Fantasy Masterworks 2000

File Updated: 14/12/00

New Fantasy Masterworks Titles 2000

John Crowley Little, Big Pbk published May 2000 by Millenium at Ł6.99 ISBN: 1-85798-711-X

Edgewood is many houses, all put inside each other, or across each other. It's filled with and surrounded by mystery and enchantment: the further in you go, the bigger it gets.
Smoky Barnable, who has fallen in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, comes to Edgewood, her family home, where he finds himself drawn into a world of magical strangeness.
Crowley's work has a special alchemy - mixing the world we know with an imagined world which seems more true and real. Winner of the World Fantasy Award, Little, Big is eloquent, sensual, funny and unforgettable.
'A book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy' Ursula K. Le Guin
'Crowley is generous, obsessed, fascinating, gripping. Really, I think Crowley is so good that he has left everybody else in the dust' Peter Straub
'Ambitious, dazzling, strangely moving, a marvellous magic-realist family chronicle' Washington Post
'John Crowley writes sentences of such coruscating magnificence that the rest of the English language has fallen in love with them. I once knew an adverbial clause who was so infatuated with the linguistic beauty of Little, Big that the poor creature pined away into a comma.' James Morrow, author of The Eternal Footman
'One of my favourite works of modem fantasy, Little, Big is an amazing tale told in an amazing way. Reading it I felt as if I were watching a high-wire artist: one slip and he would fall into the dreadful net of Twee. Yet Crowley never slips, not upon a single word, and the book grows more powerful with every page.' Katharine Kerr
'One of the shaping minds of the late-20th century literature of the fantastic' The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
About The Author
John Crowley was born in 1942. Although he was working in documentary film and television from 1966, his first novel, The Deep, was not published until 1975. He has published sporadically ever since, although every novel has received universal critical acclaim and he is recognised as one of the most significant contributors to modern fantasy. His most I recent novel was Love & Sleep (1994), the second book in a projected quartet which started with Aegypt (1987).

Titles by John Crowley at Amazon.co.uk

L.Sprague de Camp The Compleat Enchanter Pbk published October 2000 by Millenium at Ł6.99 ISBN: 1-85798-757-8

With Fletcher Pratt
The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea
The Mathematics of Magic: the greatest discovery of the ages ... at least, that's what Professor Harold Shea thought. With the proper equations he could instantly transport himself and his friend Reed Chalmers to other times, to visit the wondrous lands of ancient legend.
But Shea's magic did not always work - at least, not quite as he expected. A dragon spell might result in a hundred dragons or, even worse, one tenth of a dragon. And the imaginary lands to which he travelled, from the Castle of Otranto to the Norseland of Odin and Thor, held countless dangers that not even Professor Shea could predict.
'Whimsy and fantasy mingled with genius. Lighthearted tales that stand the test of time and rank among the best ever told.' Raymond E. Feist
'The book that introduced me to fantasy and the marvellous concept of scientifically rigorous magic - and a delightful romp with two of fantasy's finest characters, Harold Shea and Doc Chalmers. Worth falling in love with all over again’ Holly Lisle
About The Author
L. Sprague de Camp was born in 1907. He studied aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, graduating with a Masters Degree In 1933. His first story, 'The Isolinguals', was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1937. He struck up a highly productive friendship with John W Campbell Jr. when the latter became editor of the magazine, and de Camp soon became a central figure of the 'Golden Age of SF' during the '40s and '50s. He also published extensively in the magazine's fantasy counterpart Unknown. During the war he worked with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov as a Naval Reservist in the Philadelphia Naval Yard. From the 1950s he increasingly focused on fantasy, editing and adding to Robert E. Howard's Conan series as well as writing his own novels. As well as writing non?fiction on the sword and sorcery genre, he published biographies of H.P. Lovecraft (Lovecraft: A Biography (1975)) and Robert E. Howard (Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard (1983)). De Camp has always acknowledged that much of his work has been written in collaboration with his own wife, Catherine Adelaide Crook de Camp, whom he married in 1939, and who died in April 2000.
A writer and historian, Fletcher Pratt was born in 1897. He worked as a writer and translator of German SF in the early 1930s as well as writing a steady stream of non?fiction. Pratt's first published story was 'The Octopus Cycle' for Amazing Stories in 1928. He collaborated extensively with L. Sprague de Camp on a variety of fantasy stories for Unknown in the late '30s and early '40s, most famously the Harold Shea sequence. Following World War II, the two worked together briefly on some further sequels to The Incomplete Enchanter, as well as a series of tall tales collected as Tales from Gavagan's Bar (1953). Pratt also wrote two solo fantasy novels, The Well of the Unicorn (1948) and The Blue Star (1969). He wrote extensively about the US Civil War, and the Fletcher Pratt Award, for the best book on the Civil War, commemorates him. He died in 1956.

