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Author: John ONeill

Vintage Treasures: The Passing of the Dragons by Keith Roberts

Vintage Treasures: The Passing of the Dragons by Keith Roberts

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The Passing of the Dragons-small The Passing of the Dragons-back-small

Keith Roberts, who was active as an SF writer from the 60s through the 80s, has had the kind of posthumous success most authors can only dream of. His 1968 fix-up novel Pavane was called “Alternate History’s Lost Masterpiece” by io9 in 2009, nine years after his death:

I found it dense, unclear…and brilliant… This is a book to read once, get stuck, return to with a clear head, blast through, and then read again in search of deeper meanings. They are definitely there, and they are definitely worth finding.

In a 2016 piece at Tor.com Dave Hutchinson called Pavane “a significant achievement, by any measure. I was utterly bowled over by it.” And in his SF Site review back in 2001, Rich Horton compared it favorably to The Man in the High Castle:

The recent crop of alternate history stories, enjoyable as some of them may be, seem largely minor works… The shadows of two great AH novels of the 60s loom over the present-day offerings, both books with their ambition and success, and their moral centre, trivializing the current work. These are Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1963), winner of the Hugo Award, and Keith Roberts’ Pavane.

Okay, okay, I get it. I should read Pavane. But, you know, I’m busy. Doesn’t Keith Roberts have anything shorter I can read, just so I can nod along at science fiction cocktail parties, and mumble things like, “Yeah, totally love the guy?” Yes. Yes he does. Thank God. Turns out he has no less than nine collections, including a sort of “Best of” collection of his early short fiction, The Passing of the Dragons, published in paperback by Berkley Medallion in 1977.

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Weird and Wonderful and Frightening: An Interview with Fantasy Renaissance Man Howard Andrew Jones

Weird and Wonderful and Frightening: An Interview with Fantasy Renaissance Man Howard Andrew Jones

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For the Killing of Kings-smaller Howard Andrew Jones thinks big thoughts-small

Howard Andrew Jones is a true renaissance man of modern fantasy. He began writing short stories featuring his Arabian heroes Dabir & Asim for magazines and anthologies like Paradox, Sages & Swords, and Black Gate. He switched to novels with the widely acclaimed The Desert of Souls, one of the major works of fantasy of 2011. He followed that with a sequel, The Bones of the Old Ones (2011), and a 4-book sequence for Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows, Stalking the Beast, Beyond the Pool of Stars, and Through the Gate in the Sea.

In addition to writing, he’s also a gifted editor. He edited eight volumes of the collected tales of Harold Lamb for Bison Books, rescuing the early short fiction of one of the greatest adventure writers of the 20th Century from the moldering pages of pulp magazines. He was Managing Editor for the early e-zine Flashing Swords from 2004-2006, and in 2006 accepted the position of Managing Editor of Black Gate. He is the founding editor of Goodman Games’ new sword & sorcery magazine Tales From the Magician’s Skull, which published two issues last year. And in late 2018 he became Executive Editor at Perilous Worlds, where he oversees the publication of new titles for some of most popular properties in fantasy, including John C. Hocking’s Conan and the Emerald Lotus and Conan and the Living Plague.

Though that keeps him plenty busy, he has not neglected his own writing. For the Killing of Kings, the first novel in a brand new series, The Ring-Sworn trilogy, arrives today from St. Martin’s Press. It’s the top pick of the month of March for Bookpage, and Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review, saying it “will have readers laughing, crying, and cheering.” Somehow Howard found time to sit down with us for a lengthy interview about his writing process, his influences (including Zelazny, Raymond Chandler, and Leigh Brackett), and the fast-changing trends he sees from his catbird seat in the industry. Enjoy.

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Swashbuckling Adventure with that Classic Epic Fantasy Feel: The Empire of Storms Trilogy by Jon Skovron

Swashbuckling Adventure with that Classic Epic Fantasy Feel: The Empire of Storms Trilogy by Jon Skovron

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Hope and Red-smal Bane and Shadow-small Blood and Tempest-small

Cover art by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme

I’m in the market for a quick read this President’s Day weekend. Something light, with fun characters, a great setting, and a lot of action. I found a copy of Jon Skovron’s Blood and Tempest in the bookstore last weekend and, even though it’s clearly the third book in a series, it seemed exactly what I was looking for, and I happily brought it home. The first two, Hope and Red (2016) and Bane and Shadow (2017), are still in print, and I added them to my Amazon cart.

For light action fare, these books have collected a lot of praise. The Sun labeled the first one “A great swashbuckling adventure,” and in a starred review Publishers Weekly called it “Exceptional… A compelling coming-of-age yarn.” And Sarah Beth Durst (The Queen of Blood) said

Hope and Red is my favorite book of the year. Full of nonstop, irresistible adventure, it captures that wonderful classic epic fantasy feel, while introducing a fantastic pair of memorable new heroes.

