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The Desert of Souls is One of the Best Fantasy Novels of 2011

The Desert of Souls is One of the Best Fantasy Novels of 2011

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the-desert-of-soulsHoward Andrew Jones’ first novel The Desert of Souls has been named one of the best fantasy novels of the year by Barnes & Noble.

Paul Goat Allen, a full-time genre book reviewer who’s reviewed thousands of titles over the past 20 years, posted his choices for the Best Fantasy Releases of 2011 at Explorations, the highly respected Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy Blog. In addition to Desert of Souls (#4), the list also includes Prince of Thorns by Black Gate blogger and author Mark Lawrence (at #5), and our good friend James L. Sutter’s first novel, Death’s Heretic (#3).

The top two books in the list were The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss and Farlander by Col Buchanan. Allen writes:

The sheer amount of noteworthy fantasy debuts in 2011 was remarkable. Besides Buchanan and Sutter’s stellar first novels, this year gave us The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones, Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns, Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey, Courtney Schafer’s The Whitefire Crossing, Paula Brandon’s The Traitor’s Daughter, The Emperor’s Knife by Mazarkis Williams, Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick, Michael J. Sullivan’s Theft of Swords, and Teresa Frohock’s Miserere.

You can read an exclusive excerpt from Prince of Thorns, Brian Murphy’s recent review of The Desert of Souls, and Andrew Zimmerman Jones’ review of Death’s Heretic, all right here at Black Gate. Don’t tell us we don’t point you to the best fantasy.

Congratulations to Howard, Mark and James!

The Natural History of Unicorns

The Natural History of Unicorns

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natural-history-of-unicornsThe Natural History of Unicorns (2009)
By Chris Lavers

Some book titles can grab you across a room and demand your money. Such was the case with The Natural History of Unicorns, which I discovered not in a bookstore, but in a curio shop in San Francisco specializing in . . . actually, I have no idea what the store was really selling, except that it was next to the Pirate Supply Store (no joke, this exists, although principally to fund a writing workshop in the back) and the excellent science-fiction and fantasy bookstore Borderlands. A bit of both stores rubbed off onto this one, and so in the midst of taxidermy snakes was this book promising to tell me the Natural History of a fantasy animal. Immediate sell.

Well, almost immediate. I did check to see that the book was not crazy pseudo-science making the claim that the fantasy version of the unicorn was real and scientists were refusing to admit the truth. But the book appeared to be exactly what I wanted: a multi-discipline exploration of the development and evolution of the unicorn legend.

On the surface, the unicorn is the simplest of fantastic creatures: a horse with a single horn jutting from its forehead. Of course something like that might exist! There are plenty of horned hoofed animals, a unicorn isn’t much of a stretch.

But the unicorn carries a trainload of baggage behind it: a symbol of spirituality and Christianity, emblem of British royalty, symbol of virgin purity, a creature in roleplaying games, icon of New Age thinking, and decoration on a third-grade girl’s wall. The unicorn is indeed, as legend has often claimed, tough to hunt and harder catch.

Chris Lavers, a lecturer in natural history at the University of Nottingham, writes in a friendly, humorous style that feels like an Oxford professor during the off-hours entertaining guests around the fire with brandy in ample supply. In places, Lavers seems to channel Avram Davidson and his Adventures in Unhistory, although not quite as obtusely or wittily. (Davidson’s book has a chapter on unicorns, by the by.) The book makes for fast nonfiction reading, although Lavers does go off on a dull detour from his topic in the center of the book, occasionally relies too heavily on long quotations, and fails to explore an important avenue of unicorn history that I hoped to learn more about.

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Got an eReader for Christmas? Try some $0.99 Titles from Harper Voyager

Got an eReader for Christmas? Try some $0.99 Titles from Harper Voyager

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den-of-thievesI bought my first e-readers two months back — a Kindle Fire and an iPad — in preparation for converting Black Gate to digital format (a project that bore its first fruit with BG 15, now available in its full digital glory, complete with enhanced content and cool color images. Woo hoo!)

