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The nominations for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel have been announced by the DGLA. At the same time, the DGLA has also announced the nominees for The Morningstar Award for Best Debut Novel, and The Ravenheart Award for Best Fantasy Cover Art. May we have the envelope please!
John DeNardo has closed up shop at his Hugo Award-winning blog SF Signal, but he continues to write about SF and fantasy in his regular column at Kirkus Reviews. One of his best recent articles — indeed, one of the most enjoyable blog posts I’ve read in a long time — was his passionate and articulate defense of Media Tie-ins, published on June 15.
As much as I bemoan the poor public of image of science fiction by mainstream readers, there’s an even worse injustice going on. Some people in those very same slighted genre circles are often quick to dismiss a certain type of book: media tie-ins. These are the books that are based on a story most often found in another media (like film, television, and games) but could be sourced from other literary properties as well. These are the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Dungeons and Dragons prose novels that the bookstores like to relegate to the end of the science fiction and fantasy bookshelf section. They are positioned like an appendix in a non-fiction book “in case you’re interested in more reading.” You know, if you’ve run out of other things to read…
So, yes, media tie-ins are worth your time. I’ll even back that up: one of the best set of books I’ve ever read — in any genre — was the Eisenhorn trilogy by Dan Abnett. The books are set in the richly-imagined Warhammer 40K universe, which is based on the popular role playing game. (Even WH40K itself is an offshoot of the fantasy RPG Warhammer, for which there are even more prose novels.) Abnett is a one of the most skilled master storytellers you’ve never heard of. This is the series that I point to when anyone is quick to dismiss tie-in fiction. The fact that it is set in the Warhammer 40K universe is incidental, though if you are familiar with the games, that would be an added bonus when you read them. I don’t play the game, but that didn’t stop me from losing sleep because I couldn’t stop turning page after action-packed page, or cheering when a bad guy finally got his comeuppance.
Read John’s complete article here.
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As you may know from past articles, my literary relationship with Stephen King has seen more horror-themed infidelities and follow-on love fests than Ozzy Osbourne’s marriage. Frankly, I had pretty much thrown King over permanently for his more intellectually acrobatic son Joseph King (aka Joe Hill) until nearly three years when in a fit of nostalgia over The Shining, I picked up Doctor Sleep.
And just like that, Stephen King moved back into my library.
So when the first book in King’s new Detective Bill Hodges trilogy called Mr. Mercedes was released the following year, the warm glow from meeting the adult Danny Torrance was still evident and I decided to give the new series a try, even though mystery / serial killer stories are not really my thing.
And what do you know? Like the younger, more energetic version of himself in those heady days of Salem’s Lot and Carrie, King delivered a second white-knuckled nail-biter of a tale, equal to his previous work.
Retired police detective Bill Hodges, the unlikely hero of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers (book two of the trilogy), now runs an investigation agency with his partner, Holly Gibney. Holly is the sister of Hodges’ great love who died at the hands of serial killer Brady Hartsfield and also happens to be the woman who delivered the blow to Brady’s head that put him in a vegetative state.
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I get a lot of review copies in the mail, and I buy a great many books online (Amazon tells me I’ve placed 15 orders in the past 30 days, which seems like kind of a lot. And it’s probably best if we don’t discuss eBay.) But I still enjoy my Saturday trips to the bookstore, where I can leisurely browse Barnes & Noble’s SF & Fantasy section. Even for someone who puts effort into staying on top of SF publishing every single day, there are always surprises.
It was a pleasant surprise a few weeks ago when I stumbled on A. A. Aguirre’s intriguing two-volume steampunk/noir/crime series Apparatus Infernum, which consists of Bronze Gods and Silver Mirrors. A.A. Aguirre is the pseudonym for Ann & Andres Aguirre, a husband-wife writing team. Ann Aguire, as we’ve noted previously is an extraordinarily prolific fantasy and SF writer, producing some 22 novels in five years, including the Sirantha Jax science fiction adventures, the Corine Solomon urban fantasies, the YA post-apocalyptic dystopian Razorland trilogy, the dark SF series The Dred Chronicles, and many more.
The Apparatus Infernum series looks like a pleasing combination of fantasy and noir drama… and it has the added attraction of not being ten books long. Here’s the description for the first book.
