Nnedi Okorafor’s first novel for adults, Who Fears Death, won the 2011 World Fantasy Award, and was also a Tiptree Honor Book and a Nebula nominee. The prequel, The Book of Phoenix, arrived in hardcover last month, and it made me realize I need to get the lead out and read the first one.
Of course, now I’m tortured by that great dilemma of 21st Century fantasy…. should I read the acclaimed first novel first, or the prequel? Which makes more sense?
Life is hard. Here’s the description for Who Fears Death.
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the winners for the 2015 Locus Awards. Woo hoo! Cake and drinks for all.
The winners are selected by the readers of Locus magazine. The awards began in 1971, originally as a way to highlight quality work in advance of the Hugo Awards. The winners were announced yesterday, during the annual Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA.
The Sioux Spaceman was one of the very first Andre Norton novels I ever laid eyes on (other than The Last Planet and Daybreak — 2250). It was certainly one of the first Ace Doubles I ever encountered. It was first published in 1960, paired with Richard Wilson’s And Then the Town Took Off, with covers by Ed Valigursky (above).
The Norton volume was the first book in her Council/Confederation series, which eventually grew to encompass four novels:
The Sioux Spaceman (1960)
Eye of the Monster (1962)
The X Factor (1965)
Voorloper (1980)
The entire series was collected in an omnibus volume from Baen in 2009, The Game of Stars and Comets (2009; see below).
Naturally, the works of Robert E. Howard are popular post fodder here at Black Gate. While Conan is far and away his best known character, REH created many other memorable heroes, including Solomon Kane, El Borak and Kull. Earlier this year, I wrote about Howard’s largely forgotten private eye, Steve Harrison.
At the time, I thought that a post on Howard’s boxing stories would be good reading. Also realizing I was completely unqualified to write it, I contacted the current czar of boxing fiction, Paul Bishop of Fight Card Books.
Fight Card is a pulp style series of boxing tales. They’ve included two Holmes boxing novellas in the series, so you know I’m on board! See what Paul has to say about Howard’s boxing works.
The minute I stepped ashore from the Sea Girl, merchantman, I had a hunch that there would be trouble. This hunch was caused by seeing some of the crew of the Dauntless. The men on the Dauntless have disliked the Sea Girl’s crew ever since our skipper took their captain to a cleaning on the wharfs of Zanzibar – them being narrow-minded that way. They claimed that the old man had a knuckle-duster on his right, which is ridiculous and a dirty lie. He had it on his left.
~ Robert E. Howard, “The Pit of the Serpent”
Although best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, and other sword and sorcery characters, Robert E. Howard had a lifelong interest in boxing, attending fights and avidly following the careers of his favorite fighters. Even though as a child he was bookish and intellectual, in his teen years he took up bodybuilding and eventually entered the ring as an amateur boxer.
In a series of tweets yesterday, J.K. Rowling announced that her creation Harry Potter would return in a spin-off play, which will open in London’s West End in summer 2016.
I’m also very excited to confirm today that a new play called Harry Potter and the CursedChild will be opening in London next year. It will tell a new story, which is the result of a collaboration between writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and myself.
To answer one inevitable (and reasonable!) question — why isn’t #CursedChild a new novel? — I am confident that when audiences see the play, they will agree that it was the only proper medium for the story. I’ve had countless offers to extend Harry’s story over the years, but Jack, John and Sonia Friedman are a dream team! I don’t want to say too much more, because I don’t want to spoil what I know will be a real treat for fans. However, I can say that it is not a prequel!
Rowling is already hard at work on the script for another Potterspin-off, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a Warner Bros. film based on her 2001 book of the same name, featuring monster wrangler Newt Scamander. But this is the first major post-Potterwork that will feature her original characters.
Speculation is rampant about exactly where the story will fit in the time line, with some folks theorizing it could tell the tale of one of the summers only glossed over in the novels, or perhaps one of Harry Potter’s cases as an auror. Rowling’s co-writer Jack Thorne also wrote the highly regarded 2013 production of Let the Right One In for the National Theatre of Scotland (also directed by John Tiffany), so expectations are high. For now though, the creators are remaining mum.
The June issue of the online magazine Nightmare is now available.
Fiction this month includes original short stories from Maria Dahvana Headley and Dale Bailey, and reprints from Kaaron Warren and Stephen Graham Jones:
“The Changeling” by Sarah Langan (originally published in Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, September 2011) The Music of the Dark Time” by Chet Williamson (Originally published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, June 1988)
The non-fiction this issue includes the latest installment in their long-running horror column, “The H Word” (“Why Do We Read Horror?”), plus author spotlights, a showcase on cover artist Okan Bülbül, an editorial, and a feature interview with Lucy A. Snyder.
I think you’re cool and all, and I like how your gloves match your tea cups, but I think auntie Red is cooler.
