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Vintage Treasures: Rogers’ Rangers by John Silbersack

Vintage Treasures: Rogers’ Rangers by John Silbersack

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Rogers' Rangers-smallIf you know the name John Silbersack, it’s likely for his many significant accomplishments as a publisher and literary agent.

Silbersack has founded no less than six different imprints, including ROC Books at Penguin, Warner Aspect, and Harper Prism. Over a decade ago, he walked away from publishing and decided to become an agent, partnering with Trident Media Group, where he now reps some of the biggest names in the industry, including Barb & J.C. Hendee, Guy Gavriel Kay, E. E. Knight, William F. Nolan, David Schow, Paul Park, and the Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert estates.

But back in the early 80s, this publishing Renaissance man also tried his hand at writing and editing. With Victoria Schochet, he edited the first four volumes of The Berkley Showcase (1980 – 1982), an anthology of science fiction and fantasy that presented original work from Berkley authors. It lasted five volumes and published a fabulous range of fiction from Orson Scott Card, R A Lafferty, Pat Cadigan, John Kessel, Howard Waldrop, Connie Willis, Thomas M Disch, Marge Piercy, Eric Van Lustbader, and many others.

All very interesting. But what we want to talk about today is Silbersack’s sole novel: Rogers’ Rangers, a sequel to the original Buck Rogers novel, published by Ace Books in 1983, which I found in a collection of SF books from the 1980s I acquired two months ago.

Back in 1979, Glen A. Larson, the producer behind the original incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, launched a new SF TV show for Universal: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, starring Gil Gerard and Erin Gray (and the voice of Mel Blanc as Twiki, Buck’s robot companion.) The series was a hit, and I vividly remember seeing the pilot episode in theaters, shortly before the TV version launched.

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The Series Series: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

The Series Series: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

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Blood and Iron Jon Sprunk-smallOf all the wild re-envisionings of the Crusades I’ve seen lately, Jon Sprunk’s Blood and Iron may be the wildest. His alternate-universe Europeans are recognizably European, but the opposing culture they face is that of a Babylonian Empire that never fell. And why has this Babylon-by-another-name persisted for thousands of years, so powerful that only its own internal strife can shake it? Because its royals actually have the supernatural powers and demi-god ancestry that the ruling class of our world’s Fertile Crescent claimed.

The Crusades seem to be having a moment in fantasy literature. This is the third novel I’ve covered this year that reimagines them. David Hair’s novel Mage’s Blood separated east and west with a sea so storm-ridden it could only be crossed every twelve years by means of a giant magic bridge, and the twelfth year coming was sure to unleash war. The alternate history in M. Harold Page’s Marshal Versus the Assassins was much more familiar — basically our own, with the addition of a few conspiracies and with unambiguously real miracles.

Jon Sprunk’s book takes the prize for strange worldbuilding. The Akeshian Empire is approximately what the Akkadian Empire might have looked like, had each of its major cities lasted as long and urbanized as complexly as Rome did. When monotheism comes to Akeshia, it arrives as a local heresy run amok, rather than as a foreign faith attracting converts. Akeshia’s gods are not kind gods; its semi-divine ruling caste are not nice people. However, when our hero comes to understand them from something closer to their own perspective, he finds much to admire and many people worth trying to save from the civil war that is beginning to take shape around him.

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The Novels of Michael Shea: The Incompleat Nifft

The Novels of Michael Shea: The Incompleat Nifft

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The Incompleat Nifft-smallUnder editor Eric Flint, Baen Books has led the way in producing inexpensive mass market reprints of some of the most essential classic SF and Fantasy of the 20th Century — including Robert E. Howard, Andre Norton, James H. Schmitz., Murray Leinster, and P. C. Hodgell’s God Stalker Chronicles, among many, many others (They’ve continued in this tradition with fabulous anthologies, including the recent In Space No One Can Hear You Scream and many others.)

In 1997, Baen Books turned to Michael Shea, publishing his second Nifft the Lean novel, The Mines of Behemoth. By 2000, they were preparing to trumpet the arrival of his third, but by that point the original World Fantasy Award-winning volume Nifft the Lean had been out of print for almost two decades.

