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Guile by Constance Cooper Now Available in Paperback

Guile by Constance Cooper Now Available in Paperback

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Guile Constance Cooper paperback-smallWe’re always proud when a Black Gate author breaks out to wider success in the publishing world. That happened with Constance Cooper’s Guile, her debut novel set in the same world — and drawing on the same characters — as her acclaimed story “The Wily Thing” from Black Gate 12.

Guile was published in hardcover by Clarion Books last year. Here’s Sarah Avery from her BG review.

In the town of Wicked Ford, an orphan girl with a secret claim on high town respectability but a history in a bayou stilt village lives under an assumed name and a false claim. Yonie makes her living as a pearly, an assessor of magical objects… she’s a self-taught antiquarian with a brilliant eye for detail, but to detect and diagnose magic, she needs the help of her business partner the talking cat…

Guile is a remarkable layerwork of mysteries. From the seemingly trivial and isolated mysteries about enchanted lockets and street signs that Yonie and LaRue solve for their daily subsistence, a larger pattern emerges that demands investigation. Mysteries of personal origin run beneath them, and every relationship Yonie has with kin, allies, friends, and suitors will be changed one way or another by the end of the book. Deepest of all runs the mystery of the river’s magic and the fallen civilizations that once understood it.

Constance Cooper’s debut novel delighted me from start to finish. The worldbuilding feels thoroughly lived in, as if we could step ahead of Yonie around any corner or shrub and something amazing would already be there for us to find. The characters are richly imagined individuals, and together they add up to a social world that is both kinder and more dangerous than Yonie ever guessed. The plot runs like the river delta it’s set in, its streams parting and rejoining and braiding around obstacles until it runs clear to its conclusion.

Read Sarah’s complete review here..

The paperback edition of Guile is now avaiable from HMH Books. It was published on March 14, 2017. It is 384 pages, priced at $9.99 for both the trade paperback and digital editions.

New Treasures: The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror by John Llewellyn Probert

New Treasures: The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror by John Llewellyn Probert

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The Lovecraft Squad-smallEditor Stephen Jones is a busy guy, with over 140 books to his credit, and no less than four World Fantasy Awards and twenty-one British Fantasy Awards under his belt. His latest project is an interesting one — he’s the creator of The Lovecraft Squad. a series of novels that follow a secret organization dedicated to stopping the dark horrors accurately described in H.P. Lovercraft’s fiction. The first volume, All Hallows Horror, by novelist John Llewellyn Probert, was published in hardcover by Pegasus last month.

There has always been something wrong about All Hallows Church. Not just the building, but the very land upon it stands. Reports dating back to Roman times reveal that it has always been a bad place — blighted by strange sightings, unusual phenomena, and unexplained disappearances. So in the 1990s, a team of para-psychiatrists is sent in to investigate the various mysteries surrounding the Church and its unsavory legends. From the start, they begin to discover a paranormal world that defies belief. But as they dig deeper, not only do they uncover some of the secrets behind the ancient edifice designed by “Zombie King” Thomas Moreby but, hidden away beneath everything else, something so ancient and so terrifying that it is using the architect himself as a conduit to unimaginable evil.

After four days and nights, not everybody survives — and those that do will come to wish they hadn’t. Imagine The Haunting of Hill House, The Amityville Horror, The Entity and The Stone Tape rolled together into the very fabric of a single building. And then imagine if all that horror is accidentally released…

John Llewellyn Probert’s previous work includes the novels The House That Death Built and Unnatural Acts and the collection, The Faculty of Terror. He won the British Fantasy Award for his novella The Nine Deaths of Dr Valentine.

The next volume of The Lovecraft Squad, titled Waiting, will be released in hardcover on October 3, 2017.

The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror was published by Pegasus Books on March 7, 2017. It is 377 pages, priced at $25.95 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Douglas Klauba.

Carrie Patel Completes The Recoletta Trilogy With The Song of the Dead

Carrie Patel Completes The Recoletta Trilogy With The Song of the Dead

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The-Buried-Life-medium Cities-and-Thrones-medium The Song of the Dead-small

I love tales of subterranean cities. Like Charles R. Tanner’s fabulous Tumithak pulp adventure tales, Gary Gygax’s famous Drow enclave Erelhei-Cinlu, R.A. Salvatore’s Menzoberranzan, and… uh, that’s it, really. My love is fierce, but lonely.

At least it was, until Carrie Patel came along with her novels of the fantastical, gaslit underground city of Recoletta, where the last remnants of mankind huddle after a mysterious apocalypse. There have been two novels so far, and the third is due in paperback next month from Angry Robot.

The Buried Life (359 pages, March 6, 2015)
Cities and Thrones (448 pages, July 7, 2015)
The Song of the Dead (448 pages, May 2, 2017)

All three books are priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The covers are by John Coulthart.

