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Year: 2016

The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Masterpieces of Fantasy

The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Masterpieces of Fantasy

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Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment-small Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder-small

David G. Hartwell passed away on January 20th. He was not a fiction writer, but he was nonetheless one of the most respected and influential figures in the industry. He was a senior editor at many of the genre’s most important publishers, including Pocket, Arbor House, Avon/Morrow, and Tor Books, where he edited thousands of books (yes, thousands). He edited The New York Review of Science Fiction for nearly 30 years, and was nominated for the Hugo Award 41 times.

But for me his most enduring contributions to the field will always be his delightful anthologies, of which he produced many. David had a habit of editing sprawling, ambitious books which gave readers new insights into the field. Two of his earliest, released in 1988 and 1989, and co-edited with his future wife Kathryn Cramer, were Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder.

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C.S.E. Cooney’s Novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale” Available Free Online

C.S.E. Cooney’s Novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale” Available Free Online

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Bone Swans CSE Cooney-smallC.S.E. Cooney’s 2015 novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale,” from her acclaimed collection Bone Swans, has been made available free online by the publisher, Mike Allen at Mythic Delirium Books. Here’s what Paul Di Filippo said about the story in his Locus Online review:

Original to this volume, “The Bone Swans of Amandale” reads as if Patricia McKillip and Laird Barron decided jointly to rework the Redwall series. In a land where, among other wonders, a Fairy Mound rises “smooth as a bullfrog,” Maurice the Rat Man must come to the aid of the last Swan Princess, Dora Rose, whom he hopelessly loves and who has seen all her kindred slain, their precious bones turned into musical instruments by the evil ogre Mayor of Amandale, Ulia Gol, whose “florid face was as putridly pink as her wig.” With the help of Nicolas the Pied Piper, suitable reparations are exacted. To say this lively tale recaps its famous model legend is also to say that the Coen Bros.’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a straight-ahead rendition of the Labors of Hercules.

Our previous coverage of Bone Swans includes:

Locus Online on C.S.E. Cooney’s Bone Swans
C.S.E. Cooney Gets a Starred Review from Publisher’s Weekly
New Treasures: Bone Swans
Bird People, Evil Clowns, and the Crooked One: Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

Read the complete story online for free here.

New Treasures: The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo

New Treasures: The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo

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The Deep Sea Divers Syndrome-smallScience fiction can be as strange and imaginative as the best of fantasy… and that certainly seems to be the case with this slender little neo-noir thriller from French writer Serge Brussolo. While he’s published multiple bestsellers in France, this is his first novel to be translated into English. Check it out.

In The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, lucid dreamers called mediums dive into their dreams to retrieve ectoplasms — sticky blobs with curiously soothing properties that are the only form of art in the world. The more elaborate the dream, the better the ectoplasm.

David Sarella is a medium whose dream identity is a professional thief. With his beautiful accomplice Nadia, he breaks into jewelry stores and museums, lifts precious diamonds, and when he wakes, the loot turns into ectoplasms to be sold and displayed.

Only the dives require an extraordinary amount of physical effort, and as David ages, they become more difficult. His dream world — or is it the real world? — grows unstable. Any dive could be his last, forever tearing him away from Nadia and their high-octane, Bond-like adventures.

David decides to go down one final time, in the deepest, most extravagant dive ever attempted. But midway through, he begins to lose control, and the figures in the massive painting he’s trying to steal suddenly come to life… and start shooting.

The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome was translated by Edward Gauvin and published by Melville House on January 19, 2016. It is 196 pages, priced at $24.95 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Christopher King.

We All Have to Start Somewhere

We All Have to Start Somewhere

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Warchild Richard Bowes-small Feral Cell Richard Bowes-small Goblin Market Richard Bowes-small

We all have to start somewhere and this is where I started: Three paperback originals from Warner/Questar. Warchild was the first (in 1986) with an EMBOSSED cover – Art by Richard Corbin. It sold okay, got on a Year’s Best list. [Click on any of the images for bigger versions.]

