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Author: John ONeill

Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year #8 edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year #8 edited by Terry Carr

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year #8 (Del Rey, July 1979)

Terry Carr died 34 years ago, in 1987. A whole generation of fans has arrived since his death, discovered science fiction, argued over the Star War sequels, and settled comfortably into middle age to raise contentious young SF fans of their own.

So fans today could be forgiven for not understanding how thoroughly Carr dominated the field during his lifetime. Before he died in 2018, Gardner Dozois was seen as the preeminent editor and taste-maker in 21st Century science fiction, winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor a record-shattering 15 times, and editing 35 volumes of the perennially popular The Year’s Best Science Fiction. But in 1979, the year Best Science Fiction of the Year #8 appeared, that crown belonged to Carr, and he had no less than four books — including three Year’s Best — place ahead of Dozois’ own Year’s Best installment in the annual Locus Poll for Best Anthology.

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After Every Deep Breath, the Long Exhale: A Quiet Afternoon 2, edited by Liane Tsui and Grace Seybold

After Every Deep Breath, the Long Exhale: A Quiet Afternoon 2, edited by Liane Tsui and Grace Seybold

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One of my favorite anthologies from last year was A Quiet Afternoon, edited by the Canadian duo of Liane Tsui and Grace Seybold and published by Grace & Victory Publications. So I was very pleased to see an ambitious follow-up arrive this month, packed with 27 stories by Stewart C. Baker, Gabrielle Bleu, L. Chan, Jessica Cho, and many others.

What’s it all about then? Here’s Laura DeHaan, from her introduction.

We are tried and overstimulated and wrung out. The real world is presenting us with more than enough actual life-or-death struggles that we frequently feel powerless to affect. We don’t need to read more of that in our escapist literature. Instead, we take comfort in stories featuring manageable goals and which celebrate small victories.

There are, of course, bittersweet tales as well: broken hearts, lost recipes, forgotten words. Even so, there are triumphs, That which is broken can be fixed, the lost found, the forgotten remembered. After every small deep breath is the long exhale.

In, out.

An anthology dedicated to low-stakes speculative fiction is welcome and oh-so timely. Filled with tales of talking cats, home-cooked meals, robots, cryptids, weather magic, haunted houses, aliens, and knitting, A Quiet Afternoon 2 is waiting with a warm cup of tea to comfort and entertain you.

Here’s the publisher’s description and the complete contributor list.

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New Treasures: The Black Coast by Mike Brooks

New Treasures: The Black Coast by Mike Brooks

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Mike Brooks’ Dark Run space opera trilogy was published in 2016/17, and was warmly received. Kirkus Reviews called it an “old-fashioned space Western… an entertaining page-turner,” and Andrew Liptak at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog said it “deserves to be this year’s break out. A space opera in the rollicking tradition of Timothy Zahn [and] John Scalzi…”

For the past few years Brooks has been playing around in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, writing novels like Rites of Passage and Brutal Kunnin’. This spring he re-invented himself again, this time as an epic fantasy novelist, kicking off The God-King Chronicles series with the novel The Black Coast. It was named an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best SFF in February, and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review. Here’s a snippet from their enthusiastic review.

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Vintage Treasures: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Vintage Treasures: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

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The Forever War (Ballantine Books, 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is one of the most honored science fiction novels of all time. First published by St. Martin’s Press in 1975, it swept every major SF Award, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. A decade later, in 1987, it placed 18th on Locus’ list of All-Time Best SF Novels, ahead of The Martian Chronicles, Starship Troopers, and Rendezvous with Rama.

Unlike many SF classics, its reputation has grown steadily over the decades. It’s been widely praised by critics, from Thomas M. Disch (“It is to the Vietnam War what Catch-22 was to World War II, the definitive, bleakly comic satire”) to contemporary authors such as Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz. …

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Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2020, edited by Rich Horton

Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2020, edited by Rich Horton

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The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2020,
edited by Rich Horton (Prime Books, June 2021). Cover by Argus

The print version of Rich Horton’s 12th Year’s Best volume was delayed roughly six months by the pandemic, and it finally arrives next week. The delay was a little frustrating for those of us who look forward to this book every year, but considering how deeply the pandemic impacted the publishing world overall, I figure it could have been a lot worse. (The digital version has been available since December, but I remain stubbornly a print guy.)

Rich’s introductions to the early volumes belonged to the get-out-of-the-way-and let-the-fiction-do-the-talking school, but over the years they’ve loosened up a bit, and this year’s is one of his best, a lively and thoughtful look at the impact of this very eventful year on science fiction, and some thoughts on famous genre pandemic fiction. Here’s part of his comments on the tales within.

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Vintage Treasures: Stellar Fist by Geo. W. Proctor

Vintage Treasures: Stellar Fist by Geo. W. Proctor

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Stellar Fist (Ace, 1989). Cover by Martin Andrews

George Wyatt Proctor (1946 – 2008) was an prolific Texas author who produced some two dozen novels and collections after he retired from The Dallas Morning News in 1976. He wrote both science fiction and westerns, and collaborated with a host of well known writers, including Arthur C. Clarke, Howard Waldrop, and Steven Utley. With Robert E. Vardeman he produced nine Swords of Raemllyn sword & sorcery novels in the 80s and 90s, and with Andrew J. Offutt he contributed two novels to the Spaceways series (as John Cleve). In 1985 he wrote two novels in the long-running series V, based on the hit NBC series.

Stellar Fist was his last standalone science fiction novel, following Fire at the Center (1981) and Starwings (1984). From a modern perspective, it’s pretty much exactly what you expect from an 80s military SF novel. But that may not be a bad thing, as put so eloquently in this 2-star Goodreads review by Mark.

