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Category: New Treasures

Confessions of a Reluctant Self-Publisher — Now with extra Giveaways!

Confessions of a Reluctant Self-Publisher — Now with extra Giveaways!

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Forever In The Memory Of God-smallI’ll be giving away copies of my mini-ebook-collection Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories to the first five commenters who ask for one. But why should you bother? Read on!

Here is a list of things I want to do: Write; make a living with my pen.

And a list of the things I don’t want to do: marketing; selling; formatting; cover design; manual reading; forum perusing; guru worshipping; elbowing my way through the pack; self-publishing…

And yet, here we are.

Once upon a time, it was all so very different. I wrote a book and the first agent I sent it to loved it. So did a large number of publishers and in no time at all, they were clawing each other’s eyes out to get access to my manuscript. Then, exactly as it had happened in all my dreams, editors were engaged in an auction for the right to publish me. Me!

My agent used to ring me once or twice a day, cackling with glee over the latest rise in the price and the shameless favours being offered, until finally, we had hitched ourselves up to a brilliant and famous editor. How could it go wrong?

Oh, it didn’t! Not yet! Because, next came foreign language publishers from every corner of the globe. They too pledged undying love for a li’l ole book called The Inferior, and what they said about the story and the characters made me blush in parts of my body that few cameras have ever seen.

I’m sick of this boasting. Can we get to the bad part?

Yes, let’s start the dive now. Or “death-spiral,” if you prefer.

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Travel the Magic Highways with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

Travel the Magic Highways with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

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Magic Highways The Early Jack Vance-smallLast February, I wrote about how excited I was to find a copy of Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two in the Dealer’s Room at Capricon. I had purchased Volume One, Hard Luck Diggings, when it was released in 2010; it is now long out of print and new copies start at around $450 at Amazon.com. Dream Castles is now sold out as well and prices are already starting to creep up, so I was pretty jazzed to find a copy when I did.

When I wrote enthusiastically about Dream Castles last year, I said:

Jack Vance, who at 96 years old is still with us, is one of the last remaining writers from the Golden Age of Science Fiction (the only other one I can think of is Fred Pohl). He is the author of some of the most celebrated SF and fantasy of the 20th Century, including “The Dragon Masters,” “The Last Castle,” and The Dying Earth novels.

Jack Vance died on May 26th of last year, and Frederik Pohl passed away less than four months later, robbing us of two of our genre’s brightest lights.

Still, their words are still with us — and what words they are. I have no idea how many volumes are projected in The Early Jack Vance (Volume Four, Minding the Stars, is scheduled to be released this month), but every one is a delight.

Part of that is the gorgeous covers by Tom Kidd; part is the high quality production and design from publisher Subterranean, and of course part of it is simply finally having the early pulp fiction of one of the greatest fantasy writers of the 20th Century collected for the first time.

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New Treasures: Shadow Ops: Breach Zone by Myke Cole

New Treasures: Shadow Ops: Breach Zone by Myke Cole

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Shadow Ops Breach Zone-smallApparently, Myke Cole never gets tired of being awesome. He wrote the awesome short story “Naktong Flow” for Black Gate 13 and all that awesome spilled over into his first novel Shadow Ops: Control Point, which Peter V. Brett called “Black Hawk Down meets the X-Men.” He was awesome when our roving reporter Patty Templeton interviewed him (totally awesome!), and in his essay “Selling Shadow Point,” which busted open a lot of myths about publishing your first fantasy novel. His second book Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier was, guess what, awesome, and he was even awesome last month at ConFusion (according to Howard Andrew Jones, who knows all about being awesome.)

Now here he is with his third novel, Shadow Ops: Breach Zone. And it’s awesome. Next time you run into Myke, do yourself a favor and ask how you, too, can become awesome.  On top of everything else, Myke’s a very gracious guy and I’m sure he’ll give you some pointers. And I bet they’ll be awesome.

The Great Reawakening did not come quietly. Across the country and in every nation, people began “coming up Latent,” developing terrifying powers — summoning storms, raising the dead, and setting everything they touch ablaze. Those who Manifest must choose: become a sheepdog who protects the flock or a wolf who devours it…

In the wake of a bloody battle at Forward Operating Base Frontier and a scandalous presidential impeachment, Lieutenant Colonel Jan Thorsson, call sign “Harlequin,” becomes a national hero and a pariah to the military that is the only family he’s ever known.

