Browsed by
Category: Books

The Best of a Master Fantasist: The Zoran Zivkovic Collection

The Best of a Master Fantasist: The Zoran Zivkovic Collection

Impossible Stories-small Impossible Stories II-small The Papyrus Trilogy-small The Five Wonders of the Danube-small

Serbian master fantasist Zoran Zivkovic has an enviable international reputation. His novels include The Writer (1998), Impossible Encounters (2000), and The Ghostwriter (2009), and his mosaic novel The Library won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2003.

But his appearances in English here in the US has been spotty. Which is one of the reasons I was so delighted to see Cadmus Press publish The Zoran Zivkovic Collection, four gorgeous volumes of his best work, translated into English:

Impossible Stories I — 422 pages, $34, November 10, 2016 (Includes “Time Gifts,” “Impossible Encounters,” “Seven Touches of Music,” “The Library,” and “Steps through the Mist”)
Impossible Stories II — 428 pages, $34, Dec 10, 2016 (Contains the collections Four Stories Till the End, Twelve Collections, The Bridge, Amarcord, and Miss Tamara, the Reade)
The Papyrus Trilogy — 608 pages, $41, August 1, 2016 (The cases of Dejan Lucik. Includes three novels: The Last Book, The Grand Manuscript, and The Compendium of the Dead)
The Five Wonders of the Danube — 198 pages, $26, August 1, 2016

All four are hardcovers featuring striking cover art by Japanese artist Youchan Ito. On his website the author calls them “the first four volumes of The Zoran Živković Collection,” which implies there will be more. The publisher claims all four volumes “will be available in hardcover, trade paperback, and electronic editions,” but for now the hardcover editions are the only ones I can find.

Goth Chick News: A Fan Girl Meltdown Over Amazon’s Good Omens

Goth Chick News: A Fan Girl Meltdown Over Amazon’s Good Omens

good-omens-smallI can say with certainty that I almost never get worked up over film adaptations of books, with good reason; they rarely live up to their source material.

But today I make an exception.

I might actually squee… Well probably not, but still.

Amazon Studios recently announced a six-part adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens which will debut in 2018.

Insert small squee here.

I first picked up the book Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch in an airport bookstore in 2006. I then proceeded to laugh out loud on my flight from San Jose to Chicago, and laughing out loud at a book is something I haven’t done since my first reading of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Later I picked up of the audio version which I listened to in the car and nearly drove off the road. Finally, in January of 2015 I acquired the BBC Radio 4 dramatization, performed with a full cast and fell in love all over again.

There is no better cure for a bad day then listening to a few chapters of Good Omens.

But what is just so darn amusing about the story?

For me it has all the elements — demons, angels, witches, the Antichrist — all wrapped in a story that boldly showcases the absurdity of it all in the most biting and British of ways.

The book is set “today” but the show will be set in 2018 and in both, the world is on the brink of an apocalypse. But follies ensue when Aziraphale, a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley, a demon, aren’t all that enthusiastic about the end of the world, having grown quite comfortable with their lives on earth. Also, they may have misplaced the Antichrist. And he may just be an ordinary boy who wants to stay in his small town with his gang of friends.

I’m snickering just typing that.

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

New Treasures: Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

Universal Harvester

It’s great to be plugged into the industry, so I can hear what editors and publicists think are going to be the big books each season. And it’s incredibly helpful to be involved with a network of bloggers and reviewers who give me their take on the same thing.

But nothing beats hearing from readers — and what I’m hearing from readers is that John Darnielle’s modern horror novel Universal Harvester is the book that’s currently keeping them up at night. It’s available now in hardcover Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state ― the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.

But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets ― an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store ― she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.”

Read More Read More

SFWA Announces the 2016 Nebula Award Nominations

SFWA Announces the 2016 Nebula Award Nominations

The-Obelisk-Gate-smallerThe Nebulas are here! The Nebulas are here!

Ahem. Excuse me if I get a little giddy. The Nebula Award is one of the most prestigious awards in our field. I was asked to present the award for Best Novelette at the 2015 Nebulas in Chicago, and last year the Awards were even more exciting, as several Black Gate bloggers and authors — including Amal El-Mohtar, Lawrence M. Schoen, and our website editor C.S.E. Cooney — were nominated for major awards.

