Black Gate – Page 363 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Future Treasures: King of the Road, Book 2 of Brotherhood of the Wheel by R. S. Belcher

Thursday, November 29, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been waiting for the sequel to R.S. Belcher’s Brotherhood of the Wheel since the book first appeared in 2016, and next week my wait is finally over.

Expectations for King of the Road, the second book in the series, are high. In a starred review Publishers Weekly said,

Belcher’s masterful storytelling and worldbuilding make for a gripping and consistently surprising follow-up to Brotherhood of the Wheel. Long-haul trucker Jimmie Aussapile; his squire, Hector “Heck” Sinclair; and Louisiana State Police Officer Lovina Marcou, a road witch gradually coming into her powers, are members of a secret society descended from the Knights Templar, protecting the roads and travelers. While Lovina works a missing-person case involving a ghost clown and an alchemist who assembles a cult of disaffected souls, Jimmie and Heck battle a number of supernatural horrors, including animated corpses and living shadows… [a] fascinating series.

King of the Road will be published in hardcover by Tor on December 4. The first book was released in paperback last year. Here’s the book blurb.

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Birthday Reviews: John Helfers’s “The Final Battle”

Thursday, November 29, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

John Helfers was born on November 29, 1972.

Helfers has been nominated for the Hugo Award, both times in the Best Related Work category. In 2009 he and Lillian Stewart Carl were nominated for The Vorkosigan Companion: The Universe of Lois McMaster Bujold and in 2013, he shared a nomination with Martin H. Greenberg for I Have an Idea for a Book…: The Bibliography of Martin H. Greenberg. While Helfers has written numerous short stories and novels, he is perhaps best known as an editor for Tekno Books and Five Star Press and he has worked on many anthologies which did not include his name on the cover. He has collaborated on fiction with Jean Rabe, Russell Davis, and his wife Kerrie L. Hughes. His editing collaborations are too numerous to mention. He has also published works under the house name James Axler.

“The Final Battle” was published in Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology Merlin in 1999. The story has never been reprinted.

In Helfers’s story, Merlin, recently escaped from his confinement by Nimue, is shown to be a tremendously powerful magic user. Rather than showing Merlin participating in rituals to call down lightning, the magic Merlin does is almost an afterthought. A wave of his hand conjures a massive castle and, once inside, he uses magic as readily as anyone else would use breathing. Difficulties occur when he grafts himself onto a familiar, a sparrow, who flies out and discovers that Arthur’s nemesis, Mordred, is approaching Merlin’s castle. Mordred’s casual destruction of the sparrow and Merlin’s bond to it warns the magician of Mordred’s intent and that Arthur’s bastard is more powerful than Merlin expects.

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Reworking A Classic: Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Sean McLachlan Comments 0 Comment

9781786073976 The Arabic world has seen an upsurge in speculative fiction in recent years. Some attribute it to the disappointments of the Arab Spring and the disaster of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Others point to ready access to the Internet, allowing Arab writers to communicate more easily with genre fans in other parts of the world.

Of course this ignores the fact that Arabic literature has a long tradition of the fantastic. Arab writers are working from very deep roots. So it’s interesting that one of the most successful Arab speculative novels of the past decade takes its inspiration from a Western source.

Frankenstein in Baghdad retells Mary Shelley’s classic tale in American-occupied Baghdad in the early years of this decade. The book originally came out in Arabic in 2013. Baghdad is a nightmare of opposing factions shooting it out while a corrupt Iraqi government propped up by the clueless Americans tries to keep it all together.

***Spoilers follow. If you don’t like spoilers, just go out and buy the novel. You’ll be glad you did.***

Hadi is a junk dealer who drinks too much and works too little, living in an abandoned house and telling wild tales at the local cafe to anyone who listens. On his rounds he comes across the wreckage of countless car bombings. While the emergency crews try to clean up as much as possible, they often miss small body parts. Hadi decides to take these home and sew them together, making a complete body that would be suitable for burial.

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New Treasures: Terra Incognita: Three Novellas by Connie Willis

Wednesday, November 28, 2018 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I need to read more Connie Willis. She’s one of the most acclaimed modern SF writers, and what I’ve read of her so far has been fabulous.

I don’t even have the excuse that her books are all too long — she’s made it a habit to regularly publish short, digestible novels over the years, like the alien western Uncharted Territory (1994), Remake (1994), a tale of future Hollywood, and D.A. (2006), an SF conspiracy thriller. In fact, I’d read all three of those if they weren’t all long out of print and impossible to find.

