Books – Page 466 – Black Gate

New Treasures: Dream London by Tony Ballantyne

Saturday, April 5, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I’ve never read anything by this Tony Ballantyne fellow and I’m probably overdue. He’s a British science fiction writer who’s had an impressive career for a decade now, starting with the Recursion trilogy, Recursion (2004), Capacity (2005), and Divergence (2007), all published in the US by Bantam Spectra. He’s also written two volumes of The Robot Wars, Twisted Metal (2009) and Blood and Iron (2010), and I really don’t know how I missed that one — if it’s got battling robots, I’m usually all over it.

But it’s his first fantasy novel that has really piqued my curiosity and it’s getting some serious attention from both sides of the Atlantic. Set in a constantly shifting London that’s gradually getting weirder every night, and apparently throwing off the laws of physics, it’s — as Chris Beckett put it in his excellent Tor.com review — “a place you feel you might have visited yourself, if only you’d been able to hold it in your mind when you woke up.”

In Dream London the city changes a little every night and the people change a little every day. Captain Jim Wedderburn has looks, style and courage by the bucketful. He’s adored by women, respected by men and feared by his enemies. He’s the man to find out who has twisted London into this strange new world, and he knows it. But the towers are growing taller, the parks have hidden themselves away and the streets form themselves into strange new patterns. There are people sailing in from new lands down the river, new criminals emerging in the East End and a path spiralling down to another world. Everyone is changing, no one is who they seem to be, and Captain Jim Wedderburn is beginning to understand that he’s not the man he thought he was…

Dream London was published by Solaris Books on October 29, 2013. It is 404 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Win a Copy of The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four from Haffner Press

Friday, April 4, 2014 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Haffner Press has released the long-awaited fourth volume of The Collected Edmond Hamilton and we have a copy to give away to one lucky winner.

How do you enter? Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the title “Edmond Hamilton” and a one-sentence review of your favorite Hamilton novel or short story (don’t forget to mention the title of the story). One winner will be drawn at random from all qualifying entries and we’ll publish the best reviews here on the Black Gate blog. To give you the idea, here’s my one-sentence review of my favorite Hamilton story, “The Man Who Evolved.” (read the complete story here)

Arthur Wright and Hugh Dutton visit Dr. John Pollard on the night he first tests a ray that allows him to experience millions of years of human evolution… and witness a deadly experiment that threatens the entire human race.

See how easy that was? If you need more inspiration. we recently covered several Edmond Hamilton books — including Starwolf and The Best of Edmond Hamilton — and we reprinted his very first story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (from the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales) in Black Gate 2.

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 hardcover is more than, like, 10 bucks. Seriously, this thing is huge and postage is killing me.

The Reign of the Robots, The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four was published by Haffner Press on December 30, 2013. It is 696 pages, priced at $40 in hardcover. There is no digital edition. Learn more at the Haffner website.

The Thankless World of the Continuation Author

Friday, April 4, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 10 comments

Despite the title, this article is not intended as a forum for a continuation author to lament how unforgiving his critics are. Bad reviews are an inevitability and, in this instance, I’m the one bad-mouthing another continuation writer. I do not feel pangs of guilt, since the author in question is not only talented, but very successful and lauded in his industry. In other words, I’m an insignificant mouse picking on an elephant and that hopefully protects me from charges of betraying one of my own.

I recently read Benjamin Black’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, the first Philip Marlowe continuation novel in nearly 25 years. I can think of only one nice thing to say about the book and that is at long last Robert B. Parker need no longer be disparaged as the man who wrote the two worst Philip Marlowe mysteries. I am a fan of Black’s original historical mysteries, but my familiarity with his work did nothing to convince me he was a good choice to revive Raymond Chandler’s classic private eye hero, particularly when a talent such as Ace Atkins is active in the field writing new Spenser mysteries that do justice to the originals.

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The Series Series: Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories by Peadar O Guilin

Thursday, April 3, 2014 Sarah Avery Comments 3 comments

How did he pull it off?

