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Alien Devil Trees, Deadly Cargo, and the Blob: September-October 2023 Print SF Magazines

Alien Devil Trees, Deadly Cargo, and the Blob: September-October 2023 Print SF Magazines

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September-October 2023 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact,
Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Cover art by Shutterstock, Tomislav Tikulin, and Marianne Plumridge

There’s plenty of great stuff in this month’s print magazines, including a new Diving Universe novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, an homage to the 1958 classic The Blob by Eric Choi, a chilling story of the Dead Letter Office by David Erik Nelson, the gruesome secret of the alien Deviltree by Monalisa Foster, a truck driver who discovers the dreadful truth of his unknown cargo during the “Night Haul” by Andrew Crowley, and the twelfth and final installment of Gregory Feeley’s distributed novel Neptune’s Reach.

The big SF magazines are packed with brand new fiction from Lavie Tidhar, Lisa Goldstein, Derek Künsken, Dean Whitlock, Howard V. Hendrix, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Phoebe Wood, Christopher Mark Rose, Tessa Yang, and lots more. See all the details below.

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Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales, Part II

Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales, Part II

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Table of Contents for Weird Tales 1, edited by Lin Carter (Zebra Books, December 1980)

For yesterday’s Vintage Treasures post, I finally had the chance to discuss Lin Carter’s early-80s attempt to resuscitate the Magazine that Never Dies, the long-running weird fiction pulp Weird Tales.

Since I examined all four paperbacks, there wasn’t room in that article to look back at some of the fascinating discussions they’ve triggered over the last four decades, including lengthy commentary from Carter himself — especially his (largely unfulfilled) plans for the future volumes — or reviews of the stories within from modern readers. So I took the time to do that today.

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Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales

Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales

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Weird Tales , Volumes 1 -4 (Zebra Books, December 1980
– August 1983). Covers by Tom Barber (#1-3) and Doug Beekman (#4)

Lin Carter was one of the finest genre editors of the 20th Century, and Weird Tales magazine was the most important fantasy magazine of the last century, publishing the career-defining work of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and hundreds of other writers. In December 1980 Zebra Books published the equivalent of a genre superhero Team-Up, the first two volumes of a paperback relaunch of Weird Tales helmed by Lin Carter.

The ambitious effort had several things in common with the original pulp incarnation. Namely, it was criminally underfunded, published sporadically, and doomed.

But it also had a hugely talented and hardworking editor, and in three short years it published a total of four volumes containing ‘lost’ stories by Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, an original John the Balladeer story by Manly Wade Wellman, reprints of classic tales from the pages of Weird Tales, and original fiction by Ramsey Campbell, Carl Jacobi, Tanith Lee, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Hannes Bok, Joseph Payne Brennan, Evangeline Walton, Charles Sheffield, Frank Belknap Long, Lin Carter, and a lot more.

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Science Fiction History Considered As a Series of Images of Newsstand Displays

Science Fiction History Considered As a Series of Images of Newsstand Displays

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Science Fiction magazines likely displayed on the stands at ten year intervals, 1933 to 2013

Many readers here no doubt lack the experience of having personally cruised news stands, tobacco shops and underground hole-in-the-wall used book stores, through no fault of their own. Unless you can fault someone for not having been born in a particular year, which I think would be a silly thing to do.

I, on the other hand, managed to arrive on this planet at a time conducive to such things. Following a brief orientation period lasting a handful of years, during which I learned how to navigate within a 1G gravitational field and picked up a few useful tips, such as becoming proficient in one of the native languages and where food came from, not to mention the necessity of wearing clothing when out and about, I was introduced to a small, yet extremely powerful concept called “Science Fiction”.

In short order I became enraptured and the rest, as they say, is personal history.

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Kickstarter for The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume IV Launched!

Kickstarter for The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume IV Launched!

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HFQ powered through the pandemic and stuck to our regular publishing schedule; but we fell behind on getting our best-of anthologies put together — a situation we aimed to correct with the August 19th launch of our Kickstarter to fund Best-of 4.

As of this writing, we are 85% to our goal of $1,500.  Check out our campaign and help us out if you can!

— Adrian Simmons and the HFQ crew.

P.S. On the fence?  Head over to issue #57 and see what we’re all about.

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955. Cover by Ed Emshwiller

It’s been a while since my last Galaxy review, but the best things come to those who wait. This one is for the January, 1955 issue. The cover is by Ed Emshwiller and is titled “Scene: Milady’s Boudoir.” It’s an eye-catching visual of a futuristic bedroom with devices that could replace services from a salon, and the artwork contains interesting colors and shapes for the furniture and electronics. But I’m not really here to get into the artwork, of course, so let’s move on to the fiction.

