Baen Announces 2014 Fantasy Adventure Award

Baen Announces 2014 Fantasy Adventure Award

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Baen Books logoAll right, all you aspiring fantasy writers. Here’s your chance to make a splash.

Baen Books has announced a new short story contest for the best original fantasy adventure tale under 8,000 words. They’re accepting entries in all categories of fantasy, including sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, heroic fantasy, urban fantasy, etc. Here’s the official announcement:

Baen Books is proud to announce the inaugural Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, to be given at this year’s Gen Con to the best piece of original short fiction that captures the spirit and tradition of such great storytellers as Larry Correia, Robert E. Howard, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Andre Norton, J.R.R. Tolkien, David Weber and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

There’s no entry fee, but you’re limited to one entry per person. The story has to be original and not a reprint.

Only entries in English will be considered. Poetry or licensed fiction set in some else’s sandbox (such as Pathfinder, Star Wars, Doctor Who, or Twilight fanfic) will not be considered.

All submissions must be by e-mail. The contest is now open and entries must be submitted by June 30, 2014. A single winner will be announced at this year’s Gen Con.

Complete submission instructions are at the Baen website. Read them carefully, as they include very specific instructions.

Good luck!

May/June Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

May/June Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

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Fantasy and Science Fiction May June 2014-smallI’m so proud of myself. I had the latest issue of F&SF with me for my flight to New Orleans this week — which means I actually read it before it was time to tell you about it, for once. There I was, reading tales about mermaids and private eyes on Venus at 30,000 feet, while the guy on my left was playing solitaire and the woman on my right occupied herself with an article on Scarlett Johansson in Vanity Fair. Losers. Although admittedly, I kept getting distracted by glamor shots of Scarlett Johansson and tried to steal her copy of Vanity Fair when she started to nod off.

Anyway, I enjoyed this issue. It opens with David D. Levine’s pulp SF-hard boiled detective homage “The End of the Silk Road,” in which our hero, Mike Drayton (a man whose first thought is “Nice gams” when a woman collides with him in zero-g), takes a commercial prop-plane to Venus, land of foot-powered taxis and Venusian spider-silk factories, where he’s been hired to investigate a drug ring run by a froggie, a frog-like native. Of course, things aren’t what they appear to be and pretty soon the thick air of Venus is filled with the sound of gunshots, curses, and a lot of tough talk.

I was more impressed with Alyssa Wong’s first published story, “The Fisher Queen.” I was going to tell you all about it, but I made the mistake of checking Tangent Online first and discovered that the reviewers there (as usual) noticed a lot more than I did — including obvious allusions to William Faulkner and Angela Carter. So I’ll shut up and let Martha Burns & C. D. Lewis tell you about it.

“The Fisher Queen” by Alyssa Wong is stunning and smart. The first line, “My mother was a fish,” echoes a line in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In Faulkner’s novel, a young boy’s lament that his dead mother is a fish functions as a metaphor for the boy’s grief together with a less obvious comment on the way women are caricatured and discarded. In Wong’s story, fifteen-year-old Lily’s mother truly is a fish or, rather, a mermaid. Her father jokes about this with his three daughters. In the early parts of the tale, this seems like a sweet way a beloved father helps his girls cope with their mother abandoning them, but when Dad’s fishing crew catches a different kind of mermaid on a deep sea expedition, Lily finds out the gut-wrenching truth. Like Faulkner’s novel, this is a meditation on the effects of motherlessness and brutality against women. It is also a deeply satisfying revenge story. Angela Carter is the acknowledged mother of retold fairy tales where the heroines are no Disney princesses. Now she has a daughter in Alyssa Wong.

Read the complete Tangent review here.

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Vintage Treasures: Fantastic Novels, July 1948

Vintage Treasures: Fantastic Novels, July 1948

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Fantastic Novels July 1948-smallYesterday, I talked about finding a copy of the hardcover edition of Damon Knight’s Science Fiction of the 30’s on a sale table at Windy City Pulp and Paper for just $3.33. Items on the table were priced at 3 for $10, so before I could buy it, I had to find two additional items I could live with.

