Self-Published Book Review: Avarice by Annie Bellet

Self-Published Book Review: Avarice by Annie Bellet

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AvariceWe’ve been told that we can’t judge a book by its cover, yet we do it all the time. A good cover can catch our eye and attract our interest. The art and title alone can usually tell us whether it’s gritty sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, or paranormal romance. The cover tells us more about the setting and mood of the story than even the jacket copy, and continues to influence us even after we start reading.

And unfortunately, self-published authors usually lack the budget and the specialized skills to do a great cover. Often, self-published covers look amateurish. Some authors decide to forgo a cover altogether, deciding that it’s better to have no cover than a bad cover (my wife takes this approach). This month’s novel, Avarice by Annie Bellet, is a notable exception. It’s not just that the cover is beautiful in itself, it’s that it instantly tells you what the story is about. Between the illustration and the title of the series (Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division) an experienced reader of genre fiction has a pretty good idea what this book is about. I’ll give you a moment to guess before I reveal the answer below the fold.

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The Summer Movies… Again: Iron Man (3) Three

The Summer Movies… Again: Iron Man (3) Three

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Iron Man 3 Poster MainIron Man Three (2013)
Directed by Shane Black. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley, Rebecca Hall, William Sadler, Miguel Ferrer, Jon Favreau, Ty Simpkins.

For people worried that the individual Iron Man series within the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe was in trouble, have no fear: Iron Man is back on track because Shane Black has got your back.

Iron Man Three (yes, that’s what the end credits call it, and therefore it’s the official title) starts off the Marvel Movie-verse Phase 2 with a self-contained story that feels like a great five or six-issue comic book arc. You remember: the kind that Marvel used to pull off in the days before they “evented” everything to death with Skrull infiltrations and Norman Osborne conquering the world. I hear that currently the mad robot Ultron is doing the heavy lifting for Marvel’s crossover event. Maybe this means we’ll see him in Avengers 2.

This compressed approach for Iron Man Three was the correct choice coming off the huge success of The Avengers; the new Iron Man flick needed to show that Marvel’s individual heroes could still carry their own installments — their own magazine titles, so to speak — without the support of crossover mania. With Iron Man Three as the best of the Iron Man movies so far, it promises that Thor and Captain America will have superior returns in their own follow-ups. That will be quite a feat for Cap, considering how great Captain America: The First Avenger is. But it’s in the realm of the possible, as Shane Black shows everyone with Shellhead the Third.

This is a movie that will also ignite a huge debate over its changes to the comic canon. (Wait, what do I mean “will”? The battle has already started in a forum near you.) Although the script by Black and co-writer Drew Pearce uses the popular Warren Ellis Extremis storyline from 2005–06 as a starting point and features one of Iron Man’s main villains, The Mandarin, they have fashioned a story that stays true to its own internal character logic and freely jettisons major sections of Marvel Comics history both to goose the audience and give them unexpected thrills. It’s actually a touch annoying to write a standard “review” in the modern Internet spoilerphobe understanding for a film like this where I have to dodge talking about major plot points. The thrill in writing about a movie like Iron Man Three comes from getting geeky and detailed about how it toys with famous characters and undercuts expectations.

But I’ll play by the rules here — for now. You do deserve to see Iron Man Three knowing only as much as you’ve seen from the marketing. And that means I’ve negated the rest of what I am going to say. Nonetheless, onward…. and I do promise a minimum of “spoilers.” (I hate that word. Can we ditch it? I’ve found out “spoilers” before and yet not had the film “spoiled” for me. We need a better term. How about “twists”? There you go: we’ve already got a good word. Occam’s Razor Rules!)

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New Treasures: Bronze Gods, by A.A. Aguirre

New Treasures: Bronze Gods, by A.A. Aguirre

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Bronze GodsAnn Aguire is a very, very busy woman.

