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Year: 2016

John DeNardo’s February Speculative Fiction Books You Can’t Miss

John DeNardo’s February Speculative Fiction Books You Can’t Miss

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The Guns of Ivrea-smallJohn DeNardo gets it. It’s not a lack of choice that keeps us from choosing what to read… it’s that there are too many great books to choose from!

As the February lineup of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror books will prove, it’s not a lack of books that make it difficult to find something to read. If anything, there are too many books to read. Here’s a list of books to help you narrow down your selection. I’d say “choose wisely”… but all of these are sure bets. Titles this month include a serial killer, merfolk, human trafficking, illegal magic, a Lovecraftian demon, and more.

The Guns of Ivrea by Clifford Beal

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: The fates of a former thief, a pirate mercenary, and the daughter of the chief of the merfolk converge on a series of events that could mean war.

WHY YOU MIGHT LIKE IT: This is the first installment of what promises to be a swashbuckling seafaring fantasy series.

Graft by Matt Hill

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: In near-future Manchester, a local mechanic named Sol who steals car parts stumbles onto a trans-dimensional human trafficking conspiracy.DreamingDeath

WHY YOU MIGHT LIKE IT: The chase is on as Sol and a three-armed woman named Y run from their pursuers.

Read the complete article, with 16 selections of top-notch February fantasy and SF, here.

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Vintage Treasures: Worldmakers and Supermen, edited by Gardner Dozois

Vintage Treasures: Worldmakers and Supermen, edited by Gardner Dozois

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Worldmakers SF Adventures in Terraforming Supermen Tales of the Posthuman Future-small

Back in December I talked about a few of my favorite anthologies, The Good Old Stuff (1998) and The Good New Stuff (1999), which collected some of the best adventure SF from the last century, alongside Gardner Dozois’ detailed and affectionate commentary. Dozois followed up with another fine pair of anthologies focused on deep space exploration and the far future, Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons and The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future, both published in 2000. All four were released in trade paperback from St. Martin’s/Griffin, and the set is the equivalent of a Master’s level course in SF of the 20th Century.

In 2001/02, Dozois produced a final two anthologies in this format, exploring two more common themes in 20th Century SF, terraforming and advanced human evolution:

Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (459 pages, December 2001, $17.95) — cover by Chesley Bonestell
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (463 pages, January 2002, $17.95) — cover by Nick Stathopoulos

Like the first volumes, they include Dozois’ lengthy and highly informative intros to each story. Together with the first four, these books form the basis of a very solid library of 20th Century science fiction.

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The Galaxy Science Fiction $6,500 Novel-Writing Sham

The Galaxy Science Fiction $6,500 Novel-Writing Sham

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Galaxy Science Fiction March 1953-smallIn the March, 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, H. L. Gold announed a novel contest. Simon and Schuster and Galaxy partnered together to offer a $6,500 prize, “guaranteed to the author of the best original science fiction novel submitted.”

The $6,500 was only a minimum for the first world serial and TV rights. It was the largest cash prize offered to date for a science fiction novel. Other details were that the contest closed October 15, 1953, and the novel had to be between 60,000 and 75,000 words. Anyone could enter, with the following caveats:

…except employees of the Galaxy Publishing Corp. and of Simon and Shuster, Inc., and their families; AND authors who are ineligible because of contractual obligations to their present publishers… which means, in effect, that contestants will NOT be competing with most of the established ‘big names’ of science fiction.

When you consider that cars could be purchased for about $2,000 in 1953, this was an enormous prize. And let’s face it: how many of us would still be happy to sell a novel in today’s market for $6,500?

Given that the contest ended long ago, I had to find out who won. The winner was Edson McCann, whose novel Preferred Risk was serialized in Galaxy in 1955 and later published by Simon and Schuster that same year. Congratulations, Edson!

Oh… except there never was an Edson McCann.

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Support the Return of NorthGuard, Canada’s Greatest Superhero!

Support the Return of NorthGuard, Canada’s Greatest Superhero!

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NorthGuard title Image-smallWhen I was a young comic collector living in Ottawa, one of my favorite titles was NorthGuard, the Canadian superhero created in 1984 by Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrissette and published by Matrix Comics in Montreal. When I started Black Gate 15 years later, I hired two of my heroes, Matrix artists Morrissette and the brilliant Bernie Mireault, creator of The Jam and Mackenzie Queen, as interior illustrators. So I was thrilled to hear from Bernie earlier this month that there’s an effort to return Northguard to print in a deluxe format for the first time:

I’m currently engaged in coloring the original Northguard series. Mark, Gabriel and I hope to run a Kickstarter campaign in late spring and if successful, get some 200-page color collections made… As the colorist I’m going over every nut and bolt of the material and appreciating it fully for the first time. This is a great story about a Canadian superhero that I’m proud of. Phillip might not be much at the physical combat stuff but he has lots and lots of heart. Which is the way I think about Canada.

