The Jasmine Throne and The Oleander Sword (Orbit, June 2021 and August 2022). Covers by Micah Epstein
The Jasmine Throne, the opening volume in Tasha Suri’s Burning Kingdoms fantasy epic, was named one of the best books of 2021 by Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Public Library. The second installment, The Oleander Sword, is due August 16, and early reviews have only heightened the anticipation. This is shaping up to be one of the major fantasy series of the decade.
Suri is also the author of two well-received fantasy volumes, Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash — though, as Liz Bourke at Tor.com points out in her review of The Jasmine Throne, “[I] admired them as well-constructed epic fantasy with a strong romantic component, but they never made me feel like this — gobsmacked, a little awestruck, violently satisfied, painfully engaged.”
Beyond the Last Star was the fifth and final anthology put together on SFF.net, a one-time website that served not only as the webhost to numerous science fiction authors from 1996 until 2017. In addition to webhosting, SFF.net also ran a bulletin board analogous to USENET or the GEnie boards out of which it grew. The community that existed at SFF.net not only put out a series of anthologies, but also compiled and submitted the infamous Atlanta Nights, as written by Travis Tea, as a sting operation after PublishAmerica stated that “the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction.”
Kiel Stuart’s story for the final SFF.net anthology, “A Conglomeration of Bees” has a wonderfully nostalgic feel to it, a story that inhabits the same world as Ray Bradbury’s tales of growing up in “Green Town.” The story is set in a small town that could be anywhere in the United States although Stuart defines it as Sag Harbor, Long Island.
The focus is on Kate Demarest, who sold various random items off the front porch of her house. Her day started out normally, including a visit to an antiques shop, when she heard rumors or a swarm of bees moving through town in the shape of a man, apparently walking around and emulating tipping its hat. Although Kate hopes to see the bee-man, with a sense of trepidation, she also has her own business to run, no matter how slow it is.
When dealing with a regular customer, Mrs. Sedgwick, who is sure that Kate is hiding the items she is interested in, Kate’s day is enlivened by the appearance of a mandrill, who enters store on Kate’s porch and begins to rummage through the miscellany she is selling. While Mrs. Sedgwick is disturbed by the creature, Kate treats it as any other customer, knowing that there is a bonus in that the mandrill with cause Mrs. Sedgwick to leave.
Never the Wind (Titan Books, June 2022). Cover design by Julia Lloyd
I first learned about Francesco Dimitri’s new novel Never the Wind when I heard Paul Tremblay describe it as “”Susanna Clarke meets Robert Aikman,” not exactly a description I hear every day. Publishers Weeklycalls it “truly spooky…plenty here to fascinate fans of cerebral horror.”
That was more than enough to pique my interest. I set out to learn more and quickly found Dimitri’s guest post at Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, My Favorite Bit:, where he discusses the narrative use of magic. It certainly cemented my interest — but I also found the way he approached magic on the page fascinating, and enormously useful for anyone using the supernatural in fiction.
The Rape of the Sun by Ian Wallace (DAW 1982). Preliminary sketch and final cover by David B. Mattingly
As a teenaged science fiction and fantasy fan growing up in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, I loved DAW Books. They had some great authors and great cover art, and all those yellow spines looked sweet next to each other on the bookshelf.
As some of you may know, I collect and sell original SF and fantasy art. I’ve been fortunate enough over the years to acquire a number of those DAW cover paintings that I admired growing up. Recently I was given on consignment one of the cooler items that I’ve sold. This was a sketchbook, compiled by artist David Mattingly, containing 34 preliminaries. Mattingly had glued a preliminary to each right hand page. The sizes of the preliminaries varied, but they generally ranged between roughly 4.25” x 7” to 6” x 8”. There were clearly more pages at some point that had been cut out; presumably these contained other preliminaries that were sold separately over the years. Mattingly had given each preliminary a number; these ran from 62 through 113, in order, with gaps for missing pages.
I’ve always enjoyed seeing preliminaries, as they give a glimpse into the artist’s process as well as, in the case of preliminaries there were rejected, a view of what might have been. Most of the prelims in the sketchbook weren’t for DAW books – there were many for Del Rey/Ballantine Books as well as SF digests – but ten of them were. I thought that fellow DAW enthusiasts might enjoy seeing these earlier cover concepts.
In 2014, David G. Hartwell, at Tor Books, edited to second anthology of stories which were based on a specific painting. He provided a piece of art created by Richard Anderson to multiple authors and asked them to write stories inspired by the art. The first of the three novelettes to appear in The Anderson Project is Ken Liu’s “Reborn.”
The world of “Reborn” is one in which humans are living in an uneasy relationship with the alien Tawnin. The story opens with the arrival of a Tawnin ship, returning some of the Reborn, humans who have been altered by the Tawnin, back to Earth. A crowd has gathered for the event and Josh Rennon, a policeman working with the Tawnin, as well as one of the Reborn, is on the scene to see if he can spot anyone who is less than happy with the Tawnin’s residence on Earth. When a bomb explodes, he is able to apprehend someone who appears to be connected with it.
Although the story begins to take on the tone of a police procedural, Liu is interested in following up on several different threads. Rennon is in a relationship with Kai, one of the Tawnin, and Liu explores what their relationship means, from a physical as well as an emotional and intellectual point of view. In some ways, both Kai and Rennon are new. As a Reborn, some of Rennon’s memories have been excised from him while the Tawnin take the view that just as their cells are completely replaced every few years, so too are their memories, and so a Tawnin today is a completely different individual than the person thie was a decade earlier.
