Browsed by
Category: Series Fantasy

Swords and Edgar Rice Burroughs

Swords and Edgar Rice Burroughs

Comments 13 comments

Burroughs-MarsERB is probably best known to people who enjoy Fantasy and SF as the creator of the John Carter of Mars series, the Carson of Venus books, and the Pellucidar world-in-the-centre-of-the-earth stories. Then, of course, there’s Tarzan, probably second only to Dumas’s Three Musketeers as a source of movies, TV shows, and comics.

Following up on my recent sword-fighting posts, I’d like to talk about two ERB novels that are much less well-known than the ones I refer to above, and yet which have the same spirit of adventure and, for me almost more important, the same emphasis on sword play.

Both The Outlaw of Torn (1914) and The Mad King (1915) are what used to be called “romantic adventures.” This wasn’t because there was a love interest (though everyone familiar with ERB’s work knows there was), but because of the extraordinary demands placed on the hero, usually for extreme action, courage, fortitude, and sacrifice.

The Indiana Jones films are probably the closest deliberate modern equivalent to this genre, and while it’s hard for us to think of Iron Man, or Spiderman, as romantic adventurers, in the way the term was understood back then, that’s exactly what they would be.

…

Read More Read More

Year of the Unicorn by Andre Norton

Year of the Unicorn by Andre Norton

Comments 11 comments

Andre Norton Year of the Unicorn-smallOn the first day of the Year of the Unicorn, twelve and one young women are to be delivered to the Wastelands beyond High Hallack and into the hands of sorcerous shape-changers known as the Were Riders. In battle, they change their forms into those of fierce animals, instilling terror in their opponents, then ripping them apart with tooth and claw.

The lords of High Hallack turned to the Riders in their desperate search for any defense against the unstoppable invaders from Alizon across the sea. The Riders agreed, but demanded payment of those brides-to-be, due on the first day of the new year following the war’s end.

Andre Norton’s novel, Year of the Unicorn, introduces Gillan, an orphan relegated to a dreary future in the abbey of Norstead, who instead exchanges herself in secret for one of the appointed brides. In disguise, she rides into the Wastes in search of any life beyond the one she seems fated to. There she finds her beastly groom and discovers her magical powers.

Since discovering how good Andre Norton’s Witch World series is, I’ve been slowly making my way through its sixteen books. (There are later books by other writers, but it’s Norton’s original writing that has hooked me.) The four novels and dozen or so stories I’ve read so far have ranged in style from wild science-fantasy to swords & sorcery to Gothic mystery. Some have even read like fairy tales from a world catty-corner to our own. Year of the Unicorn, first novel in the High Hallack sequence, is one of those.

As a child, Gillan was rescued at sea from Alizon raiders by a High Hallack nobleman. She was too young to know where she was from or how she came to be captured, but her dark hair leads him to believe she’s from the East. Deciding that if she was worth the Alizoners’ trouble she might have some future value, the nobleman raises her in his own household.

…

Read More Read More

Expand Your Digital Library with 300 Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less

Expand Your Digital Library with 300 Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less

Comments 2 comments

three-parts-dead-smallI don’t know about you, but when I first bought my Kindle, I dreamed of having a vast portable library of great new fantasy books, patiently acquired through diligent bargain hunting. Also, I dreamed about Jennifer Lawrence in a Carmen Miranda banana hat, but that’s a different topic.

The Kindle turned out to be pretty great. Huge avalanche of great new digital books over the last few years — also great. But who has time to constantly hunt for the latest discounts?

John DeNardo at SF Signal, that’s who. John regularly keeps up-to-date on digital special offers at Amazon.com and reports on them in fabulous detail. But this morning, he outdid himself, posting a list of 300 Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Kindle eBook deals for $3.99 or less — including some of the most intriguing books we’ve covered in the last few months:

The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley Beaulieu — $0.99
The Straits of Galahesh by Bradley Beaulieu — $0.99
Legends: Stories in Honor of David Gemmell edited by Ian Whates — $3.99
The Woodcutter by Kate Danley — $0.99
The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells — $2.99
Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone — $2.99
Necropolis by Michael Dempsey — $1.99
Clockwork Phoenix edited by Mike Allen — $3.99
The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty — $1.99
Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio — $3.79
Chrysanthe by Yves Meynard — $1.99
The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu — $3.79

And many, many others. See John’s detailed list of discount digital delights at SF Signal. And remember to thank him, next time you see him.

New Treasures: Necessary Evil by Ian Tregillis

New Treasures: Necessary Evil by Ian Tregillis

Comments 0 Comment

Necessary Evil Ian Tregillis-smallWe celebrate the start of many a fantasy series here on Black Gate; I think we should pay just as much attention when an author brings one to a close. Especially when it involves Nazi supermen, the warlocks of Britain, and world-destroying Cthulhu-like monsters, like Ian Tregillis’s Milkweed alternate history trilogy.

We covered the first volume, Bitter Seeds, when it was released in paperback in 2012. Volume two, The Coldest War, was published in paperback in July of last year, and the closing volume, Necessary Evil, arrives in paperback today.

