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Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier On Sale This Week

Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier On Sale This Week

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Shadow Ops Fortress FrontierMyke Cole is a class act. Before he launched a career as an internationally celebrated novelist, he did the decent thing: he apprenticed at Black Gate first.

His story “Naktong Flow” appeared in BG 13, and Dave Truesdale at Tangent Online called it “Thoroughly professional… Think Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now and you’re on the right track.” We attempted to lure him back to our pages with insanely generous offers — his own dressing room, and fresh flowers delivered daily — and even sent the lovely Patty Templeton to interview him, but it was all to no avail. Life as a novelist offered him the one thing Black Gate couldn’t: real money. And respect. And fame. And accolades. And a ton of other stuff, but let’s not dwell on that.

In his essay “Selling Shadow Point,” Myke talks about what it took to submit and sell his first novel, saying “You have to have guts… you have to bite the bullet and take it out to market.” In his case it certainly paid off — his first novel was Shadow Ops: Control Point, which Peter V. Brett called “Black Hawk Down meets the X-Men… military fantasy like you’ve never seen it before.” It was an immediate hit, and the reading public clamored for more. Now Cole has delivered and the second volume of Shadow Ops arrives in book stores this week.

The Great Reawakening did not come quietly. Across the country and in every nation, people began to develop terrifying powers — summoning storms, raising the dead, and setting everything they touch ablaze. Overnight the rules changed… but not for everyone.

Colonel Alan Bookbinder is an army bureaucrat whose worst war wound is a paper-cut. But after he develops magical powers, he is torn from everything he knows and thrown onto the front-lines. Drafted into the Supernatural Operations Corps in a new and dangerous world, Bookbinder finds himself in command of Forward Operating Base Frontier — cut off, surrounded by monsters, and on the brink of being overrun.

Now, he must find the will to lead the people of FOB Frontier out of hell, even if the one hope of salvation lies in teaming up with the man whose own magical powers put the base in such grave danger in the first place — Oscar Britton, public enemy number one…

Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier was published by Ace Books on January 29, 2013. It is 368 pages and priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions.

Katherine Blake (or Dorothy Heydt) and The Interior Life

Katherine Blake (or Dorothy Heydt) and The Interior Life

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The Interior LifeI’ve mentioned a few times before that I have a fascination with 80s fantasy, and suspect a number of now-overlooked genre books from those years are worth closer examination. I want to put forward another example of what I mean: The Interior Life, written by Dorothy Heydt under the name Katherine Blake. Published in 1990, it’s a novel that does interesting things in mixing a fantasy world with the experiences of a modern-day housewife.

The book starts with Sue, whose three kids have just started the school year. Sue’s doing some daily chores and remembers how she told herself fairy tales when she was a child, creating and inhabiting fictional characters: “all the people I used to be.” After which, she starts seeing the lives of people in the quasi-medieval world of Demoura. More precisely, she sees things from the perspective of Lady Amalia, a noblewoman with magical gifts, Marianella, her maid, and occasionally others such as Kieran, an innkeeper’s son who joins Amalia’s service. Demoura’s menaced by a Darkness creeping westward across the land, blighting all in its path; the characters of the Demouran story live a fairly conventional high fantasy tale of an evil wounding the land, of the struggle to overthrow the dark and bring healing. But those characters also, as the story goes on, provide inspiration for Sue.

You could in theory read the book as moving back and forth between two separate worlds. Heydt, in the comments to this perceptive review of the book by Jo Walton, has said that she thinks of the fantasy aspects as entirely Sue’s creation; in fact, without being explicit, a number of things about the set-up imply this. It’s subtly done. Notably, the life-and-death drama of the fantasy becomes the venue for Sue’s development as a person. She wants nothing more than to tend her family — raise her kids and cook and keep house and help her husband advance in his career. However old-fashioned this sounds, the novel makes it clear she’s happy with this life, and the point of the book is not that she finds new goals, but that she becomes better at what she does and happier in the course of doing so. Two or three interesting points come out of this. First, the blending of the ‘real’ and ‘fantasy’ worlds is worth considering, well-done and unusual. Second, the book points out a generic similarity in fantasy stories about a protagonist developing skills and learning to master their world. Three, and this is perhaps more marked from a twenty-first century perspective than a 1990 perspective, it raises some interesting questions about what is contemporary and what is archaic. Sue’s life and aspirations feel dated in ways that the fantasy of Demoura does not.

