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The Series Series: What, You Mean Sarah Beth Durst’s Conjured Is A Stand-Alone?

The Series Series: What, You Mean Sarah Beth Durst’s Conjured Is A Stand-Alone?

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Sarah Beth Durst Conjured-smallConjured defied nearly all my expectations. That’s part of what makes it awesome.

Alas, one of my expectations was that it would be the first volume in a series. It’s strong enough to have carried that work, and then some. Instead, the book turns its final twist with a near-audible click, and we must leave its characters for good.

I need to tell you about it anyway.

My copy of Conjured came to me in a big bag of freebies at the World Fantasy Convention. Most of the books in that bag were first volumes in series, given away to promote the later volumes. When I gave each book a one-page chance to catch my attention, this was the story that wouldn’t let me go.

Eve can’t put together a coherent memory of the crimes she witnessed, or much else about her past, but the FBI must find the killer she escaped from. She knows she’s the only victim who ever escaped. She knows he wants her back. Nothing else she remembers fits the life she’s living now in the Witness Protection Program.

She’s as big a mystery to herself as her former captor is to the FBI. Why, she wonders, does she know what pizza is, but not how to unbuckle a seat belt?

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Vintage Treasures: Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy

Vintage Treasures: Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy

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The Secret Country-small Pamela Dean Hidden Land-small Pamela Dean The Whim of the Dragon-small

We’ve been talking a lot about the early days of Dungeons and Dragons recently, and that put me in mind of the early novels directly inspired by fantasy role playing. The most famous examples are probably Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1979) and Joel Rosenberg’s long-running Guardians of the Flame series, starting with The Sleeping Dragon (1983).

Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy is another early example, although it’s not as well remembered today. It began with The Secret Country (1985), featuring a group of friends who become stranded in the fantasy realm they thought they had created.

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The Long Reach of Night: The Voidal Vol. 2 by Adrian Cole

The Long Reach of Night: The Voidal Vol. 2 by Adrian Cole

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oie_862634UE7X7d5eLast year I reviewed (quite favorably, after an initial aversion to it) The Oblivion Hand (2001), the first collection of Adrian Cole’s stories about the Voidal. To say they’re excessive, over the top, and incredibly phatasmagorical barely does them justice. They are all those things and much more. These traits are carried over into the second volume, The Long Reach of Night (2011), an even better book than the first.

The Voidal is a man, cast out by the Dark Gods onto the currents of the Omniverse as punishment for some unknown sin. He has been stripped not only of his memory but also of his right hand, which has been replaced with the Oblivion Hand — a sentient-seeming thing that carries out the will of his tormentors. The Voidal is endlessly tossed about parallel dimensions and planets of the Omniverse, wholly against his will, a scourge in servitude to some celestial tribunal.

By the end of The Oblivion Hand the Voidal had acquired an associate, the froggy familiar, Elfloq. Together they set out on a search, from one hellish locale to another, for how to restore the Voidal’s lost memories and free him from the control of the Dark Gods.

Like its predecessor, The Long Reach of Night is a fix-up. Two of the stories appeared in magazines previously, but the rest appear here for the first time.

It is Elfloq who is the real protagonist of this book. For much of the time, the Voidal is lost somewhere in the aether. In each story the familiar is forced to hunt for clues to where his master is, ever formulating a plan to get one step closer to their goals.

Sometimes Elfloq is forced to undertake some dangerous task in exchange for information. In the first story, “The Preposterous Library,” he must travel through the pages of a book entitled The Skullworks to a pocket world of the same name.

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The Future of Fantasy: February New Releases

The Future of Fantasy: February New Releases

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The Wide World’s End-small The Way Into Darkness-small Fortune's Blight-small

February is packed with a stellar line up of fantasy releases. If you’ve got a ski trip or high school reunion coming up, we recommend you cancel. If you seclude yourself in your room immediately, you may just have enough time to read a small fraction of the great books coming you way.

No way you can even keep up with them all without help, however. No worries — that’s what we’re here for. Sit back and relax, and we’ll fill you in on the top new releases in fantasy scheduled for February.