Didn’t turn out to be that hard. Right next to Knight’s dusty hardcover was a copy of the July 1948 Fantastic Novels magazine, with the gorgeous Lawrence cover at left. Admit it, that cover alone is worth $3.33. I snapped it up and didn’t even look inside.

I didn’t figure there was all that much to know about the contents, anyway. Fantastic Novels was famous for including a complete novel with each issue, which usually didn’t leave much room for filler. In addition to the cover story — Garrett P. Serviss’s 1911 novel The Second Deluge — this issue had only one additional story: Frank Lillie Pollock’s “Finis,” reprinted from the June 1906 issue of The Argosy magazine.

I imagine it had to be pretty cheap to produce a magazine containing only two reprints (assuming the editors paid anything for them at all). So what did the publishers of Fantastic Novels spend their money on? Beautiful art, that’s what. In addition to the cover by Lawrence, this issue had several full pages of art by Lawrence and the great Virgil Finlay. Click on the image at left to see the full-sized version. I have no idea what The Second Deluge is all about, but I want to frame this magazine and put it on my wall.

Alas, there were no other copies of Fantastic Novels to be found on the table — and no other hardcovers of interest. For my third item, I settled on an issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories from January 1956 that looked like it had just come off the printing press. It also has fiction by Randall Garrett and James Blish, so maybe it will turn out to be worth $3.33 too.  Either way, it’s fine by me; I got my ten bucks’ worth — and more — with the first two items.

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Author Spotlight on James Sutter

Author Spotlight on James Sutter

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redemption engineI recently got a chance to talk with my friend (and editor) James Sutter about his new novel, The Redemption Engine, which debuts this week. In this wide-ranging and honest Q&A, James talked about his book and characters, the writing process, misperceptions about genre fiction — particularly of the tie-in flavor — and his hopes and dreams.

What would you say to someone wary of reading game fiction? (I would personally point them towards your first novel, Death’s Heretic, being number three on the Barnes & Noble Book Club’s 2011 Best Fantasy list.) But what would you say?

 

I would say that I used to be wary of it, too. As a kid, I read a ton of tie-in novels for properties like Star Wars, Dragonlance, etc. Then I got older and snobbier, and decided that anything with a logo couldn’t possibly be quality art. I won’t pretend there wasn’t evidence for that — a lot of tie-in books aren’t great. But as Theodore Sturgeon taught us, a lot of any art form isn’t great.

Once I started working in the game industry and realized just how many fabulous authors have done or currently do tie-in work, my opinion changed again. When you’ve got folks like Brandon Sanderson and Greg Bear writing tie-in novels, can you really claim that they’re somehow going to lose their chops just for that one book? And the truth is that great authors have always written novelizations, scripts, tie-ins, and other work-for-hire. Hell, Isaac Asimov himself wrote the novelization for Fantastic Voyage.

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New Treasures: Thornlost by Melanie Rawn

New Treasures: Thornlost by Melanie Rawn

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Thornlost Melanie Rawn-smallMelanie Rawn burst onto the fantasy scene in 1988 with her debut novel Dragon Prince, an instant success that became the first part of the Dragon Prince Trilogy (and, at nearly 600 pages, certainly helped usher in the 90s fat fantasy craze.)

How successful was Dragon Prince and its fat fantasy sequels? 26 years later, they’re all still in print. Pretty darned amazing, especially when you consider that half the New Treasures I’ve covered in the past six months are out of print already.

Rawn followed her breakout success with the Dragon Star trilogy (1991-94) and the first two novels of the Exiles trilogy. And then… silence, for nearly ten years.

She eventually set the Exiles trilogy aside (the final volume, The Captal’s Tower, is still listed as forthcoming on her website) and turned to urban fantasy with Spellbinder (2006), telling fans in a postscript to that book that she was battling clinical depression and needed to move on to other projects to speed her recovery. Fire Raiser arrived in 2009 and she returned to epic fantasy at last with The Diviner (2012).

