Browsed by
Category: Books

American Fabulation, Literary Fantasy, and The Kingdom of Ohio

American Fabulation, Literary Fantasy, and The Kingdom of Ohio

Comments 2 comments

The Kingdom of OhioHow to describe Matthew Flaming’s book The Kingdom of Ohio?

Well, at least it’s a good story. (Of course I’d have to say that, wouldn’t I? But really: it is.) It’s a story about conspiracies and struggles to reshape the world; about secret wars between men like J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. It is about one of the strangest and least-known mysteries of American history: the existence and disappearance of the Lost Kingdom of Ohio. It is about science and faith, and the distance between the two. Most of all, it’s a story about a man and a woman, and about love.

That’s from an early page of the novel. To this description one might also add: It’s about time, and memory, and the distance between those things as well. It’s about machines, and trains, and the secrets beneath our feet. It’s about the different worlds we live in without noticing. And it is about the way in which these worlds touch.

In terms of plot, the novel follows two strands; one a framing narrative of an old antiques dealer in contemporary Los Angeles, and the other the meat of the book, the story of a young man named Peter Force who was a miner in Idaho in 1899, comes to New York following the death of his father, finds work building the new subway system, and then meets a strange young woman who claims to have travelled in time. We learn that the woman, Cheri-Anne Toledo, is the only daughter of the last King of Ohio, and has collaborated with Nikola Tesla; but Tesla himself seems not to remember her.

Published in 2009, The Kingdom of Ohio is a stunningly assured book, outstanding in its skillful prose and consistent intelligence. The style of the book is powerful, evocative; it builds dreamlike worlds both in Ohio and New York, making a kind of fairy-tale of America, where inventors replace wizards and businessmen stand in for kings (sometimes). Its language is rich and perfect, reflecting a richness of conception — a richness in the way it imagines its setting, in the way it imagines its characters.

…

Read More Read More

A (very) guilty pleasure: Dennis McKiernan’s The Iron Tower Trilogy

A (very) guilty pleasure: Dennis McKiernan’s The Iron Tower Trilogy

Comments 14 comments

the-dark-tideThe publication of Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara in 1977 was a watershed moment in fantasy literature. The success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings left fans clamoring for more epic, secondary world fantasy with maps, and with The Sword of Shannara Brooks delivered. Its publication began a trend of Tolkien-inspired fantasy that deeply marked (marred, others might say) the genre thereafter.

But the ensuing years haven’t been kind to Brooks. Lin Carter, editor of the acclaimed Ballantine Adult fantasy series, said of The Sword of Shannara ,” [it’s]the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read”. Despite the commercial success of Shannara and its sequels, its now widely considered to be the poster child for Biggest Tolkien Ripoff.

But, prevailing claims to the contrary, The Sword of Shannara is not even close to that moniker. The championship belt for most slavish LOTR imitation (that I have read, at least) hangs proudly about the waist of Dennis McKiernan’s The Iron Tower Trilogy. In comparison to The Dark Tide, Shadows of Doom, and The Darkest Day, Shannara is a veritable bastion of originality sprung whole and entire from the forehead of Zeus. The Iron Tower Trilogy is, in fact, The Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off. Crudely. Anyone who possesses even a passing familiarity with Tolkien’s masterwork should stand aghast at the “similarities.”

…

Read More Read More

Diana Rowland’s My Life as A White Trash Zombie

Diana Rowland’s My Life as A White Trash Zombie

Comments 1 comment

My Life as A White Trash Zombiewhite-trash-zombie2
Diana Rowland
DAW (320 pp., $7.99, July 2011)
Reviewed by Patty Templeton

Angel Crawford is a pill-popping, self-described loser who’s found naked on Old Bayou Road after an overdose, only when she wakes up in the hospital…something’s not quite right.

She never used to waft of rot.

