Browsed by
Category: Books

Future Treasures: Spira Mirabilis, Book 3 of The Wave Trilogy, by Aidan Harte

Future Treasures: Spira Mirabilis, Book 3 of The Wave Trilogy, by Aidan Harte

Comments 1 comment
Irenicon Aidan Harte-small The Warring States-small Spira Mirabilis Aidan Harte-small

Spira Mirabilis Aidan Harte-back-smallIn her review of Irenicon, the opening novel in Aidan Harte’s Wave Trilogy, Sarah Avery wrote:

Welcome to Rasenna, a shining city-state turned failed state, where river spirits haunt the streets and mistake themselves for the citizens they’ve drowned. Rasenna’s people hide in their towers at night, and even by day fear the river their enemy wielded to cut their city in two…. Can a city recover from two decades of grief, madness, and self-destruction? Can these people change in time to save themselves? They’d better, because the rival city of sorcerous Engineers that smashed them before may well do so again…

Aidan Harte has been justly praised for his world-building in his debut novel. Irenicon is, almost, what we might get if Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities had lingered for a few hundred pages in one of its gem-perfect vignettes… Irenicon would make a perfect action film. Aidan Harte gives us a pretty good view of the movie he must have seen in his mind while he was writing. The flashing banners of Rasenna’s homegrown martial art, the glorious decay of a city that breeds endless tension, the disturbing chill of Concord’s purity and the darkness at its foundation, and (oh my!) the uncanny otherness of the river spirits could be the making of a summer blockbuster.

Sounded pretty dang good to me, but I resisted the urge to dive in right away. Partly because I gave Sarah our only review copy. But mostly because these days I avoid trilogies until I can hold all three titles in my greedy little hands. That resolution became harder and harder to keep as the accolades continued to pile up (click on the back cover of the third volume, at right, for some examples). But my long wait is finally over. The Warring States, the second volume, was published on April 7, 2015, and the final book, Spira Mirabilis, will be released in two weeks… and our review copy arrived last week. Interns, hold all my calls. I’m on assignment.

Spira Mirabilis will be published by Jo Fletcher Books on April 5, 2016. It is 522 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover. The cover is by Ghost.

ChiZine Announces Don Bassingthwaite’s Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight

ChiZine Announces Don Bassingthwaite’s Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight

Comments 0 Comment

Cocktails at Seven Apocalypse at Eight-smallDon Bassingthwaite is a man of many talents. We published his terrific sword & sorcery tale “Barbarian Instinct” in Black Gate 5, and an excerpt from his unpublished Kingdoms of Kalamar novel Point of the Knife in Black Gate 7. On top of that, he was the magazine’s Games Editor for our first four years, recruiting top-notch talent to write reviews for us, including Jennifer Brozek, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Webb, Johanna Meade, and Michael Thibault.

Don’s writing career has taken him to the top of the industry, with a dozen novels in the last ten years, from publishers like Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf. Over the years he’s also produced a series of highly regarded holiday tales, collectively known as the “Derby Cavendish” stories.

Earlier this month Don revealed the cover of his first short story collection, Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight: The Derby Cavendish Stories, in a Facebook post.

What’s this? A collection? Oh, you shouldn’t have!

ChiZine Publications has just revealed the cover (by the incomparable Erik Mohr) for my forthcoming collection Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight: The Derby Cavendish Stories — more details to come but look for it this fall!

Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight: The Derby Cavendish Stories will be available in both ebook and print editions. Look for it from Canadian publisher ChiZine later this year. I don’t have many more details at the moment — but trust me, as soon as I know more, so will you!

See our survey of ChiZine’s gorgeous 2014 catalog here.

New Treasures: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox

New Treasures: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox

Comments 0 Comment

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle-smallThe prolific Janet Fox, who wrote dozens of fantasy and SF stories between 1970-1995, as well as the Scorpio series (under the name Alex McDonough), was best known in later years as editor and publisher of the weird fiction journal Scavenger’s Newsletter. She died in 2009, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw a brand new novel with her byline arrive last week.

Turns out this isn’t the same Janet Fox. This Janet Fox lives in the UK, and is the author of Sirens, Forgiven, and Faithful. The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle is her fourth novel, a spooky tale of ghosts, ruined castles, and nazis. That’s all I need to know. I’m in.

“Keep calm and carry on.”

That’s what Katherine Bateson’s father told her, and that’s what she’s trying to do: when her father goes off to the war, when her mother sends Kat and her brother and sister away from London to escape the incessant bombing, even when the children arrive at Rookskill Castle, an ancient, crumbling manor on the misty Scottish highlands.

But it’s hard to keep calm in the strange castle that seems haunted by ghosts or worse. What’s making those terrifying screeches and groans at night? Why do the castle’s walls seem to have a mind of their own? And why do people seem to mysteriously appear and disappear?

