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Author: John ONeill

Fantasy Scroll Magazine 7 Now Available

Fantasy Scroll Magazine 7 Now Available

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Fantasy Scroll Magazine 7 June 2015-smallThe seventh issue of the online-only Fantasy Scroll Magazine is now available. It is cover dated June 2015, continuing with the new bi-monthly publishing schedule. Fantasy Scroll publishes all kinds of fantastic literature, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal short-fiction. In his editorial, Iulian Ionescu gives us a sneak peek of the contents, and news on an upcoming project:

This issue starts strong with a longer piece by Pauline Alama, “No Tale for Troubadours.” I love fantasy stories with strong female protagonists and Pauline does a great job of growing not one, but two of them in this story of friendship, war, and peace. “Hell of a Salesman” is the next story by Hank Quense, a humorous parody that takes a stab at the position of sales manager and everything around it. I’m not sure it’s a parody, or a description of what really happens inside a sales department…

Axel Taiari follows with a science fiction piece called “Beyond the Visible Spectrum,” a nice story told from the perspective of an alien invader. “Little Sprout” by Rebecca Roland is probably the shortest story we’ve ever accepted. There’s so much creepiness packed in such a short length that we just had to have it… Back by popular demand, we have the second installment of the story of Shamrock, the graphic novel authored by Josh Brown…

Another piece of buzz, before I let you go, is the news about our year one anthology. It is currently in progress and scheduled to be released sometime in September of 2015. So, it’s just a few months away and I’m very excited about it.

Here’s the complete table of contents.

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New Treasures: The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar

New Treasures: The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar

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The Violent Century-smallLavie Tidhar’s last novel, Osama, won the World Fantasy Award, and his “Guns & Sorcery” novella Gorel & The Pot Bellied God won the British Fantasy Award. His novel The Violent Century was published in the UK last year, and was called a masterpiece by both the Independent (UK) and Library Journal — and “Watchmen on crack” by io9.

An unusual amount of praise for a superhero novel. Earlier this year The Violent Century was released here in the US, and we finally have a chance to see what all the fuss is about.

They never meant to be heroes.

For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.

But there must always be an account… and the past has a habit of catching up to the present. Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism — a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields — to answer one last, impossible question:

What makes a hero?

We last covered Lavie Tidhar with a look at the omnibus edition of his steampunk trilogy The Bookman Histories from Angry Robot.

The Violent Century was published by Thomas Dunne Books on February 24, 2015. It is 362 pages. priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Ervin Serrano. The US edition contains an exclusive Author Q&A, and a brand new short story, “Aftermaths,” set some time after the end of the novel.

What Do I Read First? Who Fears Death and The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor

What Do I Read First? Who Fears Death and The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor

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Who Fears Death-small2 The Book of Phoenix-small

Nnedi Okorafor’s first novel for adults, Who Fears Death, won the 2011 World Fantasy Award, and was also a Tiptree Honor Book and a Nebula nominee. The prequel, The Book of Phoenix, arrived in hardcover last month, and it made me realize I need to get the lead out and read the first one.

Of course, now I’m tortured by that great dilemma of 21st Century fantasy…. should I read the acclaimed first novel first, or the prequel? Which makes more sense?

Life is hard. Here’s the description for Who Fears Death.

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2015 Locus Award Winners Announced

2015 Locus Award Winners Announced

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The Goblin Emperor-smallThe Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the winners for the 2015 Locus Awards. Woo hoo! Cake and drinks for all.

The winners are selected by the readers of Locus magazine. The awards began in 1971, originally as a way to highlight quality work in advance of the Hugo Awards. The winners were announced yesterday, during the annual Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA.

The winners are:

FANTASY NOVEL

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

Half a King, Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey)

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Vintage Treasures: The Sioux Spaceman by Andre Norton / And Then the Town Took Off by Richard Wilson

Vintage Treasures: The Sioux Spaceman by Andre Norton / And Then the Town Took Off by Richard Wilson

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The Sioux Spaceman-small And Then The Town Took Off-small

The Sioux Spaceman was one of the very first Andre Norton novels I ever laid eyes on (other than The Last Planet and Daybreak — 2250). It was certainly one of the first Ace Doubles I ever encountered. It was first published in 1960, paired with Richard Wilson’s And Then the Town Took Off, with covers by Ed Valigursky (above).

