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Month: September 2014

New Treasures: A Discourse in Steel by Paul S Kemp

New Treasures: A Discourse in Steel by Paul S Kemp

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A Discourse in Steel-smallThere’s a school of thought in cover design that says that book covers with a heavy design element — as opposed to a reliance on artwork — are taken more seriously.

There’s something to this. A lot of bestsellers eschew artwork altogether in favor of design, and it seems to work just fine. When George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones became a bestseller, Bantam Spectra jettisoned the artwork by Stephen Youll that had been on the cover for nearly ten years, and replaced it with the boring cover you’re familiar with today. No artwork, just a shining sword. Most mainstream readers won’t buy a book that looks too much like a fantasy novel — or at least, that’s the theory.

That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the cover of Paul S. Kemp’s  A Discourse in Steel, the second novel in his Tales of Egil & Nix series. It’s a sharp cover, actually, with a clear adventure fantasy theme. The lack of artwork and focus on design brought A Game of Thrones to mind (maybe it’s supposed to). But I also found it a little generic.

Here’s the book description.

Egil and Nix have retired, as they always said they would. No, really – they have! No more sword and hammer-play for them!

But when two recent acquaintances come calling for help, our hapless heroes find themselves up against the might of the entire Thieves Guild.

And when kidnapping the leader of the most powerful guild in the land seems like the best course of action, you know you’re in over your head…

A hugely-enjoyable stand-alone adventure in classic sword and sorcery mode, from the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Deceived and The Hammer and the Blade.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Great Profile (Barrymore) Plays the Great Profile

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Great Profile (Barrymore) Plays the Great Profile

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Barrymore_RestoredBack in May, I wrote about Eille Norwood’s turn as the silent film era’s finest Holmes. Now, just about any discussion concerning who the greatest actor of the silent era was will involve the name John Barrymore, who was known as “The Great Profile.”

So, it’s natural that he would make a film about a character that over a hundred years after his creation can still be readily identified by his profile.

By 1922, John Barrymore was an established star in both the US and Great Britain and had made a hugely successful version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde just two years before. Actor/director Albert Parker was determined to make a Holmes film with the forty year-old Barrymore in the lead role.

Of course, there was a minor snag, as Stoll Pictures (starring Norwood) had locked up the rights to Doyle’s original stories, with Sir Arthur’s own assistance. So Parker had an actor and an idea, but no script. The man was certainly energetic, and he rushed to Chicago and met with the great William Gillette, who was touring with his own play, Sherlock Holmes (subject of a future post).

Parker bought the rights to film the play (which had already been done in 1916 starring Gillette himself: sadly, no known print exists of that one) and arranged a deal with Samuel Goldwyn. This would easily be the most lavish and well-financed Holmes film to date.

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Hell to Pay: The Devil and Daniel Webster in Print and on Film

Hell to Pay: The Devil and Daniel Webster in Print and on Film

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The Devil and Daniel Webster Criterion DVD-smallIs there any place more melancholy than the graveyard of forgotten writers? While the reputations of even major literary figures can wax and wane, for genuinely innovative or influential authors, critical rebounds, if not assured, are at least possible. (Hemingway, anyone?)

But permanent eclipse seems to be the fate of the facile, ambitious middlebrow who was highly popular and overpraised during his or her prime. Once this kind of writer is no longer around to hold the stage with new work, a spell seems to be broken and often a speedy and ruthless (if not embarrassed) re-evaluation occurs, resulting in a quick trip to oblivion and a complete disappearance from the public consciousness. John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw — where are you now? Often it’s not even a matter of an “official” verdict by the critical establishment  — it’s simply that a few years pass and no one reads the writer anymore.

One victim of this kind of reaction was Stephen Vincent Benét. A prolific producer of poetry and fiction from the 1920’s up until his death from a heart attack in 1943, Benét was both highly regarded by critics and popular with the wider public. His epic narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and there was a time when countless readers were familiar with his widely-anthologized story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” a bit of nostalgic, patriotic Americana that blends history, the tall tale, and the supernatural into a fluent and beguiling concoction.

Published in 1936, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” tells the story of one Jabez Stone, a hard-working but struggling New Hampshire farmer. “He wasn’t a bad man to start with, but he was an unlucky man. If he planted corn, he got borers; if he planted potatoes, he got blight. He had good-enough land, but it didn’t prosper him; he had a decent wife and children, but the more children he had, the less there was to feed them.”

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Self-Published Book Review: Malarat by Jessica Rydill

Self-Published Book Review: Malarat by Jessica Rydill

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Malarat - eBook Cover DisplayingIf you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. I’ve run short on books that I’ve received in the past year, so anything new has a good chance of being reviewed.