Hobgoblin Night (2015) is an e-book rerelease (and revision, and repackaging, along with three previously published short stories) of The Gnome’s Engine (1991), Teresa Edgerton’s charming follow-up to Goblin Moon (1991). In it, the adventures of brave Sera Vorder and dashing Francis Skelbrooke, and the evil machinations of the faerie-human hybrid, the Duchess of Zar-Wildungen, continue.
In my Black Gate review of Goblin Moon, I wrote,
Goblin Moon is a model of what light entertainment can be. It’s not going to change your world, but it will definitely bring a smile to the face of anyone with a taste for some swashbuckling and Gothic mystery. This tale, smelling just a little of lavender and gunpowder, is a fun respite from all the bloody, cynical “realism” permeating much of modern fantasy — come to think of it, much of modern life.
Those words hold true for Hobgoblin Night, as well. There’s a little less swashbuckling and a little more Gothic mystery in this volume, but it’s just as much outright fun as its predecessor. If you have any desire to visit a world suspiciously like Europe during the Enlightenment, but with Gnomes, Fairies, Trolls, magic, and alchemy, these two books are for you.
At the end of Goblin Moon Sera, her cousin Elsie, and Jed Braun were headed off over the Alantick Ocean to the hoped-for safety of the New World. Though they had thwarted the Duchess’ evil plan to wreak dire harm on Elsie as revenge for a slight perpetrated by Elsie’s mother, they hadn’t stifled her desire for satisfaction. By stealing an ancient, mysterious parchment from the Duchess before fleeing, they had, in fact, only enraged her more.
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In her review of the second volume in Sebastien de Castell’s Greatcoats trilogy, Sarah Avery said:
De Castell is carving himself an enduring place in the fantasy canon…. I forgot I was wondering or worrying or writing a review, because the stalwart, somewhat cracked hero Falcio Val Mond was tugging me back into his story. I’d follow Falcio anywhere… he makes us laugh, raucously, especially in the bleak moments when he and we need it most…
One of the great pleasures of Knight’s Shadow is that the worldbuilding deepens, opens outward, flowers. In Traitor’s Blade, the Dashini made only a brief onstage appearance, and otherwise were basically ciphers, bogeymen the Greatcoats feared because so little was known about them. In the new volume, we learn about their tragedies and traumas, and why they were founded in the first place. The Greatcoats themselves had a centuries-long history with a violent end before King Paelis refounded them… Like Traitor’s Blade, Knight’s Shadow ends on a note that could still be satisfying if the series ended right now. One hazard of series fantasy is an endless episodic structure in which boundaries between volumes can feel arbitrary… It’s one problem you won’t find in de Castell’s work. Each of the two books now before us has a clear beginning, middle, and end…
Knight’s Shadow is so strong, the only way I can see the Greatcoats series failing to achieve eventual wide recognition as a classic is if the author meets an untimely demise before he finishes writing it. Live a long life, Sebastien de Castell.
Saint’s Blood, the third installment in the series, was released in hardcover by Jo Fletcher Books last month. Here’s the description.
Way back in 2000, I submitted a book review to Black Gate magazine on a dare.
I had recently fallen in love with the first three installments of the newly published Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (aka Dan Handler) and was going on about them at work to anyone who would listen. Finally, a coworker dared me to tell someone who might actually care and send my annoyingly enthusiastic review to his favorite publication, Black Gate – assuming, I am sure, that head honcho John O’ would effectively tell me to shut it, in writing.
But sixteen years later, thanks to that annoyed coworker and the high tolerant nature of our editor-in-chief, I continue to occupy a subterranean office at Black Gate where I perpetually maintain a small shrine to Handler beside the blender: not only because his work is where Goth Chick News began, but because he remains to this day, just that entertaining.
In 2004, five years after the first book in the Series of Unfortunate Events was published, Hollywood made what I deem a truly disastrous attempt to bring them to life on the big screen; “disastrous” because rather than focusing on the three, young protagonists, Violet, Klaus and Sunny, Paramount Pictures offered it up as a vehicle for Jim Carey. And pulling out every facial expression and delivery shtick from every one of his past characterizations all the way back to In Living Color, Carey dealt the potential franchise an agonizingly slow, 108-minute death.
At least that is what I say happened.
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Two publishers asked if we’d try something unusual. It was the same unusual thing — reviewing an entire trilogy in one go — for two different series and two different reasons.
