Browsed by
Category: Books

Unbound Worlds on the Best Sci-fi and Fantasy Books of December

Unbound Worlds on the Best Sci-fi and Fantasy Books of December

Comments 0 Comment
The Chaos of Luck-small Fleet Insurgent-small The Girl in the Tower-small

It that’s time of year again. You know what I’m talking about. That time when everyone and their grandmother publishes a Best of the Year list. Why do they do it? Why??

I’ll tell you why. Because we love them. We love Best of the Year lists, and probably always will. We’ve got a few days left until the end of the year, and we’ll cover as many of them as we can. Starting with Unbound Worlds and their Best Sci-fi and Fantasy Books of December 2017, written by Matt Stags.

The Chaos of Luck by Catherine Cerveny (Felicia Sevigny, Book 2; Orbit, 432 pages, $16, December 5, 2017)

A Brazilian tarot card reader and a Russian crime lord race to stop a conspiracy in this steamy science fiction adventure – the sequel to the exciting series that began with The Rule of Luck.

I completely missed the first Felicia Sevigny novel, The Rule of Luck, released last November from Orbit. I guess that means I have more to look forward to. This series about Brazilian tarot card reader Felicia Sevigny and Russian crime lord Alexei Petriv, the most dangerous man in the TriSystem, is set in the year 2950, after humanity has survived devastating climate shifts and four world wars. Petriv will trust only Felicia to read his cards, but the future she sees is dark indeed.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader: The Omnibus by Andy Hoare

Future Treasures: Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader: The Omnibus by Andy Hoare

Comments 3 comments

Rogue Trader the Omnibus-smallFantasy Flight released the epic Rogue Trader role playing game in 2009. One of the early fruits of their Warhammer 40,000 license, Rogue Trader allowed players to play intrepid merchant princes buying and selling outside the legal boundaries of the Imperium. I became a fan immediately, and it quickly became my favorite science fiction RPG.

Fantasy Flight lost the Warhammer 40K license last year, and the game is now out of print. I thought that would be the end of the brand, so I was pleased to see Black Library put Rogue Trader: The Omnibus on their schedule for next month. It’s a compilation of three novels and two short stories by Andy Hoare. Rogue Star (2006) and Star of Damocles (2007) chart the fortunes of rogue trader Lucian Gerrit on the Imperium’s fringes, and Savage Scars (2011) picks up the tale as the White Scars battle the T’au on the planet Dal’yth. Rogue Trader: The Omnibus arrives in trade paperback on January 23.

Explore the stars and the farthest reaches of the galaxy with the complete Rogue Trader omnibus, containing the novels Rogue Star, Star of Damocles and Savage Scars.

Licensed by ancient charter, Rogue Traders explore the uncharted regions of the galaxy, seeking new worlds to exploit on behalf of the Imperium. The fortunes of Rogue Trader Lucian Gerrit and his family are in decline, and his inheritance amounts to little more than a pile of debt and misery. In a final, desperate gamble to restore his family’s former glory, Gerrit strikes a deal on a forgotten Imperial world in the Eastern Fringe, but his timing could not be worse. The alien tau are seeking to expand their empire across the Damocles Gulf, and soon Gerrit is caught in the middle of a clash between two mighty star-spanning empires, neither of which is willing to back down.

Rogue Trader: The Omnibus will be published by Games Workshop/Black Library on January 23, 2018. It is 800 pages, priced at $21 in trade paperback. Read more at the Black Library website.

Vintage Treasures: Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

Vintage Treasures: Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

Comments 0 Comment
Tom Reamy Blind Voices-back-small Tom Reamy Blind Voices-small

In a 2014 Vanity Fair interview, George R.R. Martin shared just how profoundly he was affected by the death of Tom Reamy in 1977.

Tom died of a heart attack just a few months after winning the award for best new writer in his field. He was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. Instant. Boom. Killed him… Tom’s death had a profound effect on me, because I was in my early thirties then. I’d been thinking, as I taught, well, I have all these stories that I want to write… and I have all the time in the world… and then Tom’s death happened, and I said, Boy. Maybe I don’t…

After Tom’s death, I said, “You know, I gotta try this. I don’t know if I can make a living as a full-time writer or not, but who knows how much time I have left?…” So I decided I would sell my house in Iowa and move to New Mexico. And I’ve never looked back.

In the same article George also commented on the relentless pace of production on Game of Thrones, saying “Long before they catch up with me, I’ll have published The Winds of Winter, which’ll give me another couple years. It might be tight on the last book, A Dream of Spring, as they juggernaut forward.” Might be tight indeed. Almost four years later The Winds of Winter remains unpublished, and GoT has long since passed the novels.

Who the heck was Tom Reamy? That’s a question the late Bud Webster attempted to answer in his inaugural column in Black Gate 15.

…

Read More Read More

Celebrate the Spirit of the Holidays With The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler

Celebrate the Spirit of the Holidays With The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler

Comments 2 comments
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries-small The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries-back-small

Here in the Midwest we got a 2-inch dusting of snow on Christmas Eve, just enough to put everyone in the mood for the holidays. When it comes to a White Christmas, there’s nothing like a little just-in-time inventory.

