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Review of Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones

Review of Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones

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Pathfinder Tales Plague of Shadows-smallI just read my second Howard Andrew Jones novel: Plague of Shadows (2011), which was the first of his two Pathfinder novels (I read them out of order). In my review of Stalking the Beast (2013) for Black Gate, I raved that it delivered everything I crave from such a tale. It did so with skill and panache, introducing me to characters who have stayed with me. So I was pleased to go back and read the true introduction to Elyana, the Forlorn elven ranger raised by humans, and Drelm, the half-orc who values honor and loyalty more than most humans (let alone most orcs) do.

Knowing that it was a first outing, I went in expecting it to be not quite as good — not as polished or assured, maybe — as its follow-up (indeed, I gave Stalking the Beast a perfect 5-star rating, arguing that sword-and-sorcery RPG tie-in novels just don’t get any better than that).

But then I finished the book: And I felt that peculiar sense that only certain works of art engender, as the last sentence echoes away or the curtain falls or the credits roll. It has impressed itself upon you, and you feel enriched but tinged with a bittersweet sadness — the characters have left, and you miss them. The characters have, in some sense, become more real; they have joined your own personal pantheon. With this second visit, Elyana and Drelm grew from being fun, engaging characters in a standalone book into characters about whom I want to read many books!

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Adventures In Shape-Shifting: Robert Stallman’s The Orphan

Adventures In Shape-Shifting: Robert Stallman’s The Orphan

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The Orphan Robert Stallman-smallI write this on an emotional high, a plateau from which I never wish to descend, for I’ve just managed the impossible: I’ve gone back in time. The vehicle employed? A book, prose, a worn paperback. It’s Robert Stallman’s The Orphan.

I first encountered this title somewhere in the Dark Ages, probably around 1980. I re-read it perhaps two years later, along with its two sequels, The Captive and The Beast. Even though large swaths of plot have faded from my mind over the years, I have never, ever forgotten the book’s opening lines.

I am and will be. There is no time when I am not.

This is the first lesson.

My need creates myself.

This is the second lesson.

Alone is safe.

This is the third lesson.

I’ve spent the last thirty-five years considering those quotes (and the ideas behind them), polishing each like a gem-cutter finishing off a jewel. I’ve road-tested them, too, as a survival mechanism when, in my earliest teens, I tried out (as actors might try a cape) the attitude of Kipling’s cat, the one that walked by himself. It was necessary, in a way, but also foppish, affected. Even so, I found in The Orphan echoes of that chilly, solo stance — the same adopted in Westerns by virtually every gunslinger known, from Joel McRae to John Wayne and back again.

So once upon a time, my time, these lines held great personal weight. They were talismans, of a sort, and in picking up this gorgeous, dangerous title afresh, I was face to face with my past and the self I have since become.

For a moment, I had to look away.

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Heroika 1: Dragon Eaters edited by Janet Morris

Heroika 1: Dragon Eaters edited by Janet Morris

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oie_15175053GW6bP5j3For the past several months I kept seeing notices for the coming release of Heroika 1: Dragon Eaters. Edited by Janet Morris, one of the true heavies in heroic fantasy, and someone I have known online for several years now, I knew this was a book I was going to be reading. That its table of contents included several writers I’m a big fan of as well as many whose names I’m starting to hear good things about made it look better and better. That it’s about killing dragons sealed the deal. So when John O’Neill asked if I wanted to review it and I could have an e-book of it, I said “YES!”

I’m happy to report that with all that buildup, it’s a terrific bunch of stories. Anthologies are great because you can pick them up and dive in anywhere and take a short, rewarding excursion into whatever genre it is. I generally don’t read anthologies from cover to cover in a short period of time. Reading for this review it turned out I wanted a break from dragon-killing when I tried to finish the book in only a few big sessions. There are a few stories that aren’t to my taste, but there are no clunkers and some real treasures in this book.

The stories, and there are seventeen of them, are presented chronologically — well, the ones set in the real world anyway. Those set in more fantastical settings are fit in among the medieval ones. In the earliest tales dragons stand toe-to-toe with the gods. Slowly, they lose that stature and become mere monsters. Deadly, true, but no longer forces of raw, elemental chaos. Eventually they’re regarded only as mythical. In the future, scientific explanations have to be found for their existence.

