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Vintage Treasures: Tea With the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy

Vintage Treasures: Tea With the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy

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Tea With the Black Dragon was R.A. (Bertie) MacAvoy’s debut novel — and what a debut it was. It was the book everyone was talking about in 1983, and it was nominated for the Locus Award for Best First Novel (which it won), as well as the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Philip K. Dick Awards (which it lost to Startide Rising, The Dragon Waiting, and The Anubis Gates, respectively.  You can’t say it wasn’t a year with worthy competition.)

In his 2015 Throwback Thursday article at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jeff Somers helped re-introduce the book to a lot of modern fantasy readers, with a rather clever description of the plot.

I like to think of R.A. MacAvoy’s marvelous Tea with the Black Dragon as a quantum state fantasy, because it both is and is not a fantasy novel. The waveform collapse occurs inside your head when you read it… Martha Macnamara is a middle-aged, free-spirited musician who travels to California at the request of her semi-estranged daughter, who works in a finance role in the burgeoning California software industry. Put up in a swanky hotel, Martha meets Mayland Long, an older Asian man with elegant manners and a lot of money. Their conversation hints that he was an eyewitness to momentous events throughout history, and counts as close friends many long-dead historical figures. He and Martha strike up a thoroughly charming, adult relationship, instantly and believably drawn to one another. When Martha’s daughter goes missing, Long agrees to assist in tracking her down. Which could be useful, as he claims to be a 2,000-year old black dragon in human form. Boom.

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Future Treasures: Gather the Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Future Treasures: Gather the Fortunes by Bryan Camp

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Library Journal listed Bryan’s Camp’s debut novel The City of Lost Fortunes as one of the Best Books of 2018, and in their starred review summed it up as “”A masterly game played by gods and monsters… Camp’s thoroughly engaging debut is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.” At Locus Online Katharine Coldiron expanded on the Gaiman comparison:

If Neil Gaiman wrote a post-Katrina novel about New Orleans, it just might be The City of Lost Fortunes. It’s stuffed with more-than-meets-the-mortal-eye cityscapes, immortal schemes and meddling, and historical myth and meaning… the passion with which he writes about his alternate New Orleans is a rare pleasure. It’s a novel of magicians and musicians, bargains and paradoxes, gods – lots of gods – and death… it is an entertaining and promising debut.

The highly anticipated sequel Gather the Fortunes arrives in hardcover this month. Here’s the description.

Renaissance Raines has found her place among the psychopomps — the guides who lead the souls of the recently departed through the Seven Gates of the Underworld—and done her best to avoid the notice of gods and mortals alike. But when a young boy named Ramses St. Cyr manages to escape his foretold death, Renai finds herself at the center of a deity-thick plot unfolding in New Orleans. Someone helped Ramses slip free of his destined end — someone willing to risk everything to steal a little slice of power for themselves.

Is it one of the storm gods that’s descended on the city? The death god who’s locked the Gates of the Underworld? Or the manipulative sorcerer who also cheated Death? When she finds the schemer, there’s gonna be all kinds of hell to pay, because there are scarier things than death in the Crescent City. Renaissance Raines is one of them.

We covered The City of Lost Fortunes, last year; you can read an excerpt from the first chapter hereGather the Fortunes will be published by John Joseph Adams Books on May 21, 2019. It is 372 pages, priced at $24 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Will Staehle.

New Treasures: The Bayern Agenda by Dan Moren

New Treasures: The Bayern Agenda by Dan Moren

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Dan Moren’s second novel The Bayern Agenda shares a world and key characters with his debut The Caledonian Gambit (2017). Publishers Weekly calls his new effort “a frenzied story full of bold spycraft and exciting ground and air chases… suspenseful space opera.” In her feature review at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Emily Wenstrom finds lots to enjoy.

Whether you’ve read that earlier book or not, you’ll certainly enjoy this one, provided “fast-paced, high-action space opera with a spy adventure bent” sounds like your jam; think Star Trek meets Mission: Impossible.

In many ways, the plot hits all the familiar genre beats — active wormholes, intriguing planets, intense face-offs, and a few twists along the way — but set against the backdrop of a satisfyingly built world, it offers plenty to enjoy even if you think you’ve read this sort of thing before. The action takes place during the cold war that gives the series its name, and the complex history of tensions between its two opposing forces, the Illyrican Empire and the Commonwealth of Independent Systems, lends the caper at the novel’s center a fair bit of weight — both sides of the conflict being more than ready to instigate a new wave of aggression at the first sign of trouble.

