Black Gate

Falling Free (Baen Books, April 1988). Cover by Alan Gutierrez

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most acclaimed writers in science fiction, with four Hugo wins for Best Novel under her belt (matching Robert A. Heinlein’s record), and three enormously popular series to her credit — the Miles Vorkosigan saga, the fantasy trilogy World of the Five Gods, and the Sharing Knife series.

But in April 1988, when Falling Free appeared, she was a relative unknown. Her first novel Shards of Honor had appeared the previous year, followed quickly by two others set in the same universe: The Warrior’s Apprentice, the tale of the young Miles Vorkosigan, and Ethan of Athos, the story of an exclusively male planetary colony.

But Falling Free was the book that would catapult her to stardom. The first novel (in chronological order) in the sprawling and ambitious Vorkosigan Saga, it was nominated for a Hugo and won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the first of numerous nominations and awards she’d receive during her career. In 2017, when the first Hugo Award for Best Series was awarded at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, Bujold easily brought it home for the Vorkosigan Saga.

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Sandkings (Timescape/Pocket Books, December 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Writing is a notoriously poor-paying profession. In 2017, after eleven months of work, I sold my first novel to Houghton Mifflin for $20,000 — about $10,000 below the poverty line for a family of five in Illinois. And I felt lucky to get it, believe me.

So when someone like George R.R. Martin earns $9 million a year as a fantasy novelist, it generates a lot of wonder and amazement. And in some corners, envy and resentment. For George — who’s dedicated his career to SF and fantasy, and was famous for hosting hundreds of fans every year at the genre’s social highlight, the Hugo Loser’s Party at Worldcon — I think the resentment culminated in 2021, when Natalie Luhrs’s essay “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun” was nominated for a Hugo Award. George, who was the Toastmaster for the Hugos in 2020, has not attended a Worldcon since.

In light of the fact that The Winds of Winter, sixth novel in the series, in now roughly a decade late, there’s also been a grumbling reevaluation of Martin’s magnum opus, Game of Thrones, with fans bitterly divided over everything from the final season of the HBO series to whether the series is worth starting at all.

To me, this whole exercise is misguided. Regardless of how you feel about the vast media franchise Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin’s reputation as one of the most vibrant and groundbreaking authors of genre fiction was irrevocably established four decades ago with a string of brilliant short stories, including the Hugo-Award winners “A Song for Lya,” “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” and, especially “Sandkings,” one of the finest SF stories ever written.

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Strange Monsters of the Recent Past (Ace Books, July 1991). Cover by Alan M. Clark

Howard Waldrop passed away in January of this year, and his death was a major loss. It’s common, especially for writers, to be praised as a unique talent, but in Waldrop’s case there may be no more apt description. He had an entirely unique voice. There was no one else like him.

Waldrop left behind a single solo novel and over a dozen collections, but I think the one I treasure the most was his fourth, Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, published by Ace Books in 1991. It was one of the very few to appear in mass market paperback (the other was the Locus Award-winning Night of the Cooters, reprinted by Ace in 1993).

Strange Monsters of the Recent Past contains some of his most acclaimed short fiction, including the long novelette “He-We-Await,” from Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and his famous retelling of the labors of Hercules set in the Jim Crow south, the Nebula, World Fantasy and Locus Award-nominated novella A Dozen Tough Jobs.

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To Reign in Hell (Ace Books, May 1985). Cover by Stephen Hickman

In 1983 all my friends in Ottawa were talking about the debut novel by a young fantasy writer from Minnesota. The book was Jhereg, and it launched Steven Brust’s career in a major way. A caper tale (told from the criminal’s point of view) in a world of high-stakes court intrigue, Jhereg became an instant fantasy classic. As Fletcher Vredenburgh wrote years later here at Black Gate,

Jhereg reads like a fantastic and slightly off-kilter version of a Golden Age crime story. The focus is on Vlad’s ingenuity and the puzzle of how to kill the thief. That plus the witty banter, snarky sidekicks, and some action here and there kept me captivated.

All eyes were on Brust when his second novel appeared. Although most of us expected more tales of adventure set in the world of Dragaera, that would have to wait until Yendi — the first of a great many sequels in what eventually became one of the most successful and long-running series in modern fantasy — arrived a few months later. Brust’s actual second novel was To Reign in Hell, a fantasy retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and it proved Brust would have an extraordinary fantasy career.

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To the Resurrection Station (Avon, October 1986). Cover by Tom Kidd

Eleanor Arnason is a familiar name to anyone who’s been reading short science fiction for the past four decades. Her first story appeared in New Worlds 6 in 1973, and since then she’s published dozens of acclaimed tales in most of the major markets, especially Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tales of the Unanticipated, and many fine anthologies. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award five times, including “The Potter of Bones” (Best Novella, 2003) and “Stellar Harvest” (Best Novelette, 2000), both published in Asimov’s SF.

Her novel output has been a little thinner, though still highly acclaimed. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People, won both the inaugural James Tiptree Jr. Award in 1991, and the 1992 Mythopoeic Award. But today I want to talk about her first science fiction novel, the quirky and original far-future tale To the Resurrection Station.

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Nights Black Agents (Berkley Books, May 1980). Cover by Wayne Barlowe

Nights Black Agents was Fritz Leiber’s first first collection — and in fact his first book. It was originally published in hardcover by Arkham House in 1947, when Leiber was 37 years old.

It collects six stories published in Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, plus one tale from a fanzine, and three new stories — including the long Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella “Adept’s Gambit.” Needless to say, it was very successful, and enjoyed a series of hardcover and paperback editions that kept it in print for over three decades.

Nights Black Agents launched Leiber’s writing career, and he followed it with some three dozen more collections (and many novels) before his death in 1992.

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Horrors in Hiding, Horrors Unseen, and Horrors Unknown (Berkley Medallion, February 1973,
June 1974, and February 1976). Covers: Vincent Di Fate (x2), uncredited

A few years back I wrote a trio of Vintage Treasures pieces about a series of Berkley Medallion paperback horror anthologies from the mid-70s, all edited by Sam Moskowitz (with an assist from Alden H. Norton).

Horrors in Hiding (February 1973)
Horrors Unseen (June 1974)
Horrors Unknown (February 1976)

The last two were the final anthologies Moskowitz produced. I was planning to investigate one of Moskowitz’s classic science fiction anthologies this weekend — maybe Masterpieces of Science Fiction (1967), or Under the Moons of Mars (1970) — but by midnight Friday I was deep into a stack of his horror anthologies again. I’m mesmerized by those creepy covers, what can I tell you.

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