Black Gate – Page 633 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Future Treasures: The Unnaturalists by Tiffany Trent

Sunday, June 26, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Tiffany Trent is the author of the six-volume Hallowmere historical fantasy series, published in paperback by Mirrorstone. But my first exposure to her was in 2012, when I attended a superb reading series hosted by Wiscon in Madison. Here’s what I said in my convention report.

The first reading of the con for me was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Corset, featuring Tiffany Trent, Franny Billingsley, Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer… my favorite tale from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Corset was Tiffany Trent’s The Unnaturalists.

Set in an alternate London where magical creatures are preserved in museums, The Unnaturalists follows plucky young Vespa Nyx, who is happily cataloging unnatural creatures in her father’s museum until she becomes involved in Syrus Reed’s attempts to free his Tinker family, who have been captured to be refinery slaves. Funny, fast-paced, and packed with lively characters, Tiffany Trent’s novel captured my attention immediately.

The Unnaturalists was a success, and it spawned a sequel, The Tinker King, published in hardcover in February 2014. The Unnaturalists was published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster on August 14, 2012, and in trade paperback on August 13, 2013. It will be reprinted in mass market paperback by Saga Press on June 28, 2016, to be followed by the mass market edition of The Tinker King, on July 26. The Unnaturalists is 311 pages, priced at $7.99. The cover is by Aaron Goodman.

Barnes & Noble on 7 Essential New Sci-Fi & Fantasy Short Story Collections

Saturday, June 25, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog continues to be a great source of recs for the discerning reader. They had a fine summary of the Best SF and Fantasy of 2015, and their monthly list of the best new books on the shelves is an excellent resource (our most recent look was back in March, when their list included Myke Cole’s Javelin Rain and Adrian Selby’s Snakewood.)

This week Sam Reader takes a look at seven recent SF and fantasy short story collections, including Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble, Joan Aiken’s The People in the Castle, and Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. His list also includes the latest collection from Jeffrey Ford, whose spectacular story “Exo-Skeleton Town” was one of the most memorable tales in Black Gate 1. Here’s Sam’s description of A Natural History of Hell: Stories.

Jeffrey Ford is probably writing your dreams. It’s the best way to describe his surreal style, which frequently relies on an internal structure and logic to convey images that teeter between odd fantasy and unsettling horror, while remaining impossibly grounded in a tangible reality. A Natural History of Hell (out in July) goes to some odd places, with genre-bending stories about artists trapped on a rocket ship, imaginary serial murderers, and God being torn apart by an angry mob, but it leaves plenty of room for beauty, however dark. It also contains one of my personal favorite stories from last year, “Word Doll,” in which children are lured into a world of make-believe. If you’re looking for something you haven’t seen before, look no further than these 13 stories.

Standout stories: “A Rocket Ship to Hell,” “The Blameless.”

A Natural History of Hell: Stories will be published by Small Beer Press on July 26, 2016. It is 256 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback.

See the complete article at the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.

Vintage Treasures: The Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd

Saturday, June 25, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Here’s an odd little book.

It was fairly routine for publishers to use sex to sell paperbacks in the 60s and 70s (and 80s, and 90s, and….) But usually they teased the reader with sexy cover art, or code words like “sensuous” and “spicy” (or “French”) to signal sexual content. The Pollinators of Eden has a more overt sexual theme, dealing with an intelligent and sexually voracious species of tulip discovered on a distant planet.

It was Boyd’s second novel, following The Last Starship from Earth (1968), and preceding The Rakehells of Heaven (1969) and Sex and the High Command (1970), and critics at the time didn’t really know what to make of it. Analog reviewer P. Schuyler Miller praised it as “A treat for its picture of intra- and interagency intrigue alone… a worthy candidate for the next round of ‘best novel’ awards,” but M. John Harrison called it “a feebler look at The Ring of Ritornel,” and Kirkus Reviews said it “has enough Freudian fertilizer to swamp any Eden.”

It was not a hit in the US, and has never been reprinted here. But in the UK it appeared in four separate paperback editions between 1970-78, from Gollancz, The Science Fiction Book Club (UK), Pan, and Penguin. It has been out of print for 38 years.

The Pollinators of Eden was published by Dell in November 1970. It is 212 pages, priced at 75 cents. I bought the copy above (along with The Last Starship From Earth) in an online lot for $2.99. The cover is by Paul Lehr; click the images above for bigger versions. There is no digital edition.

Swastikas Over the Sahara: The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville

Saturday, June 25, 2016 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Who doesn’t love a good Nazi alternate history? I sure do. Twenty years ago I read Richard Harris’ riveting Fatherland, about a relentless detective who stumbles on the long-buried evidence of the Holocaust in 1964 Nazi Berlin, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Something else I like? Discount books. I’ve found a few online sellers who specialize in new-condition titles at remaindered prices, and I’ve spent waaay too much money cozying up to them. They call on the weekend and send birthday cards now. I think we’re all going walleye fishing in Alberta this August.

