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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: New Treasures: The Game’s Afoot (Wordsworth)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: New Treasures: The Game’s Afoot (Wordsworth)

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Wordsworth_GamesAfootOur fearless leader, John O’Neill, has been reviewing entries in Wordsworth’s Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural series: with emphasis on the supernatural end. So…I figured I’d look at one of the mystery entries.

Sherlock Holmes: The Game’s Afoot, offers twenty new tales of the world’s first private consulting detective. The real mystery is why I couldn’t find a single reference to this book anywhere on Wordsworth’s website. Curious, indeed.

Sherlockian pastiches are meant to emulate the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales. As opposed to parodies, which spoof Holmes.

With the explosion of self-publishing, the quality of pastiches has come to vary wildly. There is quite a bit of dreck out there and the days of buying every Holmes story listed on Amazon are long gone.

The eleven authors who contributed to this collection worked hard to create the same kind of atmosphere Conan Doyle did. David Stuart Davies is the editor of this Wordsworth series and is a well-respected Sherlockian. He includes three of his tales. June Thomson, John Hall, Dennis O. Smith … there are some well-respected Sherlockian names in this collection.

 

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New Treasures: Adventure Tales #7

New Treasures: Adventure Tales #7

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Adventure Tales 7-smallHurrah! Hurrah! The latest issue of Adventure Tales has arrived! And a spectacular issue it is.

It starts with the cover, a reprint of my all-time favorite Planet Stories cover. I’ve always wanted to know who painted it — and I still don’t know, as the cover artist remains uncredited. (Maybe nobody knows? Sadly, that’s entirely possible.)

It’s been a long, long time since we’ve seen an issue of Adventure Tales, Wildside Press’s flagship magazine of pulp reprints. And speaking as a magazine publisher who thought he was doing well putting out one issue a year, that means something. Here’s an explanatory snippet from John Betancourt’s (anonymous) editorial:

We are, as usual, managing to keep to our “irregular” schedule with an issue that’s “only” 4 years in following the last one. Hopefully that won’t happen again. (Blame the economy… we’ve had to focus on things that actually make money, rather than the publisher’s time-consuming pulp-magazine hobby!)

I’m hugely appreciative of Wildside’s tireless efforts to keep countless genre authors — many of whom have no other outlet — constantly in print. But having said that. I still vote for more issues of Adventure Tales. Let’s hear it for time-consuming pulp-magazine hobbies! They make the world go round.

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New Treasures: Trail of Cthulhu: Eternal Lies

New Treasures: Trail of Cthulhu: Eternal Lies

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Eternal Lies-smallI haven’t played Call of Cthulhu or its sister game Trail of Cthulhu in a long, long time. But that’s okay, because I still enjoy reading the fabulously creative adventures.

One of the best — and certainly one of the most elaborate and ambitious — I’ve come across in some years is Eternal Lies from Pelgrane Press. A massive new campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, Eternal Lies is packed full of surprises and adventure.

I originally covered it here when it was first released last year (see my original post for more details), but this week I finally got my hands on a copy. I was not disappointed, even after the lengthy wait.

Trail of Cthulhu is a standalone game of Lovecraftian horror, and one of Pelgrane Press’s most successful and acclaimed products. Set in the 1930s, it uses  Robin D. Laws’s GUMSHOE system, which is also the basis for several other successful games, including The Esoterrorists, Fear Itself, and Mutant City Blues. Now in its third print run, Trail of Cthulhu won two Ennie awards for Best Rules and Best Writing, as well as an honorable mention for Product of the Year.

It is superbly supported, with some of my favorite recent RPG releases, including Rough Magicks, Bookhounds of London, Arkham Detective Tales, The Armitage Files, and two omnibus adventure collections: Out of Space and Out of Time.

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Review: They Say the Sirens Left the Seas

Review: They Say the Sirens Left the Seas

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12742577d05381f961017e2b538dc745fd253fc50a37d322-thumbThe very talented darkly-humored poet James Hutchings returns with his third collection, They Say the Sirens Left the Seas. I previously reviewed his first offering, The New Death and Others, back in 2011. This new collection offers readers more of what they have come to expect from this eccentric and highly original voice.

Hutchings is just as much at home spinning fables as he is dishing up Gothic treats or plunging into the ridiculous with no consideration of social conventions. All three of his excellent collections are available at Amazon as eBooks or direct from the Smashwords website for download for less than a dollar apiece.

