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Category: Series Fantasy

Lost and Found Treasure

Lost and Found Treasure

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Sword and Sorceress VII-small Sword and Sorceress VII-back-small

A few weeks ago, I was cruising Facebook when I stopped up short at a familiar image.

It was on our esteemed editor John O’Neill’s wall. And as is often the case with such things, I was struck by a wealth of memories. I received Sword and Sorceress VII as a gift for my 12th birthday. It was probably bought at the B. Dalton in College Mall in Bloomington, IN, one of two easily accessible bookstores on that side of town back in 1990. (Before anyone does the math too fast, yes, I’m celebrating a big birthday next year. It’s in May, if you want to send gift cards for more books.)

I couldn’t tell you exactly which stories were in this volume. I know it had one of Mercedes Lackey’s “Tarma and Kethry” tales in it, but beyond that none of them stand out alone. But as a whole, that volume changed my life as a reader. While I’d feasted on the The Chronicles of Narnia, Robin McKinley, and Susan Cooper, this book was my first exposure to fantasy for grown-ups. And it was full of women.

When I think casually, 1990 doesn’t feel that far away. But in terms of the way women were portrayed in fiction it was another era entirely, and in ways I can’t even begin to explain unless you were there.

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New Treasures: The Trials of Solomon Parker by Eric Scott Fischl

New Treasures: The Trials of Solomon Parker by Eric Scott Fischl

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The Trials of Solomon Parker-small The Trials of Solomon Parker-back-small

The Trials of Solomon Parker doesn’t look it, but it’s part of a series. A loose series maybe, but still a series. The first novel, Dr Potter’s Medicine Show, was published by Angry Robot back in March. At least you don’t have to wait long between installments.

John Shirley called the first novel “A powerful alchemical elixir concocted of post Civil War historical fiction, dark fantasy, and Felliniesque flavoring.” And the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog labeled it a “gritty, down-and-dirty debut.” In her feature review at Tor.com, Arianne Thompson described it as:

An Enthusiastic Carnival of Horrors… even though Dr. Potter rightly belongs on the “horror/occult” side of the Weird Western spectrum, it cleaves apart from the sensational grimdark vogue that so heavily tints our view of the past. Fischl’s command of his characters’ world is grotesque, vivid, joyful, and sublime — an uncommon realism that honors the human side of history, and a reminder that a carnival of horrors is still a carnival, after all, with miracles and spectacles awaiting anyone brave enough to venture into the sideshow tent.

The B&N Sci-Fi Blog says “compelling and broken characters, and damn good storytelling elevates The Trials of Solomon Parker to whole new level of weird western. Two excellent books in a calendar year – Fischl is definitely a writer to watch.”

The Trials of Solomon Parker was published by Angry Robot on October 3, 2017. It is 384 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Steven Meyer-Rassow.

Helen’s Daimones by S.E. Lindberg

Helen’s Daimones by S.E. Lindberg

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51rwuiXOUeL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_There are strange territories in the wilds of swords & sorcery that have been visited successfully by only a handful of writers. They are places where, aside from some actual swords and sorcery, few of the common trappings of the genre are found. Magic may be phatasmagorical, the world — both physically and culturally — has no echoes of our own, and the hero is more likely to be a golem, a resurrected nobleman, or a little girl than an axe-swinging warrior.

Some of C.L. Moore’s Jirel stories and most of Clark Ashton Smith’s oeuvre mapped portions of these realms. In Throne of Bones, Brian McNaughton (reviewed by me here) brought back a detailed study of one nation. Michael Shea and Darrell Schweitzer mapped whole continents. They’re dangerous places, permeated by darkness and decay, and the scent of death is rarely absent from the thick, curdled air.

