Browsed by
Month: April 2016

New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

Comments 0 Comment
Something Rich and Strange-small Something Rich and Strange-back-small

Ron Rash is the author of Serena, a New York Times bestseller which was made into a Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper film with the same title in 2014. He’s also the author of The Cove and Above the Waterfall, and is a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize.

I was tipped off to his short story collection Something Rich and Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. Although the stories within are not genre fiction, there’s plenty here to reward readers of weird fiction. Entertainment Weekly said “This anthology of Rash’s earthy, often eerie short stories is like a forest you can get lost in for hours, small but affecting tales of poverty, addiction, pride, love, and despair threaded with life-altering acts of violence.” And NPR said “Rich and strange are two words that aptly apply to this book. I have two other words to continue with: Simply beautiful… some of the stories are so searing, it’s as if someone has taken a stick from a blazing fire and pressed it into your hand.”

Something Rich and Strange was published by Ecco on August 11, 2015. It is 448 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback, and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Jamie Heiden. Click the covers above for bigger versions.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197 Now Available

Comments 0 Comment

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197-smallIssue #197 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies features a sword & sorcery tale by Tony Pi and a fanciful animal fantasy by Kelly Stewart, two podcasts by Tony Pi, and a reprint by Tina Connolly. Nicky Magas at Tangent Online liked the Stewart, and had mixed feelings on the Pi:

Ao has a fairly unique ability in Tony Pi’s “The Sweetest Skill.” Although he appears to be naught but a candy maker, Ao’s family has a long symbiotic history with the zodiac spirit animals that grant him the ability to form magical constructs out of simple materials. But absolute loyalty to the spirits is required for such power, and the penalty for disobedience can be awful, as Ao well knows. So when the spirit of King Tiger shows up one night with a request to rescue a divine tigress in need, Ao is more than a little wary. On the other hand, he owes a debt of gratitude to the injured spirit and all debts must be paid, even if that means going up against the sorcery of the Ten Crows gang… “The Sweetest Skill” is a neatly packaged sword and sorcery story set in a broader narrative world. The characters, the setting, and the plot are all decently constructed, but lack a stylistic charm to be truly eye-popping…

Aril knows that you ought never invite Rabbits into the garden, in Kelly Stewart’s “Rabbit Grass.” There’s no getting rid of them or fixing the damage they do if you’re silly enough not to heed that bit of advice. All the same, there’s something about the little Rabbit Picket that Aril can’t ignore. And conversation never hurt anyone, did it?… But Picket won’t stop going on about the non-existent Rabbit Grass, and when he shows up at her window one night looking desperate and worried, Aril won’t rest until she’s aided her unlikely companion, even if it means venturing into the Rabbit warrens herself. Part Peter Rabbit and part Alice in Wonderland, “Rabbit Grass” is… a lovely pastoral fantasy.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Fifteen (The End!)

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Fifteen (The End!)

Comments 0 Comment

In The Wake of Sister Blue Mark Rigney-medium

Linked below, you’ll find the final installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue. Yes, you heard a’right. This, me hearties, do be the closing section. For now. This will be Book One of a pair (but no, not an ongoing, endless cycle), and you have reached the Continental Divide between the two.

As part of the work of laboring on to the end, I’ve also gone back to the beginning with an eye toward cleaning up typos, improving the prose as needed, and catching the odd mistake. Let’s face it, serialization (at speed) is an invitation to inconsistency. More on that another day, but for now, suffice it to say that the manuscript as a whole is now a good deal neater and cleaner.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles (or perhaps my unexpectedly popular D&D-related post, “Youth In a Box,”) I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. Oh, and if you’re only now discovering this portal, may I suggest you begin at the beginning? The Spur awaits…

Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

Read the fifteenth and final installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Future Treasures: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Comments 0 Comment

Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt-smallLast year Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt won a Hugo Award for his story “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” During my lengthy discussion with Tor editor Liz Gorinsky, who edited Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem (which won the Hugo for Best Novel last year), I learned that she was also editing Heuvelt’s first book to be published in English, the horror novel HEX.

Liz seems to have an unerring sense for foreign SF and fantasy that will appeal to an American audience. I trust her taste implicitly, and I find myself very intrigued by HEX. It was a bestselling novel in its original Dutch version; the English edition arrives in hardcover from Tor next week.

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

HEX will be published by Tor on April 26. It is 384 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. It was translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Tony Hillerman

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Tony Hillerman

Comments 7 comments
My all-time favorite coffee table book
My all-time favorite coffee table book

Last week, I wrote about John Cleese’s Elementary, My Dear Watson. I’m struggling through my re-watch of his The Strange Case of The End of Civilization as We Know It (I thought it was bad on first viewing: nothing has changed my mind this time around), so that isn’t ready to go yet. So, here’s the first of several posts related to a Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster: the late Tony Hillerman.

“I was writing episodically because this short book stretched about three years from 1967 to 1970 from first paragraph to final revision – with progress frequently interrupted by periods of sanity – probably induced by fatigue and sleepiness. Most of my efforts at fiction were done after dinner when the kids were abed, papers were graded and the telephone wasn’t ringing.

