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In 500 Words or Less: Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

In 500 Words or Less: Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

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Alice Payne Arrives
by Kate Heartfield
Tor (176 pages, $15.99 paperback, $3.99 eBook, November 6, 2018)

Has anyone else noticed that time travel fiction still seems to be REALLY popular? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive Whovian, and some of my favorite books and movies involve time travel. But I feel like time travel is everywhere. Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World has gotten a ton of acclaim. Gregory Benford’s Timescape series continued this year with Rewrite, about people using time travel to change events (usually selfishly), and Maria V. Snyder combines far-future SF with time travel investigation in Navigating the Stars. Hells, I reviewed Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Magician and discussed its time travel elements, and I even sold a time travel story of my own in 2018 – twice. My point is that time travel is still hot, somehow, and it doesn’t seem to be cooling down.

The idea of “time travel wars” and competing forces trying to rewrite history isn’t a new concept. I think its popularity now is a symptom of people feeling like the world is spiralling out of control, and that’s definitely a component to Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne Arrives, the first in what I’m told will be a series of novellas from Tor. In this particular slant on time travel, two rival organizations are fighting to correct the course of history – one with a heavy hand and the other trying to slow them down – resulting in a story that jumps between multiple periods, in a world that’s already different than our own because of repeated time travel. As a history teacher I found this really compelling, especially with focuses on the First World War and earlier 18th and 19th century society.

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New Treasures: Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

New Treasures: Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

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Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama. His “Guns & Sorcery” novella Gorel & The Pot Bellied God won the British Fantasy Award, and his Sword & Sorcery collection Black Gods Kiss was nominated for the British Fantasy Award. His novel The Violent Century was called “A masterpiece” by both the Independent and Library Journal, and “Watchmen on crack” by io9. Our previous coverage includes his recent collection Central Station and The Bookman Histories trilogy.

His latest novel Unholy Land was selected as a Best Book of 2018 by NPR Books, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the UK Guardian. Warren Ellis, who compares Tidhar to Michael Moorcock in the afterword, calls it “A jeweled little box of miracles. Magnificent,” and Guardian calls it “A gripping thriller: clever.. and twisted.” Here’s a snippet from Library Journal’s starred review:

On the suggestion of his agent, pulp fiction writer Lior Tirosh flies back to the home he hasn’t seen since childhood: Palestina, an East African Jewish state formed in the early 20th century. He soon discovers a lot has changed. In the capital, Ararat, unrest is at an all-time high. Palestina is creating a border wall to deter refugees from entering. Lior then learns from an old childhood friend that his niece Deborah is missing and takes on the persona of one of his own detective novel characters as he searches for her, only to be hunted by his own state’s security… Shifting perspectives will keep readers trying to catch up with this fast-paced plot involving incredible twists on multiple realities and homecoming…. fascinating and powerful.

Unholy Land was published by Tachyon Publications on November 6, 2018. It is 288 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Sarah Anne Langton.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Interspecies Conflict in a Universe with More Aliens than the Star Wars Cantina: Sholan Alliance by Lisanne Norman

Interspecies Conflict in a Universe with More Aliens than the Star Wars Cantina: Sholan Alliance by Lisanne Norman

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Covers by Romas Kukalis, Jim Burns (#6) and Chris Moore (#8,9)

There haven’t been many times when it’s better to be a science fiction fan than right now. Big-budget SF is king at the box office and on the small screen, the shelves are groaning with new releases, and truly exciting new authors are appearing every year. But there are a few things I still miss. The humble paperback original (PBO) has become less and less common as more and more top-tier SF appears first in hardcover or trade paperback, and much of it never sees a mass market paperback reprint at all.

I like hardcovers just fine, but it was paperbacks that introduced me to SF, and it’s paperbacks — compact, accessible, and cheap — that still draw in young and casual readers and gradually turn them into fans. More publishers have been turning their backs on paperbacks, and the result is our field has less to offer curious young readers browsing the SF shelves for affordable and enticing titles. And thus, fewer young fans discovering science fiction at all.

