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Year: 2014

Monthly Short Story Roundup – January

Monthly Short Story Roundup – January

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oie_113212RNKI9Hm5Well, it’s that time again, and here I am with another batch of new heroic fantasy and S&S short fiction reviews.

Nothing outside of Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly caught my eye this past month and the stories they offered are the usual mixed bag, varying in quality from mid-range to very good. In a perfect world, some of these writers could make a living just writing short stories.

I love short stories. Growing up, a large part of my genre reading was made up of anthologies from brilliant editors like Lin Carter and Terry Carr. Their short (by contemporary standards) volumes introduced me to dozens of great authors, established and new.

oie_114255fABYaSsMIn Lin Carter’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2, for example, the authors ranged from Tanith Lee and Fritz Leiber to Caradoc Cador and Paul Spenser. If one story stunk, there was a very good chance the next one wouldn’t. It was a rare anthology that had nothing to offer.

I’m not saying anything new when I say a ten- or fifteen-page story can be as powerful as a novel. I’d recommend Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” to anyone doubting that. As for excitement, how many five pound books can match the urgency and ferocity of Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”? Sure, there are times I enjoy being swept up in a six- or seven-hundred page book, but I’d mostly rather read twenty or thirty good individual tales. When the rare new heroic fiction story collection comes along, like Strahan and Anders’ Swords & Dark Magic or Davis and Saunders’ Griots, I don’t hesitate to toss it in my Amazon cart.

And that’s why I love the various magazines (and the work their editors do each issue). Just counting Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Swords and Sorcery Magazine, I’m guaranteed at least six new stories a month. In the months Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is published, that’s an additional four or more.

Over the course of a year, that’s a lot more stories than even Lin Carter edited together in the same amount of time. Which makes me a very happy fan.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran

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The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2013-smallYou don’t have time to keep up on all the great work produced in the fantasy and horror fields, year after year.

You may think you do. But trust me, you don’t. There are fantastic new novelists emerging all the time — folks like Laird Barron, Theodora Goss, Genevieve Valentine, and Ekaterina Sedia — and new masters of the short story, like Karen Tidbeck, Ken Liu, Rachel Swirsky, Mike Carey, and many others. How are you going to keep up?

Believe it or not, that’s not a rhetorical question. I have the answer right here: Paula Guran’s indispensable annual collection The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. It’s like a cheat sheet covering all the exciting new — and established — writers in the genre. Read it every year, and I guarantee you’ll be talking intelligently about the latest literary trends in dark fantasy at your next party. (You’re on your own picking out what to wear, though. Just remember: no white after Labor Day.)

Paula Guran doesn’t provide the lengthy annual summary typical of some Year’s Best collections. Instead she gives the space over to fiction — over 500 pages of the best short stories of 2013, culled from magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Postscripts, Cemetery Dance, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Subterranean, Lightspeed, Apex, and Shimmer, and anthologies like The Book of Cthulhu 2, Hex Appeal, Shotguns v Cthulhu, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, Black Wings II, and many others.

This is the fourth volume of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, but the first one I’ve gotten around to. In our defense, we’ve at least covered several of Paula’s other recent anthologies, including Season of Wonder and Weird Detectives.

Here’s the book description.

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Delivering What the Title Promises: Saga

Delivering What the Title Promises: Saga

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Saga #1A few months ago, the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story was given to Saga, Volume 1, the first trade paperback collection of the ongoing Saga comic book. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, with art by Fiona Staples (and lettering and design by the Fonografiks studio), the book deserved the win. It’s the first chapter in a promising story and manages to establish a simple and powerful basic situation for the main characters, while also creating a complex world, backstory, and array of subplots. If it sometimes seems overbroad, too accessible and glib, it also has a deep and original sense of history to its setting, and a design sense that makes that setting live.

