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The Collections of Tanith Lee

The Collections of Tanith Lee

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Cyrion-small Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer-small Tamastara-small

We’re continuing with our look at the extraordinary 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who passed away on May 24th. So far we’ve covered 13 of her novels; today I’d like to look at her equally dazzling short story career.

Lee published well over 300 short stories during her long career, an amazing accomplishment. Her first three major collections were all published by her long-time publisher DAW, starting with the sword-and-sorcery collection Cyrion in 1982.

Cyrion (Sept 1982, 304 pages, $2.95, cover by Ken Kelly)
Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (January 1983, 208 pages, $2.50, cover by Michael Whelan)
Tamastara, or The Indian Nights (March 1984, 174 pages, $2.95, cover by Don Maitz)

A lot has been said about Cyrion over the years, but I think perhaps James Lecky, on his blog Tales from the Computerbank, said it best in his 2009 review.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015 Edition, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015 Edition, edited by Paula Guran

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The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015-smallI’m a big fan of dark fantasy, and there’s a lot of terrific work going on in the field right now. Dale Bailey, Laird Barron, Gemma Files, Maria Dahvana Headley, John Langan, Ken Liu, Usman T. Malik, Helen Marshall, Simon Strantzas, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar… these folks and many others are writing excellent fiction.

The real challenge, of course, is finding it. All of the writers above published top-notch stories last year, but you’d have to have access to a top-notch library to get even half of it. A lot of the very best fiction from last year appeared in small print run magazines (like Dark Discoveries, Sirenia Digest, Jamais Vu, SQ Mag and Lackington’s), premiere anthologies (such as Dead Man’s Hand, Letters to Lovecraft, Fearful Symmetries, Monstrous Affections, and Nightmare Carnival), and small press collections (like Burnt Black Suns, Here with the Shadows, and Black Gods Kiss).

What you really need is an astute editor with impeccable taste who can read through all that material (and a great deal more) for you, and collect the very best, so you can settle back in your favorite recliner with a cool beverage and enjoy the finest dark fantasy and horror from the top practitioners in the field in a single fat anthology, every single year.

You see where this is going, don’t you.

Paula Guran and Prime Books have released the sixth volume in their excellent The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, which collects stories from all of the writers mentioned above, and a great deal more. It is one of three Best of the Year volumes from Prime (the others are Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the brand new The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas, also edited by Paula Guran).

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Vintage Treasures: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited by Ray Bradbury

Vintage Treasures: Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, edited by Ray Bradbury

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Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow Bantam 1952

Ray Bradbury is known primarily as a writer, and as one of the most gifted fantasists of the 20th Century. But in his 70+-year career, he also edited a handful of anthologies. The first of these, Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow, originally published as a Bantam Giant paperback original in 1952, was also the most popular, with multiple reprintings and editions over the next two decades.

Most SF and fantasy anthologies in the forties and fifties drew heavily from pulp sources. Bradbury’s approach was very different. His fat, 306-page anthology collected classic and contemporary fantasies originally published in The New Yorker, Charm magazine, Harper’s magazine, and other more literary sources, and included such writers as John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, E. B. White, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson, and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.

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Future Treasures: Shower of Stones by Zachary Jernigan

Future Treasures: Shower of Stones by Zachary Jernigan

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Shower of Stones-smallZachary Jernigan’s first novel of Jeroun, No Return, was released in 2013, and widely praised. Staffer’s Book Review called it “The most daring debut novel of 2013,” and Elizabeth Hand said, “It has the sweep of Frank Herbert’s Dune and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun… One of the most impressive debuts of recent years.”

The long-awaited concluding novel in the two-book series, Shower of Stones, will be published by Night Shade this month, and it returns to the harsh world of Jeroun, which pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic.

At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for revolt against the god Adrash, imploring mankind to unite in this struggle.

Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact, it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet’s surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads.

With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja, and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals that still matter to her — Vedas Tezul, and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world’s deepest secrets: A madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all… Hope.

Shower of Stones will be published by Night Shade Books on July 14, 2015. It is 238 pages, priced at $26.99 in both hardcover and digital formats. The cover is by Alvin Epps. Read more here.

Street Fighters of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Necropolis

Street Fighters of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Necropolis

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Necropolis_oldNecropolis
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 3 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (301 pages, $6.95, December 2000)
Cover by Martin Hanford

Necropolis marks a turning point in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series for a few reasons. It’s the first book written entirely as an original novel rather than an expansion of previously published short work. It also broadens the scope of the first couple books in covering an entire Imperial Guard campaign from the first rain of shells to the final confrontation with a Chaos warlord, as the Ghosts join in the defense of a hive city besieged by a horde of millions.

