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Author: John ONeill

Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast Presents: J.R.R. Tolkien, Master of Modern Mythology: A Conversation with Author Scott Oden

Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast Presents: J.R.R. Tolkien, Master of Modern Mythology: A Conversation with Author Scott Oden

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I really enjoyed the last audio show from Dream Tower Media, a lively conversation with Black Gate blogger Ryan Harvey on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his enduring works. So I was very pleased to see Robert Zoltan and his co-host Edgar the Raven return last month with a brand new episode of their Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast, a conversation with author Scott Oden (Memnon, The Lion of Cairo) that delves deep into the history and writing of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Once again, calling this a podcast doesn’t do it justice, as it’s really a professionally-produced radio show set in the dimension-hopping Dream Tower (with a talking raven). It opens with a trip to Middle Earth, a visit from a lost Nazgûl, and mis-dialing Sauron on a palantir. But the show eventually settles into a fascinating discussion on the life and work of Tolkien, with some lengthy asides to delve into Robert’s theories on the origins of the creative drive (and the evils of world-building).

Scott makes a terrific subject, sharing his story of hammering out three chapters of a Conan novel before turning to history as a source. And his tale of how writing — producing his first novel, Men of Bronze, with a razor-blade sitting next to him — literally saved his life, is riveting stuff. His new novel, A Gathering of Ravens, is coming from Thomas Dunne Books in June.

Check out J.R.R. Tolkien, Master of Modern Mythology: A Conversation with Author Scott Oden, and all the episodes of the Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast, here.

Future Treasures: The Return by Joseph Helmreich

Future Treasures: The Return by Joseph Helmreich

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The Return Joseph Helmreich-smallHere’s a fun little science fiction mystery thriller about a scientist who returns after a very public alien abduction… or does he? What does it mean when the man at the center of an unexplained celestial event denies it ever happened?

The Return is a the first novel from Joseph Helmreich, a script reader for the Weinstein Company and an alternative folk singer. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne next week.

During a live television broadcast on the night of a lunar eclipse, renowned astrophysicist Andrew Leland is suddenly lifted into the sky by a giant spacecraft and taken away for all to see. Six years later, he turns up, wandering in a South American desert, denying ever having been abducted and disappearing from the public eye.

Meanwhile, he inspires legions of cultish devotees, including a young physics graduate student named Shawn Ferris who is obsessed with finding out what really happened to him. When Shawn finally tracks Leland down, he discovers that he’s been on the run for years, continuously hunted by a secret organization that has pursued him across multiple continents, determined to force him into revealing what he knows.

Shawn soon joins Leland on the run. Though Leland is at first reluctant to reveal anything, Shawn will soon learn the truth about his abduction, the real reason for his return, and will find himself caught up in a global conspiracy that puts more than just one planet in danger.

Equal parts science-fiction and globe-hopping thriller, Joseph Helmreich’s The Return will appeal to fans of both, and to anyone who has ever wondered… what’s out there?

The Return will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on March 14, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by David Curtis.

Black Gate Online Fiction: Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak

Black Gate Online Fiction: Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak

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Black City Demon-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak, published by Pyr Books in trade paperback on March 14. Richard A. Knaak is the New York Times bestselling author of some three dozen novels, including The Sin War trilogy for Diablo and the Legend of Huma for Dragonlance.

A chill wind rose up. I tightened the collar of my overcoat and looked around. Diocles’s presence had left me with no more desire to be here. Besides, I had an appointment farther on the North Side — a young couple called the Nilssons who continually heard footsteps on the upper floor of the old house they rented. They thought it was the ghost of the first owner, who’d hung herself after her husband perished in the Great Fire.

I knew better. It wasn’t a ghost. If they’d seen my ad, seen the offerings of Nick Medea, investigator and debunker of the supernatural, then they had a far worse problem than ghosts. They had one of the Wyld lurking around their home.

There was plenty of time to reach my clients, since the appointment was set — for more than theatrical reasons — at midnight. It wasn’t hard to convince anyone who needed my services that I needed to come at the witching hour. They’d be desperate for any help at this point, no doubt having exhausted the usual charlatans.

“There was a visitor to Saint Michael’s this evening,” Diocles muttered.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, John Fultz, Jon Sprunk, Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner,  Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

We covered the first volume in the series, Black City Saint, here, and Richard’s newest Pathfinder Tales novel, Reaper’s Eye, here. Richard’s last article for Black Gate was “Tommy Guns, Prohibition, and…. Magic?”

Black City Demon will published March 14, 2017 by Pyr Books. It is 363 pages, priced at $17.50 in trade paperback and $2.99 for the digital edition.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon here.