We have our share of holiday traditions here in the O’Neill-Dechene household. And one of them is reading a mystery tale or two from Otto Penzler’s Big Book of Christmas Mysteries over the holidays, curled up in the living room by the fire, next to the Christmas tree. There aren’t a lot of things in this modern world that bring peace to a body. But lemme tell you, that’s definitely one of them.

Otto Penzler’s brick-sized Big Book anthologies are some of the great unsung bargains of modern publishing. We’ve covered a few of them over the years, and he publishes a new one every October (this year’s was The Big Book of Rogues and Villains, which we discussed two months ago.) But The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, an imposing 672-page volume containing yuletide ctime stories from Ellery Queen, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ellis Peters, Donald E. Westlake, Damon Runyon, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, John D. MacDonald, Peter Lovesey, Max Allan Collins, Marjorie Bowen, Ed McBain, Sara Paretsky, Mary Higgins Clark, Ngaio Marsh, Isaac Asimov, Ed Gorman, G. K. Chesterton, Rex Stout, O. Henry, and Agatha Christie, is one of my favorites. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Mountain by Ursula Pflug

New Treasures: Mountain by Ursula Pflug

Comments 3 comments
Mountain Ursula Pflug-small Mountain Ursula Pflug-back-small

I’ve been seeing the name Ursula Pflug pop up more and more in the last few years — in magazines like Lightspeed and Strange Horizons, and prestigious anthologies like David Hartwell’s Northern Suns and Postscripts. Matthew David Surridge reviewed her first short story collection After the Fires for us back in 2012, saying:

I don’t remember where I first came across Ursula Pflug’s name… From what I’d heard, she was a Canadian writer of literary fantasy, which was enough for me to take a chance on the book… Overall, these are quiet tales, surreal, dreamlike, and often elliptical… Still, there’s a clarity to the stories. Though filled with loss and despair, they often conclude with hope: they seem parables about seeking healing or wholeness, fables of fitting into place…

The stories are ultimately memorable, fascinating, because of the precision of language, and because the language briefly gets across the radical instability of fiction: in worlds constructed only of language, not of physics, anything can happen… It’s a distinctive element of a brief and strange collection. After the Fires is fascinating work, haunting and unfamiliar.

On her website she describes her latest, Mountain, as “a near-future cli-apocalypse YA thing.” It’s a novella published by Inanna Publications on June 20, 2017. It is 98 pages, priced at $19.95 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Val Fullard.

Future Treasures: Robots vs. Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and‎ Navah Wolfe

Future Treasures: Robots vs. Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and‎ Navah Wolfe

Comments 1 comment

Robots vs Fairies-smallThe Starlit Wood, the first book from Dominik Parisien and‎ Navah Wolfe, was one of the most acclaimed anthologies of 2016. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award, and won the Shirley Jackson Award. And Amal El-Mohtar’s “Seasons of Glass and Iron” swept the short fiction awards, winning the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards.

Their second anthology, scheduled to arrive in two weeks from Saga Press, is Robots vs. Fairies, and it includes another steller list of contributors, including Seanan McGuire, Jonathan Maberry, Kat Howard, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jeffrey Ford, Madeline Ashby, Lavie Tidhar, John Scalzi, Catherynne M. Valente, and many others. Publishers Weekly says:

Distinguished authors take sides in battles between robots and fairies by crafting serious (and seriously weird) reflections on whether magical or mechanical might would prove the stronger… Ken Liu creatively takes on big cities, rats, and unforeseen consequences in “Quality Time.”… Sarah Gailey’s “Bread and Milk and Salt” is a horrific rumination on the true natures of robots, fairies, and humans. Editors Parisien and Wolfe (The Starlit Wood) have cannily chosen a variety of stories that offer individual, distinctive insights into both living machines and magical creatures, along with glimpses of how humans might react to their face-off.

Reviews have already started to appear. Howling Libraries says Tim Pratt’s “Murmured Under the Moon” is a tale of “a human librarian who takes care of a fairy library, and is forced to go on a rescue mission when the fairy princess is taken hostage by a wicked man… fun, and unique, and magical, and fantastical, and sweet.” And Jim C. Hine’s Peter Pan-inspired “Second to the Left, and Straight On” is “twisted and haunting and beautiful and absolutely heartbreaking… It’s about a private investigator who is seeking out little girls that have been abducted by Tinker Bell.”

Read more at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, including the catalog copy and more details on the intricate cover, here.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

Lost and Found Treasure

Lost and Found Treasure

Comments 6 comments
Sword and Sorceress VII-small Sword and Sorceress VII-back-small

A few weeks ago, I was cruising Facebook when I stopped up short at a familiar image.

It was on our esteemed editor John O’Neill’s wall. And as is often the case with such things, I was struck by a wealth of memories. I received Sword and Sorceress VII as a gift for my 12th birthday. It was probably bought at the B. Dalton in College Mall in Bloomington, IN, one of two easily accessible bookstores on that side of town back in 1990. (Before anyone does the math too fast, yes, I’m celebrating a big birthday next year. It’s in May, if you want to send gift cards for more books.)