S.E. Lindberg’s short novel, Helen’s Daimones (2017), is one such tale of this diseased stretch of the world of swords & sorcery. I can’t say this book quite attains the same heights as Shea’s Nifft the Lean or Schweitzer’s The Mask of the Sorcerer (reviewed here), but much of the time it comes tantalizingly close. It’s always exciting to find an author hunting out the stranger reaches of fantasy instead of re-exploring places we’ve all been many times before. This is the third published (second chronologically) novel in Lindberg’s Dyscrasia series. The word dyscrasia is from the Greek, and refers to a bad mixing of the four Classical humors: phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile. In these books, there is no actual magic, only the disease Dyscrasia and corrupted souls.

Lindberg’s novel opens on his young protagonist, the daughter of a furrier, playing in the countryside.

Lithe, ivory-haired Helen crouched in the meadow. She spied the emerging fireflies, ready to play. A storm brewed on the distant, western horizon. Remote, thunderless lightning seemed to communicate to the fireflies with pulsing flashes. She wished she could interpret such magic.

“One day, I will understand your secret language,” Helen vowed.

She was accustomed to being apart from people, immersed in her own reality. Cloaked in a cougar pelt splotched with green dye, she was empowered by her feline familiar’s aura: Angie.

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Future Treasures: Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

Future Treasures: Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

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Elysium Fire-smallAlastair Reynolds’ 2007 novel The Prefect introduced Prefect Tom Dreyfus, a hardened law enforcement officer tasked with maintaining democracy throughout the Glitter Band, part of Reynolds’s Revelation Space milieu. Publishers Weekly called the book “a fascinating hybrid of space opera, police procedural and character study… solid British SF adventure, evoking echoes of le Carré and Sayers with a liberal dash of Doctor Who.”

A decade later Reynolds has written a sequel, in which Dreyfuss finds himself caught in a web of murderers, secret cultists, tampered memories, and unthinkable power. It arrives in paperback from Orion next month.

Ten thousand city-state habitats orbit the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise.

But even utopia needs a police force. For the citizens of the Glitter Band that organization is Panoply, and the prefects are its operatives.

Prefect Tom Dreyfus has a new emergency on his hands. Across the habitats and their hundred million citizens, people are dying suddenly and randomly, victims of a bizarre and unprecedented malfunction of their neural implants. And these “melters” leave no clues behind as to the cause of their deaths…

As panic rises in the populace, a charismatic figure is sowing insurrection, convincing a small but growing number of habitats to break away from the Glitter Band and form their own independent colonies.

Elysium Fire is Book 2 of 3 in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergency series. Our most recent coverage of Reynolds includes Brandon Crilly’s review of Revenger (which won the 2017 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book), and a look at The Medusa Chronicles, co-authored with Stephen Baxter. Brit Hvide at Orbit shares this take on the cover art:

Peer into the darkness! Gaze upon the future! And admire that sweet, sweet new cover for Alastair Reynolds’ latest space opera, Elysium Fire! That gold band you see on the cover? Nope, it’s not one of Jupiter’s rings, fancy space debris, or a futuristic engagement ring. It’s the Glitter Band, the setting for Reynolds’s latest adventure: ten thousand city-state habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise. How’s that for scale?

Elysium Fire will be published by Orbit on January 23, 2018. It is 432 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital editions.

Vintage Treasures: Changing Fate by Elisabeth Waters

Vintage Treasures: Changing Fate by Elisabeth Waters

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Elisabeth Waters Changing Fate-back-small Elisabeth Waters Changing Fate-small

Elisabeth Waters’ first publication, “The Keeper’s Price,” was co-authored with Marion Zimmer Bradley and appeared in Bradley’s 1980 Darkover anthology The Keeper’s Price and Other Stories. That launched a lengthy writing career that includes over 40 short stories and a novel in the Trillium series, also co-authored with Bradley. Since 2007 Waters has been the driving force behind the Sword and Sorceress anthology series, taking over with Volume XXII at Norilana Books. The most recent,  Volume 32, was released last month by the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust.

