Browsed by
Category: Series Fantasy

New Treasures: Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

New Treasures: Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Comments 8 comments

three-parts-dead-smallThe fall is a big time for fantasy releases. We see a lot of press releases and advance proofs in the build-up to the holiday season, and everyone here has their favorites. I’m usually a fan of serial fiction — Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, Jame Enge’s Morlock the Maker, Howard Andrew Jones’s Dabir and Asim novels — and I’m always on the lookout for the next breakout fantasy series.

But this year the book that most grabbed my attention was a first novel by Max Gladstone. I first saw the cover hanging on the wall at a Tor party at Wiscon in May, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting it ever since. Set in a decaying city on the verge of destruction, Three Parts Dead offers a high-stakes tale of dead gods, necromancers, and dark dealings in a richly-imagined urban landscape.

A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart.

Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot.

Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith.

When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts — and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb’s slim hope of survival.

Set in a phenomenally built world in which justice is a collective force bestowed on a few, craftsmen fly on lightning bolts, and gargoyles can rule cities, Three Parts Dead introduces readers to an ethical landscape in which the line between right and wrong blurs.

Three Parts Dead was published by Tor Books on October 2. It is 333 pages, and sells for $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital version.

Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

Comments 4 comments

farmer08_bGods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa
Philip José Farmer & Christopher Paul Carey
Subterranean Press  (576 pp, $65.00 Limited Edition Hardcover, $45.00 Trade Edition Hardcover)
Reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Once upon a time, in a lost civilization known as West Germany, the Kreuzberg Kaserne U.S. Army Base let fifth graders leave school grounds at lunchtime. Every week, I crossed the street to the little base bookstore. In the late winter of 1972, I bought the first DC Comics issue (#207) of “Tarzan of the Apes” because I wanted to learn how the heck a human being ended up living with apes. When the writer/artist, the late, much-lamented Joe Kubert, ended his adaptation with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original cliffhanger, I read Burroughs’s sequel, The Return of Tarzan, to finish the origin story. Then I found myself devouring every other Burroughs book reprinted in the early 1970s.

I couldn’t have been the decade’s only new Burroughs fan, because by the mid-1970s, his estate had authorized two different Tarzan-related series by other authors: the Bunduki novels by J.T. Edson and the Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer. Both series produced a novel or two and then, as far as I knew, ended. The tie-in titles went out of print, their copyright was probably owned or controlled by the Burroughs estate, and Philip José Farmer died in 2009. I figured none of these books would ever see another reprint.

I figured wrong, because Subterranean Press has just released Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa, which is an omnibus of the two Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer – Hadon of Ancient Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976) – together with a third, new novel in the series, The Song of Kwasin, by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey (Black Gate recently ran essays from Carey about the history of his remarkable collaboration with Farmer, and his discussion of Farmer’s ambitious creation, the lost civilization of Khokarsa.)

…

Read More Read More

The Bloodlands Novels of Christine Cody

The Bloodlands Novels of Christine Cody

Comments 7 comments

bloodlands2I’ve been having fun with the Bloodlands novels of Christine Cody. Her website calls them “a post-apocalyptic Western fantasy series,” and that’s probably the best way to describe them.

Technically they’re science fiction, since there’s a near-future SF vibe and a post-disaster setting. “The New Badlands” is a vast and devastated American West where a handful of survivors retreated underground to escape changing and deadly weather, and a sequence of unrelenting apocalyptic events that have ravaged the country.

But at heart they’re really fantasy as the Badlands aren’t just filled with lethal storms, desperate survivors and brutal gunslingers — they’re also crawling with monsters, including vampires.

The marketing copy from Ace Books left me in mind of Deadlands, the weird western role playing game from Pinnacle Entertainment that breathed new life into the RPG genre in the 90s. But the author credits her inspiration to classic westerns. This is from the dedication to Bloodlands:

A big shout-out goes to all those Westerns that provided us with High Plains Drifters, Shanes, and Pale Riders, plus all the greedy ranchers and gunslinging villains, feisty homesteaders and rugged pioneers. I wanted to twist and reshape those wonderful tropes into something new while recalling the old. Most important, though, I wanted to pay homage to the mysterious cowboys who have wandered across dusty landscapes to face down the bad guys.

Fair warning to those looking for a pure-blooded adventure series: these books have an outcast female protagonist, and a brooding and misunderstood vampire named “Gabriel.” And there’s kissing.

The technical term for books containing both kissing and vampires is “paranormal romance,” and that’s exactly what these are. If sweaty make-out scenes with the undead make you uncomfortable, then back away now.

