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New Treasures: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum

New Treasures: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum

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Dreams of Shreds and Tatters-smallAmanda Downum is the author of the three-volume Necromancer Chronicles from Orbit Books. Her latest book, described as a “Lovecraftian urban fantasy,” looks very intriguing indeed. It goes on sale in paperback next week from Solaris.

When Liz Drake’s best friend vanishes, nothing can stop her nightmares. Driven by the certainty he needs her help, she crosses a continent to search for him.

She finds Blake comatose in a Vancouver hospital, victim of a mysterious accident that claimed his lover’s life — in her dreams he drowns. Blake’s new circle of artists and mystics draws her in, but all of them are lying or keeping dangerous secrets. Soon nightmare creatures stalk the waking city, and Liz can’t fight a dream from the daylight world: to rescue Blake she must brave the darkest depths of the dreamlands. Even the attempt could kill her, or leave her mind trapped or broken.

And if she succeeds, she must face the monstrous Yellow King, whose slave Blake is on the verge of becoming forever.

Dreams of Shreds and Tatters will be published by Solaris on May 12, 2015. It is 256 pages, priced at $9.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

The Woman Who Was a Man Who Was a Woman: Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree Jr.

The Woman Who Was a Man Who Was a Woman: Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree Jr.

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Tiptree Biography-smallAlice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon was a remarkable person — world traveler, painter, sportswoman, CIA analyst, PhD in experimental psychology… and one of the greatest of all science fiction writers. If you don’t recognize her name, that’s partly by her own design.

Born in 1915, from an early age Alice was a lover of this new genre that was in those days still called “scientifiction,” devouring every copy of Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and Amazing Stories that she could find, but it wasn’t until the mid 60’s that she tried her hand at writing any SF herself. After some false starts, she completed a few stories and in 1967, when she was 51, she sent them off to John Campbell at Analog, not really expecting anything to come of it. As she considered the whole thing something of a lark, she submitted the manuscripts under a goofy pseudonym that she and her husband, Huntington (Ting) Sheldon, cooked up one day while they were grocery shopping — James Tiptree Jr. The Tiptree came from a jar of Tiptree jam; Ting added the junior.

To Alice’s professed surprise, Campbell bought one of the stories, “Birth of a Salesman.” A new science fiction writer was born, one who would, in the space of just a few years, make a tremendous impact on the genre (as two Hugos, three Nebulas, and a World Fantasy Award attest, to say nothing of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given to works which expand or explore our understandings of gender).

Alice Sheldon never looked back. She also never let anyone know that James Tiptree Jr. wasn’t a man; all of her many contacts and correspondents in the SF field assumed that the courtly “Tip” who had had such a wide-ranging life and wrote such witty letters was an all-American male. (Who wouldn’t take phone calls or meet anyone — including his agent — in person and would never show up to accept any awards. What began as a joke became, without Alice’s really planning it, an elaborate deception worthy of… well, of the CIA, and a banana peel that countless readers and critics would embarrassingly slip on.)

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Vintage Treasures: The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak

Vintage Treasures: The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak

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The Goblin Reservation Berkley-small The Goblin Reservation Berkley 1977-small The Goblin Reservation DAW-small

The Goblin Reservation was Clifford D. Simak’s fourteenth novel. An entertaining blend of science fiction and fantasy, it features a ghost, leprechauns, trolls, banshees, a dragon, a cybernetic sabertooth tiger, a Neanderthal, Shakespeare, aliens who get around on wheels, time travel, and stranger things. It was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1969.

The novel opens in the distant future as Professor Peter Maxwell is traveling home to Earth, which has been transformed into a single great University. When he gets there, he learns that he already arrived a week earlier — and was promptly murdered, either by aliens or their rivals, the goblins and trolls who’ve been brought from Earth’s distant past for study, and now live on a protected reservation. Suffice to say, The Goblin Reservation is wholly unlike any other fantasy novel, and could only have been written by Clifford D. Simak.

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The Future of Fantasy: May New Releases

The Future of Fantasy: May New Releases

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Trial of Intentions-small The Venusian Gambit-small Archivist Wasp-small

May, why do you do this to me? There are so many dynamite new fantasy books hitting the stands, I scarcely know where to look. And I have absolutely no idea where I’ll find the have time to read any of them.

