Browsed by
Category: Books

Birthday Reviews: Allan Weiss’s “Heaven and Earth”

Birthday Reviews: Allan Weiss’s “Heaven and Earth”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Colleen McDonald
Cover by Colleen McDonald

Allan Weiss was born on October 23, 1939.

Weiss has twice been nominated for the Aurora Award. His first nomination was in 1993 for his short story “Ants,” in the Best Short Form in English category. He received a second in 1996 when he was nominated with Hugh Spencer for Best Other Work in English for “Out of This World,” an exhibit they produced at the National Library.

“Heaven and Earth” was published in Tesseracts Nine in 2005. The volumes was co-edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman. The story has not been reprinted.

Steven is part of a team exploring an alien life form dug up on a distant planet. His description of the study is interspersed with memories of his Uncle Martin, who helped raise Steven during and after his parents’ divorce, teaching him both the study of Judaism and Talmud and how to espouse atheism, which are by no means mutually exclusive.

Steven’s relationship with his uncle is the strongest one in the story, although it is mirrored by his relationship to fellow-scientist Kelly Defalco, who refuses to give him straight answers about her own theories and research and causes him to question his own assumptions, just as Uncle Martin did when he was younger. This questioning becomes important when the evidence before his eyes regarding the physiognomy of the Castormondian alien species seems to contravene everything about biology that he knows from a lifetime of studying humans.

…

Read More Read More

Magic and Politics in the Desert: Deborah A. Wolf’s The Dragon’s Legacy

Magic and Politics in the Desert: Deborah A. Wolf’s The Dragon’s Legacy

Comments 0 Comment
The Dragon's Legacy-small The Forbidden City-small

I was browsing the shelves at Barnes and Noble last week when I came across the two volumes above. They caught my eye immediately. Especially the second one, with its  gorgeous depiction of a moonlit desert city… plus a supergiant bull, whatever the heck that’s about.

I didn’t pick them up right away. Derek Kunsken’s The Quantum Magician, some Angry Robot paperbacks and a bunch of SF magazines were already in my stack, and I’m trying to pace myself. But I did some research when I got home, and I admit I’m intrigued. Deborah A. Wolf is also the author of the Daughter of the Midnight Sun urban fantasy series; the first novel Split Feather came out last year. The Dragon’s Legacy is a planned trilogy, the first volume was a nominee for the 2018 Morningstar Award. Publishers Weekly praised “Wolf’s opulent visual imagination and sly humor” in their review:

Wolf’s epic fantasy debut, the first of a trilogy, is a well-crafted, intricate blend of the politics and magic of multiple cultures. Hafsa Azeina, dreamshifter of the Zeerani desert tribes, can kill her foes as they sleep. She has spent years protecting her daughter, Sulema, from the assassins hunting them, and Sulema has had the chance to come of age as a Zeerani warrior. But Sulema’s father, who may have sent the assassins, has found them. He is the dragon king of the nearby country of Atualon, and his magic prevents the dragon that sleeps under the world from waking and cracking the planet like an egg. Sulema and Hafsa must navigate shifting alliances, ongoing assassination attempts, and manipulation by both friend and foe to try to settle the balance of power and succession…

Titan Books has published two books in the trilogy so far; the third is due next year. Here’s the details:

The Dragon’s Legacy (400 pages, $24.95 hardcover/$14.95 trade/$13.99 digital, April 18, 2017)
The Forbidden City (517 pages, $24.95 hardcover/$16.99 digital, May 15, 2018)
The Seared Lands ($24.99 hardcover/$16.99 digital, April 2, 2019)

The cover artist is uncredited. See all of our recent coverage of the best in series fantasy here.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)

Comments 1 comment

I reached out to some friends to help me with A (Black) Gat in the Hand, as I certainly can’t cover everything and do it all justice. Our latest guest is author and fellow Black Gater, Joe Bonadonna. And Joe delivered an in-depth look at hardboiled adaptations on the silver screen. In fact, he covered so much ground, it’s gonna be a two-parter! So, let’s dig in! 

Hardboiled Film Noir: From Printed Page to Moving Pictures (Part One)

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” — Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

Prologue

Bonadonna_HardboiledAnthologyCrime does not discriminate. From city streets and slums to quiet suburbia, from the mansions of the rich to the boardrooms of the powerful, crime is alive and well. It can be found in dance halls, beer halls and gambling halls . . . speakeasies, seedy gin joints, smoke-filled pool halls, dive hotels, and wharf-side saloons. Crime exists everywhere, and writers and filmmakers have been telling stories about crime since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

This article deals mainly with American pulp fiction, novels and films, and a few theatrical plays, too. I’m going to give a little background history on the source material for these films and on some of the writers who penned the original stories upon which they were based.