The stories in Peadar O Guilin’s Forever in the Memory of God are in some ways old-school weird fiction, Clark Ashton Smith style, heavy on disturbing imagery and sanity-shattering trauma so far over the top that it risks going beyond gallows humor and straight into comic absurdity, and yet it works. Every time. Even for me, and this is usually not my kind of thing. What these stories have going for them that the old pulp classics didn’t is striking characterization, a flesh of psychological realism animating some surprising configurations of plot bones.

The characters in the three stories here collected find themselves in dire predicaments. These characters — not all of them can be called heroes — bring their own moments of insight and blindness, laughter and grief, to their struggles. O Guilin keeps them struggling against plot twist after plot twist, all the way to twisty endings that gave me that wonderful readerly shock followed by a sense of inevitability: What?! Oh, but of course!

In the opening story, “The First of Many,” a young woman, born into the Rememberer tribe in a post-alien-invasion Earth, is the first of her kind to be a host organism to the larval young of the slug-like conquerors. She copes with the gradual loss of her arm and her privacy in her own mind — as the larva learns to read her thoughts and chemically manipulate her emotions — with a gallows humor that will be familiar to anyone who has lived with a chronic illness.

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New Treasures: The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher

Thursday, April 3, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

I’ve mentioned my fondness for this new Weird Western genre before. In the right hands, it’s an invigorating mix of mythic adventure and the straight-out gonzo weird. There’s been no shortage of fine examples recently, including Lee Collins’s She Returns From War, Guy Adams’s Once Upon a Time in Hell, Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill’s Dead Reckoning, and the Bloodlands novels of Christine Cody. Heck, even Firefly is a weird western, if you squint at it right.

The latest volume to cross my desk, hot off the presses last week in paperback, is the debut novel by R.S. Belcher. In a starred review, Library Journal called it “an astonishing blend of first-rate steampunk fantasy and Western adventure,” which sounds like just the right mix in my book.

Nevada, 1869: Beyond the pitiless 40-Mile Desert lies Golgotha, a cattle town that hides more than its share of unnatural secrets. The sheriff bears the mark of the noose around his neck; some say he is a dead man whose time has not yet come. His half-human deputy is kin to coyotes. The mayor guards a hoard of mythical treasures. A banker’s wife belongs to a secret order of assassins. And a shady saloon owner, whose fingers are in everyone’s business, may know more about the town’s true origins than he’s letting on.

A haven for the blessed and the damned, Golgotha has known many strange events, but nothing like the primordial darkness stirring in the abandoned silver mine overlooking the town. Bleeding midnight, an ancient evil is spilling into the world, and unless the sheriff and his posse can saddle up in time, Golgotha will have seen its last dawn… and so will all of Creation.

The Six-Gun Tarot was published on January 22, 2013 by Tor Books. It is 368 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital edition. It was re-issued in paperback on March 25, 2014.

Vintage Treasures: Starwolf by Edmond Hamilton

Thursday, April 3, 2014 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

Last week, I wrote about a delightful collection of 80′s paperbacks I bought on eBay for just 10 bucks — including John Silbersack’s Buck Rogers novel Rogers’ Rangers, well worth $10 all on its own. Sometimes it’s good when no one else shares your hobbies.

I’m still digging through the remaining 74 volumes and continuing to make marvelous finds. Like the omnibus collection of pulp novels by Edmond Hamilton, gathering together all three volumes in his classic Starwolf trilogy. It contains The Weapon From Beyond (1967), The Closed Worlds (1968), and The World of the Starwolves (1968), all originally published by Ace. That’s a lot of classic space adventure from one of the greatest pulp writers of the 20th Century. Well worth tracking down, if you can find a copy.

The only mercy a Starwolf could expect was death…

Morgan Chane was a Starwolf – a member of the most infamous band of interstellar pirates in the galaxy. He had flown with the raiding packs, rockets screaming, to plunder the rich and slaughter the helpless.

