Future Treasures: The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison

Future Treasures: The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison

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The Angel of the Crows-smallThere are pseudonyms, and there are pseudonyms. “Katherine Addison” is one of the latter.

“Addison” is a pen name for Sarah Monette, who’s achieved some notoriety in the field with the Melusine novels and her Kyle Murchison Booth stories, which have appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and other fine places. In 2014 she adopted the name Katherine Addison to publish The Goblin Emperor, which became one of the most successful books of the year, nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award, and winning the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Award. It was included in Unbound Worlds‘ list of The 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time.

What do you do when your pseudonym is more famous than you are? Write more books under the pseudonym, of course. And that’s exactly what Monette has done. Her next Addison novel, The Angel of the Crows, arrives from Tor in two weeks, and it looks like a doozy.

It’s a Sherlock Holmes pastishe in which Holmes is an outcast angel called Crow, Watson is suffers from a supernatural injury picked up in the war, and the city of London is crawling with vampires, werewolves and darker things. Kirkus calls it “A Sherlock Holmes–esque novel that truly breaks the mold,” and The Nerd Daily pronounces it “good for Holmes fans of any stripe.”

Addison… makes note of the inspiration she drew from Cumberbatch’s Sherlock in particular, so it’s no surprise that since Sherlock opened with “A Study in Pink,” The Angel of the Crows opens with what we might call a Study in Gold… Yes, this version of Victorian London is densely populated by angels, monsters, creatures, fey, and various and sundry supernatural alongside the usual assortment of villains, murderers, and thieves. But that’s no real impediment to the world’s greatest detective or his newly stalwart companion. Dr. Doyle, who is essentially-but-not-quite Dr. Watson, joins the enigmatic Crow, who is Sherlock but for one distinct difference: Crow is an angel.

The Angel of the Crows takes us through the most famous of Holmes’s cases, including “A Study in Scarlet,” “The Sign of the Four,” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” as well as taking on Jack the Ripper.

The Angel of the Crows will be published by Tor Books on June 23, 2020. It is 448 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. Read the first two chapters here.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

Visit a Haunted Cyberpunk City in Punktown from Chronicle City and Miskatonic River Press

Visit a Haunted Cyberpunk City in Punktown from Chronicle City and Miskatonic River Press

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Punktown setting for Call of Cthulhu-small

Punktown: A Setting Book for Call of Cthulhu and Basic Roleplaying

Many many, oh-so-many years ago, I wrote an excited blog post about the planned final game release from Miskatonic River Press, which was slowly winding up operations. It was a Kickstarter-funded Call of Cthulhu setting book based on the setting for Jeffrey Thomas’s dark urban fantasy series Punktown. Here’s what I said, in part.

I’m a huge fan of Miskatonic River Press, and it’s great to hear they have something new in the works. They’ve produced some really terrific Call of Cthulhu products, including New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, Our Ladies of Sorrow, and their Roman-era adventure The Legacy Of Arrius Lurco…. if Miskatonic River has to end their illustrious publishing career with one book, I’m pleased it’s this one. I think Thomas’s dark-future urban setting will make a terrific locale for a rockin’ CoC campaign.

Well, it was not to be. The years rolled by, and Punktown never surfaced. The illustrious Miskatonic River Press finally closed up shop, and I silently grieved for another Kickstarer destined to never see the light of day.

Or so I thought. And then, just last week, I stumbled across a reference to it. Punktown did in fact exist, in PDF and print-on-demand formats, and it was being offered for sale at both DriveThruRPG and Lulu. It had stealthily been released in 2018 by designers Chronicle City and Miskatonic River Press. Praise Nyarlathotep!

