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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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Styrbiorn the Strong, a review

Styrbiorn the Strong, a review

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styrbiorn1“There is but one way for a man, and that is to remember that none may avoid his fate. This is to a man as the due ballast to the ship, which maketh the vessel indeed loom somewhat deeper, but keepeth it from tossing too lightly upon the uncertain waters.”

–E.R. Eddison, Styrbiorn the Strong

As a youth, E.R. Eddison (1882-1945) so loved William Morris’ translations of the Old Norse sagas that he taught himself Old Icelandic, desiring the pure injection of North Sea ice water into his veins that the stories in their original tongue delivered. He carried that love of the Sagas with him as a writer of fantasy fiction. Their echoes can be felt in Eddison’s best known work, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), but four years after the Worm Eddison set to work on the real thing, trying his hand at his own saga Styrbiorn the Strong (1926).

Styrbiorn the Strong tells the story of Styrbiorn Olaffson, teenage heir to the throne of Sweden. Denied his birthright and exiled from Sweden, Styrbiorn spends three years a-viking, during which his power and influence waxes mightily. Three years later he returns to claim his share of the kingdom. Except for a few minor characters everyone in the story is an historical figure. The main facts of the tale are also historical, including the concluding bloody Battle of Fýrisvellir, but the details and characterizations are of Eddison’s own making.

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Josh Wimmer Reviews Shades of Milk and Honey

Josh Wimmer Reviews Shades of Milk and Honey

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milkhoney_fnlcoverShades of Milk and Honey
Mary Robinette Kowal
Tor (304 pp, $14.99, trade edition June 2011)
Reviewed by Josh Wimmer

If you have read anything about Shades of Milk and Honey, then you have seen it described as “Jane Austen, but with magic” or something along those lines. That is pretty much unavoidable. The novel, the first by Hugo nominee Mary Robinette Kowal, isn’t just written in a style and voice resembling that of the British author’s Regency-era romances, but also features sisters – one pretty, one smart – yearning for suitable suitors; a low-key but loving father who wants to see his girls married because he can’t provide for them forever; a cavalcade of potential husbands of various sorts; and a lot of house parties. In other words, the book takes plenty from Pride and Prejudice and the rest of Austen’s oeuvre.

What it adds is a mild but meaningful undercurrent of fantasy, and a slightly more modern-day message than might be found in the early-19th-century works that inspired it. Jane Ellsworth is unmarried and, at age 28, likely to remain that way. To recommend her, she has her wits, her emotional steadiness, and her skill with glamour – the magical crafting of visual and audible illusions, typically for aesthetic purposes. All fine qualities, but perhaps not enough to make up for her plain appearance (which Jane resolutely and admirably refuses to enhance with glamour).

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 4: Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 4: Thuvia, Maid of Mars

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thuvia-maid-of-mars-mcclurg-coverJohn Carter’s story appeared finished with The Warlord of Mars. But readers wanted more, and Burroughs was fired with productive energy. Less than a year after “ending” the Martian novels, he launched into the second phase of the series, with a new hero, new heroine, and new point-of-view style.

Our Saga: The adventures of earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other native 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: Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916)

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

The Backstory

Burroughs wrote the fourth Barsoom novel in April–June of 1914 under the stunningly uninspired working title of “A Carthoris Story.” But it wouldn’t appear in magazine form until two years later, where it ran in All-Story in three installments in April 1916. Burroughs was deep in the middle of the busiest period of his life, and he spent most of 1915 trying to sell his new properties to Hollywood, all without success. The delay getting Thuvia, Maid of Mars to market may reflect how crazy the author’s life was getting — and that he realized that Tarzan was going to be his big franchise.

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It’s a World of Slaughter: Small World Board Game

It’s a World of Slaughter: Small World Board Game

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smallworldSmall World (Amazon)
Days of Wonder ($49.99)
2 to 5 players
Recommended ages: 8+
Playtime: Around 1 hour

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Small World is a game where various fantasy races get to fight over a world that’s just too small for them all to coexist. The intriguing gameplay mechanic ultimately drives your races into decline, forcing you to select new races to sweep in and take their place. The victor is the one with the most Victory Points at the end of the game.

Each Race has special powers which are randomly chosen each game, resulting in a total of 280 different possible Race & Special Power combinations, from Swamp Giants to Dragon Master Skeletons to Seafaring Dwarves. (Or, in another permutation, Dragon Master Giants, Seafaring Skeletons, and Swamp Dwarves.)

The set-up can be a bit overwhelming when you first open the game, but once you’ve played it once, it’s a quick, fun game for the whole family. One nice feature is that there’s nothing hidden about the game, so this is excellent for introducing younger players to gaming. Though the recommended age is 8+, my precocious 6-year-old son and I have played this game multiple times. He often has questions about the way certain powers work, so the game lasts longer than an hour, but it’s loads of fun.

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Don Lee Reviews The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead

Don Lee Reviews The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead

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huckleberry_finn_and_zombie_jimThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim: Mark Twain’s Classic with Crazy Zombie Goodness
Mark Twain and W. Bill Czolgosz
Coscom Entertainment (206 pp, $15.99, 2009)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead
Mark Twain and Don Borchert
Tor (304 pp, $13.99, 2010)
Reviewed by Don Lee

I like zombies better than vampires. It is a lot harder to prettify zombies. They shamble. They eat brains. You blow their brains out. In origin, of course, the Romero-esque brain-eating zombies have about as much to do with “real” Haitian zombies as the sexy noble vampires of Twilight have to do with the monster that is Dracula, much less the original walking bags-of-blood from whose folklore the modern literary vampire descends.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim: Mark Twain’s Classic with Crazy Zombie Goodness, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Undead are, of course, part of the recent trend of Classic Novel plus fill-in-the-blank-monster that has brought us such gems as Little Vampire Women, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Android Karenina, Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers, The Undead World of Oz, Mansfield Park and Mummies, Jane Slayre, Alice in Zombieland, and Emma and the Werewolves. So far. …

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Goth Chick News: When Goth Chicks Attack

Goth Chick News: When Goth Chicks Attack

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image002Vampire Fashionistas, Flesh-Eating Ogres, Paranoid Werewolves and Sugar-Addicted Zombies…

Welcome to Gothopolis.

As I stare at the cover of Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1 which was just delivered by the spotty intern handling the Black Gate mailroom this semester, several thoughts are competing for top billing; like “Where is this ‘Gothopolis’?” and “Someone get my travel agent on the horn,” and “Would Steven Roman mind if I developed a crush on him?”

Finally, someone who understands…

The cover of this magnificent work of art is reminiscent of looking in a mirror. Okay, not so much. But still I’m mesmerized. Is this really a novel about a zombie shooting, werewolf booting Goth chick?

It looks too good to be true really.

So I fire up the blender and with fine adult beverage in hand, I climb into my comfy chair (the big leather one just under the life-size stand up of Bela Lugosi) to have a nice, long, get-to-know-you session with Pandora Zwieback.

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