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The Return of a Fantasy Landmark: The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall

The Return of a Fantasy Landmark: The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall

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The Unfortunate Fursey-small The Return of Fursey-small

While I was standing in front of the Valancourt Books booth at the World Fantasy Convention (so I could buy a copy of the classic horror novel The Fungus by Harry Adam Knight, as I reported last week), I took the time to look over all their latest releases. Valancourt is one of the great treasures of the genre — their editorial team has excellent taste, and they scour 20th Century paperback backlists to bring long-neglected classics back into print. I’m pretty familiar with 20th Century genre stuff, but they consistently surprise me with their diverse and excellent selections.

I ended up taking home a pile of books, including the one-volume edition of Michael McDowell’s complete Blackwater Saga and Steve Rasnic Tem’s new collection Figures Unseen. But I was hoping for new discoveries, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were plenty of eye-catching titles vying for my attention, but the most interesting — and the ones I ended up taking home with me –was the pair of novels above.

Set in 11th century Ireland, where demonic forces have launched an assault on the monastery of Clonmacnoise, The Unfortunate Fursey was originally published in 1946. The sequel The Return of Fursey followed in 1948. Written by Irish writer Mervyn Wall, they were praised as “landmark book in the history of fantasy,” by Year’s Best SF editor E. F. Bleiler. More recently, Black Gate author Darrell Schweitzer wrote:

The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey are not quaint esoterica for the specialist, folks, they are living masterpieces. They haven’t dated slightly and are as fresh and as powerful as when they were first written.

Both novels were reprinted in handsome trade paperback editions by Valancourt last year, with new introductions by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda.

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Take a Bite From The Poison Apple: Interviews from Black Gate Magazine by Elizabeth Crowens

Take a Bite From The Poison Apple: Interviews from Black Gate Magazine by Elizabeth Crowens

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The Poison Apple Volume One-smallOver the past two years, since December 13, 2016, Elizabeth Crowens has become one of the most consistently popular contributors to Black Gate magazine. She’s accomplished this with a surprisingly small number of articles — scarcely a dozen so far, over 24 months.

Each, however, has been a fascinating and in-depth discussion with a prominent individual in the genre. Her interviews have included a cross section of talents, including stunt doubles, TV stage managers, fantasy illustrators, bestselling authors, editors, and even Black Gate contributors. All of her interviews have been popular, and more than a few — such as her dual interview with Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner in June 2017 — have been among the most widely-read pieces we’ve published in the past few years.

Earlier this month Elizabeth released The Poison Apple, Volume One: Interviews from Black Gate Magazine, a collection of her earliest interviews. It includes lengthy discussions with:

Teel James Glenn
Steven Van Patten
Lissanne Lake
Martin Page
Gail Carriger
Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner

The book includes the complete contents of each interview, including all the questions and responses, and even the color images.

ELizabeth tells us that she plans to follow up with Volume Two next year, which includes conversations with Charlaine Harris, Heather Graham Pozzessere, Jennifer Brozek, Nancy Kilpatrick , Nancy Holder and Leslie Klinger.

Get all the details at Elizabeth’s website here, and be sure to sign up for new Newsletter for details on her upcoming projects and special offers. While you’re waiting for the next issue of the newsletter, read all of her recent Poison Apple columns at Black Gate here.

Birthday Reviews: Janny Wurts’s “The Snare”

Birthday Reviews: Janny Wurts’s “The Snare”

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Cover by Janny Wurts
Cover by Janny Wurts

Janny Wurts was born on December 10, 1953 and is married to speculative fiction artist Don Maitz.

Wurts is both an author and artist, publishing her own fiction and novels as well as three novels in collaboration with Raymond E. Feist. Her collection That Way Lies Camelot was nominated for the British Fantasy Award in 1995. She also won three Chesley Awards for her artwork. In 1993, she won in the color art, unpublished category for The Wizard of Owls. She won the hardcover illustration award in 1995 for the cover to her own novel, The Curse of the Mistwraith, and in 1998, she received a special award for her contributions to ASFA. Wurts was guest of honor at the World Horror Con in 1996 in Eugene, Oregon, and a the World Fantasy Con, held in Tempe, Arizona in 2004.

“The Snare” was originally published in Wurts’s 1994 collection That Way Lies Camelot. It has never been reprinted. The story is based on a painting by Don Maitz entitled “The Wizard,” which originally appeared on the cover of the January 1983 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Wurts’s story is one of vengeance. The Wizard Iveldane has been imprisoned by his mentor, the Great Wizard of Trevior, for countless centuries, first bound by air, then water, then earth, and finally by fire. Through the ages, Iveldane has gone through all the emotions possible, wondering what his master was trying to teach him, cursing his master with hatred, and eventually vowing to exact a terrible price from him, which is how the story opens.

