David Agranoff

100 years of Amazing stories and the Pulitzer Prize for a Genre Novel. When the official 100th birthday of Amazing Stories hit in April, we celebrated in style here in San Diego. Philip Fracassi, me, KC Grifant, Gideon Marcus, Jac Jemc, Jonathan Maberry, and Cody Goodfellow. Far from Gernsbeck’s office at 53 Park Place in New York City, the magazine created in that humble building (still standing) was a window to the universe.

With my last column written in 2025, I wanted to highlight some works of excellent speculative fiction that might normally get overlooked. If I were going to list the best pure best of science fiction novels, it would be filled with titles like A Mountainin the Sea by Ray Nayler, Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn, Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson… All fantastic books that were bestsellers, won, and were nominated for awards.

We have to talk about Robert Bloch in the column. The list of Science Fiction writers who have enough short story output that they could call Philip K. Dick lazy. Robert Bloch was one of the few. Robert Bloch is an author most commonly remembered as the author of one novel. This is understandable. When you wrote a novel like Psycho, yes, that Psycho, made into one of Hitchcock’s greatest classics, you become Robert Bloch – the author of Psycho.