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Author: John ONeill

April 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

April 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

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Lightspeed April 2016-smallThe fiction in every issue of Lightspeed is gradually made available on the website as the month progresses; the last story in the newest issue became available on April 28th, and the entire issue is now yours to enjoy free. The April issue includes tales of supervillain ex-boyfriends, queens rescued from dragons, quantum challenges, and the first mating between humans and aliens.

Robert L Turner III reviewed the issue at Tangent Online:

In “Origin Story” by Carrie Vaughn we are introduced to Commerce City, a town overrun with heroes, supervillains, and vigilantes. Mary, the protagonist, is standing in line when she recognizes that the supervillain robbing the bank is none other than her ex-boyfriend Jason Trumble. The story is more a quick vignette about lost loves and rekindled (?) relationships than SF…

“The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel” by Matthew Bailey is the final entry for the month. In it, the first mating between Humans and the recently met Tharkan species is the subject. Told from the viewpoint of the expectant human mother, the story delves into the complexities of intercultural and interspecies communication. Bailey does a solid job of presenting the larger world through the eyes of the narrator and making the personal universal. The constant repetition of the idea of Self and Autonomy is well played against the unique situation of a first interspecies birth. Overall, the story, while not groundbreaking, is interesting and the best of the issue.

The cover artist this issue is Sam Schechter.

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Vintage Treasures: The Elsewhere Anthologies, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold

Vintage Treasures: The Elsewhere Anthologies, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold

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Terri Windling is a superstar in the field of fantasy. She’s been awarded the World Fantasy Award nine times, and she’s also won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the 2010 SFWA Solstice Award. As an editor at Ace she discovered and promoted first novels by Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and many other important authors; with Ellen Datlow she co-edited 16 volumes of the seminal Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror from 1986–2003. She’s also an author in her own right, with several highly regarded works to her credit, including the Mythopoeic Award-winning novel The Wood Wife, and a number of children’s books, such as The Raven Queen and The Winter Child.

But believe it or not, she got her start in this industry as an artist. I didn’t discover that until I interviewed Ellen Kushner for my Tale of Two Covers article on her Basilisk anthology earlier this month. Here’s Ellen:

It’s an anthology I’m still really proud of. It’s also how I met Terri Windling, who did the interior illustrations (which much more accurately represent the aesthetic of the stories). She’d just come to town, and was showing her art portfolio around. Jim [Baen] thought I’d like her work, and that he wouldn’t have to pay her much… Terri, of course, essentially took over my job as fantasy expert for Jim a few months after I left Ace.

Ellen reached out to Terri as we were fact checking the article, and in the process Terri gave me the fascinating back story on how she began her career as one of the most respected and admired editors in the field with the Elsewhere series of anthologies, the first of which won the World Fantasy Award. Here’s what she said.

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New Treasures: Starflight by Melissa Landers

New Treasures: Starflight by Melissa Landers

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Black Gate is a fantasy site, and there’s more than enough fantasy releases to keep us busy every month. But sometimes adventure SF — especially off-world space opera — reads an awful lot like great fantasy. It’s too early to see if Melissa Landers’s latest novel Starflight will go down in the annals as classic space opera, but it’s sure got the ingredients… including a plucky heroine, lawless outer realms, long-buried secrets, and an eccentric crew on a fast ship.

Solara Brooks needs a fresh start, someplace where nobody cares about the engine grease beneath her fingernails or the felony tattoos across her knuckles. The outer realm may be lawless, but it’s not like the law has ever been on her side. Still, off-world travel doesn’t come cheap; Solara is left with no choice but to indenture herself in exchange for passage to the outer realm. She just wishes it could have been to anyone besides Doran Spaulding, the rich, pretty-boy quarterback who made her life miserable in school.

The tables suddenly turn when Doran is framed for conspiracy on Earth, and Solara cons him into playing the role of her servant on board the Banshee, a ship manned by an eccentric crew with their own secrets. Given the price on both Doran and Solara’s heads, it may just be the safest place in the universe. It’s been a long time since Solara has believed in anyone, and Doran is the last person she expected to trust. But when the Banshee‘s dangerous enemies catch up with them, Solara and Doran must come together to protect the ship that has become their home – and the eccentric crew that feels like family.

Starflight was published by Disney-Hyperion on February 2, 2016. It is 368 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version.

