Search Results for: James Schmitz

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…

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Random Reviews: “Final Report” by Richard Grey Sipes

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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…

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Vintage Treasures: Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

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Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). Cover by Kim Poor When I talked about Gardner Dozois’ 1997 anthology Modern Classics of Fantasy a few years ago, I called it “a book that makes you yearn to be stranded on a desert island” (or anywhere you could read interrupted for a few days, really.) That description applies equally well to his 1994 volume Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, a book that over the last few decades…

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Vintage Treasures: Maurai & Kith by Poul Anderson

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Maurai & Kith (Tor Books, 1982). Cover art by Thomas Kidd Uber-editor Jason M. Waltz kindly invited me to write the introduction to his new anthology The Lost Empire of Sol: A Shared World Anthology of Sword & Planet Tales, co-edited by Black Gate blogger Fletcher Vredenburgh, a terrific new shared-world volume that contains new stories by Howard Andrew Jones, E.E. Knight, Mark Finn, Keith Taylor, Joe Bonadonna and David C. Smith, and many more. As I was putting it…

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The Art of Things to Come, Part 3: 1961-1963

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Science Fiction Book Club brochure (1961) As I related in the first two installments of this series (Part One: 1953-1957, and Part Two: 1958-1960), 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…

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Would You Spend $44 on a Collection of 30 Vintage DAW Paperbacks?

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Would you spend $44 on these 30 vintage DAW paperbacks? I buy a lot of paperbacks on eBay.  I mean, a lot. But believe it or not, I don’t spend a lot of money. I’ve gotten in the habit of buying small collections; because shipping costs work out better and I spend much less per item. I haven’t done the math recently, but I budget anywhere from $0.25 to $0.50 per book when I go hunting, and usually stick to…

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Thank You — Yes You — For Helping Fill Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio’s Cosmic Corsairs

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Cosmic Corsairs (Baen, August 4, 2020). Cover by Tom Kidd I was minding my own business at Barnes and Noble last week, picking up random books and opening them to the Acknowledgements page, as one does. And what should I find in Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio’s new Cosmic Corsairs anthology? For help and advice, many thanks to John O’Neil and his Black Gate webzine, R.K. Robinson, Jason McGregor, Chris Willrich, Rich Horton, Marie Bilodeau, and others I’m unforgivably forgetting. I was very touched….

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Vintage Treasures: The Astounding-Analog Reader edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss

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The Astounding-Analog Reader (Sphere 1972 and 1973). Covers by unknown (left) and Chris Foss (right) I used to scoff at the idea of online bookstores. How will you browse for books?, I demanded to know. You’ll never replace that wonderful moment of discovery, of serendipity, finding a treasure you weren’t looking for, which happens all the time in great bookstores. Of course, these days I find books online all the time. I’m a huge fan of Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss’s…

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The Omnibus Volumes of Daniel Abraham: The Long Price Quartet

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Daniel Abraham is the author of The Dagger and the Coin five-volume fantasy series, five books in the Black Sun’s Daughter horror series (as M. L. N. Hanover), and a pair of Star Wars novels. With Ty Franck he is the author of the breakout hit The Expanse, under the name James S. A. Corey. But before all that he created a four-volume fantasy series called The Long Price Quartet that helped cement his rep as a rising young star. The…

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Birthday Reviews: October Index

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January index February index March index April index May index June index July index August index September index October 1, Donald A. Wollheim: “Blueprint” October 2, Edward Wellen: “Barbarossa” October 3, Ray Nelson: “Time Travel for Pedestrians” October 4, Gary Couzens: “Half-Life” October 5, Zoran Živković: “The Whisper” October 6, David Brin: “Just a Hint”