Tag Archives: Haffner Press

Haffner Press Announces Unpublished Manly Wade Wellman Story

If you’re on the mailing list for Haffner Press, you got this in your inbox a little while ago. If you aren’t and are a Manly Wade Wellman fan, you’ll want to see this.

In This Issue:

March 7, 2019

• • • PRESS RELEASE • • •

“Not All a Dream”

An unpublished Manly Wade Wellman story
to be shipped with preorders of
THE COMPLETE JOHN THE BALLADEER

Haffner Press is pleased to announce the upcoming release of an unpublished story by Manly Wade Wellman. Originally commissioned for the never released anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, “Not All a Dream” opens with poet/politician Lord Byron (1788-1824) musing over the status of his literary canon in years to come. Admiring the lasting legacy of John Milton, Byron accepts an offer to learn the truce place of his works in centuries hence—a nightmare vision gained by traveling into a dangerous future . . .

How can you get a copy of this story? Well, if you’ve placed a preorder for Manly Wade Wellman’s two-volume omnibus THE COMPLETE JOHN THE BALLADEER, then you’re already set to receive it! (Congratulations, you wise, prescient reader!)

Otherwise, you have between now and the release of THE COMPLETE JOHN THE BALLADEER on October 31, 2019 at the World Fantasy Convention in Los Angeles to place a preorder and receive “Not All a Dream” as an exclusive 32-page chapbook at no additional charge.

Manly Wade Wellman

Manly Wade Wellman’s

“Not All a Dream”

A 32-page chapbook shipping
exclusively with preordered copies of:

THE COMPLETE
JOHN THE BALLADEER
Two 600+ page Smythe-sewn Hardcovers
Cover art by Raymond Swanland
Release Date: October 31, 2019

Pre-Order price: $90

Stories:
“O Ugly Bird!”
“The Desrick on Yandro”
“Vandy, Vandy”
“One Other”
“Call Me from the Valley”
“The Little Black Train”
“Shiver in the Pines”
“Walk Like a Mountain”
“On the Hills and Everywhere”
“Old Devlins Was A-Waiting”
“Nine Yards of Other Cloth”
“Then I Wasn’t Alone”
“You Know the Tale of Hoph”
“Blue Monkey”
“The Stars Down There”
“Find the Place Yourself”
“I Can’t Claim That”
“Who Else Could I Count On”
“John’s My Name”
“Why They’re Named That”
“None Wiser for the Trip”
“Nary Spell”
“Trill Coster’s Burden”
“The Spring”
“Owls Hoot in the Daytime”
“Can These Bones Live?”
“Nobody Ever Goes There”
“Where Did She Wander?”

Novels
The Old Gods Waken (1979)
After Dark (1980)
The Lost and the Lurking (1981)
The Hanging Stones (1982)
The Voice of the Mountain (19

That’s it for now. To ensure that you continue to receive this newsletter, be sure to add haffnerpress@sbcglobal.net and info@haffnerpress.com to your email reader’s “safe list.” And, remember, shipping is FREE in the continental United States. Alaska, Hawaii and International orders should email us at info@haffnerpress.com for shipping rate quotes. You have been warned!

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Copyright © 2019 HAFFNER PRESS
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• Keep Watching the Skies! •

Haffner Press Announces the Complete John the Balladeer

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Haffner Press announced earlier today via email newsletter that The Complete John the Balladeer will be released next year at the 2019 World Fantasy Convention in Los Angeles. The cover on the left may not be the final cover. This will be a two volume set containing all the short stories as well as the five novels. The novels have been out of print since the middle of the 1980s and are hard to come by.

The current preorder price is $90 for the two volume set.

The newsletter also said all but one or two of the outstanding projects will be published this year. I hope that turns out to be the case.

Regardless, I thought some of you would be interested. I don’t normally do two posts in one day, but this was announced today. I have something else planned for tomorrow.

Announcing The Vampire Stories of Robert Bloch

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If you get the Haffner Press newsletter in your inbox, then you already know about this. But if don’t (and why not, I might add), then you’ll want to know.

One of the greatest writers of the macabre in the 20th Century was Robert Bloch. I’ve written about him before. Like here. And here. And here. While he will probably always be best known as the author of Psycho, Bloch was many other things as well, including but not limited to a master of the short form. a member of the Lovecraft circle, and an accomplished screenwriter.

Haffner Press has announced The Vampire Stories of Robert Bloch. Tentative publication date is sometime next year. Here’s the table of contents: Continue reading →

Blogging Brackett: “The Dragon-Queen of Venus”

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“The Dragon-Queen of Venus”
Originally published as “The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter”
Planet Stories, Summer 1941

This one is an early tale by Brackett, one of her first. And while it isn’t as polished as some of her later work, and certainly doesn’t have the depth of her longer and better known stories, you can still see the writer she would become.

