Search Results for: tale covers

Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales

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Weird Tales , Volumes 1 -4 (Zebra Books, December 1980 – August 1983). Covers by Tom Barber (#1-3) and Doug Beekman (#4) Lin Carter was one of the finest genre editors of the 20th Century, and Weird Tales magazine was the most important fantasy magazine of the last century, publishing the career-defining work of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and hundreds of other writers. In December 1980 Zebra Books published the equivalent of a genre superhero Team-Up,…

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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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Future Treasures: Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror edited by John F.D. Taff

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Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror, UK edition (Titan Books, March 22, 2022) and US edition (Tor Nightfire, May 10, 2022). Covers uncredited. Forty years ago Kirby McCauley packed up and moved to New York to try his hand at being a literary agent. His friend Richard L. Tierney helped him drive to the city; before long he was representing a host of young writers, including Roger Zelazny, Stephen King, and George R. R. Martin, who credits McCauley with…

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African Folk Tales and Sword & Sorcery: Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James

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Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King (Riverhead Books, February 2019 and February 2022). Covers by Pablo Gerardo Camacho The first novel I bought by Marlon James was A Brief History of Seven Killings, a fictionalized version of the true story of the attempted hit on Bob Marley by seven gunmen in the late 1970s — which isn’t even fantasy or SF, but what can I tell you, I just picked it up in Barnes & Noble and…

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