Browsed by
Author: John ONeill

New Treasures: Sword of Fire by Katharine Kerr

New Treasures: Sword of Fire by Katharine Kerr

Comments 0 Comment

Sword of Fire-smallKatharine Kerr’s science fiction novels include Polar City Blues, Palace (with Mark Kreighbaum), and Snare. But she’s much more well known for sixteen epic fantasy novels set in the world of Deverry, starting with Daggerspell (1986), Darkspell (1987), and The Bristling Wood (1989).

Kerr’s roots are firmly in fantasy gaming, which immediately increases her cred in my book. She was introduced to fantasy gaming in in 1979, and she quickly began writing articles for gaming magazines. She was a contributing editor to Dragon magazine, and authored adventure modules for TSR and Chaosium’s Pendragon role-playing game. Her first novel was published in 1986, and she’s never looked back. It’s fiction that brings the fame and the fast cars, so I guess I can’t blame her.

The last few years she’s been occupied with her Nola O’Grady urban fantasy series for DAW (which the author describes as a “female James Bond with magic rather than violence”). It’s been over a decade since we’ve seen a new novel in Deverry, though, and it’s good to see her return. Ralph Harris gave Sword of Fire a warm review at BookPage; here’s a sample.

Sword of Fire centers around a sociopolitical struggle against the unjust courts of the Kingdom of Deverry. While that certainly could be a backdrop for a bleak, dark struggle, Kerr’s novel is instead a lovely quest with an ever-optimistic, wholeheartedly enthusiastic crew of brilliant women and chivalrous men. Alyssa, our primary heroine, embarks on a trip to recover a book that can help usurp the old traditions of the courts with even older, supposedly more fair traditions….

With a lightly magical, extremely familiar setting and lovable cast of characters, Kerr sets out to take the reader through the Kingdom of Deverry’s evolution to a (hopefully) more just world. She doles out plot points via chatty gossip between noble families and secret messages sent by way of servants… Meandering through the pages of Kerr’s Sword of Fire was escapism of the finest quality. For readers looking for a dark drama of epic proportions, these 380 pages will hold nothing for you. Here, you will only find charming banter, happy endings and optimism in prose form.

Sword of Fire is the opening volume in The Justice War. It was published by DAW on February 18, 2020. It is 384 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Katie Anderson. Read an excerpt from Chapter One here.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

John Bullard on Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”

John Bullard on Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”

Comments 1 comment

Beyond the Black River-smallKeith West dropped me a note this week to alert me to the publication of an intriguing 3-part article on his blog Adventures Fantastic.

“Beyond the Black River”: Is it Really “Beyond the Brazos River”? was written by Robert E. Howard scholar John Bullard, who’s been editing Howard’s correspondence for the next edition of his collected letters. The article examines Howard’s influences when writing the classic Conan tale “Beyond the Black River,” and particularly how he drew from a famous incident in Texas history to create the ending.

I’m not a Howard scholar myself, and generally leave these debates on Howard’s sources to the experts, but Bullard’s piece weaves together fascinating tidbits from letters to H.P. Lovecraft, Carl Jacobi, and others, plus an interview with Novalyne Price Ellis, to make a compelling case for his theory. Just as interesting to me was the intimate glimpse into Howard’s creative process, and his close friendships with his fellow pulp writers. Here’s a sample:

Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” is considered to be one of his best stories by his fans. It tells of an attack by Howard’s favorite historical peoples, the Picts, against the encroaching colonization of the Aquilonians on the Picts’ deeply forested land between the Thunder River to the East, and the Black River to the west in his fictional Hyborian world setting…

Howard’s recounting of Texas history and characters enthralled his pen pals, and in several of the surviving letters, they encouraged him to write about this history in his fiction…. Yet, prior to the second half of 1934, Howard was unsure of how to incorporate his knowledge of the settling of the Texas frontier into his stories….

Yet sometime after writing the letter to Jacobi, Howard seems to have had a breakthrough in how to incorporate his knowledge of Texas history into his stories and began writing what is generally considered to be one of his finest stories sometime during the Summer or possibly early Fall of 1934… In a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft, Howard wrote:

“My latest sales to Weird Tales have been a two-part Conan serial: “Beyond the Black River” — a frontier story; …in the Conan story I’ve attempted a new style and setting entirely — abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a background of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen. Some day I’m going to try my hand at a longer yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts.”(Lovecraft, Dec. 1934)

We’ve discussed “Beyond the Black River,” and its importance to the modern fantasy canon, previously at Black Gate. Recent coverage includes:

Hither Came Conan: Keith West on “Beyond the Black River”
Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “Beyond the Black River”

Read John Bullard’s complete 3-part article at Adventures Fantastic, starting here.

