“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 termsp for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) I’ve said many times that Norbert Davis is on my Hardboiled Mt. Rushmore. He’s not the first face carved in hardboiled stone, but he’s one of only four that are. Max Latin is my favorite…
Welcome to part 17 of my quixotic reread of the Uncanny X-Men, beginning in 1963. I’m seeing how far I can go. Issues #97 to #101 are special for me because they loom large in my personal experience of collecting the backstory. This post covers a special period for X-Men and Marvel history too. The introduction of Phoenix as the new incarnation of original x-man Jean Grey was a gigantic development, with impacts on the Marvel Universe that continue to play out in…
To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg (Sphere, 1977). Cover by Peter Elson I’m on something of a Robert Silverberg kick. It started when Mark Kelly reviewed Silverberg’s early novel Collision Course for us back in April, one of the first SF novels I ever read, and in a haze of nostalgia I ended up taking an extended look at all six Silverberg novels packaged up by Ace in that magical year of 1977. More recently I’ve been collecting some of his earlier…
The Winds of Time by Chad Oliver; First Edition: Doubleday, 1957. Cover art Dick Shelton. (Click to enlarge) The Winds of Time by Chad Oliver Doubleday (192 pages, $3.95, hardcover, April 1957) Cover art Dick Shelton This science fiction novel from 1957 is by an author known for anthropologically informed works (Wikipedia; SFE). He was an anthropologist himself, and thus one of the few science fiction writers who was also a scientist. Oliver published nine novels from the early 1950s…
The Vanished Queen (Saga Press, 2020). Cover design by Alan Dingman. On Monday I mentioned that the publishing house that’s impressed me the most with their late-summer line up was Skybound Books, in large part because of Linden A. Lewis’s debut The First Sister, an epic space opera that Library Journal selected as their Debut of the month. Coming in a close second is the always-reliable Saga Press, and the star in their crown is Lisbeth Campbell’s debut fantasy The Vanished Queen, which Beth Cato calls “One…
The following is an an excerpt from Howard Andrew Jones’ essay for the upcoming book from the Rogue Blades Foundation, Robert E. Howard Changed My Life. I kept missing Conan. He was all over the place in the 1970s as I was growing up. I couldn’t help but be drawn to the covers of the Marvel comic books that featured him, but I was a little kid and embarrassed to be seen reading anything with such scantily clad beauties in…
Welcome to the 16th installment of my reread of the X-Men, starting from issue #1 in 1963! Today’s post is kind of a big deal, because Giant-Size X-Men #1 is the launch pad for the modern X-Men. This of course leads to the gigantic sales success in the early 90s, the cartoons, the movies and everything. In essence, after a five-year absence of new X-Men stories, Giant-Size X-Men #1 adds to the X-pantheon three previously-created, but little-known mutants (Sunfire, Wolverine and Banshee) and…
The Stochastic Man (Warner Books, 1987, cover art by Don Dixon) Back in May I started a Vintage Treasures post about Robert Silverberg’s 1975 novel The Stochastic Man, and it wasn’t long before I’d unearthed nearly a dozen different editions. Pretty soon I got distracted comparing the art and author branding for each, and that led me down a deep rabbit hole that ended up with a very long article titled The Art of Author Branding: The Paperback Robert Silverberg. That was fun,…
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…
Adrian Cole is hardly a stranger to fantasy fiction. Born in Plymouth, Devonshire in 1949, Adrian first read The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s while working in a public library in Birmingham, and was inspired by the book to write an epic entitled “The Barbarians,” which was eventually revised into The Dream Lords trilogy, published by Zebra Books in the early 1970s. He has been writing various ghost, horror, and fantasy tales, in both short-story and novel-length,…