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Year: 2021

Bran Mak Morn: Social Justice Warrior

Bran Mak Morn: Social Justice Warrior

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Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard (Ace Books, 1979). Cover by Sanjulian

“Worms of the Earth” was published in Weird Tales in November of 1932, and was thus described in the table of contents as “a grim shuddery tale of the days when Roman legions ruled in Britain–a powerful story of a gruesome horror from the bowels of the earth.” It features Bran Mak Morn, the King of the Picts, one of Howard’s barbarian characters. A quasi-Faustian tale, the story dramatizes Bran Mak Morn’s greatest transgression, a dark pact the king makes with diabolic force to avenge his dying and brutalized race: the Picts.

Many consider “Worms of the Earth” one of Howard’s masterpieces, truly haunting and enigmatic, its impact lingering long after a reading, like a stagnant tobacco smell or a leathery flapping of shadowy wings. The story is also notable for its inclusion of allusions to H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos, specifically the ancient Mesopotamian god “Dagon” and the sunken city of “R’lyeh,” home to dreaming Cthulhu. Undoubtedly, the story’s themes of racial degeneracy and the violent power of geologic time are steeped in Howard’s legendary 1930s correspondence with Lovecraft.

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Jump Back! Quatro-Decadal Review, Looking Ahead to November 1989

Jump Back! Quatro-Decadal Review, Looking Ahead to November 1989

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The Holy Trinity

With the 1969 and 1979 magazines behind me I prepare to delve into 1989.  A problem with the decadal review is that, well, it comes in decade intervals. I was 10 years old in 1979, but in 1989 I was a well-seasoned 20.  The answers?  I had them.   In the intervening decade I had gotten a car, a job, started taekwondo, finished high school, and was deep into college.

Unlike 10-year-old me, 20-year-old me had a full handle on SF/F in popular culture.  In fact, the 80s were a watershed decade for SF/F — the promise of green screen special effects and the progress of practical effects really come to fruition in the 80s. Television was more hit and miss, but the decade that started with The Phoenix, progressed through V and  Knight Rider and ended with Star Trek:  The Next Generation. What started with Adventure Atari 2600 ended with Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. I discovered Dungeons and Dragons in 1982 and never looked back.  My awareness of SF/F books started with Asimov’s juveniles Lucky Starr through Andre Norton and C.J. Cherryh and into Tolkien, Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame and the discovery of REH, Fritz Lieber, Richard and Wendy Pini (which ties into the first round of graphic novels into the public imagination). 

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Vintage Treasures: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Vintage Treasures: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

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Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley. Cover by Bruce Jensen

Paul J. McAuley was one of our earliest contributors, with a book review column in the very first issue of Black Gate magazine. His writing career was taking off at the same time — his debut novel Four Hundred Billion Stars won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988, and Kirkus Reviews raved about his 1995 novel Red Dust, calling it “An extraordinary saga… Superb.”

But his breakout book was Fairyland, an early nanotech novel set in a ruined Europe where bioengineered dolls are used as disposable slaves. It won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel, and was eventually reissued as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series. In his SF Site review Matthew Cheney wrote:

Fairyland was first published in 1995; it dazzles still. Though some of the props of its future have been churned into clichés by many subsequent novels and movies, few of those props have gathered dust in the intervening years… even more remarkable is that, at least for its first two thirds, the novel succeeds as much on the strengths of its structure, characters, and themes as it does on its whizz-bangs and gosh-wows…

The basic plot is a simple thriller-quest: a man goes in search of a woman who bewitched him with something he considers love (though it might be the residual effect of being sprayed with nanobots)… Along the way, McAuley gives us a vision of EuroDisney that is as disturbing as the visions of its American counterparts in Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom and Carl Hiaasen’s Native Tongue. The chapters set here are among the most compelling and vivid in the book, a posthuman primordial ooze fueled by excesses of capital and biology in the ruins of a labyrinth built by corporate “Imagineers”….

It is a story propelled at its best moments by ideas, and yet it doesn’t neglect to present characters who are, more often than not, individual and unpredictable, and so it helps break down the supposed barriers between the novel of ideas and the novel of psychology in the same way that it breaks down the more intractable barriers between hard science fiction and high fantasy.