In the last five years alone she’s written six novels in the Sirantha Jax science fiction adventure series (Grimspace, Wanderlust, and four others); five Corine Solomon urban fantasies (beginning with Blue Diablo and Hell Fire); the YA post-apocalyptic dystopian Razorland trilogy (Enclave, Outpost, Horde); the paranormal romantic suspense Skin series (written as Ava Gray; four volumes beginning with Skin Game); the apocalyptic romance Dark Age Dawning (three so far, co-written with Carrie Lofty, under the name Ellen Connor); and the upcoming dark SF series The Dred Chronicles (starting with Perdition, scheduled for release in August).

That’s 22 novels since 2008. Allow me to express my sincere admiration, with a heartfelt WOW.

Now, you’d think someone with six series on the go already wouldn’t feel particularly pressured to launch a new sequence of steampunk noir fantasy novels. But apparently, you’d be wrong.

The Apparatus Infernum novels are co-written with her husband Andres Aguirre, and released under the name A.A. Aguirre. They sound like an appealing mix of steampunk and mystery.

Here’s the back cover copy for Bronze Gods, the first volume.

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Are We Looking for a Hero?

Are We Looking for a Hero?

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DrWhoThe other day, an issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in my mailbox. Doctor Who was on the cover. Let me repeat that, because it’s significant.  Entertainment Weekly had Doctor Who on the cover. What’s next? Good Housekeeping? Vogue? The New York Times Literary Supplement?

And there’s more. Out of the last fifteen covers, six featured genre work: the new Superman movie, Game of Thrones, World War Z, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Catching Fire. Counting the Doctor, that’s seven genre covers out of sixteen. And each with a feature article, of course.

Where am I going with this? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough to remember when it would have been UNHEARD OF for any genre work to appear on the cover or front page of any widely or popularly-read entertainment information vehicle. No newspapers, no magazines, no book or movie review sections. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

 

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The Next Generation comes to New Pulp

The Next Generation comes to New Pulp

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nate-the-greatBarryCoverAttending Windy City Pulp and Paper Con in Chicago reinforced the fact that the burgeoning New Pulp world is quickly becoming as diverse as the classic originals. While most people tend to stereotype pulp as falling between sword & sorcery, hardboiled detective fiction, and costumed avengers, it was really far more broad in its appeal, encompassing everything from sci-fi to swashbucklers to boxing tales to romance to humor. A few months ago, I spotlighted Pro Se Presents for doing an excellent job of bringing diversity back to contemporary pulp fiction. This week’s article looks at two new titles from New Pulp publishers and creators that push the boundaries in unexpected directions.

First off is the new title from Airship 27 from the team of Richard Kellogg and Gary Kato. It is no surprise to see Airship 27 continuing the tradition of giving readers new Sherlock Holmes titles to enjoy. What is surprising is that Kellogg and Kato’s book, Barry Baskerville Solves a Case, is aimed squarely at children.

The title is equal parts Encyclopedia Brown, Nate the Great, and Sherlock Holmes. While my own kids are too big to enjoy this, I can’t wait to read this title to my grandkids one day. Barry Baskerville is an absolute hoot for Holmes fans. Each page is dripping with wonderful references to the canon that parents will love (a bit like finding Easter eggs on a DVD). Best of all the many references never detract from the story to spoil the fun for kids who will want to be just like Barry.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Revenge of Son of Writing Fantasy Heroes

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Revenge of Son of Writing Fantasy Heroes

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I’ve been writing about Jason M. Waltz’s Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros for a couple of weeks now. It’s specialized, far more specialized than most classic how-to-write books, which usually talk about fiction generally, or process generally, or a whole genre at a time. Examining every permutation of a particular technical challenge in a particular genre is a weird thing for a writing book to do. The essays Waltz has assembled here are also structurally similar in an uncommon way: in each essay, the author walks the reader through passages from his or her own work, sometimes in early draft, with comments about choices that worked or didn’t. The how-to-write book is a genre beset by the Problem of Terrible Sameness, but Writing Fantasy Heroes is different from any other writing book on your shelves. While it may not have the universality of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, it will help a great many new writers already know how they want to specialize.

