One of the Best Swordfights in Fantasy: Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers

One of the Best Swordfights in Fantasy: Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers

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Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen (DAW Books, August 1979). Cover by Richard Hescox

About 1979, while in college at Arkansas Tech University, I visited a local used bookstore and found a copy of A Sword for Kregen.

The great cover, drawn by Richard Hescox (who I got a chance to meet), had what looked like a human locked in a sword fight with a creature with four arms and a tail with a hand on it. The four arms immediately reminded me of the Tharks of Barsoom. No way I was leaving the store without that book. It only cost me $1.17. (The price is still written on the cover.)

The book proved to be Sword & Planet and had one of the best swordfights I’d ever read. And, the human hero turned out ‘not’ to be the best swordsman in the fight. I’d never imagined such a thing from reading Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books and the works of Gardner Fox and others. I fell in love. And best of all, the cover said this was #20 of a series! I had a lot more good reading ahead of me, and I didn’t know the half of it.

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New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven edited by Neil Clarke

New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven edited by Neil Clarke

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven (Night Shade,
September 5, 2023). Cover by Thomas Chamberlain-Keen

It’s been distressing to watch the havoc the pandemic played with many Year’s Best Science Fiction volumes. The 13th volume of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Prime Books, was delayed a year and produced in a digital only edition last year, and now that series seems to be dead. Jonathan Strahan’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction (Saga Press) published its final volume in 2021.

And Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 (Night Shade Books), covering fiction from 2021, was delayed a year, and finally arrived last month. Volume 8 is still (supposedly) scheduled for release next month, but there’s no word on it from either the publisher or the editor, and I’m very concerned this series may be dead as well.

What does that leave us? The ninth volume of John Joseph Adams’ Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy (Mariner Books, co-edited with R. F Kuang) arrives next month, and seems to be going strong. Allan Kaster produced The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories Volume 7 (Infinivox) in June. And Paula Guran edited two: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume Two (Pyr, August 15), and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume 4 (Pyr, coming October 24). So the situation isn’t totally dire. But to lose so many top-notch anthologies in rapid succession is a blow.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand Turns 100!: Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘Getting Away With Murder’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand Turns 100!: Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘Getting Away With Murder’

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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)

And A (Black) Gat in the Hand turns 100 today. With help from some friends, this column has managed to offer a hundred essays on the fascinating world of Pulp. April 8, 1949 was the day the Pulps died (I think that American Pie is one of the greatest songs of all time – couldn’t pass up the reference – with a tip of the fedora to William Lampkin for the phrase). On that day, Street & Smith announced they were quitting the Pulps. My favorite, Dime Detective, straggled on into 1952. But the days of the Pulps were effectively over.

But the love of Pulps lived on. Back in May of 2018, I kicked off my weekly Black Gate column as follows:

“Working from Otto Penzler’s massive The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, we’re going to be exploring some pulp era writers and stories from the twenties through the forties. There will also be many references to its companion book, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. I really received my education in the hardboiled genre from the Black Lizard/Vintage line. I discovered Chester Himes, Steve Fisher, Paul Cain, Thompson and more.

With first, the advent of small press imprints, then the explosion of digital publishing, Pulp-era fiction has undergone a renaissance. Authors from Frederick Nebel to Raoul Whitfield; from Carroll John Daly to Paul Cain (that’s 27 letters – we went all the way back around the alphabet – get it?) are accessible again. Out of print and difficult-to-find stories and novels have made their way back to avid readers.”

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I Loved This Book: Being Michael Swanwick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

I Loved This Book: Being Michael Swanwick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

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Being Michael Swanwick (Fairwood Press, November 21, 2023)

Back in 2001 Michael Swanwick published a collection of interviews with his close friend, sometime mentor and collaborator, and fellow Philadelphian Gardner Dozois, called Being Gardner Dozois. That book focused on Dozois’s short fiction. And now Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, an accomplished writer of short SF himself, and a Hugo nominee for his 2016 collection of conversations with Robert Silverberg, Traveler of Worlds, has now published Being Michael Swanwick, a collection of interviews with Swanwick. This book covers essentially all of Swanwick’s short stories — which is pretty remarkable as he is quite prolific.

The book is organized chronologically, in five-year chunks, beginning in 1980, when Swanwick’s first stories, “Ginungagap” and “The Feast of Saint Janis,” appeared. I remember the excitement at the time about the Special Science Fiction Issue of the prestigious literary magazine TriQuarterly, and the surprise that a brand-new writer had a story (“Ginnungagap”) in it, amidst heavyweights like Le Guin, Wolfe, Delany, and Disch. Obviously the judgment of the editors has been vindicated — Swanwick would perhaps blush to read this, but his fiction fully stands with those great writers, and he is also clearly a writer of considerable literary merit, but also a writer who loves SF and Fantasy and inhabits the genre world enthusiastically.

