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Year: 2013

Three Against the Stars Blasts Off for Intergalactic Adventure

Three Against the Stars Blasts Off for Intergalactic Adventure

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3 against starsn21422Three Against the Stars is the second book I’ve read by Joe Bonadonna. Unlike his sword & sorcery work, this marks a venture into pure space fantasy. My knowledge of the genre is admittedly spotty. I was unfamiliar with the works of Edmond Hamilton and E. E. “Doc” Smith, who are both cited as influences, but part of the joy of genre fiction is that one does not need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all that has gone before since the influences are so pervasive, much of it strikes one as easily recognizable.

This tale of space marines calls to mind the works of Robert Heinlein, while the space war itself strongly reminded me of Malcolm Hulke’s early seventies Doctor Who serial, “Frontier in Space” with the Earth Empire brought to the brink of war with the lizard-like Draconian Empire thanks to acts of terror committed by the apelike Ogrons. What sets Bonadonna’s work apart from so many others who share similar influences is that he is able to authentically capture the fun and innocence without sacrificing intelligent commentary on war and imperialism.

This is an Airship 27 publication and art director Rob Davis does his usual stellar job of ensuring that their titles stand out as the most eye-catching on the market today. Laura Givens’s cover art perfectly captures the space fantasy artwork from publishers like Ace, Lancer, Del Rey, and Ballantine from decades past. Interior black & white illustrations by Pedro Cruz have a classy retro-style that one associates more with slicks than pulps. The decision to go with a more sophisticated style of illustration is well-suited to Bonadonna’s story, which has familiar elements, but offers a more philosophical dimension than one generally finds in pulp fiction.

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New Treasures: Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

New Treasures: Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

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Circus-smallSeems like I’ve done an awful lot of New Treasures posts this week. So I guess one more won’t matter.

Good thing too, because I’m dying to tell you about Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, a new anthology from Ekaterina Sedia and Prime Books.

Have you ever seen a book and wanted it immediately? I mean, you just got the concept instantly, and knew it was what you were looking for?  What am I talking about — of course you have.

Well, that’s what happened with me and Circus. I was innocently browsing on Amazon, shopping for… well, I forget exactly. Anyway, there it was, displayed in 76-pixel glory in the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought widget (and man, the anonymous software engineer who invented that damn thing has cost me a fortune, lemme tell you.)

And I got it: a reprint anthology featuring classic fantasy tales of circuses light and dark. I was sold the moment I laid eyes on the terrific cover by Malgorzata Jasinska (click on the image at right for the full-sized version). Here’s Ekaterina Sedia from her introduction:

We have collected tales of children running away to join the circus and circuses doing the same, stories of circuses not of this world (in all senses of the word), circuses futuristic, nostalgic, filled with existential dread and/or joy. Acts mundane, and spectacular, and incomprehensible. Clowns and extinct animals. Magicians and werewolves. Acrobats and living musical instruments… Because we cannot help but love them — for the sake of the children we once were, or for the sake of the better adults we long to become.

Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top includes tales by Peter Straub, Jeff VanderMeer, Genevieve Valentine, Barry B. Longyear, Howard Waldrop, Neal Barrett Jr, Kij Johnson and many more. Complete Table of Contents after the jump.

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Goth Chick News: Zombies Beat Eight Avengers and One Spider-Man

Goth Chick News: Zombies Beat Eight Avengers and One Spider-Man

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image002Let’s hear it for the home team…

In their continuing bid to rule all media, zombies in the form of The Walking Dead #100 had the best selling comic in North America for 2012.

The biggest success story of the past decade, TWD revitalized the horror genre in comics and spawned a television series that has broken basic-cable records. Back in 2003, creator Robert Kirkman set out to write a book that would show what happens after a zombie movie ends, following a group of survivors as they navigate a treacherous new world and discover that evil doesn’t exist in the dead, but the living.