Long ago, long before television came along, the film industry turned to books, magazine stories, theatrical plays, and radio shows for their source material, as well as original screenplays. Movie moguls bought the rights to numerous best-selling novels, mined the pages of pulp magazines, comic books, and even newspaper comic strips.

Many films made during this period were Saturday matinee serials such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and The Shadow. Dick Tracy was actually given a series of stand-alone films, and of course we had Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan.

Most of these serials were the “comic book” films about pulp fiction superheroes, caped crusaders, masked avengers, and magical crime fighters. Many others films, however, were turned into “programmers,” as they were sometimes called: B-pictures with low budgets, made by up-and-coming directors, and featuring actors who had not yet attained A-list status.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Promise of Space and Other Stories by James Patrick Kelly

New Treasures: The Promise of Space and Other Stories by James Patrick Kelly

Comments 0 Comment
The Promise of Space and Other Stories-small The Promise of Space and Other Stories-back-small

James Patrick Kelly is one of the best short story writers we have. His Hugo-winning tale “Think Like a Dinosaur” is one of the finest SF stories of the past 25 years (perhaps the finest), and his fiction has been collected in such essential volumes as Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (1997), Strange But Not a Stranger (2002), and The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories (2008). His novels include Planet of Whispers (1984), Look Into the Sun (1989), Freedom Beach (1985, with John Kessel) and Wildlife (1994).

A new James Patrick Kelly collection is a major event, and I purchased The Promise of Space and Other Stories as soon as it arrived in July. It contains 15 stories published between 2007 and 2016, plus one new tale, “Yukui!” It also contains an introduction by Sheila Williams, and an Afterword by the author. Here’s a snippet from Gark Wolfe’s review in the Chicago Tribune.

The idea of uploading your whole personality into a computer matrix as a hedge against death isn’t new, but should it become a legal right (as in “Declaration”) or face religious opposition (as in “One Sister, Two Sisters, Three”)? Could it even lead to most humans disappearing, leaving the world to intelligent chimps (“”The Chimp of the Popes”)?

For that matter, can technology ever really replace a mind? In the most heartbreaking story, “The Promise of Space,” a wife tries to connect with her brain-damaged astronaut husband, whose own faulty memory is supplemented by thousands of hours of personal video, but who can’t emotionally understand the facts he calls up.

Kelly also has a clear grasp of other genres, but uses them in unexpected ways. “The Last Judgment” is set in a world from which all the men have been snatched away by aliens, but takes the form of a hard-boiled mystery. “The Rose Witch” takes on the tone and form of a fairy tale, complete with a life-changing moral choice the heroine faces. In nearly every story, Kelly offers a master class on how short fiction works.

You can read the title story in Clarkesworld here. The Promise of Space and Other Stories was published by Prime Books on July 31, 2018. It is 383 pages, priced at $15.85 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Piotr Foksowicz. See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Old-School Sword and Planet with a Modern Attitude: An Excerpt from The MechMen of Canis-9

Old-School Sword and Planet with a Modern Attitude: An Excerpt from The MechMen of Canis-9

Comments 4 comments
Three Against the Stars-cover-small The MechMen of Canis-9-small

The MechMen of Canis-9 is my seventh novel. I’ve always wanted to write some sort of action-packed Sword and Planet Adventure, with some planet-building involved, and that’s what I hope I’ve accomplished with this “sequel” to my Space Opera, Three Against The Stars. The Foreword below should pretty well set the stage for the excerpt that follows. I hope you enjoy it and it interests you in checking out my novel. Thank you!

This time out, Sergeants Seamus O’Hara, Claudia Akira, Fernando Cortez and a platoon of Marines are deployed to Canis-9 — Devoora, the Ocean Planet. Their mission: find seven indestructible robot warriors hidden there for seventy years. Most of the platoon survives a crash-landing but are left stranded in a hostile environment of deadly sea predators. Rescued by native Tulavi islanders, the Marines get caught up in a war between this mysterious, maritime civilization and another indigenous race, the Malvarians, who hunt and harvest the eggs of the giant kaizsu — the Sea Dragons sacred to the Tulavi. As the Marines set out to complete their mission they discover a secret known only by the Tulavi: the endangered kaizsu are the key to Devoora’s ecosystem and the future of all life on the planet.