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New Treasures: The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters

New Treasures: The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters

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The-Last-PolicemanI enjoy genre mash-ups.  When done right, they highlight the strengths of both genres, and that’s a hard thing to pull off. Think horror-comedies like Ghostbusters or Zombieland, or science fiction mysteries like Asimov’s I, Robot stories. Or zombie westerns like the Bloodlands novels, or Dead Reckoning.

Not every mash-up succeeds, of course. (Did anyone see Seeking A Friend For the End of the World, Steve Carell’s romantic comedy cum apocalypse movie from 2012? No? That’s what I thought.)

But sometimes a mash-up is so brilliant I have to buy it immediately  That’s what happened with The Last Policeman, a police procedural set in Earth’s last days.

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?

Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.

The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job — but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week — except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

Now there’s an original use for an apocalyptic setting. Give me a impending extinction-level event and a relentless investigator too stubborn to give up, and you have my attention. I bought this book after reading the first two paragraphs of the plot summary, and for a jaded book purchaser like me, that’s saying something.

Ben H. Winters is a New York Times best-selling author and an Edgar Award nominee. His last novel was Bedbugs. The Last Policeman was published by Quirk Books in trade paperback July 2012. It is 316 pages and priced at $14.95 ($14.95 for the digital edition).

Nathan Shumate Looks at Lousy Book Covers

Nathan Shumate Looks at Lousy Book Covers

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Goat SuckingIt’s a lot easier to publish a book than it used to be.

So easy in fact that people are doing it themselves. They’re doing away with traditional print and distribution, all the hassle of finding an agent, publishing contracts, and 20th Century promotional models entirely.

Unfortunately, in the process many of them are also getting rid of things they probably shouldn’t. Things like book design, and cover art. And marketing.

Or even proof-reading. I mean, who needs that, right?

Sadly, the result is that some good books are getting buried under terrible cover art, or painfully sub-standard art design. Nathan Shumate has made it his mission to showcase daily examples at his blog, Lousy Book Covers. Today’s poster child, Dixon Heurass’s Goat Suckin’, is sub-titled “Hotter Than It Sounds” (as Nathan dryly observes, “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”)

Check out the many additional examples at Nathan’s blog to see just how many different ways there are to screw up cover art, or totally obscure passable art with poor title placement and font color.

We last discussed Nathan Shumate on the publication of his delightful experiment in communal self-publishing, Space Eldritch (which has a thoroughly excellent cover, incidentally).

New Treasures: Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe

New Treasures: Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe

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Pirate Freedom-smallI love bargain books. I love pirate books. And I love Gene Wolfe books. So I don’t need to tell you how I feel about bargain pirate novels by Gene Wolfe.

Pirate Freedom was released in hardcover in November 2007, and in trade paperback three years later. It’s a swashbuckling adventure novel — Sci-Fi Weekly called it “straight up adventure in the mold of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rafael Sabatini, or even the Pirates of the Caribbean films” — but as you’d expect from Wolfe, he adds an unexpected twist or two.

It begins in a monastery in Cuba the day after tomorrow, where a boy named Chris realizes he’s not meant for the priesthood, and sets out for the streets of Havana. From there it becomes a tale of time travel and fantasy adventure. The San Francisco summed it up thusly:

Plenty of action, romance, and historical color. Nearly every pirate cliche is given a new spin, from mutinous crews to cursed ships, from beautiful women in disguise to treasure beyond imagining.