But it wasn’t just paperbacks that made me a lifetime science fiction fan in my teens — it was great science fiction series, like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Asimov’s Foundation, Farmer’s Riverworld, Fred Pohl’s Heechee Saga, David Brin’s Uplift Saga, H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy novels, and many, many more. DAW is one of few publishers willing to make a significant investment in PBO series, and it’s paid off well for them over the years, with now-established writers like C. J. Cherryh (the Alliance-Union Universe and the long-running Foreigner series), Julie E. Czerneda (the Trade Pact Universe), Gini Koch (the Kitty Katt novels), Jacey Bedford (Psi-Tech), and many others.

For many years DAW’s bread and butter has been extended midlist SF and fantasy series that thrive chiefly by word of mouth. I’m frequently drawn to them just by the sheer number of volumes. You won’t connect with them all of course, but when you find one you like they offer a literary feast like no other — a long, satisfying adventure series you can get lost in for months.

Lisanne Norman’s Sholan Alliance is a perfect example. It only recently caught my attention, after decades of patiently waiting on the shelves. It began with Turning Point way back in 1993, and recently wrapped up with the ninth volume, Circle’s End, in 2017. In between it quietly gathered a lot of accolades. B&N Explorations called it “fast-paced adventure… [with] more alien species than the Star Wars cantina!” And SF Chronicle labeled it “big, sprawling, convoluted… sure to appeal to fans of C.J. Cherryh and others who have made space adventure their territory.”

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Future Treasures: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Future Treasures: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

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Samantha Shannon, author of the bestselling Bone Season trilogy, is the latest YA author to attempt the jump to adult fantasy. Her highly anticipated The Priory of the Orange Tree — all 830 pages of it — arrives in hardcover from Bloomsbury in a month.

The transition from YA superstar to mainstream success isn’t easy, however (just ask JK Rowling). But I’m extremely intrigued about this one. Mostly because of Sarah Avery’s review of The Bone Season to be honest, published right here back in 2014. Here’s the snippet that caught my eye.

Read this book. Just read it. Ignore the reviews that call Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling, or call the series that opens with The Bone Season the next Hunger Games… It’s the book you would get if Philip K. Dick decided to write about the wild Victorian occult scene that flourished under Madame Blavatsky, blossomed again in the time of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, lingering until it faded with its evenstar, Dion Fortune. That is, if Philip K. Dick decided to take all that supernatural grandiosity, and steampunk adaptations of Victoriana, and turn them on their heads by transposing them into a dystopian near-future historical moment that feels intermittently like hard SF with its what-ifs scrambled.

The early reviews of The Priory of the Orange Tree have been very promising. Marie Brennan calls it “An astonishing achievement,” and Laini Taylor labels it a “magnificent epic of queens, dragonriders, and badass secret wyrm-slaying priestesses.” Publishers Weekly says it’s a “massive standalone epic fantasy with court intrigue, travel through dangerous lands, [and] fantastical religions.” Here’s the description.

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Vintage Treasures: Space, Time & Crime edited by Miriam Allen deFord

Vintage Treasures: Space, Time & Crime edited by Miriam Allen deFord

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Genre blending these days is very popular. So you have steampunk space operas like RJ Theodore’s Flotsam, SF noir like K.R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit, near-future police procedurals such as Serial Box’s Ninth Step Station, and every conceivable genre mash-up in between. But there was a time when daring to mix genres like science fiction and mystery was exciting and new. One of the first paperback anthologies to try it was Miriam Allen deFord’s Space, Time & Crime, published by Paperback Library in 1964, when I was just six months old. But even then, as deFord rather astutely observes in her introduction, it had been going on quietly in the genre for for time.

I believe it was Sam Moskowitz who praised Caves of Steel, by Frederik Pohl and the late Cyril Kornbluth, for “accomplishing the impossible by successfully combining detective stories with science fiction.”

As a matter of fact, that intermixture is so far from impossible that it has (as this book attests) attracted a great many of the best known writers in both fields. And it is natural that this should be so. Both mystery and science fiction are concerned primarily with X, the unknown quantity. In the mystery story — both the detective and the suspense story — X is the criminal; in science fiction X may be, for example, life on planets other than ours, life in the future, life in an alternate parallel universe, or some other extrapolation of known scientific fact into imaginative probability. The interest in the unknown, but knowable, which moves the mystery story writer moves the science fiction writer as well. In consequence, both writers often turn out to be the same person.

