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Return to Thieves World in Beyond Sanctuary: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

Return to Thieves World in Beyond Sanctuary: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

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Microsoft Word - 09 12 24 Sacred Band Cover white horse white foLet me start off here with a quote from my Black Gate review of Janet and Chris Morris’s novel, The Sacred Band:

The Sacred Band is much more than great Heroic Fantasy: it is classic literature, filled with sub-plots, a fine cast of well-drawn characters, insight and wisdom and recurring themes of honor, faith, brotherhood and love. This novel spoke to me on a personal level because it’s a story of pure human drama and powerful emotions. While the characters are larger than life, they are also richly-drawn and written with great depth of insight and humanity. What also rings true with the Sacred Band is their military tradition, their ethos. These characters are soldiers, warriors. They are not only mythic heroes, they are also everyday heroes; real people, everyday people who face extraordinary odds and foes… The Sacred Band has the sharp edge of reality, the harshness, the bitterness and the danger of the real world. Love, loyalty, honor — these are the ideals by which these characters live and die. This novel is epic in scope. It is mythic by heritage. It is positively Homeric.

Janet Morris’s Beyond Sanctuary is the first volume in a trilogy that includes Beyond the Veil and Beyond Wizardwall, and the events in this trilogy take place before The Sacred Band, the magnificent novel by Janet and her husband Chris, which I previously reviewed here for Black Gate.

Beyond Sanctuary is a complex novel and truly literary heroic fantasy. It is textured and layered, subtle at times, and yet always powerful. Like the best of all literary fiction, it has emotional depth and human drama, subtext and a philosophy that is expressed through the thoughts, words, and deeds of its characters, and not through narrative lecture and dissertation that slows the pace of narrative thrust.

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New Treasures: Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

New Treasures: Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

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Broken Homes-smallBen Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels are one of my favorite new series. io9 calls them “The perfect blend of CSI and Harry Potter.” I’ve never watched CSI, but I imagine that can’t be that far off. I think Diana Gabaldon is very close when she describes them as “What would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the Fuzz.”

Even those quotes don’t do justice to how funny these novels are. They’re tightly plotted, too; just the right mix of humor, suspense, and genuine character development. The latest in the series, Broken Homes, just landed this month. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

My name is Peter Grant, and I am a keeper of the secret flame — whatever that is.

Truth be told, there’s a lot I still don’t know. My superior Nightingale, previously the last of England’s wizardly governmental force, is trying to teach me proper schooling for a magician’s apprentice. But even he doesn’t have all the answers. Mostly I’m just a constable sworn to enforce the Queen’s Peace, with the occasional help from some unusual friends and a well-placed fire blast. With the new year, I have three main objectives, a) pass the detective exam so I can officially become a DC, b) work out what the hell my relationship with Lesley Mai, an old friend from the force and now fellow apprentice, is supposed to be, and most importantly, c) get through the year without destroying a major landmark.

Two out of three isn’t bad, right?

A mutilated body in Crawley means another murderer is on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil, who may either be a common serial killer or an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man — a man whose previous encounters I’ve barely survived.

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The Return of Renner and Quist

The Return of Renner and Quist

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sleeping bearSamhain Publishing has just awakened Sleeping Bear, the second Renner and Quist adventure by Mark Rigney to see publication as an ebook. I discovered the series last year when the same publisher unearthed The Skates, a screwball quest involving tormented Victorian souls, a pair of magic ice skates, a ghostly hound, and dimensional time and space travel.

For the benefit of newcomers, Renner and Quist are an odd couple double act comprising a stuffy Unitarian minister and a rather crude, sometimes boorish, ex-linebacker and former private eye, who team to solve occult mysteries in Michigan. This quirky series is surprisingly literate fiction that calls to mind Douglas Adams’s delightful Dirk Gently detective series.

Rigney’s fiction is built around his characters’ faith (or their lack thereof) in the supernatural and preternatural. The series is thought-provoking as much as it is entertaining. This time out, Sleeping Bear finds Reverend Renner suffering through a crisis of faith as his attempts to minister at a local hospice have fallen on not just deaf ears, but unbelieving ones.

