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Sword Masters and Dangerous Texts: The Khorasan Archives by Ausma Zehanat Khan

Sword Masters and Dangerous Texts: The Khorasan Archives by Ausma Zehanat Khan

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The Bloodprint-small The Black Khan-small

Ausma Zehanat Khan is the author of the contemporary thriller The Unquiet Dead and its four sequels, including The Language of Secrets and A Deadly Divide. The Khorasan Archives is a considerable departure for her: an ambitious four-volume secondary world fantasy. It opened last year with The Bloodprint, which S.A. Chakraborty (The City of Brass) called “wonderfully written… reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic Odyssey… this time with a pair of women warriors at the helm.”

The second volume, The Black Khan, arrived last month from Harper Voyager. I’m quite intrigued by this series, and may not be able to wait until it’s complete to dip into it. Here’s the back cover text for The Bloodprint.

The author of the acclaimed mystery The Unquiet Dead delivers her first fantasy novel — the opening installment in a thrilling quartet — a tale of religion, oppression, and political intrigue that radiates with heroism, wonder, and hope.

A dark power called the Talisman, born of ignorance and persecution, has risen in the land. Led by a man known only as the One-Eyed Preacher, it is a cruel and terrifying movement bent on world domination — a superstitious patriarchy that suppresses knowledge and subjugates women. And it is growing.

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In Which Severian Becomes Human: The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

In Which Severian Becomes Human: The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

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oie_622120n9dhjJAUSeverian has finally arrived in the fortress town Thrax and taken up his duties as lictor, or “he who binds”, and jailor. More importantly, he serves in his trained capacity as torturer and executioner. It is his latter duties that lead to a rift between Severian and Dorcas. No matter how rationally he makes his case for legal torture and execution, she is more and more disturbed by his work. Eventually she leaves him and takes up residence in a tavern.

His refusal to employ his guild talents for the personal desire of Thrax’s ruler leads him to flee northward — that and the fiery salamander sent to kill him by an agent of his old nemesis, Agia. Severian hopes to return the life-restoring gem, the Claw of the Conciliator, to the traveling sisterhood from which Agia stole it back in the first book, The Shadow of the Torturer. With the revealing of several dire secrets, Dorcas leaves Severian to return to Nessus and uncover the truth of her past.

1980’s The Shadow of the Torturer is a coming-of-age tale of Severian’s passage into young adulthood and out of the safe confines of his guild’s tower. While Severian’s constant withholding of information makes his narration unreliable, the book still flows in a generally normal fashion — Severian has adventures during which he journeys from point A to point B.

1981’s The Claw of the Conciliator reads like little more than a series of someone else’s dreams and nightmares. There are powerful passages, but like dreams, their potency comes not from basic storytelling, but strange imagery and psychologically dislocating events. I’m still not sure how much of Wolfe’s story eluded me, even thinking back on it now, but there are sequences that I will not forget any time soon.

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Birthday Reviews: Catherine Asaro’s “Echoes of Pride”

Birthday Reviews: Catherine Asaro’s “Echoes of Pride”

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Cover by James Gurney
Cover by James Gurney

Catherine Asaro was born on November 6, 1955.

Asaro has won the Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Quantum Rose and the Nebula Award for Best Novella for “The Spacetime Pool.” She has also won three Sapphire Awards, presented by the SF Romance Newsletter, for the novel Catch the Lightning and the stories “Aurora in Four Voices” and “Moonglow.” Asaro served as President of SFWA from 2003-2005.

“Echoes of Pride” was originally published in the anthology Space Cadets, edited by Mike Resnick and published by SCIFI to coincide with Loscon IV, the 2006 Worldcon. The story is based on a scene from Asaro’s 2004 novel Schism. The story was reprinted in the fifth issue of Galaxy’s Edge in November 2013.

Sauscony Valdoria, Soz, is a cadet in the Dieshan Military Academy, although she harbors a secret which even her closest bunkmates don’t know. When the Imperator, Kurj comes to inspect the troops, he seems to single Soz out for special treatment, ordering her to run an advanced obstacle course which is generally reserved for more advanced cadets.

