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May, why do you do this to me? There are so many dynamite new fantasy books hitting the stands, I scarcely know where to look. And I have absolutely no idea where I’ll find the have time to read any of them.
Well, I’ll worry about that later. The task at hand is to introduce you to the 30 most intriguing fantasy titles released this month. And trust me, I had a heck of a time whittling it down to 30. Time’s a wasting, so let’s get started.
Spring has finally sprung here in Madrid. The sidewalk cafes are full, and those who can’t find a seat have set off to the countryside to go hiking. It’s a good time to leave the museums and galleries behind and take a look at what the surrounding area has to offer.
This past weekend my family and I visited Alcalá de Henares, a small city 40 minutes on the suburban train outside of Madrid. Its main claim to fame is being the birthplace of Cervantes, who has been in the news recently because Spanish archaeologists discovered his tomb.
Like many Spanish cities, it has its roots in prehistory and came to prominence in Roman times, when it was called Complutum. After the fall of the empire it was a Visigothic settlement and was later taken over by the Moors, who built a citadel (“al-qal’a” in Arabic, a common place name in Spain). During the Moorish period it was a thriving town with large Christian and Jewish quarters.
Not so very long ago, I finished all my tasks for the evening and kicked back in my big green chair with the latest issue of Locus, the news magazine of the SF & fantasy field. In Rich Horton’s short fiction column I found a pair of reviews of The Breaker Queen and The Two Paupers, the first two novellas in a new romantic fantasy series from our very own C.S.E. Cooney. Here’s what he said about the first one:
I’m a big fan of of C.S.E. Cooney’s work, so I’m very happy to point to two new, related, stories, available in electronic form from Fairchild Books. The Breaker Queen concerns Eliot Howell, a talented young painter, who has been invited to a party at Breaker House. He feels immediately out of place — the family is very rich and very privileged — and the friend who invited him is being unpleasant, but then he meets one of the maids and is instantly enchanted. For Breaker House exists in three worlds: the world of humans, the world of goblins, and Valwode, where Elliot’s maid Nyx is Queen. Elliot, even when made aware of the price one pays to visit Valwode, follows Nyx into her land, while she, simply desiring a dalliance with a mortal, finds that she may pay a price herself. It’s lovely and romantic, dark and sweet, erotic and thrilling.
The Breaker Queen is Book One of Dark Breakers. The second, The Two Paupers, was published on January 22, 2015. The pub date for the third has not yet been announced — but when it is, we’ll let you know all the details.
C.S.E. Cooney is a podcast reader for Uncanny Magazine; Mark Rigney interviewed her for us in late October. The two C.S.E. Cooney short stories we presented here, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” consistently rank among the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. She is a past website editor of Black Gate, and the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills. Her newest collection, Bone Swans, is due out this summer.
The Breaker Queen was published by Fairchild Books on October 13, 2014. It is 80 pages, priced at $2.99 for the digital edition. No word on a print edition yet.
One of the most reliable magazines out there for adventure fantasy, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, has just produced their 24th quarterly issue. This one contains short stories by Cullen Groves, Dennis Mombauer, and Andrea G. Stewart, poetry by Coleen Anderson and David Farney, striking banner art by Serbian artist Vuk Kostic, and news on their upcoming anthology, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 1.
The short stories are:
The Madness of the Mansa, by Cullen Groves
There are mysterious goings-on in the city of Asongai, which is a call to opportunity for a sea-wolf named Draba. Adventure, intrigue, vice and verse await! Cullen Groves may be familiar to readers of HFQ, cutting a skaldic swath through 2014 with his poems The Sword and The Lay of Hrethulf Glamirsbane.Melting Gold and Ashes, by Dennis Mombauer
A world riven by war and revolution teeters at the brink of collapse and anarchy and pauses to celebrate one its few heroes.The Reeds of Torin’s Field, by Andrea G. Stewart
Rounding out our fiction is a tale of bounty hunting, murder in the night, and worse than murder. Good stuff!
Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an ezine dedicated to publishing short works of heroic fantasy. It is edited by Adrian Simmons, David Farney, William Ledbetter, and James Frederick William Rowe, and published four times a year in July, October, January, and April. Issues are posted to the website, and are completely free. See all the details on issue #24 here.
When my renewed interest in swords and sorcery was sparked a few years ago, one of the first and best books of new writing I found was The Return of the Sword, edited by Jason M. Waltz (reviewed at BG by Ryan Harvey). It’s filled with a passel of great stories and turned me on to several writers I follow closely to this day. Among them are Bill Ward, James Enge, and Bruce Durham. It’s the book that convinced me that there was a renaissance in heroic fiction and that it was worth blogging about.
One of the most intriguing stories, with imagery that’s stayed with me over the years, is “To Destroy All Flesh” by Michael Ehart. I wasn’t surprised to learn it was part of an ongoing series of linked stories. “Flesh” references characters and quests that clearly predate the action at hand.
Ehart’s protagonist, Ninshi, a woman from Ugarit in Bronze Age Syria, is enslaved by a flesh-eating demon, the Manthycore. She must provide corpses of warriors for the beast to devour. Her terrible master gave her immortality, great strength, and enhanced healing in order to carry out this task.
By the time I could see again, it had already begun to feed. As always, it started with the soft parts. The belly and the face were its favorites and because it fed so seldom, it showed little restraint. This time it chose to wear the head of a lion, which seemed to be well suited for the task.