The story concerns a group of soldiers manning a besieged outpost in the early days of Terran settlement on Venus. They’re running low on everything: food, fresh water, ammunition, personnel. They’re sort of a French Foreign Legion in space; at one point the commander makes a statement that no one knows anyone else’s real name. The viewpoint character is from Texas, and of course everyone calls him Tex. Continue reading →

Blogging Brackett: “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon”

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“The Sorcerer of Rhiannon”
Astounding February 1942

“The Sorcerer of Rhiannon” predates The Sea-Kings of Mars AKA The Sword of Rhiannon by seven years. Other than the word “Rhiannon” in the title, there doesn’t appear to be much connection between the two, at least on the surface. But the seeds of the later work can be seen in “Sorcerer” if one takes the time to look. Spoiler Alert for both stories.

In this story archeologist Max Brandon is searching for the mythical Lost Islands in one of the dry sea bottoms of Mars. He’s trying to outrace a lawman intent on arresting him, a rival from Venus intent on beating him to the find, and a woman intent on marrying him. Lost in a sandstorm, he stumbles upon the remains of an ancient ship. There he finds a room that has been sealed for ages and takes shelter in it.

The room isn’t empty, nor does it and the contents look as old as they must be. A man and a woman sit across a table from each other. About the man’s head is a metal band. The woman isn’t human, but Brandon recognizes her as a member of an extinct race called the Prira Cen. She’s wearing a golden girdle over a white tunic and a ring. The Prira Cen died out forty thousand years earlier when the Lost Islands were the dominant power on Mars. Both the man and the woman appear to be alive but in some sort of stasis. Continue reading →

Happy 100th Birthday, Leigh Brackett

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So today is the centennial of Leigh Brackett’s birth. If you’ve paid any attention to this blog in the last few weeks, you know that I’ve been making a big deal of that and will continue to do so.

Some of you good people might be wondering: So just who was this Leigh Brackett person and why was she so important?

I’m glad you asked. Continue reading →

RIP, Jon Arfstrom 1928-2015

New Leigh Brackett Story Announced!

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I just preordered this! This year is the centennial of Leigh Brackett’s birth. I’m ashamed to say I missed that.

Fortunatley, Stephen Haffner is on the ball and has prepared a book to mark the occasion. It contains an unpublished story as well her nonfiction and interviews with a number of friends. You can order your copy here.

If the style of the lettering on the book is familiar, there’s a reason for that. Before her untimely death from cancer in 1978, Leigh wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. She also wrote the screenplays for the films The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Rio Bravo starring John Wayne.

Brackett brought a hard boiled sensibility to her tales of outer space adventure. Haffner Press is to be thanked for bringing her work back in high quality archival format. Many of Haffner’s Brackett titles are out of print, but check out the ones that aren’t. And order Leigh Brackett Centennial before all the hardcore Star Wars fans find out about it and buy up all the copies.

Henry Kuttner at 100

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One of my all-time favorite writers was born 100 years ago on this date. Henry Kuttner was a prolific author who wrote in multiple genres. Kuttner started out writing Lovecraft pastiche for Weird Tales.

Kuttner mentored Ray Bradbury and wrote the ending to Bradbury’s “The Candle” when Bradbury got stuck. In the introduction to the Ballatine/Del Rey edition of The Best of Henry Kuttner (there was a 2 volume British edition by the same name with more and different stories), Bradbury says in reference to “The Graveyard Rats” that Kuttner didn’t want to be remembered as a minor league Lovecraft. That’s a paraphrase, as I don’t have the book here with me. I looked at “The Graveyard Rats” on Kuttner’s birthday last year. Continue reading →

Moore Than Just a Kuttner Kornucopia

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Detour to Otherness
Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
Cover art by Richard Powers
Introduction by Robert Silverberg
Afterward by Frederik Pohl
Haffner Press
Hardcover $40, limited edition hardcover $150

In the history of the science fiction and fantasy fields, there have been few authors as versatile as the husband and wife team of Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore. This is especially true at short lengths. (Since Kuttner was an early mentor of Ray Bradbury, this is hardly surprising.)

In the early 1960s, Ballantine Books published two collections of their work, Bypass to Otherness and Return to Otherness. Stephen Haffner states on the page for Detour to Otherness that a third volume was planned but never published. I’ve never heard this before, but I’m more than willing to take his word for it.

The first two Otherness titles contain selections from several of Kuttner’s most popular and well-remembered series. The Hogbens are represented, as is Galloway Gallegher, a scientific genius but only when he’s drunk. Also included is the first of the Baldy stories that comprised the mosaic novel Mutant. They don’t have some of his best known stories, which may not have been available at the time because they were in another book from a different publisher (Line to Tomorrow, Bantam), but this is one of the best samplings of Kuttner and Moore’s work.

Haffner has assembled enough stories for a third collection and combined them in the present volume. That section of the book is called Detour to Otherness, which is also the title of the omnibus.

Haffner had nothing to do with the selections in Bypass and Return, he was responsible to the stories in Detour. Thus, while critiquing the choices in the original volumes is a waste of time, it is very much on the strength of the stories in Detour that the volume will rise or fall. None of these stories has appeared in a Kuttner collection before, although most of them have been reprinted somewhere. I’d read almost all of them before. Let’s look at them more closely. Continue reading →

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