Matt Dinniman, author of the bestselling LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl, announced an immediate ban on all AI-generated content across his subreddit this week. The post, titled “Effective Immediately. AI content ban,” reads in full:

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Independent science fiction and fantasy dates back to the 1970s and earlier, and few people have been involved in as many facets of it as Michael Tierney, whose Wild Stars series has spanned novels and comics long before people had access to online print-on-demand tools. He’s kept the series going for a final trilogy, which is on Kickstarter now, and just teamed with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate to put out an official Tarzan novel. He talked with Fandom Pulse about his long-running career.

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Cirsova just announced Wild Stars is entering its final trilogy, with the entire saga now written and in the can. You started this universe in 1972 in the fan pages of Eerie magazine when you were still in high school. That’s fifty-four years from first publication to sticking the landing. What does it feel like to actually get to finish a story that big?

There were times when I wondered if I’d ever see it finished. The story’s origin actually began when I was watching Neil Armstrong take that “Giant leap for mankind” on the moon, and thought about how outer space was about to become the next Wild West—hence the Wild Stars. That first story published in Eerie is actually an element from the final chapter of the grand finale. I always knew how the story would end. An employee once asked me what it would take for me to finish writing the series. My reply was “An editor who wants to publish it.” Found that with Cirsova. Editor Alex Alexander was a little worried about a possible George RR Martin scenario, where I might not finish on time. So he asked me to go ahead and write the concluding novels right away, instead of waiting on the yearly contract. So last year I delivered the final four volumes all at the same time. It felt good to have them completed. Cirsova’s reaction to the finale was very satisfying.

Wild Stars has transcended almost every medium you can name over four decades. Indie black-and-white comics through the 80s and early 2000s. The Book of Circles as a graphic novel. A tabletop RPG through Troll Lord Games. A board game. Novels through Cirsova. Serialization in Cirsova Magazine. Most creators pick a lane and stay in it. You went the opposite direction. What did each of those formats give you that the others couldn’t?

In the 1970s I wrote half a dozen books set in different time periods of the Wild Stars, but had no luck cracking the 5th Avenue publisher market. In the meantime I’d graduated High School and skipped college to develop a trade skill as a journeyman printer. By the age of 22, I was managing my own printing division of International Graphics. With an entire print shop at my disposal, I’d work after hours on different publications and portfolios—doing all the camera work and printing myself. The Wild Stars Volume 2 from 1988, I printed in my garage and used printer’s techniques to turn each copy into a unique art print by fading a mountain in the background of one page. If you’ve got a solid mountain on your copy, it’s from early in the print run. The more faded the mountain is, the later in the run. I’ve never heard of another comic created, illustrated, lettered, and printed by the same person—let alone employing an aspect to make each copy unique. Plus, that issue was the first ever use of foil stamping on a comic cover, the first ever die cutting on the front cover (cutting out a section of the cover to reveal the page beneath), and the first and only die-cut back cover. Making those comics meant using my diverse skill sets to find other ways to get my Wild Stars story to market. In 2002, I decided to collect all the comics together and had several teleconference meetings with Lightning Source about producing what would be their first graphic novel. It was awkward because digital terminology is different from physical printing. In printing, we referred to heavy black ink usage as Heavy Blacks. When I asked if they had any problems printing pages filled with Heavy Blacks, the other end of the phone went silent. Finally, my representative said, “I think he means heavy ink coverage,” which prompted a lot of embarrassed laughter.

The board game is something I’d still like to get made. Spent a whole year playtesting it and had it contracted. But then the manufacturer also wanted to do another Tarzan-based game that I’d designed, called “I am the Apeman,” where players compete to prove that they are the real Tarzan. It was licensed with ERB, Inc., but then they added the need for an insurance policy in the event that a child might choke on a play piece. That, and the rampant I.P. theft happening from the Chinese manufacturers, who had taken over the industry by that time, scared them away from board games altogether. But it would have been a fun game. They said my Wild Stars Celestial Clockwork game basically put a car engine inside a board game.

Wild Stars has always been an indie operation. You’ve been doing this the hard way for four decades and you’re about to close it out on your terms. What does running something for that long teach you that the guys who chase the big publisher check never learn?

At first, I was determined to publish everything myself. When I was circulating my novels, suddenly I’d start to see my ideas pop up in other places. But the books I never submitted stayed fresh. I was approached by one publisher who wanted to do the comics relaunch in 2002, but I didn’t think at the time that they would be bringing anything extra to the table. Then I had another project, the Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 Year Art Chronology, which was a 1200-page set of four books. I had the option to self-publish, but ERB, Inc. generously offered to help me check out the options with other publishers. At first, everyone wanted different parts of it—one wanted only the text, another wanted only the images, and another only wanted the historical aspects. They all said it was not practical to combine all those elements into one book. But I was determined that, should I fail, it would be while taking my best shot. That’s when Chenault & Gray came into the picture and said they’d print it however I made it. Did all the page layouts myself. That kind of control made the final product into something I am very proud of. But what finally sold me on working with other publishers was the advance sales that they achieved. Both the ERB Art Chronology and my follow-up Robert E. Howard Art Chronology, each racked up nearly $100K in advance sales. Once the books were in print, the publisher next learned how high the bay roofs were at the shipping locations when skid-loaded shipments on forklifts collided with them. I doubt that I could have achieved those kinds of sales as an indie publisher of my own work.

The Kickstarter is live. For the fans who have been with you since The Book of Circles and the ones just now discovering Wild Stars through Cirsova, what does this campaign deliver, and why did you decide to bundle Volume 9 with the never-before-published Volume 10 instead of spacing them out over another year?

The contract with Cirsova was for me to create a new Wild Stars novel every year, to be serialized in Cirsova Magazine one year, and then collected in book form the next. Unfortunately, Cirsova Magazine is going away, so last year’s Wild Stars 9: Flight from Reckoning was the last to appear in the magazine. Wild Stars 10: War of the Gods was originally supposed to be running as a serialization right now, and since I didn’t want fans to wait a whole year without new material, when it came time to collect Wild Stars 9 into book form, I pitched the idea about doing a dual release with Wild Stars 10. As a retailer, I know how you need to keep feeding the appetites of fans.

Young Tarzan and the Mysterious She is one of the more remarkable stories in modern pulp publishing. Danton Burroughs gave you an unfinished ERB fragment years ago, Dark Horse allegedly said no because “it needed Alan Moore writing and Frank Miller drawing,” the story sat, Danton died in 2008, all institutional memory of the fragment was lost. You later pitched the 100 Year Art Chronology to Jim Sullos and only then did the Young Tarzan story come back into play. Walk us through what it was like completing a piece of writing that Edgar Rice Burroughs himself started?

I’ve had a relationship with ERB, Inc. since I was a kid back in the 1960s, and was sending them my paper route money to buy books directly. When I once again tried to buy directly from them in the 1990s for inventory to stock in my comic book stores, Danton, ERB’s grandson, called to explain how they didn’t do wholesale with retailers. We struck up a friendship, and Danton liked my Wild Stars comics so much, he suggested that I might want to take a shot at a project that no one else seemed to know what to do with. Titled “Young Tarzan Ponders” at the time, I took one look and instantly knew what to do with it. The first Tarzan novel I’d ever read was Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, where Tarzan suffers a bout of amnesia. As he learned who he was, I was learning right along with him. But then beautiful La of Opar starts throwing herself at him, and the ape-man wanted nothing to do with her. To me, that made no sense. He didn’t even remember Jane at the time. But then, the first time he does see Jane, he charges straight into gunfire to rescue her. As a young reader, I wasn’t buying it. But with “Young Tarzan,” I had an opportunity to explain the reasoning and psychology behind his reactions. I made the story into essential canon that basically serves as a prelude to Jewels of Opar. After I turned it in, that’s when I discovered that, at that time, Dark Horse had an exclusive on the comics, and Del Rey had an exclusive on the text stories. Thomas Yates pitched a comic adaptation to Dark Horse, which drew the response you quoted earlier. So it went on the shelf, and I forgot about it until we were in final editing on the ERB Art Chronology. At first, Jim Sullos, President of ERB, Inc., kept wanting me to take a bigger percentage—thinking this was all my work. But I didn’t realize that at the time. It wasn’t until the final day of working out the contract with Cirsova that everyone understood I was working with a fragment that was forgotten after Danton’s tragic death.

