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New Treasures: Immortal Muse by Stephen Leigh

New Treasures: Immortal Muse by Stephen Leigh

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Immortal Muse-smallI bought my first Stephen Leigh book, Slow Fall to Dawn, the opening volume in the epic tale of the space-faring Hoorka assassins, way back in 1981. Since then, he’s published some 20 novels and over 40 short stories, including six volumes in Ray Bradbury Presents, and The Woods (2012). The most recent was the omnibus Assassin’s Dawn, which collects all three books in the Hoorka Trilogy: Slow Fall to Dawn (1981), Dance of the Hag(1983), and A Quiet of Stone (1984).

He also writes fantasy under the name S.L. Farrell, including three volumes of the Nessantico Cycle and The Cloudmages Trilogy.

His newest novel features the famous alchemist Nicholas Flamel, who’s also featured prominently in Michael Scott’s bestselling The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, just to name some recent examples. I wonder if we’re witnessing the birth of the new genre of Nicholas Flame literature. Could happen.

Immortal Muse is an unforgettable tale that sweeps readers from 1300s Paris to modern-day New York — with interludes in the 1635 Rome of Bernini, the 1737 Venice of Vivaldi, the French Revolution in Paris with Lavoisier and Robespierre, 1814 London with William Blake and John Polidori, fin de siècle Vienna with Gustav Klimt, and World War II France with Charlotte Salomon.

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Confessions of a Reluctant Self-Publisher — Now with extra Giveaways!

Confessions of a Reluctant Self-Publisher — Now with extra Giveaways!

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Forever In The Memory Of God-smallI’ll be giving away copies of my mini-ebook-collection Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories to the first five commenters who ask for one. But why should you bother? Read on!

Here is a list of things I want to do: Write; make a living with my pen.

And a list of the things I don’t want to do: marketing; selling; formatting; cover design; manual reading; forum perusing; guru worshipping; elbowing my way through the pack; self-publishing…

And yet, here we are.

Once upon a time, it was all so very different. I wrote a book and the first agent I sent it to loved it. So did a large number of publishers and in no time at all, they were clawing each other’s eyes out to get access to my manuscript. Then, exactly as it had happened in all my dreams, editors were engaged in an auction for the right to publish me. Me!

My agent used to ring me once or twice a day, cackling with glee over the latest rise in the price and the shameless favours being offered, until finally, we had hitched ourselves up to a brilliant and famous editor. How could it go wrong?

Oh, it didn’t! Not yet! Because, next came foreign language publishers from every corner of the globe. They too pledged undying love for a li’l ole book called The Inferior, and what they said about the story and the characters made me blush in parts of my body that few cameras have ever seen.

I’m sick of this boasting. Can we get to the bad part?

Yes, let’s start the dive now. Or “death-spiral,” if you prefer.

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Aaron Allston, December 8, 1960 – February 27, 2014

Aaron Allston, December 8, 1960 – February 27, 2014

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Aaron AllstonAaron Allston, one of the most creative and prolific creators in the early adventure gaming hobby, died Thursday.

I first encountered his name in the early 80s, on the masthead of my favorite gaming magazine, Space Gamer, where he seemed to do just about everything — circulation manager, assistant editor, and eventually editor. When the magazine split in two in 1983, he also served as editor of the spin-off Fantasy Gamer.

By 1983, he was also an accomplished freelance game designer with a number of impressive credits, including Autoduel Champions, a mash-up of Hero Games’ Champions and Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars. His many later credit included the Hollow World box set (TSR, 1990), Rules Cyclopedia for Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, 1991), The Complete Fighter’s Handbook (TSR, 1993), and the Fifth Edition of the Champions rules (Hero Games, 2002).

By 1990, he was working in the computer gaming industry at Origin System, publishers of Ultima and Wing Commander, where he co-wrote the acclaimed Savage Empire, named the Best PC Fantasy RPG of 1990 by Game Player magazine.

He eventually found his greatest success in fiction, beginning with the Baen novel Galatea in 2-D in 1993, followed by the second Car Wars novel Double Jeopardy (1994), Doc Sidhe (1995), and two Bard’s Tale novels co-authored with Holly Lisle. In 1998′ he published his first Stars Wars novel: Star Wars X-Wing: Wraith Squadron. He wrote four more in that series, and a total of 14 Star Wars novels, including three volumes each in the Fate of the Jedi, Legacy of the Force, and New Jedi Order series.

In April 2009, Allston suffered a heart attack and underwent an emergency quadruple bypass surgery. On Thursday of this week, while attending VisionCon in Springfield, Missouri, he collapsed and later died of apparent heart failure. He was 53 years old.

