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Witches, Sorcerers, and Space Citadels: Alan Brown on Swords Against Tomorrow, edited by Robert Hoskins

Witches, Sorcerers, and Space Citadels: Alan Brown on Swords Against Tomorrow, edited by Robert Hoskins

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Swords Against Tomorrow (Signet / New American Library, August 1970). Cover by Gene Szafran.

I’ve been enjoying Alan Brown’s classic science fiction reviews at Tor.com. In just the last few months he’s looked at Masters of the Vortex by E. E. “Doc” Smith, H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pirates of Venus, Sterling E. Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey, and Murray Leinster’s Med Ship. That’s a pretty satisfying journey through some great 20th Century SF right there (depending on how generously you’re disposed towards “Doc” Smith, I grant you).

But I was especially intrigued by his lengthy review of Robert Hoskins’ 1970 sword & sorcery anthology Swords Against Tomorrow, a long-forgotten volume that contained five long stories by Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Lin Carter, John Jakes, and Leigh Brackett, including a pair of reprints from Planet Stories and an original novelette from Lin Carter. All but one are reprints — including a standalone novella by Anderson, a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser adventure, a Brak the Barbarian story, and a tale in Brackett’s famous Venus series.

This is a fine little paperback that introduced readers to some of the most popular heroic fantasy series of the era in the early 70s, and I certainly didn’t expect to see it featured so prominently at the premier genre site over half a century after it was published.

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New Treasures: The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

New Treasures: The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

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Cover design by Richard Yoo

Way back in early 2017, John DeNardo included Entropy in Bloom: Stories in a Kirkus Reviews article on The Science Fiction & Fantasy Books Everyone Will be Talking About in April. That was my introduction to the work of Jeremy Robert Johnson, a rising star in horror fiction, author of the 2015 novel Skullcrack City and the earlier collection We Live Inside You (2011).

His new novel The Loop was released by Saga Press last month to some pretty gonzo acclaim. Kirkus called it a “grotesque teen nightmare that’s pretty much Stranger Things meets Rogue One,” and I have no idea what that even means. Here’s a cut from Sadie Hartmann’s enthusiastic notice at Cemetery Dance:

This book covers a lot of ground and offers something for everyone: A strong, female protagonist named Lucy; witty (hilarious) sidekick besties, Brewer and Bucket; and a rocket-fueled storyline about a biologically engineered virus leaked from a lab and wreaking havoc in a small, rural town in the Pacific Northwest. There’s even a likable radio personality known as the Nightwatchman that gave me strong Pump Up the Volume vibes. Do you remember that movie with Christian Slater? Well I do. One of my favorite aspects of Johnson’s writing is the way everything is stylistically cinematic to read like a cult-classic from a familiar era (definitely the late ‘80s to mid-’90s)…

Folded into this tension is Johnson’s natural-born talent for wit and sarcasm as well as his flair for spot-on pop culture references — a trifecta of storytelling gifts that Johnson’s fanbase has come to expect from his books…. This is a favorite book of 2020 for sure.

The Loop was published by Saga Press on September 29, 2020. It is 306 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Richard Yoo. Listen to an audio excerpt or read Chapter One at the Simon & Schuster website.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Rogue Blades Author: A Love Letter to Bear Creek

Rogue Blades Author: A Love Letter to Bear Creek

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The following is an excerpt from Mark Finn’s essay for Robert E. Howard Changed My Life, an upcoming book from the Rogue Blades Foundation.

Howard changed my lifeI’ve spent roughly seventy-five percent of my life thinking about Robert E. Howard, one of his many literary creations, or some combination of the two. It’s common when, in the bloom of one’s youth, a reader decides who their favorite author is and then reads everything they can get their hands on, indiscriminately. I was certainly no exception, and while I was quick to devour all the Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane I could find, I don’t think I learned about Howard’s humor stories until I was a senior in high school.

It was in the problematic pages of Dark Valley Destiny (1983) where L. Sprague de Camp wrote favorably (well, as favorably as he was able, which in this case, was fairly glowing) about Howard’s humor fiction; the fighting sailor of the Asiatics, Steve Costigan, and the lumbering mountain man from Bear Creek, Nevada, Breckinridge Elkins. Given that de Camp’s biography was so full of scant praise for the author’s literary output, these plaudits stood out in sharp relief against the backhanded compliments. As the single biggest fan of Robert E. Howard that I knew, I could not let this omission in my reading stand.

