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Year: 2015

Escalation to Fight: Understanding Magic in Trial of Intentions

Escalation to Fight: Understanding Magic in Trial of Intentions

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Trial-of-Intentions-small2War. What is it good for?

For some reason, when I sat down to write this two-part article on war in fantasy fiction, Edwin Starr’s version of the song “War, what is it good for?” popped into my head. There’s probably a reason for that. We’ll see if it bears out as I go.

In the broadest possible terms, there are two ways a people or nation will attempt to deal with war: escalate and fight (with the hope of victory), or do all they can to avert war (without sacrificing their freedom). I admit of the oversimplification here, but it’s a short two-part article series, after all.

For part one, lets hit the first topic: escalation to fight. And I’ll use some examples from my current series to try and illustrate the point.

War is a mainstay in fantasy fiction, and in epic fantasy, particularly. The stakes are high — freedom, the right to rule, stuff like that. To win or defend such things usually requires armies, dangerous political intrigue, and war.

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Future Treasures: Oathkeeper by J.F. Lewis

Future Treasures: Oathkeeper by J.F. Lewis

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Oathkeeper-smallOathkeeper, the second novel in J.F. Lewis’s Grudgebearer Trilogy, will be published in early June by Pyr. It’s an intriguing series that features carnivorous elves, sentient armor, plant people, a newly ascended god, and much more. As Dave Gross puts it, “J.F. Lewis dials high fantasy up to 11.”

Rae’en has taken the place of her father, Kholster, as First of the practically immortal Aern, a race created by the Eldrennai as warrior-slaves to defend them from the reptilian Zaur. Freed from all Oaths by Kholster’s death, Rae’en decides to wage war on the Eldrennai.

Prince Rivvek must claim the Eldrennai throne by completing the Test of Four so he can save as much of his kingdom as possible. Meanwhile, his brother, Prince Dolvek, hatches a plot to enlist the aid of the plant-like Vael to defeat the Zaur horde, who mean to take advantage of the strife between the Aern and Eldrennai.

The inevitable war between the Eldrennai and the Zaur begins, with the Aern an unpredictable force that could save the Eldrennai – or doom them. Torn by rage and grief, Rae’en must decide who is worthy to keep her people’s Oaths.

J.F. Lewis is also the author of the Void City series of urban fantasy novels from Pocket Books, composed of Staked, Revamped, Crossed, and Burned, about a vampire who runs a strip club.

Oathkeeper will be published by Pyr Books on June 9, 2015. It is 381 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Todd Lockwood. Learn more at J.F. Lewis’ website.

Editing Indie Comics and Editing Marvel Comics: The Different Worlds of Heather Antos

Editing Indie Comics and Editing Marvel Comics: The Different Worlds of Heather Antos

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Star_Wars_Princess_Leia_Vol_1_3_TextlessI’ve had a chance to e-chat with Marvel Comics editorial staff Xander Jarowey and Jake Thomas, as well as the indie comic creators from Mirror Comics. Now, I’m e-sitting down with Heather Antos, a newly-minted Assistant Editor at Marvel who also spent a year editing indie comics.

Heather got noticed by Marvel with her biggest indie credit, a comic anthology called Unlawful Good: An Anthology of Crime, which mixed together the innovations of creator-owned, anthology format, and Kickstarter crowd-funding. Crowd-funding takes a lot of work; check out its completed Kickstarter page and youtube promo video.

Kickstarter in prose as well as in comics is still relatively new as a business model, so New York Comic Con invited her to speak on a panel, which led to her hiring as assistant editor on Night of the Living Deadpool, Star Wars, Darth Vader, Deadpool and others.

So, some of your indie editor work still hasn’t come out yet. Are you able to talk about any of those works? Can you talk about Unlawful Good and how that was different for the industry?

Sure! My time in the industry as an editor is actually quite short. It was a little over a year ago that I began freelance editing. In fact, the whole point of UNLAWFUL GOOD was a bit of an experiment with myself to see even if comic editing was something I was capable of (I was a recent college grad trying to find ‘my place in the world’).

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Explore the Best of Early SF With Science Fiction From the Great Years

Explore the Best of Early SF With Science Fiction From the Great Years

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Armageddon 2419 AD-small The Mightiest Machine-small The Moon Is Hell-small Alien Planet-small

In the early 1950s, after the end of World War II and the beginning of the Space Race, science fiction experienced an almost unprecedented boom. Some 31 new SF magazines began publishing in that decade alone. Hungry to meet the demands of a new audience, publishers mined the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s for titles they could inexpensively reprint in paperback. Countless SF and fantasy writers enjoyed their very first mass market editions as a result — including Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, Lester del Rey, Jack Vance, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, and many others. Avon, Ace, Berkely and others built their fledgling enterprises into mighty publishing houses repackaging classic SF and fantasy for a new generation.