Even as Soz follows her orders, she tries to figure out why the Imperator, her half-brother, is so focused on humiliating her. Is he trying to get her to wash out, picking on a half-sibling, or making her prove her mettle? Perhaps even more importantly to Soz, she is figuring out how to maintain her secret from her bunkmates, or even wondering if they will recognize how out of the ordinary Kurj’s interest in her is.

As a reworking of a chapter (13) from the 2004 novel Schism, the story clearly ties into a more complex work, yet at the same time, Asaro has managed to let it stand on its own. Without the surrounding novel, “Echoes of Pride” could almost be set in any military training milieu, the intricacies of Asaro’s universe only impinging on it in parts. The story as is offers up sibling rivalry as well as a warrior out to prove who she is and what she is capable of. Being part of a novel, the story can provide an introduction not only to Schism, but to Asaro’s wider works.

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Future Treasures: City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender

Future Treasures: City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender

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City of Broken Magic-smallThe wheels of publishing never stop. I returned from the World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore last night with a heavy bag of new fantasy releases, weary and content. And before I even had a chance to open the bag and start telling you about any of those books, today’s mail brings more — including Mirah Bolender’s debut novel City of Broken Magic, featuring a bomb squad that defuses magic weapons. Here’s the description.

Five hundred years ago, magi created a weapon they couldn’t control. An infestation that ate magic ― and anything else it came into contact with. Enemies and allies were equally filling.

Only an elite team of non-magical humans, known as sweepers, can defuse and dispose of infestations before they spread. Most die before they finish training.

Laura, a new team member, has stayed alive longer than most. Now, she’s the last ― and only ― sweeper standing between the city and a massive infestation.

City of Broken Magic earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly, no small feat. Here’s a snippet.

Monsters are threatening to take over the city of Amicae. The government has convinced residents that the monsters can’t get in, but Clae and Laura know that isn’t true. They are Sweepers, the only people in the city qualified to fight the monsters and make sure they can’t return — and narrator Laura has only been an apprentice for three months. The duo takes on mobsters, corrupt businessmen, and a deliberately skewed cultural narrative, culminating in a fight to protect their city from its own refusal to accept reality. Amicae’s strict caste system is expertly woven into the fast-paced plot that will keep readers turning pages until the very end. This debut builds a fascinating setting that readers will want to keep coming back to.

City of Broken Magic will be published by Tor Books on November 20, 2018. It is 400 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital format. The cover is by Tony Mauro. Read more at the author’s website.

Birthday Reviews: Janet Pack’s “A Coin for Charon”

Birthday Reviews: Janet Pack’s “A Coin for Charon”

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Sol's Children
Sol’s Children

Janet Pack was born on November 5, 1952.

Pack has collaborated with Kevin Stein on several poems and has co-edited anthologies with Margaret Weis, Robin Crew, and Martin H. Greenberg. She has occasionally published as Janet Deaver-Pack.

“A Coin for Charon” was published in Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology Sol’s Children in 2002. It has never been reprinted.

Pack’s story demonstrates one of the problems with writing about near future events, although in a slightly atypical way. Pack published the story, set on a space station in orbit around Pluto, in 2002 and in 2006, NASA launched the New Horizons mission to fly through the Plutonian system. When Pack wrote the story, little was known about Pluto and only one moon, Charon, had been discovered. By 2005, two additional moons had been found, Nix and Hydra. By the time New Horizons had reached Pluto and upended what we thought we knew about the planet, two additional moons, Kerberos and Styx, had been discovered. We have also learned that Pluto was not the frozen ball of rock and “methane-ethane-nitrogen-carbon-monoxide frost” that Pack described.

However, the focus of the story is less on Pluto and more on the dysfunctional relationship between two of the scientists on the space station, Velerie Heyer and Konrad Gregorius, whose relationship starts badly and only worsens as they get to know each other and are forced to work together, with the discovery of a magnetic element that Pack describes as forcing the tidal lock between Pluto and Charon, only cementing their enmity.