This month’s self-published novel is Malarat by Jessica Rydill. The book is the third book in Ms. Rydill’s shamanworld series, but also a standalone novel. The novel takes place in a world much like our own, with France (called Lefranu), England (Anglond), Jews (Wanderers), and Christians (Doxans). But these analogs are not exact (for example, the Doxans elevate Megalmayar, the Mother of God, to the position of a goddess) and there are also a number of things that are very different, such as the Great Cold, that isolated a portion of Lefranu so that it remained stuck in Medieval times while the rest of the world advanced to what most closely resembles the late 19th and early 20th century, complete with trains, firearms, and electricity.

The novel focuses on Annat Vasilyevich and her father, Yuda, two Wanderers who are also shaman, who have a number of magical (or psychic) abilities, such as communicating by thought, traveling to other worlds, and blasting things with shaman fire. They have been asked by the rulers of Masalyar, a large city-state in Lefranu, to investigate the rise of Clovis, a new claimant for the crown of Lefranu, who has the support of the Duc de Malarat, a powerful duke, and the Canes Dei, Doxan warrior-priests with a reactionary theology and an invention, the Spider, which they can use to overcome shaman. The Canes Dei are led by the beautiful but brutal Valdes de Siccaria. Yuda is a former Railway guard, who has connections among the Railway workers, but he was crippled in a previous adventure. He plans on disguising himself as a pilgrim seeking the blessing of the new king. They are accompanied on their mission by Yuda’s non-shaman son Malchik, Malchik’s lover, Camille, and their newborn daughter, Annat’s current lover Genie and ex-husband Cluny, Yuda’s apprentice Huldis, the railway workers Nico and Lukacs, and the nuns Sister Coty and Mother Kana. This is admittedly a large cast, but they soon split into smaller parties, with Annat and Genie staying in the city of Yonar in order to defend it. There they are joined by Casildis, Huldis’s sister, and her husband, Sergey Govorin, and the shaman Semyon Magus. The others continue on toward their fateful encounter with Clovis’s forces.

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Vintage Treasures: The Beast Master and Lord of Thunder by Andre Norton

Vintage Treasures: The Beast Master and Lord of Thunder by Andre Norton

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Andre Norton Beast Master hardcover-small The Beast Maser Ace Double-small The Beast Master Ace-small

Andre Norton’s The Beast Master is one of the most famous Ace Doubles ever published.

It was also one of her most popular books. It was originally published in 1959, and it’s still in print today, 55 years later. To give you some understanding of how amazing that is, try and find a paperback from, oh, 2010 at your local Barnes & Noble. (It’s not easy — 98% of fiction paperbacks four years old are out of print already.) Ladies and gentlemen, that’s literary staying power.

The Beast Master has been reprinted in a number of handsome editions over the last five decades, with covers by Richard Powers, Ed Valigursky, John Schoenherr, Ken Barr, Julie Bell, and many other talented folks. If you’re a struggling midlist writer, that’s one more reason to be jealous of Andre Norton. She was covered by the best.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1952: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952-smallThe February, 1952 issue of Galaxy included a pair of articles along with its fiction offering. I covered Robert A. Heinlein’s predictions from an article titled “Where To?” in a previous post. The other, by L. Sprague de Camp, reflects on science fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assessing the failed predictions within older stories.

It seems odd to showcase an article about how science fiction authors failed to predict the future and then follow it up with a science fiction author predicting the future. But I digress…

“Double Standard” by Alfred Coppel — The protagonist is bent on space travel, even if he isn’t suitable for colonial breeding. With forged documents and the illegal work by a plasti-cosmetician, he’s ready to board a ship to anywhere.

This is a quirky tale with a predictable ending. But it’s short enough that it works.

“Conditionally Human” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. — Norris and his wife run a district pound, not for average dogs and cats, but for genetically modified creatures. Some are intelligent versions of dogs and cats while yet another breed, called neutroids, closely resemble humans. The neutroids only grow to specific, chosen ages between one and ten and remain at that level of development. They are suitable pets for C-class couples — people who have been deemed as having a defective heredity and thus are forbidden from having children of their own.

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What Would it Look Like to Pull a Watchmen on Planetary Romance? Part III

What Would it Look Like to Pull a Watchmen on Planetary Romance? Part III

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flash-gordon-smallWhen we last left our intrepid blogger (me) two weeks ago and four weeks ago, he was blogging (very roughly) about the superhero genre, pre- and post-Watchmen, and the kind of light that Alan Moore’s Watchmen shone onto superhero comics, as well as the core elements of the planetary romance form. I was setting up this conversation about what a Watchmen-like treatment of planetary romance would look like, both the pretty parts and the ugly ones.

This is a fun exercise and it’s quite possible that I’m way off in what I construct next, so if I am, please offer up your ideas, views, suggestions. Debate is good!

And, I’ve been ending on a cliffhanger, like any good pulp. So now, here’s Part III, What a Watchmen Treatment of Planetary Romance Might Look Like….

We’ll need a hero, a youngish white male paragon to travel to another world, because that’s the core of the form. And let’s have the aliens of this world be as close to humans as possible in physique and psychology, otherwise other assumptions become much harder to play with.

