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New Treasures: The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart

New Treasures: The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart

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book-of-cthulhuIt’s been a few good years for Cthulhu fans, with a number of high-profile, acclaimed anthologies offering brand new tales of everyone’s favorite genocidal cosmic entity, including Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound (2009), Darrell Schweitzer’s Cthulhu’s Reign (2010), S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings of Cthulhu (2010), and Future Lovecraft (2011) edited by Paula R. Stiles and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, among others.

However, if you’re new to the Cthulhu mythos, or just want to sample the best Lovecraftian horror of the last eight decades, your options are a little more limited. Paula Guran’s New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011) offers an excellent cross-section of fiction from the last decade, with short stories by Neil Gaiman, John Langan, China Miéville, Michael Shea, Charles Stross, and many others. At 528 pages, it’s a veritable feast of modern cosmic horror, but since the oldest story dates from the year 2000, it doesn’t really count as a true survey of the very finest Cthulhu fiction.

That title, I think, goes to Ross E. Lockhart’s The Book of Cthulhu. It includes some of the most famous Cthulhu stories of all time, including T.E.D. Klein’s “Black Man With a Horn” (1980), Brian McNaughton’s “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999), and fiction by Charles R. Saunders, Ramsey Campbell, Bruce Sterling, Laird Barron, Kage Baker, Thomas Ligotti, Gene Wolfe, and many others.

Although Lockhart draws heavily from modern writers, there’s surprisingly little overlap with Guran’s volume — a scant four stories. You could probably get away with getting both, in fact. I’m glad I did.

Ross E. Lockhart is the managing editor of Night Shade Books. A second volume, The Book of Cthulhu 2 — reprinting stories by Fritz Leiber, Neil Gaiman, Laird Barron, Michael Chabon, and many others — is scheduled for release in October.

The Book of Cthulhu is 530 pages in a handsome trade paperback, with cover art by Obrotowy. It was released in August, 2011 by Night Shade Books, with a cover price of $15.99.

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Uses of Terrible Comic Adaptations

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Uses of Terrible Comic Adaptations

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taran-wanderer21“Usually the combat scenes are the part I understand best,” said my student. “In this one, I have no idea what’s going on. There’s a wounded character at the end of the scene, and I have no idea how he even got near the fighting.”

We’d made our way to the end of Lloyd Alexander’s Taran Wanderer, the fourth volume in the classic 1960’s YA fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain. My student and I had sojourned in Prydain for most of a year. The prospect of seeing Taran come into his full powers at last in The High King was so exhilarating that the kid had rushed through the last several chapters of Taran Wanderer and confused himself thoroughly.

I could have assigned the usual remedy — write one page per chapter, explaining who did what to whom and why, flagging anything that’s still confusing — but I had just read Ralph Fletcher’s Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices. Fletcher devotes a chapter to the ways it can help students, especially male students in his experience, to draw illustrations and diagrams alongside their writing. Apparently English teachers in high schools and middle schools are trained to discourage such drawings, on the assumption that they’re a distraction from learning how to write.

“Write me a comic,” I said.

…

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Vintage Treasures: Eleanor Arnason’s The Sword Smith

Vintage Treasures: Eleanor Arnason’s The Sword Smith

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the-sword-smith2I first became acquainted with Eleanor Arnason through her powerful science fiction novels, including To the Resurrection Station (1986), Ring of Swords (1993), and especially A Woman of the Iron People (1991), the novel which won both the first Tiptree Award and the Mythopoeic Award in 1992.

But Arnason has a fine rep as a fantasy author as well. Her Daughter of the Bear King (1987) — the tale of a Minneapolis housewife who finds herself in a strange world where she’s hailed as a long-awaited hero, a true bear and shape-changer called to fight a creeping evil — was her second fantasy novel. Her first, and her first published novel, was The Sword Smith (1978).

The Sword Smith is an odd book in many ways. In begins in media res, with our heroes Limper, a lame smith, and his companion, the young dragon Nargri, in full flight from the King of Eshgorin, who has put a price on their heads. The reasons for all this are gradually revealed in a book that’s more travelogue than tightly-plotted heroic fantasy, with the two companions having a variety of adventures, meeting new companions, getting captured (more than once), and getting in and out of sticky situations. That’s our two heroes on the cover, making a sword (click for bigger version).

The Sword Smith is sometimes described as “low fantasy” (as opposed to high fantasy), chiefly because of the lack of plot. But it’s also praised for its originality; world building; and themes of individual freedom in the face of tyranny, the value of artistic aspirations, and prejudice.