There are many historical stories about scientific relationships which go wrong and Pack takes the worst of all of those and transplants them to a remote space station with very tight living quarters, sure to exacerbate the problem. Although she mentions the rest of the station’s inhabitants, Heyer and Gregorius are really the only ones shown in any depth, although Heyer also interacts with Tobias Wellett. Without more input from the secondary characters, Heyer’s view of the situation is, of necessity, skewed and the reader is left wondering if the other characters have really kept to themselves as much as Heyer indicates rather than trying to alleviate the tension before the state of affairs could reach the point it does in the story.

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The 2018 World Fantasy Award Winners

The 2018 World Fantasy Award Winners

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The Changeling Victor LaValle-small Jade City Fonda Lee-small The New Voices of Fantasy-small

The World Fantasy Convention is always the highlight of my year, and the highlight of the convention is always the presentation of the World Fantasy Awards, among the most prestigious awards our field has to offer.

So it was a little frustrating that I had to leave the awards ceremony so early today to catch my flight. Fortunately, our on-the-spot correspondent Patty Templeton kept me up to date with minute-by-minute texts from the ceremony during my race to the airport. While there was plenty of excitement, the biggest news Patty had to share was that the big award for the evening, BEST NOVEL, was in fact a tie (“Hot dang!” texted Templeton), which hasn’t happened since 2009 when Jeff Ford and Margo Lanagan split the prize.

So without any further ado, here are the winners of the 2018 World Fantasy Awards.

Best Novel (tie)

WINNER: The Changeling, Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)
WINNER: Jade City, Fonda Lee (Orbit)
The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager)
Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, John Crowley (Saga)
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Theodora Goss (Saga)
Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory (Knopf)

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Birthday Reviews: Kara Dalkey’s “Bouncing Babies”

Birthday Reviews: Kara Dalkey’s “Bouncing Babies”

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Not of Woman Born
Not of Woman Born

Kara Dalkey was born on November 4, 1953.

Dalkey was nominated for the Mythopoeic Award in 1989 for her novel The Nightingale, a retelling of one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in a Japanese setting. Ten years later her novel Heavenward Path was also nominated for the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Literature. She was also nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2004 for her short story “Lady of the Ice Gardens.”

“Bouncing Babies” was published in the anthology Not of Woman Born, edited by Constance Ash in 1999. The story has never been reprinted.

Although the people who live in the world of “Bouncing Babies” may see it as a utopia in which people don’t have to worry about giving birth unless they want to and the need to work is obviated, it is also a world in which a person’s worth is based solely on their ability to provide reproductive material. Teenage girls are genetically tested and if they prove to fit societal requirements are paid ten million dollars to have their eggs harvested, their genotype then used to determine their ability to fit into society.

Ms. Goodwin has long since had her eggs harvested and is living a life of luxury when she receives a notification to visit the Reprotec Bank. Not having any clue what they want to talk to her about, she goes in and discovers that her eggs are no longer genetically desirable. In fact, a child born from them was returned as defective by its parents. The bank has seized her assets to regain their investments and Goodwin realizes that she has nothing to fall back on.

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The Feminine Mystique: The Big Book of Female Detectives edited by Otto Penzler

The Feminine Mystique: The Big Book of Female Detectives edited by Otto Penzler

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The Big Book of Female Detectives-smallI think that if I were stranded on a desert island, and I could grab the works of a single writer to bring with me before my ship went down, I’d be a fool not to choose Otto Penzler.

Penzler’s brick-sized Big Book anthologies form a pretty darn complete intro to genre fiction. He’s produced more than a dozen over the last decade, publishing roughly one per year since 2007. They include:

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps — 2007
The Vampire Archives — 2009
Agents of Treachery — 2010
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories — 2010
Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! — 2011
The Big Book of Adventure Stories — 2011
The Big Book of Ghost Stories — 2012
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries — 2013
The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries — 2014
The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories — 2015
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper — 2016
The Big Book of Rogues and Villains –- 2017

His latest is a delicious mix of gumshoe gals and debutant detectives. It was published last month by Vintage Crime. Here’s the description.

