Browsed by
Category: Books

The Best in Modern Sword & Sorcery: The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume 3

The Best in Modern Sword & Sorcery: The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume 3

Comments 13 comments
The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 3-small The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 3-back-small

Cover by Zoltan

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly has been published, like clockwork, every quarter since June 2009. And every eight issues, like clockwork, the editors of HFQ assemble a Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly volume, as a way to celebrate another milestone and promote their worthy magazine.

These books are top-notch examples of modern sword & sorcery (and I’m not just saying that because I was invited to write the introduction for Volume I.) In his review of Volume I, Fletcher Vredenburgh wrote:

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is… the most consistent forum for the best in contemporary swords & sorcery. Some may think I’m laying it on a little thick, but The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: Volume 1, 2009-2011, a distillation of the mag’s first three years, should prove that I’m not.

Volume III has just arrived, with a dynamic cover by Zoltan and stories by Charles Gramlich, P. Djéli Clark, Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and many others — plus an introduction by Darrell Schweitzer, and original art for each story by Miguel Santos, Justin Pfiel, Garry McCluskey, Robert Zoltan, and others. It’s an all-around gorgeous package, and a fine reminder that Heroic Fantasy is still a vibrant genre in the 21st Century. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Unnatural Magic by C. M. Waggoner

New Treasures: Unnatural Magic by C. M. Waggoner

Comments 0 Comment
Unnatural Magic-small Unnatural Magic-back-small

Cover by Tomas Almeida

In these days of effortless online shopping, it still pays off to visit your local bookstore.

Yesterday I did exactly that, with my regular Saturday trip to our local Barnes & Noble in Geneva, Illinois. There I picked up my usual batch of magazines (Asimov’s SF, Analog, F&SF, and Interzone), and spent 20 minutes browsing the science fiction section. I’m pretty good about keeping on top of new releases in the industry, but the staff stocking the shelves at B&N always manage to surprise me — and they didn’t disappoint. I found nearly a dozen new titles, including a few that insisted they come home with me. Top of the list was Unnatural Magic by newcomer C. M. Waggoner, which Martin Cahill treated with a rave review over at Tor.com.

Unnatural Magic, a debut from author C. M. Waggoner, is utterly delightful.

It has all the elements of a parlor room mystery, with the depth and complexity of any sturdy secondary world fantasy, with just enough sense of humor, danger, and reality to round out the whole book into a startling sort of debut. Waggoner has created a world set at about the turn of the century, with a feel of industry sitting alongside a pastoral and intimate world, one which humans share with the mysterious clans of long-lived trolls, who hold a different sort of magic away from their human neighbors. Both have opinions on the others, as human and troll culture are wildly different from the other, but this world exists with mostly respect for each other, until the murders begin….

Unnatural Magic contains something for everyone. It has gentle, but efficient worldbuilding, with a colorful cast of characters… It has lush prose, with poetic turns of phrase scattered throughout. It has romance, certainly, and daring in heaping amounts. It has magic, and it has a mystery at its core. But mostly, what this brilliant debut novel has, is a massive amount of heart. It made me smile and it made me happy, and mostly, it made me very excited to see what Waggoner has cooking next. If it’s anything like Unnatural Magic, sign me up now. She’s absolutely an author to watch.

Unnatural Magic was published by Ace Books on November 5, 2019. It is 390 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Tomas Almeida. Read an 8-page excerpt from Chapter One here. See all our recent coverage of the best new science fiction and fantasy here.

RBF Author: Writing Sword and Sorcery in the Days of High Fantasy

RBF Author: Writing Sword and Sorcery in the Days of High Fantasy

Comments 4 comments

Howard changed my lifeAuthor C L Werner is one of a number of authors to provide an essay for publisher Rogue Blades Foundation‘s release later this year of the book Robert E. Howard Changed My Life. Below Werner writes of Howard and the influence of sword and sorcery literature.

I have a curious relationship as regards sword and sorcery, because for me this tribe of fantasy fiction was encountered only after spending my formative years with what would be termed “high fantasy” in modern parlance. The Tolkien epics, the Arthurian sagas, and a good deal of Dungeons & Dragons during its heyday in the mid to late 1980’s when there was an emphasis on a grand scale for narratives, as demonstrated by the Dragonlance novels. I didn’t really get a proper introduction to sword and sorcery until much later, after moving to Arizona in 1993. That was when I first read the actual stories (or at least the Lin Carter/L. Sprauge deCamp revisions of them) of Robert E. Howard and his creations Conan the Cimmerian, Solomon Kane, and Kull of Atlantis.

