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Return to Enoch: The King of Nightspore’s Crown by Raphael Ordoñez

Return to Enoch: The King of Nightspore’s Crown by Raphael Ordoñez

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“Answers, he wants! Do you really think you can just go out and find the whole story somewhere, complete and cross-referenced, without any gaps or inconsistencies? I’m sorry to disillusion you, my boy, but that’s not the sort of world we live in. It’s a messy place. There are no infallible interpreters walking among the living, no emissaries sent from the blessed realm to dole out bits of lore that move history along and need never be questioned.”

Astyges speaking to Keftu, from The King of Nightspore’s Crown

oie_201222utyzw9lrIt’s a rare fantasy story that really surprises me. Partly, I have read a lot, but often there appears to be a collective dearth of imagination. I know readers — myself included — enjoy and find easy comfort in stories filled with familiar characters and plots, but once upon a time, before fantasy became a mass-market commodity in the 1970s, there seemed to be limitless inspiration in the stories that were told. Contemporary fantasy keeps getting stuck in homage and mimicry. When faux-European settings weren’t the norm, a reader could be transported to worlds as strikingly weird as Hodgson’s sunless Night Land, Burroughs’ dying Barsoom, or the haunted corridors of Peake’s Castle Gormenghast. When there’s no limit to the colors on a fantasy writer’s palette, why do I feel like I keep seeing the same dozen or so?

It was exactly three years ago that I first encountered Raphael Ordoñez’s writing. “The Goblin King’s Concubine” (BCS #129), a captivity narrative set in a deadly, spider- and fungus-infested jungle swamp on the dying world of Antellus, was like nothing else I was reading at the time. I sought out Ordoñez’s blog, Cosmic Antipodes, and spent hours reading his older posts on things ranging from planetary adventure to painting to autism. His love for storytelling unconstrained by the modern expectations of genre fantasy were refreshing. By the end I was ensnared, and watched for new stories with anticipation. Each is strange and unique and couched within a complex cosmogony which is a mix of Old Testament, William Blake, and pulp nuttiness, among other things. It can be read about at length here.

Last year, Ordoñez self-published the novel Dragonfly (read my review here). It brings together several characters introduced previously in short stories. Unlike the discrete events of those tales, the novel is a full-blown epic. Keftu, sole survivor of a desert tribe, thinks he is the only person alive in the entire world, until he espies a glowing city floating above the ocean. He is prevented from reaching the sky-city Narva when he falls into the clutches of the Cheriopt. The Cheripot is the the “semi-divine headless social machine” that controls everything in the crumbling, ocean-encircling megacity, Enoch. He becomes by turns, a famous gladiator, a liberator, and finally, the last hope to thwart the half-goblin Zilla’s nefarious plans to throw Enoch into total chaos.

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Future Treasures: The Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard

Future Treasures: The Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard

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the-fall-of-the-house-of-cabal-smallJonathan is a marvelously talented fantasy author. We published two of his stories featuring Kyth the Taker, the cunning and resourceful thief whose commissions somehow always involve her in sorcerous intrigue: “The Beautiful Corridor,” (Black Gate 13) and its sequel, “The Shuttered Temple” (BG 15).

His most recent novel was Carter & Lovecraft (October 2015). He published his first novel, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, in 2009; his newest novel The Fall of the House of Cabal is the fifth to feature gentleman necromancer Johannes Cabal and his comrades, including his vampiric brother, Horst. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne Books at the end of the month.

Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, has come into possession of a vital clue that may lead him to his ultimate goal: a cure for death. The path is vague, however, and certainly treacherous as it takes him into strange territories that, quite literally, no one has ever seen before. The task is too dangerous to venture upon alone, so he must seek assistance, comrades for the coming travails.

So assisted ― ably and otherwise ― by his vampiric brother, Horst, and by the kindly accompaniment of a criminologist and a devil, he will encounter ruins and diableries, mystery and murder, the depths of the lowest pit and a city of horrors. London, to be exact.

Yet even though Cabal has risked such peril believing he understands the dangers he faces, he is still underestimating them. He is walking into a trap of such arcane complexity that even the one who drew him there has no idea of its true terrors. As the snare closes slowly and subtly around them, it may be that there will be no survivors at all.

We’ve covered most of Jonathan’s recent releases here at Black Gate — including his article on writing the Johannes Cabal series, “Some Little Infamy.”

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A Secret Conflict During the Civil War: The House Divided Series by Sean McLachlan

A Secret Conflict During the Civil War: The House Divided Series by Sean McLachlan

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Sean McLachlan, our Wednesday afternoon blogger, is primarily known around our offices as the guy with the enviable travel budget. His recent travelogues have taken him to Roman ruins in Spain, Wallingord Castle in England, a volcanic island in the Canary Islands, the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, a writing retreat in Tangier, Morocco, and even more exotic places.