I couldn’t tell you exactly which stories were in this volume. I know it had one of Mercedes Lackey’s “Tarma and Kethry” tales in it, but beyond that none of them stand out alone. But as a whole, that volume changed my life as a reader. While I’d feasted on the The Chronicles of Narnia, Robin McKinley, and Susan Cooper, this book was my first exposure to fantasy for grown-ups. And it was full of women.

When I think casually, 1990 doesn’t feel that far away. But in terms of the way women were portrayed in fiction it was another era entirely, and in ways I can’t even begin to explain unless you were there.

…

Read More Read More

There’s No Place Like Home

There’s No Place Like Home

Comments 2 comments

Peake gormen 1We’re always hearing about using setting as a character , and there’s no doubt that some stories simply can’t be told if they were set somewhere other than the place they’re in. Like, say, the wuthering heights in Wuthering Heights. You know, places that aren’t just somewhere for the characters to be (everyone has to be somewhere) but that in some way inform the whole story, and perhaps the characters as well.

I’m not here today to talk about setting in general, however. No Middle Earth, no Barsoom. No landscapes, thank you. At the moment I’m far more interested in human-made structures: people’s homes, public buildings, etc.

I’m tempted to suggest that buildings first gained their literary eminence in the gothic novels of the 18th century.  Works like  Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otronto, and Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho relied so much on their buildings – which gave the novels their sense of place and situation – that we’d have to ask ourselves whether the gothic would even be possible without the dark creaky old house/monastery/castle? Sure, we’ve also got the natural sublime, the mountain crags, the fogs and the mists, but they’re just the background for the titular buildings.

…

Read More Read More

Fantasy as Something Brighter: Peter S. Beagle’s The Overneath and Jane Yolen’s The Emerald Circus

Fantasy as Something Brighter: Peter S. Beagle’s The Overneath and Jane Yolen’s The Emerald Circus

Comments 0 Comment
The Overneath-small The Emerald Circus-small

The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications, 336 pages, $15.95 in trade paperback, November 14, 2017)
The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen (Tachyon Publications, 288 pages, $15.95 in trade paperback, $9.99 digital, November 14, 2017)

In 1900 Frank L. Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, arguably the first truly American fairy tale. Now, a century and counting along the Yellow Brick Road, what can be said about the current state of the fairy tale in America? We seem deep in the wilds of dystopias like Hunger Games and its darker cousin, The Walking Dead, captivated by the grim fantasies of American Gods and Game of Thrones. Is this the new reality for the American fable, for literary fantasy that aspires to be anything more than a Disney retelling?

Against this darker background, a pair of recent collections from San Francisco’s Tachyon Publications attempts to reestablish or at least reconfirm fantasy as something brighter, if no less compelling. The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle and The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen (both published November 2017) together provide a sample of American fantasy by two of its most enduring and cherished voices. Beagle and Yolen are both giants, with hundreds of publications and dozens of awards between them. They have won the highest accolades in the fields, and both now write from positions of something like legend. But do the unicorns of Beagle or the Arthurian retellings of Yolen have anything to give readers who have come to expect a heavy dose of grim realism or even grimmer apocalypse in their high fantasy?

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley

Vintage Treasures: Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley

Comments 2 comments
Red Dust Paul McAulley-small Red Dust Paul McAulley-back-small

Paul J. McAuley was the first book reviewer for Black Gate, way back in 2000-01. His first novel, the far-future space opera Four Hundred Billion Stars (Del Rey, 1988) won the Philip K. Dick Award, the sequels Of the Fall and Eternal Light appeared in 1989 and 1991.

His first standalone novel Red Dust, set on a far-future Mars colonized by the Chinese, was published by Gollancz in the UK in 1993 and AvoNova in the US in 1995. It was packed with big ideas and technologies that are still being explored in SF today, including personality downloads, biotech, virtual reality, nanotech, A.I, and a lot more. Kirkus Reviews raved, saying:

An extraordinary saga.. Seven hundred years hence, a depopulated Earth is ruled by the Consensus eco-fanatics who allow nothing to change; on Jupiter, a self-aware probe calling itself the King of the Cats broadcasts rock music and propaganda; various dwindling groups of dissenters inhabit the asteroid belt; and Mars, habitable but slowly reverting to dust and drought and populated mostly by Chinese, is ruled by a committee of ruthless old men called the Ten Thousand Years, who, in a secret pact with the Consensus, have agreed to let Mars die in return for personal immortality. Young technician Wei Lee, who believes himself beholden to his great-grandfather, one of the Ten Thousand Years, stumbles upon a spaceship crashed in the dust… McAuley’s Mars is at once satisfyingly familiar and disquietingly alien: cultural contrasts, persuasive inventions, and constant surprises are set forth with a weird yet compelling logic. Superb.

The novel has never been reprinted in the US, but copies are still fairly easy to find online. I bought the brand new copy above on eBay for $4 two months ago. It was published by AvoNova in November 1995; it is 392 pages, priced at $4.99 in paperback. The cover is by Tim Jacobus. A digital edition was published by Gollancz/Orion in 2010. Our previous coverage of Paul J. McAuley includes his recent Choice Series and his Confluence novels.