Search Results for: tale covers

Up and Down Again: Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line

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Up the Line by Robert SilverbergFirst Edition: Ballantine, August 1969. Cover art Ron Walotsky.Also shown: Fourth printing, June 1981. Cover art Murray Tinkelman. Up the Lineby Robert SilverbergBallantine (250 pages, $0.75, Paperback, August 1969)Cover art Ron Walotsky Having discussed Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity last time, I thought to move forward a decade or so and look back at a similarly recomplicated tale of time travel and time paradoxes: Robert Silverberg’s 1969 novel Up the Line. Silverberg has written…

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Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1954: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1954. Cover by Emsh Ah, yes, it’s that time again to look back at Galaxy Science Fiction. The rumor that I was traded for a box of unopened board games is untrue. But John has quite the penchant for such things, so I hope no one puts this to the test. I’m quite happy working in the Black Gate office. The cover, titled “Space-Time in One Tough Lesson,” is by Ed Emshwiller. His birthday was February…

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Vintage Treasures: Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

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Orphans of the Sky (Ace Books, 1987). Cover by Carl Lundgren Robert A. Heinlein never really did it for me. Even in my teens, when I was devouring any science fiction between covers, I didn’t get the appeal. I never read his juveniles, and I bounced hard off of Friday. I found Stranger in a Strange Land dull and unbelievable, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress resisted every attempt I made to get past the first 20 pages. Why’d I…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Classic, Mythic, and Epic

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Silvana Mangano and Kirk Douglas in Ulysses (1954) Ryan Harvey has written extensively here about the peplum movie or Italian sword-and-sandal craze of 1959-65, a phenomenon that had an immediate origin in three films: Ulysses, which showed that there was a postwar Italian market for adventure films from the era of myth; Hercules, which proved you could make such a movie popular on both sides of the Atlantic; and Hercules Unchained, which demonstrated there was a formula for repeated success….

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The Art of Things to Come, Part 2: 1958-1960

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The Fantastic Universe Omnibus, featured in the September-October 1960 issue of Things to Come. Art by Virgil Finlay As I mentioned in Part One of this series, like tens of thousands of science fiction fans before and after me, I was at one time a member of the Science Fiction Book Club (or SFBC for short). I joined just as I entered my teen years, in the fall of 1976. The bulletin of the SFBC, Things to Come, which announced…

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Vintage Treasures: Nebula Award Stories 17 edited by Joe Haldeman

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Nebula Award Stories 17 (Ace Books, 1985). Cover by Jeffrey Ridge I’ve covered a few noteworthy anthologies here in the last few weeks, including Isaac Asimov’s surprising Tin Stars, and Donald A. Wollheim’s excellent 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. It’s sharpened my appetite for good anthologies, and when I found Nebula Award Stories 17 in a small collection of vintage paperbacks I bought in eBay last month, I knew I’d found my next weekend read. The Nebula Awards anthologies have…

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Future Treasures: Transgressions of Power, Book 2 of The Broken Trust by Juliette Wade

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Mazes of Power and Transgressions of Power (DAW, 2020/21) Covers by Adam Auerbach I admit I got a little excited by the release of Mazes of Power last year, mostly because it’s set in a thousand year-old cave city (and if I have to explain why that’s so cool, we can’t be friends). But the series has become even more interesting with the impending release of the sequel, Transgressions of Power, arriving in hardcover in two weeks. Here’s an excerpt…

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Our Most Unusual Pulp Adventure

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10 Story Mystery, April 1943, and The All-Story Detective, October 1949 Based on my experience, I think that non-collectors often view us collectors as somewhat crazy. They just don’t approach things the way we do, particularly when it comes to whatever particular obsession drives us. They don’t understand why we collect, and they don’t understand what we do to collect, and they don’t understand that the desire to collect can often override what most folks would consider to be common sense. Case…

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Wandering a Monster-Ridden World: The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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The Expert System’s Brother and The Expert System’s Champion (Tor Books, 2018-21). Covers by Raphael Lacoste British author Adrian Tchaikovsky has been steadily making a name for himself since he burst onto the scene with his 10-volume epic fantasy Shadows of the Apt. He’s followed that with several ambitious new series, including the Echoes of the Fall fantasy trilogy and the far-future hard science fiction Children of Time series. His latest is a sequence of tales in Tor.com’s prestigious novella…

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Future Treasures: Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh

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Stephen Leigh has had a long and successful writing career. I bought his debut novel Slow Fall to Dawn forty year ago. It turned out to be the opening volume in the Hoorka trilogy, an epic tale of space-faring assassins, recently collected in the handsome DAW omnibus volume Assassin’s Dawn. In the four decades since Leigh has published some 20 novels and over 40 short stories, including six volumes in the Ray Bradbury Presents series and, under the name S.L….

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