Janet and Chris Morris’ “The First Dragon Eater” opens the book. Narrated by Kella, a priest of Tarhunt, it tells of the battles between the Storm God, Tarhunt, and the dragon, Illuyankas. Taken from Hattan myth, it’s probably one of the earliest tales of dragon-killing. The story’s style — formal sounding, as if something recited in a temple — lends gravitas to the introduction of the monstrous worms that figure in so many world myths and fantasy stories.

“Legacy of the Great Dragon” by S.E. Lindberg moves forward into ancient Egypt, as Thoth, physician of the gods, helps Horus to find power to avenge the death of his father, Osiris, at the hands of Set. This is a wild piece, with a cosmically huge dragon and gods fighting inside of it.

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Where Extra-planar Daemons and Dark Gods Play: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: First & Only

Where Extra-planar Daemons and Dark Gods Play: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: First & Only

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Gaunts Ghosts First and Only-smallFirst & Only
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 1 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (272 pages, $6.95, March 2000)
Cover by Kenson Low

Warhammer 40,000 is, at its core, a miniatures game artfully designed to separate wargamers from their money with peak efficiency. But it may be more broadly known as a shared-universe fiction franchise which occupies several shelves in the tie-in fiction wasteland west of “Z” at your local book retailer. Our very own John O’Neill has covered several books in the ongoing Horus Heresy saga, and odds are that even if you’ve never picked up a book, you’ve noticed the Black Library imprint occupying ever more space on the New Releases rack.

WH40k occupies a gray area between science fiction and fantasy. I’d categorize it most accurately as a very grim shade of space opera, but extra-planar daemons and dark gods play a central role in its varied mythology, and there are sci-fi races which correspond to elves, orcs, and even undead (with heavy shades of Terminator). It’s primarily a canvas on which to tell stories about war, and so none of the various factions are particularly given to the arts of peacetime.

The majority of WH40K fiction is stories about the Space Marines (Adeptus Astartes for purists): genetically enhanced super soldiers who go into battle against alien and daemonic hordes clad in heavy power armor and carrying an assortment of massive guns and chainsaw swords. They tend to be hyper-manly, grim, serious, and generally without concerns besides waging war.

Honestly, I’ve found most of the WH40K fiction I’ve sampled to be fairly shallow. Every story is perpetual war and violence, with characters who exist only as warriors, moving from battle to blood-drenched battle. Most of the time, I’ve felt that any sense of deeper meaning to the carnage gets obscured, leaving little more than loving descriptions of weaponry and slaughter.

But there are diamonds in the ashes, and Dan Abnett’s work shines brightest of them all.

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May Short Story Roundup

May Short Story Roundup

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oie_6212435zQMwrmTD (1)I’m sorry that I let April pass without a short story roundup. The outpouring of new heroic fiction continues unabated on the pages of numerous magazines the genre is lucky to have. I’m back on track and here to tell you about last month’s must-reads.

I have never left any doubt in my reviews about which is my favorite fantasy magazine, so let me start by singing the praises of Adrian Simmons and his cohorts at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. Each issue has terrific cover art, two or three stories and a number of poems, and in the three years I’ve been reading and reviewing the magazine it has always been at least satisfactory and usually splendid. What makes HFQ so strong is the editors’ love for and knowledge of the genre, which is obvious by their singular ability to select and edit stories. Always true to the traditions of heroic fiction, they yet manage to publish tales that push the genre in new directions.

Issue 24 is maybe their best yet. This quarter’s artwork is a dark, brooding piece titled “Wizard With Army” by Vuk Kostic. Click this link to see the painting in its full glory.

The issue opens with Cullen Groves’ first published story, “The Madness of the Mansa,” a tale of a capricious monarch with a peculiar penchant for poetry.

Following a night in which “a great storm arose over the western ocean, and many citizens and sailors in the port of Asongai told how they had seen the demons of madness walking the black winds in the darkness.”, the ruler, the Mansa, is struck by a curious madness. From that point on he allows people to address him only poetically, using “the old meters” of songs and legends.

