The 1973 Hugo Award for Best Editor went to Ben Bova. This was the first year of the Best Editor Hugo. It has been awarded every year since then, though in 2007 it was split in two, with a Best Editor Award given for Short Form and Long Form editors. This last reflected the fact that the Best Editor was a de facto award for Best Editor Short Form all along. (While I completely agree that “Long Form” editors are…
A.E. (Alfred Elton) van Vogt was born on April 26, 1912 and died on January 26, 2000. Van Vogt began publishing science fiction with “The Black Destroyer,” the first of four stories which became his novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle. His other major works include Slan, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The World of Ā. In 1966 his story “Research Alpha,” co-written with James Schmitz, was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella. In 1996 his “The…
Eric Flint was born on February 6, 1947. His first story, “Entropy and the Strangler” appeared in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Volume IX. He has collaborated with numerous authors, both established and new over the course of his career, including David Drake, Mercedes Lackey, S.M. Stirling, Ryk E. Spoor, Dave Freer, Gorg Huff, Paula Goodlett, Charles E. Gannon, Mike Resnick, etc. The list goes on and on. His time travel novel 1632 has not only led to…
Last month I wrote a brief piece on Ralph Milne Farley’s pulp novel An Earth Man on Venus, originally published as The Radio Man in Argosy magazine in 1924. As part of the research I dug a little into Farley, and discovered his real identity was Roger Sherman Hoar, state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts. I also discovered he produced seven (!) sequels over the next three decades: The Radio Beasts (1925), The Radio Planet (1926), The Radio Flyers (1929), The Radio Menace (1930), The Radio…
Michael Fierce writes: I just wanted to say that I really love Ryan Harvey’s article on Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. I’ve read the revised version many times and have always wanted to read the original, and now, after reading his article, am even more enthused to do so. Really excellent breakdown and the format was very reader-friendly with some visually pleasing colors that really grabbed me. I know many things about many great books but he definitely takes the cake…
By Rich Horton From Black Gate 14 Copyright © 2010 by New Epoch Press. All rights Reserved. Much has been made in recent years of “the death of the midlist” – the tendency of publishers to focus on big sellers at the expense of modest earners. The same tendency can hurt the backlist as well, making it harder to find reprints of older books. This is complicated by a number of factors – a simple one is that the explosion…
By Rich Horton from Black Gate 11, copyright © 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights Reserved. As these columns make clear, I trust, I read a great many issues of older SF magazines. I find this very enjoyable for a number of reasons, many divorced from the pure quality of the fiction. So it doesn’t matter that I have read much of the fiction already in anthologies. I like the look and feel of old magazines. I like the…
Neutron Star (Ballantine Bools, April 1968). Cover artist unknown As I was preparing last week’s Vintage Treasures article (on Poul Anderson’s Fire Time), I realized that the next book on deck was Neutron Star, by Larry Niven, one of the most important science fiction collections of the 20th Century. And I simultaneously realized we’ve never done a Vintage Treasures feature on Niven before, a pretty serious oversight. (For comparison purposes, as I was assembling reference links at the bottom of…
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…
Throughout 2022, I’ll be reviewing short stories. Some of these may be classics, others forgotten. The two things that all will have in common is that they are part of my personal collection and they will be selected through a randomization process. What works and authors I look at will be entirely selected by a roll of the dice. “Final Report” by Richard Grey Sipes appeared in the January 1965 edition of Analog Science Fiction – Science Fact, an issues…