Together the three books compose The Empire of Storms trilogy, about a warrior and a thief who go up against the forces of Empire. Here’s the description for the opening book.

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Future Treasures: The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A Journey into Space with 1950s Radio, TV, Films, Comics and Books by John Wade

Future Treasures: The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A Journey into Space with 1950s Radio, TV, Films, Comics and Books by John Wade

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction A Journey into Space with 1950s Radio, TV, Films, Comics and Books-smallJohn Wade is the author of more than thirty books published in the US and the UK, including London Curiosities and The Ingenious Victorians. His newest is The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A Journey into Space with 1950s Radio, TV, Films, Comics and Books, a gorgeous hardcover that celebrates classic science fiction in all its forms. Well, the early forms that made vintage SF what it is, anyway.

John Wade grew up in the 1950s, a decade that has since been dubbed the ‘golden age of science fiction.’ It was a wonderful decade for science fiction, but not so great for young fans. With early television broadcasts being advertised for the first time as ‘unsuitable for children’ and the inescapable barrier of the ‘X’ certificate in the cinema barring anyone under the age of sixteen, the author had only the radio to fall back on – and that turned out to be more fertile for the budding SF fan than might otherwise have been thought. Which is probably why, as he grew older, rediscovering those old TV broadcasts and films that had been out of bounds when he was a kid took on a lure that soon became an obsession.

For him, the super-accuracy and amazing technical quality of today’s science fiction films pale into insignificance beside the radio, early TV and B-picture films about people who built rockets in their back gardens and flew them to lost planets, or tales of aliens who wanted to take over, if not our entire world, then at least our bodies. This book is a personal account of John Wade’s fascination with the genre across all the entertainment media in which it appeared – the sort of stuff he revelled in as a young boy – and still enjoys today.

Science Fiction has long been a genre of obsession, though modern fans have a healthy range of sub-genres to obsess over, like video games, anime, role playing games, comics, television, Marvel movies, Star Wars, toys, Star Trek, George R.R. Martin, and many others. In the 1950s there was just magazines, movies…. and radio.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction has a lot of appeal for me, since I hope it will be a look at the genre from a fresh perspective…. well, fresh to me, anyway. I don’t know much about classic SF radio and 1950s monster movies, I’m looking forward to it. It will be published by Pen and Sword Books on February 28, 2019. It is 240 pages, priced at £25.00/$42.95 US. Get more details at the Pen and Sword website here.

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

A World of Puzzles, a Society Based on Beauty, and a Space Princess: The Latest from Harper Voyager

A World of Puzzles, a Society Based on Beauty, and a Space Princess: The Latest from Harper Voyager

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The Lost Puzzler-small Fearless Sarah Tarkoff-small Polaris Rising-small

Last Saturday, during my bi-weekly trip to our local Barnes & Noble, I picked up a copy of Rachel Dunne’s The Shattered Sun, published by Harper Voyager. In a brief post that afternoon I noted that a single publisher had dominated my attention as I browsed the shelves.

One thing I noticed this week is that half the books that caught my eye, including The Shattered Sun, the debut fantasy The Lost Puzzler by Eyal Kless, and the space opera Polaris Rising by Jessie Mihalik, were from Harper Voyager. Man, Voyager is really firing on all cylinders this season. I need to find out who the editors are over there.

A few keystrokes revealed that there are four editors at Voyager: Angela Craft, David Pomerico, Kayleigh Webb, and Pam Jaffee. There’s a great intro to the talented crew at their Meet the Team page, and a good intro to their current and future line-up here.

The books that commanded my attention that morning included The Lost Puzzler, Eyal Kless’ tale of a lowly scribe sent out in world full of puzzles, tattooed mutants, and warring guilds, to discover the fate of a child who mysteriously disappeared over a decade ago; Sarah Tarkoff’s Fearless, the sequel to last year’s Sinless, set in a near future where morality is rewarded with beauty, and crime with ugliness; and a space opera featuring rival houses, a rebellion, and a princess fleeing an arranged marriage: Polaris Rising by Jessie Mihalik. Here’s the back covers for all three.

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New Treasures: The Ingenious by Darius Hinks

New Treasures: The Ingenious by Darius Hinks

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The Ingenious-smallDarius Hinks has had a distinguished career as a fantasy writer. His first novel, Warrior Priest, won the Gemmell Morningstar award. Most of his fiction has been set in the Warhammer and Warhammer: 40K universes, including the Orion trilogy, Sigvald (2011), Blood of Sanguinius (2017), the just-released Mephiston: Revenant Crusade (Jan 8, 2019) and the upcoming Blackstone Fortress (May 14, 2019).

