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Author: John ONeill

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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018-smallWe’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

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

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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

Future Treasures: Restless Lightning by Richard Baker

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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

Vintage Treasures: The Illusionists by Faren Miller

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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

New Treasures: The Accidental War by Walter Jon Williams

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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.

A Love Letter to the Paranormal Western: The Shadow by Lila Bowen

A Love Letter to the Paranormal Western: The Shadow by Lila Bowen

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If you’re a Weird Western fan like me, you know some years are a lot leaner than others. Like pioneers on the prairie, you learn to survive by keeping your eyes sharp for unexpected bounty.

So I have no idea how Lila Bowen’s The Shadow series managed to evade me this long. I stumbled on a remaindered copy of the second book over at Bookoutlet, and quickly tracked down the other two volumes. And I just learned today that the fourth and final book, Treason of Hawks, arrives on Tuesday — perfect timing.

“Lila Bowen” is a pseudonym for Delilah S. Dawson, the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma and Servants of the Storm. Wake of Vultures, the opening novel in The Shadow, won the RT Fantasy of the Year Award, and in a starred review Publishers Weekly said, “The unforgiving western landscape is home to supernatural beasties as diverse as the human inhabitants… the narrative is a love letter to the paranormal western genre.”

In a featured review last year at Tor.com, Alex Brown offered a tantalizing summary of the story so far. Here’s his take.

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Future Treasures: The Razor by J. Barton Mitchell

Future Treasures: The Razor by J. Barton Mitchell

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The Razor J Barton Mitchell-smallI flipped open J. Barton Mitchell’s science fiction thriller The Razor today, just to get a sense of what the prose was like, and before I knew it I was deep in Chapter 2, following new convict Marcus Flynn as he plummets through the raging atmosphere and then is processed into the Razor prison planet, named for the tiny habitable zone separating the burning day and freezing night zones.

The Razor is an adventure novel about an engineer stuck in a very, very bad situation after the staff and guards at his remote prison suddenly evacuate, leaving nothing but dark mysteries behind. And yeah, the book certainly draws you in. I’m a huge fan of SF adventure novels, and this one has an enticing premise and smooth, readable prose.

I don’t know much about J. Barton Mitchell, but the press packet that came with my advance copy says he’s also the author of “the critically acclaimed Conquered Earth trilogy,” which at least gives him some street cred. Whatever, I’d sold. Time to kick the cat out of my favorite recliner and settle in for the evening.

Brilliant engineer Marcus Flynn has been sentenced to 11-H37 alongside the galaxy’s most dangerous criminals. A hard labor prison planet better known as the Razor, where life expectancy is short and all roads are dead ends.

At least until the Lost Prophet goes active…

In a few hours, prison guards and staff are evacuated, the prisoners are left to die, and dark mysteries begin to surface.

Only Flynn has the skills and knowledge to unravel them, but he will have to rely on the most unlikely of allies — killers, assassins, pirates and smugglers. If they can survive each other they just might survive the Razor… and claim it for their own.

The Razor will be published by Tor Books on November 27, 2018. It is 398 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 in trade paperback.

Read the complete first chapter here, and see all our coverage of the best in upcoming SF and fantasy here.

A Cherished Contributor, and Hard to be Friends With: Michael Moorcock on Thomas M. Disch

A Cherished Contributor, and Hard to be Friends With: Michael Moorcock on Thomas M. Disch

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Last month I wrote a brief feature on Thomas M. Disch and his 1968 dystopian SF novel Camp Concentration. Michael Moorcock, who serialized the novel in four issues of his magazine New Worlds (July -October, 1967), contacted me to share his own memories, and challenge my portrayal of Tom as “a tragic figure.”

Tom was a close friend. Sometimes hard to be friends with. He was given to depression and to taking offence over imagined insults. In spite of this, I and his other close friends loved him and I still wonder if I could have done more for him, as does Linda. She says that she loved being with us and never laughed so much as when we were together, so I don’t see him as a tragic figure. After Charlie died he became lonely and bitter on occasions but several substantial friends did all they could for him.

I serialised Camp Concentration in New Worlds and was flattered when he said he would not have aspired to make it as good as it was if he hadn’t known it was appearing there. He brought each episode in every month and I was increasingly grateful to have such a fine novel to run in the first of our large size issues. With Ballard, he was my most valued contributor. Camp Concentration was illustrated by our mutual friend, the fine artist Pamela Zoline. He brought John Clute and John Sladek into our circle and the 60s and 70s were wonderful thanks in considerable part to our mutual friendships. Politically, we rarely agreed, but we had so much fun together. I miss him terribly.

“Charlie” was Disch’s partner of three decades, poet Charles Naylor, who died in 2005. I asked Michael for permission to reprint his comments here, and he graciously granted it, and shared some additional memories of Disch.

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