Titles by L.Sprague de Camp at Amazon.co.uk

Lord Dunsany Time and the Gods Pbk published March 2000 by Millenium at Ł6.99 ISBN: 1-85798-989-9

See Review by Jay Russell - one of the greatest talents the horror industry has produced for some time… (Black Tears)
Of all the weavers of magic, there is none like Lord Dunsany. During his long lifetime he wrote more than sixty books: novels, plays, poetry collections, memoirs, essays and, most memorably, innumerable exotic and fantastical short stories.
In this definitive collection are the very best of Dunsany's extraordinarily evocative tales of Faerie, of dream-worlds and of magic: some of the loveliest fantasies in the English language, including the complete contents of Time and the Gods, The Book of Wonder, The Sword of Welleran and The Last Book of Wonder.
Fantasy Masterworks is a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written. These are the books which, along with Tolkien, Peake and others, shaped modern fantasy.
'To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream' H.P. Lovecraft
'One of the greatest writers of this century' Arthur C. Clarke
'Lord Dunsany's work is immensely significant as well as enjoyable even today' Katharine Kerr
About The Author
Lord Dunsany (1878-1957). Born in London of an Anglo-Irish family that could trace its roots back to the twelfth century, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany was a globetrotter, sportsman, hunter, poet, playwright and chessplayer. He wrote The Gods of Pegana in 1904, which became an unexpected success d'estime and was followed by several collections which have been an inspiration for modern fantasy writers.

Titles by Lord Dunsany at Amazon.co.uk

E.R. Eddison The Worm Ouroboros Pbk published April 2000 by Millenium at Ł6.99 ISBN: 1-85798-993-7

When J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was published, reviewers saw that there was only one book with which it could legitimately be compared: E.R. Eddison's classic fantasy adventure The Worm Ouroboros.
Set on a distant planet of spectacular beauty and peopled by Lords and Kings, mighty warriors and raven-haired temptresses, Eddison's extravagant story, of a great war for total domination, is a work of unforgettable splendour.
'Mr Eddison is a vast man. He needed a whole cosmos to play in, and created one; and he forged a prose to tell of it that is as gigantic as his tale.' James Stephens
'It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him the sense of having opened a door on wonder. One had thought those days were past. Eddison's heroic romances disproved it. In a word, his books are works, first and foremost, of art.' C S Lewis
'I find here - in his finest, his purest, and his most romantic vein - the finest living writer of pure fantasy.’ James Branch Cabell
'A miraculous poetic epic of sorcery and swordsmanship, of heroism and the blackest of villainy. The Worm Ouroboros is the greatest high fantasy of them all.' Robert Silverberg
'A masterpiece of hedonism ... can still shock an audience' The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
About The Author
Eric Rucker Eddison was born in 1812 in England. He worked in the civil service, and was a keen scholar of Old Norse - his fourth book (Egil's Saga, 1930) was a well-respected translation from Icelandic. His first novel was The Worm Ouroboros, published in 1922. His next three fantasy novels were set in the world of Zimiamvia, loosely connected to that of the Worm. Although he knew both Lewis and Tolkien, his work is often considered quite separate from theirs, lacking the sense of moral resolution which was so important to their respective series. His last novel, The Mezentian Gate, was unfinished at the time of his death although it was published, along with his notes on the ending, in 1958. Despite his relative anonymity when compared to Tolkien and Lewis, he has remained a firm favourite with genre readers. In a readers' poll conducted this year by Random House in the US, The Worm Ouroboros appeared in the top 50, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Lovecraft, Salinger, Huxley and E Scott Fitzgerald.

