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Clarkesworld 100 Now on Sale

Clarkesworld 100 Now on Sale

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Clarkesworld issue 100-smallThe award-winning Clarkesworld magazine published its 100th issue this month — a landmark by any measure. Very few SF and fantasy magazines have made it to 100 issues, and this is something that deserves to be celebrated.

This bigger-than-average issue contains fiction from Naomi Kritzer, Kij Johnson, Catherynne M. Valente, Jay Lake, Damien Broderick, Karl Schroeder, and others. The four non-fiction pieces are “Song for a City-Universe: Lucius Shepard’s Abandoned Vermillion,” by Jason Heller, “Exploring the Frontier: A Conversation with Xia Jia,” by Ken Liu, “#PurpleSF” by Cat Rambo, and an editorial by Neil Clarke: “On the Road to One Hundred.”

This issue’s podcast is “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” by Aliette fde Bodard, read by Kate Baker.

Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, & Sean Wallace won the World Fantasy Award in the Special Award Non-Professional category for Clarkesworld in November (see our complete report here).

We last covered Clarkesworld with Issue 97 and the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Six edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace. The anthologies are inexpensive and a great way to introduce yourself to Clarkesworld. Every purchase helps support the magazine… definitely worth considering if you’re at all a fan of short fiction.

Clarkesworld 100 was published by Wyrm Publishing. The contents are available for free online; individual issues can be purchased for $3.99, and monthly subscriptions are $2.99/month. A 6-month sub is $17.94, and the annual price is $35.88. Learn more and order individual issues at the magazine’s website.

This issue’s cover is by Julie Dillon. See the complete issue here.

See all of our recent magazine coverage here.

The Early Novels of Jack Vance: Grand Crusades: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

The Early Novels of Jack Vance: Grand Crusades: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

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Grand Crusades The Early Jack Vance Volume Five-smallSubterranean Press is now accepting pre-orders on the fifth volume of their landmark series The Early Jack Vance.

New titles in the series are released every March. I covered Volume Two, Dream Castles, after I unexpectedly found a copy in the Dealer’s Room at Capricon 33 in 2013, and I reported on Volume Three, Magic Highways, last March.

Volume Five is by far the largest so far (at 472 pages); I was also surprised to see that it contains only five stories, all short novels, most published in pulp magazines between 1950 and 1954.

The Rapparee (Startling Stories, November 1950)
Crusade to Maxus (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1951)
Gold and Iron (Space Stories, December 1952)
The Houses of Iszm (Startling Stories, Spring 1954)
Space Opera (Pyramid Books, 1965)

This volume also contains a new introduction by the editors.

The first four books in The Early Jack Vance were a treasure trove for collectors, as they contained Vance stories that have been out of print for decades — and many that have never been reprinted. In contrast, this volume contains four short novels that have appeared in a handful of paperback editions over the decades (and under multiple titles), and one that has never been reprinted. This is first time they’ve been collected under one cover and the first time any have been in print for at least 30 years. I’ve selected a dozen covers from earlier printings below.

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Uncanny Magazine Issue 2 on Sale January 6

Uncanny Magazine Issue 2 on Sale January 6

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Uncanny Issue 2-smallThe second issue of Uncanny Magazine goes on sale next week, and it looks terrific.

Issue #2, cover dated January/February 2015, contains new fiction by Hao Jingfang, Sam J. Miller, Amal El-Mohtar, Richard Bowes, and Sunny Moraine, and a classic reprint by Ann Leckie. There’s also poetry from Isabel Yap, Mari Ness, and Rose Lemberg. Nonfiction this issue includes Jim C. Hines’s “The Politics of Comfort,” “The Future’s Been Here Since 1939: Female Fans, Cosplay, and Conventions” by Erica McGillivray, “Age of the Geek, Baby” by Michi Trota, and Keidra Chaney on “The Evolution of Nerd Rock.”

