Browsed by
Category: Vintage Treasures

The Omnibus Volumes of P.N. Elrod: The Vampire Files

The Omnibus Volumes of P.N. Elrod: The Vampire Files

Comments 0 Comment
The Vampire Files Volume One The Vampire Files Volume Two-small The Vampire Files Volume Three

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t initially interested in P.N. Elrod’s The Vampire Files. A few things happened to change that.

First, I started to hear about Jack Fleming, the investigative journalist in Prohibition-era Chicago who becomes a vampire and private investigator, and whose first case was to solve his own murder. Folks used adjectives like “surprising” and “old fashioned fun” to describe his adventures. That sounded pretty good. By then, the series had gotten pretty far along, and I wondered idly if I should pick one up. But it seemed a little late to jump on board, and I was never really sure what volume to start with. Plus some of the earlier books became harder to find, and it all seemed like just a bit too much effort.

Then Ace Books released the first omnibus volume in 2003, containing the first three Vampire Files novels. And, well, you know what a sucker I am for omnibus collections. All those hard-to-find paperbacks, in one handsome and economical package? It’s too much to resist.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: A Touch of Strange by Theodore Sturgeon

Vintage Treasures: A Touch of Strange by Theodore Sturgeon

Comments 5 comments
A Touch of Strange 1959-small A Touch of Strange 1965-small A Touch of Strange 1970-small

I’ve really been enjoying this gradual survey I’ve been doing of Theodore Sturgeon’s paperbacks. It hasn’t been a particularly deliberate undertaking… the truth is that, as I come across his books, I’ve been talking about them. This week I stumbled on a copy of the 1965 Berkley edition of A Touch of Strange (above middle), and here we are.

Part of the reason I enjoy them is that I find it fascinating that a writer could have made a decent living in this business selling almost exclusively short stories. Sturgeon did write five novels (six, if you want to count his 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea novelization), but he’s far more well known for more than two dozen short fiction collections. And it was upon them that he largely built his considerable reputation.

Another reason is that I genuinely find it delightful to catalog the different editions, and note all the variations. A Touch of Strange was reprinted five times, by three different publishers, between 1958 and 1978, before it vanished from bookstores forever. Each of those editions is unique, not just in cover art and design, but also in how it was packaged and presented — and, in some cases, in content as well.

…

Read More Read More

Fletcher Vredenburgh’s Simakpalooza!

Fletcher Vredenburgh’s Simakpalooza!

Comments 4 comments

SimakpaloozaI don’t have time to read many other blogs. I barely have time to read this one, what with all the time I spend reading, and writing, and telling my wife how awesome Mad Max: Fury Road is. Seriously honey, sooo awesome. I wish I got to ride  in the desert, and take a giant chain elevator to work every day. Is there a word for when you envy the baddass folks who live in an apocalyptic dystopia? There should be such a word. And I bet that word would be awesome.

Anyway, I appreciate those moments when I get to read blogs written by other folks. Especially when they’re folks like Fletcher Vredenburgh, and especially especially when they look at one of my favorite writers, as Fletcher did this week with his Simakpalooza! (Is there a word for when you envy a writer who makes up a word? There should be such a word.) Here’s a sample:

I’m not sure what the first story I read by Clifford Simak was, but the first I remember is “Desertion.” It’s part of the book he’s probably most famous for, City. The novel is a mournful farewell to humanity and Earth and stars robot butlers and talking dogs… There’s a tremendous sense of wonder in the tale as the nature of what’s going on is revealed. I think of it as the story that showed me the true potential of sci-fi…

Sadly, Clifford Simak seems to have slipped into the ranks of the unjustly forgotten sci-fi writers of the past. Growing up, he was just part of the general fabric of sci-fi [for me], and most fellow sci-fi fans I knew had read at least something by him…

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by Simak. John O’Neill’s post about The Goblin Reservation and the comments reminded me how much I loved his work. There’s a warmth and comfortableness to his stories that I love.

Fletcher created an impressive tapestry of images from 17 Simak paperbacks to accompany his article (a tiny snippet is at right). Read the whole thing here.