Iveldane’s meeting with the Great Wizard, as well as his eventual imprisonment when his master felt his tutelage was over, are shown in flashback. Although the Great Wizard eventually must explain why he did what he did to Iveldane, most of the Great Wizard’s motives are known to the reader long before Iveldane needs to be told. The fact that the Great Wizard does have to tell Iveldane implies that Iveldane was not ready either for his punishment or, ultimately, the role that he takes on after defeating his former master, although it is quite likely that Iveldane will grow into the position once he attains it.

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Aliens in a Space Prison: The Sanctuary Novels by Caryn Lix

Aliens in a Space Prison: The Sanctuary Novels by Caryn Lix

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Sanctuary Caryn Lix-small Containment Caryn Lix-small

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that we’re living in a YA golden age. The runaway success of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and the Percy Jackson novels has generated a glut of books, most of which are fantasy or SF series. It reminds me of the urban fantasy/paranormal romance trend of a decade ago, when it seemed that half the books on the shelves featured superpowered vampire killers who were dating werewolves.

I know more than a few readers who avoid YA altogether. But, like any other subgenre, there’s plenty of interesting work to be found if you look hard enough. Recently I started reading Caryn Lix’s Sanctuary, which reads like Aliens set on a space prison, and have been enjoying it so far. The sequel Containment is set to be released next August. Here’s the jacket copy for Sanctuary.

Kenzie holds one truth above all: the company is everything.

As a citizen of Omnistellar Concepts, the most powerful corporation in the solar system, Kenzie has trained her entire life for one goal: to become an elite guard on Sanctuary, Omnistellar’s space prison for superpowered teens too dangerous for Earth. As a junior guard, she’s excited to prove herself to her company — and that means sacrificing anything that won’t propel her forward.

But then a routine drill goes sideways and Kenzie is taken hostage by rioting prisoners. At first, she’s confident her commanding officer — who also happens to be her mother — will stop at nothing to secure her freedom. Yet it soon becomes clear that her mother is more concerned with sticking to Omnistellar protocol than she is with getting Kenzie out safely.

As Kenzie forms her own plan to escape, she doesn’t realize there’s a more sinister threat looming, something ancient and evil that has clawed its way into Sanctuary from the vacuum of space. And Kenzie might have to team up with her captors to survive — all while beginning to suspect there’s a darker side to the Omnistellar she knows.

Sanctuary was published by Simon Pulse on July 24, 2018. It is 461 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Sarah Creech, with art by Jacey. Read the first chapter here. See all our recent coverage of the best new fantasy series here.

Birthday Reviews: Sarah Smith’s “And Every Pebble a Soldier”

Birthday Reviews: Sarah Smith’s “And Every Pebble a Soldier”

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Cover by Duncan Eagleson
Cover by Duncan Eagleson

Sarah Smith was born on December 9, 1947.

Although Smith is best known for writing historical mysteries set in Boston, she has also dabbled in speculative fiction, writing the hypertext novel King of Space and more traditional SF novels The Knowledge of Water and The Other Side of the Dark. She won the Agatha Award and the Massachusetts Book Award for The Other Side of the Dark.

Smith wrote “And Every Pebble a Soldier” for the 2015 anthology Deco Punk: The Spirit of the Age, edited by Thomas A. Easton and Judith K. Dial, based on a comment by Dial that linked Art Deco to Nazism. The story has not been reprinted.

Set in the aftermath of a truly destructive war, the protagonist of “And Every Pebble a Soldier,” a builder’s apprentice, is one of the only men to come back from war. Determined to build something useful, he begins to make a clockwork man that will help him clean up the debris that litters his town. When he finds a paving brick used to mark the grave of a friend, he chips away a bit of the rock and incorporates it into the wind-up man, eventually repopulating the village’s lost youth by creating an automaton with a piece of each one’s gravestone.

While some in the town take an interest in his hobby, others mock him or are down-right hostile.  The village priest sees him as someone performing the Devil’s work, as well as a threat to his own power in the Church. The apprentice persists, however, and slowly wins the town over as they begin to see his clockwork men as a way not only to repopulate the town, but to, in some way, bring their lost brothers and sons back to life.

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New Treasures: Daughters of Forgotten Light by Sean Grigsby

New Treasures: Daughters of Forgotten Light by Sean Grigsby

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Daughters of Forgotten Light-small Daughters of Forgotten Light-back-small

I spotted Sean Grigsby’s newest novel at Barnes & Noble and, despite the number of recent releases vying for my book dollar, it ended up coming home with me. Deep space penal colonies, biker gangs, and fast action…. what can I say, it made a compelling combo. Here’s an excerpt from Liz Bourke’s review at Locus Online.

