Monsters in a Mist-locked Kingdom: The Shepherd King by Rachel Gillig

Monsters in a Mist-locked Kingdom: The Shepherd King by Rachel Gillig

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One Dark Window and Two Twisted Crows (Orbit Books,
September 27, 2022, and October 17, 2023). Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

I enjoy a good fairy tale. Also a well told-gothic romance. My true love, of course, is monster movies. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a novel that took a stab at mixing all three. At least, not until I read this tasty copy on the back of One Dark Window:

Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom she calls home — she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head…

When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure the kingdom of the dark magic infecting it. Except the highwayman just so happens to be the King’s own nephew, Captain of the Destriers… and guilty of high treason.

One Dark Window is the debut novel by California author Rachel Gillig, the opening book in a duology. Sequel Two Twisted Crowns arrives later this year.

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Goth Chick News: Can Someone Please Help Me Understand Anime?

Goth Chick News: Can Someone Please Help Me Understand Anime?

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Last Friday, Goth Chick photog Chris Z and I once again had the pleasure of a press invitation to the annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (or C2E2 for you cool kids). If you haven’t heard of this event, C2E2 is a Chicago fan convention dedicated to comics, pop culture, graphic novels ,video games, toys, movies, and television.

The inaugural C2E2 was held in 2010 at the McCormick Place in Chicago and hosted roughly twenty-eight thousand people over three days. Thirteen years later and according to our inside sources, all three individual days were sold out, as well as the three-day passes. Though C2E2 show runners have been tight-lipped these last few years as to attendance numbers, estimations I’ve been able to gather put the total in the 110K neighborhood for 2023, making C2E2 in the top five largest comic conventions in the US.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Moar Mondo Mifune

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Moar Mondo Mifune

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Red Sun (France/Italy/Spain, 1971)

Though Toshiro Mifune in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s had proven himself a consummate actor capable of inhabiting a wide range of roles, by the late ‘60s he was pretty much typecast as a gruffly stoic warrior oozing with gravitas. That sounds limiting, and though Mifune plays that part in each of the films covered this week, the three movies are so varied they prove Mifune’s breadth as a performer even when seemingly typecast. Plus, the latter two of these movies are just a rollicking good time, and if you haven’t heard of them, I’m delighted to bring them to your attention.

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Alien Scarecrows, Strange Restaurants, and Mystery in a Spaceport Morgue: March-April 2023 Print SF Magazines

Alien Scarecrows, Strange Restaurants, and Mystery in a Spaceport Morgue: March-April 2023 Print SF Magazines

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March/April 2023 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction & Fact,
and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Dominic Harman
(for “Gravesend”), Shutterstock, and Mondolithic Studios/Jill Bauman (for “Mr. Catt)

It’s a bonanza of great fiction in the new print mags this month, with stories by some of the biggest names in the biz — including Peter S. Beagle, Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, Bruce Sterling and Paul Di Filippo, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lavie Tidhar, Allen M. Steele, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Adam-Troy Castro, Howard V. Hendrix, Eleanor Arnason, Tade Thompson, Kathleen Jennings, Sheila Finch, Sam J. Miller, Rajnar Vajra, Buzz Dixon, E. Catherine Tobler, Gregory Feeley, Octavia Cade, Ray Nayler, Stanley Schmidt, and many more.

The fiction here covers the gamut modern SF, with tales set on Mars, a far-future Earth where mankind has been exterminated, an 8th grade math class taught by a witch, a restaurant run by an alien who sells off parts of his own body, an asteroid inhabited by giant ants, a mysterious house that sells ideas to science fiction writers, a department store that offers new bodies, a morgue on a spaceport, a climate-ravaged Europe, and more more. See all the details below.

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Bob’s Books – Shelfie #4: Shared Universes – Thieves World, and Heroes in Hell

Bob’s Books – Shelfie #4: Shared Universes – Thieves World, and Heroes in Hell

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I’ve done three shelfies posts. If you missed those (shame on you!), I’ve been posting shelfies, with comments on some of the books, over in a bookshelf subreddit. With over 2,000 physical books, I’ve got a lot of shelves.

And to me, if you’re talking about a shared universe, you gotta start out with Thieves World. I own a (non-RPG/comics) almost complete library; including one few folks know about, let alone have.

THIEVES WORLD

The first Thieves World book came out in 1979, and I have a first edition Ace paperback. I started reading the series almost from the start, and re-read that first book as recently as 2020. It’s probably in my Top Five Fantasy series’.

Thieves World was a shared universe, where multiple authors wrote short stories around the Empire outpost, armpit town of Sanctuary. Writers could use others’ characters in their own stories, and the authors came and went in the series, but their creations were fair game for anyone.

Many of the biggest names in fantasy joined in, and there were also spin-off novels. There were twelve collections, from 1979 – 1989 in the original series. I’ve got all of them on that bottom shelf. I really liked the art-style on the first six books. A friend of mine has at least two of the original paintings by Walter Valez – I suspect more than just those two, which I got to stand right in front of. LOVE them!

Tempus, Hanse Shadowspawn (my favorite rogue in all of fantasy), Molin Torcholder, Jubal, Crit, Niko – SOOO many cool characters. It got a major shake-up later, when a sea-faring race arrived (foreshadowing of the Seanchan?), but it still works. I think that the current crop of Dark Fantasy writers were influenced by Thieves World, which was well before of them.