And as to that caper: Simon Kovalic is a seasoned Commonwealth intelligence agent with deep experience in the field and the psychological damage to go with it… During a mission gone awry that opens the novel, Kovalic obtains intelligence that suggests that the Empire is making some sort of move involving the massive Bayern Corporation, a planet-sized bank. Figuring out what’s going on and why is crucial: with the capital Bayern could provide, the Illyricans could seriously upset the balance of power in the system… though the novel does leverage a few familiar science fiction adventure tropes, it puts them to economical use, moving us quickly into the action. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to enjoy a fast, fun high-concept romp.

The Bayern Agenda is Book One of The Galactic Cold War, which sounds very promising. It was published by Angry Robot on March 5, 2019 It is 384 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Amazing15. Read the complete first chapter (21 pages) here.

Vintage Treasures: Infinite Dreams by Joe Haldeman

Vintage Treasures: Infinite Dreams by Joe Haldeman

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Cover by Clyde Caldwell

Joe Haldeman is chiefly known for his Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels, including The Forever War (1974), Forever Peace (1997), and Camouflage (2004). But he’s equally adept at shorter length, and in fact has been nominated for many major awards for his short fiction, including the novellas “Hero” and “The Hemingway Hoax,” and the stories “Tricentennial,” “Graves,” “None So Blind,” and “Four Short novels.”

Over the years I’ve hunted down several of his collections, including Dealing in Futures (1985), A Separate War and Other Stories (2006), and the huge retrospective volume from Subterranean Press, The Best of Joe Haldeman (2013). But I only recently became aware of his first collection Infinite Dreams, published in paperback by Avon in 1979 with a cover by popular TSR artist Clyde Caldwell.

Infinite Dreams gathers much of the best of his early short fiction, published 1972 – 1977 in magazines like Analog, Galaxy, F&SF and Cosmos, and anthologies like Damon Knight’s Orbit 11, and Kirby McCauley’s Frights. It contains “To Howard Hughes: A Modest Proposal,” “The Private War of Private Jacob,” “The Mazel Tov Revolution,” and his Hugo and Locus Award winner “Tricentennial.”

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Gremlins, Bizarre Capers, and Artifacts on the Moon: New Print Magazines in May

Gremlins, Bizarre Capers, and Artifacts on the Moon: New Print Magazines in May

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The May/June batch of print SF magazines has brand new fiction from a host of popular writers, including Carrie Vaughn, Ian R. MacLeod, Ted Kosmatka, Bill Johnson, E. Lily Yu, Harry Turtledove, Alec Nevala-Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Bud Sparhawk, Edward M. Lerner, Bruce McAllister (x2), Cynthia Ward, Marissa K. Lingen, Lavie Tidhar, Matthew Hughes, Tobias S. Buckell, Andy Dudak, and many others. Here’s editor Sheila Williams summation of the latest issue of Asimov’s SF.

May/June 2019 is powerhouse issue for novelettes. In his stunning story, Ted Kosmatka reveals the excruciating cost of “Sacrificial Iron” on an interstellar voyage; Asimov’s poet John Richard Trtek’s first prose piece for us is a lyrical tour de force about time travel and “Recrossing Brooklyn Ferry”; Ian R. MacLeod brilliantly conveys the tricks of a broken mind in “The Memory Artist”; and in his enjoyable romp, Bill Johnson escorts us to Canada and onto the Ship for some “Unfinished Business.”

Not to be outdone by the novelettes, Carrie Vaughn’s soaring novella investigates what’s up with “Gremlins.” We also have a full roster of exciting short stories. In Sean Monaghan’s new tale, a heart broken mother races against time while “Chasing Oumuamua”; new to Asimov’s author Rahul Kanakia looks at some timeless concerns in “The Intertidal Zone”; Jay O’Connell presents us with a bizarre caper wherein we discover that it’s “Not Only Who You Know”; Peter Wood explains why “Never the Twain Shall Meet”; and in her first tale for Asimov’s, Campbell-Award-winner E. Lily Yu examines “The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi.”

