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Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

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A complete set (18 issues) of Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and published 1947-1952

Donald A. Wollheim edited a magazine between the years 1947 to 1952 called Avon Fantasy Reader for Avon Publishers. There were 18 issues, publishing mostly reprints.

Erik Mona reviewed the first issue of Avon Fantasy Reader for Black Gate back in 2023.

I’ve never seen a copy of any of these, but in the late 1960s, George Ernsberger selected some of the best stories from the magazine for two paperback volumes. I believe there were only two. Here are some quick looks at the paperbacks, which I own and have read.

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Dark Muse News: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Issues #8, 9, & 10

Dark Muse News: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Issues #8, 9, & 10

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Cover Artists Cover #8 – Jimmy Makepeace  Cover #9 – Plastiboo  Cover #10 – Matej Kollár

Black Gate has been tracking the inception and growth of New Edge Sword & Sorcery (NESS) mgazine, starting with Micheal Harrington’s 2022 interview with Oliver Brackenbury (champion and editor of NESS), through 2023 with NESS’s first two magazine releases (also Greg Mele’s review of #1), and then into 2024 with NESS’s first book “Beating Heart and Battle Axes and its two-novella combo book Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, and then in 2025 we covered NESS‘s publication of a NEW Jirel of Joiry tale! (2025) and we interviewed one of their key New Edge authors, Bryn Hammond.

Now in 2026, NESS brings us more with promises of Issues 8, 9, and 10!

The campaign to fund and expand them ends just days after this posting (March 14th )!  Hurry now to Backerkit to get some exclusives like a poster featuring live models in full S&S costume, discounted back issues, and a cover art postcard; also, backing unlocks more interior art and bumps author payments. If you miss out, or want some of the prior rewards from previous crowdfunding, get back issues and other NESS offerings in their shop, noting that print copies often have limited print runs.

So what is in the next three issues? We asked Oliver Brackenbury that, and his answer is below. And we had a feeling Jirel of Joiry would return, and we asked Molly Tanzer to provide a bit of perspective on the heroine.

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Exploring the Dark Side of Life: Remains, edited by Andrew Cox

Exploring the Dark Side of Life: Remains, edited by Andrew Cox

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Remains, issues 4 and 4. Cover art by Richard Wagner

There are readers who, like me, prefer dark fiction in short form, because their suspension of disbelief is too brief to sustain — with a few exceptions — a full novel.

For people like us here’s a real treat: the new magazine/anthology Remains, edited by Andy Cox and illustrated by Richard Wagner, both well known for their previous work with the mythical Black Static magazine.

The first two issues are already sold out, but volume 3 ( published in late 2025) and the brand new volume 4 are available to entertain and disquiet.

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Moon Pirates, Deadly Nanobots, and Alien Plagues: November-December Print Science Fiction Magazines

Moon Pirates, Deadly Nanobots, and Alien Plagues: November-December Print Science Fiction Magazines

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Summer 2025 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the
November/December issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and
Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by John Jennings, Eldar Zakirov, and Shutterstock

It’s a bittersweet month for fans of print SF magazines. First the good news. For the first time since September 2024, there’s a full complement of science fiction magazines on the shelves. The Summer 2025 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is at last available, six months late and with an 18 month-gap since the last issue, but it’s here and we’re delighted to see it. Yes, the magazines that accompany it, Asimov’s SF and Analog, are also more than two months late, cover-dated November-December 2025 but not available until last week, but at this point we know better than to complain. We’re just grateful they’re here at all.

Now the bad news. And unfortunately, it’s bad indeed. Yesterday, January 12, the news spread that Sheila Williams, the brilliant and tireless editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, had been hospitalized with a brain aneurysm. She is reportedly conscious, and communicating with family, and we hope and pray for her speedy recovery. In my opinion Sheila is the most important editor currently at work in genre magazines, and without her the field will be enormously diminished.

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Quatro-Decadal Review: Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1999, edited by Gardner Dozois and Shelia Williams

Quatro-Decadal Review: Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1999, edited by Gardner Dozois and Shelia Williams

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Interesting, but suspiciously CGI-like cover art by Jim Burns

Column: Reflections, Autographs, by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg spent the summer of ’99 signing copies of Dying Inside. 7,000 autographs — a novella in and of itself. He muses on autographs and people who collect them.

  • His future wife signed in ‘81
  • Silverberg quit the writing game in disgust in the 70’s. In ’75 at a con he asked near-immortal Jack Williamson for his autograph. “For Bob Silverberg, who used to write great SF — trusting he’ll do it again — with a vast admiration.” Just when you get out, they pull you back in!
  • Asimov who dedicated The Gods Themselves so exuberantly dedicated to Robert Silverberg that he asked him to remove it from future editions.
  • His favorite — a non-writing friend who playfully wrote in a paperback coy of Moby Dick. “Jerry had playfully added one little touch of improvement on the inside front cover, an inscription that read: To Bob with respect and admiration—Herman.”