Kat believes she knows the answer: Lady Eleanor, who rules Rookskill Castle, is harboring a Nazi spy. But when her classmates begin to vanish, one by one, Kat must uncover the truth about what the castle actually harbors — and who Lady Eleanor really is — before it’s too late.

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle was published by Viking Books for Young Readers on March 15, 2016. It is 400 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

Vintage Treasures: Three Apocalyptic Anthologies

Vintage Treasures: Three Apocalyptic Anthologies

Comments 8 comments
After the Fall-small Countdown to Midnight-small New Dimensions 1-small

Back in January I bought a nice lot of 42 vintage science fiction paperbacks on eBay. Most were from the 70s and 80s, and most were in pretty good shape. Enough to keep me busy for a month, taking them out of the box one by one and cooing over them.

Most of you are probably too young to remember that far back, when the Cold War was at its height and the specter of nuclear war loomed over everything. In November 1981 Gallup found that 53% of American adults expected a nuclear war within a decade, and after Nicholas Meyer’s apocalyptic TV film The Day After and NBC’s tense mock-documentary Special Bulletin, about terrorists who detonate a nuclear weapon, both aired in the spring of 1983, some polls showed that number rocket briefly above 70%. 70%! These days we can’t even get that many to agree that the President of the United States is Christian.

Not too surprisingly, a lot of science fiction from the era was preoccupied with tales of the apocalypse. The Cold War is long over, but those paperback treasures, with their morbidly imaginative visions of the end of the world and beyond, are still with us. You can find plenty of great anthologies with that theme very cheaply if you look (the ones I haven’t hoarded in my basement, anyway.) Today I want to look at three that I pulled out of my newly acquired collection: Robert Sheckley’s After the Fall (1980), H. Bruce Franklin’s Countdown to Midnight (1984), and Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions 1.

…

Read More Read More

The IX: Exordium of Tears by Andrew P. Weston

The IX: Exordium of Tears by Andrew P. Weston

Comments 4 comments

oie_2118595BlvQOK2dFrom his home in the Aegean, author Andrew P. Weston has sent out another blast of science fiction action (yeah, I don’t read only fantasy) with his new book The IX: Exordium of Tears, recounting the further adventures of the famous Legio IX Hispana. The preceding volume, The IX, was released last year and reviewed at Black Gate by me here.

To recap: the Roman IX Legion, their Celtic adversaries, US cavalry troopers, their American Indian foes, and a squad of British special forces operators were torn from their respective times just as they were about to be killed in battle, and teleported to the planet Arden. There, under the guidance of the planet-controlling AI “the Architect”, they were set to fight against the Horde, an endless force of energy-eating beings who had worked their way through the billions of inhabitants of the many worlds of the spacefaring Ardenese civilization. The Architect’s plan for surival is to store the genetic templates of the surviving Ardenese and revive them in the future, while using the warlike humans to destroy the Horde. In league with the survivors of previous groups of teleported humans from other timelines, guided by the super computer, and armed with such fun toys as mini-singularity bombs, the newcomers do just that. The books show their old school sci-fi roots in this bit of Campbellian human chauvinism. They also bring to mind stories by Gordon Dickson and Jerry Pournelle, a strong mark in their favor.

In the year between their victory and the start of the new book, many of the Ardenese are restored to life. Together, they and the humans are striving to restore the planet Arden to its pre-Horde state, but peace is fleeting.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

Future Treasures: The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

Comments 1 comment
The Nameless City-small The Nameless City-back--small

Faith Erin Hicks has had a pretty enviable career in comics, as a writer for Lumberjanes, Buffy: The High School Years and The Last of Us: American Dreams, and as an artist for Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, and Brain Camp. On her own she’s created Friends with Boys, Zombies Calling!, and the Eisner-Award winning The Adventures of Superhero Girl.

Her latest, The Nameless City, has the look and feel of epic fantasy. Built on an ancient mountain pass, cut through sheer rock by some long-lost technology, the Nameless City has been conquered so many times that its long-suffering inhabitants — a melting pot of an unknown number of previous civilizations — can’t even agree on what to call it. Thirteen year-old Kaidu, the privileged son of a tribal leader, comes to the city to meet his father, a general with the ruling Dao army, for the first time. General Andren is a kind man, but too busy to spend more than a few minutes a day with a son he’s never known.

Disappointed and lonely, Kaidu sneaks out of the protective enclave of the Palace each day to wander the city. There he meets Rat, a starving street urchin who steals his most precious possession: the ancient knife his father gave to him when they first met. Lost and humiliated, Kaidu chases Rat through the streets and across the rooftops of the city until he tackles Rat, retrieving his precious knife.

…

Read More Read More

The Refusal To Sprawl: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

The Refusal To Sprawl: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Comments 1 comment

Station Eleven-smallTo peruse the book jacket of Station Eleven, one would think that this novel has a traditional main character (Kirsten). This, like the utterly misleading picture on the front –– the yellow tents and curving wall never crop up, so far as I can tell –– is a lie.

