This is one of a great many ’50s digests. It began publication in October 1956 as a bimonthly, and became a monthly in 1959 for its last four issues (the last was May). 18 issues total. (Apparently the June and July issues were assembled at least to some degree.) The publisher was Leo Margulies, and the editor for the first two issues was Sam Merwin, who had done good work with Startling Stories/Thrilling Wonder Stories. According to the Science Fiction…
Welcome to the 13th installment of my ongoing examination of one of the most influential book series of my youth, Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line. This time, we’re looking at the 1977 release, The Best of Fredric Brown, edited by Robert Bloch (who had his own entry in the series eleven months after this one, which I discussed back in July.) The Classics of Science Fiction line was my introduction to many of the major SF and fantasy…
By Janet Morris and Chris Morris This is an excerpt from The Sacred Band, by Janet Morris and Chris Morris, presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Janet Morris and Chris Morris, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. The Sacred Band is available in hardcover, trade paper; and in Kindle, Nook, and other electronic formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, I Tunes and other booksellers. Shock Troops of the Gods…
I didn’t know anything about Philip K. Dick when The Best of Philip K. Dick was released in 1977. That was the year Star Wars came out and I was more interested in trying to make a light saber out of my sister’s hair dryer. I wasn’t alone (about Dick, not my obsession with my sister’s hair dryer). Philip K. Dick was a midlist paperback science fiction writer in the mid-70s, with few awards and only a handful of successful novels to his name, largely unknown…
John W. Campbell is one of the most important figures in 20th Century science fiction and fantasy. If Campbell’s name seems familiar, it’s no accident. He’s come up multiple times in this series so far. In my last article, The Best of Hal Clement, I noted that Clement’s heroes frequently quoted Campbell’s pulp heroes Morey and Wade, and that Clement had been discovered by Campbell in June 1942, when Campbell was editing Astounding Science-Fiction. In my previous piece, on The Best of…
Jack Williamson is a true legend among science fiction fans. My favorite story about Jack Williamson concerns his first published story, “The Metal Man,” published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, when he was just 20 years old. The editor, Hugo Gernsback, was notoriously slow in paying his authors… so slow, in fact, that Williamson discovered he had broken into the magazine when he first laid eyes on the issue in a magazine rack and recognized his hero…
And so we come to Fritz Leiber, in our continuing exploration of Lester del Rey’s Classic Library of Science Fiction series. The Best of Fritz Leiber, published in 1974, was the second in the line, following The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Unlike Weinbaum and many of the authors who would follow him, Leiber was well known — even a star — to contemporary SF readers in 1974, thanks chiefly to his popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books. Which…
Edmond Hamilton is my favorite pulp writer and he has been since I read the chilling short story “The Man Who Evolved” in Before the Golden Age. (Read the complete story online at The Nostalgia League.) That’s a long time, especially considering how many pulp tales I’ve read in the intervening years. But Hamilton had a lengthy and productive career — he was one of the few writers to survive both the coming of Campbell, who ushered in the Golden…
I came across Lonesome Wyatt as I nosed about a funnel cake shack in an abandoned amusement park built on a prairie settler boneyard. He had a rotted sack of popcorn in one hand and he dragged a crowbar in the other. Twilight filtered in through a roof hole. Something skittered across his hat. He hummed an old-time dirge. This being Lonesome Wyatt of Those Poor Bastards. This being the man behind Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks. This being…
Cyril M. Kornbluth was one of the best science fiction writers of the 1950s. Like Stanley Weinbaum and Robert E. Howard, he died in his early thirties, leaving behind a handful of stories that would gradually make him famous. Kornbluth was an early member of The Futurians, the legendary group of young science fiction fans that included Donald A. Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes — and Mary Byers, who eventually became his wife. Kornbluth might be…