Setting aside that jaw-dropping gaff in the very first line (um, Caves of Steel was written by Isaac Asimov, not Pohl and Kornbluth), Space, Time & Crime is a terrific anthology, with stories from Fredric Brown, Anthony Boucher, Frederik Pohl, Avram Davidson, Ron Goulart, Isaac Asimov, Reginald Bretnor… plus a Solar Pons story August Derleth and Mack Reynolds and a Change War tale by Fritz Leiber. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Phoenix Award

Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Phoenix Award

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Ace edition covers by Gray Morrow

Steven Silver has been doing a series covering the award winners from his age 12 year, and Steven has credited me for (indirectly) suggesting this, when I quoted Peter Graham’s statement “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12″, in the “comment section” to the entry on 1973 in Jo Walton’s wonderful book An Informal History of the Hugos. You see, I was 12 in 1972, so the awards for 1973 were the awards for my personal Golden Age. And Steven suggested that much as he is covering awards for 1980, I might cover awards for 1973 here in Black Gate.

And, indeed, 1972 is when I discovered Science Fiction in the adult section of Nichols Library in Naperville, IL. Mind you, I’d already read and loved The Zero Stone by Andre Norton, and read and kind of liked Robert Silverberg’s Revolt on Alpha C, and read and loved a ton of fantasies such as the Narnia books, The Hobbit, and George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie and At the Back of the North Wind. But I found all those in the children’s section. When I was 12 two things happened. In my seventh grade class we were introduced to a variety of books via a huge set of large folded cards, each of which had a substantial extract from a book. You were supposed to read the extract and answer a quiz about it, but the real motive of the developers was to try to get kids interesting in reading the whole of some of these books.

I read a bunch of things – Exodus by Leon Uris is one I recall – but I quickly realized it was the Science Fiction that lit me up. Books I recall reading because of that class include The Currents of Space, by Isaac Asimov; Against the Fall of Night, by Arthur C. Clarke; The Universe Between, by Alan E. Nourse; Time is the Simplest Thing, by Clifford Simak; and Galactic Derelict, by Andre Norton. And, of course, to find those books I had to go the adult section of the library. Where I quickly also found other stuff by those authors, and then other authors, and perhaps more important, anthologies. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was a revelation. And so were the Nebula anthologies. And Anthony Boucher’s Treasury of Great Science Fiction. So I was hooked forever.

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New Treasures: For the Sake of the Game: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

New Treasures: For the Sake of the Game: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

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For the Sake of the Game-smallLaurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger have edited four popular Holmes-themed anthologies: A Study in Sherlock (2011), In the Company of Sherlock Holmes (2014), and Echoes of Sherlock Holmes (2016). Their newest features contributions from a stellar list of authors, including Peter S. Beagle, F. Paul Wilson, William Kotzwinkle and Joe Servello, Duane Swierczynski, and Gregg Hurwitz. Publishers Weekly says it presents a wide range of genres “from cozy to horror;” here’s a snippet from their full review.

The 14 selections include a poem, Peter S. Beagle’s “Dr. Watson’s Song,” which provides a deeper look at the doctor’s emotional life, and a comic, William Kotzwinkle and Joe Servello’s “The Case of the Naked Butterfly,” which continues the exploits of insects Inspector Mantis and Dr. Hopper. Fans of the BBC’s Sherlock will appreciate Alan Gordon’s take on Holmes’s relationship with Mycroft in “The Case of the Missing Case.” Reed Farrel Coleman weighs in with one of the more memorable contributions, the metaphysical “A Study in Absence,” in which a book editor asks for help tracing an author using the pseudonym of I.M. Knott. The best light entry is Harley Jane Kozak’s “The Walk-in,” featuring a Sherlockian British intelligence agent, which opens with the tantalizing line “It’s not every day that you walk into your apartment and find that your cat has turned into a dog.”

Here’s the description.