Fairyland was published in the UK by Gollancz in 1995, and reprinted in mass market paperback in the US by Avon in July 1997. The Avon paperback is 420 pages, priced at $5.99. The cover is by Bruce Jensen.

See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Rogue Blades Presents: The Search for Heroes Never Ends

Rogue Blades Presents: The Search for Heroes Never Ends

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The Howard House in Cross Plains, Texas.

Nearly three years ago I had the fun of spending a month driving across country in the U.S. with my girlfriend and her son. We started off in North Carolina, then made our way to Atlanta, through Alabama and down to New Orleans before heading further west to Houston and Austin before spending four days in Cross Plains, Texas, for Robert E. Howard Days 2018. From there we drove to Roswell, New Mexico, popped down to Tombstone, Arizona, for a few days and then went on our way to San Diego. From there we visited the Grand Canyon, spent some time in Las Vegas, and headed back through the beautiful state of Utah before spending a day in St. Louis. Then it was back through my home state of Kentucky and back to North Carolina through Tennessee.

In many ways this was a trip of a lifetime, and along the way I re-discovered a few things about myself. First of all, this trip brought back to me just how much I love book stores, especially used bookstores, antiquity bookstores, and regional bookstores that offer the unique. There’s nothing more I love than spending hours scouring through shelves upon shelves in hunt of the unknown. Often enough I had no particular books in mind on this trip, but allowed myself the joy of discovering books I had forgotten about or had not even known existed, or even books I had known about but were out of print and I had never expected to find one during my lifetime. The search was the thing, even if I wasn’t searching for anything in particular.

Secondly, this trip reminded me just how much I love heroes, for in many ways this trip was more than a vacation. It was a journey, an epic adventure to discover heroes, mostly heroes known to me, some heroes forgotten and recalled. Originally I didn’t set out on this trip to discover heroes, but the longer I was on the road, the more heroes I came across.

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A Near-Perfect Blend of Detective Story and Military SF: The Planetside Trilogy by Michael Mammay

A Near-Perfect Blend of Detective Story and Military SF: The Planetside Trilogy by Michael Mammay

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The Planetside Trilogy by Michael Mammy. Covers by Sébastien Hue

I discovered Michael Mammay’s debut novel Planetside, the opening novel in a new military SF trilogy, while browsing a list of the most interesting new sci-fi of July 2018 at io9. They summed it up as:

A semi-retired war hero takes on a mission at the behest of an old friend, searching for an important officer’s MIA son. But what seems like a simple search-and-rescue gig soon gets a lot more complicated when he arrives on the far side of the galaxy and discovers a strange, ravaged planet teeming with secrets.

When volume #2, Spaceside, arrived a year later, Jeff Somers at The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog included it in his Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of August 2019, saying:

Last year, Michael Mammay’s Planetside delivered a near-perfect blend of detective story and military sci-fi. The sequel finds Colonel Carl Butler returning from his assignment in that book with a split reputation — part hero, part outcast. He’s once again forced into retirement, but this time he at least gets a cushy corporate job that capitalizes on his military reputation. When he’s asked by his bosses to investigate a devastating hack of a competitor’s computer systems — a hack no one will take responsibility for — Butler finds himself caught in a dangerous web that has him doubting his own mind even as he suspects he’s onto something much bigger than simple corporate espionage.

After all that you can understand why I kept my eye out for the third book. Colonyside arrived right on time on December 29, 2020, to warm reviews. In a starred review Library Journal said it’s “Highly recommended for readers who like their heroes cynical, their mystery twisted, and their sf thought-provoking.” That’s all the endorsement I need. All three books were published as paperback originals by Harper Voyager, with covers by Sebastien Hue. Here’s the complete details.

Planetside (370 pages, $7.99 paperback/$6.99 digital, July 31, 2018)
Spaceside (368 pages, $7.99 paperback/$5.99 digital, August 27, 2019)
Colonyside (384 pages, $7.99 paperback/$5.99 digital, December 29, 2020)

See all our coverage of the best SF and fantasy series old and new here.