Announcing the Winners of Advance Reading Copies of Jon Sprunk’s Blood and Iron

Announcing the Winners of Advance Reading Copies of Jon Sprunk’s Blood and Iron

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Blood and Iron Jon Sprunk-smallLast month, we announced a contest to win one of two advance reading copies of Jon Sprunk’s highly anticipated fantasy epic Blood and Iron, compliments of Pyr Books. What’s that? You don’t recall the announcement? Strange — it was in the third paragraph of the post on our exclusive fiction excerpt of Blood and Iron, which we debuted right here.

You’re right. Perhaps that was a little sneaky. But plenty of readers fans did spot the contest, and we received a surprising number of entries. Attentive folks, those Sprunk fans.

The deadline for entries was February 28th. And so, early this morning, we carefully inscribed the names of each entrant on a numbered clay tablet, and then used the only scientifically-proven method of pure random number generation to select two random winners: D&D dice. Without further ado, we’re very pleased to announce the winners of two rare advance reading copies of Blood and Iron:

Travis Bingaman
Shauna Kosoris

Congratulations to the winners! It’s too late to enter the contest, but it’s not too late to discover Jon’s unique brand of heroic fantasy. Visit his blog here or stop by Black Gate every Wednesday to read his regular column.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and to Jon Sprunk and Pyr Books for sponsoring the contest. Blood and Iron will be published by Pyr Books on March 11. Read an exclusive excerpt here.

Travel the Magic Highways with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

Travel the Magic Highways with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

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Magic Highways The Early Jack Vance-smallLast February, I wrote about how excited I was to find a copy of Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two in the Dealer’s Room at Capricon. I had purchased Volume One, Hard Luck Diggings, when it was released in 2010; it is now long out of print and new copies start at around $450 at Amazon.com. Dream Castles is now sold out as well and prices are already starting to creep up, so I was pretty jazzed to find a copy when I did.

When I wrote enthusiastically about Dream Castles last year, I said:

Jack Vance, who at 96 years old is still with us, is one of the last remaining writers from the Golden Age of Science Fiction (the only other one I can think of is Fred Pohl). He is the author of some of the most celebrated SF and fantasy of the 20th Century, including “The Dragon Masters,” “The Last Castle,” and The Dying Earth novels.

Jack Vance died on May 26th of last year, and Frederik Pohl passed away less than four months later, robbing us of two of our genre’s brightest lights.

Still, their words are still with us — and what words they are. I have no idea how many volumes are projected in The Early Jack Vance (Volume Four, Minding the Stars, is scheduled to be released this month), but every one is a delight.

Part of that is the gorgeous covers by Tom Kidd; part is the high quality production and design from publisher Subterranean, and of course part of it is simply finally having the early pulp fiction of one of the greatest fantasy writers of the 20th Century collected for the first time.

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An Origin Story Mashed With a First-Contact Story: A Review of The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu

An Origin Story Mashed With a First-Contact Story: A Review of The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu

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The Lives Of Tao-smallThe Lives of Tao is the rare science fiction book set in modern times. No space exploration here, unless you mean the Quasing, the alien race that’s been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) orchestrating human events since… well, since there were humans to orchestrate.

Quasing are beings so ethereal that they must live within a corporeal host to survive. Once inside a host, the Quasing can only leave if the host organism dies. In essence, Quasings are immortal as long as there is a living host nearby.

The Quasing’s main goal used to be to get humans to create interstellar travel so they could get to their home planet. Now, however, the Quasing are split into two factions (the good-guy Prophus and the bad-guy Genjix), whose main goal seems to be defeating the other. Tao is a member of the Prophus faction.

When Tao’s host dies during a mission against the Genjix, Tao needs to find a new host, pronto. Enter Roan Tan: an overweight programmer with low self-esteem who’s never run a mile, let alone held a gun, in real life. The next few months finds Tao whipping Roan into some semblance of a covert operative so they can thwart the Genjix’s secret project.

There’s plenty here to enjoy. Chu choreographs vivid action scenes, he injects humor seamlessly into dialogue, and he makes the world-building fun. Chu had all of history at his disposal, after all, and he took full advantage.