In the wake of the Mansa’s madness, the merchants of Asongai find themselves unable to successfully compete for his attention against the skilled singers of his tribal subjects. When a merchant named Bukra overhears the ex-gladiator, Draba, singing in a tavern, he hires him to petition the Mansa on his behalf.

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The Camera Can Lie: FairyTale: A True Story

The Camera Can Lie: FairyTale: A True Story

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Cottingley FairiesNews flash: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, having created literature’s greatest rationalist in the form of Sherlock Holmes, spent his later years heavily invested in the occult, the supernatural, and the possible existence of (yes) fairies.

Of course, people have always evinced a desire to believe — sometimes in this, sometimes in that — and so it is perhaps not so surprising that Conan Doyle played a large role in one of history’s great photographic deceptions, that of the so-called Cottingley Fairies.

In fact, he was one of those most willing to champion the trumped-up, cheap-looking fakes (black and white stills of young girls posing in shrubbery with paper cut-outs of highly Romanticized winged fairies) His role in this debacle (the girls only recanted decades later) is the subject of a FairyTale: A True Story (1997), a film well worth revisiting given our drone-happy, GPS-driven, target-rich world.

You see where I’m going with this, yes? Given our present era of photo manipulation and computer generated graphics, our collective ability to dupe the unwary has never been greater, and just like statistics, images lie.

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Self-published Book Review: The Age of Heroes by Scott Robinson

Self-published Book Review: The Age of Heroes by Scott Robinson

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The Age of Heroes Robinson-smallThis month I’m reviewing The Age of Heroes by Scott Robinson. I’ve reviewed one of Scott’s books before, The Brightest Light, a self-described crystal-punk story. This time around, Scott’s story is straight up sword and sorcery.

Rawk is the last of the great heroes.  Famed for his great deeds, everyone in the city of Katamood knows him, he has a crowd of fans following him everywhere he goes, and women decades younger throw themselves at him.  He could easily retire — his friend Weaver declared himself Prince and took charge of Katamood thirty years ago — but despite the fact that he’s well past his prime, he refuses to. It’s a matter of pride, of preserving his reputation: he’s a hero, not a former hero.  But there just isn’t a lot for a hero to do these days.  Since Weaver banned sorcery, and the nearby city-states started to do the same, there’s been a distinct lack of exots — the weird and horrible creatures that require a hero to deal with.  Anyone else who wants to get into the heroism business has to travel far and wide to do so, leaving Rawk as the last active hero whose deeds are still known in Katamood.  So when an oversized wolf shows up one day, he’s the person that everyone calls on.

Heroism is a young man’s game — not just in the Age of Heroes, but in heroic fantasy in general.  People complain about the man part, but you’re more likely to see a woman as the protagonist in heroic fantasy than anyone over forty.  I couldn’t find Rawk’s exact age, but he’s at least in his fifties. He gets aches and pains even when he’s not particularly active, and his first fight almost ends badly when his knee nearly gives out. He spends the rest of the novel in a perpetual state of pain, unwilling to back down and let the soldiers whose job it is to deal with such threats steal his glory. Rawk’s age is a significant factor, and is the main reason this book is such a change of pace from most books in the genre. His point of view feels like that of a mature, older man, but he doesn’t necessarily act like one.

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The Series Series: Shieldwall: Barbarians! by M. Harold Page

The Series Series: Shieldwall: Barbarians! by M. Harold Page

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Shieldwall BarbariansThings you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular Black Gate reader:

  • When one of the Black Gate bloggers has a new book out, there’ll be posts here about it. Many posts, and that’s a good thing.
  • We bloggers like to cheer each other on. Writing can be a discouraging business, but celebrating each other’s good news is one of its great pleasures.
  • I will tell you straight up what I think a book’s virtues and shortcomings are, even if the book is by a fellow Black Gate blogger. I do give the occasional gushing review, but not indiscriminately.

I lay it out like that because there’s exactly one thing I wish were different about M. Harold Page’s new book, Shieldwall: Barbarians!, and it’s something I fully expect the next volume in the series will satisfy.

