The Best Vintage Paperbacks of 2025

The Best Vintage Paperbacks of 2025

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Chris Gunter’s choice for the best vintage paperbacks of 2025. Finally a socially relevant Year’s Best list

Ah, the end of the year. When social media — and my email in-box — are filled with Best of the Year lists.

I’m not complaining. I love ’em. But the ones I most enjoy are (of course) lists that include delightful old paperbacks finds. Or are maybe, I dunno, exclusively old paperbacks, since that’s about 90% of my own reading these days.

This year I especially enjoyed old books by Lin Carter (Flashing Swords 2), Jerry Pournelle (West of Honor), C.J. Cherryh (Faded Sun: Kutath) and Clifford D. Simak (City). Not too surprisingly, my favorite 2025 Best of the Year list (so far) has been a short post by Chris Gunter on the Vintage Paperback and Pulp Forum on Facebook, which enthusiastically included classics by Alfred Bester, Keith Roberts, Bob Shaw and others.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on Dash(iell) and (Lester) Dent

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray on Dash(iell) and (Lester) Dent

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Frequent guest columnist, New Pulp maven Will Murray, is back with more speculation: this time linking about the two biggest names in Pulp. Was Dashiell Hammett a Lester Dent fan? Well, let’s find out! 

The so-called Pulp Jungle, as Frank Gruber once called it, was a densely populated wonderland, at least insofar the greatest concentration of pulp magazine writers lived in or in close proximity to New York City, where most of the publishers were established.

Late in life, Theodore Tinsley, a regular contributor to Black Mask, The Shadow, as well as numerous other top pulp titles, recalled:

“Pulpland seems a strange, purple-clouded island, in a warm sea somewhere far off, where some of the damnedest elves and goblins I ever met used to say and do strange things, especially when drunk.”

Thanks in part to the American Fiction Guild, a writer’s association which flourished during the 1930s, a great many of these writers and their editors convened for Friday luncheon gatherings at Rosoff’s restaurant on 43rd Street. They socialized, vacationed together, dated, and even married. It was virtually a subculture delineated and confined by a common vocational focus.

Others, scattered throughout the country, kept in touch by letter. But not everyone knew everyone else, except possibly by reputation.

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Ghosts and Death Songs on Mars: Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, edited by John Joseph Adams

Ghosts and Death Songs on Mars: Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, edited by John Joseph Adams

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Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom (Simon & Schuster, February 2012). Cover by Mark Zug

Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom has “Inspired by the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs” on the cover. I hesitated about picking this one up. A note on the back said: “Not licensed or authorized, or in any way affiliated with, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.” This suggested some kind of controversy surrounding the publication and it seems awfully easy these days to step on toes and get hated for it. I don’t enjoy that kind of thing. But, it had stories by Joe Lansdale, Jonathan Maberry, and S. M. Stirling in it, and I knew all three of those could write. So I pulled the trigger.

Overall, I found the anthology enjoyable, and even though it seemed generally marketed for “teen” readers, the stories were far from simple and unsophisticated. I thought there were three particularly strong stories, as well as several others I liked a lot.

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The Star Warses — Part 1

The Star Warses — Part 1

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It would seem my film lists and reviews haven’t been controversial enough, because our esteemed leader recently yelled down from the lofty belfry of Black Gate Tower and asked me to expand a little on my current Letterboxd rankings of the documentary series known collectively as The Star Wars Saga.

Essentially the rankings boil down to how the films make me feel, based purely on that initial hit I received in 1977 aged 10, when my world turned upside down.

These films are important to many of us for various reasons. They’ve dominated my life for almost 50 years, and influenced my marital status (for the better), my careers (mixed results), even my kids’ names (just ask my eldest, Salacious).

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Tor Double #35: Robert A. Heinlein’s Universe and Dean Ing’s Silent Thunder

Tor Double #35: Robert A. Heinlein’s Universe and Dean Ing’s Silent Thunder

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Cover for Universe and Silent Thunder by Joe DeVito

Tor Double #35 is the penultimate volume in the Tor Double series and also the final multi-author offering, originally published in July 1991. A throwback to the early volumes in the series, this volume, although only having a single cover, has embossed title text for the first time since volume #19.

Universe was originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in May 1941. Although not the first generation ship story, Universe is a relatively early example of the subgenre and Heinlein’s first foray into it, although he would return to it in the future, eventually published Universe and its sequel “Common Sense” as the novel Orphans of the Sky.

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Doom Pilgrim! – War Claw’s Solo Card-Game-Book

Doom Pilgrim! – War Claw’s Solo Card-Game-Book

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Narrative game books steered my interest into dark fantasy reading and playing. The 1980s phenomenon of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks championed blending RPG elements into the choose-your-own-adventure genre. Although these persist in 2025 (in releases, digital versions, several tabletop games… all susceptible to reviews here soon), the last decade has enabled new forms of narrative, choose-your-own-adventure solo games.