Fighting Schools, Ancient Palaces, and a Killing Fog: The Grave Kingdom Trilogy by Jeff Wheeler

Fighting Schools, Ancient Palaces, and a Killing Fog: The Grave Kingdom Trilogy by Jeff Wheeler

Comments 0 Comment
The Killing Fog-small The Buried World-small The Immortal Words-small

Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

Jeff Wheeler was been toiling away in the fantasy word mines for nearly two decades, and in 2014 he took the leap and retired from Intel to write full-time. He’s written several popular series, including the Whispers from Mirrowen trilogy, two novels in the Landmoor series, and two trilogies in the Muirwood universe, the second of which was the Covenant of Muirwood, which we covered here back in 2015.

His latest, The Grave Kingdom trilogy, kicked off this month with The Killing Fog. At Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, Jeff Wheeler contributed a My Favorite Bit entry that piqued my interest — and not just for the Big Trouble in Little China and Kung Fu references (though they definitely didn’t hurt). Here’s what he said.

When I was young, I used to watch the TV show Kung Fu with David Carradine. I respected the loner monk wandering through America’s Wild West and taking out the bad guys. During high school, one of my favorite films was Big Trouble in Little China, just for the great martial art medley of different styles they demonstrated. What many don’t know about me is that I’ve been a practitioner of many forms of Kung Fu for almost thirty years, starting at Wing Lam Kung Fu school in Silicon Valley after my missionary service.

When I was inspired to write The Killing Fog after a month-long trip to China, I chose to set it in a world with the geography of Alaska and the culture of medieval China. Instead of palaces and royalty, I wanted to focus on the martial artists. The protagonist of the story, Bingmei (a name which means ‘ice rose’ in Chinese), is the granddaughter and daughter of a family who owns a fighting school… Bingmei’s world is a lot harsher than the one we live in. While ancient forms of fighting have been passed down within families, history has not. There is no written language, no knowledge of where the ancient buildings and palaces came from. No understanding of why the Death Wall was built and why no one is allowed to cross it. Most importantly, no one knows who left behind magical relics carved from meiwood and imbued with magical power. People collect these relics to hide them away because if their power is invoked, the presence of magic summons a deadly fog which kills any creature caught within it. And no one knows why.

It’s Bingmei’s destiny to find out.

The KIlling Fog will be followed by The Buried World in June of this year, and The Immortal Words arrives three months later, on September 22. Publishers Weekly calls the opening volume a “winding tale of valor and sacrifice… [an] excellent introduction to the prolific Wheeler’s work.”

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Future Treasures: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Comments 0 Comment

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires-smallGrady Hendrix knows horror. His Paperbacks from Hell, which Goth Chick said “takes readers on a tour through the horror paperback novels of the 1970s and ’80s… I couldn’t have found a more perfect beach read,” won the Stoker Award, and is one of the most talked-about nonfiction genre books of the last decade. His novels include Horrorstör (2011) and My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016).

His latest is The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which is already getting a TV adaptation. In a starred review Publishers Weekly calls it a “clever, addictive vampire thriller.. This powerful, eclectic novel both pays homage to the literary vampire canon and stands singularly within it.” It arrives in hardcover in two weeks. Here’s the description.

Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families.

One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor’s handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind — and Patricia has already invited him in.

Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted — including the book club — but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires will be published by Quirk Books on April 7, 2020. It is 408 pages, priced at $22.99 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats.

Check out Matthew David Surridge’s Black Gate interview with Hendrix here, and see all our coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy and horror here.

Vintage Treasures: The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley

Vintage Treasures: The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley

Comments 9 comments
The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley-small The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley-back-small


The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley (Bantam Books, 1979). Cover by the great Paul Lehr

Back in the 90s, when I was reading a lot of Gardner Dozois’ science fiction anthologies, I got used to his complaints about the short memory of science fiction fans. What he meant was that after a popular and important SF writer died or retired, it wasn’t long — 2-5 years, sometimes less — before their entire catalog was out of print, and shortly after that they were virtually forgotten.

He made a compelling case at the time. But to be honest, these days the science fiction heroes of my formative years don’t seem very forgotten. Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr, John Brunner… maybe it’s just because I hang out at places like Black Gate, but their work seems to be discussed, celebrated, and enjoyed nearly as much as ever. Some — like Philip K. Dick, Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard — are even enjoying a renaissance on a scale none of us could have imagined while they were alive.