By the early 1960s, the boom in SF was essentially over. Nearly 80% of the magazines on the market folded. Publishers drastically cut back on SF titles, and the entire industry re-trenched. By the early 1970s, a new generation of young SF readers was starting to show up in bookstores, clutching their dollar bills and looking for great adventure tales, and Frederick Pohl convinced his publishers at Ace that the time was ripe to repackage the great SF of the early 20th Century one more time.

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The Omnibus Volumes of P.N. Elrod: The Vampire Files

The Omnibus Volumes of P.N. Elrod: The Vampire Files

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The Vampire Files Volume One The Vampire Files Volume Two-small The Vampire Files Volume Three

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t initially interested in P.N. Elrod’s The Vampire Files. A few things happened to change that.

First, I started to hear about Jack Fleming, the investigative journalist in Prohibition-era Chicago who becomes a vampire and private investigator, and whose first case was to solve his own murder. Folks used adjectives like “surprising” and “old fashioned fun” to describe his adventures. That sounded pretty good. By then, the series had gotten pretty far along, and I wondered idly if I should pick one up. But it seemed a little late to jump on board, and I was never really sure what volume to start with. Plus some of the earlier books became harder to find, and it all seemed like just a bit too much effort.

Then Ace Books released the first omnibus volume in 2003, containing the first three Vampire Files novels. And, well, you know what a sucker I am for omnibus collections. All those hard-to-find paperbacks, in one handsome and economical package? It’s too much to resist.

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New Treasures: The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

New Treasures: The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

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The Girl With All the Gifts-smallI like knowing the premise of a book before I start reading it. I think that’s fairly normal. But what happens when knowing the premise is a spoiler, and the publisher won’t tell you?

That seems to be the case with the trade paperback reprint of M.R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts, which I found on the New Releases table at Barnes and Noble last Saturday. The front and back cover reveal almost nothing about the book, beyond calling it “The Most Original Thriller You Will Read This Year,” and this cryptic text on the back:

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class.

When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite. But they don’t laugh.

Instead of a plot synopsis, the book is plastered with blurbs… lots and lots of them. Joss Whedon says “So surprising, so warm and yet so chilling… as fresh as it is terrifying.” Vogue calls it “Haunting, heart-breaking,” Marie Claire says it’s “Tense and fast-paced with a heartwarming tenderness,” and Reader’s Guide gushes with “Propulsive, imaginative.”

Wait a minute. Vogue? Marie Claire? Last time I picked up something Marie Claire called “heartwarming,” I ended up reading Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t want that to happen again.

A little investigation (I have sources) reveals that The Girl With All the Gifts is, in fact, a genre novel. It’s (mild spoiler!) some kind of future dystopia. Revealing more than that would be telling, but suffice to say that I’m very intrigued indeed.

This is M.R. Carey’s first novel. The Girl With All the Gifts was published by Orbit Books on April 28. It is 435 pages, priced at $15 in trade paperback.

Allen Koszowski’s Inhuman Magazine #6 Now on Sale

Allen Koszowski’s Inhuman Magazine #6 Now on Sale

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Inhuman 6-smallWell here’s an unexpected bit of good news. Allen Koszowski’s Inhuman Magazine, which I had listed as defunct in our mid-May Fantasy Magazine Rack, has just released a new issue.

Allen Koszowski is a terrifically talented guy. I hired him to illustrate our reprint of Edmond Hamilton’s first story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” and he delivered three marvelous pieces that appeared in Black Gate 2. Since 2004 he’s been involved in the most noble and selfless act of creation known to humankind — publishing his own magazine. Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine is a monster magazine that consistently features the top names in dark fantasy and horror, and Allen handles the art for each story personally.

Centipede Press took over production with issue #5, and the magazine looks better than ever. Issue #6 is the first in four years, and it features original stories by Tim Curran, Peter Rawlik (two stories), Don D’Ammassa, Lee Weinstein, C. J. Henderson, J. F. Gonzalez, Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen, Weston Osche, and Randall D. Larson, plus reprints from Michael Bishop, Darrell Schweitzer, Gahan Wilson, Jason Van Hollander, and Chad Hensley and W. H. Pugmire. The magazine also includes verse and art from David Sutton, Kurt Newton, Justin Gustainis, Jill Bauman, Cullen Bunn, Gene O’Neill, William C. Rassmussen, Stephen Jones, Bob Eggleton, Augie Weidemann, Robert H. Knox, Nick Gucker, Chris Kuchta, Steve Gilberts, Alex Lakhtarnik, and Allen Koszowski. The artists this issue are all part of a special gallery section dedicated to The Thing from Another World.