This post highlights DOOM PILGRIM, a narrative-card-game-book by War Claw Games. The company is based in the Czech Republic. Most of their lineup has Print-to-Play options in addition to physical copies (produced by US-based manufacturer, The Game Crafter).

Released in 2022 as a physical and print-and-play game, Doom Pilgrim was awarded “Best Small Game of the Year” from the solo-dungeon-crawler guru Daniel from  Dungeon Dive (see also his his Doom Pilgrim tutorial).  In short, it is a superbly elegant, beautiful game. Doom Pilgrim has several expansions available now, with more on the way. Also, these proven game mechanics have evolved into Arthurian Legend,  Sci-Fi, and weird horror games.

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The Sword and Planet of Andrew J. Offutt, Part II

The Sword and Planet of Andrew J. Offutt, Part II

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Messenger of Zhuvastou (Berkley Medallion, March 1973). Cover by Jeff Jones

Part I of The Sword and Planet of Andrew J. Offutt is here.

I’ve read two unabashed Sword & Planet novels from Andrew J. Offutt, Messenger of Zhuvastou, and Chieftain of Andor. I thought I had a sequel to the Andor book in my TBR piles but on closer examination it’s the same book with a different title: Clansman of Andor.

Messenger of Zhuvastou features an Earthman named Moris Keniston, the son of a Senator, although this is on a future Earth where humans have begun to spread to the stars. He heads for a primitive, barbaric world called Hellene in search of Elaine Dixon, a woman he is in love with who has been taken there — either voluntarily or involuntarily. Since the planet is supposed to be left undisturbed by galactic civilization, Moris undergoes plastic surgery to make him fit in with the humanoid natives. We already know he has been an Olympic level athlete and is a trained fencer.

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In Defence of the “Romantasy Girlies”

In Defence of the “Romantasy Girlies”

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A typewriter with paper with the phrase “words have power” typed on it.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

So, once again I have entered the world of TikTok. This one is very old now, in the lightning fast news cycle that is that particular platform, so I’m rather behind the ball on commenting on it. For a few reasons for this. One, I’m old (ish. In internet terms, I mean). I simply cannot move at the speed TikTok seems to demand. Two, the one really got under my skin, despite not being one of the group targeted. So I wanted to take the time to calm down before approaching it. And third, I feel like I’ve covered this topic more than once, and I’m very annoyed that I feel compelled to tackle it once again. But here we are.

It is, of course, the weird, irritating, and erroneous snobbery between genres.

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Bob’s Books – Shelfie #13 (More Douglas Adams!)

Bob’s Books – Shelfie #13 (More Douglas Adams!)

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I don’t do much science fiction. I have Asimov’s Foundation books, and the first several Dune books (though The White Plague is my favorite Frank Herbert). And there are a few other assorted books from folks like Robert Heinlen, Philip K. Dick, and Arthur C. Clarke.

But man, I LOVE Douglas Adams, and The Hithchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I revisit Hitchhiker’s periodically, and the most recent dive down the rabbit hole led to me adding three more books to my bookshelf.

I’ve got a collection with Adams’ five Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels, as well as the lone Hitchhiker’s short story. With Adams, it all starts here, of course. I mean, how else are you gonna learn how to see the universe on less than 30 Altairian dollars a day?

There’s also Eoin Colfer’s good-enough official continuation novel, And Another Thing…

I’ve re-read the Hitchhiker’s series several times. I also listen to the audiobooks. They used to be available read by Adams himself, though those seem to be pretty much phased out. The current ‘in’ series has Stephen Fry doing book one, and Martin Freeman the other four.

Hitchhiker’s is ALWAYS fun. This series has never grown stale, or aged poorly, for me. I’ve been revisiting it for decades.

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The Sword and Planet of Andrew J. Offutt

The Sword and Planet of Andrew J. Offutt

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My Lord Barbarian (Del Rey, April 1977). Cover by Boris Vallejo

Andrew J. Offutt (1934 -2013) wrote a lot of books and I’m going to talk about him more as I go along. He wrote several Conan pastiches and a whole series of pastiches about Robert E. Howard’s character Cormac Mac Art. He also wrote porn or near porn in several genres under pseudonyms, which I’ll get around to. He has several S&P novels to his credit. Here’s one.

My Lord Barbarian was billed as a Sword and Planet novel, but it didn’t have much of the feel of such a novel to me. It was indeed set on another planet (several in fact), and the setting is S & P — an artificial solar system created by an advanced human civilization which has fallen into decay. Most worship “Siense” (Science) as a God now.

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