April 2016 Locus Now on Sale

April 2016 Locus Now on Sale

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Locus April 2016-smallI let my subscription to Locus lapse last year as a cost-savings measure (I subscribe to too many magazines), and that proved to be a big mistake. I told myself I could still buy the occasional issue when they caught my eye on newsstands. Turns out Locus is pretty eye-catching. I’ve spent far more than what a subscription would have cost me buying up individual issues. This year, I won’t make that mistake. I’m signing up for a subscription this month.

The April Locus is packed with great stuff, including interviews with Paolo Bacigalupi and Tim Pratt, a column by Kameron Hurley, a report on SF in Cuba, and reviews of short fiction and books by Eleanor Arnason, Ken Liu, Betsy James, Judith Merril, Austin Grossman, Cathy Fenner, and many others. In addition to all the news, features, and regular columns, there’s also the indispensable listings of Magazines Received, Books Received, British Books Received, and Bestsellers. Plus Letters, and an editorial. See the complete contents here.

The big change I noticed with the latest issue is that the magazine has gone to glossy, full-cover interiors — and it looks great. All those books thumbnails look terrific in color.

We last covered Locus with the February 2015 issue. Locus is edited by Liza Groen Trombi, and published monthly by Locus Publications. The issue is 62 pages, priced at $7.50. Subscriptions are $63 for 12 issues in the US. Subscribe online here. The magazine’s website, run as a separate publication by Mark R. Kelly, is a superb online resource. It is here.

See our Mid-April Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

Future Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey

Future Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey

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Nebula Awards Showcase 2016-smallThe 2015 Nebula Awards were a pretty big deal for me. They were presented here in Chicago, and I was able to attend for the first time. I was also asked to present the award for Best Novelette of the Year, an honor I won’t soon forget.

In addition I got to catch up with old friends, and meet plenty of new faces — folks like Rachel Swirsky, Liz Gorinsky, Aliette de Bodard, Lawrence M. Schoen, Cixin Liu, and many more. The Nebula Awards Weekend is relaxed, fun, and attended by the best and brightest writers and editors in the industry. It’s a great place to meet and chat with your favorite writers — not to mention get lots of free books.

They also give out some Nebula Awards, of course. And the Nebula Awards Showcase collects the winners and finalists in a handsome anthology, as it has every year since 1966. The Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 is the 50th volume in the series, and it looks like one of the strongest in recent memory.

This year editor Mercedes Lackey elected to take a rather eclectic approach — to include every short story and novelette nominee and winner, and limit herself to excerpts in the novella category (with the exception of the winner). Here’s the complete TOC.

Short Story

“Jackalope Wives,” Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14) — Winner

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Pirates, Weather Sorcery, and Desperate Nautical Adventure: The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster

Pirates, Weather Sorcery, and Desperate Nautical Adventure: The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster

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I started a new job two weeks ago, and for the first time in my life I’m commuting to downtown Chicago by train every day. Sixty minutes both ways, give or take. You know what’s perfect for a two-hour daily commute? Tor.com‘s new novellas, that’s what. They’re the ideal length, they’re written by the top fantasy writers in the field — and some great emerging talent — and the price is right. The first one I tried was The Drowning Eyes, and I’m glad I did.

According to Emily Foster’s bio in the back, she’s a fresh-faced graduate from the University of Northern Colorado, which likely makes her less than half my age. There are times, in this fast-paced tale of pirates, weather sorcery, and desperate nautical adventure, when her youth is apparent, especially in moments of dialog between Tazir, the grizzled Captain of the Giggling Goat, and her frequently cranky crew. But most of the time it’s not — which frankly is even more annoying. When punk kids start turning out polished gems of adventure fantasy like The Drowning Eyes, it takes all the joy out of cranky reminiscences about the good ole days of pulp fantasy. They’re even taking that away from us.

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Black Gate Nominated For a Hugo Award

Black Gate Nominated For a Hugo Award

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Hugo Award skinny-smallBlack Gate has been nominated for a Hugo Award, in the category of Best Fanzine.

This is the second year in a row that Black Gate has been nominated. We declined our nomination in 2015, since it was largely a result of the notorious Rabid Puppy slate created by Vox Day.

As expected (since a paid membership for Worldcon, required to vote for the 2015 Hugos, also allows you to nominate in 2016), the Rabid Puppies also had a disproportionate impact on the nominations this year. Vox Day published his slate of recommendations in March (again including Black Gate for Best Fanzine) and, as he noted on his blog earlier today, once again his recommendations thoroughly dominated the final ballot.

