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The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of July 2018

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of July 2018

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Kill the Farm Boy Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson-small City of Lies Sam Hawke-small Redemption’s Blade Adrian Tchaikovsky-small

July has been a terrific month for fantasy readers, with several exciting debuts, more than a few big names, and a handful of highly anticipated installments in popular series. As usual, Jeff Somers at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog handily summarizes the most interesting titles of the month. Here’s a half-dozen of his best selections.

Kill the Farm Boy by Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson (Del Rey, 384 pages, $27 in hardcover/ $13.99 digital, July 17)

Hearne and Dawson set out to undermine the white male patriarchy in a hilarious and surprisingly deep fantasy in the Pratchett mold. The titular, clichéd farm boy destined to save the world is killed more or less immediately after being anointed the Chosen One, but his death doesn’t end the threat to the world. A colorful band of unlikely heroes must assemble to do the job for him, including a half-rabbit bard, an aspiring evil wizard whose main skill is conjuring bread, a rogue lacking any sort of coordination, and, naturally, a talking goat. Their quest to take on the Dark Lord infesting their world with evil curses and evil-er magic is filled with plenty of jokes, songs, and riffs on the fundamental importance of cheese — but also delves into the inner lives of these crazy characters, making them real, interesting people. (Which is more than can be said of many super-serious epic fantasy stories.)

If Kill the Farm Boy is half as much fun as I’ve been hearing, it deserves to be the breakout title for the month. It’s book 1 of The Tales of Pell; no news yet on the next release.

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Birthday Reviews: Forrest Aguirre’s “Matriarch”

Birthday Reviews: Forrest Aguirre’s “Matriarch”

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Cover by Lara Wells
Cover by Lara Wells

Forrest Aguirre was born on July 29, 1969.

Aguirre’s career began around the turn of the millennium with several short stories appearing in various magazines and several Wheatland Press projects. He co-edited Leviathan, Volume Three with Jeff VanderMeer, which earned them a nomination for the Philip K. Dick Award and won them a World Fantasy Award. He also edited Leviathan 4: Cities and Polyphony 7, the latter with Deborah Layne.

Aguirre wrote “Matriarch” for inclusion in the David Moles and Jay Lake edited All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. The next year, Aguirre included the story in his collection Fugue XXIX.

“Matriarch” is a very short story, almost a vignette, which does not provide any real context for the story itself. It is set aboard a zeppelin which appears to have a crew of three: the titular pilot and her two crewmembers, LeFevre and LeBlanc. More important than setting or context is the story’s imagery. Aguirre describes the zeppelin in short terms, but they are evocative. The airship has clearly recently been in a battle and the losing forces, officials from the city below it, are dangling from ropes lowered from the zeppelin, skirting the heads of children in the city who have turned cannibal.

Even in their moment of triumph and riding above the ravenous throngs, the Matriarch and her crew don’t feel completely safe. LeFevre finds himself falling into the crowd below the zeppelin, and is killed and stripped clean by the children, almost as if he had fallen into a river swarming with piranhas. Losing LeFevre and the dangling officials to the cannibals allows the zeppelin to flee the scene of its victory and the carnage below, however, LeBlanc misreads the situation, much to his dismay.

There is little story and little setting in “Matriarch,” but Aguirre is fully able to describe the scenes through which the Matriarch zeppelin is flying. The imagery is almost cinematic in nature even if he doesn’t give too many specifics on what his characters, the city, or the airship look like. When he does deploy his expressive powers, Aguirre gets fully value.

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New Treasures: Redder Than Blood by Tanith Lee

New Treasures: Redder Than Blood by Tanith Lee

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Redder Than Blood Tanith Lee-small Redder Than Blood Tanith Lee-back-small Red-as-Blood-or-Tales-from-the-Sisters-Grimmer-medium

Tanith Lee passed away in 2015, and at the time I worried that meant her work would quickly vanish from bookstores.

That hasn’t happened, and it’s mostly due to the efforts of her long-time publisher DAW Books, who over the last three years has gradually been returning some of her most popular work to print in gorgeous new paperback editions, including all five Flat Earth novels, the Wars of Vis trilogy, the Birthgrave trilogy, and the just-released novella collection Companions on the Road. Most have covers by French artist Bastien Lecouffe Deharme (website here).

