Search Results for: anna smith

IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

Comments 21 comments

The Evolving and Cloned Barbarian Conan, King Kull, Cormac, Bran Mak Morn — names that conjure magic, characters often imitated, but never duplicated. These creations of Robert E. Howard (circa 1930) started the Sword and Sorcery boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Then there are the barbarian warriors inspired by Howard — “Clonans,” as one writer recently referred to these sword-slinging, muscle-bound characters. A fair observation, but in some cases, not so true. I prefer to think of these…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The New Hugo Winners edited by Isaac Asimov

Comments 9 comments

The New Hugo Winners, Volume I & II and The Super Hugos (Baen, 1991, 1992, and 1992). Covers by Vincent Di Fate, Bob Eggleton, and Frank Kelly Freas Last month, as part of my master plan to examine every interesting science fiction paperback ever printed, I surveyed five of the finest SF anthologies of all time: the first Hugo Winners volumes, all edited by Isaac Asimov and published by Doubleday between 1962 and 1986. Although the first two volumes, collected…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Not a Bit Jealous of the 2021 Stoker Award Winners

Comments 0 Comment

  Back in March, I laid out the list of nominees for the Horror Writers Association’s 2021 Stoker Awards for superior literary achievement in horror, in a variety of categories. The Bram Stoker Awards (literally the coolest award in history) were instituted in 1987 and the eleven award categories are: Novel, First Novel, Short Fiction, Long Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction Collection, Poetry Collection, Anthology, Screenplay, Graphic Novel, and Non-Fiction. As I previously explained, I’ve tried everything short of writing a…

Read More Read More

Spider-Societies, Alien Structures, and Grim Wastelands: March/April 2022 Print SF Magazines

Comments 0 Comment

March/April 2022 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Shutterstock, 123RF, and Mondolithic Studios One of the bennies of digital publishing is the luxury of enjoying magazine reviews while the magazines are still on the shelves. I haven’t purchased the March/April F&F yet, for example, but my interest has been sharpened by reviews like this one, by C.D. Lewis at Tangent Online, for Tobi Ogundiran’s “The…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: If I Could Buy One, I Too Would Be a (Sort Of) 2021 Bram Stoker Award Nominee

Comments 0 Comment

Well, you can’t blame me for trying. Every year around this time, The Horror Writers Association announces the nominees for the annual Bram Stoker Awards, which recognize superior achievement in horror and dark fiction. Also, every year, I go on an Internet search for one of these amazing awards for sale somewhere. I mean come on, people have sold their Oscars, which admittedly are not this cool and are probably not this difficult to get. A general search got my…

Read More Read More

Slapdash Slapstick: Ron Goulart, January 13, 1933 – January 14, 2022

Comments 11 comments

Ron Goulart in 2009 Contrary to popular opinion, comic science fiction didn’t start and end with Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The humorous mode has a long and honorable history, exemplified by writers like Stanislaw Lem, Harry Harrison, R.A. Lafferty, Frederic Brown, Robert Sheckley… and Ron Goulart. Ron Goulart, who died on January 14th, a day after his eighty-ninth birthday, was an insanely prolific science fiction and mystery writer, especially in the 70’s and 80’s, when…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Modern Classics of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

Comments 5 comments

Modern Classics of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Press, 1992). Jacket illustration courtesy of NASA Back in October I wrote about Gardner Dozois’ 1994 anthology Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, saying it was one of my favorite fall reads. I noted at the time that it was part of a trilogy of books Gardner did for St. Martin’s that also included Modern Classics of Fantasy (1997), which I called “a book that makes you yearn to be stranded on a…

Read More Read More

An Anthology to Help End Violence Against Women: Giving the Devil His Due edited by Rebecca Brewer

Comments 0 Comment

Giving the Devil His Due (Running Wild Press, September 2021). Cover uncredited I’m getting word from a number of readers that a recent charity anthology, Giving the Devil His Due, is well worth a look. Published in September by The Pixel Project in partnership with Running Wild Press, it contains reprints and new fiction from Stephen Graham Jones, Kelley Armstrong, Nicholas Kaufmann, Nisi Shawl, Peter Tieryas, Dana Cameron, Jason Sanford, and many others. It was compiled by ex-Ace/Roc editor Rebecca Brewer;…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

Comments 14 comments

Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). Cover by Kim Poor When I talked about Gardner Dozois’ 1997 anthology Modern Classics of Fantasy a few years ago, I called it “a book that makes you yearn to be stranded on a desert island” (or anywhere you could read interrupted for a few days, really.) That description applies equally well to his 1994 volume Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, a book that over the last few decades…

Read More Read More

Fantasia 2021, Part X: Tin Can

Comments 0 Comment

The Fantasia International Film Festival does a good job matching genres when they bundle a short together with a feature. So Tin Can, a feature-length claustrophobic near-future science-fiction film, came with “Death Valley,” an 11-minute tale of a future of environmental devastation; both about isolation and both featuring protagonists isolated from the world. THe short, written and directed by Grace Sloan, follows a woman in the future living in space who is determined to travel to Death Valley on a…

Read More Read More