…

Read More Read More

David Soyka Reviews Prince of Thorns

David Soyka Reviews Prince of Thorns

Comments 7 comments

prince-of-thornsPrince of Thorns (Book One of The Broken Empire)
Mark Lawrence
Ace (324 pp, $29.95, Hardcover August 2011)
Reviewed by David Soyka

This is pretty brutal.  Relentlessly brutal, right from the opening paragraphs:

Ravens! Always the ravens. They settled in the gables of the church even before the injured became the dead. Even before Rike had finished taking fingers from hands, and rings from fingers. I leaned back against the gallows post and nodded to the birds, a dozen of them in a black line, wise-eyed and watching.

The town-square ran red. Blood in the gutters, bloom on the flagstones, blood in the fountain. The corpses posed as corpses do. Some comical, reaching for the sky with missing fingers, some peaceful, coiled about their wounds. Flies rose above the wounded as they struggled. This way and that, some blind, some sly, all betrayed by their buzzing entourage.

“Water! Water!” It’s always water with the dying. Strange, it’s killing that gives me thirst.

And this the ostensible hero talking in Prince of Thorns, the first in a (you guessed it) projected trilogy collectively called The Broken Empire.  So, we’re clearly in anti-hero land, in the “shit and blood” sub genre of sword and sorcery that aims to rub your face in what rusty blades, poor sanitation and disease actually do to people living under medieval conditions, in stark contrast to high fantasy depictions of noble quests in which divinely provident good triumphs over corrupt and therefore ultimately doomed to fail evil.

…

Read More Read More

Return to : Reviving a Masterpiece

Return to : Reviving a Masterpiece

Comments 3 comments
The new Norilana edition of a must-read fantasy classic, NIGHT’S MASTER by Tanith Lee.

Fantasy readers…rejoice!

The fact that Tanith Lee’s TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH has been out of print for years has been a blatant injustice done to all lovers of epic fantasy. Now, thanks to Vera Nazarian’s Norilana Books, one of the field’s great masterpieces is once again available to the public.

The individual books of the FLAT EARTH series (each of which is a stand-alone novel) are being released in hardcover and trade paperback on a roughly annual basis, and feature gorgeous new cover treatments and artwork. If you haven’t yet discovered the FLAT EARTH books, I envy you. You are in for a spectacular reading experience.

The first book in this landmark series is NIGHT’S MASTER (1978), which was nominated for a Best Novel World Fantasy Award. It introduces the time-lost world of ancient sorcery where Azhrarn the Prince of Demons and his fellow Lords of Darkness roam the flat world creating mischief, drama, and tragedy across the primeval human kingdoms.

The book is rich with lyrical prose, jewel-bright imagery, dark beauty, and ironic myths. Human protagonists come and go, while the real main character is Azhrarn, who is despicable yet inhumanly handsome, evil yet oddly compassionate, godlike yet flawed, and an unlikely champion of a doomed humankind. Let all would-be fantasy writers savor the flavor of Lee’s sumptuous prose. This is how it’s done, people.

…

Read More Read More

Adventure Fantasy in the Children’s Section: Garth Nix

Adventure Fantasy in the Children’s Section: Garth Nix

Comments 2 comments

Recently, on a writer listserv I’m on, discussion veered to how to turn kids in general, but boys in particular, into avid readers. The general consensus from the parents on the list was: limit screen time, whether TV, games, videos; find books they are interested in; and read to them every day. On the topic of how to find books, one father of two boys in particular recommended the authors Patricia Wrede, Diana Wynne Jones, and Garth Nix, saying that he hadn’t considered the gender of the authors or the main characters, he just knew his kids would love their books, and they had. I would certainly second his recommendation. There is plenty for adults to enjoy, too.

Garth Nix, who is this year’s Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention, is my 9-year-old son’s favorite author, and the one who easily topped his “what books would you want with you on a desert isle” list. (Here in Dubai, we are on a desert peninsula, not isle, but given how expensive books are, the feeling is sometimes the same.) Having been given a size and weight limit by his parents, he filled it mostly with Nix’s Seventh Tower and Keys to the Kingdom series.

The former consists of six slim volumes that would add up to a decent-sized tome in the adult section. It’s set on a pair of worlds, one, Aenir, the source of magic and spirits, the other, where humans live, in perpetual darkness except for the magical Sunstones that come from Aenir. Residents of the seven-towered Castle on the human world must each acquire and enslave a spiritshadow (exchanging it for their own natural one) via a quest to Aenir in order to achieve any status. The story begins when one of the main characters, Tal, has to steal a Sunstone from the top of one of the towers in order to heal his sick mother. He falls off the tower, out of the Castle, and into the wider world where his people are considered evil sorcerers…. It’s fast-paced, very readable, with humor, plot complications, and interesting characters and world-building, if (to an adult) a rather familiar overall plot trajectory.

…

Read More Read More