Browsed by
Category: Books

New Treasures: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

New Treasures: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Comments 0 Comment


The Vanished Birds (Del Rey, January 26, 2021)

January is that time of year when I browse BEST OF THE YEAR lists, wondering what I missed (it’s usually a lot). One title that shows up repeatedly is Simon Jimenez’s debut novel The Vanished Birds, which I picked up in paperback last January, and which promptly vanished into the towering to-be-read stack next to my big green chair. I need a filing system that’s more like a library, and less like a geological rock formation.

Anyway. While I didn’t make time to read the book, I didn’t fail to notice all the breathless notices. Kirkus Reviews, which called it “The best of what science fiction can be,” listed it as one of the Best Debut Fiction and Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the year; Martin Cahill at Tor.com proclaimed it “brilliant,” and Paul Di Filippo at Locus called it “not only the best debut novel I’ve read in ages, but simply one of the best SF novels in recent memory.” Here’s a slice from Martin’s enthusiastic review.

…

Read More Read More

Celebrate Derek Künsken’s First Trilogy, The Quantum Evolution

Celebrate Derek Künsken’s First Trilogy, The Quantum Evolution

Comments 3 comments


The Quantum Evolution trilogy by Derek Künsken (Solaris; 2018, 2019, and 2021). Covers by Justin Adams

You lot know that every time one of our authors publishes a novel, we celebrate with dinner at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters in downtown Chicago. And you’re also aware that every time an author completes a trilogy, we bake a cake. So what do we do when a Black Gate author completes a trilogy, as our own Derek Künsken just did with the release of The Quantum War, the third novel in The Quantum Evolution?

Why, it’s cake for dinner, of course. In fact, it’s cake and bubbly for everyone! Have a drink on us to join in the celebration*!

(*Conditions apply. Must be 21 years old. Offer not valid outside the continental United States. Or anywhere that serves bubbly.)

…

Read More Read More

Pushing Us Away from Gender-Based Assumptions: “Winter’s King” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Pushing Us Away from Gender-Based Assumptions: “Winter’s King” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Comments 6 comments

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Harper & Row, 1975). Cover by Patricia Voehl

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m returning to my series of essays about stories I find particularly interesting – often because of how good they are, but sometimes for other reasons. My goal is to examine them closely, and to try to understand – at least a bit – why they work, or why they don’t, or at least why they are interesting.

Ursula Le Guin is a favorite writer of mine. That’s hardly a challenging stance to take! I love many of her novels: The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed of course, and the Earthsea books, but also her last novel, Lavinia, and the YA novels that preceded it, collectively called Annals of the Western Shore; and her first completed novel (published much later): Malafrena. And too I love her short fiction, above all I’d say “Nine Lives” and “The Stars Below”. Another short story – or novelette – that has long been a particular favorite of mine is “Winter’s King.”

I first read “Winter’s King” in her collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (a collection I chose long ago as the best single author collection of SF of all time (not counting “Best of” collections, or “Collected Stories”).) (Since that time I’d allow Stories of Your Life, and Others, by Ted Chiang, as another contender.) But, intriguingly, Le Guin’s introduction to that story in her collection mentions that it is revised from its original version in one important way: the gender of the characters from the primary planet of that story, Winter, is represented as female in the new version, but in the original version they were depicted as both male and female.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction 1: Intergalactic Empires edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

Vintage Treasures: Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction 1: Intergalactic Empires edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh

Comments 7 comments


Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction 1: Intergalactic Empires
(Signet, December 1983). Cover by Paul Alexander

Last year, while I was researching an article on Asimov’s industry-changing success as a science fiction anthologist, I came across some amazing stats. Here’s the summary:

The Internet Science Fiction database lists nearly 200 anthologies with Asimov’s name on them, averaging around seven per year between 1963 and his death in 1992… the vast majority were produced in partnership with a team of editors, especially Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. In the early days Asimov compiled anthologies the old-fashioned way: by himself. It was the enduring, decades-long success of those books that paved the way for the massive literary-industrial complex to spring up around Asimov in the 80s and 90s.

Ha! That ‘literary-industrial complex’ line still busts me up. But the really interesting thing to come out of all that research was an obsession to track down all ten volumes in Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction, starting with Volume 1, Intergalactic Empires. In the process I also managed to find the last surviving editor of the series, Charles G. Waugh, who proved a fascinating correspondent.

…

Read More Read More

Cleve Cartmill, The Devil’s in the Details

Cleve Cartmill, The Devil’s in the Details

Comments 1 comment


Astounding Science Fiction, March 1944, containing “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill. Cover by William Timmins

Pulp writer Cleve Cartmill (1908 – 1964) is probably best known for writing the story that prompted an FBI visit to John W. Campbell’s office at Astounding. The story in question, “Deadline” (March, 1944), featured a bomb eerily similar to the one being developed by the Manhattan Project at the time. As an educated science fiction audience, Black Gate readers probably do not need that old story re-hashed. Instead, I’ll tell you about three of Cartmill’s fantasy stories published in Unknown, all of which are interesting and worth reading.

