I need to read more Sheri S. Tepper. I tend to think of her primarily as a science fiction writer, probably because I first encountered her with her groundbreaking The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) and the major SF novel that followed, Grass (1989), a Hugo and Locus Awards nominee. But she wrote a great deal of highly acclaimed fantasy in the 80s and 90s, and it’s high time I acquainted myself with it. A few weeks back, I purchased a set…
Last month, we invited Black Gate readers to send us a one-sentence review of their favorite Edmond Hamilton novel or short story. In return, we offered to award a copy of the long-awaited fourth volume of The Collected Edmond Hamilton from Haffner Press to one lucky winner. The winner was randomly drawn from the list of all qualified entrants. Before we announce the winner, let’s have a look at some of the entries. We can’t reprint all of them, but we can hit the highlights. (But fret not…
Okay, I admit I’ve been on a weird western kick recently. It started with the Bloodlands novels of Christine Cody, Lee Collins’s She Returns From War, and Guy Adams’s The Good The Bad and The Infernal and the sequel Once Upon a Time in Hell; then I moved on to Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill’s Dead Reckoning, and The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher. For those of you keeping up at home — congratulations. We should form a book club. Michael Spradlin’s Blood Riders is the latest, and…
I love dollar bins. If you’ve ever been in the Dealer’s Room at a convention, or any decent bookstore, you know what I’m talking about. The jumbled box at the foot of the booth, virtually ignored, with a hand-scrawled note on the lid: “All books — $1.” I was at Capricon 34 this weekend here in Chicago and dropped by Greg Ketter’s booth in the Dealer’s Room. Greg is a great guy, owner of DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis, one of…
A few months ago I wrote about The Best of Jack Williamson, a fun refresher course for me in one of the great science fiction writers of the pulp era. It also reminded me that I wanted to read his Legion of Space novels, one of the most popular pre-Campbell space operas. Time is running out, too. Isaac Asimov, a huge fan of The Legion of Space when he first read it in Astounding Stories in 1934, sadly found it virtually unreadable…
Last week, I reminisced about how some of my earliest scribbles were influenced by the interstellar dogfights I saw in Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. I was always doodling — a look at one of my notebooks from any year of my schooling would testify to how it sustained me through boring classes. There in the margins bloomed flora and fauna from the Dr. Seuss School of Zoology, spaceships, barbarians, and things that must have crept from the deeper recesses…
So I tried to hit all the genre classics in my early days as an SF and fantasy reader, and I think I did a pretty fair job . Sure, I have a few gaps here and there, but overall I think I managed to read the ones that looked interesting. With a few notable exceptions. I didn’t discover James H. Schmitz until relatively late, and I wasn’t able to lay hands on his most famous novel, Hugo nominee The Witches…
Christmas is pretty hectic at our house, and has been for about 18 years. Ever since we started sharing it with children. Our kids try to sit still and open their presents. They do. But after they’ve torn open a few, they can’t sit around in a calm circle in the living room any longer. Nope, nope. They tear off to shoot each other with their new Nerf guns or play Arkham Origins on the Xbox or read Atomic Robo or…
I’m still enjoying the Appendix N surveys by Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode at Tor.com, as they read through every author Gary Gygax cited as an influence on Dungeons and Dragons, even though I’ve found lots to disagree with in their recent columns. So I’m happy to continue with these re-caps here. Especially since I don’t have a lot emotionally invested in their next two subjects: Lord Dunsany and Philip José Farmer. I have a lot of respect for Lord…
Last month we invited Black Gate readers to tell us about the best sword & sorcery tale they’d ever read, in one paragraph or less. In return, we offered to award a copy of Howard Andrew Jones’ terrific new Pathfinder Tales book, Stalking the Beast, the follow-up to his hit Pathfinder release Plague of Shadows from Paizo Publishing, to five lucky winners. Those five winners were randomly drawn from the list of all qualified entrants. Before we announce the winners, let’s have a look at some of the story…