As it turned out, it would have to, at least for a couple of years, until I could get to a better class of used bookstore. I bought both The Iron Man (1976) and A Gent From Bear Creek (1975) at the same time at Austin Books, in (where else?) Austin, Texas. They were the Zebra editions with wonderfully evocative covers by Jeff Jones. I was stunned and a little disheartened to find out that Howard’s humor writing was, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, about 95% unpublished. Sure, A Gent From Bear Creek was available, but it was, at the time, at odds with the rest of Howard’s work in print. Specifically, it was hard to reconcile this picaresque romp of a humor novel, full of hyperbole and exaggerations, with the same author that wrote “The Black Stone” and “Red Nails.” If I’m being completely honest, I didn’t quite get it.

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Andrew Liptak on 24 Sci-fi and Fantasy Books to Check Out in October

Andrew Liptak on 24 Sci-fi and Fantasy Books to Check Out in October

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Covers by: Kathryn Galloway English, DoFresh, and uncredited (click to embiggen)

Andrew Liptak’s monthly SF and fantasy book roundup in his email newsletter is both exhilarating and frustrating. You probably know what I’m talking about. It’s like being rushed through a tantalizing buffet — it looks fantastic, but no way you’ll have time to try it all.

His October book list is especially appetizing, with new releases from Linda Nagata, Kim Stanley Robinson, V.E. Schwab, Elizabeth Bear, P. Djèlí Clark, Cory Doctorow, Alix E. Harrow, Rebecca Roanhorse, Patrick Tomlinson, Neil Gaiman, Yoon Ha Lee, Cixin Liu, Lou Diamond Phillips, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Charles Stross, and more. But time’s a-wasting. Let’s check out the highlights.

Trinity Sight by Jennifer Givhan (Blackstone Publishing, 304 pages, $15.99 paperback/$7.99 digital, October 13, 2020) – cover design by Kathryn Galloway English

An anthropologist named Calliope Santiago is driving home from work and experiences a bright flash of light, and crashes. When she awakens, she discovers that almost everyone has vanished, and that New Mexico has turned into an unforgiving landscape of volcanoes, monsters, and magic. Along with her son and unborn twins, she and a neighbor’s child navigate this new wilderness, meeting survivors along the way as they try and find safety.

Kirkus Reviews notes that Givhan “employs Southwestern Puebloan mythology to inform the plot,” as well as more contemporary tensions between the US Government, atomic bombs, and more.

Jennifer Givhan is also the author of Jubilee and the collection Girl with Death Mask.

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Vintage Treasures: Dorothea Dreams by Suzy McKee Charnas

Vintage Treasures: Dorothea Dreams by Suzy McKee Charnas

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Berkley Books (1987). Cover uncredited

Suzy McKee Charnas has won virtually every major accolade our genre has to offer, including the Nebula, Hugo, and James Tiptree Jr. awards. Perhaps her most famous work is The Vampire Tapestry (1980), a non-supernatural tale of vampires with an SF premise. Her four-volume Holdfast Chronicles, which opened with Walk to the End of the World (1974), is a modern classic of feminist science fiction.

Dorothea Dreams, her fifth novel, is supernatural horror; The Washington Post called it “a ghost story — and a beautifully realised unconventional one at that.” It’s the tale of Dorothea Howard, a New Mexico artist haunted in her dreams by a ghost from the French Revolution. Midlist horror didn’t get a lot of critical notice in the mid-80s, but Dorothea Dreams did. This review from Publisher’s Weekly is fairly typical of the book’s warm reception.

For two years artist Dorothea Howard has been embedding fragments of pottery, wire and glass in the wall of black volcanic rock on her property near Taos. Her solitude is broken when her old friend Ricky, a British travel writer dying of cancer, arrives, saying simply he was drawn to visit. While trying to unravel Dorothea’s complex, frightening dreams which feature a 19th century lawyer who is a survivor of the French Revolution, Ricky urges his reluctant friend to show others the wall… Then a group of Chicano teenagers hunted by the police takes over the house… Charnas (The Vampire Tapestry) is billed as a fantasy writer, but this novel, as beautifully layered as Dorothea’s wall, is also a very human story about love and loss and continuation.