While Carson traveled to Venus, Carter to Barsoom, and Rogers to the future by themselves, we may need companions for the hero, like Flash Gordon did. And for later grist for the dramatic mill, it will probably serve us that one is a strong, well-characterized, complex woman, preferably from another political viewpoint or culture.

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Future Treasures: The Baen Big Book of Monsters, edited by Hank Davis

Future Treasures: The Baen Big Book of Monsters, edited by Hank Davis

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The Baen Big Book of Monsters-smallMonsters!! And lots of ’em.

That’s all you need to know. Big monster book comin’. A Halloween-themed monster anthology, with a tantalizing a mix of classic reprints and original stories, all featuring REALLY BIG MONSTERS. Contributors include names that will be very familiar to Black Gate readers, such as Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, William Hope Hodgson, Murray Leinster, James H. Schmitz, Arthur C. Clarke, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, David Drake, and many more.

It even includes the pulp classic “The Monster-God of Mamurth” by Edmond Hamilton. And Harlan Ellison told us that story sucked when we wanted to reprint it. What does he know?

I approve of this Hank Davis fellow. His last anthology for Baen was the awesome In Space No One Can Hear You Scream, released last Halloween. This man is doing God’s work. Next time you run into him tell him he is blessed, and we’ll be rubbing elbows with the saints in the line to buy his book.

Here’s the book description, and the complete Table of Contents.

SIZE MATTERS

From the dragons of legend to Jack the Giant Killer’s colleague to King Kong and Godzilla, people have found the idea of giant creatures both scary and fascinating. Why so many should find accounts of a critter big enough to gulp down a puny human like an insignificantly small hor d’oeuvre or step on said human and leave a grease spot might be explained by the psychologists, but such yarns are undeniable fun.

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Self-Publishing Checklist: The Random No One Tells You

Self-Publishing Checklist: The Random No One Tells You

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there-is-no-lovely-end-switchblade-smallOH MY GAWD! You fancy glitterquill! You wrote a book.

So did I. It took forever. Mostly because I was an undisciplined mess who worked multiple jobs for the majority of the book’s birthing, but HEY! It got done. And… it appears… you’ve done the same. Which is rad. Take a moment to celebrate yourself. I don’t care how you get yer good times (sex, napping, whiskey, dancing, WHATEVER!), but you need to celebrate. For example, I read for a week straight and C.S.E. Cooney got me a sweet potato pie. Which no one else ate. It was ALL MINE. For breakfast. For dinner. There was no guilt ONLY WIN AT LIFE!

But… okay. So you have this thing. It is a manuscript. It is in a Word doc. You want to self-publish it. What the hell happens now? A LOT. Dear GEEZUS, a lot. Are you sure you want to do this? Yes? Okay. Well, here is a list – NOT ALL INCLUSIVE – but a starter guide to the pile of stink you stuck your foot into.

1. Firm Out Your Expectations

  • What do you want from your self-publishing experience?
  • Do you want to be a bestseller? (Um… good luck.)
  • Are you shooting to be a midlist author?
  • Maybe you are a passionate amateur who is publishing for friends and family?

Whatever you are, know it and embrace it. My suggestion… keep your heart and drive high and your expectations low.

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New Treasures: The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett

New Treasures: The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett

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The Company Man-smallYes, I’m late to the party with The Company Man. Yes, it came out three years ago. And yes, here I am trying to pull a fast one and sneak it in as a “New Treasure.” Work with me here; it’s been a long week.

Basically, I decided it’s time to pay attention to this Robert Jackson Bennett fellow. He made a considerable splash with his debut novel, Mr. Shivers (2010), and since then he’s put out a book a year: The Company Man (2011), The Troupe (2012), and American Elsewhere (2013). His latest, City of Stairs, which Tor.com described this morning as “an atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city,” goes on sale next week. The Company Man looks like a very dark alternate history that combines gumshoe pulp fiction with a steampunk setting. I bought a copy last week, and it shot immediately to the top of my TBR pile.

The year is 1919.

The McNaughton Corporation is the pinnacle of American industry. They built the guns that won the Great War before it even began. They built the airships that tie the world together. And, above all, they built Evesden – a shining metropolis, the best that the world has to offer.

But something is rotten at the heart of the city. Deep underground, a trolley car pulls into a station with eleven dead bodies inside. Four minutes before, the victims were seen boarding at the previous station. Eleven men butchered by hand in the blink of an eye. All are dead. And all are union.

Now, one man, Cyril Hayes, must fix this. There is a dark secret behind the inventions of McNaughton and with a war brewing between the executives and the workers, the truth must be discovered before the whole city burns. Caught between the union and the company, between the police and the victims, Hayes must uncover the mystery before it kills him.

Others have clearly caught on to Robert Jackson Bennett long before me — he’s been awarded an Edgar, the Shirley Jackson, and the Philip K. Dick Citation of Excellence. The Company Man was published in April 2011 by Orbit Books. It is 466 pages, priced at $13.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version.