His latest novel (and the second of three planned for release this year) is his first non-licensed work, and it’s certainly the first to catch my eye. In his article “7 Impossible Fantasy Cities Worth the Visit” at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Sam Reader says:

Floating outside of time and space and only coming to rest once a year for the annual Conjunction — during which it adds new districts to itself — Athanor is a massive living city controlled by a secretive group of alchemists known as the Curious Men. While the danger of the place is immediately obvious within two chapters of Darius Hinks’ new novel — its lower levels are ruled by a twisted gang of mutants, the cops know how to hide a body way too well (and also all wear cultist uniforms), and one of the Curious Men has been straight-up murdering people with a skin-shroud so he can take control of and literally bend reality. At the same time, the place feels vibrant and alive in a way few fictional metropolises do, literally pulsing and teeming with life as it travels through and around spacetime. Its constantly changing nature gives it the sense of a wild, beautiful, protean place, its danger as seductive as it is horrifying.

Here’s the book description.

Political exiles are desperate to escape from the impossible city that imprisons them, in this bloody and brilliant epic fantasy

Thousands of years ago, the city of Athanor was set adrift in time and space by alchemists, called “the Curious Men.” Ever since, it has accumulated cultures, citizens and species into a vast, unmappable metropolis.

Isten and her gang of half-starved political exiles live off petty crime and gangland warfare in Athanor’s seediest alleys. Though they dream of returning home to lead a glorious revolution, Isten’s downward spiral drags them into a mire of addiction and violence. Isten must find a way to save the exiles and herself if they are ever to build a better, fairer world for the people of their distant homeland.

The Ingenious was published by Angry Robot on February 5, 2019. It is 349 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback. The cover is by John Coulthart. Read an excerpt from the first chapter here, and see all our recent New Treasures here.

Vintage Treasures: Doomsday Morning by C.L. Moore

Vintage Treasures: Doomsday Morning by C.L. Moore

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Doomsday Morning-small Doomsday Morning-back-small

Art by Vincent DiFate

C.L. Moore is a name to conjure with. One of the finest early contributors to Weird Tales, she helped define and create the sword-&-sorcery genre alongside Robert E. Howard, with her tales of Jirel of Joiry. Her other great pulp hero was Northwest Smith, whose adventures have remained in print for the greater part of the past eight decades.

Perhaps best remembered today for her nearly career-long collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, Moore nonetheless made numerous major solo contributions to the genre, including the groundbreaking collections Judgment Night (1952) and Shambleau and Others (1953). Her last novel, Doomsday Morning (1957), would be called dystopian science fiction today. Something of a departure for Moore, it’s a more thoughtful and mature work that still reads well. Here’s an excerpt from Sandy Ferber’s review at the Fantasy Literature blog.

[Moore] capped off a glorious writing career with a solo SF novel, her last, Doomsday Morning.

A companion piece in title only to Moore’s 1943 novel Judgment Night, this is a very fine tale indeed. It is a bit unusual for the author in that its setting is not Venus, or deep space, or the distant future, or some unusually named fantasy world, but rather America — New York City and rural California, to be precise — of only 50 years in the future; in other words, around 2007, or right now! The America of Moore’s early 21st century has become a quasi-totalitarian regime run by a far-reaching entity known as Comus (short for Communications of the United States). This government department in essence controls not only all the communications in the country, but also the schools, transportation network, the hospitals, the entertainment industry, the military divisions, et al. Howard Rohan, a washed-up alcoholic wreck who had once been one of Broadway’s greatest stars, is pressured by Comus into putting on a traveling, open-air play called “Crossroads,” along with a troupe of five other actors, to entertain in California. That state, it seems, had been rebelling openly against Comus, and activists there had been purportedly hard at work perfecting some kind of “Anti-Com” device that might miraculously bring about Comus’ downfall. The story of how Rohan becomes a whole man again, after three years of grieving for his late wife, and how he becomes involved in nothing less than a second Revolutionary War of sorts, is the story of Doomsday Morning.

Read Sandy’s complete review here.

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Telepathic Invaders and Desperate Revolutionaries: The Shattered Kingdoms by Evie Manieri

Telepathic Invaders and Desperate Revolutionaries: The Shattered Kingdoms by Evie Manieri

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Blood's Pride Evie Manieri-small Fortune's Blight Evie Manieri-small Strife's Bane Evie Manieri-small

Every time a fantasy trilogy wraps up, we bake a cake in the Black Gate offices.

Evie Manieri’s The Shattered Kingdoms trilogy ends this month with Strife’s Bane, published in hardcover last week, four years after the last volume appeared. The series opened with Manieri’s debut novel Blood’s Pride (2013), the tale of a secret rebellion against telepathic warriors twenty years after they enslaved a nation, and continued with Fortune’s Blight (2015). Although it’s received praise from multiple quarters — Publishers Weekly says “The suspense, character development, and worldbuilding are all superior,” and Sharon Shinn called the opening novel “A fast-paced tale of honor and betrayal, hope and despair, secrets, revelations, and a whisper of divine magic”– the series has flown under the radar for many readers. Fortune’s Blight has only two reviews on Amazon, and (so far) Strife’s Bane has none at all — and has an Amazon Sales Rank of 932,782 a week after publication, not a promising sign.

