Browsed by
Category: New Treasures

Warhammer Chronicles: The Gotrek & Felix Novels by William King and Nathan Long are Back in Print

Warhammer Chronicles: The Gotrek & Felix Novels by William King and Nathan Long are Back in Print

Comments 5 comments
Gotrek and Felix Volume 1-small Gotrek & Felix The Second Omnibus-small Gotrek & Felix The Third Omnibus-small

I became a fan of Warhammer through Relic’s Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War series of computer games, and eventually became a huge fan of their audiobooks. But people I respect have been telling me for years that their fiction is worth reading. Howard Andrew Jones in particular recommended Clint Werner’s Brunner novels and Nathan Long’s Blackhearts volumes as fine examples of modern sword & sorcery.

But the series I’ve heard the most about is the long-running Gotrek and Felix, which currently stands at no less than 17 volumes, written by William King, Nathan Long, Josh Reynolds, and David Guymer. King is the originator of the series and he wrote the first seven volumes, which I’ve heard described as “the reference series for Warhammer fantasy.”

The early editions are long out of print, and in fact the original omnibus reprints, which collected three novels each and were issued in 2003-2004, are out as print as well. They’re expensive collectors editions today. So are the second batch of reprints, published by Black Library in 2006-2013, which gathered the first 12 novels.

So I was pleased to see Games Workshop issue a third edition of this classic adventure fantasy series, and bought the first volume as soon as it became available. The second volume arrived in February. and the third is due in June. Here’s the details.

…

Read More Read More

When Earth is a Graveyard of Gods: Edges by Linda Nagata

When Earth is a Graveyard of Gods: Edges by Linda Nagata

Comments 0 Comment
Edges Linda Nagata-small Edges Linda Nagata-back-small

The Fermi Paradox is relatively simple. It asks, considering the immense expanse of time, the apparent plentitude of planets in our galaxy, and thus the likelihood of intelligent life somewhere else — why don’t we see it? Why is the sky so resolutely silent? Answering this question has become something of a hobby among science fiction writers, with responses ranging from the transcendental to the sobering. Maybe life evolves quickly beyond the physical. Or maybe life is out there but quietly watching and waiting. Linda Nagata’s work offers a more straightforward answer: intelligent life is hunted.

In Nagata’s universe, Chenzeme coursers are living alien weapons: biomechanical vessels coated in hulls of intelligent “philosopher cells.” The ships are programmed to systematically hunt down technological civilizations and sterilize entire worlds. In her previous series, humanity’s spread into the frontier was halted by encounters with these vessels. The coursers were only one prong though in an ancient assault that had long outlasted the ship’s original creators. The other was an ancient virus, which bypassed the frontier worlds and affected the original core planets of humanity’s origins, including Earth, subsuming entire planetary populations into huge group-minds that went on to construct immense Dyson spheres enclosing their stars.

I fell into this universe through a paperback copy of the final book in her previous series, Vast (1998), and was immediately entranced (I reviewed Vast for Black Gate here). Nagata has a way of making the incredible distances, both in space and time, of galactic travel real. Humans are tenuous here, following divergent evolutionary roads, clinging to disparate worlds in the night. Vast followed an expedition from the planet Deception Well to find the source of the Chenzeme coursers and spun out from there into a stunning novel that was at its core a centuries-long chase sequence but managed to explore the characters and the biomechanical and technological realities of life aboard the exploratory ship.

All this to say I was thrilled when I learned that Nagata, after nearly two decades, was returning to this universe with a follow-up series called Inverted Frontier. The first book in this series, Edges, was released this spring and Nagata was kind enough to send me a pre-print for review.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Winds of Marque by Bennett R. Coles

New Treasures: Winds of Marque by Bennett R. Coles

Comments 0 Comment
Winds of Marque-small Winds of Marque-back-small

You love tales of space pirates, yes? Of course you do. Why did I even ask?

Bennett R. Coles is the author of the Virtues of War trilogy, which we covered here around this time two years ago. His latest, Winds of Marque, is a tale of star-sailing ships, secret identities, dashing commanders and plucky quartermasters, not to mention “interplanetary travel, black powder cannons, and close quarter cutlass duels with members of the brutish Theropods and their mighty tail swords” (Booklist). And pirates! Lots of pirates. Kirkus gives it their stamp of approval.

With solar sails hoisted and war with the Sectoids imminent, Imperial Navy Subcmdr. Liam Blackwood, enigmatic quartermaster Amelia Virtue, and the crew of the HMSS Daring must stop space pirates from disrupting human supply lines in the outer sectors in the first book in a new series.

