Search Results for: Two covers

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Two-Thirds of a Miracle

Comments 7 comments

The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line Cinema, December 2001) Some of us waited a very long time for these movies — or at least, that’s how it felt. I grew up in the 1960s reading science fiction and fantasy; my father had read pulps like Weird Tales back in the ‘30s, and when those stories were republished as postwar paperbacks, he bought them and then passed them on to me. But I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy…

Read More Read More

NEW EDGE SWORD & SORCERY MAGAZINE First Two Issues Released

Comments 4 comments

October 2022, Michael Harrington hosted an interview with Oliver Brackenbury on Black Gate; Brackenbury is the editor and champion of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine. That post coincided with the release of the teaser Issue #0 including short fiction & non-fiction (free in digital format, or priced at cost on Amazon Print-on-Demand, through the New Edge Website). In Feb. 2023 Black Gate announced the magazine’s Kickstarter which succeeded and spurred the creation of the illustrated Issues 1 & 2 that are being…

Read More Read More

Retro Review: Two F&SFs from Robert P. Mills’ Editorship

Comments 3 comments

The November 1958 and May 1961 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Covers by John Pederson and Ed Emshwiller I’ve recently looked at a few issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from the early to mid-50s, when Anthony Boucher (at first in collaboration with J. Francis McComas) was the editor. Boucher left that post with the August 1958 issue, and Robert P. Mills took over. (Mills had been the editor of F&SF’s sister magazine…

Read More Read More

When USA was Kicking the Major Networks’ Collective Butts!

Comments 4 comments

In the early 2000’s, for about a decade and-a-half, USA Network was cranking out quality shows. For some programming, they were a viable competitor to the big four. In those pre-streaming days, I faithfully watched each week. And in the past year, I’ve discovered a couple I didn’t watch the first time around. I decided it’s time to talk about a few of them. So here’s the first of a two-parter, looking at some of those great USA Network shows….

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian Aldiss

Comments 10 comments

Galactic Empires Volume Two (Avon, 1979). Cover by Alex Ebel It’s the Christmas break, I finally have some serious reading time, and I know I should be trying some recent stuff. There are many promising new authors I’ve been looking forward to sampling, and I’m reasonably sure I even made a resolution or two in that direction a while back. But here I am enjoying some old Brian Aldiss anthologies, and I don’t even have the decency to feel guilty….

Read More Read More

Once There Were Two Rabbits…Watership Down by Richard Adams

Comments 10 comments

When I was young I watched numerous live-action animal movies on The Wonderful World of Disney (Sunday nights on NBC, right after Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom). There was Run, Cougar, Run (1972), Nikki, Dog of the North (1961), and my favorite, The Incredible Journey (1963). I had, of course, also seen Bambi (1942), an animated movie that gave voice to its animal characters, unlike the live-action ones. The point being, when my friend Karl told me about an exciting…

Read More Read More

Space Opera That Reshapes the Genre: A Desolation Called Peace, Book Two of Teixcalaan by Arkady Martine

Comments 4 comments

The first two novels in the Teixcalaan series from Tor Books. Covers by Jaime Jones Arkady Martine’s debut novel A Memory Called Empire was published in 2019, and was nominated for major awards, including both the Nebula and Hugo. Debuts don’t usually win awards, but that didn’t stop Martine — her first book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, beating out competition from Seanan McGuire, Tamsyn Muir, Kameron Hurley, Charlie Jane Anders, and others. Andrew Liptak summed up some…

Read More Read More

Recomplicated Realities: Philip K. Dick’s Eye In the Sky and Two Others

Comments 5 comments

Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick; First Edition: Ace, 1957. Cover art likely Ed Valigursky. (Click to enlarge) Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick Ace (255 pages, $.35, paperback, 1957) Cover art (likely) Ed Valigursky Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick Ace (188 pages, $.35, paperback, 1955) Cover art unidentified Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick Lippincott (221 pages, $3.50, paperback, 1959) Cover art Arthur Hawkins I confess I’ve never warmed to Philip K….

Read More Read More

These Two Books Are Not the Same: John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes and Out of the Deeps

Comments 11 comments

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham; First Edition: Michael Joseph, 1953 Cover art uncredited The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham Michael Joseph (288 pages, 10/6, hardcover, 1953) Cover art uncredited Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham Ballantine (182 pages, $2.00, hardcover, 1953) Cover by Richard Powers John Wyndham was an English author, popular for five or six major novels published in the 1950s and 1960s, among numerous other books. The first of his famous novels was The Day of…

Read More Read More

Network Effect is the First Full Novel in the Martha Wells’ Epic Murderbot Saga

Comments 2 comments

Covers by Jaime Jones Martha Wells exploded into the big time with Murderbot. Black Gate readers, of course, know and love Martha from her Ile-Rien tales “Holy Places,” “Houses of the Dead,” and “Reflections,” which originally appeared in the pages of our print magazine (and her Nebula-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer, which we serialized online in its entirely here.) But the world at large didn’t truly know her the way we did until the first Murderbot tale All Systems Red…

Read More Read More