One series, Brian Stavely’s The Emperor’s Blades, was about to conclude. The other, Martin Leicht and Isla Neal’s The Ever-Expanding Universe, had been published by one imprint as YA, and was being given a second chance as a series for adults by another imprint of the same house. Though I knew reviewing two trilogies in this way would reduce the number of posts I made to BG this year considerably, I was curious. So here we are.
The Ever-Expanding Universe follows the adventures of a daring young engineer whose dreams of interplanetary exploration and college, not necessarily in that order, seem at first to be dashed by a bout of teen pregnancy. Thanks to the cover copy, it’s no spoiler to tell you that the young engineer’s baby daddy and not-quite-boyfriend turns out to be of extraterrestrial ancestry, and the most contested commodities in a resource war between two alien species are the bodies of the girls at the near-earth-orbit boarding school for unwed mothers where Elvie Nara has gone to hide from her high school nemesis.
Is it worse when Cole Archer, the sort-of-boyfriend, turns out to be an alien commando, or when Cole’s definitely-girlfriend and Elvie’s aforementioned cheerleader nemesis Britta McVicker turns out to be one of Elvie’s classmates for prenatal yoga? The three of them, and an impressively varied passel of other gravid girls seriously irked at having been tricked by alien boyfriends, spend the first volume of the series, Mothership, dodging ruthless alien attackers and fleeing through a booby-trapped and sabotaged space cruise ship refitted as a high school.
It’s a delightful mix of suspense, fight scenes, engineering puzzles involving transitions from one gravity or atmospheric environment to another, slapstick comedy, social satire, secret history, and stuff blowing up real good, all delivered by a hilariously smart first-person-smartass narrator you want to see triumph. How could any SFF reader resist? How did we miss this series when it first came out? Why is it not already a classic of humorous science fiction?
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Irish writer John Connolly is best known for the Charlie Parker private eye/horror novels. The first, Every Dead Thing (1999) was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, and the fourteenth, A Time of Torment, will be released this August. In 2009 Connolly published his first novel for younger readers, The Gates, featuring Samuel Johnson, his faithful daschund Boswell, and his bumbling demon friend Nurd. It was followed by two more; all three are now available in trade paperback from Emily Bestler Books.
The Gates (320 pages, $7.99, August 30, 2011)
The Infernals (336 pages, $15, April 10, 2012; published in the UK as Hell’s Bells)
The Creeps (319 pages, $15, August 26, 2014)
The books have been celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. The LA Times calls them “Laugh out loud funny… a cross between Eoin Colfer and Terry Pratchett,” and Booklist says they’re “Hilariously macabre.” In her Black Gate review of The Infernals, Andrea Grennan called them “Marvelous… great fun for any reader, young or old. Like the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, adults will appreciate The Infernals in a different and more sophisticated way.”
I’ve found a number of online sellers offering brand new copies of recent British SF and fantasy books very inexpensively (essentially, at remainder prices), and I’ve been taking advantage of them. My most recent purchases include Paul McAuley’s In the Mouth of the Whale (the third volume in his far-future series The Quiet War), and the massive omnibus volume Confluence, which contains his complete trilogy. And I do mean massive — just take a look at the thing (click the image at right for a more lifesize version). At 935 pages, it proudly stands all on its own on my end table (and darn near tips it over).
Paul McAuley was an early columnist for Black Gate (his fantasy review column On the Edge appeared in our early print issues). The omnibus volume contains three complete novels, all originally published in hardcover in the US by Avon EOS:
Child of the River (1997)
Ancients of Days (1998)
Shrine of Stars (1999)
Here’s the description:
Confluence — a long, narrow, artificial world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. A world beyond the end of human history, served by countless machines, inhabited by 10,000 bloodlines who worship their absent creators, riven by a vast war against heretics.
This is the home of Yama, found as an infant in a white boat on the world’s Great River, raised by an obscure bureaucrat in an obscure town in the middle of a ruined necropolis, destined to become a clerk — until the discovery of his singular ancestry. For Yama appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the revered architects of Confluence, able to awaken and control the secret machineries of the world.
Pursued by enemies who want to make use of his powers, Yama voyages down the length of the world to search for answers to the mysteries of his origin, and to discover if he is to be the saviour of his world, or its nemesis.
Confluence was published by Gollancz in August 2015. It is 935 pages, priced at £16.99 in trade paperback and $15.99 for the digital edition. I bought my copy from Media Universe for $12.14 plus $3.99 shipping (and In the Mouth of the Whale from the same vendor for $2.95). Copies of both are still available.