Still, I hadn’t gotten around to picking up a copy until this week, when I noticed that Amazon had marked down the price by 60% — to $9.98 for the hardcover, and just $6.40 for the trade paperback. If you’re interested in a copy, act quickly; there are only about half a dozen left.

Pirate Freedom was published by Tor Books. It is 320 pages, and was originally priced at $24.95 for the hardcover, and $15.95 for the trade paperback. The gorgeous cover is by David Grove (click on the image at right for a larger version).

Kiini Ibura Salaam on Advice Received in the Bathroom from Octavia Butler, Selling Books at the Green Market, and Holding Five Jobs When Life Only Has Room for Two: An Audio Interview

Kiini Ibura Salaam on Advice Received in the Bathroom from Octavia Butler, Selling Books at the Green Market, and Holding Five Jobs When Life Only Has Room for Two: An Audio Interview

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e3667e7c97f30a7f0235ec.L._V149931200_SX200_I’m a total fangirl around Kiini Ibura Salaam.

When people ask what the best thing about Clarion West was, my first answer is: everything I learned about writing; but a very close second is: that it made me cool enough to hang out with people like Kiini. Originally from New Orleans, she has traveled the world and writes mind-bending stories rich in culture and sensuality. She is also a painter, mother, and blogger for KIS List, an email newsletter she started over a decade ago.

At the time of this posting, she has just earned out her advance on her collection of short stories, Ancient, Ancient, which any short story author can tell you is no small feat. In this interview, she discusses both her artistic process and her marketing strategy as she continues to build a name and a brand for herself in the modern publishing era.

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George R.R. Martin: “A Writer Who Needs to Get Writing”

George R.R. Martin: “A Writer Who Needs to Get Writing”

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George_R_R_MartinGeorge R.R. Martin is profiled by The Huffington Post today in a piece titled “13 Writers Who Need To Get Writing.”

Martin is the poster child — his smiling face is at the top — but the article also pokes Philip Pullman (“We want him to write The Book of Dust, the latest companion book to the His Dark Materials series”), George Saunders (“His quirky, disturbing sci-fiesque suburban short stories have critics fighting over each other… write a goddamn novel already”), and The Night Circus author Erin Morgenstern (“Morgenstern says her next book is “a film noir-flavored Alice in Wonderland“… WE WANT TO READ IT NOW.”)

In other GRRM news “The Princess and the Queen,” a new novella set in the world of A Song and Ice and Fire, will appear in Martin and Gardner Dozois’s upcoming “massive crossgenre anthology” Dangerous Women. Here’s the scoop from Martin’s blog:

Mine own contribution… well, it’s some of that fake history I have been writing lo these many months, the true (mostly) story of the origins of the Dance of the Dragons. The stand-alone stories, not part of any series, feature some amazing work as well. For those who like to lose themselves in long stories, the Brandon Sanderson story, the Diana Gabaldon story, the Caroline Spector story, and my “Princess and Queen” are novellas. Huge mothers.

Read the complete details at Tor.com.

New Treasures: The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

New Treasures: The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

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The Complete John Thunstone-smallIf you’ve been reading Josh Reynolds’s excellent series The Nightmare Men here at Black Gate (And if you haven’t, what’s your deal? It’s packed with monsters, ghosts, and ghoulies, and the stalwart men who face them in dark corridors. I swear, every column is like The Exorcist re-made as an Indiana Jones movie), you know he covered Manly Wade Wellman’s supernatural sleuth John Thunstone last February. Here’s a snippet:

Big and blocky, with a well-groomed moustache and eyes like flint, Thunstone is an implacable and self-described ‘enemy of evil’. He hunts it with the verve of a Van Helsing and strikes with the speed and viciousness that puts Anton Zarnak to shame.

Well read and well-armed against vampires, werewolves and all things dark and devilish, Thunstone seeks out malevolent occult menaces in a variety of locales. The sixteen stories and two novels have settings which range from the steel and glass corridors of Manhattan to the mountains of the rural South, or the pastoral fields of England. He faces off against Inuit sorcerers, demonic familiars and worse things in the name of protecting the Earth and all its peoples from the hungry shapes in the dark that would otherwise devour it and them.

