Black Gate

Cover by Michael Whelan

If you want to get permanent editions of the brilliant short fiction of Fritz Leiber, these days your best bet may be the Centipede Press hardcovers like Swords in the Mist. These are gorgeous books, but they’re also a little out of my price range ($75 for the unsigned editions). Still, if there’s someone who deserves editions this beautiful, it’s Leiber.

Or you could do what I do: happily buy one of Leiber’s many vintage paperback collections. Many of these are also gorgeous and beautifully made, like Heroes and Horrors, a 1980 Pocket paperback with a cover by Michael Whelan. It contains two Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, one from an early issue of Dragon magazine and the other original to this book, plus a Cthulhu Mythos tale (“The Terror from the Depths”), and many others. Copies are readily available in the online market at prices ranging from $3.50 – $10, less than the price of a modern paperback.

Heroes and Horrors also contains a 1-page preface by the book’s editor, Stuart David Schiff, and a 5-page introduction by John Jakes, neither of which has ever been reprinted. It’s a fine introduction to one of the greatest fantasists of the 20th Century, especially if you enjoy dark fantasy and horror. Here’s the Table of Contents.

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Cover by Anthony Roberts

I love discovering British vintage SF paperbacks. There’s a lot to discover, they’re relatively inexpensive, and they’re virtually unknown here in the US. Recently I’ve been accumulating British short story collections by John Wyndham and Keith Roberts, and they’ve been well worth tracking down. I admit I enjoy the covers as well — especially the ones featuring exotic spaceships.

My latest discovery is Machines and Men, the second collection by Keith Roberts, published by Panther in 1973 and which was never reprinted in the US. It’s a slender volume, yet packed with tales of UFOs, wary submariners, a 24th-Century film crew, a synthetic human getting a divorce, and much more. And lo! There’s an exotic spaceship on the cover, which sorta looks like a futuristic curling iron.

The fiction within originally appeared between 1964-69, in places like SF Impulse magazine and John Carnell’s long-running New Writings in SF anthology series. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Cover by Walter Bachinsky

Christopher Priest is one of the most celebrated modern British science fiction authors. He won a World Fantasy Award for his 1995 novel The Prestige (filmed under the same name in 2006 by Christopher Nolan, with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale), the British Science Fiction Award award for Best Novel no less than four times (for Inverted World, The Extremes, The Separation, and The Islanders), and he’s been nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Non-Fiction Book (that last one for his epic expose on Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions, The Book on the Edge of Forever).

But in the mid-70s he was still a young SF writer trying to make a name for himself, building on the Campbell nomination for his second novel Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) and the BSFA win and Hugo nomination for his third, The Inverted World (1974). His fifth novel, A Dream of Wessex, is the one I want to talk about today. It was a very early take on virtual reality — published a full 30 years before the first Oculus Rift prototype.

A Dream of Wessex is the tale of a group of volunteers who create a utopian consensus VR world where they’re unable to remember their past lives. It appeared in the UK in 1977, and was published in the US by Dell under the name The Perfect Lover. Here’s an excerpt from the Kirkus Review of the novel in December of 1977.

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