Search Results for: tale covers

Vintage Treasures: The Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg

Comments 4 comments

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,…

Read More Read More

These Two Books Are Not the Same: John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes and Out of the Deeps

Comments 11 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Between the Years When the Oceans Drank (Henry Kuttner’s) Atlantis, and the Rise of COVID-19 — Elak Lives Again!

Comments 4 comments

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,…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

Comments 0 Comment

You know how much I enjoy a good debut. And The Year of the Witching, arriving in hardcover from Ace next week, looks very promising indeed. Publishers Weekly calls it “riveting… [it] announces Henderson as an exciting new voice in dark fantasy,” and Dhonielle Clayton says it “takes witchcraft to its very depths… horrific.” Here’s the description. A young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society discovers dark powers within herself in this stunning, feminist fantasy debut. In the lands…

Read More Read More

If I Were a Movie Maker: Dell Science Fiction Reviews

Comments 0 Comment

Analog cover by Dominic Harman This issue of Asimov’s starts out with a bang, with two standout stories. In a perfect world, the first of them, “Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Relationship,” by Will McIntosh, will be optioned for a feature length romantic comedy starring the latest and hottest Hollywood crushes. The female lead will be played by someone who can convincingly be a pragmatic professional. The male lead will be well-liked and unpretentious. We also should enjoy the two other important…

Read More Read More

Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Of Lambs and Lizardmen

Comments 8 comments

The Ring-Sworn Trilogy by Howard Andrew Jones: For the Killing of Kings (Feb 2019), Upon the Flight of the Queen (November 2019) and the forthcoming When the Goddess Wakes (April 2021) A bit of prologue and some full disclosure to the Gentle Reader The purpose of this column has been looking at the challenges of historicity vs. fantasy in the process of world-building; well at least when the fantasy in question is trying to be either realistic or set in…

Read More Read More

Revisit the Fabled City of Brass: S. A. Chakraborty Wraps The Daevabad Trilogy with The Empire of Gold

Comments 0 Comment

It’s always a delight to watch a talented writer successfully wrap up a fantasy series. And that’s especially true of S. A. Chakraborty’s The Daevabad Trilogy, which opened with one of the most popular debuts of the last few years. The City of Brass. Here’s what Brandon Crilly’s said in his enthusiastic review right here at Black Gate in 2018. Chakraborty creates a world that’s nuanced and detailed. It has exactly the vivid freshness we continue to need in the fantasy genre, as…

Read More Read More

Return to Dragon Pass with The Red Cow Campaign by Ian Cooper, Jeff Richard, and Greg Stafford

Comments 7 comments

The Coming Storm (March 2016) and The Eleven Lights (April 2018), published by Chaosium We live in a Golden Age of board gaming, and if you’re in the market for a fantasy game, you literally have thousands to choose from. Mind you, that wasn’t the case 40 years ago. In fact, if you were looking for a serious fantasy-based pastime in those days, there were literally only a few games in town: SPI’s War of the Ring (1977), TSR’s Divine Right (1979),…

Read More Read More

Andrew Liptak on 22 New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books in June

Comments 2 comments

Covers by Larry Rostant Polygon has discontinued Andrew Liptak’s excellent monthly new SF book column, which is a shame. John DeNardo’s column seems to have vanished from Kirkus as well, and since the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog folded up shop at the end of last year, that leave us with no regular new columns at any of the major sites. Fortunately, Andrew hasn’t given up. At least according to this notice in his bi-weekly newsletter: My regular column with Polygon…

Read More Read More

The Importance of Good Fantasy Art

Comments 9 comments

Art by Frank Frazetta, Michael Whelan, and Jeffrey Catherine Jones An adventure tale isn’t good just because it features a bare-chested hero and a sword, and neither is a painting. Stories and art are successful because they are created by talented people who have devoted long hours (usually 10,000 or more) to educate themselves about their field and develop the proper skills and style to express that talent. And the presentation of that talent is absolutely vital to the success of the…

Read More Read More