Cover art by Larry Blamire – “Louis Wu Making Good His Escape” I’m going to start my review of the November 1979 issue of Galileo magazine by talking about Omni. I’ve heard people, people of a certain age — people who were there, man — talk about Omni like it was the second coming of Christ. I bring that up because Galileo magazine was like Christ rolled the stone out of the way and was serving up fancy drinks in the tomb….
I didn’t really pick the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to begin my November 1979 survey of sf/f magazines, it just happened to be on top of the stack. Overall I have to say that I was disappointed. Lord Valentine’s Castle, Part 1, by Robert Silverberg. Given how much I enjoyed Downward to Earth in the November 1969 Galaxy, I was eager to see how Mr. Silverberg had evolved over a decade. … Lord Valentine’s Castle was a big…
When you’re seven years old, you do not see what’s coming next between these two I’m about to get into the November 1979 science fiction magazines. Dive Deep. But, there is a fundamental difference between November 1969, and November 1979 — I was born in 1969, but by 1979 I was 10 years old. I remember 1979. Or pieces of it anyway. Before I got into the magazines I thought I’d see what I could recall from my younger years….
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has put some delightful old content on their website for those who care to look, and earlier this month I came across their reprint of Thomas M. Disch’s Book column from the February 1981 issue, in which he compares the three Best of the Year volumes published the previous year. 1979 was a marvelous year for short SF, with many stories destined to become classics — including George R.R. Martin’s brilliant “Sandkings,” and…
My peak Star Trek watching years came in the seventies. Those of us who were too young to catch the show when it first aired in the mid-sixties could gorge ourselves on seemingly endless reruns of three seasons worth of shows. It was a far cry from Netflix and calling up any episode any time but we made do. As the seventies wound down my interest in Star Trek waned and I wasn’t really cognizant of what came along later —…
Sandkings (Timescape/Pocket Books, December 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill Writing is a notoriously poor-paying profession. In 2017, after eleven months of work, I sold my first novel to Houghton Mifflin for $20,000 — about $10,000 below the poverty line for a family of five in Illinois. And I felt lucky to get it, believe me. So when someone like George R.R. Martin earns $9 million a year as a fantasy novelist, it generates a lot of wonder and amazement. And…
One of the interesting things in this random selection of stories is how often the selected items share some unexpected and unintentional trait. The two stories that showed up for the letter I, Jack Iams’s “The Hat in the Hall” and Francis E. Izzo’s “Tank,” both reflect the only entry each author has in the Internet Science Fiction Database (although not, necessarily their only published story). “Tank” was originally published in the March 1979 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction…
Hammer’s Slammers (Ace Books, April 1979). Cover by Paul Alexander David Drake passed away on December 10, 2023, and his death was a major loss to the field. In addition to his considerable accomplishments as a writer — with dozens of novels and collections to his credit — he made significant contributions as an editor and publisher. He edited dozen of volumes for Ace, including the Space Anthologies with Marty Greenberg and Charles Waugh, and The Fleet and Battlestation shared…
Andre Norton’s two-book series Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus (Fawcett Crest, December 1979 and January 1980). Covers by Ken Barr Part I of Andre Norton: Gateway to Magic is here. Two other fun books by Norton that I read between ages 12 and 16 were Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus. In Judgement, a down and out young man named Naill Renfro ends up on the planet Janus, which is ruled by a group of religious fanatics…
For me, a passion project is something that could not be sold in a traditional sense to the mainstream market, but you want — need — to create it anyway. Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980 is the kind of project that I could not sell to a traditional publication house despite it being a middle grade-appropriate cozy ghost story. Partly because it is told in 24 physical letters. Partly because while it is middle grade-appropriate, its ephemeral nature and subject matter will…