In the fight for Latent equality, Oscar Britton is positioned to lead a rebellion in exile, but a powerful rival beats him to the punch: Scylla, a walking weapon who will stop at nothing to end the human-sanctioned apartheid against her kind.

When Scylla’s inhuman forces invade New York City, the Supernatural Operations Corps are the only soldiers equipped to prevent a massacre. In order to redeem himself with the military, Harlequin will be forced to face off with this havoc-wreaking woman from his past, warped by her power into something evil…

Shadow Ops: Breach Zone is the third novel in the Shadow Ops series. It was published on January 28, 2014 by Ace Books. It is 370 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions.

New Treasures: A Turn of Light by Julie E. Czerneda

New Treasures: A Turn of Light by Julie E. Czerneda

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A Turn of Light-smallI managed to miss A Turn of Light when it was released in trade paperback last March. A pity, as I’ve tried to keep up on the novels of Julie E. Czerneda ever since her first, A Thousand Words for Stranger, landed at my door back in 1997. The fact that she’s a fellow Canadian just adds an extra layer of awesome.

In the 17 years since her debut, Julie has published no less than four highly regarded science fiction trilogies: Trade Pact, Stratification, Species Imperative, and Web Shifters. But with her latest, she turns to epic fantasy for the first time and I’m keenly interested in seeing where she’ll take the genre.

The pastoral valley of Marrowdell is home to a small pioneer settlement of refugees, lush fields of grain, enigmatic house toads — and Jenn Nalynn, the miller’s daughter. Life here is full of laughter and peace, as well as hard work, and no one bothers overmuch about the outside world. Except Jenn Nalynn. Jenn longs to travel, to seek what’s missing in her life. Not that she’s sure what that is, but since this summer began, she’s felt a strange and powerful yearning. She’s certain she’ll find what she needs, if only she can leave the valley.

But she must not. Jenn is turn-born and cursed, born by the light of two worlds and bound to both. For the valley is more than it seems. Long ago, a cataclysm of misused power pinned Marrowdell to the Verge, a place of wild magic, home to dragons and even stranger creatures. Should Jenn step beyond Marrowdell, she will pull the worlds asunder. To prevent this, powers from the Verge have sent a guard to watch over her, a disgraced dragon Jenn knows as Wisp, her invisible playmate. Wisp’s duty is to keep Jenn in Marrowdell. By love, if he can. By her death, if he must.

But time is running out. What Jenn unknowingly feels is the rise of the Verge’s magic within her, a magic that will threaten her and those she loves. Worse, this summer will end with a Great Turn, and strangers seeking power at any cost have come to Marrowdell to try to force an opening into the Verge, to the ruin of all.

A Turn of Light, the first in the Night’s Edge series, will be published by DAW on March 4th. It is 822 pages, priced at $8.99 for the paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. The second volume, A Play of Shadow, is scheduled to be released in November. Check out her website for fresh updates.

New Treasures: Reflected by Rhiannon Held

New Treasures: Reflected by Rhiannon Held

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Reflected Rhiannon Held-smallI’m not sure why, but everyone on the Internet seems to be showing the wrong cover for Reflected. The artwork — a beautifully spooky silhouette of a woman reclining by a mist-covered, moonlit lake — is correct, but the text is wrong, and the title is at the top, instead of the bottom. Amazon’s cover is wrong; so is Barnes & Noble. Even Goodreads is showing the pre-release version. The correct cover, scanned from the hot-of-the-presses copy in my hot little hands, is at right.

Well, at least they’re all talking about the book. Reflected is Rhiannon Held’s third novel, the second sequel to her very popular debut Silver, an urban fantasy which introduced the Roanoke were-pack and the deadly monsters which threaten them.

The Were have lived among humans for centuries, secretly, carefully. They came to America with the earliest European colonists, seeking a land where their packs could run free. Andrew Dare is a descendant of those colonists, and he and his mate, Silver, have become alphas of the Roanoke pack, the largest in North America.

But they have enemies, both within their territory and beyond the sea. Andrew is drawn away to deal with the problem of a half-human child in Alaska, leaving Silver to handle the pack and his rebellious daughter just as a troublemaker from Spain arrives on the scene.

