Search Results for: Stories That Work

James Davis Nicoll on Five Thrilling SF Stories About Patrolling Space

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Crashing Suns (Ace, 1965), A Matter of Oaths (Questar, 1990), and The Prefect (Ace Books, 2009). Covers by Ed Valigursky, Martin Andrews, and Chris Moore What’s better than thrilling stories of patrolling space?? (No need to email an answer; it’s a rhetorical question. And the answer is “nuthin’”). Mind you, I’d be hard pressed to cite actual examples. Star Trek books maybe? EC Comics Weird Science, naturally. After that, I got nothing. Fortunately James Nicoll reads a lot more than…

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Out of the Past: The Scarecrow and Other Stories by G Ranger Wormser

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The Scarecrow and Other Stories G Ranger Wormser Edited by William P. Simmons Shadow House Publishing (161 pages, October 26, 2020) Originally published in 1918, this collection of short stories is the first installment of a Macabre Mistresses series aiming to unearth forgotten dark fiction, much to the joy of genre fans. As William P. Simmons points out in his insightful Introduction, Wormser’s work has nothing to do with the horror genre in its more blatant expressions, but relies upon…

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Read Matthew David Surridge’s Sword & Sorcery Novella “The Great Work” at Patreon

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Matthew David Surridge’s novellete “The Word of Azrael” first appeared in Black Gate 14, and was one of the most widely acclaimed stories we ever published. Tangent Online called it “One of the strongest heroic fantasies I have seen in years,” and Rich Horton selected it for the 2011 Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. In his Locus review Rich said: Even better is Matthew Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael.” It concerns Isrohim Vey, who sees the Angel of Death on…

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Generational Connections: Ursula Pflug’s Seeds And Other Stories

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Ursula Pflug’s fiction demands to be savoured. Her new collection, Seeds And Other Stories, holds 26 short fictions ranging in length from flash fiction to short novelettes, each marked out by precise language and fantastic happenings seen edge-on. They’re not linked by plot but by threads of imagery: portals to other places; hallucinatory new drugs named for colours; gardening, and plants sprouting from the earth or human bodies. Each individual piece on its own carries a powerful emotional weight. Together…

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As Close as We’ll Get to a Completed Big Numbers: A Glimpse of a Lost Masterwork by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz

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Big Numbers issues 1 and 2. Mad Love, April and August 1990. Covers by Bill Sienkiewicz It’s one of the great might-have-beens of comics history. First announced in 1988, Big Numbers was going to be a 12-issue series written and conceived by Alan Moore with art by Bill Sienkiewicz about a major American shopping mall being built in a small English town. It would be an intricate social-realist story touching on colonialism, gender issues, and more — all tied together…

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The Stories We Tell: Bias in Research and Its Effects on Fiction

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Hadrian’s Wall, from the ruins of a Milecastle. Image from publicdomainpictures.net. Good morning, Readers! Last week, I was watching a lecture on Hadrian’s Wall, as you do, hoping to learn something new about the situation in Britain during the Roman occupation. I did not, incidentally, learn anything I had not already known (if money was no object, I would have a doctorate in archaeology, specializing in the British Isles, and probably a few extra degrees in archaeogenetics and archaeolinguistics. I am fascinated…

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Vintage Treasures: Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov

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Nightfall and Other Stories (Fawcett Crest, 1970). Cover artist unknown. I’ve been buying small collections recently, and writing about some of the more interesting items here. Two months back I was unpacking a box of 70s paperbacks, and I made a genuinely interesting find: a copy of Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov. Asimov was one of my heroes. There was a time in the 70s and 80s when he was science fiction, the embodiment not just of what was…

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Captured at Capricon: Stories Of The Restoration by K.M. Herkes

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Covers by Niina Cord, Rachel Bostwick, and Nicole Grandinetti It’s always a pleasure to discover an exciting series by an author from your home town, and that’s exactly what happened to me at Capricon 40 back in February. Capricon is a long-running and very friendly con here in Chicago, with imaginative programming and a great Dealers Room, and one of the highlights for me this year was the Bad Grammar Theater booth. Bad Grammar is a local reading series, and their booth in…

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Stories the Dogs Tell: Clifford D. Simak’s City

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City by Clifford D. Simak. First Edition: Gnome Books, 1952. Cover by Frank Kelly Freas (click to enlarge) City by Clifford D. Simak Gnome Press (224 pages, $2.75 in hardcover, May 1952) Clifford D. Simak was a Midwestern US newspaperman who wrote science fiction on the side, and published stories beginning in the 1930s in magazines like Wonder Stories until finding a home in John W. Campbell’s Astounding in the 1940s (and later Galaxy in the 1950s). City was his…

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Call for Backers! Mary Shelley Presents Four Horror Stories by Victorian Women

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Everyone’s heard of Frankenstein, and most people also know its author, Mary Shelley, but on the 200th anniversary of that novel’s publication, Kymera Press is doing something very, very cool. Mary Shelley Presents is a graphic novel series about other Victorian women horror writers. These women were famous in their own day, but their legacies have faded over time. Now, with the help of Kickstarter, Kymera press seeks to assemble the multiple stories of this series into one trade paperback that they will then bring…

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