Titles by E.R. Eddison at Amazon.co.uk

M John Harrison Viriconium Pbk published July 2000 by Millenium at Ł7.99 ISBN: 1-85798-995-3

Viriconium: the Pastel City was the last bastion of the civilised world, where Queen Methvet Nian ruled supreme.
In Viriconium, the young men whistle to one another all night long as they go about their deadly games, if you wake suddenly, you might hear footsteps running, or an urgent sigh. After a minute or two, the whistles move away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. The next day, some lordling is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut. Who can tell fantasy from reality, magic from illusion, hero from villain, man from monster... in Viriconium?
'In the best tradition of the finest writing, Viriconium is universal and particular together. It is the ultimate city, the very essence of what we understand such a collection of buildings, thoroughfares, monuments, institutions, concerns, inhabitants, lives and fates to be.' Iain Banks
'exemplary fictions of unease shot through with poetic insight and most beautifully written.' Angela Carter
'Viriconium is a scintillating kaleidoscope of cities.' Observer
'Beautifully written and disconcertingly haunting.' Time Out
'The fantasy is grounded in M. John Harrison's sense of reality... It is lifelike. It is also written in the kind of prose which, as when you tap a nail on a crystal glass, never rings false.' Guardian
'A witty and truly imaginative writer.' Literary Review
About The Author
M. John Harrison was born in 1945. His first story appeared in 1966, and he subsequently became closely involved in the magazine New Worlds during the late sixties, when it was under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. As well as writing stories he also wrote criticism for the magazine, and spent some time as its literary editor. His first published novel was The Committed Men (1971). The Pastel City was the first of his books about Viriconium, and he revisited the city several times during the eighties. His fifth book, In Viriconium, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and his sixth, Climbers, won the Boardman Tasker Award in 1989. In 1999 he received the Richard Evans Award. He has written for several periodicals including the Spectator, and currently reviews new fiction for the TLS. M. John Harrison lives in South London.

Titles by M John Harrison at Amazon.co.uk

Robert E. Howard The People of the Black Circle Pbk published August 2000 by Millenium at Ł7.99 ISBN: 1-85798-996-1

The Conan Chronicles Volume 1
Conan the Cimmerian: he rose from boy?thief and mercenary to become king of Aquilonia. Neither supernatural fiends nor demonic sorcery could oppose the barbarian warrior as he wielded his mighty sword and dispatched his enemies to a bloody doom on the battlefields of the legendary Hyborian Age.
Collected together for the first time anywhere in the world, in chronological order, are all Robert E. Howard's definitive stories of Conan, exactly as he wrote them, as fresh, atmospheric and vibrant today as when they were first published in the pulp magazines more than sixty years ago.
Fantasy Masterworks is a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written. These are the books, which along with Tolkien, Peake and others, shaped modern fantasy.
'Howard was the Thomas Wolfe of fantasy, and most of his Conan tales seem to almost fall over themselves in their need to get out' Stephen King
A hero of mythic proportion, fashioned by a storyteller who helped define what a modern fantasy should be. 'Rogues in the House' is one of the finest tales of sword and sorcery ever written.' Raymond E. Feist
'Howard's writing seems so highly charged with energy it nearly gives off sparks' Stephen King
'Conan is the barbarian hero to end all barbarian heroes; his later imitations seem pallid by comparison.' L. Sprague de Camp
'Pure adventure yarns with a touch of weirdness' H.P. Lovecraft
'Conan has remained Howard's most popular character' Karl Edward Wagner
About The Author
Robert Ervin Howard (1906?1936) was born and raised in rural Texas, where he lived all his life. The son of a pioneer physician, he began writing professionally at fifteen. Written between 1932 and 1935, Howard's twenty?one adventures of Conan will be collected into two Fantasy Masterworks volumes. Howard killed himself in June 1936, on learning that his beloved mother had slipped into a terminal coma.

Titles by Robert E. Howard at Amazon.co.uk

Hope Mirrlees Lud-In-The-Mist Pbk published November 2000 by Millenium at Ł7.99 ISBN: 1-85798-767-5

Lud was a prosperous, bustling little country port, situated at the confluence of two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl. But the Dapple had its roots in the land of Faerie, beyond the Elfin Marches and the Debatable lands to the West, which was a great trial to Lud, a town that had long ago rejected any such fanciful nonsense as ‘fairies’ and ‘elves’ and the like.
But when a plague of faerie influences hits the town, steps must be taken. Fortunately for Lud its Mayor, Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, is a man with his head firmly in the clouds.
‘The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century. ‘ Neil Gaiman
‘A Shakespearian tragi-comedy, a murder mystery, and a multi-faceted allegory all in one: and a damn good story, too…’ Mary Gentle
‘A minor classic . . . Hope Mirrlees’ writing, usually underrated, moves between gently crazy humour, poetic snatches, real menace and real poignancy’ Encyclopedia of Fantasy
‘The tone is assured and urbane, with aphorisms dripping from every other sentence and a real sense of the menacing and the bizarre. It has been a major influence on genre fantasy since its republication in the late 1960s’ Roz Kaveney, Cambridge Guide to Women Writers
About The Author
Hope Mirrlees was born in 1887 in England. A scholar and translator, she published three novels during the twenties of which Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is the most well known. She lived and worked with Jane Ellen Harrison, the classical scholar, from about 1921 onwards. Mifflees did not publish for a long while after Harrison’s death in 1928 - her only subsequent piece of work was the first volume of a biography of Cotton the Antiquarian (A Fly in Amber 1962). Since its republication in the 1960s, Lud-in-the-Mist has been hugely influential on genre fantasy. She died in 1978.

