Search Results for: New Edge Sword

Flood Monsters and Ghost Riders: The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Comments 4 comments

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII (DAW, July 1980). Cover by Michael Whelan The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VIII was the eighth volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories, copyrighted and printed in 1980. This was the first volume edited by horror author and editor Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). Artist Michael Whelan (1950–) appears for a sixth time in a row on the cover. I have been very impressed with Whelan’s variety. The covered and walking corpse is…

Read More Read More

When Venice Ruled the… Galaxy? Miles Cameron’s Artifact Space

Comments 2 comments

Artifact Space by Miles Cameron (Gollancz, June 14, 2022) Although I love to watch Sci-Fi shows & movies, I don’t tend to read a lot of Sci-fi, and never have; even though Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos remains one of my favorite set of novels in any genre, and I have an incredible soft-spot for sword & planet pulp. OTOH, good space opera often blurs the line between fantasy and Sci-Fi, or takes themes we see in historical fiction and contemporary…

Read More Read More

Space Traders, Backwater Planets, and Rocket Girls: May/June 2022 Print SF Magazines

Comments 0 Comment

May/June 2022 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Analog Science Fiction & Fact. Cover art by Alan M. Clark, 123RF, and NASA There’s a fine batch of print magazines piled on my nightstand this week. But the clear highlight is the return of James Enge’s delightful traveling wizard Morlock Ambrosius, who made his debut in Black Gate 8. “The Hunger” appears in in the pages of F&SF; Sam Tomaino at SF Revu calls…

Read More Read More

Six Thousand Years of Galactic Empires, Space Pirates, and Fuzzies: H. Beam Piper’s Rich Future History

Comments 11 comments

H. Beam Piper’s Federation and Empire (Ace Books, February 1982 and May 1981). Covers by Michael Whelan H. Beam Piper is an enduring favorite of mine. I love his SF adventure tales, including The Fuzzy Papers and the stories in his Paratime sequence. But I haven’t really dipped into his more ambitious work, the Future History that tied together most of his longer stories. The Zarthani website dedicated to Piper’s work summarizes it succinctly: Piper’s Terro-human Future History is a future-historical…

Read More Read More

Exploring Modern Pulp: Royal Road and the Web Novel

Comments 6 comments

Image courtesy Royal Road “Web novels?” you say. “What are those?” They’re exactly what you think they are; novels written and published on the internet, free to read. They’re more common than you think. What may surprise you about this community of writers and readers is not only the writers themselves, but the abundance of readers who support them financially. I think many folks here have probably heard of places like Wattpad, the web publishing platform where writers post their…

Read More Read More

Richard L. Tierney’s Sorcery Against Caeser; Review and Tour Guide of Simon of Gitta’s Sica & Sorcery!

Comments 3 comments

Greg Mele recently paid tribute to Richard L. Tierney at Black Gate. That memorial post covers the author’s life and bibliography very well, so check that out; Tierney co-authored books with David C. Smith will be echoed here. The Goodreads S&S group is hosting a two-month group read of his work presently (March-April 2022), which spurred me to read Scroll of Thoth; Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones. That book lingered way too long on my shelf. It was…

Read More Read More

Invasion! The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Comments 7 comments

Across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. One hundred and twenty-five years after its first publication, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (serialized 1897, published 1898) remains a brutally effective tale of alien invasion and a critique of imperialism. I can’t remember how young I…

Read More Read More

Neverwhens, Where Fantasy and History Collide: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion

Comments 9 comments

Cyrion (DAW, 1982, cover by Ken W. Kelly) The Empress of Dreams I hardly need to sing the praises of the late Tanith Lee (1947 – 2015).  A two-time World Fantasy winner, Horror Grandmaster, Hugo nominee, yadda yadda yadda, she rose out of nowhere writing sword & sorcery (generally a male-dominated field) with the Nebula-nominated The Birthgrave, and went on to pen 70 novels, 300 short stories and create a style of lush, dark fantasy perhaps best represented by her…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Time Troopers edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

Comments 2 comments

Time Troopers (Baen, April 5, 2022). Cover by Kieran Yanner It’s a delight to see a brand new anthology from the dynamic duo of Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio. Their previous collaborations (Space Pioneers, Overruled, and Cosmic Corsairs) were a lot of fun — and they even gave a shout out to the readers of Black Gate in the acknowledgments of Cosmic Corsairs for their help selecting the stories. Their newest, Time Troopers, contains new and classic tales of Time…

Read More Read More