Black Gate

Last week I ordered a copy of Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, published in a deluxe edition from Subterranean Press. I knew it was a big volume, but I didn’t realize just how massive until it arrived with a thud on my doorstep: 784 pages in hardcover, with a gorgeous warparound cover and interior artwork by Dominic Harman.

Subterranean Press is one of the most prolific small press publishers in the genre. I don’t often give them a lot of coverage here at Black Gate, mostly because they specialize in autographed limited edition hardcovers, targeted at the collectors market, which are out of my price range. But over the last two decades or so, as mainstream publishers have largely abandoned the single-author collection as commercially unviable, Subterranean founder and editor William Schafer has made a noble effort to pick up the slack, publishing nearly a hundred collections by Jack Vance, Joe R. Lansdale, Charles de Lint, George R. R. Martin, James P. Blaylock, Robert Silverberg, Robert McCammon, Tim Lebbon, Neal Barrett, Jr., Tad Williams, Charles Beaumont, K. J. Parker, Terry Dowling, Lewis Shiner, Greg Egan, and many, many others.

Subterranean Press’ collections clearly deserve a closer look, and I’ve decided to start with three of their most recent: Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, edited by Jonathan Strahan and William Schafer, The Best of Nancy Kress, and The Best of Gregory Benford, edited by the late David G. Hartwell. All three are monumental volumes, and all three are priced very affordably, especially if your shop around. (I paid $28.54 for a brand new copy of Beyond the Aquila Rift, which I purchased from a trusted third party seller on Amazon.)

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Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Spiderlight, published last month by Tor.com Publishing, is fast becoming one of the most talk-about books of the fall. What begins as a familiar tale of a small band of adventurers on an epic quest to defeat the Dark Lord quickly becomes something else entirely. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog calls it “A master class in subverting our expectations to surprise, engage, and deliver a fantastic story,” And Django Wexler says, “If, like me, you’re a D&D fan who always wondered about the ethics of Detect Evil or what the orcs eat in Mordor, you will love this one.”

Tchaikovsky sounds like someone who’s fond of old-fashioned heroic fantasy — in particular, the trope of the Adventuring Party — and also someone who isn’t afraid of messing with the genre. So I was particularly interested in his August article at Tor.com “Five Books Featuring Adventuring Parties,” which begins:

My new book, Spiderlight, is something of a deconstruction of the fantasy adventuring party, as seen in plenty of post-Tolkien works, and as beloved of Dungeons & Dragons players everywhere. It’s not as common as you’d think in fiction — often the action is a single individual or a hero-and-sidekick pair, or something larger, like a military company. What I’m after here is an ensemble cast with a particular feel to it — that mix of clashing characters and different skillsets. Here are some of my favorites.

Yeah, that sounds good to me. One of his choices is a book that completely slipped past me: The Copper Promise by Jen Williams, published in July by Angry Robot.

When there’s a wizard and a warrior but the rogue gets a chance to shine.

Jen is one of the best new voices in UK fantasy, and it’s a testament to her writing skill that Wydrin, the “Copper Cat” and a proper fantasy rogue through and through, does not actually eclipse her companions Frith and Sebastian as they fight, trick and run their way through a world that has gone from run-of-the-mill dangerous to actively-being-set-on-fire-by-a-dragon dangerous thanks, chiefly, to their own poor life choices. “Let sleeping gods lie,” goes the tagline. No need to tell you how that one works out.

We previously discussed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novels The Tiger and the Wolf and Guns of the Dawn. Learn more about his Tor.com novella Spiderlight here.

Read Tchaikovsky’s complete article at Tor.com here.

Well, we’re heading into fall (at least, for those readers in the Northern Hemisphere), and that’s reading season. Time to snuggle down with a good book or three, as the weather turns foul outside. My choice for Labor Day weekend is the debut novel by Forrest Leo, a Monty Pythonesque fantasy about a poet who accidentally sells his wife to the devil — then assembles a band of adventurers to rescue her. BookRiot labels it “a delight,” and Locus calls it “Wonderfully demented and comical… as if Tom Holt and Oscar Wilde got together and decided to do up a steampunk novelty… a robust, riotous romp.”

When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they’re broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him.

Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil — the polite “Gentleman” of the title — who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party’s over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord.

Newly in love with Vivian, Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell that includes Simmons, the butler; Tompkins, the bookseller; Ashley Lancaster, swashbuckling Buddhist; Will Kensington, inventor of a flying machine; and Savage’s spirited kid sister, Lizzie, freshly booted from boarding school for a “dalliance.” Throughout, his cousin’s quibbling footnotes to the text push the story into comedy nirvana.

Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, anarchist-fearing bobbies, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history, and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny, The Gentleman is a giddy farce that recalls the masterful confections of P.G. Wodehouse and Hergé’s beautifully detailed Tintin adventures.

The Gentleman was published by Penguin Press on August 16, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $26 on hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.