Black Gate‘s website editor emeritus C.S.E. Cooney joined Uncanny last month as their newest podcast reader, and this issue includes two full podcasts, with C.S.E. and Amal El-Mohtar reading two stories and two poems. I admit I puzzled over exactly how a magazine could include a podcast, before I remembered that Uncanny is digital-only. Shows you how old school I am.

We last covered Uncanny Magazine with Issue #1, which contained new fiction by Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard, Max Gladstone, Amelia Beamer, Ken Liu, and Christopher Barzak, and a reprint from Jay Lake, plus poetry by Neil Gaiman, Amal El-Mohtar, and Sonya Taaffe.

Uncanny Magazine is edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota, and published bi-monthly. This issue’s cover is by Julie Dillon. The issue is priced at $3.99, and is available as an eBook (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). eBook Subscriptions are available at Weightless Books. See all the details at the magazine’s website.

Donald Westlake’s Famous Complaint

Donald Westlake’s Famous Complaint

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Xero 5 fanzine-smallThree-time Edgar Award winning mystery author Donald Westlake famously dissed virtually every editor in the field in an article in fan magazine Xero in 1960, saying in part:

Campbell is an egomaniac. Mills of F&SF is a journeyman incompetent. Cele Goldsmith is a third-grade teacher and I think she wonders what in the world she’s doing at Amazing. (Know I do.) As for Pohl, who can tell? Galaxy is still laden with Gold’s inventory, and when Pohl edited Star he had the advantage of no deadline and a better pay rate than anyone else in the field, so it’s difficult to say what Galaxy will be like next year, except Kingsley Amis will probably like it.

In the years since, many have asked how much of Westlake’s famous complaint was true. In retrospect, I think we know. Not a lot.

Campbell was indeed an egomaniac and a science crank fully as credulous as Ray Palmer had ever been. But he still had an eye for a story and when not forcing (or being tricked by) regurgitations of his own editorials, he could still develop new writers and inspire occasional greatness.

The 1960s was a dull period for Analog... but it did serialize Dune, which says quite a lot. I think Campbell was well past his prime by this point, but he still had occasional flashes of what made him so important in the ’40s.

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Vintage Treasures: Unknown and Unknown Worlds, edited by Stanley Schmidt

Vintage Treasures: Unknown and Unknown Worlds, edited by Stanley Schmidt

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Unknown edited by Stanley Schmidt Baen-smallI intended to post a brief article on Echoes of Valor II today, continuing the series as promised after I covered the first volume last week.

But the first comment on that article, from BG blogger Thomas Parker, was:

Isn’t it time for someone to do some anthologies from Unknown? (Have there been any since the old Pyramid paperbacks?)

Thomas is talking about two paperback anthologies edited by western author D.R. Bensen, The Unknown (1963) and its sequel The Unknown 5 (1964), which collected stories from Unknown magazine. I covered the 1978 Jove reprints of both books in a lengthy Vintage Treasures post last December.

I was pretty sure the answer was no — there haven’t been any other paperback anthologies collecting tales from Unknown. But before I could open my mouth, Keith West posted the following comment:

Baen published a collection of stories from Unknown entitled Unknown in 1988. It was edited by Stanley Schmidt with a Thomas Kidd cover and contained 9 stories…

Galahad Books, which is a British publisher IIRC, published a substantial hardback, also in 1988, entitled Unknown Worlds Tales from Beyond. It had a blah cover but contained 25 stories. I think I picked my copy up in either a Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton’s in the remainder bin…

Keith is exactly right. I put my notes on Echoes of Valor II aside for now, and went on a hunt to find out what I could about these two Unknown anthologies.

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New Treasures: Clarkesworld: Year Six edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

New Treasures: Clarkesworld: Year Six edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

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Clarkesworld Year Six-smallClarkesworld Magazine is one of the finest online outlets for science fiction and fantasy. Edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, it has been published monthly since October 2006. Fiction from the magazine has been nominated for countless awards — including the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press, World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula — and the magazine has been nominated for the Chesley, Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus, and Nebula awards. It won the 2010, 2011, and 2013 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, the 2014 British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine, and the 2014 World Fantasy Special Award in the Non-Professional category.

