Black Gate – Page 824 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Coode Street Podcast Reveals that K.J. Parker is Tom Holt

Wednesday, April 22, 2015 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

Best selling fantasy author K.J. Parker appeared on the scene 17 years ago, when he published Colours in the Steel (1998), the first novel in The Fencer trilogy.

Since then he’s had a stellar career, producing The Scavenger trilogy and the popular The Engineer trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, and The Escapement), plus standalone novels such as The Company (2008), The Folding Knife (2010), and The Hammer (2011).

But Parker has never appeared in public, or even spoken on the phone — not even to accept the two World Fantasy Awards he’s won. It soon became public knowledge that the name was a pseudonym. But despite intense curiosity and conjecture, the identity behind the name remained a closely guarded secret, until Parker decided to reveal it to his long-time editor Jonathan Strahan and his partner Gary K. Wolfe yesterday, on their Coode Street Podcast.

K.J. Parker is actually humorous fantasy writer Tom Holt, whose popular novels include Expecting Someone Taller (1987), Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (1988), Ye Gods! (1992), Blonde Bombshell (2010), and more than two dozen others.

Over the last 17 years Holt has continued his prolific output under his own name, while simultaneously writing over a dozen novels as K.J. Parker.

Listen to the complete interview here.

Vintage Treasures: Razored Saddles, edited by Joe R. Lansdale

Wednesday, April 22, 2015 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

I was at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback convention here in Chicago over the weekend — hands down one of my favorite shows, and absolutely the place where I make my best finds, year after year — and I stumbled across a paperback I’d never seen before.

Now, this really isn’t all that unusual. Last year I found Carl Jacobi’s Revelations in Black, The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, Stephen E. Fabian’s luscious art book Ladies & Legends, and a bunch more things, just as examples. But I expect to be surprised by odd British books and small print run paperbacks from the 1970s. I don’t expect to discover that a major anthology from the 1990s — from one of the biggest paperback publishers in the country, and edited by no less a personage than Joe R. Lansdale — has completely slipped my radar.

Razored Saddles was originally released in a limited edition hardcover by Dark Harvest in September 1989, and nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. The hardcover is relatively easy to come by, and in fact I’ve seen plenty of them over the years. But the paperback must have come and gone in a flash, because I’ve never come across a copy in over 25 years.

The dealer who was offering it for sale was well aware of its scarcity — he wanted more than I would expect to pay for the limited edition hardcover. Well, I’m loathe to pay more than the cover price of a modern paperback for any vintage paperback, and I didn’t in this case. But I admit I was tempted… Razored Saddles looks like a stellar collection of weird western tales from a Who’s Who of early 90s horror writers, including Neal Barrett, Jr., Robert R. McCammon, David J. Schow, Lewis Shiner, Howard Waldrop, Richard Christian Matheson, F. Paul Wilson, Richard Laymon, and many others. And let’s face it. That cover, with a gun-toting skeletal cowboy mounted against a stark blue sky, very nearly seals the deal.

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Philip Sandifer’s Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and his Supporters

Tuesday, April 21, 2015 John ONeill Comments 63 comments

Author Philip Sandifer (The Last War in Albion, TARDIS Eruditorum) has a fascinating take on the ongoing 2015 Hugo controversy, pointing out that debating with the Sad Puppies is a waste of time — not because they don’t have a point, but because they are largely irrelevant. Theo Beale’s Rabid Puppies slate largely dictated the outcome, and it’s Beale ‘s agenda that will shape the outcome in future years.

Relatively unreported — and indeed misreported in most coverage of this, is the fact that the Sad Puppies largely failed… In the only category in which both Beale and Torgersen proposed full slates, Best Short Story, Beale’s nominees made it.

Sandifer’s thesis is that the Sad Puppies, and the groundswell of fans who’ve gathered to support it, are the popular face of a much more tightly controlled effort by Theo Beale.

As we’ve seen, it’s not really Torgersen who is most important here; it’s Theodore Beale…. The Rabid Puppies were the slate that actually dominated the Hugos nominations, but the Sad Puppies give every appearance of having been actively constructed to allow them to… Regardless of Torgersen’s intentions, the practical result is that he’s providing the politely moderate front for a movement that is in practice dominated by Theodore Beale…

Torgersen makes much of empowering fans, saying that the slate “is a recommendation. Not an absolute,” and stressing that “YOU get to have a say in who is acknowledged.” Beale, on the other hand, discourages his readers from exercising any personal preference, saying of his recommendations that “I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are.”

Read the complete article here.

