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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Over at Adventures Fantastic, the distinguished Keith West visits a topic near and dear to our hearts: the Ballantine Best of series, perhaps the most important line of paperback collections the genre has ever seen. The 21 volumes of the Ballantine Best of series introduced thousands of readers to the best short fiction by the greatest SF and fantasy writers of the 20th Century — and more than a few writers who have now been forgotten. Here’s Keith: I’ve already…
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A while back I got a letter from a reader saying, “I love those photos you post of your eBay finds!” Well, that warms my heart. So here we are with another batch, a look at a lot of nine books I bought on December 11, 2016. This one is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s all hardcovers. Usually I spend my hard-earned collecting dollars on paperbacks, but this particular lot — a truly fabulous set of vintage anthologies…
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The Goodman Games site is one of my regular stopping points on the web. The company’s well known as an imagination factory that produces some of the most innovative and entertaining game supplements in print today. It’s also home of the popular Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game. What it’s never been until now is a purveyor of Weird Tales, so I was intrigued when I discovered five facsimile issues of the famous magazine were available for purchase on the site. I wrote…
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2016 was another great year for anthologies. I haven’t read them all of course — not even close — but some of my favorites so far include Things From Outer Space, edited by Hank Davis, What the #@&% Is That? by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen, Bridging Infinity, from Jonathan Strahan, Women of Futures Past, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Drowned Worlds, also from the mighty Jonathan Strahan. Not to mention the various Best of the Year volumes, of course. 2016…
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