So five months before the release of The A’rak, Baen bundled both of the first two novels into a single paperback, cleverly titled The Incompleat Nifft, signally the impending arrival of the what would be the final book in the series. At 576 pages it was a terrific bargain, collecting both Nifft the Lean and The Mines of Behemoth under a Gary Ruddell cover, and it has become perhaps the most collectible paperback in Shea’s catalog.

This Time, They Would Make a Killing

Join master thief Nifft the Lean with his companion-at-arms, mighty barbarian Barnar Hammer-Hand, as they trust to their wits and their luck. Once Nifft and Barnar were hired by the ghost of a dead woman to kidnap the man who betrayed her and drag him down to hell to join her. A simple task — or so they thought at first…

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New Treasures: The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan

New Treasures: The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan

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The Cold Commands Richard Morgan-smallWay back in Black Gate 13, the distinguished John C. Hocking contributed a feature review of Richard K. Morgan’s first fantasy novel and it alerted me to the fact that I was missing out on a major new work of sword & sorcery.

Here’s what he said, in part:

Richard K Morgan has made a name for himself with a chain of dark, slickly written science fiction thrillers… one might reasonably expect Morgan to continue in that style… Instead, he has written 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.

You can see why I was intrigued. Can that Hocking fellow write a review or what?

I’m a little late to talk about the sequel, The Cold Commands, especially in a column that ostensibly deals exclusively with the latest releases. But I just discovered it, so I’m going to do it anyway (I blame Hocking.)

The Cold Commands was released in in hardcover in 2011. It is subtitled Book Two of A Land For Heroes. You know what that means: now that there are two books, Morgan was forced to come up with a name for his series.

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Future Treasures: The Silk Map, A Gaunt and Bone Novel by Chris Willrich, Due May 6

Future Treasures: The Silk Map, A Gaunt and Bone Novel by Chris Willrich, Due May 6

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The Silk Map Chris WillrichWe published Chris Willrich’s gloriously imaginative sword-and-sorcery tale “The Lions of Karthagar” in Black Gate 15. I’ve been very curious about his popular Gaunt and Bone tales, which have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Flashing Swords, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other places. The first Gaunt and Bone book, The Scroll of Years — which contained a complete novel plus the very first published story, “The Thief with Two Deaths” (from F&SF, June 2000) — was released in September of last year and now we have the details on the sequel.

At the end of The Scroll of Years, the poet Persimmon Gaunt and her husband, the thief Imago Bone, had saved their child from evil forces at the price of trapping him within a pocket dimension. Now they will attempt what seems impossible; they will seek a way to recover their son. Allied with Snow Pine, a scrappy bandit who’s also lost her child to the Scroll of Years, Gaunt and Bone awaken the Great Sage, a monkeylike demigod of the East, currently trapped by vaster powers beneath a mountain. The Sage knows of a way to reach the Scroll — but there is a price. The three must seek the world’s greatest treasure and bring it back to him. They must find the worms of the alien Iron Moths, whose cocoons produce the wondrous material ironsilk.

And so the rogues join a grand contest waged along three thousand miles of dangerous and alluring trade routes between East and West. For many parties have simultaneously uncovered fragments of the Silk Map, a document pointing the way toward a nest of the Iron Moths. Our heroes tangle with Western treasure hunters, a blind mystic warrior and his homicidal magic carpet, a nomad princess determined to rebuild her father’s empire, and a secret society obsessed with guarding the lost paradise where the Moths are found — even if paradise must be protected by murder.

Chris Willrich is also the author of the Pathfinder Tales novel The Dagger of Trust.

The Silk Map will be on published by Pyr Books on May 6, 2014. It is 442 pages, and will be priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. Visit Chris’s website here.

New Treasures: Night Owls by Lauren M. Roy

New Treasures: Night Owls by Lauren M. Roy

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Night Owls Lauren M. Roy-smallI love fantasies about book stores. They already seem magical to me anyway, so they’re a logical setting for tales of strange goings-on and otherwordly adventure. Add a cast of quirky characters and a supernatural menace or two, and I’m sold.

