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New Treasures: Philippa Ballantine’s The Order of Deacons

New Treasures: Philippa Ballantine’s The Order of Deacons

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The Order of DeaconsI can’t be the only one who really enjoys these low-cost omnibus editions produced by the Science Fiction Book Club.

Omnibus editions have been a tradition for the SFBC for as long as I’ve been a member (don’t ask how long that is). One of the first books I purchased from them — and still one of my favorite SF books, period — was H. Beam Piper’s The Fuzzy Papers in the mid -1970s, containing Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens. The most recent was probably E.E. Knight’s Enter the Wolf, containing the first three novels of his terrific Vampire Earth saga: Way of the Wolf, Choice of the Cat, and Tale of the Thunderbolt.

At the same time as I purchased Enter the Wolf, I also acquired The Order of the Deacons, which collects the first three volumes of Philippa Ballantine’s A Book of the Order series. I’ve been intrigued by these books for a long time, and was impressed by the snippets I read from Geist, the opening book. Here’s the description for Geist:

Between the living and the dead is the Order of the Deacons, protectors of the Empire, guardians against possession, sentinels enlisted to ward off the malevolent haunting of the geists…

Among the most powerful of the Order is Sorcha, now thrust into partnership with the novice Deacon, Merrick Chambers. They have been dispatched to the isolated village of Ulrich to aide the Priory with a surge of violent geist activity. With them is Raed Rossin, Pretender to the throne that Sorcha is sworn to protect, and bearer of a terrible curse.

But what greets them in the strange settlement is something far more predatory and more horrifying than any mere haunting. And as she uncovers a tradition of twisted rituals passed down through the dark reaches of history, Sorcha will be forced to reconsider everything she thinks she knows.

And if she makes it out of Ulrich alive, what in Hell is she returning to?

The omnibus also includes Spectyr and the most recent volume, Wrayth. Philippa Ballantine is also the co-author, with Tee Morris, of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novels (as “Pip Ballantine”) and the Shifted World fantasy series, which began with Hunter and Fox. With luck, those will get a SFBC omnibus treatment too.

The Order of Deacons was published by SFBC in January 2013. It is 787 pages in hardcover, priced at $17.99. There is no digital edition. It is available exclusively to Science Fiction Book Club members; learn more at the SFBC website. Cover art by Karla Ortiz.

Gothic Ambiguity: Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching

Gothic Ambiguity: Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching

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White is for WitchingI picked up Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel, 2009’s White is for Witching, knowing very little about it. I’d read that Oyeyemi was a highly-regarded young writer in ‘mainstream’ literary circles, whose work contained some speculative elements (born in 1984, her first book had been 2005’s The Icarus Girl, followed by The Opposite House in 2007; a fourth book, Mr Fox, came out in 2011). What I found in White is for Witching was an excellent horror story whose intricacy demanded careful attention. It’s sharply-written and tightly-constructed, and if its plot is not immediately clear, the book’s strong enough to encourage careful attention.

The novel moves back and forth between several perspectives, building an unusual structure out of their interplay. The prologue at first borders on nonsensical, but as the tale goes on, things become clear: this is a novel of great ambition, not afraid to possibly bite off too much. If the tone had been slightly different, the sheer flashiness and verve might have been distracting; as it is, the book modulates nicely between voices, building from a normal-seeming reality to an increasing awareness of wrongness, madness, and the supernatural.

The inventiveness of the book rests on a traditional gothic framework. There’s a family saga here and a cursed dwelling. The house, in fact, is given a voice, a personality, and may be the monster, or a monster, moving events. But one of the book’s unusual aspects is the way you’re never quite sure who is the monster, even when you’re given the point-of-view of each character. It’s a book that seems to resist any one possible reading, any reduction to one truth.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales of Outer Space, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: Tales of Outer Space, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

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Tales of Outer SpaceSometimes I think I owe Donald A. Wollheim for a big chunk of my childhood.

Today we’re looking at Tales of Outer Space, a collection of interplanetary adventure tales edited by Wollheim in 1954, a decade after he invented the mass-market SF anthology with The Pocket Book of Science Fiction in 1943 (the first book with the words “Science Fiction” in the title), and not long after he produced  the first original SF anthology, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, in 1947.