12 May 1940. Westminster, London, England: the early days of World War II.

Again.

Raybould Marsh, one of “our” Britain’s best spies, has traveled to another Earth in a desperate attempt to save at least one timeline from the Cthulhu-like monsters who have been observing our species from space and have already destroyed Marsh’s timeline. In order to accomplish this, he must remove all traces of the supermen that were created by the Nazi war machine and caused the specters from outer space to notice our planet in the first place.

His biggest challenge is the mad seer Gretel, one of the most powerful of the Nazi creations, who has sent a version of herself to this timeline to thwart Marsh. Why would she stand in his way? Because she has seen that in all the timelines she dies and she is determined to stop that from happening, even if it means destroying most of humanity in the process. And Marsh is the only man who can stop her.

Ian Tregillis’s latest novel, Something More Than Night, a murder mystery set in Heaven, was published in hardcover in December. Emily Mah interviewed him for Black Gate early last year, and our roving reporter Howard Andrew Jones reported on Ian’s appearance (and his uncanny resemblance to our Managing Editor) at ConFusion in Detroit just last month.

Necessary Evil was published today by Tor Books. It is 384 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

Comments 20 comments

The Wood Beyond the World William Morris-smallThe Wood Beyond the World
William Morris
Ballantine Books (237 pages, June 1969, $0.95)
Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo

With this installment in my reviews of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, we come to the first volume by a man who has one of the worst reputations for prose in the series.

I’m talking of course about William Morris. Lin Carter published four of Morris’s works in five volumes; The Well at the World’s End came in at two volumes. Carter appears to have had plans for another four volumes.

In his introduction, Carter makes the claim that Morris invented the modern quest fantasy. Personally, I think that may be stretching things a bit. Morris did invent a number of things, including the Morris chair, but I’m not sure he should get sole credit for modern fantasy.

I must admit I came to this book with some trepidation. After the Adult Fantasy line was canceled, the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library published 24 volumes, with five by Morris. I attempted to read one, the collection Golden Wings and Other Stories, about ten or twelve years ago. I didn’t get very far.

Fortunately, The Wood Beyond the World isn’t a long book. Furthermore, it’s broken up into short chapters, with a line break and a heading before every paragraph or two. Of course with Morris, paragraphs can be more than a page long.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Immortal Muse by Stephen Leigh

New Treasures: Immortal Muse by Stephen Leigh

Comments 0 Comment

Immortal Muse-smallI bought my first Stephen Leigh book, Slow Fall to Dawn, the opening volume in the epic tale of the space-faring Hoorka assassins, way back in 1981. Since then, he’s published some 20 novels and over 40 short stories, including six volumes in Ray Bradbury Presents, and The Woods (2012). The most recent was the omnibus Assassin’s Dawn, which collects all three books in the Hoorka Trilogy: Slow Fall to Dawn (1981), Dance of the Hag(1983), and A Quiet of Stone (1984).

He also writes fantasy under the name S.L. Farrell, including three volumes of the Nessantico Cycle and The Cloudmages Trilogy.

His newest novel features the famous alchemist Nicholas Flamel, who’s also featured prominently in Michael Scott’s bestselling The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, just to name some recent examples. I wonder if we’re witnessing the birth of the new genre of Nicholas Flame literature. Could happen.

Immortal Muse is an unforgettable tale that sweeps readers from 1300s Paris to modern-day New York — with interludes in the 1635 Rome of Bernini, the 1737 Venice of Vivaldi, the French Revolution in Paris with Lavoisier and Robespierre, 1814 London with William Blake and John Polidori, fin de siècle Vienna with Gustav Klimt, and World War II France with Charlotte Salomon.

…

Read More Read More

Travel the Magic Highways with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

Travel the Magic Highways with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

Comments 3 comments

Magic Highways The Early Jack Vance-smallLast February, I wrote about how excited I was to find a copy of Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two in the Dealer’s Room at Capricon. I had purchased Volume One, Hard Luck Diggings, when it was released in 2010; it is now long out of print and new copies start at around $450 at Amazon.com. Dream Castles is now sold out as well and prices are already starting to creep up, so I was pretty jazzed to find a copy when I did.

When I wrote enthusiastically about Dream Castles last year, I said:

Jack Vance, who at 96 years old is still with us, is one of the last remaining writers from the Golden Age of Science Fiction (the only other one I can think of is Fred Pohl). He is the author of some of the most celebrated SF and fantasy of the 20th Century, including “The Dragon Masters,” “The Last Castle,” and The Dying Earth novels.

Jack Vance died on May 26th of last year, and Frederik Pohl passed away less than four months later, robbing us of two of our genre’s brightest lights.

Still, their words are still with us — and what words they are. I have no idea how many volumes are projected in The Early Jack Vance (Volume Four, Minding the Stars, is scheduled to be released this month), but every one is a delight.

Part of that is the gorgeous covers by Tom Kidd; part is the high quality production and design from publisher Subterranean, and of course part of it is simply finally having the early pulp fiction of one of the greatest fantasy writers of the 20th Century collected for the first time.