Night Owls bookstore is the one spot on campus open late enough to help out even the most practiced slacker. The employees’ penchant for fighting the evil creatures of the night is just a perk…

Valerie McTeague’s business model is simple: provide the students of Edgewood College with a late-night study haven and stay as far away as possible from the underworld conflicts of her vampire brethren. She’s experienced that life, and the price she paid was far too high for her to ever want to return.

Elly Garrett hasn’t known any life except that of fighting the supernatural beings known as Creeps or Jackals. But she always had her mentor and foster father by her side — until he gave his life protecting a book that the Creeps desperately want to get their hands on.

When the book gets stashed at Night Owls for safekeeping, those Val holds nearest and dearest are put in mortal peril. Now Val and Elly will have to team up, along with a mismatched crew of humans, vampires, and lesbian succubi, to stop the Jackals from getting their claws on the book and unleashing unnamed horrors…

I can’t find much about author Lauren M. Roy — I eventually uncovered her website — but I did discover she is a bookseller, in addition to being a first-time novelist and a freelance writer for games such as Trail of Cthulhu, Dragon Age, and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. I also found a pic of her wearing a cool hat at GoodReads. I think all authors should be required to wear cool hats, so we can spot them in public. And buy them lunch.

Night Owls was published on February 25, 2014 by Ace Books. It is 296 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions. It is the first volume in the Night Owls series.

Review of Pathfinder Tales: Stalking the Beast by Howard Andrew Jones

Review of Pathfinder Tales: Stalking the Beast by Howard Andrew Jones

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Pathfinder Tales Stalking the Beast-smallLike many fantasy fans of my generation and the generation before (Gen X and Baby Boom respectively), I was ushered into the genre by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and C.S. Lewis. There were others, of course, but those were the big three. Narnia gave me my first taste of a secondary world populated by mythical creatures, witches and wizards, and talking beasts. Burroughs inched me toward a more Americanized “sword and sorcery” via the “sword-and-planet” Barsoom novels. Howard’s gritty, fabled world of a certain barbaric Cimmerian delivered the full-on S&S.

Branching out from Narnia, I found my way to the towering, epic high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. And moving on from Howard I stumbled into the dangerous alleyways of Lankhmar in Fritz Leiber’s world of Nehwon.

Not surprisingly, when I got wind of a game that allowed you to invent your own characters and take them on adventures in such worlds via some cool dice, maps, rulebooks, and a little bit of imagination, I was all over it. By the sixth grade I was a devout Dungeons & Dragons player, and Tolkien was my favorite author. Both statements remain true.

So perhaps it’s a bit surprising, given this profile, that I never delved into any of the D&D novelizations — the Dragonlance Chronicles and their ilk. (I did read some of the D&D Endless Quest books, which were in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure, lured by their solo-gaming appeal — a craving that was better met by the Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy game books.)

My reading of Howard Andrew Jones’s new novel Pathfinder Tales: Stalking the Beast may be a test case on whether it stands on its own merits because, first, I’ve just never been much into tie-in novels. (Somewhere along the line I read a Star Wars novel, and in junior high I went on a Doctor Who kick. There were also a couple movie novelizations in the mix — inevitably written by Alan Dean Foster. But when it comes to full disclosure on that point, there’s just not much to disclose.)

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The Novels of Michael Shea: The A’rak

The Novels of Michael Shea: The A’rak

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The A'rak-smallMichael Shea’s classic Nifft the Lean was published in 1982 and won the World Fantasy Award, a rare honor for a  sword and sorcery collection. Nfift returned in a three-part novel serialized in Algis Budrys’ Tomorrow Speculative Fiction magazine (June – November, 1996), eventually collected by Baen Books in paperback as The Mines of Behemoth.

Nifft made one last appearance in the year 2000, in his third and final book: The A’rak.

Prosperous Hagia’s vaults brimmed with gold. Her warehouse bulged with the goods of the Southern Seas. She had the Spider-God to thank for her prosperity.

