Search Results for: tale covers

A Tale of Two Covers: Ellen Kushner on Basilisk

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August 1980 May 1984 Last month I was delighted to find a brand new copy of Ellen Kushner’s first anthology Basilisk on eBay for the criminally low price of $1.50 — less than cover price! The copy I found was the original 1980 edition (above left), with the gorgeous Rowena cover. In fact, it wasn’t until I started researching it that I discovered it was re-issued in 1984, with a brand new cover by Stephen Hickman (above right). Well, here was a curious mystery….

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A Tale of Two Covers: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

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For this installment of A Tale of Two Covers, we look at my favorite book by one of my favorite writers: John Brunner’s Hugo Award-winning Stand on Zanzibar. Stand on Zanzibar was published in 1969. I read it about a decade later, when I was in my mid-teens, and it pretty much blew my mind. It’s set in the far-distant future of 2010, when the Earth groans under the weight of a staggering seven billion souls, terrorists are the major…

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A Tale of Two Covers: The Last Page by Anthony Huso

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I bought the hardcover edition of Anthony Huso’s debut novel The Last Page after reading Matthew David Surridge’s review in Black Gate 12. The Last Page is a high fantasy steampunk novel, and a love story. We follow the sexually charged relationship between the improbably named Caliph Howl, heir to the throne of the northern country of Stonehold, and a witch named Sena. The two of them meet at university, go their own ways, and then come together again after…

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A Tale of the Last Free Humans: Fletcher Vredenburgh on Jack Vance’s “The Dragon Masters”

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Various covers for Jack Vance’s novella “The Dragon Masters” over the years: the original appearance in the August 1962 Galaxy, the 1972 Ace Double, and the 1981 Ace paperback edition. Cover art by Jack Gaughan, Josh Kirby, and David B. Mattingly Over at Goodman Games Bill Ward, Howard Andrew Jones and a team of thousands have assembled a world-class fantasy blog around their magnificent magazine Tales From the Magician’s Skull. Recent articles include Bill Ward’s delightful survey of the Classic…

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The New Weird Tales

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Weird Tales #366, the Sword & Sorcery issue (January 2023), and #367, the Cosmic Horror issue (May 2023). Covers by Bob Eggleton and Mike Mignola I ordered a copy of the new Sword & Sorcery issue of Weird Tales last year, and it finally arrived a few weeks ago — so late that I almost forgot I ordered it. But it did arrive — and turned out to be damn impressive. A huge oversize (8×10) issue in full color, with…

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Horror Pervades the UK: Terror Tales Of The West Country, Edited by Paul Finch

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Terror Tales Of The West Country (Telos Publishing, October 31, 2022). Cover by Neil Williams This is volume 14 in the successful ongoing series Terror Tales, a bunch of anthologies collecting horror short stories set every time in a different area of the United Kingdom. Which, all in all, appears to be a really spooky place where dark and supernatural events occur all the time. For the present  book editor Paul Finch (an excellent horror writer himself) has chosen the West…

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Tales of Adventure and Exploration from the Pre-Spaceflight Era: Mike Ashley’s British Library Science Fiction Classics

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All ten anthologies in the British Library Science Fiction Classics edited by Mike Ashley, plus his non-fiction survey Yesterday’s Tomorrows, and interior art from Moonrise (bottom right). Covers by Chesley Bonestell, David A. Hardy, Warwick Goble, Frederick Siebel, et al Mike Ashley is a fascinating guy. He interviewed me years ago about founding the SF Site (sfsite.com), one of the first science fiction websites, back in 1995, for his book The Rise of the Cyberzines, the fifth volume of his…

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Vintage Treasures: Tales from the Spaceport Bar edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer

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Tales from the Spaceport Bar and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (Avon Books, 1987 and 1989). Covers by James Warhola and Doug Beekman Science fiction has a rep for being serious stuff. Tales of dystopias, climate catastrophes and environmental collapse, dire warnings about worrying trends, that’s SF in a nutshell. Even dressed up in its best story-telling adventure garb, Star Wars or Mad Max-style, it’s still often perceived as all about desperate battles in apocalyptic settings. Of course, science…

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Demons are Forever: Review of A Hybrid’s Tale. The Cambion Journals: Book One by Andrew P. Weston

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“Cambion: the half-human offspring of the union between a human male and a Succubus, or a human female and an Incubus.”  A Hybrid’s Tale is the latest offering by Andrew P. Weston. It’s a short, fast-paced novel set in the realm of “demondim,” and is the first book in his new series, The Cambion Journals. It’s “billed” as Occult Horror, but it’s much more than that. Weston skillfully blends and cross-breeds genres: supernatural horror and science fiction, fantasy and mythology,…

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