Howard Andrew Jones’s “Two Sought Adventure” details the problems and potentials in stories that have more than one hero. A story with multiple heroes is very different from a one-hero story with a sidekick, love interest, foil, nemesis, or whatever. There are plenty of straightforward techniques for using secondary characters to reveal a single protagonist’s character. Using two (or more) heroes to do this for one another in a way that feels balanced and gratifying for the reader is a tougher trick.  Dialogue is crucial, and Jones offers close readings of dialogue from his own work and others’ that illustrate ways to welcome the reader into the shorthand, in-jokes, and shifting tones in conversations between longtime friends. He also addresses a problem I’ve seen in too much professionally published fiction: the duo that bickers like an old married couple, to the point where you wish they would split up, go away, or get eaten by the monster already. Friends have conflict, and friends engaged in epic heroics may have epic conflicts, but bickering is only entertaining in small doses, and it’s rarely illuminating. Jones offers a variety of specific alternative ways to handle conflict between heroes, and to interweave it with a story’s other conflicts.

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Goth Chick News: The 2013 Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo

Goth Chick News: The 2013 Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo

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image004Last week the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2 for you cool kids) rolled into town with its usual juggernaut of the innovative, the unusual and the spandex’d.

Though this is my fourth year covering the show for Black Gate, I must say it is by far the worst place to send someone like me who has a problem with staring; especially when doing so is likely to seriously annoy a very big person in a very small costume.

But never let it be said that I shirked my obligation to a long-suffering readership. Therefore I bribed Black Gate photographer Chris Z to once again wade into a precarious situation with me, this time with the promise he could meet all the crew of the Black Pearl from Pirates of the Caribbean who were listed as special guests.

Plus, Chris would be a good deterrent if I did indeed seriously annoy someone; like Batman or Chewbacca.

Almost immediately I realized Chris Z was probably in as much trouble as I was.

The first indication was a sign instructing us to text a number if we saw anything “suspicious.” At which point Chris and I looked at each other and said in unison, “Define suspicious.”

When everywhere you look are adults dressed as super heroes, Star Wars characters and video game icons, determining exactly what constitutes “suspicious” is darn near impossible. Which makes you wonder what would cause someone to text the number as instructed.

Still, Chris and I did our very best to put on the mental blinders and run through a full-day lineup of interviews, meet-and-greets and 100 aisles of merchandise.

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Get Out of the Dungeon with Monsters! Monsters!

Get Out of the Dungeon with Monsters! Monsters!

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monsters-monsters-smallSome 35 years ago, I read an article in The Space Gamer on an unusual little game called Monsters! Monsters!

I’m not even sure I’d played D&D when I first read about Monsters! Monsters! I was introduced to fantasy gaming by Metagaming, and specifically their brilliant mini-games Ogre, Melee, and Wizard, all designed by Steve Jackson.

Orge everyone knows about — if you didn’t play the game at the lunch table in high school when it was first released in 1977, then you’re probably aware of last year’s Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly a million dollars for a massive 14-pound Designer’s Edition.

I doubt every copy of Ogre in the world in 1977 totalled 14 pounds. I think Ogre may have the unique distinction of being the simplest and most spare SF game ever created, and now it’s also the largest.

Anyway, it was Melee and Wizard that first taught me all about role playing. I rolled my first attack dice in a school cafeteria in 1978 (I missed). The rules were simple, the miniatures were made of paper, but the magic was exactly as advertised. I carried those games in my back pocket for years, and my friends and I were die-hard Metagaming fans long before we stepped into our first dungeon.

Metagaming’s house organ was the magazine The Space Gamer, where they advertised upcoming releases, chatted about the industry, and generally talked up their games. It was there I first learned of the wider world of role playing, and where I discovered an odd little game called Monsters! Monsters! that they released in 1976.

