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Weirdbook Relaunches

Weirdbook Relaunches

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Weirdbook 22-smallW. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook, one of the all-time great weird fiction magazines, will be relaunched this year by David A. Riley and Black Gate blogger Douglas Draa‎.

Weirdbook, a large-sized magazine with excellent production values, produced thirty annual issues between 1968 and 1997, publishing fiction by Stephen King, Joseph Payne Brennan, H. Warner Munn, Robert E. Howard, Tim Powers, Darrell Schweitzer, Basil Wells, Charles R. Saunders, Michael Bishop, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Ramsey Campbell, Delia Sherman, and countless others. The magazine was also famous for its gorgeous interior artwork by Gene Day, Victoria Poyser, J. K. Potter, Allen Koszowski, Stephen E. Fabian, and many others.

Douglas Draa, a prolific blogger and the former Online Editor for Weird Tales, is the Managing Editor and Fiction editor; Riley has signed on as Senior Editor and Publisher. When I asked Doug for additional details he shared this with us:

We’ll closely, but not slavishly, follow the original format. Content wise we hope to have a strong mix of weird, horror, weird-sf, dark fantasy, swords & sorcery, and everything in between. The accent will be on strong story telling that the reader will enjoy. The eclectic mix of style and sub-genres that the original was famous will be our “leitfaden.” Paul is on board as Editor Emeritus with “kill-switch” powers to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Our goal is to bring the reader high quality genre fiction original in the Weirdbook tradition. The key word will be entertainment. Critics be damned.

On a personal note, W. Paul Ganley and Weirdbook were a big influence on me, and a major inspiration for Black Gate. I was consciously following in Paul’s footsteps when I launched BG 15 years ago, and I’m very excited to see his magazine return. For more details, see Doug’s announcement here, and the magazines’s new website here.

Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1952: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction July 1952-smallSporting a robot miner on the cover (art by Jack Coggins), Galaxy’s July, 1952 issue invites readers inside. And it doesn’t disappoint!

“Star, Bright” by Mark Clifton — A single father observes that his four-year-old daughter, Star, has an impressive intelligence level. He doesn’t understand exactly how high it is until she begins to use telepathy.

The story has an interesting premise, but I’m not sure I liked where the story went. It seemed a bit too far-fetched at points.

“Wailing Wall” by Roger Dee — The crew of the Marco Four interacts with the colony on Sadr III. The Sadrians had been under the control of an alien race known as the Hymenops, which could explain their odd behavior. Since the crew’s landing, over a hundred people in the world’s only village have died as a result of murder or suicide.

I think the story would have been better without the initial flash-forward. Otherwise, it was a good read. Roger Dee is a pseudonym for Roger D. Aycock. The crew of the Marco Four return in “Pet Farm” (published in the February, 1954 issue of Galaxy) and “Control Group” (in the January, 1960 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories).

“Origin of Galactic Slang” by Edward Wellen (illustrated by David Stone) — This is a compilation of fictional anecdotes around “galactic” terms and phrases.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as a story, but I found it amusing. It’s listed in the table of contents as a “Non-Fact Article”. Wellen wrote eight such “Origins of Galactic X” articles.

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Interzone #256 Now on Sale

Interzone #256 Now on Sale

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Interzone-256-smallBlack Static 44 is now on sale here in the US, and I thought it was long past time to take a look at its sister magazine Interzone, also published by TTA Press in the UK.

Interzone was founded in 1982 by a UK collective of fans that included author and critic John Clute, Take Back Plenty author Colin Greenland, Malcolm Edwards, who became the SF editor at Victor Gollancz and creator of the highly respected SF Masterworks line, and David Pringle. David Pringle eventually became the sole editor, remaining at the helm for an incredible 193 issues, until he stepped down in 2004. Since then it’s been owned by TTA Press, publishers of Black Static and Crimewave, with Andy Cox as editor.

Interzone contains chiefly science fiction but, like Asimov’s SF here in the states, does publish the occasional fantasy piece. Issue #256 is cover-dated January/February, and contains the following stories:

“Nostalgia” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
“An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extraterrestrial Betting Markets” by T.R. Napper
“The Ferry Man” by Pandora Hope
“Tribute” by Christen Gholson
“Fish on Friday” by Neil Williamson

The cover this issue (titled Berenice) is by artist Martin Hanford, who has been commissioned to do all the 2015 covers. Click the cover for a bigger version. If the style looks familiar, you probably saw Hanford’s art just yesterday in our New Treasures piece on Swords of Steel.

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February 2015 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

February 2015 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

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Nightmare Issue 29-smallThe February 2015 issue of Nightmare Magazine is now available. (Truthfully, issue 30 will be on sale any day now too, but I’ll get to that later.)