You’ve now written for the Beyond the Farthest Star weekly strip, built the 1200-page 100 Year Art Chronology, and finished a Tarzan fragment. What does Burroughs mean to you as a writer, and what did you learn about your own craft by working inside his sandbox?

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The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named Nancy Kress its 43rd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master on Friday, announced during a Fireside Chat at Worldcon in Los Angeles. Kress has six Nebulas and a pair of Hugos to her name, most for novellas on genetic engineering and biotech ethics, but she is hardly the genre-transforming type picked before the 2020s. Her most popular novella, Beggars in Spain, is simply a political argument with Ayn Rand shoehorned into a story, not offering much more than a repudiation of Rand’s ubermensch. More notable is that, by SFWA’s count, she is the eighth consecutive woman to receive the honor in a streak that runs back to Lois McMaster Bujold’s selection in 2020.

Not one man has been named since William Gibson in 2019.

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Will Murray, one of the pulp fiction community’s most prolific writers and its foremost living historian, died earlier this week at age 73. Matt Moring of Steeger Books announced Murray’s death on Facebook Friday morning.

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Murray had been active in pulp fandom since the early 1970s. He edited and largely wrote the fanzine Duende from 1975 to 1977, and The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine, which he co-authored, remains a foundational text in Shadow scholarship. His breakthrough came in 1978, when a visit to the La Plata, Missouri home of Doc Savage creator Lester Dent turned up the outline for a Dent story that had never been written. Murray built a novel from it, Python Isle, published in 1991 under the Kenneth Robeson house name. It launched more than 20 new Doc Savage adventures written by Murray. He had served as literary agent for the Dent estate since 1979, and went on to write authorized continuations of The Spider, Tarzan, and King Kong under their respective house names or estates. He had recently completed a story featuring Robert E. Howard’s El Borak for an upcoming Howard-inspired anthology.

Beyond Doc Savage, Murray built a bibliography of more than 75 novels, contributing extensively to The Destroyer and The Executioner series, and writing short fiction featuring Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Sherlock Holmes, the Phantom, the Green Hornet, Zorro, Honey West, and the Cthulhu Mythos. He was widely regarded as one of the top authorities on 20th century pulp fiction. Pulpcon awarded him its Lamont Award in 1979, when he was 26.

Genre readers with an interest in Clark Ashton Smith know Murray’s editorial work directly. In 1995, he co-edited Clark Ashton Smith’s Tales of Zothique with Steve Behrends for Necronomicon Press, organizing Smith’s Zothique cycle stories in chronological order of original publication. Necronomicon Press followed in 1996 with The Book of Hyperborea, gathering Smith’s Hyperborean cycle. Both books served for years as the standard editions of Smith’s two best-known story cycles before newer collections arrived.

In comics, Murray co-created Squirrel Girl with artist Steve Ditko for Marvel Super-Heroes vol. 2 #8 in 1991. Murray wrote the character’s origin story without an artist attached, originally intending to work with Tom Morgan before requesting Ditko. Ditko added the character’s signature knuckle spikes, a detail not in Murray’s script. Murray later described the character’s genesis in his own words:

“Actually I created Squirrel Girl in script form without any artist input. Tom Morgan was originally going to draw it, but when he dropped out, I requested Ditko and got him. Ditko did a great job in bringing my baby to life. He invented that knuckle spike. It wasn’t in the script. I based Squirrel Girl ironically enough on a long–ago girlfriend who read comics and was into “critters”—wild animals of all types. Coincidentally, she was a big Ditko fan. I think I got the idea because I had a bunch of squirrels running around my roof and sometimes coming in through my open bedroom window and inspiration struck.”

Squirrel Girl went on to become a recurring Marvel character with her own ongoing series decades after that 1991 debut, and Murray returned to write a story for her in 2016.

Murray grew up in Boston, graduated from North Quincy High School in 1971, and went on to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He remained a fixture at PulpFest and its predecessor Pulpcon for decades, appearing as a dealer, panelist, and in 2013 as guest of honor. His most recent PulpFest appearance came on August 1st, 2026, on a panel titled “Working With Licensed Characters.” He had contributed to every issue of The Pulpster, the convention’s program publication, from its first issue at Pulpcon 20 in 1991 through issue 35 released at PulpFest 2026 just weeks before his death.

Murray’s decades of work kept Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Clark Ashton Smith’s lost continents in print for generations of readers who came to them long after the pulp era ended.

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Richard “Rick” Lewis Katze, the fan and editor who spent decades preserving Poul Anderson’s short fiction in print, died on August 27th, 2026, at the age of 81. Katze passed away at Oak Knoll Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, of natural causes following a long series of health problems, after a bout of pneumonia earlier in the year had confined him there for roughly the last six months of his life.

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Katze was a longtime member of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) and Massachusetts Convention Fandom, Inc. (MCFI), serving as an officer of both organizations, and was also a member of the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests. NESFA elected him a Fellow in 1980, one of the club’s highest honors.

His most lasting contribution to genre readers came through NESFA Press, where he edited the seven-volume Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, published between 2009 and 2017. The series gathered the bulk of Anderson’s short fiction, including every Hugo and Nebula nominated and winning story he wrote, across volumes titled Call Me Joe, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Saturn Game, Admiralty, Door to Anywhere, A Bicycle Built for Brew, and Question and Answer. Katze edited the set largely on his own, with Lis Carey co-editing the first volume and Michael Kerpan joining him for the sixth and seventh. Anderson, a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, won seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards over his career, and Katze’s project gave readers a way to trace that career in full rather than piecemeal across decades of scattered anthologies and out-of-print magazines.

Beyond editing, Katze was a fixture of convention-running in Boston-area fandom for over forty years, volunteering on Worldcons, Westercons, Smofcons, and Boskones. He chaired three Boskones, numbers 21, 28, and 41, and also chaired Lexicon 8. He served multiple times as Hugo Award Administrator for Worldcons, a role that put him at the center of the genre’s most visible award process for years running.

His legal background found its way into fandom as well. As counsel to the Constellation Bailout Committee, he negotiated the settlement of the 1983 Worldcon’s unpaid non-fannish debt down to roughly sixty cents on the dollar, a piece of behind-the-scenes fan history that kept a Worldcon’s financial mess from becoming a lasting black mark.

Katze was born in Boston on October 1st, 1944, graduated from Boston University in 1966, and went on to Suffolk University Law School before practicing law for many years. He later lived in Natick and Framingham. He was preceded in death by his parents, Hyman Allan Katze and Esta Dorothy Katze. Cremation will be private, with details on a memorial service to follow.

For any reader who’s picked up a Poul Anderson collection with Katze’s name on the editor’s page, the work speaks for itself: seven volumes’ worth of a Grand Master’s short fiction, kept in print and in order because one fan decided it needed doing.

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NEXT: Folio Society Sells Netflix’s Title, Not Liu Cixin’s, With New Three-Body Problem Limited Edition

The Folio Society has announced a Limited Edition release of Liu Cixin’s science fiction trilogy, branding it “The Three-Body Problem Trilogy.” That title belongs to the first book. Liu Cixin’s own trilogy is called “Remembrance of Earth’s Past.”

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The edition launches September 8th at 4pm UK time, restricted to 750 numbered copies. It collects all three novels, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End, with a new introduction by Liu Cixin, artwork from illustrator Matt Griffin, and signatures from both the author and the illustrator. As of this writing, the page only accepts email signups ahead of the launch.

The naming choice lines up with Netflix’s adaptation, “3 Body Problem,” which debuted in 2024 and has a second season coming. Netflix titled its show after the first novel because that’s the recognizable hook for a mass audience that never read the books. Folio has now done the same thing with the printed trilogy, collapsing three distinct novels under the name of one.

