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Back to Ancient Opar

Back to Ancient Opar

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king-oparexiles-khoEdgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan has proven an unstoppable force. While misguided movies, TV series, and musicals do their best to rob the ape man of his savage nature and integrity in the name of mass marketing and political correctness, Burroughs’ original Jungle Lord perseveres. Conventional wisdom may suggest time has passed him by, but it’s the vitality of the original that keeps readers coming back for more. Happily, talents like Joe R. Lansdale, Philip Jose Farmer, and most recently Will Murray have been willing to give fans further adventures of the real Tarzan.

Turn back the clock four decades and you’ll find Philip Jose Farmer’s seminal fictional biography, Tarzan Alive (1972) had much to answer for in terms of launching the Wold Newton movement in popular fiction as well as boosting Burroughs’ cachet. While the book may be relatively obscure today, the ripples it created are still felt on the beaches of pulp fiction. For his part, Farmer launched a series of officially sanctioned books recounting the history of ancient Opar. Longtime readers of Burroughs’ work will know that Opar was the first of the author’s lost cities (an outpost of forgotten Atlantis) that survived undiscovered in Tarzan’s African jungle.

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New Treasures: The Sea of Trolls Trilogy by Nancy Farmer

New Treasures: The Sea of Trolls Trilogy by Nancy Farmer

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The Sea of Trolls-small The Land of the Silver Apples-small The Islands of the Blessed-small

I’ve been very excited by what I’ve seen from Saga Press in the last few months. They’ve published novels from some of the most exciting new names in fantasy, including Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, and Genevieve Valentine’s Persona, among many others. And just this month they brought us John Joseph Adam’s timely new anthology Loosed upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction.

But mixed in with that sharp nose for exciting new work is a keen talent for finding and repackaging overlooked older fantasy. So I was just as excited to see Saga bring Nancy Farmer’s The Sea of Trolls trilogy, originally published in hardcover by Atheneum Books in 2004-2009, out in mass market paperback for the first time, with a gorgeous series of new covers by Richard Anderson. The release dates were:

The Sea of Trolls (496 pages) – June 30, 2015
The Land of the Silver Apples (496 pages) – July 28, 2015
The Islands of the Blessed (496 pages) – August 25, 2015

All three books are now on sale from Saga, priced at $8.99 in paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. Check ’em out.

Win a Copy of Gestapo Mars by Victor Gischler

Win a Copy of Gestapo Mars by Victor Gischler

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Gestapo Mars-smallOn Monday, we told you about the upcoming release of a brand new novel of far future adventure and Nazi mayhem, Victor Gischler’s Gestapo Mars.

Gestapo Mars, a Carter Sloan novel, combines science fiction, Nazis, assassins, and disgusting gelatinous aliens in a fast-paced, rollicking adventure, on sale September 22 from Titan Books.

We are very pleased to announce that we have three copies to give away to readers of Black Gate, compliments of Titan Books.

How do you enter? Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “Gestapo Mars,” and a one-sentence review of your favorite Nazi science fiction story (bonus points if it includes Gestapo!) That’s it — what could possibly be easier? We’ll announce the winners in 10 days, and present some of the best entries here.

Three winners will be drawn at random from all qualifying entries. All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Not valid where prohibited by law. Or anywhere postage for a hefty trade paperback is more than, like, 10 bucks (practically, that means US and Canada).

Gestapo Mars will be released on Tuesday by Titan Books. It is 277 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version. Learn more at the Titan Books website.

Future Treasures: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Future Treasures: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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Six of Crows-smallI love a good caper novel. Fantasy doesn’t have enough of them. There’s Steven Brust’s Jhereg books, of course, and Scott Lynch’s marvelous Gentleman Bastard trilogy (The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves). But we could certainly use a few more. Leigh Bardugo sets out to correct that deficiency with Six of Crows, a very promising new novel featuring “a cunning leader with a plan for every occasion, nigh-impossible odds, an entertainingly combative team of skilled misfits, a twisty plot, and a nerve-wracking cliffhanger” (Publishers Weekly). It’s on sale September 29 from Henry Holt and Co.

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price — and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone…

A convict with a thirst for revenge. A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager. A runaway with a privileged past.

A spy known as the Wraith. A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums. A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes.

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction — if they don’t kill each other first.

Leigh Bardugo is the author of the popular YA novels Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising (collectively The Grisha Trilogy). Read her story “The Too-Clever Fox” for free at Tor.com.

Six of Crows will be published by Henry Holt and Co. on September 29, 2015. It is 480 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $8.99 for the digital edition.