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Scenic Dunnsmouth

Scenic Dunnsmouth

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dunnsmouth1I have a complicated relationship with adventure modules.

As a someone introduced to Dungeons & Dragons during the Fad Years of the late ’70s to early ’80s, TSR Hobbies was only too glad to satiate my appetite for all things D&D with a steady diet of ready-made scenarios to inflict upon my friends’ characters. I had a lot of fun doing so and, even now, more than three decades later, some of the fondest memories of my youth center around the adventures those modules engendered. Having spoken to lots of roleplayers over the years, I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that one of the most important functions of TSR’s modules was creating common experiences that gamers across the world could share. To this day, I can mention the minotaur in the Caves of Chaos or the juggernaut from Acererak’s tomb and players of a certain vintage know exactly what I mean, because they, too, have had to deal with these threats.

At the same time, there’s a part of me – a snobbish part of me, I suppose – that looks down my nose at “pre-packaged” scenarios, seeing them as the adventure design equivalent of fast food. This elitist part of me prefers “home made meals,” created by the referee from hand-picked ingredients and prepared using original recipes. Anything less than that is a concession, whether it be to mere practicalities, such as time, or something far worse, such as a lack of imagination. Such pomposity wonders, “If you can’t be bothered to make up your own adventures, why would you dare to present yourself as a referee?”

I’ve favored each of these positions, to varying degrees, at different times in my life. It should come as no surprise that the “adventure modules are for the unimaginative” position was something I adopted most strenuously in my later teen years, whereas the “Cool! Queen of the Demonweb Pits!” position was what I adopted earlier. Nowadays, I’m more fond of adventure modules than I have been in quite some time, in part, I think, because there are a lot of really good ones being produced these days. A good example of what I’m talking about is Zzarchov Kowolski‘s Scenic Dunnsmouth, published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess in Finland.

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The Constant Tower by Carole McDonnell

The Constant Tower by Carole McDonnell

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oie_92323565jFPqCc4When I started my blog (Swords & Sorcery: A Blog), one of my goals was to force myself to read new fantasy. I knew I’d get bored pretty quickly if all I did was write about books and stories I’d read many times. As a fan, it’s too easy to allow oneself to get comfortably caught up in a cycle of reading and rereading the same old dusty stack of Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock. My newer go-to books include Norton, Saunders, and Wagner, but most of their books are still between thirty-five and fifty years old.

Like any other person writing, I also wanted people to read my work. Another article about “Queen of the Black Coast” or “Adept’s Gambit” out in the universe was going to bore most readers as much as it would me while writing it. This meant finding my way back into the thicket of current heroic fantasy, which I’d stopped reading a long time ago.

Turns out I picked about the perfect time to start reading heroic fantasy again, as there was an exciting revival taking place. One discovery I made was Milton Davis and the tremendous efforts he was making to write and publish sword & soul stories. My interest was piqued by the idea that someone was doing something different in the genre, not just regurgitating the same heroic fantasy tropes that have been done to death.

When I went from looking at the amazing cover of his and Charles Saunders’s anthology Griots and actually reading the contents (reviewed at my site), I was hooked. Other than Davis and Saunders, I didn’t recognize any contributors to the collection. Several really grabbed me, but the story that I liked best was “Changeling,” a tale of daughterly duty and sibling jealousy by Carole McDonnell.

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New Treasures: Dead Man’s Hand edited by John Joseph Adams

New Treasures: Dead Man’s Hand edited by John Joseph Adams

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Dead Man's Hand John Jospeh Adams-smallJohn Joseph Adams is having a good year.

Back in April, he was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor, Short Form (his seventh nomination), for his work as editor of Lightspeed, Nightmare, and anthologies like The Apocalypse Triptych.

That’s not his only triumph this year — far from it. His popular anthology Robot Uprisings (co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson) was released on April 8, and the special Women Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightspeed has just arrived, and is being recognized as a landmark issue.

But the JJA project I’ve most been looking forward to this year is his original anthology of Weird Western tales, featuring brand new stories from Alastair Reynolds, Joe R. Lansdale, Tad Williams, Seanan McGuire, Tobias S. Buckell, David Farland, Alan Dean Foster, Jeffrey Ford, Laura Anne Gilman, Fred Van Lente, Walter Jon Williams, and many more.