One of those sellers had a curious book called The Afrika Reich in stock and, well, let’s just say we came to an arrangement. I admit to buyers remorse about the Star Trek cookbooks and picture books on Damascus architecture, but this one, about the realization of the Third’s Reich’s diabolical plans for Africa, definitely has my interest. It made the Sunday Express Books of the Year list in 2011, The Times calls it “An horrific reimaging of the Dark Continent,” and Daily Telegraph says it’s “Fatherland for an action movie age.” That all sounds great to me. I’m sold (literally, in this case).

The Afrika Reich was published by St. Martin’s Griffin on January 13, 2015. It is 379 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback. The cover was designed by David Shoemaker (click the images above for bigger versions). BookOutlet USA currently has new copies in stock for $1.98.

July 2016 Asimov’s Science Fiction Now on Sale

Friday, June 24, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Over at Tangent Online, Chuck Rothman finds plenty to like in the latest issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

July’s Asimov’s begins with “Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man” by Suzanne Palmer and starts out with a protagonist — a poet — attending what is essentially a writing retreat alone on an alien world with strange life forms, including the Mossums, described as “green fuzzy boulders.” The poet writes a series of poems about his impressions, and slowly begins to discover that the Mossums are more complex than he imagines. The story started a bit slowly, but quickly drew me in, and it was nice to read something that portrayed aliens by hints and without any clear-cut answers…

“Masked” shows a future where the wealthy use both makeup and holographic techniques to make themselves as beautiful as they can. Bess is about to meet again with her friend Vera, who has suffered a computer virus that wreaked havoc with the computer programs she uses to adjust her appearance. Vera is supposedly recovered, but Bess can see that she doesn’t seem right. Rich Larson’s version of the future and the styles are well imagined, and one of the strengths of the story is the way that Bess begins to understand what’s really important…

The set up to Will McIntosh’s “Lost:Mind” is convoluted, but once that’s past it becomes a fine story. Colonel Walter Murphy’s wife Mimi is dying of Alzheimer’s and, desperate, he turns to technology, creating a recording of her mind so she can live on. But such experimentation is illegal in the US, so it has to be smuggled in from India. A full mind would raise alarms, so it’s broken into 32 pieces of a chess set, to be assembled later. And the chess set is stolen. What follows is a race against the clock to find the pieces (from a noted sculptor) before the battery dies, along with Mimi’s mind. There’s a great mixture of action, dead ends, and emotional roller coasters to make the story one of the best of the year.

Read the complete review here.

…

Read More Read More

Series Fantasy: John Connolly’s Tales of Samuel Johnson

Friday, June 24, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Irish writer John Connolly is best known for the Charlie Parker private eye/horror novels. The first, Every Dead Thing (1999) was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, and the fourteenth, A Time of Torment, will be released this August. In 2009 Connolly published his first novel for younger readers, The Gates, featuring Samuel Johnson, his faithful daschund Boswell, and his bumbling demon friend Nurd. It was followed by two more; all three are now available in trade paperback from Emily Bestler Books.

The Gates (320 pages, $7.99, August 30, 2011)
The Infernals (336 pages, $15, April 10, 2012; published in the UK as Hell’s Bells)
The Creeps (319 pages, $15, August 26, 2014)

The books have been celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. The LA Times calls them “Laugh out loud funny… a cross between Eoin Colfer and Terry Pratchett,” and Booklist says they’re “Hilariously macabre.” In her Black Gate review of The Infernals, Andrea Grennan called them “Marvelous… great fun for any reader, young or old. Like the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, adults will appreciate The Infernals in a different and more sophisticated way.”

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Confluence by Paul McAuley

Thursday, June 23, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’ve found a number of online sellers offering brand new copies of recent British SF and fantasy books very inexpensively (essentially, at remainder prices), and I’ve been taking advantage of them. My most recent purchases include Paul McAuley’s In the Mouth of the Whale (the third volume in his far-future series The Quiet War), and the massive omnibus volume Confluence, which contains his complete trilogy. And I do mean massive — just take a look at the thing (click the image at right for a more lifesize version). At 935 pages, it proudly stands all on its own on my end table (and darn near tips it over).

Paul McAuley was an early columnist for Black Gate (his fantasy review column On the Edge appeared in our early print issues). The omnibus volume contains three complete novels, all originally published in hardcover in the US by Avon EOS:

Child of the River (1997)
Ancients of Days (1998)
Shrine of Stars (1999)

Here’s the description:

Confluence — a long, narrow, artificial world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. A world beyond the end of human history, served by countless machines, inhabited by 10,000 bloodlines who worship their absent creators, riven by a vast war against heretics.