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New Treasures: A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland

New Treasures: A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland

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A Conspiracy of Truths-smallI’m at the World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore this weekend. This is my first trip to the city (Holy cats! Did you know Baltimore was on the Atlantic Ocean?? They should tell people this stuff), and so far I’ve dined at a terrific seafood restaurant, taken in the salt air, and visited what has to be the largest Barnes & Noble on the planet.

I’ve also reconnected with plenty of friends whom I only see at conventions these days, including more than a few Black Gate contributors (quick shout out to Derek Kunsken, Marie Bilodeau, Howard Andrew Jones, Patty Templeton, Doug Ellis, L.E. Modesitt, and Sarah Avery!) and wandered through the beautiful Dealer’s Room, packed to the brim with fantasy books. It may seem strange that even surrounded by a hive of activity like WFC I can still be distracted by new books, but there you are. One of the first to catch my eye was the debut fantasy novel by Alexandra Rowland. I think I’ll be taking this one home with me.

A wrongfully imprisoned storyteller spins stories from his jail cell that just might have the power to save him — and take down his jailers too.

Arrested on accusations of witchcraft and treason, Chant finds himself trapped in a cold, filthy jail cell in a foreign land. With only his advocate, the unhelpful and uninterested Consanza, he quickly finds himself cast as a bargaining chip in a brewing battle between the five rulers of this small, backwards, and petty nation.

Or, at least, that’s how he would tell the story.

In truth, Chant has little idea of what is happening outside the walls of his cell, but he must quickly start to unravel the puzzle of his imprisonment before they execute him for his alleged crimes. But Chant is no witch—he is a member of a rare and obscure order of wandering storytellers. With no country to call his home, and no people to claim as his own, all Chant has is his wits and his apprentice, a lad more interested in wooing handsome shepherds than learning the ways of the world.

And yet, he has one great power: his stories in the ears of the rulers determined to prosecute him for betraying a nation he knows next to nothing about. The tales he tells will topple the Queens of Nuryevet and just maybe, save his life.

A Conspiracy of Truths was published by Saga Press on October 23, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

From Beneath the Review Pile: The Same Old Story

From Beneath the Review Pile: The Same Old Story

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oie_1235943NVf82AxcAs they used to say in Monty Python, “and now for something completely different.”

The more I read, the more difficult it is for me to be entranced by a novel or short story. My writer brain is always whirring away in the background, pointing out when an author has done something clever or highlighting specific techniques like Chekhov’s gun. To be honest, it’s sort of a pain in the ass. If a novel isn’t gripping to the point that my writer brain clicks off for a bit – or at least gets quieter – I usually put it down somewhere around the fifty-page mark, if not sooner.

Doing this column makes it tough sometimes, too, because a) I don’t like to review something I didn’t at least enjoy enough to finish, but b) I need to find a book worth reviewing every two weeks. And honestly, two years into this column it’s getting harder, since I keep seeing the same story over and over again.

Let me give you an example, without giving too many specifics (since I don’t want to insult anyone). Recently I started a space opera ARC that I received from a publisher, because the back cover blurb sounded really cool, involving a protagonist who’s vilified by the galaxy he worked to save. Except the novel doesn’t start with that; it goes back to the protagonist’s youth, struggling to find his own way in a typical noble household, feeling stifled and controlled until he escapes and begins to come into his own, etc, etc. Sigh. Where’s my story about the intergalactic savior grappling with whether he should consider himself a hero or a villain? If we started there, I’d be able to forgive yet another far-future imperial setting structured like a hundred other novels I’ve read in the last few years.

Sorry if that sounded a little more heated than I usually get here. It’s just that I keep seeing the same story, and it’s wearying. Sometimes the story pretends to be different through its main characters. Like a post-alien invasion apocalypse where the adults are gone and young people have to survive on their own. Jazz it up with lead characters that are different than your usual fare, whether it’s based on gender identity, race, mental health, physical disability, etc, and maybe you’ve got a hit. Or maybe it’s the same story with the exact same beats and even some of the same tropes, and all the author is trying to do is be clever.

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