Now I’d had a peripheral awareness of Robert E. Howard’s characters before, through comic books and the Conan movies (and that really cool stunt show Universal Studios had back in the 1980s), but my belated discovery of the actual stories really had a profound effect on me. While I did enjoy The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, I was always off-put by The Silmarillion and became jaded on many versions of the Arthurian tales. My investment in Dragonlance also waned over time, and I think the culprit can be found in an inability to be engaged by protagonists who are so far beyond relatability. Elf lords who can single-handedly cross swords with a balrog or wizards who can one-shot a dragon become, sadly, not as engaging as a character who has limitations to what they can do and how they can do it. In Howard’s stories, Conan or Solomon Kane get knocked about by the bad guys, put through the ringer by the ordeals they face. Certainly these characters overcome incredible odds and mighty foes, but these triumphs always felt like they were earned rather than an inevitable, foregone result. The reader experiences the struggle to prevail alongside the hero and in a more visceral way than often can be found in narratives that are operating to some legendary scale of warring gods and unfolding prophecies.

…

Read More Read More

There Will Never Be an End to Wonder: James Davis Nicoll on Poul Anderson

There Will Never Be an End to Wonder: James Davis Nicoll on Poul Anderson

Comments 6 comments

Brain Wave Poul Anderson

Brain Wave by Poul Anderson (Ballantine Books, 1954). Cover by Richard Powers.

Poul Anderson was one of my favorite science fiction writers when I first discovered the genre. That interest didn’t survive into adulthood. While I still read Vance, Zelazny, Delany, I probably haven’t picked up a Poul Anderson novel in 30 years. It’s mostly neglect, rather than any conscious choice. It’s simply been too long since a Poul Anderson book survived the cut in my to-be-read pile.

I finally read James Davis Nicoll’s Tor.com article Celebrating Five Favourite Works by Poul Anderson, published on the 93rd anniversary of his birth, November 25, and it was a fine reminder of why Anderson’s work used to appeal to me… and why much of it maybe still does. Here’s Nicoll on the the 1953 novel Brain Wave.

The Earth emerges from an intelligence-suppressing field. Every creature that can think suddenly finds itself five times smarter. All humans of normal intelligence wake to find themselves geniuses. Animals discover that they can now think around the barriers used to control them. Human institutions crumble because humans are too bright to believe in them, while the agricultural systems on which we depend are themselves threatened by animals no longer willing to be stock or prey.

This could very easily have been an apocalyptic tale (superhuman humans shrug and carry on eating creatures that now fully understand what’s going on) — but that’s not the direction in which a comparatively young Anderson took his novel. Instead, the various viewpoint characters do their best to find new, better ways to live.

That’s a strongly appealing review, especially for a 66-year old book. But in many ways that matter, Anderson still speaks to modern readers. As Nicoll writes in his review of The Enemy Stars, “Anderson delivered on the promise. He took worldbuilding very seriously. He understood the sheer immensity of the universe… There will never be an end to wonder.”

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Space Magicians, edited by Alden H. Norton and Sam Moskowitz

Vintage Treasures: The Space Magicians, edited by Alden H. Norton and Sam Moskowitz

Comments 14 comments
The Space Magicians-small The Space Magicians-back-small

Cover artist unknown (which is kinda tragic)

And so my quest to write up all the interesting science fiction anthologies of the 20th Century brings us to The Space Magicians.

This is kind of an oddball anthology. Yes, it has a theme. (That theme is not space magicians.) The idea appears to be a collection of rare and hard-to-find science fiction tales by “science fiction’s major talents… each one a masterpiece in its own right,” and each of which has never been reprinted in paperback before.

The result is an eclectic mix of pulp tales by, yes, seven major SF writers: John Wyndham, Henry Kuttner, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, Eric Frank Russell, Robert Bloch, and Robert W. Chambers. The stories within originally appeared between 1899 and 1953, in Wonder Stories, Super Science Stories, Astonishing Stories, Science-Fiction Plus, Universe Science Fiction, and other fine venues. They include the first reprint of Asimov’s “Half-Breed,” written when he was 19 years old, and Robert W. Chambers science fiction story “In Search of the Unknown.”

The stories are packaged in a 206-page paperback with a gonzo wraparound cover featuring cartoon characters on a gloriously colorful alien landscape. The artist, tragically, is unknown. The editors offer a chatty two-page introduction in which they wonder aloud why none of these stories have been reprinted, and tell us a bit about each one to whet our appetite. Here’s the complete intro.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Fighters of Fear: Occult Detective Stories edited by Mike Ashley

Future Treasures: Fighters of Fear: Occult Detective Stories edited by Mike Ashley

Comments 5 comments

Fighters of Fear Occult Detective Stories-smallMike Ashley has been editing anthologies since at least 1977 (with the Year’s Best volume SF Choice 77 from Orbit), and in the last 40 years he’s produced dozens, including no less than 19 volumes of The Mammoth Book of.. (such as The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales, etc.), and over a dozen for British Library Publishing, including Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet and Moonrise: The Golden Era of Lunar Adventures. He’s also edited multiple volumes of the Stark House Algernon Blackwood.

