Full disclosure: I’m a little biased on this week’s podcast choice. I first discovered UnSpoiled when my friend, Maggie, was covering Stranger Things with network runner Natasha. In my defense, I’ve got a lot of friends whose podcasts will never be discussed here. “UnSpoiled” has become one of my favorite podcasts: the one I’ll drop everything for. A fandom and analysis podcast, UnSpoiled covers a broad variety of material, but always with the same concept and format: there are two people…
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Usually I use a Vintage Treasure post to celebrate a book I enjoyed decades ago, or a tough-to-find artifact that I’ve finally tracked down. But not always. Sometimes they’re just surprises. The 1985 Tor paperback The Exile Waiting is a fine example. It showed up in a small collection of vintage paperbacks I bought on eBay last week for $5.95. Until then, I had no idea it even existed. This is a surprise because Vonda N. McIntyre was one of my favorite…
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Karen Joy Fowler was born on February 7, 1950. She began her science fiction career with the stories “Praxis” and “Recalling Cinderella,” both published in March, 1985. Her first novel, Sarah Canary, appeared in 1991. In addition to writing science fiction, Fowler wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, which was turned into a film. In 1991 Fowler, along with Pat Murphy, founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award to recognize speculative fiction that expands or explores the understanding of gender. She has…
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Cover by Vincent di Fate Neal Asher was born on February 4, 1961. His first published story was “Another England” in 1989. He began his long-running Polity series in 2001 with the appearance of the novel Gridlinked. His 2006 novel, Cowl was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. “Owner Space” was published in 2008 in Gardner Dozois’ anthology Galactic Empires. The story is the fourth Asher wrote about the Owner, following “Proctors,” “The Owner,” and “Tiger Tiger.” Three…
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Gather round friends – it’s once again time to don the footie pajamas, pour a steaming hot-toddy and hunker down until spring with the most awesome reading list of the year: namely the annual nominees for the coolest award ever. The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Several members of the HWA including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such…
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In a 2014 Vanity Fair interview, George R.R. Martin shared just how profoundly he was affected by the death of Tom Reamy in 1977. Tom died of a heart attack just a few months after winning the award for best new writer in his field. He was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. Instant. Boom. Killed him… Tom’s death had a profound effect on me, because I was in my early thirties then. I’d been…
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By Janet Morris and Chris Morris This is an excerpt from Tempus Unbound, by Janet Morris and Chris Morris, presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Janet Morris and Chris Morris, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Tempus Unbound is available in hardcover, trade paper; and in Kindle, Nook, and other electronic formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, I Tunes and other booksellers. Chapter 17: Hunters From the Future Something scrambled…
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Earlier this week I wrote a brief Vintage Treasures piece about Raymond J. Healy’s groundbreaking anthology New Tales of Space and Time. Groundbreaking because it virtually invented the original science fiction anthology, way back in 1951. I was inspired to write that article by Rich Horton’s review of Healy’s follow-up, 9 Tales of Space and Time, at his blog Strange at Ecbatan. Here’s Rich. Raymond J. Healy (1907-1997) is primarily remembered within the SF field for his role as co-editor (with…
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Australian writer Garth Nix became a New York Times bestselling author with The Old Kingdom series, which began in 1995 with Sabriel. He’s had a very significant career quite apart from these novels, with his popular Seventh Tower books (6 volumes), The Keys to the Kingdom (7 books), Shade’s Children (1997 — that’s the publication year, not the number of volumes), and many others. But The Old Kingdom remains perhaps his most popular series, and it’s appeared in multiple editions. At…
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I’m convinced I became a science fiction fan at exactly the right time, the 60s. That was just long enough ago that there was so little science fiction (compared to now), that a young fan had to read the “classics” because there wasn’t the flood of new stuff appearing each month. I don’t know how, exactly, I started reading E.E. Doc Smith, for example. His books originally appeared in the 30s and 40s. I bought the Skylark and Lensmen books…
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