Search Results for: book club

A Neglected Master: The Best of Henry Kuttner

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In Henry Kuttner’s short story “The Voice of the Lobster,” a character who is trying to escape some enemies muses to himself that he wishes he were a Cerean. In a footnote Kuttner includes the following: “The inhabitants of Ceres were long supposed to be invisible. Lately it has been discovered that Ceres has no inhabitants.” (p. 135). Such is the typical humor of The Best of Henry Kuttner (1975), the fourth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series….

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Jonathan Strahan on the Best Short Novels of 2016

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Jonathan Strahan used to edit a marvelous anthology series for the Science Fiction Book Club called Best Short Novels. He published four volumes, from 2004-2007. On his Coode Street website yesterday, Jonathan published “An Imaginary List” of his picks for a 2016 volume. I was pondering what I’d put into my old Best Short Novels series, if I was still editing it for someone today. After a bit of reflection I came up with the following list. I wasn’t restricted to…

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Future Treasures: Gloriana: Or, The Unfulfill’d Queen by Michael Moorcock

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Michael Moorcock is best known today for his ambitious Eternal Champion story arc, which includes the sword & sorcery classic Elric of Melnibone, the Hawkmoon novels, the Chronicles of Corum, the Von Bek novels… and man, a whole lot more. Seriously, if you want to dive in, there’s a whole lot of reading ahead of you. The Wikipedia page, which lists roughly a billion novels and short stories in the seres, will get you started. But some of Moorcock’s most acclaimed fantasies…

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Vampires, Frozen Worlds, and Gambling With the Devil: The Best of Fritz Leiber

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In my last post I reviewed The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, the first volume in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. In this one I’ll review the second in the series, The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974). The introduction was done by the excellent sci-fi/fantasy author Poul Anderson (1926-2001). The cover was by Dean Ellis (1920-2009), though a later 1979 printing (see below) has a cover by Michael Herring (1947-). Fritz Leiber is probably best known for his Fafhrd and Grey…

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The Shadow over Innsmouth as a Generational Family Saga in Rural Alabama: Michael McDowell’s Blackwater

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Michael McDowell’s Blackwater was a paperback horror series originally published in six volumes by Avon in 1983. It’s a tough set to track down these days, but not impossible. For those wiling to settle for a modern edition, Amazon offers a complete omnibus Kindle volume for just $9.99 and, at the other end of the spectrum, Centipede Press produced a hardcover slipcased set of all six books in 2014 for $350. I don’t own any of the original Avon paperbacks (although it’s certainly…

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New Treasures: The Greatship by Robert Reed

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I’ve been hearing about Robert Reed’s Greatship stories for a very long time. The tales of a vast spaceship relic that is larger than worlds, and which contains thousands of alien species, the Greatship stories appeared first in F&SF and Asimov’s Science Fiction in the mid-90s, and were frequently reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. By the last decade Reed was producing ambitious novellas in his Greatship universe, and they were appearing primarily in anthologies — especially the novella-friendly anthologies from…

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The 2016 Hugos: Short Fiction Ballot Thoughts

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Here are my compiled thoughts (as promised) on the stories nominated in the short fiction categories for the 2016 Hugo. (Versions of these posts appeared earlier on my blog, Strange at Ecbatan.) A quick word on my voting philosophy: I am not planning to reflexively rank Rabid Puppy entries below No Award. I am of course disgusted by the Rabid Puppy antics, and I feel that many more worthy stories were kept off the ballot by the Rabid choices. And…

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Vintage Treasures: The Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd

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Here’s an odd little book. It was fairly routine for publishers to use sex to sell paperbacks in the 60s and 70s (and 80s, and 90s, and….) But usually they teased the reader with sexy cover art, or code words like “sensuous” and “spicy” (or “French”) to signal sexual content. The Pollinators of Eden has a more overt sexual theme, dealing with an intelligent and sexually voracious species of tulip discovered on a distant planet. It was Boyd’s second novel, following The Last…

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Future Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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Holy cats… Jonathan Strahan’s up to Volume Ten already? My oh my, how times flies. Well, you know what the imminent arrival of the newest volume of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year means. That’s right — the Best of the Year season is upon us. Strahan kicks it off, as usual, but in the next 3-4 months we’ll see a dozen more from Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Paula Guran (two volumes!), Ellen Datlow, Neil Clarke, John Joseph Adams, and…

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Ancient Planets and Treachery at Every Turn: Rich Horton on The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett

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Over at his personal blog Strange at Ecbatan, Rich Horton reviews one of the great classics of science fantasy, Leigh Brackett’s The Ginger Star, the opening novel in the three-volume Book of Skaith. I adore the great Brackett stories of the late ’40s and early ‘50s, particularly The Sword of Rhiannon, one of the great pure planetary romances; and other stories in the same loosely developed future (though The Sword of Rhiannon is really set in the past): “The Halfling,”…

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