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This Week’s Bargain SF & Fantasy Books at Amazon.com

This Week’s Bargain SF & Fantasy Books at Amazon.com

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swords-dark-magic-256I need a better system for tracking these discount books at Amazon. Way I do it now, I just add candidates to my cart whenever I find them. Which means my cart fills up pretty quick, and I have to keep emptying it.

Don’t tell me I should create a wishlist. I already have over a dozen wishlists. Compulsive people shouldn’t be allowed to use Amazon.

Anyway, what do we have in the bag for you this week? Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery, the excellent anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, has been marked down from $15.99 to just $6.40; David Weber’s new standalone SF novel, Out of the Dark, is just $2.98 in hardcover; and Tanya Huff’s latest hardcover, The Truth of Valor, is just $2.54. All that, plus two novels by Charles de Lint, Spirits in the Wires and Spiritwalk, for roughly six bucks; three Hawkmoon novels by Michael Moorcock for six bucks or less: The Mad God’s Amulet, The Jewel in the Skull, and The Sword of the Dawn; The New Space Opera, volumes One and Two, edited by Gardner Dozois for under 7 bucks; Gene Wolfe’s latest novel, Home Fires, in hardcover for $10; and over a dozen more.

Crux – Albert E. Cowdrey – $9.98 (was $24.95)

The New Space Opera – Gardner Dozois; Paperback – $6.38 (was $15.95)

The New Space Opera 2 – Gardner Dozois; $6.40, (was $15.99)

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New Treasures: The Scorpions of Zahir by Christine Brodien-Jones

New Treasures: The Scorpions of Zahir by Christine Brodien-Jones

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the-scorpions-of-zahirI can’t be the only one out there with a young teen daughter who likes to read.

I thought this would be easy. I’d give her a few books every month — books I treasured when I was her age, and carefully preserved for decades for just this moment — and she would retire in contentment to her reading nook, only popping out from time to time to comment on what a great Dad I am. Piece of cake.

Didn’t exactly work out like that.

For one thing, she’s really not interested in books from 40 years ago. She wants to read the books her friends are reading. And guess what? They’re not reading A Wrinkle in Time or Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators either. They’re reading The Hunger Games and Twilight and the Fallen novels and Vampire Academy and.. and…

And that’s the other thing. These kids read a lot. A few books a month? More like a few books a day. They’re voracious, and by the time I’ve ordered the book her friends are all taking about, they’re forgotten it and moved on. Forget being a great Dad… I’m left scrambling just so I don’t look like a clueless parent who’s perpetually “totally last week.”

Fortunately, I have people. People who work for publishing companies, and send me advance proofs. Of books that aren’t even out yet. Take that, bratty thirteen-year-old mean girls. I can still compete for my daughter’s attention by leaving these lying around.

She pretends not to be interested, but then picks one up. What’s this? she sez. Oh, that? The Scorpions of Zahir — just something some Manhattan publishers sent over. You wouldn’t be interested. Won’t even be on sale for another month or so. It’s about a girl in Morocco trying to keep a sacred city from being buried forever, or something. Your friends probably won’t be talking about it for weeks.

I know. I’m a bad person, but I’m desperate. And it works. Soon she’s curled up in her reading nook. She doesn’t come out to tell me I’m a great father or anything, but once she does ask where “Morocco” is. I show her on the map. We almost make eye contact for a moment, before she goes back to reading.

I get a quick hug the next morning. The book is tucked into her bag as she heads off to school. I’ll need to have a new book by the end of the day, but I’ll worry about that later.

Heaven help me when she turns sixteen. But this morning I’m a cool Dad again. Treasure the small victories.

Steampunk Spotlight: City of Iron Board Game on Kickstarter

Steampunk Spotlight: City of Iron Board Game on Kickstarter

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cityofiron-boxLast winter, I saw an excellent game on Kickstarter called Empires of the Void (Amazon). I was fairly new to Kickstarter, however, so didn’t actually back it at the time because I was hesitant about how the whole process worked. When I caught a glimpse of the game at GenCon, however, I was very impressed with the production values and wish I’d gotten it … because the Kickstarter discount turns out to be nearly 50%.