So it’s always exciting when the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) announces the nominees — and this year is no exception. This year’s nominees are (links will take you to our previous coverage):

Novel

All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
Borderline, Mishell Baker (Saga)
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
Ninefox Gambit,Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
Everfair, Nisi Shawl (Tor)

Read More Read More

In Viriconium by M. John Harrison

In Viriconium by M. John Harrison

oie_213541TcmWZhNHAnd so we come to the end of M. John Harrison’s trilogy of novels set in the far, far future of our world. For In Viriconium (1982) Harrison drops almost all elements of heroic fantasy in presenting the story of the artist Ashlyme. Ashlyme’s effort to rescue another artist, the reclusive Audsley King, from a plague outbreak is set against the antics of two manic deities. Woven through the novel are characters and clues that tie it to the previous two, The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings (reviewed at the links). Some build on the earlier stories while others seem to deconstruct and reconfigure them.

The Low City, the poorer section of Viriconium and the one most given over to decay, has been struck by a strange malady:

The plague is difficult to describe. It had begun some months before. It was not a plague in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a kind of thinness, a transparency. Within it people aged quickly, or succumbed to debilitating illnesses — phthisis, influenza, galloping consumption. The very buildings fell apart and began to look unkempt, ill-kept. Businesses failed. All projects dragged out indefinitely and in the end came to nothing.

Day by day it is spreading, restricting travel in and out of a growing portion of the Low City. Hidden away in her rooms above the Rue Serpolet, Audsley King remains the most famous and sought after artist in Viriconium. Even as the plague pares away the substance and people of the city, her agent, Paulinus Spack, is hoping to produce a new play with sets designed by her. All across the High City, Viriconium’s wealthy district, patrons are itching to invest in something featuring King’s creations. She, for that to happen, must leave the Low City — but she does not wish to. In addition to her acceptance of eventual death from the plague, she is repulsed by her potential benefactors:

“Besides,” she said, “I would not go if they did. Why should I go? The High City is an elaborate catafalque. Art is dead up there, and Paulinus Rack is burying it. Nothing is safe from him — or from those old women who finance him — painting, theater, poetry, music. I no longer wish to go there.” Her voice rose. “I no longer wish them to buy my work. I belong here.”

Spurred by a desire to save one of Viriconium’s most important figures, Ashlyme agrees to convince King to flee to the High City. If she cannot be convinced he will, with the help of the astronomer Emmet Buffo, kidnap her and bring her out anyway.

Read More Read More

Black Gate Online Fiction: Mouth of the Dragon by Tom Barczak

Black Gate Online Fiction: Mouth of the Dragon by Tom Barczak

Mouth of the Dragon wrap-small

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Mouth of the Dragon: Prophecy of the Evarun by Thomas Barczak, published in deluxe trade paperback and digital formats this month by Perseid Press. Thomas Barczak’s short fiction has appeared in the award-winning Heroes in Hell anthologies edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris; his previous novels include the epic fantasy novel Veil of the Dragon, and the Kindle serial Awakening Evarun.

Chaelus watched them fall, one by one, like cordwood; five Servian knights brought down to the bristling snow.

Crimson feathers stuck out against the pallor. Even from a half a league away he could see them, like the blood they let. The red fletching of the Khaalish. But Chaelus didn’t need the whisper of the Giver to drift through him to know it was a ruse. It wasn’t the Khaalish. It was something far worse.

It was the Hunters.

Idyliss bowed her head without his command and flew across the snow-covered plain.

They were still too far away for him to save them.

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The Vorrh Book II – The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

Future Treasures: The Vorrh Book II – The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

The Vorrh and The Erstwhile-small

Early last year, Matthew David Surridge reviewed the Vintage trade paperback edition of The Vorrh here at Black Gate, calling it:

A powerful, fascinating book that defied easy categorization; epic fantasy or epic horror, magic realism or magic surrealism, it seemed bigger and stranger than whatever one might think to call it. Set mostly in Africa and mostly in the years after World War I, it deals with a forest called the Vorrh, where reality and time and logic become confused. A hunter tries to cross the forest, another man tries to stop him, yet another man tries to stop the second. Meanwhile, in a colonial German city that exists inside the forest, a young cyclops is educated by peculiar automata…

Vintage has announced the impending arrival of the sequel, The Erstwhile, which will be released in trade paperback next month.