Nightmare is the sister publication of the highly-regarded science fiction and fantasy magazine Lightspeed. It’s an online magazine of horror and dark fantasy, with a broad focus — editor John Joseph Adams promises you’ll find all kinds of horror within, from zombie stories and haunted house tales to visceral psychological horror.

This issue has two pieces of original fiction:

“The Garden” by Karen Munro
“Descent” by and Carmen Maria Machado

As well as two reprints:

“Fishfly Season” by Halli Villegas
“Cult by Brian Evenson

There’s also the latest installment of their column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights, a showcase on the cover artist, and an interview with award-winning author Chuck Palahniuk.

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Take a Visual Tour of the Early SF and Fantasy Pulps in Futures Past #1

Take a Visual Tour of the Early SF and Fantasy Pulps in Futures Past #1

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Futures Past 1926-smallI have a great curiosity about the beginnings of science fiction and fantasy in the United States — particularly what’s known as the Gernsback Era, beginning when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories in 1926, and virtually created modern science fiction. Nearly simultaneously, Weird Tales (founded in 1923) was publishing the first stories of the greatest fantasists of the 20th Century: Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith.

So I was delighted to discover a brand new magazine devoted to covering the birth of modern science fiction: Futures Past: A Visual History of Science Fiction, edited by Jim Emerson. The first issue of this 64-page, full color magazine, subtitled 1926: The Birth of Modern Science Fiction, appeared in July 2014, and is now available in e-book PDF format. Future issues will cover the whole field of science fiction — including magazines, books, movies and conventions — year by year, in an attractive and easy-to-read format.

Here’s the description of the entire undertaking from the publisher:

Welcome to one of the largest and most ambitious projects ever attempted in the field of science fiction.  In the pages of Futures Past we will be covering, in detail, the birth and development of modern science fiction over its first 50 years – from 1926 to 1975. Designed in a yearbook format, each issue of Futures Past will cover all the works, people, organizations and events in detailed chronological order.

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Black Static #44 Now on Sale

Black Static #44 Now on Sale

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Black Static 44-smallI stumbled on my first copy of Black Static, issue #40, at a Barnes and Noble here in Chicago last year, and I was very impressed. The magazine is beautifully designed and illustrated, with top-notch writing and some great columns. It’s exactly the kind of thing I like to take with me on long plane rides.

I’ve been tracking down subsequent issues and writing about them here, because I think you deserve to know about them. Also, because really excellent fantasy magazines are a vanishing breed, and they deserve your support. Issue #44 is cover-dated January/February, which means it’s still on sale here in the US. The fiction contents are:

“Going Back to the World” by Simon Avery
“The Absent Shade” by Priya Sharma
“The Fishers of Men” by Jackson Kuhl
“Sweet Water” by E. Catherine Tobler
“Samhain” by Tyler Keevil

Yes, that’s our own Jackson Kuhl in the TOC. Jackson’s last article for us was his review of Jeffrey E. Barlough’s The Cobbler of Ridingham, which appeared here last week. On his blog, Jackson talks a little about selling his story, “The Fishers of Men,” to a British market like Black Static:

I was a little shocked when [Black Static editor] Andy Cox accepted “Fishers;” it is a very American story and when I sent it I wasn’t sure the historical background would translate. But I suppose I don’t have to know the intricacies of lines of royal succession or the industrialization of Greater Manchester to enjoy M.R. James, Robert Aickman, or Susanna Clarke (to name the three most recent authors I’ve read), so perhaps the width of the Atlantic isn’t as great as I sometimes imagine.

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Short Fiction Reviews: “Tuesdays,” by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2015)

Short Fiction Reviews: “Tuesdays,” by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2015)

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Asimov's Science Fiction March 2015-smallFor today’s column I’m covering for our regular Tuesday short fiction reviewer, Fletcher Vredenburgh, who’s goofing off this week. Which is a nice excuse for me to blow off other stuff I’m supposed to be doing, and settle back in my big green chair with the latest issues of my favorite magazines.

I started with the March issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction (which used to be called Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, back when the pace of life was slower and people had time to read a title that long.) Partly because it’s been far too long since I’ve read an issue, but mostly because I love Paul Youll’s delightful cover, with a strangely sinister UFO hovering outside a diner. I opened the magazine hoping that it’s illustrating the featured story, Suzanne Palmer’s “Tuesdays,” because I think I’d enjoy a good UFO story, and also because I want to know what that mischievous-looking blonde on the cover is up to.