Robert Silverberg’s Reflections celebrates “Our Shaggy Cousins.” James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net commands us to “Fire the Canon!” In James Gunn’s Thought Experiment “Science Fiction Considers the Post Human” while Norman Spinrad’s On Books ponders whether writers can go “Beyond Mimesis?” Plus we’ll have an array of poetry and more features that you’re sure to enjoy.

And here’s Trevor Quachri on the new Analog.

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Kay Kenyon Wraps Up the Dark Talents Trilogy with Nest of the Monarch

Kay Kenyon Wraps Up the Dark Talents Trilogy with Nest of the Monarch

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Covers by Mike Heath

At the 2016 World Fantasy Convention I enjoyed a bunch of terrific readings, but my favorite — by a wide margin — was Kay Kenyon, who read from her  WWII spy novel At the Table of Wolves, the tale of a young English woman with superhuman abilities who stumbles on a chilling Nazi plan to invade England using superhuman agents. The sequel Serpent in the Heather arrived last year, and just last month the concluding volume in the trilogy, Nest of the Monarch, was published in hardcover by Saga Press. Kay’s Amazon bio has a nice summary of the entire series; here it is.

My trilogy, The Dark Talents novels finished in spring of 2019 with the publication of Nest of the Monarch. The series features Kim Tavistock, who deals with dark Talents, Nazi conspiracies, and espionage in 1936 England and Europe. Both Nest of the Monarch and At the Table of Wolves received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly.

In Book two, Serpent in the Heather, Kim must track down the Nazi assassin who is systematically killing young people with Talents. Kirkus called it “A unique concept that is superbly executed.” Book three brings Kim undercover in Berlin… I was inspired to write this series by the stories of the many women spies, radio operators and resistance fighters in the world wars. See my blog series, “Women spies in the World Wars” at www.KayKenyon.com.

Kay offers a great teaser for the closing volume at her website.

I wanted to pull out all the stops for what Kim Tavistock is capable of, and place the events of the book in the scariest environment I could imagine, at least for a spy: 1936 Berlin and a secret SS outpost. The result is my richest story yet, I’m thinking

Here’s the full description for Nest of the Monarch.

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New Treasures: Sky Without Stars by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell

New Treasures: Sky Without Stars by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell

Sky Without Stars-smallNow here’s an interesting item. A fat, epic YA novel that reimagines Victor Hugo’s classic Les Misérables as a tale of revolution on the French planet of Laterre. Caitlyn Paxson at NPR calls it “kind of brilliant… a massive tome, full of twists and turns and a thousand agonies that propel its characters to their inevitable fates.” It arrived in hardcover from Simon & Schuster in March.

A thief.
An officer.
A guardian.

Three strangers, one shared destiny…

When the Last Days came, the planet of Laterre promised hope. A new life for a wealthy French family and their descendants. But five hundred years later, it’s now a place where an extravagant elite class reigns supreme; where the clouds hide the stars and the poor starve in the streets; where a rebel group, long thought dead, is resurfacing.

Whispers of revolution have begun — a revolution that hinges on three unlikely heroes…

Chatine is a street-savvy thief who will do anything to escape the brutal Regime, including spy on Marcellus, the grandson of the most powerful man on the planet.

Marcellus is an officer — and the son of a renowned traitor. In training to take command of the military, Marcellus begins to doubt the government he’s vowed to serve when his father dies and leaves behind a cryptic message that only one person can read: a girl named Alouette.

Alouette is living in an underground refuge, where she guards and protects the last surviving library on the planet. But a shocking murder will bring Alouette to the surface for the first time in twelve years… and plunge Laterre into chaos.

All three have a role to play in a dangerous game of revolution — and together they will shape the future of a planet.

Power, romance, and destiny collide in this sweeping reimagining of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables.

Sky Without Stars was published by Simon Pulse on March 26, 2019. It is 582 pages, priced at $19.95 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Billelis. Read the complete first chapter here.

Vintage Treasures: On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch

Vintage Treasures: On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch

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Bantam Books, 1985. Cover by Kid Kane

Last time I wrote about Thomas M. Disch I got a cranky note from Michael Moorcock, taking me to task for calling him a “tragic figure.” Fair enough. He’s not quite as forgotten as I made him out to be, either. There are still people whispering about Thomas Disch in dusty corners of the internet, if you know where to look.

