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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : ( A ) : Ashley, Mike
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In this truly mammoth guide, Mike Ashley analyzes and explicates the line between the real Arthurian world and the legends that surround it. Ashley gives us a firm identity not only for King Arthur, but also for Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table—as well as identifying all the major Arthurian sites. He traces the development of each of the legends and shows how they were related to events happening at the time, bringing a new dimension of realism to the magical Arthurian world. Ashley also offers new and little known information on Arthur—including a fascinating link to the present royal family and the likelihood that Arthurian legends arose from the exploits of not just one man but at least four. With over 700 pages, this is the most complete single-volume guide to Arthurian legend and history.
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The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction is a new collection that features 25 hard sci-fi stories that really push the boundaries, from names like Charles Stross, Robert Reed, Peter Hamilton, and Neal Asher. Highlights feature a perpetual war fought within a cosmic string; a machine that detects alternate worlds and creates a choice of Christs; murder in virtual reality; and a spaceship so large that there's an entire planetary system within it.
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C. S. Forester's Captain Horatio Hornblower eludes an American privateer and Richard Woodman brings Nathaniel Drinkwater out of retirement in this collection of twenty-one sea stories, fifteen of them written especially for this volume. From the Hawaiian coast to the shores of England, at Trafalgar, at Copenhagen, and on the Nile, daring exploits and breathtaking encounters quicken these pages by celebrated writers like David Donachie, Jacland Marmur, William Hope Hodgson, Kenneth Bulmer, Nigel Brown, Harriet Hudson, Peter T. Garratt, Peter Tremayne, Derek Wilson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
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Sorcery is all around us. From a child's struggles to control magical powers for the first time, to the epic clashes of forces of good and evil on a titanic scale, here are more than twenty of the finest in contemporary and classic wizardry tales. Ranging from Michael Moorcock's "Master of Chaos," the story of a knight traveling to a castle on the edge of the world to face the ultimate sorcerer, to Peter Crowther's "The Eternal Altercation," in which a man is forced into the eternal battle between hope and despair on a sorcerer-controlled train, The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers' Tales also includes stories from Ursula Le Guin, Steve Rasnic Tem, James Bibby, Robert Weinberg, A. C. Benson, Michael Kurland, and Louise Cooper.
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Jules Verne, one of the founding fathers of science fiction, was the author of such thrilling and perennial favorites as Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as well as more than sixty other novels of adventure and exploration. One hundred years after his death, this magnificent new collection celebrates Verne's amazing vision. A host of today's top science fiction authors pay homage to Verne's genius with a series of stories inspired by his groundbreaking imagination and original characters. In this anthology are extraordinary voyages of discovery and adventure from the four corners of the globe, and even within it. Following the tradition of Verne's original tales, Ian Watson tells of a journey deep into the center of the Earth, where Verne himself does battle with occultist Nazis, and Adam Roberts takes us to latter-day California, where a descendant of Verne's character Hector Servadac is preparing for the end of the world as we know it. These and many more compelling adventures add up to an anthology that will introduce a new generation to the wonder of Jules Verne and delight readers already familiar with the master.
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Sixteen stories based on the Arthurian tradition, by such authors as John Steinbeck, Jane Yolen, Andre Norton, and others. Also included are a helpful guide to Arthurian names and characters and a bibliography of "100 Years of Arthurian Fiction."
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(20070601)In the 1970s science fiction exploded into the popular consciousness, appearing everywhere along the cultural spectrum—from David Bowie’s alien stage persona to the massively successful global juggernaut that was Star Wars. With the American involvement in Vietnam reaching its bitter conclusion, the Apollo moon program ending, and awareness of humanity’s destructive impact on the environment increasing, our planet began to seem a smaller, lonelier, more fragile place—and the escapist appeal of science fiction grew.
Corresponding with these tumultuous events was a period of significant American economic decline, and, as Mike Ashley shows in Gateways to Forever, the once-enormously-popular science fiction magazines struggled to survive. The third volume of this award-winning series chronicles the publications’ most difficult period so far. The decade began with the death of John Campbell Jr., the man who launched the magazine Astonishing, and with it science fiction’s prominence as a genre. The widespread popularization of sci-fi imagery reflected a newly diversified market—new anthologies, fanzines, role-playing games, comics, and blockbuster films all fought for the attention and money of sci-fi fans. Ashley shows how the traditional magazines coped with these setbacks but also how they, as always, looked to the future, as the decade closed and the earliest precursors to the Internet emerged.
Mike Ashley’s groundbreaking history is a monument to science fiction’s evolution. As the genre continues to infiltrate mainstream literature, Gateways to Forever is essential reading for anyone interested in seeing how it all began.
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With the hilarious "Happy Valley," a story originally written by John Cleese and Connie Booth for Monty Python's Flying Circus, this third volume in an extraordinarily popular Mammoth Book series gets off to a suitably silly start. It continues merrily apace with "Attack of the Charlie Chaplins" by Garry Kilworth, visits "The Strawhouse Pavilion" by Ron Goulart, and takes in "A Bad Day on Mount Olympus" with Marilyn Todd. Along the way it introduces Esther Eisner's "Gunsel and Gretel" and Cherith Baldry's "Broadway Barbarian" and renews acquaintance with F. Anstey's "Ferdie." It bemuses as well as amuses with "A Case of Four Fingers" concocted by John Grant, not to mention "The Absolute and Utter Impossibility of the Facts in the Case of the Vanishing of Henning Vok" from Jack Adrian. And before this wildly comic romp ends, it discovers "Math Takes a Holiday" (Paul Di Filippo) and "Mother Duck Strikes Again" (Craig Shaw Gardner). Fantasy finds broad definition in this wackily comic tour. While some of the stories approach the domain of science fiction, others are lodged in an everyday reality. None of them, though, fails to entertain. Together, the more than thirty selections -- thirteen of them brand-new and the balance of them often rare finds or forgotten gems -- provide a fresh sampling of comic genius in the sphere of fantasy fiction and a wide range of tales to suit every taste in humor.
