New Treasures: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London

New Treasures: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London

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rivers-of-londonOne of the great things about Amazon.com is that there are so many ways to browse. Which is rather ironic, considering that 10 years ago that’s the precise reason I confidently gave for why online booksellers would never replace local bookshops: you couldn’t browse.

Yeah, well. I was wrong.  You can browse.  And how. Last week I stumbled across a few hard-to-find British hardcovers in the Science Fiction & Fantasy section of their Bargain Department, and on a hunch I did a search for all titles from Gollancz, the prolific UK SF & fantasy publisher. I sorted by price and bam, I had a handy list of great bargain Gollancz books.

One that grabbed my attention immediately was Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London, in hardcover for just $14.56:

My name is Peter Grant and until January I was just probationary constable in that mighty army for justice known to all right-thinking people as the Metropolitan Police Service (as the Filth to everybody else). My only concerns in life were how to avoid a transfer to the Case Progression Unit – we do paperwork so real coppers don’t have to – and finding a way to climb into the panties of the outrageously perky WPC Leslie May. Then one night, in pursuance of a murder inquiry, I tried to take a witness statement from someone who was dead but disturbingly voluable, and that brought me to the attention of Inspector Nightingale, the last wizard in England.

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Black Gate Interviews Howard Andrew Jones, Part Three

Black Gate Interviews Howard Andrew Jones, Part Three

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Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows, by Howard Andrew Jones. Coming February 2011In part one of our interview Howard talked about one of his new novels, The Desert of Souls, and about historical fantasy; in part two we discussed the works of Harold Lamb and Howard’s efforts to collect and republish Lamb’s fiction; for our third and final installment Howard tells us about yet another newly released novel, and his experience with gaming:

We’ve talked about historical fiction and historical fantasy, but you also have a history with gaming. Tell us a bit about your new Pathfinder novel, Plague of Shadows.

James Sutter, the editor of the Pathfinder line, is pretty selective about what he buys, so when I was invited to submit ideas I had to throw several his way before one finally took. I think the line in the pitch that hooked him was “Jirel of Joiry crossed with Unforgiven.” I made it clear that I wasn’t going to lift the plot or character, but that I was going to strive for a similar feel. As for the subject matter, I think that James described it pretty well in a blurb he posted recently: “It revolves around the exploits of not one but two bands of adventurers journeying in eastern Avistan, two decades apart. The parties are connected by Elyana, an elf seeking to cure her former adventuring partner (and former lover) Stelan from a curse that’s connected to events — and people — from their shadowy past. Elyana’s journey will take her and her companions from Taldor to Galt, into Kyonin and to the Vale of Shadows, where the consequences of events decades before will affect Stelan’s future.”

I wanted a story that started out with a linear feel so that it could move forward with momentum, then added complications as the adventure got under way. I think there are some nice character moments and well-motivated, though unexpected, plot turns. Personality wise Elyana didn’t end up being a Jirel of Joiry knock-off, although she’s definitely a kick butt protagonist, so she has that in common with the famous character. She’s also seasoned and clever, and she’s relentless — she simply never gives up. I had a lot of fun writing her.

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Art of the Genre: Is Digital Art Real Art?

Art of the Genre: Is Digital Art Real Art?

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I’ve often been asked ‘how cool is it to have all that original art from the Art Evolution Project?’ or ‘What will you do with all that original art?’ I tend to smile when I hear it because it somehow means that I know more than most where the world of art is concerned. The primary thing would be that the bulk of artists don’t give up originals these days unless you are willing to pay a king’s ransom for them, and the secondary is that much of the work done for me in the project was at least ‘touched’ by a computer or fully rendered in a digital format. The reality is that the original is not the piece you see, assuming there is even ‘hard’ original to begin with.

Colbert says Americans don't believe digital art is real even if Todd Lockwood paints him in full digital!
Colbert says Americans don't believe digital art is real even if Todd Lockwood paints him in full digital!

That in itself is a testament to the changing landscape of art and the power of the computer when used in the process of creation. Still, it leaves many people feeling a bit hollow, the new inability to own an original because only an artist’s hard drive has the capability for that. The computer also rocked the art field as the backlash from the lack of original hard art begging the question ‘is digital art, ‘real’ art?’

Everyone who is anyone has an opinion on this, and certainly one of my favorite views on the subject comes from Lazarus Chernick in his WordPress blog that can be found here, but instead of trusting the husband of an artist, I went out and got three well known artists to address the subject.

The following are responses to the question of digital art being real art.

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March/April Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine Now on Sale

March/April Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine Now on Sale

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fsf-apr-may-2011The March/April double issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction goes on sale today.

Click on the image at left for a full-sized version of the cool cover art by Kent Bash, illustrating Sheila Finch’s novella “The Evening and the Morning.”

