Rod Duncan is the author of The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire trilogy, a supernatural mystery series featuring Elizabeth Barnabus, who lives a double life as herself and as her brother, a private detective. The first volume, The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter (2014) was a finalist for the 2014 Phillip K. Dick Award. We covered The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughterhere, and the entire series here.
His newest, The Queen of All Crows, is the start of a brand new series, The Map of Unknown Things. Only Elizabeth Barnabus can stop the world from descending into endless war in this new saga set in the world of the Gas-Lit Empire. It seems an odd mix of steampunk, supernatural mystery, and intellectual property thriller, but I like it.
The Queen of All Crows was published by Angry Robot on January 2, 2018. It is 348 pages, priced at $9.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Will Staehle. Get more details at the Angry Robot website.
In 500 Words or Less: From a Certain Point of View (Del Rey Books)
From a Certain Point of View
By Various Authors
Del Rey (400 pages, $35.00 hardcover, $14.99 eBook, October 2017)
I’m a massive Star Warsfan and grew up loving the Expanded Universe novels. My first exposures to writing greatness were people like Timothy Zahn, Christie Golden, and Kevin J. Anderson. When Disney announced that the Expanded Universe wasn’t canon anymore, I was pissed like a lot of people, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the new films, I couldn’t bring myself to read any of the new fiction.
Is that petty and stupid? Probably, especially when you consider the caliber of writers who are being brought on to write the new EU. And that if I’m ever at a career level to be offered a spot in that canon, I’ll probably take the deal.
So I finally shook off my old-timey stubbornness and bought a copy of the new anthology From a Certain Point of View. Big surprise: I have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, there are some amazing stories here. “Master and Apprentice” by Claudia Gray shows the ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn visiting Obi-Wan Kenobi before he takes Luke to Mos Eisley, and it’s touching and tragic because Qui-Gon knows what’s about to happen to his former apprentice. Wil Wheaton reminds us about the sacrifices of the average rebel in “Laina,” and Nnedi Okorafor brings us into the mind of the Death Star’s dianoga in “The Baptist.” There’s a great combination of writers, including a few Star Wars veterans (Christie Golden among them) and the likes of Ben Blacker, Mur Lafferty, Chuck Wendig, and more.
Philip José Farmer was born on January 26, 1918 (Happy Centennial, Phil!) and died on February 25, 2009. In 1953, he received one of the inaugural Hugo Awards for Best New Author or Artist (a forerunner to the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award). He would win the Hugo again in 1968 for his novella “Riders of the Purple Wage” and in 1972 for his novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go. Farmer was the Guest of Honor at Baycon, the 1968 Worldcon in Oakland.
His lifetime achievement awards include the World Fantasy Award and the SFWA Grand Master Award, both awarded in 2001. In 2003, he received the Forry Award and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award. Farmer was known for expanding the science fiction field to include frank portrayals of sex with his novel The Lovers (Ballantine, 1961, expanded from the 1952 novella of the same title).
His story “The Rise Gotten” was written for an anthology Robert Bloch planned, but never published. The story saws its first publication in 2006 in the collection Pearls from Peoria, which collected previously published and unpublished works by Farmer.
“The Rise Gotten” is the story of a long-married couple who have fallen out of love, and merely survive in each other’s presence. Roger Baird’s impotence is a major sticking point for his wife, Rey, who either ignores him or denigrates him. Roger is just as happy ignoring his wife, whose alcoholic stupors make her less attractive to him even if he weren’t suffering impotence.
Their relationship, while sad, is completely mundane. Roger retreats to his study to get away from his wife and her sister’s drinking binge and turns his attention to the newspapers, which he reads and finds just as much horror as in the magazines, like Weird Tales, which form his pleasure reading. After his sister-in-law leaves and his wife suggests a cure for his impotence that worked for her brother-in-law, the story takes a decidedly dark turn. While part of the power of Farmer’s story comes from its ending, most of it comes from the sudden switch from a very mundane tale to Roger’s reaction to his years of humiliation by his wife.
Gather round friends – it’s once again time to don the footie pajamas, pour a steaming hot-toddy and hunker down until spring with the most awesome reading list of the year: namely the annual nominees for the coolest award ever.
The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA).
Several members of the HWA including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA therefore went to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.
Which is lovely and all, but I believe I would not be above doing something mean-spirited if not downright evil to get my hands on the award itself, which is a haunted house whose front door opens to reveal the category and winner.
Is it OK to post now on the other significant SF news from Tuesday (happier news)? Because it does seem worthwhile to mention that Peter Beagle has been named the latest SFWA Grand Master.
