The Art of Space Travel (Titan Books, September 2021). Cover by Vince Haig I had the chance to wander the Dealer’s Room at Worldcon last week — and if you’ve never had that pleasure, I encourage you to do it at least once. If there’s a worthy pilgrimage for science fiction and fantasy readers, it’s the peerless Dealer’s Room at Worldcon. The only things in my experience that come close are the vast Dealer’s Room at Windy City in Chicago,…
A Vanished Hand and Others (Swan River Press, October 2021). Cover by Brian Coldrick Clotilde Graves (1863-1932) was an eccentric, prolific and eclectic Irish writer whose historical novels were published under the pen name Richard Dehan. As Clo Graves she also published a number of fantastic stories, most of which are now reprinted and collected in a volume from Swan River Press, edited and introduced by Melissa Edmunson. The book assembles thirteen tales showing Graves’ contribution to what we call…
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….
John C. Hocking’s Conan Pastiches Conan and the Emerald Lotus by John C. Hocking emerged from Tor in 1995 (Ciruelo Cabral cover artist), and was reprinted in 1999 (with a Ken Kelly cover); both paperbacks are insanely expensive now (i.e. $500+ on Amazon, 2021 price). In 2019 Hocking released a 12-part serialized novella “Black Starlight” published in the back of the recent Conan the Barbarian comic (the comic portion was written by Jason Aaron), a direct sequel to “Emerald Lotus”…
The first printing of John Meyers Meyers’ The Harp and the Blade was serialized in seven parts in the pulp magazine Argosy from June through early August of 1940. Although the Rudolph Belarski painting on the cover of the June 22 issue might suggest that The Harp and the Blade is a fantasy, it is not. It is instead a straight adventure story set in medieval France. What makes this story really interesting is its feeling of reality and the…
The Gaean Reach and The Gaean Reach Gazetteer (Pelgrane Press, 2014). Covers by Chris Huth The great Jack Vance doesn’t get a lot of love from role players. Despite his huge influence on the field (Gygax based the fundamental cast-and-forget spellcasting system of Dungeons and Dragons on the Vancian magic system the author developed for his Dying Earth tales, just as an example), there aren’t a lot of ways to use dice to explore the wonderful worlds Vance created. Twenty…
Nebula Awards Showcase 55 (SFWA, August 2021). Cover by Lauren Raye Snow I’m hearing some grousing about the latest Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by the distinguished Catherynne M. Valente. This is the 55th volume in the long-running series, and the second to be published directly by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. As is customary, it contains the complete Nebula award-winning stories, as selected by that august body, as well as a tasty selection of the other nominees, as…
Hawk the Slayer (1980) The Eighties Barbarian Boom didn’t start with Conan the Barbarian (1982), though its long pre-release hype train certainly primed the pump. In truth, the market was ripe for such films, and by mid-1981, a number of other sword-and-sorcery movies were in production or pre-production. The genre had been bubbling its way up in other mass media throughout the Seventies, Dungeons & Dragons co-designer Gary Gygax had come to Hollywood talking it up, and the largely heroic…
Activation Degradation (Harper Voyager, September 2021) Marina J. Lostetter is the author of the acclaimed Noumenon space opera series, and the fantasy novel The Helm of Midnight, released just this past April. She doesn’t appear interested in just soaking up the glory of those accomplishments, however — her next novel (and her second this year) arrived in September. Activation Degradation features a spunky robot hero in a fast-paced tale of alien invasion in high orbit over Jupiter, one with plenty…
Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Arkham House, 1976) and Dark Valley Destiny (Bluejay Books, 1983) Covers by Tim Kirk and Kevin Eugene Johnson Robert E. Howard and prostitutes is a complicated and fascinating subject. Not only is there a question of whether he visited the ladies of the night, there was also the issue of whether he was a virgin. In his REH biography, Dark Valley Destiny (1983) L. Sprague de Camp wrote, Some of Robert…