His latest is Fighters of Fear, a collection of 31 classic occult detective tales from Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, Victor Rousseau, Sax Rohmer, Seabury Quinn, Henry S. Whitehead, Manly Wade Wellman, Joseph Payne Brennan, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and many, many others — including a handful that have never before been reprinted.

It’s a fat 624-page volume that belongs in the library of every serious fantasy fan, and it’s easily one of my most anticipated volumes of winter. It got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, pretty much unprecedented for a collection of generally obscure, mostly 19th Century genre fantasy. Here’s a snippet:

Ashley… has never been better in conveying his genre expertise than in this impressive assembly of 31 short stories featuring psychic or occult detectives from the mid-19th century (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”) to the late 20th century (Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s “Jeremiah”). While usual suspects Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson are deservedly included, the volume’s real value lies in its introducing fans of those writers to more obscure authors, such as Max Rittenberg, whose “The Sorcerer of Arjuzanx,” concerning a possible case of bewitchment at Lourdes, makes the case that his consulting psychologist, Xavier Wycherley, merits having all his stories republished. And few setups are more tantalizing than Victor Rousseau’s “The Woman with the Crooked Nose,” in which a man consults a doctor after seeing a ghost resembling a dead woman in every particular, except that it has a straight nose, unlike the deceased.

It’s been a lean few years for occult detective fans. The most recent really comprehensive anthologies I can think of were Stephen Jones’ Dark Detectives: An Anthology of Supernatural Mysteries (Fedogan & Bremer, 1999), Paula Guran’s Weird Detectives (Prime, 2013), and of course The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, by Seabury Quinn (Night Shade Books, 2017-18). And we mustn’t forget Occult Detective Magazine, which just published its 6th issue last month.

Fighters of Fear will be published in trade paperback in two weeks. Here’s the complete description and Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

Bob’s Books: “Fast, Loose Money” by John D. MacDonald

Bob’s Books: “Fast, Loose Money” by John D. MacDonald

Comments 3 comments

MacDonald_EndTigerCover2EDITEDJohn D. MacDonald broke in near the end of the Pulp Era, writing for science fiction and mystery magazines. He appeared in Dime Detective his first year of writing, and made it into Black Mask the next. Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw became his agent after the legendary editor left the magazine. He quickly became a staple for Fawcett Gold Medal’s paperback origscoinal novels, while still writing short stories, including for slicks like Redbook and Cosmopolitan. With seven stories in 1958 (the same as in 1957), Macdonald effectively ended his run as a short story writer and shifted almost completely to novelist.  He would only write that many short stories in a year twice more for the rest of his life.

The last story published in 1958 was “The Fast, Loose Money,” in the July issue of Cosmopolitan. It was included in the 1966 collection, End of the Tiger and Other Stories. One of the fourteen other stories in that book is “The Trap of Solid Gold,” which I think is one of his best; and which Steve Scott used to name his blog – the best John D. MacDonald site on the web. You can read Steve’s two-part essay on MacDonald’s Park Falkner, here.

At eleven pages of tightly spaced small print, it’s a little longer than almost every other story in the book.

During World War II, MacDonald was an ordnance officer in the India-China-Burma Theater, working in procurement. He was initially assigned to New Delhi, and he did not like India, writing over forty years later, that it “was a sorry country, full of sorry people.”

He was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which became the CIA. He worked out of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma, and China. MacDonald would use his experiences and knowledge of his wartime service in the Far East, in several of his short stories. 1958’s “Taint of the Tiger” was expanded into a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback, Soft Touch. Another ‘war-roots’ story from that year is “Fast, Loose Money.”

Something has gone very wrong in Jerry Thompson’s day. Jerry owns three parking lots in a nearby city. He and his wife Marie live well enough off of them, but as he says, “If you play by the rules, you’re a sucker.” So, Jerry had been using a duplicate ticket scheme to grab some off-the-book income, totaling about $26,000, which he kept at home in a wall safe, and spent low-key, to avoid the danger of getting caught.

…

Read More Read More

The Top Five Books I Read in 2019

The Top Five Books I Read in 2019

Comments 0 Comment
Alice Payne Rides-small The-Kingdom-of-Copper-medium Titanshade-medium

Covers by Cliff Nielsen, Unusual Corporation, and Chris McGrath

Being semi-retired from my biweekly column doesn’t mean I’m off the hook from picking my Top Five reads from 2019! *The crowd goes wild*

Like with previous years — 2016-18; see below for links — I’m focusing specifically on fiction (sorry, non-fiction books) published sometime in 2019 (sorry, amazing older books I read – especially the Broken Earth trilogy). I’m also chickening out from ranking all five and only picking my top choice, with the rest in alphabetical order.