Liu Cixin and the trilogy’s original Chinese publishers never called the series “The Three Body Problem Trilogy.” Readers who know the books catch the substitution instantly. Readers who only know the Netflix show won’t notice, and that’s who Folio appears to be marketing to. A publisher that commissions an introduction from the author and puts his signature on the book knows the correct series title. The choice to use the show’s branding instead is a marketing decision, not an oversight.

This fits a pattern for Folio’s Limited Edition catalog. The company currently runs a banner on its site for its Iain Banks release, The Wasp Factory, noting fewer than 150 copies remain. Folio’s limited runs on genre titles with built-in fandoms and screen adaptations, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, tend to move through their print runs on the strength of that pre-existing audience rather than word of mouth after release. A 750-copy run signed by a bestselling author with a Netflix show driving new readers to the source material sets up the same dynamic.

The books themselves are a mild success independent of the show. The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first work in translation to do so. Liu Cixin built a readership in China and internationally before Netflix optioned the rights. Folio’s branding choice doesn’t change what’s inside the slipcase. It changes who Folio expects to buy it.

Sign-ups are open now at http://foliosociety.com/uk/three-body-problem-limited-edition-sign-up.

Does a publisher owe readers the correct title of a work it’s charging a premium for, or is show-branding just how genre fiction sells now?

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: The Prophet Who Saw 2010 From 1968: A John Brunner Retrospective

On the evening of Friday, August 25, 1995, at the 53rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland, Robert Silverberg stepped to the podium at the Hugo Awards ceremony and told four thousand fans that John Brunner had died of a stroke earlier that day, in his hotel room, at the age of sixty. Silverberg suggested that instead of a moment of silence, John would have preferred a last round of applause. The standing ovation ran four minutes. Fans in every corner of the SF world learned of his death within hours, over the still-young internet, which was the kind of communications architecture Brunner himself had described in one of his novels twenty years earlier.

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He had been the first British author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. He had won the British Science Fiction Association Award twice. He had won the Prix Apollo. He had been Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction Convention. He had written more than eighty novels across four decades. His 1968 masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar is set in 2010 and got so much of the twenty-first century right that reading it in the actual twenty-first century is uncanny. He coined the word “worm” for self-replicating malware. He predicted the internet. He predicted mass shootings. He predicted the corporate takeover of nation-states, the collapse of American cities, the ecological crises of the 2020s, and the drug-saturated media environment we all now live inside.

By the time he died, most of his books were out of print. His publishers had lost interest. The mainstream SF conversation had moved past him. He was, at the moment of his death, one of the great forgotten prophets of modern science fiction.

His stock has recovered somewhat in the years since as the world he predicted has continued to come true, but most working SF readers under fifty do not know his name. That should change.

The Boy Who Sold His First Novel at Seventeen

John Kilian Houston Brunner was born on September 24, 1934, in Preston Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, England, the son of Anthony and Felicity Brunner. He was educated at Cheltenham College, one of the old English public schools, then went up to Oxford. He served as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1956, which he loathed. He came out of the RAF with a deep suspicion of military institutions and became active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for which he wrote the anthem “The H-Bomb’s Thunder” in 1958. The song is still sung at CND marches. It is one of the most durable political anthems in twentieth-century British political music.

His writing career started early. He sold his first novel at seventeen: Galactic Storm (1951), published under the pen-name Gill Hunt. Through the 1950s and early 1960s he became one of the most prolific pulp SF writers on either side of the Atlantic, working for Ace Books, DAW, and every American and British paperback house that would take his work. He wrote under several pseudonyms including K. Houston Brunner and Keith Woodcott. He did not start writing full time until 1958.

The Pulp Catalog

The current SF conversation talks about Brunner, when it talks about him at all, as if his career started in 1968 with Stand on Zanzibar. That version of the story leaves out the first fifteen years of his working life and about half his best sword-and-spaceship instincts. Brunner spent the 1950s and 1960s writing exactly the kind of tight, imaginative, adventure-driven space opera that the current indie SF space is rebuilding at industrial scale, and a lot of it holds up better than the field’s later dismissal of it would suggest.

The Interstellar Empire sequence is the crown jewel of Brunner’s pulp period. Set in the twilight of the Argian Empire, a galactic civilization that humanity built on the back of a discovered cache of abandoned alien starships and then lost the ability to maintain, the sequence works the ground Isaac Asimov staked out in Foundation and H. Beam Piper worked in Space Viking, but with a texture and moral seriousness that belongs to Brunner alone. Empires crumble. Frontier worlds fall to barbarism. Slaves, mutants, adventurers, and swordsmen fight for space in the ruins. The novella The Wanton of Argus appeared in 1953 in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books under the byline Kilian Houston Brunner, and was reissued as The Space-Time Juggler by Ace in 1963. The Altar on Asconel followed in 1965. “The Man from the Big Dark” filled in the middle. DAW collected all three as Interstellar Empire in 1976, which is the edition most readers should hunt for. Brunner later dismissed these stories as “naive,” which is the kind of thing serious writers say about their pulp when the prestige conversation makes them ashamed of the work that formed them. The stories are better than that assessment.

The Zarathustra Refugee Planets trilogy is the other essential Brunner pulp sequence. Secret Agent of Terra (1962) introduces a Terran agent working undercover on a lost colony world to keep imperial law functioning in a corner of space that has forgotten it exists. Castaways’ World (1963) and The Repairmen of Cyclops (1965) complete the trilogy. Brunner later reworked Secret Agent of Terra as The Avengers of Carrig (1969). The framework is competent-agent-in-over-his-head planetary romance, and it is exactly the kind of self-contained adventure that a reader can pick up on a Saturday morning and finish before dinner. This is the Brunner that fans who love Poul Anderson’s Flandry stories, H. Beam Piper’s Paratime and Space Viking novels, and Andre Norton’s Solar Queen books should be reading. It has been out of print more often than in, which is a scandal.

Beyond the two organized sequences, the pulp catalog is enormous. Threshold of Eternity (1959) is a time-war novel. The 100th Millennium (1959) is far-future adventure. The Skynappers (1960), Meeting at Infinity (1961), The Super Barbarians (1962), Times Without Number (1962), The Rites of Ohe (1963), and The Astronauts Must Not Land (1963) are all straight adventure work of varying quality but consistent inventiveness. The Long Result (1965) is the first-contact novel that shows Brunner beginning to write about ideas rather than around them. The Squares of the City (1965) is the political novel set in a fictional South American capital and structured around the sequence of moves in the actual 1892 Havana chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin. It was nominated for the Hugo. The Whole Man (1964), also published as Telepathist, is the story of a physically disabled telepath who becomes a healer working for a UN agency. It was nominated for the Hugo. Both novels sit right on the seam between the pulp work and what came next.

None of the pulp is required reading to understand Brunner’s contribution to the field. All of it is required reading to understand Brunner as a working writer, and much of it is more fun than the more famous later novels. If you like sword-and-spaceship space opera, planetary romance, or competent-agent adventure, Brunner wrote some of the best examples of each in the 1960s, and the catalog is sitting there in used bookstores and Kindle reprints waiting for readers who did not get the memo that this stuff was supposed to be embarrassing.

The Turn

In 1968 Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, and the field had not seen anything quite like it. The novel is 582 pages long. It is set in the year 2010. It is structured after John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, dividing its narrative into four rotating types of chapter: Continuity, Tracking with Closeups, The Happening World, and Context. Continuity chapters carry the main plot. Tracking chapters follow individual characters. The Happening World chapters are collages of advertisements, news bulletins, propaganda, official government notices, television transcripts, and overheard fragments of conversation. Context chapters are excerpts from the sociological writings of a fictional pundit named Chad Mulligan, who functions as the novel’s philosopher-critic.

The plot centers on two Manhattan roommates, corporate executive Norman Niblock House and undercover intelligence analyst Donald Hogan, whose lives converge with a genetic engineering breakthrough that will reshape human civilization. The world around them is a hyperkinetic collage of overpopulation, media saturation, corporate feudalism, and casual daily violence. The book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel at Worldcon 1969. Brunner became the first British author to win the top Hugo. He also took the BSFA Award and, later, the French Prix Apollo. He was thirty-four years old.

