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New Treasures: Robert Silverberg’s Tales of Majipoor

New Treasures: Robert Silverberg’s Tales of Majipoor

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Tales of MajipoorRobert Silverberg’s last post at Black Gate was “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?” (which, as I recall, generated a lot of debate, including an intriguing counter-argument by Jerry Pournelle.)

His post seemed like a good excuse to finally get around to reading Lord Valentine’s Castle, the first novel in his Majipoor Cycle. It’s one of the few major fantasy series I haven’t tried, and I’ve long been intrigued by its science fantasy setting. Majipoor is a vast world, much larger than Earth (but much less dense, hence with a comparable gravity), settled by a host of bizarre alien races who co-exist more-or-less peacefully with the shape-changing natives, the Piurivar. It’s is a low-tech planet where agriculture is the main occupation, but numerous artifacts of a space-faring culture dot the landscape, some of them quite mysterious — the perfect stage for some grand adventures.

Lord Valentine’s Castle was highly acclaimed when it first appeared in 1980, garnering a Hugo nomination and winning the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Five more novels followed, including Valentine Pontifex (1983) and Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997), and one collection, Majipoor Chronicles (1982).

In the two decades since that last collection, Silverberg has published some major short work set in Majipoor, including:

  • “The Seventh Shrine,” a murder mystery from Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy
  • “The Book of Changes,” a novella of Majipoor’s early history from Legends II
  • “The End of the Line,” a novelette featuring Lord Stiamot from Asimov’s Science Fiction (read an excerpt here)
  • “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn,” from online magazine Subterranean (read the complete story here)
  • “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a novelette from Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy
  • “Dark Times At The Midnight Market,” from Swords & Dark Magic
  • “The Way They Move the Spells at Sippulgur.”

All seven of these tales are collected in Tales of Majipoor, the new collection from Roc that goes on sale this month. I found Lord Valentine’s Castle buried under review notes, still unopened, only a few weeks after I took it down to read it. But that’s okay, because Tales of Majipoor looks like an even better way to take my first steps unto this vast planet.

Tales of Majipoor was published on May 7 by Roc. It is 320 pages in trade paperback, priced at $16 ($9.99 for the digital edition).

Dreams of Conquest in a Four Color Universe: Kaput and Zösky

Dreams of Conquest in a Four Color Universe: Kaput and Zösky

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kaput-and-zoskyI’ve been a fan of French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim since I first read the marvelous Dungeon (co-created with Joann Sfar) over a decade ago. His comics are bizarre, funny, and fabulously creative.

So I didn’t mind taking a chance on a new Trondheim comic collection: Kaput and Zösky, an 80-page graphic novel collecting over a dozen tales (especially since I found it remaindered on Amazon for $5.58).

Kaput and Zösky are two determined galactic conquerors, traveling from planet to planet in a tiny spaceship, constantly dreaming of ways to bring the next planet to its knees. Their abilities don’t quite match their dreams, however, and most strips end with them hightailing it off-planet, usually escaping death by inches.

The art in Kaput and Zösky is by Eric Cartier, and it was the high point of the comic for me. Cartier’s cartoony aliens are expressive and frequently very funny, and he captures Kaput and Zösky’s goofy schemes brilliantly. I suspect the strips may work better standalone than bundled together, as they got a little repetitive after a while.

Fortunately, the adventures of Kaput and Zösky aren’t limited to the page. Kaput and Zösky: The Ultimate Obliterators, a Nicktoons cartoon broadcast in 2003, captures the charm of Cartier’s artwork, and the Canadian voice cast does an excellent job of bringing the two bloodthirsty aliens to life. A total of 26 half-hour episodes (78 shorts) were produced, many of which have found their way to YouTube. Check out Kaput & Zosky in “The Planet Pax,” a complete 8-minute episode:

Kaput & Zosky – The Planet Pax

Kaput and Zösky was published in April 2008 by First Second. It is 80 pages in color, with text translated from the French by Edward Gauvin.

