New Treasures: The Shootout Solution by Michael R. Underwood

New Treasures: The Shootout Solution by Michael R. Underwood

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The Shootout Solution-smallMichael R. Underwood’s novel Shield and Crocus, set in a city built on the bones of a fallen giant and ruled by five criminal tyrants, had perhaps the most intriguing setting I came across last year. So I was delighted to see he was joining the stellar line-up at Tor.com with a new series, the Genrenauts. The first episode, The Shootout Solution, was published on November 17 as their tenth premium novella.

Leah Tang just died on stage.

Not literally.

Not yet.

Leah’s stand-up career isn’t going well. But she understands the power of fiction, and when she’s offered employment with the mysterious Genrenauts Foundation, she soon discovers that literally dying on stage is a hazard of the job!

Her first job takes her to a Western world. When a cowboy tale slips off its rails, and the outlaws start to win, it’s up to Leah — and the Genrenauts team — to nudge the story back on track and prevent major ripples on Earth.

But the story’s hero isn’t interested in winning, and the safety of Earth hangs in the balance…

See the complete list of Tor.com novellas we’ve covered so far below.

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The Medieval Medina of Tetouan, Morocco

The Medieval Medina of Tetouan, Morocco

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The narrow streets hide some lovely bits of old Islamic architecture. This is the door to the Saqia al-Fouqia Mosque, built 1608. The plastic sheeting got in the way of a lot of my photos, but it helped keep me dry.
The narrow streets hide some lovely bits of old Islamic architecture. This is the door to the Saqia al-Fouqia Mosque, built 1608. The plastic sheeting got in the way of a lot of my photos, but it helped keep me dry.

I’ve blogged previously here on Black Gate about spending some time living in Tangier, Morocco. The city is a good jumping off point to see northern Morocco, a region many visitors skip as they head down to Fez, the Atlas Mountains, and the southern casbahs. If they do that, they miss one of North Africa’s best preserved medinas, the 15th century marketplace of Tetouan, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Tetouan is located in the saddle of two clusters of hills. Home to about half a million people, it doesn’t attract many foreign tourists and offers a look at an traditional medina and its market that have not felt the hand of international shoppers.

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 187 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 187 Now Available

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 187-smallIssue #187 of BCS has short fiction from Rich Larson and Jason S. Ridler, and an Audio Vault podcast (from issue #33) by Aliette de Bodard. It is cover-dated November 24.

“The Delusive Cartographer” by Rich Larson
Crane needed no further invitation. The pain in his back was forgotten now that he was finally here, finally close. He charted a foot over from the cell’s sliver window and down to the floor. He’d doubted, in the darkest hours of the night. He’d doubted the whole thing. But the groove was exactly where the cartographer had described it.

“Spider’s Ink” by Jason S. Ridler
To catch a bug, you must burn him out. That had been our experience with Macti spies and rebels. Under the authority of the Wayfaring House we came with black fire and warned all that if the Spider known as Heriz was not returned, we would decree the island corrupted and purify by shot and flame. It had worked in Jani, Uurun, and it would work here.

Audio Vault Podcast:
“In the Age of Iron and Ashes” by Aliette de Bodard

Rich Larson has been nominated for the Sturgeon Award, and his work has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, and many other places. Jason S. Ridler has published over sixty stories in such magazines as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Out of the Gutter.

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Vintage Treasures: Jinian Star-Eye by Sheri S. Tepper

Vintage Treasures: Jinian Star-Eye by Sheri S. Tepper

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Jinian Star-Eye was the last volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s monumental nine-volume fantasy opus, The True Game. On course, in keeping with 1980s-era fantasy marketing, no mention was made of this anywhere on the book. However, if you were an attentive buyer, you might have noticed the poem on the back, a sure tip that this was part of the series. Poetry as a marketing device, to the best of my knowledge, was an idea that was born and died with this series.

We’ve covered several of the previous installments over the years, but not the entire series. It began with King’s Blood Four in 1983, Tepper’s first novel. Subsequent volumes were divided into a trio of trilogies, starting with the True Game trilogy:

King’s Blood Four (1983)
Necromancer Nine (1983)
Wizard’s Eleven (1984)

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Future Treasures: X’s For Eyes by Laird Barron

Future Treasures: X’s For Eyes by Laird Barron

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Laird Barron made quite a name for himself as a horror writer early in his career, but he’s really come into his own in the last few years. He was the guest editor of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One, and the subject of the highly acclaimed tribute anthology, The Children of Old Leech. James McGlothlin reviewed his recent work for us, calling his collection The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All “a great combination of cosmic horror… [and] gritty noir,” and The Light is the Darkness evidence that Barron has become “a superstar… in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft.”

His latest book, a slender novella from JournalStone, will be published this Friday. It features brothers MacBeth and Drederick, ages 14 and 12, wealthy sons of the superich Tooms family. Their father may be a supervillain, and it looks like the company’s newest space probe just accidentally contacted a malevolent alien god, but that won’t stop the lads from having a great summer vacation. Stu Horvath at Unwinnable says, “They’re like some kind of midnight reflection of the Hardy Boys or Johnny Quest and Hadji. If you ever thought The Venture Brothers needed more horror and less Star Wars references, then this is the book for you.”

