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Dark Horse Comics is collecting and reprinting the John Carter of Mars stories that were originally published in the 1970's comic books Weird Worlds #1-#7 and Tarzan #207-#209. The forthcoming volume, titled John Carter of Mars: Weird Worlds and scheduled to be released in January 2011, features the handsome work of comics legends Marv Wolfman, Murphy Anderson, Gray Morrow, Sal Amendola, Joe Orlando, and Howard Chaykin..JPG)
A new retrospective collection of American science fiction, fantasy and horror author Scott Edelman’s best science fiction short stories from the past thirty years has just been published by Fantastic Books. Titled What We Still Talk About, the collection includes “Mom, the Martians, and Me,” which was originally published in British editor Peter Crowther's anthology Mars Probes (2002) and is one of my favorite stories about Martians!With Dad gone, the bedroom that they had shared for years was transformed into a makeshift astronomical museum. Star maps covered every available inch of wall space, even hiding the bay window that had once cast light over their twin beds. A floor-to-ceiling mosaic of the surface of Mars as seen from space filled one wall of the room, looming like a giant unblinking eye. Mom had planted a silver pushpin where she was sure he was being kept.Scott Edelman was the editor of the 1990s magazine Science Fiction Age and is currently the editor of the SF website Blastr. He maintains his own website and a LiveJournal.
Odd books were everywhere. She’d always been an avid reader, but only of nonfiction. She could not stand made-up lives. Science fiction distressed her most of all. It had nothing to do with real life, she said. Now, she might as well have been living in a science fiction novel, for the library she’d built to wall off the world was so fantastic as to make any fiction, however wild, seem mundane by comparison. Until Mom went strange and I lost her, I had not realized that there were so many first-person accounts by people who claimed to have been scooped up by spacecraft and later returned. On the bulging shelves next to these grew scrapbooks of clippings from supermarket gossip rags, stories telling of women who had been impregnated by Martians, teenagers who had been stolen as youths and returned middle-aged, and old men whose end-stage colon cancer had been cured by the touch of alien fingers.
Children’s small windup toys decorated her end table, rocket ships and alien robots that were sometimes left scattered on the floor where I would trip over them. The area around her bed became littered with badly printed newsletters which purported to tell the truth about a government conspiracy to hide from the public the secrets of crashed alien crafts and their inhabitants....
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Weslayan University Press has posted the table of contents for its mammoth new anthology: The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (August 2010). Among the 52 short stories are these four Martian classics: “Shambleau” (1933) by Catherine L. Moore; “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) by Stanley G. Weinbaum; “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) by Ray Bradbury; and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966) by Philip K. Dick. Also, it’s refreshing to see that the anthology includes a story by early 20th-century SF writer Leslie F. Stone..JPG)
Earlier this month, the cover for The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson (Night Shade Books, August 2010), edited by Aussie anthologist Jonathan Strahan, was revealed. Sadly, it looks more appropriate for a high school astronomy book than a collection of twenty-two short stories and novellas spanning the entire career of a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction author. In any case, the forthcoming volume includes three stories previously published in KSR’s collection The Martians (2000): "Arthur Sternbach Brings The Curveball To Mars" (1999), "Sexual Dimorphism" (1999), and "Discovering Life" (2000).
Here’s an interesting anthology of reprinted short stories from the 1940s and 1950s that I’m looking forward to reading this summer: Lost Treasure of Mars and Other Stories (2006), compiled by a fellow named Jerry L. Schneider and published by a small print-on-demand shop called Pulpville Press in Rialto, California. I bought this book for about $15 through Lulu.com a few months ago, but it is also available through Amazon.com. Here’s the line-up, with a couple of writers whose names are new to me:.JPG)
The website First Comics News has a nice review of the new Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars: The Jesse Marsh Years (Dark Horse Comics, May 2010) reprinted 1950s comic book collection, concluding: “Editor Samantha Robertson, Designer David Nestelle and Digital Restorer Andy Fisher have lovingly brought this collection to life without putting too much of their own stamp on it. They’ve just reproduced it as faithfully and beautifully as they could, so the work could go right ahead and speak for itself. The ability to know when to get out of the way and just let that happen is one of the best qualities of this Dark Horse team […] fine example of the comics medium which I give a well-deserved 9 out of 10.” I bought this hardcover book a few weeks ago. No regrets!
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The blog JCOM Reader has an insightful review of the new Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars: The Jesse Marsh Years (Dark Horse Comics, May 2010) reprinted 1950s comic book collection, concluding: “In the end the book is probably going to split John Carter fans. Some will probably enjoy it and some will probably not like it for differing reasons. The presentation by Dark Horse is pretty good though -- a nice hardcover binding, original covers and inside art showing the different creatures of Barsoom -- and a nice introduction by Love and Rockets co-creator Marco Hernandez at least gives it an A for effort for B material.” I bought the book but haven't had a chance to look at it closely.