Dorothea Dreams was published by Arbor House in 1986, and reprinted in paperback by Berkley Books in January 1987. The paperback edition is 246 pages, priced at $2.95. The cover is uncredited.

See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Women Do It Better? The Women of Weird Tales, from Valancourt Books

Women Do It Better? The Women of Weird Tales, from Valancourt Books

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The Women of Weird Tales
By Everil Worrell, Eli Colter, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Greye La Spina
Introduction by Melanie Anderson
Valancourt Books (280 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$16.99 paperback/$9.99 digital, November 3, 2020)

It is well known by now that women had a pivotal role in the development of those literary genres called Gothic Fiction, Horror, Dark Fantasy, etc. If we look at the iconic Weird Tales, the golden era of which spanned the ‘20s to the ‘50s, female authors were constantly included, and they penned some of the magazine’s most popular stories. Not to mention that some of the most influential editors and cover artists of the era were women as well.

Valancourt Books has aptly published a new anthology showcasing stories from Weird Tales by female writers, Women of Weird Tales.

Greye La Spina is present with five stories. The most accomplished, to me, is “The Antimacassar,” an effective, well told tale portraying a case of vampirism, gradually disclosed throughout the yarn. Other good tales are the bizarre “The Remorse of Professor Panebianco,” in which a mad scientist designs a device to imprison the soul of dying people; “The Dead-Wagon,” a dark gothic tale about a family curse dating back to the times of the Black Death; and “ The Deadly Theory,” a disturbing piece showing how the power to bring back people from the dead leads to tragedy.

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Corum and Me: The Disappointment of the Swords

Corum and Me: The Disappointment of the Swords

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The Swords Trilogy (Berkley Medallion, 1977, cover by Ken Barr) and
The Chronicles of Corum (Berkley Medallion, 1983, artist uncredited).

In late 2017, I published an article at Black Gate called “Elric and Me” in which I discussed revisiting Michael Moorcock’s most famous creation. Three years later, I’ve decided to revisit another of his creations, Corum Jhaelen Irsei., the Prince of the Scarlet Robe.

I first became acquainted with all of Moorcock’s characters in the early 1980s when I discovered Elric and Hawkmoon in Appendix N of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Over the next several years, I tracked down as many of his works as I could, and my timing was fantastic since during those years, DAW was printing and reprinting nearly all of Moorcock’s fiction in reasonably easy to acquire versions.

The Corum books, however, were reprinted by Berkley in two omnibus editions. The first, The Swords Trilogy, contains The Knight of the Swords, The Queen of the Swords, and The King of the Swords. The second, The Chronicles of Corum, contained The Bull and the Spear, The Oak and the Ram, and The Sword and the Stallion. In this first of two essays, we explore The Swords Trilogy.

Over the years, I’ve read and re-read various series by Moorcock. Kane of Old Mars in 1998, The History of the Runestaff in 2010, and, of course, Elric in 2017. When I picked up the anthology Michael Moorcock’s Legends of the Multiverse in August and read the Corum story included there, I realized that I hadn’t actually re-read the Corum novels since the 1980s. Perhaps it was time to revisit them.

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New Treasures: The Breach by M.T. Hill

New Treasures: The Breach by M.T. Hill

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Cover design by Julia Lloyd

M.T. Hill has had a busy few years. Last year Locus reviewer Paul Di Filippo raved “his third novel, Zero Bomb, is so good that you will want to snatch up copies of the first two, as I just did.” Those first two books were written under the name Matt Hill, and they include the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award nominee Graft, which we covered back in 2016. His fourth novel in four years, The Breach, was released back in May, and fulfilled the promise of his early books. Lucy Wood at Sublime Horror was clearly impressed:

In a period of state-sanctioned exercise and rationed food, I have lost myself in M.T. Hill’s The Breach, a story of infection, incubation, contagion and transmission, of invasion and quarantine, that, although very much firmly in the sci-fi realm, could not be more appropriate right now.

