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Thomas M. MacKay Reviews The Enchantment Emporium

Thomas M. MacKay Reviews The Enchantment Emporium

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the-enchantment-emporium-coverThe Enchantment Emporium
Tanya Huff
DAW (473 pp, $7.99, June 2010)
Reviewed by Thomas M. MacKay

Canadian writer Tanya Huff has well-established credentials in the speculative fiction world, having written a number of respected novels, spanning the range from traditional epic fantasy, to contemporary fantasy, to full-on science fiction. Certain common themes tend to appear in her work, though handled gracefully and without detracting from the story. Ms. Huff’s work commonly challenges any cultural bias toward inequality – whether among races, genders, or for any other reason – and questions the validity of sexual inhibitions, while never denying the real and powerful impact that love imposes.

In the Gale family, “charming” preserves its original meaning, as the Gales still follow the old ways of the Goddess and the Wild God. Twenty-four year old Allie Gale grew up learning how to cast charms and mix potions, taking her place in the third circle among her many cousins, and trying to avoid crossing the Aunties – because Gale power grows as you age, and the oldest generation of women together possess the power to change the world. But magic still can’t give you purpose, and Allie is back home trying to figure out what to do with her heart and her life after losing her job as a research assistant at the Ontario Museum and still struggling to get over her gay ex-boyfriend. When Allie’s wild grandmother, the one Gale Auntie that lives apart from the family, doesn’t come home for the May Day ritual, Allie’s restlessness grows. The next day comes word that Allie’s Gran has died and left Allie an esoteric little store in Calgary. The Aunties don’t really believe their sister is dead, but they send Allie off anyway to figure out what her Gran is up to.

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Art of the Genre: Review of the Inner Sea World Guide

Art of the Genre: Review of the Inner Sea World Guide

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pzo9226_500My very first campaign setting, as probably the bulk of old time gamers would also claim, was The World of Greyhawk. I still have great nostalgia for that world, and the classic adventure modules set in it, but sometimes you just need to upgrade, you know? I mean, Greyhawk is over thirty years old, and has gone through a number of facelifts, but still it’s always nice to try on something new.

And speaking of new! How about Paizo’s Pathfinder Campaign Setting The Inner Sea World Guide. I mean the name alone is worth the price! I’m not sure when the first time I saw this book, but I know when I did I WANTED IT!

Pathfinder is already an outstanding supplemental system, with a massive amount of core books, adventure paths, and gazetteers, but if you’re looking for a new age setting or simply want to steal some quality ideas for your own world, this book is an incredible resource.

As I delved into the pages it was like opening a Pandora’s Box of fantasy grandeur. The book begins with a nice expansion of the races of The Inner Sea, and like Iron Kingdoms did some years back for their setting, Paizo defines twelve different human races before delivering a nice history on the usual suspects like elves, dwarves, and the like.

I was intrigued by this kind of detail, and as I flipped through the different races I couldn’t help by smile at those chosen and the great adventures that could be set in a country populated by these individuals.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 5: The Chessmen of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 5: The Chessmen of Mars

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chessmen-of-mars-1st-edition1“The squares shall be contested to the death. Just are the laws of Manator! I have spoken.”

After Edgar Rice Burroughs pulled the Martian novels in a different direction with Thuvia, Maid of Mars, he retreated from Barsoom for a spell to concentrate on other projects. Eight years passed between the writing of Thuvia and the publication of the next adventure, The Chessmen of Mars, which switched to yet another hero and heroine to hurl into the unknown regions of Mars. In the process, Burroughs gave science fiction a new board game to play.

Our Saga: The adventures of earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Chessmen of Mars (1922)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1913-14), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916)

The Backstory

Thuvia, Maid of Mars was a success, and it made sense that when Burroughs returned to Mars he would repeat the same formula of third-person narration and a different hero and heroine pair in a one-off adventure. Although John Carter’s son Carthoris seemed a natural to continue as the hero, Burroughs chose to use a full-blood Martian as his lead for the first time. The decision to change protagonists once before made it easy to do it a second time, and with Carthoris already paired with Thuvia, picking a new character meant ERB could start over with a fresh love interest. (He rarely let his heroes switch heroines once they dedicated themselves. Tarzan could get away with it with La of Opar, but only because of amnesia.) …

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Join the Heroes of the Feywild

Join the Heroes of the Feywild

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heroesfeywildPlayer’s Option: Heroes of the Feywild (Amazon, B&N)
Dungeons & Dragons – Rodney Thompson, Claudio Pozas, Steve Townshend
Wizards of the Coast (160 pp, $29.95, Nov. 2011)

Fury of the Feywild Fortune Cards (Amazon)
Dungeons and Dragons
Wizards of the Coast ($3.99, Nov. 2011)

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

In roleplaying games, I’ve always been a fan of taking full advantage of each character’s unique traits. The statistics are a reflection of these unique traits, of course, but they aren’t the most important element. The differences between Dwarves and Elves goes far beyond just their Dexterity and Constitution bonuses, reflecting deep cultural differences that are far more interesting.