If it wasn’t trouble enough that Angel is slowly starting to smell more and more like a pile of dead cats soaked in sewage on a hot summer day, well, she has a new job. Ok, so it’s not like Burger Bayou was taking her places, but really, who wants to work in a morgue? Angel never did, but a mysterious note informs her that if she doesn’t take the job and keep it for at least one month, she’ll go to jail. Sure, it’s delivering dead bodies and assisting in autopsies, but you don’t get paid for normal rehab. Angel takes the gig.

Soon after, fingers skull-deep during an autopsy, Angel realizes that she wants to eat brains. Justifiably, she flips. It doesn’t help when she finds another note on her windshield that reads If you crave it, eat it.

To make matters worse, somebody starts killing off all the zombies around town.

This is not your average zombie novel and it might piss off horror purists who like their monsters in predictable niches. Angel doesn’t shamble. She isn’t dull-witted. She’s not a gorehound. In fact, it’s questionable if she is even a monster. She’s a woman who’s had a lot of bad breaks in life, the most recent of which was being turned into a zombie who has to drink brain smoothies to keep from decomposing. Some folks might contend that Diana Rowland’s zombies aren’t zombies. They might be right. Angel is closer to a vampire than not, only instead of blood healing her, it’s dead people’s brains. What does it matter, as long as the story catches you?

Amidst the brain saws, busted heads and maggots, there’s the introspective story of Angel Crawford, high school drop-out and general ef-up, finally getting on a stable path. It’s not action-heavy. There are no zombie hordes. Only a woman fighting her way through everyday life, which includes a past filled with drugs, the wrong man, an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother. It’s a humorous, light-gore novel that you could probably get away with recommending to any of your friends that like both Jodi Picoult and C.S.I. Similarly, if you dig books from a zombie’s point of view, like Breathers or Warm Bodies, you’ve got a good chance of enjoying My Life as A White Trash Zombie.

brain1 brain11I give it two out of three brains. And seriously, the cover is AWESOME. Now that’s a le freakin’ sexy zombie.

The 2011 Locus Award Winners

The 2011 Locus Award Winners

Comments 2 comments

hundred-thousandThe 2011 Locus Awards were announced last weekend. The winners are:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)
Best Fantasy Novel: Kraken, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey)
Best First Novel: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
Best Young Adult Book: Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
Best Novella: The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
Best Novelette: “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains”, Neil Gaiman (Stories)
Best Short Story: “The Thing About Cassandra”, Neil Gaiman (Songs of Love and Death)
Best Magazine: Asimov’s SF
Best Book Publisher: Tor
Best Anthology: Warriors, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Tor)
Best Collection: Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, Fritz Leiber (Night Shade)

You can find the complete list of winners and nominees at Locus Online.

The Locus Awards are presented to winners of Locus Magazine’s annual readers’ poll. The award was first given in 1971, for works published in 1970. According to Locus, the awards frequently draw more voters than the Hugo and Nebula Awards combined.

The Centenary of Mervyn Peake

The Centenary of Mervyn Peake

Comments 4 comments

Titus GroanJuly 9, 2011 will be the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Mervyn Peake, the author of three remarkable fantasy novels: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. The books — published in 1946, 1950, and 1959 — form a series (along with the novella “Boy in Darkness,” which I have not read) following the early life of Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl of the immense castle called Gormenghast. Peake had intended to write a longer sequence of novels about Titus; he planned two more books, but the advent of Parkinson`s Disease made that impossible. A number of activities are being planned to commemorate Peake’s centenary, including the publication of a fourth Titus volume, Titus Awakes, written by Peake’s wife after his death in 1968.

The Titus novels are excellent books. Each seems to have a slightly different style, a different approach to Titus and his world. All of them are stylistically and imaginatively rich; although the explicitly fantastic is rare in the books, arguably nonexistent, there is in each of them an approach to world-building, a readiness to leave behind the rational, that I think makes them fantasy more than anything else — so long as you use “fantasy” in its broadest sense, agreeing that contemporary genre expectations have nothing to do with the variety implicit in the word.