Maybe that’s what was going through the mind of the editors at Del Rey when they decided to publish Terra Incognita, an affordable trade paperback collecting all three short novels. The reviews have been terrific, especially for a reprint collection: Kirkus Reviews said “A master of fantasy playfully combines science fiction with other genres in three antic novellas… Clever, funny, thought-provoking, and sweet, these stories are classic Willis,” and Shelf Awareness said:

Willis’s lively, funny forays into futuristic territory shine as brightly today as when originally released… In all three stories, the protagonists find their narrow concepts of life challenged and expanded by possibilities created through technology. As a collection, these smart, accessible shorts make for an entertaining initiation or reintroduction into the world of one of sci-fi’s greatest treasures.

Here’s all the details.

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Birthday Reviews: David Zindell’s “Caverns”

Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

David Zindell was born on November 28, 1952.

Zindell was a first place winner of the 1985 Writers of the Future Third Quarter contest with the story “Shanidar,” which Terry Carr subsequently selected for his Terry Carr’s Best SF of the Year #15. The next year, he was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His novels Neverness and The Broken God were both nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

“Caverns” was originally published in the Winter 1985/6 issue of Interzone, edited by Simon Ounsley and David Pringle. In 1987 it was translated into German for publication in Wolfgang Jeschke’s anthology L Wie Liquidator. It has never been reprinted in English.

“Caverns” is a tragic love story between the narrator and his wife, Mary. The narrator has decided to undergo an experimental process of introducing neurophages into his system in order to take the next evolutionary leap. Mary is unwilling to participate in the experiment with him and the two grow apart through the story, which is told in alternating sections, some of which details his divergence from humanity and others which show his relationship disintegrating.

It is important to note that even the earliest parts of his human relationship are not particularly strong. It is clear that the narrator never really listens to what his wife is saying, although she also doesn’t appear to be very good at communication. When she tells him she’s pregnant, for instance, he’s surprised at the news, but she seems to think he should have known without having to tell him. As the neurophages take hold, it becomes clear that even as he insists that he needs her, the two are leading parallel and only occasionally convergent lives. He loves not Mary, but his impression of who she is. Told from his point of view, Mary’s needs can only be conjectured as she strives to give him what she thinks he might need, often to her own detriment and without actually understanding what he is looking for.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Outside the Gates by Molly Gloss

Tuesday, November 27, 2018 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Outside the Gates Molly Gloss Saga-small

Molly Gloss has published only a handful of novels, but she’s accumulated an enviable number of awards and nominations, including the Ken Kesey Award and Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for the non-genre The Jump-Off Creek (also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), and a James Tiptree, Jr. Award for SF novel Wild Life (2000). Her first novel Outside the Gates was published as a slender hardcover by Atheneum in 1986 (above left, cover by Michael Mariano), and Ursula K. Le Guin called it “The best first novel I’ve seen in years.” It has been out of print for over three decades, but Saga Press is finally rectifying that situation by reprinting it in January with a spare new cover by Jeffrey Alan Love (above right). Hard to say which one I like more; they’re both clear products of their time. Here’s the description.

Villagers were always warned that monsters live outside the gates, but when a young boy named Vren is cast out, he finds a home in the world beyond, in Whiting Award winner Molly Gloss’s classic fantasy novel.

Vren has always been told that the world beyond the gates of his village is one filled with monsters, giants, and other terrifying creatures. But when he confides with his family about his ability to talk to animals, he’s outcast to the very world he’s been taught to fear his whole life. He expects to die alone, lost and confused, but he finds something different altogether — refuge in a community of shadowed people with extraordinary powers.

Thirty years later, Molly Gloss’s dystopian fantasy novel is just as timely, poignant, and stirring as ever, in a brand-new edition!

This slender book is more a novella than a true novel; to sweeten the deal Saga is packaging it with Gloss’ 18-page story “Lambing Season,” which was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Outside the Gates was published by Atheneum in September 1986. It was 120 pages, priced at $11.95 in hardcover. It will be reprinted by Saga Press on January 1, 2019. It is 115 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. See all our recent Tales of Two Covers here.

That’s All (for now)

Tuesday, November 27, 2018 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 15 comments

Over five years:

55 Short Story Roundups, each of at least four stories, making for a minimum of 220 reviewed. It’s probably at least half-again as many.

