Search Results for: neverwhens

Neverwhens: Existential Horror and Medieval Mystery Play meet in Between Two Fires

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Last week, I had the dumb good luck to be sitting to dinner with Christopher Buehlman just after the news came out that Nightfire’s new edition of Between Two Fires had hit #4 on the Bestseller list. I want the record to show I was on the BTF train long before that. Indeed, Buehlman, who’s garnered a lot of (deserved) attention for his recent fantasy novels The Black Tongue Thief and The Daughter’s War, had a previous career writing horror,…

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Neverwhens: War “On Earth, As it Is in Heaven” — Rebecca Roanhorse’s Mirrored Heavens

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Between Earth & Sky has always been about doing something fresh. Rebecca Roanhorse set out to create an epic fantasy set in a world based on the pre-contact Americas. It has its Maya, Cahokia, Ancestral Puebloan and Woodlands analog cultures; it has a seafaring matriarchy that is a bit Polynesian, a bit Caribbean, a bit “this would be cool.” But the world of The Meridian is its own thing. At times the technology is greater than what existed in our…

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Neverwhens: In His Sunken House of… Doggerland… Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming

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Yeah…Doggerland. For those not in the know, during the last Ice Age Earth’s seas were about 300 feet lower, revealing a vast amount of land. While no true Atlantis or Mu have been found, examples include a broad plain — and now sunken lakebed — connecting Australia to New Guinea, the Sunda Shelf — a massive sub-continent that unites most of Southeast Asia in a single landmass that includes places as far flung as Java and the Philippines, and Doggerland….

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Neverwhens: Ancient Civilizations Topple and the Age of Heroes ends in the Blades of Bronze Trilogy by Mark Knowles

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I sincerely doubt any Black Gate reader needs an education in who Ray Harryhausen was or why his films, despite the sea-change in special effects technology, remain seminal classics (I’ve been making my way through a bunch of his swashbuckling adventures with my Zoomer son, who notes, time and again, how ‘cheesy and awesome’ the stop motion is, but also calls out how perfect at times the strange movements are at making monsters seem, well…strange and *monstrous* in a way…

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Neverwhens: Hannibals’ Ghost(s) roams a City of Marble and Blood and a Genre is Reborn

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The Chronicles of Hanuvar: Lord of a Shattered Land and The City of Marble and Blood by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen, August 1, 2023 and October 3, 2023). Covers by Dave Seeley Friends, Carthaginians, Dog-Brothers, I come to praise Howard Andrew Jones, not to bury him… That was a lot of mixed-metaphors, but Howard’s mixed a lot of themes, tropes and reached back into the very roots of early heroic fantasy in his Chronicles of Hanuvar to breathe new life…

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Neverwhens: Picts, Romans, Eldritch Horrors and Giants in the Earth collide in The Shadows of Thule by Patrick Mallet and Lionel Marty

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The Shadows of Thule (Humanoids, August 15, 2023). Cover by Lionel Marty Scotland, 2nd Century AD. The Roman conquest has stopped south of Hadrian’s Wall; beyond it lies the land of the unconquered Gauls, and even further north, the wild hills of the Pictish people. When a Roman general loses his wife in a Pictish raid, a mysterious necromancer convinces him to awaken an ancient horror and unleash it on the North. In response, Cormak Mac Fianna, the last king…

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Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Rebecca Roanhorse’s Fevered Star Shines Against a Black Sun

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Fevered Star (Gallery/Saga Press, April 19, 2022) The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent. The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded? As sea…

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Neverwhens, Where Fantasy and History Collide: Tanith Lee’s Cyrion

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Cyrion (DAW, 1982, cover by Ken W. Kelly) The Empress of Dreams I hardly need to sing the praises of the late Tanith Lee (1947 – 2015).  A two-time World Fantasy winner, Horror Grandmaster, Hugo nominee, yadda yadda yadda, she rose out of nowhere writing sword & sorcery (generally a male-dominated field) with the Nebula-nominated The Birthgrave, and went on to pen 70 novels, 300 short stories and create a style of lush, dark fantasy perhaps best represented by her…

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Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: “When the Levee Breaks (and the Goddess Wakes), I’ll Have a Place to Stay…”

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When the Goddess Wakes (St. Martin’s Press, August 2021). Cover by Lauren Saint-Onge Know, O prince, that between the years when Stag-flation and the Iran Hostage Crisis drank the Carter Administration, and the years of the rise of the stepson of Roger Clinton Sr, there was an Age Undreamed of, when sword & sorcery, high fantasy epics, slender trilogies and stand-alone novels lay spread across bookshelves like paper jewels beneath fluorescent stars. This tongue-in-cheek riff on Robert E. Howard’s famous…

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Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Of Aztecs and Iron Chandeliers – Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Return of the Sorceress

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The Return of the Sorceress (Subterranean, June 2021). Cover by Fang Xinyu One of the best things about Moreno-Garcia is that she writes whatever the hell she wants, and it is up to others to categorize it. In an era where authors are often told to “stay in their lane” (be that about what ethnicities or cultures they write about, or what genres the can write in without resorting to pen names), SMG has, in a short span of years,…

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