Dead Man’s Hand was published by Titan Books on May 13. It is 409 pages, priced at $16.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Read more details — and the complete book description — in my April 13 Future Treasures post.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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New Treasures: New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird edited by Paula Guran

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New Cthulhu-smallMy birthday was last month, and one of the gifts my children bought for me (my children! That’s sweet. And a little disturbing) was Paula Guran’s 2011 anthology New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird. Yes, I do realize the book is very nearly three years old and a bit long in the tooth to be a “New Treasure,” but I’m still so touched that my kids got me a Cthulhu anthology that I’m going to overlook it.

Anyway, it’s a fine addition to any Cthulhu library. It reprints 27 Cthulhu Mythos tales from the 21st Century, including contributions from Neil Gaiman, Kim Neuman, Charles Stross, Marc Laidlaw, Laird Barron, Paul McAuley, William Browning Spencer, Holly Phillips — and even Michael Shea’s chilling novelette “Tsathoggua,” published online here at Black Gate. Here’s the book description.

For more than 80 years H.P. Lovecraft has inspired writers of supernatural fiction, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and gaming. His themes of cosmic indifference, the utter insignificance of humankind, minds invaded by the alien, and the horrors of history — written with a pervasive atmosphere of unexplainable dread — remain not only viable motifs, but are more relevant than ever as we explore the mysteries of a universe in which our planet is infinitesimal and climatic change is overwhelming it.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the best supernatural writers no longer imitate Lovecraft, but they are profoundly influenced by the genre and the mythos he created. New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird presents some of the best of this new Lovecraftian fiction — bizarre, subtle, atmospheric, metaphysical, psychological, filled with strange creatures and stranger characters – eldritch, unsettling, evocative, and darkly appealing.

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New Treasures: Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone

New Treasures: Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone

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Two Serpents Rise-smallYou know what irks me? Writers who write faster than I can read, that’s what irks me.

A few years back, I got all excited by Max Gladstone’s debut novel, Three Parts Dead, which I described as “a high-stakes tale of dead gods, necromancers, and dark dealings in a richly-imagined urban landscape.” Apparently I wasn’t the only one — last year Gladstone was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and Tor moved quickly to snap up his next novels.

Recently, Tor announced that Full Fathom Five, the third book in what’s now known as the Craft Sequence, will be released on July 15, 2014, and Gladstone has already contracted for a fourth, Last First Snow, plus at least one more. Here’s how Gladstone summed up the deal on his blog back in February:

The big news hit Publisher’s Weekly on Friday: Tor Books has bought two more novels in the Craft Sequence! So, after Full Fathom Five, I get to play more in this world of creepy lawyers, boss skeletons, existential uncertainty and gargoyles and undead gods. The first of the pair is done already — in fact, this morning I finished the fourth draft, a bit ahead of schedule.

Wait, what? I don’t even have a copy of the second one yet!

A hasty trip to Amazon rectified that and yesterday Two Serpents Rise finally crossed my humble threshold. It sounds pretty good, too.

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New Treasures: Nihal of the Land of the Wind by Licia Troisi

New Treasures: Nihal of the Land of the Wind by Licia Troisi

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Nihal of the Land of the Wind-smallWhen I first got my Kindle, I imagined it would be a gateway to a whole new way to buy and read books. The ability to browse and download books in a matter of seconds, all from the comfort of my big green chair, was pretty darned appealing — not to mention the host of free samples and complete novels Amazon posts every week.

Well, it didn’t unfold that way. Turns out that, by and large, I still buy and read novels primarily in paperback. And cover art and design have a huge impact on what I pick up every week… and frankly, much of the digital-only fantasy out there just isn’t visually appealing enough for me to bother with.

That’s starting to change, though. Exhibit A: Nihal of the Land of the Wind, the first volume of Chronicles of the Overworld, a bestselling Italian fantasy series by Licia Troisi. I have no idea who painted the cover — and the Kindle version doesn’t tell me — but it is gorgeous (click for a bigger version). Here’s the description.

Nihal lives in one of the many towers of the Land of the Wind. There is nobody like her in the Overworld: big violet eyes, pointed ears, and blue hair. She is an expert in swordplay and the leader of a handful of friends that includes Sennar the wizard. She has no parents; brought up by an armorer and a sorceress, Nihal seems to be from nowhere.

Things suddenly change when the Tyrant takes charge. Nihal finds herself forced to take action when she is faced with the most difficult mission a girl her age could imagine.

Fierce, strong, and armed with her black crystal sword, Nihal sets out to become a real warrior. Readers will be riveted as she forges her powerful path of resistance.

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