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Future Treasures: Red Sister by Mark Lawrence

Future Treasures: Red Sister by Mark Lawrence

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Red Sister by Mark Lawrence-smallI don’t make time much time for epic fantasy these days. It’s not that I’m not tempted, it’s just that epic fantasy is such a huge time investment, and I’d rather spend that time sampling a variety of standalone titles from up and coming authors.

But I make an exception for Mark Lawrence, whom I consider one of the finest craftsmen working in the field of modern fantasy. He is the international bestselling author of the Broken Empire and the Red Queen’s War trilogies, and his latest, Red Sister, kicks off a brand new series about a secretive order of holy warriors. It arrives in hardcover from Ace next month.

At the Convent of Sweet Mercy, young girls are raised to be killers. In some few children the old bloods show, gifting rare talents that can be honed to deadly or mystic effect. But even the mistresses of sword and shadow don’t truly understand what they have purchased when Nona Grey is brought to their halls.

A bloodstained child of nine falsely accused of murder, guilty of worse, Nona is stolen from the shadow of the noose. It takes ten years to educate a Red Sister in the ways of blade and fist, but under Abbess Glass’s care there is much more to learn than the arts of death. Among her class Nona finds a new family — and new enemies.

Despite the security and isolation of the convent, Nona’s secret and violent past finds her out, drawing with it the tangled politics of a crumbling empire. Her arrival sparks old feuds to life, igniting vicious struggles within the church and even drawing the eye of the emperor himself.

Beneath a dying sun, Nona Grey must master her inner demons, then loose them on those who stand in her way.

Red Sister, the first volume of Book of the Ancestor, will be published by Ace on April 4, 2017. It is 480 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Bastien Lecouff Deharme. Read the prologue here, and read Mark’s last blog post for us here.

Colonists, Smugglers, and Fast Attack Craft: The Virtues of War Trilogy by Bennett R. Coles

Colonists, Smugglers, and Fast Attack Craft: The Virtues of War Trilogy by Bennett R. Coles

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Virtues of War Coles-smaller Ghosts of War Coles-small March of War Coles-big

I grew up as an army brat in Canada. My dad was an engineer in the Canadian Armed Forces, and I was born on a Canadian Air Force base in Marville, France in the mid-60s. We moved all over Nova Scotia, Quebec, and eventually Ontario, as Dad led teams of engineers working on huge projects, including radar installations in Eureka, Nunavut, and the Air Combat Maneuvering range in Cold Lake, Alberta.

So I’ve been naturally curious about the work of author Bennett R. Coles, who spent 14 years as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy, and served two tours with the United Nations in Syria and Lebanon. His debut SF novel, Virtues of War (Promontory Press, 2010), drew wide praise for both its realistic portrayal of life in uniform, and for his mastery of fast-paced military SF.

Now, I know you’ve been wanting to try some military SF, but you’ve been a little gun shy, right? Who better to ease you into the genre than a Canadian writing about far-flung Terran colonies, smugglers, rebellion, sinister terrorists, and the crew of a fast attack craft caught in the middle of it all? You know I’m right.

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Future Treasures: Among the Fallen, Book 2 of Godserfs, by NS Dolkart

Future Treasures: Among the Fallen, Book 2 of Godserfs, by NS Dolkart

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SIlent Hall NS Dolkart-small Among the Fallen NS Dolkart-small

Among the Fallen, the second volume in NS Dolkart’s epic fantasy series Godserfs, arrives early next month from Angry Robot. The first volume, Silent Hall, was released in the US last June, and James A Moore called it “Very nearly a perfect novel. I wish my first book had been anywhere near as inventive and challenging.” So let’s start with that one. Here’s the description.

Five bedraggled refugees and a sinister wizard awaken a dragon and defy the gods.

After their homeland is struck with a deadly plague, five refugees cross the continent searching for answers. Instead they find Psander, a wizard whose fortress is invisible to the gods, and who is willing to sacrifice anything – and anyone – to keep the knowledge of the wizards safe.

With Psander as their patron, the refugees cross the mountains, brave the territory of their sworn enemies, confront a hostile ocean and even traverse the world of the fairies in search of magic powerful enough to save themselves – and Psander’s library – from the wrath of the gods.

All they need to do is to rescue an imprisoned dragon and unleash a primordial monster upon the world.

How hard could it be?

Looks like things turned out okay for everybody, since they’re back for a second volume. Let’s see what’s going on in this one. Hope that sinister wizard guy shows up again.

