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New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson

New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson

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Nebula Awards Showcase 2014-smallThe first volume of the revered Nebula Awards anthologies was released nearly half a century ago, in 1966, and it’s been an annual event ever since. I really can’t think of a single anthology series that’s lasted even half as long.

It’s no accident, either. Year after year these books, which gather Nebula Award-winning short fiction from the previous year — alongside additional nominees, excerpts from winning novels, author retrospectives and appreciations, and survey pieces — collectively form a record of the most acclaimed SF and fantasy our industry has produced for the last 49 years.

Want an example? Have a look at the Tables of Contents for the first three volumes, which contained such stories as “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny, “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw, “The Last Castle” by Jack Vance, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, “Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delany, “Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock, and “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber.

It’s not just that those are some of the most famous SF tales ever written. It’s that the Nebula Awards — and these volumes — helped preserve and promote them and they’re likely the reason you know about these stories today.

All that begs the question: who’s in the latest volume? Who are the writers who will be remembered and acclaimed half a century from today?

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Future Treasures: Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence

Future Treasures: Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence

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Prince of Fools Mark Lawrence-smallIn The Broken Empire trilogy (Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, and Emperor of Thorns), Mark Lawrence told the tale of Jorg Ancrath’s devastating rise to power. In a blog post for us shortly before Prince of Thorns was released, Mark Lawrence explained some of the genesis of the series:

The book I’ve written, Prince of Thorns, has layers, rather like an onion (or an ogre). I hope it can be enjoyed as a violent swords and sorcery romp. Get your teeth into it though and there’s more there – it’s as much about our prince as it is about what he does. This is a damaged person and although the story is told in his words without a hint of excuse, there are lessons to be learned between the lines. It wasn’t until tonight though, desperately scratching at the subject in the effort to come up with something to say in this blog post I was invited to supply, that I discovered another layer, deeper still…

In Prince of Thorns the main character has suffered a personal disaster. It’s not the ‘evil threatens the village’ of classic fantasy. It’s not injured pride or a looming darkness in the east. He’s been screwed over, a tsunami has rolled through his life and left devastation. And the book is in large part his reaction to that… It’s only through the lens of half a decade and more that I see I was writing out… not a version of my own experience, but a mapping of the emotions.

We published the first chapter of Prince of Thorns, with a brand new introduction by Mark, online here.

The numerous fans of The Broken Empire trilogy will be thrilled to hear that Mark Lawrence returns to the Broken Empire with his next book, coming June 3. Prince of Fools tells the tale of The Red Queen’s grandson, Prince Jalan Kendeth, a man tenth in line for the throne, who nonetheless finds life quickly becoming very complicated indeed…

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Vintage Treasures: The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark by Leigh Brackett

Vintage Treasures: The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark by Leigh Brackett

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Leigh Brackett The Book of Skaith-smallI joined the Science Fiction Book Club in the fall of 1975, when I was in my last year at St. Francis Junior High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Before I joined, I agonized over my introductory selection — three books for a just a dollar! — for days, reading and re-reading the tiny paragraphs in the brochure, and then waiting impatiently for my selections to arrive in the mail. My friend John MacMaster enrolled me and I’m pretty sure I’ll remember the contents of my enrollment package until the day I die: The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, The Hugo Winners, Volumes One and Two, edited by Isaac Asimov, and Before the Golden Age, edited by (can you guess?) Isaac Asimov.

John had introduced me to science fiction earlier that year, loaning me Clifford D. Simak’s Shakespeare’s Planet and Piers Anthony’s Ox when I was home sick from school. I devoured them both and wanted more. John explained how the club worked and it sounded terrific. “They sometimes have these big collections, a bunch of novels gathered into one book,” he said. “They’re the best.”

John was right. The year after I joined, in 1976, the featured selection for the month was The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark, an omnibus of three novels by Leigh Brackett, under a new cover by Don Maitz. It was a marvelous introduction to one of SF’s great pulp writers, in an attractive and affordable package offered exclusively through the Science Fiction Book Club.

That’s one of the great things about the SFBC: its exclusive omnibus editions, highly collectible as they are, are generally still available at excellent prices. In February of this year, nearly 40 years after it was published, I bought a copy of The Book of Skaith in excellent condition on eBay for just $2.99.

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New Treasures: Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal

New Treasures: Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Valour and Vanity-smallBack in February, I had the good fortune to attend Capricon 34 here in Chicago, where I heard Mary Robinette Kowal read from her upcoming novel Valour and Vanity. It was a delightful affair, not least because Mary gave us a highly entertaining peek behind the scenes at what it really takes to produce a period fantasy novel.

Valour and Vanity is the fourth book in the successful Glamourist Histories, following Shades of Milk and Honey (2010), Glamour in Glass (2012), and Without a Summer (2013). Mary’s first collection, Scenting the Dark and Other Stories, was released by Subterranean Press in 2009.