Every year, the editors gather all the online fiction from the previous year into a single generous volume and this year is the biggest yet: 427 pages, collecting all 34 stories published in 2013, from authors like Aliette de Bodard, Robert Reed, Mari Ness, Erik Amundsen, Catherynne M. Valente, Carrie Vaughn, Suzanne Church, Kij Johnson, Sofia Samatar, Lavie Tidhar, Ken Liu, and many others.

The book also serves as a fund-raiser for the magazine (which is available free), and every purchase helps support one of the finest magazines out there. In his introduction to this year’s volume, Neil says:

In July of 2012, I had a “widow-maker” heart attack that nearly killed me. Afterwards, I took a long, hard look at my life and started pruning away the unnecessary…

Since then Clarkesworld has slowly, but steadily, grown. I can’t quit the day job just yet, but thanks to people like you, I’m even more confident it will happen. By purchasing this book, subscribing to Clarkesworld, writing a review, or supporting us at Patreon, you are helping me realize that dream. Thank you! It means a lot.

Clarkesworld: Year Six was edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace and published by Wyrm Publishing on May 24, 2014. It is 427 pages, priced at $16.95 in trade paperback, and $6.99 for the digital version. I bought my copy in the Dealers Room at the World Fantasy Convention. Visit the Clarkesworld website here or subscribe for just $2.99/month.

November Short Story Roundup

November Short Story Roundup

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Whelp, it’s well into December and I’m only getting to the November roundup now. My apologies, and here goes.

oie_146527XTeMGO0FLast month, I promised I’d let you know about Fantasy Scroll #3. Despite its name and its side-of-a-van-worthy covers, the magazine continues to be mostly science fiction or non-heroic fantasy. When you buy something with a cover like the one to the left of this paragraph (<—), and you don’t get a lot of swordplay, demons, and wizards, you might feel like you bought a pig in a poke. Maybe they’ve got plans to mix things up a little more in the future. There are two S&S out of thirteen stories in Issue #3, but I’m definitely hoping for more per issue in the future.

That said, the magazine managed to get a Piers Anthony story, “Descant.” It’s a love story set to music about an intelligent king and princess. There are some awkward sentences and overall I found it a little boring. But it doesn’t have any puns, so it’s got that going for it.

James Beamon’s very funny “Orc Legal” is about the prison and courtroom travails of an orc named Anglewood. He’s been jailed pretty much for being an ex-evil henchman. He takes on the defense of a centaur charged with lewd behavior in order to finish the community service part of his sentence. No Atticus Finch, he uses any tool, from obfuscation to outright threats, to win his client’s acquittal. Beamon has a lot of fun with all the orc stereotypes, and gets a few well-deserved digs at snooty elves as well. I like a funny story that’s actually funny, and this one definitely is.

“The First First Fire” by Alexander Monteagudo is a very short story. Ralo, the first man ever appointed First Fire — essentially the tribal wizard –is normally a peaceful man. But a caravan from his home, the village of Pempansie, has been attacked by slavers. While warriors defeated the slavers, everyone knows they’ll be back. This brief tale describes how the young magic user decides what to do in the face of the threat to his family and friends. There’s not much here, but I enjoyed it and would be happy enough to see more of the character.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1952: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction April 1952-smallAh, Galaxy. My old friend. I wonder if this is how readers felt by the time the April, 1952 issue rolled out. Officially labeled as Volume 4, Number 1, this issue marked the completion of 18 months for the magazine. You can tell a lot about a magazine by that point in time, especially if it’s hitting newsstands every month. And I think readers could tell that this was something amazing.

“Accidental Flight” by F. L. Wallace — Medical advancements can save people with profound injuries, but in some cases, the patients can’t recover into “normal” status. They might be amputees, lack vital organs, or have any variety of conditions that makes them unsuitable to join the rest of society. These people live on an asteroid, cared for and guarded by medical staff. And though they don’t wish to rejoin society, they do wish to leave their asteroid in order to explore the stars.