Read More Read More

Get Reacquainted with the Gentlemen Bastards in Scotty Lynch’s The Bastards and the Knives

Get Reacquainted with the Gentlemen Bastards in Scotty Lynch’s The Bastards and the Knives

The Lies of Locke Lamora-small Red Seas Under Red Skies-small The Republic of Thieves-small The Bastards and the Knives-small

I hear nothing but good things — really, nothing but great things — about Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. The opening novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and placed second in the Locus poll for First Novel, and became a bestseller in paperback. The Republic of Thieves placed third in the 2014 Locus poll for Best Fantasy Novel.

The series so far is composed of:

The Lies of Locke Lamora (June 2006)
Red Seas Under Red Skies (June 2007)
The Republic of Thieves (October 2013)

Next month Gollancz releases The Bastards and the Knives, an omnibus collection of two prequel novellas in the series, “The Mad Baron’s Mechanical Attic” and “The Choir of Knives.” Both are previously unpublished.

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Novels of Lawrence Watt-Evans

Vintage Treasures: The Novels of Lawrence Watt-Evans

Lawrence Watt Evans-small

My introduction to Lawrence Watt-Evans was his brilliant short story “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” which originally appeared in the July 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and which I read in his 1992 collection Crosstime Traffic. It won the Hugo Award for best story of the year. And while the overall tone of the tale is downbeat, even melancholic, it is hands-down one of the most optimistic and life-affirming short stories I’ve read in any genre. Check it out if you haven’t had the pleasure already — it appears in a bunch of different anthologies, including The New Hugo Winners, Volume II (1992), The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of the 20th Century (1998), and a 2013 Escape Pod podcast.

Lawrence’s most significant contribution to the genre, however, has been his novels — and he’s written a lot of them. His first, The Lure of the Basilisk, appeared in 1980; since then he’s produced five novels in The Lords of Dûs series (which Bob Byrne wrote about here), The Worlds of Shadow trilogy, The Obsidian Chronicles trilogy, thirteen novels set in the world of Ethshar (originally developed as a role-playing game setting), beginning with The Misenchanted Sword (1985), The Annals of the Chosen trilogy, The Fall of the Sorcerers series, and many others. Under his Nathan Archer pseudonym he’s produced a pair of Star Trek novels, Spider-Man: Goblin Moon (1999), two Predator novels, and much more.

I tend to like my SF and fantasy dark and gritty, and Lawrence’s work — especially his early novels — had a reputation for being light hearted and fun. So for much of his career I tended to ignore his work, which I’ve recently come to realize was a significant oversight. So when I found the lot of vintage Lawrence Watt-Evans novels above for sale on eBay for just $7.95 (shipping included), I found it irresistible. It arrived last week.

Read More Read More

Thrill-Power Overload: A History of the British Comic 2000 AD

Thrill-Power Overload: A History of the British Comic 2000 AD

Thrill-Power Overload-1

I love comic book history. I’ve got a few books at home of the golden and silver age of American comics I reread every so often.

I recently got the chance to check out Thrill-Power Overload, the history of the British comic book series 2000AD in honor of their 40th anniversary.

I usually read only American comics, but over the last two years, I’ve been reading 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics, both the recent ones, and some of the their collected volumes, so this was a timely discovery for me, and a fascinating one.

2000AD was an experiment when it launched in 1977. British comic books were weekly publications, and not glossy, and until the launch of 2000AD, they were very much targeting younger readers with pretty tame, conservative stories with production and artistic values that didn’t even credit the creators.

2000AD‘s editorial and creative team had a vision of a far edgier anthology science fiction comic book, one whose tone I can best describe as punk rock sensibilities seen in sequential story, or an anti-authoritarianism giving the finger to the world. The creators of the time call the tone comedy and violence.

It featured genetically-engineered soldiers, robot fighters (and fighting robots), soldiers, assassins, and most importantly, Judge Dredd, a futuristic police officer of centuries in the future, stopping crime in the combined roles of police, judge and executioner.

Read More Read More