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Invasions, Space Combat, and a Human Bomb: Margaret Fortune’s Spectre War

Invasions, Space Combat, and a Human Bomb: Margaret Fortune’s Spectre War

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Nova Spectre War Margaret Fortune Archangel Spectre War Margaret Fortune-small

Margaret Fortune’s Spectre War looks like my kind of YA series — the kind with space combat. The first volume, Nova, was published in hardcover in 2015 by DAW, and Booklist called it “A super start to what looks like a fine series.” Here’s the description.

Lia Johansen was created for only one purpose: to slip onto the strategically placed New Sol Space Station and explode.

But her mission goes to hell when her clock malfunctions, freezing her countdown with just two minutes to go. With no Plan B, no memories of her past, and no identity besides a name stolen from a dead POW, Lia has no idea what to do next. Her life gets even more complicated when she meets Michael Sorenson, the real Lia’s childhood best friend.

Drawn to Michael and his family against her better judgment, Lia starts learning what it means to live and love, and to be human. It is only when her countdown clock begins sporadically losing time that she realizes even duds can still blow up.

If she wants any chance at a future, she must find a way to unlock the secrets of her past and stop her clock. But as Lia digs into her origins, she begins to suspect there’s far more to her mission and to this war, than meets the eye. With the fate of not just a space station but an entire empire hanging in the balance, Lia races to find the truth before her time — literally — runs out.

The second installment, Archangel, arrived in hardcover last week. Nova is now available in paperback — and the digital version is just $1.99!

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Future Treasures: The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One by Seabury Quinn

Future Treasures: The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One by Seabury Quinn

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The Horror on the Links The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin Volume One-smallToday Weird Tales is chiefly remembered as the magazine that launched the careers of the great pulp fantasy writers of the 20th Century. But as most fans of the Grand old Lady of the pulps know, the most popular Weird Tales author wasn’t Robert E. Howard, or H.P. Lovecraft, but Seabury Quinn, someone whom is almost completely forgotten today. Quinn’s supernatural detective Jules De Grandin — a top-seller in the 20s and 30s, appearing in over ninety stories and a single novel between 1925 and 1951 — has been out of print for decades. Night Shade rectifies that injustice with the first volume of The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, arriving in hardcover next week.

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries — and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!) — captivated readers for nearly three decades.

Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero.

The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Horror on the Links” (1925) to “The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by Robert Weinberg.

The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One will be published by Night Shade Books on April 4, 2017. It is 512 pages, priced at $34.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition. Not sure who did the cover, but I’m working on it.

New Treasures: Dr Potter’s Medicine Show by Eric Scott Fischl

New Treasures: Dr Potter’s Medicine Show by Eric Scott Fischl

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Dr Potter's Medicine Show-small Dr Potter's Medicine Show-back-small

The mass market original seems almost like a dying art form these days. But not for Angry Robot, for whom it’s their bread and butter. They find talented writers and package their works in attractive, sharply-designed, inexpensive paperbacks. I heartily approve.

Dr Potter’s Medicine Show, by Eric Scott Fischl, is the latest Angry Robot paperback to grab my attention. It’s an historical dark fantasy that John Shirley calls “A powerful alchemical elixir concocted of post Civil War historical fiction, dark fantasy, and Felliniesque flavoring.” On his website, Fischl recently announced that the next book in the series, The Trials of Solomon Parker, will be released in November 2017, also from Angry Robot.

Dr Potter’s Medicine Show was published by Angry Robot on February 2, 2017. It is 346 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Steven Meyer-Rassow. Read the first three chapters at the Angry Robot website.

Where The Road meets Mad Max: Peter Newman’s The Vagrant Trilogy

Where The Road meets Mad Max: Peter Newman’s The Vagrant Trilogy

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The Vagrant Peter Newman-small The Malice Peter Newman-small The Seven Peter Newman-small

In his SF Signal review Nick Sharps called Peter Newman’s The Vagrant “Dark Dystopian Fantasy at Its Very Best,” saying:

The premise of The Vagrant is simple enough. Accompanied by a baby and a goat, a nameless mute must cross demon-infested wastelands to deliver a magical sword to the Shining City, last bastion of hope. The mute is hunted by multiple factions and it is difficult to distinguish friend from foe in the ruins of a world tainted by evil… Beneath the grit and grime of The Vagrant there is no shortage of beauty. It’s part fantasy and part science fiction. There are demons and knights but the demons enhance their followers with necrotech and the knights ride floating castles and caterpillar tanks. All of the shiny technology of the past has fallen to rust and disuse in the wake of the demonic incursion. The taint of the demons brings mutation and famine. The Vagrant has a sort of The Road meets Mad Max meets The Children of Men vibe…

It wouldn’t feel appropriate to classify The Vagrant as grimdark fantasy. The elements of the subgenre are all present: the setting is dystopian, life is harsh and brief, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are few and far between. Newman’s demons and the change they affect on the world and its inhabitants remind me of the forces of Chaos from Warhammer 40,000 — the very property that inspired the term grimdark. The Vagrant is bleak, depressive, and violent and yet… The Vagrant surpassed all my expectations.

