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Experience a Darkly Gripping Vision of the Future with the San Angeles Trilogy by Gerald Brandt

Experience a Darkly Gripping Vision of the Future with the San Angeles Trilogy by Gerald Brandt

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The Courier Gerald Brandt-small The-Operative-Gerald-Brandt-smaller The Rebel Gerald Brandt-small

Every time a trilogy completes, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

Today’s cake is in honor of Gerald Brandt’s San Angeles series. It opened with The Courier, which the B&N Sci-fi Fantasy Blog called “a darkly gripping vision of the future.” It was published in hardcover by DAW in March 2016. Here’s the description.

The first installment in the San Angeles trilogy, a thrilling near-future cyberpunk sci-fi series

Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level 2 trash in a multi-level city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border — a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of fourteen, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone’s help.

But a late day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients. Now she’s stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants. It looks like the corporations want Kris gone, and are willing to go to almost any length to make it happen.

Hunted, scared, and alone, she retreats to the only place she knows she can hide: the Level 1 streets. Fleeing from people that seem to know her every move, she is rescued by Miller — a member of an underground resistance group — only to be pulled deeper into a world she doesn’t understand.

Together Kris and Miller barely manage to stay one step ahead of the corporate killers, but it’s only a matter of time until Miller’s resources and their luck run out….

The Rebel, the third and final volume, arrived in hardcover November 14.

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Future Treasures: Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

Future Treasures: Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

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Quietus-smallTristan Palmgren is a Missouri writer; his ambitious debut novel Quietus arrives from Angry Robot next week. Una McCormack calls it “A truly outstanding debut… Palmgren takes the staples of science fiction – post-apocalypse, first contact, interventionism – and integrates them seamlessly, breathing new life into familiar forms.” Here’s the description.

A transdimensional anthropologist can’t keep herself from interfering with Earth’s darkest period of history in this brilliant science fiction debut

Niccolucio, a young Florentine Carthusian monk, leads a devout life until the Black Death kills all of his brothers, leaving him alone and filled with doubt. Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe racked by plague, is overwhelmed by the suffering. Unable to maintain her observer neutrality, she saves Niccolucio from the brink of death.

Habidah discovers that neither her home’s plague nor her assignment on Niccolucio’s world are as she’s been led to believe. Suddenly the pair are drawn into a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.

As interesting as all that is, I’m more fascinated by this snippet from an interview with Palmgren at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

Every time we read history, we change it. We bring our biases and myopias. If we’re honest, we can be aware of them. (And if we’re naive, we can convince ourselves that we’ve found all of them, or that being aware means we escaped them.)

Quietus embraces the observer. It’s about the paradox of being an observer – the biases we bring to history, the urge to touch…. Every time we read history, we bring ourselves to it like we bring ourselves to everything else we read. Our perspective lurks between the lines. Quietus, as does other science fiction and fantasy about history, takes the observer out of the hidden space and into the text. We confront ourselves as observers, and see what we bring without intending to. And by using the freedom of fantasy to play with the facts of the past, I want to make that past feel like the present.

Quietus will be published by Angry Robot on March 6, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Dominic Harman. A sequel, Terminus, is already scheduled for November 6, 2018.

Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

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Cover by Phil Parks
Cover by Phil Parks

While 2018 isn’t a leap year, that doesn’t stop us from celebrating authors with that very particular birthday.

Tim Powers was born on February 29, 1952. Other authors who were born on leap day include Patricia McKillip, Howard Tayler, and Sharon Webb. Powers has frequently collaborated with James P. Blaylock, occasionally using the joint pseudonym William Ashbless, which is not only a pseudonym, but a poet both authors have referred to in their works.

Powers has won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novels The Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace. His novels Last Call and Declare have won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and he won the Collection award for The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. Anubis Gates also won the Prix Apollo and Geffen Award, Declare earned Powers an International Horror Guild Award, and The Stress of Her Regard won a Mythopoeic Award and Ignotus Award. A translation of the story “A Soul in a Bottle” won the Xatafi-Cyberdark Award. In 2014, LASFS recognized Powers with the Forry Award.

In 2003, Subterranean Press published an anthology by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock called The Devils in the Details, which contained a story by each author and a collaborative effort. Powers contributed “Through and Through.” The story was included in his collection Strange Itineraries and again in Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.

“Through and Through” tells the tale of a priest doing a stint in the Confessional shortly after a woman committed suicide in his church. He had received her confession, but was unable to give her absolution. A week after her funeral, she returns to receive the penance he refused her the first time.

In other hands, the priest might have suffered from a crisis of faith, however Powers priest is grounded in the secular world, while easily accepting that the woman’s ghost can be in the confession. At the same time, he is trying to balance the changes that have been introduced to the traditional priesthood and sacraments he embraces, and those the Church is currently promoting.

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Andrew Liptak on 18 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in February

Andrew Liptak on 18 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in February

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Tarnished City Vic James-small The Gone World Tom Sweterlitsch-small Echoes of Understorey by Thoraiya Dyer-small

Andrew Liptak’s February book selections give you a nice opportunity to be an armchair tourist in some pretty exotic locales (“Visit distant planets, conspiracies, and galactic conflicts!”)

