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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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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.

Goblin Secrets, A Review

Goblin Secrets, A Review

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bggobsecGoblin Secrets
 William Alexander
Margaret K. McElderry Books (240 pages, $16.99, Hardcover 2012)
Reviewed by C.S.E. Cooney

After reading this article about the decay of criticism in online book culture and the rise of the “cult of admiration,” I’m feeling a little furtive, a little tender, when I first sit down to write about things I like. Ashamed of, I dunno, “enthusing.”

I mean, look at that word. “Enthuse.” It’s just soggy with connotation. To enthuse is to be ridiculous, unsophisticated, bumptious even — and don’t I wish my brains to be a whirl of razorblades, that my words might be bright like blood on snow?

That said, alas, I can never sufficiently motivate myself to write about things I dislike. The energy it takes to be snarky! And then, to be cleverly snarky! Things I perceive as stupid sap me of that energy. In fact, stupid things fade so fast from my mind, it’s almost like a magical amnesia, like I was wand-bopped by some Fairy of Forgetting on my Naming Day and doomed to be as unlike Addison DeWitt as a self-styled critic may be.

This forgetting may be a kind of criticism in itself, but it’s not the public, in your face(book), post-to-the-Zeitgeist kind. It is personal. It is not at all useful to society in the ways certain negative reviews can be. (For the interested, author James Enge listed a few services negative reviews may provide, in a recent blog:

Negative reviews provide a public health service: some books, or elements in some books, constitute hazards that the public has a right to be warned about… [They also can be] useful autopsies of failure. Sometimes you can figure out how fiction works by examining a fiction that doesn’t work.

The point of all this — the POINT, my friends and fellow readers — is… that I, um, loved Goblin Secrets, by William Alexander.

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Vintage Treasures: The Prince of Morning Bells by Nancy Kress

Vintage Treasures: The Prince of Morning Bells by Nancy Kress

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prince-of-morning-bellsI first discovered Nancy Kress through her brilliant SF short stories, like the Hugo- and Nebula-Award winning  “Beggars in Spain.” But she has an impressive fantasy resume as well, including her early novels, The Golden Grove (1984) and The White Pipes (1985) — which we cover here.

The Prince of Morning Bells (1981) was her first novel, and I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of it. Until I found a copy in Martin Harry Greenberg’s vast paperback collection.

Only yesterday, when marvels and mystery blessed the Universe…

Lovely Princess Kirila rejected royal traditions to seek wisdom and truth at the Tents of Omnium at the Heart of the World. With her protector and savior, the enchanted purple dog, Chessie, she reaches the kingdom of the Quirks — but their rational society cannot help in her hazardous quest. Nor can the people of Ruor, whose mystic religion threatens to enslave her. It is only at the Castle of Reyndak that a handsome young prince succeeds in interrupting her journey…

But years later, Kirila will again take up her quest with faithful Chessie, to reach the fabled tents, and discover the amazing secret at the heart of every woman’s world.

You’ve got to hand it to any book summary that includes the words “enchanted purple dog.” That’s some serious book blurbing chutzpah right there.

The original Timescape paperback is pretty hard to find (and no, you can’t have mine.) But we live in the era of digital books, and if you’ve got an e-reader, then The Prince of Morning Bells can be all yours for just $5.99 in a revised edition with a new afterword by the author.

The Prince of Morning Bells is 236 pages. It was originally published by Pocket Books, as part of their Timescape line, and released in a revised edition in trade paperback by FoxAcre Press in 2000 (still in print). It is currently available in digital format for the Nook and Kindle.

New Treasures: The Black Opera by Mary Gentle

New Treasures: The Black Opera by Mary Gentle

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the-black-operaI don’t know if British fantasy author Mary Gentle is all that well known here in the US. But in my native Canada — and especially among the fantasy fans I circulated among in Ottawa — she is highly respected indeed.

