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“Blah Blah Blah” by Thingy Whatsisname: A Review of a Pre-YA SciFi Adventure Novel

“Blah Blah Blah” by Thingy Whatsisname: A Review of a Pre-YA SciFi Adventure Novel

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Pulp-O-Mizer_Cover_Image
I don’t want to roast anybody I may subsequently meet in a professional capacity (who may then take a swing at me, metaphorical or otherwise).

I don’t tend to post negative reviews because, mostly, I can’t be bothered.

You can’t learn much about how to survive the melee from inspecting a corpse.

I’m also aware that my tastes may be special to me. For example, the entire world loved the wonderful Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion series, except for me. I simply don’t like the spiraling-disaster-with-redemption-at-the end sub genre. Finally, I’ll also admit  I don’t want to roast anybody I may subsequently meet in a professional capacity (who may then take a swing at me, metaphorical or otherwise).

Luke Challenger Adventures
…promised good rip-roaring adventure along the lines of the truly excellent Luke Challenger Adventures.

So, let me tell you about, um, Blah Blah Blah by, call him/her, Thingy Whatsisname. (Cover by Pulp-O-Mizer.)

It’s in that not-quite-YA category of 9-14, so I read it to my son “Kurtzhau” a couple of years back when he was 8.

It came complete with a cover quote by Philip “My God, that City is on Caterpillar tracks” Reeve and promised Pulp Tropes and good rip-roaring adventure along the lines of the truly excellent Luke Challenger Adventures.

What it delivered… well it did deliver the Pulp Tropes, but only grudgingly.

It followed the boilerplate children’s fiction structure Kurtzhau once described as “It’s all blah blah blah here’s his uncle and now we’re travelling, and FINALLY you get to the space station.”

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Goth Chick News: Take A Break From the Cold and Enjoy a Spin Through Joyland

Goth Chick News: Take A Break From the Cold and Enjoy a Spin Through Joyland

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Joyland Stephen King-smallAdmittedly, until Doctor Sleep, I had been over Stephen King for some time.

I caught up with him in college, falling hard for Salam’s Lot and The Shining, and proceeded to devour anything King I could get my hands on.

That is until I slammed head-first into The Stand.

That experience, much like a really bad bender, left me swearing I’d never, ever, do that again. And just like the days or weeks or even months after that horrible hangover, here I am once again ready to slug down a really strong glass of King – neat.

But this isn’t the Wild Turkey King of my youth – no siree.

This is an aged and far smoother vintage of King; free of what we now know was a fairly serious struggle with substance abuse.

Which totally explains The Stand, if you ask me.

And so having consumed Doctor Sleep, finding it a wonderful and satisfying with no nasty after taste, I now carry the experience a bit further with Joyland.

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New Treasures: Season of Wonder, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: Season of Wonder, edited by Paula Guran

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Season-of-Wonder-smallI think a Christmas fantasy anthology is a great idea. For one thing, there’s a long history of magical Christmas tales, including some of the most famous in the fantasy genre (especially if you’re willing to include Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Jimmy Stewart’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which of course we are).

Connie Willis used to write a semi-regular Christmas fantasy for Asimov’s, and I always thought that was cool. Going by the stellar line-up of authors in Paula Guran’s Season of Wonder, she’s not the only one seduced into writing a yuletide fantasy: Charles de Lint, Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, Ellen Kushner, Robert Reed, James Patrick Kelly, Robert Charles Wilson — and of course, Connie Willis — plus many others are all included. Here’s the back cover copy:

Wonders abound with the winter holidays. Yuletide brings marvels and miracles both fantastic and scientific. Christmas spirits can bring haunting holidays, seasonal songs might be sung by unearthly choirs, and magical celebrations are the norm during this very special time of the year. The best stories from many realms of fantasy and a multitude of future universes, gift-wrapped in one spectacular treasury of wintertime wonder.