Reflected is the third in the series, following Silver (2012) and Tarnished (2013). It was published by Tor Books on February 18, 2014. It is 336 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Visit Rhiannon Held’s website here.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Madness of True Detective

The Madness of True Detective

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HBO True Detective-smallSo everyone in my office has been talking about the new HBO show True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

They talk in hushed whispers. “Hey, did you watch last night?” Suddenly, the volume drops and all I hear is a low buzz over the cube wall. I hear enough to know they’re taking about McConaughey and that new HBO show — and they’re obviously riveted.

I haven’t seen it. Did see the cool ad and noticed how vastly different McConaughey looked, all gaunt in a suit. He’s really turned into an Actor’s Actor, what with terrific recent performances in Mud and Dallas Buyers Club. Although my favorite McConaughey film is probably Sahara. Man, my kids still spout quotes from that movie. Every day I hear, “Sit down… I’ll get the check.” (And, “Of course I brought the dynamite!”)

Anyway. I’ve been seeing a strange flurry of articles about Robert W. Chambers’s brilliant collection The King in Yellow crop up on Facebook recently, and I saw the headline of that io9 piece, “The One Literary Reference You Must Know to Appreciate True Detective.” But I didn’t really make the connection until I saw this article at The Daily Beast, “Read The King in Yellow, the True Detective Reference That’s the Key to the Show.”

The key to understanding HBO’s enthralling series True Detective might be the references to the Yellow King and Carcosa, which the killer Reggie Ledoux talks about and the show hints at to be figures and symbols of a satanic cult of some sort. But the Yellow King is an allusion to The King in Yellow, an 1895 book of horror and supernatural short stories by the writer Robert W. Chambers…

Holy cow… True Detective is based on The King in Yellow?

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New Treasures: Wildside Double #6 — Alien StarSwarm by Robert Sheckley / Human’s Burden by Damien Broderick & Rory Barnes

New Treasures: Wildside Double #6 — Alien StarSwarm by Robert Sheckley / Human’s Burden by Damien Broderick & Rory Barnes

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Alien Starswarm Robert Sheckley-smallWith all the recent attention we’ve been giving to the classic Ace Doubles by Andre Norton, Harlan Ellison, Murray Leinster, and others, I would be remiss to not point out that Wildside Press has recently revived the tradition of the Ace Double with a handsome series of back-to-back short novels (novellas, really). It looks like they’re pairing hard-to-find reprints with original fiction, which I think is a terrific idea.

They’ve assembled a crackerjack list of writers, too — including Robert Sheckley, Damien Broderick & Rory Barnes, Edmond Hamilton, Harl Vincent, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Brian Stableford, Howard V. Hendrix, Philip Jose Farmer, Randall Garrett, Robert Silverberg, Pamela Sargent, and many others. So far, they’ve produced over 30, which is pretty darned impressive.

I bought an assortment of titles to try them out, and the one that commanded my attention immediately was #6 — Robert Sheckley’s Alien StarSwarm, paired with Human’s Burden, by Damien Broderick & Rory Barnes. Likely that’s due to the gorgeous covers by Emsh (Ed Emshwiller), one of the greatest (if not the greatest) cover artists our genre has ever seen. The Sheckley side features a nicely re-colored version of the cover of the February 1957 issue of the short-lived magazine Infinity Science Fiction. Here’s the book description for Alien StarSwarm.

Salvatore commands the battleship Endymion. He’s seen his share of battles and fought them bravely, too. So he doesn’t hesitate when beautiful Princess Hatari pleads for his help. She wants to regain her throne, but it may be more than Salvatore can accomplish, for the deadly race known as the Balderdash has taken over the planet Melchior — and now, even his own men have turned against him. Bred to fight, he accepts the challenge!

Alien StarSwarm was originally published as a 96-page chapbook from a company called DimeNovels way back in 1990. It certainly qualifies as hard-to-find… I’ve never even seem a copy (here’s a snap of the cover, just to prove it exists.) It has never before been reprinted — so if you’re a Sheckley fan, this may be the only way you’re going to find it.

