The new year rolls on. I can’t say that it’s started with a successful charge, exactly. My van was damaged in a head-on collision in which I escaped any injury whatsoever. The other driver is sore but okay, but his car is a mess, whereas mine has superficial but expensive damage. His insurance is paying, fortunately for me. In an odd moment of synchronicity one of my sisters had a car accident on the very same day within an hour or two of mine. She, too, is okay, but her car is totalled.

All in all, though, things here in Black Gate’s southern outpost overlooking the Sea of Terror are pretty good. John is working hard on BG 12 and making some very tough decisions on a final handful of subs (we really will get back to all of you, soon!). I am working on reviews for said issue, which includes the onerous task of reading through a big stack of really amazing new gaming products. Man, the material produced these days is just really good. It’ll be hard to find much bad to say about anything I’m seeing this time around, but then I come from the school of review where I just tell it like I see it. If all the products get a big thumbs up it doesn’t mean I’m going soft, it just means that they’re all pretty danged cool.

Speaking of danged cool, I just got Haffner Press’s second Brackett collection (or third, if you count the collection that also reprinted some Edmund Hamilton). It’s glorious. Soon all of Brackett’s short science adventure stories will be in lovely hardbacks, courtesy of Haffner Press. Paizo’s gearing up for some paperback reprints of some of Brackett’s Eric John Stark adventures, which will be a great way to introduce a new generation of readers as to why having hardback sets from the Queen of Space Opera is a must. The borders between sword-and-sorcery, science fiction, and fantasy all blur when you plop down with a Brackett story. All that really matters is how good the stories are.

Howard