Love,
Petunia
My dearest Petunia,
Let me begin by saying that choosing favorites is not becoming. Not even a little bit. Imagine, here I am returning from a perfectly wonderful party with this lovely(?) punch, to find this letter waiting for me, basically telling me that I am *not* in fact the favorite aunt… it hurts, Petunia. Good thing I still have some of this punch to ease the pain of your treachery.
… Do you think you were named Petunia for Red? No, you were not. Be realistic, dear. Let me just finish up my punch and tell you exactly why you are wrong, dear, innocent child.
“Brilliant, an excuse to play online warrior all day!” — NOT
I’ve been spending time on writing forums — a substitute for actual work while convalescing from an operation — and… well, I’ve noticed embedded in the culture are several pieces of advice that aren’t very useful for novice writers.
Rather than stringing them out into a series, I’m going to blast through them here:
Great games. Great gig. But rather than going, “Brilliant, an excuse to play online warrior all day!“, I had a go at them, then handed each off to my son for a thorough exploration (a chore he greatly enjoyed, though being something of a sniper, he got regularly kicked from servers).
I like video games — I’m playing through Mass Effect at the moment — but I like writing better.
See where I’m going with this?
Nobody ever posts online, “How do I motivate myself to complete Halo 3?”
Video games are automatically fun out-of-the-box, because the challenge is the game itself, not the business of getting around inside the virtual world; most games even have similar key bindings (e.g. awsd). So if writing is not as much fun as gaming, then it’s probably because you’re still struggling with the basics of writing rather than wrestling with storytelling.
Therefore if motivation is a problem for you, work on your craft. Success breeds success.
Humor is tough to get right. So when I hear pre-release buzz about a book that gets it right, I pay attention. Logan J. Hunder’s debut novel Witches Be Crazy, coming next month from Night Shade Books, has been called “A wild fantasy adventure” by Piers Anthony, and “Laugh-out-loud hilarious… Witches Be Crazy skewers fantasy tropes and hoists them high on their own petard (whatever a ‘petard’ is)” by Kevin J. Anderson. Featuring a masquerading princess, pirates, cultists, crazy hobos, and a heroic innkeeper, Witches Be Crazy could be just what I’m looking for.
Real heroes never die. But they do get grouchy in middle age.
The beloved King Ik is dead, and there was barely time to check his pulse before the royal throne was supporting the suspiciously shapely backside of an impostor pretending to be Ik’s beautiful long-lost daughter. With the land’s heroic hunks busy drooling all over themselves, there’s only one man left who can save the kingdom of Jenair. His name is Dungar Loloth, a rural blacksmith turned innkeeper, a surly hermit and an all-around nobody oozing toward middle age, compensating for a lack of height, looks, charm, and tact with guts and an attitude.
Normally politics are the least of his concerns, but after everyone in the neighboring kingdom of Farrawee comes down with a severe case of being dead, Dungar learns that the masquerading princess not only is behind the carnage but also has similar plans for his own hometown. Together with an eccentric and arguably insane hobo named Jimminy, he journeys out into the world he’s so pointedly tried to avoid as the only hope of defeating the most powerful person in it. That is, if he can survive the pirates, cultists, radical Amazonians, and assorted other dangers lying in wait along the way.
Witches Be Crazy will be published by Night Shade Books on July 14, 2015. It is 352 pages, priced at $15.99 for both the trade paperback and digital versions.
Nick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, author of Sarah Court and Cataract City. Davidson explains the Cutter identity was created at his agent’s suggestion, to help readers differentiate between Davidson’s more serious output, and “the gore-spattered nightmares” of Nick Cutter. The Troop, his debut novel under the name Cutter, was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of last year. It won the Jame Herbert Award for Horror Writing, and Stephen King said “The Troop scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t put it down. This is old-school horror at its best.”
Cutter’s new novel The Acolyte appeared from ChiZine last month, and it’s even more interesting to me than The Troop. A police procedural set in a religious dystopia where the police are responsible for eradicating heretical religious faiths, it follows acolyte Jonah Murtag as he unravels the truth behind a mysterious string of urban bombings.
Jonah Murtag is an Acolyte on the New Bethlehem police force. His job: eradicate all heretical religious faiths, their practitioners, and artefacts. Murtag’s got problems — one of his partners is a zealot, and he’s in love with the other one. Trouble at work, trouble at home. Murtag realizes that you can rob a citizenry of almost anything, but you can’t take away its faith.
When a string of bombings paralyzes the city, religious fanatics are initially suspected, but startling clues point to a far more ominous perpetrator. If Murtag doesn’t get things sorted out, the Divine Council will dispatch The Quints, aka: Heaven’s Own Bagmen. The clock is ticking towards doomsday for the Chosen of New Bethlehem.
And Jonah Murtag’s got another problem. The biggest and most worrisome…
Jonah isn’t a believer anymore.
The Acolyte was published by ChiZine Publications on May 19, 2015. It is 301 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Erik Mohr. I got my copy at the Nebula Awards weekend here in Chicago in early June. See our recent survey of the impressive ChiZine catalog here.