Station Eleven is akin in many ways to A Song Of Ice And Fire in that it positions a dozen main characters and asks us to follow them all, sometimes for moments, sometimes for chapters, in what amounts to a kind of prose chorale. The effort is largely successful, but it also suggests a grander canvas, one that Mandel, who surely thinks of herself as a writer of literary work, has no intention of pursuing.

Contrast with Mr. Martin: when he sets his dozen, then fifty, characters in motion, he follows every one, rabbit hole after rabbit hole. This is not to say that either approach is more valid than the other, but it’s telling; the one method begets only a single book, the other a series or even a cycle.

Once again, I find myself puzzled by the (apparently necessary) differences between genre and literary publishing tropes. I honestly don’t think Mandel even considered expanding her storylines, or following her characters farther afield. Expansion and long-form digressions are all but expected in fantasy and science fiction, and the short novel (say, Flowers For Algernon) is a rare bird these days, and getting rarer.

But in nominally literary work? One book, and you’re out. Covers closed, shelve the title. Move along, people. Nothing more to see here.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Grimm Future, edited by Erin Underwood

New Treasures: The Grimm Future, edited by Erin Underwood

Comments 1 comment

The Grimm Future-smallNESFA Press is one of my favorite small publishers. They’ve done some of the most essential collections of the past few decades, including From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, the massive six-volume Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, the two-volume Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, the magnificent Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell, Transfinite: The Essential A. E. Van Vogt, and dozens more. They’ve been relatively quiet recently (except for releasing a new volume in The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson every year or so, which admittedly is enough to keep anyone busy), and I admit that I was growing concerned that the once tireless NESFA machine was perhaps not as tireless as most of us thought.

So I was very pleased to see the release of The Grimm Future last month, an anthology collecting reimagined Grimm fairy tales by Garth Nix, Max Gladstone, Carlos Hernandez, Jeffrey Ford, Peadar Ó Guillín, John Langan, Seanan McGuire, and many others.

Blending fresh new science fiction with a futuristic dash of magic, The Grimm Future is a unique anthology of reimagined Grimm fairy tales from some of today’s most exciting authors — along with the original stories that inspired them. The Grimm Future examines our humanity and what that term might come to mean through the eyes of future generations as society advances into an age when technology consumes nearly every aspect of our lives or has ultimately changed life as we know it. How might these timeless stories evolve? Given the relentless onrush of technology, there is even greater need for fairy tales and Grimm magic in our future. Read on!

All the stories are new.

…

Read More Read More

Profound Enough to Hurt: Amal El-Mohtar on Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Profound Enough to Hurt: Amal El-Mohtar on Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Comments 2 comments

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories-smallI read a lot of reviews (no, seriously. A lot. Of reviews). But, like everyone else, I have favorite reviewers — those who’ve guided me towards books I might not have selected on my own, or whose taste aligns splendidly well with (or is a heckuva lot better than) mine.

These days one of my go-to reviewers is Amal El-Mohtar, occasional Black Gate blogger and author — whose own short story “Madeleine” is a 2016 Nebula finalist for Best Short Story. Earlier this week Amal reviewed Ken Liu’s new short story collection The Paper Menagerie for NPR… and had more to say about it on her website.

I have never been so moved by a collection of short fiction. I was at times afraid to read more. Every single story struck chords in me profound enough to hurt, whether about the love and cruelty of families; the melancholy of thermodynamics; the vicious unfairness of history and the humbling grace with which people endure its weight. Stories so often take us out of ourselves; Liu’s stories went deep into my marrow, laying bare painful truths, meticulously slicing through the layers of pearl to find the grain of sand at its heart.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories was published by Saga Press on March 8, 2016. It is 464 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital version. That origami tiger on the cover was designed, folded and photographed by Quentin Trollip. We covered the complete contents here.

See all of our coverage of the best in new fantasy book here.

Vintage Treasures: The Silistra Quartet by Janet Morris

Vintage Treasures: The Silistra Quartet by Janet Morris

Comments 6 comments
High Couch of Silistra-small The Golden Sword Janet Morris 1981-small

In the last few weeks I’ve touched on a few tales of modern writers who didn’t make it — or at least, fantasy series that never got off the ground, and died after one or two hardcover releases without even a paperback edition. To switch things up a bit, today I thought I’d look at one of the most successful fantasy debuts of all time, a series that became a huge international hit with its first release, launching the career of one of the most prolific fantasy writers of the late 20th Century: Janet Morris’ The Silistra Quartet.

The Silistra Quartet began with Janet’s first novel, High Couch of Silistra, which appeared in paperback from Bantam Books in 1977 with a classic cover by Boris (above left). Although it was packaged as fantasy, High Couch was really science fiction, the far-future tale of the colony planet of Silistra, still recovering from an ancient war that left the planet scarred and much of the population infertile. With a dangerously low birth-rate, it’s not long before the human colonists of Silistra develop a new social order, with a hierarchy based on fertility and sexual prowess.

…

Read More Read More