Browsed by
Category: Books

When We Catch It, Let’s Chase It Again: An Interview with Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat Author Jim Breyfogle

When We Catch It, Let’s Chase It Again: An Interview with Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat Author Jim Breyfogle

Comments 2 comments

Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat-small

Cover Art by Anton Oxenuk

Cirsova Publishing has been putting out its flagship magazine focusing on action, adventure, and romance in science fiction and fantasy since 2016. Last year Cirsova began branching out, with the two-author anthology, Duel Visions by Misha Burnett and Louise Sorensen, their fully illustrated 70th Anniversary Edition of Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark Planet Stories [which we covered at Black Gate last year], and the 35th Anniversary Edition of Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars.

Cirsova’s newest upcoming release is an anthology of Jim Breyfogle’s Mongoose & Meerkat adventures, lavishly illustrated by up-and-coming artist DarkFilly. Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat Volume 1: Pursuit Without Asking collects all of the stories published in the pages of Cirsova Magazine through 2019.

Mangos is a bit of a bravo, ready to knock a few heads for some coin. Kat is a mysterious wanderer with more than her share of street-smarts and a head for ancient history. Together, the Mongoose and the Meerkat are a pair of rogues looking to keep their bellies and wine skins filled. Fitting in a comfy mid-point somewhere between Slayers and Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser, this duo is sure to appeal to fans of classic Sword & Sorcery.

We had a chance to talk with Mongoose & Meerkat author Jim Breyfogle about this thrilling new project.

…

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.

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

Stories the Dogs Tell: Clifford D. Simak’s City

Stories the Dogs Tell: Clifford D. Simak’s City

Comments 0 Comment

SimakCityGnome

City by Clifford D. Simak. First Edition: Gnome Books, 1952.
Cover by Frank Kelly Freas (click to enlarge)

City
by Clifford D. Simak
Gnome Press (224 pages, $2.75 in hardcover, May 1952)

Clifford D. Simak was a Midwestern US newspaperman who wrote science fiction on the side, and published stories beginning in the 1930s in magazines like Wonder Stories until finding a home in John W. Campbell’s Astounding in the 1940s (and later Galaxy in the 1950s). City was his earliest significant work, published in 1952 but composed of stories published mostly in Astounding from 1944 onward. An enduring work, it won one of the very earliest awards for SF or fantasy, the International Fantasy Award, in 1953 (two years after Stewart’s Earth Abides, which I reviewed here in January, won the same award). It’s Simak’s most popular book along with his Way Station, published a decade later.

Gist

The book tells the future of humanity as it abandons cities for country estates and then moves off Earth to settle other planets, and in parallel the rise of an artificially created Dog civilization. By the end, humans have largely propagated outward to other planets, and Earth is left to the intelligent dog civilization, to whom these stories are myths.

…

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

John DeNardo on the 7 Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of March

John DeNardo on the 7 Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of March

Comments 1 comment
A Pale Light in the Black-small The House in the Cerulean Sea-small The Gobblin’ Society by James P. Blaylock-small

Covers by Vadim Sadovski, Chris Sickels/Red Nose Studio, and Jon Foster

Good friends recommend good books. And that makes John DeNardo just about the best friend we have in this business. I’ve come to rely on his regular columns for Kirkus Reviews to point me towards the best new releases each month, in articles like “Sex Robots, the Future of Racism, and Cthulhu Vacations” [Jan 21] and “The Definitive List of the Top Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2019” [Dec 2019].

He also does regular monthly round-ups of the best novels — while not neglecting short fiction, which is one of the things I like about him. For March he looks at new novels by Katie M. Flynn, K. B. Wagers, Myke Cole (Sixteenth Watch), TJ Klune, N. K. Jemisin (The City We Became), Zack Jordan, and Menna van Praag, and new short fiction and collections from Tor (including Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights, and Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson), Titan Books (including Cursed edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane), Undertow Publications, the British Library, and Black Library, not to mention James P. Blaylock, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and many others.

As always, there’s plenty of great stuff on John’s list. Here’s a few of the highlights.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Future Treasures: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Comments 0 Comment

The City We Became-small

Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

There is no hotter writer in the field right now than N.K. Jemisin. She’s the first writer in history to win back-to-back-to-back Hugo awards, with all three novels in her Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky). Last year she started working for DC Comics, producing the science fiction comic Far Sector with Jamal Campbell.

She has a new book coming out next week, and it looks like a winner. It’s an expanded version of her short story “The City Born Great,” originally published at Tor.com (and which you can read online right here). Set in an eldritch New York City, the story followed a supernatural talented graffiti artist, NYC’s self-dubbed “midwife,” as he tried to paint the city’s song. What’s the novel about, then? Best to let N.K. explain it. Here’s what she told EW in a recent interview.

This story is my chance to have a little monstrous fun after the weight of the Broken Earth saga, so I’m hoping readers will enjoy it, too… The city of New York comes to life — literally, as in, the city has developed sentience and an ability to act on its own. And because there’s a dangerous otherworldly tourist lurking about, trying to supernaturally gentrify the city to death, New York chooses five human champions to fight for it. Problem: they don’t know they’ve been recruited for a magical, interdimensional battle, although they figure it out pretty quickly when possessed toilet stalls attack, backyard pools turn into portals to monsterville, and traffic on the FDR becomes a literal, tentacled, killer.

Yeah, that sounds adequately funky and pretty darn great. The City We Became will be published by Orbit on March 24, 2020. It is 448 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $14.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Lauren Panepinto. It is the first novel in The Great Cities Trilogy. See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.