I came away from Sean Grigsby’s debut novel, science fiction pulp extravaganza Daughters of Forgotten Light, deeply entertained, and moved by its apparent feminism and queer-inclusiveness – the latest in Angry Robot’s (really quite strong) feminist, queer-inclusive and fun pulp list… Daughters of Forgotten Light sets itself in a dystopian future – a future America locked in an endless eastern war with a successor state to Rus­sia and China, and threatened by environmental apocalypse. In this future, young women who’re deemed unsuitable for the military by the govern­ment and who are unwanted by their parents are sent to an abandoned space platform, a space prison from which there’s no return…

Daughters of Forgotten Light is a fast-paced, tense, and fun novel, with science fictional motor­bike gangs and a cast composed largely of badass women (two things that go really well together), with good dialogue and compelling charac­terisation. All of the women feel like real people. Grigsby also manages a diverse and inclusive cast: at least one of the narrators, Sarah Pao, is asexual and possibly aromantic, while another is Jewish, and the senator (also a viewpoint character) is a black woman.

Although Liz calls it a ‘debut,’ that’s not strictly correct. Grigsby’s first novel Smoke Eaters appeared from Angry Robot back in March, and the sequel Ash Kickers is due Summer 2019. Daughters of Forgotten Light was published by Angry Robot on September 4, 2018. It is 348 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $8.99 in digital formats. The cover is by John Coulthart. Read the first 35 pages at the Angry Robot website. See all our recent New Treasures here.

Looking For a Perfect Stocking Stuffer? Try A Lot Like Christmas by Connie Willis

Looking For a Perfect Stocking Stuffer? Try A Lot Like Christmas by Connie Willis

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A Lot Like Christmas-small A Lot Like Christmas-back-small

Twenty years ago Bantam Spectra published a collection of Connie Willis’ much-loved Christmas stories. Miracle and Other Christmas Stories came in third on the Locus Award ballot for Best Collection of the year (behind The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson, and A Good Old-Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling), and made the preliminary ballot for the British Fantasy Award. However, it’s been out of print for 18 long years, and if there’s something the world needs desperately today, it’s the wit and wisdom of Willis’ classic SF Christmas tales.

Last year Del Rey saw fit to publish a much-expanded edition of Miracle and Other Christmas Stories in a handsome trade paperback edition. The original volume was a generous 328 pages; the newly retitled A Lot Like Christmas is a whopping 544. For fans of novella-length fiction this book is a special treat, as it contains no less than seven, including the Hugo Award nominee “Miracle,” the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus nominee “Just Like the Ones We Used to Know,” and the Hugo Award winner “All Seated on the Ground.”

Virtually all of the stories within were originally published in the December issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction (the only exceptions being two original tales from Miracle, and the novella “Now Showing,” from the Martin/Dozois anthology Rogues). The expanded edition is missing the short story “The Pony,” but includes four new novellas: “deck.halls@boughs/holly,” “All Seated on the Ground,” “All About Emily” and “Now Showing.” It also includes the original introduction and three follow-up essays on classic Christmas tales and movies, plus a brand new fourth essay on TV specials (“Plus a Half-Dozen TV Shows You May Not Have Seen That Haven’t Succumbed to “Very-Special-Christmas-Episode” Syndrome”). Here’s the complete TOC.

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Worldbuilding Once and Future Fake News: Not Really A Review of Singer & Brooking’s LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

Worldbuilding Once and Future Fake News: Not Really A Review of Singer & Brooking’s LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

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LikeWar
(Not about the Sack of Limoges, or the Hundred Years War)
conversation-with-smaug-recoloured - 300 dpi
Worldbuilders!

What if I told you that the Sack of Limoges in Froissart… never happened?

Well, OK, you’d look at me blankly. After a moment you might ask, “I’ve never heard of Froissart. Where is that? French Canada?”

I’ve been reading LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Singer and Brooking. It describes the emerging world of Internet “news” where news passes from person-to-person on social media, no source is uncontroversially trustworthy, and where both information warriors and click-bait farmers are uninterested in the truth, except as a way of making untruths more plausible.

In this world, what determines a narrative’s success is not veracity but rather: Simplicity; Resonance; and Novelty.

Just switch the arena to “rumor” and this looks awfully like a greatly accelerated version of the pre-modern — especially Medieval and Renaissance — milieus we use as inspiration for Fantasy worldbuilding.  Keep the rumor but return the tech, and it’s also a good jumping-off point for building a Space Opera future. Stay with me and I’ll explain. But first, back to the smoking ruins of Limoges.