Unable to catch the pirates outright, they pose as opportunistic space merchants to gather intelligence. Any booty they take from the pirates remains their prize, but sailing the system under a false flag comes with great risk: Fail, and the emperor will disavow all knowledge of the mission. Every member of the crew will be dishonorably discharged and made destitute. When Daring commander Sophia Riverton’s orders jeopardize the mission, that threat becomes all too real, and the crew slips closer and closer toward mutiny. Romantic complications notwithstanding, Liam and Amelia have to uncover the truth about Riverton before the pirates discover their ruse and scuttle the mission, destroying any chance humankind has against the relentless Sectoids… Traditional science fiction lovers may get distracted looking for more space tech, but lovers of classic high-seas adventures and those who enjoy genre-bending SF will find this swashbuckling space adventure a worthy read.

Winds of Marque is the opening volume in a new series, Blackwood & Virtue. It is 354 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Damonza. Read a sizable 30-page excerpt, the complete first two chapters, here, and listen to a 4-minute audio sample here.

New Treasures: Finder by Suzanne Palmer

New Treasures: Finder by Suzanne Palmer

Comments 0 Comment

Finder Suzanne Palmer-smallSuzanne Palmer has become a familiar face in Asimov’s Science Fiction, with over a dozen stories there in the last decade. Her 2018 Clarkesworld novelette “The Secret Life of Bots” won a Hugo Award, and she’s twice been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Her debut novel Finder features Fergus Ferguson, interstellar repo man and professional finder, in an action-packed sci-fi caper that Maria Haskins at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog calls “a Ridiculously Fun Science Fiction Adventure… a rollicking ride from a hardscrabble space colony at the outer edge of the galaxy to the conflict-ridden settlements of colonized Mars and back again, with stops on the way at an alien spaceship and a holiday planet.” It’s available now in hardcover from DAW.

Fergus Ferguson has been called a lot of names: thief, con artist, repo man. He prefers the term finder.

His latest job should be simple. Find the spacecraft Venetia’s Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. He’ll slip in, decode the ship’s compromised AI security, and get out of town, Sword in hand.

Fergus locates both Gilger and the ship in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a backwater deep space colony called Cernee. But Fergus’ arrival at the colony is anything but simple. A cable car explosion launches Cernee into civil war, and Fergus must ally with Gilger’s enemies to navigate a field of space mines and a small army of hostile mercenaries. What was supposed to be a routine job evolves into negotiating a power struggle between factions. Even worse, Fergus has become increasingly — and inconveniently — invested in the lives of the locals.

It doesn’t help that a dangerous alien species Fergus thought mythical prove unsettlingly real, and their ominous triangle ships keep following him around.

Foolhardy. Eccentric. Reckless. Whatever he’s called, Fergus will need all the help he can get to take back the Sword and maybe save Cernee from destruction in the process.

Finder was published by DAW on April 2, 2019. It is 400 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Kekai Kotaki. Read the first ten pages of Chapter One here, and see all our recent New Treasures here.

L. E. Modesitt Jr. wraps up The Imager Portfolio with Endgames

L. E. Modesitt Jr. wraps up The Imager Portfolio with Endgames

Comments 0 Comment
Imager-small Imager's Challenge-small Imager's Intrigue-small Scholar Imager-small
Princeps Imager Portfolio-small Imager's Battalion-small Antiagon Fire-small Rex Regis-small
Madness in Solidar-small Treachery's Tools-small Assassin's Price-small Endgames Modesitt-small

Cover art for all 12 volumes by Donato Giancola

Every time a trilogy wraps up, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters. Strangely, we don’t have a protocol for when a 12-book cycle completes, but we’re working on it.

L. E. Modesitt Jr.’s Imager Portfolio series opened with Imager in 2009, and around about book 8, Rex Regis, Tor started referring to it as “The New York Times Bestselling Imager Portfolio.” Modesitt has hit those rarefied heights before — the 20 books in his Saga of Recluse have sold over three million copies — but it was good to see him with another major success.

The final volume in the series, Endgames, arrived in February. This time the publisher refers to it as “the third book in the story arc that began with Madness in Solidar through Treachery’s Tools and Assassin’s Price” and, despite having counted several times, I make Endgames the fourth book in that sequence, but hey, whatever. You count any way you want Tor, and don’t let ’em give you any grief.

