Black Gate

I’m very intrigued by James Longrove’s Dev Harmer Mission series, and I may add it to my Fall Reading Program. (I’m also intrigued by his 8-volume Pantheon series, but let’s remain realistic, shall we?) Dev Harmer is a reluctant agent of mega-corporation Interstellar Security Solutions, dispatched to various hotspots around the galaxy. He wakes up in a brand new cloned body every time. His original body, back on Earth, reportedly no longer exists, so Hammer has to earn enough to afford a new one… and that means doing the dirty jobs no one else wants.

Each of these jobs takes him to a very different locale — starting with Alighieri, a planet perpetually in flames, and the setting for the opening novel in the series, World of Fire.

Dev Harmer, reluctant agent of Interstellar Security Solutions, wakes up in a newly cloned host body on the planet Alighieri, ready for action. It’s an infernal world, so close to its sun that it surface is regularly baked to 1,000°C, hot enough to turn rock to lava. But deep underground there are networks of tunnels connecting colonies of miners who dig for the precious helium-3 regolith deposits in Alighieri’s crust.

Polis+, the AI race who are humankind’s great galactic rivals, want to claim the fiery planet’s mineral wealth for their own. All that stands between them and this goal is Dev. But as well as Polis+’s agents, there are giant moleworms to contend with, and a spate of mysterious earthquakes, and the perils of the surface where a man can be burned to cinders if he gets caught unprotected on the day side…

Giant worms, hostile AIs, hell planet… that’s all the essentials for a rousing space adventure, right there.

…

Read More Read More

When my copy of The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection arrived last week, I was pleased (and a little flattered) to see this quote on the back.

There are roughly ten Year’s Best volumes currently being published in the speculative fiction market, but they all bow before Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction… To read Gardner’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction every year is to get the pulse of the entire industry. All the new writers, literary movements, shake­ups, and happenings in the field ― it’s all there at your fingertips. ― Black Gate

That’s taken from my article on last year’s volume, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.

I’ve covered eight Best of the Year anthologies so far this year, from editors like Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, Neil Clarke, and John Joseph Adams. But the gold standard remains Gardner Dozois’ massive The Year’s Best Science Fiction, now in its 33rd annual volume.

…

Read More Read More

Sometimes I want to settle down with a straightforward adventure fantasy novel. And sometimes… sometimes I want something a bit more off the wall. Something like Gabriel Squailia’s debut novel Dead Boys, in which Jacob Campbell sets off across the Land of the Dead, accompanied by a boy with strange powers over bones, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, searching for the Living Man, the only adventurer to cross the underworld while still alive.

Author Brendan Mathews calls it “A macabre, madcap picaresque full of fast-talking corpses and philosophical skeletons,” and Publishers Weekly praises it for its “Exquisite worldbuilding alongside a mix of humor and philosophy… This underworld is a fascinating city.” Sounds like just the thing I’m in the mood for.

Dead Boys was published by Talos on March 10, 2015. It is 278 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Brian Peterson. Click the images above for bigger versions.

I jotted a quick note on Marjorie Sandor’s The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows last spring. I finally bought a copy last week, and settled down with it this weekend.

As horror anthologies go, it has an even broader scope than I expected. Last year I described it as “a generous new collection of classic and new horror fiction from the four corners of the globe,” and that’s true, more or less. There’s stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann (Germany), Edgar Allan Poe (USA), Ambrose Bierce (USA), Guy de Maupassant (France), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Franz Kafka (Czech Republic), H. P. Lovecraft (The Outer Void), and others.

But in its 555 pages are also more contemporary tales by Kelly Link, Jonathan Carroll, Joan Aiken, Steven Millhauser, and many others. In her lengthy Los Angeles Review of Books review, Rachel Pastan writes:

Though containing fewer than three dozen pieces, The Uncanny Reader feels remarkably generous and comprehensive… [Sandor writes], “Every writer in this collection strips away the armor of familiar, overused language… they make us see and hear anew.” It is this conceit that makes room under one sprawling mansard roof for a horror story like Poe’s “Berenice,” in which a crazed lover disinters his beloved in order to rip her teeth out of her head… a surrealist story like Bruno Schultz’s “The Birds,” in which the narrator’s father turns the family home into an incubator for exotic eggs… and a fantastical story like Karen Russell’s “Haunting Olivia” in which two brothers use a pair of magic pink underwater goggles to hunt for their dead sister’s ghost…

Other standouts: Shirley Jackson’s energetic and urban “Paranoia”; Chris Adrian’s surprising suicide-on-Nantucket story, “The Black Square”; and Kelly Link’s haunted and haunting tale of domestic life, “Stone Animals,” [in which] a family moves out of an apartment in New York City and into a big house in the country… The unexpected and poignantly human way in which this house turns out to be haunted is one of Link’s great achievements.

Here’s the complete table of contents.

…

Read More Read More