But Morgan Chane was also a Terran, adopted as a child into the Starwolf clan. And when a quarrel erupted, Chane discovered that the Starwolves weighed his alien birth more heavily than all the years of comradeship. Now he is cast out of the clan – and running for his life.

But where, in all the galaxy, can a Starwolf expect to find refuge?

Starwolf was published by Ace Books in October 1982. It is 456 pages, priced at $3.50. It went through multiple printings between 1982 and 1990, but has otherwise never been reprinted. There is no digital edition. The cover is by David Schleinkofer, who was obviously influenced by one too many viewings of Battlestar Galactica.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Future Treasures: The Leopard by K.V. Johansen

Wednesday, April 2, 2014 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Lou Anders, editorial director of Pyr Books, may be the closest we have to Lin Carter in the field today: an editor with impeccable taste and boundless energy, who has also been a tireless champion for sword & sorcery. The latest he’s offering us is the opening volume in a new series from K.V. Johansen, the Canadian author of Blackdog (2011). Black Gate’s own James Enge blurbs The Leopard with a stylish tip of the hat to the great Harold Lamb: “I’m hooked. This mix of magic, Tibetan-style religion, and Harold Lamb-style adventure is pretty addicting.” Sounds pretty darn good to me.

Ahjvar, the assassin known as the Leopard, wants only to die, to end the curse that binds him to a life of horror. Although he has no reason to trust the goddess Catairanach or her messenger Deyandara, fugitive heir to a murdered tribal queen, desperation leads him to accept her bargain: if he kills the mad prophet known as the Voice of Marakand, Catairanach will free him of his curse. Accompanying him on his mission is the one person he has let close to him in a lifetime of death, a runaway slave named Ghu. Ahj knows Ghu is far from the half-wit others think him, but in Marakand, the great city where the caravan roads of east and west meet, both will need to face the deepest secrets of their souls, if either is to survive the undying enemies who hunt them and find a way through the darkness that damns the Leopard.

To Marakand, too, come a Northron wanderer and her demon verrbjarn lover, carrying the obsidian sword Lakkariss, a weapon forged by the Old Great Gods to bring their justice to the seven devils who escaped the cold hells so long before.

The Leopard is Volume One of Marakand. It will be published on June 10 by Pyr Books. It is 370 pages, to be priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital version. The second volume, The Lady, is scheduled to arrive in December (see the cover here).

Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One, edited by Laird Barron

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 John R. Fultz Comments 4 comments

YEAR’S BEST WEIRD FICTION, Vol. 1, edited by the great Laird Barron for Undertow Press, is scheduled for an August release. You can pre-order it right here. This will be a brilliant inauguration for the series. Each volume will be edited by a different “guest editor” and Undertow could not have made a better choice for their first book: Barron is one of the best weird/horror writers in the field. Here is the complete Table of Contents:

“Success” by Michael Blumlein, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov./Dec.
“Like Feather, Like Bone” by Kristi DeMeester, Shimmer #17
“A Terror” by Jeffrey Ford, Tor.com, July.
“The Key to Your Heart Is Made of Brass” by John R. Fultz, Fungi #21
“A Cavern of Redbrick” by Richard Gavin, Shadows & Tall Trees #5
“The Krakatoan” by Maria Dahvana Headley, Nightmare Magazine/The Lowest Heaven, July.
“Bor Urus” by John Langan, Shadow’s Edge
“Furnace” by Livia Llewellyn, The Grimscribe’s Puppets
“Eyes Exchange Bank” by Scott Nicolay, The Grimscribe’s Puppets
“A Quest of Dream” by W.H. Pugmire, Bohemians of Sesqua Valley
“(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror” by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Lovecraft eZine #28
“Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron” by A.C. Wise, Ideomancer Vol. 12 #2
“The Year of the Rat” by Chen Quifan, The Mag. of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August.
“Fox into Lady” by Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Darkscapes
“Olimpia’s Ghost” by Sofia Samatar, Phantom Drift #3
“The Nineteenth Step” by Simon Strantzas, Shadows Edge
“The Girl in the Blue Coat” by Anna Taborska, Exotic Gothic 5 Vol. 1
“In Limbo” by Jeffrey Thomas, Worship the Night
“Moonstruck” by Karin Tidbeck, Shadows & Tall Trees #5
“Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks” by Paul Tremblay, Bourbon Penn #8
“No Breather in the World But Thee” by Jeff VanderMeer, Nightmare Magazine, March.
“Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” by Damien Angelica Walters, Shock Totem #7.

Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds is Punch-You-in-the-Face Good

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 Kelly Swails Comments 1 comment

Fate wants what fate wants. No one knows this better then Miriam Black.

Miriam sees death every time she touches someone. A few seconds of skin-on-skin contact is all she needs to learn the exact date, time, and method of someone’s death. Over the past several years, she’s seen thousands of suicides and car crashes, violent deaths and peaceful ones. Miriam has long since stopped trying to save people, because it never works. Fate wants what fate wants; and when fate wants someone dead, it happens.

That is, until Miriam meets Louis and learns he will die saying her name, three weeks after they meet. Miriam knows she is present when Louis dies and that she must do everything she can to stop it.

Blackbirds is punch-you-in-the-face, miss-your-stop-on-the-train good. If it were a TV show, it would have an “MA LVS” warning — for mature audiences, language, violence, and sexual content. As such, this book isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s important to note, though, that all of this graphic content doesn’t feel gratuitous in any way. Wendig is masterful at characterization and he didn’t pull any punches when he wrote Miriam Black. She is foul-mouthed (once or twice I re-read a few sentences because I was simultaneously shocked, awed, and jealous), self-protective, and quite capable of holding her own in a bar fight. She might rub some readers the wrong way — especially after the visceral opening scene when she appears uncaring — but if you stick with her a bit, you’ll see her coarse, abrasive nature is nothing more than an armor that Miriam has had to acquire in order to keep her sanity intact.

The plot is fairly straight-forward and tightly constructed. There are no extraneous scenes or chapters. The “Interlude” segments serve to tell us Miriam’s backstory in an untraditional way. If I had one quibble with this book, it would be the ending. While it’s satisfying, completes the story, and is the expected ending, I felt Miriam could have been a little more proactive in carrying out the task fate had in mind for her. Still, that’s a minor complaint; I thoroughly enjoyed the book and look forward to reading the next in the series.

Doctor Who and the Daemons – the Novel!

Monday, March 31, 2014 markrigney Comments 7 comments

More than once on Black Gate, I’ve heard that the seventies were a dead zone for science fiction and fantasy. For teens in search of readily available genre “gateway drugs,” I suppose this might have been true for many, but my particular experience of growing up managed, against all odds, to be different. Ohio was my home base, a vanilla environment for “culture” of the fantastical sort, but luckily I had a smorgasbord of British relatives. One especially perceptive and sibylline aunt started sending me Doctor Who novelizations.

Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, that was the first I tried. Next, one of the best offerings in the canon, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion. I was in third grade and after facing down those blank-eyed Autons and their Nestene masters, I was hooked.

Note that I wasn’t in any way watching the TV show. In Columbus, Ohio, it simply wasn’t available, not until the early eighties, and then, when PBS did pick up a few random episodes, it was Tom Baker’s roost to rule. The Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, and William Hartnell adventures I first encountered were absent entire.

What Tom Baker’s run taught me is that talented actors can be mired forever in substandard scripts and even worse special effects. This was a total and unpleasant surprise, because the novelizations were fast-paced genre gems, especially those penned by Terrance Dicks. (Malcolm Hulke was the other regular adapter for the Doctor Who franchise, with a rotating cast of fellow contributors including Gerry Davis, Ian Marter, and David Whitaker.) How could such pacey, adrenaline-filled books arise from such hokey, hamstrung screen material?

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