Sarah, William Morris, and Me

Sarah, William Morris, and Me

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Sigurd the Volsung-smallHurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up, you whippersnappers, and see Old Fogy’s Carnival of Cantankerous Complaints. Present your tickets and take your seats for yet another unsolicited argument justifying my personal preference for bound paper books over electronic texts. Keep your arms and hands inside the diatribe at all times. (Go away kid, you bother me.) Ready?

A while back I decided I wanted to read William Morris’s 1877 book-length epic poem, Sigurd the Volsung, a violent Victorianizing of old Norse myth. After discovering that the paperback copy I ordered from Amazon was heavily abridged (grrrr!) I located an old used copy online — an American edition published in Boston by Roberts Brothers in 1891. (Morris was a popular author, and editions of his works that are this old are not at all scarce; I think it cost me ten or fifteen dollars.)

When the book arrived, I carefully took it out of the shipping package (books of this vintage are wonderfully heavy) and opened the dark green cover to look through it. I immediately saw, on the very first blank page, a name and a date neatly written in pencil:

Sarah Anderson Bates 1892

I’m not specifically a collector of signed editions, though I have acquired quite a few over the years (mostly from science fiction writers), among them books signed by Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Harlan Ellison, Peter Beagle, Fritz Leiber, and Cormac McCarthy — some pretty heavy hitters.

The signature I value most is Sarah Anderson Bates. Why? Partially for the surprise of having it at all, but mostly because she is someone I know nothing about, who was — just like me — an ordinary person who had a book she valued, and who, by writing her name in it, became a kind of time traveler, sending a signal to me, a person who probably wasn’t even born until long after she was gone.

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New Treasures: Awaiting Strange Gods by Darrell Schweitzer

New Treasures: Awaiting Strange Gods by Darrell Schweitzer

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Awaiting Strange Gods-smallI was proud to publish two very fine stories by Darrell Schweitzer in the print version of Black Gate: the frontier horror story “A Dark Miracle” (BG 3) and the Thomas the Rhymer tale “Into the Gathering Dark” (BG 15). So I’m very pleased indeed to see a brand new collection from Mr. Schweitzer, Awaiting Strange Gods: Weird and Lovecraftian Fictions, which collects 22 tales in a very handsome package. In addition to a new introduction by S.T. Joshi, the book also contains three interior illustrations by cover artist Tim Kirk.

I’m especially delighted by Awaiting Strange Gods because it also marks the continued resurgence of Fedogan & Bremer, the Minneapolis-based weird fiction publisher that produced over two dozen fabulous volumes in the 80s and 90s, including Colossus by Donald Wandrei, Stephen Jones’ Shadows Over Innsmouth and Dark Detectives, and Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner. It’s marvelous to see them active again.

Darrell Schweitzer, for 19 years co-editor of Weird Tales, is a familiar name in Dark Fantasy and fringe SF stories. But his forays into Weird/Lovecraftian got underway long after he had established his literary voice. These are very personal stories, notable for character development as opposed to HPL’s cutouts against a cosmic background. 22 tales ranging from straight Mythos to Historical, and from Pennsylvania to Asia Minor. We think these tales are a treat, and you will too!

John R. Fultz produced a marvelously detailed survey of Schweitzer’s weird fantasy, coupled with an interview, in “The Sorcery of Storytelling: The Imaginary Worlds of Darrell Schweitzer,” published at Black Gate ‘way back in 2006. Read it here.

Awaiting Strange Gods: Weird and Lovecraftian Fictions was published by Fedogan & Bremer on September 15, 2015. It is 292 pages, priced at $39.95 in hardcover, and $125 for the deluxe limited edition, with a signature page and fitted slipcase. The cover art is by Tim Kirk. There is no digital edition.

When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

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1592281877The recent scandal over the killing of Cecil the Lion has once again brought big game hunting into the spotlight, with various websites outing rich hunters who go to Africa to blow away lions, giraffes, and other animals.

Here in Spain, we had an even bigger scandal back in 2012 when, at the height of this country’s financial crisis, King Juan Carlos went to Botswana and killed an elephant. He later apologized but this, plus rumors of extramarital affairs and numerous incidents of being apparently drunk in public, forced him to abdicate two years later.

There was a time when scandals like this would have never happened, when kings and commoners could empty their guns into beautiful animals free from the fear of criticism. Many wrote memoirs of going on safari, creating a genre that has all but died out today.

One of the classics of the genre is The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson and originally published in 1907. Patterson worked as the chief engineer building the Mombasa to Uganda railway in 1898. Managing a huge crew of Africans, Pathans, and Sikhs in adverse conditions to build a railroad through poorly mapped territory would have been hard enough, but soon lions started coming into the workmen’s camp at night and carrying off his workers.