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John DeNardo on The Science Fiction & Fantasy Books Everyone Will be Talking About in April

John DeNardo on The Science Fiction & Fantasy Books Everyone Will be Talking About in April

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Void Star Zachary Mason-small Change Agent Danial Suarez-small Entropy in Bloom Stories-small

At the end of March, John DeNardo crafted a brief article at Kirkus Reviews highlighting “The Science Fiction & Fantasy Books Everyone Will be Talking About in April.” Wait, wait, wait. How the heck does he know that? I’m still not sure what books people were taking about in February.

Well, no sense trying to suss out the roots of DeNardo’s uncanny forecasting abilities (’cause they’re probably supernatural, involving dark underworld pacts. Best not to know.) But we can share a few of his recommendations with you here, as long as you don’t ask too many questions.

Void Star by Zachary Mason (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $27 hardcover/$12.99 digital, April 11, 2017)

Void Star is a mind-bending story set in the near-future that follows three characters. There’s Irina, possessing an artificial memory that lets her earn a living by acting as a medium between her employers and their complex artificial intelligences; there’s Kern, a refugee who lives in a drone-built slum who gets by as a thief and paid enforcer; and Thales, the mathematically-inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, who has fled to L.A. after the attack that left him crippled and his father dead. Strangers at the outset, events – or more specifically forces that remain just out of sight – conspire to push these characters towards the same path.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Skullsworn by Brian Staveley

A Tale of Two Covers: Skullsworn by Brian Staveley

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Skullsworn-small Skullsworn UK-small

We covered the first three novels in Brian Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne right here last year. Skullsworn, the new standalone novel in the same world, features the adventures of a priestess-assassin for the God of Death. It will be published by Tor Books this week in both the US and the UK.

Although the US and UK editions have similar publishing dates, that’s pretty much all they have in common. The descriptions for each book are markedly different — and the covers are dramatically different. The US version by Richard Anderson (above left) has lush colors and and action scene, while the UK cover (above right), designed by Matthew Garrett, is heavily design-focused. In a guest post at Tor.com, Brian Staveley talks about the US cover.

This one hits all the right notes… it gives a feel for the city, but here Pyrre is in the shadows, close to the quotidian world of human affairs, but separate, unnoticed. She’s also motionless. Her knife is drawn, but the drama doesn’t come from the knife itself, or the imminent violence, but from what’s in her mind, from her struggle to understand her own motives and emotions, then to translate them into the life she wants to live. It’s not easy to fall in love, especially when you’re staying up late every night giving women and men to the god of death. That’s the book I’m trying to write… The final version of the cover is just perfect. The color, the claustrophobia of Dombang’s hot, narrow alleys, the fish-scale lanterns, Pyrre’s crouch, ready, predatory, but not yet committed — this cover captures everything I’d hoped about the book.

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New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two, edited by Neil Clarke

New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two, edited by Neil Clarke

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The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume Two Neil Clarke-small The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume Two Neil Clarke-back-small

Neil Clarke has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor for each of the last five years (not including 2015, when the Puppies took over the ballot and nominated pretty much exclusively their Puppy-aligned pals), and has won three Hugo Awards for his magazine Clarkesworld.

But recently he’s been gaining more recognition as a highly-regarded anthology editor, for books such as Galactic Empires, the cyborg anthology Upgraded, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1. Volume 2 of his Best Science Fiction of the Year arrived earlier this month, with stories by Ian R. MacLeod, Nina Allan, Lavie Tidhar, Sam J. Miller, Xia Jia, Aliette de Bodard, Alastair Reynolds, Sarah Pinsker, Margaret Ronald, Robert Reed, Suzanne Palmer, Ken Liu, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and many others. Its arrival kicked off the Best of the Year season — nearly a dozen more Best of volumes are scheduled to arrive over the next few months.

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Witches, Time Travel, and Enchanted Manuscripts: The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness

Witches, Time Travel, and Enchanted Manuscripts: The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness

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A Discovery of Witches-small Shadow of Night Harkness-smlall The Book of Life Harkness-small

I’m not much of a fan of typographical covers — covers which feature the title, and not much else. I expect to be able to learn a lot about a book from the cover art and design, and typographical covers seem designed chiefly to keep a book mysterious. And they just don’t draw my eye the way a good piece of art does.

Mind you, that flaw didn’t seem to hurt A Discovery of Witches, the debut fantasy novel from Deborah Harkness which hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. She followed it with Shadow of Night and The Book of Life, which together comprise the All Souls Trilogy. The books are modern urban fantasies which feature reluctant witch Diana Bishop and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and their search for the legendary lost manuscript Ashmole 782. The actions roams across Oxford’s Bodleian Library, a fantastical underworld, Elizabethan London, and Matthew’s ancestral home of Sept-Tours, France.

I was curious enough to purchase all three books in trade paperback. They’re also available in mass market paperback and digital formats from Penguin. Here’s a look at the back covers for A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night.