The sequel, The Malice, finally arrived in trade paperback from Harper Voyager this week, and the third and final book, The Seven, is scheduled to appear in October.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak

Black Gate Online Fiction: Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak

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Black City Demon-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak, published by Pyr Books in trade paperback on March 14. Richard A. Knaak is the New York Times bestselling author of some three dozen novels, including The Sin War trilogy for Diablo and the Legend of Huma for Dragonlance.

A chill wind rose up. I tightened the collar of my overcoat and looked around. Diocles’s presence had left me with no more desire to be here. Besides, I had an appointment farther on the North Side — a young couple called the Nilssons who continually heard footsteps on the upper floor of the old house they rented. They thought it was the ghost of the first owner, who’d hung herself after her husband perished in the Great Fire.

I knew better. It wasn’t a ghost. If they’d seen my ad, seen the offerings of Nick Medea, investigator and debunker of the supernatural, then they had a far worse problem than ghosts. They had one of the Wyld lurking around their home.

There was plenty of time to reach my clients, since the appointment was set — for more than theatrical reasons — at midnight. It wasn’t hard to convince anyone who needed my services that I needed to come at the witching hour. They’d be desperate for any help at this point, no doubt having exhausted the usual charlatans.

“There was a visitor to Saint Michael’s this evening,” Diocles muttered.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, John Fultz, Jon Sprunk, Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner,  Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

We covered the first volume in the series, Black City Saint, here, and Richard’s newest Pathfinder Tales novel, Reaper’s Eye, here. Richard’s last article for Black Gate was “Tommy Guns, Prohibition, and…. Magic?”

Black City Demon will published March 14, 2017 by Pyr Books. It is 363 pages, priced at $17.50 in trade paperback and $2.99 for the digital edition.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon here.

Dead Gods, Buried Histories, and a Protean City: Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Divine Cities Trilogy

Dead Gods, Buried Histories, and a Protean City: Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Divine Cities Trilogy

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City of Stairs-small City of Blades-small City of Miracles-small

I love it when the final book in a terrific trilogy finally arrives. (Wait a minute… are you sure it’s a trilogy? How can you tell? Sure, they all look like trilogies, until that pesky fourth book shows up. Better start over.) I love it when the third book in a terrific series finally arrives, and wraps things up satisfactorily… at least until the fourth book appears, maybe.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs (2014), the opening novel in The Divine Cities, was nominated for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and GoodReads Choice Award, and came in second for the Locus Award. But what got my attention was BG writer Peadar Ó Guilín calling it “The best fantasy I’ve read so far this year. Great stuff,” and a reviewer at Tor.com who described it as “an atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city.” Volume II, City of Blades, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim, and that built up anticipation for the third volume nicely.

City of Miracles is now scheduled to arrive in trade paperback from Broadway Books in early May. On his blog Bennett calls it “the final installment of The Divine Cities series, starring everyone’s favorite Dreyling murder machine, Sigrud. It’s readable as a standalone, just like the other books, but it’s highly recommended that you read the previous ones first.” Final installment. Uh huh. Let’s see how long that promise that holds up when this thing is optioned as the next big Netflix series.

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Future Treasures: Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods by Tania del Rio and Will Staehle

Future Treasures: Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods by Tania del Rio and Will Staehle

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Back in September I wrote a brief piece on Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye, the opening book in a new middle grade series written by Tania Del Rio and illustrated by Will Staehle. I’d been seeing glowing coverage of the book and had decided to order it, and as I said in the piece, “I can make up my mind on Staehle’s artwork right now — and I think it’s fantastic.”

So I was very pleased to see a new entry in the series, Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods, on the schedule for March 21, 2017. The books follow the adventures of twelve-year-old Warren, a kid who looks like he escaped from an Edward Gorey cartoon. Warren is the sole surviving heir to a grand (but rapidly decaying) old hotel, and his exploits see him mixed up with a terrific cast of supporting characters who live on or near the grounds of the rambling hotel, including monsters, witches, a ghostly girl who creeps around the hedge maze, and his twisted Aunt Annaconda and her evil sisters.

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