The novel’s predictions have held up in ways that are hard to overstate. Brunner predicted the media environment of the smartphone era. He predicted the terrorism-as-ambient-noise of the post-9/11 world. He predicted mass shootings, which he called “muckers” and imagined as ordinary people who snap and go on random violent sprees. He predicted commercial genetic engineering, corporate takeover of African states, in-vitro fertilization anxieties, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, the collapse of Detroit, President Obomi (his stand-in for an African-American president elected in 2010), and the general texture of a Western civilization that no longer believes in its own future. He was writing this in 1966 and 1967. It landed in 1968.

The Club of Rome Quartet

Stand on Zanzibar was the first of what critics have come to call the Club of Rome Quartet, named after the international think tank whose 1972 report Limits to Growth codified the anxieties Brunner had been dramatizing on his own. The other three novels are The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Together they add up to one of the most sustained and prescient bodies of near-future speculation in twentieth-century science fiction.

The Jagged Orbit (1969) takes on race, weapons proliferation, and the medicalization of daily life. Set in an America of the 2010s that has been sorted into “knee” (African American) and “blank” (white) enclaves after decades of unchecked racial violence, the novel imagines an arms industry that profits from perpetual paranoia, a psychiatric establishment that pathologizes normal human distress in order to sell drugs, and a state apparatus that has abandoned all pretense of neutrality. The book has 100 numbered chapters, some running only a single syllable, some running several pages. It won the BSFA Award in 1970. Its predictions about the militarization of civilian police, the psychiatrization of ordinary distress, and the profit motive underlying racial polarization are somewhere between prescient and unnerving.

The Sheep Look Up (1972) is the ecological catastrophe novel. It takes place over the course of a single year, one chapter per month, tracking the environmental collapse of the United States under an administration that responds to every warning by demanding more industrial deregulation. The environmentalist Austin Train, an academic who has become disillusioned with public life, is pursued as a folk hero by a scattered network of eco-terrorists calling themselves Trainites. The book ends with America burning. It is Brunner’s bleakest novel, and it is arguably his most morally serious one. The specific warnings, from contaminated tap water to synthetic food subsidies to a president whose media strategy is to bully the press into printing “what is good for America,” read now like a checklist of anxieties that have become permanent features of Western political life.

The Shockwave Rider (1975) closed the quartet with the most technologically prophetic of the four. Brunner was reading Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock while writing it, and the novel imagines an America whose information infrastructure has become so pervasive that human identity itself has become a matter of what the “data net” says about you. The protagonist, Nickie Haflinger, is a fugitive from a covert government program who survives by using his hacking skills to invent new identities on the fly. In the course of the plot he releases a self-replicating program called a “worm” designed to expose the corruption underlying the data net. Brunner coined the term. Every subsequent use of “worm” for self-replicating malware traces back to this novel. William Gibson has cited The Shockwave Rider as a direct precursor to cyberpunk. It is one of the most influential SF novels of the 1970s and almost nobody outside the specialist conversation reads it anymore.

Together the four books add up to a body of speculation about the twenty-first century that has no peer in mid-century American SF. Ballard was doing something similar in the UK. Le Guin was working a different vein. But nobody else combined Brunner’s political seriousness, his rigorous futures-studies approach to extrapolation, his experimental structural boldness, and his willingness to imagine the collapse of the world he was writing from. Brunner was the writer who took the intellectual tools of the 1960s New Wave and applied them to the actual problems of running a civilization into the twenty-first century.

The Post-Zanzibar Catalog

The Club of Rome Quartet gets most of the post-Zanzibar attention, but Brunner kept writing serious standalone SF for the next two decades, and significant chunks of it deserve recovery alongside the four famous dystopias.

Total Eclipse (1974) is a first-contact archaeology novel about a human expedition trying to figure out why an alien civilization went extinct. It is short, tight, and devastating. The Crucible of Time (1983) is his generation-spanning novel about an alien civilization struggling to develop the technology to escape its dying star system before catastrophe wipes it out. Web of Everywhere (1974) explores what happens to a society that adopts personal teleportation before it works out the social consequences. A Maze of Stars (1991), one of his final novels, is a mature space opera about a sentient starship tasked with observing the descendants of the human colonists it originally seeded across the galaxy.

He also wrote thrillers, contemporary novels, and poetry. The Great Steamboat Race (1983) is a mainstream historical novel about the 1870 Mississippi steamboat race between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez. He worked on it for years. It did not sell well. He was a linguist and translator who spoke fluent French, German, Italian, Spanish, and some Russian, and he did significant translation work throughout his career.

The Final Years

By the late 1970s and early 1980s Brunner’s commercial fortunes began to slide. The Club of Rome Quartet had won every major award and stopped selling. Publishers wanted more of the pulp adventure Brunner had been producing in the 1960s and less of the ambitious near-future work he had built his reputation on. He kept writing. The industry lost interest.

His first wife Marjorie handled his publishing relationships for the entirety of their marriage. She was, by all accounts, the reason his business affairs held together. She died in 1986. Brunner’s health had already begun to decline. Her death accelerated the slide. His finances tightened. He became known in the industry as difficult to deal with, which some observers attributed to grief and financial pressure and others attributed to accumulated frustration with a business that had stopped valuing him.

He remarried on September 27, 1991, to Li Yi Tan, a Chinese immigrant. The marriage brought some stability back into his life. He continued to write, continued to attend conventions, and continued to work through health problems that were becoming steadily more serious. Most of his novels were out of print by the early 1990s. He accused publishers of a conspiracy against him. The truth was probably simpler and sadder: his kind of book was out of fashion, and he did not have the personal or professional infrastructure to fight for the catalog.

He traveled to Glasgow in August 1995 for Intersection, the 53rd Worldcon. He was sixty years old. He died there of a stroke on the afternoon of Friday, August 25, in his hotel room. Robert Silverberg’s eulogy at the Hugo ceremony was one of the great moments in modern SF fan history. The four-minute standing ovation is what the field remembers.

Why He Matters Now

Brunner is the writer who proved that near-future speculative fiction, done with rigor, can outlast the moment that produced it. The Club of Rome Quartet was written to be topical, and it has aged into permanence. That is a rare accomplishment. Most topical fiction dates the second the topic changes. Brunner’s dates upward, becoming more accurate every year.

The indie and crowdfunded SF space that is rebuilding a genre where craft, ambition, and unfashionable perspectives are welcome has almost nobody to point to at Brunner’s level of technical accomplishment in near-future extrapolation. He wrote novels with real people in them, real ideas driving them, and real political consequences following from the ideas. He did not preach. He showed the reader the world twenty years out and let the reader draw the conclusions. That is what serious speculative fiction is supposed to do, and modern SF has largely forgotten how to do it.

Reading Brunner now is also an object lesson in what happens to a working writer when the publishing industry decides it no longer wants what he does best. The commercial collapse of his career in the 1980s was not the result of declining quality. A Maze of Stars (1991), written near the end, is a serious mature novel. The Crucible of Time (1983) is one of his finest sustained works. The catalog stopped selling because the market moved. The writer kept working. The pattern is familiar to anyone paying attention to the current state of trad-pub SF, and Brunner’s case is the historical precedent for what recovery through indie publishing is going to look like as the next generation of writers finds itself in the same position.

If you have never read Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar is the entry point. It is long, it is dense, it takes about a hundred pages before the Dos Passos structure starts feeling like a feature rather than an obstacle, and it is worth every page. The Sheep Look Up is the darkest and most morally serious of the four. The Shockwave Rider is the fastest and most accessible, and the one that reads most obviously like a cyberpunk novel written before cyberpunk had a name. The Whole Man is the entry point for the earlier work.

He was one of the great prophets of the field. The prophecies keep coming true. The books are, slowly, coming back into print. The reading is waiting.

Which prescient SF writer do you think saw the twenty-first century most clearly from the twentieth, and which of their books would you put in every reader’s hands?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: The William Morrow Tolkien Boxed Sets: A Collector’s Guide

HarperCollins has spent the last few years quietly assembling one of the best entry points into serious Tolkien collecting in decades. Working through its William Morrow imprint in the US and HarperCollins proper in the UK, the publisher has been repackaging Christopher Tolkien’s forty-year editorial project into a run of affordable hardcover boxed sets, each with double-sided dust jackets that pair new art with the classic cover treatments. Six sets exist so far: four covering the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth plus its index, and two “Myths and Legends” sets gathering Tolkien’s academic translations and shorter fiction.