I’m especially appreciative that DAW also saw fit to release a brand new short story collection of dark fairy tales, Redder Than Blood, last year. It’s a companion volume to Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (1983), a paperback original published by DAW with a Michael Whelan cover no less than twenty-five years ago (above right).

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Vintage Treasures: Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland

Vintage Treasures: Take Back Plenty by Colin Greenland

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Take Back Plenty-small Seasons of Plenty-small Mother of Plenty-small

I’ve been buying up back issues of Science Fiction Eye, one of the better SF review zines of the 90s. SF Eye had a marvelous stable of hot young writers, including Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Paul Di Filippo, Pat Murphy, Gary Westfahl, Tony Daniel, Charles Platt, John Shirley, Jack Womack, Elizabeth Hand, Mark Laidlaw, and many others. I thought I’d enjoy revisiting the cutting edge genre journalism I found so thought provoking two decades ago, but what I really find entertaining this time around is the high quality reviews. Especially coverage of now-forgotten books like Colin Greenland”s Take Back Plenty (1990) the opening novel of his gonzo space opera trilogy featuring Tabitha Jute. Here’s a snippet of Sherry Coldsmith’s excellent review, from the Winter ’91 issue, which I bought on eBay last month for $7.50.

Take Back Plenty is a raid on the traditional space opera, a coup at the galactic palace. Its author has poked through the rubble of pulp SF, looking for the genre’s mermaids and Marie Celestes. Greenland’s pickings include a fecund Venus that chokes with unconquerable jungles, and an arid Mars scarred by canals. More modern tropes are also put to use: cyberjacks, talking corpses, titanic tin-can inhabitants that circle the Earth. Greenland has chucked away anything that requires scientific veracity and kept anything that possess mythic dazzle.

The protagonists are as fascinating as the background. Tabitha Jute is the owner-operator of a space vehicle, the sentient and personable Alice Liddell. These two soul sisters of the Sol system get into love and trouble in a world that Is a surreally logical as the one the bedeviled Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

Take Back Plenty won both the British Science Fiction and Clarke awards for Best Novel; it was followed by two sequels, Seasons of Plenty (1995) and Mother of Plenty (1998). Greenland’s last two books, Spiritfeather (2000) and Finding Helen (2003) appeared only in the UK. You can read Coldsmith’s complete review of Take Back Plenty (and the tail end of the enthusiastic notice of Crichton’s Jurassic Park) here — page 1 and page 2. See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

In 500 Words or Less: An Ancient Peace by Tanya Huff

In 500 Words or Less: An Ancient Peace by Tanya Huff

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An Ancient Peace Tanya Huff-small A Peace Divided-small The Privilege of Peace-small

An Ancient Peace (Peacekeeper #1)
By Tanya Huff
DAW Books (432 pages, $7.99 paperback, $1.99 eBook, October 2016)

I love seeing characters in new contexts. An author creating a character who’s rounded and nuanced and thrilling to read about is something really special – characters like Harry Dresden, Millie Roper, Sira di’Sarc, or Logen Ninefingers. When an author can take that character, spin the world around them and let them thrive in an entirely changed environment – that’s something else entirely, and it’s phenomenal to see done well. Like moving Morgan to Fear the Walking Dead or Worf to Deep Space Nine.

And that’s exactly what Tanya Huff has done with Torin Kerr, formerly the star of the Confederation novels and now one of the central characters to the recently-concluded Peacekeeper trilogy. I’m a little behind the game in that I’ve only just read the first novel, An Ancient Peace, but damn if it wasn’t even more exciting and compelling than the previous Torin adventures I’ve read. In any long-running series, there are bound to be books that stand out and others that comparatively don’t measure up (much as I love The Dresden Files, not all fifteen are actual magic) but so far Huff consistently makes each novel even better than the last.

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Future Treasures: Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah

Future Treasures: Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah

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Before She Sleeps-smallThe hit Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale has brought a whole new generation of readers to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel — and spawned a growing subgenre.

One of the more interesting to me is Pakistani author Bina Shah’s upcoming Before She Sleeps, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a novel that is in explicit conversation with The Handmaid’s Tale… an overdue enlargement of the cultural conversation that Atwood’s novel continues to provoke.” The book has received considerable pre-publication buzz, and Publishers Weekly calls it “A haunting dystopian thriller.” Here’s the description.

In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible.

Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment.

