Nifft the Lean by Michael Shea
Back in 1950, Hillman Periodicals published a little book for 25 cents called The Dying Earth by Jack Vance. It could easily have disappeared into obscurity like thousands of other books, but there was something special about it. There weren’t any other books in SF/Fantasy quite like it, depicting an incredibly distant future earth where the sun has cooled to a red color, the moon is gone, and humanity has declined to a pale shadow of former greatness, and struggles to survive amongst the ruins of the past. The world is filled with magicians, sorcerers, maidens, demons, ghouls, brigands, thieves, and adventurers.
The Dying Earth inspired many works ranging from Read More
The Extra by Michael Shea
In The Extra, a near-future science fiction novel set in a dystopian version of Los Angeles, Val Margolian is the creator and most successful director of a new genre of action movies, in which crowds of real people are cast as extras and have to defend themselves against movie monsters. The action is real, and so are the deaths. Whoever manages to kill one of the monsters, and anyone who survives the shoot, gets a huge cash reward. Naturally, with rampant poverty in LA, the expression "cattle call" takes on a whole new meaning, with thousands of people applying to become cannon fodder for this new blood-thirsty form of entertainment, and only a small percentage surviving with enough cash to move out of the urban jungle and on to a better life.
The Extra combines elements of The Running Man and The Truman Show, switching from the ground ... Read More
The owner, publisher and editor of Weird Tales have all changed since the last issue of the magazine, and it shows. No longer innovative, with cutting edge fiction, it is now filled with pastiches of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, a throwback to the early days of the magazine. The Hugo-Award-winning team of fiction editor Ann VanderMeer and editorial and creative director Stephen H. Segal are clearly no longer choosing the fiction or art that used to brighten each issue, and the intelligent nonfiction that completed the magazine is nearly gone, though Kenneth Hite’s exploration of Lovecraft’s work, “Lost in Lovecraft,” continues; the fourteenth entry in the series is in this issue. This change is not for the better.... Read More
Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword & Sorcery edited by Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders
Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword & Sorcery is a book I’ve been eagerly anticipating ever since it was first announced in 2009. I was particularly excited about the anthology’s impressive list of contributors which includes several authors I enjoy reading like Glen Cook, Greg Keyes, Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, Garth Nix, Tim Lebbon, Caitlin R. Kiern... Read More
June 15th, 2010.
Robert Thompson (RETIRED),
Stefan Raets (RETIRED) and
Greg Hersom´s rating:
4.5 |
Bill Willingham,
Caitlín R. Kiernan,
Garth Nix,
Gene Wolfe,
Glen Cook,
Greg Keyes,
James Enge,
Joe Abercrombie,
Jonathan Strahan,
K.J. Parker,
Lou Anders,
Michael Moorcock,
Michael Shea,
Robert Silverberg,
Scott Lynch,
Steven Erikson,
Tanith Lee,
Tim Lebbon |
Short Fiction |
SFF Reviews |
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More by Michael Shea
A Quest for Simbilis — (1974) Publisher: Set in the world of Jack Vance‘s Dying Earth. A Quest for Simbilis is a sequel to Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, but is so highly original that it is no mere pastiche. Shea later applied his talents to Nifft the Lean, which won him the World Fantasy Award.
The Color Out of Time — (1984) Publisher: The flooded New England valley made a beautiful holiday spot, with twenty miles of secluded lakeshore. But visitors Gerald Sternbruck and Ernst Carlsberg soon realise that the still waters of the lake conceal a frightful evil that preys on flora, fauna — and human beings. Then they discover that the same evil first manifested itself before the valley was flooded — and may have been the basis for H.P. Lovecraft’s classic story The Colour out of Space. For fifty years one waman has been planning her revenge on the monstrous force which caused the strange shimmering colours — and sucks the very life from the people in its clutches…
In Yana, The Touch of Undying — (1985) Publisher: Wealth, power, fame couldall be his… or he could sacrifice it all for the secret of Yana.
Polyphemus — (1988) World Fantasy Best Collection Finalist. A collection comprising: “The Autopsy”, “The Angel of Death”, “Polyphemus”, “Uncle Tuggs”, “The Pearls of the Vampire Queen”, “The Horror on the #33”, and “The Extra”.
Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales — (2009) Publisher: Rocked by the gentle sea, the City sleeps; but its dreams are not its own… With eight psychotropic visions of damnation and transformation in the urban coral reef of San Francisco, COPPING SQUID forms a mosaic of otherworldly menace shot through with glimpses of awe-inspiring majesty: of invisible outsiders and self-medicating seekers whose desperate prayers and hidden rituals lead them to behold their alien reflections in the all-seeing eyes of the secret masters of creation. With the deceptive ease and streetwise enlightenment of a weird storytelling master, Michael Shea fearlessly sounds the unplumbed depths of the Cthulhu Mythos to witness visions from which traditional cosmic horror has always averted its dark-adapted gaze.
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(1946-2014)