…

Read More Read More

An Origin Story Mashed With a First-Contact Story: A Review of The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu

An Origin Story Mashed With a First-Contact Story: A Review of The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu

Comments 4 comments

The Lives Of Tao-smallThe Lives of Tao is the rare science fiction book set in modern times. No space exploration here, unless you mean the Quasing, the alien race that’s been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) orchestrating human events since… well, since there were humans to orchestrate.

Quasing are beings so ethereal that they must live within a corporeal host to survive. Once inside a host, the Quasing can only leave if the host organism dies. In essence, Quasings are immortal as long as there is a living host nearby.

The Quasing’s main goal used to be to get humans to create interstellar travel so they could get to their home planet. Now, however, the Quasing are split into two factions (the good-guy Prophus and the bad-guy Genjix), whose main goal seems to be defeating the other. Tao is a member of the Prophus faction.

When Tao’s host dies during a mission against the Genjix, Tao needs to find a new host, pronto. Enter Roan Tan: an overweight programmer with low self-esteem who’s never run a mile, let alone held a gun, in real life. The next few months finds Tao whipping Roan into some semblance of a covert operative so they can thwart the Genjix’s secret project.

There’s plenty here to enjoy. Chu choreographs vivid action scenes, he injects humor seamlessly into dialogue, and he makes the world-building fun. Chu had all of history at his disposal, after all, and he took full advantage.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Shadow Ops: Breach Zone by Myke Cole

New Treasures: Shadow Ops: Breach Zone by Myke Cole

Comments 5 comments

Shadow Ops Breach Zone-smallApparently, Myke Cole never gets tired of being awesome. He wrote the awesome short story “Naktong Flow” for Black Gate 13 and all that awesome spilled over into his first novel Shadow Ops: Control Point, which Peter V. Brett called “Black Hawk Down meets the X-Men.” He was awesome when our roving reporter Patty Templeton interviewed him (totally awesome!), and in his essay “Selling Shadow Point,” which busted open a lot of myths about publishing your first fantasy novel. His second book Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier was, guess what, awesome, and he was even awesome last month at ConFusion (according to Howard Andrew Jones, who knows all about being awesome.)

Now here he is with his third novel, Shadow Ops: Breach Zone. And it’s awesome. Next time you run into Myke, do yourself a favor and ask how you, too, can become awesome.  On top of everything else, Myke’s a very gracious guy and I’m sure he’ll give you some pointers. And I bet they’ll be awesome.

The Great Reawakening did not come quietly. Across the country and in every nation, people began “coming up Latent,” developing terrifying powers — summoning storms, raising the dead, and setting everything they touch ablaze. Those who Manifest must choose: become a sheepdog who protects the flock or a wolf who devours it…

In the wake of a bloody battle at Forward Operating Base Frontier and a scandalous presidential impeachment, Lieutenant Colonel Jan Thorsson, call sign “Harlequin,” becomes a national hero and a pariah to the military that is the only family he’s ever known.

In the fight for Latent equality, Oscar Britton is positioned to lead a rebellion in exile, but a powerful rival beats him to the punch: Scylla, a walking weapon who will stop at nothing to end the human-sanctioned apartheid against her kind.

When Scylla’s inhuman forces invade New York City, the Supernatural Operations Corps are the only soldiers equipped to prevent a massacre. In order to redeem himself with the military, Harlequin will be forced to face off with this havoc-wreaking woman from his past, warped by her power into something evil…

Shadow Ops: Breach Zone is the third novel in the Shadow Ops series. It was published on January 28, 2014 by Ace Books. It is 370 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions.

Vintage Treasures: And All Between by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Vintage Treasures: And All Between by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Comments 8 comments

Zilpha Keatley Snyder And All Between-smallI love doing these Vintage Treasures articles. I could tell you they’re popular, or they bring some historical weight to the blog, but really, they’re just an excuse to scan some of my favorite old paperbacks and happily yak about them for a few paragraphs. It’s the simple things that keep you happy.

But every once in a while, it’s interesting to feature a book, and an author, that I know absolutely nothing about. And that’s the case with today’s subject, And All Between, a 1985 paperback from Tor and the second volume in the Green-Sky trilogy, by an author I’ve never heard of:  Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

I picked it up in the Dealer’s Room at Capricon 34 two weeks ago. I bought it from Erin and Rich at Starfarer’s Despatch for two bucks, because the cover was so gorgeous that I couldn’t say no. I mean, just look at it.

Yes, it’s the second book in a trilogy. But that just makes it more intriguing to a paperback collector like me. Now I have two more to track down. Sweet! I hope their covers are just as luscious (turns out, they are.)

To be honest, the back cover text kinds of make the novel sound like an episode of The Smurfs, which isn’t really a selling point.

The Erdlings live in the underground world below the magical root — banished there forever by the Ol-zhaan, supreme members of the Kindar, who live in the lofty branches of their forest home in Green-sky.

The Erdlings are starving and escape through the iron-strong root is impossible. Yet, when eight-year-old Teera learns that her pet Lapin must be used for food, she runs away — and climbs through a break in the root to the forest floor above.

…

Read More Read More