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The Adventure Continues: the Return of Renner and Quist

The Adventure Continues: the Return of Renner and Quist

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Sleeping Bear coverWhen I first dreamed up my odd-couple pair of Renner & Quist, one of the many goals I had in mind was to write their stories specifically and consciously as adventures. This was not perhaps the most sensible decision, given a literary market polarized between nominally realistic “grown-up” fare and the highly fantastical tomes aimed at teens. (I shall not deign to even mention Romance; call me biased, go ahead. I can take it.) Nor did my conception of Renner & Quist allow for them to don armor, wield swords, or inhabit some far-flung or alternate world. No, these two, Reverend Renner being a Unitarian Universalist minister and Dale Quist a former P.I. and ex-linebacker, required a contemporary setting; to emplace them elsewhere would be to guarantee that any stories woven around them would be untruthful.

This is not to say that I’m against high fantasy; quite the opposite. I’m here, aren’t I? For further proof, take a gander at my Black Gate trilogy concerning Gemen the Antiques Dealer.

But not all ideas trend that direction and with Renner & Quist, I knew I had nearer waters to chart. Now that their second novella, Sleeping Bear, is out in the world, and with their first proper novel, Check-Out Time, very much in the production pipeline, it seems high time to explore what remains, in the 21st century, of that cracking good term, “adventure.”

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Return to Thieves World in Beyond Sanctuary: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

Return to Thieves World in Beyond Sanctuary: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

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Microsoft Word - 09 12 24 Sacred Band Cover white horse white foLet me start off here with a quote from my Black Gate review of Janet and Chris Morris’s novel, The Sacred Band:

The Sacred Band is much more than great Heroic Fantasy: it is classic literature, filled with sub-plots, a fine cast of well-drawn characters, insight and wisdom and recurring themes of honor, faith, brotherhood and love. This novel spoke to me on a personal level because it’s a story of pure human drama and powerful emotions. While the characters are larger than life, they are also richly-drawn and written with great depth of insight and humanity. What also rings true with the Sacred Band is their military tradition, their ethos. These characters are soldiers, warriors. They are not only mythic heroes, they are also everyday heroes; real people, everyday people who face extraordinary odds and foes… The Sacred Band has the sharp edge of reality, the harshness, the bitterness and the danger of the real world. Love, loyalty, honor — these are the ideals by which these characters live and die. This novel is epic in scope. It is mythic by heritage. It is positively Homeric.

Janet Morris’s Beyond Sanctuary is the first volume in a trilogy that includes Beyond the Veil and Beyond Wizardwall, and the events in this trilogy take place before The Sacred Band, the magnificent novel by Janet and her husband Chris, which I previously reviewed here for Black Gate.

Beyond Sanctuary is a complex novel and truly literary heroic fantasy. It is textured and layered, subtle at times, and yet always powerful. Like the best of all literary fiction, it has emotional depth and human drama, subtext and a philosophy that is expressed through the thoughts, words, and deeds of its characters, and not through narrative lecture and dissertation that slows the pace of narrative thrust.

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New Treasures: Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

New Treasures: Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

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Broken Homes-smallBen Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels are one of my favorite new series. io9 calls them “The perfect blend of CSI and Harry Potter.” I’ve never watched CSI, but I imagine that can’t be that far off. I think Diana Gabaldon is very close when she describes them as “What would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the Fuzz.”

Even those quotes don’t do justice to how funny these novels are. They’re tightly plotted, too; just the right mix of humor, suspense, and genuine character development. The latest in the series, Broken Homes, just landed this month. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

My name is Peter Grant, and I am a keeper of the secret flame — whatever that is.

Truth be told, there’s a lot I still don’t know. My superior Nightingale, previously the last of England’s wizardly governmental force, is trying to teach me proper schooling for a magician’s apprentice. But even he doesn’t have all the answers. Mostly I’m just a constable sworn to enforce the Queen’s Peace, with the occasional help from some unusual friends and a well-placed fire blast. With the new year, I have three main objectives, a) pass the detective exam so I can officially become a DC, b) work out what the hell my relationship with Lesley Mai, an old friend from the force and now fellow apprentice, is supposed to be, and most importantly, c) get through the year without destroying a major landmark.

Two out of three isn’t bad, right?

A mutilated body in Crawley means another murderer is on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil, who may either be a common serial killer or an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man — a man whose previous encounters I’ve barely survived.

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