Browsed by
Category: New Treasures

New Treasures: Xenowealth by Tobias S. Buckell

New Treasures: Xenowealth by Tobias S. Buckell

Comments 0 Comment
Xenowealth-small Xenowealth-back-small

I wasn’t actually aware that so many of Tobias S. Buckell’s acclaimed novels took place in the same universe until I stumbled on a copy of his collection Xenowealth. That kind of put it all together for me. His Locus-Award nominated first novel Crystal Rain (2006), his Nebula nominee Ragamuffin (2007), Sly Mongoose (2008), and his self-published The Apocalypse Ocean (2012) are all part of a series called The Benevolent Satrapy Universe… also know as the Xenowealth novels.

The Xenowealth novels have been widely acclaimed as high concept space opera, and this collection gathers tales featuring the same setting and characters… including “Manumission,” the origin story of Pepper, the dread-locked baddass from Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, “Placa del Fuego,” an extended excerpt from the last novel, Apocalypse Ocean, two new stories written just for this collection, and many others.

…

Read More Read More

The Most Successful Anthology of 2015: Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan

The Most Successful Anthology of 2015: Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Comments 5 comments

Meeting Infinity-smallIt’s beginning to look as if Jonathan Strahan’s Meeting Infinity is the most successful SF anthology of 2015… at least if you use story reprints as your yardstick (which I kinda do).

Let’s examine the evidence. Rich Horton reprinted two stories from Meeting Infinity for his Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy:

“My Last Bringback” by John Barnes
“Drones” by Simon Ings

Neil Clarke reprinted a whopping four for his Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1, more than any other source except Asimov’s SF. Of course, they were a different four.

“In Blue Lily’s Wake” by Aliette de Bodard
“Outsider” by An Owomeyla
“Cocoons” by Nancy Kress
“The Cold Inequalities” by Yoon Ha Lee

Meanwhile Gardner Dozois picked a completely different set of three tales, for the upcoming 33rd volume of his Year’s Best Science Fiction

“The Falls: A Luna Story,” by Ian McDonald
“Emergence,” by Gwyneth Jones
“Rates of Change,” by James S.A. Corey

That’s a darned impressive hit rate… over 50% of the Table of Contents selected for Best of the Year volumes. I’m sure there’s an historical precedent if you look hard enough, but I can’t remember one. And I tried.

…

Read More Read More

The Omnibus Volumes of C.J. Cherryh, Part IV: The Complete Morgaine

The Omnibus Volumes of C.J. Cherryh, Part IV: The Complete Morgaine

Comments 4 comments

The Complete Morgaine CJ Cherryh-smallLast year, in my series on The Omnibus Volumes of C.J. Cherryh, I mentioned The Morgaine Saga, a collection of the first three novels in her classic sword-and-sorcery series. That’s a fine book, but there are two problems with it. One, it doesn’t include the final novel, Exile’s Gate, and two, it’s been out of print for over a frickin’ decade.

Ah well… I guess when you’re a vintage paperback collector, you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The Morgaine Saga was a terrific book, and collectors were glad to get it (when we could find it). Gate of Ivrel, Cherryh’s first novel, and the first book in the series, was a breakout book for her. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer the year after it appeared, and it helped launch her entire career (for the intimate details of her start in the business, watch CJ’s talk at 2016 the Nebula Awards last month.)

In honor of CJ’s Grand Master at the Nebula’s, DAW gave out samples of her work to all the attendees. And I was surprised and delighted to find a copy of The Complete Morgaine among the giveaways. Published in trade paperback last year, it contains all four books for the first time in a single volume:

Gate of Ivrel (1976)
Well of Shiuan (1978)
Fires of Azeroth (1979)
Exile’s Gate (1988)

I guess it’s true what they say… good things come to he who waits. The Complete Morgaine was published in September 2015 by DAW Books. It is 816 pages, priced at $20, with a cover by Michael Whelan. It also contains an introduction by Andre Norton. We previously surveyed The Omnibus Volumes of C.J. Cherryh (and there’s more than you think): Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Sample Three New Pathfinder Tales Soundclips from Macmillan Audio!

Sample Three New Pathfinder Tales Soundclips from Macmillan Audio!

Comments 0 Comment
Pathfinder Tales Hellknight audio-small Pathfinder Tales Bloodbound audio-small Pathfinder Tales Beyond the Pool of Stars audio-small

Two weeks ago we shared three Pathfinder Tales soundclip samples from Macmillan Audio with you, from the audiobook versions of Pirate’s Prophecy by Chris A. Jackson, Dave Gross’ Lord of Runes, and Liar’s Island by Tim Pratt. They were extremely well received, so we’re back by popular demand with three more — including a sample from Beyond the Pool of Stars, by our very own Howard Andrew Jones!

Hellknight by Liane Merciel
Bloodbound by F. Wesley Schneider
Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones

[Links will take you to our previous coverage of each book.]

