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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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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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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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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