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James Nicoll on Five Classic SFF Collections Too Good to Be Forgotten

James Nicoll on Five Classic SFF Collections Too Good to Be Forgotten

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A Pride of Monsters (Collier Books, 1973), Eyes of Amber (Signet, 1983) and Neutron Star
(Ballantine, 1976). Covers by Richard Jones, Tom Kidd, and Rick Sternbach

Over at Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll looks at a fine set of vintage SF collections, including Eyes of Amber and Other Stories by Joan D. Vinge.

Vinge began her publishing career with memorable novellas and novelettes. It’s therefore quite frustrating that, to my knowledge, there are only three collections of her work, all out of print. Of the three, Eyes of Amber and Other Stories is by far the best. In addition to the title story, a tale of aristocratic ambition and rock & roll set on Titan, the collection provides tales that range from straight-up adventure to puzzle stories, from classic hard SF to a deep space murder thriller, all skillfully written.

In addition to Vinge, James looks back at some very fine books by Tanith Lee, Katherine MacLean, Larry Niven, and James H. Schmitz.

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Random Reviews: “In the Bookshadow” by Marianne de Pierres

Random Reviews: “In the Bookshadow” by Marianne de Pierres

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Cover by John Picacio

In 2002, Greg Ketter, the owner of Minneapolis’ DreamHaven Books, published the original anthology Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores. The anthology includes one of my favorite stories, P.D. Cacek’s “A Book, By Its Cover.” It also included sixteen other stories, and, while I have re-read Cacek’s story over the years, I haven’t necessarily re-read many of the other stories since the book was originally published. While the book includes work by major names such as Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and Harlan Ellison, it also contains stories by less well-known names, including Marianne de Pierres, who had only published a handful of stories when Shelf Life came out, although she has proven to be more prolific in the years since.

Her contribution of Shelf Life is the story “In the Bookshadow,” which explores some of the more marginal customers at a bookstore. Anyone who has worked in retail knows that there are a variety of customer types.  Most come and, make their purchases, and leave, the presence only noted by the brief exchange at the cash register. Others are star customers. The staff knows them and looks forward to their visits. They are personable, spend a lot of money, and make the employees feel as if they are doing a real service. De Pierres’ protagonist is the employee who takes care of the marginal customers who give everyone else the willies.

When she begins to start seeing things out of the corner of her eye in the bookstore, she points them out to the customers, who don’t confirm her visions, but also appear to be doing something to protect her from the strange entities that seem to appear when nobody else is around.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 edited by Terry Carr

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 (Timescape, July 1982)

I’ve realized I enjoy these old Terry Carr anthologies much more now than when they first appeared 40 years ago.

I wasn’t a sophisticated reader in those days (not that I’m particularly sophisticated today, but at least I’m more patient). I was still discovering science fiction, and purely on the hunt for tales of wonder and adventure. I’d read Carr’s Best Science Fiction volumes with a skeptical eye, not at all convinced I was actually enjoying the finest stories of the year, and skip anything that didn’t grab me in the first few pages.

Nowadays it’s a different story. When I plucked The Best Science Fiction of the Year 11 off my shelves last week, I was delighted to find it contained David R. Palmer’s Hugo-nominated novella “Emergence,” the tale of an 11-year-old girl traveling through a post-apocalyptic US; “The Thermals of August,” Edward Bryant’s Hugo and Nebula-nominated tale of wingsuit-wearing daredevils on a wonderfully realized alien world; Gene Wolfe’s Hugo-nominated classic “The Woman the Unicorn Loved,” about a genetically engineered unicorn that escapes onto a college campus; and Poul Anderson’s famous novella “The Saturn Game,” which swept all the major awards, about an immersive role playing game played by a crew exploring Saturn’s moons that turns unexpectedly deadly.

Opening these books now is a journey of discovery of a different sort. I’m not on the hunt for new authors, and not simply for entertainment, either. It’s more a journey into the past, a chance to explore some of the most innovative and exciting SF of 1981, and see what authors whom I’ve come to love were up to early in their careers — and, especially, find an overlooked fictional gem or two.