Goth Chick News: In 2021, The “Stakes” Get Higher…

Goth Chick News: In 2021, The “Stakes” Get Higher…

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No surprise, I absolutely love a good vampire story. And though I’ve had a bit of an up and down relationship with Stephen King over the years, one of the “up” periods involved his book Salem’s Lot. During the year-end holidays I reread it, followed by a revisiting of the 1979 TV miniseries starring David Soul and directed by Tobe Hooper. Though it had its moments, not the least of which being the vampires themselves, I’ve always felt a little “meh” about this rendition as compared to its literary source material. The “meh” goes double for that hot mess on TNT starring Rob Lowe in 2004. This is also no surprise, as a King novel successfully translated to the screen of any size is a rare thing indeed.

Still, hope springs eternal in these matters, as shown by Carrie and The Shining, so when The Hollywood Reporter said director Gary Dauberman had signed up to bring Salem’s Lot to the big-screen, my interest was piqued.

Why? It’s not just due to Dauberman’s horror-chops, but the fact that he is also signed on to write the interpretation. To me it seems that whenever King gets involved as the screen writer, to ensure his stories are told his way, a train wreck ensues. The most recent case in point was Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining which I enjoyed so much I’ve read it twice. But hating Stanley Kubrick’s take on his original installment, King insisted on writing the script for Doctor Sleep himself, resulting in such a disappointing theatrical interpretation that I nearly primal screamed on the way out of the theater.

Raw fish does not belong on a pizza, and Stephen King should not write movie scripts – it’s that simple.

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Evil Space Plants, Lecherous Dragons, and the Mysteries of the Vampire: Weird Tales 364 Arrives

Evil Space Plants, Lecherous Dragons, and the Mysteries of the Vampire: Weird Tales 364 Arrives

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Weird Tales #364. Cover by Lynne Hansen

What’s this? Can it be? Two issues of Weird Tales magazine published in a single year? That hasn’t happened since (hastily checks notes) 2012!

There are other changes afoot as well, not just this insanely overambitious publication schedule. Marvin Kaye, who took over as editor in 2012 with issue 360 and managed just four issue in the last nine years, is no longer on the masthead. Replacing him as editor is Jonathan Maberry, who was Editorial Director of issue 363, which I wrote about last January.

But enough editorial gossip — what about the issue itself? It is real? Who’s in it? Who painted that awesome cover?

It is in fact real — at least digitally. Weird Tales #364 was published in digital formats on December 21, with print issues “available soon.” It’s crammed with tales of “Evil space plants, lecherous dragons and the mysteries of the vampire” by a stellar line up of writers, including Seanan McGuire, Marguerite Reed, Joe R. Lansdale, Gregory Frost, Tim Waggoner, and many more. And that entirely awesome and weird bird-lady cover? It’s by Lynne Hansen.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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New Treasures: Best New Horror 30, edited by Stephen Jones

New Treasures: Best New Horror 30, edited by Stephen Jones

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Best New Horror 30 (PS Publishing, November 2020). Cover by Warren Kremer

Gardner Dozois edited 35 volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction between 1984 and 2018, an extraordinary achievement that I didn’t expect to be equaled any time soon. But closing fast on his heels is Stephen Jones, who just released volume 30 of his Best New Horror series in November.

Publishing delays have accumulated for Best New Horror over the years; as result this volume collects tales from 2018. But that blemish aside, it’s a fine anthology with top notch horror from Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshal Smith, Alison Littlewood, Graham Masterton, Damien Angelica Walters, two stories from Peter Bell, and lots more — all packaged under a delightfully retro cover by Warren Kremer. Black Gate blogger Mario Guslandi offers up an in-depth review at Ginger Nuts of Horror; here’s a sample.

First of all I’d like to mention the two stories by Peter Bell, a fantastic author of ghostly tales, whose body of work has appeared so far only in books from small, indie imprints… “The House” is an eerie piece of fiction about three gentlemen following the traces of an elusive, ambiguous ghost story writer, and “ The Virgin Mary Well” is a dark, atmospheric story where ancient, unholy secrets about a mysterious well are unearthed and brought back to the present…

“The Deep Sea Swell” by John Langan is a tense, thrilling story where the ghost of a past sea tragedy gets loose during a storm, while “ Holiday Reading” by Rosalie Parker is a delightful tale suspended between literature and reality. In the creepy “The Smiling Man, by Simon Kurt Unsworth, violating the grave of a disreputable character brings about serious disturbances in a quiet small village…