The Norton volume was the first book in her Council/Confederation series, which eventually grew to encompass four novels:

  1. The Sioux Spaceman (1960)
  2. Eye of the Monster (1962)
  3. The X Factor (1965)
  4. Voorloper (1980)

The entire series was collected in an omnibus volume from Baen in 2009, The Game of Stars and Comets (2009; see below).

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J. K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Play

J. K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Play

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Harry Potter charactersIn a series of tweets yesterday, J.K. Rowling announced that her creation Harry Potter would return in a spin-off play, which will open in London’s West End in summer 2016.

I’m also very excited to confirm today that a new play called Harry Potter and the CursedChild will be opening in London next year. It will tell a new story, which is the result of a collaboration between writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and myself.

To answer one inevitable (and reasonable!) question — why isn’t #CursedChild a new novel? — I am confident that when audiences see the play, they will agree that it was the only proper medium for the story. I’ve had countless offers to extend Harry’s story over the years, but Jack, John and Sonia Friedman are a dream team! I don’t want to say too much more, because I don’t want to spoil what I know will be a real treat for fans. However, I can say that it is not a prequel!

Rowling is already hard at work on the script for another Potter spin-off, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a Warner Bros. film based on her 2001 book of the same name, featuring monster wrangler Newt Scamander. But this is the first major post-Potter work that will feature her original characters.

Speculation is rampant about exactly where the story will fit in the time line, with some folks theorizing it could tell the tale of one of the summers only glossed over in the novels, or perhaps one of Harry Potter’s cases as an auror. Rowling’s co-writer Jack Thorne also wrote the highly regarded 2013 production of Let the Right One In for the National Theatre of Scotland (also directed by John Tiffany), so expectations are high. For now though, the creators are remaining mum.

June 2015 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

June 2015 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

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Nightmare Magazine June 2015-smallThe June issue of the online magazine Nightmare is now available.

Fiction this month includes original short stories from Maria Dahvana Headley and Dale Bailey, and reprints from Kaaron Warren and Stephen Graham Jones:

Original Stories

“The Cellar Dweller” by Maria Dahvana Headley
“Snow” by Dale Bailey

Reprints

“The Changeling” by Sarah Langan (originally published in Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, September 2011)
The Music of the Dark Time” by Chet Williamson (Originally published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, June 1988)

The non-fiction this issue includes the latest installment in their long-running horror column, “The H Word” (“Why Do We Read Horror?”), plus author spotlights, a showcase on cover artist Okan Bülbül, an editorial, and a feature interview with Lucy A. Snyder.

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Future Treasures: Witches Be Crazy by Logan J. Hunder

Future Treasures: Witches Be Crazy by Logan J. Hunder

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Witches Be Crazy-smallHumor is tough to get right. So when I hear pre-release buzz about a book that gets it right, I pay attention. Logan J. Hunder’s debut novel Witches Be Crazy, coming next month from Night Shade Books, has been called “A wild fantasy adventure” by Piers Anthony, and “Laugh-out-loud hilarious… Witches Be Crazy skewers fantasy tropes and hoists them high on their own petard (whatever a ‘petard’ is)” by Kevin J. Anderson. Featuring a masquerading princess, pirates, cultists, crazy hobos, and a heroic innkeeper, Witches Be Crazy could be just what I’m looking for.

Real heroes never die. But they do get grouchy in middle age.

The beloved King Ik is dead, and there was barely time to check his pulse before the royal throne was supporting the suspiciously shapely backside of an impostor pretending to be Ik’s beautiful long-lost daughter. With the land’s heroic hunks busy drooling all over themselves, there’s only one man left who can save the kingdom of Jenair. His name is Dungar Loloth, a rural blacksmith turned innkeeper, a surly hermit and an all-around nobody oozing toward middle age, compensating for a lack of height, looks, charm, and tact with guts and an attitude.

