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Month: January 2013

January/February Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine now on Sale

January/February Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine now on Sale

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fsf-jan-feb-2013The new issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction goes on sale today. Not often you see cows (or floating eyeballs, for that matter) on the cover. Louis West reviews the issue at Tangent Online; here’s what he says about the cover story:

This issue of F&SF contains a diverse and (mostly) entertaining selection of SF, horror, and fantasy stories. Many of the authors have a long history of producing award-winning work. For the most part, that excellence is displayed throughout this issue.

“Watching the Cow,” by Alex Irvine, is masterfully told. Once started, I couldn’t stop. I had to know how it would end, and the end was nicely unexpected….

Ariel, the genius of the family, has accidently blinded two million teens who had been playing a game using VR goggles. And two of the kids were her brothers. But it wasn’t a physical blindness. All the parts still worked. The brain simply had stopped processing the visual data. The kids didn’t seem bothered at all, although the parents freaked and conspiracy theories thrived.

Ariel was determined to fix the problem, and her angry brother believed her. Instead of sight, all the kids could now mentally network with each other… This story is told from Ariel’s brother’s POV. It follows his emotional roller-coaster ride as he deals with what’s happening to his kids, their lack of reaction, keeping the secret that his sister had caused the problem and wondering when the FBI will finally catch up to him and Ariel. A pleasure to read.

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Ian Tregillis on Secret Government Demonology, Writers Group Hazing Rituals, and Vlad Jetpack, King of the Space Vampires: An Audio Interview

Ian Tregillis on Secret Government Demonology, Writers Group Hazing Rituals, and Vlad Jetpack, King of the Space Vampires: An Audio Interview

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Readers with an eye for detail will note that this interview with Ian Tregillis was conducted in July, but not posted until now, and one might wonder why I waited so long. This one took a lot of sound editing because the interview covers two topics that are so intermeshed that we jumped back and forth in the actual interview, but I’ve re-edited it so that it’s got what I hope is a more logical progression. We discuss Ian’s trilogy, The Milkweed Tryptich, which includes: Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War, and the yet to be released Necessary Evil, which I cannot recommend highly enough. And while we discuss how these books came to be, we talk at length about our time in Critical Mass.

bitterseeds2coverCritical Mass is a writers group that has been around for nearly two decades. During the time I lived in New Mexico and was attending meetings, the membership included: George RR Martin, Walter Jon Williams, S.M. Stirling, Melinda Snodgrass, Victor Milan, Yvonne Coats, Sally Gwlan, Terry England, Daniel Abraham, and Ty Franck, among others who came and went. (And now readers will cease to be the least bit impressed by whom I’m able to get interviews with, I know.) When Ian joined this group, I’d already been a member for about five years and he and I shared the distinction of being the youngest and only unpublished members. We were also the only members from Los Alamos and the meetings were always in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, which meant either a one- or a two-hour commute, so we carpooled. That probably gave us way too much time to form in-jokes.

This interview isn’t with just a fantastic writer, though he is that; Ian’s also a comrade in arms with whom I shared an important period of my career. The story of how his first novel trilogy came to be is inextricably connected to his tenure in Critical Mass and the high-powered, dynamic group it was and is.

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The House of Ideas that Jack (and Steve) Built: Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

The House of Ideas that Jack (and Steve) Built: Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

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Marvel Comics: The Untold StoryEarly on in Sean Howe’s book-length history Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, the reader’s imagination is spurred by a throwaway anecdote: in 1937, New York magazine publisher Martin Goodman and his wife planned to return from a trip to Europe aboard the Hindenburg — on what would turn out to be the final tragic flight of the German dirigible, which ended with a terrifying aerial explosion and fire that led to the deaths of 36 people. Goodman, as it happened, was too late to get tickets and took a plane instead. You can’t help but wonder, though. What if he’d died then, before he’d expanded his magazine line to include comics? Before he’d hired his nephew Stanley to work in the office and do fill-in bits of writing? What if Marvel Comics, the subject of Howe’s book, had been stillborn? What would have been different in the development of comics, of popular culture, of the North American imagination? Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.