And so in an effort to reintroduce Northguard to the public at large and create awareness of our pending attempt to solicit funding for the collection through Kickstarter or Indie gogo, etc. I’ve created a dedicated Northguard Facebook page that is designed to bring people who are unfamiliar with the work up to speed on the story and historical/political context. www.facebook.com/bem61

Matthew David Surridge profiled Bernie’s The Jam in Part II of his series My City’s Heroes, and columnist Timothy Callahan called him an artist who combined “the high Romanticism of the fantastic with the mundane life on the street” in Comic Book Resources.

If you’re at all interested in Canadian comics, or just want to keep tabs on the ongoing effort to return one of the best Canadian superheroes to print, check out Bernie’s Facebook page here. Vive Le Protecteur!

Uncanny Magazine Issue 8 Now on Sale

Uncanny Magazine Issue 8 Now on Sale

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Uncanny Magazine Issue 8-smallUncanny editors Lynn and Michael Thomas return from the Chicago TARDIS convention with an impassioned plea for increased accessibility, in their editorial in the January/February issue.

One of the reasons this convention is such a joy for us is Chicago TARDIS and its staff are very attentive to accessibility… We go to a ton of conventions for work, and, sadly, this isn’t always the case. Many excellent conventions are addressing accessibility at their events, and improving every year, which we absolutely applaud and appreciate. Others have resisted, even though it’s both the right thing to do and a US federal law thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act. After some recent conventions had some major failures with their accessibility again, we and Mary Robinette Kowal — with help from many others — felt it was necessary to create an SF/F Convention Accessibility Pledge, similar to the John Scalzi pledge about not attending conventions without harassment policies. Hundreds have signed the pledge, and it has also been covered by io9 Most importantly, we’re seeing many convention staff members joining together to share information and work to make their conventions more accessible. That’s awesome, and frankly, the point of the whole thing. Fandom is for everyone, including people with disabilities.

The January/February issue contains all–new short fiction by Maria Dahvana Headley, Nghi Vo, Christopher Barzak, Brit Mandelo, and Rose Lemberg, classic fiction by Sarah Rees Brennan, nonfiction by Chris Kluwe, Max Gladstone, Isabel Schechter and L.M. Myles, poems by Kayla Whaley, Leslie J. Anderson, and Bryan Thao Worra, interviews with Maria Dahvana Headley and Christopher Barzak, and a cover by Priscilla H. Kim. All that plus two podcasts!

All of the content became available for purchase as an eBook (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) on January 1, 2016.

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New Treasures: The Passenger by F.R. Tallis

New Treasures: The Passenger by F.R. Tallis

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The Passenger F R Tallis-smallF. R. Tallis is the author of The Sleep Room (2013), The Forbidden (2014), and The Voices (2014). He’s been nominated for the Edgar award, the New London Writer’s Award, and the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger Award. His latest supernatural thriller takes readers under the wartime seas of the stormy North Atlantic in 1942, to a German U-boat with an unnatural passenger… what’s better than the creepy mixture of Nazis and ghosts? I know what I’ll be curling up with this weekend.

1941. A German submarine, U-471, patrols the stormy inhospitable waters of the North Atlantic. It is commanded by Siegfried Lorenz, a maverick SS officer who does not believe in the war he is bound by duty and honor to fight in.

U-471 receives a triple-encoded message with instructions to collect two prisoners from a vessel located off the Icelandic coast and transport them to the base at Brest ― and a British submarine commander, Sutherland, and a Norwegian academic, Professor Bjornar Grimstad, are taken on board. Contact between the prisoners and Lorenz has been forbidden, and it transpires that this special mission has been ordered by an unknown source, high up in the SS. It is rumored that Grimstad is working on a secret weapon that could change the course of the war…

Then, Sutherland goes rogue, and a series of shocking, brutal events occur. In the aftermath, disturbing things start happening on the boat. It seems that a lethal, supernatural force is stalking the crew, wrestling with Lorenz for control. A thousand feet under the dark, icy waves, it doesn’t matter how loud you scream…

The Passenger was published by Pegasus on February 1, 2016. It is 371 pages, priced at $25.95 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version.

Marooned Spacemen, Forgotten Planets, and Alien Dragons: Rich Horton on Rocannon’s World/The Kar-Chee Reign

Marooned Spacemen, Forgotten Planets, and Alien Dragons: Rich Horton on Rocannon’s World/The Kar-Chee Reign

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Rocannon's World-small The Kar-Chee Reign-small

The Ace Doubles were a fairly low-paying market by most measures, and they didn’t always attract top authors. But they did publish early books by many writers who would go on to become top authors. Such is the case with the pairing of Rocannon’s World, the first novel by the great Ursula K. LeGuin, and The Kar-Chee Reign, an early novel by SF master Avram Davidson.