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Vintage Treasures: The Inquisitor by Cheryl J. Franklin

Vintage Treasures: The Inquisitor by Cheryl J. Franklin

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The Inquisitor Cheryl Franklin-small The Inquisitor Cheryl Franklin-back-small

The Inquisitor by Cheryl J. Franklin. DAW, 1992. Cover by Les Edwards

Cheryl J. Franklin was one of a reliable stable of women writers upon whom DAW built a mighty paperback dynasty in the late 80s and early 90s. While science fiction of the 60s and 70s was dominated by slender volumes of male-focused adventure, DAW (and others) shook things up at the end of the century — and grabbed an impressive share of the market in the process — by showcasing female writers and sprawling SF and fantasy operas with (gasp) a hint of romance. Melanie Rawn, Mercedes Lackey, C. S. Friedman, Kate Elliot, Mickey Zucker Reichert and Cheryl J. Franklin were right there in the front lines, and you got used to seeing their names on the paperback racks.

Franklin produced two series with DAW, both of which were fairly popular: the fantasy Tales of Taormin (Fire Get and Fire Lord), and the four-volume Network/Consortium. By 1996, however, she had stopped writing for good, beyond a brief appearance in Science Fiction: DAW 30th Anniversary anthology in 2002.

If Goodreads is any judge, Network/Consortium is still read today. Lynn Hall recently called the third volume The Inquisitor “Good old hard core scifi, with a believable alien world and great characters.” John Clute, in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, describes the series as “fantasy-like… set in a Planetary Romance venue, into which interstellar vampires are imported.” I’m pretty much sold based on that description alone.

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Future History, First Draft: Robert A. Heinlein’s For Us, the Living

Future History, First Draft: Robert A. Heinlein’s For Us, the Living

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HeinleinForUs

For Us, the Living by Robert A. Heinlein; First Edition: Scribner 2004.
Jacket illustration by Mark Stutzman (click to enlarge)

For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs
by Robert A. Heinlein
Introduction by Spider Robinson; Afterword by Robert James, Ph.D.
Scribner (263 pages, $25.00 in hardcover, 2004)

Almost on a lark, I picked up the first novel by Robert A. Heinlein a few days ago, and read it through. It’s a fascinating book on several levels.

First, it’s Heinlein’s first novel in that it’s the first one he wrote, way back in 1938 and 1939, when he hadn’t yet broken into print. But it didn’t sell, was never published at the time, and went unknown for decades. In fact the manuscript was thought lost; Heinlein and his wife had destroyed copies in their possession in the approach to Heinlein’s death. Yet another copy of the ms. was found years later, after Heinlein’s death in 1988, and, as Robert James explains in an afterword here, was published in 2004, with an introduction by Spider Robinson. (Spider Robinson would later publish Variable Star, based on a Heinlein outline, in 2006; I have not read that, though I believe I’ve read every other Heinlein book at least once, albeit some not in decades.) I read For Us, the Living when it first came out, in late December 2003, but didn’t remember the details of its future society, and wanted to refresh myself on them, until rereading it this week.

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Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Of Orks and Orkney

Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Of Orks and Orkney

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Scott Oden Scott Odin

One of these men is an author, the other is Odin…there’s more commonality than you might think.

Scott Oden  is an American writer best known for his historical novels set in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece, and historical fantasy. Oden’s breakthrough novel was 2005’s Men of Bronze, set in late Pharonic Egypt; it was followed in 2006 by Memnon and in 2010 with The Lion of Cairo, which mixed pulp-style action and sorcery with Crusader politics in Fatimid Egypt. His most recent novels are the opening volumes of the saga of Grimnir, the last orc, following a quest for revenge across the centuries, from Brian Boru’s Ireland in the 11th century to 14th century Messina in the forthcoming third and final volume. Considering how much his areas of interest and writing overlap with Christian Cameron, whom I interviewed last month, it was fascinating to see how much the two authors methods of world building do, and don’t, overlap.

GM: So you’ve written both historical fiction and fantasy. Which genre was your first love?