I’m not going to make that mistake again. Empires of the Void‘s creators, Red Raven Games, now has a second Kickstarter going. City of Iron is a steampunk-themed board game, complete with bizarre races, exotic lands (including floating islands), airships, and yes, even bottled demons. That’s right: one of the game’s many resources are bottled demons.

The goal of the game is to build up your civilization’s resource levels to surpass those of your competing civilizations. There are a variety of different ways you can proceed, with each turn allowing for three actions chosen from the following:

  • Build using a Building card
  • Buy Science tokens
  • Play a Citizen or Military card
  • Store a Building
  • Draw a card
  • Tax to gain coins
  • Attack a town

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New Treasures: A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones

New Treasures: A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones

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a-book-of-horrorsI ran into Stephen Jones when he and his wife Mandy Slater swung by the Black Gate booth at Worldcon last week. I’ve known Mandy for nearly 30 years, since we were both involved in Ottawa fandom in the early 80s, but Stephen I first met in the early days of running the SF Site. I was an entrepreneur trying to get a website dedicated to science fiction and fantasy off the ground at the dawn of the World Wide Web (1996), and Stephen was a young editor publishing some of the most exciting anthologies in the field, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Dark Voices, Fantasy Tales, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, and many others.

Fifteen years later, I’m a grumpy small press magazine publisher, and Stephen Jones is still publishing some of the most exciting anthologies in the field. The 23rd volume (23rd!!) of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror will be released on Oct 23, and this week, A Book of Horrors, one of the most anticipated anthologies of the year, goes on sale here in the US. It includes all-new stories from Stephen King, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ramsey Campbell, and many others:

Many of us grew up on The Pan Book of Horror Stories and its later incarnations, Dark Voices and Dark Terrors (The Gollancz Book of Horror), which won the World Fantasy Award, the Horror Critics’ Guild Award and the British Fantasy Award, but for a decade or more there has been no non-themed anthology of original horror fiction published in the mainstream. Now that horror has returned to the bookshelves, it is time for a regular anthology of brand-new fiction by the best and brightest in the field, both the Big Names and the most talented newcomers.

A Book of Horrors is 429 pages in trade paperback. It is published by St. Martin’s Griffin, priced at $15.99 print and $9.99 for the digital edition. You can see more details, including the complete list of contributors, here.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

Subterranean Press Announces $2.99 e-Book Sale

Subterranean Press Announces $2.99 e-Book Sale

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the-chronicles-of-master-li-and-number-ten-oxOne of our favorite small press publishers, Subterranean Press, have announced an impressive sale on more than 60 digital titles.

Until the end of September, all Subterranean Press digital books are available for $0.99 to $2.99, including work by Kelly Armstrong, Peter S. Beagle, Elizabeth Bear, James P. Blaylock, Peter V. Brett, Ted Chiang, Robin Hobb, Barry Hughart, Joe Lansdale, Thomas Ligotti, Brian Lumley, Robert McCammon, Jack McDevitt, Cherie Priest, Mike Resnick, John Scalzi, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, Robert Silverberg, Dan Simmons, Peter Straub, Michael Swanwick, and Connie Willis.

This includes some classic works of fantasy, such as the 3-novel omnibus The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart, containing the World Fantasy Award-winning Bridge of Birds and both of its sequels; Ted Chiang’s Hugo-Award winning novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects; and his Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelette The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.

It also includes the classic Grimscribe and Noctuary by Thomas Ligotti, the 500-page omnibus edition of The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives by James P. Blaylock, and The God Engines by John Scalzi.

Short fiction lovers have several excellent choices, including The Best of Lucius Shepard; The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volumes One through Four; In the Beginning: Tales From the Pulp Era by Robert Silverberg; The Best of Michael Swanwick, Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt; The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories by Peter Straub; and a collection of Connie Willis’s Christmas stories, All Seated on the Ground.

Subterranean Press eBooks are completely DRM-free. You can find a complete list of available titles here.