It begins with a birth, a battle, and an attempt to escape war. In a galaxy (presumably) not our own, there is a planet named Landfall, where a species of winged humanoids have developed high technology; orbiting Landfall is the moon Wreath, where magic-using horned humanoids live. Moon and planet have always been at war, but have reached the point where they can’t battle directly in their home solar system without risking their own destruction. So the war’s fought on countless fronts throughout the galaxy, with alien species everywhere forced to choose sides. One front is the planet called Cleave, where the fighting’s especially vicious; there, a woman from Landfall, Alana, has fallen in love with Marko, a former warrior from Wreath. They’ve run away from the war and the book begins with the birth of their daughter — and their discovery by agents of both sides.

The story moves quickly. Factions enlist various agents to track down the young family. And these agents have stories of their own. The book cuts quickly between plot strands, narrated by the newborn daughter speaking from some unspecified point in the future. There are ghosts, robots, pleasure planets, bounty hunters, mass battles, and all the familiar genre furnishings. There are also less familiar things, born from the mash-up of genres. Forests of rocketships. An interspecies romance novel. And a grumpy-looking lynx who can detect lies. It’s an inventive, fast-moving story about parenthood and art that never overstrains its central metaphors.

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Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Dave Truesdale and Others Sign Petition Calling for Changes to SFWA

Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Dave Truesdale and Others Sign Petition Calling for Changes to SFWA

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SFWA Bulletin 200Word of a new controversy inside the hallowed walls of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) is hardly news — the organization is known for regular rows. Less than a year ago, in fact, we reported that SFWA Bulletin Editor Jean Rabe resigned amidst a controversy over a series of sexist and rather tasteless articles. As a consequence, the membership of SFWA demanded additional oversight of the Bulletin and the new President, Steven Gould, promised the organization’s officers would take a more active role in overseeing production.

Now Tangent Online editor Dave Truesdale (a non-member of SFWA) has circulated a petition taking issue with the planned oversight, citing fears of censorship and excess political correctness. I think. It’s 12 pages long and seriously rambly, and frankly lost me when it started quoting Charlton Heston as “an early civil rights activist” (you can read the original doc here).

Predictably, the petition has struck a chord on both sides of the issue. It has already been signed by Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Barry N. Malzberg, Mike Resnick, Nancy Kress, Gene Wolfe, Jack Dann, Norman Spinrad, and Sheila Finch. Meanwhile, several folks have been speaking up loudly against it — most entertainingly Natalie Luhrs:

It’s full of appeals to the sanctity of the First Amendment – which, as a private organization, SFWA doesn’t need to abide by – and a whacking great heap of sexism and racism, too. I don’t understand why some people are constantly conflating their desire to say anything they want, wherever they want, with private organizations’ right to moderate spaces that they own.

For those who want a slightly more balanced and objective viewpoint (and why would you want that?), I recommend C.C. Finlay’s concise summary of the issue, Editing is not Censorship, posted on Facebook here (with comments) and on his blog here (comments disabled).

Vintage Treasures: The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning

Vintage Treasures: The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning

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The Man Who Awoke-smallI love dollar bins. If you’ve ever been in the Dealer’s Room at a convention, or any decent bookstore, you know what I’m talking about. The jumbled box at the foot of the booth, virtually ignored, with a hand-scrawled note on the lid: “All books — $1.”

I was at Capricon 34 this weekend here in Chicago and dropped by Greg Ketter’s booth in the Dealer’s Room. Greg is a great guy, owner of DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis, one of the last great science fiction bookstores. I’m pretty sure I was in the middle of a conversation with someone when I saw three boxes peeking under from under his booth with a hand-written “$1” sign. Next thing I know, I’m sitting on the floor, surrounded by neat little stacks of books on the carpet.

There’s nothing like finding a book you’ve always wanted in a dollar bin. Except maybe finding a treasure you didn’t even know existed. And that’s what happened when I pulled out a pristine copy of Laurence Manning’s 1975 paperback The Man Who Awoke from the bottom of the box.

The Man Who Awoke is a collection of five novelettes originally published in Wonder Stories in 1933. It follows the adventures of Norman Winters, a scientist who finds a way to put himself into suspended animation and wake up every 5,000 years. He encounters vastly changed human civilizations at every stop, until he awakens one last time in the year 25,000 A.D.