Acclaimed fantasist Mary Robinette Kowal has enchanted many fans with her beloved novels featuring a Regency setting in which magic — known here as glamour — is real. In Valour and Vanity, master glamourists Jane and Vincent find themselves in the sort of a magical adventure that might result if Jane Austen wrote Ocean’s Eleven.

After Melody’s wedding, the Ellsworths and Vincents accompany the young couple on their tour of the continent. Jane and Vincent plan to separate from the party and travel to Murano to study with glassblowers there, but their ship is set upon by Barbary corsairs while en route. It is their good fortune that they are not enslaved, but they lose everything to the pirates and arrive in Murano destitute.

Jane and Vincent are helped by a kind local they meet en route, but Vincent is determined to become self-reliant and get their money back, and hatches a plan to do so. But when so many things are not what they seem, even the best laid plans conceal a few pitfalls. The ensuing adventure is a combination of the best parts of magical fantasy and heist novels, set against a glorious Regency backdrop.

Valour and Vanity was published on April 29 by Tor Books. It is 408 pages, priced at 25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The jacket art is by Larry Rostant.

Author Spotlight on James Sutter

Author Spotlight on James Sutter

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redemption engineI recently got a chance to talk with my friend (and editor) James Sutter about his new novel, The Redemption Engine, which debuts this week. In this wide-ranging and honest Q&A, James talked about his book and characters, the writing process, misperceptions about genre fiction — particularly of the tie-in flavor — and his hopes and dreams.

What would you say to someone wary of reading game fiction? (I would personally point them towards your first novel, Death’s Heretic, being number three on the Barnes & Noble Book Club’s 2011 Best Fantasy list.) But what would you say?

 

I would say that I used to be wary of it, too. As a kid, I read a ton of tie-in novels for properties like Star Wars, Dragonlance, etc. Then I got older and snobbier, and decided that anything with a logo couldn’t possibly be quality art. I won’t pretend there wasn’t evidence for that — a lot of tie-in books aren’t great. But as Theodore Sturgeon taught us, a lot of any art form isn’t great.

Once I started working in the game industry and realized just how many fabulous authors have done or currently do tie-in work, my opinion changed again. When you’ve got folks like Brandon Sanderson and Greg Bear writing tie-in novels, can you really claim that they’re somehow going to lose their chops just for that one book? And the truth is that great authors have always written novelizations, scripts, tie-ins, and other work-for-hire. Hell, Isaac Asimov himself wrote the novelization for Fantastic Voyage.

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New Treasures: Thornlost by Melanie Rawn

New Treasures: Thornlost by Melanie Rawn

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Thornlost Melanie Rawn-smallMelanie Rawn burst onto the fantasy scene in 1988 with her debut novel Dragon Prince, an instant success that became the first part of the Dragon Prince Trilogy (and, at nearly 600 pages, certainly helped usher in the 90s fat fantasy craze.)

How successful was Dragon Prince and its fat fantasy sequels? 26 years later, they’re all still in print. Pretty darned amazing, especially when you consider that half the New Treasures I’ve covered in the past six months are out of print already.

Rawn followed her breakout success with the Dragon Star trilogy (1991-94) and the first two novels of the Exiles trilogy. And then… silence, for nearly ten years.

She eventually set the Exiles trilogy aside (the final volume, The Captal’s Tower, is still listed as forthcoming on her website) and turned to urban fantasy with Spellbinder (2006), telling fans in a postscript to that book that she was battling clinical depression and needed to move on to other projects to speed her recovery. Fire Raiser arrived in 2009 and she returned to epic fantasy at last with The Diviner (2012).

She’s been working tirelessly ever since, delivering the first two volumes of the Glass Thorns series: Touchstone (2012) and Elsewhens (2013). Now she returns to the rich fantasy world of those volumes with Thornlost, the third volume in the series.

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A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

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oie_520266yr2OCRWhAfter several weeks spent among ghoulish haunts, a Cthulhu-haunted island, and nightmare dimensions, I thought a trip to ancient Britain — the sun-dappled forests of the High Weald and the rolling downs of the Vale of Kent — was needed. Yes, I’ve visited previously in reviews of Henry Treece’s The Great Captains and David Drake’s The Dragonlord, and Keith Taylor’s Bard (1981) is a return to post-Roman Britain in the days of Arthur and Saxon and Jutish invaders.

Bard is one of those books that my dad bought years ago and I never bothered to read. I didn’t know anything about it or its author, but I was done with my short-lived infatuation with Celtic fantasy. Nothing about it enticed me to pick it up… until I started blogging about swords & sorcery.

As I read articles and websites on heroic fiction, I quickly learned that Keith Taylor was an important voice in the field of Robert E. Howard scholarship and then I started seeing very good reviews of Bard. I remembered that a copy was tucked away in the attic so I went and retrieved it and I’m quite glad I did.