For a working collector who doesn’t have five figures to spend chasing first editions, this series is the answer. The books are well made, the price per volume is reasonable, and the line has now done something no previous reprint effort managed: it put The Old English Exodus back into print.

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Why Exodus Matters

Tolkien’s translation and commentary on the Old English Exodus poem first appeared in 1981 from Clarendon Press in Oxford, edited by his former student Joan Turville-Petre. It’s a short book, roughly a hundred pages, split between the poem itself, Tolkien’s translation, and his notes on how he arrived at it. It never had a second printing. A clean copy on the secondary market runs past $1,000 when you can find one at all; as of this writing there isn’t a single listing on eBay.

The content itself won’t reshape anyone’s understanding of Tolkien’s fiction. It’s philology, not fantasy, and readers hoping for insight into Middle-earth will find thinner pickings here than in something like The Monsters and the Critics. But for anyone trying to own the complete Tolkien bibliography, Exodus has been the single hardest title to find for over forty years. Myths and Legends Box Set #2, released in 2026, is the cheapest that book has ever been to acquire, full stop.

That same set also carries Finn and Hengest, Tolkien’s study of the two Anglo-Saxon warlords who turn up obliquely in Beowulf. It’s one of the few Tolkien scholarly works Easton Press never gave the leather-bound treatment, which makes this the most presentable hardcover edition currently on shelves. Rounding out the box are The Story of Kullervo, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, and The Battle of Maldon.

How Close Is “Complete”?

Two notable holdouts remain standalone volumes rather than folded into a box: The Bovadium Fragments, Christopher Tolkien’s 2025 release of his father’s satirical parable about cars destroying Oxford, and the various editions of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Oddly, even though Morrow remains publisher, these don’t have matching spines or a way to look like the rest of the set. A handful of other perennial standalones round out the shelf too: Tales from the Perilous Realm, Letters from Father Christmas, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and On Fairy-stories all remain single volumes rather than box set contents. None of that undercuts the larger point. Between the four History of Middle-earth sets and the two Myths and Legends sets, William Morrow has consolidated the overwhelming majority of Tolkien’s posthumous scholarly output into six purchases instead of twenty.

The Size Problem

The one real complaint from collectors, and it’s a legitimate one, involves trim size. Readers on r/tolkienbooks have compared notes for years on how the William Morrow US editions don’t always match the dimensions of their UK HarperCollins counterparts, even within the same box set line. If your goal is a shelf where every spine lines up flush, the fix is to buy the UK HarperCollins printings across the board rather than mixing US and UK stock. It’s a minor annoyance next to the content on offer, but it’s worth knowing before you order, especially if you’re the type who cares whether a shelf reads as one unified set instead of a scavenged one.

Build Quality

None of that changes the fact that these are genuinely nice books. The boards are sturdy, the dust jackets have a matte finish on the newer printings, and the double-sided jacket design lets you flip each book to show either the new commissioned art or a design echoing the vintage Allen & Unwin look. Some of the earlier releases in the run shipped with glossier jackets, so if a uniform matte finish across your shelf matters to you, lean toward the more recent Harper Collins UK printings when you can.

The Bottom Line

For a completionist, this series is close to essential. You’re not getting first editions, and you’re not getting leather. What you are getting is the cheapest path that has ever existed to a complete Tolkien scholarly shelf, including a book that spent four decades as one of the genre’s genuine white whales. Buy them for the content, plan around the sizing quirks, and don’t lose sleep over chasing down a thousand-dollar 1981 Clarendon Press copy you no longer need.

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: From “Next Tolkien” to Cautionary Tale: Mike’s Book Reviews Tells How Brandon Sanderson Lost the Room

There was a time when a new Brandon Sanderson release felt like a holiday. YouTuber Mike, of Nightsradiant, says that’s no longer true. What follows it now, in his words, is dread. His new video tracing the arc of the Stormlight Archive doesn’t play like a hit piece. It plays like a longtime believer working through a breakup, and that makes his criticism land harder than most.

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The Horror Writers Association is heading into its 2026 presidential election without a candidate. According to horror author Brian Keene, the sole person running for HWA president, who was unopposed, withdrew after allegations surfaced online, leaving the organization weeks from voting with nobody on the ballot. Keene broke the news on his blog on August 20, and by his own account nobody stepped up to replace the withdrawn candidate.

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George R.R. Martin published five Song of Ice and Fire books between 1996 and 2011. Since then: nothing. The Winds of Winter has been “in progress” for well over a decade, past multiple deadlines Martin set for himself in public and then missed. HBO ran out of source material, finished the story without him, and delivered an ending large parts of the fanbase still consider a disaster, one that could have been avoided if the books existed to guide it. Patrick Rothfuss is arguably worse off. The Wise Man’s Fear came out in 2011. The Doors of Stone has no release date fourteen years later, and Rothfuss spent part of that gap running a charity livestream fans felt mocked by how long they’d been left hanging. Into that record steps YouTuber Daniel Greene with a video that isn’t a reckoning. It’s an apology tour on Martin’s behalf.

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This is the end! The full retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom, which began with a left-wing movement in the 1970s appropriating his work and has slowly migrated over time to people realizing how right-wing and Christian Lord of the Rings is. I’ll probably release this as a book in the near future. Now, we continue.

Part 14:

Part 13:

Part 12:

Pa…

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Castalia Library has published the first English translation of “The Battle of Salamanca,” the tenth and final novel in the First Series of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales. Translator Vox Day brought the book to English readers this week, closing out a ten-volume arc that took more than a century and a half to reach an Anglophone audience in full.

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“The Battle of Salamanca” carries protagonist Gabriel Araceli from the Béjar sierra to the two bare hills south of Salamanca that the Spanish call Los Arapiles. There, on July 22, 1812, Wellington broke Marshal Marmont’s army in forty minutes and changed the course of the Peninsular War. Gabriel is a major now, attached to the Spanish division serving alongside the allied army, and he arrives at the battle chasing a private matter: Luis de Santorcaz, the freemason and afrancesado who stole Inés seven years earlier, has finally been tracked down. He is not in France after all.

The novel is now available via Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook. Castalia sent the ebook to paid subscribers ahead of the wider release.

This is not the first time Castalia has closed a translation gap on Galdós. In early August, the press released “Cádiz,” the first English translation of the eighth Episodios Nacionales volume, also translated by Vox Day. That novel follows Gabriel into the besieged port city as French forces close in, working to free a secret daughter held inside a strict Catholic household governed by a matriarch with the authority of a convent superior.

The pattern is important for anyone tracking the state of Spanish literature in English. Galdós wrote the Episodios Nacionales between 1872 and 1912: forty-six novels tracing Spanish history from Trafalgar in 1805 through the political upheavals of the 1870s, divided into five series of ten (with a final series of six). As recently as 1950, few of his works existed in English translation at all, despite a critical reputation that puts him second only to Cervantes among Spanish novelists and earned him five Nobel Prize nominations. Scholars have long compared the scale of the project to Balzac’s Comédie Humaine.

With “The Battle of Salamanca” now in English, Castalia has finished the entire First Series, ten novels covering 1805 to 1812, in translation for the first time. The Second Series, covering 1812 to 1833 under the reign of Ferdinand VII, remains largely untranslated territory.

Galdós spent four decades on this cycle and it stood untranslated in full for most of the twentieth century. What does it say about the state of literary translation that a small independent press is the one finishing the job?

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NEXT: Centipede Press’s Roger Zelazny Reprint Sells Out in Under 24 Hours

Violence is never the answer.

It is the question. And the answer is YES!

And the man to provide that answer is SLEDGE!

Back in October of 2023, an indie book dropped that did something a lot of indie books do not manage to do: cultivate a sense of aura around it. From the first glance at the book cover, you get the feeling of a gritty and brutal scenario happening. Author Nick Horvath sells Sledge online not just as another character, but a presence that hovers around the book and it went a long way into making Sledge feel like a legend in the making.