Mark Samuels provides “Posterity”, an Aickmanesque story (not a simple coincidence…) describing the uncanny experience of a literary researcher exploring the legacy of a deceased writer whose initials are R.A. In Thana Niveau’s truly outstanding “ Octoberland” nostalgia and childhood horrors blend to create an insightful, unforgettable mix.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The First British Invasion

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The First British Invasion

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Television and TV broadcasting had many forebears, but the first regular national service was Great Britain’s BBC TV in 1936. It was suspended in 1939 during World War II so enemy aircraft couldn’t home in on its signals, but broadcasting resumed in 1946 and expanded rapidly thereafter. In 1955 the BBC was joined on the British airwaves by the Independent Television network, or ITV. Unlike the BBC, ITV was a commercial network, its programming supported by advertising and, it was hoped, by selling its content for rebroadcasting in the burgeoning American markets.

ITV broadcast a range of content, but what’s important to us is that there were entertaining swashbuckler series in the mix, starting from the very beginning in September 1955 with The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel. In Robin Hood, at least, ITV had a smash success, and its production company added two additional series in 1956, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers. (There was also an independent Count of Monte Cristo series, but we’ll save that for another day.) All of these shows were syndicated regionally across the United States, and Robin Hood in particular is fondly remembered.

The Adventures of Robin Hood, Season One

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1955
Director: Ralph Smart, et al.
Source: Network DVD

This series, which premiered in 1955 in both the USA and UK, heralded a brief vogue for swashbuckling TV shows, most of them produced in Britain — but this is the one that really mattered, because it was smart and dependably entertaining, found a devoted audience, ran for four seasons in the Fifties and then for decades in syndication. Its success inspired its only significant rival in Disney’s Zorro. Though shot in the UK with a British cast and crew, its producers were Americans whose politics leaned left, and most of its scripters were American screenwriters such as Howard Koch and Waldo Salt who’d been blacklisted in Hollywood. They gave the stories an anti-authoritarian edge that accorded well with Robin Hood’s outlaw legend.

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Future Treasures: The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson

Future Treasures: The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson

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Ah, there’s nothing like a good fantasy debut novel. Joshua Phillip Johnson has published a handful of short stories in small-press online journals (including “The Ghost Repeater” at The Future Fire and “The Demon in the Page” at Metaphorosis Magazine), and now leaps into the big time with a major hardcover release from DAW, coming in two weeks.

The Forever Sea is the opening book in a new epic fantasy series set in a world where ships sail an endless grass sea. Mary Robinette Kowal said, “This was everything I wanted it to be. Wind-swept prairie seas, pirates, magic, and found families,” Tor.com called it “a thrilling pirate fantasy that follows a crew of women that sail a sea of prairie grass,” and Publishers Weekly said it “calls to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series… this entertaining story makes a nice addition to the growing hopepunk subgenre.” I don’t know what the heck “hopepunk ” is, but between the comparisons to Earthsea and the “pirate fantasy” label I’m sold.

Here’s the publisher’s description.

On the never-ending, miles-high expanse of prairie grasses known as the Forever Sea, Kindred Greyreach, hearthfire keeper and sailor aboard harvesting vessel The Errant, is just beginning to fit in with the crew of her new ship when she receives devastating news. Her grandmother — The Marchess, legendary captain and hearthfire keeper — has stepped from her vessel and disappeared into the sea.

But the note she leaves Kindred suggests this was not an act of suicide. Something waits in the depths, and the Marchess has set out to find it.

To follow in her grandmother’s footsteps, Kindred must embroil herself in conflicts bigger than she could imagine: a water war simmering below the surface of two cultures; the politics of a mythic pirate city floating beyond the edges of safe seas; battles against beasts of the deep, driven to the brink of madness; and the elusive promise of a world below the waves.

Kindred finds that she will sacrifice almost everything — ship, crew, and a life sailing in the sun — to discover the truth of the darkness that waits below the Forever Sea.

The Forever Sea will be published by DAW Books on January 19, 2021. It is 464 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $14.99 in digital formats. The cover art is by Marc Simonetti. Read Chapter One at Tor.com.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming fantasy and science fiction here.