Mostly I’ve been using them to review dozens of different iterations of BG 14 & 15, as John Woolley and I constantly tweaked and improved the digital versions. But I’m gradually getting used to them, and despite having a library of thousands of print volumes, I can see how digital readers could easily become my preferred medium for leisure reading. They are light, compact, and perfect for the kind of quick web surfing needed to check on that curious fact or two that comes up during reading. Plus, they’re capable of surviving a gentle plummet from about three feet when I doze off in my chair, just like real books.

I told myself I’d finally use one to read a novel over the Christmas break, and see if I found them as compelling for lengthier work. But I haven’t made the time to pick a book; and besides, most of ones I want to read I’ve already purchased in print, and I wasn’t wild about shelling out another seven to eight bucks just to get a digital version.

But that was before I got an e-mail from Harper Voyager yesterday, with a list of digital fantasy titles specially priced at $0.99 to $1.99 — including a handful that were on my reading list this month, like David Chandler’s Den of Thieves and Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. The books are available for Kindle, Nook, iBookstore, and Google eBookstore, and titles include:

heir-of-night

Den of Thieves by David Chandler ($0.99)
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey ($0.99)
Nightwalker by Jocelynn Drake ($0.99)
White Tiger by Kylie Chan ($0.99)
Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine & Tee Morris ($0.99)
The Scent of Shadows by Vicki Pettersson ($0.99)
Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison ($1.99)
Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb ($1.99)
Rides a Dread Legion by Raymond E. Feist ($1.99)
The Heir of Night by Helen Lowe ($1.99)
Earth Strike: Star Carrier One by Ian Douglas ($1.99)

For 99 cents, I don’t mind buying a digital version of a novel I already have in print, and I bought four (the Chandler, Kadrey, plus The Scent of Shadows and The Heir of Night).

The complete list of titles is here, or you can just do a search for each of the above digital titles at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, or Google eBookstore. The website doesn’t say how long the pricing will last however, so if you’re interested, I would act now.

Osprey Adventures

Osprey Adventures

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teutonic-knightWhat if one day you woke up and found yourself in charge of a publishing imprint?

You had financial backing, the support of an experienced production and marketing team, and a wide-open remit. You also had the weight of a lot of expectation.

Well, about a month ago, this happened to me.

My name is Joseph McCullough, which some of you may recognize from Black Gate. At various times I have worked as an author and an assistant editor for the magazine, and I continue to be a fan and supporter.

I have also recently been made the Project Manager for Osprey Adventures, an imprint of Osprey Publishing.

I mentioned my new position to John O’Neill, and he kindly invited me to write a series of blogs about my experiences in the publishing world, and my trials and tribulations as I attempt to bring some new, fun, semi-fantasy books to market.

For those who don’t know, Osprey Publishing is arguably the most famous publisher of military history in the English language.

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Long Live the Physical Book–at least for now

Long Live the Physical Book–at least for now

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jp-holiday-articleinlineSo it would seem that the death of the physical book and the physical bookstore is greatly exaggerated. According to The New York Times, bookstores are having a banner year. In part this is because some of the competition (i.e., Borders) is no longer a factor in brick-and-mortar retailing, a number of popular books (ironically including the biography of Steve Jobs, the very guy who sought to digitize and commodify the object in question) and a desire among consumers in a slowly recovering economy to give gifts that are attractive in a way that bits on a screen don’t quite emulate.

Also, content owners are, as they are prone to do, shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to digital retailing. Despite the fact the e-book readers are more affordable than ever with a growing proliferation of titles in e-book format, pricing strategies are frequently rendering physical books as less expensive than their digital counterparts, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Long live the dog-eared book, if only for another few years.

On another note, and though it has nothing to do with the normal realm of Black Gate matters, I’m sad to note the passing of Christopher Hitchens.  Right up to the end, he was one gutsy bastard.  Here’s what I presume was his last piece of Vanity Fair.