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Andrew J. Offutt, August 16, 1934 – April 30, 2013

Andrew J. Offutt, August 16, 1934 – April 30, 2013

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swords-against-darkness-ivAndrew J. Offutt, who authored many fantasy novels in the 70s and 80s, and who made a significant contribution to Sword and Sorcery as an editor with his seminal Swords Against Darkness anthology series, died yesterday.

Offutt wrote numerous novels under the name John Cleve (and other pseudonyms), including five volumes in the Crusader historical adventure line, and the long-running erotic SF adventure series Spaceways. The first science fiction novel to appear under his own name was Evil is Live Spelled Backwards in 1970.

But I first encountered him in Swords Against Darkness IV in 1979, a marvelous book which contains stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Orson Scott Card, Poul Anderson, Tanith Lee, and many others. The first Swords Against Darkness appeared in 1977 from Zebra Books, with a Robert E. Howard fragment completed by Offutt, a Simon of Gitta tale from Richard L. Tierney, and fiction from Poul Anderson, Manly Wade Wellman, David Drake, Ramsey Campbell and many others. Offutt edited a total of five volumes, with the final one appearing in 1979. Together with Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords anthologies and a handful of small press magazines like Weirdbook, Swords Against Darkness kept Sword & Sorcery alive throughout the 70s and into the early 80s.

Offutt went on to some success with collaborator Richard K. Lyons, beginning with the War of the Wizards trilogy (1978-81). He also wrote the War of the Gods on Earth trilogy (1979-83), but was mostly known for his Robert E. Howard pastiche novels featuring Conan and Cormac Mac Art, including The Undying Wizard (1976), The Mists of Doom (1977), and Conan and the Sorcerer (1978). He was a noted contributor to Thieves’ World, appearing in several volumes in the ’80s and ’90s.

Offutt had a long hiatus after his last Thieves World work appear in 1993. He returned briefly to the field in the last decade, contributing a short story co-authored with Richard K. Lyon for 2009’s Rage of the Behemoth from Rogue Blades Entertainment.

Altogether Offutt wrote and edited more than 75 books. He also contributed to the field in other ways, including two terms as president of SFWA, from 1976-78. He died yesterday at the age of 78.

Vintage Treasures: An Earth Man on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

Vintage Treasures: An Earth Man on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

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An Earth Man on VenusRalph Milne Farley was a pen name for Roger Sherman Hoar, a state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts. Why a state senator wouldn’t proudly lay claim to a novel featuring a man and woman in underwear on the cover is beyond me, but some people just humbly shy away from fame, I guess.

Or maybe it’s the antennae growing out of her head. It’s hard to be sure.

Whatever the case, An Earthman on Venus was originally published (as The Radio Man) in that grand old lady of the pulps, Argosy, in 1924. It was immediately popular, and reprinted many times, starting in Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1939) and then in hardcover from Fantasy Publishing in 1948.

The version of interest to us is the 1950 Avon paperback, pictured at left. Primarily because it’s a prime early example of underwear chic, but also because it was the first true mass market edition.

Legendary editor Donald A. Wollheim — who would later found DAW Books — was at the helm at Avon at the time, and he had an eye for pulp fiction that would play well in paperback. While he was at Avon, he made A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, and C. S. Lewis’s Silent Planet space trilogy available in mass market for the first time, bringing those authors — and many others — a wide audience.

The Radio Man isn’t particularly well-remembered today, but it’s an important part of the history of our genre nonetheless. Not just because of it has giant ants and antenna girls on the cover… well, mostly that. But it was also one of the first sword-and-planet adventures, and it was successful enough to spawn no less than seven sequels over the next three decades, starting with The Radio Beasts (1925) and including The Radio Planet (1926), The Radio Flyers (1929), The Radio Menace (1930), The Radio Gun-Runners (1930), The Radio War (1932) and The Radio Minds of Mars (1955).

Now I don’t know about you, but I thought the sequel was invented with The Godfather, Part II. Evidence that fantasy writers were doing that kind of thing half a century before Francis Ford Coppola thought of it fills me with pride. And a powerful compulsion to buy blue lingerie for Alice, but let’s not get in to that.

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