I know there’s a popular trend (certainly among Black Gate readers, anyway) to stay clear of epic fantasy series until they’ve successfully completed. I hope that now that The Shattered Kingdoms has wrapped up, it will spur some fresh interest in the trilogy. Unlike many writers afflicted with late-series bloat, Manieri has kept her series lean. The first book in fact was by far the longest (528 pages); the second came in at 377, and Strife’s Bane weighs in at a trim 317. Here’s the description for the final book.

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Future Treasures: The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

Future Treasures: The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

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The Raven Tower-smallAnn Leckie knows how to make an entrance. Her debut novel Ancillary Justice (2013) won the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and British Science Fiction Award, and she followed it in short order with three sequels: Ancillary Sword (2014), Ancillary Mercy (2015), and Provenance (2017).

Her fifth novel, and her debut fantasy, is one of the most anticipated books of the year. It arrives in hardcover from Orbit next week. Lev Grossman calls The Raven Tower “A powerhouse epic of humans and gods at war, deeply imagined and profoundly thrilling,” and Kirkus Reviews says:

It is a common fantasy trope to suggest gods gain strength through faith and worshipers and that they can employ that strength to bend reality. But few authors have really explored all the implications of what happens when multiple beings with that power come into conflict. There is so much story and careful thought packed into this short volume that it should correct anyone who believes a fully realized fantasy novel requires a minimum of 500 pages.

Here’s the description.

Gods meddle in the fates of men, men play with the fates of gods, and a pretender must be cast down from the throne in this masterful first fantasy novel from Ann Leckie, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

For centuries, the kingdom of Iraden has been protected by the god known as the Raven. He watches over his territory from atop a tower in the powerful port of Vastai. His will is enacted through the Raven’s Lease, a human ruler chosen by the god himself. His magic is sustained via the blood sacrifice that every Lease must offer. And under the Raven’s watch, the city flourishes.

But the power of the Raven is weakening. A usurper has claimed the throne. The kingdom borders are tested by invaders who long for the prosperity that Vastai boasts. And they have made their own alliances with other gods.

It is into this unrest that the warrior Eolo — aide to Mawat, the true Lease — arrives. And in seeking to help Mawat reclaim his city, Eolo discovers that the Raven’s Tower holds a secret. Its foundations conceal a dark history that has been waiting to reveal itself… and to set in motion a chain of events that could destroy Iraden forever.

The Raven Tower will be published by Orbit Books on February 26, 2019. It is 432 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Lauren Panepinto.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming fantasy here.

New Treasures: The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons

New Treasures: The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons

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The Ruin of Kings-smallIt’s tough being a debut fantasy writer. There are so many books being released every month, it’s very, very challenging for new voices to be heard. The thing that can really help is a starred review from one of the big four review sites — Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, or Booklist. Even a single starred review can mean the difference between a successful launch and vanishing without a trace.

Getting a pair of starred reviews is a very good omen, and three is extremely rare. I can only think of a handful of titles that pulled off the nearly-impossible trick of a clean sweep of all four — but that’s exactly what happened with Jenn Lyons’s new novel The Ruin of Kings. Library Journal called it “Stunning,” Booklist labeled it “Dazzling,” and Publishers Weekly called it ” intricate epic fantasy.” But my favorite review was from Kirkus, who said:

The story begins in a jail cell with a young man named Kihrin being guarded by Talon, a beautiful and monstrous shape-shifting assassin. Kihrin, awaiting what will surely be his death, begins telling her his life story. Talon complements Kihrin’s tale with her own memories of the past few years, and, together, they weave a jaw-dropping, action-packed story of betrayal, greed, and grand-scale conspiracy. It all begins when Kihrin — a thief who has been raised in the slums by a compassionate blind musician—witnesses a horrific murder while robbing a house…. While the comparisons to Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle will be unavoidable — in terms of story structure and general narrative content — the potential of this projected five-book saga may be even greater. Although a cast of well-developed characters and an impressively intricate storyline power this novel, it’s Lyons’ audacious worldbuilding that makes for such an unforgettable read. In a sprawling, magic-filled world populated by gods, dragons, krakens, witches, demons, ghosts, shape-shifters, zombies, and so much more, Lyons ties it all together seamlessly to create literary magic.

Epic fantasy fans looking for a virtually un-put-down-able read should look no further.

The Ruin of Kings was published by Tor Books on February 5, 2019. It is 560 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover art is by Lars West. Read the complete first chapter at Tor.com.

See all our recent New Treasures here.