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The Real Tartan Tat Army! A review of Better is the Proud Plaid by Jenn Scott

The Real Tartan Tat Army! A review of Better is the Proud Plaid by Jenn Scott

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At least half looked like soldiers draped in tartan tat.
Regular soldiers draped in tartan tat

What if I told you that the Highland army at Culloden in 1746 wasn’t really a “Highland” Army?

What if I also told you that apart from a few front-ranking testosterone-poisoned sword and targe men, it fought like any other 18th century European army and that at least half the men looked like regular soldiers draped in tartan tat — sashes, tartan trews, a better quality version of the kind of stuff tourists still pick up in Edinburgh’s gift shops — to show which side they were on?

Yes, I’ve been reading Jenn Scott’s new Better is the Proud Plaid: The Clothing, Weapons and Accoutrements of the Jacobites in the ’45. (UK, US)

It’s so far out of my normal period that I’m in danger of doing that thing where I age before your eyes and turn into a puddle of steaming goop.

However, every Scot grows up with the tale of Bonny Prince Charley, the ’45 Rebellion, and the tragic Battle of Culloden. Me being an Anglo-Scot, my ancestors, if involved, wore red coats and cursed in Nottinghamshire accents while they fought for Good King George. No wonder, then, that I’ve always been suspicious of the noble-savage-fighting-for-Scottish-freedom-while-swiving-time-travelling-American-nurses narrative that has wrapped itself around the rebellion. This book promised to debunk some of that — which it does, but in doing so replaces it with something perhaps more impressive.

And, also, I was expecting to be impressed. I’ve been hearing about Jenn’s research for years.

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The Death of the Classical World: Reading The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey

The Death of the Classical World: Reading The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey

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The destroyers came out from the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness had been terrorizing the east of the Roman Empire.

Thus starts the controversial new history of the pagan/Christian transition by Classics scholar Catherine Nixey. Making a deliberate parallel between the early Christians and ISIS is a bold move, intended to shock and turn our historical and cultural presumptions upside down.

It’s only the first of many. For 250 pages, Nixey makes a full-on assault against the dominant narrative that Christians were brutally oppressed by the Roman Empire, before peacefully taking over by winning the debate against an exhausted and decadent paganism.

In Palmyra c. AD 385, a horde of black-robed monks swarmed out of their desert caves and crude shelters to break into the city’s temple of Athena. There they came upon a graceful, larger-than-life statue of the goddess. They hacked the head from its shoulders, then battered at the head where it lay on the ground. When they left, their rage satiated, the head lay where they had left it for centuries until uncovered by modern archaeologists.

All across the Late Roman Empire, this scene was played out again and again with increasing frequency as Christians grew in number and confidence.

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Dark Evil and Atlantean Gods: Stygian: A Dark-Hunter Novel by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Dark Evil and Atlantean Gods: Stygian: A Dark-Hunter Novel by Sherrilyn Kenyon

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When I received a review copy of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s new novel Stygian, I noticed the subtitle A Dark Hunter Novel. I know Kenyon is the author of multiple ongoing series (including the Deadman’s Cross historical fantasies featuring curses, pirates, and a sentient ship on the Spanish Main), but I wasn’t prepared for the scale of this one.

Depending on how you count, this is the 22nd novel in the Dark Hunter series, a saga of dark evil and the Atlantean gods that began way back in 2002 with Fantasy Lover.

Kenyon has made a name for herself as a paranormal romance writer with a string of #1 New York Times bestsellers under her belt, but Stygian isn’t just the latest in a long running series. It picks up the tale of the Dark-Hunter leader Acheron and his twin brother Styxx, told in the #1 bestselling Acheron and Styxx, to tell the story of Urian, Styxx’s son. Here’s the description.

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A Tale of Alchemy and Magic in Gilded Age New York: The Last Magician Series by Lisa Maxwell

A Tale of Alchemy and Magic in Gilded Age New York: The Last Magician Series by Lisa Maxwell

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The Last Magician-small The Devil's Thief-small

I received a review copy of The Devil’s Thief a few months ago. It’s the second volume in Last Magician series by Lisa Maxwell, and I didn’t have a copy of the first one, last year’s The Last Magician.