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Vintage Treasures: A Second Chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton

Vintage Treasures: A Second Chance at Eden by Peter F. Hamilton

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“Sonnie’s Edge” by Peter F. Hamilton (adapted for Love, Death & Robots, 2019)

Peter F. Hamilton made a name for himself in the early 90s with a popular SF series featuring Greg Mandel, a veteran of a tactical psychic unit in the British army who becomes a psychic detective in a near-future Britain where the messy collapse of a communist government has left the country in ruins (Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, and The Nano Flower).

By 1998 he had a bestselling space opera series on his hands, the Night’s Dawn trilogy. Set in a sprawling far-future timeline known as the Confederation Universe, it was a huge departure from his early gritty SF noir. Hamilton first explored the Confederation Universe and the Affinity tech in a series of short pieces published in 1991 and 1992, and when the first books in Night’s Dawn, The Reality Dysfunction and The Neutronium Alchemist, started hitting bestseller lists in Britain he released his first collection.

A Second Chance at Eden gathered all the early tales plus two new novellas (“A Second Chance at Eden” and “The Lives and Loves of Tiarella Rosa”) and a new short story, “New Days Old Times.” The first piece in the series, “Sonnie’s Edge,” was adapted as an episode of Tim Miller’s Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots in 2019.

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Vintage Treasures: A Glow of Candles by Charles L. Grant

Vintage Treasures: A Glow of Candles by Charles L. Grant

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A Glow of Candles (Berkley Books, November 1981). Cover by Jill Bauman

Charles L. Grant was a major figure in 20th Century horror, not just as a writer but as a talented editor. He edited dozens of horror anthologies, including eleven volumes of the groundbreaking Shadows series from 1978-1991. He produced over a dozen novels, but is remembered today primarily for his powerful short fiction, gathered in three major collections: Tales from the Nightside and A Glow of Candles and Other Stories (both in 1981), and the retrospective Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant (PS Publishing, 2012). He died in 2006.

Grant received the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award for life achievement in 1987, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers of America in 2000. He was honored with two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards for his writing and editing. Sadly, little of his work remains in print, and his collections can be hard to come by. I recently managed to track down a copy of A Glow of Candles, and it was well worth the effort.

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THE ART OF THINGS TO COME, PART 4: 1964-1966

THE ART OF THINGS TO COME, PART 4: 1964-1966

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Science Fiction Book Club mailer from 1964, featuring From the Twilight Zone. Art by Virgil Finlay

As I related in the first three installments of this series (parts One, Two, and Three), like tens of thousands of science fiction fans before and after me, I was at one time a member of the Science Fiction Book Club (or SFBC for short). I joined just as I entered my teen years, in the fall of 1976, shortly after I’d discovered their ads in the SF digests.

The bulletin of the SFBC, Things to Come – which announced the featured selections available and alternates – sometimes just reproduced the dust jacket art for the books in question. During the first couple of decades of Things to Come, however, those occasions were rare. In most cases during that period, the art was created solely for the bulletin, and was not used in the book or anywhere else. Since nearly all of the art for the first 20 years of Things to Come is exclusive to that bulletin, it hasn’t been seen by many SF fans.

In this series, I’ll reproduce some of that art, chosen by virtue of the art, the story that it illustrates or the author of the story. The first installment featured art from 1957 and earlier, while the second installment covered 1958-1960 and the third installment dealt with 1961-1963. In this fourth installment I’ll look at the years 1964-1966, presented chronologically.