Feral Cell came out in 1987 – About alternate worlds and cancer which I’d had while writing Warchild – this got me some critical attention plus I got cured!

The sequel to Warchild was Goblin Market (1988) – nice enough but didn’t sell like the original (maybe because the cover wasn’t embossed).

Here are the back covers to all three books.

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Future Treasures: Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen edited by Claude Lalumiere and Mark Shainblum

Future Treasures: Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen edited by Claude Lalumiere and Mark Shainblum

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Superhero Universe Tesseracts Nineteen-smallMark Shainblum has been a friend of mine ever since I wrote him a fan letter after reading New Triumph #1 in 1984, featuring the Canadian superhero Northguard he created with Gabriel Morrissette. And Claude Lalumiere was Black Gate‘s first comics editor, with a lengthy column in every one of our early issues. Together, the two have teamed up to edit the nineteenth volume of Tesseracts, the prestigious and long running Canadian anthology series. The theme this volume is superheroes, in all their fascinating combinations.

Superheroes! Supervillains! Superpowered antiheroes! Mad scientists!

Adventurers into the unknown. Detectives of the dark night. Costumed crimefighters. Steampunk armored avengers. Brave and bold supergroups. Crusading aliens in a strange land. Secret histories. Pulp action.

Tesseracts Nineteen features all of these permutations of the superhero genre and many others besides! Featuring stories by: Patrick T. Goddard, D.K. Latta, Alex C. Renwick, Mary Pletsch & Dylan Blacquiere, Geoff Hart, Marcelle Dube, Kevin Cockle, John Bell, Evelyn Deshane, A.C. Wise, Jennifer Rahn, Bevan Thoma, Bernard E. Mireault, Sacha A. Howells, Kim Goldberg, Luke Murphy, Corey Redekop, Brent Nichols, Jason Sharp, Arun Jiwa, Chadwick Ginther, Leigh Wallace, David Perlmutter, P.E. Bolivar, Michael Matheson.

The Tesseracts anthology series is Canada’s longest running anthology. It was first edited by the late Judith Merril in 1985, and has published more than 529 original Canadian speculative fiction (Science fiction, fantasy and horror) stories and poems by 315 Canadian authors, editors, translators and special guests. Some of Canada’s best known writers have been published within the pages of these volumes ― including Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Robert J. Sawyer, and Spider Robinson (to name a few).

Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen will be published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing on April 15, 2016. It is 200 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback. But the digital version will be available next week, and is priced at only $5.99. The cover is by Jason Loo.

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Barbara Barrett – Painting With Words: The Poetry of REH

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Barbara Barrett – Painting With Words: The Poetry of REH

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REH_PoetryIndexBlack Gate‘s ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series had ranged far and wide across the writings of REH. But we had not yet tackled his poetry. Consider it tackled! Barbara Barrett, who put together the extensively detailed The Wordbook: An Index Guide to the Poetry of Robert E. Howard, is the planet’s resident expert on the poetry of REH. And the author of Conan was quite a poet. Read on!

By the time I discovered Howard’s poetry, Solomon Kane, King Kull, Conan and El Borak were familiar characters. I didn’t think Howard’s writing could get any better than the poetic prose in those stories. At least, until I picked up a copy of Shadow Kingdoms: The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard and read these lines from his poem “The Ride of Falume.”

A league behind the western wind, a mile beyond the moon,

Where the dim seas roar on an unknown shore and the drifting stars lie strewn

I was transported to a place straight out of a Hubble star-strewn space photo where I sat on some unknown seashore, gazing at a moon larger than I had ever seen, and listening to the roaring waves crash against sand and rock. I could see it all clearly.

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Tracking Down Frank Kelly Freas’ Planet Stories Cover for “The Ambassadors of Flesh”

Tracking Down Frank Kelly Freas’ Planet Stories Cover for “The Ambassadors of Flesh”

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Planet Stories Summer 1954-small

A little while ago, I posted one of our two big IlluxCon purchases — a Hubert Rogers Astounding cover that we had arranged to buy over the summer from a friend, and the deal was completed at IlluxCon. This is the other major piece we picked up there, also from the same friend (click for a bigger version).