The magazine is huge — 208 pages! — and copiously illustrated. It is perfect bound for the criminally low price of just $6.99. Copies of the latest issue can be hard to come by, but at least two eBay vendors are currently stocking it at cover price. Check it out — I think you’ll enjoy it.

We last covered Inhuman Magazine with Issue #5. See all of our recent magazine coverage here.

Charles de Lint and The Little Country

Charles de Lint and The Little Country

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The Little CountryIn talking about portal fantasies last time, I was moved to reread one of the more unusual examples of the sub-genre, Charles de Lint’s The Little Country (1991).

The book is in a very real sense two books, but it isn’t a simple play-within-a-play, story-within-a-story thing: Each book is being read by the protagonist of the other. The now-overused self-referential concept known as “meta” wasn’t so common when The Little Country was written, but it might have been invented to describe the novel. The book is extremely self-aware, something which even the protagonists are forced to recognize.

The two stories do run parallel to one another, but this isn’t a case of success in one world reflecting or depending on success in the other world, as we see in King and Straub’s The Talisman, for example. The characters don’t overlap, the settings aren’t the same, though you might say that the outcomes are. There is a physical object common to both worlds, a standing stone with an opening through which objects and people can pass. Both worlds have the tradition that passing through the stone nine times at moonrise effects some magical change – entrance into the land of the faerie, a cure for sickness or barrenness, etc.

In the thread which most resembles our world, Janey Little, a twenty-something traditional musician, finds a book in her grandfather’s attic – a one-of-a-kind hitherto unknown work left in her grandfather’s keeping by the author, an old and eccentric friend. The book is called “The Little Country.”

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Vintage Treasures: A Touch of Strange by Theodore Sturgeon

Vintage Treasures: A Touch of Strange by Theodore Sturgeon

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A Touch of Strange 1959-small A Touch of Strange 1965-small A Touch of Strange 1970-small

I’ve really been enjoying this gradual survey I’ve been doing of Theodore Sturgeon’s paperbacks. It hasn’t been a particularly deliberate undertaking… the truth is that, as I come across his books, I’ve been talking about them. This week I stumbled on a copy of the 1965 Berkley edition of A Touch of Strange (above middle), and here we are.

Part of the reason I enjoy them is that I find it fascinating that a writer could have made a decent living in this business selling almost exclusively short stories. Sturgeon did write five novels (six, if you want to count his 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea novelization), but he’s far more well known for more than two dozen short fiction collections. And it was upon them that he largely built his considerable reputation.

Another reason is that I genuinely find it delightful to catalog the different editions, and note all the variations. A Touch of Strange was reprinted five times, by three different publishers, between 1958 and 1978, before it vanished from bookstores forever. Each of those editions is unique, not just in cover art and design, but also in how it was packaged and presented — and, in some cases, in content as well.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

Black Gate Online Fiction: The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

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The Testament of Tall Eagle-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz, the new fantasy novel from the author of the Books of the Shaper trilogy.

A second mountain sat atop the first. Yet the second mountain was made of glowing gold, beaded with shimmering crystals set in weird designs. The second mountain had been carved into slim, pointed spires like tremendous teepees of gold. Giant domes of sparkling stone gleamed brighter than Mother Moon at her fullest… All these things thrilled me and stole my heaving breath, but it was the eagles that filled my heart with joy.

Between the golden spires a flock of eagles soared. They skirted the surrounding peaks, and sometimes I heard their shrill songs tearing through the sky. Here are the Lords of All Eagles, I thought. The Eagle Spirit himself must live here. These are his people…

I had no idea how huge these eagles were until one of them descended. The light of the golden mountain made it a massive shadow winging toward me. It did not cry out, but I felt the great beating of its wings. They made a wind that nearly knocked me backwards, where I would have fallen to my death. But I knew no fear in the face of that great bird, for it served the Eagle Spirit, and had it not called me here?

John’s Books of the Shaper trilogy includes Seven Princes,Seven Kings, and Seven Sorcerers (Orbit Books). His short story collection, The Revelations of Zang, is a series of interrelated tales born in the pages of Weird Tales and Black Gate. His website is www.johnrfultz.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Jon Sprunk, 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.

The Testament of Tall Eagle will be published by Ragnarok Publications on June 8, 2015. It is 400 pages and available in digital format for $4.99. Learn more at Ragnarok Publications.

Read the complete first chapter of The Testament of Tall Eagle here.