Paula’s previous anthologies include a wide range of nifty titles, including the altogether splendid Weird Detectives, and Vampires: The Recent Undead, New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, After the End: Recent Apocalypses, and the ongoing The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, which she’s been editing since 2010. She’s practically a one-woman renaissance in fantasy anthologies and we’re having trouble keeping up with her.

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The Weapons of Fantasy

The Weapons of Fantasy

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Stormbringer, by Michael Whelan
Stormbringer, by Michael Whelan

I love weapons. No, not guns and rockets (although they can be cool, too). I prefer the weapons of ages past. Swords, axes, spears, arrows, and maces. Just like Napoleon Dynamite, I remember drawing them in my notebooks when I was in school.

When I was younger, the weapons were part of what drew me to fantasy. Science fiction has its laser guns and starships. Horror has axe murderers and vampires. But fantasy takes me back to earlier epochs in human history when people (and nations) settled their differences with bronze and iron.

Fantasy also adds an element of the mystical to these trappings, and one of my favorite literary devices are weapons so famous or powerful they have their own names. There’s just something… well, magical… about these weapons. Just saying their names evokes a world of pageantry and adventure.

I have some that are my favorites, which I’d like to share with you today.

Stormbringer/Mournblade

If you’ve been reading my blogs here for a while, you already know how much I love the Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock. So it should be no surprise that this fell blade ranks among my top fantasy weapons of all-time.

A huge, black, rune-covered vampiric sword that sucks the souls from those it kills and transfers a portion of that energy to its wielder, it is the perfect (albeit evil) companion for our tragic hero Elric. Sure, in the end it devoured all life in the universe, but hey, you can’t blame a demonic sword for following its heart.

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Duelists, Animal People, and Machinery Not Meant to be Fiddled With: The Prophecy Machine by Neal Barrett Jr.

Duelists, Animal People, and Machinery Not Meant to be Fiddled With: The Prophecy Machine by Neal Barrett Jr.

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oie_275513I22lm2dJThe late Neal Barrett Jr. wrote around thirty novels and seventy short stories. I’ve only read a little bit from his works, which include sci-fi and fantasy as well as crime fiction and magic realism. He seems to have slipped under the radar of most genre readers. On the other hand, everything I’ve read about the man marks him as one of those special authors held in high esteem by other writers.

My own experience with Barrett started when I found a copy of Aldair, Master of Ships in the attic. The back of the book hinted at the story’s plot, asking:

Where is humanity? What legacy has true mankind left to its manlike descendants that they must relive our past?

I was fourteen and that was enough to hook me. (In fact, only for a short, embarrassingly snooty period in my early twenties would that have been too pulpy to catch my eye.) Even so, I was struck by the strangeness of Barrett’s Roman Empire recreated with pig-men at odds with ursine and lupine barbarians. It took me several years to track down the other three books in that series, but it was well worth it. Now, of course, you can get all four together as a single e-book. There’s a wonderful strangeness and a blackly mocking sense of humor to these books that hold up well to this day.

My next run-in with Barrett also came about by accident. During a 1999 book run to the Montclair Book Center, I found the post-apocalyptic-set Through Darkest America (1987) and on a whim I bought it. Pretty much by the third or fourth page I realized I was not in a comic book, Mad Max world, but something so dismal and bleak it disturbed me to the marrow. What followed was an utterly grim coming-of-age story, where innocence is ripped away and violence is the standard.

When a second trip to Montclair secured me the sequel, Dawn’s Uncertain Light (1989), instead of joining in conversation on the ride home, I read most of the book, to the annoyance of my friends. The impact wasn’t as severe as the first book, but it still made me uncomfortable. Together, these books have a power that leaves me chilled if I just think about them for too long. If you think Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the be-all and end-all of despairing post-apocalypse stories, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong and I’ll leave it at that.

