If you’ve hung around Black Gate for any length of time, you’ve heard us talk about Weird Tales, the greatest and most influential pulp fantasy magazine every published. Weird Tales has died many times, and crawled out of the grave and shambled back to life just as often (if you’re a Weird Tales fan, you’ve heard countless zombie metaphors about your favorite magazine). When the pulp version of the magazine died in September 1954 after 279 issues, many believed it…
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Click any of the images to see the complete wrap-around covers. Last week I wrote a brief Vintage Treasures article about Andre Norton’s classic SF adventure novel Galactic Derelict. Here’s what I said about the book’s printing history: Galactic Derelict was published in 1959 by the World Publishing Company and has been reprinted in eight different editions over the last half-century. It first appeared in paperback from Ace Books in 1961. It is 192 pages in paperback, priced at 35 cents….
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Our roving correspondent — and new Online Editor for Weird Tales magazine — Douglas Draa reports on the latest issue of the world’s oldest (and arguably greatest) fantasy magazine. Weird Tales magazine and Nth Dimension Media are pleased to announce the pending publication of the Spring 2014 issue of Weird Tales magazine. Continuing the successful concept of themed issues, #362 is our unsettling, but entertaining, Undead issue. And as always, there is also a sizable amount of un-themed fiction included…
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This coming weekend, Friday April 25th through Sunday April 27th, is Doug Ellis’s magnificent celebration of all things pulp, the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Convention here in Chicago, in nearby Lombard, Illinois. Windy City is one of my favorite local cons. I’ve written about it before, and in fact I’ve been attending the show for around 10 years. 2012 was perhaps the most successful show in some years, considering I returned with a fabulous assortment of mint-condition fantasy and science fiction paperbacks from the collection of…
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The latest issue of the world’s oldest — and arguably greatest — fantasy magazine is now on sale. Weird Tales #361 is the special demented Fairy Tale issue, with fiction by Peter S. Beagle, Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, Morgan Llywelyn, and many others. There’s also articles from Darrell Schweitzer (“Ninety Years of Weird Tales“), an interview with J. David Spurlock on the artwork of Margaret Brundage, and “An Inside Look at Weird Tales,” a step-by-step look at the evolving cover…
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When I was a kid in the late 60s/early 70s, I was fascinated by the fantastic. It didn’t matter what it was: films, comics, television, or books. Although, until I learned to read, my exposure to the genre — and especially horror — was through purely visual media such as comics and whatever was on TV. Luckily my earliest talent, which later turned out to be pretty much my only one, was that I took to reading like a cultist…
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It’s a lot easier to publish a book than it used to be. So easy in fact that people are doing it themselves. They’re doing away with traditional print and distribution, all the hassle of finding an agent, publishing contracts, and 20th Century promotional models entirely. Unfortunately, in the process many of them are also getting rid of things they probably shouldn’t. Things like book design, and cover art. And marketing. Or even proof-reading. I mean, who needs that, right?…
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Well, sort of. I’ve been waiting expectantly for this one. It’s something of a watershed issue — Ann VanderMeer’s final issue as editor, and the first from the new publishers, Nth Dimension media (as we reported back in August). It has fiction from Stephen Graham Jones, Tamsyn Muir, Evan J. Peterson, and many others, and articles from Paula Guran, Michael Skeet and Kenneth Hite. At least, so they tell me. I haven’t been able to find a copy. I blame…
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Back in the mid-80s, I would go out to my dad’s house in Las Vegas and spend a few weeks of every summer seeing how he lived his life in the city of sin. It always had its ups and downs, but certainly even twenty-five years later I’ve got some lasting memories that bring a smile to my face. One such memory is that of going to my first Toys “R” Us, at age 14, with my father to look…
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I know we’ve got a lot of Steven Erikson fans out there. We’ve got your back. On Tuesday Tor Book released The Devil Delivered and Other Tales, the latest collection of a trio of fantasy novellas from Steven Erikson, following 2009’s Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, which gathered three short novels of the Malazan Empire. Like Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, The Devil Delivered and Other Tales features work previously printed in expensive limited edition hardcovers from PS Publishing: The Devil Delivered (from March 2005),…
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