TWD #100, issued on July 11, 2012 by Image Comics, led the annual list of top-selling comics compiled by Diamond Comic Distributors.  In this installment, Kirkman shocked longtime readers by graphically killing off a key character, ultimately causing the book to sell out and go through three printings due to demand.

Here is the entire top 10 list, outnumbered but not ultimately ruled by Avengers vs. X-Men.

[Spoiler alert after the jump].
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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Assignments and Other Artificial Emergencies

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Assignments and Other Artificial Emergencies

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Binge readers beware!

“Finishing one Henry James novel a week is like trying to chug a pint of Bailey’s Irish Cream a day,” a favorite professor declared when I mentioned the reading pace of another professor’s class. “You can’t absorb it, you certainly can’t enjoy it, you’ll never want to look at it again, and there’s just no need to do that to yourself.” He regarded it as a violence against the books and their author, too, to demand that a class read them at a pace that could only make them repellent.

My mentor’s advice saved me from Henry James, and Henry James from me. I still think of that day often, when my students gorge themselves on dense books they’ve put off reading until their school deadlines are imminent.

For that matter, I think of it some weeks when I face the deadline for this blog column and realize I’m still not ready to talk about Stephen King’s On Writing or whatever other nebulous notion for a post hasn’t quite coalesced yet. The more worthy a book is of patient consideration, the more likely we are to attach some kind of assignment, an artificial emergency, to it.

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Vintage Treasures: The Fox Woman & Other Stories by A. Merritt

Vintage Treasures: The Fox Woman & Other Stories by A. Merritt

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The Fox Woman-smallI’m a pulp fan, and I have been for decades. The next time I’m marooned on a desert island, I’m taking as many magazines from the 1930s and ’40s as I can cram in the life raft.

Pulp novels though… you know, that’s another story. Ask me to name the great fantasy novels of the pulp era, and I run out of air pretty quickly. The fast action and colorful settings of great pulp fiction seem to work best at short length, which maybe explains why the era’s biggest names — H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith — wrote almost exclusively at that length.

Perhaps that also explains why the years have not been kind to the most popular fantasy novelists of the pulp era — Otis Adelbert Kline, Ray Cummings, John Taine, L. Ron Hubbard, Ralph Milne Farley. All were prolific novelists before the end of World War II and virtually all are long out of print.

That’s especially true of the man who was perhaps the biggest name in pulp fantasy: A. Merritt. For decades, his name on the cover of a pulp magazine guaranteed sales in the hundreds of thousands and his novels remained in print late into the ’70s.

I first tried Merritt at the age of fourteen — already a pulp fan, I’d read more than a few breathless reviews of his work from several sources. I found a copy of his 1931 novel, The Face in the Abyss, in the spinning racks of a used book store in Ottawa and snatched it up with considerable excitement… which quickly turned to disappointment.

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New Treasures: The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock

New Treasures: The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock

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The Aylesford Skull-smallJames P. Blaylock is something of a hero to Steampunk fans. We don’t go so far as to say he invented the genre single-handed, but he was definitely in the laboratory when Igor threw the switch and it took its first lumbering steps.

I first encountered Blaylock in the late 80s, when he was making a name for himself with brilliant short fiction like “Paper Dragons” (1986), which won the World Fantasy Award, and novels like The Elfin Ship (1982) and The Digging Leviathan (1984).

But his steampunk pedigree dates back to his Langdon St. Ives novels, starting with Homunculus (1986) and Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992) — collected in The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives, a handsome omnibus edition that also included four related short stories, published by Subterranean Press in 2008.

So you can understand the excitement when Titan Books recently announced the first full-length Langdon St. Ives novel in two decades: The Aylesford Skull, a rollicking new steampunk adventure, from one of the genre’s pioneers, that takes us into the dangerous underworld of 19th Century England, through the foggy depths of the Cliffe Marches and the lairs of smugglers and pirates, and into the sewers, lost rivers, and sorcerous underworld of London:

It is the summer of 1883 and Professor Langdon St. Ives — brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer — is at home in Aylesford with his family. However, a few miles to the north a steam launch has been taken by pirates above Egypt Bay; the crew murdered and pitched overboard. In Aylesford itself a grave is opened and possibly robbed of the skull. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of Langdon St. Ives.