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Future Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Future Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8-smallWhen we covered The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 7 (back in May, if memory serves), publisher Night Shade was having serious issues and I mentioned, “Likely this will be the last one, at least in this format.” Which I considered a real tragedy, as editor Strahan has proven to have a real talent for picking out gems from the crowded and constantly changing genre short fiction market.

Fortunately, ace publisher Solaris has stepped into the void and rescued the series and Volume 8 will appear this year on schedule. They’ve changed the distinctive cover style and format — a shame, since the first seven volumes look impressive on my shelves — but hopefully they won’t mess with too much else.

Strahan has unveiled the table of contents at his website and it looks like another very impressive volume. As usual, he culls fiction from a wide range of industry markets, including traditional print mags — F&SF, Interzone, McSweeney’s, Asimov’s, Electric Velocipede, and even Twelve Tomorrows, the special SF issues of the MIT Technology Review — and top-tier online markets like Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Eclipse Online, Subterranean, Tor.com, and Strange Horizons.

He also draws stories from the biggest anthologies of the year, like Old Mars, Dangerous Women, Rags and Bones, Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, and An Aura of Familiarity.

Authors in this volume include Ian McDonald, Robert Reed, Eleanor Arnason, Ian R Macleod, Charlie Jane Anders, James Patrick Kelly, K J Parker, Lavie Tidhar, Richard Parks, Ted Chiang, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman, Greg Egan — and, as always, a few new talents whose names you may not yet recognize, but whom you may want to keep an eye on.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran

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The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2013-smallYou don’t have time to keep up on all the great work produced in the fantasy and horror fields, year after year.

You may think you do. But trust me, you don’t. There are fantastic new novelists emerging all the time — folks like Laird Barron, Theodora Goss, Genevieve Valentine, and Ekaterina Sedia — and new masters of the short story, like Karen Tidbeck, Ken Liu, Rachel Swirsky, Mike Carey, and many others. How are you going to keep up?

Believe it or not, that’s not a rhetorical question. I have the answer right here: Paula Guran’s indispensable annual collection The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. It’s like a cheat sheet covering all the exciting new — and established — writers in the genre. Read it every year, and I guarantee you’ll be talking intelligently about the latest literary trends in dark fantasy at your next party. (You’re on your own picking out what to wear, though. Just remember: no white after Labor Day.)

Paula Guran doesn’t provide the lengthy annual summary typical of some Year’s Best collections. Instead she gives the space over to fiction — over 500 pages of the best short stories of 2013, culled from magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Postscripts, Cemetery Dance, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Subterranean, Lightspeed, Apex, and Shimmer, and anthologies like The Book of Cthulhu 2, Hex Appeal, Shotguns v Cthulhu, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, Black Wings II, and many others.

This is the fourth volume of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, but the first one I’ve gotten around to. In our defense, we’ve at least covered several of Paula’s other recent anthologies, including Season of Wonder and Weird Detectives.

Here’s the book description.

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The Series Series: Marshal Versus the Assassins by M. Harold Page

The Series Series: Marshal Versus the Assassins by M. Harold Page

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Marshall Versus the Assassins-smallOf the many excellences in Marshal Versus the Assassins, M. Harold Page’s story of a real historical crusader trying to avert a crusade, the most remarkable is Page’s rendering of physical combat. There are so many reasons this stand-alone adventure in the Foreworld Saga could be subtitled Don’t Try This at Home.

Since you’re here reading Black Gate, odds are you’re a fight scene connoisseur. You’ll have read some classic set-pieces, and some classic blunders. You may even have read this post, which discusses the biggest pitfall most writers face when they set out to learn how to write a fight scene: the counterintuitive way a blow-by-blow approach to even the most exciting events can turn tedious. Writers who overcome that problem generally do it by intertwining the physical blow-by-blow fight choreography with the things fiction can render and film can’t — most of them aspects of the viewpoint character’s inner life.