But Sean is also a prolific author. A former archaeologist, he is now a full-time writer who specializes in history, travel, and fiction. He won the 2013 Society of American Travel Writers Award for his Iraq reportage, and his historical fantasy novella “The Quintessence of Absence” appeared in Black Gate. He currently has several series on the go, including Toxic World, a post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure, and the Trench Raiders action series set in World War One. And his contemporary thriller, The Last Hotel Room, will be released later this month.

But my current favorite is his Civil War horror series House Divided, which so far consists of two novels: A Fine Likeness and The River of Desperation. Here’s what Sean told me when I asked him about the origin of the series.

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Much of a Muchness: Phyllis Eisenstein’s Born to Exile

Much of a Muchness: Phyllis Eisenstein’s Born to Exile

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First edition of Eisenstein’s Born to Exile
Fantasy Fiction, editorial, detail
Why was the editor of Fantasy Fiction getting stories full of mystical strangeness? We cannot tell.

Recently I was reading an editorial in Fantasy Fiction, an old magazine from near the end of the pulp era. This is the kind of thing I’m apt to do, especially when I should be getting some work done, but in this case I was hooked by the title, which was one of Latin’s greatest hits about reading: NON MULTA, SED MULTUM (“not many things, but much of a thing”).

The message of the editorial was that the editor was seeing too many stories that overdid the number of fantastic elements: “Recently a story came in which had everything — ghosts were making a compact with a group of trolls to defeat the Greek gods, now about to retake the world with a bunch of Hebraic letter incantations.”

The editor felt this was bad and stopped reading on the third page. I say it sounds awesome and the editor should have been banished to the outer darkness where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. But I’m of the opposite school of fantasy — the “more cowbell” school, you might call it (to allude to another classic). Some people will try to tell you that less is more, but “more cowbell” people insist that only more is more: more miracles, more fireballs, more talking squids in space.

The truth is that neither school is right or wrong; it’s just a question of what works in a given story. The advantage of the non multa, sed multum approach is that it allows the writer to explore the ramifications of a fantastic concept, and maybe work in a character or two, not to mention a more carefully detailed world.

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When a Trilogy Becomes a Sextuplet

When a Trilogy Becomes a Sextuplet

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Michael J. Sullivan
Michael J. Sullivan

After the launch of his newest book a few weeks ago I asked writer Michael J. Sullivan if he could spare some time to talk about his writing process. In addition to being talented, Michael also happens to be one of the humblest and kindest writers it’s been my pleasure to meet. It’s my pleasure to turn the blog over to him.

I recently released Age of Myth, the first novel in my new series. It’s the one with the big tree on the cover. Since people ignore advice, and nearly everyone actually does judge books by their covers, it’s a good thing for me that trees appear to be popular (no pun on poplar intended… okay maybe it was).

My first series The Riyria Revelations is six books long. This new series was supposed to be a trilogy. You’ll note I used the word supposed in that sentence. When I write a novel it almost always tops off around the 100,000-130,000 word mark (around 375-450 pages). I don’t plan it that way — just happens. It’s the length I need to tell a self-contained tale. Apparently I also have a set number when it comes to how many books it takes to write a series. You guessed it, my trilogy grew to six books long (okay, you had help from the post’s title). No, the publisher didn’t make me expand it, and Peter Jackson had nothing to do with it. The story takes place during a great war, but the story stopped before all the conflicts were over. I had a suspicion readers weren’t going to like that. I didn’t either. Quitting before the war was 100% resolved felt unfinished.

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Future Treasures: Crooked Kingdom, the Sequel to Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Future Treasures: Crooked Kingdom, the Sequel to Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, published in hardcover last September by Henry Holt and Co, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. Which hardly seems fair, since she already had a bestselling young adult series in The Grisha Trilogy (Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising), but some people just hog all the attention, I guess.

Six of Crows is a caper novel set in the same world as The Grisha Trilogy, in which criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker dreams of a brazen heist in the bustling hub of Ketterdam, and manages to assemble a talented team of geniuses and misfits to pull it off. Author Holly Black called it “A twisty and elegantly crafted masterpiece,” and the Los Angeles Times says it’s “Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones… with a caper twist.” How can you resist a description like that?

The sequel, Crooked Kingdom, arrives in hardcover at the end of the month, and sees Kaz Brekker and his crew thrown right back into the thick of things. Here’s the description.

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Is Robert Reed the New Century’s Most Compelling SF Voice?

Is Robert Reed the New Century’s Most Compelling SF Voice?

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The Memory of Sky wraparound cover

Last month I finally got around to picking up a copy of Robert Reed’s massive collection The Greatship (which I talked about here.) It collects 11 tales — plus a bunch of new connecting material — in his Greatship saga, set on a vast spaceship relic that is larger than worlds, and which contains thousands of alien species.