When Dr. Narbondo returns to kidnap his four-year-old son Eddie and then vanishes into the night, St. Ives and his factotum Hasbro race to London in pursuit…

The Aylesford Skull will be published January 15th by Titan Books. It is 425 pages in trade paperback, priced at $14.95 for both the print and digital versions.

You can see all of our recent New Treasures here.

Seize Control of the Galaxy with Eclipse

Seize Control of the Galaxy with Eclipse

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Eclipse by AsmodeeI spent the better part of last year trying to track down this game. I first heard about it via the excited chatter at BoardGameGeek, where it bubbled near the top of their Board Game Rank, displacing such beloved games as Settlers of Catan, War of the Ring, and Civilization.

And, of course, it was no longer available. Released in 2011, the first printing sold out in record time and what few copies were still in the channel were commanding $200 or more. Publisher Asmodee announced it would not be available again until the second edition (which fixed some minor gameplay and production issues) was ready in late 2012.

It was a long wait. And the temptation to spring for one of those rapidly vanishing first edition copies was strong – especially as the year rolled on and there was no sign of the new edition. But patience is its own reward, or something. Anyway, it finally arrived, and I now have a copy in my hot little hands.

Eclipse is a game of interstellar conquest and intrigue, meaning you move starships around a colorful board and blow stuff up. That’s really all I needed to know to want a copy more than life itself. But we have a little room left, so I’ll pad this out by copying some stuff from the back of the box.

Apparently you can play as one of several races. I’m guessing the chubby green guy, blue alien, and bald supermodel on the cover are just a few of the choices. I picture my race of supermodels conquering the galaxy in slender battlecruisers, crushing all opposition beneath their stiletto heels, and suddenly I understand why copies were going for $200. I mean, damn. Now I want two copies.

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Adventure on Film: The Duellists

Adventure on Film: The Duellists

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duellists2One of the oddest, most esoteric regrets in my life is that I long ago gave away my collection of the now defunct American Film magazine. Most of these, purchased primarily from sidewalk vendors in Manhattan, I do not care to recover; but I would give a great deal to have again the October issue from 1986. It contains a dialogue with film producer David Puttnam, and one small paragraph in that interview taught me more about collaboration than any other single event I know.

More on that in a moment. In the meantime, let me introduce one of Hollywood’s really fine on-screen adventures, The Duellists.

Now, I admit up front that as with The Horseman On the Roof, a title I explored a few weeks back, The Duellists contains no overt fantasy element; but what it lacks in sorcery, it more than makes up for in swords. Right out of the gate, Lieutenant D’Hubert (Keith Carradine, one of my very favorite actors) is ordered by a busy general to round up fellow cavalry man Feraud (Harvey Keitel) and escort him to the brig; it seems that Feraud has been dueling, illegally, with the mayor’s nephew. Feraud takes offense first to D’Hubert’s assignment and then to D’Hubert himself; he challenges him on the spot to a duel, an event D’Hubert, a reasonable man, ultimately cannot prevent.

Thus the wheel of this most simple of plots grinds into implacable motion: D’Hubert cannot ever contrive to avoid Feraud, and neither, in repeated duels, each instigated by Feraud, can ever quite kill off the other. Over the course of the Napoleonic wars, these two clash again and again in a battle both particular and symbolic. D’Hubert’s enlightened rationalism must stave off Feraud’s chivalric single-mindedness, and both, to D’Hubert’s dismay, must contend with the expectations of the times: that their differences constitute a “point of honor” (indeed, such was the title of the story on its U.S. publication), and that to settle this point, one of them must die.

But wait, you cry! What about David Puttnam and all those moldering magazines?