Well, I’ll worry about that later. The task at hand is to introduce you to the 30 most intriguing fantasy titles released this month. And trust me, I had a heck of a time whittling it down to 30. Time’s a wasting, so let’s get started.

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Rich Horton on The Breaker Queen by C.S.E. Cooney

Rich Horton on The Breaker Queen by C.S.E. Cooney

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The Breaker Queen-smallNot so very long ago, I finished all my tasks for the evening and kicked back in my big green chair with the latest issue of Locus, the news magazine of the SF & fantasy field. In Rich Horton’s short fiction column I found a pair of reviews of The Breaker Queen and The Two Paupers, the first two novellas in a new romantic fantasy series from our very own C.S.E. Cooney. Here’s what he said about the first one:

I’m a big fan of of C.S.E. Cooney’s work, so I’m very happy to point to two new, related, stories, available in electronic form from Fairchild Books. The Breaker Queen concerns Eliot Howell, a talented young painter, who has been invited to a party at Breaker House. He feels immediately out of place — the family is very rich and very privileged — and the friend who invited him is being unpleasant, but then he meets one of the maids and is instantly enchanted. For Breaker House exists in three worlds: the world of humans, the world of goblins, and Valwode, where Elliot’s maid Nyx is Queen. Elliot, even when made aware of the price one pays to visit Valwode, follows Nyx into her land, while she, simply desiring a dalliance with a mortal, finds that she may pay a price herself. It’s lovely and romantic, dark and sweet, erotic and thrilling.

The Breaker Queen is Book One of Dark Breakers. The second, The Two Paupers, was published on January 22, 2015. The pub date for the third has not yet been announced — but when it is, we’ll let you know all the details.

C.S.E. Cooney is a podcast reader for Uncanny Magazine; Mark Rigney interviewed her for us in late October. The two C.S.E. Cooney short stories we presented here, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” consistently rank among the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. She is a past website editor of Black Gate, and the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills. Her newest collection, Bone Swans, is due out this summer.

The Breaker Queen was published by Fairchild Books on October 13, 2014. It is 80 pages, priced at $2.99 for the digital edition. No word on a print edition yet.

The Tears of Ishtar by Michael Ehart

The Tears of Ishtar by Michael Ehart

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oie_351436BG5v7xydWhen my renewed interest in swords and sorcery was sparked a few years ago, one of the first and best books of new writing I found was The Return of the Sword, edited by Jason M. Waltz (reviewed at BG by Ryan Harvey). It’s filled with a passel of great stories and turned me on to several writers I follow closely to this day. Among them are Bill Ward, James Enge, and Bruce Durham. It’s the book that convinced me that there was a renaissance in heroic fiction and that it was worth blogging about.

One of the most intriguing stories, with imagery that’s stayed with me over the years, is “To Destroy All Flesh” by Michael Ehart. I wasn’t surprised to learn it was part of an ongoing series of linked stories. “Flesh” references characters and quests that clearly predate the action at hand.

Ehart’s protagonist, Ninshi, a woman from Ugarit in Bronze Age Syria, is enslaved by a flesh-eating demon, the Manthycore. She must provide corpses of warriors for the beast to devour. Her terrible master gave her immortality, great strength, and enhanced healing in order to carry out this task.

By the time I could see again, it had already begun to feed. As always, it started with the soft parts. The belly and the face were its favorites and because it fed so seldom, it showed little restraint. This time it chose to wear the head of a lion, which seemed to be well suited for the task.

It felt the force of my gaze, but did not react right away, engrossed in some particularly savory morsel from the belly of one of the corpses. I took care not to take note of which one. It is a matter of pride that I not look away, but I long ago learned to look without seeing.

She is sustained over the centuries of her servitude by the dream of freeing herself and forcing the Manthycore to restore her lover to life. That quest sets the stage for the tales collected in The Tears of Ishtar.

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New Treasures: The Vorrh by B. Catling

New Treasures: The Vorrh by B. Catling

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The Vorrh-smallI first heard of B. Catling’s second novel The Vorrh when Matthew David Surridge reviewed it for us two years ago, saying:

It’s a powerful book, precise and unexpected in its use of language and its plot construction, a dizzying and straight-faced blend of history and the unreal… It’s mostly set in the years after World War One, but although there are scenes with peculiar Victorian technology and bakelite automata, it mostly avoids any feel of either steampunk or such recently-coined retrofantasies as dieselpunk or decopunk… while one can say that the Vorrh of Catling’s novel — a massive forest in which time is confused and myths wander — recalls Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, the feel is something quite different.