I read the first story in the pages of that pinnacle of Western Modern Literature, Isaac Asimov’s pulp anthology Before the Golden Age, and really enjoyed it. Winters awakens in 5,000 A.D. to find the city of New York gone, and in its place a thick forest — and humanity struggling to survive.

It was a rip-snortin’ slice of pulp escapism… or was it?

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Brains Hardwired for Horror

Brains Hardwired for Horror

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BrainArous2Reporter Henry Austin filed this story for NBC News on February 6:

Naked, Growling Man Shot Dead by Cops After Biting Teen’s Face

“A naked, growling man was shot dead by cops after biting a teenager’s face and attacking a retired police officer on Wednesday, officials told reporters.”

More details follow, although I have redacted the names of the individuals involved (a quick Google search can sate any curiosity you might have in that regard). My focus is not on the story per se; rather, I want to use it to make a point about your mind, and how I know what it’s thinking. Yes, yours, dear reader. Read on…

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

Black Gate Online Fiction: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

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Blood and Iron Jon Sprunk-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk — a new novel of heroic fantasy that reads like a sword-and-sorcery version of Spartacus.

It starts with a shipwreck following a magical storm at sea. Horace, a soldier from the west, had joined the Great Crusade against the heathens of Akeshia after the deaths of his wife and son from plague. When he washes ashore, he finds himself at the mercy of the very people he was sent to kill, who speak a language and have a culture and customs he doesn’t even begin to understand.

Not long after, Horace is pressed into service as a house slave. But this doesn’t last. The Akeshians discover that Horace was a latent sorcerer, and he is catapulted from the chains of a slave to the halls of power in the queen’s court. Together with Jirom, an ex-mercenary and gladiator, and Alyra, a spy in the court, he will seek a path to free himself and the empire’s caste of slaves from a system where every man and woman must pay the price of blood or iron. Before the end, Horace will have paid dearly in both.

Jon Sprunk is the author of the Shadow Saga (Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure, and Shadow’s Master) and a mentor at the Seton Hill University fiction writing program. He is a regular blogger for Black Gate.

Win one of two Advance Reading Copies of Blood and Iron! Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “Blood and Iron,” and we’ll enter you in the drawing. Entries must be received by Friday, February 28, 2014. No purchase necessary. Terms and conditions subject to change. Not valid where prohibited by law.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner,  Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

Blood and Iron, Book One of The Book of the Black Earth, will be published by Pyr Books on March 11, 2014. It is 445 pages and will be available in trade paperback for $18.00 ($11.00 for the digital version). Learn more at Pyr Books.

Read a complete sample chapter of Blood and Iron here.

Self-published Book Review: Sorcerer Rising by E. Nathan Sisk

Self-published Book Review: Sorcerer Rising by E. Nathan Sisk

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After a month off, I’m ready to start reviewing self-published books again. I haven’t received many new books recently, so if you have a book you’d like me to review, please follow the submission guidelines here. The fewer submissions I receive, the better your chances of getting a review. Meanwhile, this month’s book is Sorcerer Rising by E. Nathan Sisk. A submission which I received in December, not coincidentally.

SorcererRising800x600The titular sorcerer in Sorcerer Rising is one Virgil McDane. The word “sorcerer” can mean different things in different books. In some books, sorcerer, wizard, witch, and magician are all terms for the same thing. And in others, they’re very different. In Virgil’s world, a world a lot like ours, except that magic is real and public (and as a result technology is different but recognizable), the real difference is that wizards are part of the Guild, trained in its magic and responsible for following its rules, and sorcerers are self-taught. (I’m still not sure what the deal is with witches, just that Virgil considers them scarier than wizards.) Virgil is a sorcerer, but he used to be a wizard. When he was kicked out of the Guild for an act of desperation, he was Branded, and everything the guild taught him was taken away. He had to relearn magic on his own, and thus he is a Sorcerer, working outside the Guild, scraping together a living doing jobs that wizards won’t do.