The procedural potion of the story also continues and Rennon begins to discover that his suspect appears to be part of a larger conspiracy. As Rennon tracks down the threads that appear during his interrogation of the suspect, he comes across the mysterious Walker Lincoln, who appears to be the key to this particular terrorist cell, even if there doesn’t seem to be a record of Lincoln. Nevertheless, Rennon insists on following up on any leads, which makes his colleague Claire, as well as Kai, concerned about where the investigation is taking him.
A Strange and Stubborn Endurance (Tor, July 26, 2022)
Foz Meadows is conquering the world.
She won a Hugo Award in 2019 (as she puts it, “for yelling on the internet”), and she’s been a widely acclaimed essayist and blogger — at Strange Horizons, The Huffington Post, and Black Gate, among many other fine places — for nearly a decade. Her fantasy novel An Accident of Stars and its sequel A Tyranny of Queens were publishedby Angry Robot in 2016/17, and last year Tor Books announced they’d acquired her massive new fantasy novel, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance.
A Strange and Stubborn Endurance finally arrives next week and, if the early buzz is anything to go by, it’s shaping up to be one of the major fantasy novels of year. Publishers Weeklycalls it “lushly drawn fantasy romance… skillfully integrates gripping mystery and satisfying slow-burn romance,” and Library Journalproclaims it ““an emotionally gripping, delightful queer fantasy filled with political intrigue.” But my favorite notice came from SF Chronicle, which heralds Foz as “newly minted royalty of sci-fi fantasy.”
A Book of Blades (Rogues in the House Podcast, July 2022; 233pages; cover art by Jesus Garcia)
This January Black Gate teased a second publication from the Rogues in the House Sword & Sorcery podcast while we covered the folks/rogues behind the show and highlighted episodes (Go Rogues! link). Beyond luring in S&S authors like Howard Andrew Jones, Scott Oden, John R. Fultz, and Jason Ray Carney, they’ve covered Morgan King & Phil Gelatt (creators of the movie The Spine of Night), Peter D. Adkison (founder and first CEO of Wizards of the Coast and owner of GenCon, the world’s largest board game convention), and Sara Frazetta (granddaughter of the fantasy master painter, an artist herself, and CEO of Frazetta Girls).
Now the anthology has been released into the wild. A Book of Blades hosts 15 short stories from established and emerging heroic authors! Check out the table of contents below. There are even illustrations from the aforementioned Morgan Galen King & Sara Frazetta, amongst other artists. All proceeds go toward making the show a stronger and more attractive platform for all. The anthology is available now in Paperback and Kindle. …
The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction and The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Science Fiction
(Fawcett Crest, 1980 and 1981). Covers by Jerome Podwil
Back in the day, there was a pretty reliable formula for a successful science fiction anthology.
Went like this: Step one, find a fresh theme. Could be anything. Unicorns, space dreadnaughts, cats (cats were always a good choice). Step two, find a bunch of science fiction stories. Step three, put Isaac Asimov’s name on the cover.
In 1978, Asimov put out his first anthology with Martin H. Greenberg, who was famously gifted at the production side of things, and over the next decade or so they published over a hundred together, usually with Charles G. Waugh, a psychology professor in Maine. Charles picked the stories, Isaac wrote the intros, and Marty did everything else.
It was an inspired partnership, and it produced many celebrated volumes, including Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction (10 books), Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy (12 books), and many Mammoth Books of Science Fiction. But for me the real gems of the enterprise were some of the one-offs, including The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction, and its sequel The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Science Fiction.
The Sun Eaters series (so far): Empire of Silence, Howling Dark, Demon in White, and Kingdoms of Death. All published by DAW. Covers by Sam Weber (book 1) and Kieran Yanner (books 2-4).
Every time an author completes a fantasy trilogy, we bake a cake at Black Gate headquarters. I can’t comment on anyone else, but speaking personally, this job has kept me fat for over a decade. I have no complaints.
The corporate protocol is a little fuzzier when an author produces four books in a series (though I did see Bob Byrne attempt a souffle last month.) And when we see that rare fivebook milestone? I can’t remember the last time it happened, but I think it involved ice cream and a catapult.
We better figure it out soon, though. The fifth and final book in Christopher Ruocchio’s groundbreaking Sun Eater series is scheduled to arrive this year, and it will bring to a close one of the most popular and acclaimed space operas of the decade. Library Journal called the opening volume a “wow book… stretched across a vast array of planets,” and Eric Flint labeled it “epic-scale space opera in the tradition of Iain M. Banks and Frank Herbert’s Dune.” It won Ruocchio the 2019 Manly Wade Wellman Award.
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Dover Thrift Editions,
November 2017). Cover: New Orleans Map, Currier and Ives, 1885
Last night I finished re-reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. I had not read it in many years — I first read it in the mid-1970s in a graduate seminar on Hawthorne and Melville taught by the wonderful Professor Elizabeth Schultz at the University of Kansas.
It’s perhaps my favorite Melville book, and a significant influence on my writing; my first solo novel Good News From Outer Space was an attempt to cross the figure of the multiply-disguised Confidence Man from Melville’s book with the shape-changing aliens of classic science fiction.
It all takes place in a single day — April Fool’s Day — on a steamboat that leaves St. Louis for points south, carrying a carnival of American character types, among them a confidence man who assumes eight different disguises as he interacts with, and bilks, various passengers during the the course of the day. It’s been described as a series of sketches or conversations. But that description does not do justice to the ways in which this book deconstructs America — and friendship and society and capitalism and progress and nature and religion and language itself — pretty much anything that any of us put faith in.