That’s some pioneering stuff. But Wollheim spent most of his career as a pioneer. From 1947 to 1951, he was the editor of Avon Books, where he introduced mainstream America to mass-market editions of some of the best fantasy from the pulp era — including Ralph Milne Farley’s An Earth Man on Venus (which I discussed last month), A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, and eighteen issues of the highly sought-after fantasy paperback magazine, The Avon Fantasy Reader, among many other accomplishments. He even published C. S. Lewis’s Silent Planet space trilogy.

In 1952, Wollheim left Avon to spearhead a new paperback imprint, Ace Books, where he remained for 20 years. While there, he added science fiction to their lineup for the first time and, in a stroke of brilliance which endeared him to future generations of paperback collectors, invented the Ace Double in 1952.

You may have heard of some of his other successes at Ace as well: he first introduced Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings to the US in 1964 (against Tolkien’s wishes, as it happened) and published Frank Herbert’s obscure hardcover Dune in a paperback edition that made it a bestseller in 1965.

That ought to be enough for anyone. But of course, as many of you know, it wasn’t enough for Wollheim. In 1971, he left Ace to found his own publishing company, which bore his initials. DAW was the first mass market publisher to specialize in SF and fantasy, and before his death in 1990, it had acquired and published over a thousand titles, making it one of the most successful genre publishers of all time.

Of course, most of that was in Wollheim’s future when he released Tales of Outer Space — but the seeds of greatness were already there for anyone who looked.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Circle of Enemies

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Circle of Enemies

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Circle of EnemiesCircle of enemies cover
By Harry Connolly
Del Rey (320 pages, mass market first edition August 2011, $7.99)

And so we come full circle. Circle of Enemies is the final novel in the Twenty Palaces series as it stands, and in some ways the most crowded with monsters, sorcery, and mysteries. If it has one major flaw, it’s that it whet my appetite for a sequel that will likely never be written.

The action moves south from the Pacific northwest hamlets of Child of Fire (my review here) and Game of Cages (review) to the sun-scorched sidewalks and shadowy mansions of Los Angeles, as Ray revisits the life he lived before his stay in prison. One of his old friends from his carjacker days — a woman named Caramella — arrives in Ray’s Seattle room with a cryptic message: “You killed me, Ray.” After delivering it, she vanishes into thin air.

Magic — and all the horrors that accompany it — have found Ray’s old crew. He drives south to his old stomping grounds in Los Angeles to find his old allies and save them before the Twenty Palaces society arrives to wipe them out. The world is once again in danger from a predator with the potential to annihilate all human life, one hapless victim at a time.

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Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang

Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang

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China Mountain ZhangThere’s a distinctive kind of surprise some science fiction books can generate: surprise that a book which seems to be speaking to the beliefs, fears, or world-view of a given time was in fact written well beforehand. I remember being taken aback, for example, that A Clockwork Orange was first published in 1962, before hippies and punks and the coining of ‘generation gap’ (first recorded 1967). And it’s interesting to me that Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, published in 1992, calmly and thoroughly imagines a future dominated by China — something much discussed today, but a less common idea before the turn of the millennium. McHugh’s book is a twentieth century novel, lacking a world wide web or smartphones, that speaks to the twenty-first.

It does so because it’s a very strong book. And because the world it imagines is credible; the setting doesn’t seem a product of the anxiety of an ebbing imperial power, but a depiction of life as it is lived in the future. Characters go about their business, negotiating with the structures of their society as we do ours. We recognise them, and what they do, and their attempts to plan out their lives. As in much of the best science fiction, the imagined society’s complex and deeply imagined, existing in a dynamic relationship with character; it’s realistic, but not mimetic, and uses both its differences and similarities to the world we know as a way of getting at its thematic interest.

The book’s made up of long chapters that have the shape of short stories. Most follow an engineer surnamed Zhang, whose given names are ‘Rafael’ and ‘Zhong Shan,’ the latter of which can be translated ‘China Mountain.’ We follow Zhang as he finds his way to a career and builds a life for himself, a task complicated by ethnicity and sexual orientation. In and around the chapters dealing with Zhang are stories following other characters, minor figures in his life who broaden the story and add depth to the novel’s setting and structure. One of the metaphors that emerges in the book is chaos theory, and the now-familiar image of the butterfly fluttering its wings and causing a hurricane on the far side of the world; so these characters help demonstrate the interconnectedness of the world, affecting each other slightly or significantly, a structural embodiment of the chaos imagery.