For the Sake of the Game is the latest volume in the award-winning series from New York Times bestselling editors Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger, with stories of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and friends in a variety of eras and forms. King and Klinger have a simple formula: ask some of the world’s greatest writers ― regardless of genre ― to be inspired by the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The results are surprising and joyous. Some tales are pastiches, featuring the recognizable figures of Holmes and Watson; others step away in time or place to describe characters and stories influenced by the Holmes world. Some of the authors spin whimsical tales of fancy; others tell hard-core thrillers or puzzling mysteries. One beloved author writes a song; two others craft a melancholy graphic tale of insectoid analysis.

This is not a volume for readers who crave a steady diet of stories about Holmes and Watson on Baker Street. Rather, it is for the generations of readers who were themselves inspired by the classic tales, and who are prepared to let their imaginations roam freely.

Leslie S. Klinger’s previous books include In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe and The Annotated Watchmen; Elizabeth Crowens interviewed him for Black Gate last year. For the Sake of the Game was published by Pegasus Books on December 4, 2018. It is 264 pages, priced at $25.95 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Christine Van Bree.

Future Treasures: The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan

Future Treasures: The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan

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Gareth Hanrahan has written or co-written an impressive number of gaming supplements for several of our favorite systems, including Ashen Stars, Trail of Cthulhu, Traveller, and 13th Age. His debut fantasy novel The Gutter Prayer, set in a world of strange monsters, dark gods and dangerous magic, explodes onto shelves next week, and it’s currently my most anticipated fantasy novel of the month. Peter McLean (Priest of Bones) calls it “A groundbreaking and extraordinary novel,” and Nicholas Eames (Kings of the Wyld) says “Guerdon is a city that seethes with history, horror, and hidden secrets, and Hanrahan’s assured style is reminiscent of China Mievelle in the best way possible.” Michael W. Everest at Fantasy Hive gave it a rave review, saying:

The Gutter Prayer is a mercurial masterpiece… Welcome to Guerdon. A city of cities, built upon the brick and block of those cities and civilisations before it. And like its construction, its citizens stand on the shoulders of those beneath them, those ‘low lifes’ whose only crime (or at least, their first crime) was to be born into a lower rank than the rich and the ruthless above them. Politicians and priesthoods, alchemists and ancient forces, sorcerers and saints, thieves and Tallowmen, golems and ghouls – Guerdon’s streets are a hive of scum and villainy that would spit out any Chosen One farmboy (or girl!).

This one looks like it will command my attention the day it arrives. Here’s the description.

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Three Miles Around but Infinitely Deep: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Three Miles Around but Infinitely Deep: Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

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Here’s a shout-out for one of my favorite books, Robert Holdstock’s amazing, 1985, World Fantasy award winning novel Mythago Wood. Holdstock’s book dovetailed neatly with my other favorite of that time, David Brin’s The Postman.

I really can’t recommend Mythago Wood enough. In a time when everyone else was echoing Tolkien, Holdstock created a completely different take on fantasy (rural fantasy — if that’s a genre). I loved this story of two brothers, their estranged and absent father, and a patch of wood that was only three miles around but infinitely deep.

Of all the books I’ve read, none has impacted me as strongly at the end as this novel. Endings are hard, so when I read a perfect one, I take notice.

Stylistically, Holdstock nailed it too. I didn’t notice the smoothness and rhythm of his work at first, but on subsequent rereads I paid much more attention to his sentence and paragraph building. He has taught me a lot. If you are looking for an outstanding read to start your 2019, give Mythago Wood a try.

I’m always looking for my next, great novel. Do you have a recommendation of a book that exists in your personal canon of classics?

The 2019 Philip K. Dick Nominees

The 2019 Philip K. Dick Nominees

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The nominees for the 2019 Philip K. Dick Award, given each year for distinguished science fiction originally published in paperback in the United States, have been announced. They are (links will take you to our previous coverage):

Time Was by Ian McDonald (Tor.com)
The Body Library by Jeff Noon (Angry Robot)
84K by Claire North (Orbit)
Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories by Abbey Mei Otis (Small Beer Press)
Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions)
Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press)

Special shout-out to Small Beer Press for placing two fine collections on the ballot.

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