Future Treasures: Rat Queens Volume 2 by Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch

Tuesday, April 21, 2015 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Rat Queens, Volume 1 was nominated for a 2015 Hugo — and all on its own, too, without having to rely on a slate or anything. (I wonder if we’ll have to put that qualifier on all future Hugo nominees.)

The Rat Queens is a darkly comedic “sass-and-sorcery” graphic novel, featuring a pack of booze-guzzling, death-dealing battle maidens-for-hire in the business of killing all god’s creatures for profit. It follow the adventures of four Dungeons and Dragons archetypes, Hannah the Rockabilly Elven Mage, Violet the Hipster Dwarven Fighter, Dee the Atheist Human Cleric and Betty the Hippy Smidgen Thief, as they hack their way through dungeons and strangers things, in this modern spin on an old school genre.

A brand-new, booze-soaked tale of the Rat Queens reveals a growing menace within the very walls of Palisade. And while Dee may have run from her past, the bloated, blood-feasting sky god N’rygoth never really lets his children stray too far. Collects issues #6-10 of the smash-hit series, plus extras.

Volume 1, Sass & Sorcery, was released on April 8, 2014, and is still available — at the low introductory price of $9.99. It’s definitely the best starting place if you’re not familiar with the series. I bought it last year, and it was quickly snatched up by all the comic-reading bipeds in my house.

Rat Queens Volume 2: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N’rygoth was written by Kurtis J. Wiebe and illustrated by Roc Upchurch and Stjepan Sejic. It will be published by Image Comics on May 19, 2015. It is 136 pages in full color, priced at $14.99. There is no digital edition.

The Omnibus Volumes of H. Beam Piper

Tuesday, April 21, 2015 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

H. Beam Piper is one of my favorite Twentieth Century writers. He died a few months after I was born, on November 4, 1964, but his books are still in print today in handsome omnibus collections from his long-time publisher, Ace Books. And if you’re willing to hunt for a few vintage paperbacks (and why wouldn’t you?), you can also find some terrific collections of his earlier novels and stories.

Let’s start with the classic series for which Piper is most remembered today: The Fuzzy novels (also published as The Fuzzy Papers), collected in the omnibus volume The Complete Fuzzy. An enduring favorite among Golden Age SF fans, the series began with Little Fuzzy (1962) and The Other Human Race (1964; also called Fuzzy Sapiens), and continued in Fuzzies and Other People, which was found among Piper’s papers and published two decades after his death, in 1984.

The Fuzzy novels have inspired several writers to pen new adventures featuring the titular aliens, notably William Tuning, Ardath Mayhar, Wolfgang Diehr, and most recently John Scalzi, who published Fuzzy Nation in 2011.

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New Treasures: Werewolves: A Hunter’s Guide by Graeme Davis

Monday, April 20, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Graeme Davis is the co-author of the classic Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game, and he’s written adventures and supplements for most of the major RPG lines, including AD&D, Pathfinder, GURPS, Freeport, Vampire: The Masquerade, Colonial Gothic, and many others. He’s no stranger to Osprey’s Myths and Legends line either, with both Thor: The Viking God of Thunder and Theseus and the Minotaur to his credit.

His latest book for Osprey, Werewolves: A Hunter’s Guide, reveals the shocking role that werewolves have played in some of history’s most significant events.

Fear the full moon; for on that day of lunacy the terrible wrath of the werewolves is unleashed. For thousands of years, from ancient Greek chronicles to modern news reports, from the depths of the darkest forests to dimly lit city streets, these dread beasts have stalked us in the realms of shadow and nightmare. Now, they are awakening. This book is the only thing standing between humanity and an overwhelming horde of snarling, ferocious lycanthropes. It reveals the secret societies devoted to studying their condition, providing information on where werewolves live, and what they do to survive. It illustrates the startling variety of werewolf subspecies, as diverse as humanity itself, collecting reports of skinwalkers, hengeyokai, and other shapeshifters from across the world.

Werewolves offers the dearly bought information from those that have hunted them down through the centuries – the best techniques to find and slay these creatures of the night.

Werewolves: A Hunter’s Guide was published by Osprey Publishing on March 24, 2015. It is 80 pages in full color, priced at $18.95 in trade paperback, and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Get Ready For Six More Best-of-the-Year Volumes

Monday, April 20, 2015 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

Last week I wrote a brief Future Treasures piece on the upcoming crop of Year’s Best anthologies, Get Ready For 11 Best-of-the-Year Volumes, scheduled to be released in the next six months. I covered the big books in the pipeline, including ones from Rich Horton, Paula Guran, Jonathan Strahan, Gardner Dozois, John Joseph Adams, and others.

