John ONeill – Page 110

Secret Magical Orders and an Occult Underworld: The Nightwise Novels by R.S. Belcher

Friday, October 26, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

R.S. Belcher’s Golgotha series is one of the more popular Weird Westerns on the market. Booklist called the opening volume “nothing short of fantastic… a setting so sharp you can feel the dust in your mouth,” and San Francisco Book Review summed it up as “a whirlwind of shootouts, assassins, cults, zombies, magic, attractive ladies, dubious morals, and demonic possession.”

Belcher kicked off a new series set in a seedy occult underworld with Nightwise in 2015. RT Book Reviews called it “brilliant… [a] sensational noir urban fantasy.” Sequel The Night Dahlia arrived earlier this year, making it a real series, and Tor re-issued the first volume with a matching cover.

I picked up both books earlier this month, and they look very attractive on my bookshelves — not to mention intriguing. They’ll make terrific Halloween reading to close out the month.

Here’s the description for both volumes, starting with Nightwise.

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New Treasures: An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris

Thursday, October 25, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Charlaine Harris was the first really big interview we ever scored at Black Gate. This was thirteen years ago, before the breakout success of the True Blood HBO series based on her Sookie Stackhouse novels, but she was already hugely popular. Goth Chick met with her at a restaurant, before a big signing event here in the suburbs of Chicago, and came back totally charmed. We included the interview in Black Gate 8, the Summer 2005 issue, and it was a big hit with readers.

Harris has reached a point in her career where she can do whatever she wants. Fortunately for us, what she wants to do appears to be tell Weird Western tales. Her latest, An Easy Death, is set in a southwestern country known as Texoma, where magic is common and a young gunslinger named Lizbeth Rose takes a job to be a local guide for a pair of Russian wizards. But all is not what it appears to be, and dark forces are aligning against Lizbeth and her clients. It was published in hardcover earlier this month by Saga Press.

The beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, the inspiration for HBO’s True Blood, and the Midnight Crossroad trilogy adapted for NBC’s Midnight, Texas, has written a taut new thriller — the first in the Gunnie Rose series — centered on a young gunslinging mercenary, Lizbeth Rose.

Set in a fractured United States, in the southwestern country now known as Texoma. A world where magic is acknowledged but mistrusted, especially by a young gunslinger named Lizbeth Rose. Battered by a run across the border to Mexico Lizbeth Rose takes a job offer from a pair of Russian wizards to be their local guide and gunnie. For the wizards, Gunnie Rose has already acquired a fearsome reputation and they’re at a desperate crossroad, even if they won’t admit it. They’re searching through the small border towns near Mexico, trying to locate a low-level magic practitioner, Oleg Karkarov. The wizards believe Oleg is a direct descendant of Grigori Rasputin, and that Oleg’s blood can save the young tsar’s life.

As the trio journey through an altered America, shattered into several countries by the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression, they’re set on by enemies. It’s clear that a powerful force does not want them to succeed in their mission. Lizbeth Rose is a gunnie who has never failed a client, but her oath will test all of her skills and resolve to get them all out alive.

An Easy Death was published by Saga Press on October 2, 2018. It is 306 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Colin Anderson. Read the complete first chapter here.

Future Treasures: Mage Against the Machine by Shaun Barger

Tuesday, October 23, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

In his feature at The Verge earlier this month, 9 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this October, Andrew Liptak describes Mage Against the Machine as “Harry Potter meets The Terminator,” which certainly got my attention.

I don’t quite know what to make of it, though. It’s the debut novel by Shaun Barger, so I can’t look to his previous books for any clue. There aren’t a lot of early reviews. It’s got a mage army, vast machine intelligences, a human resistance, Arnie posters, heroes with cybernetic enhancement, and even a dome. I love all those things.

Will they be great together? I gotta know. And there’s only one way to find out.

The year is 2120. The humans are dead. The mages have retreated from the world after a madman blew up civilization with weaponized magical technology. Safe within domes that protect them from the nuclear wasteland on the other side, the mages have spent the last century putting their lives back together.

