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Future Treasures: Persephone Station by Stina Leicht

Future Treasures: Persephone Station by Stina Leicht

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Stina Leicht has had an impressive career over the last decade. Of Blood and Honey came in sixth in the 2012 Locus Poll for Best First Novel; sequel And Blue Skies from Pain appeared on the nomination list for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her two-book flintlock fantasy series The Malorum Gates wrapped up in 2017.

Her new novel Persephone Station arrives from Saga Press next month, and it’s a significant departure for Leicht — a space opera that Publishers Weekly calls a “sprawling, frenetic science fiction take on The Seven Samurai,” which sounds like something I need.

Here’s an excerpt from the Kirkus review.

In this earnest space opera, an ensemble of badass women and nonbinary and queer characters fight corporate overlords on the semilawless planet Persephone.

A century ago, the Emissaries, hidden beings indigenous to Persephone, gave the gift of prolonged life to Rosie, a nonbinary cleric-colonizer, and Vissia, now head of the corporation that owns the planet. Despite and because of that gift, Vissia’s bent on exploiting the Emissaries until nothing is left. Rosie, now a crime boss, enlists Angel, the expelled former student of an all-female martial arts academy, and her team of revivified United Republic of Worlds soldiers, to protect the Emissaries. Unless they can be convinced to reveal themselves and join the URW, making the corporate claim on Persephone void, the odds are not in their favor…. Their gender-fluid nonbinariness is just one part of a delightfully complex, genuine, and amoral character who could make this novel worth your time.

Persephone Station will be published by Saga Press on January 5, 2021. It is 512 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $9.99 in digital formats. I can’t find any information on who created the cover, but I like it.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

New Treasures: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

New Treasures: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

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We’re nearing the end of 2020 and like most of you, all I can think is, man. Good riddance.

There were a few highlights, of course. As always there were a number of exciting debuts, and that cheered me up a little. One of the most talked about SF debuts of 2020 has been Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, named one of the Best Books of the Year by Library Journal, NPR, and Book Riot.

In The New York Times, Black Gate blogger emeritus Amal El-Mohtar says the word ‘debut’ “is utterly insufficient for the blazing, relentless power of this book, suggesting ballroom manners where it should conjure comet tails… this tale is profoundly satisfying… The book remained two steps ahead of my imagination, rattling it out of complacency and flooding it with color and heat.”

That sounds pretty good to me. Here’s the description.

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying — from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.

On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works — and shamelessly flirts — with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security.

But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined — and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world but the entire multiverse.

The Space Between Worlds was published by Del Rey on August 4, 2020. It is 322 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats.

See all our coverage of the best new releases in SF & fantasy here.

Vintage Treasures: The Sky is Filled With Ships by Richard C. Meredith

Vintage Treasures: The Sky is Filled With Ships by Richard C. Meredith

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The Sky Is Filled with Ships (Ballantine Books, 1969). Cover by Jerome Podwil

Richard C. Meredith died tragically young in 1979, at the age of 41. He left behind a body of work that’s still read and discussed today, including the Timeliner trilogy, We All Died at Breakaway Station (1969), which John Clute and Peter Nichols at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction call “a bleak, well-crafted space opera in a kind of Alamo setting, where a scarred cyborg crew must withstand both external alien enemies and the devils of introspection,” and Run, Come See Jerusalem! (1976), a complex and effective alternate history set in a world where the Nazis were victorious.

Although he sold his first stories to Fred Pohl at Worlds of Tomorrow in 1966, rightly or wrongly I still think of Meredith as a Campbell writer. He bought his first copy of Astounding at the age of 13 and became an instant fan, faithfully purchasing every issue until John W. Campbell passed away in 1971.

Meredith’s debut novel was The Sky Is Filled with Ships, published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in 1969 with a striking cover by Jerome Podwil. It was selected to be part of Singularity & Co’s “Save the Sci-Fi” digital reissue campaign in 2013, and that put it in the hands of a lot of modern readers. I was surprised to see that it held up well with them, and enjoys an impressive 4.51 rating at Goodreads. BJ Haun’s 4-star review is fairly typical.

