Search Results for: book club

New Treasures: Enter The Wolf: Vampire Earth Volume 1

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E.E. Knight’s Vampire Earth is one of the best adventure series on the market — action-packed, highly entertaining, and filled with great twists and surprises. Set on a near-future Earth conquered by a vampiric alien race, it’s the kind of fast paced and chilling narrative that would have resulted (as Paul Witcover puts it), “If The Red Badge of Courage had been written by H.P. Lovecraft.” The Science Fiction Book Club has just released a high-quality hardcover omnibus of the first three books,…

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Modern Space Opera With a Classic Feel

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“I think it’s pretty cool that crowdfunding allows all the elements of this anthology to come together — a magazine with a history in the space opera community, pro authors who are enjoying a chance to pursue a unique project, and a small press getting a chance to grow alongside a rising editor working with his love of space opera.” – Camille Gooderham-Campbell, Every Day Publishing I imagine many Black Gate readers came to their love of science fiction and…

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Vintage Treasures: The Fuzzy Papers by H. Beam Piper

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The Fuzzy Papers was one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and it’s one of the small handful of books that made me an SF reader for life. The Fuzzy Papers contains two novels by H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy (1962) and Fuzzy Sapiens (1964, also known as The Other Human Race), and was published by the Science Fiction Book Club  in 1980. I joined the SFBC at the age of 12 at the urging of my friend…

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Vintage Treasures: Creatures From Beyond, edited by Terry Carr

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It shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t discover science fiction and fantasy through novels — not really. I discovered it by reading short stories in Junior High, and especially the enticing anthologies on display every week in the library at St. Francis School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I didn’t really know what science fiction was; but if it had monsters on the cover, I was all over it. The first anthology I can recall reading was Creatures From Beyond, a…

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 10: Llana of Gathol

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Back on Mars, and closing in on its finale, after my short sabbatical… What can I say? It seems Synthetic Men of Mars will suck out the desire to keep trudging forward from even the most dedicated ERB enthusiast. Llana of Gathol is the first of the two story collections that close out the published Barsoom epic: it contains four novellas chronologically linked together to produce an episodic novel… one that hopefully improves upon the failed previous book. Our Saga:…

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Worldcon Wrap-up

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I was almost to Chicago last Thursday when I realized I’d gotten so wrapped up in the audio book of The Name of the Wind that I’d missed my turn. Fortunately, I found another way to Interstate 90 and the Hyatt Regency. And when I finally reached the dealer’s room, I was able to lodge a personal complaint with Patrick Rothfuss himself for writing so well that I got distracted. It wasn’t long ago that I’d arrive at a convention…

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Black Gate Interviews Nathan Long, Part One

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Nathan Long is a novelist best known for his work in the Warhammer universe, most notably for his Black Hearts series and Ulrika the Vampire series, as well as penning the new adventures of the classic Warhammer duo, Gotrek & Felix. Recently, Nathan’s Jane Carver of Waar has been released to some great reviews, and is getting a lot of attention in light of the recent big budget movie adaptation of the Burroughs novel that inspired it. Welcome, Nathan, and…

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Alyx Among the Dandelions: Exploring Joanna Russ and Ray Bradbury

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I think our book club should have a name. It’s that cool. It consists of our Mighty Robot Overlord John O’Neill, awesomely chill Chicago author Geoff Hyatt, our own Dread Patty Templeton and myself. Four people make for a nicely balanced book club, in my opinion. Now, we may not meet in the most consistent fashion ever (our two meetings had a wee gap of four months between them), but we do read SPIFFY BOOKS. Or at least… discussable ones….

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Romanticism and Fantasy: The Neoclassical Background

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By way of beginning a discussion about Romanticism and fantasy, I’d like to take a quick look at where the Romantics came from. If Romanticism was a revolt against Reason, what was Reason understood to be? If Romanticism, as I feel, is essentially fantastic, is Reason opposed to fantasy? To know Romanticism is to know the Enlightenment which it was reacting against, so in this post I’ll try to describe some characteristics of the 18th-century Enlightenment in England that seem…

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Q.D. Leavis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Fiction and the Reading Public

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Before continuing the series of posts on Romanticism that I talked about last week, I’d like to write about a couple of subjects I’ve had on my mind for a while. First up is Q.D. Leavis, and her book Fiction and the Reading Public. In or slightly before 1932, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a letter to literary ciritc Queenie Dorothy Leavis. Leavis was preparing her PhD thesis, a book that would be an overview of the development of the bestseller…

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