The book has just been reprinted in trade paperback by Vintage, with an impressive range of cover blurbs, including a stellar endorsement by Alan Moore on the front cover:

Easily the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy.

Sadly, Moore’s introduction to the hardcover edition is missing here, but you can’t have everything. (The hardcover, out of print for scarcely a year, already commands ridiculous prices on the collector’s market, so I’m just glad to finally have a copy.)

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2015 Locus Award Finalists Announced

2015 Locus Award Finalists Announced

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The Mirror Empire-smallThe Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the nominations for the 2015 Locus Awards.

The winners are selected by the readers of Locus magazine. The awards began in 1971, originally as a way to highlight quality work in advance of the Hugo Awards. The winners will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, on June 26-28, 2015. In addition to creators, the Locus Foundation also honors winning publishers with certificates, which I think is kind of neat.

The finalists are:

FANTASY NOVEL

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
Steles of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway)
The Magician’s Land, Lev Grossman (Viking)
The Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley (Angry Robot US)

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Vintage Treasures: The Last T’En Trilogy by Cory Daniells

Vintage Treasures: The Last T’En Trilogy by Cory Daniells

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Broken Vows Cory Daniells-small Dark Dreams Cory Daniells Desperate Alliances Cory Daniells-small
Broken Vows Rowena Cory Daniells-small Dark Dreams Rowena Cory Daniells-small Desperate Alliances Rowena Cory Daniells-small

Two months ago, in my March New Releases article, I said a few words about a handsome omnibus volume from best selling author Rowena Cory Daniells, The Fall of Fair Isle, published in paperback by Solaris on March 10. A complete trilogy on one volume, it collects Broken Vows, Dark Dreams, and Desperate Alliances, all originally published over a decade ago and recently republished with new cover art. Together, they form a sequel to her epic fantasy saga The Outcast Chronicles.

After that, I kinda forgot about it. Until last week, when I was sorting through some old review copies that I received in the late 90s, while I was editor of SF Site. I found the original paperback editions from Bantam Books (above, top row) and, to be blunt, it took a few days before it dawned on me that they were the same series. Where the Bantam editions were packaged as high fantasy/medieval romances, the new Solaris versions are marketed as dark fantasy — with starkly different cover design, and under a different name. It’s one of the more interesting examples of a publishing make-over I’ve seen in a while.

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Self-published Book Review: The Shard by Ted Cross

Self-published Book Review: The Shard by Ted Cross

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. 

Shard coverTed Cross’s The Shard takes place in a world of elves, dwarves, and humans. Millenia ago, dwarves and elves warred against one another with devastating losses on both sides. Only when it was almost too late did they realize that they had been tricked by the corrupted wizard Bilach, leaving themselves vulnerable to his conquering armies. They combined forces and defeated Bilach. Afterward, the remaining wizards created a tower called the Spire of Light, with a great crystal atop enchanted to encourage peace. Centuries later, the dragon came and destroyed the tower and the crystal. Now a new threat has appeared, and the only way to defeat it is to find the sole remaining shard of the crystal, hidden in the lair of the dragon who destroyed it.

Wisely, the author doesn’t lay out the ancient history quite so directly as I’ve done here. Told this way, it seems too simple, too familiar. Instead, the history is told in bits and pieces, not through the eyes of the elves or the dwarves, but through the perspective of the humans, who came late to the region and saw the coming of the dragon, but know little of the history behind what it destroyed. In a sense, the story is told backward, each new story a revelation farther into the past, shedding light on a new person’s or people’s origin and role.

At the center of the large cast of characters is Midas. A lord of a minor holding, he is still mourning the loss of his son Miros when he discovers that someone is attempting to spark a war between the humans and the elves. He knows right away that such an act is foolhardy, and he makes contacts with the elves in order to try to ease tensions. The elf lady Alvanaria is eager to help keep the peace, but ultimately it’s the appearance of a new threat that prevents humans and elves from going to war. An army of wyrmen is rapidly approaching, and it will take humans, elves, and dwarves to stop them. But first, Midas, his sons, Alvanaria, the wizard Xax, and their companions will need to retrieve the shard of the Spire of Light from the dragon’s lair.

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