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New Treasures: Tunnel Out of Death by Jamil Nasir

New Treasures: Tunnel Out of Death by Jamil Nasir

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Tunnel Out of Death-smallJamil Nasir wrote a number of intriguing paperbacks for Bantam Spectra over a decade ago, including The Higher Space (1996), Tower of Dreams (1999), and Distance Haze (2000) — see all three here. They were an interesting blend of science fiction of fantasy, asking Philip. K. Dick-like questions about dreams and the nature of reality (the cover tag for Distance Haze was “If dreams are doorways, where do they take us?”). And indeed, Tower of Dreams was nominated for the Philip. K. Dick Award, given annually to the best original paperback published in the US.

Nasir has been relatively quiet since 2000, publishing one new novel from Tor in 2008, The Houses of Time. But he bounced back last year with Tunnel Out of Death, a science fantasy about a private detective hired to find a literal lost soul…

Heath Ransom, former police psychic turned machine-enhanced “endovoyant” private investigator, is hired to find the consciousness of the rich and comatose Margaret Biel and return it to her body. Tracking her through the etheric world, he comes upon a strange and terrifying object that appears to be a tear in the very fabric of reality. He falls into it — and into an astonishing metaphysical shadow-play.

For Margaret is a pawn in a war between secret, ruthless government agencies and a nonhuman entity known only as “Amphibian.” Their battlefield is a multi-level reality unlike anything humankind has ever imagined. When Heath learns to move back and forth between two different versions of his life, and begins to realize that everyone around him may be a super-realistic android, that is only the beginning of a wholesale deconstruction of reality that threatens more than his sanity…

I have to admit, that’s one of the most original plot synopses I’ve read in the last year. I ordered a copy last week; my to-be-read pile is hopelessly backlogged, but if I get a chance to crack it open, I’ll report back here. Tunnel Out of Death was published May 7, 2013 by Tor Books. It is 304 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. So far, there is no paperback edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

Last Chance to Win a Copy of M. Harold Page’s The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets

Last Chance to Win a Copy of M. Harold Page’s The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets

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Blood in the Streets-smallOn January 7th, we announced a contest to win a copy of both of M. Harold Page’s exciting Scholar Knight novels: The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets. Here’s the description for the second, Blood in the Streets:

Jack shifted both hands to his blade. With an animal roar, he executed a ‘Murder Strike’, swinging the weapon like a hammer. The crossguard caught the Lancastrian where only mail protected the nape of his neck. There was a loud crack. A shock reverberated up the blade stinging Jack’s palms.

AD1455. The Yorkists are marching on London. What happens next is History… but Jack Rose must still live through it. Jack had planned to live quietly as a country gentleman while wooing the illusive Theodora, a fiery Greek lady of mysterious origin. Unfortunately, the price of keeping his land is following his lord to war. Now Jack must stop his men from getting themselves killed, survive lethal assassination attempts, win Theodora despite her fear of losing him, and, ultimately, pick up his greatsword and plunge into the first brutal battle of the Wars of the Roses.

In this standalone sequel to The Sword is Mightier, Jack wades through brawl, skirmish and melee, his fallen foes paving his path from scholar to knight.

How do you enter to win? Simple — just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com, using as the subject the name of the first Master Strike in the German School of Fencing (we’ll even give you a clue: it’s “Zornhau”), and we’ll enter you in the drawing.

Entries must be received by Friday, January 31, 2014. One lucky winner will win both books. The winner will be contacted by e-mail and books will be delivered in digital format.

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. Terms and conditions subject to change. Not valid where prohibited by law. Eat your vegetables. And good luck!

Vintage Treasures: Gaslight Tales of Terror, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Vintage Treasures: Gaslight Tales of Terror, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

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Gaslight Tales of Terror-smallI don’t know much about British ghost story writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes. According to his entry at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, he produced ten novels and two dozen short story collections between 1959 and 2001, the year he died. That’s a heck of a lot of ghost stories.