The Omnibus Volumes of Jack Vance, Part III: The Demon Princes

The Omnibus Volumes of Jack Vance, Part III: The Demon Princes

Comments 6 comments
The Demon Princes Volume 1-small The Demon Princes Volume 2-small

The first novel in Jack Vance’s Demon Princes saga, The Star King, was published as a two-part serial in Galaxy Magazine, in December 1963 and February 1964.

It took Vance eighteen years to complete the series — the fifth and final novel, The Book of Dreams, appeared in 1981 — and during that time he wrote all four novels in of Planet of Adventure, the Durdane trilogy, one novel in The Dying Earth, three books in his Alastor Cluster series, and at least four standalone novels. This is not a man who liked to focus on one thing at a time.

The Demon Princes is essentially a revenge fantasy. The central character is Kirth Gersen, whose entire village was enslaved while he was a child by five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes. Each novel deals with an elaborate revenge scheme masterminded by Gersen on one of the five Princes, each of whom has achieved significant power — and embodies at least one major vice.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Clockwork’s Pirates/Ghost Breaker by Ron Goulart

Vintage Treasures: Clockwork’s Pirates/Ghost Breaker by Ron Goulart

Comments 12 comments
Clockwork's Pirates Ron Goulart-small Ghost Breaker Ron Goulart-small

We’re back to our survey of Ace Doubles, this time with a surprising pair of adventure books by Ron Goulart.

I’m a fan of Ron Goulart, although I only discovered him recently, when I sampled some stories from his excellent collection What’s Become of Screwloose? and Other Inquiries in 2012. So I was pleased to spot his 1971 Ace Double, Clockwork’s Pirates and Ghost Breaker, in a collection of 23 old paperback I found on eBay. Twenty-two bucks later, the collection was all mine.

Goulart has a well-deserved reputation for satire and comedy, but with Screwloose I was happy to discover he has a talent for mystery and adventure as well. Mystery and adventure are very much what’s advertised in Clockwork’s Pirates and Ghost Breaker. The former is a novel of robot pirates, the scourge of the spaceways, who steal the planetary governor’s daughter and sell her on the slave markets, and the latter is a collection of short stories featuring a modern supernatural detective, in the mold of John Silence and Carnacki the Ghost Finder.

…

Read More Read More

Psychical Violence and Beckoning Beauties: The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions

Psychical Violence and Beckoning Beauties: The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions

Comments 8 comments

The Dead of Night The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions-smallWhile I was at the World Fantasy Convention last November, I sat in on a panel called “Ghost Stories Without Ghosts.” Truth to tell, I was only there because of the delightful Patty Templeton, who was a guest on the panel, talking about her popular debut novel There Is No Lovely End.

However, the other panelists — S. T. Joshi, Jonathan Oliver, and Darrell Schweitzer — had interesting things to say as well, and several times the conversation came around to Oliver Onions, who was held up as an exemplar of the form.

All very interesting, but who the heck is Oliver Onions?

When faced with a situation such as this (an embarrassing lack of knowledge about a revered figure in 19th Century Supernatural Fiction — which happens a lot more often than you might think), I invariably turn to the same resource: the always reliable Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural. Or, as we like to call them, TOMAToS.

Sure enough, the Wordsworth Tales line includes a huge Oliver Onions volume: The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions. 627 pages of creepy fiction featuring werewolves, haunted houses, a dream shared down through history, living ghosts, an obsessed sculptor, characters in a romance novel who come to life, a temptress who’s doomed countless men through the centuries until she falls in love for the first time, a haunted meadow, a cheery Christmas ghost who disobeys the Special Committee on Ethereal Traffic and Right of Way to save lives, and many others.

…

Read More Read More

Into the Wastelands: Enchanted Pilgrimage by Clifford D. Simak

Into the Wastelands: Enchanted Pilgrimage by Clifford D. Simak

Comments 4 comments

Enchanted Pilgrimage-smallClifford Simak is often described as a pastoralist, his sci-fi stories set in rural Wisconsin or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Kindly robots as well as smart and faithful dogs feature in many of his books. Scholars are more likely than soldiers to figure as his heroes. There’s more kindness and sense of wonder than violence in most of his stories.

If you haven’t read him (which wouldn’t be surprising since most of his twenty-six novels and multitude of story collections are out of print in the US), snag a battered old copy of City or Way Station to start. City holds a place in my heart as one of my favorite books. Simak brought a gentle humanity to his writing. Love of an unhurried life and respect for common decency run through many of his stories.