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Quatro-Decadal Review: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 1999, edited by Stanley Schmidt

Quatro-Decadal Review: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 1999, edited by Stanley Schmidt

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Cover Art by Kim Poor

Editorial, Technological Temptation by Stanley Schmidt

Cameras at stop-lights, that is the issue that has rubbed Schmidt’s libertarian streak wrong. Very wrong! He soon spins a future of nanny-state-over-arching-safety-protocols.

I’m not an expert at the art of rhetoric and argument, but even I am immediately pick up on several logic holes, beginning with his fundamental argument, “That if it leads to a reduction in crime it must be good, therefore there should be more of it.” Thus, more cameras, cameras everywhere, in your home even! Then he wraps it up with a little of the ol’ argument from authority with the Ben Franklin chestnut about “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
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From Decades of Robert E. Howard Scholarship: The Solomon Kane Companion by Fred Blosser

From Decades of Robert E. Howard Scholarship: The Solomon Kane Companion by Fred Blosser

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The Solomon Kane Companion by Fred Blosser (Pulp Hero Press, June 17, 2025)

If you’re familiar with Robert E. Howard Fandom, you already know who Fred Blosser is. I first encountered his work back in the early 1970s, when he was writing articles and reviews for Marvel Comics’ Savage Sword of Conan magazine.

For SSoC, Blosser authored well-researched articles about topics such as the Picts in Howard’s fiction, REH Fanzines, Howard’s Kozaks, and a history of Howard’s puritan adventurer, Solomon Kane.

Now Blosser has taken that last one much farther, producing a book called The Solomon Kane Companion, published by Pulp Hero Press, who kindly sent me a review copy. As I mentioned, Kane is a puritan, and his adventures take place in the Elizabethan era. He was created by Robert E. Howard while Howard was still in high school, and his first published appearance was in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales, in the story “Red Shadows.”

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The Best Short SF: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Part II

The Best Short SF: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Part II

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F&SF, February 1973. Cover by Bert Tanner

For this installment, we look at a selection of tales from The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1985), edited by Edward L. Ferman.

“Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal,” a novelette by Robert Aickman

First published in F&SF, February 1973
Read the story in the original magazine here

A young girl records her travels in Italy, where she and her family are hosted by a Contessa. At a soirée she meets a hauntingly enchanting suitor, and after a nocturnal encounter, she begins to experience a strange transformation. This vampire tale was the first winner of a World Fantasy Award for short fiction. The prose is elegant and seemed convincingly of its intended 1830s setting.

Rating: *** (Good)
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The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

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Having returned the Eye of Rhynn and the Hand of Kwll to their rightful (quite frightening) owners, Sean CW Korsgaard and I sat down to conclude our Sword & Sorcery chat, and to focus once more on his upcoming magazine Battleborn. Thanks to a successful Indiegogo campaign, Issues One and Two are now fully funded, both digital and print.

Read Part One of the interview here, and Part Two here.

Battleborn is positioning itself as a sword & sorcery outlet. Speaking both as editor and fan, how is that different from epic or high fantasy? What elements or touches make a story S&S?

What makes the sword-and-sorcery subgenre are a combination of five factors. First up, the Protagonist. Unlike, for example, epic fantasy, which have large casts or changing points of view, a work of S&S typically follows a single protagonist, or the odd duo. I say protagonist instead of hero for a reason –– many of these characters are rogues, mercenaries, rebels, savages, and scoundrels, if not antiheroes or outright villainous. They are often underdogs or outsiders, and often on the road or far from home, akin to lone gunslingers of American westerns and the wandering samurai of Japanese folklore.

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Stray Missiles, Alien Plagues, & Underwater Laboratories: September-October Print Science Fiction Magazines

Stray Missiles, Alien Plagues, & Underwater Laboratories: September-October Print Science Fiction Magazines

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September-October 2025 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and
Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by Tithi Luadthong/Shutterstock

It’s the 500th issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction! That explains why I had to start stacking them sideways in 2004. Sheila Williams celebrates this incredible milestone in her editorial, touching on just a sampling of the truly extraordinary fiction to appear in the magazine over the past 48 years. Here’s an excerpt.

Under our first editor, George H. Scithers, we published great tales by writers like Barry Longyear, Roger Zelazny, and Somtow Sucharitkul. Kathleen Moloney’s tenure lasted less than a year, but during that time we published Connie Willis’s earliest award-winning stories — “A Letter from the Cleary’s” and “Fire Watch,” as well as David Brin’s “The Postman.” Important work published by Shawna include Octavia Butler’s “Blood Child,” Greg Bear’s “Hardfought,” George R.R. Martin’s “Portraits of his Children,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Green Mars,” and Robert Silverberg’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Gardner Dozois’s years at the helm brought us James Patrick Kelly’s “Think Like a Dinosaur,” Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” Neal Barrett, Jr.’s “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus,” Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire,” Allen M. Steele’s “The Death of Captain Future,” Michael Swanwick’s “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” Charles Stross’s “Lobsters,” and much more.

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