Search Results for: book club

The Cover and TOC for Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

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Ten years ago Rich Horton, who’d already published several highly detailed survey articles in the print edition of Black Gate (including “Building the Fantasy Canon: the Classic Anthologies of Genre Fantasy” and “The Big Little SF Magazines of the 1970s”) wrote the first installment of what was to become a highly ambitious series: Rich Horton’s Virtual Best of the Year. Rich surveyed virtually every piece of short fiction published in the genre in 2005 (an astounding 9.5+ million words), and compiled…

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Vintage Treasures: Explorers and The Furthest Horizon, edited by Gardner Dozois

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Last week I talked about two of my favorite anthologies by one of the most acclaimed editors in the field: The Good Old Stuff (1998) and The Good New Stuff (1999) (collected into one massive 982-page volume as The Good Stuff by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1999), both edited by Gardner Dozois. Those books collected some of the best adventure SF from the last century, alongside Dozois’ detailed and affectionate commentary on each author. The result was the equivalent of a…

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Vintage Treasures: The Good Stuff by Gardner Dozois

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Gardner Dozois is one of the most accomplished and prolific editors in our field. He’s produced scores of anthologies, including 31 volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times in 17 years from 1988 to 2004, as editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction. In addition to championing countless new writers (as well as older and more neglected writers), he’s shown a lot of love for adventure SF and space opera over…

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Collecting Karl Edward Wagner

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I’ve been enjoying gathering data for my informal survey of paperback prices for some of the most popular and collectible 20th Century science fiction and fantasy authors — mostly because it means shopping for vintage books on eBay. As I said in the last installment, I was a little surprised at the demand for Robert A. Heinlein, but at least I knew he’d be near the top of the list. He wasn’t at the top, however. Setting aside Phil K. Dick, so…

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Vintage Treasures: Jinian Star-Eye by Sheri S. Tepper

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Jinian Star-Eye was the last volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s monumental nine-volume fantasy opus, The True Game. On course, in keeping with 1980s-era fantasy marketing, no mention was made of this anywhere on the book. However, if you were an attentive buyer, you might have noticed the poem on the back, a sure tip that this was part of the series. Poetry as a marketing device, to the best of my knowledge, was an idea that was born and died with…

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The Late November Fantasy Magazine Rack

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We’ve got lots of great magazine coverage to point you towards the best new short fiction this month. We started our coverage of Interfictions with issue #6, and reported on the arrival of the massive Best Of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume 1. In our reviews section, Learned Foote took a look at Nike Salway’s “The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club” in the October Lightspeed, and Fletcher Vredenburgh highlighted the best in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Swords and Sorcery…

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Vintage Treasures: John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman

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Manly Wade Wellman, whom Karl Edward Wagner called “the dean of fantasy writers,” was one of the great 20th Century fantasists, particularly in the field of the “occult detective.” He created several memorable occult investigators, including Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone. But his most enduring creation is surely Silver John, also known as John the Balladeer. Silver John, a Korean War vet who becomes a wandering singer in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, appeared in around 20 stories published…

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Comedy in Fantasy: The Ebenezum Trilogy by Craig Shaw Gardner

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The late Terry Pratchett left a large gap in the Comedic Fantasy genre which, for many, may never be filled. Love him or hate him (I have found myself doing both over the years), he pretty much defined the field. I first came across Craig Shaw Gardner not long after I read The Colour of Magic. Giving away my age here, but when I read The Colour of Magic I think only the third Discworld book, Equal Rights, has just…

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October 2015 Lightspeed Magazine Now on Sale

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In his editorial this month, John Joseph Adams takes a few minutes to highlight a few of his accomplishments in the past month. It’s an impressive list. In case you missed the news last month, we won another Hugo!… Lightspeed took home the rocket for Best Semiprozine, but also, just as exciting, there were two other Lightspeed Hugo victories: Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s story from Lightspeed, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” won the Hugo for Best Novelette, and one of…

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Vintage Treasures: The Deep by John Crowley

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I bounced off John Crowley when I first tried him. It was 1977, I was thirteen years old, and the Science Fiction Book Club had just shipped me his second novel, Beasts, because I forgot to return their stupid monthly request form. The cover featured a lion-man in a broken cage, and I figured, eh, what the hell. I got about five pages in before I gave up, and re-read Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course instead (that book rocks). That probably would have…

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