However you count his books, L.E. Modesitt deserves some serious respect. He’s produced more than seventy novels, including two science fiction series, the Ghost Books and Ecolitan Matter, four fantasy series, the Imager Portfolio, the Saga of Recluce, the Spellsong Cycle and the Corean Chronicles, and many popular standalone titles such as Solar Express, which Arin Komins at Starfarer’s Despatch calls utterly wonderful. All 12 volumes in the Imager Portfolio series are still in print, which is no mean feat. Here’s the description for the first one.

…

Read More Read More

A Meditation on Futuristic Medicine: Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton

A Meditation on Futuristic Medicine: Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton

Comments 0 Comment

Stronger Faster and More Beautiful CoverEvan will die if his organs aren’t replaced. A perfect organ donor has been lined up – his twin sister. But she’s still alive.

Milla should be dead. Only by becoming a cyborg was she able to survive the car crash. She tries to keep her new nature secret at school. But when the boy she likes actually listens to her, she can’t help but divulge the whole story. Now everyone knows she’s not quite human.

When the riot broke out, Elsie thought she was about to die with her family. Waking up, she learns that only she and her father survived. Her father, a charismatic minister, has always agitated against medical technology, calling it blasphemy. But now he’s changed his mind. And while she was unconscious, he’s had her changed, too.

Arwen Elys Dayton’s Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful advances in a series of episodes, each with a different narrator with a compelling original voice who confronts vastly different circumstances. Yet the book isn’t a collection of short stories. An extended meditation on the future of medicine, it explores the ethical and social ramifications of saving human life through recourse to machines, genome editing and cybernetics. The classic tension of science versus religion runs throughout the book. The human race itself is the protagonist, and there’s a clear narrative arc. Each excerpt takes us further into the future, and as the years pile up, humanity becomes increasingly unrecognizable to itself… Not to mention disloyal.

This book reminds us of science fiction’s highest calling – to provide readers with a way to think through the consequences and implications of nascent technology in order to move into the future more mindfully. Despite its heady content, however, Dayton knows how to bait a hook and keep readers turning pages. Over and over again, she presents characters that readers can’t help but connect with and feel for, no matter how strange their situation and bizarre the setting.

…

Read More Read More

In 500 Words or Less: The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty

In 500 Words or Less: The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty

Comments 0 Comment
The City of Brass-small The Kingdom of Copper-small

The Kingdom of Copper (Daevabad Trilogy #2)
By S.A. Chakraborty
HarperCollins (640 pages, $26.99 hardcover, January 2019)

No joke, I just wrote what would have been the opening two paragraphs for this post, and followed it immediately by typing the words, Wow, that sounds like a boring, stereotypical book review and I’m a hack. That’s a sign my brain is running low on capacity for anything other than novella and podcast revisions. Or, more likely, it’s run out of patience for reading anything that doesn’t immediately catch and hold my attention.

Luckily, the book I’m trying to extoll in this review is an easy sell. You might remember my review of S.A. Chakraborty’s debut novel The City of Brass, which I’ll admit I wasn’t totally enamored with because of the way the plot seemed to drag. Chakraborty’s follow-up novel The Kingdom of Copper, though, is exactly what you want from an author’s second book: even more of the elements you love, and an improvement in everything else.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Winter Road by Adrian Selby

New Treasures: The Winter Road by Adrian Selby

Comments 2 comments

The Winter Road Selby-smallI’ve been intrigued by many of Orbit’s recent releases, including Splintered Suns by Michael Cobley, John Gwynne’s A Time of Blood, Jamie Sawyer’s Eternity War, and especially Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy. Orbit has more than exceeded the post-expansion success we predicted for them two years ago, and I’m very glad to see it.

Best of all, they’re still taking chances on new authors, and they appear to be paying off nicely. Adrian Selby is a fine example. His second novel The Winter Road was released in November, and it seems to be nicely positioned to attract Game of Thrones fans. In his review James Latimer at The Fantasy Hive says “Selby’s books… are different, dark, uncompromising, ambitious, but brilliant.” Here’s the description.

The brutally powerful story of a daring warrior traveling a path that might bring salvation to her people… or lead her to ruin. For fans of Mark Lawrence, Andrzej Sapkowski, and Joe Abercrombie.

The Circle — a thousand miles of perilous forests and warring clans. No one has ever tamed such treacherous territory before, but ex-soldier Teyr Amondsen, veteran of a hundred battles, is determined to try.