But The Devil’s Thief still managed to capture my attention. Man, I hate that.

We covered Lisa Maxwell’s previous book, the Peter Pan homage Unhooked, back in 2016. But it was The Last Magician that really put her on the map, becoming an instant New York Times bestseller. The tale of a girl who travels back in time to find a mysterious book that could save her future, The Last Magician was called a “twisty tale of alchemy and magic in Gilded Age New York” by Cinda Williams Chima.

How do I know all this? Because I shelled out for a copy, because I’m a sucker. Here’s the description.

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Ouroboros: The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

Ouroboros: The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

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I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food (as the Ascian would have said) are all the work of the Increate. Thus, stories are small things indeed in the scheme of the universe, but it is hard not to love best what is our own—hard for me, at least.

— Severian

oie_1342155N3OR5AdvWith The Citadel of the Autarch (1983) the story ends where it began: Nessus, the great city of the Commonwealth. Severian is no longer a young torturer exiled for an act of mercy, but a figure of incredible power and importance. Realistic depictions of peace and war are interwoven with excursions into phantasmagoria. Severian encounters old friends as well as enemies, experiences mass combat, and meets the strange soldiers of the Commonwealth’s Orwellian enemy, Ascia. Told in Wolfe’s often elliptical style, there are the familiar hints of Clark Ashton Smith, the stench of Wolfe’s time during the Korean War, and a solid whiff of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

At the end of the previous book, The Sword of the Lictor, Severian’s great sword, Terminus Est, was broken. So too, seemingly, the life-restoring Claw of the Conciliator he means to return to the religious order, the Pelerines. Searching for the blue gem’s pieces, he discovered that at its shattered heart was a simple thorn. The gem itself was mere glass.

Citadel begins with Severian continuing northward in search of the Pelerines and the front between the Commonwealth’s and Ascia’s armies. He soon meets the trailing edge of the Autarch’s armies: supply trains, cavalry patrols, and the scattered remains of the killed. As he pilfers supplies from one dead soldier he is struck by the callousness of his actions and by the contents of a letter written by the dead man to his beloved. He restores the corpse to life with the thorn from the Claw. Whether unable or unwilling to speak, the resurrected soldier travels with Severian until they finally come to a great field hospital run by the Pelerines.

Severian, it turns out, is suffering from a fever and is taken in by the ministering sisters. He strikes up a friendship with several fellow patients, a woman and three men who wish to marry her. And here, Citadel takes a storytelling detour. To choose a husband from among her suitors, Foila decides that whomever can tell the best story will win her hand. She asks Severian to act as judge. Each story has its own strengths, but it’s that of the Ascian prisoner I found the most interesting.

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Pyr Sold to Start Publishing

Pyr Sold to Start Publishing

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A Guile of Dragons-small Blood Orbit-small The Hanged Man K.D. Edwards-small

Publishers Weekly is reporting that Pyr, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Prometheus Books, has been sold to digital publisher Start Publishing.

Under Editorial Director Lou Anders, who founded the line in March 2005, Pyr was one of the most dynamic and exciting independent publishers in the industry, acquiring books from Michael Moorcock, Ian McDonald, Kay Kenyon, Sean Williams, Alan Dean Foster, Adam Roberts, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Tim Lebbon, Paul McAuley, Brenda Cooper, Jack Dann, Ken MacLeod, Robert Silverberg, and many others. Pyr launched numerous talented new writers as well, including Black Gate authors James Enge, Chris Willrich, Jon Sprunk, and others. Lou left Pyr in 2014 to pursue his own writing career, but under new editor Rene Sears Pyr has continued to be a force in the industry, with a backlist of over 170 titles. Recent releases include K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit, Tracy Townsend’s Thieves of Fate series, and the excellent Nebula Awards Showcase anthologies; its forthcoming titles include K.D. Edwards The Hanged Man.

I’m not sure what this means for Pyr, and especially their print editions. But PW claims Start Publishing will continue the print versions, and retain at least two editors from Pyr and their sister crime fiction imprint Seventh Street Books.

