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The Sword & Sorcery Anthology Now on Sale

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology Now on Sale

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sword-and-sorcery-anthologyOne of the year’s most anticipated books has arrived — a few days ahead of its official June 1 publication date.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman, is now on sale. This massive 480-page tome contains classic S&S tales from the writers who created the genre — including C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Karl Edward Wagner and Michael Moorcock — as well as modern masters such as Charles R. Saunders, Glen Cook, George R. R. Martin, Jeffrey Ford, and Caitlín R. Kiernan.

It also includes “Epistle from Lebanoi,” an original tale by Michael Shea, author of the classic Nifft the Lean, and “The Year of the Three Monarchs,” a new story by Michael Swanwick.

The early reviews have already been filled with praise, including this one from Publishers Weekly:

Hartwell and Weisman have selected some of the best short-form work in the genre… This is an unbeatable selection from classic to modern, and each story brings its A game.

With an introduction by David Drake, “Storytellers: A Guided Ramble into Sword and Sorcery Fiction” and a tantalizing assortment of stories I’m unfamiliar with — including “Gimmile’s Song” by Charles R. Saunders, “Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat” by Glen Cook, “Six from Atlantis” by Gene Wolfe, and “Path of the Dragon” by George R. R. Martin — this ones leaps right to the top of my want list.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology is published by Tachyon Publications, and priced at $15.95 for the print version and $10.95 in digital format. More complete details are here, and the complete Tables of Contents is here.

Blogging Austin Briggs’ Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Freeland”

Blogging Austin Briggs’ Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Freeland”

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9665211flash-gordon-volume-2“Freeland” was the second installment of Austin Briggs’ Flash Gordon daily comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally published between February 24 and August 21, 1941, “Freeland” was the second story in the daily companion to Alex Raymond’s celebrated Sunday strip. It is the second of two Briggs strips available in a reprint collection from Kitchen Sink Press.

“Freeland” gets underway with the ship bearing our motley crew making its way toward the Promised Land free from Ming. Flash and Dale set out in a rocketship to scout for a safe harbor and encounter a hostile tribe of what appear to be Native Americans.

Once more, Austin Briggs demonstrates his version of Mongo is more attuned to contemporary American experience or American history than the prehistoric or Medieval Europe model chosen by Alex Raymond. Briggs may also be borrowing a page from Edgar Rice Burroughs (one of Raymond’s primary inspirations) in transplanting Native Americans to another world.

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The Nightmare Men: The Good Inspector

The Nightmare Men: The Good Inspector

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jrlegrasseLike Van Helsing before him, Inspector John Raymond Legrasse has only had one canonical appearance: HP Lovecraft’s seminal “The Call of Cthulhu”. But like the Dutch professor, the Creole Inspector has continued on past the end of his own story, popping up here and there, stubbornly inserting himself into the arcane worlds of others, most notably those of CJ Henderson.

Described as a “commonplace looking middle-aged man”, Legrasse is a man devoted to duty and possessed of an unshakeable resolve, despite his unassuming appearance. This resolve pitches him into conflict with the servants of one of Lovecraft’s most enduring creations, Cthulhu. Legrasse’ part in “The Call of Cthulhu” is a minor one, but its reverberations reach far, especially when one considers how much a template ‘The Tale of Inspector Legrasse’ is for the modern occult detective story.

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William Patrick Maynard’s The Terror of Fu Manchu

William Patrick Maynard’s The Terror of Fu Manchu

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the-terror-of-fu-manchu2We’re a talented group here at Black Gate. Every time I drop a pencil someone on staff publishes a book. Last week I spilled a pencil case, and Scott Taylor announced a nine-volume fantasy series.

I was especially pleased to get my hands on the first novel by Friday blogger William Patrick Maynard, The Terror of Fu Manchu, published in 2009 by Black Coat Press. Bill was authorized to continue Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers and the second volume, The Destiny of Fu Manchu has just appeared, also from Black Coat Press.

I met Bill for the first time at the Windy City Pulp and Paper show two weeks ago here in Chicago, and found him to be an intelligent and entertaining conversationalist. I was fortunate to have the chance to ask him about his novels, and I was treated to an enthusiastic and fascinating lecture on the Boxer Rebellion, the psychology of Yellow Peril novels, and the uniquely global evil of Fu Manchu.

It was one of those moments when you wish you had a recorder. After listening to Bill I was more intrigued than ever to read his novels, and I wished I had a way to share his infectious enthusiasm with our readers.

Eventually I asked Bill to recreate what he told me as best he could in an e-mail message, to post here.

He graciously complied, and here’s what he sent me.

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Win a copy of Thunder in the Void from Haffner Press!

Win a copy of Thunder in the Void from Haffner Press!

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thunder-in-the-voidContests! I love contests. It’s because we love to give away stuff, like Santa Claus.

