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Vintage Treasures: The Cockatrice Boys by Joan Aiken

Vintage Treasures: The Cockatrice Boys by Joan Aiken

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The Cockatrice Boys Joan Aiken-back-small The Cockatrice Boys Joan Aiken-small

Twenty years ago this week I received the artifact above in the mail, with a news release from Tor Books tucked inside: a trade paperback re-issue of Joan Aiken’s The Cockatrice Boys, with a 100% gonzo cover and interior art by Jason Van Hollander.

Joan Aiken, the daughter of the Pulitzer prize winning poet Conrad Aiken, was the author of many novels for young adults, including Black Hearts in Battersea, The Cuckoo Tree, and the 4 million-copy bestselling The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. According to the press release that came with my copy, The Cockatrice Boys was her “first adult fantasy novel… a weird, and wonderful adventure that combines the horror of Salem’s Lot with the fantasy and charm of Alice in Wonderland.” That certainly sounds gonzo, anyway.

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Future Treasures: Glass Town by Steven Savile

Future Treasures: Glass Town by Steven Savile

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Steven Savile has written several Warhammer books, including Curse of the Necrarch (2008), and the Vampire Wars: The Von Carstein trilogy (2008). His novels include Moonlands (2012) and Sunfail (2015), and he’s written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Stargate. His US debut is Glass Town, a tale of magic and mystery lurking in London. It arrives in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press next month.

In 1924, two brothers both loved Eleanor Raines, a promising young actress from the East End of London. She disappeared during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s debut, Number 13, which itself is now lost. It was the crime of the age, capturing the imagination of the city: the beautiful actress never seen again, and the gangster who disappeared the same day.

Generations have passed. Everyone involved is long dead. But even now their dark, twisted secret threatens to tear the city apart.

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A Mashup Between 2001 and The Walking Dead: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

A Mashup Between 2001 and The Walking Dead: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

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Illuminae Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff-small

When you crack open the cover of Illuminae (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), the first thing you read is a memo to Executive Director Frobisher written by someone with a ghost ID. The memo explains that the rest of the book contains public documents exposing a secret corporate war. You don’t know who Executive Director Frobisher is. You also don’t know who’s using the ghost ID. But you will by the last page of the book, and this information will make you want to start re-reading the novel all over again.

But for now, all you’ve read is the memo. Turning the page, you encounter an interview filed with the United Terran Navy between an anonymous staffer and sarcastic teenager Kady Grant. Yes, Kady has a bad attitude. No, Kady isn’t a team player. But you’ll roar with laughter as she figuratively pies the interviewer in the face time and time again when he asks questions about her escape from the violent invasion of her planet. You’d be unwise to underestimate her. She might be short, but she’s good with computers.

Interspersed with Kady’s interview is another with Ezra Mason, the guy she broke up with the morning of the invasion. (At one point, Kady explains to her interviewer, she and Ezra were dodging explosions and ground troops when he says to her: “You picked a hell of a day to dump me, Kades.”)

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New Treasures: Above the Timberline by Gregory Manchess

New Treasures: Above the Timberline by Gregory Manchess

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One of the most interesting review copies to land on my desk in the past six months is Gregory Manchess’ debut novel Above the Timberline, a postapocalyptic arctic fantasy with zepplins, lost cities, and a whole lot of adventure.

Manchess is best known as a painter. His work has appeared in feature and covers for National Geographic Magazine, Time, Atlantic Monthly, The Smithsonian, as well as numerous commissions for stamps by the US Postal Service. Above the Timberline, a 240-page hardcover, is his first novel, and it is gorgeously illustrated on every page. The art, in fact, is crucial to the tale.

And what a tale! In hi feature review at Locus, Paul Di Filippo calls it “A spectacular success… [a] postapocalyptic arctic dieselpunk love story with polar bears and a hint of Indiana Jones.” It was published by Saga Press on October 24. Here’s a closer look at some of that gorgeous interior art.

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Dark Osprey: The Shadowy Worlds of Cthulhu, Alien Bug Hunts, and a Nazi Moonbase

Dark Osprey: The Shadowy Worlds of Cthulhu, Alien Bug Hunts, and a Nazi Moonbase

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The Cthulhu Campaigns Ancient Rome-small Nanzi Moonbase Dark Osprey-small Bug Hunts Dark Osprey-small

Over the last forty years Osprey Publishing has built up a sterling reputation for its long running series of illustrated military history books. Role-players, wargamers, and even casual readers like me have enjoyed them, and used them as reference guides.

Black Gate author Joseph McCullough joined Osprey a decade ago, and since then Osprey has produced a growing volume of books of interest to gamers and genre fans alike, including Steampunk miniatures rules (In Her Majesty’s Name), the Frostgrave tabletop skirmish game, and the Osprey Adventures line. But most interesting to me is Dark Osprey, a series of marvelously imaginative and well-illustrated tomes that serve as excellent setting books for the RPG of your choice.