157 Book Reviews, including 11 books by Glen Cook, 7 by PC Hodgell, 7 by Andre Norton, 6 by TC Rypel

12 Essays

That’s how much I’ve written at Black Gate since my inaugural post, The Best New Sword & Sorcery of the Last Twelve Months. I should also add I co-wrote a review of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood books with Howard Andrew Jones and conversed with Adrian Simmons and Chris Hocking on the subject of CJ Cherryh’s award-winning Downbelow Station. I’m happy with most of the posts I’ve written and actually proud of more than a few of them. I bring this all up because I’ve decided it’s time to hang up my sword for at least a little while. I’ve reached the point where readingreviewingediting every week has become a grind. In fact it’s been a bit of a hard slog for a while now, which is why I mixed things up with classic sci-fi last year and the entirety of Glen Cook’s Black Company series this year. Both of those undertakings were a lot of fun. It’s been years since I’ve read any of those books. Some, like Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, I had never read ever. Still, it wasn’t enough to thwart this hiatus.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the time doing these posts is a tremendous amount of fun. Discovering writers I didn’t know or had forgotten all about (or discovering those I had once loved who were better left forgotten) was a blast. If I hadn’t done these posts I probably would never have read Paul Kingsnorth or Tim Willocks or made friends with scores of fellow S&S fans out in the digital wild. Even the weakest books I read still offered me something: how to find the best parts of something bad and how to treat an author’s efforts with respect even if the end result was poor.

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Birthday Reviews: L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Figurine”

Tuesday, November 27, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

L. (Lyon) Sprague de Camp was born on November 27, 1907 and died on November 6, 2000.

De Camp won his only Hugo Award in 1997 for his non-fiction book Time & Chance: An Autobiography. He also won the International Fantasy Award for the non-fiction book Lands Beyond, written with Willy Ley and won the British Fantasy Award for The Fallible Fiend. In 1996 he was recognized with the first Sidewise Award for Lifetime Achievement and in 2003 received a Southeastern SF Life Achievement Award. He was named a Grand Master of Fantasy with a Gandalf Award in 1976 and received a Forry Award in 1977. In 1979 SFWA named him a Grand Master and in 1984 he received a Life Achievement World Fantasy Award. H was inducted into the First Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1989 and, along with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp, earned a Gallun Award in 1993. SFRA presented him with a Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and F scholarship in 1998. De Camp was the author Guest of Honor at Tricon, the 24^th World Science Fiction Convention held in Cleveland in 1966.

“The Figurine” was first published in the February 1977 issue of Fantastic, edited by Ted White. De Camp included it in his 1980 collection The Purple Pterodactyls, which was translated into German in 1982 by Thomas Schlück. The story has not, otherwise, seen print.

A trip to Guatemala in “The Figurine” results in Willy Newbury returning home with a small statue of a god that he places in his office. His children begin to joke that the god is ruining the television reception and they jokingly give the god a sacrifice of some plastic flowers, which clears it up. Newbury doesn’t really believe that the statue has magical powers, but he brings it along on a business trip, where he finds himself in the middle of a riot. He jokingly offers to sacrifice a chicken to the statuette in return for escaping unharmed. When he manages to get away from the rioters and gets home, he suddenly finds that things that were working previously aren’t anymore, and the figurine is no longer fixing things for plastic flowers.

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Vintage Treasures: The Dreamhaven Box

Monday, November 26, 2018 John ONeill Comments 29 comments

49 beautiful vintage paperbacks for $36, courtesy of Dreamhaven Books

On years I attend the World Fantasy Convention I don’t usually do Windycon, the local convention here in Chicago, the very next week. I don’t typically have the stamina for two back-to-back cons. But this year Richard Chwedyk, who runs the Saturday Writer’s Workshop at Windycon, asked me to fill in as a judge, and I learned that my friend Rich Horton and his wife Mary Anne were making the long drive from Missouri. So I decided to register for the con.

I made it to the Dealer’s Room only a few minutes before they closed Friday night. And who did I find in the back but the tireless Greg Ketter and his wife Lisa Freitag, manning the well-stocked Dreamhaven Books table. I’d seen both of them at World Fantasy, where they’d also had a table. They’d packed that up, driven from Baltimore to Minneapolis, and then here to Chicago — with brand new stock! Talk about stamina.

While we were chatting in front of their booth I discovered eight boxes at my feet, tightly crammed with paperbacks. “They’re all a dollar,” Lisa said, noticing my distracted gaze. “Less than that if you buy a bunch.”

Gentle reader, I bought a bunch.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #3

Monday, November 26, 2018 Bob Byrne Comments 1 comment

“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)

Hopefully, discerning reader of this column…

What? No, there is no guest poster this week. I wrote the column. Really? Well, I’m SOOO sorry you’re disappointed that I’m actually writing my own essay for my own column this week. The hardboiled genre is full of setbacks and kicks in the teeth. You just have to overcome.

Anywhoo…as I was saying: by now, you are aware that I put up posts on my Facebook page under the moniker, Back Deck Pulp. They usually relate some tidbit to something I’m reading for this column, and I include a picture – usually taken out on my back deck. Thus, the title. The first two Back Deck Pulp essays were ‘as is.’ I’ve added a little context this time, to help. I hope it does, anyways. So, read on!

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