The authors — Singer wrote a great book on robot warfare, by the way — talk about a US military training scenario that would make a good Traveller adventure: insurgents set up both a demonstration and an ambush, guaranteeing the former will get caught in the latter, the objective being to generate Internet images of an occupier-perpetrated massacre. The military response — as I recall; the index isn’t very good — is to contain or avoid the ambush. Singer and Brooking remark that this won’t do any good. The insurgents — if cynical enough — can just shoot the civilians anyway and blame the occupiers, or simply upload images from elsewhere.

And that’s what made me think of Froissart and Limoges.

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Birthday Reviews: Jon DeCles’s “The Power of Kings”

Birthday Reviews: Jon DeCles’s “The Power of Kings”

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Cover by Gary Ruddell
Cover by Gary Ruddell

Jon DeCles was born as Donald Studebaker on December 5, 1941.

In addition to writing, DeCles is also a Mark Twain interpreter, performing as Twain and giving lectures about the man’s life and career. He collaborated with Paul Edwin Zimmer on the novel Blood of the Colyn Muir. Studebaker married author Diana L. Paxson.

“The Power of Kings” was written for the eleventh Thieves’ World anthology, Uneasy Alliances, edited by Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey and published in 1988. He would write a follow-up story for the next, and final, volume of the original series as well.

A troupe of actors led by Feltheryn has arrived in Sanctuary, where High Priest Molin Torchholder is building them a new theatre and has commissioned them to perform a play. Once a major actor in the capital of Ranke, Feltheryn and his crew are hoping to reestablish themselves in Sanctuary, unaware that Torchholder has specifically chosen a play that couldn’t help be political in nature and set to offend Prince Kadakithis and his lover, the Beysa. The story is clearly part of the woven tapestry of Thieves World and would not work well standing on its own.

The story deals with Feltheryn’s need to get the theatre in order, rehearse himself and his troupe, and keep tabs on his troupe, from his partner/lover Gisselrand, who is as focused as he is, to Rounsnouf, the comedian given a key dramatic role who is spending all his time at the infamous Vulgar Unicorn tavern. Into this schedule are thrown random groups of street toughs who want to avenge themselves on Feltheryn for not being able to rob him, as well as meetings, chance or otherwise, with various denizens of Sanctuary.

For someone who thrived in the capital, Feltheryn seems to have a poor sense for when he is being used a as pawn. Not only is Torchholder using him and the troupe for his own purposes, but many others who he or Rounsnouf come into contact with see the theatrical troupe as a means of advancing their own agenda. Even without the troupe being aware that anything is happening, they are moved in a political agenda which could (and should) be disastrous until Feltheryn’s quick thinking allows him to cast the situation in a more positive light.

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Pirates, Dungeons, and Undead Soldiers: The Copper Cat novels by Jen Williams

Pirates, Dungeons, and Undead Soldiers: The Copper Cat novels by Jen Williams

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The Copper Promise-small The Iron Ghost-small

Art by Gene Mollica

I’m a fan of all kinds of fantasy. Urban, romance, Arthurian, YA, weird, magic realism, anthropomorphic, horror, sword & planet… plus all the ones I can’t think of right now. But my first love was adventure fantasy and sword & sorcery, and that’s still the sub-genre that gets the bulk of my attention. Tell me a tale of heroes and magic, and you’ve got my interest. Throw in a dungeon, and I’ll show up for opening night.

So when I found Jen Williams’ 2016 fantasy The Copper Promise — a tale of swords, monsters, and dungeons — at Barnes & Noble last weekend, I wasn’t so much intrigued as I was thinking, “How the heck did I miss this for two years??” Turns out I didn’t miss it entirely; Adrian Tchaikovsky recommended it in his Tor.com list of Five Books Featuring Adventuring Parties, which I read back in 2016, saying:

Jen is one of the best new voices in UK fantasy, and it’s a testament to her writing skill that Wydrin, the “Copper Cat” and a proper fantasy rogue through and through, does not actually eclipse her companions Frith and Sebastian as they fight, trick and run their way through a world that has gone from run-of-the-mill dangerous to actively-being-set-on-fire-by-a-dragon dangerous thanks, chiefly, to their own poor life choices. “Let sleeping gods lie,” goes the tagline. No need to tell you how that one works out.

The book was released by Angry Robot; a little digging online found one sequel from the same publisher, The Iron Ghost (2017), and a third volume published only in the UK, The Silver Tide (2016). All three were nominated for the British Fantasy Award. The first for Best Newcomer, and the second and third for Best Fantasy Novel. The reviews have been strong as well, especially for the first one. Starburst Magazine said “The Copper Promise is near-perfect fantasy-adventure fun and a breath of fresh air,” and Den Patrick said, “There are pirates and magic, demons and disciples, undead soldiers and noble knights… a lot of fun.” Here’s the Angry Robot book blurbs for the first two.

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