Nikolai is obsessed with artifacts from twentieth-century human life: mage-crafted replica Chuck Taylors on his feet, Schwarzenegger posters on his walls, Beatlemania still alive and well in his head. But he’s also tasked with a higher calling — to maintain the Veils that protect mage-kind from the hazards of the wastes beyond. As a cadet in the Mage King’s army, Nik has finally found what he always wanted — a purpose. But when confronted by one of his former instructors gone rogue, Nik tumbles into a dark secret. The humans weren’t nuked into oblivion — they’re still alive. Not only that, outside the domes a war rages between the last enclaves of free humans and vast machine intelligences.

Outside the dome, unprepared and on the run, Nik finds Jem. Jem is a Runner for the Human Resistance. A ballerina-turned-soldier by the circumstances of war, Jem is more than just a human — her cybernetic enhancement mods make her faster, smarter, and are the only things that give her a fighting chance against the artificial beings bent on humanity’s eradication.

Now Nik faces an impossible decision: side with the mages and let humanity die out? Or stand with Jem and the humans — and risk endangering everything he knows and loves?

Mage Against the Machine will be published by Saga Press on October 30, 2018. It is 512 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, $16.99 in trade paperback, and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Marko Manev. See all our recent coverage of the best in upcoming SF and Fantasy here.

Magic and Politics in the Desert: Deborah A. Wolf’s The Dragon’s Legacy

Monday, October 22, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I was browsing the shelves at Barnes and Noble last week when I came across the two volumes above. They caught my eye immediately. Especially the second one, with its gorgeous depiction of a moonlit desert city… plus a supergiant bull, whatever the heck that’s about.

I didn’t pick them up right away. Derek Kunsken’s The Quantum Magician, some Angry Robot paperbacks and a bunch of SF magazines were already in my stack, and I’m trying to pace myself. But I did some research when I got home, and I admit I’m intrigued. Deborah A. Wolf is also the author of the Daughter of the Midnight Sun urban fantasy series; the first novel Split Feather came out last year. The Dragon’s Legacy is a planned trilogy, the first volume was a nominee for the 2018 Morningstar Award. Publishers Weekly praised “Wolf’s opulent visual imagination and sly humor” in their review:

Wolf’s epic fantasy debut, the first of a trilogy, is a well-crafted, intricate blend of the politics and magic of multiple cultures. Hafsa Azeina, dreamshifter of the Zeerani desert tribes, can kill her foes as they sleep. She has spent years protecting her daughter, Sulema, from the assassins hunting them, and Sulema has had the chance to come of age as a Zeerani warrior. But Sulema’s father, who may have sent the assassins, has found them. He is the dragon king of the nearby country of Atualon, and his magic prevents the dragon that sleeps under the world from waking and cracking the planet like an egg. Sulema and Hafsa must navigate shifting alliances, ongoing assassination attempts, and manipulation by both friend and foe to try to settle the balance of power and succession…

Titan Books has published two books in the trilogy so far; the third is due next year. Here’s the details:

The Dragon’s Legacy (400 pages, $24.95 hardcover/$14.95 trade/$13.99 digital, April 18, 2017)
The Forbidden City (517 pages, $24.95 hardcover/$16.99 digital, May 15, 2018)
The Seared Lands ($24.99 hardcover/$16.99 digital, April 2, 2019)

The cover artist is uncredited. See all of our recent coverage of the best in series fantasy here.

New Treasures: The Promise of Space and Other Stories by James Patrick Kelly

Sunday, October 21, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

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James Patrick Kelly is one of the best short story writers we have. His Hugo-winning tale “Think Like a Dinosaur” is one of the finest SF stories of the past 25 years (perhaps the finest), and his fiction has been collected in such essential volumes as Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (1997), Strange But Not a Stranger (2002), and The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories (2008). His novels include Planet of Whispers (1984), Look Into the Sun (1989), Freedom Beach (1985, with John Kessel) and Wildlife (1994).

A new James Patrick Kelly collection is a major event, and I purchased The Promise of Space and Other Stories as soon as it arrived in July. It contains 15 stories published between 2007 and 2016, plus one new tale, “Yukui!” It also contains an introduction by Sheila Williams, and an Afterword by the author. Here’s a snippet from Gark Wolfe’s review in the Chicago Tribune.

The idea of uploading your whole personality into a computer matrix as a hedge against death isn’t new, but should it become a legal right (as in “Declaration”) or face religious opposition (as in “One Sister, Two Sisters, Three”)? Could it even lead to most humans disappearing, leaving the world to intelligent chimps (“”The Chimp of the Popes”)?