It took me a while to track down a copy, but I finally found one last week. I think this has more to do with the publisher — a tiny outfit called Condor Publishing, who as far as I know published virtually no other fantasy novels — than any lack of quality. For whatever reason, copies are scare, and the book has never been reprinted.

The Sword Smith is 208 pages in paperback. It was published in 1978 by Condor Publishing, with a wraparound cover by A. Echevarria, and had an original cover price of $1.95.

Mindjammer Press Publishes Sarah Newton’s Mindjammer

Mindjammer Press Publishes Sarah Newton’s Mindjammer

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mindjammer2I first encountered Sarah Newton in 2010, when Howard Andrew Jones mentioned how impressed he was with Mindjammer, a far future transhuman space opera setting she wrote for the Starblazer Adventures RPG. I picked up a copy of her massive Legends of Anglerre fantasy roleplaying game on the strength of his rec and wasn’t disappointed. It was a gorgeous and inventive game based on the popular FATE system and we reviewed it in detail in Black Gate 15. I was especially impressed with Sarah’s crisp prose and attention to detail.

We don’t let talent like that get away if we can help it, so we recruited Sarah as a BG contributor last year. Her detailed appreciation of a classic urban setting, Pavis – Gateway to Adventure: The Classic RPG City is Back! (parts One and Two) was one of the most popular gaming articles we’ve published on the website this year.

Now Sarah has published her first novel, Mindjammer, through the brand new Mindjammer Press. Mindjammer Press, a new roleplaying and fiction imprint, has announced plans to publish both the Mindjammer roleplaying game and a new line of associated fiction. Their publication schedule includes the upcoming second edition core book, Mindjammer: The Expansionary Era — with vastly expanded content, new and detailed background material, and all new artwork — in spring 2013. It will be followed by the Solenine campaign pack, based on the setting for the first novel, a new and revamped Black Zone campaign, and the second novel in the Mindjammer series, Transcendence. Here’s the description for the first novel:

IT IS THE SECOND AGE OF SPACE… In the seventeenth millennium, the New Commonality of Humankind is expanding, using newly-discovered faster-than-light travel to rediscover lost worlds colonised in the distant past. It’s a time of turmoil, of clashing cultures, as civilisations shudder and collapse before the might of a benevolent empire ten millennia old.

In the Solenine Cluster, things are going from bad to worse, as hyper-advanced technologies destabilise a world in chaos. Thaddeus Clay and his SCI Force special ops team are on the trail of the Transmigration Heresy. What they find is something beyond even their imagining – something which could tear the whole Commonality apart…

Mindjammer is receiving a lot of positive press from readers both inside and outside the gaming industry. Here’s what Stargazer’s World said about it:

What I also enjoyed tremendously was that Mindjammer is a science fiction story that really deserves the name. The technology described sounds plausible and the Commonality era feels “real.” And even though Mindjammer is highly entertaining it also makes the reader ponder a couple of philosophical questions like what makes us human and is there a way to cheat death? In my opinion good SF should not only entertain but make us ask questions. Mindjammer does that all the time…

Mindjammer is a very exiting and intelligently-written novel that should be on the reading list of every SF fan!

Mindjammer is available now in Kindle format for $3.99 and in print for $15.95, both from Amazon. Check it out.

New Treasures: Bentley Little’s Indignities of the Flesh

New Treasures: Bentley Little’s Indignities of the Flesh

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indignities-of-the-flesh2I try to keep up on the latest in horror, I do. But it’s challenging. There’s a lot of fresh talent emerging, exciting new work from established authors, and classic stuff I really should make time for. What do I buy, and what do I make time to read?

Lacking a real plan, I’ve fallen back on a tried-and-true strategy that introduced me to the best fantasy and science fiction decades ago: I buy the books with the best covers.

Which brings us handily to Indignities of the Flesh by Bentley Little. Isn’t that a cool cover? Creepy claw-handed dudes, glowing blue hair, and cosmic-colored pajamas. I was reaching for my credit card before I’d finished reading the title. (Click on the image for a bigger version.)

Indignities of the Flesh is a collection of 10 short stories by the acclaimed author of nearly two dozen horror novels. Bentley Little won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel for The Revelation in 1990; he was nominated again for Best Novel in 1993 for The Summoning. I have his previous short story collection, The Collection, which is now out of print and highly prized by collectors. Here’s the book description for Indignities:

Herein you’ll meet: the mischievous “Rodeo Clown”, who may very well be evil incarnate, or perhaps little more than an innocent bystander in a ring of coincidence; a man obsessed with dental hygiene to the point of stalking, in “Brushing”; a cynic forced to tag along on an ill-advised trip to a faith healer in “Documented Miracles”; a demented birthday girl whose equally demented birthday wishes are about to come true, in “Happy Birthday, Dear Tama”; a family on the run from cartoonists in search of their god, in “Looney Tunes”; and a man who pays the ultimate price for circumventing a parking attendant in the never before published, “Valet Parking.”