New Treasures: Dead Boys by Michael Penkas

New Treasures: Dead Boys by Michael Penkas

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Dead Boys Michael PenkasI first met Michael Penkas in 2010 at the Top Shelf Open Mic in Palatine, Illinois, a friendly local reading event hosted by C.S.E. Cooney.

The Top Shelf Open Mic has attracted some extraordinary talent over the years. Gene Wolfe read chapters of his upcoming novel The Land Across, Joe Bonnadonna shared early drafts of Waters of Darkness, David C. Smith read from his supernatural thriller Call of Shadows, and of course C.S.E. Cooney regularly entertained us with boundless energy, reading from The Big Ba-Ha, Jack o’ the Hills, and other acclaimed publications.

But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Michael Penkas has become the unexpected true star of our local reading group. His creepy and electrifying short stories have mesmerized us month after month.

Michael has an uncanny ability to pry open your heart with sparkling prose, humor, and warm and genuine characters… and then drive a cold spike through it with relentless and diabolical twists. All with some of the most compact and economical prose I have ever encountered.

Michael has published over a dozen stories since 2007. While he’s best known for his extremely effective horror and dark fantasy, he’s equally at home with mystery, science fiction, and gonzo humor — as his upcoming story for Black Gate illustrates. “The Worst Was Yet to Come,” a chilling retelling of Moses’s unexpected conversation with God immediately after the Ten Plagues of Egypt, will appear here this Sunday. It’s sure to win him many more fans, or possibly get him strung up — or both.

Michael has just released his first — and long awaited — collection, assembling four of his earliest published stories. It’s a delightful sampling of some of the best work of a fast-rising dark fantasy and horror author.

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New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Seven, edited by Jonathan Strahan

New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Seven, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven StrahanI always look forward to the Best of the Year anthologies. It’s an annual ritual, like the arrival of spring, heralding new hope and rebirth for the land. Or something.

Over the next few months, we’ll see several of them, from Rich Horton, David Hartwell, Gardner Dozois, Stephen Jones, and Paula Guran, just to name a few. But the season kicks off every year with Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, certainly one of the most interesting volumes for fantasy fans.

Like the preceding six volumes, it is published by Night Shade Books, who are experiencing difficulties. Likely this will be the last one, at least in this format.

In short: if you’re at all interested in a generous collection of some of the finest SF and fantasy from the best writers in the genre, do what I did and buy it now while it’s still available.

Here’s what we know about the stories:

Four artificial intelligences struggle towards life on the icy moon of Callisto; insect love means something deeply disturbing in a world of mantis wives; an elderly woman matches wits with Death in a battle for her life; a birthday party on a spaceship is haunted by ghosts from afar; a UFO researcher finds far more than she’s looking for in the backwoods of Missouri; a grand tour of the solar system ends in an unexpected discovery; a researcher strives to make one last grand discovery before the stars wink out a final time…

And here’s the complete table of contents.

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New Treasures: Federation Commander: Klingon Border

New Treasures: Federation Commander: Klingon Border

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Federation Commander Klingon BorderIn honor of the US release of Star Trek Into Darkness this week, I found some of my favorite Star Trek games in the basement, and hugged them.

Took longer than you might expect. Turns out there are a lot of decent Star Trek titles. Over a dozen board games, for example — starting with West End’s terrific 1985 contributions, the paragraph-based Star Trek The Adventure Game and the more family-friendly The Enterprise Encounter, all the way up to Wizkids’ 2011 deluxe releases, Reiner Knizia’s solitaire/cooperative mission game Star Trek Expeditions and the strategic space exploration/ship-to-ship combat title Star Trek – Fleet Captains. Not to mention last year’s oddball Star Trek Catan from Mayfair Games.

Let’s not neglect the role playing games, starting with FASA’s classic 1983 Star Trek The Role Playing Game and the updated RPG from Last Unicorn Games in 1999. And of course, numerous card, deck-building, and collectible games, like Star Trek HeroClix from WizKids.

That’s not including dozens of computer and video games, starting with SSI’s unlicensed Apple II space-combat title The Warp Factor (1982), to the text-based The Promethean Prophecy (Simon & Schuster, 1984) and the classic adventure games from Interplay like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992) and Judgment Rites (1993). I could go on, but my fingers are tired already.