It’s A Small World After All

It’s A Small World After All

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the-mindwarpersI sold a copy of Eric Frank Russell’s The Mindwarpers at Worldcon last week, for three bucks. This usually isn’t a big deal. I buy a lot of vintage SF and fantasy collections, and I end up with a lot of duplicates. A lot of duplicates — thousands of ’em, packed in dozens of boxes in my bedroom, garage, and basement. Years ago, I hit on the bright idea of bringing some with me when I get a booth at science fiction conventions. Beside all the bright, shiny Black Gate issues for sale, I spread out a few hundred paperbacks from the 60s and 70s, and let nostalgia do the rest. (Howard published some snapshots of our booth, including the paperbacks, in his Worldcon Wrap-up last week.)

Sometimes I’ll get compliments from folks who stop by the booth. “You have a terrific collection,” they say with admiration, fingering a 50-year old Ace paperback. It’s a little awkward to admit that this isn’t my collection. It’s a small portion of the duplicates from my collection. But admitting that is akin to confessing to a compulsive mental disorder, so I usually just smile and say, “Thanks. I hate to part with them, but I need the space.”

But the woman I sold The Mindwarpers to thought it was a big deal. She was evidently a big Eric Frank Russell fan, and she had no idea the book existed. It was originally published by Lancer in 1965 with a Richard Powers cover and a cover price of 50 cents, and she was thrilled to find it. She practically did a happy dance right there in the booth. I took her three bucks and told her I was glad it had found a good home.

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New Treasures: Stefan Petrucha’s Dead Mann Running

New Treasures: Stefan Petrucha’s Dead Mann Running

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dead-mann-runningI’m keeping my promise to spend a few days focusing on paperback arrivals in my New Treasures column. It’s easy to do, as there’s been plenty to grab my attention recently.

Case in point: Dead Mann Running by Stefan Petrucha, sequel to Dead Mann Walking. David Wellington, author of Monster Island, called it “Fast-paced zombie noir with a melancholy bite, a sure antidote for the blandness of traditional zombie fare.”

It kills me that there’s such a thing as “traditional zombie fare” these days. As a kid growing up on monster movies, there was no such thing as “traditional zombie fare.” Zombie fare was all gourmet, let me tell you. Anyway, I’m intrigued by the “zombie noir” blurb, and the book description, narrated by dead detective Hessius Mann:

Just because a bullet has your name on it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t duck…

Either I’m stubborn or it’s rigor mortis, but being dead didn’t stop me from being a detective. But it’s tough out there for a zombie. These days the life-challenged have to register and take monthly tests to prove our emotional stability. See, if we get too low, we go feral. And I’ve been feeling down lately myself.

So when a severed arm – yeah, just the arm – leaves a mysterious briefcase in my office, my assistant Misty thinks figuring out where it came from will keep me on track. But this job goes deeper and darker than I imagined.

Turns out the people after the briefcase know more about my past life than I can remember, and even more about what I’ve become.

Believe it or not, this is not the only zombie detective novel I plan to cover this week (maybe David Wellington was on to something after all). But you’ll have to wait until later in the week to hear about the second one.

Dead Mann Running was published by Roc on September 4. It is 339 pages in paperback or digital format for $7.99. You can read a free excerpt here.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

It’s Halloween Already with Graphic Classic’s Halloween Classics

It’s Halloween Already with Graphic Classic’s Halloween Classics

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halloween-classics2Goth Chick gets all excited as we approach the Halloween season every year, decorating the Black Gate offices in black ribbons and plastic tombstones. If we left it up to her, Halloween decorations would be up between Labor Day and Christmas Eve.

But she’s not the only one. Plenty of publishers offer up exciting books around Halloween, and I never really get tired of them. Last week, I received word that Graphic Classics (whom we last wrote about back in July) have released a new comic anthology collecting five scary stories in the tradition of EC Comics, presented by your horrible host Nerwin the Docent:

Eureka Productions is pleased to announce the release of Halloween Classics: Graphic Classics Volume 23, the newest volume in the Graphic Classics series of comics adaptations of great literature.

