Browsed by
Category: Books

Vintage Treasures: The Bard Series by Keith Taylor

Vintage Treasures: The Bard Series by Keith Taylor

Comments 15 comments


Bard, Volumes I-IV (Ace Books, 1981-97). Covers by Don Maitz

In October 1975 an unknown author named Dennis More made his debut in Fantastic magazine with “Fugitives in Winter,” the rousing tale of Felimid mac Fal of Eire, a bard whose tools are his ancient harp Golden Singer, and his magic sword, Kincaid. Eight more tales of Felimid followed, in places like Fantastic, Weird Tales, and Andrew Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness.

‘Dennis More,’ as it turned out, was Australian writer Keith Taylor, who began writing under his own name with the story “Hungry Grass” in Swords Against Darkness V (1979). In 1981 Taylor collected four of his early Felimid stories  — along with a brand new novella — in the fix up novel Bard, which Fletcher Vredenburgh called “a perfect artifact from the glory days of 1970s swords & sorcery.” It spawned a long-running series that lasted five volumes (with rumors of a sixth in the pipeline).

…

Read More Read More

Superior Sword-and-Planet: The Bane of Kanthos by Alex Dain

Superior Sword-and-Planet: The Bane of Kanthos by Alex Dain

Comments 8 comments


The Bane of Kanthos (Ace Books, October 1969). Cover by Gray Morrow

I read The Bane of Kanthos by Alex Dain in the original 1969 edition, which was part of an Ace Double with Kalin by E. C. Tubb. The cover uses the phrase sword-and-sorcery, but The Bane of Kanthos is a sword & planet novel. An earthman is transported to an alternate world via passage through a black gate. He discovers that the world is at risk from a great, reawakened evil, and that he is the only one who can save it.

There are staunch allies, nasty villains, and a beautiful warrior-princess. All these tropes are familiar, but I enjoy them. What raised this book above the standard level for me was the fine writing. I thought the author’s word usage and prose choices were excellent.

…

Read More Read More

Dread Monsters and Sinister Menaces: The Worlds of James H. Schmitz

Dread Monsters and Sinister Menaces: The Worlds of James H. Schmitz

Comments 5 comments
Telzey Amberdon-small Agent of Vega & Other Stories-small Eternal Frontier-small


Three Bean omnibus reprint volumes featuring James H. Schmitz:
Telzey Amberdon, Agent of Vega and Other Stories, and Eternal Frontier
(March 2000, November 2001, September 2002). Covers by Bob Eggleton

Two years ago I created a Facebook post about a Black Gate Vintage Treasures article on James H. Schmitz’s 1979 novel Legacy. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that you’ll occasionally get comments years later, and that’s what happened this time. On November 3rd of this year Allan T. Grohe Jr. responded to that ancient post with two intriguing questions for me.

John: do you know of any 1/ interviews with Schmitz? — other than the one in Moebius Trip #15 from 1972, which I’m aware of but seems pretty difficult to find, or 2/ literary studies of Schmitz’s works?

I first read Schmitz about 15 years ago, via Eric Flint’s Baen collections, and he ranks up there with Herbert as a worlds-builder, in my estimation! 🙂

Unfortunately I don’t know of any interviews with, or studies of, James Schmitz. But that comment did lead to a broader and very rewarding conversation with Allan, in which I learned about his own writing on Schmitz.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Out on Blue Six by Ian McDonald

Vintage Treasures: Out on Blue Six by Ian McDonald

Comments 0 Comment


Out on Blue Six (Bantam Spectra, May 1989). Cover by Will Cormier

Ian McDonald has written some of the most acclaimed science fiction of the last four decades. His first novel Desolation Road (1988), about an oasis town on a far-future Mars, won the Locus Award, and his King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991) won the Philip K. Dick Award. His novels River of Gods, Brasyl, and The Dervish House were all nominated for the Hugo Award, and he’s been nominated for the BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) Award numerous times, including for his novels Terminal Cafe, Chaga, and Luna: New Moon.

Out on Blue Six is something of an oddity in his catalog. His second novel, it tells the tale of a group of “pain criminals” in a far-future state where all forms of pain and unhappiness are illegal. Ian McDonald has gone on record saying “I hate [it]… I wish I hadn’t written the damn thing.” Kat Hooper at Fantasy Literature, in her review Out on Blue Six: Really bizarre, calls it “strange all the way through… and over-stimulating, like an acid trip.”

None of that has dissuaded the book’s many fans, of course, who adore this book.

…

Read More Read More

Track Down Michael Kelly’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction While You Can

Track Down Michael Kelly’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction While You Can

Comments 3 comments

Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volumes One – Five, edited by
Michael Kelly and Divers Hands (Undertow Publications, 2014-2018 )

Two weeks ago I caught this brief note on Michael Kelly’s Facebook page.

It was 5 years ago that I published the fifth, and final, volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. My proudest publishing endeavour. These are all out of print, now.

Could that be true? Were all five of these fabulous volumes no longer available?

Alas, it appears to be. None are available from the publisher, or at Amazon, or any of the other online sellers I hastily checked. If it’s true these books are no longer in the channel, and you don’t already have them, then I urge you to track them down in the secondary market while you can.

…

Read More Read More

The Art and Act of Story-telling: Evenmere Tales and Other Stories by James Stoddard

The Art and Act of Story-telling: Evenmere Tales and Other Stories by James Stoddard

Comments 2 comments


Evenmere Tales and Other Stories (Ransom House, October 23, 2023)

James Stoddard, author of six novels including the delightful Evenmere trilogy (The High House, The False House, and Evenmere), has finally released a complete collection of his short stories. These stories at their best are first rate American fantasy. Even when they are not at their best, they are worth reading. Stoddard’s ambitions are extraordinary, and achieved often enough that he should be read, and read again.