Put it this way: Peake wrote before fantasy fiction had been defined as a form, but from where we stand now, his work is more easily assimilable to fantasy than to anything else. He’s been a strong influence on fantasists like Michael Moorcock; Lin Carter published his books as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. But like a lot of early fantasists, Peake is somewhat apart from the conventions of fantasy we now know. His books have little to do with medievalism or any historical culture, but neither do they seem to reflect the modern world (except in the last of them, and that’s a world as strange and distorted as a Terry Gilliam movie, a setting that, it has been said, prefigures the fantasy of steampunk). As an illustrator, Peake was working on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Grimms’ Household Tales while writing Titus Groan; those may be useful places to start.

…

Read More Read More

The Year’s Best SF & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton

The Year’s Best SF & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton

Comments 5 comments

yearsbest2011The third volume of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (Prime Books), my favorite annual Year’s Best collection, shipped in early June, and my copy finally arrived last week. Imagine my surprise to find this on the dedication page:

For two editors who got me started on the route to putting together these books: Dave Truesdale and John O’Neill.

You don’t have to imagine how honored I feel, because I can tell you that right now: pretty damn honored. I’ve been publishing Rich’s excellent articles and reviews since the early days of the SF Site, shortly after he was introduced to me by, yes, Dave Truesdale, who was publishing his short fiction reviews at Tangent. Thanks, Rich. And thanks, Dave.  Owe you one.

As for the book, it’s excellent as always. This year it features thirty stories that showcase the very best in contemporary SF and fantasy, from the finest writers in the field: Gene Wolfe, Robert Reed, Paul Park, Carol Emshwiller, and many others. In fact, this year’s volume is even more awesome than usual, as it features “The Word of Azrael” from BG 14, by our very own Matthew David Surridge, as well as “Braiding the Ghosts” (from Clockwork Phoenix 3) by our website editor C.S.E. Cooney.

C.S.E. had a particularly good year last year, in fact: two additional tales made Rich’s Recommended Reading list, including “Household Spirits” (from Strange Horizons; read the complete story here) and her novella The Big Bah-Ha (from Drollerie Press), alongside Robert J. Howe’s novella from BG 14, “The Natural History of Calamity.” We covered the 2009 edition of Year’s Best SF & Fantasy here.

Congratulations to all the contributors, and to Rich on another superb volume. If you’re looking for one book this year to point you to the cream of the crop in modern SF & fantasy, this is the one.

Art of the Genre: The Black Company

Art of the Genre: The Black Company

Comments 10 comments
Kerdark grabs a chance at the original Black Company cover
Kerdark grabs a chance at the original Black Company cover

In 1984 author Glen Cook published The Black Company. In 1990, my freshman year in college, this book was passed to me by a person on my dorm and I spent the next decade following the exploits of the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar.

Now, as a storyteller myself, the book resonated with its rather unique concept, that it was actually a tale written by the Company annalist as he continued the four hundred years of written tradition the company had laid down since its came out of the distant south.

This is a military book, although cast in a fantasy setting. To that point, there are wizards present, although all of them are seemingly either competent illusionists or powerful necromancers. You don’t see any fireballs or lightning bolts, and the craft of a medieval military is kept up in rather precise fashion as the Black Company moves from what I would perceive as northern Europe, through Africa, and finally ending up someplace in India.

It’s a fantastic tale, one so well crafted that I’m actually floored even today when I remember a three-book long twist that had me shaking my head and calling for Cook to be given a Hugo. If you haven’t read the series, I certainly suggest it, even if the first book is over twenty-five years old and what was acceptable for publication then is much different than today. I still think these books hold water and are well worth your time, but on to the reason I assume you’re here, the art.

