvest whales, of course, but they do so to the condemnation of many other nations.

Clarke was of course an avid diver and had moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 (according to Science Fiction Encyclopedia), a year before this novel was published. So the descriptions here of diving, of exploring the coral reefs, are likely drawn from first-hand experience.

…

Read More Read More