Stoddard’s complete collection is slim — Evenmere Tales contains eleven tales, ranging from short story to novella. The oldest is “The Perfect Day,” a Bradburyesque tale published in 1985; the newest is the Evenmere novella “The Leechmont,” published here for the first time. Six appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 2002 and 2011 — “The Star Watch” (Evenmere), “The Battle of York,” “The Star to Every Wandering Barque,” “The First Editions,” “Christmas at Hostage Canyon,” and “The Ifs of Time” (Evenmere). Three were published in various outlets between 2011 and 2020, although some were written earlier: “The Last Roadmaker,” “Day of the Shark,” and “Cage of Honor.” “The Coasts of Hope,” published in 2017 in a Hungarian magazine, is not included.

…

Read More Read More

Donald A. Wollheim and the Death of the Future

Donald A. Wollheim and the Death of the Future

Comments 12 comments


The 1987 World’s Best SF (DAW Books, June 1987). Cover by Tony Roberts

I’ve been reading a lot of older science fiction recently, though not in a very organized fashion. I pulled Wollheim’s 1987 World’s Best SF off the shelf this morning to read Pat Cadigan’s cyberpunk Classic “Pretty Boy Crossover,” which I saw on the table of contents of Jared Shurin’s The Big Book of Cyberpunk. I prefer to the read the original, when I can.

Of course I got distracted by the rest of the book, which contains plenty of classic tales, including Lucius Shepard’s Nebula award-winning 87-page novella “R & R,” Roger Zelazny’s Hugo-winning “Permafrost,” Howard Waldrop’s Nebula nominee “The Lions Are Asleep This Night,” and a few delightful surprises. I wrote it up as a Vintage Treasure back in April.

But the thing that really commanded my attention this time was Wollheim’s curmudgeonly introduction, which contains the most uncharitable description of the Challenger disaster and crew I’ve ever read, and his wildly off-base assessment of this new-fanged cyberpunk stuff, which he asserts “has something to do with computers and their programming and possibly — considering the derogatory term “punk” — with snubbing accepted traditions.”

Today it reads more like a eulogy for the bright and shiny future science fiction once promised than an introduction by one of the founding fathers of the genre.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories by Robert Hichens

New Treasures: The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories by Robert Hichens

Comments 5 comments


The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories (Stark House, November 1, 2023)

Stark House has performed an extraordinary service for lovers of classic weird fiction with their excellent line of Stark House Supernatural Classics, which has returned forgotten tales by Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, and many others into print in handsome and inexpensive paperback editions. They’ve produced more than a dozen titles over the last seventeen years, with no sign of slowing.

Stark House doesn’t specialize in supernatural fiction. Their bread and butter is their Black Gat Book line, which includes dozens of classic crime novels. They also have a terrific Film Noir Classic imprint, Stark House Crime Classics, and an extensive Stark House Science Fiction catalog, which includes titles by Mike Ashley, Storm Constantine, Barry Malzberg, Bill Pronzini, and many others.

These days I tend to be interested in overlooked writers, and recently that includes the prolific Robert Hichens, who wrote primarily in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and who produced a great deal of celebrated weird fiction. Stark House has produced three collections of his short work, including The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories, published just last week.

…

Read More Read More

The Sorcerer and the Novelist: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

The Sorcerer and the Novelist: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

Comments 12 comments

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley, poet, mountaineer, religious mystic and self-proclaimed prophet, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, drug addict, braggart, sexual adventurer, the self-named “Beast 666” and, according to the popular press, “The Wickedest Man in the World,” was one of the most notorious and controversial figures of his era and remains so even today, three quarters of a century after his death.

W. Somerset Maugham, physician, world-traveler, wildly successful playwright (at one time he had four plays appearing in London’s West End theaters simultaneously) and sometime British secret agent, prolific short story writer and novelist, author of such acclaimed works as Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor’s Edge, was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century.

These two very different men may seem an unlikely pair, but Maugham met Crowley in Paris in 1905 and (like virtually everyone who encountered the man) was strongly impressed by him. In Maugham’s case the impression was a highly negative one, though he did concede that the occultist had some unique qualities, so much so that he made a thinly-disguised Crowley the central figure in his 1907 novel, The Magician.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Tales By Moonlight edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Vintage Treasures: Tales By Moonlight edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Comments 4 comments


Tales by Moonlight, volumes One and Two (Tor, January 1985
and July 1989). Covers by Mark E. Rogers and Jill Bauman

Jessica Amanda Salmonson has produced only a handful of anthologies, but they are all highly regarded. Her first, Amazons!, won the World Fantasy Award in 1980, and the two Heroic Visions volumes she edited in the mid-80s are still enjoyed and discussed today, with an original Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella by Fritz Leiber, plus terrific sword and sorcery tales by Jane Yolen, Phyllis Ann Karr, F. M. Busby, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Silverberg, Joanna Russ, Michael Bishop, Keith Roberts, Ellen Kushner, Avram Davidson, Manly Wade Wellman, Grania Davis, and Thomas Ligotti.

Salmonson’s held in such high regard that I recently decided to investigate her two Tales by Moonlight anthologies, published by Tor in the late 80s, and I’m very glad I did. They contain a rich assembly of talent, including Thomas Ligotti, Ruth Berman, H. P. Lovecraft, Janet Fox, Steve Rasnic Tem, W. Paul Ganley, Spider Robinson, John Varley, Charles L. Grant, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jayge Carr, W. H. Pugmire, Ramsey Campbell, Joseph Payne Brennan, Phyllis Ann Karr, Eileen Gunn, and many more.

…

Read More Read More