It’s interesting to see a cast of characters with disabilities. The story moves well, and I think (or perhaps hope) that this fiction touches on the theme that all people have value, despite what limitations a society may perceive. Wallace later expanded this tale into a novel titled Address: Centauri, published by Gnome Press in 1955, and as Galaxy Novel #32 in 1958 (see below).

“Katahut Said No” by J. T. M’Intosh — A computer system on Earth helps the Economic Center determine unviable towns on Venus. After all, there are only a limited amount of resources available, and the latest analysis shows one of the towns must die. The people would be dispersed elsewhere, and efficiency would increase. Unfortunately, the computer picks Katahut, the first settlement on the planet. And the citizens of the town do not wish to comply.

I liked the politics around this story — how one man tries to rally the town to fight the decision and what that may mean for all of the settlements. But the zinger was the final sentence.

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C. S. E. Cooney Joins Uncanny Magazine as a Podcast Reader

C. S. E. Cooney Joins Uncanny Magazine as a Podcast Reader

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C. S. E. Cooney has hair like Medusa seriously it's amazing-smallThe brand new fantasy magazine Uncanny — which we discussed excitedly last month when its first issue went on sale — has shown uncanny good sense by hiring our very own C.S.E. Cooney as a podcast reader. Here’s a bit cribbed from the press release:

Uncanny Magazine is thrilled to announce that the marvelous C.S.E. Cooney has agreed to join us as the second reader on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast! Ms. Cooney is a Rhode Island writer and actor… She loves to read aloud to anyone who will sit still long enough to listen. Some of her narration work can be found on Podcastle and Tales to Terrify. With her fellow artists in the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, C. S. E. Cooney appears at conventions and other venues, singing from their growing collection of Distant Star Ballads, dramatizing fiction, and performing such story-poems as “The Sea King’s Second Bride,” for which she won the Rhysling Award in 2011.

Ms. Cooney will make her debut as an Uncanny Magazine Podcast reader in Episode 3 this January.

So much exciting C.S.E. Cooney news! Just last month, we reported on Amal El-Mohtar’s review of her short story “Witch, Beast, Saint,” and our roving reporter Mark Rigney interviewed her in late October. The two C.S.E. Cooney short stories we published here at Black Gate, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” consistently rank among the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. Her most recent blog post for us was Book Pairings: Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells and Royal Airs, published last Sunday. She is a past website editor of Black Gate, and the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills.

In other C.S.E. Cooney news, today is her birthday. Happy Birthday, Claire!!

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Science Fictional Solar Pons

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Science Fictional Solar Pons

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OffTrail_SnitchA few weeks ago, I wrote about the best of all Holmes pastiches, August Derleth’s Solar Pons. I mentioned that Pons had a more open-minded view towards the supernatural. This was certainly reflected in four stories that Derleth co-authored with noted science fiction writer Mack Reynolds.

Just last week, John O’Neill wrote a post about Anthony Boucher. As he mentioned, Boucher, along with J. Francis McComas, was the founder of the seminal Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

In January of 1953, they wrote to Derleth. Reynolds had submitted “The Adventure of the Snitch in Time,” a pastiche in which Sherlock Holmes receives a visitor from an alternate time-space continuum. The editors loved the idea, but, “Unhappily, Mack did not in any sense of the word recreate Holmes, Watson, or Baker Street! Outside of the plot idea, the story was, to be wholly frank, lousy!”

Also, to avoid trouble from those pesky Doyle brothers, none of the characters were named: wholly unsatisfactory.

So, the two editors wrote to Reynolds, suggesting that they have Derleth rework it into a Solar Pons story. Reynolds loved the idea, sending back, “I’d appreciate it if you’d give Augie Derleth first chance at it. It was after reading his Solar Pons stories that I got the idea for Snitch. Besides that, I’m an admirer of the old Seigneur of Sauk City and it would be a privilege to have a story appear under a collaborative by-line…”

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