Inspired by John O’Neill’s post about The Goblin Reservation, I dug out the first of Simak’s three fantasy novels, Enchanted Pilgrimage (1975). In it, a disparate party of travelers leave the safety of humanity’s lands to explore the dangerous, magical Wasteland. He would revisit this theme twice more before his death in 1986, in the structurally similar The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978) and Where the Evil Dwells (1982).

I remember liking the book thirty years ago and thirty years later, I still like it. It’s fully fantasy and science fiction, both. While there are goblins, gnomes, witches, and trolls, there are also UFOs, a robot, and a traveler from an alternate Earth.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Arabesk Trilogy by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Vintage Treasures: The Arabesk Trilogy by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Comments 2 comments
Pashazade-small Effendi-small Felaheen-small

Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Vampire Assassin Trilogy (The Fallen Blade, The Outcast Blade, and The Exiled Blade) has earned him an enviable rep as a fantasy author. But I first became acquainted with him over a decade ago with The Arabesk Trilogy, a trio of acclaimed novels that had the unusual distinction of being nominated for both the British Science Fiction and British Fantasy Awards.

The Arabesk Trilogy isn’t easy to describe. It’s sort of an alternate history fantasy cyberpunk hard-boiled detective series, if that makes sense. The point of divergence with our reality is 1915, with Woodrow Wilson brokering a peace accord that prevents World War I from expanding outside the Balkans. All three books are set in Alexandria, in Islamic Ottoman North Africa (called El Iskandriyah in the novels), in the 21st century. The main characters are Raf, a genetically enhanced ex-street criminal now posing as a rich Ottoman aristocrat, and the hallucinatory fox Tiriganiaq, who frequently accompanies him.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Heroic Visions, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Vintage Treasures: Heroic Visions, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Comments 5 comments
Heroic Visions-small Heroic Visions II-small

We’ve covered so many classic paperbacks here at Black Gate, in so many sub-genres, that I sometimes forget that our original focus was Heroic Fantasy. We’ve kept true to that promise (more or less) here on the website, although as a matter of course we’ve broadened our focus as the years have gone by.

But it’s good to be reminded from time to time that it was heroic fantasy that lured many of us into this field. This week’s reminder came in the form of a slender 1983 Ace paperback I found titled Heroic Visions. It collects sword & sorcery tales by Jane Yolen, Alan Dean Foster, F.M. Busby, Robert Silverberg, Michael Bishop, Joanna Russ, Phyllis Ann Karr — and a brand new Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella by Fritz Leiber. It was followed by a sequel, Heroic Visions II, with new stories from Thomas Ligotti, Manly Wade Wellman, Keith Roberts, Ellen Kushner, Michael Bishop, Avram Davidson, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and many others. Both are fine collections featuring some of the top fantasy writers of the 80s.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Under the Moons of Mars, edited by Sam Moskowitz

Vintage Treasures: Under the Moons of Mars, edited by Sam Moskowitz

Comments 4 comments

Under the Moons of Mars Moskowitz-smallSome folks I know date the creation of modern SF and Fantasy to Star Trek in the mid-60, or the release of Star Wars in 1977. Those who are a little more knowledgeable date it to the first issue of Amazing Stories, in April 1926.

Folks who are really knowledgeable date it even earlier, to the “Scientific Romances” that became popular in early pulp magazines — so popular, in fact, that a young entrepreneur named Hugo Gernsback decided that the time was right for a magazine devoted exclusively to them. That magazine was Amazing Stories, and the rest, as they say, is history.

When editors first began combing the old pulps for stories to anthologize in the late 40 and early 50s, virtually all of them began with Amazing Stories #1. There was a great deal of popular SF and fantasy published well before that, but it was overlooked. And, as the decades went by, it was gradually forgotten.

Where did it appear? I have no idea — the really knowledgeable could tell you, but I’m not one of them. As we look backwards through history, my vision goes dark right around Lost in Space.

Fortunately, the great genre historian Sam Moskowitz was one of the really knowledgeable. And he used his vast knowledge for good. Specifically, he used it to assemble the anthology Under the Moons of Mars, which collected some of the very best of the early science fiction and fantasy from the days before there were magazines dedicated to such things — including stories and novel excerpts from Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, and many others.

…

Read More Read More