Songs of the Dying Earth

I remember entering that world of magicians, madmen, strange plants, and beautiful unattainable women as if it were happening to my circumscribed life, which I saw as stretching out forward in time, forever, to my 16-year-old mind.

Vance probably started some of the stories that composed The Dying Earth while on leaky tubs in the Atlantic or Pacific in the merchant marine during VWII. His imagination found a way of transcending his circumstances — while other SF writers were still reeling from, and writing about, man-made nuclear disasters, Vance looked beyond to a time when the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe had grown old, and mankind found its own ways to deal with it.

Rereading The Dying Earth, with one eye full of blood, flat on my back in a VA hospital, was a revelation. It was a different book; it had grown in its implications. (Part of this I attribute to my growth as a person in the intervening 46 years; partly to the depth of writing Vance put into the book.)

The Dying Earth is a fully-thought-out work of pure imagination. It spoke to me again (sad shape that I was in) across the years — it will continue to speak to people as long as books are read.

And every time someone new reads it, it will be a different book.

You can’t ask for more than that.

— Howard Waldrop

George R. R. Martin A Night at the Tarn House

Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winner George R. R. Martin, New York Times bestselling author of the landmark A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, has been called “the American Tolkien.”

Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, George R. R. Martin made his first sale in 1971, and soon established himself as one of the most popular SF writers of the ’70s. He quickly became a mainstay of the Ben Bova Analog with stories such as “With Morning Comes Mistfall,” “And Seven Times Never Kill Man,” “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” “The Storms of Windhaven” (in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, and later expanded by them into the novel Windhaven), “Override,” and others, although he also sold to Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Orbit, and other markets. One of his Analog stories, the striking novella “A Song for Lya,” won him his first Hugo Award, in 1975.

By the end of the ’70s, he had reached the height of his influence as a science fiction writer, and was producing his best work in that category with stories such as the famous “Sandkings,” his best-known story, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo in 1980 (he’d later win another Nebula in 1985 for his story “Portraits of His Children”), “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” which won a Hugo Award in the same year (making Martin the first author ever to receive two Hugo Awards for fiction in the same year) “Bitterblooms,” “The Stone City,” “Starlady,” and others. These stories would be collected in Sandkings, one of the strongest collections of the period. By now, he had mostly moved away from Analog, although he would have a long sequence of stories about the droll interstellar adventures of Havalend Tuf (later collected in Tuf Voyaging) running throughout the ’80s in the Stanley Schmidt Analog, as well as a few strong individual pieces such as the novella “Nightflyers”—most of his major work of the late ’70s and early ’80s, though, would appear in Omni. The late ’70s and ’80s also saw the publication of his memorable novel Dying of the Light, his only solo SF novel, while his stories were collected in A Song for Lya, Sandkings, Songs of Stars and Shadows, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Nightflyers, and Portraits of His Children. By the beginning of the ’80s, he’d moved away from SF and into the horror genre, publishing the big horror novel Fevre Dream, and winning the Bram Stoker Award for his horror story “The PearShaped Man” and the World Fantasy Award for his werewolf novella “The Skin Trade.” By the end of that decade, though, the crash of the horror market and the commercial failure of his ambitious horror novel Armageddon Rag had driven him out of the print world and to a successful career in television instead, where for more than a decade he worked as story editor or producer on such shows as new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast.