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Month: July 2015

Spotlight on Barnes & Noble “Get Pop-Cultured” Month

Spotlight on Barnes & Noble “Get Pop-Cultured” Month

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PopCultured-EventsBarnes & Noble is a pretty cool store, with the one reservation that in the ‘90s it did earn a villainous reputation for running many small, independent bookstores out of business.

Ironically, B&N has in recent years run into financial troubles of its own from a new competitor on the block: Amazon and other online outlets are making survival difficult for brick and mortar stores (bye bye Borders). Tasting a bit of its own medicine, one might say. But it would be a shame to see B&N go.

In recent years, it has diversified and expanded its offerings: the children’s book section has morphed into a whole children’s toy-store department, including Lego and Thomas the Tank Engine tables where kids can play (and then beg their parents to buy the toys at premium retail prices — I walk this gauntlet every time I bring my kids along). And they are catering to fan culture with an ever-growing game section and comic-convention collectibles from brands like Diamond Select Toys, Funko, and Titans.

Underscoring this move to cater to a hip, young “geek-culture” clientele is July’s “Get Pop-Cultured” month. Throughout the month special giveaways, contests, and even encouragement for customers to engage in “cosplay” will spotlight various popular book series and film and television franchises.

I attended the July 3 spotlight on Doctor Who during “Time Travel Weekend.” Read more for a rundown of other B&N specials this month that will appeal specifically to science-fiction and fantasy fans (and for my personal opinion on whether they’re worth a trip to the store).

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Faerie Magazine 31 Now Available

Faerie Magazine 31 Now Available

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Faerie Magazine 31-smallAfter covering this industry for several decades, I don’t get surprised all that often. But I was surprised when I read this Facebook announcement from author Shveta Thakrar:

I’ve been sitting on this a little while, but today is a good day for an announcement! I have sold my nagini story, “She Sleeps Beneath the Sea,” to Faerie Magazine, and it will appear in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” issue, out next month!

I am BEYOND excited. I have adored this magazine for so many years, and now I get to be in it with a story starring mythical beings from my heritage! [Editor] Carolyn Turgeon worked with me to get the text just right for the magazine, and I can’t wait for you all to be able to read it!

I had no idea Faerie Magazine published fiction. It describes itself as a quarterly print magazine “that celebrates everything magical and extraordinary.” I found this description of the latest issue on their website:

Issue #31 is our “Midsummer Night’s Dream” issue, with all kinds of nocturnal delights … moon goddesses and bioluminescent bays and fireflies, enchanted slumber and night-blooming flowers and nourishing night creams… and much more!

Shveta was kind enough to send me tear sheets of her story, and I was astounded at the beautiful artwork. Not only is the magazine wonderfully designed, but it has full color artwork and photos throughout. Here’s a sample of two of the four pieces accompanying Shveta’s story.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sidney Paget Draws the Great Detective

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sidney Paget Draws the Great Detective

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Paget_Cornell
Australian Phil Cornell is perhaps the finest modern Holmes illustrator. Here he gives us Sidney Paget

Last month, I mentioned that it was illustrator Sidney Paget who first adorned the head of Sherlock Holmes with a deerstalker. Along with Frederic Dorr Steele, Paget is certainly one of the two most significant illustrators of the great detective.

Baker Street Essays is one of my two, free, online newsletters. The most recent issue (#5, February 2014) contained my essay, “The Illustrated Holmes.”

Strongly influenced by Walter Klinefelter’s excellent (though black and white) book, Portrait of a Profile, I believe it to be the best look at the history of illustrators of the Canon you’ll find on the internet (it’s not exactly a crowded field!).

Today’s post, with a bit of fiddling, contains the Paget portion of that essay. Did you know Sidney was chosen by mistake? The Strand Magazine meant to hire his brother, Walter, who ended up modeling for Holmes! And Doyle thought that Paget made Holmes too handsome!

A few illustrators, including the author’s own father, Charles Altamont Doyle, had provided drawings of Holmes for the first two stories, the novellas A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, without making much of an impression.

And as we know, those two books didn’t do very well. It was the short story format that Doyle applied to Holmes for The Strand Magazine that turned the world’s first private consulting detective into an enduring literary and pop culture icon. And there we meet the first (and arguably foremost) Holmes illustrator…

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Future Treasures: Nightwise by R. S. Belcher

Future Treasures: Nightwise by R. S. Belcher

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Nightwise-smallR. S. Belcher’s previous novels, The Six-Gun Tarot and The Shotgun Arcana, were weird westerns set in the town of Golgotha. The San Francisco Book Review called the first “A fun, rollicking, dark, and disturbing romp… a whirlwind of shootouts, assassins, cults, zombies, magic, attractive ladies, dubious morals, and demonic possession.”

With his newest novel, Nightwise, Belcher tries something a little differenr: a brand new new urban fantasy series that explores a gritty occult underworld, with a resourceful and cynical hero. It will be released in hardcover from Tor next month.

In the more shadowy corners of the world, frequented by angels and demons and everything in-between, Laytham Ballard is a legend. It’s said he raised the dead at the age of ten, stole the Philosopher’s Stone in Vegas back in 1999, and survived the bloodsucking kiss of the Mosquito Queen. Wise in the hidden ways of the night, he’s also a cynical bastard who stopped thinking of himself as the good guy a long time ago.

Now a promise to a dying friend has Ballard on the trail of an escaped Serbian war criminal with friends in both high and low places — and a sinister history of blood sacrifices. Ballard is hell-bent on making Dusan Slorzack pay for his numerous atrocities, but Slorzack seems to have literally dropped off the face of the Earth, beyond the reach of his enemies, the Illuminati, and maybe even the Devil himself. To find Slorzack, Ballard must follow a winding, treacherous path that stretches from Wall Street and Washington, D.C. to backwoods hollows and truckstops, while risking what’s left of his very soul…

Nightwise will be published by Tor Books on August 18, 2015. It is 320 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent reports on the best in upcoming fantasy here.

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro Tip From Laura Anne Gilman

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro Tip From Laura Anne Gilman

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Laura Anne Gilman-smallOccasionally, I’ll be hosting the wit and wisdom of professionals across the Spec Fic field. I’ve compiled a list of some of the most frequently asked questions posed by new authors, and provided that list to some of the pros. They’re invited to pick one and respond to it.

This week, Laura Anne Gilman — a Nebula nominated author, prolific novelist, former NYC editor, and author of the non-fiction book Practical Meerkat’s 52 Bits of Useful Info for Young (and Old) Writers — shares her advice on:

What do you do to get unstuck and solve writer’s block?

Someone asked me a similar question recently — I’d been talking about how I get up every morning, and from 7am to around noon, I focus on the work in progress, usually with a word goal in mind, and they asked “but what if the words don’t come? What do you do then?”

And my answer was that the words always come. The trick is, they’re not always the right words, or the best words. And there may not be as many words as I’d like. That’s okay. So long as I’ve shoved the scene forward, however ugly the shove, I can go back and fix it later. And — probably not surprisingly — once I’ve gotten past that first ugly push, with permission to suck… the right words usually show up. Being there is 70% of the gig. The other 30% is staying there.

Laura Anne Gilman is the Nebula award-nominated author of more than 20 published novels, including the forthcoming Silver on the Road, Book 1 of The Devil’s West (October 2015). Ms. Gilman also writes mysteries under the name L.A. Kornetsky.

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Self-published Book Review: Nightmares by Peter Nealen

Self-published Book Review: Nightmares by Peter Nealen

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The self-published book review will be going on hiatus for the next few months while I start on a new project. Feel free to continue sending me submissions, but don’t expect to see many reviews posted before 2016.

Pageflex Persona [document: PRS0000039_00017]Peter Nealen’s Nightmares is this month’s self-published novel. As a marine serving in Iraq, Jed Horn had a nasty encounter with an ifrit, a creature of fire and darkness. Returning to the states, he tried to forget, but no matter how much he drank, it wasn’t enough. So he started looking into the matter, hooking up with ghost hunters and amateur occultists. That turned out to be an even worse mistake. Dabbling, with no real knowledge of what you’re up against, is a quick way to attract the attention of some very dark, very evil things. One of them is following Jed now, killing those he’s interacted with. When he meets up with a priest, Father O’Neal, and Dan, who claims to be a Hunter of the dark things, they give him an ultimatum: either join up and fight back against the things hunting him, or keep running, and probably die in short order. You can probably guess which one Jed chooses.

The hunt takes Jed back to a small college in Colorado, where he first met Professor Ashton, whose studies into the occult have unearthed something real. From a stone tablet that only the professor can read, to ancient books and artifacts imbued with a sense of wrongness, Ashton has begun to glimpse what lies beyond, and has developed a mad obsession with summoning the chthonic spirit buried beneath Powell Hill. Much of the book is about Jed’s interactions with Ashton, trying to determine whether the professor is the source of the things hunting him, or merely a tool of larger forces. There’s something Lovecraftian about the horror here, manifest in wrongness and madness and alien spirits, hidden in ancient tablets and underground vaults and art and sculpture that change when you’re not looking. But Nealen turns away from Lovecraft’s nihilistic existential horror, and filters the same imagery through the lens of Catholicism.

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Narrative Dance: Darcy Tamayose’s Odori

Narrative Dance: Darcy Tamayose’s Odori

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OdoriDarcy Tamayose’s novel Odori was published in 2007, and in 2008 won the Canada Council of the Arts’ Canada-Japan Literary Award for an English-language book. Lush yet understated, Odori uses dreams, ghosts, and the fantastic to frame the story of a woman’s life, told across generations. I think more than most books, it can profitably read in a number of ways; but what for me is most striking is its approach to storytelling and the layering of tales.

In southern Alberta in 1999 a woman named Mai Yoshimoto-Lanier is in a car accident with her husband and children. Caught between life and death, Mai finds herself in another place, a world where her dead great-grandmother, Chiru, tells Mai a series of stories about the land of Chiru’s birth: the Ryukyu Islands, what is now Okinawa and was once a separate kingdom of its own. The stories begin far back in the past, presenting myths and history of the Ryukyus; then move quickly forward to the late 1930s, to tell the story of Mai’s mother Emiko and her twin sister Miyako, an aunt Mai never knew she had. Emiko and Miyako, the daughters of Japanese immigrants to Alberta, return to Chiru and Japan for schooling — but things don’t go as planned, and their stay becomes longer than they expected as the Second World War looms.

Tamayose nicely balances story against story, building the tales of Chiru, Emiko, and Mai as the book goes along. Questions are raised, then answered; and as this is fundamentally an unusual character piece, the result is the depiction of three women’s lives and how they tie together. It is also a story of sea-surrounded Okinawa and landlocked southern Alberta, and how they’re linked by the experience of a family: a story of place and of the distance between places, as it is a story of time and of time outside of times. You can see how character and events are shaped by history — the annexation of the Ryukyus by Japan in the late nineteenth century, the development of an Okinawan community in southern Alberta in the twentieth, the battles of the Second World War. But you also feel how the rhythms of the seasons and the revolving years shape story and experience; and see how those rhythms in fact provide a frame by which the developments of history may be understood. Stories are told, stories are retold, and stories return across time bearing the meaning of the past with them.

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The Omnibus Volumes of James H. Schmitz

The Omnibus Volumes of James H. Schmitz

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Agent of Vega & Other Stories-small Telzey Amberdon-small TNT Telzey Amberdon & Trigger Argee Together-small

We continue to survey the best omnibus volumes for collectors out there. And at long last, we come to one of my favorite short story writers, and one of my favorite omnibus sets: the seven volumes collecting the science fiction and science fantasy of James H. Schmitz, published by Baen Books.

Baen Books, and especially its long-time editor Eric Flint, have done some really extraordinary work collecting classic SF and fantasy in handsome and highly affordable mass market editions, and they’ve been doing it for decades. Baen has published omnibus collections featuring Andre Norton, P.C. Hogdell, Murray Leinster, A. Bertam Chandler, Lois McMaster Bujold, Cordwainer Smith, Christopher Anvil, Randall Garrett, Keith Laumer, Howard L. Myers, Michael Shea, A. E. Van Vogt, and countless others.

The Baen reprint program largely began with these volumes in 2000, and I still believe they may be their crowning achievement.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1952: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction October 1952 back-small Galaxy Science Fiction October 1952 cover-small

Galaxy celebrated its second birthday (and start of its third year) with a cover depicting some of its staff and contributors (illustrated by E. A. Emshwiller). The artwork wrapped around the back (interrupted by the spine) and included a “key” on the inside cover to identify each person, including the robot and alien.

October 1952 Cover Key

Editor H. L. Gold is on the left on the front cover, halfway down the picture, shown in a blue suit and holding a cup. (Click on the images above for bigger versions.)

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New Treasures: Bone Swans by C. S. E. Cooney

New Treasures: Bone Swans by C. S. E. Cooney

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Bone Swans CSE Cooney-smallBone Swans, the long awaited first collection from C.S.E. Cooney, has just been released, and in the last few days has accumulated some marvelous notices. She received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and over at Tor.com Brit Mandelo had many positive things to say, especially about “Life on the Sun,” originally published here at Black Gate:

Cooney’s approach also brings in a sort of cavalier, witty, and approachable contemporary story-telling, perhaps more closely related to adventure yarns than anything… The result tends to be a fascinating mashup between the tropes and resonances of the mythic tale with the sensibilities of contemporary action-oriented fantasy… “Life on the Sun” is perhaps the best illustration of what I mean…

And the July 1 issue of Library Journal had this to say:

In five beautifully crafted stories, Cooney (Jack O’ the Hills) builds imaginary worlds full of flying carpets, fairy-tale characters, and children confronted with a postapocalyptic Earth. In addition, each tale packs in enough plot for a novel, with adventurous characters who brim with wit. In “Life on the Sun” a young woman’s fate catches up to her. In the title story, Maurice the rat hires the Pied Piper to help out a swan princess. The marvelous “Martyr’s Gem” begins with a marriage and ends with true love. “How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain” is another fairy tale, this time a play on the Rumpelstiltskin story. Cooney’s final piece, “The Big Bah-Ha,” shows her virtuosity with language, as she tells of doomed children striking a bargain with the monster who would eat their bones. VERDICT Short stories… [are] usually not where you find vivid worldbuilding or immersive storytelling, but this gorgeous new collection reveals that both are possible in the short form.

Bone Swans was published by Mythic Delirium Books on July 1, 2015. It is 224 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $5.99 for the digital version. Cover art by Kay Nielsen. See the Mythic Delirium website for more details, and the complete Table of Contents here.