The Rape of the Sun by Ian Wallace (DAW 1982). Preliminary sketch and final cover by David B. Mattingly As a teenaged science fiction and fantasy fan growing up in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, I loved DAW Books. They had some great authors and great cover art, and all those yellow spines looked sweet next to each other on the bookshelf. As some of you may know, I collect and sell original SF and fantasy art. I’ve been…
The Best Science Fiction of the Year 12 (Timescape/Pocket Books, July 1983) I recently found a copy of Terry Carr’s 1983 anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year 12 in a paperback collection I bought on eBay, and I was astonished at just how many great tales it contained. There’s Connie Willis’s Hugo & Nebula Award winner “Firewatch,” the story of a time-traveling history student doing research during the London Blitz who discovers much more than he bargained for;…
Planets Three by Frederik Pohl (Berkley Books, 1982). Cover by Gregg Hinlicky I admire Frederik Pohl. He had a nearly 75-year career in science fiction, from the early stories he published as a young teen in the 1930s all the way to the Hugo Award he won in 2010 for his superb early blog, The Way the Future Blogs, at the age of 90. He was an astute and prolific fan writer, an agent, and a legendary editor, winning three successive…
The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Second Annual Collection (Infinivox, November 21, 2021). Cover by Maurizio Manzieri I’ve been reading and writing about Year’s Best volumes for decades, and I’ve covered a lot of them, including anthologies by Terry Carr, Don Wollheim, Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, Rich Horton, Neil Clarke, and many others. So I hope you can appreciate what a pleasure it was to receive a copy of Allan Kaster’s The Year’s Top…
Rogue Dragon (Ace Books, 1965, cover by Jack Gaughan) and the back-page Ace paperback catalog As ludicrous as it might sound, I have a few books I bought more than half a century ago and still haven’t got around to reading. This short Avram Davidson novel was one of them, until I dusted it off last night. Looking at the ads in the back of the book — from a time when publishers could do direct mail-order sales — I…
Richard L. Tierney It was not long ago that I wrote an obituary here for Charles R. Saunders, the father of Sword & Soul and a man who showed the possibilities of sword & sorcery/heroic fantasy in non-European settings. Now, I must poor libations for another who took a genre’s flickering torch and in his own, and very different way, showed how to keep it burning. Richard Louis Tierney (7 August 1936 – 1 Feb 2022) was an American writer,…
The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IV (DAW, July 1976). Cover by Michael Whelan The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IV was the fourth volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror, copyright and printed in 1976. This one introduced a different editor, American author Gerald W. Page (1939–). Page had edited the successful weird tales magazine Witches & Sorcery from 1971 to 1974, and some stories from his ‘zine had made the earlier volumes of Year’s Best Horror. My guess is…
The Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW, 1972). Cover by Karel Thole The first Year’s Best Horror Stories, DAW No. 13, published in 1972, was edited by British author and editor Richard Davis, who would go on to produce many more horror and sci-fi anthologies throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He also edited the next two Year’s Best Horror Stories for DAW, but he primarily published through British outlets. The Year’s Best Horror Stories, No. 1, was first published by Sphere…
20 of the 22 volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW Books) Today I’m beginning a new series of posts investigating DAW Books’ Year’s Best Horror Stories series, which ran from 1971 to 1994. As a fan of literary horror, I’m excited to sequentially read through these volumes and share my thoughts with you. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to discover some great stories and authors, perhaps some we’ve never read before, and I’m also hoping that we…
Mars, We Love You (Pyramid Books, 1973) and its British reprint, The Book of Mars(Orbit, 1976). Covers: unknown (left), and Patrick Woodroffe (right) The 70s was the golden age of science fiction anthologies, and especially themed anthologies. You didn’t find a lot of books collecting SF cat tales, mermaid legends, or vampire love stories in those days (not that there’s anything wrong with those, I hasten to add). But take Mars, We Love You, for example. Originally published in hardcover…