Hive cities are one of the key features of life in the 41st millennium, and they’re exactly what the name implies: Enormous cities where millions, if not billions, of Imperial citizens live elbow-to-elbow in habitation towers most easily measured in kilometers. They’re usually built around some kind of industry, whether raw resource mining, mass agriculture, or manufacturing, and exist almost as worlds unto themselves. Hives have their own aristocracy, their own independent militaries, their own networks of corporations and guilds, their underclasses and underworlds.

Vervunhive, on the Sabbat Worlds planet Verghast, actually seems like a reasonably nice place to live, by 41st millennium standards. That is until warning claxons fill every corner of the hive, and a merciless barrage of shells starts falling from guns placed over the horizon.

Panic spreads through all levels of the hive as we skip viewpoints from Agun Soric, a manufacturing plant supervisor, to Gol Kolea, a deep-shaft miner, and from Tona Criid, a gangster from the hives depths, to Salvador Sondar, the half-mad ruler of the hive. An unstoppable tide of armor follows on the heels of the shelling, smashing the attempted counterattack by the Vervunhive defense regiments, and only the hive’s defensive energy shield keeps it from being overrun. Their neighbor, Zoica, has been corrupted by the dark powers of Chaos, and now the entire population and industrial might of that rival hive have mobilized to claim the rest of the planet.

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Drew Hayden Taylor’s Tales of Otter Lake: The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

Drew Hayden Taylor’s Tales of Otter Lake: The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

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The Night WandererIn 2007 Annick Press published a Young Adult tale called The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel by Drew Hayden Taylor, a veteran playwright, journalist, and essayist (as well as stand-up comic, TV writer, and documentary film-maker). The book follows a mysterious stranger who returns from Europe to the fictional Anishinabe (or Ojibway) Otter Lake Reserve in what is now Ontario, and a teenage girl whose life he ends up affecting. Taylor mentions in an afterword that the story began existence as a play which never quite satisfied him, until fifteen years later, while working with Annick Press on another project, he rewrote it as a prose novel. It’s since been adapted by Alison Kooistra into a graphic novel with art by Mike Wyatt.

In 2010 Taylor returned to Otter Lake with another novel, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, published by Knopf Canada. In this story, an ancient trickster spirit comes to Otter Lake and becomes involved with the woman who’s currently the chief of the community. It’s longer and more complex than The Night Wanderer, and perhaps more fully exploits the freedoms of the novel form. Point-of-view is varied, and sub-plots more complex.

Both are charming books. Taylor’s prose is light, quick, and direct. His stories marry an earthy sense of reality with superhuman and supernatural figures who upend that reality by their basic nature. And his characters are well-drawn, sometimes broad but always interesting. Even when they’re confused about what they want, at least they want something at any given moment. As you’d expect from a playwright, the scenes move.

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New Treasures: Depth by Lev AC Rosen

New Treasures: Depth by Lev AC Rosen

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Depth Lev Rosen-smallLev AC Rosen is the author of All Men of Genius and the just-released Woundabout. But it’s his second novel, Depth, the tale of a private investigator whose routine surveillance case leads her to an impossible treasure in post-apocalyptic flooded New York City, that really grabbed my attention this year. Here’s what Lev said on his blog about the genesis of the novel:

I have a longstanding love of noir (I’ve even taught classes on it), and this book is near and dear to my heart. It’s a classic hardboiled noir… that happens to take place in NYC after global warming has melted the ice caps. New York is now a city of building tops, boats and bridges. It’s very far away from the conservative US mainland, and it operates differently.

Living in New York now, especially living in the financial district, I have a few things around me all the time; one is the constant… I don’t know what the word is. The financial district used to be this fantastic historical area – my building is over 100 years old. But there are so many new highrises going up, shiny, sleek looking condos. The moody vibe of 1930s and 40s NYC used to be, I think, most accessible in my neighborhood (when I moved in almost a decade ago). Now it feels fake, too modern, too rich. The grit is gone. I knew if I were going to write a noir, I’d have to bring that grit back somehow.

The other thing down here, of course, is the water. Even before Sandy, there were these great nights where I would be out walking and this heavy fog would come off the water and it would smell like the ocean and the dark would be silvery. And then, of course, Sandy hit – the day after my wedding – and my apartment got a moat. I got to see the first inklings of a New York with rivers instead of streets.

Both those things are what helped shape this. I wanted a noir that felt like the old Bogart and Bacall movies, but without being historical. So I went to the future – possibly not even that far – and I’m really proud of what I came up with.

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Books for Writers: A Guide to Improvised Weaponry

Books for Writers: A Guide to Improvised Weaponry

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A Guide to Improvised Weaponry-smallThere are a lot of how-to manuals for writers out there–books about world building, books about grammar, books about finding markets, books about almost every aspect of the writing life. Sadly, there’s no book telling writers how to defend themselves if an axe murderer invades their home office.

Until now.