There are exceptions, of course. Wonderful writers whose works are forgotten, or very nearly so. Robert Sheckley is a good example. In 2001 Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; he produced nearly two dozen novels in a career spanning five decades, including Dimension of Miracles (1968), The Status Civilization (1960), and The 10th Victim (1965). His most enduring work was his short fiction, collected in Citizen in Space (1955), Pilgrimage to Earth (1957), Shards of Space (1962), and over a dozen more — including the NESFA Press tribute volume The Masque of Mañana, and five volumes of The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley from Pulphouse (1991). Sheckley died in 2005, and his work — the most popular of which was kept in print continuously for decades — is nearly completely forgotten today.

Well, if we’re going to pay attention to someone, it might as well be someone forgotten. So today’s Vintage Treasure is a wonderful little collection from 1979, very nearly the peak of Sheckley’s popularity, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Re-Coil by J. T. Nicholas

New Treasures: Re-Coil by J. T. Nicholas

Comments 0 Comment

Re-Coil J T Nicholas-smallWhen I published my first novel The Robots of Gotham (written under the name Todd McAulty), John Scalzi was enormously kind to me, helping me promote it by featuring me on his blog Whatever, one of the most popular SF sites in the country. I used the opportunity to conduct a mock interview with an ill-fated Sovereign Intelligence machine character, and it was a lot of fun.

Scalzi’s blog is a great way to discover new writers, in fact, and I’ve become a regular reader. It’s how I discovered J.T. Nicholas’ new novel Re-Coil, out this month from Titan. Here’s a snippet from his own guest post at Scalzi’s Whatever, published earlier this month:

The story – the plot – is a whodunnit at its heart, a mystery where the protagonists are trying to hunt down their would-be killers and stop the first truly existential threat to humanity since mankind uncovered the secrets of immortality. It’s part mystery, part space action romp, and part cyberpunk conspiracy tale. But writing those bits was the easy part. For me, the hard part of Re-Coil was creating the world, fleshing out the societies, and answering the questions my agent and editor posed. Big questions on race and sex and gender and identity and power that I hadn’t really intended to write about, but once I set up the basic premise, I couldn’t possibly avoid.

You can read Nicholas’ full article here. Here’s the publisher’s description for Re-Coil.

Carter Langston is murdered whilst salvaging a derelict vessel — a major inconvenience as he’s downloaded into a brand-new body on the space station where he backed up, several weeks’ journey away. But events quickly slip out of control when an assassin breaks into the medbay and tries to finish the job.

Death no longer holds sway over a humanity that has spread across the solar system: consciousness can be placed in a new body, or coil, straight after death, giving people the potential for immortality. Yet Carter’s backups — supposedly secure — have been damaged, his crew are missing, and everything points back to the derelict that should have been a simple salvage mission.

With enemies in hot pursuit, Carter tracks down his last crewmate — re-coiled after death into a body she cannot stand — to delve deeper into a mystery that threatens humanity and identity as they have come to know it.

Re-Coil was published by Titan Books on March 3, 2020. It is 359 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 in digital format. The cover was designed by Vince Haig. Read an excerpt at Tor.com, and see all our recent New Treasures here.

Reading in Transit

Reading in Transit

Comments 2 comments

Locus March 2020

I’m currently in Washington Dulles airport, waiting for my connecting flight back to Chicago. I flew to Tampa on Friday to help my parents, who snowbird in Florida every winter, to pack up and return to Canada a month early. They weren’t happy about it, but given the rate COVID-19 is upending things around the globe, they didn’t have much choice.

Mission Accomplished. But because of flight cancellations, I’m stuck in Dulles with an 11-hour layover before I can get home. Thank God for Locus magazine, which I grabbed on my way out the door on Friday. As usual, the March 2020 issue is packed with reviews, columns, photos and articles of keen interest to science fiction and fantasy readers. There’s even an excerpt from Kit Rocha’s upcoming Tor novel Deal With the Devil. But the feature that I found most fascinating was the interview with Nina Allen, author of The Rift and The Dollmaker. She talks about Doctor Who, Vladimir Nabokov, and Graham Joyce, and delivers perhaps the most on-point description of writing a novel I’ve ever read:

That’s what writing should entail — the fear and the terror and the joy of knowing that this problem is solvable, and there is only one person who can solve it, and it’s me…. I am in competition primarily with myself, because other writers’ talent should be nothing but a joy. When I see writers doing well and being better than me, that’s a joy and a goad and a challenge — not in any way negative. It’s wonderful. Nothing pleases me more than seeing people write brilliantly.

The March 2020 issue of Locus is still available at finer bookstores, and on the Locus website. Individual copies are $8.99. If you haven’t tried the magazine yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. Check it out.