Her first novel was Hawk in Silver, published in 1977 when she was only eighteen. But it was her two linked science fiction novels Golden Witchbreed (1983) and Ancient Light (1987) that really put her in the map. Her first major fantasy novel was Rats and Gargoyles (1990), the first volume of the White Crow sequence; perhaps her most acclaimed recent work has been Ash: A Secret History (2000, published in four volumes in the US) and Ilario (2007).

She’s also well known for Grunts! (1992), an action-packed send-up of epic fantasy, which follows Orc Captain Ashnak and his war-band as they take arms against the insufferable forces of Light — including murderous halflings and racist elves — who slaughter his orc brothers by the thousands in their path to inevitable victory.

Her newest novel is The Black Opera, and it has all the hallmarks of Gentle’s original and thought-provoking fantasy:

Naples, the 19th Century. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, holy music has power. Under the auspices of the Church, the Sung Mass can bring about actual miracles like healing the sick or raising the dead. But some believe that the musicodramma of grand opera can also work magic by channeling powerful emotions into something sublime. Now the Prince’s Men, a secret society, hope to stage their own black opera to empower the Devil himself – and change Creation for the better! Conrad Scalese is a struggling librettist whose latest opera has landed him in trouble with the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Rescued by King Ferdinand II, Conrad finds himself recruited to write and stage a counter opera that will, hopefully, cancel out the apocalyptic threat of the black opera, provided the Prince’s Men, and their spies and saboteurs, don’t get to him first. And he only has six weeks to do it…

The Black Opera was published in May by Night Shade Press. It is 515 pages (including a one-page appendix, “Rude Italian for Beginners,”) and is available for $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in various digital formats.

Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

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barbariansThere’s been some good discussion of Sword & Sorcery on the BG blog of late, from Brian Murphy’s excellent list of “A Half-Dozen Swords And Sorcery Short Stories Worth Your Summer Reading Time, and Howard Andrew Jones’s skillful examination of the writing technique of the genre’s patriarch, “Under the Hood with Robert E. Howard,” to Joe Bonadonna’s warm reminiscence of the very best S&S of his youth, “How I Met Your Cimmerian (and other Barbarian Swordsmen).”

I thought I was pretty well educated in Sword & Sorcery; but it’s the sign of a rich and vibrant genre that it can still surprise you after decades of collecting.

That’s exactly what happened when I found the artifact at left, buried deep in a paperback science fiction collection I recently purchased.

Barbarians was a major S&S retrospective anthology published by Signet in 1986. It was edited by Robert Adams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh, and contained stories by Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen, Andre Norton, Karl Edward Wagner, and many more. It’s a thick paperback original with 13 short stories.

And no, I’d never seen a copy before — or its sequel. Here’s the back cover copy:

From a beautiful huntress with glittering eyes and a killing kiss to mighty Conan’s struggle in a deadly place beyond magic… from a distant planet fated to do battle with the forgotten past to primeval swordsmen pledged to protect a besieged land — here are tales of titanic strength and unearthly courage, of savage warriors facing incredible challenges in the far-flung realms of the imagination.

Sounds pretty good. Not entirely sure how this one escaped me for all these years, but I’m glad I’ve stumbled across it now.

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Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

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ew-hobbit-bilboFans of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings should be thrilled that The Hobbit, originally planned as two feature films, is now slated for three.  More Tolkien on screen is a good thing, right?

Surely yes, if what we are getting is indeed more Tolkien. But Jackson’s “bridge” film is not going to be more Tolkien, but more Jackson. And that is not necessarily an encouraging thought.

Due to contractual issues with the Tolkien estate — Jackson is unable to use material from The Silmarillion, The History of Middle-Earth, or Unfinished Tales — this “bridge” film will come from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson wrote on his Facebook page:

“We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance. The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.”

The appendices are certainly a mine of information, but the stories they tell are scattered, patchy in places, and not written as straightforward narrative. To bridge the events of The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings in a film that neatly connects a series of disparate dots, Jackson must fill in gaps, construct dialogue from scratch, and so on. And that could spell trouble.

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