She’s been working tirelessly ever since, delivering the first two volumes of the Glass Thorns series: Touchstone (2012) and Elsewhens (2013). Now she returns to the rich fantasy world of those volumes with Thornlost, the third volume in the series.

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Art of the Genre: The Art of ‘Making Your Own Way’

Art of the Genre: The Art of ‘Making Your Own Way’

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elmore cleric basic red box d and dToday I’d like to talk about something I call, ‘Making your own way.’  Honestly, I just made that up, in case you were wondering, right here in my bed as I write this at 5:53 AM on a Sunday morning.  Couldn’t sleep, you see, and sometimes you’ve just got to get stuff out of your head.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, which in essence is creationism in pre-established role-playing canon.  You see, I’ve been writing a series of blog posts on the art of the 1983 Mentzer Basic D&D Red Box [Part One and Part Two] over on my Art of the Genre site and as I dipped into that nostalgia pool I couldn’t help but be motivated to dig a bit deeper.

I’d recently started gaming with my eight-year-old son, an experience that has been both a joy and, oddly enough, more difficult than I’d imagined it would be.  First, he’s still pretty young for an RPG, probably two or three years too young, but more importantly, as I played out each scenario, I started to wonder if I was too old!  It certainly seemed harder and harder to tell the story I wanted, to get motivated to be a dungeon master, and when I really thought about it, I realized it wasn’t really about either of our ages, but instead about the place in life I was in.  The everyday stress had gotten me down, but after looking at it that way, I was able to knock off the rust, do what gaming does best, and let myself forget the troubles of existence and then concentrate on the adventure!

So I started out just as I had with my ‘Gaming Week’ friends back in 2011, in a little province of my Nameless Realms I call Oakshire.  Oakshire was inspired by the Basic D&D module Keep on the Borderlands and I used it as the basis for an ongoing campaign that still persists today, but in the case of my son’s mini-campaign, it was more simply a backdrop for the Mentzer intro adventure and first solo adventure from the previously mentioned Red Box.

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Ancient Worlds: What Kind Of Book Is This, Anyway?

Ancient Worlds: What Kind Of Book Is This, Anyway?

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Oh no, I admit it. I'm judging this book by the cover. And its title. And the fact that it's a part of a series about time traveling viking navy SEALs. I'm not making any part of that up. But I am judging the holy hell out of it.
Oh no, I admit it. I’m judging this book by the cover. And its title. And the fact it’s part of a series about time traveling viking navy SEALs. Not making any part of that up. But I am judging the holy hell outta it.

We all know the old adage “Never judge a book by its cover.” But when it comes to literal application, we all do. That’s because our book culture encourages it. The cover won’t always tell us much about the quality of a book, true, but if we want to know what kind of book it is, the cover is where we find out.

Shirtless guy holding woman in historically inaccurate clothing in highly improbable position? Romance.

Shirtless guy flexing while holding sword (with or without scantily clad woman clinging to his knees)? Heroic fantasy.

Woman scantily clad while still wearing a lot of black leather with a sword, possibly straddling a motorcycle? Urban fantasy. Probably.

Genre is how the publisher knows what kind of cover to put on a book. It’s also how the reader knows, more or less, what to expect when they pick a novel up. If you buy a book with a silhouette of a tank on the cover and get a story that is 90% romance, you’re going to be perplexed.

The same was true of ancient books, although the cues were given in different ways.

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Rogues Gallery

Rogues Gallery

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gamestoreThe first roleplaying game product I bought for myself – using money given to me by my grandmother for Christmas 1979 – was the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. I ordered it through the Sears catalog, because, to my 10 year-old mind, that’s what you did when you wanted to buy something “unusual” (which D&D was to me at that time). The thought never occurred to me to look for the book anywhere else, since I didn’t recall ever seeing any RPG products on the shelves of the shops and stores I usually visited.

As convenient as the Sears catalog was, its selection was limited, as I learned after admiring the collection of D&D materials owned by the high school-age older brother of a good friend. This older brother was one of my mentors in the hobby, who initiated me into its mysteries at an impressionable age. He’d acquired his books, adventure modules, and magazines from hobby and comic book shops throughout suburban Baltimore and spoke enticingly about the many other treasures they held. Needless to say, I wanted to visit some of these shops myself.