Future Treasures: Eden by Tim Lebbon

Future Treasures: Eden by Tim Lebbon

Comments 1 comment

Tim Lebbon Eden-small

The ivy-cover copy of Tim Lebbon’s Eden,
mailed to me by a creative publicist at Titan Books

Getting review copies never gets old. I get far too many to write about these days, and they pile up on my library floor. When it comes time to crank out a Future Treasures post about an upcoming title, I take the time to select what looks most interesting, or the one I think you lot would most like to hear about.

Unless I’m in a hurry, in which case I grab whatever catches my eye. Then you’re at the mercy of whatever publicist or cover designer is most clever this week, and able to cut through all the clutter and grab my attention.

Today there are more than three dozen review copies and advance proofs piled up in front of my big green chair, but I’m not writing about any of them. Today you’re hearing about Tim Lebbon’s new eco-thriller Eden. Not because Kirkus Reviews calls it “Jurassic Park meets catastrophic climate change in this creepy, cinema-ready story,” or because Publishers Weekly says it’s “wondrous and deeply unsettling.” No, I’m telling you about Eden because a very clever publicist took the time to wrap a copy in plastic ivy before mailing it to me, and it’s that little bit of extra effort that gets attention. (Plus, what the hell are you going to do with an ivy-wrapped book? You can’t just stick it in the pile; the ivy will get crushed.)

It reminds me of the time the Tor publicity team sent me K Arsenault Rivera’s The Tiger’s Daughter with a seed packet that doubled as a bookmark (complete with planting instructions). You better believe I wrote about that one.

…

Read More Read More

A Masterclass in Dystopian Science Fiction: The Worlds Trilogy by Joe Haldeman

A Masterclass in Dystopian Science Fiction: The Worlds Trilogy by Joe Haldeman

Comments 3 comments
Worlds Joe Haldeman-small Worlds Apart Joe Haldeman-small Worlds Enough and Time-small

Joe Haldeman’s Worlds trilogy, paperback editions from Avon/ AvoNova. Covers by Vincent Di Fate

Are you working from home? Quarantined? Hanging out with a doomsday cult and wondering if the end times have actually arrived? You’re not alone. (Especially if you’re in a doomsday cult — those guys are surprisingly chummy.) But here at Black Gate, our work continues. Classic SF and fantasy isn’t going to promote itself to an increasingly chaotic world. That’s our job.

Today I’m looking at a forgotten trilogy from an author who is very definitely not forgotten. Joe Haldeman became an SFWA Grand Master in 2010, the highest honor one can attain in our field. In 2012 he was inducted as a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and he’s won virtually every major science fiction award. His most famous novels include The Forever War (1974), The Hemingway Hoax (1991) and Forever Peace (1997).

In 1981 he wrote the opening novel in a trilogy about life in an orbital habitat, Worlds. It was followed by Worlds Apart (1983) and Worlds Enough and Time nearly a decade later (1992). All three were shortlisted for the Locus Award. The Portalist calls the trilogy “an epic sci-fi saga… a masterclass in dystopian science fiction,” and last July they published an excerpt from the first novel to help promote the release of digital versions of all three books from Open Road Media. Here’s an excerpt from Xavier Piedra’s helpful recap of the whole series.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Made To Order: Robots and Revolution edited by Jonathan Strahan

New Treasures: Made To Order: Robots and Revolution edited by Jonathan Strahan

Comments 2 comments
Made To Order Robots and Revolution-small Made To Order Robots and Revolution-back-small

Cover by Blacksheep UK

A new anthology by Jonathan Strahan is always an event. He’s been editing Year’s Best volumes since 2003, for ibooks, the Science Fiction Book Club, Night Shade, and Solaris, and just announced the contents of the first volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction from Saga Press (if that Facebook link doesn’t work for you, don’t worry about it; I’ll cover it in an upcoming Future Treasures post). He also edited the groundbreaking Infinity series for Solaris, seven volumes starting with Engineering Infinity (2010) and ending with Infinity’s End (2018), perhaps the most acclaimed original anthology series of the last decade.

His latest is Made To Order: Robots and Revolution, released yesterday by Solaris. Published on the 100th anniversary of the word “Robot” entering our modern lexicon, Made To Order contains brand new stories by Sofia Samatar, Peter Watts, Ken Liu, Sarah Pinsker, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Annalee Newitz, Suzanne Palmer, Ian R. MacLeod, Rich Larson, and others. (To get a sense of the spirit of this anthology, read the first story “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, complete and completely free, at Tor.com. It’s a hilarious tale of two robot pals who couldn’t be more different, and it’s well worth your time.)

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More