Search Results for: steven brust

Steven Brust’s Jhegaala

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Jhegaala Steven Brust Tor (300 pages, $24.95, July 2008) Reviewed by Bill Ward The world of epic fantasy has its Martins, Jordans, and Eriksons, writers at the helm of long-running series with massively convoluted plots and hundreds of characters — and, quite often, no end in sight. But when compared to Steven Brust’s Taltos novels, which debuted in 1983, these long-running epics are Johnny-come-latelys, part of a newer way of packaging fantasy fiction that began with Robert Jordan in the…

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Vintage Treasures: This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

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This Immortal (Ace Books, September 1980). Cover by Rowena Morrill Two weeks ago I dashed off a Vintage Treasures piece on Larry Niven’s first collection Neutron Star, the first I’d ever done on Niven, and it helped me realize that there are several other major writers sorely underrepresented in these pages. Near the top of that list is Roger Zelazny, one of the most important fantasists of the 20th Century, and the man behind much of the work that turned…

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Birthday Reviews: Emma Bull’s “A Bird That Whistles”

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Emma Bull was born on December 13, 1954. Bull’s novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Philip K. Dick Awards. Her novel War for the Oaks was nominated for the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial, the Geffen, the Mythopoeic, and the William L. Crawford – IAFA Fantasy Awards. She received a second Nebula nomination for the story “Silver of Gold,” a second Mythopoeic nomination for The Princess and the Lord of Night…

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The Omnibus Volumes of Daniel Abraham: The Long Price Quartet

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Daniel Abraham is the author of The Dagger and the Coin five-volume fantasy series, five books in the Black Sun’s Daughter horror series (as M. L. N. Hanover), and a pair of Star Wars novels. With Ty Franck he is the author of the breakout hit The Expanse, under the name James S. A. Corey. But before all that he created a four-volume fantasy series called The Long Price Quartet that helped cement his rep as a rising young star. The…

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Vintage Treasures: Witch Blood by Will Shetterly

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Will Shetterly’s first novel Cats Have No Lord was published in 1985, the same year he launched his groundbreaking Liavek shared world anthology series, which he co-edited with his wife Emma Bull. Cats Have No Lord placed sixth in the annual Locus Poll for Best First Novel (losing to Tad Williams, Guy Gavriel Kay, Michael Swanwick, and Carl Sagan, but placing ahead of Geoff Ryman, Judith Tarr, Sheila Finch, and Dan Simmons — man, 1985 was a competitive year!) Over…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

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Sword and Sorcery dominated the stage at Black Gate last month. The most popular topic in October was the new S&S magazine from industry pioneers Joseph Goodman and Howard Andrew Jones, Tales From the Magician’s Skull, which showed up twice in the Top Ten, first with a far-ranging interview with Joseph and Howard (and their undead overlord, the Talking Skull), followed by a report on the blockbuster Kickstarter that funded the first two issues. Gaming and game news were definitely popular as well….

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How to Assemble an Instant Science Fiction Collection

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I came home from the 2017 Windy City Pulp & Paper Show with a lot of books. The 120 SF & fantasy paperbacks books above represent the bulk of my purchases this year. I found plenty of additional treasures — including early issues of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories, a handful of hardcovers, art books, bargain graphic novels, and plenty of magazines — but this year, it was mostly about the paperbacks. And man, what a haul. As I mentioned…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

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Back in December, Derek Kunsken’s enthusiastic review of Star Wars: Rogue One, “I Am One With the Force and the Force Is With Me,” shot up to #2 on our monthly traffic chart. Last month he claimed the #1 slot, and he didn’t need a blockbuster film to make it happen — he did it the old fashioned way, with a book review. The book in question was Thrill-Power Overload: A History of the British Comic 2000 AD, a detailed history…

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io9 on January’s Must-Read Science Fiction and Fantasy

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After we completed our round up of the most interesting Best of 2016 lists, I kinda got a little list happy. I started investigating all these other lists. Best Books of January! Best of 2017! Turns out there’s a lot of interesting books coming your way in the next 12 months. Like, a lot. I can’t be expected to keep all this knowledge to myself. So here we are with another book list, in this case io9′s nicely comprehensive summary of January’s Must-Read…

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Future Treasures: The Twenty Sided Sorceress, Volume Two: Boss Fight, by Annie Bellet

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I love omnibus volumes. I did a series on them a while back, looking at inexpensive paperback omnibus (omnibi?) volumes from C.J. Cherryh, Andre Norton, Murray Leinster, James H. Schmitz, Steven Brust, Jack Vance, and others. But omnibus novel collections aren’t just for classic writers — oh, no. Saga Press is putting the format to good use collecting Annie Belett’s bestselling fantasy series The Twenty Sided Sorceress, which originally appeared from a small press. The first volume, Level Grind, was…

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