Black Gate

When you’ve been covering the genre for decades, you start to get a sense for the break-out books. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind.

Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper looks like a breakout book. It’s got all the classic elements — fabulous setting, swordplay, and the supernatural — while also being totally original. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Molly is poised for a break-out. Her first novel Vermilion received rave reviews (“A splendid page-turner of a Weird West adventure… hugely entertaining” — Publishers Weekly), and her most recent book was the anthology Swords vs Cthulhu, co-edited with Jesse Bullington. How cool is that?

Creatures of Will and Temper is already starting to generate buzz at the top levels of the industry (“A delightful, dark, and entertaining romp… Molly Tanzer is at the top of her form” — Jeff VanderMeer). It arrived in trade paperback this week from ace editor John Joseph Adams’s imprint, John Joseph Adams Books. Don’t wait too long to check it out.

Victorian London is a place of fluid social roles, vibrant arts culture, fin-de-siècle wonders… and dangerous underground diabolic cults. Fencer Evadne Gray cares for none of the former and knows nothing of the latter when she’s sent to London to chaperone her younger sister, aspiring art critic Dorina.

At loose ends after Dorina becomes enamored with their uncle’s friend, Lady Henrietta “Henry” Wotton, a local aristocrat and aesthete, Evadne enrolls in a fencing school. There, she meets George Cantrell, an experienced fencing master like she’s always dreamed of studying under. But soon, George shows her something more than fancy footwork — he reveals to Evadne a secret, hidden world of devilish demons and their obedient servants. George has dedicated himself to eradicating demons and diabolists alike, and now he needs Evadne’s help. But as she learns more, Evadne begins to believe that Lady Henry might actually be a diabolist… and even worse, she suspects Dorina might have become one too.

Combining swordplay, the supernatural, and Victorian high society, Creatures of Will and Temper reveals a familiar but strange London in a riff on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that readers won’t soon forget.

Creatures of Will and Temper was published by John Joseph Adams Books on November 14, 2017. It is 368 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover designer is Eduardo Recife. See our previous coverage of Molly’s work here.

One of the most interesting review copies to land on my desk in the past six months is Gregory Manchess’ debut novel Above the Timberline, a postapocalyptic arctic fantasy with zepplins, lost cities, and a whole lot of adventure.

Manchess is best known as a painter. His work has appeared in feature and covers for National Geographic Magazine, Time, Atlantic Monthly, The Smithsonian, as well as numerous commissions for stamps by the US Postal Service. Above the Timberline, a 240-page hardcover, is his first novel, and it is gorgeously illustrated on every page. The art, in fact, is crucial to the tale.

And what a tale! In hi feature review at Locus, Paul Di Filippo calls it “A spectacular success… [a] postapocalyptic arctic dieselpunk love story with polar bears and a hint of Indiana Jones.” It was published by Saga Press on October 24. Here’s a closer look at some of that gorgeous interior art.

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Bryan Thomas Schmidt is probably best known as the guy who loudly stormed out of the 2015 Hugo Awards when he lost in the Best Editor, Short Form category (he lost to No Award, since all the nominees were dictated by Vox Day as part of his Rabid Puppy slate). Black Gate was part of the same slate, but we withdrew our nomination (and Bryan unfriended me immediately thereafter).

That’s an unfortunate thing to be known for, especially since Bryan has done some really excellent work before and since. His other anthologies include Shattered Shields, Little Green Men―Attack!, Mission: Tomorrow, Galactic Games, and many others. His latest book, the massive Infinite Stars, is the most ambitious project of his career to date: a 674-page anthology of space opera tales featuring some of the biggest names in the industry. Here’s Rich Horton’s take, from the October issue of Locus.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s new anthology Infinite Stars is a big collection of space opera stories, split roughly evenly between reprints and originals. The reprints serve to some extent as an introduction to the subgenre, with examples from such classic series as Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind, Anne McCaffrey’s Ship Who Sang books, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, A.C. Crispin’s Starbridge, and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Codominium… These serve their purpose very well — they are a set of significant stories and showcase space opera from the ’50s to the present day nicely…

Most of the other stories in this book are also parts of series… these series include some really major SF landmarks: Orson Scott Card’s Ender universe, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson continuing Frank Herbert’s Dune series, David Weber’s Honorverse. There are stories from some more recent series that I’ve really enjoyed — Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War, for example (which she has just returned to), and David Drake’s Leary/Mundy (or RCN) series. It was nice also to be introduced to some work new to me, such as Linda Nagata’s Red stories, Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet, and Charles R. Gannon’s Caine Riardon stories…

All in all, Infinite Stars is a strong celebration of the variety and power of the space opera subgenre, both in its history and its ongoing vitality.

As Rich points out, there’s a great deal to enjoy in this book for any fan of space opera, old and new.

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October is over, but that doesn’t mean that all the good creepy reading is behind us. Penguin Classics released two fine collections on October 10th that should keep you busy at least through early December.

The first is The Best of Richard Matheson, a long-overdue collection from one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th Century. It’s a 432-page treasure trove from the man whom Stephen King said called “the author who influenced me most as a writer.” The author of I Am Legend and sixteen Twilight Zone episodes modernized horror by taking it out of Gothic castles and setting it in darkened streets and suburbs much closer to home. This volume gathers his greatest stories as chosen by Victor LaValle. It’s $17 in paperback ($11.99 digital).

Dark Tales collects classic and newly reprinted stories from the author of “The Lottery,” including the “The Possibility of Evil,” “The Summer People,” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” first published in 2014. Collecting 17 pieces published between 1950 and 2015, Dark Tales features stories in which a daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, and a concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. It’s 208 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback ($11.99 digital).

Richard A. Kirk (not to be confused with Richard Kirk, which was the pseudonym Robert Holdstock used to write sword & sorcery novels in the Raven series) is an artist with a number of covers to his credit. His short novel The Lost Machine, a tale of “deadly plagues, witches, and artificial intelligence in a dark fantastical setting,” was serialized at Weird Fiction Review (check out their interview with him here).

In his first latest book, Necessary Monsters, he delivers a caper novel set in a dark and wondrous world. It’s available now in trade paperback from Arche Press.

Lumsden Moss is an escaped thief and an unrepentant bibliophile with a long-suffering desire to foist some karmic retribution on those who have wronged him. But when the opportunity to steal a rare book from the man who sentenced him to prison puts him on the wrong side of the wrong people, Moss finds himself on the run. And it’s not just the book he stole that these people want, it’s also the secrets of a long-forgotten location on Nightjar Island, a place cursed and abandoned since the Purge.

When Moss falls in with Imogen, a nimble-fingered thief who has taken a traveling bookcase filled with many secrets, he starts to realize how much of his unsavory past is indelibly tied to a frightening witch-child and her nightmarish pet monster.

In a fantastic world, still recovering from a war where magic and technology were fused together, Moss and Imogen must decipher the mystery of their mutual pasts in order to illuminate the dark heart that still lurks on Nightjar Island.

Necessary Monsters was published by Arche Press on June 6, 2017. It is 384 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Richard A. Kirk. Buy copies right from the website.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.