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Vintage Treasures: Hell’s Gate by Dean R. Koontz

Vintage Treasures: Hell’s Gate by Dean R. Koontz

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Hell's Gate Dean R Koontz-small Hell's Gate Dean R Koontz-back-small

One of the great things about collecting old paperbacks is that it’s an inexpensive hobby. Almost criminally inexpensive. Want a good condition copy of the first edition of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, one of the rarest and most sought-after genre paperbacks? Copies at Amazon.com start at around 10 bucks… about the price of a brand new paperback. I bought a mint-condition, unread copy on eBay for a lofty $20 a few years back.

But there are exceptions. And some of the most interesting exceptions are the early paperbacks of Dean R. Koontz.

Koontz was (and is) a terrifically prolific writer, publishing as many as eight books a year. His first novel, Star Quest (cover here), was published as an Ace Double in 1968, and over the next few years he wrote more than a dozen other SF novels, under his own name and many pseudonyms, including Leigh Nichols, David Axton, and many others. His first bestsellers were Demon Seed (1973), The Key to Midnight (1979, as by Leigh Nichols) and his breakout novel Whispers (1980). With the money he made as a bestselling writer, Koontz famously bought up the rights to most of his early work and, with rare exceptions, has not allowed it to be reprinted.

Which brings us to Hell’s Gate, his fifth novel, published under his own name as a paperback original by Lancer in 1970. It is 190 pages, originally priced at $0.75, with a gorgeous cover by the great Kelly Freas (click the above images for bigger versions). The rights now rest with Koontz and, like much of his early work, it has never been reprinted. There is no digital edition. If you want a copy, you’ll have to turn to the collector’s market, and copies in good condition can be pretty expensive. Prices at Amazon.com currently range from around $15-35, and at eBay range from $7.50 to $100. If you’re interested, be prepared to shop around.

Tanith Airborne: Warhammer 40k: Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Guns of Tanith

Tanith Airborne: Warhammer 40k: Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Guns of Tanith

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The Guns of Tanith-smallThe Guns of Tanith
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 5 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (315 pages, $6.95, May 2002)
Cover by Adrian Smith

The Guns of Tanith opens with another first for the Ghosts: A training sequence. After redeeming himself for the disaster on Hagia, Gaunt and the men of the Tanith First-and-Only are being deployed to Phantine. Phantine’s industrial history spans so many millennia that most of the planet is covered by smog toxic enough to make human life impossible. The remaining Phantine cities are perched on mountains whose elevations rise above the poisonous clouds. So naturally, when the time comes to liberate Phantine settlements from the occupying forces of Chaos, ground assaults aren’t an option. Thus, en route to Phantine, we find the Ghosts in training for an aerial drop assault, supported by Phantine’s elite aerial corps.

The training sequence reintroduces us to some familiar faces: Twitchy sniper Larkin, soft-hearted giant “Try-Again” Bragg, scout leader Mkoll, and the rest of the crew, along with some relatively new arrivals, particularly Commissar Viktor Hark, who joined the Ghosts in the previous volume to supplement Gaunt’s split role as both Commissar (a kind of propaganda officer) and Colonel of the Ghosts. Hark, as neither Tanith nor Vervunhive, is in a position to be a little harsher, a little more detached, and perhaps a little more objective in his disciple than Gaunt can ever be. He’s a fair man, and fits well with the Tanith, but is more at ease with the brutal reality of a commissar’s duty to enforce iron disciple.

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Future Treasures: Seasons of the Cats by Pamela Sargent

Future Treasures: Seasons of the Cats by Pamela Sargent

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Season of the cats-smallPamela Sargent is something of a legend among long-time SF readers. She won a Nebula Award for her 1992 novelette “Danny Goes to Mars,” about Vice President Dan Quayle, but it was her Venus trilogy (Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, and Child of Venus) that made serious readers sit up and take notice. Her other works include Earthseed, Cloned Lives, and the fabulous Women of Wonder anthologies. Her latest novel is in a lighter vein, a contemporary fantasy to be published next month by Wildside Press.

Gena and Don seemed an ideal couple. Young. In love. Playful and imaginative. They often pretended to be cats, purring and playing and taking on pretend roles in their made-up cat-world of “Cat”-alonia!

When they move into their first house and money becomes tight, management of household finances — what the shared Household account pays for versus what share goes to personal expenses — becomes a contention point. And their imaginary world takes a darker turn, with Household becoming an evil that threatens the harmony of their beloved Catalonia.

But Catalonia and its feline residents have become so real that they begin to intrude into Gena and Don’s world, appearing as stray cats — with a mission of their own. And they aren’t going to let the young couple destroy their world, at any cost!

We last covered Pamela Sargent with her novel The Alien Upstairs.

Seasons of the Cats will be published by Wildside Press on October 15, 2015. It is 224 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover, and $13.99 for the trade paperback. The cover is by Ron Miller.