The Sky is Filled with Ships might be my favorite book to come out of Singularity & Co’s “Save the Sci-Fi” campaign thus far. It’s an interesting little story that has some action, some space battles, some intrigue, and maybe a couple too many melodramatic bits.

The Sky Is Filled with Ships is 184 pages, and was originally priced at 75 cents. It has been out of print since 1969, though it’s available in ebook formats from Singularity & Co. See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Where Ghoulish Shadows Haunt the Appalachians: The Witchy War Series by D.J. Buter

Where Ghoulish Shadows Haunt the Appalachians: The Witchy War Series by D.J. Buter

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Covers by Daniel Dos Santos

Apparently I haven’t been paying enough attention to DJ Butler. I can tell because when Serpent Daughter, the newest in his Witchy War saga, arrived in November, I thought it was the second in the series. Not so! There are actually four novels in Witchy War, and I managed to miss half of them.

I didn’t miss Serpent Daughter though — thanks mostly to Daniel Dos Santos’ knockout cover, which caught my eye the moment I spotted it in the Books You May Like tray at Amazon. A little digging revealed three previous installments, which have been labeled a blend of “alternate history, Appalachian Folklore, and epic fantasy.” The series opened with Witchy Eye, a Baen hardcover, back in 2017; Publishers Weekly gave it an enthusiastic starred review, saying:

In an alternate North America where magic is pervasive and the Appalachians are under the boot of Emperor Thomas Penn, 15-year-old Sarah Calhoun, youngest daughter of imperial war hero Iron Andy Calhoun, is content with her rural Tennessee tobacco-farming life, in which she gets to cast the occasional small spell… When the priest Thalanes, an acquaintance of Andy’s, arrives and helps to reveal that Sarah is not a Calhoun daughter but carries royal blood — and is being hunted by humans and magical entities in the service of the emperor… Butler’s fantasy is by turns sardonic and lighthearted; ghoulish shadows claw into the most remote areas and heroism bursts out of the most unlikely people. Sarah is the epitome of the downtrodden hero who refuses to give up until she gets what she needs, and her story will appeal to fantasy readers of all stripes.

I’m not quite sure how many books the series will run, but with four on the shelves already, I think it’s safe to give this one a try. Serpent Daughter was published by Baen on November 3, 2020; it is 608 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $8.99 in digital formats. Read the first five chapters of Witchy Eye here.

See all our recent coverage of the best new fantasy series here.

A Tale of Horrific First Contact: The Sentience Trilogy by Terry A. Adams

A Tale of Horrific First Contact: The Sentience Trilogy by Terry A. Adams

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Covers by James Gurney, Richard Hescox, and Stephan Martiniere

Every time an author completes a trilogy, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters. Given how long some big fantasy trilogies take to wrap up, we’ve learned patience over the years. Even so, we rarely have have to wait 27 years, as dedicated fans did for Terry A. Adams popular Sentience trilogy.

It opened with Sentience, Adams’ debut novel, which made quite a splash in 1986.  It was nominated for the Locus Award for Best First Novel; Locus magazine said “Adams writes with an elaborate, intricate prose … [and] weaves an elegant tale that makes for fascinating reading,” and Voya called it “an exciting story, well told and well written…. An excellent SF thriller by a new writer.” John Clute at The Science Fiction Encyclopedia describes the series this way:

Begins in the conflict between “true” humans and D’Neerans, who are human telepath, and builds into a Space-Opera sequence involving new races and challenges to their female telepath protagonist, who saves several worlds. They are told in a skittish but engaging style designed to give some sense of a telepath’s way of thinking.

Ken Richards gave the first book a 4-star review at Goodreads. Here’s an excerpt from his more detailed review.

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New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 54 edited by Nibedita Sen

New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 54 edited by Nibedita Sen

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The Nebula Awards Showcase is one of the most auspicious and long running anthology series in science fiction. Founded way back in 1966 by Damon Knight (the man who founded the Science Fiction Writers of America), the series was originally created to help fund the annual Nebula Awards, and in that regard it’s had a successful run for over five decades — and produced a great many top-notch anthologies in the process.

