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An Old-Fashioned Space Opera: The Transcendental Machine Trilogy by James Gunn

An Old-Fashioned Space Opera: The Transcendental Machine Trilogy by James Gunn

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I settled in with the latest issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction last week, and noticed something unusual… it had two stories by James Gunn, both set in his Transcendental universe, the setting for his novels Transcendental, Transgalactic and the newly-released Transformation. In the comments on my Asimov’s piece Amy Bisson pointed out that it was Gunn’s birthday, and when I went to confirm that, Wikipedia casually informed me he was 94 years old… 94 and still writing cutting edge hard SF! The field hasn’t seen anything like that since Jack Williamson (who won a Hugo at the age of 92, and died in 2006 at the age of 98).

Interestingly, Gunn was one of Jack Williamson’s collaborators. They wrote Star Bridge together in 1955. Like Williamson, Gunn began his career in the pulps, selling his first stories to Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949. His first novels, including Star Bridge and This Fortress World, were published by Gnome Press in 1955. Carl Sagan called his 1972 novel The Listeners, runner-up for the first annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award, “one of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written.” In 1996, he novelized Theodore Sturgeon’s famed unproduced Star Trek script The Joy Machine. As an editor he’s best known for his monumental six-volume Road to Science Fiction anthology series, and he won the Hugo Award in 1983 for his non-fiction book Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He became SFWA’s 24th Grand Master in 2007, and he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2015.

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Future Treasures: A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon

Future Treasures: A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon

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A Man of Shadows Jeff Noon-smallJeff Noon is something of a legend among SF fans, chiefly for the breakout success of his audacious Vurt trilogy (Vurt, Pollen, Nymphomation). His latest is completely different, a science fiction noir thriller about a PI who takes on the case of a missing girl in an inverted city. I doubt any description I can come up with would do it justice… instead, here’s Noon’s comments on the Q*bert-inspired cover by Will Staehle.

I was truly excited when I first saw the cover design for A Man Of Shadows. Will Staehle has caught the essence of the novel: the noir atmosphere, the loneliness of the characters, the nature of the invented city with its mirrored images of light and dark, and the Escher-like labyrinth that my private eye hero is trapped within. The story is set in an alternative 1959, and the cover captures both the period feel as well as the more fantastical elements of the book. I couldn’t ask for a better design. It’s perfect!

See the complete cover reveal at Tor.com. Here’s the book description.

Below the neon skies of Dayzone – where the lights never go out, and night has been banished – lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna.

As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city’s fate. In the end, there’s only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk.

A Man of Shadows will be published by Angry Robot on August 1, 2017. It is 352 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Will Staehle (and you know I’m right about Q*bert). It is the first book in the John Nyquist series.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming fantasy and SF here.

In 500 Words or Less: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

In 500 Words or Less: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

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Red Country by Joe Abercrombie-smallRed Country
By Joe Abercrombie
Orbit (480 pages, $16.00 paperback, $9.99 eBook, October 2013)

One of my earlier reviews here focused on Best Served Cold, the first standalone novel in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world (but the fourth overall, for anyone playing the home game). You might remember that I was a little disappointed, but I still gave Abercrombie’s second standalone, The Heroes, a chance and was pleasantly surprised. Recently I cracked open the third (and most recent) of these standalone novels, Red Country – and though I was a little nervous at the beginning of the novel, I’ve decided this might be the best First Law of them all.

Since it was stated in a lot of promos for the book, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Red Country presents the return of Logen Ninefingers, the conflicted and half-mad barbarian who was among the First Law trilogy’s stars. Presumed dead, the “Bloody-Nine” is living under an assumed name, though if you’re reading closely enough (and didn’t read the back cover) you’ll figure out in the first chapter who the cowardly “Lamb” really is. This was where I started to get worried, and decided that if Abercrombie was going to play some game at trying to be subtle with Lamb’s true identity, my review here would be very different.

But Abercrombie isn’t that kind of writer. Instead, Logen’s attempts to keep his past and his worse nature at bay becomes a key focus of the book, elegantly constructed in his interactions with the novel’s other characters, as the reader wonders when his loved ones will get the full story. The brief mentions of characters and events in previous books, and the moments when other characters admit that they know exactly who Logen is, are woven in expertly without certain names ever being mentioned.