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A Sledgend, as he likes to call fans of the book.

And Sledge does indeed have fans, having separated itself from a lot of the indie books by having a personality attached to it that runs down to the depths of the ink on the page. The cover is your first introduction, and I cannot praise the cover for its visual storytelling. At a glance, you assume the most immediate answer: Is this a book about a guy who hits people with a sledgehammer?

Sledge delivers exactly what it promises: old-school, unapologetic ultra-violence. Like an 80s R-rated beat-em up flick or a 90s video game before the industry had its balls removed by devs with no balls or had their balls removed.

The titular character is actually Einarr Laukkanen, a former basketball player who stands at 6’11 and lives in the deep cold of Minnesota. The book hits the ground running, and Sledge finds his ex-girlfriend at his doorstep with dire news: someone is trying to kill her, and she turns to him to help protect her. Fortunately, Sledge is willing and able and sets off to uncover the mystery. After some detective work that involves a lot of fists meeting a lot of faces, he finds himself having to contend with The Labyrinth, a roster of dark web assassins hellbent on taking Sledge out.

Thus the book unfolds with Sledge having to face each member of the Labyrinth for the amusement of a dark web audience that pays big money to watch deathmatches online. And now Sledge finds himself climbing their ranks like an arcade fighting game’s roster. But he’s not some normie. Not an everyday Joe off the street. No. He’s SLEDGE and Sledge knows how to hurt and be hurt. He’s tougher than a two-dollar steak, as Jim Ross used to say. And Sledge hits harder than a Mack truck at full speed.

Even though Sledge fights as if he’s got a cheat code enabled, he’s not immune to being hurt, he just can take a helluva beating. And boy does he. There are times in the book it comes close to straining credulity about the amount of physical trauma a human body can take. Working in the medical field myself, I have seen the human body survive grievous injuries and kept telling myself this as I read the book. Some of the violence he inflicts had me clenching my buttcheeks and wincing as I read it.

A bit of backstory does help flesh out why Sledge is such a walking tank. Despite being a basketball player, Sledge did a stint in a russian gulag where they pitted prisoners against each other in fight or die matches. And Sledge had to become who he is in order to overcome that ordeal. Very quickly you figure out that Sledge is driven by an almost feral energy when he fights. His hesitancy to use guns even makes sense given that in a firefight, he knows how big a target he is. The man is 70% center mass, he’s a sharpshooter’s dream target.

The mystery behind the Labyrinth keeps the characters going so that every chapter is not just one action set piece after another. Sledge and his friends manage to do a lot of sleuthing to try and tack down whoever is behind the Labyrinth before the Labyrinth’s top assassins come after him. Even then, its like watching the assassins look at John Wick and think “Yeah, I got this.”

No, you don’t. You ain’t got Sledge.

The book excels in its unapologetic action scenes that are dripping with bloody fun and imaginative set-pieces. Best of all, the book is unapologetic in its content. Language, violence, and dark material are presented without tiptoeing around feelings or content warnings. It’s a sharp contrast to media that’s had its corners shaved off.

If there’s criticism to be had, it would have to be the ending, which is a bit of an interesting twist I didn’t quite see coming, but feels a bit so-so compared to a lot of what came before. By no means a bad ending, just one I’m not sure works as well as the rest of the book does.

At (page numbers), the book is well paced, well written, and doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s a fun skull-bashing time to be had and unlike almost any book I’d ever read up to this point. I highly recommend Sledge vs the Labyrinth and recommend you follow its author on Twitter. No one is a bigger fan of Sledge than he is.

And if you want to want, you can watch my original Sledge review here.

You can grab Sledge vs the Labyrinth HERE. Its sequel Sledge vs the Wendigo, is right around the corner, dropping in October 2026, and is available to pre-order now: Pre-order Sledge vs the Wendigo

John A. Douglas is an independently published author and the author of the Age of Adventures fantasy series, including its two starter books: The Black Crown and The Lionheart: Icon of Justice

Jon Del Arroz’s new book, The Wages of Sin, releases August 20, following up Churchianity, which hit #1 in Amazon’s religious philosophy category last year. Where Churchianity diagnosed the consumer-driven model reshaping American parishes, the new book turns to a word Del Arroz says most pulpits quietly retired: sin.

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The Wages of Sin builds its structure on the Confiteor, the confession prayer Catholics have recited at every Mass since at least the tenth century. Del Arroz splits the book into four sections, one for each phrase of the prayer: thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. Nine chapters work through the sins Augustine confessed in his Confessions, including pride dressed as worship, envy refined into schadenfreude, the spiritual torpor the Church Fathers called acedia, and the four sins Scripture names as crying out to heaven for vengeance. Each chapter closes with an examination of conscience, and the appendix adds a full one plus a vice-virtue table for daily use.

The book leans on Augustine’s framework of sin as disordered love: not a checklist of prohibitions, but the habit of loving the wrong things, or loving right things out of order. Del Arroz traces that idea into Romans 6:23 and the Catechism’s teaching on mortal sin, arguing that a Church which stopped naming sin also stopped being able to prescribe its cure.

The book does not exempt its author. Del Arroz opens by identifying himself among the sinners in the chapters that follow, writing that the Confiteor is first person and that any reader who moves through the book thinking mainly about other people’s failures has missed the prayer entirely.

Churchianity‘s bestseller run gave Del Arroz an audience already primed for a critique of American church culture. The Wages of Sin asks that same audience to turn the critique inward. Both books are available now: Churchianity here, and The Wages of Sin here.

Does a readership that embraced Churchianity‘s critique of consumer faith culture stay with Del Arroz when the target shifts from institutions to their own examination of conscience, or is naming the sins of others always the easier sale?

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J. Michael Straczynski, executor of the Harlan Ellison estate, spent a full essay this week defending a decision that never needed defending: running a ChatGPT-generated response to “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in the new solo edition of the story. What he produced instead was a case study in how badly the “AI will never produce anything above mediocre” crowd misunderstands the actual argument.

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Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks just got the deluxe treatment from Centipede Press, and it didn’t last a day on the shelf. The Colorado small press released its signed and numbered edition of the 1979 road-trip science fiction novel on June 2026, limited to 400 copies at $100 each, and the entire run sold out within 24 hours of going live.

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The book was on their own PayPal link with several copies also being offered through Subterranean Press’s webstore. This is an incredible speed for a lesser-known work, not known as one of Zelazny’s finest.

The edition wraps Zelazny’s genre-bending novel, which follows a driver named Red Dorakeen down a road that connects every point in history to every point that never happened, in a full cloth binding with a dust jacket, ribbon marker, and head and tail bands. Cover art comes from Pascal Blanché, with an introduction and glossary from Christopher S. Kovacs, plus an author interview and reproductions of older paperback covers. Both Kovacs and Blanché signed the run.

Centipede Press has spent 25 years building a reputation most collectors in the small press world know by name. Founded in 2001 by Jerad Walters out of Lakewood, Colorado, the publisher puts out roughly two dozen titles a year in print runs typically capped between 200 and 1,000 copies, with heavy cloth and leather bindings, archival paper, and cover art commissioned specifically for each release. That combination of scarcity and production value has turned Centipede into one of the driving forces behind the current boom in high-end genre reprints, where fans pay well past mass-market prices for editions built to be kept rather than read once and shelved.

The Roadmarks sellout is already rippling through the collector community. Members of the Centipede Press collectors group on Facebook started asking where to find copies within hours of the listing disappearing, the same pattern that hits nearly every Centipede release once word spreads. Centipede’s own site currently shows the signed and numbered copies gone, with a note that more stock is expected later in the week.

Centipede frequently follows a sold-out signed edition with a later unnumbered printing at a lower price point, aimed at readers who want the art and production quality without chasing a numbered copy on the secondary market. Fans in the collectors group are already hoping Roadmarks gets the same treatment, since a second run would be the only realistic way to land a copy without paying a resale markup once the current print run starts showing up on eBay.