Each clip is about ten minutes long. So sit back, close your eyes, and let professional readers Ilyana Kadushin and Steve West whisk you away to a world of magic and adventure!

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1926 and 1927 Anthologies, edited by Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine

New Treasures: The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1926 and 1927 Anthologies, edited by Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine

Comments 3 comments
The Best of Amazing Stories 1926-small The Best of Amazing 1927-small

While I was wandering the aisles of the Windy City Pulp and Paper Show here in Chicago last month, I came across a delightful find… the second volume of Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine’s The Best of Amazing Stories, covering 1927 (above right). I snatched it up immediately, and hunted up the first volume online (above left).

My fascination with Amazing Stories began with Isaac Asimov’s biographical anthology Before the Golden Age, in which he collected his favorite pulp SF stories. Asimov noted that Amazing had the best reputation at the time, saying “It was Amazing Stories all the way with me.” But there hasn’t been much attention paid to the early days of perhaps the greatest SF magazine, so I was very pleased to see an anthology series that attempts to collect the best of the Grand Old Lady of the pulps, year by year.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet

New Treasures: The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet

Comments 4 comments

The Murdstone Trilogy-smallHow hard can it be to write a fantasy trilogy? That’s a topic that came up more than once at the Nebula Awards this month. You know what also came up? A copy of Mel Peet’s The Murdstone Trilogy, which deals with that very question. I was fortunate enough to get one of the few copies that showed up on the free book table at the Nebula weekend, and I was very glad I did. It proved to be the prize acquisition of the weekend.

Written by Carnegie Medalist Mal Peet, it’s a black comedy about an impoverished literary writer who makes a pact with the devil to write a sword-and-sorcery trilogy. It was sold as an adult novel in the UK, but is being marketed as YA here in the US. The Wall Street Journal calls it “A deliriously freewheeling send-up of the publishing industry and the current sword-and-sorcery craze,” and Publishers Weekly says it’s “enormous fun, especially for those familiar with the literary conventions it skewers.”

Award-winning YA author Philip Murdstone is in trouble. Flat broke. His star has waned. No one wants his novels about sensitive teenage boys. So his ruthless agent, Minerva Cinch, convinces him that his only hope is to write a sword-and-sorcery blockbuster. High Fantasy, specifically, or, to be more precise, Phantasy with a p-h. Unfortunately, Philip — allergic to the faintest trace of anything Tolkien — is utterly unsuited to the task.

In Philip’s darkest, whiskey-fueled hour, a dwarfish stranger comes to his rescue. But the deal Philip makes with Pocket Wellfair turns out to have Faustian consequences. The Murdstone Trilogy is a richly dark comedy described by one U.K. reviewer as “totally insane in the best way possible.”

The Murdstone Trilogy was published by Candlewick Press on September 22, 2015. It is 314 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Greg Clarke.

Capture the Magic of the Nebulas With Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey

Capture the Magic of the Nebulas With Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, edited by Mercedes Lackey

Comments 0 Comment

Nebula Awards Showcase 2016-smallThe buzz here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters for the past week has been all about the Nebula Awards weekend, held just a few blocks away in the Palmer House in downtown Chicago. Half of the staff attended — including me, Tina Jens, C.S.E. Cooney, Derek Kunsken, and Zeta Moore — and we had a terrific time, mingling with the great writers, editors, and publishers in the field. It culminated, of course, in the Nebula Awards presentation Saturday night (see our detailed report on the Awards here, and the entire weekend here).

The Nebulas are a celebration of the finest writing of the year, and even if you can’t attend the weekend, you can still enjoy that — in the form of the annual Nebula Awards Showcase. The latest volume, edited and assembled by Mercedes Lackey, gather the winners from last year in a handsome trade paperback.

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories of the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The editor, selected by SFWA’s anthology Committee (chaired by Mike Resnick), is American science fiction and fantasy writer Mercedes Lackey. This year’s Nebula winners are Ursula Vernon, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Nancy Kress, and Jeff VanderMeer, with Alaya Dawn Johnson winning the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book.

Mercedes Lackey took the rather unusual approach of including every short story and novelette nominee and winner, and limiting herself to excerpts in the novella category (with the exception of the winner). See the complete Table of Contents here.

…

Read More Read More

Amal El-Mohtar on Clockwork Canada

Amal El-Mohtar on Clockwork Canada

Comments 0 Comment

Clockwork Canada-smallI’ve been enjoying Amal El-Mohtar’s review column at Lightspeed magazine. In her latest, for the May issue, she calls Max Gladstone’s Four Roads Cross, the upcoming book in his Craft Sequence, “breathtakingly satisfying,” and Nnedi Okorafor’s Nebula-award winning Tor.com novella Binti “a startling whirlwind of a book that engaged and entranced me.”