SO: Definitely fantasy. The Hobbit was my gateway text, back when I was 8 or 9 years old, and I quickly followed that with The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. Howard’s Conan (the Ace editions), and eventually Moorcock’s Elric and Karl Wagner’s Kane. I liked some historical fiction as a kid, mainly the fictionalized biographies of Harold Lamb — especially Alexander of Macedon… what kid wouldn’t marvel to the feats of Alexander, as described by Lamb? I was — and remain — a huge aficionado of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse myth. I had this little pocket-sized encyclopedia from Scholastic called Gods, Demigods, and Demons by Bernard Evslin. I still have that battered old copy . . . [GM: So do I!!!]

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: It’s a Hardboiled June on TCM

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: It’s a Hardboiled June on TCM

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Sheridan_Solo“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Coming off of Edward G. Robinson as the May Star of the Month on TCM, June is Ann Sheridan Month. The ‘Oomph Girl’ appeared in several hardboiled/noir/crime movies, so we’ll tell you some movies to look for.

Every Tuesday, there is a batch of Sheridan movies, and things kicked off June 1st, with eight flicks, including two Bogart movies: Black Legion, and The Great O’Malley. But the past is prologue.

Now, all of these films can be streamed live on Watch TCM if you get Turner Classic via your cable company. But even if you don’t, most of them can be viewed for at least one week after airing on WatchTCM. Some, like Casablanca, don’t get put up. I assume it’s to help sell mover DVDs. But most do. So, if you miss a movie, you can watch it via the app, or the website.

Having laid all of that out, let’s take a look at some of the June films, all EST:

June 2 (look for on Watch TCM)

8:00 PM – Black Legion

A 1937 ‘social cause’ movie. It’s based on the real-life Black Legion, which was a splinter group of the Ku Klux Klan. Humphrey Bogart is a factory worker with seniority who gets passed over by a smarter, harder-working foreigner. And ends up joining the hate group. It was a strong performance by Bogart, who was just being forced by Warners to crank out B-movies (this was four years before High Sierra). Sheridan is fourth-billed and is really only the third main female. The speech from the judge at the end is as heavy-handed propaganda as you’ll run across in a Bogart film. Worth a watch.

9:30 PM – Dodge City

This is a big budget western, starring the swashbuckling Errol Flynn. Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) directed, with a great musical score by Max Steiner. One of my favorite comic supporting actors, Frank McHugh, is here, as Sheridan plays female second banana to Olivia de Haviland. This movie features a heck of a bar room brawl, and the cast is solid. There was an unrelated follow-up with Flynn, Virginia City. Which included Bogart as a Mexican raider with a cheesy mustache.

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Jetpacks and Bazookas: Jonny Quest

Jetpacks and Bazookas: Jonny Quest

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(1) Jonny Quest

Who was the most influential person in the history of the American fantastic imagination? Was it a founding father like Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, or Nathaniel Hawthorne? Or could it be a golden-age great like Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov or the editor who shaped their early careers, John W. Campbell? Certainly, the big three of Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, have set the pattern for countless imitators down to the present day. Perhaps it was a pure pulpster like Edgar Rice Burroughs or a more literary type like Ray Bradbury, or someone who came to the fore later, like Frank Herbert or Poul Anderson. Maybe it was someone less traditional, like Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Joanna Russ, or Samuel R. Delaney.

It’s a fun question to contemplate and a tricky and enjoyable argument to make, whoever your choice is. For myself, I don’t think any of the worthies I’ve mentioned had the widespread, long-term influence of my nominee(s): William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. (But then, if asked to name the single greatest work of American fantasy, I’m likely to blurt out that it’s the 1964 Rankin-Bass TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)

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Let’s Get Diverted Together

Let’s Get Diverted Together

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122577

This might work.

Good morning, Readers!

I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about my writing and my writing skills… or lack thereof depending on who you ask. I fall short in a lot of areas, particularly any story that is supposed to be short. My inability to keep things short has helped me with the whole novel-writing thing I love to do, but I’m slightly miffed at myself for being so inept at something creative. Short stories simply aren’t my forte. I mean, the last time I tried to write one, it became a two volume epic. So, there’s that.