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If you can believe this, my local comic book shop actually had a copy of the new Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars: The Jesse Marsh Years (May 2010) comic book collection. Published by Dark Horse Comics, this beautiful, hardcover book reprints all three issues of the Four Color Comics: John Carter of Mars series, which was written by Paul S. Newman, illustrated by Jesse Marsh, and originally published in the 1950s by Dell Publishing. Considering the cost of buying the originals, $30 seemed like a good deal. Plus, I got to listen to “Ape Man” by the Kinks, free of charge. Thank you, Newbury Comics!
Thanks to the generosity of editor Lou Anders, you can read the opening chapters of the new Pyr reprint of award-winning British author Ian McDonald’s 2001 magic-realist novel Ares Express. Set on a terraformed Mars, starring a young woman named Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, and featuring fusion-powered locomotives, Ares Express is generating positive reviews. Meanwhile, according to WorldCat, nearly 100 public library systems have purchased copies of Ares Express, including:+30.JPG)
Congratulations to French artist Stephan Martiniere, British author Ian McDonald, and American editor Lou Anders of Pyr! Martiniere’s exquisite cover art for the 2009 Pyr reprint of McDonald’s acclaimed debut novel Desolation Road (1988) recently won a British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) award in the category of Best Artwork. When you've finished admiring Martiniere’s work, check out a Flickr gallery of about 10 other Desolation Road covers!
The Pyr reprint of award-winning British author Ian McDonald’s 2001 novel Ares Express has landed on bookstore and library shelves. The follow-up to Desolation Road (1988, 2009), McDonald’s acclaimed debut novel, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars and stars fusion-powered locomotives..bmp)
More good news out of Michigan. Haffner Press recently announced that it will reprint The Magician of Mars, a complete novel written by Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) that was originally published in the Summer 1941 issue of Captain Future magazine, as part of the forthcoming second volume in its monumental The Collected Captain Future series.
Subterranean Press announced that it will reprint “The Hole Man” (1974), a Hugo Award-winning short story written by science fiction author Larry Niven, and 26 other stories in The Best of Larry Niven, a new collection being crafted by Australian editor Jonathan Strahan that is scheduled to be released in late 2010. A hard-science read set on Mars, Niven considers “The Hole Man” a “straightforward crime story rendered distinctive only by an unusual murder weapon.” According to his website, Niven wrote the story after he and fellow SF author Jerry Pournelle interviewed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking about the latter's research on black holes.
Publishers Weekly has a positive review of Pyr’s forthcoming reprint of British science fiction author Ian McDonald’s 2001 novel Ares Express, concluding “McDonald’s fantastic Mars is vividly detailed and owes much to Bradbury’s Martian stories. Despite a bit of hand waving around technology that is glibly indistinguishable from magic, this sequel is entirely worthy of its rightly lauded predecessor." The follow-up to Desolation Road (1988; Pyr 2009), McDonald’s acclaimed debut novel, Ares Express is scheduled to be released in April 2010.
The exquisite cover art for the recent Pyr reprint of British science fiction author Ian McDonald’s acclaimed debut novel Desolation Road (1988) has been nominated for a British Science Fiction Association award in the category of Best Artwork. Illustrated by Stephan Martinière with jacket design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke, the artwork for Desolation Road depicts a mammoth train on Mars.
Jim and Lee of the blog Comics And...Other Imaginary Tales have each written a brief preview review of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars: The Jesse Marsh Years (May 2010), Dark Horse Comics’ forthcoming reprint of all three issues of Dell Publishing’s Four Color Comics: John Carter of Mars series.
Over at Tor.com, Canadian SF&F writer Jo Walton takes an interesting look back at Desolation Road (1988), the debut novel by British SF author Ian McDonald that was reprinted earlier this year by Pyr. Set in a growing town on Mars, Walton calls the work a “magic realist science fiction novel” and concludes: “If you ever want to demonstrate how different science fiction can be, what an incredible range and sweep of things are published with a little spaceship on the spine, Desolation Road is a shining datapoint, because it isn’t like anything else and yet it is coming from a knowledge of what the genre can do and can be and making something new out of it.”
The Black Heart (2009), a new collection of short stories written by American SF/Fantasy author Patrick O’Leary and published by UK-based PS Publishing, includes his 2002 short story “The Me After the Rock,” which was originally published in the anthology Mars Probes (2002).
Dark Horse Comics will reprint all three issues of Dell Publishing’s Four Color Comics: John Carter of Mars series, written by Paul S. Newman and illustrated by Jesse Marsh, in their entirety in a forthcoming volume entitled Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars: The Jesse Marsh Years (May 2010).
Robert A. Heinlein’s classic novel Podkayne of Mars (1963) is scheduled to be reprinted as a trade paperback in early January 2010 by Ace Trade. One interesting point about the cover for the forthcoming reprint: the style and size of the font almost make it look like her name is “Pookayne.”
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