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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
R. A. MacAvoy published her first novel, Tea with the Black Dragon, in May 1983. It was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and received the 1984 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Not too surprisingly, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1984. Her next novel, Damiano, the tale of a wizard’s son befriended by the Archangel Raphael, appeared in 1984, and became the first novel of an ambitious fantasy trilogy….
One of the great things about science fiction conventions is getting to rub shoulders with your heroes. Some years ago I received an advance proof of an upcoming fantasy from Bantam Spectra, just before heading to Archon in St. Louis. I threw it in my luggage, and brought it to the author’s reading. There were only seven people in the audience, so afterwards I got to have a nice chat with the author, and he graciously signed my book for…
We’re continuing with our look at the monumental 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who died last week. We started with The Wars of Vis trilogy, and today we continue with her most acclaimed fantasy series, Tales From the Flat Earth. I say “most acclaimed” because — in addition to the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Mythopoeic, and Balrog award nominations these books have accumulated over the years — in the Comments section of her obituary, this series was called “the towering…
The first novel in Jack Vance’s Demon Princes saga, The Star King, was published as a two-part serial in Galaxy Magazine, in December 1963 and February 1964. It took Vance eighteen years to complete the series — the fifth and final novel, The Book of Dreams, appeared in 1981 — and during that time he wrote all four novels in of Planet of Adventure, the Durdane trilogy, one novel in The Dying Earth, three books in his Alastor Cluster series,…