“The Tunnel Under the World” by Frederik Pohl — Guy Burckhardt wakes up on June 15th, screaming from a dream. In the dream, he felt an explosion that killed him. He continues through his day as best he can. And the next morning awakes on June 15th again, and once again awakes in terror from a nightmare of dying in an explosion. The horrors of the nightmare are alarming, but the deeper issue is the recurring date.

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Wooden Pirates, Group Therapy for Super Heroes, and Crab Gods: July-August 2023 Print SF Magazines

Wooden Pirates, Group Therapy for Super Heroes, and Crab Gods: July-August 2023 Print SF Magazines

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July/August 2023 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction,
and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by 123RF, Eldar Zakirov
(for “Bridges”), and Mondolithic Studios

The big news for the print SF magazines this month isn’t good. In March Amazon stopped selling Kindle subscriptions to Asimov’s SF and Analog, and current issues will only be available for purchase until September 4, 2023. After that, Amazon will only offer access to the magazines through their Kindle Unlimited program.

This is a major blow to the magazines, which have come to rely on Amazon digital subscriptions for a substantial portion of their income. But they have rolled with the punches, and on July 20 Asimov’s SF and Analog announced a new digital subscription method. You can subscribe now to get the July/August issue and have Sept/Oct delivered on August 8th, and then the 8th every other month going forward. It costs just $6/an issue, and downloads are available as EPUB or PDF. Order directly here.

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GW Thomas on Interplanetary Graveyards, Cemetery Worlds, and Junkyard Planets

GW Thomas on Interplanetary Graveyards, Cemetery Worlds, and Junkyard Planets

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Art by Chris Foss

GW Thomas’s Dark Worlds is one of the better blogs out there, at least for fans of classic SF, comics and pulps. In just the last few weeks he’s discussed Sword & Sorcery at Warren (Part 10: 1980), Bronze Age DC Werewolves (Parts 1, 2, and 3) and Golden Age Plant Monsters.

No one else is doing scholarship on plant monsters, and Thomas clearly deserves an award for that alone. But my favorite recent piece was his 2-part article on interplanetary graveyards, cemetery worlds, and junkyard planets in comics and pulps.

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Reading the Avon Fantasy Reader — Issue 1: What Defines a Classic?

Reading the Avon Fantasy Reader — Issue 1: What Defines a Classic?

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Avon Fantasy Reader #1 (Avon Books, February 1947). Cover artist unknown

On the occasion of this year’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention — my fifth — I resolved to learn from past mistakes and come armed with a specific list of items needed to plug holes in my considerable collection of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks and pulps. This year, I came looking to complete my set of all 18 volumes of Donald A. Wollheim’s Avon Fantasy Reader, a digest magazine I’d poked at before due to its propensity to publish works by Clark Ashton Smith, a writer who never disappoints. The convention coughed up all but two of my missing issues, but crucially provided the first volume in the series, which I had never before seen in person. I snagged it immediately, of course, and began reading it that day.

The Avon Fantasy Reader ran 18 issues, from February 1947 to March 1952. Originally intended as a quarterly, it usually managed three issues per year. Wollheim’s introduction to the first volume promises tales of fantasy and imagination about “those strange forces which exist just beyond the boundaries of knowledge.” He further touts a roster of authors that represented “a sure guarantee of the best stories of their kind available.”

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Mummies, Sexy Robots, and an ancient Greek Labyrinth: May-June 2023 Print SF Magazines

Mummies, Sexy Robots, and an ancient Greek Labyrinth: May-June 2023 Print SF Magazines

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May/June 2023 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction,
and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Eldar Zakirov
(for “Aleyara’s Descent”), 123RF, and Maurizio Manzieri (for “The Dire Delusion”)

There’s a lot of great reading in store for us in this month’s print magazines. Including a classic mummy horror tale, stories of fox-gods and conjure houses, and a new tale of Cascor the Discriminator by Matthew Hughes (in F&SF); a sexy apocalypse robot, a Star Trek-like tale of the coldest spot in the universe, and a hero in an ancient Greek Labyrinth (in Asimov’s SF); and a Raymond Chandler-esque noir in space, an action-packed novella of terrifying aliens on an alien world, a berserk mech on Mars, and a wry narrator with hangover in a dystopian London (Analog).

The big SF magazines are packed with brand new fiction from Sean McMullen, Allen M. Steele, Lavie Tidhar, Matthew Hughes, Zig Zag Claybourne, Frank Wu & Jay Werkheiser, Mark W. Teidermann, Andy Dudak, R. Garcia y Robertson, Tom Purdom, Sandra McDonald, Bill Johnson & Gregory Frost, Chris Willrich, Barbara Krasnoff, Melissa A. Watkins, and many more. See all the details below.

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