It’s not like I’ve never written anything short. I was the short story champion in high school, and my short story writing ability got me one of the highest QCS (Queensland Core Skills) scores in my class back when I was exiting secondary school. My marks dragged down my eventual exit OP (Overall Position) score, because high school was hell and I didn’t cope.

Anyway, the point is, I stopped writing short stories and now I feel like I have simply lost the knack.

I would like to fix that. But, you know, without the pressure of it counting towards any kind of grade.

And, I’d like for us all to join in for a communal, no pressure, bit of shared creativity.

Let me explain.

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New Treasures: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

New Treasures: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

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The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea-smallMay was a tough month for new releases.  Many were pushed to the fall as a result of bookstore closure across the country — and the fact that Amazon dramatically slowed down shipping on all non-essential items.

But a few brave publishers stuck to the schedule, and virtual bookstore shelves weren’t empty last month. I think it’s all the more important to celebrate those books, and especially the ones that deserve special attention. Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s debut novel The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea is definitely one of them. Kirkus calls it “Absolutely enthralling,” and Alex Brown at Tor.com says “Every single character is as deeply compelling as the world they live in… a remarkable novel and hands down one of the best of the year.” Here’s the description.

In a world divided by colonialism and threaded with magic, a desperate orphan turned pirate and a rebellious imperial lady find a connection on the high seas.

The pirate Florian, born Flora, has always done whatever it takes to survive — including sailing under false flag on the Dove as a marauder, thief, and worse. Lady Evelyn Hasegawa, a highborn Imperial daughter, is on board as well — accompanied by her own casket. But Evelyn’s one-way voyage to an arranged marriage in the Floating Islands is interrupted when the captain and crew show their true colors and enslave their wealthy passengers.

Both Florian and Evelyn have lived their lives by the rules, and whims, of others. But when they fall in love, they decide to take fate into their own hands — no matter the cost.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s sweeping fantasy debut, full of stolen memories, illicit mermaid’s blood, double agents, and haunting mythical creatures conjures an extraordinary cast of characters and the unforgettable story of a couple striving to stay together in the face of myriad forces wishing to control their identities and destinies.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea was published by Candlewick Press on May 5, 2020. It is 371 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $5 in digital formats.

See all our latest New Releases here.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Johnny O’Clock (Powell)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Johnny O’Clock (Powell)

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Powell_OClockPoster1“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

And for the third year in a row, A (Black) Gat in the Hand makes a hardboiled reservation for Monday mornings. It’s a limited run, but for the month of June, I’ll look at some hardboiled/noir on screen efforts: Ones that you might not be quite as familiar with. Not totally off the beaten path, but not the big names, either. And we kick things off with Dick Powell’s follow up to Murder My Sweet, Johnny, O’Clock.

When you think of the hardboiled movie, or book, it’s usually a private eye that comes to mind. There’s Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer. Of course, there were also cops in movies, like Glenn Ford’s Dave Bannion in The Big Heat; and Frederick Nebel’s MacBride in print. Those stories were changed into seven Torchy Blaine movies, and quite different from Nebel’s hardboiled stories about MacBride, unfortunately.

Other occupations were covered, including reporters, and lawyers. Ex-soldiers of various stripes, like Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, were popular. A movie that I really like in this genre starred a gambler. Like Humphrey Bogart’s Dead Reckoning, this film doesn’t appear on any top ten lists, but it doesn’t feature a private eye, and it’s a ‘could have been really good’ film.

Like James Cagney and George Raft, Dick Powell was a successful song and dance man in Hollywood. Then, he was surprisingly cast as Raymond Chandler’s world-weary Phililp Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, and he nailed the part. That 1944 effort was the first of four hardboiled films he made in a five-movie span, of which Johnny O’Clock was the third.

Picking Iron (trivia) – This new side of Powell made him perfect for the singing, funny, tough radio PI, Richard Diamond (I love that series).

Powell plays the title character, and he’s manager of a fancy (and legal) gambling joint in NYC. He dresses well, knows lots of people, and lives in a fancy apartment with an ex-con named Charlie, who is his jack of all trades assistant.

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