I bet you’re sorry you missed it now. Anyway, Josh also plugged the upcoming volume The Complete John Thunstone from Haffner Press, which he noted would contain “both the short stories AND the two Thunstone novels.”

Sweet! That was worth haunting the Haffner Press website for (not that I wasn’t doing it anyway).  I checked on a daily basis… for months. Man, not for nothing did Stephen Haffner earn his rep as a painstaking craftsman and perfectionist. Just when I’d resigned myself to slipping peacefully into old age without seeing it, two review copies landed on my doorstep (with an impressive thud). Good timing too, as old age is a few weeks away at most.

John Thunstone first appeared in “The Third Cry to Legba” in the November 1943 issue of Weird Tales. This volume collects that story and 15 others, along with the novels What Dreams May Come (1983) and The School of Darkness (1985). It’s a gorgeous package, and I can finally settle in and read Thunstone’s exploits against vampires, werewolves, the diabolical sorcerer Rowley Thorne, and the enigmatic shonokins, a race who claim to have ruled North America before the coming of humans.

The Complete John Thunstone is edited by Stephen Haffner, and was published December 22, 2012. It is 640 pages, and priced at $40. Stay tuned to the Black Gate website, where we’ll announce a contest in which you can win a copy in the next two weeks. In the meantime, you can read additional details at Haffner Press.

A Slew of Old D&D (and AD&D) Books Now Available Digitally

A Slew of Old D&D (and AD&D) Books Now Available Digitally

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Fiends Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition
Fiend Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast officially released the first wave of backlist products available in digital format. These books are available in PDF format through DriveThruRPG, and you can access all of the Wizards of the Coast titles there … or through their new website, DnDClassics.com.

The move to make their classic backlist titles available was originally announced back at their GenCon keynote (which I liveblogged back in August). The ultimate plan is to have every Dungeons & Dragons resource ever published available, but that’ll obviously take a while.

They appear to have started with collection of about 86 products, ranging from some core rulebooks, adventure modules, setting manuals, and so on. Even in just this first wave of products, we’ve got access to some truly classic material, such as the Basic Set Rulebook and the original Fiend Folio for Advanced D&D.

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New Treasures: The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace

New Treasures: The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace

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Mammoth Book of Steampunk-smallBack in 1987, I was reading novels like Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides, James Blaylock’s Homunculus, and K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, all three men were friends. What I did notice was that all three shared a common fascination with Victorian-era manners and plots, and their books likewise shared a common aesthetic, an alternate-history extrapolation and love of steam-powered gadgetry. I remember Jeter’s famous letter, published in the April 1987 issue of Locus, in which he coined the term ‘steampunk’ to describe what he and his friends were doing, and make a modest prediction:

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like ‘steam-punks,’ perhaps.

How right he was. Steampunk did become the next big thing, gradually displacing the “cyberpunks,” who were widely considered The Next Big Thing in 1987. No one predicted steampunk would be just as much a clothing and cosplay phenomenon as a literary trend, but no one had heard of cosplay in 1987 either, so that’s understandable.

If you want to get into steampunk fashion, you’re on your own. But if you’re looking for a great introduction to the ideas and writers behind the defining SF aesthetic of the 21st Century (so far), Sean Wallace’s The Mammoth Book of Steampunk is a fine place to start. Reprinting fiction from Jeff VanderMeer, Aliette de Bodard, N.K. Jemisin, Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick, Margo Lanagan, Amal El-Mohtar, Barth Anderson, Jeffrey Ford, James Morrow, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jay Lake, Cherie Priest, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine, and many other, this fat anthology will make you an expert on the sub-genre in short order.

The Mammoth Book of Steampunk was published by Running Press in June, 2012. It is 498-pages in trade paperback, priced at $13.95, or $11.12 for the digital edition. Check it out.