Just as important for diligent book fans, Andrew catches us up with some of the more intriguing ongoing fantasy series. So without further ado, let’s see what he has for us this month.

Tarnished City by Vic James ( Del Rey, 416 pages, $25 in hardcover/$10.99 digital, February 6, 2018)

Vic James began her career last year with The Gilded Cage, in which the world belongs to a class of gifted magical aristocrats. In the next installment of her Dark Gifts trilogy, an uprising has been crushed, and protagonist Abi Hadley’s brother Luke has been framed for the murder of Parliament’s Chancellor Zelston. She goes into hiding, and after her brother is condemned to a remote estate, she hatches a plan to save him. Publisher’s Weekly says that readers will “appreciate the multifaceted complexity of James’s world and its lively, determined characters.”

We covered the opening volume, Gilded Cage, back in April.

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Vintage Treasures: Dark is the Sun by Philip Jose Farmer

Vintage Treasures: Dark is the Sun by Philip Jose Farmer

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Dark is the Sun Philip Jose Farmer-small Dark is the Sun Philip Jose Farmer-back-small

The first Philip Jose Farmer book I ever read was To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), the Hugo-Award winning first novel in his famous Riverworld series. Today he’s just as well known for his World of Tiers, Dayworld, and Tarzan novels, among many other other popular series. Farmer was famously prolific, and he kept at it right until the very end, when he died in 2009 at the age of 91.

I have more than a few Philip Jose Farmer books in my to-be-read pile. But the oldest, way down in the stratified layers near the floor, I bought back in 1980 . Dark is the Sun, one of his lesser known novels, is a far-future science fiction tale that reads like epic fantasy, and the classic Darrell K. Sweet cover certainly reinforced that. There are witches, thieves, gigantic walking skeletons, mobile plants, magic eggs, haunted jungles, and the threat of a collapsing universe… if you wanted to market a novel to a million young D&D players in the early 80s, you could have done a lot worse.

Dark is the Sun reminds me of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, with its fifteen-billion-years hence setting; the 1982 British paperback edition from Panther, to my mind, rather resembled Brian Aldiss’ far-future classic Hothouse (see below).

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Birthday Reviews: Stephen Goldin’s “The Last Ghost”

Birthday Reviews: Stephen Goldin’s “The Last Ghost”

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Protostars-small Protostars-back-small

Cover by Gene Szafran

Stephen Goldin was born on February 28, 1947. Prior to becoming a science fiction author, Goldin earned a degree in astronomy and worked as a civilian space scientist for the US Navy.

Beginning in 1976, Goldin wrote the Family d’Alembert novels, based on a novella by E.E. “Doc” Smith. He followed that series up with the Parsina Saga and wrote the two volume Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series in collaboration with his second wife, Mary Mason.

He co-edited the anthology Protostars with David Gerrold and edited the anthology The Alien Condition solo. Goldin also collaborated with his first wife, Kathleen Sky, on both fiction and non-fiction. He received a Nebula nomination for his short story “The Last Ghost” in 1972.

“The Last Ghost” originally appeared in the 1971 anthology Protostars, edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin. Lloyd Biggle, Jr. reprinted it in Nebula Award Stories Seven. Goldin included it in two of his collections, The Last Ghost and Other Stories and Ghosts, Girls, & Other Phantasms. It has been translated into French twice and German twice.

Goldin looks at a distant future in which immorality of a sort has been achieved by downloading people’s consciousness into machines. His two characters, which he arbitrarily designates as male and female, have both been downloaded into a computer for several thousand years.

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A Demanding Work that Sings all the Stronger in 2018: The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White

A Demanding Work that Sings all the Stronger in 2018: The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White

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The Witch in the Wood-small The Witch in the Wood-back-small

In my early teens, I discovered and devoured T.H. White’s omnibus quartet of novels, The Once and Future King. The first and most child-like remains the best known: The Sword in the Stone. After this, and unjustly neglected (by Disney and the world in general), come The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle In the Wind.

In my later teen years, I concluded that The Once and Future King, taken as a whole, was the single best novel I had ever read. Having reached the ripe old age of fifty, it’s time to re-evaluate. Is White’s work still worth its weight in gold?

Perhaps you recall Book One, in which the young King Arthur, known affectionately as the Wart, meets Merlyn, gambols through a lifetime’s worth of transformational adventures, and draws a certain sword from a stone. Hysterically funny, dreamy and given to long flights of fancy about hawks and birds, The Once and Future King still works genuine magic, even when its digressions and mood swings threaten to topple the whole everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink mess into a stew of narrative anarchy.

In short, it’s a full meal and then some, and I, along with fantasy lovers the world over, adore it still. (Ursula K. LeGuin, R.I.P., lent her opinion to one edition’s jacket copy, saying, “I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life.”) Yet, many seem unaware that the cycle, tracing Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, continues.

