The thought that preoccupies me is, “How the heck am I going to find enough pictures to go with this post?” Unlike that one time when we crashed a Zeppelin into Madison, we did not document our epic journey across America with anything so practical as a camera. No! Instead, we marked the miles in the bellowing of bawdy (need I say, alternate?) lyrics to “There’s a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza,” the scrawling of character notes, place names…
Read More Read More
And now the third of three consecutive months of SF magazines I recently bought, each a different specimen of the canonical “Big Three” of that time. The first, the December 1965 Galaxy, is here, and the January 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is here. Todd Mason complained last time about this designation of Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF as the “canonical Big Three” SF magazines of the ’60s. He noted, correctly, that Galaxy‘s sister magazine If was…
Read More Read More
It’s the start of Howard Andrew Jones Month here at the Black Gate blog. You have to do something pretty special to get a whole month, even if you’re Managing Editor of Black Gate. But publishing your first two novels — The Desert of Souls and Plague of Shadows — from two different publishers, not to mention writing an essay for John Scalzi’s “Big Idea,” holding your first book signing, conducting a sweepstakes, getting picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club, publishing…
Read More Read More
Contributing Editor and SF historian Rich Horton’s article for Black Gate 14 was on modern reprints of the best in classic fantasy and science fiction: Orion, via their imprints Millennium and later Gollancz, took a different tack in keeping important SF in print. The SF Masterworks series, beginning in 1999, undertook to reprint the very best science fiction novels of the past century or so… a couple of story collections slipped in, including most significantly (to my mind) The Rediscovery…
Read More Read More
By Rich Horton From Black Gate 14 Copyright © 2010 by New Epoch Press. All rights Reserved. Much has been made in recent years of “the death of the midlist” – the tendency of publishers to focus on big sellers at the expense of modest earners. The same tendency can hurt the backlist as well, making it harder to find reprints of older books. This is complicated by a number of factors – a simple one is that the explosion…
Read More Read More
Collector prices are not always rational, as I think most collectors know. They can be fueled by hysteria. As many collectors have noticed, Clive Barker futures are very soft these days. Only the first British hardcovers of the Books of Blood and the British first of The Damnation Game have retained their value. There was a time, within a year or so of publication, when the advance galley of the American edition of Weaveworld could easily bring a hundred dollars. The last…
Read More Read More
I don’t know whether the third edition of Best American Fantasy, which has found a new home with Underland Press, represents the “best” fantasy, or why it matters whether it’s “American” (meaning, presumably, the United States). Of course, it’s a cliché for any anthology to proclaim its contents represent a “best of,” and the editors who’ve been doing it for a number of years frequently rely on stories from the usual suspects of authors who mostly all publish in the…
Read More Read More
Black Gate 14 goes to press this month. It’s a big issue — including a Morlock novella from James Enge, the sequel to “The Face in the Sea” (BG 13) from John C. Hocking, and great new adventure fantasy from Martin Owton, Matthew Surridge, Pete Butler, Michael Jasper & Jay Lake, and many others. Of course, that’s not all. Contributing Editor Rich Horton delivers another great retrospective piece, this one a detailed look at your best bets for quality reprints of Classic Fantasy,…
Read More Read More
Joe Mallozzi’s online book club is reading Moorcock’s The Stealer of Souls this month (there’s already been some discussion here; Moorcock himself will appear as guest today, Wed. 6/10/09). So I thought I’d say a few words about the book… but which book is it, anyway? That’s not a rhetorical question. Geeky details beyond the jump, cobbled together from various copyright pages, the wise words of Mr. Wikipedia, and other stuff I read somewhere once or heard someone say.
As a recovering English major, I sometimes just like to read for the hell of it, enjoy the story and not worry too much about literary merit or what any of the stuff might symbolize. Moby Dick, after all, is a great yarn about high seas adventures. But, then again, you’re missing something if you don’t also ponder what it is has to to say about God and the existence of evil (which is nothing particularly uplifting; Melville will never…
Read More Read More