In addition to Finch, this issue features novelets by Albert E. Cowdrey and Francis Marion Soty, and short stories by Paul Di Filippo, James Patrick Kelly, Kali Wallace, James Stoddard, and others.

It also includes “Night Gauntlet,” a short story attributed to no less than six authors: Walter C. DeBill, Jr., Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, W. H. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas, and Don Webb. Looking forward to that one!

F&SF is published six times a year; issues are a generous 258 pages.  It is the longest-running professional fantasy magazine in the country, and has been published continuously since 1949. It is a great way to sample some of the fast-rising new names in fantasy.

The cover price is $7.50; one year-subscriptions are a bargain at $34.97, and include the giant October/November anniversary issue. You can order subscriptions and browse their blog at www.sfsite.com/fsf/.

We covered the Jan/Feb issue of F&SF here.

The 2010 Bram Stoker Award Nominees

The 2010 Bram Stoker Award Nominees

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stoker-awardThe final ballot for the 2010 Bram Stoker Awards has been announced. The Bram Stoker Awards are given each year by the Horror Writer’s Association for Superior Achievement. The categories are Novel, First Novel, Long Fiction, Short Fiction, Anthology, Collection, Non-Fiction, and Poetry Collection. The winers will be announced at the Stoker Weekend in Long Island NY, from June 16-19. The winners receive what is undoubtedly the coolest trophy the genre has to offer: a miniature haunted house designed by Gahan Wilson. The door even opens, with the winner’s name engraved on the inside. Man. I want one of these on my mantle so bad. Not bad enough to actually write a horror novel, but I wonder if I could get one on eBay. Well, eight more are going to be given out this June, so my chances are going up. The nominees include:

Superior Achievement in a Novel

  • Horns, Joe Hill (William Morrow)
  • Rot and Ruin, Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)
  • Dead Love, Linda Watanabe McFerrin (Stone Bridge Press)
  • Apocalypse of the Dead, Joe McKinney (Pinnacle)
  • Dweller, Jeff Strand (Leisure/Dark Regions Press)
  • A Dark Matter, Peter Straub (DoubleDay)

Superior Achievement in a Collection

  • Occultation, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
  • Blood and Gristle, Michael Louis Calvillo (Bad Moon Books)
  • Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King (Simon & Schuster)
  • The Ones That Got Away, Stephen Graham Jones (Prime Books)
  • A Host of Shadows, Harry Shannon (Dark Regions)

The complete list is here. Congratulations to all the nominees! And don’t forget, eBay is a fine place to unload all those annoying trophies cluttering up your home.

“Are You Not Still Entertained?”: Gladiator’s 10-Year Oscar Anniversary

“Are You Not Still Entertained?”: Gladiator’s 10-Year Oscar Anniversary

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gladiator-posterAs of Sunday evening, The King’s Speech is the newest Academy Award winner for Best Picture. I am sure a virulent backlash against the English period drama is already underway, but let the record show that I thoroughly enjoyed that movie. It is not my personal pick for the best film of 2010. I would have liked Black Swan, Inception, or True Grit to win, but such was not to be, and The King’s Speech as a winner doesn’t anger me.

However, I prophesy that The King’s Speech will go down in history as one of the Oscar winners with scant staying power. Remember Shakespeare in Love? Chances are you haven’t thought of it much at all. The same can be said for numerous winners since the awards started in 1929: movies that had their moment, and then faded back as the “losers” turned into perennials. No one has much interest in Cavalcade (winner for 1933, the year of King Kong and Duck Soup) or The Great Ziegfield (winner for 1936) today; 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth is the butt of jokes about “Worst Best Picture Ever”; and even the recent A Beautiful Mind has blipped off the pop-culture radar fast, while Crash’s win tends to get people upset.* I can even mount an argument that the massively popular win for Forrest Gump has been overshadowed in the ensuing years by the everlasting popularity of two of its competitors, The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction.

But many Academy wins have lasted. It is amazing to realize that Casablanca was a surprise victory in 1943, upsetting favorite Watch on the Rhine. When was the last time you quoted or heard someone quote Watch on the Rhine? Other enduring winners include The Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, Rocky, Platoon, and from the last twenty years The Silence of the Lambs (this year is its twentieth anniversary as a winner) and Unforgiven.

Which brings me to this year’s tenth-anniversary winner. Where does Ridley Scott’s Roman epic Gladiator stand today, a decade after it received five Oscars at the 73rd Annual Academy Awards?

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New Treasures: Col Buchanan’s Farlander

New Treasures: Col Buchanan’s Farlander

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farlanderAfter weeks of late nights working on Black Gate 15 layout, I’m ready to relax in my big green chair with something substantial.  The latest big-budget fantasy from Tor looks like it might just fit the bill.