In this case, it’s stuff you really, really want: the latest archival quality hardcover from Haffner Press, Thunder in the Void, a massive collection of 16 Space Opera tales by Henry Kuttner. It’s scarcely been on sale two weeks, and it’s already almost sold out, so act fast.

Thunder in the Void gathers classic pulp fiction from Planet Stories, Weird Tales, Super Science Stories, and even rarer sources, including “War-Gods of the Void,” “Raider of the Spaceways,” “We Guard the Black Planet,” “Crypt-City of the Deathless Ones,” and the previously unpublished “The Interplanetary Limited.”  Most appear here in book form for the first time.

How do you win? Now pay attention, this is the fun part. You must submit the title of an imaginary Space Opera story. The most compelling pulp title — as selected by a crack team of judges including Howard Andrew Jones, C.S.E. Cooney, and John O’Neill — will receive a free copy of Thunder in the Void in the mail, complements of Haffner Press and Black Gate magazine.

One submission per person, please. Submissions must be received by May 31st, 2012. Winner will be contacted by e-mail, so use a real e-mail address maybe. All submissions must be sent to john@blackgate.com, with the subject line Thunder in the Void, or something obvious like that so I don’t randomly delete it.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Employees of New Epoch Press are ineligible to enter (including the judges — sorry, Howard and C.S.E.) Not valid where prohibited by law. Or anywhere postage for a hefty hardcover is more than, like, 10 bucks. Seriously, this book is heavy and we’re on a budget.

Thunder in the Void is 612 pages in high-quality hardcover format, with an introduction by Mike Resnick and a cover price of $40. Cover art is by Norman Saunders. It is available directly from Haffner Press.

The Nightmare Men: God’s Madman

The Nightmare Men: God’s Madman

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vanhelsingAbraham Van Helsing only had one truly canonical appearance, arriving as he did mid-way through Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, so strong was the Dutch professor’s hold on the public imagination, and so fierce his rivalry with the Lord of the Undead, that he has followed his nightmare enemy into the Twentieth Century like a gin-drinking Fury.

Described by Stoker as ‘a man of medium weight, strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest…’ Van Helsing radiates physical and mental vitality, placing him in dynamic opposition to the ambulatory black hole that is Dracula. Van Helsing exudes the stuff of life, where Dracula only consumes. Besides his physicality, Van Helsing is ‘a philosopher and metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day’; again, this is in contrast to Dracula, who is mired in Old World nightmare and squalor. One represents life, knowledge and light, while the other brings only darkness and decay. Van Helsing, like John Silence, is a representative of all that is good in man, set in opposition to malign forces which seek to pervert the natural world.

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New Treasures: Henry Kuttner’s Thunder in the Void

New Treasures: Henry Kuttner’s Thunder in the Void

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thunder-in-the-voidThis weekend here in Chicago was the 12th annual Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, one of my favorite local shows. I met fellow BG bloggers Jason Waltz, Joe Bonadonna, and David C. Smith on Saturday, as well as Bill “Indy” Cavalier, Morgan Holmes, and the always engaging Bob Garcia. Late on Sunday I heard someone call my name and turned to discover none other than William Patrick Maynard, our distinguished Friday blogger, who was selling his new novels The Terror of Fu Manchu and The Destiny of Fu Manchu at an impressively-stocked table. Despite having worked together for years it was the first time we’d ever meet, and I really enjoyed our conversation. He’s a fascinating fellow, and I kept him until well after the show had ended.

But the highlight of the show is always seeing the new titles at the Haffner Press booth, and this year didn’t disappoint. Stephen Haffner’s archival quality hardcovers are works of art, and his taste is excellent. He has published the definitive short fiction collections of many of the finest early pulp writers, including Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, C.L. Moore, and Henry Kuttner.

Still, Stephen may have outdone himself with his newest release, Henry Kuttner’s Thunder in the Void, a massive collection of 16 Space Opera tales from Planet Stories, Weird Tales, Super Science Stories, and other classic pulps. Before Kuttner married C.L. Moore in 1940, he wrote blood-n-thunder Space Opera in the style of one of his favorite authors, Edmond Hamilton — with winning titles like “Raider of the Spaceways,” “We Guard the Black Planet,” and my favorite, “Crypt-City of the Deathless Ones” — all of which are collected here.

The book looks terrific, even by the high standards of Haffner Press. Most of the these tales are appearing in book form for the first time. Also included is a previously unpublished story, “The Interplanetary Limited,” and an introduction by Mike Resnick.

Stephen mention to me that Thunder in the Void may be the fastest-selling book he has ever printed. It was released on April 4th in a printing of 1000 copies, of which only 200 are left. If you want a copy, I urge you to act fast. Thunder in the Void is 612 pages in a high-quality hardcover, with a cover price of $40. Cover art is by Norman Saunders. It is available directly from Haffner Press.

Previous Haffner releases covered here include Kuttner and Moore’s Detour to Otherness, Henry Kuttner’s Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One, and the upcoming The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman.