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Dual Structures in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories and Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland

Dual Structures in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories and Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland

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BaileyShadowlandRecently I completed my reading of all of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. After I had put down the second or fourth collection (this depends on how you approach the editions from White Wolf, which collected the books doubly in single volumes, and these are the publications with which I began my survey), I made some faintly denigrating comment on Goodreads (if I remember it correctly), something about the quality of these stories being like flies caught in amber. This was a metaphor for Leiber’s soupy, languid, highly embellished prose style.

But a year or so later, as I got to the end of The Knight and Knave of Swords and then the termination of Swords and Ice Magic, I found that I had really begun enjoying these stories. I had even begun to admire the writing style. So I bought, without question, Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland out of interest to see who possibly could be so foolish as to try to meet Leiber on his own brilliant terms.

Before I get to a review of Leiber and then, specifically, to Bailey, I want to detail the kind of place I come from. As I become a regular contributor to Black Gate, I realize that there are quite a number of books that I really should have read while I was growing up. Now, I’ve read a lot of fantasy. That will be apparent. But sometimes I pick up a new volume, open the cover, begin reading, and ask myself, “Why didn’t I read this twenty-five years ago?” One of the answers might be because of my intense snobbishness, a youthful shortcoming that I slightly touched on last entry. Another reason is because, at the beginning of eleventh grade, I artificially arrested the sheer volume of my high fantasy reading by consciously “growing up” and turning my back on the genre in preference for established “literary” pursuits. But also, as I cast my memory back through the years, I’m coming to believe that I didn’t read a lot of these works then because a lot of these weren’t all that visible.

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Figures of Earth by James Branch Cabell

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Figures of Earth by James Branch Cabell

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Figures of Earth-smallFigures of Earth
James Branch Cabell
Ballantine Books (290 p, November 1969. $0.95)
Cover art by Robert Pepper

Okay, this one is probably going to be the last Cabell I read for a while. It turned out to be more of a slog than I expected. I’ll elaborate below.

Figures of Earth was the second volume of James Branch Cabell’s Chronicles of Fabled Poictesme, published as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It is the story of how the swineherd Dom Manuel came to be the Count of Poictesme.

Poictesme is of course a fictional province in France. Cabell freely mixes real and imaginary locations in his work.

The story begins with Dom Manuel leaving his pigs to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a count from the sorcerer Miramon Lluagor. He hasn’t really been paying much attention to the pigs. Instead he’s been making human figures from clay because his mother told him from her deathbed that he should make a figure in the world. I suspect he misunderstood what she meant.

Anyway, Manuel sets off on his quest. Along the way, he meets the young woman Niafer, who is the one who actually gets them through the various magical traps along the way. Once they reach the sorcerer’s castle, they learn that things aren’t quite what they seem. The quest to rescue the princess is actually Miramon’s idea. She’s his wife, and he’s tired of her. Manuel and Niafer manage to reconcile the couple and start back down the mountain.

At the bottom of the hill, they are met by Grandfather Death. He is riding a black horse and has a white horse with him. Grandfather Death says that one of them must ride his white horse. Dom Manuel promptly volunteers Niafer to be the rider. She goes to her death without protest.

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Peter Watts’ Rifters Trilogy

Peter Watts’ Rifters Trilogy

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StarfishUsually I write here about books I’ve read and enjoyed. It’s really quite selfish: thinking about a good book extends the pleasure I get from reading it. This post, though, is a little different. I’m going to write about a science fiction trilogy in order to work out why I don’t like it more than I do. These are good books, even excellent books. But something about them didn’t grip me the way I would have thought they might.

The books are Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy: Starfish, Maelstrom, and ßehemoth (that’s a Greek beta at the start of the last; for ease of typing, I’ll stick with the English B from here out). Starfish was Watts’ first novel, published in 1999, and Maelstrom followed two years later. Behemoth was split into two volumes for print publication; B-Max (Betamax, I suppose) was published in 2004, Seppuku in 2005. All these books are available for free on Watts’ web site.

They’re extremely well-written. The plot’s tight and fast-moving, the characters are multilayered, and the prose is both concise and, when it needs to be, beautiful. And they’ve got some potent themes, about power and science and the nature of humanity. I came away from them very impressed. And also somehow dissatisfied, for no reason I could put a finger on. So I will write about them here, and see if I can articulate for my own satisfaction what it was that I missed, and whether it was something in the books or something in myself in as a reader.