Historically, Cartmill is considered a competent but undistinguished pulp writer. In A Requiem for Astounding, Alva Rogers writes — “Cartmill wrote with an easy and colloquial fluidity that made his stories eminently readable.” I agree. But I also think there’s more to him than that. In the three pulp fantasy stories I’ll be reviewing here — “Bit of Tapestry” (1941), “Wheesht!” (1943), and “Hell Hath Fury” (1943) — Cartmill examines some deeper themes including free will and what makes us human. Although he doesn’t always follow through on these ideas, you are asked to think about them.

As a heads up, there will be heavy spoilers in this article.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Traveling the Road of Bones

Goth Chick News: Traveling the Road of Bones

Comments 0 Comment


Road of Bones by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Press, January 25, 2022). Cover artist unknown

I have recently been entertained by a Facebook group called View from My Window. People from around the world post pictures of just that; the view they see outside their windows. The fascinating bit is seeing postings from people in the farthest-flung corners of the globe, including Siberia. I didn’t know much about Siberia before, other than Russian dissidents being banished there, but seeing the pictures made me do a little research. I now know that Siberia is home to 33.7 million people, but that number is a little rough since there is no single precise definition of Siberia’s territorial borders. That population occupies 5 million square miles, so my concept of “sparsely populated” is mostly true. And boy is it cold. The average temperature in January −13 °F (no wind chill factored in) and warmest temps averaging around 50 °F.

So why am I telling you this and what does it have to do with horror?

Because my recent fascination with Siberia coincides nicely with a recent horror release from St. Martin’s Press, titled Road of Bones by Christopher Golden.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: City of Iron and Dust by J.P. Oakes

New Treasures: City of Iron and Dust by J.P. Oakes

Comments 0 Comment


City of Iron and Dust (Titan Books, July 2021). Cover by Shutterstock/Julia Lloyd

I don’t know much about J.P. Oakes. He lives on Long Island, City of Iron and Dust was his first (and so far only) novel, and he keeps a low profile.

But I know that the moment I read the back of City of Iron and Dust I wanted to buy it. It’s the tale of a goblin princess, the aftermath of a terrible war, an old soldier plotting a revolution, and The Iron City, a “singular dark fantasy creation that breathes with menace and decay.” (Paul Jessup, author of The Silence That Binds.)

Paul Di Filippo calls it “a grim’n’gritty yet often blackly humorous political-coup-cum-caper novel… [a] lusty, brutal, philosophical excursion.” Here’s an excerpt from his entertaining review at Locus Online.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Tales of Robin Hood by Clayton Emery

Vintage Treasures: Tales of Robin Hood by Clayton Emery

Comments 4 comments


Tales of Robin Hood (Baen, 1988). Cover by Larry Elmore

I’m a sucker for Robin Hood stories, and that’s probably why I bought Clayton Emery’s Tales of Robin Hood in 1988. Well, that and the fact that I thought it was an anthology. It’s actually a novel, a magical take on the legend of Sherwood Forest, with witches, demon boars, black-robed monks, and a Robin “attacked on all sides by sorcery and sword.”

Clayton Emery had a steady career as a TSR author in the late 90s, producing a series of Forgotten Realms books including the Netheril Trilogy (1996-98) and the third novel in the Lost Empires series, Star of Cursrah (1999), plus six Magic: The Gathering titles, including the Legends Cycle (2001-2). Tales of Robin Hood was originally published as a paperback by Baen and pretty much vanished without a trace, until iUniverse reprinted it in 2002 under the title Robin Hood and the Beasts of Sherwood. It caught on with modern readers in the new incarnation, and was warmly reviewed by a new generation of readers.

…

Read More Read More

A Philosophical Policeman: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

A Philosophical Policeman: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

Comments 12 comments

Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left—sanity.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), by G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, is a wondrous amalgam of thriller, mystery, boys’ adventure, and Christian allegory wrapped in a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of a cabal of anarchists plotting to blow things up. Gabriel Syme is a poet who fears the world is destined for destruction under a wave of moral relativism and nihilism. He is recruited to a special anti-anarchist unit of the British police by a mysterious figure who remains hidden in the shadows. …

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Keanu as The Devil in the White City?

Goth Chick News: Keanu as The Devil in the White City?

Comments 5 comments

As a lifelong Chicagoan I have always enjoyed stories of my city’s colorful history. From its Blues connection to New Orleans, to the Gilded Age of Marshall Field and Parker Palmer, to the seedier stories like that of the Everleigh Sisters, the building of Chicago reads like a naughty version of Downton Abbey. Of course, as entertaining as its early history can be, Chicago was a tough, crime-ridden place. It was dirty, both literally and figuratively, and violent in every sense of the word. The city was and still is, associated with a lot of unsavory activity that we unsuccessfully try to distance ourselves from. For instance, we’d love for the world to stop thinking of Al Capone every time someone brings up Chicago. Ironically, the one name most people don’t associate with our city is H. H. Holmes, at least up to now.

…

Read More Read More