This book was pretty much awful, but I found myself really enjoying it — from the ridiculous interstellar-sexpot-spy-turned-time-traveling-lounge-singer-returned-interstellar-spy to the last 20 pages of complete story- and character-breaking chaos. Would highly recommend reading it if you’ve got a sense of humor and nothing better lying around.

That reads like a solid recommendation in my book.

Stellar Fist was published by Ace Books in January 1989. It’s 229 pages, priced $3.50. The cover is by Martin Andrews. It has never been reprinted, which really isn’t very surprising.

See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

New Treasures: Hooting Grange by Jeffrey E. Barlough

New Treasures: Hooting Grange by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Hooting Grange, eleventh volume in Jeffrey E. Barlough’s Northern Lights series,
published March 2021 by Gresham & Doyle. Cover “The Close Gate” by Ernest William Haslehust.

One of the most popular fantasy series in the Black Gate offices these days doesn’t come from a major Manhattan publisher. In fact, it doesn’t come from traditional publishing at all. For the last 23 years Jeffrey E. Barlough has quietly been writing one of the strongest and most unusual fantasy epics on the market, put out by tiny California publishing house Gresham and Doyle.

Jackson Kuhl describes the eleven volume Northern Lights series as “kinda-sorta gaslamp fantasy, except there doesn’t seem to be any natural gas. Barlough’s creation is best described as a Victorian Dying Earth — gothic and claustrophobic… mastodons and mylodons mixed with ghosts and gorgons.”

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Vintage Treasures: The Empire of Kaz by Leslie Gadallah

Vintage Treasures: The Empire of Kaz by Leslie Gadallah

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Cat’s Pawn and Cat’s Gambit (Del Rey, 1987 and 1990). Covers by Barclay Shaw

Canadian writer Leslie Gadallah isn’t well known today. She produced a handful of novels in the late 80s for Del Rey, including two books in a highly regarded space opera, Cat’s Pawn and its sequel Cat’s Gambit, the first volumes in what’s now called the Empire of Kaz trilogy. Here’s an excerpt from Delia Sherman’s enthusiastic coverage in the May 1987 issue of Fantasy Review.

Cat’s Pawn is a first novel in the aliens-befriends-human mode. The plotting is masterful. The novel is made up of three complexly interrelated stories, and Gadallah moves easily among them, revealing what we need to know just when we need to know it. Bill Anderson, a linguist. suffers a heart-attack after the starship he is on is captured by pirates. Taran, a cat-like Orian diplomat, keeps him alive, rescues him, heals him, and generally takes a disconcerting interest in his health and welfare. When Bill moves to the port city of Space Central, he is taken up by its villainous boss Steven Black, who blackmails him into agreeing to assassinate Taran. Woven into all this is a plot to take over the galaxy by a race of murderous bugs…

Cat’s Pawn is always exciting. It is smoothly written and deals forthrightly with the question of how basic xenophobia is to human nature. And toward the end there are a coupe of scenes in the deserts of Orion which are truly strange and wonderful

Gadallah, now in her 80s, is — according to recent interviews at least — still writing.

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It’s Good to be Back

It’s Good to be Back

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It’s good to be back.

If you visited Black Gate between May 19th and May 31st, you may have noticed something odd. As in, it was completely missing. For the first time since the website went live in late 1999, Black Gate was off the air for more than a few hours. We were, in fact, dead for a dozen long days.

Our fault entirely. As our traffic continued to grow significantly in 2021, we started to notice some equally significant slowdown in the site in February and March. (You may have noticed it too. Lots of you did.) We’d outgrown our shared server, and desperately needed an upgrade. After a few months of tuning and planning, led chiefly by the stalwart Martin Page, we migrated to a much more powerful server on May 18. It passed all the preliminary tests, and on May 19th I ordered the DNS switchover.

Too soon, as it turned out. The new server crashed almost immediately, and never came back. We gave up after nine fruitless days of panicked effort, configured and migrated to another server with a lot more memory and, after a few error-filled days, here were are.

We apologize for the long absence, and thank you very much for your patience with us. As Tony Stark says so well, it’s good to be back. We missed you.

Criminal Dragons and a Brotherhood of Thieves: The Broken God, Book 3 of The Black Iron Legacy by Gareth Hanrahan

Criminal Dragons and a Brotherhood of Thieves: The Broken God, Book 3 of The Black Iron Legacy by Gareth Hanrahan

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The Black Iron Legacy trilogy (Orbit Books). Cover art by Richard Anderson

Gareth Hanrahan first got my attention with his top-notch work in the RPG industry for Ashen Stars, Trail of Cthulhu, and Traveller. That served him well when he released his breakout debut novel The Gutter Prayer, which was roundly praised. Holly at GrimDark Magazine wrote:

To say that the hype surrounding this book is intense would be an understatement. Anticipation levels have been through the goddamn roof… Briefly, it features three friends, thieves, who get caught up in an ongoing magical battle. Shenanigans abound…. It’s evident that Hanrahan writes role-playing games, because he took all of the best things from RPG’s & made it into something even more mesmerizing within this fantasy epic. The world building is just wondrous.

The second volume in the series. The Shadow Saint, was released in January of last year; Fantasy Inn labeled it “brilliant” and Publishers Weekly called it “epic, surreal… mixes diplomacy, espionage, and religion to excellent effect.” Volume three, The Broken God, arrives this week, and it’s one of the most anticipated fantasy releases of the year in our offices. Here’s the publisher’s description.

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