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Author: John ONeill

Future Treasures: Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

Future Treasures: Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

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Too Like the Lightning-small Seven Surrenders-small The WIll to Battle-small

Ada Palmer’s debut Too Like the Lightning was one of the most acclaimed SF novels of last year. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog selected it as one of the Best Novels of 2016, and Rich Horton included it in his 2017 Hugo Nomination list, saying:

A fairly seamless mixture of SF and Fantasy… Too Like the Lightning is set several centuries in the future, in a world divided into “Hives,” cooperative family-like organizations with different strengths. The narrator is Mycroft Canner, who, we slowly learn, is a criminal… but who is also quite engaging, and an important mentor to an amazing child who can bring inanimate things to life. This novel introduces a conflict – a threat to the world’s balance of power – and also intricately sketches the complex background of this future, and introduces a ton of neat characters. Then it stops, which is its main weakness – it is but half a novel. The sequel (Seven Surrenders) is due in March 2017.

Seven Surrenders, the second novel in what’s now being called the Terra Ignota series, arrives in hardcover next week from Tor Books. It is 400 pages. The Will to Battle, the third book in the series, is scheduled to be published December 5, 2017. It is 368 pages. Both books will be priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. Read the first four chapters of Too Like the Lightning at Tor.com, and the first two chapters of Seven Surrenders here.

Earth, Air, Fire and Water: The Elemental Blessings Series by Sharon Shinn

Earth, Air, Fire and Water: The Elemental Blessings Series by Sharon Shinn

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Troubled Waters Sharon Shinn-small Royal Airs Sharon Shinn-small Jeweled Fire Sharon Shinn-small Unquiet Land Sharon Shinn-small

I’ve been friends with Sharon Shinn ever since we co-hosted a writing workshop at Capricon here in Chicago some years ago. Turns out that’s a great way to bond: giving grueling assignments to aspiring writers while grading their efforts with a cruel eye. Try it some time!

Something else you should try is Sharon’s Elemental Blessings series, which just wrapped up with the fourth volume, Unquiet Land, which arrived in hardcover in November. C.S.E. Cooney, in her report on Royal Airs, described it as follows.

The Elemental Blessings series… take place in the Kingdom of Chialto. It’s an exciting time in this secondary world, with “smoker cars” taking over for horse-drawn carriages, the blushing dawn of flying machines, alliances forming and falling apart with realms across the mountains and seas, the delicate balance of power between the regent, the primes of the Five Houses, and the heirs to the throne.

All of this and magic too!

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New Treasures: Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames

New Treasures: Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames

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Kings of the Wyld-smallA few weeks ago I spotted an intriguing trade paperback in the New Arrivals section at Barnes and Noble. But I didn’t buy it (I’m making an effort to reduce all those impulse purchases, thank you) and, by the time I got home, I’d completely forgotten the title. I spent a fruitless hour online, paging through New Release sections at multiple online sources, before I gave up. Fortunately, it was waiting for me when I returned to B&N a week later, and I bought it immediately. The moral of this terrifying story? Buy good books when you find them, damn it.

That new guiding principle served me well this week when I stumbled on Nicholas Eames’ debut fantasy novel Kings of the Wyld, which grabbed me immediately with its central conceit: an aging mercenary attempts to get the band back together for one final mission. Corrina Lawson at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog gives it two hearty thumbs up.

Kings of the Wyld… manages to be a comedy, an adventure tale, a consideration on growing older, and a sendup of fantasy conventions, all at the same time. It also has heart. In short: it rocks.

The heart comes in the form of our protagonist, Clay “Slowhand” Cooper, the moral center of the mercenary group known as the Kings of the Wyld. Or, well, “formerly known as,” because Clay is retired, working a boring job as a city guard…. It’s inevitable Clay would answer his old friend Gabriel’s call to get the band back together to tackle one more seemingly impossible task: rescuing Gabriel’s grown daughter from a city under siege. Accompanying Clay is his trusty shield, Blackheart, made from the wood of a sentient tree Clay killed. The first half of the book is a trip across the fantasy kingdom as Clay and Gabriel attempt to put their band, Saga, back together. Not so easy, especially as Gabriel first must liberate his magic sword from his ex-wife and her new husband…

The setting Eames builds around these characters made me wish this story existed in graphic novel form. There’s the Wyld Forest, teeming with treacherous inhabitants; and an amazing action sequence in a floating arena, where the group finally gets it mojo back; a pursuit via magical airship; a tense chase sequence across an ice bridge; and, of course, the inevitably epic finale. Did I mention the fight with the dragon? It isn’t really an epic fantasy until the dragon shows up.

