Black Gate

Allen Andrews is the author of a number of fine British histories, including Kings and Queens of England and Scotland, The Whiskey Barons, The Air Marshals, and Wonders of Victorian Engineering. But for genre fans, he’s chiefly remembered for two light fantasy novels he produced in the 1980s: The Pig Plantagenet (1980) and Castle Crespin (1982), both reprinted in paperback by Tor with a pair of fine covers by Victoria Poyser.

The Pig Plantagenet is the tale of Plantagenet, a pig on a 13th century farm in Poitou, France, who schemes to ruin a great hunt that will slaughter all the wild pigs and other creatures surrounding the farm. The sequel focuses more on Fulgent the Fox, who has “fairly traditional designs on a local farmer’s poultry,” and who is also part of the local animal aristocracy. One thing leads to another, and soon two very different societies are locked in deadly conflict.

Both books drew strong comparisons to Watership Down and Animal Farm, which was doubtless inevitable with any fantasy featuring farm animals, but more astute reviewers saw more in these books, especially the rather clever way in which the author depicts a class-based animal society with surprising complexity.

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Back in 2002, Ace Books tried an unusual experiment with Paul Kearney’s The Monarchies of God novels. They were originally published in the UK starting in 1995, but when Ace brought them to the US, they released the books just one month apart.

As I noted in my April article, the experiment wasn’t a success, and the books went out of print fairly quickly. At the time, however, I said that Ace never repeated the experiment, and that’s not actually true. They attempted the same thing at least one more time, with Chaz Brenchley Books of Outremer, originally published in three fat volumes in the UK in 1998-2002, and reprinted as six paperbacks in the US, one every month, between June and November 2003, with covers by John Howe and Barbara Lofthouse.

Near as I can figure out, this experiment wasn’t any more successful. The books were never reprinted, and are now long out of print.

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Cherry Wilder had a relatively short career as fantasy writers go. Her first novel was The Luck of Brin’s Five (1977), which won the 1978 Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction Novel, and was the first novel in The Torin Trilogy. She produced two other series, The Rulers of Hylor (four novels, published between 1984 and 2004) and two novels in the Rhomary Land series (in 1986 and 1996), several short stores, and that was it. She died in 2002.

Still, she is very fondly remembered as one of the shining lights of 80s fantasy. Although The Torin Trilogy has all the trappings of fantasy — including sorcerers, far-flung kingdoms, and mystical powers — at heart it’s actually science fiction. It’s the tale of Scott Gale, a space traveler from Earth who finds himself shipwrecked on the world of Torin, where he’s accepted as a family member by Brin’s Five. Before long he finds himself embroiled in a desperate battle against the feared man who rules much of the land, Strangler Tiath Pentroy.

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