Black Gate

Sometime Lofty Towers (Brackenbury Books, December 2025). Cover by Saša Đurđević

I’ve just finished reading what may be David C. Smith’s best work — Sometime Lofty Towers.

My first contact with Smith was from the Robert E. Howard related pastiche work he did earlier in his career. He wrote an excellent Black Vulmea story, The Witch of the Indies (Zebra, 1977, cover by Stephen Fabian), and a Bran Mak Morn tale, Witch of the Mists with Richard Tierney (Zebra, 1978, cover by Doug Beekman), and he and Tierney (1936 –2022) collaborated on six novels about Red Sonja. The Sonja tales are not REH pastiches, of course, but are based on a comic book character created to interact with Conan in the Marvel series.

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Lord of Light (Avon Books, January 1969). Cover by Ronald Walotsky

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god.

Roger Zelazny was considered to be one of the major New Wave writers of the 1960s. But where many of those writers found inspiration in naturalism, modernism, or even surrealism, much of Zelazny’s work was inspired by mythology, somewhat in the style of poets such as Yeats or Eliot.

Early novels in this mode included The Dream Master (expanded from the novella “He Who Shapes”), This Immortal (originally titled And Call Me Conrad, which I think is a much better choice), and Lord of Light, which I’ve long considered his single greatest literary achievement.

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Steel Beach (Ace Books, August 1993). Cover by Todd Cameron Hamilton

My hot take for 2026: books are ephemeral.

Old news, perhaps, but did any spec-fic writer know this better than John Varley?  In 1992’s Steel Beach, he positively revels in his own unimportance while offering blistering, adroit editorials on everything from indolence to anatomy. But who remembers this book today? And how many remember the name John Varley?

I first encountered Varley’s Nebula-winning short, “The Persistence of Vision,” on a 1988 cross-country camping trip. The Terry Carr-edited Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1 was and is chock-full of good material, but it was Varley’s story that haunted me, in part because it tacitly asks readers whether they would put out their own eyes for love – and I must confess that I didn’t like the question, much less my reflexive, fully sighted answer.

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The High Crusade (Berkley Books, October 1983). Cover by Tom Kidd

The High Crusade is one of the earlier novels in Poul Anderson’s long career: serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the summer of 1960 (just as it was changing its title to Analog), published in book form that same year, and nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961, though it lost to A Canticle for Leibowitz. It remained popular and is still in print. In a lot of ways the story is a romp, but it also has themes that Anderson returned to more seriously in later books.

The High Crusade starts out as an alien invasion story, of a form going back to H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds: A spacecraft lands in England, and mysterious beings emerge from it, wielding advanced weapons and killing people to show their power. We have the same contrast between human and alien military technologies. But in this story, Anderson plays a trick he loved to do, especially early in his career (in stories such as “Journeys End” and “The Man Who Came Early”): he reverses the expected outcome from earlier stories.

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