It’s by the great Frank Kelly Freas, and is the cover for the Summer 1954 issue of Planet Stories. It illustrates “The Ambassadors of Flesh” by Poul Anderson, which was the third of his Dominic Flandry stories. Needless to say, Flandry saves the day, and the girl.

Like all of the original Planet Stories covers I’ve seen, the block where the magazine’s logo went was just painted as a solid color. My friend had the logo scanned and printed onto mylar, which is laid in on top of the painting as it’s framed, so the logo is actually not on the artwork. Freas won the first of his ten Best Artist Hugos in 1955, about a year after this painting was published.

On a side note, artist Herman Vestal, a Fiction House regular, contributed a double-page spread which ran as the interior illustration for this story. Several years ago at Windy City, I managed to pick up the left half of that illo (still looking for the right half!), which has Flandry in a good action scene. I’ll post that down the road.

January GigaNotoSaurus Features “Godfall” by Sandra M. Odell

January GigaNotoSaurus Features “Godfall” by Sandra M. Odell

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giganotosaurus logo-smallOver at GigaNotoSaurus, editor Rashida J. Smith surveys every single story they published last year, which is awfully handy for latecomers like me who’ve just started following this fabulous magazine.

2015 concluded my second year as editor (officially my first full year of choosing stories) and looking at the stories that did make the cut it’s easier to see themes emerge.

In “Serving Girl,” “The Business of Buying and Selling,” “Blow the Moon Out,” and “Quarter Days,” relationships play an important role in navigating the strange new worlds the protagonists find themselves in.

“The Stars, Their Faces Uplifted in Song” and “And the Ends of the Earth for Thy Possession,” tackle the complexity of faith in distant futures and alternate worlds.

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Goth Chick News: J.J. Abrams Sneaks Up On Us Again

Goth Chick News: J.J. Abrams Sneaks Up On Us Again

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10 Cloverfield Lane posterThe story I’m about to tell you gets a little confusing, but it contains J.J. Abrams, one of my all-time favorite modern-day monster films, Cloverfield and an entire movie filmed right under the noses of the people whose business it is to keep tabs on this sort of thing. So stay with me, I think it will be worth it.

Our tale begins early last week when the internet exploded with the news that a new Cloverfield film was not only confirmed, but that it was already filmed and would be coming out in just under two months. Titled 10 Cloverfield Lane, the film is a. “…blood relative of Cloverfield,” according to J.J. Abrams, who produced the original film, and stars John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and John Gallagher, Jr.

Before we go on, let’s take the way-back machine to 2008 in the months before the release of the original Cloverfield, which was also kept very much under wraps and was credited with being the object of a new concept in millennium marketing; “guerilla campaigns.”

The film appeared to feature a mysterious monster of unknown origin ravaging a large city in the style of Godzilla movies from decades past, but what really made it notable as far as big-budget movies are concerned, was its seeming lack of any promotion at all. The film was ushered into theaters with an incredibly simple teaser trailer that didn’t even feature the title of the film. It only contained the release date – 11/18/08. Beside the fact that it starred a cast of unknown actors and featured a monster doing something in a city that had yet to be identified, almost nothing was known about the film prior to its release. It initially wasn’t even clear if Abrams himself was even involved.

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The Tor.com Novellas are Now Available in Bargain Bundles

The Tor.com Novellas are Now Available in Bargain Bundles

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Torcom September Novellas

I’ve been thrilled to see so many exciting new novellas come out of Tor.com‘s new publishing program, by so many top names in fantasy and SF. Each novella is priced at $2.99 (or $12.99 for the print versions.) Now Tor.com has announced that you can buy discounted bundles of all their novellas published in 2015.

Tor.com Bundle #1 contains all four novellas originally published in September 2015, and is priced at $8.99.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson
Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell
Sunset Mantle by Alter S. Reiss
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

It was published on January 12th, and is currently available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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