Browsed by
Author: John ONeill

Vintage Treasures: Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance

Vintage Treasures: Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance

Comments 10 comments
Green Magic Underwood Miller-small Green Magic Jack Vance-small

Jack Vance was one of the most prolific fantasists of the 20th Century at both long and short lengths, producing some 55 novels and dozens of short stories. Underwood-Miller published no less than 60 hardcover volumes of his work during his lifetime, chiefly collections, and Subterranean Press produced some eleven volumes of his short stories and novellas, starting with the massive Jack Vance Treasury in 2007, and including The Early Jack Vance, a thoroughly delightful five-volume set that ended with Grand Crusades.

All those marvelous hardcover volumes were aimed at the collectors market, however, and sadly Vance had precious little fantasy short fiction reprinted in paperback. In fact, he had relatively few mass market collections at all. Ace gave us a handful of science fiction collections, including The Worlds of Jack Vance (1973), Galactic Effectuator (1981) and The Augmented Agent and Other Stories (1988); DAW published Dust of Far Suns (1981) and The Narrow Land (1982); and Pocket just one: The Best of Jack Vance (1976).

But what Vance lacked in quantity, he made up in quality. His 1979 collection Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance, one of the very few collections that focuses on his fantasy work, gathers some of his very finest work, including the title story and the brilliant “The Moon Moth.” It appeared in hardcover from Underwood Miller in 1979, and was reprinted in paperback by Tor in 1988.

…

Read More Read More

Monsters, Super-Science, and Devastating Family Secrets: Aurora West by Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin

Monsters, Super-Science, and Devastating Family Secrets: Aurora West by Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin

Comments 3 comments
The Rise of Aurora West-small The Fall of the House of West-small

When I started my new job last month, I began taking the train into the city every day for the first time. St. Charles to Chicago, an hour each way. That’s a long time to be staring at all those suburbs going by. So I did two things immediately: I upgraded to a new iPhone 6s, which allowed me to keep up with all my blogs on the go (especially Politico, Tor.com, and MSNBC), and I started catching up on graphic novels.

For my first month on the job (at least until Alice got me a subscription to The New York Times as a birthday present last week), I read almost exclusively comics and graphic novels on the train, digging into the huge stack I’d accumulated over the past eighteen months. I read Original Sin, a cosmic mystery featuring Marvel’s greatest heroes as they attempted to solve the murder of The Watcher. I enjoyed Rick Remender’s gonzo dimension-hopping adventure Black Science, and the 2016 Hugo nominee Invisible Republic, a really superior far-future political thriller, and lots more.

In short, I read some pretty fine stuff. But the crème-de-la-crème was a two-volume story featuring Aurora West, a compelling heroine who was completely new to me: The Rise of Aurora West and The Fall of the House of West. Aurora accompanies her father Haggard West, greatest hero of the beleaguered city of Arcopolis, as he races across rooftops, investigates the mysterious origins of the strange plague of monsters bedeviling his city, and solves bizarre crimes. But in the process Aurora stumbles on clues relating to a long-forgotten crime, and begins an investigation of her own… one that leads to a series of revelations that challenge everything she knows, and threatens the very future of Arcopolis.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds

Future Treasures: The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds

Comments 3 comments
Arthur C Clarke A Meeting With Medusa-small Arthur C Clarke The Medusa Chronicles-small

Arthur C. Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1971, and 45 years later is still considered one of the great classics of SF. It introduced us to Howard Falcon, who suffered a terrible accident while exploring the hostile skies of Jupiter — an accident that nearly destroyed his helium-filled airship, and both turned him into the world’s first cyborg, his badly damaged body largely replaced with machines, and made him essentially immortal. When Falcon returns to Jupiter in a more advanced ship, he makes contact with giant jellyfish-like creatures he names “Medusae.” The Medusae may be intelligent, and Falcon’s experience with them changes him even more dramatically than his previous accident. Now Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds have written a novel-length sequel to Clarke’s classic tale, following Falcon’s further adventures to the limits of our solar system… and beyond.