I’m glad I had the chance to familiarize myself with the Greatship tales, as that came in handy last month at Worldcon in Kansas City. I attended the Asimov’s SF group reading, hosted by editor Sheila Williams, and found it an insightful and entertaining hour, as writers James Patrick Kelly, Connie Willis, Steve Rasnic Tem, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Robert Reed all read from recent or upcoming tales published in the magazine. Robert Reed, whom Sheila calls the writer with the most stories in Asimov’s (“by quite a bit”), read from an unpublished Greatships novella coming in the magazine next year, and it was totally captivating. It certainly helped pique my interest in the series, and it was pretty high to begin with.

[As the panel got started James Patrick Kelly exhorted the audience to “check out the new website — it’s so much better than the old one!” Sheila, with an uncomfortable glance at me, said she didn’t feel right disparaging the old website, “since the person who designed it is sitting in the audience.” I helped Sheila launch the Asimov’s website at SF Site roughly two decades ago, and in fact it was Rodger Turner who did most of the heavy lifting, so it certainly was no insult to me that they’d finally upgraded to a much superior design. I don’t usually like to interrupt panels, but this time I was happy to shout out “Disparage away!”]

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Gods, Monsters and Mayhem: The Pantheon Novels of James Lovegrove

Gods, Monsters and Mayhem: The Pantheon Novels of James Lovegrove

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Age of Shiva James Lovegrove-small Age of Heroes James Lovegrove-small

One of my all-time favorite fantasy novels is Roger Zelazny’s Hugo-winning Lord of Light, a richly original science fantasy of one man’s attempt to stop an elitist cabal from setting themselves up as gods on a newly colonized world, using the gods of the Hindu pantheon as a template. James Lovegrove’s 8-volume Pantheon series is, if anything, even more ambitious than that groundbreaking work, as each volume uses a different pantheon of gods to spin a standalone tale of mythological mayhem.

The series began with The Age of Ra in 2009, and continued in six additional novels and one collection, Godpunk. The most recent, Age of Shiva, which borrows from god of the Hindu Pantheon, arrived in 2014, and the next volume, Age of Heroes, which features the Gods of Greece, arrives in paperback next week.

For anyone looking for their next big SF adventure series, the Pantheon novels make a fine candidate. Here’s the complete list of titles.

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Magic, Intrigue, Adventure, and a Bit of Piracy: The Shades of Magic Trilogy by V. E. Schwab

Magic, Intrigue, Adventure, and a Bit of Piracy: The Shades of Magic Trilogy by V. E. Schwab

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335710zWYMO5wF A-Gathering-of-Shadows-small A Conjuring of Light-small

The second book in V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy, A Gathering of Shadows, made her a New York Times bestselling author. It has become one of the most acclaimed and popular fantasy series in recent memory. Booklist says it’s “Full of magic, intrigue, adventure, deception, a bit of piracy,” and NPR called it “Compulsively readable.” The Wall Street Journal labeled it “a multiple split-screen adventure, with an engaging hero/heroine pair,” and Steven Brust says “is as twisty-turny, dark, and gorgeous as the (multiple) Londons it winds through — I loved it!”

When the second volume was released earlier this year, I called it the “concluding volume” in a 2-book series. Whoops. That’s the publishing biz for you. I hope I don’t get in trouble soon for calling it a trilogy.

The series follows the adventures of Kell, a magician, ambassador, and smuggler who travels between parallel Londons, carrying royal correspondence. When a thief named Delilah Bard robs him, and then saves him from a nasty fate, the two find themselves on the run, jumping between worlds. In A Gathering of Shadows, Kell is visited by dreams of ominous magical events… as strange things begin to emerge from Black London, the place of which no one speaks.

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Future Treasures: Of Sand and Malice Made by Bradley P. Beaulieu

Future Treasures: Of Sand and Malice Made by Bradley P. Beaulieu

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Of Sand and Malice Made

Bradley P. Beaulieu’s first novel in the Song of Shattered Sands series, Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, was published last September, and listed as one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BuzzFeed. The next book in the series, Of Sand and Malice Made, tells an earlier tale of Çeda, the youngest pit fighter in the history of the great desert city of Sharakhai. It arrives in hardcover from DAW next week.

Çeda, the heroine of the novel Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, is the youngest pit fighter in the history of the great desert city of Sharakhai. In this prequel, she has already made her name in the arena as the fearsome, undefeated White Wolf; none but her closest friends and allies know her true identity.

But this all changes when she crosses the path of Rümayesh, an ehrekh, a sadistic creature forged long ago by the god of chaos. The ehrekh are usually desert dwellers, but this one lurks in the dark corners of Sharakhai, toying with and preying on humans. As Rümayesh works to unmask the White Wolf and claim Çeda for her own, Çeda’s struggle becomes a battle for her very soul.

The next installment in the series, With Blood Upon the Sand, is due in hardcover in February.

Of Sand and Malice Made will be published by DAW on September 6, 2016. It is 240 pages, priced at $18 in hardcover, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by René Aigner.