New Treasures: The Facefaker’s Game by Chandler J. Birch

New Treasures: The Facefaker’s Game by Chandler J. Birch

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I stumbled on Chandler J. Birch’s debut fantasy novel in the New Arrivals section at Barnes & Noble last month. The description on the back immediately made me think of a fantasy version of Charles Dickens… a clever and resourceful pickpocket in the employ of the greedy Mr. Ragged plies his trade in a monster-infested slum, until the day he crosses Ragged once too often and is forced to flee. Soon enough he falls in with a crew of talented rogues planning an ambitious heist, led by the brilliant and mysterious Candlestick Jack.

I’m not the only one to make the comparison to Dickens. Brent Weeks says, “It takes a special writer to blend Dickens, Sanderson, and Lynch — and yet make it totally his own. Chandler Birch succeeds beautifully. A wonderful debut!” I was hoping to point you to an online excerpt so you could try it out, but so far I’ve been unable to track one down. If that changes, I’ll let you know!

The Facefaker’s Game was published by Simon & Schuster/ Simon451 on November 1, 2016. It is 444 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $4.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Tal Goretsky. Click the images above for bigger versions.

March/April 2017 Asimov’s Science Fiction Now on Sale

March/April 2017 Asimov’s Science Fiction Now on Sale

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Asimov's Science Fiction March April 2017-smallThe March/April 2017 Asimov’s Science Fiction is the magazine’s 40th Anniversary issue. I can still remember buying the second issue off the racks in Ottawa back in 1977. I vividly remember Isaac’s editorial, which cheerfully encouraged young readers to write science fiction, and how much it inspired me to try my hand at it myself.

I borrowed my parent’s typewriter, banged out a story, and mailed it in a few weeks later, dreams of being an SF writer in my head. I’m sure Asimov’s then editor, George Scithers, was cursing Asimov as he worked through the crush of submissions. I still have his personal rejection letter, which gently critiqued my plot, characters, and spelling. When I met George at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, I was finally able to thank him for his kindness to me a quarter-century earlier.

The double-sized March/April issue of Asimov’s is packed with intriguing stuff, including brand new fiction by Damien Broderick, Will McIntosh, Bill Johnson & Gregory Frost, Ian R. MacLeod, Suzanne Palmer, Sarah Pinsker, Dale Bailey, Rich Larson, Terry Bisson, and others. Here’s Sheila’s full description from the website:

March/April 2017 is our official fortieth anniversary! The exciting cover story is by Asimov’s Readers’ Award-winner Suzanne Palmer. In her tense new tale, a human-created artificial intelligence — left grieving and lonely on a distant planet — may annihilate an alien lifeform over a terrible misunderstanding. Don’t miss “Number Thirty-Nine Skink”!

Alan Smale flies us to another universe for an alternate view of “Kitty Hawk”; Ian MacLeod reveals the brutal “Wisdom of the Group”; We’ve come to expect that Damien Broderick will play with a myriad of motifs in his tales and certainly delivers in “Tao Zero”; Terry Bisson offers a wry explanation for why “We Regret the Error”; We find some twisted love in Rich Larson’s “Cupido”; while Will McIntosh provides us with another story of love gone wrong in “Soulmates.com”; “A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension” is a charming Asimov’s debut for new writer Andrea M. Pawley; Sarah Pinsker will break your heart with “The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going”; Ian Creasey lets us know that it will only get worse “After the Atrocity”; with “The Invasion of the Saucer-Men” Dale Bailey treats us to another of his works inspired by fifties SF movie titles; Gregory Norman Bossert lets us know who’s a “Goner”; and we’ll learn why “Three Can Keep a Secret” from a mysterious con artist in Bill Johnson & Gregory Frost’s new novelette.

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Dead Gods, Buried Histories, and a Protean City: Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Divine Cities Trilogy

Dead Gods, Buried Histories, and a Protean City: Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Divine Cities Trilogy

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I love it when the final book in a terrific trilogy finally arrives. (Wait a minute… are you sure it’s a trilogy? How can you tell? Sure, they all look like trilogies, until that pesky fourth book shows up. Better start over.) I love it when the third book in a terrific series finally arrives, and wraps things up satisfactorily… at least until the fourth book appears, maybe.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs (2014), the opening novel in The Divine Cities, was nominated for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and GoodReads Choice Award, and came in second for the Locus Award. But what got my attention was BG writer Peadar Ó Guilín calling it “The best fantasy I’ve read so far this year. Great stuff,” and a reviewer at Tor.com who described it as “an atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city.” Volume II, City of Blades, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim, and that built up anticipation for the third volume nicely.