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A new collection of the very best fairy stories, from the works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to that of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Selected contemporary authors offer a new take on some old tales. Illustrated throughout with drawings specially commissioned for the book. The Introduction chronicles the history and literary perspective of the fairy tale.
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Mike Ashley is back with an all-new edition of one of the bestselling Mammoth Books ever, from the funniest writers in the field, including Neil Gaiman, Tom Holt, and Terry Jones. The thirty- five off-the-wall comic fantasies featured in Ashley's new collection are a mix of specially written stories and hard-to-find gems: a computer salesman in fairyland, a vampire football match, a psychotic Father Christmas, and a wizard allergic to magic. Ashley expertly turns fantasy and horror fiction on its head and magic into mayhem. This is huge fun for all comic fantasy fans.
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Twenty leading science fiction authors, including Stephen Baxter, Brian W. Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, and Connie Willis, chronicle the changes and surprises that might befall humanity in the centuries to come. Is the ultimate Utopia heaven or hell? asks Robert Sheckley in his "A Ticket to Tranai." In "The Infinite Assassin," Greg Egan polices the multiverse for murderers of their alternate selves. Geoffrey A. Landis plumbs the depths of a black hole in "Approaching Perimelasma." These and other stories by James White, Eric Frank Russell, Robert Reed, H. Beam Piper, H. Chandler Elliott, and many others make this one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking science fiction anthologies in light-years.
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Supernatural fiction continues to be of interest to modern readers, though many of the most frequently anthologized ghost stories were written during the Victorian era. Because so much supernatural fiction has been published as short stories, anthologies have long been a useful means of bringing supernatural literature to the readers. This reference is the first index to all known anthologies of supernatural, fantasy, and weird fiction. Included are entries for more than 2,100 anthologies from 1813 to the present. Many of these anthologies have never been listed previously in bibliographies, and the volume even includes citations for rare Victorian works. Entries provide original publication sources for reprinted stories, including many from obscure magazines not previously indexed. The book also provides birth and death dates and pseudonyms for more than 7,700 authors of supernatural fiction. Citations may be accessed by editor, author, book title, or story title. Also included is a listing of the contents of each anthology.
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Three dozen mystery writers—among them Elizabeth Peters, Edward D. Hoch, Tom Holt, Margaret Frazer, Susanna Gregory, Derek Wilson, Marilyn Todd, and Michael Jecks—contrive deadly conundrums in the original stories commissioned especially for the volume. Its chilling, suspenseful pages include lethal doings in old Byzantium, the case of a serial killer loose in Elizabethan London, and terror in Celtic Wales, while inexplicable killings in medieval Sherwood Forest make sleuths of Robin Hood and Maid Marion and a perplexing murder in ancient Rome turns the orator Quintilian into Perry Mason. Readers of the immensely popular first Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits will welcome back Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder and his occasional employer, the lawyer Cicero (in a story never collected before in book form), Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma in medieval Ireland, and Mary Reed and Eric Mayer's John the Eunuch, the Emperor Justinian's Lord Chamberlain. Edward Hoch, Keith Taylor, and Cherith Baldry also turn such familiar historical figures as Christopher Columbus, John de Mandeville, and Geoffrey Chaucer into detectives in this new Mammoth collection of historical mysteries.
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However you take your fantasy—comic, dark, heroic, or supernatural—your taste will be tantalized by this outstanding collection that brings together in one generous volume originators of this ever-popular genre like George MacDonald and Lord Dunsay; great writers from the golden age of fantasy like Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, and J. R. R. Tolkein, who captivated readers worldwide with The Lord of the Rings; and such contemporary masters of the craft as Terry Pratchett, Michael Moorcock, David Eddings, David Gemmell, Tanith Lee, and Ursula K. LeGuin. Compiled by Mike Ashley, the esteemed editor of the popular Mammoth Comic Fantasy trilogy, this new Mammoth anthology explores the realms of the bizarre, extraordinary, and impossible in more than two dozen ingeniously fashioned tales. Among them stand such classics as Theodore Sturgeon's "Yesterday Was Monday," in which a man wakes to discover he has lost more than a Tuesday; Cleveland Moffett's "The Mysterious Card," a tale chillingly and brilliantly contrived out of opposing perceptions; and "The Wall Around the World," Theodore Cogswell's story of a young boy who masters flight in order to escape the world that has entrapped him. Offering a wide and varied selection of fantasy tales, Mike Ashley's newest anthology promises adventures, journeys, passages, and quests sure to delight readers of every type of fantasy fiction—from the ardent fans of J. R. R. Tolkein to the exuberant followers of Harry Potter.
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'In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Hugo Gernsback, and the start of a serious study of the contribution he made to the development of science fiction. . . . It seemed to me that the time was due to reinvestigate the Gernsback era and dig into the facts surrounding the origins of Amazing Stories. I wanted to find out exactly why Hugo Gernsback had launched the magazine, what he was trying to achieve, and to consider what effects he had-good and bad. . . . Too many writers and editors from the Gernsback days have been unjustly neglected, or unfairly criticized. Now, I hope, Robert A. W. Lowndes and I have provided the grounds for a fair consideration of their efforts, and a true reconstruction of the development of science fiction. It's the closest to time travel you'll ever get. I hope you enjoy the trip.'-Mike Ashley, Preface
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After the runaway success of The Pendragon Chronicles, Mike Ashley brings together further stories of heroism and virtue from the age of the Knights of the Round Table, written by some of fantasy's bestselling authors, as well as famous names from literature.
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