Zelazny won six Hugo Awards and three Nebulas over his career, and Roadmarks has held a smaller but dedicated following among his readers since its original 1979 release.

With small press reprints selling out this fast across the board, is the current wave of deluxe genre fiction editions a passive collector boom, or has scarcity itself become the product?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: The Queen of Rhemuth: A Katherine Kurtz Retrospective

Every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, on an IRC network with a Discord bridge, Katherine Kurtz shows up to talk with her readers. She has been doing this, in one form or another, for close to twenty-five years. She is eighty-one years old. Her community, gathered at rhemuthcastle.com under the banner “The Worlds of Katherine Kurtz,” calls it KKChat. The community’s conduct rule, posted on the front page, is five words long: Be excellent to each other.

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This is the same author who published Deryni Rising in 1970, which was among the earliest historical fantasy novels ever written, essentially inventing a subgenre that includes Guy Gavriel Kay, Lois McMaster Bujold, and, arguably, George R.R. Martin. She wrote sixteen Deryni novels across five trilogies spanning more than four decades of publication. She founded her own crypto-history subgenre with novels about the Battle of Britain, the American Revolution, and the Knights Templar. She lived twenty years in a haunted gothic revival mansion in Ireland, next door to Anne McCaffrey. She was cited in Dragon Magazine issue #78 as the model for adapting psionics to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. She has an entire tabletop RPG published in her honor.

She has been, by the standards of the current SF/F prestige conversation, largely forgotten. She almost certainly should not have been.

The Chemist Who Became a Medievalist

Katherine Irene Kurtz was born in Coral Gables, Florida, on October 18, 1944, during a hurricane. She grew up in Florida. She won a four-year science scholarship to the University of Miami and graduated with a bachelor of science in chemistry. She started medical school. After a year she decided she would rather write about medicine than practice it, an instinct that has served her career well.

She moved to Los Angeles for graduate work in medieval English history at UCLA. While completing her master’s, she worked as an instructional designer for the Los Angeles Police Department, writing training curriculum. She was already deep in fandom and became an early member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, adopting the persona Bevan Fraser of Stirling and eventually rising to the rank of Countess.

She had also, at some point during those years, had a vivid dream. It was about a young king, a poisoned father, a treacherous court, and a persecuted people with psychic powers who were the only ones who could defend the boy on the throne. She started writing it down. She sold the first three novels to Ballantine Books on her first submission attempt. Deryni Rising appeared in 1970 as part of Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, the same imprint that was bringing E.R. Eddison and William Morris back into print. Kurtz was twenty-five years old.

Why the Deryni Novels Are Still great

We ran a review of Deryni Rising two weeks ago, so this is not the place to relitigate the individual book. What this retrospective can do is explain what Kurtz was building across the entire sequence, which is where her real achievement lives.

The Deryni novels are set in the kingdom of Gwynedd, one of the fictional Eleven Kingdoms, on a world whose culture, geography, and political structure closely parallel the British Isles of the twelfth century. The court dresses like Plantagenet England. The armor is right for the period. The saints have Welsh names. The language, the food, the ecclesiastical vestments, the coronation rites, the heraldry: all of it is drawn from Kurtz’s actual medieval history training, and all of it holds up under scrutiny. Kari Sperring, writing for Strange Horizons, called Kurtz “the first writer of secondary-world historical fantasy,” and the description sticks. Before Kurtz, secondary-world fantasy was mostly Tolkien-influenced high fantasy or Howard-descended sword and sorcery. Kurtz wrote fantasy the way Dorothy Dunnett and Maurice Druon wrote historical novels. Nobody had done that before.

The Deryni themselves are a persecuted minority within Gwynedd, humans with hereditary psychic abilities, treated by the majority population and by significant factions within the Church as either heretics or demons. The magic is not casual. It requires training, ritual preparation, and cost. The abilities are close to what science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s called psionics: telepathy, telekinesis, healing, energy manipulation, dream-sharing. Kurtz built her magic system on the same intellectual scaffolding that A.E. van Vogt, John W. Campbell, and Alfred Bester had used, then dropped it into a medieval Christianized society and let the friction generate the story.

The friction is the point. Deryni magic is not neutral. It is theologically dangerous. Some Deryni have used their powers to commit atrocities. Some priests believe all Deryni powers are inherently evil. Some Deryni, including the sainted Camber MacRorie, believe the powers are gifts from God to be used in service. The political and religious debates across the sequence are as substantive as anything in The Name of the Rose, and they matter to the plot because the characters take their own religious convictions seriously.

Which brings up the point that probably explains why Kurtz has been quietly forgotten by the mainstream fantasy establishment.

The Church Taken Seriously

Kurtz’s Church is not a straw man. The Holy Church of Gwynedd is a Catholic church in all but name, complete with an Archbishop, a College of Bishops, a monastic tradition, and a full liturgical year. The prayers are real prayers, adapted from actual medieval Latin sources. The Mass is a real Mass. When a character crosses himself, it means something. When a character makes confession, the theology is worked out. When the Bishops meet in council to debate whether Deryni magic is intrinsically evil, they argue in the vocabulary of actual medieval scholastic theology.

Kurtz shows corrupt bishops. She also shows saints. She shows the Church at its worst, used by ambitious men as an instrument of political power against minorities. She also shows the Church at its best, offering sacramental grace and hard moral clarity to characters who are trying to live rightly under impossible circumstances. King Kelson goes to Mass. He believes what he confesses. His faith is a working part of the story, not decoration.

Fantasy that takes Christianity seriously, as a real intellectual and spiritual tradition worthy of representation, is thin on the ground in the current genre. Kurtz was doing it in 1970. That fact is worth stating outright. The mainstream conversation moved past her in part because it had less and less room for fantasy that treated the historical Church as anything other than an oppressor, and Kurtz kept insisting that the Church contained saints as well as villains.

The Five Trilogies

The Deryni catalog is structured as five interlocking trilogies plus supplementary material, and the timeline hops around across roughly 250 years of Gwynedd’s history. The internal chronology is intricate. The publication order does not match the story order. Newcomers often find it disorienting until they realize the whole point is that Kurtz built a real history and wrote across different centuries as the mood took her, exactly the way a working historian moves back and forth across the record.

The Chronicles of the Deryni (1970-1973), consisting of Deryni Rising, Deryni Checkmate, and High Deryni, is the original trilogy, set around 1120 in Gwynedd’s internal calendar. King Kelson Haldane takes the throne at fourteen after his father is poisoned. His half-Deryni protector Duke Alaric Morgan holds off both the political fallout and the accusations of witchcraft. This is the entry point for most readers.

The Legends of Camber of Culdi (1976-1979), consisting of Camber of Culdi, Saint Camber, and Camber the Heretic, jumps back two centuries to the story of the Deryni saint whose legacy shapes everything in the later books. Camber MacRorie leads the restoration of the human Haldane dynasty during a period of Deryni tyranny, then dies and is canonized, then is posthumously declared a heretic when the political winds shift. It is the darkest trilogy in the sequence.

The Histories of King Kelson (1984-1986), consisting of The Bishop’s Heir, The King’s Justice, and The Quest for Saint Camber, picks up where the original trilogy left off, following Kelson through his young adulthood, his political consolidation of Gwynedd, and his attempts to marry and produce an heir. There’s also a fourth book to this trilogy in King Kelson’s Bride that sometimes gets overlooked.

The Heirs of Saint Camber (1989-1994), consisting of The Harrowing of Gwynedd, King Javan’s Year, and The Bastard Prince, returns to the period immediately after Camber’s death, chronicling the anti-Deryni persecutions and the reigns of the young Haldane kings who inherited the mess. These books are brutal in ways that reward the reader with real emotional payoff, and they contain some of Kurtz’s finest writing on power, faith, and legitimate authority.

The Childe Morgan Trilogy (2006-2014), consisting of In the King’s Service, Childe Morgan, and The King’s Deryni, is the most recent addition, set in the generation before Deryni Rising, following Alaric Morgan’s father Kenneth and Alaric’s own boyhood. It fills in the backstory that the original trilogy assumed.

