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Future Treasures: The Heart of Betrayal by Mary E. Pearson

Future Treasures: The Heart of Betrayal by Mary E. Pearson

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The Heart of Betrayal-smallThe first time I encountered Mary E. Pearson was with her short story “The Rotten Beast” at Tor.com. Her first fantasy novel, The Kiss of Deception, was published by Henry Holt last year, and called “a wonderfully full-bodied story: harrowing, romantic, and full of myth and memory… this has the sweep of an epic tale,” (Booklist), and Publishers Weekly said “the novel has a formidable heroine at its core, who is as quick with a knife as she is to laugh or cry… [a] masterfully crafted story.” The Heart of Betrayal, the second volume in The Remnant Chronicles, will be released next week, and it continues the tale of 17-year-old princess Lia.

Held captive in the barbarian kingdom of Venda, Lia and Rafe have little chance of escape… and even less of being together.

Desperate to save her life, Lia’s erstwhile assassin, Kaden, has told the Vendan Komisar that she has a magical gift, and the Komisar’s interest in Lia is greater than either Kaden or Lia foresaw.

Meanwhile, the foundations of Lia’s deeply-held beliefs are crumbling beneath her. Nothing is straightforward: there’s Rafe, who lied to her, but has sacrificed his freedom to protect her; Kaden, who meant to assassinate her but has now saved her life; and the Vendans, whom she always believed to be barbarians but whom she now realizes are people who have been terribly brutalized by the kingdoms of Dalbreck and Morrighan. Wrestling with her upbringing, her gift, and her very sense of self, Lia will have to make powerful choices that affect her country, her people… and her own destiny.

The Heart of Betrayal will be published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 7, 2015. It is 480 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition.

When is Reality Too Real? Or, Still Stuck in the Woods

When is Reality Too Real? Or, Still Stuck in the Woods

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Austen PrideLast time I was talking about those real life events and happenings that never seem to occur on TV, or in books. If you have a look, the comments are well worth reading, and not only because most everyone agrees with me (and William Goldman) on the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon. There were also many examples given of fantasy characters pooping, though not necessarily in the woods.

There did seem to be a consensus that we were in agreement with Goldman, that too much reality could slow things down, not only in TV and movies, but in the written narrative as well. If we do include what one commentator called “the earthier things” they’re usually plot or story related. Or, as another put it, “if it doesn’t propel the plot (not the plop!) strike it.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

The subject also sparked a lengthy comment stream on Facebook, thanks to James Enge sharing a link to my original post. One woman was prompted to point out that female characters in fiction don’t menstruate – in the same sense, that is, that they don’t poop, which is to say, we don’t talk about it. As a woman, it took me a surprisingly long time to become aware of this particular example of the phenomenon (or perhaps not, considering the dearth of female protagonists until fairly recently). It’s particularly odd, when you think about it, since so many of us link the appearance of psychic abilities in our characters with the onset of puberty.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton

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The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015-smallIn his introduction to this year’s volume, Rich provides a penetrating breakdown of the current state of our genre’s magazines:

Trevor Quacchri… [is] introducing some intriguing new writers, while not abandoning Analog’s core identity. Last year he published Timons Esais’ “Sadness,” clearly one of the very best stories of the year. Even more recently, F&SF has changed editors… the editing reins have been handed to C.C. Finlay, who “auditioned” with a strong guest issue in July-August 2014, from which I’ve chosen Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i” for this book. Asimov’s stays the course with Sheila Williams, and 2014 was a very good year for the magazine….

I choose four stories each from two other top online sources, Clarkesworld (three-time Hugo Winner for Best Semiprozine) and Lightspeed… Clarkesworld publishes almost soley science fiction, and Lightspeed publishes an even mixture of science fiction and fantasy, so it can be argued that another online ‘zine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, is the top fantasy magazine online, and the two outstanding stories I chose from it should support that argument. And it would be folly to forget Tor.com…

The New Yorker regularly features science fiction and fantasy (including a pretty decent story by Tom Hanks this year), and New Yorker stories have appeared in these anthologies. Tin House in particular is very hospitable to fantastika, and this year I saw some outstanding work at Granta.