Maybe nothing, because Goodman was not himself involved in any significant way in the creation of the books. The best days for his company came when he let his nephew, by then working under the pseudonym Stan Lee, edit the comics with a free hand — aside from the occasional directive, such as the alleged command ‘those guys across town are doing well with their super-hero team book; you do a super-hero team book too,’ which by one account gave rise in 1961 to The Fantastic Four and to Marvel Comics as we know them. But Goodman himself wrote nothing and drew nothing. If he’d died in 1937, Jack Kirby would have still gone on to a great career. Maybe not with Goodman’s company, but with somebody’s. Steve Ditko as well. You can’t help but think that comics veterans who came to Marvel in the 50s and 60s, Gil Kane and Gene Colan and John Buscema and John Romita and the like, would have found work somewhere. And the next wave of creators, artists like Barry Windsor-Smith and Jim Steranko and Neal Adams, writers like Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber, would have made careers in comics for themselves somehow.

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New Treasures: Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm

New Treasures: Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm

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dead-harvest-smallHoly cats, it’s 2013 already. Happy New Year, all you Black Gate peeps.

And where did 2012 go? There’s 1,021 unanswered e-mail messages in my in-box, I’m late editing this week’s BG Online Fiction entry, and I’m not even sure how many unread review copies are stacked up by my big green chair. 2013 ain’t even 20 hours old, and I’m weeks behind already.

Ah, the heck with it. I have to keep up on the latest top-notch fiction, don’t I? Yes, I do. So tonight I’m curling up in my big green chair and starting 2013 off right: by reading Chris F. Holm’s first novel, an intriguing mix of dark fantasy and noir-dark crime: Dead Harvest.

Meet Sam Thornton, Collector of Souls.

Sam’s job is to collect the souls of the damned, and ensure their souls are dispatched to the appropriate destination.

But when he’s dispatched to collect the soul of a young woman he believes to be innocent of the horrific crime that’s doomed her to Hell, he says something no Collector has ever said before.

“No.”

The second book, The Wrong Goodbye, hit shelves in September. If we’re lucky, they could both eventually be re-released in a handsome and affordable 3-novel omnibus like Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian & Blood. But damn, I can’t wait that long.

Dead Harvest was published February 2012 by Angry Robot. It is 381 pages in paperback, priced at $7.99 ($5.99 for the digital edition).

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Red Sonja 4

Red Sonja 4

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red-sonja-4-coverLast issue, Red Sonja competed in the Games of Gita, won, then killed the Queen of Athos. This issue, she’s still hanging around the city. Apparently, the queen wasn’t that popular. So her new friend, Mikal, is showing her the sights, which include a dark lake infested with shambling actors. “(T)hese strange beings, whose limbs are an eldritch mixture of beast and fowl and lowly reptile.” They slowly make their way to the aptly named “Theatre of Monsters.”

Walking into the Theatre, Sonja finds that the performances consist of monsters, who are clearly monsters wearing human masks, performing surreal renditions of standard plays. Of course, the actors behave with more dignity than the howling human audience around them. At one point, they invite Red Sonja to join their performance in exchange for a purse of gold.

Since Sonja is perpetually broke, she accepts the offer and takes the stage. But since it’s pretty much her fate to be perpetually broke, the offer of gold was a ruse and the monster performers try to kill her immediately. Several monster-corpses later, their leader is begging for mercy and offering to explain what just happened.

At this point, Mikal joins Sonja, having apparently been using the bathroom while she was fighting for her life on stage. The two of them are escorted to the lake, where the waters are parted Moses-style so that they can follow the monsters down to their underwater crystal city. There, she is told the story of how the monsters are descended from aliens whose ship crashed in the lake. After adopting water-breathing forms, they began to interbreed with various Earth animals (um, yuck) until the succeeding generations were the monsters that now occupy the city. Apparently, their leader was captured by the people of Athos and they are forced to perform as circus entertainers in order to ensure that he stays alive.

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