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Red Sonja 5

Red Sonja 5

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Red Sonja 5 coverThis issue follows up from the last one, in which Red Sonja vowed to find the leader of the Lake People, who was imprisoned in the Singing Tower (just called “the tower” last issue). She is still accompanied by Mikal, the mysterious traveler from issues three and four, who, rather remarkably, has not yet tried to seduce her. The issue opens with the two of them hiding behind their horses and watching a procession of warriors in the middle of the night.

Now, if I wanted to trick someone into thinking a road is unoccupied, I wouldn’t leave a pair of saddled horses in plain sight. (“Hey, let’s hide behind the biggest clue we can find!”) Curiously, none of the riders seem to the notice the horses standing just to their right (no doubt experiencing the same lack of peripheral vision suffered by Imperial Storm Troopers and every single Doctor Who villain).

Of course, Sonja and Mikal are so pre-occupied with hiding in plain sight that they fail to notice the approach of the truands, who are basically forest-dwelling dwarves. Yes, this issue, Red Sonja fights a gang of unarmed dwarves. Unarmed dwarves dressed like pixies. Because, honestly, at this point the chain mail bikini isn’t politically incorrect enough.

Well, it should be no surprise that she easily defeats the little people, keeping one under foot for questioning. She asks him only one question: Where can she find the Singing Tower? His answer is that she should follow the dark riders. The dark riders she was following before the truands attacked. Meaning that the attack really served no narrative purpose other than to fill two pages. Ah well.

So Sonja and Mikal catch up with the riders, who seem to be moving just slow enough to make following them easy. Eventually, they lead our heroes into a valley, where they discover that (best Admiral Ackbar voice) it’s a trap. They are easily captured and Mikal is taken away. Sonja is taken to a bell tower, which is apparently the capital building of Bor Ti-Ki, the City of Bells. If you’re thinking the bell tower is the Singing Tower, Red Sonja makes the same mistake. But this is apparently a completely different tower.

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New Treasures: A Memory of Light, The Final Volume of The Wheel of Time

New Treasures: A Memory of Light, The Final Volume of The Wheel of Time

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A Memory of Light-smallWell, this has been a long time coming.

The first volume of The Wheel of Time, possibly the defining epic fantasy series of our generation, was published over two decades ago in 1990. The Eye of the World was an immediate success, and the dozen volumes that followed have sold over forty million copies — 25 million more than its only true competitor at the top of the charts, the five existing novels in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

When Robert Jordan died in 2007, fans around the world mourned his loss and were justifiably concerned that the series would be left incomplete. But rising star Brandon Sanderson, working from notes and partial texts by Jordan, finished Jordan’s masterwork. Sanderson delivered The Gathering Storm (Book 12) in 2009, and Towers of Midnight (Book 13) in 2010, both of which became # 1 New York Times hardcover bestsellers, and today Tor Books released the 14th and final volume of The Wheel of Time: A Memory of Light, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.

In the Field of Merrilor the rulers of the nations gather to join behind Rand al’Thor, or to stop him from his plan to break the seals on the Dark One’s prison – which may be a sign of his madness, or the last hope of humankind. Egwene, the Amyrlin Seat, leans toward the former.

In Andor, the Trollocs seize Caemlyn.

In the wolf dream, Perrin Aybara battles Slayer.

Approaching Ebou Dar, Mat Cauthon plans to visit his wife Tuon, now Fortuona, Empress of the Seanchan.

All humanity is in peril – and the outcome will be decided in Shayol Ghul itself. The Wheel is turning, and the Age is coming to its end. The Last Battle will determine the fate of the world…

A Memory of Light, like every volume in the series, was edited by Jordan’s widow, Tor editor Harriet McDougal, who owns The Wheel of Time copyright and controls the rights to the series. Brandon Sanderson recently revealed that she is working on a comprehensive Wheel of Time encyclopedia, to be published next year.

A Memory of Light was published by Tor Books on January 8, 2013. It is 911 pages in hardcover (which, incidentally, brings the total for all 14 hardcover volumes to a staggering 10,037 pages). It is $34.99; an audio version is also available. There is no digital version. The striking cover art is by Michael Whelan.