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Unearthing Solomon’s Vineyard

Unearthing Solomon’s Vineyard

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latimersolomonslatimer_solomons_vineyardJonathan Latimer is sadly forgotten today. There was a time when his screwball private eye series featuring the rarely sober Bill Crane were bestsellers and even made the transition to the silver screen in the late 1930s, courtesy of Universal Pictures, in a fun trio of B-movies. Latimer was a respected Hollywood screenwriter of the 1940s who crossed over to television from the 1950s through the early 1970s, writing for such series as Perry Mason and Columbo. He also achieved instant notoriety as the author of the hardboiled detective novel, Solomon’s Vineyard, which was banned almost upon publication in 1941 and remained unavailable in its original form in the U.S. for decades.

The general consensus is with Solomon’s Vineyard, Latimer turned up the heat on hardboiled detective fiction and blurred the line between pulp and pornography. Most critics will claim that even today, readers would be hard-pressed to find a tougher or more shocking private eye novel. While public domain copies riddled with typos are easy to come by, I finally tracked down an affordable copy of an earlier edition and read the book for myself. I was shocked as well, not by the content, but to learn the book is clearly intended as yet another of Latimer’s laugh-out-loud farces, despite its reputation.

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En Garde!

En Garde!

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Robin Hood towerA few weeks ago, my colleague Jon Sprunk gave us a marvelous post on the weapons of fantasy. Like Jon, the weapons were very much what attracted me to fantasy in the first place. But I loved swords and sword fighting before I ever picked up my first fantasy novel (The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which, by the way, the tradition of named weapons is followed with Peter’s sword Rhindon).

I’m not sure what got Jon started off, but what attracted me to sword fighting, and prepared me for the fight scenes in my favourite genre, were movie sword fights, beginning particularly with those in Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

It was from this last movie that I also gained my life-long love of archery, and the great archer Howard Hill, who did all the trick shots for Flynn, including the iconic splitting of the arrow.

Flynn did do all his own fencing in the films, but unlike his frequent opponent and co-star, Basil Rathbone, he didn’t take it up as a sport.

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Future Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson

Future Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson

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Nebula Awards Showcase 2014-smallI love the Nebula Awards Showcase volumes. For one thing, they have a glorious history — stretching all the way back to the very first volume in 1966, edited by the founder of SFWA himself, Damon Knight.

And for another thing… they include some damn good stories. The Nebula Award winning short fiction from the previous year (and as many nominees as will fit), as chosen by the members of Science Fiction Writers of America. Alongside those stories are excerpts from the award-winning novel; appreciations of this year’s Grand Master Winner, Gene Wolfe, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Dirda, a Wolfe story, and more. If you’re looking for a survey of the best in SF and fantasy from last year, you’d be hard pressed to do better than this.

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories in the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America . The editor selected by SFWA’s anthology committee (chaired by Mike Resnick) is American fantasy writer Kij Johnson, author of three novels and associate director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.

This year’s Nebula winners, and expected contributors, are Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Andy Duncan, and Aliette de Bodard, with E.C. Myers winning the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

Nebula Awards Showcase 2014 is edited by Kij Johnson and will be published on May 13, 2014 by Pyr. It is 291 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. New publisher Pyr has put together a handsome package for the book, with a colorful cover by Raoul Vitale. Keep an eye out for it — and don’t forget to have a look at the 2013 Nebula Award Nominations, announced earlier this week.

Goth Chick News: M. Night Shyamalan Gets Small

Goth Chick News: M. Night Shyamalan Gets Small

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M. Night on the set of Sundowning with his production designer
M. Night on the set of Sundowning with his production designer

Okay, don’t immediately blow past this post because your eye caught the name M. Night Shyamalan – this is actually encouraging news.

The last time I wrote something about M. Night (as they call him in the biz that once thought he was the next Spielberg, but then mercilessly crucified him), he had left his tomato-covered director’s chair and returned to writing. M. Night completed the script for Devil back in 2009 and relative newcomer John Dowdle brought it to the big screen with a modest $10M budget. It grossed nearly $340M worldwide, definitively proving that M. Night is a masterful storyteller, but an inconsistent front man.

Case in point: in a rush of optimism following Devil, the Hollywood moneymen turned around and gave M. Night $130M and Will Smith (plus child) to write, direct and executive produce After Earth, which was an apocalyptic film in more ways than one.

So it is either by choice or necessity that M. Night’s latest project is very small and hasn’t been getting a ton of press beyond what M. Night himself has been dolling out; oh, and it’s being called a micro-budgeted horror film.

“Micro budget” is the latest, sexy term for independent films, or films not financially supported or promoted by a large studio or big-budget investors. If you want some examples of micro-budget films that went platinum, IMDB has compiled a handy list (ironically a good percentage of them are horror movies), and in the number 1 slot is The Blair Witch Project.

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