As such,I love supplements that help to differentiate even more between different types of characters. The Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Option book Heroes of the Feywild is superb at doing that for Feywild characters, providing both storytelling details about these engaging character types as well as new mechanics designed to support stories that feature the Feywild. If you want to enter into this world of raw magical power, this is definitely a must-have supplement.

To supplement the book, Wizards of the Coast also released an Fortune Cards expansion, Fury of the Feywild, which allows you to invoke feywild-linked events into your Dungeon & Dragons game in a more random fashion. You can download the rules for using Fortune Cards from Wizards directly.

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Jackson Kuhl Reviews Perfect Murders

Jackson Kuhl Reviews Perfect Murders

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perfect-murdersPerfect Murders
Horace L. Gold
Bison Books (360 pp, $19.95, May 2010)
Reviewed by Jackson Kuhl

Raymond Chandler once noted how bad directors filmed whole sequences of mundane actions that could be more simply communicated in a single shot. A man need not be shown climbing into a cab and going to the post office to receive a letter, for example – all the audience needed was an anonymous postman handing the man the letter. This kind of boring direction, Chandler believed, was a holdover from the time when film was new and watching everyday occurrences on celluloid was still thrilling.

And so it is with Horace Gold. He was, in turn, a World War II veteran, the highest paid comic-book writer in the world, and the editor of Galaxy Science Fiction for over a decade. He was also an accomplished pulp fictioneer. Perfect Murders: Pulp Fiction Classics collects six of Gold’s science-fiction detective mash-ups; a seventh, “I Know Suicide,” is a straight noir mystery. Unfortunately, most of these stories are artifacts of their time, thin plots so laden with long passages of dialogue and commonplace action that the eyes glaze and the mind drowses. …

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David Soyka Reviews Prince of Thorns

David Soyka Reviews Prince of Thorns

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prince-of-thornsPrince of Thorns (Book One of The Broken Empire)
Mark Lawrence
Ace (324 pp, $29.95, Hardcover August 2011)
Reviewed by David Soyka

This is pretty brutal.  Relentlessly brutal, right from the opening paragraphs:

Ravens! Always the ravens. They settled in the gables of the church even before the injured became the dead. Even before Rike had finished taking fingers from hands, and rings from fingers. I leaned back against the gallows post and nodded to the birds, a dozen of them in a black line, wise-eyed and watching.

The town-square ran red. Blood in the gutters, bloom on the flagstones, blood in the fountain. The corpses posed as corpses do. Some comical, reaching for the sky with missing fingers, some peaceful, coiled about their wounds. Flies rose above the wounded as they struggled. This way and that, some blind, some sly, all betrayed by their buzzing entourage.

“Water! Water!” It’s always water with the dying. Strange, it’s killing that gives me thirst.

And this the ostensible hero talking in Prince of Thorns, the first in a (you guessed it) projected trilogy collectively called The Broken Empire.  So, we’re clearly in anti-hero land, in the “shit and blood” sub genre of sword and sorcery that aims to rub your face in what rusty blades, poor sanitation and disease actually do to people living under medieval conditions, in stark contrast to high fantasy depictions of noble quests in which divinely provident good triumphs over corrupt and therefore ultimately doomed to fail evil.

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John Ottinger Reviews The Conqueror’s Shadow

John Ottinger Reviews The Conqueror’s Shadow

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the-conquerors-shadow1The Conqueror’s Shadow
Ari Marmell
Spectra/Ballantine (480 pages, $7.99, mass market edition December 2010)
Reviewed by John Ottinger III

The Conqueror’s Shadow is Ari Marmell’s first wholly original novel. Though published three times before under the Dungeons & Dragons trademark (Agents of Artifice, Gehenna: The Final Night), this is the first fiction Marmell has produced without a shared world. What results is a mix of epic fantasy and sword and sorcery tropes slanted slightly, ringed around with humor, peopled with not-good but not-really-evil characters, with a setting that Marmell says, “drew on all the traditional sources of fantasy. There is some historical Western Europe, some D&D, a sprinkling of Eddings and Feist.” The end result is a fast-paced epic adventure bursting with riotous humor and likable characters.