Enjoying the Unique Character of Karl Edward Wagner’s Dark Crusade

Enjoying the Unique Character of Karl Edward Wagner’s Dark Crusade

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dark-crusade-wagnerWhy has swords and sorcery languished while epic fantasy enjoys a wide readership? In an age of diminished attention spans and the proliferation of Twitter and video games, it’s hard to explain why ponderous five and seven and 12 book series dominate fantasy fiction while lean and mean swords and sorcery short stories and novels struggle to find markets (Black Gate and a few other outlets excepted).

During a recent reading of the late Karl Edward Wagner’s Dark Crusade (1976) a potential answer coalesced: Many readers want and expect deep characterization in their fiction, and it’s simply not a particularly strong suit of the swords and sorcery genre (or at least of classic swords and sorcery, circa 1930 through the early 1980s). Wagner is one of a handful of classic swords and sorcery authors to whom history has not been particularly kind*. His dark, God-accursed hero-villain Kane deserves a place alongside Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the roll of great genre heroes, but is sadly left off many “best of” swords and sorcery lists. Relegated to the status of cult figure, Kane is the darling of heroic fantasy connoisseurs but unread of by many casual genre fans, and unheard of by most of the larger fantasy fan base.

Kane and many of his swords and sorcery ilk are not what most modern readers would consider fully realized characters. You just don’t get anything close to the same level of introspection and cradle to the grave development of Kane in Dark Crusade as you do of, say, Kvothe in Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind.

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Goth Chick News: The Best Book to Not Read on a Plane

Goth Chick News: The Best Book to Not Read on a Plane

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image0021Until recently, reading on a plane was one of my personal joys.

As an electronics geek (admitting it is the first step) it is a rare thing indeed for me to find myself in an environment where connectivity isn’t possible.  Okay, I know that some flights are now offering Internet in the sky, but I prefer to ignore this for the time being in the name of preserving the one place where I can guiltlessly escape email, IM and my cell phone.  And though it is still possible to “work” while disconnected, I generally ignore this as well and relish the opportunity to sink uninterrupted into a novel.

And this was precisely what I did on a recent getaway to my favorite US destination; New Orleans.  I boarded the American Airlines jet and settled back in my window seat with Chris Bohjalian’s fourteenth novel, The Night Strangers.

Things went all wrong shortly thereafter.

We had only just pushed back from the gate when the plane came to a rather abrupt halt and the engines shut down.  The pilot’s voice sounded a tad embarrassed when he explained our aircraft had just experienced an “electrical abnormality” and mechanics were being called to look into the issue before we would be cleared to take off.

Now, as someone who has clocked countless hours on airplanes, this “electrical abnormality” didn’t concern me all that much.  I imagined that some unexpected red light was blinking away in the flight deck that probably wouldn’t have meant much if it had occurred aloft, but as it had started up while we were still on the runway, the crew was obligated to halt our journey and have it looked at.

I went back to The Night Strangers.

In case you’re not familiar (I certainly wasn’t prior to picking up his latest book), Chris Bohjalian is a New York Times bestselling author, and his latest outing The Night Strangers is a ghost story inspired by both a door in his basement and Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River.

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Fantasy Out Loud

Fantasy Out Loud

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the-hobbitNearly every night, I read aloud to my boys.   For Evan, my seven-year-old, I have lately been reading The Hobbit.  Two nights ago, no sooner had I begun than Evan interrupted, saying, “It’s funny how they spell ‘Smaug.’”

“Oh?” I asked.  “How would you spell it?”

“S-M-O-G.”

“Good,” I said.  “That is how you would normally spell it.”  But privately, I thought how wonderful it was that Tolkien chose this other, more evocative spelling.  It also occurred to me that without Evan’s commentary, I might not have even noticed.