X’s For Eyes is 98 pages, priced at $9.95 in trade paperback and $2.99 for the digital edition. Click the covers above for bigger versions.

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

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CityWatch_GuardsCoverThe most popular article at Black Gate last month was M. Harold Page’s “An Adventurer’s Guide to the Middle Ages: Town Watch? Where?”, a look at the much-loved concept of a citizen’s militia in fantasy. It’s not hard to see why it was popular:

The first thing that Conan — or Locke Lamora, or Grey Mouser, or Vimes, or a D&D party  — would notice about a real medieval city would be the almost total absence of an Ankh Morpork-style town watch.

It’s a stock trope: here come a dozen Keystone Cops town watch in their funny armour, to arrest the drunken barbarian or catch the thief. Only it’s not like that in reality, or at least not quite like that in Later Medieval and Early Modern England, France, and Germany.

That’s not a criticism. Fantasy writers must write what they will. Dickensian thief takers are plausible, and raise themes to do with policing and justice. However, if, like me, you write Historical Adventure Fiction , then you need to know how policing worked because integrity, and because somebody else will know and will gleefully correct you in reviews. (It’s funny when your research is better than theirs though — and the one time I ever answered a review.)

Back in March, Thomas Parker’s asked our readers to “Tell Me Why,” demanding to know why fantasy fans embrace “ambitious, multivolume phone book series.” Sarah Avery’s long-gestating response, “Why Do We Do This To Ourselves? I Can Explain!”, the latest installment in her Series Series, clocked in at #2 for the month.

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The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip

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“Who is the Star-Bearer, and what will he loose that is bound?”

                                             from the Riddle-Master of Hed

This week’s work of epic high fantasy, Patricia McKillip’s The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), the first volume in her Riddle-Master trilogy, is more restrained than those I’ve reviewed the past few weeks. In his book Modern Fantasy, David Pringle calls the series “romantic fantasies of a delicate kind” and in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy John Clute describes McKillip’s development of the series’ lead characters as “handled with scrupulous delicacy.” While I detect a slightly dismissive tone in those comments, neither is completely inaccurate. If The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are a great big Romantic symphony, then McKillip’s book is more like a piano sonata. There’s a lightness of touch, though not of tone, here, as well as a focus on the small details. So, though an ancient war is reignited, mysterious shapeshifting enemies appear out of nowhere, and the fate of the world is at stake, at the center of the story is a young hero and his struggle to refuse to submit to prophecies of which he wants no part.

My mother took these books out from the YA section in the St. George Library on Staten Island way back in 1979 for my dad. She thought he’d like them and she was right. He must have read them every other year or so between then and his death in 2001. Because he liked them so much I gave them a try and I was as enthralled as he clearly was. Like him, I was drawn into McKillip’s world of riddles, strange magics, and hidden and lost identities. I’ve probably read the trilogy four or five times myself, but this is the first time I’ve picked it up in over a decade. Having finished the first, I’m looking forward to the next two volumes, Heir of Sea and Fire and Harpist in the Wind, with great anticipation.

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An Adventurer’s Guide to the Middle Ages: What if There’s No Room at the Inn (or No Inn Whatsoever?)

An Adventurer’s Guide to the Middle Ages: What if There’s No Room at the Inn (or No Inn Whatsoever?)

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…you are automatically interesting. You have stories to tell that people will repeat for years to come…

So, by definition, adventurers travel. Where do you stay?

With the elves is good.

Seriously, Tolkien got it right. His two parties of adventurers travel across Middle Earth (which has an empty Early Dark Age/Early Middle Ages feel) and how many times do they stay in inns?

It’s pretty much camping and hospitality all the way. In Middle Earth, this means craving the hospitality of elves, shape-shifters, and humans of various social ranks.

In the real Middle Ages, you’re stuck with just humans.

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When Mankind Shares the Earth with Vampires, Werewolves, & Trolls: Dean R. Koontz’s The Haunted Earth

When Mankind Shares the Earth with Vampires, Werewolves, & Trolls: Dean R. Koontz’s The Haunted Earth

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The Haunted Earth Koontz-back-small The Haunted Earth Koontz-small

The Haunted Earth
Dean R. Koontz
Lancer Books original paperback (192 pages, $0.95, 1973)

Last time out, I did a retro-review of Koontz’s early 1970’s science-fiction murder mystery, A Werewolf Among Us. This time around, I’m looking at another of the genre mysteries he wrote early in his career, The Haunted Earth. I enjoyed it when I first read it in 1973, and I enjoyed it again, 42 years later. For those of you who are familiar with Clifford D. Simak’s Out of Their Minds and The Goblin Reservation, as well as the works of Ron Goulart, most notably his The Chameleon Corps, Koontz’s The Haunted Earth has much in common with those: wild imagination, fast-paced narrative, interesting characters, and plenty of humor.

The premise is this: in the “future” year of 2000, Earth is visited by a race of Lovecraft-inspired, benevolent aliens called the Maseni. Not only were we introduced to these tentacle-wearing ETs, they brought with them their supernatural brothers. Furthermore, the Maseni showed us how to “release from bondage” our own mythological and supernatural entities. Thus, Mankind now shares the Earth with vampires, werewolves, minotaurs, dryads, trolls, et cetera, et cetera.

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