The MechMen of Canis-9 is now available in both paperback and Kindle editions. Thank you!

Read an exclusive excerpt from The MechMen of Canis-9 here.

Birthday Reviews: Diana Rowland’s “Fine Print”

Birthday Reviews: Diana Rowland’s “Fine Print”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Dan Dos Santos
Cover by Dan Dos Santos

Diana Rowland was born on October 20, 1966.

Rowland won third place in the third quarter of the 2005 Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest for her story “Schrodinger’s Hummingbird.” In 2012, Rowland won the RT Reviewers Choice Award for Best Urban Fantasy Protagonist for her character Angel Crawford in the novel Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues. She has been nominated for the RT Reviewers Choice Award on at least two other occasions and the audio of her novel My Life as a White Trash Zombie was nominated for an Audie Award. She won the Phoenix Award, presented by DeepSouthCon, for lifetime achievement in 2015.

Rowland wrote “Fine Print” for Mark L. Van Name’s anthology The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge, published by Baen Books in 2011.

Jason is the editor of a minor literary horror magazine, Black Magick Stories. When he meets Rachel at a convention, she comes onto him with a line asking if he would publish her stories if she sleeps with him, a variation on the Hollywood casting couch. When Jason points out how unethical that sort of thing would be, Rachel passes it off as a joke and backs away, but within days, she successfully seduces Jason and the two began dating. It is several months before she actually approaches him to publish one of her stories.

Luckily for Jason, when Rachel gives him a story, it was quite good. Unfortunately, it also turns out that Rachel is a Greater Demon and is using publication in his magazine to gain a foothold on Earth so she can rule, like other demons. Although the story has darkness, and much of it details Rachel’s torturing of Jason for his decision to publish her story in the November issue of the magazine rather than the Halloween issue, Rowland does incorporate a certain amount of humor. The standard deal with the devil story also takes an interesting turn because of a misunderstanding by Rachel about the way the periodical publishing world works, which Jason explains.

…

Read More Read More

In 500 Words or Less: An Advance Review of The Fall by Tracy Townsend

In 500 Words or Less: An Advance Review of The Fall by Tracy Townsend

Comments 1 comment
The Nine Tracy Townsend-medium The Fall Tracy Townsend-small

The Fall (Thieves of Fate, Book 2)
by Tracy Townsend
Pyr (400 pages, $18 paperback, $9.99 eBook, Jan 15, 2019)

Let’s start with something my friend Matt Moore would call a “hand grenade” on a panel: The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie.

Why? Because it splits up our beloved characters and challenges them with new locales and crises, all while introducing brand new favorites and raising the stakes. I can still remember watching it for the first time as a kid (fine, it was on VHS) and learning back then that one of my main measures for the quality is how many times I gasp out loud at what’s happening. That sort of reaction is tough to achieve with a debut, let alone a sequel, but Lucas and his team pulled it off. And Tracy Townsend has done the same with The Fall, her follow-up to breakout novel The Nine, which I reviewed last year as my Top Book 0f 2017.

And good gods, The Fall is just as amazing. It even reminded me of Empire in a lot of ways, which may or may not have been intentional. Young Rowena Downshire is still very much the star, as she tries to find her footing in the company of Erasmus Pardon and Anselm Meteron, retired campaigners determined to keep her from realizing she’s one of nine subjects being studied by God as part of His Grand Experiment. But each of our valiant heroes gets their moments in the sun, as we learn how far they’re willing to go on the side of right. Much like Empire, The Fall expands various characters like Rowena’s mother Clara, but also adds a bunch of new faces to the mix. There’s even a Palpatine-esque shadow cast by Anselm’s father, Bishop Meteron, though he isn’t quite the Big Bad you’d expect – if he’s a villain at all.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018 edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018 edited by Paula Guran

Comments 1 comment

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018-smallWe’ve just about wrapped up the Best of the Year season, the summer/fall period when eight publishers and a dozen editors collaborate to produce ten volumes gathering the best short science fiction, fantasy, and horror of the year. We’ve had eight so far, from Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, David Afsharirad, N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams, and others.

But we’re not done yet — and in fact, this week two of my favorites landed on the same day. I’ll deal with Robert Shearman and Michael Kelly’s The Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Five in a future post, but today I want to talk about the latest installment in Paula Guran’s long-running Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror.

