Cover by Ilene Meyer C.J. (Carolyn Janice) Cherry was born on September 1, 1942. When she sold her first work, editor Donald A. Wollheim suggested adding the final “h,” making her byline C.J. Cherryh. Her brother is artist David Cherry, who did not add a final “h.” Cherryh won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977. In 1982, she won the coveted Balrog Award for her short story “A Thief in Korianth.” She has won three…
My first encounter with C.J. Cherryh was in Merchanter’s Luck, a short, action-packed story set in Cherryh’s super-dense Alliance-Union Universe. While the plot could have been drafted by any number of skilled space opera purveyors, I’d never before encountered one who wrote with Cherryh’s level of near contempt for explaining things to the reader. She writes in what she’s variably called “very tight limited third person” and “intense internal voice.” This means characters only think or talk about what actually interests them. Descriptions will not be…
As we segue (stagger, stumble, reel, crawl, stop-drop-and roll) from winter into spring, we are faced as always with the never-ending question: “What in the world am I going to read next?” Everyone will solve this dilemma in their own way. Dart and ouija boards, animal entrails, tarot cards, various dice systems, and the blind recommendations of pimply, pasty complexioned clerks in chain bookstores have all been resorted to by readers desperate for guidance. For many people (Black Gate followers no…
Carlos Hernandez, CSE Cooney, Alyx Dellamonica, and Kelly Robson at the 2016 Nebula Awards banquet I spent last weekend at the 2016 SFWA Nebula Conference in downtown Chicago. The Conference is the big annual gala for the Science Fiction Writers of America, and it culminated in the Nebula Awards ceremony Saturday night. It was a very special weekend for a lot of reasons, not least of which was the nomination for one of our own — C.S.E. Cooney, Black Gate‘s Website…
A couple of times this past summer I felt really old. Somehow the classic sci-fi/fantasy books I grew up reading weren’t well known to younger readers (really, you don’t know who Manly Wade Wellman is?!?) or even all that important anymore. In the forty-year span of my sci-fi and fantasy reading life, the genres’ audiences had changed. Now you could be a sci-fi reader without having read Dune or planning to ever read it. Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber was “shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to…