With a merchant caravan protected by a crew of skilled mercenaries, Teyr embarks on a dangerous mission to forge a road across the untamed wilderness that was once her home. But a warlord has risen in the wilds of the Circle, uniting its clans and terrorizing its people. Teyr’s battles are far from over…

Adrian has a fondness for tales of mercenary companies, and for that reason Black Gate readers have compared him to Glen Cook. His debut novel Snakewood (2017) was the story of a legendary band of mercenaries, now retired, who are being hunted down and killed one by one; The Winter Road is a loose prequel, set about a hundred years earlier.

The Winter Road was published by Orbit on November 13, 2018. It is 496 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Jaime Jones, whose previous credits include Peter Newman’s Vagrant trilogy. Read the complete first chapter of The Winter Road at the Orbit website.

Shipwrecks, Labyrinths, and Sentient Islands: The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens

Shipwrecks, Labyrinths, and Sentient Islands: The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens

Comments 1 comment
The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy-small The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy-back-small

The Bison Frontiers of Imagination line has reprinted dozens of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Clark Ashton Smith, Philip Wylie, E.E. “Doc” Smith, A. Merritt, Jack London, Ray Cummings, Hugo Gernsback, Robert Silverberg, and many others, in handsome and affordable trade paperback editions. We’ve reviewed several of them here at Black Gate including:

The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney, reviewed by Thomas Parker
Perfect Murders by Horace L. Gold, reviewed by Bill Ward

I’ve been accumulating them for over ten years, starting with the Clark Ashton Smith volumes Lost World and Out of Space and Time, which are among my favorite Smith reprints. But recently I’ve been a little more experimental with my Bison purchases, and so far I haven’t been disappointed. Last week I bought a copy of The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens, a pseudonym for Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883 – 1948), author of The Citadel of Fear and The Heads of Cerberus. Her work appeared in many horror anthologies I’ve enjoyed over the years, including Jonathan E. Lewis’s Strange Island Stories (2018), and Sam Moskowitz’s Horrors Unknown (1971) and Under the Moons of Mars (1970). Here’s a snippet from the back cover to demonstrate her range.

In a future where women rule the world, a sentient island becomes murderously jealous of a shipwrecked couple. Dire consequences await a human swept into the dark, magical world of elves. A deadly labyrinth coils around the dark heart of a picturesque landscape garden. Within an Egyptian sarcophagus lies the horrifying price of infidelity. Swirling unseen around us are loathsome creatures giving form to our basest desires and fears…

Sounds like just what I’m in the mood for. The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy was edited and introduced by Gary Hoppenstand, and published by Bison Books on October 1, 2004. It is 404 pages, priced at $21.95. There is no digital edition. The cover is by R.W. Boeche.

Future Treasures: All My Colors by David Quantick

Future Treasures: All My Colors by David Quantick

Comments 1 comment

All My Colors-smallDavid Quantick is the author of Sparks and The Mule. His latest, All My Colors, is a dark comedy about a man who remembers a book that may not exist, with dire consequences.

Booklist compares it to one of my favorite 80s fantasies, saying “the slowly unfolding literary menace will appeal to fans of Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs (1980),” and Kirkus Reviews calls it “wonderfully bizarre… a twisty and fitfully funny episode of The Twilight Zone, it’s a blast. A caustic, unexpected comic horror story in which the villain, as always, thinks he’s the hero.” Here’s the description.

It is March 1979 in DeKalb Illinois. Todd Milstead is a wannabe writer, a serial adulterer, and a jerk, only tolerated by his friends because he throws the best parties with the best booze. During one particular party, Todd is showing off his perfect recall, quoting poetry and literature word for word plucked from his eidetic memory. When he begins quoting from a book no one else seems to know, a novel called All My Colors, Todd is incredulous. He can quote it from cover to cover and yet it doesn’t seem to exist.

With a looming divorce and mounting financial worries, Todd finally tries to write a novel, with the vague idea of making money from his talent. The only problem is he can’t write. But the book — All My Colors — is there in his head. Todd makes a decision: he will “write” this book that nobody but him can remember. After all, if nobody’s heard of it, how can he get into trouble?

As the dire consequences of his actions come home to both Todd and his long-suffering friends, it becomes clear that there is a high — and painful — price to pay for his crime.

All My Colors will be published by Titan Books on April 16, 2019. It is 289 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $8.99 in digital formats.

See all of our recent coverage of the best upcoming fantasy here.