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BuzzFeed Names the 32 Best Fantasy Books Of 2015

BuzzFeed Names the 32 Best Fantasy Books Of 2015

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Half-Resurrection Blues-smallAh, the end of the year, when Best of the Year lists start to arrive in earnest, and we learn which novels are jockeying for front-runner status for major awards. Most lists limit themselves to 10, but this week the editors at BuzzFeed bravely cataloged “The 32 Best Fantasy Books Of 2015.” Their list includes plenty of titles we’ve enthused about at Black Gate in the past few months, including The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin, Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson, and Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu. It also highlights a few we’ve somehow overlooked, such as Daniel José Older’s Half-Resurrection Blues, the opening novel in his Bone Street Rumba series:

A dark urban fantasy that explores the world between dead and living through the eyes of Carlos Delacruz, an agent of the New York Council of the Dead who, as an “inbetweener,” knows a little something about both worlds. Delacruz works to solve a mystery that threatens to bring these two worlds dangerously close together in this engaging beginning to a promising new series.

And Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Signal to Noise:

The charming debut novel from Silvia Moreno-Garcia alternates between 1988 and 2009 in Mexico City to uncover the circumstances behind why heroine Meche’s beautiful childhood friendships fell apart, and whether there is a chance she can mend these broken bonds. Meche’s ability to cast spells using songs makes this fascinating read as much a meditation on the incredible power of music as it is an exploration of why some friendships disintegrate, and whether they can be put back together again.

The list was compiled by Tanner Greenring, Isaac Fitzgerald, and Jack Shepherd on the BuzzFeed Staff. Read the complete article here.

Vintage Treasures: The Queens’ Quarter Trilogy by Midori Snyder

Vintage Treasures: The Queens’ Quarter Trilogy by Midori Snyder

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New Moon Midori Snyder-small Sadar's Keep Beldan's Fire

It’s a tough thing to have to change publishers in the middle of a trilogy. That’s exactly what happened with Midori Snyder’s The Queens’ Quarter, which began with her second novel, New Moon, published in 1989. The last two novels followed over the next four years.

New Moon (1989)
Sadar’s Keep (1990)
Beldan’s Fire (1993)

Snyder’s first novel was Soulstring (1987), a standalone fairytale based on the Scottish legend of Tam Lin (which we covered here). Two years later, she decided to turn her attention to a secondary world fantasy. The first novel, New Moon, appeared in paperback from Ace in February 1989 with a fine cover by Jody Lee (above left; click for bigger version).

If subsequent books in the series had also had covers by Jody Lee, or even kept the same cover design, they would have been easy to spot as part of the same series. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Snyder was forced to switch publishers in midstream. As a result the second book, Sadar’s Keep, arrived in paperback in the US March 1991 from Tor Books, with a fine but strikingly different cover by Dennis Nolan (above middle).

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Future Treasures: Drake by Peter McLean

Future Treasures: Drake by Peter McLean

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Drake Peter McLean-smallPeter McLean’s first novel will be released in paperback by Angry Robot in early January, and it sounds pretty darn good.

Don’t believe me? Drake features a hitman who owes a gambling debt to a demon, his faithful magical accomplice The Burned Man (an imprisoned archdemon), the Furies of Greek myth, an (almost) fallen angel named Trixie, and oh, yeah. Lucifer. Dave Hutchinson calls it “a gritty, grungy, funny, sweary noir thriller with added demons. Don Drake is a wonderful creation.” I told you it sounded good. Drake is the opening installment in a new series titled The Burned Man.

Hitman Don Drake owes a gambling debt to a demon. Forced to carry out one more assassination to clear his debt, Don unwittingly kills an innocent child and brings the Furies of Greek myth down upon himself.

Rescued by an almost-fallen angel called Trixie, Don and his magical accomplice The Burned Man, an imprisoned archdemon, are forced to deal with Lucifer himself whilst battling a powerful evil magician.

Now Don must foil Lucifer’s plan to complete Trixie’s fall and save her soul whilst preventing the Burned Man from breaking free from captivity and wreaking havoc on the entire world.

Drake will be published by Angry Robot on January 5, 2016. It is 320 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The very cool cover is by Raid71. Learn more at the Angry Robot website.

See all our coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy here.

David W. Wixon on Editing The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak

David W. Wixon on Editing The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak

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I Am Crying All Inside-smallTwo months ago I was thrilled to announce the impending publication of the first six volumes of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, edited by David W. Wixon, the Executor of the Literary Estate and a close friend of Simak’s. The lack of a complete collection of Simak’s short stories has been an aggravation to serious fans, so this massive project from Open Road Media — a comprehensive collection of all of Simak’s short stories, including his science fiction, fantasy, and westerns — was cause for celebration. Over the last few months there’s been a lot of excitement in the industry about the project, and Paul Di Filippo asked if “The Simak Renaissance was finally here.”

Wixon stopped by Black Gate yesterday, and he was gracious enough to answer some of the questions we posed in our first article, particularly on the digital pricing (the announced prices are a little wonky: $14.99 for volume 1, $7.99 for volumes 2 and 3, and $9.99 for volumes 4-6. As I said in the article, even $9.99 seems a little high for 8-10 stories/volume. ) Wixon commented:

I’m not sure of the policy behind Open Road’s pricing, but they assure me that they will deal with the issues you’ve raised.

On exactly how many volumes are in the series:

There will be 14 volumes of the complete Simak short fiction.