For that matter, can technology ever really replace a mind? In the most heartbreaking story, “The Promise of Space,” a wife tries to connect with her brain-damaged astronaut husband, whose own faulty memory is supplemented by thousands of hours of personal video, but who can’t emotionally understand the facts he calls up.

Kelly also has a clear grasp of other genres, but uses them in unexpected ways. “The Last Judgment” is set in a world from which all the men have been snatched away by aliens, but takes the form of a hard-boiled mystery. “The Rose Witch” takes on the tone and form of a fairy tale, complete with a life-changing moral choice the heroine faces. In nearly every story, Kelly offers a master class on how short fiction works.

You can read the title story in Clarkesworld here. The Promise of Space and Other Stories was published by Prime Books on July 31, 2018. It is 383 pages, priced at $15.85 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Piotr Foksowicz. See all of our recent New Treasures here.

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018 edited by Paula Guran

Friday, October 19, 2018 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

We’ve just about wrapped up the Best of the Year season, the summer/fall period when eight publishers and a dozen editors collaborate to produce ten volumes gathering the best short science fiction, fantasy, and horror of the year. We’ve had eight so far, from Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, David Afsharirad, N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams, and others.

But we’re not done yet — and in fact, this week two of my favorites landed on the same day. I’ll deal with Robert Shearman and Michael Kelly’s The Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Five in a future post, but today I want to talk about the latest installment in Paula Guran’s long-running Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror.

This is the ninth volume in the series, which has been continuously published since 2010. While Paula has been enormously productive in the last decade, this is her sole anthology in 2018, which she laments a little in her Acknowledgments.

This is, if she’s counted correctly, the forty-fifth anthology Guran has edited. Instead of what had become the usual multiple titles per calendar year, it is the only anthology that will appear from her in 2018. That’s probably a refreshing break for most people. She’s got mixed feelings about it herself. After more than a decade of full-time editing, she now freelancing. Guran enjoys the variety but regrets the lack of a monthly paycheck.

This year’s edition includes much of the most talked-about horror and dark fantasy of the year, including Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,” Laird Barron’s “Swift to Chase,” Priya Sharma’s “The Crow Palace,” M. Rickert’s “Everything Beautiful Is Terrifying,” Robert Shearman’s “The Swimming Pool Party,” and Stephen Graham Jones’s complete Tor.com novella Mapping the Interior, published at $10.99. Another reason why The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror is one of the best values on the shelves.

Altogether there are 26 stories in the latest volume, plus an introduction by Paula and a 7-page About the Authors section. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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A Treasure Trove of Classic British Horror: Darkness Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper

Tuesday, October 16, 2018 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I first saw the three volumes of Darkness Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basic Copper at Greg Ketter’s booth at Windy City seven years ago. It was a gorgeous set of hardcovers, with magnificent wraparound Stephen Fabian artwork, and it drew my eye immediately.

It was prohibitively expensive, however — nearly $200 for the set, if I remember correctly. Two hundred bucks buys a lot of vintage paperbacks. I put them back on the shelf with a sigh, and headed for the back of the room, where the cheap paperbacks were piled high on countless tables.

Darkness Mist & Shadow was published by Drugstore Indian Press, a division of PS Publishing in the UK, which means it wasn’t widely distributed here in the US. I’ve always been curious about Basil Copper’s fiction… not curious enough to part with $200 on an impulse purchase, but still. Bob Byrne is a fan of his Solar Pons tales (also available from PS Publishing), and Bob has good taste, so that heightened my curiosity.

I’m not always in the mood for classic British horror, but when October rolls around, with its long evenings, hot chocolate, and a cat that insists on climbing into my lap at seven o’clock and staying there, immobile, until midnight, I’m much more receptive. The promise of a virtual library of short stories and novellas — painstakingly gathered from such hard-to-find sources as the Dark Terrors anthology series, the Pan Book of Horror Stories, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and long out-of-print Arkham House volumes — gets a lot more appealing. So when PS reissued the books in beautiful trade paperback editions, priced at just £9.99 each ($17 from most US sellers), it was simply too hard to resist. I paid $45 for the complete set, and I’m very happy I did.