Want examples? Just have a look at the first three volumes, which contained such stories as “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny, “The Saliva Tree” by Brian W. Aldiss, “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw, “The Last Castle” by Jack Vance, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, “Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delany, “Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock, and “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber.

This year’s volume is unusual in that it’s the first to be published directly by SFWA (technically SFWA, Inc, which as far as I know was created solely to publish this book). Otherwise, it hews pretty close to tradition. It’s edited by a rising star in the industry — in this case Bengali writer Nibedita Sen — and contains as many of last year’s Nebula Award winners and nominees as they could cram between two covers.

The book was released last month in trade paperback; digital editions are coming soon. Here’s a look at the complete Table of Contents.

Intro & Essays

Introduction by Nibedita Sen
“It’s Dangerous to Go Alone” by Kate Dollarhyde
“Into the Spider-verse: A Classic Origin Story in Bold New Color” by Brandon O’Brien

Best Short Story

“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” by P. Djèlí Clark — Nebula winner
“Interview for the End of the World” by Rhett C. Bruno
“And Yet” by A. T. Greenblatt
“A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow
“The Court Magician” by Sarah Pinsker

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Discover How We’ll Get into Space in Stellaris: People of the Stars, edited by Les Johnson and Robert E. Hampson

Discover How We’ll Get into Space in Stellaris: People of the Stars, edited by Les Johnson and Robert E. Hampson

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Stellaris: People of the Stars (Baen, August 2020). Cover by Sam Kennedy

I complain (a lot) about the death of the mass market science fiction anthology. So when I see a new one on the shelves, it’s worth celebrating — especially when it looks as strong as Baen’s Stellaris: People of the Stars, which is obviously a tie-in to the hugely popular Stellaris computer game from Paradox.

Except it isn’t, which I discovered after I bought a copy and brought it home. It was inspired instead by a gathering of scientists and writers at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, and is a mix of fiction and non-fiction essays on space travel. Here’s a slice from by Kevin P Hallett’s review at Tangent Online.

This anthology contains ten science fiction stories themed around humanity’s quest to expand out to the stars and the many challenges they will face. With very few exceptions the stories are strong page turners. Scattered among the stories are six essays on various challenges that humanity will face, ensuring the anthology is a broad exploration of space colonization in the future….

“At the Bottom of the White” by Todd McCaffrey

Cin is a crewmember of the Valrise, a trading spaceship that is renewing contact with the abandoned colony of Arwon. The trader’s technology far exceeds Arwon’s sectarian government that starves its disaffected minorities.

Unaware of the nuances in such a charged political environment, Cin and the other members of the ship’s crew try to trade. Only to find themselves suddenly embroiled in the brutal politics of subjugation and faced with tough choices. Cin must risk going ‘down to the white’, if she’s to help the people. This was an interesting character-centric story with its fair share of intrigue and action.

Les Johnson is the author of Mission to Methone; his previous anthology was Going Interstellar (2012), edited with Jack McDevitt. Robert E. Hampson is the editor of the forthcoming The Founder Effect.

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Vintage Treasures: Saraband of Lost Time by Richard Grant

Vintage Treasures: Saraband of Lost Time by Richard Grant

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Saraband of Lost Time (Avon, March 1985). Cover by Jim Burns

Richard Grant has had a fine career as an American fantasy writer, with works such as Rumors of Spring (1986), Views from the Oldest House (1989) and the Philip K. Dick Award winner Through the Heart (1991). But his career began with his 1985 debut Saraband of Lost Time, a science fiction novel that was a Locus Award nominee for Best First Novel and received an Honorable Mention from the Philip K. Dick Award jury.

Saraband received a lot of attention at the time. In his Books column in F&SF Algis Budrys called “one of the most engaging first novels in years… a piece of cultured prose which by its nature confers importance on its cast of characters and on their activities.”

But what do modern readers make of it? It has generally positive reviews at Goodreads; Tom Britz calls it “a far reaching future tale of environmental changes [that] jumped around to different characters as it tried to make sense of this future world.” And in a 4-star review, Avis Black sums up by saying,

Grant is one bizarre writer, and Saraband is his best and most (relatively speaking) accessible novel.

But Geoff Clarke found it took a second reading to really appreciate it.