The Table of Contents lists “Tuesdays” as starting on page 13. I flip to page 13. It’s an ad for a crossword magazine. I chuckle a little. Getting the Table of Contents 100% right was always the biggest pain with the print edition of Black Gate, too. I usually did it last, because last-minute changes were constantly messing with story placement.

I flip to page 14. Page 14 opens in mid-sentence. I glance back at page 12. It’s the last page of James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net column. I flip back and forth for a minute, confused, before the truth finally dawns: the first page of “Tuesdays,” the cover story for the issue, is missing.

Now, I haven’t been an editor of a print magazine for almost four years. But that doesn’t dull the sympathetic horror that crawls up my spine. This is every editor’s nightmare (and probably every writer’s horror — but let’s be truthful, writers are terrified of everything). No one understands just how easy it is to make a mistake like this.

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Is This Where John Norman Got His Inspiration?

Is This Where John Norman Got His Inspiration?

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DSC_1549

I spotted this in the classifieds at the back of the March 1962 issue of Amazing. Too bad I didn’t know about this when I met John Norman!

Sean McLachlan is a freelance travel and history writer. He is the author of the historical fantasy novel A Fine Likeness, set in Civil War Missouri, and the post-apocalyptic thriller Radio Hope. His historical fantasy novella The Quintessence of Absence, was published by Black Gate. Find out more about him on his blog and Amazon author’s page.

The Dark Issue 7 now on Sale

The Dark Issue 7 now on Sale

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The Dark Magazine Issue 7-smallI’m jealous of the fabulous covers that grace The Dark magazine.

Selecting cover art for a magazine is no simple task. I know, I did it for over a decade — sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. A great cover has to be a great piece of art, both eye catching and unique, but that’s not enough. It also has to clearly communicate the tone and content within. It won’t help you, for example, to have vibrant sword and sorcery heroes on your cover month after month, if you never actually publish sword & sorcery (as Realms of Fantasy was notorious for.)

The Dark has great covers. And they faithfully convey the macabre tone of the stories within… and, occasionally, the magazine’s playful side as well, as Lane Brown’s cover for the February issue, featuring a young girl feeding a bat, does marvelously (at right, click to embiggen.)

The Dark is a quarterly magazine co-edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace. The seventh issue features four all-original short stories:

“Bearskin” by Angela Slatter
“In the Dreams Full of Sleep, Beakless Birds Can Fly” by Patricia Russo
“Welcome to Argentia” by Sandra McDonald
“A Spoke in Fortune’s Wheel” by Brooke Wonders

You can read issues free online, or help support the magazine by subscribing to the ebook editions, available for the Kindle and Nook in Mobi and ePub format. Issues are around 50 pages, and priced at $2.99 through Amazon, B&N.com, Apple, Kobo, and other fine outlets. If you enjoy the magazine you can also support it by buying their books, reviewing stories, or even just leaving comments. Read issue 7 here, and see their complete back issue catalog here. We last covered The Dark with Issue 6. A one-year sub (six issues) is just $15 – subscribe today.

Fantastic Universe, September 1959: A Retro-Review

Fantastic Universe, September 1959: A Retro-Review

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Fantastic Universe September 1959-smallHere is probably one of the less-remembered digest SF magazines of the 1950s. Fantastic Universe was founded in 1953 and lasted until 1960, publishing 71 issues overall… it was a bimonthly briefly then a monthly until its demise (with a missed issue or two along the way). Thus it survived the collapse of the pulps in about 1955, and the American News Company disaster in 1957 or so, and even Sputnik. That’s not a bad run, all things considered.

But what does historian of the field Mike Ashley say of it (in Tymn/Ashley, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines):

Fantastic Universe was born at the height of the SF magazine boom in 1953, and perhaps the most surprising fact about it was that it survived the boom and appeared regularly throughout the rest of the 1950s.  Because if FU had any distinguishing feature it was its remarkable lack of memorable or meritorious fiction.

Ouch!

Alas, a skim through the TOCs of its run supports that notion: the most memorable stories were perhaps “Short in the Chest,” by “Idris Seabright” (Margaret St. Clair); “The Large Ant,” by Howard Fast; “Be My Guest,” by Damon Knight; and Robert Silverberg’s “Road to Nightfall.”

Add a couple of stories more famous for either their novel expansion, or the movie version: Algis Budrys’ “Who?” and Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report,” and a couple decent but minor stories each by Poul Anderson and Jack Vance, oh, and say Walter Miller’s “The Hoofer” and Avram Davidson’s “The Bounty Hunter.” There was a short Borges story in translation as well (before Borges was all that well known in the US). Not all that much to show for 71 issues: even these stories I mention are solid works but not their authors at their very best.

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