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Future Treasures: Restless Lightning by Richard Baker

Sunday, October 14, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Richard Baker’s new military SF series Breaker of Empires, set in an era of great interstellar colonial powers, began with Valiant Dust last year, and the second installment is scheduled to arrive in trade paperback from Tor next week.

I’m glad to see it. Baker began his career as a game designer at TSR where he co-designed the Birthright campaign setting. His first novel was Forgotten Realms: The Adventures: The Shadow Stone (1997). He wrote nearly a dozen more for TSR over the next decade, but Breaker of Empires is his first non-licensed project. It’s generated plenty of interest — Booklist called the first volume “a great start,” and Michael Stackpole proclaimed it “an excellent example of military SF at its best.”

Richard Baker continues the adventures of Sikander North in Restless Lightning, the second book in his new military science fiction series Breaker of Empires and sequel to Valiant Dust.

Lieutenant Sikander North has avoided an outright court martial and finds himself assigned to a remote outpost in the crumbling, alien Tzoru Empire―where the navy sends trouble-makers to be forgotten. When Sikander finds himself in the middle of an alien uprising, he, once again, must do the impossible: smuggle an alien ambassador off-world, break a siege, and fight the irrational prejudice of his superior officers. The odds are against his success, and his choices could mean disgrace ― or redemption.

We covered Valiant Dust here.

Restless Lightning will be published by Tor Books on October 23, 2018. It is 429 pages, priced at $18.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Larry Rostant.

Vintage Treasures: The Illusionists by Faren Miller

Saturday, October 13, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

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Faren Miller’s The Illusionists is a curious book. I snapped up a copy when it first appeared in 1991, chiefly because of the author. Faren Miller had been writing for Locus magazine for ten years by then (and she still is, with some 3,100 articles and reviews to her name in the ISFDB index), and she’d gradually become one of my favorite reviewers. Her writing was polished and assured, and always insightful and entertaining, and when ads for her debut novel The Illusionists began to appear from the fledgling Questar, the short-lived SF imprint of Warner Books, I was very intrigued.

The Illusionists came in 7th for the Locus Award for Best First Novel that year, but didn’t receive much other press that I could see, good or bad. The book vanished and has never been reprinted. Miller never wrote another novel, and this seemed to be the beginning and ending of her writing career. It currently has a lukewarm 3.0 rating at Goodreads, with only two reviews, one which enthusiastically proclaims “Just started this book with hopes that it would be a trashy Sci-Fantasy story, I am not disappointed!” and another that complains, “I did not care for this novel at all. The writing was poetic and descriptive, but the characters and plot failed to generate any sort of interest.”

But I still find the plot and setting of The Illusionists intriguing, even after all these years. I pulled out my copy this morning, and found the Prologue promising enough to grab my attention. The gorgeous cover by Gary Ruddell doesn’t hurt, either. That’s my reading for the weekend sorted then.

The Illusionists was published by Questar Books in March 1991. It is 213 pages, priced at $4.95 in paperback.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

New Treasures: The Accidental War by Walter Jon Williams

Friday, October 12, 2018 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I love a good space opera. Especially when it features evil empires, civil war, a valiant Terran navy, and ‘splosions. One of the weighty classics of the genre is Walter Jon Williams’ Praxis Universe, which includes the Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy (The Praxis, The Sundering, and Conventions of War), the Tor.com novella Impersonations (2016), a novella in Robert Silverberg’s Between Worlds, and more.

The Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy is scheduled to be re-released next year in handsome new Author’s Preferred Editions from Harper Voyager, with brand new covers by artist Damon Za. (Which you can see here. For you vintage paperback collectors in the audience, the original editions looks like this.) Just in time to build excitement for those versions, Williams has released a new novel, The Accidental War, the opening volume in a new trilogy in the series. To help whet your appetite, here’s our previous coverage of Walter Jon Williams.

Walter Jon Williams Explains Why UFOs Are Actually Made of Bread, and Other Little Known Facts by Emily Mah
Future Treasures: Quillifer
John DeNardo on SF and Fantasy for October 2016: Impersonations by Walter Jon Williams
Birthday Reviews: Walter Jon Williams’s “The Fate Line” by Steven H Silver

The Accidental War was published by Harper Voyager on September 4. It is 496 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Damon Za.

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