Throughout much of the staggering medieval fantasy Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the characters live as actors. Don Rumata, the protagonist, acts as an arrogant nobleman in order to conceal his true identity. In reality, he is a scientist visiting the distant planet of Arkanar from Russia.
Arkanar has halted its development in the Middle Ages. As a consequence of an evil overlord’s actions, the planet has descended into hellish chaos. Though he lives as a nobleman with all the power the fragile planet can offer, Don Rumata can do nothing but watch the Prince of Darkness at work from on high, as would a God.
Cinda Williams Chima is the author of two previous series that made her a New York Times bestselling writer: Heir Chronicles and Seven Realms. Her latest novel, Flamecaster, the opening volume in the four-volume Shattered Realms series, returns to the world of Seven Realms to tell the tale of the next generation.
Flamecaster introduces Ash, a trained healer with a powerful magical gift, and Jenna, an independent girl abandoned at birth who finds herself hunted by the King’s Guard because of a strange magemark on the back of her neck. Shattered Realms stands alone, and doesn’t require knowledge of the previous volumes to fully enjoy.
Adrian sul’Han, known as Ash, is a powerful healer with a gift of magic – and a thirst for revenge. The son of the queen of the Fells, Ash is forced into hiding after a series of murders throws the queendom into chaos. Now Ash is closer than he’s ever been to killing the man responsible, the cruel king of Arden. As a healer, can he use his powers not to save a life but to take it?
Jenna Bandelow lives a reckless as a spy and saboteur, striking back against the king. She has been warned that the mysterious magemark on the back of her neck would one day make her a target, but she never believed in the curse… until the King’s Guard launches a relentless search for a girl with a mark like hers. Jenna doesn’t know why she’s being hunted. She only knows that she can’t get caught.
In a twist of fate, Ash’s and Jenna’s paths collide in Arden, where chilling threats and dark magic abound. Ultimately, they’ll come to recue each other in ways they cannot yet imagine.
Flamecaster will be published by HarperTeen on April 5, 2016. It 536 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.
Otto Binder on H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard
In late December 1935, science fiction author Otto Binder moved from Chicago to NYC to represent Otis Adelbert Kline’s literary agency. Among the authors he represented for Kline’s agency was Robert E. Howard. Binder had been to NYC previously, in late June and early July 1935, with his friends Clifford Kornoelje (better known in SF circles as Jack Darrow) and Bill Dellenback.
As I’ve mentioned before, back in 2001 I bought a few boxes of correspondence from Darrow’s estate, including dozens of letters that Binder had written to Darrow over the course of many decades. In going through them last month, I pulled this one and thought I’d post it today.
Once in NYC, Otto quickly resumed his friendships with Mort Weisinger and Charles Hornig, and rapidly met more figures involved in the local science fiction community. Less than two weeks after he’d arrived, he was invited to a gathering at Frank Belknap Long’s place, which was held on Friday, January 3, 1936. Binder and Long were fellow Weird Tales authors, with Binder and his brother, Earl, having sold WT some stories under their Eando Binder penname.
In December, Black Gate editor John O’Neill scooped the world with the cover of Clockwork Canada, Dominik Parisien’s newest offering as an anthologist. Dominik is best known as a poet and writer, but also for his editorial work with the Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and Saga Press. Exile Editions is launching Clockwork Canada this month and I wanted to chat with Dominik about his intriguing vision behind this anthology.
To set this up, I include the back-cover blurb:
Welcome to an alternate Canada, where steam technology and the wonders and horrors of the mechanical age have reshaped the past into something both wholly familiar yet compellingly different. These fifteen supercharged all-new tales reimagine Canadian historical events, explore alternate Canadas, and gather inspiration from the northern landscape to make us wonder: what if history had gone a different way?
Experience steam-powered buffalo women roaming the plains; join extraordinary men and women striking out on their own or striving to build communities; marvel as giant rampaging spirits are thwarted by a miniscule timepiece; cringe when a great clock chimes and the Seven O’Clock Man appears to terrorize a village in Quebec; witness a Maritime scientist develop a deadly weapon that could change the course of the American Civil War.
Anachronistic technologies, retro-futuristic inventions, alternative history, fantasy, horror, historical fiction, and other branches of speculative fiction all culminate in this uniquely Canadian search for identity.
Issue #196 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies introduces new artwork by Geoffrey Icard, and features original short fiction by Alter S. Reiss and C.A. Hawksmoor, a podcast by Alter S. Reiss, and a reprint by Oliver Buckram.
“Sea of Dreams” by Alter S. Reiss There was nothing Ierois could say; he made his way back to his house and took up the book he had been given. But there was something stale in the words. Over his years on the island, he had been given nine other books, but they had become outworn, nothing in them to distract him.
“The Stone Garden” by C.A. Hawksmoor They rose with the light and worked long into the sunrise clearing a space beneath the broken roof, like the hollow an animal makes in the bracken by circling itself to sleep. Unloading the wood-burner from the wagon and coaxing it into place against the chimney breast was harder, and the tear in Gwyn’s shoulder tugged like wool caught in a wall.