But the great-granddaddy of Star Trek games has to be Star Fleet Battles, which began as a 1979 pocket game released in a zip-lock bag by Task Force Games and has grown into one of the largest franchises in table-top gaming, with countless expansions and variants from a small handful of publishers over the last three decades.

The title which got the warmest hug during my basement walkabout, and likely the one I’d grab if I were to be marooned on a lonely asteroid with a group of fellow Star Trek gamers, was Federation Commander: Klingon Border, a Star Fleet Battles mega-game which challenges you to take the helm of a Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser and hold the border during a massive Klingon invasion.

Admit it — that sounds like fun.

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New Treasures: Cyclades

New Treasures: Cyclades

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Cyclades board gameI saw the original release of Clash of the Titans, starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith, on opening night in 1981. As just about anyone who’s seen it can tell you, it’s not a very good movie, with a painfully flat performance by Harry Hamlin as Perseus and clumsy attempts to add kid appeal with a nonsensical robot owl.

In the middle of a tale involving Pegasus, three blind witches, Medusa, and the Kraken, Hollywood feels the need to add a robot owl. I mean, come on.

But it didn’t matter. I loved it with a wild passion, and it ignited an intense interest in Ancient Greece in me.

I read everything I could get my hands on, from Homer to Aeschylus, Euripides to Aristophanes. I visited the library and asked to see maps of ancient Athens, circa 500 B.C. And I scrapped our ongoing D&D campaign, set in a generic medieval landscape, and told my bemused players we’d be starting over in Athens, at the height of the Bronze Age.

I discovered the history of the Cyclades, the tight knot of islands off the coast of Greece, that I learned had been packed with tiny civilizations and numerous isolated cultures over the centuries. It was a perfect setting for a fantasy game: a maze of islands thick with myth and mystery, a stone’s throw from the great city states that birthed modern civilization. The D&D campaign that began there carried on for over a decade, and was easily the most successful and rewarding one I’ve ever played.

But I always wondered why I didn’t see the setting used more often. So you can imagine how I felt when the fantasy board game Cyclades was released in 2009. I bought a copy last month, and so far I’ve been very pleased with it.

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New Treasures: A Matter of Blood by Sarah Pinborough

New Treasures: A Matter of Blood by Sarah Pinborough

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A Matter of BloodYou can’t judge a book by its cover.

But you know what you can judge by the cover? The cover. And since that’s an important part of a book, I guess you can make a successful partial judgment just by holding a book at arms length for a few seconds. Admit it — you do it all the time, I’m just giving you some air cover here.

Come to think of it, it’s a pity you can’t judge books by their covers. Because, man, that would save me a lot of reviewing time that I could put to good use playing Mass Effect.

Until that happy day, we’re stuck doing things the old fashioned way, with hours of bleary-eyed reading late into the night. Unless you’re like me, of course, picking through the weekly new arrivals until you find a cover that makes you say, “Whoa. That looks cool. I should tell people about it.”

Which brings us nicely to Sarah Pinborough’s new novel A Matter of Blood, the first volume of The Forgotten Gods trilogy. Which, if you haven’t guessed, has a great cover, with an upside-down London skyline and a cracked overlay that looks like reptilian skin.

And the book description sounds pretty intriguing too.

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New Treasures: Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

New Treasures: Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

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Solaris Rising 2You’re not reading enough great short fiction.

You know it’s true. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

I have a suggestion (I know — when do I not?) You should read Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

Solaris has been a fast-rising brand in science fiction and fantasy for the past six years, since they were founded in 2007. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve covered several recent titles of note, including Juliet E. McKenna’s Dangerous Waters and The Good The Bad and the Infernal by Guy Adams. See? These guys are serious.

They’re serious about great short fiction, too. They started with three annual volumes of The Solaris Book Of New Science Fiction, edited by George Mann and published between 2007 and 2009. They relaunched the series last year as Solaris Rising, under new editor Ian Whates, and the book was a significant critical success.