Bard is a fix-up of four previously published stories and one original tale about Felimid mac Fal of Eire, wielder of the magic sword, Kincaid, and player of the ancient harp, Golden Singer. Under the right circumstances, the harp allows him to cast spells and play songs to influence his audience. Blessed with talent, wit, and cunning, Felimid is able to enter the courts of ferocious Jutish warlords and survive encounters with monsters and sorcerers in haunted forests.

Though tied together by a pair of ongoing plots, Bard reads more like the scattered adventures of a peripatetic traveler than a novel. Despite its melancholic setting in a time of fading magic and invaders from across the sea, this book is tremendous fun. Felimid is a bold, lively character with a winning way, well worth any heroic fantasy reader’s time.

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The Series Series: Irenicon by Aidan Harte

The Series Series: Irenicon by Aidan Harte

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Irenicon by Aidan Harte-smallWelcome to Rasenna, a shining city-state turned failed state, where river spirits haunt the streets and mistake themselves for the citizens they’ve drowned. Rasenna’s people hide in their towers at night, and even by day fear the river their enemy wielded to cut their city in two. With the city’s legitimate ruling house reduced to one girl not yet of age, the closest thing it has to law is the twenty-year vendetta between the gang that rules north of the Irenicon and the gang that rules to its south. Both sides boast masters of a martial art perfectly organic to the world of this book, one that could arise in no other.

Can a city recover from two decades of grief, madness, and self-destruction? Can these people change in time to save themselves? They’d better, because the rival city of sorcerous Engineers that smashed them before may well do so again. The masters of Concord have striven to perfect their Wave technology. Any city they choose to strike now will be scoured from the soil of Etruria.

Meanwhile — what are the Concordians playing at? — the enemy sends Rasenna an Engineer to build a bridge over the hated river. It’s a bridge no Rasenneisi citizen wants. The Irenicon and its water spirits are not keen to be bridged, either.

Aidan Harte has been justly praised for his world-building in his debut novel. Irenicon is, almost, what we might get if Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities had lingered for a few hundred pages in one of its gem-perfect vignettes. Almost, except that Harte’s stunning gift for setting does not yet extend to dialogue, characterization, or prose style. Irenicon will not be a classic, but it is a fine, fun read.

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Future Treasures: Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Future Treasures: Skin Game by Jim Butcher

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Skin Game Jim Butcher.-smallJim Butcher is something of an inspiration to modern fantasy writers.

Harry Dresden was not a hit when he first appeared, way back in the paperback original Storm Front (2000). Roc sent me a copy and I remember I couldn’t find anyone interested in reviewing it. Ditto with the next few, Fool Moon (2001) and Grave Peril (2001). Thomas Cunningham was the first to start reviewing them for us and he quickly became an unabashed fan.

Things happened fast after that. All my review copies were snapped up (except for my first edition of Summer Knight, which accidently ended up in a dollar bin at my booth at the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, where it was found by a lucky fan). I bought a complete set of the hardcover omnibus editions from the Science Fiction Book Club — and they were loaned out and never returned. I bought a second copy and it suffered the same fate.

Jim Butcher began to hit bestseller lists. I clearly remember the moment when I realized he’d crossed over to literary megastardom — it was at Dragon*Con 2010, when I glimpsed the size of the mob that showed up to get his autograph. The line wound around the room, out the door, and down several blocks.

Jim Butcher is proof positive that it’s still possible to achieve bestseller status starting with a midlist paperback series. That’s the dream of virtually every midlist fantasy writer, and for the greater part of the last decade, as publishing suffered one upheaval after another — the rise of Amazon, the collapse of Borders, and the shift to e-books, just to name a few — it was beginning to look like that dream may have suffered a hard death.

So there’s a lot of reasons to celebrate Jim Butcher’s success. But for most of us, it’s enough to know that the fifteenth volume of one of the most popular fantasy series on the market has finally arrived, breaking an 18-month drought since the last volume, Cold Days (November 2012).

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The 2014 David Gemmell Award Nominees

The 2014 David Gemmell Award Nominees

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The Daylight War-smallThe nominations for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2013 have been announced by the DGLA. May we have the envelope please!

The Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel

  • The Daylight War, Peter V Brett (Del Rey)
  • Emperor of Thorns, Mark Lawrence (Harper Collins)
  • The Republic of Thieves, Scott Lynch (Gollancz)
  • A Memory of Light, Brandon Sanderson & Robert Jordan (Tor)
  • War Master’s Gate, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)

The David Gemmell Legend Award is a fan-voted award administered by the DGLA. The Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel was first granted in 2009 to Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves; in 2010, the winner was Graham McNeill’s Empire: The Legend of Sigmar; and in 2011, it was Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. In 2012, the winner was The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss and last year, The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks took home the top prize.

The Gemmell Award is not the only award administered by the DGLA; every year it gives out two others: The Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer and The Ravenheart Award for Best Fantasy Cover Art. So much excitement packed into one ceremony! The nominees for those awards follow.

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