Rounding out the collection are “The Black Ladies” and “The Piñata,” a pair of unsettling stories culled from childhood nightmares, the surprisingly poignant “Even the Dead,” which documents the last days of a tender partnership between two friends, only one of whom is still alive… Indignities of the Flesh is a superlative gathering of the kind of twisted, darkly humorous, and mind-bending stories for which Bentley Little is best known.

Indignities of the Flesh is 208 pages in a deluxe hardcover edition from Subterranean Press. It is $35, and was released on May 31. The cover and interior pen-and-ink illustrations are by the talented Bob Eggleton. Learn more at the Subterranean website.

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

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

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those-across-the-river2You. You’ve got some kind of high octane karma going.

Not feeling it? Check this out: two days ago the World Fantasy Convention announced Christopher Buehlman’s debut novel, Those Across the River, had been nominated for a World Fantasy Award. And guess what’s recently been remaindered at Amazon.com for just $9.98 in hardcover.

See what I mean? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. How about a copy of He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, edited by Christopher Conlon and containing all new stories by Stephen King, Joe Hill, Nancy Collins, and Joe Lansdale, for just $2.08 (marked down from $25.99)? Or Col Buchanan’s epic fantasy, Farlander, in hardcover for $1.80 (originally $24.99)? Or the gorgeous full-color art anthology, Sci-Fi Art Now, edited by John Freeman, for just 12 bucks (was $29.99)? Or Omnitopia Dawn, the first volume of Diane Duane’s new Omnitopia series, for a measly $2.92 (original price: $24.95)?

Damn, man.  You did something right in your previous life. Invented penicillin or the TV remote control or something. Sit back and enjoy the spoils.

Most books are discounted from 60% to 80%. As always, quantities on these bargain books are very limited. All are eligible for free domestic shipping on orders over $25. Many of last month’s discount titles are also still available; you can see them here.

Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Libriomancer

Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Libriomancer

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libriomancerLirbriomancer
Jim C. Hines
DAW (320 pgs, $24.95, hardcover August 2012)
Reviewed by Alana Joli Abbott

We have met this protagonist, and he is us.

Whenever I open a Jim Hines novel, I expect to have a good time – humor mixed with some soul pondering, deep character development, fast action, and snappy dialogue. So I was unsurprised that Libriomancer had all of these things in spades, plus a unique use of magic and a fractured and cobbled together cosmology that makes complete sense as a whole. What I didn’t expect was to see myself in the pages. With Isaac Vainio, Hines has created a protagonist who not only knows and loves the same geek pop culture that I do, but who has a passion for books as deep as my own. In Isaac’s case, this passion, the shared belief in the worlds that inhabit the pages of real-world books, allows him to reach inside those pages and draw objects into the real world.

When the book begins, Isaac has been forbidden from using his magic. He knows about a world populated by magical creatures – both indigenous to the real world and brought into it through the worlds of books – but he’s unable to access it. He’s an incredibly strong libriomancer – a magic user who uses books as both, as Isaac says, a church and an armory – but his rash decisions in the field have relegated him to desk work at a library. (As a former library worker myself, Isaac’s clear love of and appreciation for libraries resonates almost as deeply as his love of created worlds.) When he is attacked by vampires, and rescued by a curvy and kick-ass dryad named Lena, he has no choice but to give in to his longing to return to practicing magic. And it’s a good thing he does: the Porters, the guild of libriomancers dedicated to protecting the world from supernatural dangers, are facing an all out war, with their leader, Johannes Gutenberg, missing.

…

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World Fantasy Award Nominations Announced

World Fantasy Award Nominations Announced

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those-across-the-river2The nominations for the 2012 World Fantasy Awards have been announced. They are:

Novel

  • Those Across the River, Christopher Buehlman (Ace)
  • 11/22/63, Stephen King (Scribner)
  • A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam)
  • Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
  • Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Novella

  • “Near Zennor”, Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors)
  • “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong”, K.J. Parker (Subterranean, Winter 2011)
  • “Alice Through the Plastic Sheet”, Robert Shearman (A Book of Horrors)
  • “Rose Street Attractors”, Lucius Shepard (Ghosts by Gaslight)
  • Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente (WSFA Press and Clarkesworld)

Short Story

  • “X for Demetrious,” Steve Duffy (Blood and Other Cravings)
  • “Younger Women,” Karen Joy Fowler (Subterranean, Summer 2011)
  • “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)
  • “A Journey of Only Two Paces,” Tim Powers (The Bible Repairman and Other Stories)
  • “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld April 2011)

…

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New Treasures: Sherwood Smith’s The Spy Princess

New Treasures: Sherwood Smith’s The Spy Princess

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the-spy-princess2If you’re not reading Sherwood Smith, you’re missing out on one of the most gifted and versatile fantasy authors at work today.

