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Vintage Treasures: This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

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This Immortal (Ace Books, September 1980). Cover by Rowena Morrill Two weeks ago I dashed off a Vintage Treasures piece on Larry Niven’s first collection Neutron Star, the first I’d ever done on Niven, and it helped me realize that there are several other major writers sorely underrepresented in these pages. Near the top of that list is Roger Zelazny, one of the most important fantasists of the 20th Century, and the man behind much of the work that turned…

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Viy by Nikolai Gogol

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Viy is the colossal creation of the common folk’s imagination. The Little Russians (Ukrainians) use this name for the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids on his eyes reach all the way to the ground. This whole story is a folk legend. I did not want to change anything about it, so I am narrating it in almost the same simple form which I heard it. Nikolai Gogol, footnote to “Viy“ None of that is true. There are no Slavic…

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Alien Devil Trees, Deadly Cargo, and the Blob: September-October 2023 Print SF Magazines

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September-October 2023 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Shutterstock, Tomislav Tikulin, and Marianne Plumridge There’s plenty of great stuff in this month’s print magazines, including a new Diving Universe novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, an homage to the 1958 classic The Blob by Eric Choi, a chilling story of the Dead Letter Office by David Erik Nelson, the gruesome secret of the alien Deviltree by…

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Vintage Treasures: Neutron Star by Larry Niven

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Neutron Star (Ballantine Bools, April 1968). Cover artist unknown As I was preparing last week’s Vintage Treasures article (on Poul Anderson’s Fire Time), I realized that the next book on deck was Neutron Star, by Larry Niven, one of the most important science fiction collections of the 20th Century. And I simultaneously realized we’ve never done a Vintage Treasures feature on Niven before, a pretty serious oversight. (For comparison purposes, as I was assembling reference links at the bottom of…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Beware of Greeks

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Xena and Hercules If you were watching TV in the late ‘90s, it was pretty hard to avoid Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules series and its spinoffs, even if you wanted to. Despite its modest budget, unambitious stories, and mostly indifferent acting, this likable family-friendly series nonetheless found an audience devoted enough to sustain it through six TV seasons. There was clearly a hunger for solid fantasy adventures, and Hercules fed that demand. In fact, the Herc series revealed so much demand…

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New Treasures: Dead Water by C.A. Fletcher

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Dead Water (Redhook, June 13, 2023). Cover design by kid-ethic C. A. Fletcher is a Scottish writer, and the author of the popular post-apocalyptic novel A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World. I’m unfamiliar with his work, but I decided to pick up his latest when it was released in paperback in June. Dead Water is described as ‘Folk Horror,’ which I think means it’s a tale of horrible stuff that happens to people who live…

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Goth Chick News: Kicking Off Spooky Season with a Ghost Story

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Ghost Story (Pocket Books paperback reprint, September 1, 1989) When fall finally starts descending on Chicagoland there are a few rituals which are essential to getting me in the mood for Spooky Season. Granted, this time of year isn’t dramatically different from the rest of the year around here, considering. But there are certain things that ramp up the countdown to October 31st. For example, a more than average quantity of gothic elements appears in the décor, the sweatshirts come…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: John Bullard on REH’s Rough and Ready Clowns of the West – Part I

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) A (Black) Gat in the Hand was primarily about hardboiled Pulp stuff when it began, because that’s what I mostly what I was interested in, and knew about. And I was the one writing it….

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Vintage Treasures: Shadow of Earth by Phyllis Eisenstein

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Shadow of Earth (Dell, September 1979). Cover artist uncredited We lost Phyllis Eisenstein almost three years ago, in December 2020. She was a friend of mine, and I miss the long conversations we used to have at Windycon and the Windy City Pulp & Paper Show. I’ll never forget the greeting she shouted at me in 2015 (“I’m retired!”) after she finally quit her advertising job. She had numerous writing projects she wanted to complete. She died of a stroke…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand – The ‘Lost’ Mike & Trixie Intro

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) So… I agreed to write an introduction for The Complete Cases of Mike & Trixie: Volume One, from Steeger Books. That intro is below. It is not, however, in that particular book, as I missed…

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