Waters published a single standalone novel, Changing Fate, in 1994, with a striking wraparound cover by Lord of the Rings artist John Howe. It grew out of the short story “A Woman’s Privilege” in Sword and Sorceress 3, published in 1986; it was nominated for the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and won Andre Norton’s Gryphon Award. A sequel, Mending Fate, finally appeared last year, 22 years after the first volume, from the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust.

Changing Fate was published by DAW Books in April 1994. It is 240 pages, priced at $4.99 in paperback. The cover is by John Howe. It was reprinted in trade paperback and digital formats in 2015. Read more at Elisabeth Waters’ website.

New Treasures: All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault by James Alan Gardner

New Treasures: All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault by James Alan Gardner

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All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault-back-small All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault-small

Canadian SF writer James Alan Gardner published seven novels between 1997 and 2002, including Expendable, Commitment Hour, and Radiant. Then he switched almost entirely to short fiction, producing 17 short stories and one collection between 2005 and 2017 (with the exception of one media tie-in novel, Tomb Raider: The Man of Bronze).

There’s nothing wrong with short fiction, of course. But when you stop writing novels for a dozen years, people think you’ve vanished. So I was both pleased and surprised to tear open an envelope from Tor this week and find a review copy of Gardner’s first new novel since 2005. It’s good to have him back — especially with something that looks as fun as All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault. It’s the tale of Kim Lam and her three housemates who are transformed from ordinary college students into superheroes by “a freak scientific accident (what else?),” and find themselves caught up in a war between super-powered humans and sinister darkling creatures (vampires, ghosts, and worse things.) The sequel, They Promised Me the Gun Wasn’t Loaded, arrives next year.

All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault was published by Tor Books on November 7, 2017. It is 382 pages, priced at $17.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Getty images. Read an excerpt here.

Future Treasures: The Midnight Front by David Mack

Future Treasures: The Midnight Front by David Mack

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The Midnight Front-smallDavid Mack has built his rep chiefly on Star Trek novels, such as the Star Trek: Vanguard series, and the new Star Trek Discovery tie-in novel Desperate Hours (which Derek Kunsken reviewed for us here).

His latest is a World War II-era adventure in which an American soldier finds himself up against Nazi sorcerers. Kirkus Reviews calls it “Propulsive… Equal parts brimstone and gunpowder… an entertaining scenario that wouldn’t be out of place in a video game or a spirited match of Dungeons & Dragons.”

The Midnight Front is the opening novel in the Dark Arts series; it arrives simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback from Tor in January. It will be followed by The Iron Codex, set in the 1950s; and Shadow Commission, set in the ’60s.

On the eve of World War Two, Nazi sorcerers come gunning for Cade but kill his family instead. His one path of vengeance is to become an apprentice of The Midnight Front ― the Allies’ top-secret magickal warfare program ― and become a sorcerer himself.

Unsure who will kill him first ― his allies, his enemies, or the demons he has to use to wield magick ― Cade fights his way through occupied Europe and enemy lines. But he learns too late the true price of revenge will be more terrible than just the loss of his soul ― and there’s no task harder than doing good with a power born of ultimate evil.

The Midnight Front will be published by Tor Books on January 30, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover, $15.99 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Larry Rostant. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.

See all of our coverage of the best upcoming fantasy here.

New Treasures: The Stone in the Skull by Elizabeth Bear

New Treasures: The Stone in the Skull by Elizabeth Bear

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The Stone in the Skull-smallElizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and followed that in quick succession with two Hugo wins: in 2008 a Best Short Story nod for “Tideline,” and in 2009 a Best Novelette award for “Shoggoths in Bloom.”

Her biggest commercial hit so far has been her Eternal Sky trilogy (Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, Steles of the Sky). Last month she returned to the world of Eternal Sky with a brand new trilogy, The Lotus Kingdoms, which kicked off with The Stone in the Skull, now available in hardcover from Tor.

The Stone in the Skull, the first volume in her new trilogy, takes readers over the dangerous mountain passes of the Steles of the Sky and south into the Lotus Kingdoms.

