Classic Covers: Poul Anderson
With scores of novels spanning the popular genres of science fiction and fantasy, with hundreds of magazine and anthology appearances, and with a career spanning the most creative era of visual marketing in publishing of the 20th century, Poul Anderson’s bibliography has the quintessential ‘Classic Covers’ ingredients. Here is but a small sample of the art that brought Anderson’s stories to...
Classic Covers: More From Michael Moorcock
As with our previous Classic Covers: Michael Moorcock, the sheer prolific variety of Moorcock’s career, coupled with the rapidly evolving trends and tastes in illustration over decades of publishing, ensures that Moorcock’s back catalog of cover art is as riotously colorful and surprising as his fiction...
Elric Covers Through the Years
Be sure to join Goodman Games and Sanctum Secorum for a live Twitch interview with the legendary Michael Moorcock tomorrow, Saturday, October 8th! The myriad incarnations of Michael Moorcock’s legendary Elric in media rival the thousandfold manifestations of the Eternal Champion himself. While comics, games, and illustrations and art of all stripes have celebrated the striking appearance of the albino Prince of Chaos and his...
Classic Covers: Michael Moorcock
With more than a half-century of prolific, diverse, and wonderfully inventive writing in everything from classic sword-and-sorcery to surreal alternate history to sword-and-planet pastiche to counter culture lit fic, Michael Moorcock has seen more editions of his work than you can shake a demon-possessed sword at. And while Moorcock freely hops from genre to sub-genre to whatever-he-feels-like, he seems to have inspired a similar...
Classic Covers: Edgar Rice Burroughs
From the pulps of the 20s and 30s to the paperback racks of the 60s and 70s to the comics and films and ebooks of the digital age and beyond, the publishing phenomenon that is Edgar Rice Burroughs encompasses millions of books sold, popular reading tastes changed, and classic tropes established. From John Carter to Tarzan, from Mars to Venus to the Earth’s Core to the Land that Time Forgot — with occasional forays into the...
Andrew Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness
Can you name the 1970s sword-and-sorcery anthology series helmed by a fantasy author/editor, featuring original work from the biggest names as well as up-and-comers, that’s initial volume sported a Frank Frazetta cover and ran to five books in total? If you said Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords, you’re right! But if you said Andrew Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness . . . you’re also right! Following just a few...
Classic Covers: Brian Aldiss
While best-loved by sci-fi fans for his tales of generational starships (Non-Stop) and far-future earths (Hothouse), English author and Science Fiction Grand Master Brian Aldiss was a prolific and daring writer who ranged up and down the spectrum of speculative fiction incorporating everything from straight pulp adventure to sharp satire, classic tropes of time-travel, space opera, and post-apocalyptic survival, to wild forays into...
Classic Covers: David Gemmell
David Gemmell’s 1984 debut novel Legend told the blood-and-thunder story of an aging warrior’s heroic defense against all odds and the inspiring example of his leadership and self-sacrifice — it also catapulted Gemmell onto the bestseller lists for the next two decades and brought him an international renown outside of his native UK. With over a million copies sold across his more than thirty novels, Gemmell’s...
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: William Hope Hodgson
William Hope Hodgson, godfather to cosmic horror and ghost detectives alike, had two books reprinted in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The Night Land. The Night Land was published in two volumes because of its length — more controversially it received heavy editing from series editor Lin Carter to render Hodgson’s deliberately difficult prose more accessible. Both covers from Robert...
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Lord Dunsany
Among the most reprinted authors in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line was Lord Dunsany, the Anglo-Irish peer who was also a tremendously prolific short story writer and playwright. Dunsany’s sweeping elegies of imagined worlds were both reminiscent of classical myth and the dreaming aesthetic of the visionary fantasists and tellers of Weird Tales going back to Poe. Dunsany is cited as an influence by almost every major writer of...
Classic Covers: Ken Kelly
The world of fantasy illustrators has lost one of its most prolific and long-running practitioners, Ken Kelly (May 19, 1946 – June 3, 2022). From the classic Berkley Medallion line of collected Robert E. Howard to the modern Baen reissues, Tor Conan pastiches, and Wildside/Dorchester Weird Works of REH — and the thousands of fantasy and science fiction books from every major publisher in between — Kelly’s art was a...
Classic Covers: More Roger Zelazny
Multiple-award-winning and best-selling author Roger Zelazny’s popularity wasn’t just confined to his native United States. Winner of France’s Prix Apollo, translated into dozens of languages, Zelazny’s reach was international and his appeal universal. While many of us will only ever appreciate him in one language, the multitude of artistic interpretations of his highly imaginative stories is something we can...