Inspired by Clarke’s novella, The Medusa Chronicles continues the story of Howard Falcon, perhaps humanity’s greatest ambassador and explorer, and the centuries of his adventures among our solar system, the rise of artificial intelligence, and our expansion on to other planets, written with the permission from Clarke’s estate by two of our greatest science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds.

The Medusa Chronicles is an awe-inspiring work by two modern masters of science fiction who have taken the vision of one the field’s greatest writers and expanded upon it, combining cutting-edge science, philosophy, and technology into a transcendent work of fiction that offers a plausible future for our solar system through the eyes of one of its great fictional heroes.

The Medusa Chronicles will be published by Saga Press on June 7, 2016. It is 412 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Getty Images.

New Treasures: The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet

New Treasures: The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet

Comments 4 comments

The Murdstone Trilogy-smallHow hard can it be to write a fantasy trilogy? That’s a topic that came up more than once at the Nebula Awards this month. You know what also came up? A copy of Mel Peet’s The Murdstone Trilogy, which deals with that very question. I was fortunate enough to get one of the few copies that showed up on the free book table at the Nebula weekend, and I was very glad I did. It proved to be the prize acquisition of the weekend.

Written by Carnegie Medalist Mal Peet, it’s a black comedy about an impoverished literary writer who makes a pact with the devil to write a sword-and-sorcery trilogy. It was sold as an adult novel in the UK, but is being marketed as YA here in the US. The Wall Street Journal calls it “A deliriously freewheeling send-up of the publishing industry and the current sword-and-sorcery craze,” and Publishers Weekly says it’s “enormous fun, especially for those familiar with the literary conventions it skewers.”

Award-winning YA author Philip Murdstone is in trouble. Flat broke. His star has waned. No one wants his novels about sensitive teenage boys. So his ruthless agent, Minerva Cinch, convinces him that his only hope is to write a sword-and-sorcery blockbuster. High Fantasy, specifically, or, to be more precise, Phantasy with a p-h. Unfortunately, Philip — allergic to the faintest trace of anything Tolkien — is utterly unsuited to the task.

In Philip’s darkest, whiskey-fueled hour, a dwarfish stranger comes to his rescue. But the deal Philip makes with Pocket Wellfair turns out to have Faustian consequences. The Murdstone Trilogy is a richly dark comedy described by one U.K. reviewer as “totally insane in the best way possible.”

The Murdstone Trilogy was published by Candlewick Press on September 22, 2015. It is 314 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Greg Clarke.

May 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

May 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

Comments 0 Comment

Lightspeed May 2016-smallThe complete May issue of Lightspeed is now yours to enjoy free online. The month offers new fantasy by Seanan McGuire and Wole Talabi, and fantasy reprints by Tim Pratt and Elizabeth Hand, plus original science fiction by An Owomoyela and Mari Ness, and SF reprints by Haris A. Durrani and Tora Greve.

It also features author spotlights, book reviews by Amal El-Mohtar, a movie review by Carrie Vaughn, and an interview with Charlie Jane Anders. The ebook also includes a reprint of Hugh Howey’s “The Plagiarist” and a new excerpt Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, out in trade paperback this month from Vintage Books.

The cover artist this issue is Goñi Montes. Here’s the complete contents for the May issue.

Fantasy

“The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch” by Seanan McGuire
Mist flowed through the Tulgey Wood like treacle, slow and thick and unyielding. Squeaks and muffled chitters came from the underbrush as rabbits, foxes, and adolescent toves that hadn’t sensed the weather changing were caught and drowned in the gray-white mire. It would clear by noon, burnt off by the sun, and then the scavengers would come, making a feast of the small mist-struck creatures.

“North Over Empty Space” by Tim Pratt (Originally published at Patreon.com, 2015)
Sigmund came back to himself after a gray interval of unknown time, hunched in the yellow vinyl booth of an appallingly bright diner, his head aching from the night’s exertions. His partner Carlsbad sat across from him, drawing no attention at all, which struck Sigmund as strange even in his exhausted state. Carlsbad was a human-shaped figure, but he was unclothed, his face was entirely featureless, and he was composed of a viscous-looking black substance instead of flesh.