Titles by Hope Mirrlees at Amazon.co.uk

Jack Vance Tales of the Dying Earth Pbk published April 2000 by Millenium at Ł7.99 ISBN: 1857989945

'A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite and the sun is feeble and red. A million cities have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples, a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth ... Earth is dying ...
Travel to a far distant future, where magic and science are one, and the Earth has but a few short decades to live. Here, in one volume, is Jack Vance's masterpiece, the Dying Earth saga, comprising The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga and Rhialto the Marvellous.
Fantasy Masterworks is a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written. These are the books which, along with Tolkien, Peake and others, shaped modern fantasy.
‘One of the best and most influential fantasy works of the 20th century.' Terry Pratchett
"A modern classic by one of the great fantasy and science fiction writers of the 20th century. A rare tale of an Earth so far in the future as to be nearly unrecognisable to the contemporary reader.’ Raymond E. Feist
'A complete world which springs up fully-formed from its own fragments. Anyone who wants to understand fantasy should begin here, at the End of Time.' M. John Harrison
'Jack Vance is one of the greatest image-makers of English letters' Frank Herbert
'Endless inventiveness ... superb style ... one of the very best writers we have' Poul Anderson
'Jack Vance has been for half a century central to both sf and fantasy. He has a genius of place' Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
'Nobody paints the kind of pictures of worlds and societies that Jack Vance does' P. Schuyler Miller, Analog
About The Author
Jack Vance is the version of his name used by John Holbrook Vance. Vance was born in 1916 in the US. He studied engineering, physics and journalism at the University of California. During WWII he served in the Merchant Navy and was torpedoed twice. He wrote his first SF story during the war, and published it in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1945. For the rest of the forties and early fifties he published a considerable amount of short fiction in the pulp magazines. His first novel, The Dying Earth (1950) was influenced heavily by the work of Clark Ashton Smith. Vance has continued to write of increasingly elaborate and highly individual worlds ever since. His first SF award was a Hugo for the novella The Dragon Masters, published in 1963 The Last Castle (1966) was to win both a Nebula and a Hugo in 1966 and 1967 respectively. The most notable of his sequences have been the 'Demon Princes' series (published between 1964 and 1981), the 'Alastor' sequence (1973-'978) and more recently, the Lyonesse stories, the third of which, Madouc, won the World Fantasy Award in 1990. Vance has also written several detective novels, one of which, The Man in the Cage (1960) won an Edgar Award. Given his large body of work, it is not surprising that Vance has received both the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement award (1984) and the Grand Master Nebula for Lifetime Achievement (1996).

Titles by Jack Vance at Amazon.co.uk

Gene Wolfe The Book of the New Sun (Vol 1) Pbk published March 2000 by Millenium at Ł7.99 ISBN: 1-85798-977-5