Sherwood’d first novel, Wren to the Rescue (1990), kicked off the popular 6-volume Wren fantasy series, including Wren’s Quest (1993), Wren’s War (1995) and A Posse of Princesses (2008). I first took notice of her with the Court and Crown Duet, published as two YA novels, Crown Duel and Court Duel, in 1997/98.

Sherwood effortlessly transitioned to adult fantasy with the major novel Inda (2006), the first installment in an ambitious fantasy quartet which continued with The Fox (2007), King’s Shield (2008), and Treason’s Shore (2009). To science fiction fans Sherwood is the author of the beloved Exordium series, co-written with Dave Trowbridge, which began with The Phoenix in Flight (1993), as well as two novels in Andre Norton’s Solar Queen universe (co-written with Andre Norton), and two books in Norton’s Time Traders universe.

With The Spy Princess Sherwood offers up a treat for the numerous fans of her YA books: the tale of four intrepid children who are the only thing that stand between a city and destruction.

When twelve-year-old Lady Lilah decides to disguise herself and sneak out of the palace one night, she has more of an adventure than she expected — for she learns very quickly that the country is on the edge of revolution. When she sneaks back in, she learns something even more surprising: her older brother Peitar is one of the forces behind it all. The revolution happens before all of his plans are in place, and brings unexpected chaos and violence. Lilah and her friends, leaving their old lives behind, are determined to help however they can. But what can four kids do? Become spies, of course!

The Spy Princess is 400 pages in hardcover from Viking Juvenile. The hardcover is $17.99, and the digital version is $10.99. It was published on August 2.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve

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universe-3I continue to find marvelous treasures in the four boxes I purchased from the Martin H. Greenberg collection.

Take, for example, Universe 3, the 1973 original anthology edited by Terry Carr. I haggled with Doug Ellis until he sold me both Universe 3 and 4 for 51 cents (all the change I had left in my pocket), mostly because of the mysterious and cool notes I found scrawled on the Table of Contents, presumably by Martin H. Greenberg himself.

But it was in Carr’s introduction that I found the real treasure this time, a quote I’ve heard time and time again since I started reading science fiction and fantasy in my early teens:

When aficionados of this field get together, that’s a standard topic of discussion. When was science fiction’s golden age? Some say the early forties, when John W. Campbell and a host of new writers like Heinlein, Sturgeon and van Vogt were transforming the entire field; others point to the early fifties, to [editors] H.L. Gold and Anthony Boucher and to such writers as Damon Knight, Alfred Bester and Ray Bradbury. Some will lay claims for the late sixties, when the new wave passed and names like Ballard, Disch and Aldiss came forward.

There are still people around, too, who’ll tell you about 1929 and David H. Keller, E.E. Smith and Ray Cummings.

The clue in most cases is when the person talking first began to read science fiction. When it was all new, all of it was exciting. Years ago a friend of mine, Pete Graham, tersely answered the question “When was the golden age of science fiction?” by saying “Twelve.” He didn’t have to explain further; we knew what he meant.

I was surprised and pleased to discover the origins of that famous phrase (although, by the time it reached me, it had morphed into “The golden age of science fiction is fourteen.”)

Either way, there’s fundamental truth in Pete Graham’s observation. Between the ages of 12 and 14 I devoured countless volumes of fantasy and science fiction, including a great many reprints from the pulp era. For me, the Golden Age of Science Fiction lies between 1932 and 1942, when everything was new in the genre, and authors sought, above all, to deliver a sense of wonder to their readers.

There’s a great deal more to recommend Universe 3 besides Carr’s famous introduction, by the way. It contains fiction by Edward Bryant, George Alec Effinger, Edgar Pangborn, Robert Silverberg, Gordon Eklund, pulp writer Ross Rocklynne — and Gene Wolfe’s famous tale “The Death of Doctor Island.” If you can find a copy, I highly recommend it.

Just don’t expect to pay 51 cents for it. Leave that to the experts.