The Breach is told in the main by local newspaper reporter Freya and Shep, a thrill-seeking trainee steeplejack. Freya is sent to cover the funeral of a young climber, Stephen, whose death is not as straightforward as it’s being claimed. When Shep isn’t shimmying up sky-high stacks for work, he is an urban explorer – a highly illegal activity in this near future world they live in. They cross paths when Freya uncovers a post uploaded to an urbex forum by Stephen, showing what appears to be a nest. As Freya’s probe into the circumstances of his death grows more unsettling, both she and Shep journey headlong into a situation with devastating consequences.

Hill’s storytelling is second-to-none… I’ve read some horrifying stuff in my time. The Breach notches up the fear incrementally, almost imperceptibly. Before you know it, we are head-deep in a skin-crawling version of life, where what’s real and what isn’t merges… The Breach is a smart novel for our ever-shifting times and a reminder of our fragility. It also gives us the space to draw our own conclusion on what it is to be human. And it allows us to really think about our rights to privacy and to be an individual. Most of all it’s a rollicking good read, with a resonance that lasts long after the final page has turned. Trust me, this one will get under your skin.

The Breach was published by Titan Books on March 17, 2020. It is 380 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by the tireless Julia Lloyd. Read a brief excerpt at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

See all our coverage of the best new releases in fantasy and horror here.

L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series: #1 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum’s Oz Series: #1 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

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If we were to look at the roots of American fantasy, or even world fantasy, the writer L. Frank Baum’s influence looms large in the pre-Tolkien era. The 1939 MGM The Wizard of Oz movie is an indelible part of world culture. Canvas for impactful movie villains and the Wicked Witch of the West tops most people’s lists. The movie is so pervasive in culture that we can forget the source novels, though.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, sold 3 million copies by 1956, when it entered the public domain. Baum wasn’t keen on sequels, but the fan mail from kids proved to be a powerful pressure and he ended up writing 14 Oz books before his death in 1919. Then the publisher hired Ruth Plumley Thompson to write another 21, and some other writers came later.

I’d of course seen the movie as a child and received the third Oz book (Ozma of Oz) from a classmate in grade six. I hadn’t known that the movie was based off of books, nor that there was a vast narrative mythology in prose form. I read Ozma of Oz and was charmed with the creativity, the tone, the promise of many more adventures, and began picking up other books as I encountered them.

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Future Treasures: The Fractured Void: A Twilight Imperium Novel by Tim Pratt

Future Treasures: The Fractured Void: A Twilight Imperium Novel by Tim Pratt

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Twilight Imperium, Third Edition (Fantasy Flight Games, 2004), and The Fractured Void (Aconyte, November 2020)

Tim Pratt has been nominated for all the major genre awards, including the Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Mythopoeic, and Stoker, and he won a Hugo in 2007 for his short story “Impossible Dreams.” His most recent books include the Axiom trilogy, and the 10-volume Marla Mason series.

His upcoming book is a space opera with a twist — it’s based on the rich background created for Twilight Imperium. Yes, that Twilight Imperium, Fantasy Flight’s epic (and I do mean epic) game of space conquest, politics, and trade. Designed by Christian T. Petersen and first released in 1997, Twilight Imperium is one of the most successful science fiction games of the last few decades. It’s been continuously in print for over two decades, and gone through four editions. The mythos that has grown up around the game and its 17 playable races is sprawling and rich, and certainly deserving of a line of fiction novels. I’m definitely looking forward to the first, The Fractured Void, and Pratt is an excellent choice to kick off the line. Here’s the publisher’s description.

A brave starship crew are drawn into the schemes of interplanetary powers competing for galactic domination, in this epic space opera from the best-selling strategic boardgame, Twilight Imperium.

Captain Felix Duval and the crew of the Temerarious quietly patrol a remote Mentak Coalition colony system where nothing ever happens. But when they answer a distress call from a moon under attack, that peaceful existence is torn apart. They rescue a scientist, Thales, who’s developing revolutionary technology to create new wormholes. He just needs a few things to make it fully operational… and now, ordered to aid the scientist, the Temerarious is targeted by two rival black-ops teams intent on reacquiring Thales. Can Felix trust Thales? Or is this a conspiracy to tip the balance of power in the galaxy forever?

The Fractured Void will be published by Aconyte on November 3, 2020. It is $16.95 in trade paperback and $9.95 in digital formats. Get more details and read an excerpt here, and check out the handsome fourth edition of Twilight Imperium at the Fantasy Flight website.

See all our recent coverage of the best in upcoming SF and fantasy books here.