Read Corrina’s complete review here.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Swords Against Darkness

A Tale of Two Covers: Swords Against Darkness

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Swords Against Darkness Andrew Offutt-small Swords Against Darkness Paula Guran-small

Last September we reported here on the massive stack of research material Paula Guran was digesting in a noble attempt to produce the ultimate modern Swords & Sorcery anthology. The project, Swords Against Darkness, now has a cover (above right), and a release date (July). It does not (yet) have a table of contents. But when it does, you’ll be the first to know.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to put Paula’s cover side by side with its namesake, Andrew J. Offutt’s groundbreaking 1977 paperback anthology from Zebra, which spawned a series of five books containing original S&S tales from Poul Anderson, Tanith Lee, Charles R. Saunders, Orson Scott Card, Charles de Lint, Diana L. Paxson, Keith Taylor, Manly Wade Wellman, Richard L. Tierney, David Drake, Ramsey Campbell, Andre Norton, and many others. Paula’s new anthology is twice as long as that slender paperback, and will come crammed with classic stories by Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, Steven Erikson, and many others.

Of course, Offutt’s version also boasted an original cover by the great Frank Frazetta, and it’s hard to compete with that. The new cover goes for a more modern look and, while I’m old-school enough to wish for cover art instead of a photo edit, I think it does the job well enough. Here’s the back cover text.

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Future Treasures: The Girl From Rawblood by Catriona Ward

Future Treasures: The Girl From Rawblood by Catriona Ward

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The Girl From Rawblood-small The Girl From Rawblood-back-small

Catriona Ward’s debut The Girl From Rawblood won the 2016 August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel — an impressive accomplishment for a first novel. Critics have raved over both its unabashed gothic horror sensibilities, and its originality… no easy feat!

Comic artist/writer Mike Mignola calls it “Brilliant… the old-school gothic novel I have been waiting for… I have never read anything like it and that’s saying something.” Kelly Link says it’s “A story to satisfy the most gothic of hearts… Sentence by sentence, Catriona Ward made herself one of my very favorite writers.” And Sarah Pinborough calls it “Terrifying… a dazzlingly brilliant Gothic masterpiece.” With praise like that, I might just have to clear an entire weekend for this one.

The Girl from Rawblood will be published by Sourcebooks Landmark on March 7, 2017. It is 368 pages, priced at $15.99 in paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

February 2017 Clarkesworld Now Available

February 2017 Clarkesworld Now Available

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Clarkesworld February 2017-smallThe February 2017 issue of Clarkesworld, issue #125, marks an important milestone for the magazine — and for its editor and founder, Neil Clarke. Here’s Neil to explain (from his editorial, “The Next Chapter Begins“).

The day this issue is published will be my first day as a full-time editor, which isn’t to say I’ve reached the point where I’m making a full-time salary. That’s going to take time, which I finally have. The first order of business is to close the salary gap between Lisa’s job and my old one and to cover the cost of our new health plan. I’ve agreed to do some consulting and knowledge transfer sessions with my former employer, so that should help create a bit more of a buffer before our savings account has to come into play.

As for the impact all this new-found time and energy will have on Clarkesworld, give me a couple of months to work that out. I still have some backlogged tasks that need to be completed and then I can start hammering out a long-range plan. In the meantime, each new subscription, Patreon supporter, or advertiser takes a little bit of the financial pressure away, so this will be one of my immediate areas of focus.The other will probably be targeting more anthology projects, both original and new, including catching up on the remaining Clarkesworld annuals. I’ll probably take on a few more ebook clients as well.

If you are already a subscriber or supporter, thank you. You’ve made this leap possible. If you aren’t a subscriber, there’s no better time than now. I know money is tight for many of our readers and listeners, so if you can’t afford to, you can always help by amplifying the calls for new subscribers/supporters on social media or perhaps adding a review on one of the many sites that sell our digital subscriptions — you’d be really surprised by how much of an impact that sometimes makes.

And while part of me will miss my old career, I’m eager to get started on this new chapter in my life and look forward to the new opportunities it presents. Now, back to work… !

Clarkesworld is one of the finest magazines we have — and one of the best things to happen to genre short fiction in the last decade. If you care at all about the future of the field, I hope you’ll consider supporting Clarkesworld, perhaps by just buying a sample issue at Amazon or B&N.com for $2.99 or, as I did, signing up at their Patreon page. I’m very excited to see what the new era brings at Clarkesworld, and I hope you’ll join us for the ride.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in January

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in January

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Black-Science-Volume-1-smallerWell, this is a little recursive. As I draft the list of Top Ten BG articles last month, I learn that our most posts in January were… Top Ten lists.

That includes Brandon Crilly’s Top Ten Books I Read in 2016, sitting right at the top of the heap, as well as GeekDad‘s Best Tabletop Games of 2016 (at #2), John DeNardo’s Best of the Best: The Definitive List of 2016’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (#3), and even the Top 50 Black Gate Posts in December (#6).

What can I say? At the start of a new year, everybody seems to want to know what the heck they missed last year.

It wasn’t all about Top Ten lists last month, of course. Coming in at number 4 was Fletcher Vredenburgh’s review of Michael Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead (and the classic film derived from it, The 13th Warrior). Rounding out the Top 5 for the month was Ryan Harvey’s second installment in his survey of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga.