This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid’s Tale about women’s lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women’s bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.

Bina Shah has written two collections and three previous novels, including A Season for Martyrs and the international bestseller Slum Child.

Before She Sleeps will be published by Delphinium on August 7, 2018. It is 256 pages, priced at $25 in hardcover and $17.99 for the digital version.

The 2018 World Fantasy Awards Ballot

The 2018 World Fantasy Awards Ballot

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Changeling Victor LaValle-small Mapping the Interior Stephen Graham Jones-small Tender Sofia Samatar-small

The 2018 World Fantasy Awards Ballot, containing a whole bunch of books I haven’t read yet, has just been announced. The ballot is compiled by the voting attendees of the World Fantasy Convention, all of whom clearly read a lot more than I do. Where do they find the time? Don’t they have blog posts to write, like normal people?

At least I have my membership for the convention, so I’ll be there to watch all the excitement unfold. It’s still a few months away, so I a little time to get caught up. Wish we luck.

As has been tradition since 1998, the coveted Life Achievement Award is being given to two recipients. This year they are Canadian author Charles de Lint and DAW Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth (Betsy) Wollheim. Both are fine selections, richly deserving of this recognition.

The winners in every other category will be selected by a panel of judges. Here’s the complete list of nominees, with links to our previous coverage.

Life Achievement

  • Charles de Lint
  • Elizabeth Wollheim

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A Modern Masterpiece: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

A Modern Masterpiece: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

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The-Hazel-Wood-Melissa Albert-smallI usually need to read at least a third of a book before deciding to review it for Black Gate. While I always read the books I review all the way to the end, sometimes it takes that long to decide. But when I picked up Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood, I suspected I’d review it after only reading the first two paragraphs. I was sure of it once I’d hit page three.

That’s got to be some kind of record.

Something’s strange about our protagonist, Alice Crewe. From a young age, she’s always been on the move. Her most dominant memory is the view of the blue sky out the sunroof. But according to her mother, their car doesn’t have one.

When she was three, Alice was abducted by a kind stranger who drove off with her in a blue Buick. Even though her mother swears she’s never seen the man before, we wonder if perhaps six-year-old Alice could be right, and he’s actually her father.

Throughout Alice’s childhood, dangerous people and peculiar occurrences dog Alice and her mother like persistent bad luck, so they lead a semi-nomadic existence, uprooting themselves whenever something uncanny gets too close. Until one day, when Alice’s mother receives a letter informing her of her mother’s death. “This isn’t… forgive me, but this isn’t a bad thing. It’s not,” she insists. “It means we’re free.”

Alice’s grandmother’s death means that, for once, they can stop moving. The bad luck’s gone. When their home is subsequently broken into, it’s not a resurgence of the curse. It’s just New York City being, you know, New York City.

Or so teenage Alice thinks, until the day she’s working at a coffee shop and realizes that one of her customers is the man who kidnapped her when she was six. He’s sitting at a table reading Tales from the Hinterland, the collection of dark fairy tales written by Alice’s grandmother that’s so rare, Alice has never been able to read it. When he sees that she’s noticed him, he exits in a hurry, taking the book with him but leaving behind a bone, a feather, and a red plastic comb. For the first time, Alice wonders whether her grandmother’s disturbing fairy tales might not be fiction.

Maybe they’re real.

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Birthday Reviews: John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Redhead”

Birthday Reviews: John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Redhead”

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BG_MacDonaldOtherWorldsEvery so often, I prove that the Black Gate firewall needs some serious tightening up by jumping in and putting up a post where I don’t belong (many readers and fellow bloggers believe that would be the entirety of the Black Gate website…). So, if you’re reading this, the crack web monitoring team hasn’t seen it yet. Don’t tell Steven Silver. He might gnaw through the restraining chain around his ankle and crawl over to my desk in the cellar…basement…journalist’s suite to thrash me.

John Dann MacDonald, my favorite author and one of the best writers of the twentieth century – in any genre – was born on July 24th, 1916. MacDonald, Harvard MBA and a lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, was thirty years old when he began writing for the pulps in 1946. Through hard work and talent, MacDonald quickly became successful, selling to the mystery and sports magazines.

He graduated to the slicks more quickly than most pulpsters and he began writing paperback novels in 1950, mostly for Fawcett Gold Medal and Dell. And in 1960 he created his famous non-private eye, Travis McGee, in The Deep Blue Goodbye. MacDonald wrote over 400 short stories and five dozen novels.