City of Miracles is now scheduled to arrive in trade paperback from Broadway Books in early May. On his blog Bennett calls it “the final installment of The Divine Cities series, starring everyone’s favorite Dreyling murder machine, Sigrud. It’s readable as a standalone, just like the other books, but it’s highly recommended that you read the previous ones first.” Final installment. Uh huh. Let’s see how long that promise that holds up when this thing is optioned as the next big Netflix series.

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Future Treasures: Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods by Tania del Rio and Will Staehle

Future Treasures: Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods by Tania del Rio and Will Staehle

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Back in September I wrote a brief piece on Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye, the opening book in a new middle grade series written by Tania Del Rio and illustrated by Will Staehle. I’d been seeing glowing coverage of the book and had decided to order it, and as I said in the piece, “I can make up my mind on Staehle’s artwork right now — and I think it’s fantastic.”

So I was very pleased to see a new entry in the series, Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods, on the schedule for March 21, 2017. The books follow the adventures of twelve-year-old Warren, a kid who looks like he escaped from an Edward Gorey cartoon. Warren is the sole surviving heir to a grand (but rapidly decaying) old hotel, and his exploits see him mixed up with a terrific cast of supporting characters who live on or near the grounds of the rambling hotel, including monsters, witches, a ghostly girl who creeps around the hedge maze, and his twisted Aunt Annaconda and her evil sisters.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder by Roy A. Mauritsen

Black Gate Online Fiction: Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder by Roy A. Mauritsen

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Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder by Roy A. Mauritsen, published by Padwolf Publishing and now available in a brand new audibook narrated by Christopher Crosby Morris!

The new audiobook is available at Amazon, iTunes and Audible.com. Over 15 hours long and richly enhanced with music and sound, it’s a whole new way to experience Shards Of The Glass Slipper — the fairy tale fantasy epic that Patrick Thomas (The Murphy’s Lore series) calls “The Brothers Grimm meets Lord of the Rings.”

Here’s the audiobook trailer.

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Modular: Dungeons That Fight Back: 13th Age: Bestiary and Eyes of the Stone Thief from Pelgrane Press

Modular: Dungeons That Fight Back: 13th Age: Bestiary and Eyes of the Stone Thief from Pelgrane Press

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This past Saturday was the bi-annual Games Plus auction in Mount Prospect, Illinois, an event I celebrate every year (usually by massively blowing my budget in a prolonged bout of auction fever). A lot of folks attend looking for collectible vintage SF & fantasy games, and there’s certainly plenty of those to be had. But the chief reason I go is to find bargains, and especially bargains on new games. Heck, the big reason I sit in an uncomfortable metal chair for seven hours is just to see all the new games that flash by (and to see which ones the crowd goes nuts for). It’s sort of like attending a Paris fashion show for games, a comparison I’ve made previously.

When you’re sitting in the front row and the auctioneer starts fast-talking about a fascinating new game you’ve never seen before, you need to be ready to make a quick assessment. Is it a rare out-of-print title, like that copy of Victory Point Games’ Darkest Night I foolishly let get away for $40? Or are copies still available on Amazon for 20 bucks, like that Star Trek: Five Year Mission from Mayfair Games I agonized over? I kept my smartphone handy, and got pretty adept at fast-thumbing online prices as the auction progressed.

I made out pretty well this year, carting home seven big boxes of games — including plenty that fell into both categories. Some of my most intriguing purchases included Krosmaster Arena (for $20), Z-man Games Tragedy Looper ($10), City of Horror ($12), a shrinkwrapped copy of SoulJar Games’ Torn Amor ($15), and even an unread copy of KenzerCo’s Cattlepunk Chronicles ($5). But when I got home, there was one item I wanted to get my hands on immediately, and I dug through all seven boxes until I found it (nestled at the bottom of the seventh box, naturally): Eyes of the Stone Thief, a massive adventure supplement for the popular 13th Age RPG from Pelgrane Press. Along with it I won a copy of the 13th Age Bestiary, a full color monster compendium for the same system.

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New Treasures: If This Goes Wrong… edited by Hank Davis

New Treasures: If This Goes Wrong… edited by Hank Davis

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I’m really enjoying these recent Hank Davis anthologies, especially The Baen Big Book of Monsters and Things from Outer Space. As I’ve mentioned before, no one else today is collecting writers like Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, and Fredric Brown and packaging them in mass market anthologies for under 8 bucks. Davis is making the greatest SF writers of the 20th Century accessible to casual modern readers, and that’s no small thing.

Plus, his anthologies are a blast.

His most recent, If This Goes Wrong…, showed up just after Christmas. It collects 17 tales of off-kilter futures originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy, World of IF, Analog, and other fine publications. Just think — some kid in Oklahoma picked this book up and discovered the science fiction of the pulps for the first time. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

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