Also on the Top Ten list were Violette Malan’s essay “Retrofitting, And When It Doesn’t Work,” Bob Byrne’s look at a gorgeous new Solar Pons Omnibus, Bob’s affectionate examination of perhaps the finest D&D adventure ever made, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About The Temple of Elemental Evil,” and Elizabeth Crowens’s Interview with a Brooklyn Vampire.

The complete list of Top Articles for January follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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Nancy Willard, June 26, 1936 – February 19, 2017

Nancy Willard, June 26, 1936 – February 19, 2017

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Things Invisible to See Nancy Willard-small Pish, Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch Sister Water Nancy Willard paperback-small

Nancy Willard was the author of more than 70 books, including more than 40 books for children, such as the Anatole trilogy, Firebrat (1988), East of the Sun and West of the Moon: A Play (1989), and Pish, Posh Said Hieronymus Bosch (1991), illustrated by the Dillons. She won the Newbery Award in 1982 for her book of poetry, William Blake’s Inn, illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen. It was the first book of poetry to win the Newbery.

She also wrote a handful of fantasy novels for adults, including Things Invisible to See (1985), which I bought in Ottawa in the Bantam Spectra paperback edition in 1986 (above left; cover by Todd Schorr). Set in her home town of Ann Arbor in the 1940s, it tells the tale of two brothers who meet a paralyzed young woman, and ends with a baseball game featuring some of the sport’s most famous players. Sister Water (1993) was called “Heavenly…Marvelous… A kind of miracle,” by People magazine (see the back cover of the Wayne State edition here).

Nancy Willard was born on June 26, 1936 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, and became a professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1965. She retired from Vassar in 2013. Her last children’s book will be released this fall. She died peacefully at her home in Poughkeepsie on February 19. She was 80 years old. Read her obituary at the Poughkeepsie Journal.

New Treasures: Prophets of the Ghost Ants by Clark Thomas Carlton

New Treasures: Prophets of the Ghost Ants by Clark Thomas Carlton

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Clark Thomas Carlton is the author of precisely one previous book, the novelization of the John Travolta/Nicolas Cage film Face/Off, which was published 20 years ago. His newest novel is completely different, a science fantasy set a billion years in the future, which Carlton says was “inspired during a trip to the Yucatan when I witnessed a battle for a Spanish peanut by two different tribes of ants.” It’s perhaps the most fascinating premise of any novel I’ve seen so far this year. It was published as a 598-page mass market paperback by Harper Voyager last month. Annalee Newitz, reviewing the self-published paperback edition in 2011 at io9, wrote:

I’m fascinated by the worldbuilding in Clark T. Carlton’s novel Prophets of the Ghost Ants, which Carlton says “takes place a billion years in the future when the human race has been reduced to the size of rice grains and has intertwined with the insect world in order survive, essentially becoming the parasites of ants…” Journey into a strange future of insect battalions and a power-mad aristocracy that’s more antlike than human.

Prophets of the Ghost Ants is described as Book One of the Antasy Series (although it first appeared six years ago, and there’s been no sign of a second one, so take that with a grain of salt). It was published by Warner Aspect on January 24, 2017. It is 598 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $3.99 for the digital version. The cover artist is not credited. Read the prologue and the first three chapters at WattPad.

The Best of a Master Fantasist: The Zoran Zivkovic Collection

The Best of a Master Fantasist: The Zoran Zivkovic Collection

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Impossible Stories-small Impossible Stories II-small The Papyrus Trilogy-small The Five Wonders of the Danube-small

Serbian master fantasist Zoran Zivkovic has an enviable international reputation. His novels include The Writer (1998), Impossible Encounters (2000), and The Ghostwriter (2009), and his mosaic novel The Library won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2003.

But his appearances in English here in the US has been spotty. Which is one of the reasons I was so delighted to see Cadmus Press publish The Zoran Zivkovic Collection, four gorgeous volumes of his best work, translated into English:

Impossible Stories I — 422 pages, $34, November 10, 2016 (Includes “Time Gifts,” “Impossible Encounters,” “Seven Touches of Music,” “The Library,” and “Steps through the Mist”)
Impossible Stories II — 428 pages, $34, Dec 10, 2016 (Contains the collections Four Stories Till the End, Twelve Collections, The Bridge, Amarcord, and Miss Tamara, the Reade)
The Papyrus Trilogy — 608 pages, $41, August 1, 2016 (The cases of Dejan Lucik. Includes three novels: The Last Book, The Grand Manuscript, and The Compendium of the Dead)
The Five Wonders of the Danube — 198 pages, $26, August 1, 2016

All four are hardcovers featuring striking cover art by Japanese artist Youchan Ito. On his website the author calls them “the first four volumes of The Zoran Živković Collection,” which implies there will be more. The publisher claims all four volumes “will be available in hardcover, trade paperback, and electronic editions,” but for now the hardcover editions are the only ones I can find.