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Vintage Treasures: Neutron Star by Larry Niven

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 my Fire Time piece, there simply wasn’t room to include the dozens of articles we’ve written on Anderson.) In fact, other than a pair of reviews by Fletcher Vredenburgh, two blog posts on Convergent Series by Steven Silver, and a note on the 1973 Skylark Award by Rich Horton, we’ve had virtually no coverage of Niven at all on Black Gate.

I’m to blame for this. Niven is, unquestionably, one of the most important science fiction writers alive today. But I was never a fan of his novels (I made two attempts to read his classic Ringworld, before giving up for good in the early 80s). His short stories, however, are a different matter, and I’m very glad to finally have the chance to discuss his first collection, the groundbreaking Neutron Star, first published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in April 1968.

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Science Fiction History Considered As a Series of Images of Newsstand Displays

Science Fiction History Considered As a Series of Images of Newsstand Displays

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Science Fiction magazines likely displayed on the stands at ten year intervals, 1933 to 2013

Many readers here no doubt lack the experience of having personally cruised news stands, tobacco shops and underground hole-in-the-wall used book stores, through no fault of their own. Unless you can fault someone for not having been born in a particular year, which I think would be a silly thing to do.

I, on the other hand, managed to arrive on this planet at a time conducive to such things. Following a brief orientation period lasting a handful of years, during which I learned how to navigate within a 1G gravitational field and picked up a few useful tips, such as becoming proficient in one of the native languages and where food came from, not to mention the necessity of wearing clothing when out and about, I was introduced to a small, yet extremely powerful concept called “Science Fiction”.

In short order I became enraptured and the rest, as they say, is personal history.

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Goth Chick News: The Night We Played Terror Roulette

Goth Chick News: The Night We Played Terror Roulette

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September means one thing here at GCN – haunted attractions grand openings. The result is that Black Gate photog Chris Z and I usually spend most if not all September weekends getting early looks at the latest upgrades to the Chicagoland haunts. I am proud to brag that several entries on any list of “the nation’s best haunted attractions” are local to us, which means the bar around here is set pretty darn high.

This year, Chris Z’s long-suffering spouse had enough of his haunted house nonsense and booked an extended vacation abroad during the month of September. Though I understand not wanting to try to organize one’s wedding anniversary celebration around a Hell’s Gate press night, Chris Z’s absence left me feeling kind of pathetic. I mean, in the very early days of GCN I used to cover all the events on my own, but I had to admit that I’d grown accustomed to his rolling commentary and snarky asides.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Beware of Greeks

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 for fantasy that to meet it, it generated the vastly superior Xena: Warrior Princess show, which is so good that we can forgive the much weaker Hercules show almost anything. Ki-yi-yi-yi-yi!

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Marketing is Hard, BookTok is Harder

Marketing is Hard, BookTok is Harder

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Good Afterevenmorn!

I’m back at it with the mentions of BookTok, largely in part because this is a (relatively) new-to-me social media site, and I’m still trying to plumb its depths and unravel its mysteries. Right now, all I’ve managed to do is upload a few vids that are largely trying out silly filters and somehow turn my ‘For You Page’ into nothing but Astarion (from the Baldur’s Gate 3 game that was recently released) thirst traps.

You like one funny video…

In any case, I understand that it can be an incredibly powerful tool in getting a readership — which I so desperately need if I have any hope of making any kind of living from my writing. BookTok is such a powerful player in the publishing world that brick-and-mortar stores often have a table near the front door devoted to books that have popped off on the site. Conquering BookTok is now one of the best ways to acquire that much-needed readership.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Murray on Cross-Genre Confusion, and Supernatural Westerns

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Murray on Cross-Genre Confusion, and Supernatural Westerns

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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)

Last week was part two of  fellow Robert E Howard Foundation Award-winner John Bullard’s look at Robert E. Howard’s humorous Westerns. Earlier this summer, Pulp maven (and fellow Sherlock Holmes afficionado) William Murray revealed right here in this column, that Dashiell Hammett did not actually write “The Diamond Wager/” Will, who has written about Doc Savage, and The Spider, for A (Black) Gat in the Hand, is back at it again. 

Will – who has written THE look at Western pulps – Wordslingers: An Epitaph for the Western – takes us into the world of Weird Westerns. It’s no surprise that Pulp editors were leery of ‘crossing the streams’ for these types of stories. Read on!

Cross Genre Confusion

In the beginning, the pulp magazine was an undifferentiated product.

Starting with the first of its type, The Argosy, it was essentially a colorful cornucopia of fiction, much of it belonging to no particular category. Stories of city, farm, and tenement life were common. Yarns set in the half-tamed West were not always gunsmoke sagas, but simply narratives set in the contemporary West. Historical tales were also common. As were simple homespun comedies. Many were quasi-adventure stories of men at their work. Thus we often discover coal mining episodes, off-field yarns, and Mountie exploits.

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