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A Kick-ass Female Perspective on Comics That’s Disturbingly Close to Real-Life: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

A Kick-ass Female Perspective on Comics That’s Disturbingly Close to Real-Life: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

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the-refrigerator-monologues-smallThe Wonder Woman movie has received considerable buzz for depicting an interesting lead female character who actually has a personality, is not dependent on some guy to come to her rescue and truly is the star attraction; it even has a female director. It’s enough to make you forgive the silly and at this point yawn inducing CGI pyrotechnics between good and evil ending that is apparently sacrosanct in these sort of flicks. Look, I enjoyed the movie, but for all its merits it’s still a sad commentary of our times that Wonder Woman is considered somehow ground breaking. Problem is, compared to the latest crop of superhero movies (maybe even movies in general) the bar isn’t set very high.

You want some real kick-ass female perspective on the comic book world that’s disturbingly close to real-life? Check out The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente. This is a series of short stories set in shared alternate comic book universe (with characters such as Grimdark and Kid Mercury and Doctor Nocturne evoking various Marvel and DC Comics personages) linked by a sort of AA session in which deceased women (with one exception who for her own reasons hangs out among the unliving) take turns explaining how they ended up in Deadtown, i.e., thanks to some male superhero or supervillian exploit.

The title of the collection is a take-off of The Vagina Monologues — the Eve Ensler play about sex and body image told from the perspectives of a variety of women representing different ethnic, sexual and class identities — and comic book writer Gail Simone’s observation that comic book women are typically hypersexualized for a male audience and often end up “refrigerated” — killed, disabled, or otherwise rendered marginalized or powerless in order to advance a male character’s storyline. Indeed, in “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane” the title character literally ends up in a refrigerator. (And, by the way, is just one of many great comic book kind of names that Valente invents for her cast of characters. Also by the way, it’s worth noting that in Wonder Woman a male character dies to advance our heroine’s story — perhaps an intentional inversion of the refrigerator motif?)

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New Treasures: An Oath of Dogs by Wendy N. Wagner

New Treasures: An Oath of Dogs by Wendy N. Wagner

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Wendy N. Wagner is the Managing Editor for Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines, as well as an editor for the fabulous Destroy series of anthologies, including Women Destroy Science Fiction, Women Destroy Fantasy, and Queers Destroy Science Fiction. She’s had short stories in Nightmare and Fantasy Magazine, as well as the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Armored, and Shattered Shields. She’s also published two Pathfinder novels, Skinwalkers and Starspawn, the latter of which has been described as “Pathfinder Meets Lovecraft.”

Her latest is something very different, an “exoplanetary colony sci-fi trip riddled with mystery and conspiracy” (Jason LaPier). It’s the tale of Kate Stadish, an investigator on an alien world of strange sentient dogs, mill towns… and murder. Ferrett Steinmetz (author of the ‘Mancer series, which we covered here), says “An Oath of Dogs nails the rough-hewn feel of a frontier town, then mixes it up with intergalactic corporate intrigue and alien biology. It’s like Lake Wobegon mashed up with a Michael Crichton thriller.”

An Oath of Dogs was published by Angry Robot on July 4, 2017. It is 430 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Joey HiFi. Read Chapter One at Wagner’s website.

John DeNardo on Your Best Bets for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror in July

John DeNardo on Your Best Bets for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror in July

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The Art of Starving Sam J Miller-small Age of Swords Michael J. Sullivan-small The Best Horror of the Year Volume Nine-small

As regular readers know, I enjoy John DeNardo’s survey pieces on the best new books every month over at Kirkus Reviews. For July, he’s assembled what could well be the best batch of new releases so far this year. Here’s John.

Summer reading season is in full swing, and if you’d like to join the beach party, there’s plenty of entertainment to be found in the pages of science fiction, fantasy, and horror books. July’s cream of the crop includes stories about a robot hitman, a dark and previously unseen perspective on Peter Pan, a woman with supernatural abilities who goes up against Nazis, aliens in New York, flying shapeshifters, and more short stories than you can shake a stick at.

The list this month includes new books by Nancy Kress, Kay Kenyon, Carrie Vaughn, Martha Wells, Charles Stross, Naomi Kritzer, Christopher Rowe, Margaret St. Clair, William Browning Spencer, Adam Christopher, and many more. Here’s a few of the highlights.