It felt the force of my gaze, but did not react right away, engrossed in some particularly savory morsel from the belly of one of the corpses. I took care not to take note of which one. It is a matter of pride that I not look away, but I long ago learned to look without seeing.
She is sustained over the centuries of her servitude by the dream of freeing herself and forcing the Manthycore to restore her lover to life. That quest sets the stage for the tales collected in The Tears of Ishtar.
I first heard of B. Catling’s second novel The Vorrh when Matthew David Surridge reviewed it for us two years ago, saying:
It’s a powerful book, precise and unexpected in its use of language and its plot construction, a dizzying and straight-faced blend of history and the unreal… It’s mostly set in the years after World War One, but although there are scenes with peculiar Victorian technology and bakelite automata, it mostly avoids any feel of either steampunk or such recently-coined retrofantasies as dieselpunk or decopunk… while one can say that the Vorrh of Catling’s novel — a massive forest in which time is confused and myths wander — recalls Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, the feel is something quite different.
The book has just been reprinted in trade paperback by Vintage, with an impressive range of cover blurbs, including a stellar endorsement by Alan Moore on the front cover:
Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy.
Sadly, Moore’s introduction to the hardcover edition is missing here, but you can’t have everything. (The hardcover, out of print for scarcely a year, already commands ridiculous prices on the collector’s market, so I’m just glad to finally have a copy.)
I’ve been drinking coffee from this mug since way back in the twentieth century. It was a gift, of that I’m pretty sure, but I’ve had it so long I can no longer tell you who I got it from or when.
It survived my first marriage, a move from Arizona to Minnesota and several subsequent moves all over the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and being left through one brutal winter in a cow pasture (I lost it on a walk late in the fall; the following spring it was still there where I’d left it, sitting on the hood of a rusted old jalopy!).
It is a little worse for wear — a chip on the rim and another one on the base. The litho, though — incredibly — is pristine and unfaded, even though it’s been through hundreds of cycles in the dishwasher.
The caricature of Tolkien as a hobbit, which is repeated on either side of the mug, was done by Steven Cragg. The text, which is attributed to “Largely Literary Designs, Inc.,” reads as follows:
Ever since we were no bigger than a billiard ball we’ve wanted something important we could call our own — a yacht, for example, or a cottage in the Bahamas, or a marriage counselor who could go an entire hour without saying the word “feelings,” or, well, a mythology of Middle-Earth, to be perfectly honest with you, a unique vision of history and pre-history, good and evil, gods, devils, the whole shebang, the sort of thing J.R.R. Tolkien devised more than a half a century ago, which means we’re lucky as Frodo, of course, because thanks to modern printing technology and a newfangled bartering system called “money,” we now need go no further than our corner bookstore, pick up a copy of The Hobbit and suddenly we’re there, chucked head over heels into Tolkien’s magical kingdom, thankful that when our own world becomes too much for us, we can always turn to his.
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the nominations for the 2015 Locus Awards.
The winners are selected by the readers of Locus magazine. The awards began in 1971, originally as a way to highlight quality work in advance of the Hugo Awards. The winners will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, on June 26-28, 2015. In addition to creators, the Locus Foundation also honors winning publishers with certificates, which I think is kind of neat.
The finalists are:
FANTASY NOVEL
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
Steles of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway)
The Magician’s Land, Lev Grossman (Viking)
The Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley (Angry Robot US)
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Two months ago, in my March New Releases article, I said a few words about a handsome omnibus volume from best selling author Rowena Cory Daniells, The Fall of Fair Isle, published in paperback by Solaris on March 10. A complete trilogy on one volume, it collects Broken Vows, Dark Dreams, and Desperate Alliances, all originally published over a decade ago and recently republished with new cover art. Together, they form a sequel to her epic fantasy saga The Outcast Chronicles.
After that, I kinda forgot about it. Until last week, when I was sorting through some old review copies that I received in the late 90s, while I was editor of SF Site. I found the original paperback editions from Bantam Books (above, top row) and, to be blunt, it took a few days before it dawned on me that they were the same series. Where the Bantam editions were packaged as high fantasy/medieval romances, the new Solaris versions are marketed as dark fantasy — with starkly different cover design, and under a different name. It’s one of the more interesting examples of a publishing make-over I’ve seen in a while.
For several decades, Basil Rathbone, star of fourteen Holmes films in the thirties and forties, was generally the most recognizable and popular screen Holmes. And of course today, Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr are internationally recognized for their turns as the master detective.
But in between Rathbone and Cumberbatch, one actor (with apologies to Peter Cushing) stood above all other portrayers of Sherlock Holmes. And that was Jeremy Brett.
This is number one of a three part series looking at the first part (The Adventures) of the Granada television series, which ran in full from 1984 to 1994. To many fans, Brett is simply THE Holmes. So…
In 1980, Michael Cox was a producer at Granada, one of the Independent Television (ITV) contractors in England. At the same time in America, Charlton Heston was starring as Sherlock Holmes in the stage play, The Crucifer of Blood. His Watson was a handsome Englishman named Jeremy Brett.
The following year, Cox proposed an authentic Sherlock Holmes series; one that was as true to the original tales as could commercially be done in the television format. His idea was received positively, but Cox was told that an essential element of the deal would be a pre-sale agreement with American television. This would secure “up-front” money, which would be invested into the series. WGBH in Boston, host of the popular PBS series, Mystery!, was an ideal candidate for the partnership.