What Page does more and better than any other fantasy writer I know is intertwine the viewpoint character’s complete sensory experience during combat. As a practitioner and historian of Europe’s lost martial arts traditions, Page knows in muscle memory how each weapon his crusader characters use feels in the hand, in the heft, and in the mailed body it strikes. All of us who write fantasy that includes fight scenes try to convey this kind of sensory vividness and immediacy. The difference in results between a writer who’s relying on research or imagination and a writer who has dedicated years to mastering the things his characters have mastered is immediately apparent.

I was about to say the difference was apparent on the page, but for much of the time I spent reading the fight scenes, I wasn’t really paying attention to the existence of a page. It would be more accurate to say the difference is apparent in the reader’s mirror neurons.

I love reading a book that I couldn’t have written, one that displays writerly chops totally different from mine. Of course, the thing Page makes look easy that I struggle with as a writer is not the only virtue of this book.

For instance, there’s the delightful blank spot in history that Page imagines his way into.

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Robin Hobb on What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy

Robin Hobb on What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy

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Robin Hobb Ship of Destiny-smallOver at SF Signal, Andrea Johnson has put together one of the more interesting round-robin interviews I’ve read in a some time. As part of their Mind Meld series, she asked eight well known fantasy authors — including Martha Wells, Melanie Rawn, Sam Sykes, and Robin Hobb — to answer the question “What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy?”

Many of the answers are both fascinating and insightful. Martha critiques the current trend towards multiple viewpoint characters (“A perfectly valid style, but… when it’s done wrong, it’s tedious”), Marc Alpin comments on the necessity to switch gears between books (“Some readers, especially those who wanted more of book one, freak out and think they’ve been cheated”), and Patrick Tomlinson discusses inevitable book bloat (“The longer an author writes inside a world, the longer the books tend to become.”) But it was Megan Lindholm, aka Robin Hobb, who I thought had the most salient comment, pointing out that the rise of independent publishers has also unleashed a host of amateur marketeers, whose newbie mistakes have left us with countless books that are misrepresenting themselves on the shelves:

I’m going to commit heresy here. I think that old time publishers are actually better at targeting the audience and showing readers the books they want than our current climate of ‘Everyone quick, promote a book you like’ is. Authors see their own books differently from how their publishers see them, and some of the author promotions I’ve seen led me to expect one sort of book and then [they] delivered another… I think that some (not all) of the people who are hired to create the book trailers don’t really know much about marketing… They make terrific trailers, and I get so excited to read the book, I buy it, and then think, ‘Well, this is a pretty good book, but it’s not at all what I thought it was going to be…’

To find a book that you really want to read, I recommend going to a bookstore (a big building sometimes made out of brick and mortar where they sell books made out of paper), and talk to the book seller (a person who knows all about what she or he is selling)… If you do not have a bookseller who can do this, then I am very sorry for you. Try your librarian.

Read the complete article here.

An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat by Glen Cook

An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat by Glen Cook

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oie_32154116Ox9HKeIGlen Cook is the author of some of my hands-down favorite books. I hold out his Black Company series as arguably the best military fantasy ever written. The early Garrett books set a standard for the blending of fantasy and hardboiled fiction. But what introduced me to Cook and made me a fan for life was his earlier work, the Dread Empire series, starting with the short story “Filed Teeth.”

The first time I ever saw the name Glen Cook was on the first three Dread Empire books, bound together with a rubber band on the bottom shelf in my local used book store. I didn’t like the cover illustrations (I still don’t) and I thought the whole “Dread Empire” thing seemed a little too dopey.

Then my dad tossed me Orson Scott Card’s Dragons of Darkness anthology. The first story in it, “Filed Teeth,” was set in the aftermath of a great war involving the Dread Empire and it blew me away! I had to have those books I had casually dismissed only a few weeks before.