I did know he was a prolific and important anthologist. He took over The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories from editor Robert Aickman with number nine in 1973, bringing the series to 20 volumes before it ended in 1984, and he edited six volumes of the Armada Monster Book between 1975 and 1981. He also produced five standalone horror anthologies with Fontana, including Cornish Tales of Terror (1970), Scottish Tales of Terror (1972), Welsh Tales of Terror (1973), and Tales of Terror from Outer Space (1975).

The last in the series was Gaslight Tales of Terror (1976), a marvelous mix of original and classic spooky tales. Here’s R., from his introduction:

Here are fourteen Gaslight Tales of Terror, including one or two oil lamps and a few guttering candles. With one exception all the stories have either a Victorian or Edwardian background… But although — if newspaper reports are to be believed — ghosts and other horrors have not been exorcised by the advent of space travel and colour television, one feels they were more at home during the reign of Queen Victoria. And I do mean at home: in pea-souper fogs, on gloomy streets where the lamp-lighter with his long pole trudged wearily from post to post, and a potential Jack the Ripper lurked in dark alleyways.

Eight tales are original to this volume, including contributions from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Roger Malisson, Dorothy K. Haynes, Rosemary Timperley, and a vampire tale from Chetwynd-Hayes himself.

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The Series Series: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

The Series Series: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

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The Bone Season-smallRead this book. Just read it. Ignore the reviews that call Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling, or call the series that opens with The Bone Season the next Hunger Games. Most importantly, ignore the jacket copy, which spoils a big reveal that is best appreciated in a state of shocked astonishment alongside the protagonist’s own. For that matter, I give you leave to ignore everything about this review I am writing right now except the first sentence, which I am not abashed about reiterating: Read this book.

You’re still here? Okay, that’s cool, too.

If all the comparisons in the mainstream reviews are off the mark — and the ones I find bandied about online all are — then what is The Bone Season?

It’s the book you would get if Philip K. Dick decided to write about the wild Victorian occult scene that flourished under Madame Blavatsky, blossomed again in the time of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, lingering until it faded with its evenstar, Dion Fortune. That is, if Philip K. Dick decided to take all that supernatural grandiosity, and steampunk adaptations of Victoriana,  and turn them on their heads by transposing them into a dystopian near-future historical moment that feels intermittently like  hard SF with its what-ifs scrambled.

It’s Minority Report meets Oliver Twist in the secret séance parlor of Martha Wells’s The Death of the Necromancer. Sez me. But the readers of Cosmopolitan don’t speak geek, so instead Cosmo conjures the ghost of J.K. Rowling, because hey, the blasted ruins of Oxford being repurposed as a prison camp for deliberately starved clairvoyants is a setting so reminiscent of Hogwarts. Oh, well. I’m sure someday I’ll write a review that far off the mark, too. (But not this day.)

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New Treasures: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler

New Treasures: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler

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The Vampire Archive-smallLast week I wrote a brief piece on Otto Penzler’s marvelous The Big Book of Adventure Stories, and I’ve been having so much fun with it that I decided to look at some of his other door-stopper genre anthologies. So here we are this week with The Vampire Archives, one of the best collections of vampire stories I’ve ever encountered.

What makes it so great? It’s over 1,000 pages of the finest vampire fiction ever written, old and new, in a beautiful and inexpensive package. This is the only volume you need to bring yourself up to speed on vampire lit of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries — no small claim.

It includes the classics you’d expect, like John Keats’ 1820 poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber — as well as many that you might not, like Ambrose Bierce’s 1891 tale “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” an excerpt from Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour,” “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Lovely Lady” by D. H. Lawrence, and even a Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” by Arthur Conan Doyle.

There’s a generous selection of fiction from the pulps, including “Stragella” by Hugh B. Cave, “Revelations in Black” by Carl Jacobi, “When It Was Moonlight” by Manly Wade Wellman, and Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne tale “The End of the Story.”

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