Oddly, the story begins at its ending, or at least seemingly so. Corvis Rebaine, the Terror of the East, has conquered Denathere, a key city in the Impahallion Empire. But Rebaine makes a tactical error, and he won’t be able to hold the city against the combined might of the empire’s armies and the private armies of the Guilds. So Corvis flees, taking along as hostage the young noblewoman Tyannon, leaving his own armies to be defeated. Skip forward seventeen years, and Rebaine has settled down into the life of farmer with his wife Tyannon. All is well, until Rebaine’s two young children are threatened by the roving marauders of a new warlord, Audriss, who follows the exact same battle plan Rebaine once devised. The now middle-aged ex-warlord gathers old compatriots from his glory days to end the threat to his new life, family, and the very empire he once tried to destroy.

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Have Fun Storming the Chaostle

Have Fun Storming the Chaostle

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chaostleChaostle (Amazon)
Chivalry Games ($69.99, May 2011)

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Many fantasy board games have you performing some sort of dungeon crawl, but the approach in Chaostle is a bit different. Instead of crawling through the bowels of a castle’s lower levels, you are instead moving through various levels, leaping from floor to floor in an effort to make it through the castle as quickly as possible. There are a variety of different paths to take and these choices are as significant as any others that you make in the game.

Designed for 2 to 8 players (ages 10 and up), the goal of Chaostle is to beat the other groups of adventurers through the castle. Once you enter the Sanctuary in the center of the castle, you still haven’t won until you are able to beat the castle itself, meaning that the other players do have an opportunity to catch up and sweep in for victory at the last minute.

The game has a fairly sophisticated style of play, so it’s not for the feint of heart. If you are an experienced fantasy gamer, then this will be  fun game, but be warned:

Do not use this game as a means to get your kids, girlfriend, spouse, or other non-gamer involved in the genre.

If you’ve already got a solid group of gamer friends available to you, though, Chaostle can provides hours of entertainment with combat and surprises aplenty.

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After the Golden Age: A Review

After the Golden Age: A Review

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After the Golden AgeAfter the Golden Age
Carrie Vaughn
Tor Books (A Tom Doherty Associates Book; 304 pp, $24.99 USD, $29.99 CDN; hardcover April 2011, paperback January 2012)
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

Celia West is an accountant in her mid-twenties. She seems normal enough, but appearances are deceiving. Celia lives in Commerce City, home to a number of super-powered heroes and their archenemies. She’s not one of them, though, being in fact the non-powered daughter of two of Commerce City’s greatest champions, Captain Olympus and Spark, leaders of the group called the Olympiad. Now the Olympiad’s worst enemy, the Destructor, has been arrested, and Celia’s skills as an accountant can help to find the fiscal evidence to put him behind bars — only, once, years ago, Celia joined the Destructor as an ally. Can she overcome that act of youthful rebellion to build her own life, and see that justice is done?

That’s the question driving the plot of Carrie Vaughn’s novel After the Golden Age. Super-heroes arguably started in prose, with the exploits of Zorro, the Spider, the Shadow, and Doc Savage, to name some of the best known, but the full-blown super-hero — with exceptional powers, a distinctive costume, and an alter-ego — was really a development of comics. A costumed hero is inherently visual, and many of the best super-hero powers lend themselves to illustration. Can prose present a super-hero story as well as comics can? It’s notable that a lot of the better prose super-hero tales have been shorter works: the best of the Wild Cards shared-world books, for example (a series for which Vaughn writes), or the 2008 anthology Who Can Save Us Now?, or Daryl Gregory’s excellent story from the same year “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm.” Perhaps the strangeness of powers and costumes works better at that length.

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Charlene Brusso Reviews The Way of Kings

Charlene Brusso Reviews The Way of Kings

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wayofkings255b8255d1The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
Tor (1280 pp, $8.99, May 2011 mass market)
Reviewed by Charlene Brusso

When does the end justify the means? That is the overarching question posed in the first volume of Sanderson’s new series. It’s a tough one, and an excellent choice for exploration within an epic fantasy framework. Working on the Wheel of Time series has made Sanderson’s writing longer, but thankfully it hasn’t dulled his skill at worldbuilding, or his masterful ability to create vivid characters caught up in challenging situations.

The Way of Kings is an ancient text which discusses how to protect a nation and govern honorably. Most of its teachings, however, are poorly regarded – in fact, outright heretical – by the powerful Vorin church in contemporary Roshar, some 4500 years after it was written. The text comes from the time of the lost Radiants, noble warriors whose mighty Shardblades gave them powers beyond normal men. But the Radiants disbanded, abandoning their responsibilities, and none now knows the truth of those times. And so the text has fallen into disfavor.

Millennia later, the current king, Elhokar, has his hands full fighting off Parshendi incursions, and no time or interest in reading heretical philosophy. His father’s assassination left him in control of a vast kingdom under siege, and he is determined to do whatever he must to hold it together. The last thing he needs is to lose his top commander and most trusted advisor, his uncle Dalinar, to insanity.

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