Since I was on stage to present the Nebula Award for Best Novelette to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” I can personally attest that Rich knows how to pick ’em. The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 was published by Prime Books on June 11, 2015. It is 576 pages, priced at $19.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. See the complete Table of Contents here.

Jakes’ Progress: On Wheels

Jakes’ Progress: On Wheels

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On Wheels-smallJohn Jakes is a publishing phenomenon. That is always the first thing mentioned whenever he is written about and will doubtless be the first line of his obituary (not that I’m trying to hurry him). From 1974 through 1979 he produced the eight volumes of The Kent Family Chronicles, which follow the fortunes of an American family from revolutionary times through the end of the nineteenth century. The series has sold over 50 million copies and is still in print, and Jakes followed it with the even more successful North and South trilogy. Appearing from 1982 to 1987 and set in the Civil War era, it tells the story of two closely connected families, the Hazards and the Mains, one from Pennsylvania and the other from South Carolina, as they live through the country’s greatest conflict.

In the succeeding years Jakes has written other books of the same stripe, and while none have generated the huge numbers that either earlier series did, he is still one of America’s most popular authors. He is the reigning master of the American historical blockbuster; his historicals are straightforward, thoroughly researched, expansive in scope (and in page count), and unashamedly, old-fashionedly melodramatic. They are the sort of  stories that used to be called “lusty.” Tolstoy they ain’t (and Jakes has never claimed that they are), but they are solid, well-constructed entertainments that deserve their wide success.

But before he became the writer of a New York Times number one bestseller (a distinction earned by North and South, the first volume of the trilogy that bears its name), John Jakes spent his time cranking out yarns about a Conan clone named Brak the Barbarian, and one-off heroic fantasies like The Last Magicians and the humorous Mention My Name in Atlantis, as well as science fiction novels such as the Westworld-flavored Six-Gun Planet (three years before Westworld). None of these books ever made the New York Times bestseller list. Once he glimpsed those green (and I mean green) pastures, Jakes understandably left such low-paying, low-prestige science fiction and fantasy work behind, seemingly forever — he wrote his last fantastic fiction in 1973.

Was his exit from the ranks of the genre any loss? Is there anything to be found in the pre-respectability John Jakes but slapdash schlock? Is any of it still worth reading? Well, brothers and sisters, that’s what I’m here to tell you! And yes, that means that there are spoilers galore in the following review of a forty two year old book. Sue me.

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Space Orks, Space Elves, and Tough Space Men: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Ghostmaker

Space Orks, Space Elves, and Tough Space Men: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Ghostmaker

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GhostmakerGhostmaker
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 2 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (288 pages, $6.95, July 2000)

In the inaugural series installment, Warhammer 40K: First and Only, Dan Abnett introduced us to the Tanith First regiment of Imperial Guardsmen and their iron-willed commander, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt. That novel had Gaunt as its clear protagonist. A series of flashback chapters sketched out his past: Losing his father to Ork hordes in boyhood, growing up a ward of the Imperium, beginning a military career, and finally avenging his loss in a chainsword duel with the man who left his father to die.

We also got an introduction to the Tanith, a thousand men who together represent the only survivors of their homeworld. In First and Only, we saw them largely through Gaunt’s eyes, and received a comparatively cursory introduction to the various personalities among them. In Ghostmaker, Abnett establishes the men of the Tanith in greater depth, laying out a cast of battle brothers as rich and intriguing as any created by Bernard Cornwell or C. S. Forrester.

Ghostmaker is a fix-up novel. The brief “present-day” chapters are connective tissue for a series of short stories from the regiment’s past, each of which centers around an individual soldier of the Tanith and gives him a moment to shine. Along the way we learn more about what the Ghosts lost on their homeworld and how each of them lives with the horrors they confront on 41st millennium battlefields.

I’m normally ambivalent about fix-up novels. I’ve read good ones (see Tears of Ishtar by Michael Ehart for a great example), but in general I feel they end up too fragmented to be read as a novel and too connected to read piecemeal, the way I would normally approach a short story collection. Ghostmaker is a stand-out in the field, and ranks as my favorite of the first trio of Ghosts novels.