While Joe was written several, they’ve also recruited a handful of other top-notch authors, including Warhammer author Graeme Davis, Trail of Cthulhu scribe Kenneth Hite, novelist Mark A. Latham (The Lazarus Gate), and others. So far they’ve published over a dozen, including The Cthulhu Campaigns Ancient Rome by Mark Latham, Nazi Moonbase by Graeme Davis, and Bug Hunts: Surviving and Combating the Alien Menace by Mark Latham.

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Goth Chick News, New Treasures: Demon Freaks by J.R.R.R. (Jim) Hardison

Goth Chick News, New Treasures: Demon Freaks by J.R.R.R. (Jim) Hardison

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As a huge fan of Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and since I was trying to figure out what to do with myself now that I’ve binge-watch Stranger Things 2… twice… I was particularly excited to open up the latest intriguing book release from my pals over at Wunderkind PR.

First, the author’s name is J.R.R.R. (Jim) Hardison, and whether that’s a joke or not, it’s funny, at least to me – like he wanted to outdo John O’s buddy George R. R. Martin by one “R” and see him a “J.” Next, Hardison’s bio is rather amusing, as well as impressive:

Jim has an epically silly career. He’s been a movie producer (The Creature from Lake Michigan), an animation director (UPNs Gary and Mike), a screen writer (Popeye’s Voyage, SeeMore’s Playhouse) and a graphic novelist (The Helm). He even appeared on the NBC show The Apprentice as an expert adviser on brand characters. This is his second novel following his epically silly fantasy Fish Wielder.

Last, according to the additional information Wunkerkind shared, Jim would love to entertain interview questions concerning why horror films often feature bands as his current novel does.

Do they? I mean, Jennifer’s Body did, but that’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but okay.

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Future Treasures: The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty

Future Treasures: The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty

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Dungeon Masters Guide-small The City of Brass-small

The City of Brass! One of the most storied locations in fantasy! Or it would be, except that no one dares write about it. Ever since it was featured on the cover of Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979 (above left), the opulent city of efreet floating on the Elemental Plane of Fire has loomed large in the imaginations of Dungeons and Dragons players around the world. But beyond a single tale from the Arabian Nights, there’s been precious little to feed those eager minds.

So I was intrigued to read the details of The City of Brass, the upcoming debut fantasy from S. A. Chakraborty, which has been described as a blend of The Golem and the Jinni, The Grace of Kings, and Uprooted. It’s a tale of a magical Middle Eastern kingdom, and a clever and young con artist with strange gifts. It arrives in hardcover from HarperVoyager next week.

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by — palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing — are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive.

But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to reconsider her beliefs. For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass — a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

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A Tale from the Archonate: A Wizard’s Henchman by Matthew Hughes

A Tale from the Archonate: A Wizard’s Henchman by Matthew Hughes

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a-wizard-s-henchman-hardcover-by-matthew-hughes-[3]-3997-pI hate Matthew Hughes’ book, A Wizard’s Henchman (2016). Not for the wonderfully complicated cosmogony of its universe; not for the ease with which it slips between dark humor and nightmarish horror; not for its uber-compentent, sympathetic hero, Kaslo. No, I hate it because, although it’s the first volume in a new series, it turns out it’s also a culmination of sorts for Hughes’ long-running Archonate series, and I didn’t know that going in. I had no idea until well into AWH that it serves as a major hinge point in his fictional universe, where one type of reality is supplanted by an entirely different one. Now, if I limit myself to the expoits of master discriminator Henghis Hapthorn, I have three novels and a collection of short stories to read. If I don’t limit myself, there’s another ten books to add to the list.

Obviously, I don’t hate A Wizard’s Henchman. In fact, I love it — for all the reasons I mention above and more. Many comparisons have been made between Hughes and Jack Vance, even by Hughes himself (where he describes the Archonate’s explicitly Vance-inspired origins). On the surface, it’s easy to see similarities in the two authors’ works: a love of rarely-used words; sly humor; non-stop inventiveness harnessed to creating oddball societies ruled by idiosyncratic rules and rulers; etc. Hughes, though, is no mere mimic. Like Michael Shea and Neal Barrett Jr., Hughes clearly carries a torch for Vance, but it does not outshine his own talent, originality, and powerful instincts as a creator of captivating stories and great originality.

Up until now, most of the Archonate stories have occurred in Earth’s stellar arm among thousands of settled worlds, collectively called the Spray. Apparently, (SOMETHING I WOULD HAVE KNOWN IF I’D READ ANY OF THE OTHER BOOKS FIRST) one of the central conceits in the series is that magic is staging a universal comeback, at which point it will completely replace cause-and-effect empiricism. Hughes created the sci-fi version of the Archonate as the last age before that of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. (As a side note, let me say that if you haven’t read them you should be ashamed. Buy them now and read them tonight). In Vance’s books, old Sol is a fading crimson orb illuminating an Earth that’s a long way down the path toward extinction, and where more magic has been forgotten than is even remembered anymore. A Wizard’s Henchman is about the days following the transition of the Universe to a place where sympathetic magic rules everything and the laws of physics have lost much of their sway.