What we choose to read to our children has ramifications almost beyond counting.  Certainly, a shared reading experience is pivotal to the in-home dynamics and shared knowledge of any family, but insofar as one tackles a diet of writing that qualifies as “fantastic,” reading aloud is also crucial to the development and enculturation of an entire new generation of fantasy readers.  Given a world that grows ever more hectic, and therefore has less and less time for “pleasure” reading, this is no small thing.

I am fortunate to have two children, both boys, and I can see the results of my reading choices –– the goblin fruit, as it were, of my labor –– as if I had scrawled on their souls with indelible ink.  Corey, my older boy, now reads nothing but fantasy fiction, at least not by choice.  (He has also, to my dismay, discovered comics, and for this, too, I blame myself.)

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New Treasures: Strange Worlds

New Treasures: Strange Worlds

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strange-worldsBack on October 7th I reported on a promising little artifact called Strange Worlds,  an anthology of sword and planet stories from Space Puppet Press, collected and edited by Jeff Doten.

Now I’m holding a copy in my hot little hands, and I can report that it’s just as cool as it looks.

Strange Worlds collects nine pieces of original fiction from Ken St. Andre, Charles A. Gramlich, Paul R. McNamee, Lisa V. Tomecek, Charles R. Rutledge, and others.

Each story is also illustrated by Doten with a full color plate, done in loving homage to the Ace Doubles of the 50s and 60s, where much of the most-loved sword & planet in the genre first appeared.

Doten also provides some fine black & white interior illustrations for each story.

Interior color plate by Jeff Doten
Interior plate by Jeff Doten
It’s a quality package, and no mistake. There’s even a 13-page full-color “Strange Worlds” comic, written and illustrated by Doten, rounding out the book.

It’s very clear to me that Doten knows his stuff, and his love and knowledge of the genre comes across on every page. There’s even a three-page Suggested Reading list, an invaluable reference for modern fans covering virtually every major practitioner of the genre — from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, Gardner Fox, Leigh Brackett, and Lin Carter, all the way up to more modern writers experimenting in the same playground, such as S.M. Stirling.

In his introduction Doten says Strange Worlds was “my effort to rectify the tragic lack of Sword and Planet stories in the modern world.” He has succeeded with flying colors.

Strange Worlds is 189 pages printed on quality stock in oversize format. It is available from Space Puppet Press for $27 plus $3.75 U.S. shipping, and richly deserves your support.

Order today from strangeworldsanthology.com.

Mur Lafferty on Reading the Classics

Mur Lafferty on Reading the Classics

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Mur Lafferty, author of The Afterlife Series and Playing For Keeps, has kicked off an interesting discussion on reading classic SF and Fantasy on her blog:

earth-abidesI’m not quite sure how to read classic SF. You know the stuff that was groundbreaking with its expanse of ideas that hadn’t even been considered yet? But it was also the stuff that was very likely sexist, had cardboard characters, was completely lacking women or POC, used what we consider now to be hack tools (eg “looking in a mirror to describe the protag”), and may have protags that are total jerks.

I couldn’t finish The Stars My Destination, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever or the Book of the New Sun. I can’t root for a rapist protagonist. And I really wanted to read Stars and New Sun.

Recently I couldn’t finish Earth Abides (despite the wonderful intro by one of my favorite authors of all time, Connie Willis.) I got bored and annoyed with the elitist, “It’s the end of the world, but I’m CERTAINLY not going to hang out with whores and drunks,” attitude of the protagonist. And WTF is up with mentioning that a woman is “young enough” in her description, and leaving it at that? …how can I appreciate the classics when I run into such painful roadblocks like this? It’s hard to read things I’m not enjoying, even for academic purposes.

Speaking as someone with an unnatural fondness for pulp fiction, this is a problem I’m intimately familiar with. My last attempt to re-read Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy ended in utter failure. And I dearly loved that book in my early teens. But I didn’t pay much attention to girls then, and I suppose a book that also pretended women didn’t exist just didn’t seem very unusual.

Comments are now closed on Lafferty’s blog (she notes they had “gone into unhelpful areas“), but you can read the original post and comments here.