Rich Horton examined both novels as part of his ongoing series of Ace Double reviews at his blog Strange at Ecbatan. Here’s what he said, in part:

Seeing that Ursula K. Le Guin’s first novel was an Ace Double came as a mild surprise to me, some time back when I encountered this pairing. Since then I’ve realized that that wasn’t really that rare, for example, Samuel R. Delany also had early novels published as Ace Doubles, as did many other great writers…

Rocannon’s World is a curious novel. It is a “Hainish” novel, thus fitting into Le Guin’s main “future history,” but it doesn’t seem wholly consistent with novels like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. What it mainly is is a fantasy novel with SF trappings. Except for the prose, which is excellent as one might expect from Le Guin, it feels strikingly pulpish. The plot and feel would not have been out of place in an early 50s issue of Planet Stories…

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The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Early Horror Paperbacks

The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Early Horror Paperbacks

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The Screaming Skull and Other Great American Ghost Stories-small Bodies of the Dead and Other Great American Ghost Stories

We lost David Hartwell on January 20th. This is our third article in a series that looks back at one of the most important editors in our industry.

When I think of David Hartwell, I think chiefly of his forte — the massive retrospective anthologies like Foundations of Fear and The Science Fiction Century that gave deep insight into the changing nature of our field. But David also produced a small number of mass market paperback anthologies, especially early in his career. The two I want to look at today are The Screaming Skull and Other Great American Ghost Stories (1994) and Bodies of the Dead and Other Great American Ghost Stories (1995), both published by Tor.

Mass market anthologies like this really don’t exist today, chiefly because modern audiences weren’t raised on short stories the way I was. But I’m very glad they did when I was a young reader haunting bookstore shelves in the 80s and 90s. Cheap enough to be a quick impulse buy, they were a great way to get introduced to a wide variety of authors — and a lot of fun to read, I might add.

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Future Treasures: The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Future Treasures: The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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The Tiger and the Wolf-smallAdrian Tchaikovsky is a British fantasy writer whose claim to fame is the ambitious 10-volume series Shadows of the Apt, published in the US by Pyr, which began with Empire in Black and Gold (2008). In his Black Gate review “Epic Musket Fights and Vampire-Like Magic,” M Harold Page called his 2015 novel Guns of the Dawn “a supremely good read with a satisfying ending.”

His newest novel, The Tiger and the Wolf, kicks off a brand new series, about a young girl coming of age in a dangerous world of shapeshifters on the brink of war. It will be published in the UK next week. No word on a US release date, but Amazon UK will ship the book to the US.

In the bleak northern crown of the world, war is coming

Maniye’s father is the Wolf clan’s chieftain, but she’s an outcast. Her mother was queen of the Tiger and these tribes have been enemies for generations. Maniye also hides a deadly secret. All can shift into their clan’s animal form, but Maniye can take on tiger and wolf shapes. She refuses to disown half her soul, so escapes, rescuing a prisoner of the Wolf clan in the process. The killer Broken Axe is set on their trail, to drag them back for retribution.

Maniye’s father plots to rule the north and controlling his daughter is crucial to his schemes. However, other tribes also prepare for strife. Strangers from the far south appear too, seeking allies in their own conflict. It’s a season for omens as priests foresee danger, and a darkness falling across the land. Some say a great war is coming, overshadowing even Wolf ambitions. A time of testing and broken laws is near, but what spark will set the world ablaze?

The Tiger and the Wolf will be published in the UK by Tor-Macmillan on February 11. It is 590 pages, priced at £18 in hardcover and £11.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Neil Lang.

Goth Chick News: What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done? Miss Out on This News, That’s What…

Goth Chick News: What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done? Miss Out on This News, That’s What…

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Ghost Story-smallBack as a starving college student when I haunted the used book stores, I came across a dusty hardcover edition of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, thus discovering the only book that ever scared the crap out of me.

Of course as a lifelong devotee of the horror genre, I had certainly read stories that gave me the creeps before then. But with Ghost Story I was introduced to a whole new threshold of terrifying. Why? Because Straub had the ability to turn a beautiful, sunny day in December, or an ordinary afternoon in a grocery store parking lot, into scenes more blood-curling than any in a crumbling graveyard on a moonlit night in October.

Since that initial introduction, Ghost Story is my go-to read every fall, getting me in the perfect mood for Halloween.

And I confess. It still scares the crap out of me.

Apparently I am far from alone in this as — if we forget about the film version (and please do) — the novel continues to appear on “best of” lists to this day, being widely considered one of the greatest horror novels of all time.

So I was particularly excited to learn that this week Berkley Books is releasing Ghost Story in a new trade paperback edition, as well as in eBook format for the very first time.

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