A Guide to Improvised Weaponry is the perfect self-defense manual for any writer. It tells you just how to defend yourself when ISIS terrorists decided your work in progress makes you a candidate for their next YouTube video. It’s written by Terry Schappert, a Green Beret and Master sergeant in the U.S. Army Special Forces. This guy knows how to kill you with a pencil. It’s co-written by Adam Slutsky, a professional writer who probably had to explain to Terry that a disappointing advance, low royalties, and non-compete clauses are not valid reasons for killing an acquisitions editor with a pencil.

Each chapter focuses on a common object that you probably have in your home. I was especially interested in objects that are in my home office, ready to be picked up the moment one of my many anonymous online haters kicks in my door.

First, my coffee cup, strategically located to the left of my computer, ready to protect me and mine. Schappert makes the obvious suggestions, like flinging my hot Ethiopian brew into my attacker’s face or using it as a knuckle duster, with the caveat that there’s a good chance of hurting your hand with that second method. He also explains how you can use it to catch the tip of your attacker’s knife and deflect the blow.

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Vintage Treasures: Over the Hills and Far Away by Lord Dunsany

Vintage Treasures: Over the Hills and Far Away by Lord Dunsany

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Over the Hills and Far Away-smallOver the Hills and Far Away is my favorite Dunsany collection, and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, edited by Lin Carter and published in 1974, is my favorite edition.

Yes, some of that has to do with the gorgeous wraparound cover by Gervasio Gallardo (see the original painting here). But I think most of it has to do with Lin Carter’s attitude as an unabashed Dunsany fanbody, and the passion that comes across throughout the book. This is a man who was arguably the most respected voice in fantasy in the mid-Twentieth Century, and his admiration for Dunsay was second to none. Here’s a bit from his introduction:

Lord Dunsany is probably the greatest fantasy writer who ever lived. Quite a few of the most distinguished writers of fantasy have made a similar judgment of his work. James Branch Cabell, for example, praised Dunsany’s craftsmanship in glowing terms. H.P. Lovecraft adored Dunsany’s early Book of Wonder tales, and paid them the highest compliment of direct imitation (as I also have done in my little fables of Simrana the Dreamworld). In fact, Lovecraft wrote several pieces about Dunsany’s work, which he considered superlative. I think Clark Ashton Smith might also have concurred with my estimate of Dunsany, and perhaps Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber would agree as well…

In the pages of this book I have brought together twenty-five of his finest fantasy stories, as well as one major novella, or short novel. Also included are two of his most brilliant and fantastical plays, four of his short-short stories, and (just to give you a balanced and comprehensive view of his entire literary career) four of the later short stories concerning Mr. Joseph Jorkens, the world traveler and noted clubman.

Over the Hills and Far Away was edited by Lin Carter and published by Ballantine Books in 1974. It is 234 pages, priced at $1.25. The cover is by Gervasio Gallardo. It is part of the groundbreaking Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which Keith West is current examining for us in detail; his most recent article was Dragons, Elves, and Heroes.

Building a World in a Vacant Lot: The Circus of Dr. Lao

Building a World in a Vacant Lot: The Circus of Dr. Lao

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The Circus of Dr Lao Bison 2nd Edition-smallFantasy, like all life-consuming obsessions (fly fishing, stamp collecting, running for public office) has a language all its own, one that can seem arcane and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Polder, thinning, underlier, Dark Lord, secondary world, Hidden Monarch, threshold, time abyss, mythago – each of these names a vital fantasy concept or device, and of all such terms, none is more important to the modern genre than worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is, according to Wikipedia, (the greatest repository of fantasy on the internet) the process of “developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology,” and it “often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world.”

In worldbuilding as in so many other things, it was J.R.R. Tolkien who set the standard for all who followed. His Middle Earth, with its immensely deep and detailed history, cosmogony, and geography, was worldbuilding on an unprecedented scale, even to the creation of complete languages for the various races that inhabit this invented milieu.

Post-Tolkien fantasy is largely the story of the primacy of this kind of worldbuilding, as the maps, glossaries, and genealogies that pad the backs of so many fat paperbacks attest, and almost all epic fantasies published since The Lord of the Rings owe a large debt to Tolkien and his example. But all writers are worldbuilders, Hemingway and Updike as much as Jordan and Martin, and perfect as the Tolkien method is for a particular kind of tale, there are many ways to create a believable world — even a fantasy one.

The kind of construction exemplified in The Lord of the Rings is largely external, which is well suited to Tolkien’s rather formal purposes. There is another kind of worldbuilding, however, one less concerned with royal lines and the names of rivers than with what might be called the mythic geography of ordinary life. A superb example of this kind of work is Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao. Published in 1935, it is one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written; indeed, in some moods I’m inclined to think that it is the greatest of them all.

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