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White Supremacist Science Fiction: Reading The Turner Diaries

White Supremacist Science Fiction: Reading The Turner Diaries

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The Turner Diaries-smallThe recent attack by a white supremacist on a black church in Charleston reminded everyone that radical Muslims aren’t the only terrorists out there. In fact, an FBI report studying terrorism in the U.S. between 1980 and 2005 shows there were more attacks by far-right groups than Muslim groups, even in the most recent years of that period. A study of terror attacks in the European Union reveals that less than two percent were religiously motivated. Most were either by separatist or far-right organizations.

So what motivates radical right-wing terror groups? What’s their equivalent of ISIS beheading videos? While there is a large body of white supremacist videos and literature, the undisputed classic is The Turner Diaries.

This novel, written in 1978 by white supremacist activist William Luther Pierce under the pen name Andrew MacDonald, tells of a race war in the 1990s in which a group of whites called The Order overthrow the Zionist-controlled U.S. government and kill all Jews and racial minorities. The book became famous because a scene depicting the blowing up of an FBI building was eerily similar to the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh. Later investigation showed he had been inspired by the book, as had a short-lived racist group called The Order that committed a string of robberies and killed a Jewish radio personality. Several other white supremacist criminals have also been inspired by the novel.

While it’s not proven that the Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, had read the book, it’s so well-known in the circles in which he circulated he surely must have heard of it. Curious, I decided to track it down.

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Future Treasures: The Empress Game by Rhonda Mason

Future Treasures: The Empress Game by Rhonda Mason

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The Empress Game-smallTitan Books has been doing some terrific stuff recently, especially in the realm of intriguing fantasy series. So when they sent me an advance proof of Rhonda Mason’s The Empress Game, the first installment in a promising new space fantasy coming out later this month, I promised myself I’d read it.

And I totally failed. I told myself I probably wouldn’t have liked it, anyway. And then Liz Bourke totally trashed that theory, with this stellar review over at Tor.com, calling it an “old-fashioned pulp space opera”:

Rhonda Mason’s science fiction debut — first in a projected trilogy — is unashamedly old-fashioned pulp space opera… Kayla Reunimon makes a living through brutal gladiatorial combat in an arena on a world that probably counts as a classic space opera “hive of scum and villainy.” She used to be an Ordochian princess, trained to protect her psychic twin, until an Imperial-supported coup overthrew her government and killed most of her family. She escaped with her last surviving younger brother, but without resources, they’ve been stranded, and Kayla has kept them safe and fed as best her training allows. But when a mysterious stranger approaches her with an offer she can’t refuse — an offer he won’t permit her to refuse — their precarious equilibrium is irretrievably altered. The stranger — Malkor — might offer them their best hope of survival, because their enemies are closing in…

This is a novel about fighting princesses. And family. But you pretty much had me at gladiatorial princesses. I’m not going to pretend this is particularly admirable of me, but I’m terribly afraid I like that trope far, far too much. I can forgive a novel a lot for combining angst and violence in an entertaining way, and The Empress Game does that.

Looks like I’m going to have to read it after all. The Empress Game will be published by Titan Books on July 14, 2015. It is 352 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover artist is uncredited.

New Treasures: The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

New Treasures: The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

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The Revolutions Felix Gilman-smallMatthew David Surridge called Felix Gilman “one of the strongest new novelists in fantasy fiction today.” Over the past eight years Gilman has been gradually making a name for himself, with popular steampunk novels like Thunderer, Gears of the City, and the duology The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City. For his latest, The Revolutions, now available in paperback from Tor, Gilman has written a sweeping stand-alone tale of Victorian science fiction, arcane exploration, and planetary romance.

In 1893, young journalist Arthur Shaw is at work in the British Museum Reading Room when the Great Storm hits London, wreaking unprecedented damage. In its aftermath, Arthur’s newspaper closes, owing him money, and all his debts come due at once. His fiancé Josephine takes a job as a stenographer for some of the fashionable spiritualist and occult societies of fin de siècle London society. At one of her meetings, Arthur is given a job lead for what seems to be accounting work, but at a salary many times what any clerk could expect. The work is long and peculiar, as the workers spend all day performing unnerving calculations that make them hallucinate or even go mad, but the money is compelling.