…

Read More Read More

Capture the Magic of the Nebulas With Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey

Capture the Magic of the Nebulas With Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey

Comments 0 Comment

Nebula Awards Showcase 2016-smallThe buzz here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters for the past week has been all about the Nebula Awards weekend, held just a few blocks away in the Palmer House in downtown Chicago. Half of the staff attended — including me, Tina Jens, C.S.E. Cooney, Derek Kunsken, and Zeta Moore — and we had a terrific time, mingling with the great writers, editors, and publishers in the field. It culminated, of course, in the Nebula Awards presentation Saturday night (see our detailed report on the Awards here, and the entire weekend here).

The Nebulas are a celebration of the finest writing of the year, and even if you can’t attend the weekend, you can still enjoy that — in the form of the annual Nebula Awards Showcase. The latest volume, edited and assembled by Mercedes Lackey, gather the winners from last year in a handsome trade paperback.

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories of the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The editor, selected by SFWA’s anthology Committee (chaired by Mike Resnick), is American science fiction and fantasy writer Mercedes Lackey. This year’s Nebula winners are Ursula Vernon, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Nancy Kress, and Jeff VanderMeer, with Alaya Dawn Johnson winning the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

Mercedes Lackey took the rather unusual approach of including every short story and novelette nominee and winner, and limiting herself to excerpts in the novella category (with the exception of the winner). See the complete Table of Contents here.

…

Read More Read More

Amal El-Mohtar on Clockwork Canada

Amal El-Mohtar on Clockwork Canada

Comments 0 Comment

Clockwork Canada-smallI’ve been enjoying Amal El-Mohtar’s review column at Lightspeed magazine. In her latest, for the May issue, she calls Max Gladstone’s Four Roads Cross, the upcoming book in his Craft Sequence, “breathtakingly satisfying,” and Nnedi Okorafor’s Nebula-award winning Tor.com novella Binti “a startling whirlwind of a book that engaged and entranced me.”

But it’s her review of Dominik Parisien’s new anthology Clockwork Canada that I found most intriguing. Party because I’m Canadian, but also because the book sounds so darn enticing. Here’s Amal.

In Clockwork Canada, [Dominik]’s brought an artificer’s eye to this collection’s various parts to ensure they work together as a whole that is more than their sum… It’s an enormously diverse collection, both in terms of its authors’ backgrounds and interests and the eclecticism of its contents: These are stories that span the breadth (and occasionally, literally, depth) of Canada, geographically and temporally, as well as the whole spectrum of steampunk. There’s a good mix of adventure stories and domestic stories, some more hopeful, some more horror; some are more fantastic, some more science fictional. Some stories imagine alternate histories, while others nestle small, beautiful stories in the corners of enormous events; some do both, and more, tangling retro and futurism in different measures.

This is not a collection of beaver jokes and maple syrup. I hugely appreciated seeing, across all these stories, a Canada shorn of any of the jingoistic patter that masquerades as heart-warming pluralism these days. These stories probe and poke at the country’s beginnings as at the edges of a wound: the workers who fed their bodies like coal into the railroad’s furnace; the immigrants who were turned away at ports for being too brown, too foreign; the enslavement of African peoples; the indigenous people displaced and decimated. “So you think you know about Canada,” any of these stories might begin. “Let me tell you about Canada…”

An excellent showcase for new and established Canadian voices as well as for Parisien’s editorial skill, Clockwork Canada’s a fascinating, faceted read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Read Amal’s complete review here. We previously covered Clockwork Canada — including listing the complete TOC — here. Clockwork Canada was published by Exile Editions on May 1, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $19.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version.

Parallel Universes and Space Marines: Rich Horton on The Games of Neith by Margaret St. Clair/The Earth Gods are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer

Parallel Universes and Space Marines: Rich Horton on The Games of Neith by Margaret St. Clair/The Earth Gods are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer

Comments 3 comments
The Games of Neith-small The Earth Gods Are Coming-small
Galaxy, June 1975
Galaxy, June 1975

Over at his website Strange at Ecbatan, Rich Horton looks at another obscure Ace Double.