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A Tale That Calls to Mind Classic SF Sagas: The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton

A Tale That Calls to Mind Classic SF Sagas: The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton

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The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton (Del Rey, 2018-2020). Covers by Anna Kochman

You know, I remember when Peter F. Hamilton was known for hardboiled science fiction like the Greg Mandel series (Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, and The Nano Flower, 1993-95). His breakout work was the massive 1.2 million-word The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God, 1996-99) which turned him into the 21st Century’s poster child for Space Opera. Since then he’s become one of the top selling modern SF writers, with a series of NYT bestselling space opera trilogies, including the Commonwealth Saga, the Void Trilogy, and the Chronicle of the Fallers.

This month sees the release of The Saints of Salvation, the third novel in The Salvation Sequence. Here’s a slice from Paul Di Filippo’s rave review at Locus Online.

Peter Hamilton just keeps getting better and better with each book, more assured and more craftsmanly adroit, and more inventive. And to his credit, he wants to stretch and try different things, not just repeat himself. His newest – the first in a fresh cycle – is, to my eye, rather different than any of his previous books. I detect a distinct Neal Stephenson vibe layered atop his own signature Hard SF moves…

What’s the year 2204 like? Pretty amazing and different…  what could upset this arcadian applecart? The discovery of an unknown alien ship on a distant planet – a ship filled with semi-butchered yet still living humans. Immediately the Connexion Corp mounts a top-secret mission to Nkya. Helmed by an employee named Feriton, the posse consists of several deadly security experts, masters of dirty tricks and brute survivalism… Hamilton gives us a tale – or at least the maximally effective start of a tale – that calls to mind such classic sagas as Greg Benford’s Galactic Center series and Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee cycle… It’s a bravura performance from start to finish….

The flashback sequences are remarkable, heart-stopping mini-thrillers, kind of police procedurals-cum-spy-capers. Hamilton should really be tasked with doing the script for the next Mission: Impossible film… In short, Hamilton is juggling chainsaws while simultaneously doing needlepoint over a shark tank. It’s a virtuoso treat, and I for one can hardly wait for Salvation Lost.

Lucky for you, you don’t have to wait. Salvation Lost was published last year. Here’s the complete deets on all three volumes, all released by Del Rey.

Salvation (576 pages, $30 hardcover/$9.99 paperback and digital, September 4, 2018) – cover by Anna Kochman
Salvation Lost (512 pages, $32 hardcover/$9.99 paperback and digital, October 29, 2019) – cover by Anna Kochman
The Saints of Salvation (528 pages, $30 hardcover/$14.99 digital, November 17, 2020) – cover by Anna Kochman

See all our recent coverage of the best new Space Opera trilogies (and other high quality series) here.

Black Gate is Moving!

Black Gate is Moving!

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Black Gate is moving!

If you’ve had trouble leaving a comment recently, or logging into the site to create an article (or for any reason), that’s the likely reason. For the last 20 years we were hosted at Toybox in Ottawa, run with tireless efficiency by Roy Hopper, but Roy has decided to wind down the business. Effective yesterday afternoon, we migrated the entire site to a brand new hosting service in Florida.

This wasn’t exactly an easy process (not according to the exhausted late-night calls we got from Support at our new service provider, anyway). It involved moving over 211,000 files, uncounted gigs of images, sound files (who uploaded sound files?), and strange databases apparently created by DAW Books in the 1970s. Our offices look like a Marvel Studios sound stage after a wrap party.

All of this is a prelude to begging your indulgence for the next few days. Simultaneous with the migration, we upgraded our WordPress install, moved our email servers, and shed several old databases and obsolete plug-ins. Like Bones stepping off a transporter pad, we’re padding ourselves down to make sure all our parts arrived intact. Things are sure to be a little off-kilter for at least the next few days — and maybe a little later than usual. (And if you’re a BG contributor frustrated with the new setup, don’t hesitate to get in touch to ask for help.)

With luck, the whole team will be back to normal next month. In the meantime, enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday (for our US readers), and for international visitors, enjoy the coming slate of holidays SF and fantasy books.

And thanks in advance for your patience with us!