Well done, all of you Rabids. Very well done. According to Mike Glyer, the Rabid Puppies placed 64 of its 81 recommendations on the final ballot… You understand, as the other side does not, that there is no end to cultural war. They still think we can be intimidated, or shamed, or guilted somehow, because those are the tactics that have worked for their kind for decades, if not generations.

But we are immune to such things. Let them scoff, let them minimize, let them posture, let them cry, it makes absolutely no difference what they do or what they say. There is nothing that they can do except vote No Award and change the rules….

Are you not entertained?

The winners will be announced at MidAmericon II, the 74th World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Kansas City MO, on August 17-21, 2016.

New Treasures: Fall of Light, Book Two of the Kharkanas Trilogy by Steven Erikson

New Treasures: Fall of Light, Book Two of the Kharkanas Trilogy by Steven Erikson

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Steven Erikson’s 10-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen is one of the great works of fantasy of the 21st Century. It began with Gardens of the Moon in 1999; by 2012 the series had sold over a million copies worldwide.

In August 2012, Erikson kicked off The Kharkanas Trilogy, a prequel trilogy dealing with the Tiste before their split into darkness, light and shadow, with the opening novel Forge of Shadow. That book delved into events hinted at in the earlier series, and featured important characters from the Malazan Book of the Fallen such as Spinnoch Durav, Anomander Rake, and Andaris.

Erikson picks up the tale with Fall of Light, hot off the Tor presses this week, continuing the tragic story of the downfall of an ancient realm thousand years before the events of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Civil war is ravaging Kurald Galain, as Urusander’s Legion prepares to march on the city of Kharkanas, and Silchas Ruin seeks to gather the Houseblades of the Highborn families to him and resurrect the Hust Legion in the southlands… but he is fast running out of time.

Fall of Light was published today by Tor Books. It is 864 pages, priced at $29.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. See all our recent New Treasures here.

Interzone #263 Now on Sale

Interzone #263 Now on Sale

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Interzone 263-smallThe March/April issue of Interzone magazine is now on sale, with a cover by 2016 cover artist Vincent Sammy, “November-Class 627A” (click the image at right for a bigger version.)

Interzone #263 contains six stories:

“Ten Confessions of Blue Mercury Addicts, by Anna Spencer” by Alexander Marsh Freed
“Spine” by Christopher Fowler
“Not Recommended For Guests Of A Philosophically Uncertain Disposition” by Michelle Ann King
“Motherboard” by Jeffrey Thomas
“Lotto” by Rich Larson
“Andromeda of the Skies” by E. Catherine Tobler

Non-fiction this issue includes Shattering Illusions in SFF by Juliet E. McKenna, Future Interrupted by Jonathan McCalmont, Time Pieces by Nina Allan, News and obituaries, plus David Langford’s Ansible Link, and the regular columns: book reviews, Nick Lowe’s Mutant Popcorn film reviews, and Tony Lee’s DVD column, Laser Fodder. Issue 263 is nearly 100 pages and packed with fiction, columns, and top-notch art.

Interzone is the sister magazine of Black Static, both are published by TTA Press in the UK. The distinguished Andy Cox is the editor of both.

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Vintage Treasures: Sorcerer’s Son by Phyllis Eisenstein

Vintage Treasures: Sorcerer’s Son by Phyllis Eisenstein

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I ran into my friend Phyllis Eisenstein at the Windy City Pulp & Paper Show here in Chicago over the weekend, and the first thing she said to me was, “I’m retired!”

This is exciting news. Phyllis has been nurturing several writing projects for the past few years, and I’ve been impatiently waiting for them — and it’s great to hear that she’ll finally have more time to devote to them. Though I forgot to ask if it means we’ll finally get the long-promised third volume in her Book of Elementals fantasy series, which began with Sorcerer’s Son in 1979, and continued with The Crystal Palace (1988). The third volume, The City in Stone, was actually completed a decade ago, but was left without a publisher after the sudden collapse of Meisha Merlin in 2007. The first two volumes are now long out of print.

Phyllis’ other novels include Shadow of Earth (1979), In the Hands of Glory (1981), and the Tales of Alaric the Minstrel (two novels, Born to Exile (1978) and In the Red Lord’s Reach (1989), plus various short stories). Her work has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, but these days of course she’s most famous for being the person who convinced George R.R. Martin to put dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire.

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