So, on to the story:

A brother chases warbands, and then armies, across the ragged edges of the Roman Empire, right into a city besieged by Attila the Hun, because that’s what it will take to rescue his sister from slavery. On the way, young Prince Hengest’s own warband doubts his readiness to lead them. Can a boy fostered among Romans ever truly become a man of the Jutes? And as their odds of finding Princess Tova look slimmer and slimmer, why should they keep risking their lives far from home against foes they have no quarrel with? The man who was to marry Tova, hoping to claim Hengest’s crown for himself, feeds those doubts. That insubordination will end in blood, sooner or later.

Hengest is too civilized for his barbarian kinsmen, too barbaric for the fading nobility of the empire, and too late to side with Attila, whose army encampment spreads as far as the eye can see. The young Jutish prince and his men will take the job the doomed city of Aurelianum offers them. Doomed — for Aurelianum cannot possibly stand against Attila, can it? What Hengest must do is find his sister, wherever her captors have hidden her in the city, and get her out through the carnage when at last Aurelianum falls and releases him from his oath to protect it.

Good thing Hengest is a master of improvisation, because nothing plays out as he expects.

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Science Fiction Seeking Legitimacy: Connoisseur’s Science Fiction, edited by Tom Boardman

Science Fiction Seeking Legitimacy: Connoisseur’s Science Fiction, edited by Tom Boardman

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Connoisseur's Science Fiction-smallConnoisseur’s Science Fiction
Edited by Tom Boardman
Penguin Books (234 pages, $0.95, 1966)

It’s a small world. The last story in the last anthology I read (Other Dimensions, edited by Robert Silverberg) was “Disappearing Act,” by Alfred Bester. The next book I read was this one, and the first story therein was “Disappearing Act,” by Alfred Bester. How do you like that? In any event, I didn’t read it again, but copied my remarks from the review at my site to this one.

In Connoisseur’s Science Fiction, Boardman, a pioneering SF reviewer in Britain who went on to edit four more anthologies, attempted to put together a collection of science fiction stories that had literary merit — or something like that. And you thought this business about science fiction seeking legitimacy was a new thing. Half of the stories worked for me and half did not.

Thumbs Up

“Disappearing Act,” by Alfred Bester

The military is trying to determine why shell-shocked patients in a secret ward are disappearing. The answer is a fairly simple one having to do with other dimensions. But it’s made more interesting by the portrayal of the General in charge, who’s way over the top and who’s constantly demanding experts to sort out whatever he needs to know. Comparisons to a certain Kubrick movie wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

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A Gateway to Fantasy for Young Readers: Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi

A Gateway to Fantasy for Young Readers: Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi

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amulet coverWith the height of the “Harry Potter phenomenon” nearly a decade past, we now have a new generation of seven- and eight-year-olds who were born after the final book in that series came out. A perennial question comes up: What will be the next “gateway” work that ushers young readers into a lifelong love of fantasy and speculative fiction?

Well, some may rightly ask, why can’t it be Harry Potter? Or A Wrinkle in Time, or The Dark is Rising sequence, or The Chronicles of Prydain, or The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Hobbit, or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or…?

Many do still find their first taste of enchantment in books that are decades or even a century old, but there is no denying that — at least in the publishing and bookselling world — there has to be a “latest model.” Librarians still push those beloved older books faithfully, but their sales pitch is a lot stronger when it comes as a follow-up to a young reader who, having just read something that is currently “all the rage,” asks, “What else out there is like this?”

I’m here today to suggest that if you want a contemporary work that will introduce 3rd to 7th graders to the pleasures of epic fantasy, steampunk, people with animal heads, and wise-cracking robots, you could do a lot worse than hand them the graphic novel Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper (2008) by Kazu Kibuishi. But be prepared: odds are good that they will immediately be demanding books 2 through 6. And then they will be waiting with bated breath for book 7 and cursing that there is now a two-year interval between volumes (welcome, Young Reader, to the Pains of Following a Series that is Ongoing. To better understand what you are in for, see any conversations referencing George R.R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss).

But I’m also here to recommend them to anyone who likes this sort of stuff, regardless your age. I mentioned “3rd to 7th graders” in the last paragraph because those are the perimeters the publisher, Scholastic, says they are written toward. As someone who does not fit that demographic, I can vouch for them being worthwhile reads even if you are middle-aged.

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