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No Slimy Monsters, No Princesses: The Bantam Spectra Omnibus Robert Silverberg

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Robert Silverberg practically introduced me to science fiction. His novel Collision Course was one of the first SF novels I ever read, and he’s one of the first authors I collected. Like a lot of Campbell-era SF, Collision Course is about humans thrusting out into space in an aggressive age of empire-building, and our first encounter with an equally aggressive alien race with the same dreams. The copy I read was the 1977 Ace edition with a cover (by an uncredited artist) that casually gave…

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Fantasia 2017, Day 1: The Bizarre Adventure Begins (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable)

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The body has a memory, memory activated by the time of year and the weather and the repetition of physical activity. Every year now as summer passes its midpoint, walking through Montreal evokes for me a sense of wonder and anticipation: a physical remembrance of the Fantasia International Film Festival. I’ve covered Montreal’s genre film festival for Black Gate the last three years, walking downtown during the days of the festival and then walking back at night marveling at the…

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The July Fantasy Magazine Rack

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I’m trying something a bit different with our Magazine Rack this month. Rather than just recap the last eight magazines we’ve covered, I want to make this report a little more useful by actually focusing on magazines cover-dated July 2017. That means there are three magazines above — Back Issue, Grimdark, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies — that we’ve haven’t covered yet this month. But I’m including them here because they’re cool, they came out in July, and you should know about…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in June

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Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Photo by Liz Duffy Adams June was a big month for interviews at Black Gate. Our top articles were interviews, and our roving reporter Joe Bonadonna placed two in the Top Ten — a lengthy conversation with Author T.C. Rypel (the Gonji series) at #2, and a free-wheeling conversation with two editors of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Adrian Simmons and David Farney, at #8. And the #1 article for the month was Elizabeth Crowens’s enchanting conversation with the…

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The Eighth Samurai: An Interview with Author T.C. Rypel

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Back in the 1970s and 1980s, many authors were churning out their own versions of big, iron-muscled barbarian heroes like Conan of Cimmeria. There were exceptions, of course, like Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance, to name three authors I’ve always favored. But then along came T.C. Rypel, who hit the ground running with something different, something uniquely his own . . . his character of Sabatake Gonji-no-Sadowara, the half Scandinavian and half Japanese samurai. Gonji was truly a…

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The June Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Lots of interesting stuff in our magazine coverage this month. Adrian Simmons reviews the March/April issue of Analog, with fiction from Catherine Wells, Michael Flynn, Tom Ballantyne, Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, and many others. For fans of Asimov’s SF and Analog, we shared the good news about Dell Magazines’ Science Fiction Value Packs, a great way to get packs of back issues at ridiculously cheap prices. And in a far-ranging interview, our roving reporter Joe Bonadonna grilled Adrian Simmons and…

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Smugglers, Alien Vampires, and Dark Dimensions: The Best of C. L. Moore

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The Best of C. L. Moore (1976) was the sixth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. After taking a break from the fifth installment to let J. J. Pierce edit, Lester Del Rey (1915–1993) returned to edit and give an introduction to this volume. You may recall that Dean Ellis (1920–2009) did the cover art for the first four installments in the series with Darrell Sweet handling the fifth, though still in the style of Ellis. But the fabulous cover…

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Half Past Human by T.J. Bass

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‘Civilization is too high a price to pay for survival’ Moon from Half Past Human I don’t know what made me buy Half Past Human (1971) by T.J. Bass fifteen years ago. It was one of those books I had always seen on the used book store shelves, but nothing about the cover (the basis on which I tended to buy unknown books back then) made me go “Gotta buy it.” Something on the back cover, though, must have caught my…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in May

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Four Thousand Year Old Bread from Ancient Egypt Sean McLachlan was the top draw at the Black Gate blog last month, with three posts in the Top Ten for May — including the #1 article, a mouth-watering report on 4,000 year-old bread found in a tomb in Ancient Egypt (with pics!) Sean’s adventure-filled report on braving scorpions and impassible tunnels at the Queens’ Pyramids at Giza came in at #7. While he was in Egypt, Sean also interviewed Egyptian Science Fiction writer Mohammad…

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