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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 207 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 207 Now Available

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 207-smallBlack Gate is up against Beneath Ceaseless Skies for a World Fantasy Award this year, and I don’t mind telling you, that’s some stiff competition. BCS has been publishing since October 2008 — nearly 8 years — hitting its bimonthly schedule without missing a beat. Speaking as someone who managed one issue a year, that’s pretty impressive. It’s become one of the top markets for Adventure Fantasy, and has published stories by Aliette de Bodard, Gemma Files, Catherynne M. Valente, Fran Wilde, Kameron Hurley, E. Catherine Tobler, Tina Connolly, Sarah Pinsker, Cat Rambo, Yoon Ha Lee, K.J. Parker, Rachel Swirsky, Bruce McAllister, Saladin Ahmed, Carrie Vaughn, and many others.

Of particular note to Black Gate readers, they’ve also published a fair number of BG authors, including Derek Künsken, Rosamund Hodge, Richard Parks, Brian Dolton, and Chris Willrich.

If you haven’t made the time to check it out, it’s not too late. Issue #207 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now available, completely free on their website. It is dated September 1 and features fiction by Marie Brennan and Thomas M. Waldroon, a podcast by Marie Brennan, a Audio Vault podcast by Marie Brennan, and a Novel Excerpt by James Morrow. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

“To Rise No More” by Marie Brennan
Ada shook her head, staring once more at the Thames. “I do not think what I had in mind will work. The size of the wing, if it is to be large enough to lift me—my body cannot possibly generate enough force to move it. Not with the speed required.” Especially not when she kept growing. Every inch meant more weight for the wings to lift, without a commensurate gain in strength.

“George & Frank Tarr, Boy Avencherers, in ‘Beeyon the Shours We Knowe!!!!’” by Thomas M. Waldroon
Where’s it all come from? George wondered. Where you think it comes from? Frank scoffed. It’s fields and roads and house lots. It’s America, running westwards to somewhere else, anywhere else, someplace maybe better, like Great-Grandpaps did, and like Papa did, and just like we’re doing.

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New Treasures: Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye by Tania Del Rio and Will Staehle

New Treasures: Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye by Tania Del Rio and Will Staehle

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Warren the 13th-small

Looking over Will Staehle’s art for the book Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye, I’ve never been closer to believing Lewis Carroll’s adage that all good books must be illustrated.

12 year-old Warren is the sole surviving heir to a grand (but rapidly decaying) old hotel. When a strange bandaged guest arrives, Warren’s deliciously self-absorbed Aunt Annaconda soon becomes convinced that he’s after the All-Seeing Eye, a magnificent treasure that family legend says is hidden someone on the property. The result is a madcap treasure hunt and Warren, determined to find his rightful inheritance first, soon joins the search. But first he’ll have to contend with strange monsters, sinister witches, bizarre mazes and secret codes, and a long-forgotten riddle.

This 224-page book is heavily illustrated, with art on virtually every page. The New York Times Book Review calls it “an engaging mystery… with a few nice twists and surprises along the way,” and Publishers Weekly says it’s “stylish, exciting, funny, and just slightly macabre.” That’s good to know, but I can make up my mind on Staehle’s artwork right now — and I think it’s fantastic.

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Future Treasures: Everfair by Nisi Shawl

Future Treasures: Everfair by Nisi Shawl

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Everfair-smallNisi Shawl has been writing short stories for over two decades, and her long awaited first novel, an historical fantasy steampunk tale set in the Belgian Congo, will be released this week. It explores one of the darkest periods in human history — King Leopold’s African holocaust — and imagines what might have been if the native peoples of the Congo had developed steam technology of their own. It’s a fascinating premise, and Everfair is one of the most intriguing literary offerings of the fall.

Everfair is a wonderful Neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britian join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.

Nisi Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history. Everfair is told from a multiplicity of voices: Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and African Americans in complex relationships with one another, in a compelling range of voices that have historically been silenced. Everfair is not only a beautiful book but an educational and inspiring one that will give the reader new insight into an often ignored period of history.

Everfair will be published by Tor Books on September 6, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Victo Ngai.

Read a sample chapter at Tor.com.