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Beauty and Nightmare on an Alien World: NIGHTBORN: COLDFIRE RISING BY C. S. FRIEDMAN

Beauty and Nightmare on an Alien World: NIGHTBORN: COLDFIRE RISING BY C. S. FRIEDMAN

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Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman. (DAW Books, July, 18th, 2023, 304pages). Cover art by Jeszika Le Vye.

 

What if your feelings had shape and were visible?

What if you could see your nightmares manifest as they turned on you?

C. S. Friedman has published 14 novels, including the highly acclaimed Coldfire Trilogy and the groundbreaking science fiction novel This Alien Shore (New York Times Notable Book of the Year -1998). Her Nightborn: Coldfire Rising novel will be published this July, 2023 by DAW Books; this post reviews an advanced review copy (preorder from the publisher).

The stunning cover art by Jeszika Le Vye evokes and extends the signature covers of the Coldfire Trilogy crafted by Michael Whelan; the trilogy was released during 1991-1995 followed by a 2012 prequel novella, Dominion. Note that a revised version of Dominion, starring the Hunter himself, is in Nightborn.

And stay tuned — Black Gate has an interview in the works with C. S. Friedman (a perfect fit for our series on Beauty in Weird Fiction).

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Vintage Treasures: The 1987 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha

Vintage Treasures: The 1987 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha

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The 1987 Annual World’s Best SF (DAW Books, June 1987). Cover art by Tony Roberts

By the time The 1987 Annual World’s Best SF appeared as a paperback original from DAW Books in mid-1987, editor Donald A. Wollheim was of course well established as one of the most important and influential — perhaps the most influential — editor in science fiction. Founding editor at Ace Books, and founder of DAW Books, Wollheim had been editing The Annual World’s Best SF series since 1965, when he launched the series with his assistant Terry Carr. It would run for only three more years, until his death in 1990.

The 1987 volume, the 23rd in the series, is an exemplary installment. It includes Lucius Shepard’s groundbreaking novella “R&R,” a Nebula Award winner; Roger Zelazny’s Hugo award-winning “Permafrost;” Howard Waldrop’s Nebula nominee “The Lions Are Asleep This Night;” and Pat Cadigan’s Nebula nominee “Pretty Boy Crossover;” plus stories by Tanith Lee, Doris Egan, Robert Silverberg, Damon Knight, Suzette Haden Elgin, and more.

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The Thing Meets The Handmaid’s Tale: Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

The Thing Meets The Handmaid’s Tale: Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

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Camp Zero by Michelle Min (Sterling Atria Books, April 4, 2023)

Camp Zero, Michelle Min Sterling’s debut, is a climate change novel that takes place in a near future where only the wealthy can enjoy the best the world has to offer as the temperature and sea levels rise rapidly, forcing them to take refuge in floating cities, virtual worlds, and the great white north.

These wealthy individuals are invading Canada by buying up tracts of land where they can escape the 110-degree (F) average temperatures of places like LA. Meyer, a classic tech-bro architect, has a vision of Camp Zero, a far north city of geodesic domes, and has brought together a team of locals to build it, although that may not be his real agenda. He has also brought in a team of “hostesses,” complete with a madam, to keep the executive staff happy and as occasional treats for the “diggers.” Grant, the camp’s latest hire, is an English teacher fresh out of prestigious Walden University, eager to cut ties with his wealthy family and settle into a quiet academic life surrounded by Nordic furniture and fields of snow.

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Goth Chick News: Nicolas Cage as Dracula? Yes, Please

Goth Chick News: Nicolas Cage as Dracula? Yes, Please

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I recently enjoyed one of my periodic, cathartic rants about the state of vampires on film in the past couple of decades. Having had it with the very liberal license the entertainment industry has taken with my favorite classic monster, I was happy to share that Hollywood was finally going to give us a seriously violent throw-back version in the form of The Last Voyage of the Demeter. However, though I took exception to vampires being depicted as angsty, flannel-wearing mopes who despised their own blood-sucking nature, I never mentioned believing that vampires should not have a sense of humor.

I mean, if you had to hang around watching humans for roughly 590 years, you’d have to be able to laugh at stuff, right?

If you think about it, Dracula must appreciate the irony of his situation. Certainly director Chris McKay (The Tomorrow War, The LEGO Batman Movie) screenwriter Ryan Ridley (Ghosted, Rick & Morty), and comic book writer Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead, Invincible) gave it a lot of thought, which is why you should mark your calendars for April 14th.

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New Treasures: Rubicon by J.S. Dewes

New Treasures: Rubicon by J.S. Dewes

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Rubicon by J.S. Dewes (Tor Books, March 28, 2023). Cover art by Shutterstock

J.S. Dewes’ two-book debut series The Divide was published in 2021 to plenty of breathless acclaim. In her mid-year wrap-up of The Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the Year, Sadie Gennis at Vulture called opening book The Last Watch “one of the most stunning sci-fi series debuts of recent years… [a] nail-biting space epic,” and Booklist proclaimed it “a bravura debut that blends great action with compelling characters.”

Her new novel Rubicon arrived this week, and it sounds right up my alley. A military SF novel that blends A.I. with a twisty plot and a far future setting, Rubicon has been called “A fresh and forward-looking story about the costs of “forever” wars… Witty and readable, it features an endearing cast of characters and fast-paced action” by Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly says it’s “A standalone outing that is simultaneously thoughtful and pulse-pounding… Fans of smart military sci-fi will be riveted.“

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