I confess — somewhat bewilderedly — that I had not thought of him when I speculated on who the next GM might be. (I believe that’s because early in his career he was not a “core genre writer,” in that he didn’t publish in the magazines. (Yes, Fantasy & Science Fiction published “Come Lady Death,” but as a reprint.) That’s not a good reason, it’s just what I think must have made me forget him.) But on seeing the announcement, I thought, well, of course! Peter Beagle IS a Grand Master, and this is an award he eminently deserves.
I (with many other fans, to be sure) absolutely adore The Last Unicorn. And his other fiction is quite marvelous as well. I’ve used a few of his stories in my books.
Viriconium is a city of the distant future, surrounded by the polluted wastelands left by previous civilisations. It is fundamentally decadent, filled with killers, artists, street gangs, and peculiar customs. It is divided into different neighbourhoods along class lines. And it is frequently under threat, though what precise consequences these threats can bring is often nebulous. The first book, The Pastel City, is clearly the most conventional. At first blush, it strongly resembles the pulp work of Michael Moorcock; the better points of the Hawkmoon books, for example, though Pastel City is much better written.
But it was Fletcher Vredenburgh, with this 4-part examination of the Viriconium books, that really sent me chasing after Harrison’s novels.
Greg van Eekhout was born on January 25. His first story appeared in the anthology Starlight 3 and his first novel, Norse Code, in 2009. Van Eekhout was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 2005 for “In the Late December,” and received a Golden Duck nomination in 2011 for Kid Vs. Squid. In 2012, his novel The Boy at the End of the World was nominated for the Andre Norton Award.
“Native Aliens” was originally published in 2004 in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Van Eekhout included it in his collection Show and Tell and Other Stories two years later and it was reprinted again in 2013 in Aliens: Recent Encounters, edited by Alex Daily MacFarlane.
“Native Aliens” tells two stories in parallel. One focuses on a Dutch colonial family living in Indonesia in the 1940s. Although the family has been there for generations and has intermarried with the Indonesians, they still consider themselves Dutch even though Indonesia is the only home they’ve ever known. As a result the father is forced to run a gauntlet after the Indonesian Revolution in the second half of the 1940s.
The other story looks at a group of humans who have colonized the world of Breva and who are about to be sent back to Earth. While the Dutch family looks like Indonesians and only know life there, the humans on Breva have been genetically modified to resemble the Brevans, making their return to their native world that much more problematic.
While van Eekhout explores the Brevan-Terran plans to repatriate themselves to the planet of the ancestors, he simultaneously shows us the Dutch family’s attempts to assimilate into Dutch, and later American, culture. Van Eekhout offers an intriguing view of colonization and its effects by focusing on those who are native to the land but still identify with, or are identified as, the colonizing power, without having any experience with the land from which their ancestors came.
Perhaps most poignant is the tale of the son of the character who experienced upheaval in Indonesia and the Netherlands, whose attitude directly leads to the issue facing the Brevan-Terrans centuries later. Fourteen years after its initial publication, when the US government is discussing, or refusing to discuss, the plight of the “Dreamers,” the van Eekhout’s story seems more pertinent than ever.
As Steven Silver has already noted, today is C.L. Moore’s birthday. To celebrate Steven reviewed “Lost Paradise,” from the July 1936 Weird Tales, “one of her stories featuring her space-faring rogue Northwest Smith… essentially a bar story with a twist.”
Northwest Smith is one of the enduring serial characters C.L. Moore created for Weird Tales (the other was Jirel of Jorey) — and I do mean enduring. The tales of this “space-faring rogue” have been collected multiple times, and over 80 years later they are still in print. It’s pretty clear that George Lucas, a noted fan of Planet Stories and other SF pulps, drew on Smith as his inspiration for Han Solo, as the two characters are cut from the same cloth.
Over at Tor.com, Alan Brown has a more detailed look at C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith tales, which have been reprinted in a number of highly collectible volumes over the years. Here’s my favorite quote.
The rather unobtrusive entrance to the tomb. Like most mastabas, its superstructure has disappeared over time.
Put on your pith helmets, Black Gatereaders, because today we’re going into an ancient Egyptian tomb!
This tomb, on the Giza plateau, was built for Idu, an inspector of priests of the pharaohs Khufu and Khafre and overseer of scribes. Idu made sure the rites and rituals in honor of the departed pharaohs were done properly, and that the priests had all the equipment they needed. Idu lived in the VI Dynasty, probably during the reign of Pepi I (2332-2283 BC), a couple of hundred years after the death of these two important pharaohs. The most prominent Egyptian pharaohs had cults that lasted centuries.
Kids love robots the way they love dinosaurs. Collectors know of thousands of toy robots, especially when the myriad variations of color and design are counted separately. The first of the zillions of robot toys produced in the United States was Robert the Robot, introduced by Ideal for the 1954 Christmas toy season.