There is also Deryni Magic (1990), a companion volume explaining the magic system in scholarly detail, and Codex Derynianus (1998), a comprehensive encyclopedia of the Deryni universe cowritten with Robert Reginald. Both are still cited by the fan community as reference texts.

Ireland, Holybrooke Hall, and the McCaffrey Connection

In 1983 Kurtz married Scott MacMillan, an Australian who worked in film and later as a herald in the Office of the Chief Herald of Ireland. They had a son, Cameron. Within a couple of years they moved to Ireland, and both eventually took Irish citizenship. From 1987 to 2007 they lived at Holybrooke Hall, a gothic revival mansion in County Wicklow, between the villages of Kilmacanogue and Bray. Twelve Tudor chimney stacks. A twenty-foot vaulted great hall with a stained glass window. Crenelated battlements. Ghosts, which Kurtz has written about openly and with affection.

The house was less than an hour from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonhold-Underhill, also in County Wicklow. The two writers were neighbors for the better part of two decades. McCaffrey blurbed the Deryni novels with a line that has been reprinted on every subsequent edition: “an incredible historical tapestry of a world that never was and of immensely vital people who ought to be.” McCaffrey died in 2011, and Kurtz’s husband Scott MacMillan passed in 2019. Kurtz since returned to America at the historic house in Staunton, Virginia, that she and MacMillan bought in 2007.

The Crypto-History Novels

Alongside the Deryni sequence, Kurtz built a second body of work she calls “crypto-history,” in which the hidden magical history behind real historical events drives the plot. These books are freestanding and use the same rigorous research technique she brought to the Deryni novels, applied to actual periods of Earth history.

Lammas Night (1983) is her most respected crypto-history novel and arguably her most polished single book. It builds on the widely circulated but historically unproven story that English witches met on the eve of Lammas 1940 to raise magical resistance against a Nazi invasion of Britain. The novel handles the occult material with dignity, gives the Battle of Britain the weight it deserves, and treats faith and sacrifice as serious matters. It is a book Kurtz herself has named as one of her favorites of her own catalog.

Two Crowns for America (1996) applies the same technique to the American Revolution, weaving Masonic and mystical elements through the actual historical events. The Adept series, cowritten with Deborah Turner Harris, sets a similar framework in contemporary Scotland. She also produced two Knights Templar novels with Harris and edited three Templar anthologies. St. Patrick’s Gargoyle (2001) is a stand-alone light urban fantasy set in Dublin. She wrote what she wanted to write.

The George R.R. Martin Question

The Deryni novels prefigure A Song of Ice and Fire to a degree that any reader picking up both series will notice. A medieval kingdom loosely based on the British Isles. Intricate court intrigue driven by the deaths of major characters. A powerful Church whose politics matter to the plot. Multiple noble houses with real historical detail. Cousin marriages, contested successions, poisoned kings. Detailed heraldry. Winter as a background threat. Even the tendency to kill off characters the reader has come to love.

Martin has been careful in his cited influences and has publicly named Tad Williams as his primary modern fantasy influence for A Song of Ice and Fire. He has not, so far as the public record goes, explicitly cited Kurtz. But critics in the SF/F conversation have made the connection repeatedly. Reactor ran an essay in 2024 arguing directly that A Game of Thrones is legible as a response to Deryni Rising, with Martin deliberately deconstructing the Romantic assumptions of Kurtz’s work. Black Gate, Cora Buhlert’s blog, and Strange Horizons have all pointed at the parallels. Whether or not Martin sat down and read the Deryni novels, he was working in a subgenre Kurtz had built, using tools she had invented, and the family resemblance is impossible to miss.

The difference in tone is the tell. Martin writes toward despair. Kurtz writes toward hard-won hope. Kelson wants to be a good and wise king and mostly succeeds. Camber sacrifices himself for the right reasons. The best characters are trying to live morally under conditions that make morality expensive. If ASoIaF is where fantasy went when it lost its faith in the possibility of virtuous power, the Deryni novels are what fantasy looked like before the loss happened.

The RPG Legacy

Kurtz has a substantial second life in tabletop RPG circles that mainstream literary fans do not know about.

Dragon Magazine issue #78, published in October 1983, was the psionics issue for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition. One of the featured articles adapted the Deryni universe as a psionics campaign framework, effectively presenting Kurtz’s magic system as the model for how ESP-based abilities should work in a fantasy RPG. For a generation of AD&D players, that Dragon issue was how they discovered Kurtz’s novels in the first place. Multiple working writers and game designers have credited it as their entry point.

Mayfair Games’ Witches supplement in 1990 included a full “Deryni Witches” section as one of six templates for AD&D witch characters. Grey Ghost Games released The Deryni Adventure Game in 2005, a complete tabletop RPG using the FUDGE system, designed by Aaron S. Rosenberg with Kurtz’s cooperation. It remains in print. The Deryni universe is one of a small number of major fantasy IPs that has generated a serious independent RPG rather than a licensed sourcebook slotted into an existing system.

The Fan Community Is The Best Part

The community around Katherine Kurtz’s work is one of the more charming corners of the internet, and it functions the way SF/F fandom did before social media flattened everything.

The hub is rhemuthcastle.com, named for the capital city of Gwynedd. It hosts a full phpBB-style forum with discussion boards for every trilogy, an active fan fiction section, an ongoing play-by-post role-playing campaign called Forgotten Shadows, a recipe exchange for medieval Gwynedd-appropriate dishes, and archives going back to the site’s founding around 2001. The community is older, respectful, deeply committed to the source material, and small enough that regulars know each other by handle.

The forum is the front door. The core of the community is KKChat, held every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern on the Communiti Chat IRC Network with a Discord bridge for the newer contingent. On the first Sunday of each month, the chat shifts to a Members-Only Zoom call at 3:00 PM Eastern. Kurtz herself attends. She takes questions. She talks about her current writing. She engages with the fan fiction. She is eighty-one and she still shows up every week to talk to the readers who have stayed with her for fifty-five years.

The fan fiction community deserves its own paragraph. The forum’s Deryni Archives Fan E-Zine, named in tribute to the print magazine Kurtz herself edited in the 1980s, hosts a rolling body of fan-written novels, novellas, and short stories set in Gwynedd. Regular contributors have produced multi-volume epics. Kurtz reads it. She comments. She encourages new writers. There have been ongoing conversations about assembling the best of the fan fiction into an authorized print anthology, a project Kurtz has indicated she would like to see happen. The 25th anniversary chat happened in January 2026. The community is not going anywhere.

This is what a healthy small fandom looks like. Direct author engagement. Craft-oriented discussion. A conduct rule short enough to fit in a tweet. No performative fighting. The people who found Kurtz thirty years ago through Dragon Magazine or a battered used-bookstore copy of Deryni Rising are still there, and they have made room for anyone who wants to join.

Why She’s Important Now

The current recovery of Christian-friendly fantasy in the indie and crowdfunded space has almost nobody to point to as a model at Kurtz’s level. She was writing intricate, faith-serious, historically grounded fantasy at the peak of the New Age fantasy wave. She was doing it decades before the current genre conversation had the vocabulary to describe why it worked. She wrote adult political drama with children in it, real religious conviction without either sneering or apologetics, women characters who were formidable without being modern, and courts full of grown-up men whose loyalties and disloyalties cost them something.

She is also a working example of how a writer can stay in productive relationship with her readers across five decades without either burning out or letting the mainstream conversation dictate her values. The Sunday chats matter. The fan fiction blessing matters. The fact that the community organized itself around the actual work rather than around a personality cult matters.

If you have never read Kurtz, Deryni Rising remains the entry point Fandom Pulse recently recommended, and the argument for it stands. If you want to see what she can do at full length and full ambition, Camber the Heretic is the darkest and finest single book in the Camber trilogy. If you want the standalone crypto-history, Lammas Night is where to go. If you want the reference volume that maps the whole world, Codex Derynianus is still cited in the fan community every week.

She is one of the great overlooked builders of modern fantasy. The catalog is largely still in print. The community is still meeting on Sundays. The author is still showing up.

Which faith-serious fantasy writer do you think the mainstream conversation has ignored the longest, and which book of theirs would you put in every reader’s hands?

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