The next day I took the bus to the book store and bought all three. I devoured them. They’re not as polished as many of his later books, but there are episodes of genius that range from vast fantastic battles to tender moments of pathos. The series introduces us to Cook’s likable trio of rogues, Bragi Ragnarson, Mocker and Haroun bin Yousif. The books begin with the trio scheming to make themselves wealthy beyond compare, and culminates in a war between huge armies and unbelievably powerful sorcery. If you like his other books, I highly recommend them.

Since then I’ve bought most of Cook’s books as soon as they hit the shelves. The six years I had to wait between the sixth and seventh Black Company books were among the worst I’ve encountered as a reader. The news that a new Black Company book is in the wings has me twitching.

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New Treasures: Iron Night by M.L. Brennan

New Treasures: Iron Night by M.L. Brennan

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Iron Night-smallI’m a sucker for a good review. You’d think that, with all the reviews I’ve written, edited, and published, I’d be immune to a little hyperbole by now. But I’m not. When I see a reviewer pull out all the stops for a new book — especially one from a writer I’ve had my eye on for a while — I’m intrigued. I can’t help it. I love this genre and, at the end of the day, we’re all on the lookout for that great read hidden amongst all the same-looking titles on the bookshelves.

It was the ever-trusty SF Signal that pointed me towards my latest discovery, M.L. Brennan’s Generation V series, with Nick Sharps’ review of the second volume, Iron Night:

Someone or something is killing humans in a particularly gruesome way and it just happened to pick the wrong target – the roommate of Fortitude Scott. Fort, now being brought up to speed on the family business, pursues the killer with vengeance in mind, but he might have stumbled onto something far more dangerous than a common murderer…

I haven’t been this excited about a series in a long time. This is urban fantasy at its best, with a strong focus on characters and relationships and an awesome take on established creatures… Brennan’s elves are on par with her vampires. The elves of Iron Night are seriously twisted – more the product of Guillermo del Toro’s worst nightmare than Tolkien’s friendly fair folk… The plot of Iron Night is much stronger than Generation V, complete with really awesome moments (I’m particularly fond of the undercover speed dating)…

Iron Night is freaking awesome. Brennan has made vampires cool again, elves creepy, and urban fantasy feel fresh. In an over saturated genre this is no small feat.

M.L. Brennan’s first novel, Generation V, featuring the young vampire Fortitude Scott, was published on May 7, 2013. The third installment, Tainted Blood, will appear in November.

Iron Night was published on January 7, 2014 by Roc Books. It is 320 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions.

The Series Series: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

The Series Series: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

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The Bone Season-smallRead this book. Just read it. Ignore the reviews that call Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling, or call the series that opens with The Bone Season the next Hunger Games. Most importantly, ignore the jacket copy, which spoils a big reveal that is best appreciated in a state of shocked astonishment alongside the protagonist’s own. For that matter, I give you leave to ignore everything about this review I am writing right now except the first sentence, which I am not abashed about reiterating: Read this book.

You’re still here? Okay, that’s cool, too.

If all the comparisons in the mainstream reviews are off the mark — and the ones I find bandied about online all are — then what is The Bone Season?

It’s the book you would get if Philip K. Dick decided to write about the wild Victorian occult scene that flourished under Madame Blavatsky, blossomed again in the time of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, lingering until it faded with its evenstar, Dion Fortune. That is, if Philip K. Dick decided to take all that supernatural grandiosity, and steampunk adaptations of Victoriana,  and turn them on their heads by transposing them into a dystopian near-future historical moment that feels intermittently like  hard SF with its what-ifs scrambled.

It’s Minority Report meets Oliver Twist in the secret séance parlor of Martha Wells’s The Death of the Necromancer. Sez me. But the readers of Cosmopolitan don’t speak geek, so instead Cosmo conjures the ghost of J.K. Rowling, because hey, the blasted ruins of Oxford being repurposed as a prison camp for deliberately starved clairvoyants is a setting so reminiscent of Hogwarts. Oh, well. I’m sure someday I’ll write a review that far off the mark, too. (But not this day.)

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