But beneath Hagia’s ancient bargain with the A’Rak lay the direst danger. That mercenary kingdom had mortgaged its soul in its pact with the giant arachnoid. When the note fell due, death of the most hideous kind awaited the multitudes of that affluent and bustling nation.

As Hagia’s debt falls due, two foreigners arrive in Big Quay, her capital: Lagademe and her team, foremost among the world’s Nuncios — deliverers of anything to anywhere — and Nifft the Lean, thief and rogue extraordinaire.

Nifft and Lagademe, strangers to one another at the outset, will soon be struggling side by side for their lives — and a nation’s survival — against the most hideous foe in the annals of Sword and Sorcery fiction.

The A’rak was published by Baen in October 2000. It is 320 pages, originally priced at $6.99 in paperback. The cover was by Gary Ruddell. It was never reprinted, and there is no digital edition, so copies are in some demand.

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Caught Between Rebels and the Empire’s Blackest Magic: Beyond the Veil: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

Caught Between Rebels and the Empire’s Blackest Magic: Beyond the Veil: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

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Beyond the Veil Janet Morris-smallI continue with my review of the 5-star, Author’s Cut editions of Janet Morris’s classic of Homeric Heroic Fantasy, the Beyond Sanctuary Trilogy, of which Beyond the Veil is the second book. Once again, she does not disappoint in this stirring novel of political and religious intrigue, dark magic, gods and men, witches and mages, and the price of love and war.

This is a pivotal book in the trilogy, where foreshadowing and story threads begin to weave in and out to form a tapestry, telling a tale of friends who become foes, enemies who become allies, and what fate lies in store for certain demigods and mortals.

Now, after the battle to win Wizardwall that took place in book one, Beyond Sanctuary, Tempus, Niko, and the Sacred Band are caught between the local rebels and the empire of Mygdonia’s blackest magic. Once again, “War is coming, sending ahead its customary harbingers: fear and falsity and fools.”

It begins with the murder of a courier on his way to meet with Tempus, and the arrival of a young woman named Kama, of the 3rd Commandoes, (a unit of special rangers originally formed by Tempus) who seeks audience with Tempus, who is also known as Riddler. Her mission is to take 11-year old Shamshi, the young wizard-boy, back home to Mygdonia.

Shamshi, once a pawn in the game played by the late sorcerer Datan in the previous novel, is still under the spell of Roxane the witch, but is now being held as a guest-hostage by Tempus and the Sacred Band. Though he may be a child in the eyes of men, Shamshi is already plotting against Tempus and Niko.

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The Novels of Michael Shea: The Mines of Behemoth

The Novels of Michael Shea: The Mines of Behemoth

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The Mines of Behemoth-smallThe last two Michael Shea novels we discussed, The Extra and Attack on Sunrise, took his career in an intriguing and very different direction. But I still admit a greater fascination with his Nifft the Lean novels, Nifft the Lean (1982), The Mines of Behemoth (1997), and The A’rak (2000). Baen Books published the last two in attractive paperback editions, with covers by Gary Ruddell, and I’ve always thought they were some of the most eye-catching sword-and-sorcery on the market.

We lost Michael last month, but very fortunately for us, he left a fine body of work behind to remember him by, including The Color Out Of Time (1984), In Yana, the Touch of Undying (1985); and his highly acclaimed collections Polyphemus (1987), The Autopsy and Other Tales (2008), and Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2010).

Nifft the Lean, and his companion-at-arms, Barnar Hammer-Hand, were often lucky. Enroute to working Costard’s sap mine — very dangerous, and sometimes nauseating work far below ground — they were shipwrecked. But this proved fortuitous, when they met Bunt, who had been seeking just such as they. If they would work the sap mine, but also bring back twenty gills of fluid, he would make them exceedingly wealthy. So it was settled. They would suck the sap from the servants of the monstrous insectile queen — and they would bring back some of the ichor that she alone exuded — and they would be rich. It seemed relatively easy. They wouldn’t have to go to hell at all, for instance.

Of course, the best laid plans sometimes do go a little astray.

The Mines of Behemoth was published in 1997 by Baen Books. It is 256 pages, with an original price of $5.99 in paperback. It is out of print and there is no digital edition.

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