Start Publishing began has an exclusively digital publisher but, through a series of acquisitions, now releases print editions as well. Start will publish both print and digital editions of the newly acquired titles. Jarred Weisfeld, president of Start, told PW two editors from Prometheus will stay on to continue to release frontlist titles under both imprints. Start will also hire a new public relations/marketing person to promote the two imprints.

Read the complete announcement here.

Sentient Starships, Cyborgs, and Eerie Horror: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 edited by N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams

Sentient Starships, Cyborgs, and Eerie Horror: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 edited by N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018-small The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018-back-small

The Year’s Best season came to a close last month. It was a pretty spectacular year, with no less than 10 volumes from editors Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan, Paula Guran, Jane Yolen, Michael Kelly, David Afsharirad, and others. We’ve covered them all, and we close out 2018 with The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. This is the fourth volume; the series is edited by John Joseph Adams with a different co-editor every year. His partner this year is N.K. Jemisin, who may be the most honored SF writer in the field at the moment, with three back-to-back-to-back Hugo wins under her belt.

This year’s volume received a rave review from Publishers Weekly. Here’s an excerpt.

An almost unheard-of diversity of tales absolutely sing in this superlative anthology of short speculative stories. Encompassing a wide range of styles and perspectives, the book swings gracefully from thoughtful superhero SF (“Destroy the City with Me Tonight” by Kate Alice Marshall) to nuanced horror based on Congolese mythology (“You will Always Have Family: A Triptych” by Kathleen Kayembe) to musings on the justice and the multiverse (“Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities” by Lettie Prell) without a single sour note. A. Merc Rustad contributes “Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn,” a heartfelt piece about sentient spacecraft and found family, and Caroline M. Yoachim delves further into ideas of family and obligation with the windup characters of “Carnival Nine.” From the Chinese afterlife (“The Last Cheng Beng Gift” by Jaymee Goh) to a future of cyborgs run amok (“The Greatest One-Star Restaurant” by Rachael K. Jones), this anthology delivers.

As always, this volume contains 10 fantasy and 10 SF tales. This year’s contributors include Samuel R. Delany, Charlie Jane Anders, Carmen Maria Machado, Maureen F. McHugh, Caroline M. Yoachim, Peter Watts, Tobias S. Buckell, and two stories from Maria Dahvana Headley. Here’s the complete TOC.

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New Treasures: The Wastelanders by K.S. Merbeth

New Treasures: The Wastelanders by K.S. Merbeth

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I was picking up some books at Sally Kobee’s table at the World Fantasy Convention when I spotted K.S. Merbeth’s The Wastelanders, with the cover blurb “A full throttle, sand-in-your-eyes, no-holds-barred ride through a Mad Max-style wasteland” (from Delilah S. Dawson). That got my attention, sure enough.

But I was bringing back too many books from the con as it was, so I put it back reluctantly. I finally got a copy on Friday, and I’m glad I did. Turns out The Wastelanders is an omnibus edition of two Orbit paperbacks, Bite and Raid, which share a gritty post-apocalyptic setting. Booklist gave a rave review to the first when it first appeared; here’s a snippet.

Merbeth’s action-driven debut introduces us to Kid, a teenage girl who has known no world other than this postnuclear apocalyptic one. She’s barely surviving alone after the death of her father. Knowing she should not trust strangers but too tired and hungry to care, Kid gets in a car with two ominous figures, the large, dreadlocked Wolf and the bright-blue-haired Dolly. And so begins a fast-paced ride through a barren world in which food and water are scarce, “Raiders” and “Sharks” rule the trade routes, and cannibalism is a real survival option. The first-person narration will leave readers hanging on Kid’s every word as she falls in with Wolf and his gang. The first battle scene comes immediately and is closely followed by another and then another, constantly escalating… Filled with dark humor, wit, and a realistic dystopian setting, Bite plays with the idea of who the good guys are in such a harsh world. Think Carl Hiaasen thriller set in a Mad Max world, and you have an idea of what to expect.