Solaris Rising 2 looks like one of the best volumes yet. It includes stories by Mike Allen, Kay Kenyon, Nancy Kress, James Lovegrove, Robert Reed, Norman Spinrad, Liz Williams, Allan Steele, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Paul Cornell, Eugie Foster, Nick Harkaway, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Vandana Singh, and many others.

Editor Ian Whates is no newbie to SF and fantasy. His novels City of Dreams & Nightmare and City of Hope & Despair were published by Angry Robot and The Noise Within and The Noise Revealed were released by Solaris. You should take advantage of expertise like that, and let him guide you to some quality fiction.

Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction was published by Solaris Books on March 26. It is 448 pages, priced at $8.99 in paperback. There is no digital edition.

New Treasures: Firebrand by Gillian Philip

New Treasures: Firebrand by Gillian Philip

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Firebrand Gillian PhilipHere in the U.S., Gillian Philip is known primarily for her Carnegie Medal–nominated contemporary novel, Crossing the Line, and the YA dystopian title, Bad Faith. In the UK however, she’s also known for her popular YA fantasy series, Rebel Angels, which the Sunday Times of London called “The best fantasy of 2010.”

Filled with twisted court intrigue — and even more twisted monsters from the realm of faery — Firebrand seems like exactly the kind of fast-paced adventure Black Gate readers are interested in.

Now Tor has brought the first volume, Firebrand, into print on this side of the pond, in a handsome hardcover edition with a new cover by Steve Stone.

At the end of the sixteenth century, religious upheaval brings fear, superstition, and doubt to the lives of mortals. Yet unbeknownst to them, another world lies just beyond the Veil: the realm of the Sithe, a fierce and beautiful people for whom a full-mortal life is but the blink of an eye. The Veil protects and hides their world… but it is fraying at the edges, and not all think it should be repaired.

Discarded by his mother and ignored by his father, sixteen-year-old Seth MacGregor has grown up half wild in his father’s fortress, with only his idolized older brother, Conal, for family. When Conal quarrels with the Sithe queen and is forced into exile in the full-mortal world, Seth volunteers to go with him.

But life beyond the Veil is even more dangerous than they expected, and Seth and Conal soon find themselves embroiled in a witch-hunt—in which they are the quarry. Trapped between the queen’s machinations at home and the superstitious violence of the otherworld, Seth must act before both of them are fed to the witch-hunters’ fires…

The second and third volumes, Bloodstone and Wolfsbane, are already in print in the UK. Interestingly, while all three books are marketed as YA there, Tor has mainstreamed them here in the US. It’s an interesting switch, and I’m curious to see how the market reacts.

Firebrand was published by Tor Books on February 19. It is 365 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital edition.

New Treasures: Bronze Gods, by A.A. Aguirre

New Treasures: Bronze Gods, by A.A. Aguirre

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Bronze GodsAnn Aguire is a very, very busy woman.

In the last five years alone she’s written six novels in the Sirantha Jax science fiction adventure series (Grimspace, Wanderlust, and four others); five Corine Solomon urban fantasies (beginning with Blue Diablo and Hell Fire); the YA post-apocalyptic dystopian Razorland trilogy (Enclave, Outpost, Horde); the paranormal romantic suspense Skin series (written as Ava Gray; four volumes beginning with Skin Game); the apocalyptic romance Dark Age Dawning (three so far, co-written with Carrie Lofty, under the name Ellen Connor); and the upcoming dark SF series The Dred Chronicles (starting with Perdition, scheduled for release in August).

That’s 22 novels since 2008. Allow me to express my sincere admiration, with a heartfelt WOW.

Now, you’d think someone with six series on the go already wouldn’t feel particularly pressured to launch a new sequence of steampunk noir fantasy novels. But apparently, you’d be wrong.

The Apparatus Infernum novels are co-written with her husband Andres Aguirre, and released under the name A.A. Aguirre. They sound like an appealing mix of steampunk and mystery.

Here’s the back cover copy for Bronze Gods, the first volume.

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