Drumroll, please…

Alice Payne Rides by Kate Heartfield (Tor Books, 176 pages, $14.99 paperback/$3.99 digital, March 5, 2019)

Fine, I’m just one of the multitude going on and on about how amazing this time travel duology has been. Sue me. I was concerned at the end of Alice Payne Arrives that retconning some of the story and resetting its core characters (a la time travel) would turn me off, but Heartfield maintains the core of Alice, Jayne, Zuniga and the others while putting them in even more harrowing scenarios. There’s a ton of genuine peril and some neat twists on what sometimes feels like the bloated genre of time travel stories, tied together somehow with a tidy conclusion.

…

Read More Read More

Gothic Noir in the Tradition of Weird Tales: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, Book One: Mad Shadows by Joe Bonadonna

Gothic Noir in the Tradition of Weird Tales: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, Book One: Mad Shadows by Joe Bonadonna

Comments 4 comments
Mad Shadows Joe Bonadonna-small Mad Shadows Joe Bonadonna-back-small

Joe Bonadonna’s first swords and sorcery collection Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, which won the 2017 Golden Book Readers’ Choice Award for Fantasy, is one of the most successful modern S&S offerings — especially among our readers. It contains many fine stories, including the novelette “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” perhaps the most popular piece of online fiction ever published at Black Gate.

Mad Shadows was originally published in January 2011, and last month Pulp Hero Press released a second revised edition with a new cover, new maps, revised text, and an expanded Afterword on Heroic Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery. In his 2012 review Fletcher Vredenburgh wrote “Mad Shadows is good stuff. It’s got no pretensions to be anything other than a worthy addition to the canons of S&S and there it’s wildly successful.” And in his BG article “The Coming of Dorgo the Dowser,” William Patrick Maynard wrote:

Joe Bonadonna describes his fiction as ‘Gothic Noir’ and it is entirely appropriate. As much as Mad Shadows succeeds in carrying on the tradition of Weird Tales, the brooding, darkly-humored Dorgo could have easily found a home in the pages of Black Mask if only his (dowsing) rod shot lead rather than divined spirits. The six stories in Mad Shadows offer a mixture of traditional sword & sorcery necromancers and demons as well as werewolves, vampires, witches, and bizarre half-human mutations that H. P. Lovecraft would happily embrace.

Joe followed up his original collection with Mad Shadows II: Dorgo the Dowser and The Order of the Serpent in 2017 (which Fletcher reviewed for us here). Read an excerpt right here at Black Gate.

The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, Book One: Mad Shadows was published by Pulp Hero Press on December 8, 2019. It is 282 pages, priced at $14.95 in paperback, and is available worldwide in paperback and Kindle editions. Check it out, and read all our previous coverage of Dorgo’s adventures here.

New Treasures: War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

New Treasures: War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

Comments 0 Comment

War Girls-smallTochi Onyebuchi’s debut Beasts Made of Night made a big splash in 2017. VOYA said it was “Unforgettable,” and Buzzfeed called it a “compelling Nigerian-influenced fantasy… [with] brilliant worldbuilding.”

His latest is the science fiction novel War Girls, which he describes as “Gundam in Nigeria.” I’m always on the lookout for something new, and that’s definitely a pitch I don’t hear every day. Booklist calls it “Brilliant,” and in a starred review Publishers Weekly said:

Set amid the horrors of war in a world ravaged by climate change and nuclear disaster, this heart-wrenching and complex page-turner, drawn from the 1960s Nigerian civil war, will leave readers stunned and awaiting the second installment.

Here’s the publisher’s description.

Two sisters are torn apart by war and must fight their way back to each other in a futuristic, Black Panther-inspired Nigeria.

The year is 2172. Climate change and nuclear disasters have rendered much of Earth unlivable. Only the lucky ones have escaped to space colonies in the sky.

In a war-torn Nigeria, battles are fought using flying, deadly mechs and soldiers are outfitted with bionic limbs and artificial organs meant to protect them from the harsh, radiation-heavy climate. Across the nation, as the years-long civil war wages on, survival becomes the only way of life.

Two sisters, Onyii and Ify, dream of more. Their lives have been marked by violence and political unrest. Still, they dream of peace, of hope, of a future together.

And they’re willing to fight an entire war to get there.

War Girls is the opening novel in a new series. It was published by Razorbill on October 15, 2019. It is 464 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $10.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Nekro. Read the complete first chapter at Gizmodo, and listen to an audio sample here.

See all our recent New Treasures here.