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Mysterion 2

Mysterion 2

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MysterionLast year, my wife and I published an anthology entitled Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith. We have been working on this project for over a year: reading submissions and selecting the stories, editing for content, copy editing, layout, cover design, printing, and selling. It was, as you can imagine, a lot of work. I wrote about some of the process here at Back Gate: calling for submissions, using math on submissions, and presenting the table of contents.

After all that, we were very happy with the result. We felt that we had achieved our goal of publishing stories that dealt with the Christian faith in an authentic way, stories which don’t fit comfortably into either religious or mainstream markets, which ask hard questions and refuse to settle for easy answers. In other words, stories that explored the mysteries of the faith.

We got a few nice reviews as well, at Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Cemetery Dance, and Tangent Online.

So now that we’ve had a chance to rest up, would we do it again?

Well, if you read the title of this post, you can probably guess the answer.

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Classic SF from One of the Twentieth Century’s Great Masters: The Best of John W. Campbell

Classic SF from One of the Twentieth Century’s Great Masters: The Best of John W. Campbell

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The Best of John W. Campbell (1976) was the seventh installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. Lester Del Rey (1915–1993) is again the editor; he also provides the introduction. H. R. Van Dongen (1920–2010) did the attractive cover art, and it seems in line with the artistic feel set by Dean Ellis, Darrell Sweet, and The Brothers Hildebrandt on the previous volumes. For those books, unless the author was deceased, the afterword was usually written by the author being celebrated. Since Campbell had passed a few years before this publication, his widow (also now deceased) provided an interesting afterword.

John W. Campbell (1910–1971) was more than just one of the greatest science fiction writers of the twentieth century. Probably more importantly, as editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog) from 1937 until his death, he is generally credited with being the primary shaper of the Golden Age of science fiction. He tutored such giants in the field as A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, and the great Robert A. Heinlein. And everyone from Isaac Asimov to Robert Silverberg credited him with being a major influence on their writing.

As I’ve said before, I’m not generally a big fan of science fiction; I tend to lean more towards horror and fantasy. And thus I know I tend to caricature classic sci-fi as being sometimes tedious and outmoded. But as with some previous writers in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series, I continue to be pleasantly surprised by some of these Golden Age (and later) science fiction writers. Since we’ve covered this volume once before (back in 2013), this time, rather than simply giving an overview of selected stories, I will primarily focus on some recurring themes and give some overall thoughts.

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If Batman Were a Teenager and Magically Talented: The Maradaine Novels by Marshall Ryan Maresca

If Batman Were a Teenager and Magically Talented: The Maradaine Novels by Marshall Ryan Maresca

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A Murder of Mages-small An Import of Intrigue-small The Holver Alley Crew-small

The Thorn of Dentonhill was Marshall Ryan Maresca’s debut novel. It followed the adventures of Veranix Calbert, diligent college student by day and crime-fighting vigilante by night, in the crime-ridden districts of the port city of Maradaine. It was nominated for the Compton Crook award, but it was the Library Journal‘s pithy review (“Veranix is Batman, if Batman were a teenager and magically talented”) that really piqued my interest.

I featured the sequel, The Alchemy of Chaos, as a Future Treasure in December 2015, and last week I checked online to see if there was news of any new volumes. There are indeed… in the last two years Maresca has produced no less than five novels set in the world of Maradaine, and there’s two more in the pipeline. His Maradaine series has fast become one of the most popular and interesting urban fantasies on the market, and Maresca has responded splendidly to the demands of his fast-growing readership for more. Here’s a quick recap of the series.

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New Treasures: Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp

New Treasures: Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp

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While I was at Wiscon in May, I didn’t just attend readings (although it probably seemed like it). I also hung out in the Dealer’s Room, where I bought a whole bunch of vintage paperbacks, most of which remain unpacked on the floor of my library. With luck, I can steal some time this weekend to photograph them for upcoming Vintage Treasures columns.

I haven’t unpacked them because all the time I would normally be spending with them, I’ve been spending instead with a fabulous anthology I bought from Greg Ketter: Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction. It’s packaged as a scholarly tome (and is even published by Wesleyan University Press), but don’t be fooled — this is a top-notch collection of pulp-era SF by women, which also doubles as a very compelling argument that “women have always been part of the genre” (to quote the back cover copy.) One of the great things about this volume — in addition to the fabulous (and rarely reprinted) pulp tales by Clare Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, C. L. Moore, and others — is that it also includes poetry, articles by women, editorials, and even a gorgeous selection of pulp covers in color.

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