By the summer of 1980, there were quite a few places selling roleplaying games in my neck of the woods, including chain bookstores (like Walden and B. Dalton) and even greeting card stores. The number of dedicated game stores, though, was quite small. It’d still be a few more years before they started to become, if not commonplace, at least easier to find. Consequently, I became a very loyal customer to those I did find, often hanging out at these places with my friends. And why wouldn’t I? Not only did they have shelves of D&D and other RPGs I’d never heard of, but they also had dice and fanzines and miniature figures. Several of them even had a space or room where people could sit down and play. In many ways, those public gaming spaces held even more appeal to me than everything else, because they gave me a chance to see roleplayers “in the wild” – and what a cast of characters they were!

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A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

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oie_520266yr2OCRWhAfter several weeks spent among ghoulish haunts, a Cthulhu-haunted island, and nightmare dimensions, I thought a trip to ancient Britain — the sun-dappled forests of the High Weald and the rolling downs of the Vale of Kent — was needed. Yes, I’ve visited previously in reviews of Henry Treece’s The Great Captains and David Drake’s The Dragonlord, and Keith Taylor’s Bard (1981) is a return to post-Roman Britain in the days of Arthur and Saxon and Jutish invaders.

Bard is one of those books that my dad bought years ago and I never bothered to read. I didn’t know anything about it or its author, but I was done with my short-lived infatuation with Celtic fantasy. Nothing about it enticed me to pick it up… until I started blogging about swords & sorcery.

As I read articles and websites on heroic fiction, I quickly learned that Keith Taylor was an important voice in the field of Robert E. Howard scholarship and then I started seeing very good reviews of Bard. I remembered that a copy was tucked away in the attic so I went and retrieved it and I’m quite glad I did.

Bard is a fix-up of four previously published stories and one original tale about Felimid mac Fal of Eire, wielder of the magic sword, Kincaid, and player of the ancient harp, Golden Singer. Under the right circumstances, the harp allows him to cast spells and play songs to influence his audience. Blessed with talent, wit, and cunning, Felimid is able to enter the courts of ferocious Jutish warlords and survive encounters with monsters and sorcerers in haunted forests.

Though tied together by a pair of ongoing plots, Bard reads more like the scattered adventures of a peripatetic traveler than a novel. Despite its melancholic setting in a time of fading magic and invaders from across the sea, this book is tremendous fun. Felimid is a bold, lively character with a winning way, well worth any heroic fantasy reader’s time.

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Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight

Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight

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Science Fiction of the 30s-smallWindy City Pulp and Paper is a fabulous convention and, as its name implies, it’s focused mostly on vintage magazines and paperbacks. Wandering the vast Dealer’s Room is like stepping into a Cave of Wonders for fans of pulp science fiction and fantasy.

But it’s also a den of surprises and a pleasant one awaited me while browsing a table piled high with pulps and digest magazines. A hand-written sign proclaimed all items were “3 For $10,” so I decided to spend a few minutes exploring the heaped stacks. Buried under a loose pile of Science Fiction Quarterly magazines and Amazing Stories, I found a lone hardcover volume: Damon Knight’s pulp anthology Science Fiction of the 30’s, in much better shape than my tattered copy.

Well, that was certainly worth $3.33. It didn’t take much effort to find two other worthy treasures (a July 1948 Fantastic Novels pulp with a classic Lawrence cover and the January 1956 issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories with a James Blish cover story, which looked like it had just come off the magazine rack.) I plunked down my ten bucks and fled before the vendor changed his mind.

Science Fiction of the 30’s was one of two great pulp anthologies I read over thirty years ago — the other being of course Isaac Asimov’s marvelous Before the Golden Age. Those books, together with Jacques Sadoul’s art book 2000 A.D. Illustrations From the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps, ignited a love of pulp fiction in me as a young teen that never died.

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