Black Gate

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII (DAW Books, October 1985). Cover by Michael Whelan

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIII was the thirteenth in the DAW Year’s Best Horror series, and the sixth edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). The book was copyrighted and printed in 1985. Michael Whelan returns as cover artist after taking a hiatus from Series XII. This marked Whelan’s tenth cover for the series! The newest cover is more fantasy than horror with an elf or goblin-like human playing a bone as a flute in a Pan-like fashion. There is a darkness to the art that is suggestive of horror or darker fantasy. Whelan’s diverse choice of artistic topics for horror does not disappoint.

This volume contained seventeen different authors. All male. Nine were American, six were British, and there is one returning Canadian author, Vincent McHardy and a returning German-born author, David J. Schow. Six of these stories came from books. Another six came from professional magazines. Two came from fanzines, one from a convention program, one from a chapbook, one from a journal, and one from a comic book. Considering the pre-internet era of this volume, Wagner is impressive in that he seemed to read everything from everywhere, looking for good horror.

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The Mind Spider and Other Stories and Ships to the Stars (Ace Books, 1976). Covers by Walter Rane

Last year I discussed the marvelous collection The Worlds of Fritz Leiber, published by Ace in 1976, and was astounded to find the author make this claim in the introduction.

I believe this collection represents me more completely, provides a fuller measure of the range of my fictional efforts, than any other. I’ve tried to make it that way, without repeating stories from other collections, especially the ones currently in print. There no overlap with those whatsoever. (Overlapping collections are an annoyance to readers and authors alike.)

Leiber had more than half a dozen collections in print in 1976, including five volumes of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, two volumes of The Book of Fritz Leiber (DAW, 1974 and 1975), The Best of Fritz Leiber (Del Rey, 1974), and the two collections we’re discussing today, The Mind Spider and Ships to the Stars.

How is it possible to assemble a world-class retrospective and avoid any overlap with his other popular collections? I guess the only way to do it is to be Fritz Leiber.

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Time to Come (Berkley Books, December 1958). Cover by Robert E. Schulz

Back in December I kicked off a survey of the Science Fiction Anthologies of August Derleth, starting with his 1948 reprint anthology Strange Ports of Call.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls Derleth “one of the pioneering anthologists in the genre.” He began his editing career with horror collection Sleep No More in 1944. Strange Ports of Call, which drew heavily from pulps such as Astounding, Wonder Stories, Amazing, The Black Cat, Planet Stories, and others, was his first SF volume. It was a success, and so was the Berkley paperback, and very quickly the formula was set. Over the next six years Derleth produced six more SF anthologies, all of which drew heavily from pulp magazines, and all of which were released in paperback — packaged and heavily abridged with machine-like precision to hit a 172-174 page count and a profitable 35-cent price point.

Time to Come was something different. Derleth’s first original science fiction anthology, it contained brand new stories by the biggest writers of the day, including Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Charles Beaumont, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Carl Jacobi, Ross Rocklynne, Robert Sheckley, and Clark Ashton Smith. Like the others it was very successful, remaining in print in multiple editions for 15 years.

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The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Third Annual Collection (Bluejay Books, April 1986). Cover by Tom Kidd

I saw a copy of the third volume in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series on eBay for $11.45 last week, and decided to take a chance. Turned out to be the Book Club edition, a reprint that’s a smaller size than my other volumes, which was a disappointment. But at least I finally had a copy.

On the back of the book I found a Table of Contents — and Lord, what an amazing list. Gardner had famously good taste, but this single volume includes some of the most acclaimed science fiction of the past few decades. It contains Lucius Shepard’s famous magic realist tale “The Jaguar Hunter,” a Hugo and Nebula nominee; Frederik Pohl’s Hugo winner “Fermi and Frost;” Bruce Sterling’s classic novella of an old-school bulletin-board romance, the Nebula-nominated “Green Days in Brunei;” Robert Silverberg’s Hugo-winning far-future tale “Sailing to Byzantium;” Nancy Kress’s famous Nebula Award-winning story of a waitress who meets an alien on the night shift, “Out of All Them Bright Stars;” James Tiptree, Jr’s Locus and Hugo Award-winning novella of a young woman who spends her last dollars renting a spaceship to explore the frontier, “The Only Neat Thing to Do;” Pat Cadigan’s creepy tale of alien sex on the road, “Roadside Rescue;” James P. Blaylock’s World Fantasy Award winner “Paper Dragons;” and the novella that kicked off one of the most acclaimed SF trilogies of the 20th Century, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Green Mars.”

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