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A Tale of Three Covers: Allen Steele Resurrects Captain Future

A Tale of Three Covers: Allen Steele Resurrects Captain Future

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Captain Future Winter 1941 Asimovs-October-1985-small Avengers-of-the-Moon-smaller

Captain Future was created by editor Mort Weisinger way back in 1940, but it was the great pulp writer Edmond Hamilton who made him popular. Hamilton wrote dozens of stories featuring the futuristic adventurer between 1940 and 1951, such as “Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones,” which appeared in the Winter 1941 issue of Captain Future: Man of Tomorrow (above left, cover by Earle K. Bergey). Most of Hamilton’s short novels were reprinted in paperback in the 60s, and there was even a 1978-79 anime production that brought the Captain some fame in markets like Spain and Germany, but in general the character was long forgotten here in the US by the mid-80s.

In 1995, Allen Steele wrote “The Death of Captain Future,” a fond homage to Hamilton’s classic tales. It was the cover story for the October 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, with a stellar retro-pulp cover by Black Gate cover artist Todd Lockwood (click the image above left to see Todd’s original painting). “The Death of Captain Future” was nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Hugo Award for best novella of the year. Steele returned to the same characters four years later with “The Exile of Evening Star” (Asimov’s SF, January 1999).

Fast forward nearly 20 years, and we find Steele’s brand new novel Avengers of the Moon on sale at bookstores across the country. It returns once again to Hamilton’s Captain Future milieu, but with a more ambitious tale, and this time Steele hews much closer to the original source material, right down to Captain Future’s colorful cast of sidekicks, and the villainous U1 Quorn, a half-Martian renegade scientist. Avengers of the Moon was published in hardcover by Tor Books this week; the cover artist is uncredited.

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New Treasures: The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume 1 edited by Hank Davis

New Treasures: The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume 1 edited by Hank Davis

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The Best of Gordon R Dickson Volume 1-smallOver the last four years we’ve spent a lot of time and energy covering Del Rey’s 1970s-era Classic Science Fiction line, also know as the Best of…. series. In the process we may have angrily shaken our fists at the entire publishing industry once or twice, shouting “You don’t have the guts or the imagination to do something like this any more, do you??”

And of course, along comes Baen Books to prove us wrong.

Last week Baen Books released The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume 1, the first in a two-volume set collecting a generous sample of science fiction and fantasy from one of the most popular and celebrated SF writers of the 20th Century. It follows The Best of Bova, a planned 3-volume set, and their recent omnibus collections of Andre Norton, Murray Leinster, and James H. Schmitz.

The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume I, gathers together fourteen stories, predominantly from the first half of legendary science fiction and fantasy writer Gordon R. Dickson’s career, ranging from the early 1950s through the 1960s, including tales dragons, dolphins, aliens, werewolves, mutants and humans trying to make sense of an infinitely bewildering universe. A maiden aunt is suddenly given superpowers. An alien who looks like a large, sentient rabbit makes ominous announcement which make no sense from behind an impenetrable force shield. Humans besieged by an alien enemy refuse, against all reason, to give up fighting. And much more, in stories running the gamut from exciting adventure to stark tragedy to hysterical comedy. Plus the never before published “Love Story,” written for Harlan Ellison’s legendary, but never published anthology, The Last Dangerous Visions. And stay tuned for The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume II, with another generous display of Dickson’s virtuosity, covering his brilliant career from 1970s to the century’s end.

I was especially pleased to see that editor Hank Davis managed to pry another unpublished tale from Harlan Ellison’s clutches, where it has been languishing in the submission pile for The Last Dangerous Visions since 1973.

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Space Pirates and Interplanetary Intrigue: The Far Stars Trilogy by Jay Allan

Space Pirates and Interplanetary Intrigue: The Far Stars Trilogy by Jay Allan

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Shadow of Empire-small Enemy in the Dark-small Funeral Games-small

Shadow of Empire, the first novel in Jay Allen’s Far Stars Trilogy, opens with Captain Blackhawk stripped to the waist on a hostile planet, armed with a shortsword, facing off against a 9-foot monster in an alien arena. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the tone and target audience for this series — it’s a straight ahead, unapologetic space adventure, with a protagonist who commands a ship called the Wolf’s Claw, and whose “eyes focus like twin lasers” in combat.

Jay Allen is one of the most successful of a new generation of authors who, like Vaughn Heppner, Michael Anderle, and others, skirted traditional publishing and found an audience self-publishing digital books. His Crimson Worlds series includes 9 titles, and has sold over 800,000 copies in digital format. The Far Stars Trilogy looks like Allan’s first foray into traditional publishing, but it’s not his last — his latest book, Flames of Rebellion, the start of a brand new military adventure series, arrived in trade paperback from Harper Voyager on March 21.

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