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Parke Godwin, January 28, 1929 – June 19, 2013

Parke Godwin, January 28, 1929 – June 19, 2013

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Sherwood Parke Godwin-smallParke Godwin, the American author of more than a dozen fantasy novels, died this week.

I first encountered Godwin with The Masters of Solitude, his 1978 science fiction collaboration with Weird Tales editor Marvin Kaye. They wrote one sequel, Wintermind (1982), and one horror novel together: A Cold Blue Light (1983).

But I’ll chiefly remember Godwin for my favorite Robin Hood adaptation, Sherwood, published in hardcover by William Morrow & Co. in August 1991. The novel follows young Edward Aelredson, Thane of Denby, who’s driven from his home by Norman invaders and takes refuge in primeval Sherwood forest — where he meets a surprising cast of characters and gradually becomes a thorn in the side of the usurping king. Set during the Norman conquest, Sherwood features both William the Conqueror and William Rufus as major characters. Godwin wrote one sequel, Robin and the King, in 1993.

Sherwood was perhaps his most successful book, but he’s also fondly remembered for his Arthurian trilogy set in 5th century Britain during the collapse of the Roman empire: Firelord (1980), Beloved Exile (1984), and The Last Rainbow (1985).

Godwin’s first novel was Darker Places (1973), his last was Prince of Nowhere, published in 2011. In between, he wrote a number of popular historical and romantic fantasies, including A Truce with Time (1988), The Tower of Beowulf (1995), and Lord of Sunset (1998). He also turned his hand to solo science fiction with Limbo Search (1995) and the humorous Snake Oil series: Waiting for the Galactic Bus (1988) and The Snake Oil Wars (1989).

As an editor he produced Invitation to Camelot (1988) and, with Marvin Kaye, one collection of Weird Tales reprints, Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies (1988). He had one short story collection, the Hugo-nominated The Fire When It Comes (1984), which included the World Fantasy Award-winning title story.

His short story “Influencing the Hell out of Time and Teresa Golowitz,” (Twilight Zone magazine, January, 1982) was adapted as “Time and Teresa Golowitz,” an episode of The Twilight Zone TV show in 1986.

Parke Godwin was born in New York City in 1929, and lived there much of his life. He died on Wednesday at the age of 84.

Did I Do That? Or, We’ve Had the Sword, Where’s the Sorcery?

Did I Do That? Or, We’ve Had the Sword, Where’s the Sorcery?

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ElricA while ago, when I started writing these posts, I talked about how to put the sword in Sword and Sorcery, and while doing my latest posts on the Fantasy and SF hero, it struck me that, in a way, I was still really talking about the sword. Maybe it’s time to talk about the sorcery.

This is not to say that our heroes can’t be wielding some kind of magic at the same time they’re wielding swords – but that’s not the way things started out. Most of the early heroes of the genre that we’re familiar with, Conan, for example, and yes, even Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, weren’t magic users. In fact, many of these early heroes were fighting against those who were. Sorcerers were often seen as the enemy, or, at best, as very gingerly tolerated allies.

Along came some notable exceptions to this idea, particularly Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, and, someone I mentioned last week, Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish the Damned. But these two, we might argue, are representatives of the “New Wave” in Fantasy, which in part introduced the concept of the more complex, multidimensional, anti-hero. They also fall into a special category of sorcerer, in that they’re at least partially magical beings, not humans. Which brings us to the first major subdivision of sorcery or magic that any writer in our genre has to consider: Is the magic internal, or external? Does it come from within, or without?

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Murray Leinster

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Murray Leinster

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The Best of Murray LeinsterI first encountered Murray Leinster… wow, I don’t even know when. Probably in The Hugo Winners, Isaac Asimov’s 1962 anthology collecting the first short stories to win science fiction’s coveted prize.