The Life of a Reprint Anthologist: Paula Guran’s Research Stack for the Upcoming Swords Against Darkness

The Life of a Reprint Anthologist: Paula Guran’s Research Stack for the Upcoming Swords Against Darkness

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Paula Guran's sword and sorcery research

Paula Guran has my dream job. She’s currently deep into the research phase for her upcoming Swords Against Darkness (named, she says, partly in tribute to Andrew J. Offutt’s classic line of 70s Zebra anthologies). And last week she posted this pic of her current reading stack, saying:

Life of a Reprint Anthologist: This is not even HALF the research sources for Swords Against Darkness (a sword & sorcery anthology for next year).

Check out those gorgeous Black Gate magazines in the second stack!

I think Paula is the perfect editor to tackle this job. She has excellent taste, and she’s already proven — in numerous excellent recent anthologies such as Weird Detectives, New Cthulhu 2, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016 — that she brings a fresh eye to fantasy.

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Gods, Monsters and Mayhem: The Pantheon Novels of James Lovegrove

Gods, Monsters and Mayhem: The Pantheon Novels of James Lovegrove

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Age of Shiva James Lovegrove-small Age of Heroes James Lovegrove-small

One of my all-time favorite fantasy novels is Roger Zelazny’s Hugo-winning Lord of Light, a richly original science fantasy of one man’s attempt to stop an elitist cabal from setting themselves up as gods on a newly colonized world, using the gods of the Hindu pantheon as a template. James Lovegrove’s 8-volume Pantheon series is, if anything, even more ambitious than that groundbreaking work, as each volume uses a different pantheon of gods to spin a standalone tale of mythological mayhem.

The series began with The Age of Ra in 2009, and continued in six additional novels and one collection, Godpunk. The most recent, Age of Shiva, which borrows from god of the Hindu Pantheon, arrived in 2014, and the next volume, Age of Heroes, which features the Gods of Greece, arrives in paperback next week.

For anyone looking for their next big SF adventure series, the Pantheon novels make a fine candidate. Here’s the complete list of titles.

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August 2016 Apex Magazine Now Available

August 2016 Apex Magazine Now Available

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Apex August 2016-smallI’m long overdue to check in on Apex magazine — I haven’t covered an issue since April. The September issue is due in just a few days, but I love Marcela Bolívar’s August cover so much I’m not going to wait for it.

Jason Sizemore gives us the complete scoop on the contents in his editorial.

Welcome to issue 87 – the issue where we break your heart…

“The Gentleman of Chaos” by A. Merc Rustad is a dark fantasy that shows the rewards of a well-disciplined long game. “I Remember Your Face” by E.K. Wagner is a heartbreaking post-apocalyptic tale of revenge, loss, and sacrifice. “Fall to Her” by flash fiction master Alexis A. Hunter takes us on a journey of unforgettable grief in a thousand words.

Our reprints this month are “Paskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion)” by Damien Angelica Walters and an excerpt from Stay Crazy (Apex Publications, 2016) by Erica L. Satifka. Poetry editor Bianca Spriggs has an impressive lineup of poems for us: “Not Like This” by Mary Soon Lee, “This Earth” by Frank Tota, “The Labyrinth Keeper” by Anton Rose, and “Perplexities” by Peter Venable…

Rounding out our content are interviews with A. Merc Rustad and cover artist Marcela Bolívar and the latest incarnation of A.C. Wise’s short fiction review series “Words for Thoughts.” Be sure to check out the podcast version of “A Gentleman of Chaos” by A. Merc Rustad as read by Mahvesh Murad.

Here’s the complete TOC, with links to all the free content.

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Magic, Intrigue, Adventure, and a Bit of Piracy: The Shades of Magic Trilogy by V. E. Schwab

Magic, Intrigue, Adventure, and a Bit of Piracy: The Shades of Magic Trilogy by V. E. Schwab

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335710zWYMO5wF A-Gathering-of-Shadows-small A Conjuring of Light-small

The second book in V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy, A Gathering of Shadows, made her a New York Times bestselling author. It has become one of the most acclaimed and popular fantasy series in recent memory. Booklist says it’s “Full of magic, intrigue, adventure, deception, a bit of piracy,” and NPR called it “Compulsively readable.” The Wall Street Journal labeled it “a multiple split-screen adventure, with an engaging hero/heroine pair,” and Steven Brust says “is as twisty-turny, dark, and gorgeous as the (multiple) Londons it winds through — I loved it!”

When the second volume was released earlier this year, I called it the “concluding volume” in a 2-book series. Whoops. That’s the publishing biz for you. I hope I don’t get in trouble soon for calling it a trilogy.