At the beginning of Sorcerer Rising, that job is smuggling. Across the world are scattered clouds, mists of pure Aether, and in each cloud is a world. How the world is formed is not fully explained, but it seems that raw Aether can be influenced by the human mind and the first people to visit a world do a lot to shape what it becomes. The Guild controls access to most of these clouds, as they have the knowledge and magic to safely enter and return. They can also Inhale things in these clouds, storing them in their minds, later Exhaling them into the world. Most of the Guild’s wealth comes from trade with these clouds, retrieving rare and valuable materials and bringing them back to the mundane world.

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New Treasures: Dreamwalker by C.S. Friedman

New Treasures: Dreamwalker by C.S. Friedman

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C.S.Friedman Dreamwalker-smallC.S. Friedman is not a particularly prolific writer — but what she does write usually makes an impact. Her first novels, including In Conquest Born and The Madness Season, were science fiction; her more recent Magister trilogy (Feast of Souls, Wings of Wrath, and Legacy of Kings) returned to the sweeping epic fantasy of her popular Coldfire trilogy (Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows).

Her new novel, on sale this week, is something brand new for Friedman — a contemporary fantasy. Mixing a woman gifted with visionary dreams, gaming culture, and the very roots of mythology, Dreamwalker is an ambitious new novel with an intriguing premise.

All her life Jessica Drake has dreamed of other worlds, some of them similar to her own, others disturbingly alien. She never shares the details with anyone, save her younger brother Tommy, a compulsive gamer who incorporates some aspects of Jessica’s dreams into his games. But now someone is asking about those dreams… and about her. A strange woman has been watching her house. A visitor to her school attempts to take possession of her dream-inspired artwork.

Why?

As she begins to search for answers it becomes clear that whoever is watching her does not want her to learn the truth. One night her house catches on fire, and when the smoke clears she discovers that her brother has been kidnapped. She must figure out what is going on, and quickly, if she and her family are to be safe.

Following clues left behind on Tommy’s computer, determined to find her brother and bring him home safely, Jessica and two of her friends are about to embark on a journey that will test their spirits and their courage to the breaking point, as they must leave their own world behind and confront the source of Earth’s darkest legends – as well as the terrifying truth of their own secret heritage.

Dreamwalker was published Feb. 4 by DAW Books. It is 400 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover, and $10.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Least-Expected Trumpet of Apocalypse: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet

The Least-Expected Trumpet of Apocalypse: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet

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The Hearing TrumpetA little while ago, I followed a retweeted link to a blog post by writer Sofia Samatar, presenting the syllabus for a class on weird world fiction she’ll be teaching this semester. It was an interesting list. Some names were new to me, so I set about looking them up. And found a library near me had a book by one of these writers: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. Which turned out to be a constantly surprising read, a short book that opened doors to places I didn’t expect.

Carrington died in 2011 at the age of 94. She was primarily known as a painter; as a young artist she left school to live with Max Ernst, and with him became a part of the Surrealist movement. When the German Ernst was arrested by the French government in September of 1939, Carrington suffered a mental breakdown and, after fleeing France, was institutionalised in Spain. She ultimately fled to Mexico, where she lived for the rest of her life, producing paintings, sculptures, novels, plays, and short stories. (You can see a selection of her works at her page at wikipaintings.org.)

The Hearing Trumpet may have been first written in 1950, or perhaps in the early 1960s; it was first published in French in 1974, then in Engish in 1976. It’s a story about a 92-year-old woman, Marian Leatherby, given a hearing trumpet by her friend Carmella (a character widely believed to be based on Carrington’s close friend, the surrealist painter Remedios Vero — see more of her work here). The trumpet sharpens Marian’s hearing to a fantastic degree and she at once hears her family planning to put her in a home for old women. This institution turns out to be marked by strange architecture — buildings in the shape of “toadstools, swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boot, [and] another like what I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy,” with the main building a castle at the centre — and is run by highly idiosyncratic Christians. A picture of a one-eyed female saint seems to grin mockingly in the dining hall. Strange things follow: one of the other inmates dies, perhaps murdered; Marian is given a peculiar book outlining the history of the painted saint and her quest for the Holy Grail; and then things get much, much weirder.

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