…

Read More Read More

Behind the Plague of Shadows

Behind the Plague of Shadows

Comments 4 comments

Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows, by Howard Andrew Jones. Coming February 2011Over at Flames Rising, Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones talks about the genesis of his Pathfinder novel Plague of Shadows:

I pitched [editor James Sutter] “Jirel of Joiry crossed with Unforgiven.” I wasn’t planning to lift the character or the plot, but I hoped to evoke a similar feel… I’d never written anything with orcs or dwarves, and while I’d scripted an evil sorcerer or two, they’d never been Pathfinder magic users. Writing deals in a lot of archetypes, and fantasy gaming fiction tends to wear those archetypes proudly on its sleeves — the elven archer, the surly half-orc, the mysterious wizard. I embraced those archetypes and tweaked them, as any gamer would when designing a character for play. I planned out scenes that would put the characters in conflict so I could get a better handle on who they were and what was important to them.

I started writing within a day or two of getting my outline approved, and pretty quickly I realized that I needed to stat out my main characters. I’ve been gaming regularly with a variety of systems since I was about 9, but in all that time, I’d never rolled up story characters prior to writing about them… I kept the rule book handy so that my spell descriptions would match, as closely as possible, the spiffy descriptions drafted by the Paizo maestros.

You can learn more about Plague of Shadows here, and the complete conversation with Howard is at Flames Rising.

The Dream-World of Lud-in-the-Mist

The Dream-World of Lud-in-the-Mist

Comments 6 comments

Lud-in-the-MistHope Mirrlees’ stunning 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist begins with the following epigraph:

The Sirens stand, as it would seem, to the ancient and the modern, for the impulses in life as yet immoralised, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art, or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his “Land of Heart’s Desire,” and to which if he hearken it may be that he will return no more — voices, too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on.

It’s a quote from the classical scholar Jane Harrison, who was Mirrlees’ close companion at the time Mirrlees was working on Lud-in-the-Mist. It’s a perfectly chosen introduction to the book. It sets out the themes, and to an extent the method, which Mirrlees used: the conflict between instinctive desires and the conscious will, that tries to repress those desires and establish a social harmony — all symbolically realised through the imagery of myth and fantasy.

The sirens sang to Odysseus, who had himself lashed to his mast to hear their song while his crew went about their duties with their ears stopped up with wax. Apollonius of Rhodes says that they also sang to the Argonauts, but that their song was overcome by Orpheus, and the sirens threw themselves into the sea and became rocks. And I will note here, for reasons that should become clear later, that Apollonius also says that only a little later the Argonauts came to the garden of the Hesperides, in the far west, where the golden apples of Gaea had been kept, a marriage gift for Hera, until Hercules had took them as part of his labours.

…

Read More Read More

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews The Authorized Ender Companion

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews The Authorized Ender Companion

Comments 3 comments

the-authorized-ender-companionThe Authorized Ender Companion
Jake Black
Tor (432 pp, $27.99, November 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

One of my most prized possessions is a signed hardcover copy of Orson Scott Card’s Hugo and Nebula award winning Ender’s Game. Before the signature, Card inscribed “A survival guide for geniuses.” This is a wonderful tagline for Ender’s Game, which has spoken to a full generation of science fiction fans. Now, Jake Black has written a complete and authorized companion to the set of nine (so far) novels and assorted short stories – the Enderverse, as it is known to fans.

The bulk of The Authorized Ender Companion is taken up by the 315-page “Ender Encyclopedia,” which lists every individual, place, or thing that shows up anywhere in the Enderverse. This ranges from the detailed (a 15-page entry on Bean and 20-page entry on Ender) to the passing (such as the one-line entry that reminds us all what a “barkdancer” is). Probably one of the best entries is the 3-page lexicon of Battle School Slang.
The end of the Encyclopedia lists all of the sources, which is very helpful for those of us who haven’t yet read all of the short stories, followed by a couple of pages of “Ender’s Time Line” which, while interesting, is in print that is so small you may need a magnifying glass. (Note: I read an advanced review copy, so hopefully some sane editor will decided that this must be enlarged for the final edition.) Beyond the Encyclopedia, however, are some of the more substantive aspects of this book and the ones that fans should really be looking forward to.

…

Read More Read More