Normally politics are the least of his concerns, but after everyone in the neighboring kingdom of Farrawee comes down with a severe case of being dead, Dungar learns that the masquerading princess not only is behind the carnage but also has similar plans for his own hometown. Together with an eccentric and arguably insane hobo named Jimminy, he journeys out into the world he’s so pointedly tried to avoid as the only hope of defeating the most powerful person in it. That is, if he can survive the pirates, cultists, radical Amazonians, and assorted other dangers lying in wait along the way.

Witches Be Crazy will be published by Night Shade Books on July 14, 2015. It is 352 pages, priced at $15.99 for both the trade paperback and digital versions.

New Treasures: The Acolyte by Nick Cutter

New Treasures: The Acolyte by Nick Cutter

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The Acolyte by Nick Cutter-smallNick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, author of Sarah Court and Cataract City. Davidson explains the Cutter identity was created at his agent’s suggestion, to help readers differentiate between Davidson’s more serious output, and “the gore-spattered nightmares” of Nick Cutter. The Troop, his debut novel under the name Cutter, was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of last year. It won the Jame Herbert Award for Horror Writing, and Stephen King said “The Troop scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t put it down. This is old-school horror at its best.”

Cutter’s new novel The Acolyte appeared from ChiZine last month, and it’s even more interesting to me than The Troop. A police procedural set in a religious dystopia where the police are responsible for eradicating heretical religious faiths, it follows acolyte Jonah Murtag as he unravels the truth behind a mysterious string of urban bombings.

Jonah Murtag is an Acolyte on the New Bethlehem police force. His job: eradicate all heretical religious faiths, their practitioners, and artefacts. Murtag’s got problems — one of his partners is a zealot, and he’s in love with the other one. Trouble at work, trouble at home. Murtag realizes that you can rob a citizenry of almost anything, but you can’t take away its faith.

When a string of bombings paralyzes the city, religious fanatics are initially suspected, but startling clues point to a far more ominous perpetrator. If Murtag doesn’t get things sorted out, the Divine Council will dispatch The Quints, aka: Heaven’s Own Bagmen. The clock is ticking towards doomsday for the Chosen of New Bethlehem.

And Jonah Murtag’s got another problem. The biggest and most worrisome…

Jonah isn’t a believer anymore.

The Acolyte was published by ChiZine Publications on May 19, 2015. It is 301 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Erik Mohr. I got my copy at the Nebula Awards weekend here in Chicago in early June. See our recent survey of the impressive ChiZine catalog here.

Albedo One #45 Now on Sale

Albedo One #45 Now on Sale

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Albedo One 45-smallI’ve never tried an issue of Albedo One before. Honestly, I don’t know much about it — I’m not even sure if it is print or digital. I always assumed it was a magazine of hard science fiction (“An albedo… that’s, like, science stuff,”) of peripheral interest at best to Black Gate fans. But then I saw the marvelous cover for Issue 45, with the alien frog dude, and thought, maybe science isn’t so bad.

I wandered over to the website this morning, where I learned lots of interesting things about the magazine, including the fact that it features fantasy and horror — and it’s published in Ireland. Here’s a snippet from the About section.

Albedo One is Ireland’s longest-running and foremost magazine of the Fantastic. Since 1993, we have published stories from both Irish and international authors which push at the boundaries of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror… we’ve published fiction by Robert Reed, Bruce McAlister, Brian Stableford, Norman Spinrad, Ian Watson, Colin Greenland, Gill Alderman, Hugh Cook, Jeff Vandermeer, Esther M. Friesner, Uncle River, Patricia Anthony and Liz Williams.

As Europe’s westernmost outpost, we believe passionately that one of our roles is to bring unique and excellent speculative fiction written and published in other European and World languages to an English readership. To this end we have initiated a program of translations to and from English with our colleagues and partners beyond Ireland… As well as reviews by our regular columnists Juliet E. McKenna and David Conyers, each issue features in-depth home-grown interviews with the most interesting names in the speculative fiction genres…

Albedo One is published between two and three times a year… Issues are available in print and low-cost downloadable PDF format.

All that sounds marvelous to me. Clearly I have neglected this magazine for far too long. Time to correct that, starting with this issue. Thanks, frog dude.

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