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Drizzt Do’Urden Simply Won’t Stop Adventuring: Myke Cole on Learning to Love Serial Fantasy

Drizzt Do’Urden Simply Won’t Stop Adventuring: Myke Cole on Learning to Love Serial Fantasy

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Gemini Cell-smallMy name is Myke Cole, and I have a hard time with serial fantasy.

Yes, that’s right, I’m admitting it right up front. I’m wading into the hornet’s nest and making my confession.

More than three books in a series and I start to nod off. At five, you’ve pretty much lost me. It’s happened to me again and again and again. In A Song of Ice and Fire, I honestly don’t really care what happens after Dance. I followed Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharp through twelve books before I finally decided that, no matter how awesome his further adventures might be, I couldn’t get excited about them. Daniel Abraham’s The Widow’s House is the fourth book in his absolutely stunning Dagger and Coin series, and I know I’ll get to it… eventually.

It’s happened to me time and again with comic book series. Fables, Hundred Bullets, Sandman and on and on and on. I reach a point 5 or 6 or 10 trades in where I just sort of throw up my hands.

And all of the above examples are for good books. The kind of books that resonate and transport, the kind of books that make you want to give up writing because you’ll never be in the same league as that author.

For years, I’ve hid my head in the company of other fans, bit my tongue and kept my opinions to myself. Because Brandon Sanderson wound up rounding out The Wheel of Time series at fourteen books. Because Drizzt Do’Urden simply won’t stop adventuring, because fans LOVE long serials.

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Dave Duncan’s The Great Game

Dave Duncan’s The Great Game

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duncan past Connor Gormley wrote a post not long ago in which he discussed the seeming sameness of the current state of Fantasy. That the genre which should be most imaginative showed a singular lack of imagination, or flexibility might be a better word, in its choice of settings and characters. The comments give you a pretty good idea of how people agreed or disagreed with his thesis, and the whole post is well worth looking at. I think what it did for a lot of people, however, is remind them of books they’ve read that aren’t cloyed down with the sameness of things.

In my case, I was reminded specifically of Dave Duncan’s work. I’ve mentioned his Alchemist Novels in discussing fantasy mysteries, and one day I’d like discuss the brilliant West of January in more detail, but at the moment I want to introduce you to the trilogy The Great Game, made up of Past Imperative, Present Tense, and Future Indefinite.

At first glance it seems we’re being dealt a typical stranger-in-a-strange land trope, but as is so often the case with Duncan, the first glance is all you get for free. I think it’s safe to say that whatever you think Duncan’s up to, it’s very seldom what’s going on.

Part Imperative begin with two apparently unconnected storylines, or rather, we assume they are connected – not being entirely new to this game ourselves – but we aren’t shown how until much farther into the narrative than we’d expect. An epigraph does give us a broad hint, but honestly, it’s very easy to overlook. I have a theory that fewer than half of all readers actually read epigraphs, even the ones at the beginning of chapters, but that’s neither here nor there – which, come to think of it, pretty much describes the position of Duncan’s characters.

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New Treasures: The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan

New Treasures: The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan

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The Dark Defiles-smallI can’t read all the fantasy books out there. I can’t even read all the really great stuff. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by a superb team of reviewers who keep me on top of things.

When Richard K. Morgan published his highly acclaimed first fantasy novel back in 2009, I totally missed it. But John C. Hocking didn’t, and in his review in Black Gate 13 he called it:

One of the most unusual, powerful, and daring sword & sorcery novels to see print for decades… The Steel Remains follows a trio of characters, each of whom played a dramatic part in humanity’s grim battle with the Scaled Folk — reptilian invaders from the sea, defeated several years past… As the three heroes are slowly drawn back together, a threat older and even more alien than the Scaled Folk moves into the world. Ringil and his friends will meet it with steel.

A sequel, The Cold Commands, followed in 2011, introducing the dark prophecy of the Illwrack Changeling, a boy raised to manhood in a ghostly between-world realm, whose return would be catastrophic for the fragile land. And late last year the final novel in what’s now being called a trilogy finally arrived. As the world teeters towards another war with the dragon folk, Ringil and his companions find the prophecy of a dark lord may be coming true very close to home.

Here’s the publisher’s description for The Dark Defiles, the closing volume of Land Fit for Heroes.

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