It featured Leinster’s 1956 novelette, “Exploration Team,” about a desperate rescue attempt on a distant planet — involving an illegal settler blackmailed into helping a lost colony, and his team of Kodiak bears. Lost colonies, deadly aliens, and even more deadly bears… that’s the kind of story that sticks in your mind when you’re twelve, believe me.

Leinster died in 1975; he published his last book, a novelization of the Land of the Giants TV series, in 1969. But he was a steady presence on bookstore shelves during my formative reading years for well over a decade after his death, with reprint titles like The Med Series (Ace, 1983) and The Forgotten Planet (Carroll & Graf, 1990).

The mass market reprints have tapered off over the last few years. The last were all from Baen, a trio of excellent collections all edited by Eric Flint and Guy Gordon: Med Ship (2002), Planets of Adventure (2003), and A Logic Named Joe (2005).

Since then, the wheels of publishing have ground on, as they do, abandoning Leinster by the side of the road. We did our part to keep his memory alive, of course. I reprinted one of Leinster’s earliest pulp tales, “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” from the January 1931 Astounding Stories of Super-Science, in Black Gate 9.

There have also been low-budget digital editions of his out-of-copyright pulp fiction, sure, but by and large the genre — as living genres should — has focused instead on new and emerging authors.

I used to think that was inevitable. Readers have long memories, but publishing industries don’t, and when an author has been out of print for over a decade, she’s likely to remain that way.

But the brilliant Lester del Rey, publisher of Del Rey Books, proved me wrong. In fact, he proved me wrong nearly four decades ago, with a fabulous line of top-selling paperbacks collecting the best short science fiction and fantasy from the writers of the Golden Age of SF — including The Best of Murray Leinster, a collection of some of the best short SF and fantasy of the 20th Century.

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New Treasures: Fiery Edge of Steel

New Treasures: Fiery Edge of Steel

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fiery-edge-of-steelJill Archer’s first Noon Onyx novel, Dark Light of Day, served up a truly post-apocalyptic setting. And I don’t mean global warming or an inconvenient economic collapse. Armageddon is over, the demons won, and the few surviving humans worship patron demons just to survive. Sorta makes Mad Max look more like Mad Men, just with cooler fashions.

The second book in the series, Fiery Edge of Steel, has now arrived and it looks even more intriguing. It tosses an unusual mystery, a remote outpost, and an ancient and evil foe into the mix.

Lucifer and his army triumphed at Armageddon, leaving humans and demons living in uncertain peace based on sacrifice and strict laws. It is up to those with mixed demon and human blood, the Host, to prevent society from falling into anarchy.

Noon Onyx is the first female Host in memory to wield the destructive waning magic that is used to maintain order among the demons. Her unique abilities, along with a lack of control and a reluctance to kill, have branded her as an outsider among her peers. Only her powerful lover, Ari Carmine, and a roguish and mysterious Angel, Rafe Sinclair, support her unconventional ways.

When Noon is shipped off to a remote outpost to investigate several unusual disappearances, a task that will most likely involve trying and killing the patron demon of that area, it seems Luck is not on her side. But when the outpost settlers claim that an ancient and evil foe has stepped out of legend to commit the crimes, Noon realizes that she could be facing something much worse than she ever imagined…

Fiery Edge of Steel was published by Ace Books on May 28. It is 330 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

Vintage Treasures: Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural

Vintage Treasures: Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural

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Hauntings Tales of the SupernaturalWhen I was a kid in the late 60s/early 70s, I was fascinated by the fantastic. It didn’t matter what it was: films, comics, television, or books. Although, until I learned to read, my exposure to the genre — and especially horror — was through purely visual media such as comics and whatever was on TV.

Luckily my earliest talent, which later turned out to be pretty much my only one, was that I took to reading like a cultist takes to, well, cults! This opened up a whole new world for me, as our elementary school had a well stocked library.

And it didn’t take long to catch on that the best books didn’t have any pictures in them. Sure, they had great covers, but inside there was nothing but words! Lots and lots of wonderful words that helped me fill my mind with images that no film or comic could match.

Another important thing that I learned was that adults didn’t care what you read as long as it was a genuine book. Comics brought only disdain and suspicion.

Especially those wonderfully gory black and white comics published by Warren, Skywald, and Eerie Publications, those you had to hide from the adults. My dad always called those comics “Doug’s damned weirdo books.”

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