Over at his blog, The Urban Sprawl Project, Ben Peek celebrates the release of Leviathan’s Blood, the sequel to 2014’s The Godless.
You should buy it. You should review it. You should tell your friends about it. Perhaps even your enemies.
I’m pretty happy with it, myself. It’s the middle of the trilogy, the Empire of the Children Trilogy, and there are things in this book that I am absurdly pleased with. There is a set of scenes here that I worked towards from the moment I settled on the narrative structure of the book. (It is, for those of you who have not heard me say it before, a structure that echoes the 12/13 episode structure that TV shows have adopted in the last decade. One of my favourite shows of this was Deadwood, and I remember, way back when I began work on The Godless, how interesting it would be for a fantasy book to echo that.) It’s strange to have a moment laid out in a book beyond the first while you’re writing it, but frankly, the whole series is laid out in that fashion, which will hopefully make for an interesting rereading for people. But anyhow, I am absurdly pleased with this.
Any novel with a structure inspired by Deadwood is okay in my book.
Last month I was delighted to find a brand new copy of Ellen Kushner’s first anthology Basilisk on eBay for the criminally low price of $1.50 — less than cover price! The copy I found was the original 1980 edition (above left), with the gorgeous Rowena cover. In fact, it wasn’t until I started researching it that I discovered it was re-issued in 1984, with a brand new cover by Stephen Hickman (above right).
Well, here was a curious mystery. Why would Ace Books, no newbie to fantasy publishing, replace such a colorful and effective cover? Nothing against Hickman’s cover — which, in fact, I think is tremendously effective — but it’s hard to compete with a life-and-death knife fight between a beautiful desert princess and a buck-naked green guy. And let’s face it, if you have to have a topless princess and a naked green guy on your cover, Rowena is the artist to put them there.
Maybe 1980 was a little too early to introduce naked green butt to mass market? Maybe Basilisk was intended as the first in a series, and when that didn’t happen, Ace thought Hickman’s cover more suited to a one-off anthology? Obviously, there’s a story here. And the person to tell that story is Ellen Kushner. I reached out to her last week with a few questions, and was very pleased to get a lengthy (and very entertaining!) response. Rather than edit it to fit a shorter article, I decided to reproduce the entire thing here. Ladies and gentlemen, the marvelous Ellen Kushner.
They say for good or bad, you never forget your first love; and so it went with me and Stephen King.
I fell deeply in love with him in those heady, early days of Carrie, Salem’s Lot and Firestarter when thankfully I was advised by an older and wiser high school friend, to “read King in order.” But by the time I arrived at The Stand and Gerald’s Game I had begun to spend more and more time with other authors, as King started to feel… well… a little predictable. And ultimately, I never even cracked The Dark Tower books (though I have heard they are quite good) because by that time my literary horror affections were firmly turned elsewhere.
Ah well… I was young.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Doctor Sleep when it was released in October, 2013. I mean, King to me was “back then”; was I really proposing to give him another chance?
Ultimately, I was moved by the warm memories I had of The Shining, in spite of being in the heretical subset who think Kubrick’s interpretation is every bit as good a movie as the source material. Doctor Sleep was, after all, King’s hotly-anticipated sequel.
Well as you probably know, there I was the minute I closed the back cover of the novel, literally gushing about King all over you in Goth Chick News. Doctor Sleep was not only fantastic, but may well rank in my top 10 favorite reads ever. And that’s saying quite a lot.
Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K universe is one of the best sandboxes around.
I’m working on a sandbox Space Opera setting.
Sandbox is the tricky part; a “sandbox” is a storyworld that lets you tell (or experience — if you are a gamer) all sorts of different kinds of story. Essentially, I’m building my Discworld.
Oh, you say, just make it big with lots of different kinds of settings plus spare blank spots on the map.
Yes, that gives you lots of flexibility (though less than you’d think). However, the stories won’t be — sorry, I can’t think of a better word — branded.
I mean, the asteroid miners over here and the fight against the dark lord over there, don’t need to belong in the same universe and the reader (or player) won’t really feel as if they are revisiting the same place.
So a good sandbox is one that maximises the possible range of branded stories.
Spend time with a 12-year-old tabletop gamer and you quickly realize that — in this light — Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K universe is one of the best sandboxes around. You can could dump just about any Space Opera SF story into it, and it would still feel like 40K. To do Firefly, just plug in Orcs, Inquisitors and Space Marines and Imperial Guards. To do Starship Troopers tell a story about the Imperial Guard. To do Star Trek, just follow a Tau captain on their five year mission.
Less so in the Star Wars universe.
Firefly Wars would need a local civil war as backstory, since the cleanup after the prequels feels like it would involve more mass graves. Your Alliance could be the Empire, but the Empire doesn’t really feel as if it would do dark secrets — why bother hiding them? — or have secret super soldier programs– it has Stormtroopers and Sith anyway. Starship Troopers could be about the latter-day Stormtroopers, but the moral ambiguity would be lost. Star Trek…? No, not without taking a ship to a different galaxy and then it would not feel like Star Wars. It would lose its brand.
So the 40K ‘verse is a far better sandbox than the Star Wars one. How can this be? It appears to follow four basic rules…
