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An Original Ballantine Adult Fantasy: The Children of Llyr by Evangeline Walton

An Original Ballantine Adult Fantasy: The Children of Llyr by Evangeline Walton

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The Children of Llyr (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #33, August 1971). Cover by David Johnston

This latest entry in my series of essays about mostly obscure SF and Fantasy from the ’70s and ’80s looks at a novel published in one of the most celebrated publishing series of the early ’70s. This was the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which ran from 1969 to 1974, under the editorship of Lin Carter.

I’ve discussed Carter’s work before, and I subscribe to the more or less standard view that he was not a very good writer of fiction, but that his contributions to the field as an editor were tremendous. And nowhere more so than in this series of books.

The first volume was The Blue Star, by Fletcher Pratt, a reprint of a 1952 novel. The final official Ballantine Adult Fantasy publication was #65, Over the Hills and Far Away, by Lord Dunsany.

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Tor Doubles #31: Gordon R. Dickson’s The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars

Tor Doubles #31: Gordon R. Dickson’s The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars

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Cover for The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars by Brian Waugh

Tor Double #31 was originally published in April 1991. The proto-Tor Double, which included two stories by Keith Laumer, was the only volume up to this point to include content from a single author. This volume, with two stories by Gordon R. Dickson, is the first official Tor Double to include content from only one author. However, of the remaining five Tor Doubles, four of them would prove to be single author collections.

Naked to the Stars was an originally serialized in F&SF in October and November 1961. Although the story begins as a fairly typical piece of military science fiction, Dickson takes it into a different direction, which makes the story stand out.

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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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Tor Doubles #30: Poul Anderson’s The Longest Voyage and Steven Popkes’ Slow Lightning

Tor Doubles #30: Poul Anderson’s The Longest Voyage and Steven Popkes’ Slow Lightning

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Cover for The Longest Voyage and Slow Lightning by Wayne Barlowe

 

Tor Double #30 contains Poul Anderson’s third and final appearance and was originally published in February 1991. He is joined by Steve Popkes with a story original to this volume and which has not been reprinted.

“The Longest Voyage” was originally published in Analog in December 1960. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, which makes it a strange choice for the Tor Doubles series, which generally published novellas, but the second story in the volume may be the longest story published in the series.

There are many science fiction stories that take historical characters and use them as the basis for a different take on the world. Robert J. Sawyer notably published his trilogy of novels Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner whose characters were based on Galileo, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. In “The Longest Voyage,” Captain Rovic appears to be based on Ferdinand Magellan, leading the Golden Leaper (shades of Francis Drake’s Golden Hind) on a circumnavigation of the moon on which they live in search of the fables Aureate Cities.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Seven: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Seven: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

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Ten years ago to the month (I started this in October), I wrote about Terry Brooks’ groundbreaking The Sword of Shannara (1977), and declared that the joy I got reading the book the first time around was something I couldn’t recapture. Time had opened a gap between the book and what I could take away that seemed uncrossable. Revisiting the book, yet again, I no longer think that’s completely true, but it’s not entirely false.

When I set out earlier this year on my journey through Tolkien’s writing, I decided to mix it up with several works clearly inspired by Tolkien, and particularly the Lord of the Rings. Bored of the Rings (reviewed here), was my first choice because it’s an explicit parody of the trilogy (and a brilliant one!).

Sword was an easy choice, as well, even if its origin story is complex and was touched by divers hands (well, six, to be precise, between Brooks and the Del Reys). I’m not sure Brooks set out to write a story that tracks so closely to the LotR in so many places, but that was result. It kicked off the mass-market success of quest trilogies featuring secret heirs in search of the foozle needed to bring down the Dark Lord in his isolated redoubt.

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Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

Tor Doubles #29: Ian Watson’s Nanoware Time and John Varley’s The Persistence of Vision

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

John Varley makes his third and final appearance in the Tor Double series in volume #29, which was originally published in January 1991. Ian Watson makes his only appearance in this volume.

The Persistence of Vision was originally published in F&SF in March 1978. It won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award as well as the Locus poll.  It was also nominated for the Ditmar Award.

Varley offers a United States which has gone through a series of boom and bust cycles. During one of the bust cycles, Varley’s narrator decides to travel from his native Chicago to Japan, but with the economy being the way it is, he isn’t able to take any form of public transportation, instead walking and relying on the occasional ride. Rather than heading straight west, he takes a more southerly route to avoid the radioactive wastes of Kansas and other Great Plains states.

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A Hobo in Space: Starhiker by Jack Dann

A Hobo in Space: Starhiker by Jack Dann

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Starhiker by Jack Dann (Harper & Row, March 1977). Cover uncredited

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a look at a ’70s science fiction novel in this space, and this seems a good book to feature. It’s rather better than some of the books I’ve written about, though it has, as far as I can tell, never been reprinted. And it’s a very 1970s book.

Jack Dann was born in upstate New York some 80 years ago, and after spending some time in New York City moved back to Binghamton, close to his birthplace of Johnson City. He attended SUNY Binghamton, where SF writers Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski were also students, and Joanna Russ was a Professor. (I don’t know if Dann had contact with Russ at that time.)

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Tor Doubles #28: Kim Stanley Robinson’s A Short, Sharp Shock and Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters

Tor Doubles #28: Kim Stanley Robinson’s A Short, Sharp Shock and Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Originally published in December 1990, Tor Double #28 contains the fourth story (but third headlining story) by Kim Stanley Robinson, who first appeared in Tor Double #1, and the second, and final story by Jack Vance.

The Dragon Masters was originally published in Galaxy in August 1962. It was previously published as part of an Ace Double (with Vance’s The Five Gold Bands) by Ace Books in 1963. It won the Hugo Award and the Seiun Award.

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Tor Doubles #27: Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith

Tor Doubles #27: Orson Scott Card’s Eye for Eye and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Tunesmith

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Originally published in November 1990. In addition to the stories, Orson Scott Card provided two essays entitled “Foreword: How Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Changed My Life, Part I (The Tunesmith)” and “Afterword: How Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Changed My Life, Part II (The Tunesmith),” both original to this volume.

The Tunesmith was originally published in Worlds of If in August 1957. Erlin Bacue is a composer in a world which has turned a deaf ear to traditional music. The only music that is composed are Coms, short for commercials. What sets Baque apart from his fellow composers is that, while he makes use of the multichord for his compositions, he does all his composing himself, unlike most other composers who make heavy use of what we would now recognize as artificial intelligence. This hive his Coms a depth that others don’t have, but it also means that he takes longer to compose his Coms than other composers do.

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From Traveller to Tantalizing Fiction: Torchship by Karl K. Gallagher

From Traveller to Tantalizing Fiction: Torchship by Karl K. Gallagher

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Torchship by Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven Press, December 9, 2015). Cover by Stephanie G. Folse

In the introduction to his first collection of short fiction, Unmitigated Acts (the title comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Female of the Species”), Karl Gallagher reflects on the history of the series: “I have a fondness for ‘rag tag crew on ramshackle ship’ stories” (p. 5). His first book, Torchship, published in 2015, is exactly that kind of story. Its setting is a nostalgic one: A starship, the Fives Full, navigated with paper charts and slide rules, like something from a Heinlein juvenile!

But there’s more to this than nostalgia. Gallagher’s interstellar future has a history, one in which artificial intelligence has come to be seen as an existential threat. How to deal with this threat is a central political issue that drives much of the plot. It’s more or less in the background in this first volume; in the sequels (Torchship Pilot and Torchship Captain), the entire plot emerges from it.

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