But it’s her review of Dominik Parisien’s new anthology Clockwork Canada that I found most intriguing. Party because I’m Canadian, but also because the book sounds so darn enticing. Here’s Amal.

In Clockwork Canada, [Dominik]’s brought an artificer’s eye to this collection’s various parts to ensure they work together as a whole that is more than their sum… It’s an enormously diverse collection, both in terms of its authors’ backgrounds and interests and the eclecticism of its contents: These are stories that span the breadth (and occasionally, literally, depth) of Canada, geographically and temporally, as well as the whole spectrum of steampunk. There’s a good mix of adventure stories and domestic stories, some more hopeful, some more horror; some are more fantastic, some more science fictional. Some stories imagine alternate histories, while others nestle small, beautiful stories in the corners of enormous events; some do both, and more, tangling retro and futurism in different measures.

This is not a collection of beaver jokes and maple syrup. I hugely appreciated seeing, across all these stories, a Canada shorn of any of the jingoistic patter that masquerades as heart-warming pluralism these days. These stories probe and poke at the country’s beginnings as at the edges of a wound: the workers who fed their bodies like coal into the railroad’s furnace; the immigrants who were turned away at ports for being too brown, too foreign; the enslavement of African peoples; the indigenous people displaced and decimated. “So you think you know about Canada,” any of these stories might begin. “Let me tell you about Canada…”

An excellent showcase for new and established Canadian voices as well as for Parisien’s editorial skill, Clockwork Canada’s a fascinating, faceted read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Read Amal’s complete review here. We previously covered Clockwork Canada — including listing the complete TOC — here. Clockwork Canada was published by Exile Editions on May 1, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $19.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version.

New Treasures: The End of the End of Everything by Dale Bailey

New Treasures: The End of the End of Everything by Dale Bailey

Comments 0 Comment

The End of the End of Everything Dale Bailey-small

I don’t keep on top of modern horror and dark fantasy as much as I should, but I do make an effort to get the collections everyone is talking about. That means Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters, Laird Barron’s The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, John Langan’s The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, Simon Strantzas’ Burnt Black Suns, and Stephen Graham Jones’ After the People Lights Have Gone Off. And the last one on my list was The End of the End of Everything, Dale Bailey’s second collection (following his 2003 Golden Gryphon volume The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories). I’ve been hearing great things about Bailey for over a decade, and I’ve been meaning to pick this one up for a while. But it was James Patrick Kelly’s gonzo blurb that finally made me pull the trigger:

Here are nine gorgeously-written and closely-observed tales of ordinary people trying to hold it together when everything is falling apart. I’ve been a story aficionado for several decades now and I can’t think of a more accomplished master of the fantastic short form. Prepare to hunt feral Girl Scouts! Pack your bags for a dinosaur safari! Invite friends to your end of the world party! Dale Bailey is the poet of the apocalypse; his stories are guaranteed to haunt you.

If I ever get around to writing a book — or anything, really — I want James Patrick Kelly writing all my blurbs.

The End of the End of Everything was published by Arche Press on April 9, 2015. It is 229 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $3.99 for the digital version. The cover art is by Galan Dara. Click the image above for a bigger version.

Beneath the Shining Jewel by Balogun Ojetade

Beneath the Shining Jewel by Balogun Ojetade

Comments 0 Comment

oie_242157WrHge7mkFor the most part I don’t review new fantasy novels. They get all the press they need, and I don’t read that many of them (though I am seriously looking forward to R. Scott Bakker’s The Great Ordeal). Once in a while, though, there’s something that intrigues me. This week, Balogun Ojetade’s sword & soul horror story, Beneath the Shining Jewel, caught my eye. And then chewed on it and swallowed it raw.

A few years back Ojetade and fellow sword & soul/steamfunk/cyberfunk impresario and author, Milton Davis, released an anthology called Ki Khanga (2013). I reviewed it at my site, Swords & Sorcery: A Blog. Ki Khanga is a world where sorcery and super science exist side by side, Godzilla-sized beasts endanger civilization, and flame thrower-equipped elephants battle monster beetles. It’s a wild setting painted with boldness and liveliness. While I found some of the stories too thin, reading like little more than character backgrounds, others punched hard and I found myself hoping there would be more tales from Ki Khanga in the future.

Last month I asked Davis, apropos of nothing at all, if there was anything planned for his and Ojetade’s shared world. He told me Ojetade had a horror novel set in the world due the very next week. That book is Beneath the Shining Jewel.

Ki Khanga is a large ocean-ringed continent split nearly in two by a gigantic inlet called the Cleave. Tradition holds that it was made when Daarila, the creator god, used his great axe to destroy two warring magical races who had dared to storm Heaven. The axe came down and cut a hole through which all sorts of dangerous creatures and magic now creep.

…

Read More Read More