Halloween Classics presents five scary tales for the holiday, each with an EC Comics-style introduction by famed horror author Mort Castle. Featured are Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s mummy tale “Lot No. 249,” Mark Twain’s “A Curious Dream,” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cool Air.” Plus, a comics adaptation of the great silent film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Calligari,” illustrated by Matt Howarth, with a terrifying cover by Simon Gane.

Halloween Classics: Graphic Classics Volume 23 is edited by Tom Pomplun, and published September 2012 by Eureka Productions. It is 144 pages in full color oversize paperback, priced at $15.00.

Get more details at the Eureka Productions website.

Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

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of-blood-and-honey-by-stina-leicth-adoiOf Blood and Honey
By Stina Leicht
Night Shade Books ($14.99, trade paperback, 296 pages, January 2011)
Reviewed by Sean T. M. Stiennon

Perhaps I’ll be accused of going below the belt by saying this, but the most damning criticism I can offer of Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey is that it took me several weeks of intermittent reading to finish.  It’s not an awful book by any means, but I never felt as though it generated enough momentum or sympathy to pull me from one reading session to another.

But let me discuss what I did like, which is quite a bit.  Although Leicht is ultimately writing a tale of faeries, demons, and inquisitors, she opts for a clean, modern style that’s well in keeping with the setting in 1970s Ireland.  The sentences flow smoothly from paragraph to paragraph and page to page.  There are some nice snatches of dialogue which, to me at least, rang as distinctly Irish: “It’s married I am, and it’s married I’ll stay.”  Leicht never resorts to spelling out accents, instead relying on vocabulary and syntax to convey dialect, which is a far higher and finer art.

The picture the book paints is rather grim, but ultimately I thought the book came through strongest on atmosphere and milieu.  I know very nearly jack-squat about the Troubles (my ancestors left Ireland much earlier, more around the time of the Potato Famine), but the sense of constant fear and persecution Leicht evokes is powerful.

She tells the story of Liam, a young man who has never known any father besides his step-father Patrick.  His mother tells him that he’s the product of her forbidden union with a Protestant, but Liam has always suspected that there’s something more alien about his origins.

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New Treasures: Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine

New Treasures: Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine

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the-grass-kings-concubine2I haven’t paid much attention to paperbacks in my New Treasures column. Which is odd, considering paperbacks are actually my preferred format. I think it’s just force of habit — I try to talk about the arrivals that look the most interesting and important, and I think my eye just gravitates towards the hardcovers and trade paperbacks each week.

Several very intriguing paperback originals have arrived in the past few weeks and I’m going to try and rectify that mistake by highlighting them, starting with Kari Sperring’s The Grass King’s Concubine. Sperring made a splash with her first novel Living With Ghosts — a finalist for the Crawford Award, a Tiptree Award Honor Book, Locus Recommended First Novel, and the winner of the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. With her second novel she returns to the same world with a brand new tale set several hundred years later:

It began with Marcallen, a man bringing human knoledge into WorldBelow — where no mortal had been… And though Marcellan never meant to cause harm, his theories undermined the immortal Grass King’s magic, the power that gave life and plenty to all the Domains of WorldBelow. That disaster was compounded by a spell of stone and blood cast in WorldAbove by exiled shapeshifter twins, once favorites of the Grass King…

Generations later, Aude, born to wealth yet driven always by her childhood vision of a strange Shining Place, seeks to understand her family’s past, where their wealth came from, and why they and all who live in the Silver City want for nothing, while the people who live in the industrial Brass City have nothing at all.

Jehan, a soldier serving in the Brass City, also questions the inequities between the wealthy and those who work for them. When the two find each other on the troubled streets, their destinies are linked. Together, they flee the cities in search of the origins of Aude’s family. All they find is a devastated land, and when Aude is snatched away to WorldBelow by the Grass King’s last remaining supporters, the Cadre, Jehan has no choice but to follow, aided and impeded by the twins. While Jehan travels through hostile lands and battles terrifying guardians, Aude must survive as a prisoner of the Cadre, who believe that she is the solution to restoring WorldBelow — even at the cost of her own life…

The Grass King’s Concubine was released by DAW Books on August 7. It is 481 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the print and digital editions.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.