Search Results for: book club

Keith West on the Ballantine Best of Series and Why We Need it More Than Ever

Comments 6 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Some Classic Science Fiction Hardcovers

Comments 7 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Weird Tales Reprints Published by Goodman Games

Comments 2 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Galactic Empires, edited by Neil Clarke

Comments 6 comments

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…

Read More Read More

A Neglected Master: The Best of Henry Kuttner

Comments 14 comments

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….

Read More Read More

Jonathan Strahan on the Best Short Novels of 2016

Comments 1 comment

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…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 11 comments

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…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 5 comments

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…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 7 comments

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…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Greatship by Robert Reed

Comments 2 comments

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…

Read More Read More