This is the home of Yama, found as an infant in a white boat on the world’s Great River, raised by an obscure bureaucrat in an obscure town in the middle of a ruined necropolis, destined to become a clerk — until the discovery of his singular ancestry. For Yama appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the revered architects of Confluence, able to awaken and control the secret machineries of the world.

Pursued by enemies who want to make use of his powers, Yama voyages down the length of the world to search for answers to the mysteries of his origin, and to discover if he is to be the saviour of his world, or its nemesis.

Confluence was published by Gollancz in August 2015. It is 935 pages, priced at £16.99 in trade paperback and $15.99 for the digital edition. I bought my copy from Media Universe for $12.14 plus $3.99 shipping (and In the Mouth of the Whale from the same vendor for $2.95). Copies of both are still available.

Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

Thursday, June 23, 2016 M Harold Page Comments 6 comments

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jantar_Mantar_-_Laghu_samrat_yantra.JPG — …when we sit down to write a book

OK I admit it, I put the Harry Potter reference in the title as link bait. Well almost. Take a look at the word counts for each of the Harry Potter books:

The Philosopher’s Stone – 76,944
The Chamber of Secrets – 85,141
The Prisoner of Azkaban – 107,253
The Goblet of Fire – 190,637
The Order of the Phoenix – 257,045
The Half-Blood Prince – 168,923
The Deathly Hallows – 198,227
(source)

That’s a lot of words, and it illustrates the mountain an author contemplates when we sit down to write a book. Until recently, the length of The Prisoner of Azkaban was pretty much industry standard — 100K words is an economic sweetspot for printing and distribution. Lengths seem to be drifting down of late, because there’s no economy of scale for ebooks.

Who knows? Perhaps we’ll one day return to the sanity of the 35K-word 1970s pulp?

But thirty-five thousand words is still a lot of words!

So it’s natural to look at the project, divide target word count by available days and use that as a measure of progress.

…

Read More Read More

The Paranormal on British TV: The BBC’s The Ωmega Factor

Thursday, June 23, 2016 Barbara Barrett Comments 5 comments

The Omega Factor DVD

Starring James Hazeldine and Louise Jameson
(1979. 10 episodes, 3 disks, 510 minutes)

Saturday night at the 2016 Windy City Pulp and Paper Show back in April, I had dinner with John O’Neill and several others, including Arin Komins and her husband Rich Warren. During our discussions about Blake’s Seven and The Sandbaggers, Arin mentioned another BBC program, The Ωmega Factor. Her description sounded fascinating, so I bought it on Sunday from a dealer.

The Ωmega Factor is a British series about the limitless potential of the human mind and this theme is explored through various paranormal abilities. The show stars James Hazeldine (1947-2002) as journalist and psychic investigator Tom Crane; Louise Jameson, as psychic investigator Dr. Anne Reynolds; and John Carlisle as psychiatrist Roy Martindale. Crane and Reynolds report to Martindale who directly supervises Department 7, a secret British government group that explores psychic phenomenon mostly for use by the military.

Mind control, poltergeists, possession, witches, experimental devices, haunted houses and out-of-body experiences are a few of the paranormal subjects discussed in the ten episodes that were produced. Here’s a look at each one.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The Big Sheep by Robert Kroese

Wednesday, June 22, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Robert Kroese is the author of Mercury Falls, Starship Grifters, and Disenchanted. His latest novel is a science fiction noir that reads like it takes place in the same L.A. as Blade Runner (except it’s a lot funnier). It follows two very different private investigators as they track an extremely valuable genetically engineered sheep through a dystopian future L.A. Worth checking out.

Los Angeles of 2039 is a baffling and bifurcated place. After the Collapse of 2028, a vast section of LA, the Disincorporated Zone, was disowned by the civil authorities, and became essentially a third world country within the borders of the city. Navigating the boundaries between DZ and LA proper is a tricky task, and there’s no one better suited than eccentric private investigator Erasmus Keane. When a valuable genetically altered sheep mysteriously goes missing from Esper Corporation’s labs, Keane is the one they call.

But while the erratic Keane and his more grounded partner, Blake Fowler, are on the trail of the lost sheep, they land an even bigger case. Beautiful television star Priya Mistry suspects that someone is trying to kill her — and she wants Keane to find out who. When Priya vanishes and then reappears with no memory of having hired them, Keane and Fowler realize something very strange is going on. As they unravel the threads of the mystery, it soon becomes clear that the two cases are connected — and both point to a sinister conspiracy involving the most powerful people in the city. Saving Priya and the sheep will take all of Keane’s wits and Fowler’s skills, but in the end, they may discover that some secrets are better left hidden.

The Big Sheep will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on June 28, 2016. It is 308 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by David Curtis. Click the images above for bigger versions.