Book Two began life as The Witch in the Wood, and arrived in print in 1939, just as the world fell off a precipice it hadn’t seen coming, and descended into a darkness from which it is still fighting to recover. Revised and expanded, The Witch in the Wood became The Queen of Air and Darkness, and no book better upholds the argument for valuing a work as the sum of its discordant parts.

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New Treasures: The Throne of Amenkor by Joshua Palmatier

New Treasures: The Throne of Amenkor by Joshua Palmatier

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The Throne of Amenkor Joshua Palmatier DAW-small The Throne of Amenkor Joshua Palmatier DAW-back-small

Joshua Palmatier is a high-energy guy. I wrote about his science fictional Ley Trilogy last year, and I backed his 2017 Kickstarter for the Guilds & Glaives anthology because it contains stories by no less than four Black Gate authors: David B. Coe, James Enge, Howard Andrew Jones, and Violette Malan.

That ought to be enough from one guy to satisfy even the most demanding readers. So I was surprised to find a fat 840-page volume from Palmatier during my last trip to Barnes & Noble: The Throne of Amenkor. It turns out to be an omnibus reprint collecting three of his early fantasy novels:

The Shewed Throne (384 pages, $8.99 in paperback, January 3, 2006)
The Cracked Throne (400 pages, $7.99 in paperback, November 7, 2006)
The Vacant Throne (480 pages, $8.99 in paperback, January 2, 2008)

All three were published in hardcover by DAW, and are still in print in mass market paperback a decade later — an impressive feat. K. Tang and Charlene Brusso reviewed them enthusiastically for Black Gate, but I never had the chance to enjoy them myself. I already have a handful of Joshua Palmatier novels sitting on my nightstand, and an anthology on the way, but I’m a sucker for these big omnibus editions from DAW and I ended up bringing The Throne of Amenkor home with me anyway.

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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

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A Wrinkle in Time-smallGiven to me by the same friend who told me about A Wizard of Earthsea, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) is another of the books that introduced me to fantasy and science fiction. The novel is a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and good dose of Christianity, and is completely unbound by any rules or expectations about genre. A children’s book, it is also an artifact of a time when fantasy wasn’t primarily a commercial designation. There’s a freshness to the book all these years later, and rereading it was an absolute joy.

Meg Murry is the fourteen-year-old daughter of scientists, and sister to twins Sandy and Denys and the strange, brilliant five-year-old Charles Wallace. Her father, employed by the government, has been missing for some time before the book’s opening, and there has been no word about what happened to him.

In her own eyes Meg is gawky and ugly, made so by her “mouse-brown” hair, glasses, and “teeth covered with braces.” Her self-impression and her worry over her father’s disappearance have caused her to become a poor student. Her principal, a man unsympathetic to her worry to the point of telling her she needs to “face the facts” about her father (implying he’s never returning), warns her she’s in danger of having to repeat ninth grade.

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Future Treasures: Dayfall by Michael David Ares

Future Treasures: Dayfall by Michael David Ares

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Dayfall Michael David Ares-smallReading between the lines of Michael David Ares’ bio, it sounds like he’s a successful ghostwriter who is finally striking out with a novel of his own. Dayfall has a distinct Blade Runner vibe, and in fact Tor is strongly playing up that angle. The preliminary cover design (right) has a cover blurb from KW Jeter, while the final copy I currently hold in my hot little hands uses the same blurb, but prominently credits Jeter as the author of Blade Runner: Replicant Night. On the back cover is the following quote from Amy Lignor, author of Tallent & Lowery:

A novel that brings Blade Runner to mind. Dayfall is strong, intense and beyond memorable.

The comparison to Blade Runner seems apt enough, I suppose, although Dayfall has its own unique premise. Here’s the description.

FEAR THE DAY

In the near future, patches of the northern hemisphere have been shrouded in years of darkness from a nuclear winter, and the water level has risen in the North Atlantic. The island of Manhattan has lost its outer edges to flooding and is now ringed by a large seawall.

The darkness and isolation have allowed crime and sin to thrive in the never-ending shadows of the once great city, and when the sun finally begins to reappear, everything gets worse. A serial killer cuts a bloody swath across the city during the initial periods of daylight, and a violent panic sweeps through crowds on the streets. The Manhattan police, riddled with corruption and apathy, are at a loss.

That’s when the Mayor recruits Jon Phillips, a small-town Pennsylvania cop who had just single-handedly stopped a high-profile serial killer in his own area, and flies him into the insanity of this new New York City. The young detective is partnered with a shady older cop and begins to investigate the crimes amidst the vagaries of a twenty-four hour nightlife he has never experienced before. Soon realizing that he was chosen for reasons other than what he was told, Jon is left with no one to trust and forced to go on the run in the dark streets, and below them in the maze of the underground. Against all odds he still hopes that he can save his own life, the woman of his dreams, and maybe even the whole city before the arrival of the mysterious and dreaded event that has come to be known as…. DAYFALL.

Dayfall will be published by Tor Books on March 13, 2018. It is 286 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Paul Youll. Read the complete first chapter here.