New Treasures: Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s

New Treasures: Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s

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goodis-five-noir-novels1Let’s take stock for a minute. Been a busy week, and it’s only Tuesday. Is it time for another installment of New Treasures already?

Let’s see, let’s see… what did we cover last time? Been so long I barely remember. Well look at that — it was a handsome pair of novels from The Library of America. By coincidence, The Library of America also published the book I want to talk about today: Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s.

Or maybe it’s not coincidence. Maybe The Library of America is just that cool. Here’s the back cover copy for today’s omnibus collection of five classic crime novels by David Goodis — you decide.

In 1997 The Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir gathered, in two volumes, eleven classic works of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s — among them David Goodis’s moody and intensely lyrical masterpiece Down There, adapted by François Truffaut for his 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player. Now, The Library of America and editor Robert Polito team up again to celebrate the full scope of Goodis’s signature style with this landmark volume collecting five great novels from the height of his career. Goodis (1917-1967) was a Philadelphia- born pulp expressionist who brought a jazzy style to his spare, passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists: an innocent man railroaded for his wife’s murder (Dark Passage); an artist whose life turns nightmarish because of a cache of stolen money (Nightfall); a dockworker seeking to comprehend his sister’s brutal death (The Moon in the Gutter); a petty criminal derailed by irresistible passion (The Burglar); and a famous crooner scarred by violence and descending into dereliction (Street of No Return). Long a cult favorite, Goodis now takes his place alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the pantheon of classic American crime writers.

No, it’s not fantasy or science fiction. But it’s a complete noir library in one attractive package, and it has thumbnail pics of five pulp paperbacks from the 40s & 50s right on the cover wrap. Good enough for me.

Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s is 848 pages in hardcover. It was published March 29, 2012, and retails for $35.

Doug Draa looks at Frank Belknap Long

Doug Draa looks at Frank Belknap Long

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rim-of-the-unknown2Doug Draa has kicked off a new blog dedicated to the golden age of Horror Anthology Paperbacks. His first subject is the much-overlooked pulp master Frank Belknap Long:

I’ve enjoyed Mr. Long’s stories since the middle 70s when I first read “The Space Eaters” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1. He was a correspondent of Lovecraft’s and wrote several stories incorporating HPL’s Cthulhu Mythos. His attempts at Mythos writing were successful enough that his “Hounds of Tindalos” are more or less accepted as canon.

His stories are pure pulp and crazy enough to stand above the normal horror fare of the 30s and 40s. I find “The Space Eaters” to be one of the very best non-HPL penned Mythos tales ever. It tells of an invasion from beyond (actually from outside and between) in such a cold hearted and nonchalant manner without any of HPL’s typical histrionics that it is truly unsettling without ever being “over the top”. Hats off to the man! But as far as craziness goes, how can you not love such titles as “The Flame Midget,” “The Man with a Thousand Legs” or “The Horror from the Hills”?

Indeed. Frank Belknap Long published a host of stories in the pulps and several fine collections, including The Early Long, Odd Science Fiction, The Hounds of Tindalos, The Rim of the Unknown and Night Fear.

He wrote nearly 30 novels, including Space Station 1 (1957), Mission to a Distant Star, Mars is My Destination (1962), The Horror from the Hills (1963), Monster From Out of Time (1970), and Survival World (1971).

I don’t see a lot of blogs devoted to vintage horror anthologies, but if all the entries are as informative as this one, I’ll be a regular visitor.

You can find Doug’s blog, Uncle Doug’s Bunker of Horror, here.

New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times

New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times

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the-pulpsPulp fiction is back — in print, online, in ebooks, and on iPads. Tough guys, tough women, tough prose, action and more action, blood and thunder, heroes and villains presented unapologetically as heroes and villains.

And why not? Why not have as much blood and thunder as we can handle right now, given that the last time we saw this much imaginative raw prose in the hands of readers, we were in the hard times of the early 1930s?

Fans of the original old, tough, wild pulp stories have always been here, collecting the magazines when they found them at garage sales or at science fiction conventions. But after the heyday of these magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, popular fiction in the 1950s and 1960s changed and moved on to paperbacks and digest zines and television shows.

By then, though, pulp had lost some of its edge. In the postwar boom, it became less than it had been, in the same way that the antics of rough early vaudeville, for example, changed as the routines moved to radio and then to early television and then to sitcoms.

The early 1970s saw a boom in nostalgia for the real stuff from the 1920s and 1930s — just in time for the very serious recession then. That’s when you found remaindered copies everywhere of Tony Goodstone’s big old coffee table book The Pulps, still the best introduction to the popular fiction of hard times and war time. Tons of great stories were brought back, and Bette Midler’s Songs for the New Depression sold right alongside paperback reprints of the Shadow and Doc Savage and Max Brand.

We’re back there now. We’re in the Lesser Depression, as Paul Krugman has identified it. And just as in the hard times of the early 1970s and the very hard times of the early 1930s, pulp fiction is here to fulfill its commitment to giving us outlandish, big top entertainment.

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