Me, for one. Disch is a fairly recent discovery for me, I admit, and I probably would never have tried him if it hadn’t been for a few lone voices out there still championing his quirky brand of SF, including Rich HortonTed Gioia, and Jo Walton. It was Jo who helped pique my interest in his 1979 novel On Wings of Song, with her 2011 review at Tor.com.

It’s a fascinating complex world. There are machines which you hook up to and sing sincerely, and if you do it right you have an out of body experience. They call this flying, and it’s banned in the same way that drugs are banned — illegal but available… There are famines when rations get cut to starvation levels, and prisons where you have to get McDonalds takeout to survive…

We don’t seem to have a word to describe the kind of story this is. It’s the whole life story, from age five to death, of Daniel Weinreb… He wants to fly, he wants it more than anything. His life is complicated and largely unheroic, the kind of life people actually have in reality and seldom have in fiction. But it’s a life he could only have in that time and place, in the world he lives in. It’s a book about how he grows up and what happens to him and what he wants and what he has to do to get by.

The book is depressing and hilarious in a way that’s very hard to describe. Most of Disch is brilliant and depressing, this is brilliant and depressing and moving and funny… You really want to read On Wings of Song. You might not like it, but it’s one of the books that marks the boundaries of what it’s possible to do with SF.

On Wings of Song was a Hugo nominee, and won the Campbell Award. But I’m certain I would have bounced off it when it was first published. In 1980 I was discovering Roger Zelazny, Robert A. Heinlein, and Stephen R. Donaldson, and busy falling in love with the sweeping adventure epics SF had to offer. I was just one of the many science fiction readers who ignored Disch completely. Definitely my loss.

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Future Treasures: Nexus, Book 2 of The Androma Saga by Sasha Alsberg and Lindsay Cummings

Future Treasures: Nexus, Book 2 of The Androma Saga by Sasha Alsberg and Lindsay Cummings

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When I parked myself in the sprawling Young Adult section at Barnes & Noble last December, I decided to take home the single book that appealed to me the most. I ended up choosing Zenith, the first book in The Androma Saga by Sasha Alsberg and Lindsay Cummings. This is why:

The book that won out over all the others was an instant New York Times bestseller by two popular YA writers, a tale of an all-girl crew of space privateers getting caught up in “a dark and complex sci-fi drama” (Library Journal), and it just screamed fun.

Publishers Weekly said the first volume “features plentiful action, complex politics, and a rich mythology,” and Buzzfeed went much further, saying:

This sci-fi novel follows Andi, also known as the Bloody Baroness, and her fearless all-female crew of space pirates. When someone of high importance proposes a mission that Andi cannot refuse, she finds herself and her crew partnered with Dex — a bounty hunter who has a not-so-pleasant past with Andy. They must work together to complete a nearly impossible mission. But what they don’t know is that the ruler of the planet Xen Ptera is planning to extract revenge on the galaxy, threatening all who inhabit it. Zenith is an spectacularly stunning, whirlwind adventure with a race-against-the-clock plot and strong as hell female characters.

The next book in the series, Nexus, arrives in hardcover next week, and it continues the saga in high fashion. Here’s the description.

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Warhammer Chronicles: The Gotrek & Felix Novels by William King and Nathan Long are Back in Print

Warhammer Chronicles: The Gotrek & Felix Novels by William King and Nathan Long are Back in Print

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I became a fan of Warhammer through Relic’s Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War series of computer games, and eventually became a huge fan of their audiobooks. But people I respect have been telling me for years that their fiction is worth reading. Howard Andrew Jones in particular recommended Clint Werner’s Brunner novels and Nathan Long’s Blackhearts volumes as fine examples of modern sword & sorcery.

But the series I’ve heard the most about is the long-running Gotrek and Felix, which currently stands at no less than 17 volumes, written by William King, Nathan Long, Josh Reynolds, and David Guymer. King is the originator of the series and he wrote the first seven volumes, which I’ve heard described as “the reference series for Warhammer fantasy.”

The early editions are long out of print, and in fact the original omnibus reprints, which collected three novels each and were issued in 2003-2004, are out as print as well. They’re expensive collectors editions today. So are the second batch of reprints, published by Black Library in 2006-2013, which gathered the first 12 novels.

So I was pleased to see Games Workshop issue a third edition of this classic adventure fantasy series, and bought the first volume as soon as it became available. The second volume arrived in February. and the third is due in June. Here’s the details.

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