Things are beginning to look up when the perils of dabbling in the esoteric suddenly come to a head: A war breaks out between competing magical societies. Josephine joins one of them for a hazardous occult exploration-an experiment which threatens to leave her stranded at the outer limits of consciousness, among the celestial spheres.

Arthur won’t give up his great love so easily, and hunts for a way to save her, as Josephine fights for survival… somewhere in the vicinity of Mars.

The Revolutions was published in hardcover by Tor Books on April 1, 2014, and reprinted in trade paperback on April 7, 2015. It is 416 pages, priced at $16.99, or $9.99 for the digital edition.

The Novels of Tanith Lee: Days of Grass

The Novels of Tanith Lee: Days of Grass

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Days of Grass-smallWe’re continuing with our look at the extraordinary 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who passed away on May 24th. So far I’ve focused on her highly regarded series work, but I don’t want to neglect her standalone novels.

Today I’d like to briefly highlight Days of Grass, subtitled After the Fall of Humanity, one of the first Tanith Lee novels I ever bought. I wish I could tell you I was drawn by her reputation, but truthfully it was Michael Whelan’s gorgeous cover that seduced me. Click on the image at right for a bigger version — and be sure to note the man hiding in the rocks, and the alien striding machine rounding the cliffs on the far left.

Days of Grass might do better today than it did when it was first published. It’s a postapocalyptic dystopia with a strong female protagonist, and the world didn’t know how to treat a book like that in 1985. As it is, it has never been reprinted, and has now been out of print for 30 years. Copies are available online for not much more than the original cover price.

The free humans lived underground, secretive, like rats. Above, the world was a fearsome place for them – the open sky a terror, the night so black, and the striding machines from space so laser-flame deadly.

Esther dared the open; she saw the sky; she saw the Enemy. And she was taken – captive – to the vast alien empty city. Surrounded by marvels of science not born on earth, Esther did not know what they wanted of her. There was mystery in the city, dread in the heavens, and magic in the handsome alien man who came to her.

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The Dark Island by Henry Treece

The Dark Island by Henry Treece

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Britain is a dark island of mists and woods. It lies farther north than any other known land, so that the sun is seldom seen there. The people of this island are brave in battle but fearful of their gods and priests.

Arminius Agricola, Ambassador to Camulodunum, A.D. 25 – A.D. 30

The first written of Henry Treece’s Celtic Tetralogy, the second chronologically, and the third to be reviewed by me, The Dark Island (1952) is a story of 1st century AD Britain. I’ve previously reviewed The Great Captains and Red Queen, White Queen here at Black Gate. The fourth is The Invaders. Together, they present one of the most artistically successful attempts to portray ancient Britain and its people. Treece’s ancient Britons are the inhabitants of a dark and violent world, where signs and portents are seen in every event. For them, the gods and their blessings and curses are real. Fiercely independent as they believe themselves to be, even kings and princes bow down before the blood-soaked hands of the Druids. Under their direction human sacrifices to the gods are a regular occurrence. It is a world alien to us today and Treece presents it without condescension or sentimentality, and as completely believable.

The Dark Island is a story of trying to hold on to ideals in the face of overwhelming forces. Gwyndoc, cousin of Caradoc (better known as Caractacus), is a prince and a warrior. He was raised to be loyal, brave, and to fear the gods. In the wake of the Roman invasion, the shattering of the British army at the Battle of the Medway, and the easy acquiescence of most of the population to Roman rule, holding true to his ideals becomes difficult and self-destructive.

Gwyndoc and Caradoc are as close as brothers when they are young. They come of age during the golden days of the rule of Caradoc’s father, Cunobelin (more commonly known as Cymbeline). While Caesar’s invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 BC failed, Roman commerce and culture have made great inroads there. The merchants of Camulodunum and the tribal kings and princes have become richer than ever before. Their sons are educated by Roman tutors. Times are peaceful and plentiful.

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