We covered Bite after it first appeared last year (and I note that I was just as intrigued by that cover blurb back then… at least I’m consistent). But I somehow managed to totally miss the sequel Raid, so I’m grateful for the chance to rectify that oversight now.

The Wastelanders was published by Orbit on October 16, 2018. It is 595 pages (including 22 pages of sample chapters from two other Orbit releases, Lilith Saintcrow’s Afterwar and Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s The Extinction Cycle), priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Lisa Marie Pompilio.

Birthday Reviews: Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples”

Birthday Reviews: Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples”

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Cover by Charles Vess

Cover by Charles Vess

Neil Gaiman was born on November 10, 1960.

Gaiman has received Hugo Awards for his novels American Gods and The Graveyard Book, his novella Coraline, his short story “A Study in Emerald,” and his Graphic Story The Sandman: Overture. Both American Gods and Coraline won the Nebula Award and Gaiman has also won the Bradbury Award from SFWA for his screenplay for the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife.” His short story “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” part of his Sandman graphic novel, won the World Fantasy Award for Gaiman and collaborator artist Charles Vess. Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano won the Bram Stoker Award for The Sandman: Dream Hunters and Gaiman has also won the award for American Gods, Coraline, and The Sandman: Endless Nights. He won the British SF Association Award for Coraline and The Wolves in the Wall, the latter in collaboration with Dave McKean. His novelette “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” earned him a Shirley Jackson Award in 2011 and the anthology Stories: All New Tales earned him and collaborator Al Sarrantonio a second Shirley Jackson Award that same year. Gaiman’s work in both prose and comic has won him several other awards as well. He was the guest of Honor at Anticipation, the 67th Worldcon in Montreal in 2009. Gaiman has collaborated with numerous authors and artists for his work in comics and collaborated with Terry Pratchett on the novel Good Omens. Other prose fiction collaborators include Dave McKean, Kim Newman, Eugene Byrne, Gene Wolfe, Toby Litt, Alisa Kwitney, Jaime Delano, and Bryan Talbot.

Snow, Glass, Apples was originally published as a chapbook in 1995 by DreamHaven Press to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow selected the story to appear in their anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection and Poppy Z. Brite included the story in her anthology Love in Vein II: Eighteen More Tales of Vampiric Erotica. The story was translated into Spanish in 1997 for inclusion in the July issue of the fanzine Artifex. Gaiman included it in his collection Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, which was translated into French. The story has also been translated into Dutch. In 2007, Martin H. Greenberg included it in the anthology Women of the Night and John Joseph Adams used the story in his 2009 anthology By Blood We Live. The next year, it appeared in Peter S. Beagle’s anthology The Secret History of Fantasy. Gaiman adapted the story into a play in 2002 and that same year, he recorded the play along with another for HarperAudio. The story was also adapted into a play by the Edinburgh University Theatre Societty in 2012.

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Mystery, Megacorps, and a Murderous A.I.: The Shieldrunner Pirates by R. E. Stearns

Mystery, Megacorps, and a Murderous A.I.: The Shieldrunner Pirates by R. E. Stearns

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Kirkus Reviews called Barbary Station, the opening novel in R.E. Stearns’ Shieldrunner Pirates trilogy, “Super cool… It mixes unpredictable mysteries, a murderous AI, space battles, [and] an awesome and fashionable Pirate Leader… a blend of Die Hard and The Illuminae Files.” Stearns’ debut featured two engineers who hijack a spaceship to join a band of space pirates, only to discover the pirates are hiding from a malevolent AI. We covered it enthusiastically last year.

The sequel Mutiny at Vesta arrived right on time last month, and it picks up the story without missing a beat. In her Tor.com review, Liz Bourke writes:

Stearns has written a worthy successor… If Barbary Station was a variant on the gothic novel in space (complete with a haunted house in the form of a space station), Mutiny at Vesta is a nested, layered series of capers in which Adda and Iridian work with limited resources and the pressure of time and other people’s competing priorities to pull off the damn-near impossible… Stearns writes measured, tense, and intense space opera, filled with a diverse selection of believable characters. I really enjoyed this book.

Here’s the publisher’s description.

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