Here’s an Ace Double featuring a couple of authors I’ve discussed before. I bought it partly because of that — both writers have proved enjoyable in the past, St. Clair often more than that, and, partly, frankly, because of the quite gorgeous Emswhiller cover on the St. Clair book, which for some reason reminded me of Wendy Pini’s cover for the June 1975 Galaxy.

I wrote before about Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) as follows: “She was one of the more noticeable early women writers of SF, but somehow her profile was a bit lower than those of C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Andre Norton. Perhaps it was simply that those writers did just a bit more, and were just a bit better (taken as a whole) than her, but it does seem that she’s not quite as well remembered as perhaps she deserves. One contributing factor is that she wrote some of her very best stories pseudonymously, as “Idris Seabright.” 20 or so of her 50+ short stories were as by Seabright, including some of the very best (such as “Short in the Chest” and “An Egg a Month from All Over”). She also wrote 8 novels (four of them published as Ace Double halves). Her career in SF stretched from 1946 to 1981…”

Reading this book made clear to me another reason St. Clair is not as well remembered as Moore, Brackett, or Norton — she was much weaker at novel length than at shorter lengths. At least, that is, based on those I’ve read. The Games of Neith was a terrible disappointment to me — it’s really just a bad, silly, book.

Sadly the flip side, Kenneth Bulmer’s The Earth Gods are Coming, doesn’t measure up much better.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Liar’s Bargain by Tim Pratt

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Liar’s Bargain by Tim Pratt

Comments 0 Comment

Pathfinder Tales Liar's Bargain-smallTim Pratt is one of the most popular and prolific authors in the Pathfinder Tales stable. His first two tales of Rodrick the thief were Liar’s Blade (called “Fafhrd-and-Grey-Mouser-style sword and sorcery adventure” by SF Signal) and Liar’s Island. The third in the series sees Rodrick and his talking sword Hrym pressed into service for the crime of theft in Lastwall… service that leads to some pretty hazardous duty, all in the name of defending the innocent.

Who Are You Calling Expendable?

When caught stealing in the crusader nation of Lastwall, veteran con man Rodrick and his talking sword Hrym expect to weasel or fight their way out of punishment. Instead, they find themselves ensnared by powerful magic, and given a choice: serve the cause of justice as part of a covert team of similarly bound villains — or die horribly. Together with their criminal cohorts, Rodrick and Hrym settle in to their new job of defending the innocent, only to discover that being a secret government operative is even more dangerous than a life of crime.

From Hugo Award winner Tim Pratt comes a tale of reluctant heroes and plausible deniability, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Our recent Pathfinder coverage includes free Soundclip samples from Macmillan Audio, a look at Liane Merciel’s Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight, and Nick Ozment’s popular piece on the Fellowship of the Pathfinders.

Pathfinder Tales: Liar’s Bargain will be published by Tor Books on June 7, 2016. It is 288 pages (plus a 12-page preview of Starspawn by Wendy N. Wagner), priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Raymond Swanland. See all our recent Pathfinder coverage here.

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in April

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in April

Comments 9 comments

Star Trek 4 exact change

Good to see Star Trek is still enormously popular with our readers. The most widely read post at Black Gate last month was William I. Lengeman III’s review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the latest installment in his ongoing Star Trek Re-Watch (his review of ST III was #2 last month).

Or maybe we’re just old. The most popular category last month was Vintage Treasures (that’s my favorite too!) When I get old enough, my eyesight will fade enough that I can’t read books, and then what will it be? Maybe Old Time Radio? That’ll be fun.

Number 2 on the list was our announcement on Black Gate‘s Hugo nomination, followed by M Harold Page’s article on Worldbuilding in the Warhammer 40K Universe, and Sean McLachlan on Vintage Trash: Reel Wild Cinema (Vintage again! We are old). Rounding out the Top Five last month was M Harold Page’s review of All Things Medieval: An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World.

…

Read More Read More