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Vintage Treasures: The Lord Darcy Adventures by Randall Garrett

Vintage Treasures: The Lord Darcy Adventures by Randall Garrett

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Too Many Magicians, Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates
(Ace, 1979 – 1981). Cover art by Robert Adragna

In 1977 Jim Baen accepted an offer from publisher Tom Doherty to return to Ace Books to head their science fiction line. Doherty left Ace to found Tor Books in 1980 and Baen soon followed him, but his years at Ace were extraordinarily productive. He resurrected an enormous amount of classic SF and fantasy from the magazines and brought it to a brand new audience, including Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Poul Anderson’s Flandry, Keith Laumer’s Retief, Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker, H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy novels, and collections by Robert Sheckley, James Tiptree, Jr, Robert E. Howard, James H. Schmitz, Barry N. Malzberg, and countless others.

One of the most distinctive works Baen championed was Randall Garrett’s tales of occult detective Lord Darcy, set in an alternate England in which the laws of Magic are rigorously codified, but the laws of physics remain unknown. He gathered them into three volumes: the novel Too Many Magicians and the collections Murder and Magic and Lord Darcy Investigates. They captured a brand new readership, and the books have been reprinted half a dozen times in subsequent decades.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of British SF 1 and 2 edited by Mike Ashley

Vintage Treasures: The Best of British SF 1 and 2 edited by Mike Ashley

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The Best of British SF 1 and 2 (Orbit, 1977). Covers by Bob Layzell

Every once in a while I sit back, take stock of our accomplishments, and think, “Man. We’ve showcased countless forgotten writers here at Black Gate, discussed tens of thousands of neglected books, writing late into the night on tight deadlines, and nobody has spell checked anything.”

Still, I’m justifiably proud of what we’ve accomplished in the 23 years this website has been live. Though I do have to admit that we have been, like the market at large, over-focused on American publishing. So I was delighted to find the massive two-volume anthology The Best of British SF 1 and 2, published as paperback originals by Orbit in 1977.

Containing nearly 800 pages of short fiction from Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, John Russell Fearn, Eric Frank Russell, Arthur C. Clarke, John Christopher, John Brunner, E. C. Tubb, Brian W. Aldiss, James White, Bob Shaw, Philip E. High, Colin Kapp, Kingsley Amis, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Keith Roberts, and many others — all interspersed with insightful genre history and commentary from editor Mike Ashley — these books are a wonderful retrospective of the finest science fiction from across the pond.

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Vintage Treasures: Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy edited by Lin Carter

Vintage Treasures: Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy edited by Lin Carter

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Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy, Volume 1 (Ballantine Books, 1972). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo

Over the decades we’ve spent a lot of pixels at Black Gate talking about Lin Carter’s groundbreaking Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. He was under contract to produce a book a month for editors Ian and Betty Ballantine, and that’s exactly what he did for five years and 65 titles, almost all reprints of out-of-print fantasy novels and original anthologies. For the most part my favorites are those marvelous anthologies, including The Young Magicians, Golden Cities, Far, Discoveries in Fantasy, and others.

In 1972 and 1973 Carter produced the first two volumes in what he’d hoped would be an ongoing series, Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy. They each included four novellas, accompanied by his usual fine introductions, and it’s a tragedy he was unable to produce any more before the Adult Fantasy series was discontinued when Random House bought Ballantine. In his opening essay, Four Worlds of Wonder, Carter explains his focus on longer fantasy.

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A Jumble Sale of Fascinating Ideas: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke

A Jumble Sale of Fascinating Ideas: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke

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Across the Sea of Stars and From the Ocean, from the Stars,
two omnibus collections by Arthur C. Clarke (Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1959 and 1961)

I’ve just about finished trimming and sorting my SF collection. It’s a pretty eclectic assortment: some of these books have personal meaning for me, some strike me as interesting for their cover art or their connection to the history of the genre, some are just old friends I’ve carried around for decades. Most fall into the category of post-war English-language SF up to about 1980, though there are more recent titles among them. I have other and more current titles elsewhere in the house, but this is where my heart is. (Maybe you can’t love a genre quite so wholeheartedly once you start publishing in it.)

All of which prompted me to re-read some classic SF, since I probably can’t trust the opinions I formed when I encountered these books at the age of 14 or 15. Case in point: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, as I originally discovered it: in the omnibus collection Across the Sea of Stars.
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