Like a James Bond movie, AWH opens with a mini-adventure. Erm Kaslo, a licensed confidential operative, has arrived on the world of Cheddle to enforce an arrest warrant for Binnie Varshun for defrauding Diomedo Obron. As soon as he meets the local police chief, Kaslo is knocked out, then wakes up in a prison camp. In the aftermath of his escape, Kaslo starts to learn that certain people, his employer, Obron, among them, believe the Universe was once run by magic and is about to be again.

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New Treasures: Infinite Stars, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

New Treasures: Infinite Stars, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

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Infinite Stars-smallBryan Thomas Schmidt is probably best known as the guy who loudly stormed out of the 2015 Hugo Awards when he lost in the Best Editor, Short Form category (he lost to No Award, since all the nominees were dictated by Vox Day as part of his Rabid Puppy slate). Black Gate was part of the same slate, but we withdrew our nomination (and Bryan unfriended me immediately thereafter).

That’s an unfortunate thing to be known for, especially since Bryan has done some really excellent work before and since. His other anthologies include Shattered Shields, Little Green Men―Attack!, Mission: Tomorrow, Galactic Games, and many others. His latest book, the massive Infinite Stars, is the most ambitious project of his career to date: a 674-page anthology of space opera tales featuring some of the biggest names in the industry. Here’s Rich Horton’s take, from the October issue of Locus.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s new anthology Infinite Stars is a big collection of space opera stories, split roughly evenly between reprints and originals. The reprints serve to some extent as an introduction to the subgenre, with examples from such classic series as Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind, Anne McCaffrey’s Ship Who Sang books, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, A.C. Crispin’s Starbridge, and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Codominium… These serve their purpose very well — they are a set of significant stories and showcase space opera from the ’50s to the present day nicely…

Most of the other stories in this book are also parts of series… these series include some really major SF landmarks: Orson Scott Card’s Ender universe, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson continuing Frank Herbert’s Dune series, David Weber’s Honorverse. There are stories from some more recent series that I’ve really enjoyed — Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War, for example (which she has just returned to), and David Drake’s Leary/Mundy (or RCN) series. It was nice also to be introduced to some work new to me, such as Linda Nagata’s Red stories, Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet, and Charles R. Gannon’s Caine Riardon stories…

All in all, Infinite Stars is a strong celebration of the variety and power of the space opera subgenre, both in its history and its ongoing vitality.

As Rich points out, there’s a great deal to enjoy in this book for any fan of space opera, old and new.

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Self-published Book Review: At Yomi’s Gate by John Meszaros

Self-published Book Review: At Yomi’s Gate by John Meszaros

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I’m always looking for more books to review. If you have any, send them my way.

yomi coverJohn Meszaros’s novel, At Yomi’s Gate, is a story about medieval Japan, in which every legend, myth, and religious belief are not only true, but play an active role in the story. Central to the story is the fire god Kagu-tsuchi. Lord Kotoheisei has trapped him in the Batsu-no-Kaji, from which he releases him only to wreak havoc on his enemies. Kagu-tsuchi is a mindless engine of destruction, destroying everything in his vicinity unless he can be controlled. This is not his story. Instead, it is the story of the Batsu-no-Kaji, a young woman named Sakura.

On Lord Kotoheisei’s first attempt to use his weapon, he loses control of Kagu-tsuchi. Ikuko, the priestess whose job it is to keep the fire god contained, escapes with Sakura, and Lord Kotoheisei is furious. He sends his nephew Fumito out to find his Batsu-no-Kaji and bring her back, on threat of murdering his family one-by-one. Fumito is no warrior, but an artist who uses illustrated scrolls to tell stories. Both he and Lord Kotoheisei know that the ink he uses is enchanted with the fire god’s magic, and will no doubt draw the Batsu-no-Kaji to him.

Fumito has no illusions about the kind of man his uncle is, and when he finds Sakura and Ikuko, he decides that he is willing to sacrifice his family to save thousands from Kagu-tsuchi’s fire. However, in their attempt to free Sakura of Kagu-tsuchi, they instead transfer Kagu-tsuchi’s magic into her. Bursting with her newfound power, Sakura decides she will rescue Fumito’s family and get her revenge on Lord Kotoheisei. The attack does not go as planned, however, and Fumito barely escapes Kotoheisei’s palace with his one surviving relative, his sister Yoko. Before the story is through, Ikuko, Sakura, Yoko, and Fumito will face ghosts and demons, gods and oni, and travel to the underworld of Yomi itself in order to defeat the forces trying to control Sakura’s fire.

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