The Gage is a brass automaton created by a wizard of Messaline around the core of a human being. His wizard is long dead, and he works as a mercenary. He is carrying a message from a the most powerful sorcerer of Messaline to the Rajni of the Lotus Kingdom. With him is The Dead Man, a bitter survivor of the body guard of the deposed Uthman Caliphate, protecting the message and the Gage. They are friends, of a peculiar sort.

They are walking into a dynastic war between the rulers of the shattered bits of a once great Empire.

Tor.com usually offers up sample chapters of new Tor releases, and they didn’t disappoint us this time. Check out Chapter One here, and Chapter Two hidden in a completely different place here.

The Stone in the Skull was published by Tor Books on October 10, 2017. It is 368 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Richard Anderson.

Stories of Wild Childhood Adventure: The Wildwood Chronicles by Colin Meloy

Stories of Wild Childhood Adventure: The Wildwood Chronicles by Colin Meloy

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Wildwood Colin Meloy-small Under Wildwood Colin Meloy-small Wildwood Imperium Colin Meloy-small

Colin Meloy is a talented guy. As the frontman for the rock band The Decemberists he’s sold over a million records around the world. His debut novel, Wildwood, became a New York Times bestseller, and grew into a bestselling trilogy that has been called “full of suspense and danger and frightening things the world has never seen,” (Lemony Snicket), and which Michael Chabon calls “Dark and whimsical, with a true and uncanny sense of otherworldliness… the heir to a great tradition of stories of wild childhood adventure.” Here’s the description for the first volume.

Prue McKeel’s life is ordinary. That is, until her brother is abducted by a murder of crows and taken to the Impassable Wilderness, a dense, tangled forest on the edge of Portland.

So begins an adventure that will take Prue and her friend Curtis deep into the Impassable Wilderness. And what begins as a rescue mission becomes something much greater as the two friends find themselves entwined in a struggle for the very freedom of this wilderness. A wilderness the locals call Wildwood.

All three novels in the series are illustrated by Carson Ellis, the acclaimed illustrator of The Mysterious Benedict Society. Here’s a look at all three back covers.

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A Homecoming: Son of Mfumu by Milton J. Davis

A Homecoming: Son of Mfumu by Milton J. Davis

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DIhhmcBUQAAjNxv“…keep it old school. Don’t make it boring, pack it with action, don’t invert it, converge it, or subvert it. Have a hero even if he is a rascal. Have some gothic atmosphere and a touch of cosmicism. Give it technicolor and dream dust instead of shades of gray. Have the ending mean something.”  -Morgan Holmes, on writing a classic S&S story.

Milton Davis’ five volume series about the mighty and wily Changa Diop is swords & sorcery cast from a classic mold, the dimensions of which were first set down ninety years ago by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C.L. Moore. Changa is a hero through and through. Even when he’s got one eye focused on making a profit, the other is on his own honor and courage. There are wonderful descriptions of a vibrant, exciting world designed perfectly as a stage for mighty adventures, but done so well it never impedes the action. Of action, there’s more than enough for any S&S fan, ranging from duels with pirates to epic battles with demonic conjurations. Heroes are bold and villains deadly. This is the root stuff of which good S&S is made.

Whenever you get bummed out about the current state of S&S, rest assured that there are authors hewing to something like Holmes’ cri-de-coeur. And they aren’t making copies of the tried and true, but crafting their own myths and legends, adding their rousing additions to this genre we love.

Starting with Changa’s Safari (2011), and continuing for four more books, Milton Davis has sent our titular hero to the ends of the earth in search of the means to avenge his father’s murder, and claim the throne of Kongo from the usurper and sorcerer, Usenge. Each comrade with whom he surrounds himself is skilled and memorable in his own way. Foremost, there is the blue-robed and silent swordsman known only as the Tuareg. Zakee is a young Yemeni prince rescued from a disastrous marriage, the irascible navigator Mikaili is an Ethiopian with plans to become an priest someday…just never today, and finally there is Panya, Yoruban sorceress and beloved of Changa.

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