Confession: I’m a top 10/top 100/top whatever list addict. If I find an article on a subject about which I’m even remotely interested, and written in the form of a numbered list, I’ll generally stop to read it. That chance increases when said list is arranged in ascending or descending order of quality. I fully admit that many top 10/ top 100/top whatever lists are contrived hit count fodder (slugging something a “top 10” anything is guaranteed to increase the number of visits to…
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I ranted and raved in the previous installment of this monstrous undertaking about how all the mere morsels who responded to my first post in the the series did little to address my actual question — which was, who are the great monster of modern heroic fantasy? What crevasses do they haunt, what lonely paths do they prowl? As you can see, many monstrosities were discussed, but little from the preferred topic of this here Black Gate blog. However, as…
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“Evil powers…disappear Demons worry…when the Wizard is near He turns tears…into joy Everyone’s happy…when the Wizard walks by” — Black Sabbath Make way for the Wizard! WAY OF THE WIZARD is being released on November 16th, but editor John Joseph Adams (The Living Dead, Lightspeed) has launched a website for the book that features 7 stories ABSOLUTELY FREE. One of these stories is my own mini-epic “The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria.” You can read it and the rest right here….
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Warriors, edited by George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois Tor Books (736 pages. $27.99. March 16th, 2010) Warriors is a unique anthology. With its smorgasbord of genres, there is a tale and a Warrior for any reader. Well, there is a tale for every reader. Similar to Swords & Dark Magic, the other 2010 mega-sized mega-star-studded co-edited anthology, Warriors’ cover — title and text — misleads the reader as to the nature of its contents. The cover — which at…
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I don’t know whether the third edition of Best American Fantasy, which has found a new home with Underland Press, represents the “best” fantasy, or why it matters whether it’s “American” (meaning, presumably, the United States). Of course, it’s a cliché for any anthology to proclaim its contents represent a “best of,” and the editors who’ve been doing it for a number of years frequently rely on stories from the usual suspects of authors who mostly all publish in the…
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by Rich Horton For some time now I have been preparing summaries of the short SF I read each year, complete with my choices for the best in each length category. A bit more recently someone suggested I refine those choices into a virtual Best of the Year anthology Table of Contents (TOC). Never able to leave well enough alone, I went ahead and created four: an extended-length list for a general anthology, an SF-only and a Fantasy-only list; and…
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by Rich Horton This year so far I have read a total of 65 novellas, 315 novelettes, and 1580 short stories. The novella and short story totals are up a great deal from last year. The novelette total is almost the same. Of the short stories, 227 were short shorts. (I consider a short-short to be anything under 1500 words.) The total length of the new short fiction I read last year was about 10.8 million words, versus a final…
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John Crowley’s Flint and Mirror (Tor, April 2022), Engine Summer (Bantam, December 1983), and The Translator (William Morrow/HarperCollins, April 2002). Covers: unknown, Yvonne Gilbert, Chin-Yee Lai Recently I mentioned that passages in John Crowley’s Flint and Mirror made me cry… and it was (nicely) hinted that maybe it’s odd for men to cry while reading. The thing is, I cry often while reading. Sometimes for sad events, sometimes for joy, sometimes for anger, sometimes for wonder, sometimes for sheer beauty….
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Being Michael Swanwick (Fairwood Press, November 21, 2023) Prolificity is in the DNA of science fiction. H. G. Wells, whose most famous works date back to the 1890s, wrote some fifty novels, seventy non-fiction books, and one hundred short stories. Pick almost any SFWA Grand Master and you’ll encounter a bibliography that will engulf your life for many months, if not years. How many shelves to house the hundreds of books published, for instance, by Andre Norton, or Poul Anderson,…
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It’s time to wrap up Talking Tolkien. And I thought a Tolkien-themed version of Ten Things I Think I Think would be a fun way to do it. So away we go… READ THE LEGEND OF SIGURD & GUDRUN I read this last year, and I intend to write an essay on it, but just haven’t fit it in yet. This is a good book. And you can really see the influence it had on Tolkien. It’s as depressing as…
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