It’s less well-remembered that in the late forties and early fifties, MacDonald wrote a great deal of science fiction: over fifty short stories and two novels. He tired of the genre and essentially quit cold turkey in 1952, writing only seven more stories and one novel (The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything, which was made into a movie with Robert Hays and Pam Dawber) in the final thirty-four years of his life. He wrote that he tired of science fiction and simply quit writing it.

“Ring Around the Redhead” appeared in the November, 1948 issue of Startling Stories (His “Shenadun” had been in the September issue). It was anthologized in 1953 and again in 1967. I read it in Other Times, Other Worlds, a collection consisting entirely of science fiction stories by MacDonald.

Bill Maloney, an inventor, is on trial for murdering his next door neighbor. There’s no body, just some brain and hair bits. Anita Hempflet, the classic nosy neighbor (you know, the kind that says “I don’t mind anybody’s business but my own” and then proceeds to gossip like it’s an Olympic event) weighs in with her nose in the air, saying that Bill has been shacked up (remember: it’s 1948) with a pretty redhead who seems to be deaf and was wearing some odd, metallic clothing when she appeared.

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Next Year in Khatovar: She Is the Darkness by Glen Cook Part 1

Next Year in Khatovar: She Is the Darkness by Glen Cook Part 1

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oie_2353716i3KOHmsdA skinny, mangy mongrel raced past and on the dead run clamped jaws on a startled crow. He got a wing.

All the crows in the world descended on him before he could enjoy his dinner.

“A parable,” One-Eye said. “Observe! Black crows. Black dog. The eternal struggle.”

“Black philosopher,” Croaker grumbled.

“Black Company.”

One-Eye and Croaker from She Is the Darkness

It’s summer, I’m busy living a summer life. As Glen Cook books go, She Is the Darkness (1997) is a long one. Um, something, something, something. All that’s to say I’m breaking my review into two parts. It’s not what I’d normally do, but I don’t want to lose the momentum of reading the books back to back. Remember: beyond here lie spoilers.

At the end of the previous book, Bleak Seasons, the Black Company under the restored leadership of Croaker, aka the Old Man, aka the Captain, was girding its loins for the final march on the last stronghold of Longshadow, the last Shadowmaster.

Overlook is pretty much Glen Cook’s version of Barad-dûr. Its walls rise to a hundred feet, and are covered in protective spells. Inside lurk untold numbers of soldiers backed by the terrible sorcery of the erstwhile Taken, Howler, and Longshadow himself.

In the field, ex-Black Company chief-of-staff Mogaba leads Longshadow’s last remaining army. Aided by another defector, Blade, Mogaba cannot imagine himself being beaten, and lies in wait for the Black Company and the soldiers of Taglios to attempt to force the pass over the Dhanda Presh Mountains.

Oh, and the wife of new Black Company Annalist Murgen was murdered by the Deceivers. During an assassination attempt on Croaker in the Palace of Taglios, a group of killers found their way into the living quarters of Murgen’s family and left his wife Sahra and her son dead. While not a completely broken man, Murgen is allowing himself to become addicted to traveling through time and space on the spirit of the comatose wizard, Smoke. Officially, Murgen’s doing this to spy on Longshadow and other things important to the health and welfare of the Black Company, but really it’s to avoid the depression brought on by the killing of Sahra. It continues to be a poorly explained and clunky device.

The death of Sahra is also not as simple as it seems. There’s a terrible secret surrounding it, and even though his late wife’s family, including the thoroughly kickass Uncle Doj, know what happened, Murgen doesn’t uncover it for many months. In a series flush with emotionally raw events, what really happened the night of Sahra’s death is one of the hardest in the whole series.

The entire first half of She Is the Darkness concerns the movement of Croaker’s forces towards the showdown with Mogaba’s and Blade’s. Meanwhile Murgen, flying on the wings of Smoke’s psyche, spies for his commander and fills in all the gaps for the reader, giving us an inside look at the doings of the Company’s enemies. There’s no getting around it, much of the first half of the book’s a slog. It might reflect some sort of logistical and strategic masterpiece if it occurred in real life, but on the page it moves like molasses on a winter day. Nonetheless, the book isn’t a disaster, just frustrating.

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