The series follows the adventures of Kell, a magician, ambassador, and smuggler who travels between parallel Londons, carrying royal correspondence. When a thief named Delilah Bard robs him, and then saves him from a nasty fate, the two find themselves on the run, jumping between worlds. In A Gathering of Shadows, Kell is visited by dreams of ominous magical events… as strange things begin to emerge from Black London, the place of which no one speaks.

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New Treasures: The Gentleman, by Forrest Leo

New Treasures: The Gentleman, by Forrest Leo

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The Gentleman Forrest Leo-smallWell, we’re heading into fall (at least, for those readers in the Northern Hemisphere), and that’s reading season. Time to snuggle down with a good book or three, as the weather turns foul outside. My choice for Labor Day weekend is the debut novel by Forrest Leo, a Monty Pythonesque fantasy about a poet who accidentally sells his wife to the devil — then assembles a band of adventurers to rescue her. BookRiot labels it “a delight,” and Locus calls it “Wonderfully demented and comical… as if Tom Holt and Oscar Wilde got together and decided to do up a steampunk novelty… a robust, riotous romp.”

When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they’re broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him.

Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil — the polite “Gentleman” of the title — who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party’s over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord.

Newly in love with Vivian, Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell that includes Simmons, the butler; Tompkins, the bookseller; Ashley Lancaster, swashbuckling Buddhist; Will Kensington, inventor of a flying machine; and Savage’s spirited kid sister, Lizzie, freshly booted from boarding school for a “dalliance.” Throughout, his cousin’s quibbling footnotes to the text push the story into comedy nirvana.

Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, anarchist-fearing bobbies, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history, and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny, The Gentleman is a giddy farce that recalls the masterful confections of P.G. Wodehouse and Hergé’s beautifully detailed Tintin adventures.

The Gentleman was published by Penguin Press on August 16, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $26 on hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Joe Bonadonna Reports on Weird Tales

Joe Bonadonna Reports on Weird Tales

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Weird Tales 360 back cover-smallBack in May I wrote a brief post asking “Is Weird Tales Dead… Again?”

Since then there’s been no shortage of rumors, grumblings, and premature death announcements… but not a lot of facts. But this week, Black Gate roving reporter Joe Bonadonna checks in with the latest news.

In spite some talk concerning the possible demise of Weird Tales, I’m happy to report that it is still alive and well. I spoke with editor Marvin Kaye and he told me plans are in the works for the future. They had some financial issues, but all is well. The publisher plans to do an “unthemed” issue, followed by a “Halloween Edition” before all else.

I am hoping that the planned “Sword and Sorcery Special Edition” will follow after that. I was not given any specific timeline for the publication of these issues, but let’s hope they’ll all see the light of day within a short amount of time, without too much time-lag between issues. I keep checking Weird Tales websites for updates, but so far haven’t been able to learn anything. Let’s all hope for the best, and I’ll try to keep you all in the loop when and if I learn anything more.

As for new submissions, they are overstocked with fiction. No need to submit. That is all.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.

Future Treasures: Of Sand and Malice Made by Bradley P. Beaulieu

Future Treasures: Of Sand and Malice Made by Bradley P. Beaulieu

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Of Sand and Malice Made

Bradley P. Beaulieu’s first novel in the Song of Shattered Sands series, Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, was published last September, and listed as one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BuzzFeed. The next book in the series, Of Sand and Malice Made, tells an earlier tale of Çeda, the youngest pit fighter in the history of the great desert city of Sharakhai. It arrives in hardcover from DAW next week.

Çeda, the heroine of the novel Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, is the youngest pit fighter in the history of the great desert city of Sharakhai. In this prequel, she has already made her name in the arena as the fearsome, undefeated White Wolf; none but her closest friends and allies know her true identity.

But this all changes when she crosses the path of Rümayesh, an ehrekh, a sadistic creature forged long ago by the god of chaos. The ehrekh are usually desert dwellers, but this one lurks in the dark corners of Sharakhai, toying with and preying on humans. As Rümayesh works to unmask the White Wolf and claim Çeda for her own, Çeda’s struggle becomes a battle for her very soul.

The next installment in the series, With Blood Upon the Sand, is due in hardcover in February.

Of Sand and Malice Made will be published by DAW on September 6, 2016. It is 240 pages, priced at $18 in hardcover, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by René Aigner.