For fifty years the Holy Empire of Mann, an empire and religion born from a nihilistic urban cult, has been conquering nation after nation. Their leader, Holy Matriarch Sasheen, ruthlessly maintains control through her Diplomats, priests trained as subtle predators. The Mercian Free Ports are the only confederacy yet to fall… For ten years now, the city has been besieged by the Imperial Fourth Army. It is only a matter of time before it falls.

Ash is a member of a sect known as Rōshun, assassins who offer protection through the threat of vendetta… Forced by his ailing health to take on an apprentice, he chooses Nico, a young man living in the besieged city of Bar-Khos, whose own father is long gone, a deserter of his family. At the time, Nico is hungry, desperate, and alone in a city that finds itself teetering on the brink.

When the Holy Matriarch’s son murders a woman under the protection of the Rōshun, he forces the sect to seek his life in retribution. As Ash and his young apprentice set out to fulfill the vendetta, their journey takes them into the heart of the conflict between the Empire and the Free Ports — into bloodshed and death.

I don’t usually go for books with assassins as main characters.  Maybe I’m just in a dark mood. Maybe the unusual cover intrigues me, with an African American assassin posed before a decaying urban setting (“African American” really doesn’t apply in a setting that includes neither Africa nor America, and which was created by an Irishman.  But “black assassin” signifies the wrong thing altogether.) And the airship doesn’t hurt.

Farlander is the first novel in The Heart of the World.  It is available in hardcover from Tor for $24.99.

A Review of Neptune Crossing by Jeffrey A. Carver

A Review of Neptune Crossing by Jeffrey A. Carver

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neptuneNeptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles, Volume 1), by Jeffrey A. Carver
Tor (383 pages, hardcover, April 1994)

Neptune Crossing, by Jeffrey A. Carver, is the first of a series. As with some other books I’ve reviewed, it feels unfinished and awkward without its sequels. That’s not to say that it’s a bad book, or that you shouldn’t read this series, but you might want to pick up Strange Attractors at the same time and treat them as a set.

John Bandicut is a man with problems. He works for a mining company on Triton, the same mining company that caused him to lose his cybernetic implants, and he’s going insane from that loss. Also, an alien called a quarx has moved into his brain, declaring that he has to help it save the Earth — possibly doing quite a bit of the work himself, as the quarxx might die before the job gets done.

And it’s probably a suicide mission. And he can’t tell anyone. And he’s met a woman he likes.

Quite a lot of this book is about Bandicut struggling to cope with his situation, and sometimes failing. There’s sometimes a palpable sense of isolation and depression, which fits the subject matter; first and foremost, Bandicut has to wrestle cooperation out of his own mind.

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Hadestown: A Review

Hadestown: A Review

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bgalbumcover
Peter Nevin’s album artwork

On November 20th, 2010, at 1:46 PM, I received an e-mail from C.S.E. Cooney titled, “I got walls to build, I got riots to quell, and they’re giving me Hell back in Hades.”

If you know Claire at all, you’ll understand why I received this intelligence with equanimity. Of course she does; of course they are. Poor fools. They’ll soon learn better, and be begging our Claire for one cool disdainful look cast from beneath her mighty lashes.

If you don’t know Claire at all, I highly recommend the acquaintance.

I confess, however, to being somewhat surprised by the body of the message, which went as follows:

bghadescerberus
Hades and Cerberus

You don’t even KNOW!

Unless you did — and you didn’t TELL ME!

Aaaauuggggghhhh!!!

Hadestown — a folk rock opera with GREG BROWN!

Why? Why not until THIS MORNING???

Francesca Forrest sent me this. Now I must own the rest.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.15 “The French Mistake”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.15 “The French Mistake”

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SUPERNATURALThe episode starts with the Angel turned scam artist Balthazar showing up, hastily explaining that the Angel Raphael is winning the civil war in Heaven and has put a hit out on the Angel Castiel and everyone else who opposed him, including Balthazar, Sam, and Dean. In order to protect his stash of stolen weapons from Heaven, Balthazar gives Sam and Dean a key and casts a spell. They are thrown through a window … only to land on a stunt pad.

Turns out that they’re in the real world, where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, stars of the television series Supernatural.

This isn’t a terribly original premise. Among other things, I recall a similar gimmick being played in Hercules and/or Xena (it’s all a blur). Even on Supernatural, this angle has been explored before.

In the season 4 episode “The Monster at the End of This Book” (a title inspired by one of my favorite children’s books), Sam and Dean discovered that a series of trashy horror novels were based on their exploits, written by novelist turned prophet of the Lord (who was exploiting visions of their lives).

Last season, they even ended up drawn into a Supernatural fan convention.