As comprehensive as that list was, since it went live I’ve been contacted by several folks in the know who’ve pointed out that I missed a number of volumes. Without further ado, here are six additional Best of the Year volumes scheduled to be released this year.

Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, ed. Steve Berman (Lethe)
Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, ed. Steve Berman (Lethe)
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Fiction, edired by Sandra Kasturi (ChiZine)
The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, edited by Liz Grzyb & Talie Helene (Ticonderoga)
The Year’s Illustrious Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nisi Shawl (Aqueduct Press)
Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction 2013, edited by Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein (Kaleidoscope)

This brings the total to 17… and it still doesn’t include several announced titles, such as the new Night Shade series edited by Neil Clarke, The Best Science Fiction of the Year (first volume to be released in 2016), and Steve Haynes’ Best British Fantasy (no word on a 2015 volume.) If you’re a fan of short genre fiction, the next six months will be very good to you indeed.

Clarkesworld 103 Now on Sale

Monday, April 20, 2015 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

The newest issue of Clarkesworld, one of the most acclaimed fiction mags on the market, is now on sale. Issue 103 contains six short stories — including one by the source of that other big 2015 Hugo controversy, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, who also writes as the notorious blogger and book reviewer “Requires Hate.”

Sriduangkaew’s long-running campaign of intimidation and death threats against other genre writers was detailed in Laura J. Mixon’s exhaustive “A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names,” for which Mixon was nominated for a 2015 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer.

Short stories featured this issue are:

“The Empress in Her Glory” by Robert Reed
“Let Baser Things Devise” by Berrien C. Henderson
“The Petals Abide” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
“Postcards from Monster Island” by Emily Devenport
“Noble Mold” by Kage Baker
“Weep for Day” by Indrapramit Das

Non-fiction includes “Small Markets, Big Wonders” by Julie Novakova, a report on a roundtable on Spanish science fiction by Alvaro Zinos Amaro, “Another Word: The Precious Five-Star and the Reviewers of Mount Doom” by Alethea Kontis, and an editorial, “Danger! Radioactive!,” by Neil Clarke. This issue also includes three podcasts.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Conan of Venarium

Monday, April 20, 2015 Bob Byrne Comments 5 comments

I’ve got a couple Holmes-related posts in the works, but am not done researching any of them (no, I don’t just make up my posts as I go: I actually put some thought into them; even if it may not always appear so). Fortunately, I’ve got no shortage of other areas of interest that I can use to fill the gap (I still haven’t figured out how to get a baseball-related post here. Although, if I still had my copy of that Daryl Brock book. Maybe something on W P Kinsella.).

The esteemed Ryan Harvey used to review Conan pastiches here at Black Gate. I am absolutely a Robert E. Howard and Conan fan. Perhaps you read this recent post? So, looking to indulge my non-mystery interest (I really want to write something on Tolkien’s Nauglamir, but it’s not even outlined yet), I turned to Conan.

Harry Turtledove is best known for his alternate history novels. I’ve read little Turtledove, so I can’t expound on them. However, one that I did read and enjoyed very much was The Guns of the South, which involves time-travelers bringing Robert E. Lee AK-47s, changing the outcome of the American Civil War (it’s better than it sounds). I definitely enjoyed it more than his other alt-Civil War book, How Few Remain.

Back in 2003, Turtledove joined the list of authors putting out Conan pastiches for Tor Books. Fans of Conan know that this line was quite hit and miss. Conan of Venarium was the 49th and last of the Tor originals, coming six years after the previous entry.

You can read Ryan’s review of that one, here. I’ll include a quote that I think sums up his thoughts on Venarium’s predecessor: “I am glad to report that Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza is superior to Conan and the Mists of Doom. Unfortunately, that still ranks it as the second worst Conan novel I’ve read.”

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Vintage Treasures: The Monarchies of God by Paul Kearney

Sunday, April 19, 2015 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Paul Kearney’s first novel was The Way to Babylon (1992), followed quickly by A Different Kingdom (1993) and Riding the Unicorn (1994). With his fourth novel, Hawkwood’s Voyage (1995), he began an extremely ambitious story cycle that eventually ran to five volumes and over 1,600 pages: The Monarchies of God.

The Monarchies of God was originally published in the UK by Gollancz, with each volume released as it was written. In the US, however, publisher Ace Books tried an unusual experiment. They waited until the series was virtually complete, publishing the first volume here in the US in February 2002, and subsequent books one per month, in March, April, and May. The final volume was released in January 2003, virtually simultaneous with its UK release.

I have to assume the experiment was not a success, as the books went out of print rather quickly, and Ace has shown no particular appetite to repeat it since.

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