This is the ninth volume in the series, which has been continuously published since 2010. While Paula has been enormously productive in the last decade, this is her sole anthology in 2018, which she laments a little in her Acknowledgments.

This is, if she’s counted correctly, the forty-fifth anthology Guran has edited. Instead of what had become the usual multiple titles per calendar year, it is the only anthology that will appear from her in 2018. That’s probably a refreshing break for most people. She’s got mixed feelings about it herself. After more than a decade of full-time editing, she now freelancing. Guran enjoys the variety but regrets the lack of a monthly paycheck.

This year’s edition includes much of the most talked-about horror and dark fantasy of the year, including Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,” Laird Barron’s “Swift to Chase,” Priya Sharma’s “The Crow Palace,” M. Rickert’s “Everything Beautiful Is Terrifying,” Robert Shearman’s “The Swimming Pool Party,” and Stephen Graham Jones’s complete Tor.com novella Mapping the Interior, published at $10.99. Another reason why The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror is one of the best values on the shelves.

Altogether there are 26 stories in the latest volume, plus an introduction by Paula and a 7-page About the Authors section. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Three New Horror Stories to Chill Your October Nights

Goth Chick News: Three New Horror Stories to Chill Your October Nights

Comments 0 Comment
The Dark Beneath the Ice-small The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein-small Dracul Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker-small

With our favorite month of the year nearly half over, and the last two weeks of “the season” in full swing, we here at Goth Chick News have been living on a diet of adult beverages, caffeine and Pez. From making the rounds to Chicagoland’s best haunted attractions, to hosting our biennial Halloween bash for 200 (this year’s theme was Freak Show), there has been very little time to sleep as we work to cram in every last drop of fun before November 1st.

So, normally I would bring you these three new releases one at a time. But as it’s 3 a.m. here in the Midwest and I’ve had quite a lot of espresso, you’re getting them all in one go.

The Dark Beneath the Ice by Amelinda Bérubé was released in August and is the Canadian author’s first book. Technically it is considered YA, but as I didn’t know that going in, I honestly wouldn’t have guessed. Though I wouldn’t exactly bill it the way the publisher did, as “Black Swan meets Paranormal Activity,” The Dark Beneath the Ice is a terrific, creepy story that poses many questions, one of which is: can an inner demon summon the supernatural?

…

Read More Read More

Birthday Reviews: Ted Chiang’s “The Evolution of Human Science”

Birthday Reviews: Ted Chiang’s “The Evolution of Human Science”

Comments 0 Comment
Cover by Gregory Manchess
Cover by Gregory Manchess

Ted Chiang was born in October 1967.

Chiang has won the Hugo Award four times, for his novelettes “Hell Is the Absence of God” and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” for his short story “Exhalation,” and for his novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects. Both of those novelettes also won the Nebula as did his novelette “Tower of Babylon” and his novella “Story of Your Life,” which was turned into the Hugo and Bradbury Award-winning film Arrival. “Exhalation” also won the British SF Association Award and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. “Story of Your Life” earned the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for “Seventy-Two Letters.” Chiang has won the Hayakawa Award for “Understand,” “Story of Your Life,” and “Seventy-Two Letters.” The Lifecycle of Software Objects won the Italia Award. “Hell Is the Absence of God won the Kurd Lasswitz Preis. Translations of his stories “Story of Your Life,” “Hell Is the Absence of God,” “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” and The Lifecycle of Software Objects won the Seiun Award. In 1992, Chiang won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

“Catching Crumbs from the Table” originally appeared in the June 1, 2000 issue of Nature. When Chiang included it in his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others (later reprinted as Arrival), he changed the title to “The Evolution of Human Science.” The story was translated into French for the collection La Tour de Babylone and into German by Karin Will and Michael Plogmann for the collection Das wahre Wesen der Dinge. It was translated into German again in 2017 for inclusion in the March issue of Spektrum der Wissenschaft.

Chiang’s “The Evolution of Human Science” is an interesting short story which doesn’t have any characters. It is written as an editorial appearing in a future issue of Nature which notes that humans are no longer making any breakthroughs in scientific endeavors. Metahumans who have been genetically modified are the ones who are pushing the boundaries while humans can, at most, synthesize the metahumans’ achievements for a broader audience. The humans aren’t always good at that since many of the successes of the metahumans, while beneficial to the mere humans, can’t really be understood by the unenhanced mind.

…

Read More Read More