Recently voted the greatest fantasy of all time after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is an extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, on an Earth transformed in mysterious and wondrous ways.
Severian is a torturer, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his victims, and now journeying to the distant city of Thrax, armed with his ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est. This edition contains The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, the first two volumes of this four volume novel.
'The first two volumes of one of the greatest novels ever written’ Kim Stanley Robinson
'The books are chests full of wonders; full of images like jewels, of words a reader can get drunk on, of people and incidents that will linger long in memory. For years and years to come, I think, we'll see inferior imitations of Wolfe's masterpiece decked out with the phrase "'In the tradition of Wolfe", for that is the tribute all great originals are inevitably paid' George R. R. Martin
'An accomplishment which must justify itself by nothing less than total success… What results is a… page-turningly tense and ominously dark narrative' Algis Budrys
'The first volume of a masterpiece. Gene Wolfe is a wizard, a torturer, frightening, delightful. Beware! This is magic stuff!… Totally original, new, incomparable’ Ursula K. Le Guin
'One expects any book from Gene Wolfe to be a classic and here it is ... Dark, daunting, and thoroughly believable.' Thomas M. Disch
'In fantasy, as in SF, Gene Wolfe's originality lies in the sense that - more thoroughly than almost any of his contemporaries - he is in the process of finishing the stories he tells. His work signals the late maturity of the genres he graces' The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
'One of the great science fantasy epics of all time' George R.R. Martin
About The Author
Gene Wolfe was born in 1931 in New York but raised in Texas. He Served in the Korean War and afterwards studied mechanical engineering. Apart from the Fifth Head of Cerberus his major work is the four-volume Book of the New Sun. The encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as 'quite possible the most important author in the SF field today'.
In 1972 Gene Wolfe became editor of an engineering periodical. His first story ('The Dead Man') appeared in 1965, after he had already been writing for some time. During the 60s and the 70s Wolfe wrote a large number of short stories, many of which were published in Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies. In 1973 'The Death of Doctor Island', part of a quartet of stories later collected as The Wolfe Archipelago in 1983, won a Nebula award. His first novel (Operation Ares) was published in 1970, but was heavily cut by the publisher. His second novel was The Fifth Head of Cerberus, published in 1972. In 1980, he started to publish a long sequence of novels called The Book of The New Sun, beginning with The Shadow of the Torturer (1980). The final book in the sequence was The Citadel of the Autarch (1983), although there followed a sequel in 1987 ( The Urth of the New Sun). Of these books, The Shadow of the Torturer won a World Fantasy Award and The Claw of the Conciliator (1981) won a Nebula. He wrote several more novels before starting on a new sequence in 1993 called The Book of The Long Sun.

Titles by Gene Wolfe at Amazon.co.uk

Roger Zelazny The Chronicles of Amber Pbk published June 2000 by Millenium at Ł7.99 ISBN: 1-85798-726-8

Amber is the one real world, casting infinite reflections of itself - shadow worlds, which can be manipulated by those of royal Amberite blood. But the royal family is torn apart by jealousies and suspicion; the disappearance of the patriarch Oberon has intensified the internal conflict by leaving the throne apparently up for grabs; and amnesia has robbed Corwin, Crown Prince of Amber his memory - even the fact that he is rightful heir to the throne.
The Chronicles of Amber is Zelazny's finest fantasy, a grand imaginative vision of alternate worlds, magic, swordplay, and murderous rivalries.
‘Zelazny's stories are fabulous! I genuinely envy anyone who has not read them and is about to.’ Theodore Sturgeon
‘Zelazny, telling of gods and wizards, uses magical words as if he himself were a wizard.’ Philip Jose Farmer
‘The Amber series is daring and magnificent’ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
'His stories are sunk to the knees in maturity and wisdom, in bravura writing that breaks rules most writers only suspect exist. His concepts are fresh, his attacks bold, his resolutions generally trenchant' Harlan Ellison
'Roger Zelazny can be as realistic as Hemingway, as fanciful as Kenneth Graham; he is by turns a hard-nosed naturalist and a poet of exquisite sensibility' Thomas Burnett Swann
'Inventive, incident-packed... fascinating' Kirkus
'Brilliant' Publishers Weekly
About The Author
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama at Columbia University. Few writers have made a more immediate impact on SF than Zelazny, each of whose first three novels won a major sf award. Altogether, in the course of his career, he won six Hugo awards and three Nebula awards. Born in Ohio in 1937, he lived for most of his writing life in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Roger Zelazny's first published story was 'Passion Play' which appeared in Amazing Stories in 1962, the same year he graduated from Columbia with his MA. For the next five years, Zelazny was a prolific writer, sometimes resorting to the pseudonym of Harrison Denmark. He rose quickly to prominence, winning Nebula awards in 1965 for 'He Who Shapes' (published in 1966 as The Dream Master) and 'The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth'. He followed this with a Hugo award in 1966 for the novel This Immortal (originally titled '...And Call Me Conrad'). In 1967 he started writing full time. That year he published Lord of Light, which went on to win a Hugo in 1968. His 1969 novel Damnation Alley was adapted as a film of the same name in 1977. During the 70s he started to focus more on his fantasy sequence, the Amber series, although he never stopped writing SF. His short fiction continued to receive acclaim; he received a Hugo and a Nebula for 'Home is the Hangman' in 1976, and further Hugos for 'Twenty-Four views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai' in 1986, 'Unicorn Variation' in 1982 and 'Permafrost' in 1987. He died in 1995.

Titles by Roger Zelazny at Amazon.co.uk