He also elaborated in more detail on how he selected and sorted the contents for each volume.

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Poetic Witchery and the Strangeness in Ordinary Things: Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

Poetic Witchery and the Strangeness in Ordinary Things: Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

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The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories Algernon Blackwood-smallOf the many things Algernon Blackwood did in his lifetime the most notable is producing a substantial body of horror and weird fiction. He tends to be overshadowed by some other writers of yesteryear, but one of the best known of those writers, H.P. Lovecraft, offered high praise for his abilities:

Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.

The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories was the first of Blackwood’s many story collections. It first saw publication in 1906. The edition reviewed here was published in 1916.

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New Treasures: The Shootout Solution by Michael R. Underwood

New Treasures: The Shootout Solution by Michael R. Underwood

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The Shootout Solution-smallMichael R. Underwood’s novel Shield and Crocus, set in a city built on the bones of a fallen giant and ruled by five criminal tyrants, had perhaps the most intriguing setting I came across last year. So I was delighted to see he was joining the stellar line-up at Tor.com with a new series, the Genrenauts. The first episode, The Shootout Solution, was published on November 17 as their tenth premium novella.

Leah Tang just died on stage.

Not literally.

Not yet.

Leah’s stand-up career isn’t going well. But she understands the power of fiction, and when she’s offered employment with the mysterious Genrenauts Foundation, she soon discovers that literally dying on stage is a hazard of the job!

Her first job takes her to a Western world. When a cowboy tale slips off its rails, and the outlaws start to win, it’s up to Leah — and the Genrenauts team — to nudge the story back on track and prevent major ripples on Earth.

But the story’s hero isn’t interested in winning, and the safety of Earth hangs in the balance…

See the complete list of Tor.com novellas we’ve covered so far below.

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Vintage Treasures: Jinian Star-Eye by Sheri S. Tepper

Vintage Treasures: Jinian Star-Eye by Sheri S. Tepper

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Jinian Star Eye Tepper-small

Jinian Star-Eye was the last volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s monumental nine-volume fantasy opus, The True Game. On course, in keeping with 1980s-era fantasy marketing, no mention was made of this anywhere on the book. However, if you were an attentive buyer, you might have noticed the poem on the back, a sure tip that this was part of the series. Poetry as a marketing device, to the best of my knowledge, was an idea that was born and died with this series.

We’ve covered several of the previous installments over the years, but not the entire series. It began with King’s Blood Four in 1983, Tepper’s first novel. Subsequent volumes were divided into a trio of trilogies, starting with the True Game trilogy:

King’s Blood Four (1983)
Necromancer Nine (1983)
Wizard’s Eleven (1984)

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Future Treasures: X’s For Eyes by Laird Barron

Future Treasures: X’s For Eyes by Laird Barron

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X's For Eyes-back-small X's For Eyes-small

Laird Barron made quite a name for himself as a horror writer early in his career, but he’s really come into his own in the last few years. He was the guest editor of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One, and the subject of the highly acclaimed tribute anthology, The Children of Old Leech. James McGlothlin reviewed his recent work for us, calling his collection The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All “a great combination of cosmic horror… [and] gritty noir,” and The Light is the Darkness evidence that Barron has become “a superstar… in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft.”

His latest book, a slender novella from JournalStone, will be published this Friday. It features brothers MacBeth and Drederick, ages 14 and 12, wealthy sons of the superich Tooms family. Their father may be a supervillain, and it looks like the company’s newest space probe just accidentally contacted a malevolent alien god, but that won’t stop the lads from having a great summer vacation. Stu Horvath at Unwinnable says, “They’re like some kind of midnight reflection of the Hardy Boys or Johnny Quest and Hadji. If you ever thought The Venture Brothers needed more horror and less Star Wars references, then this is the book for you.”

X’s For Eyes is 98 pages, priced at $9.95 in trade paperback and $2.99 for the digital edition. Click the covers above for bigger versions.

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip

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“Who is the Star-Bearer, and what will he loose that is bound?”

                                             from the Riddle-Master of Hed

This week’s work of epic high fantasy, Patricia McKillip’s The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), the first volume in her Riddle-Master trilogy, is more restrained than those I’ve reviewed the past few weeks. In his book Modern Fantasy, David Pringle calls the series “romantic fantasies of a delicate kind” and in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy John Clute describes McKillip’s development of the series’ lead characters as “handled with scrupulous delicacy.” While I detect a slightly dismissive tone in those comments, neither is completely inaccurate. If The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are a great big Romantic symphony, then McKillip’s book is more like a piano sonata. There’s a lightness of touch, though not of tone, here, as well as a focus on the small details. So, though an ancient war is reignited, mysterious shapeshifting enemies appear out of nowhere, and the fate of the world is at stake, at the center of the story is a young hero and his struggle to refuse to submit to prophecies of which he wants no part.

My mother took these books out from the YA section in the St. George Library on Staten Island way back in 1979 for my dad. She thought he’d like them and she was right. He must have read them every other year or so between then and his death in 2001. Because he liked them so much I gave them a try and I was as enthralled as he clearly was. Like him, I was drawn into McKillip’s world of riddles, strange magics, and hidden and lost identities. I’ve probably read the trilogy four or five times myself, but this is the first time I’ve picked it up in over a decade. Having finished the first, I’m looking forward to the next two volumes, Heir of Sea and Fire and Harpist in the Wind, with great anticipation.

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