Sometimes, in those dark hours, I would realize that the scene I finished was bad, the story wasn’t moving, the book would never be published, and I couldn’t afford wasting time I could be using to write nonfiction people would buy.

Then I would pull the paper from the typewriter (remember those?), put the manuscript back in the box, and the box on the shelf to sit for days, or some times a week, until job stress eased and the urge to tell the story returned.”

So did Tony Hillerman, decorated World War II combat veteran, former newspaper reporter and then-current university teacher, very slowly, write The Blessing Way. Hillerman is not a Navajo. He’s a Caucasian who grew up in a small Oklahoma village on land belonging to the Potawatomi tribe. He went to the local Indian school for first through eighth grade and from an early age had no prejudices against Indians. They were just kids, like him. It shaped the character that let him write about the Navajos in a realistic and sympathetic manner. They aren’t simply stereotypes in a mystery book.

…

Read More Read More

Sci-ficionados: Our Insatiable Hunger for Stories, and What it Means for the Human Race

Sci-ficionados: Our Insatiable Hunger for Stories, and What it Means for the Human Race

Comments 7 comments

third eyeFans of science fiction and fantasy tend to have an innate curiosity, one that is not sated simply by day-to-day life and the world as it is. They cannot content themselves with the rote script written for them.

There are people all around who are content simply to go to school, get a job, have a family, raise kids to follow the same formula, retire. And some of these people are well informed — they read the news to see what’s going on. They have hobbies. They like to be entertained — they watch sitcoms to have a laugh at the status quo. They may even watch some of those movies with zombies and giant robots and superheroes to let a little bit of their imagination off the leash: what if this predictable old world were shaken up by something like that?

But the real sci-ficionados, they aren’t content with an occasional, half-winking excursion into the game of what-if before settling back down onto the landing pad of Reality. Because they recognize, deep down, that this is not the only possible world, and that this so-called reality is also utterly strange. They want to know about nano-tech and parasites and the Inquisition and how and why homo sapiens developed a larger prefrontal cortex and what the hell are dreams anyway? And a hundred, a thousand, a million other things. Why is this society the way it is, and is it foreordained that we must follow this script?

…

Read More Read More

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: “Head-Hopper” – A Correction and a New Example

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: “Head-Hopper” – A Correction and a New Example

Comments 0 Comment

coral povThis is part 9 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

After I turned in my blog last week, I met my husband at a blues club. I do a lot of writing, and thinking about writing, while listening to live music.

For years I have been using my story “What’s With All the Damned Zombies, Anyway?” to explain to my students the Head-Hopper point of view. Years. Just as I did in last week’s blog. And it dawned on me, in the middle of one of Pistol Pete’s guitar solos, that I was wrong.

That isn’t a true example of Head-Hopper. That’s an example of Mixed POVs: it has Serial POV segments which are strung together using Folksy Narrator (next blog) interludes.

…

Read More Read More

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in March

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in March

Comments 0 Comment

The palace of Fasiladas-smallThe number one post at the Black Gate blog last month was Sean McLachlan’s report on the historically fascinating castles of Gondar, Ethiopia. Sean’s adventures in Ethiopia certainly captured the attention of our readers — he also had the #3 post, with his photo-essay on the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela.

Coming in at #2 was the fifth chapter in William I. Lengeman III’s ongoing Star Trek re-watch, on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. I’ve been re-watching the early Star Trek films myself the past few months, and been enjoying this series very much.

Rounding out the Top Five are our Vintage Treasures report on The Silistra Quartet — by one of the most popular writers among Black Gate’s readership, Janet Morris — and our look at Gardner’s Dozois recent controversial comments on the New Sword and Sorcery.

Classic writers captured the next three slots, including Bob Byrne’s report on the new Conan RPG, Rich Horton on Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Thomas Parker’s look at one of the most hotly debated writers of pulp SF: “Classically Awful or Awfully Classic: A.E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A.”

Howard Andrew Jones had the #9 slot with his review of the Second Edition of Victory Point Games’ popular Empires in America, and Drake author Peter McLean closed out the Top Ten with his thoughtful article on “Why We Shouldn’t Hunt The Trope To Extinction.”

…

Read More Read More

Read “The Great Detective” by Delia Sherman at Tor.com

Read “The Great Detective” by Delia Sherman at Tor.com

Comments 0 Comment

The Great Detective Delia Sherman-smallDelia Sherman is the author of The Freedom Maze, which won the Andre Norton Award, the Prometheus Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature in 2012. She’s also the author of Through a Brazen Mirror (1988), The Porcelain Dove (1993, also a Mythopoeic winner), and The Fall of the Kings (2002, with Ellen Kushner).

“The Great Detective” is an alternate history Sherlockian SF tale available free online at Tor.com — right up Bob Byrne’s alley, now that I think about it.

When Sir Arthur Cwmlech’s home is robbed and the Illogic Engine – his prize invention – stolen, it is only natural that he and his clever assistant Miss Tacy Gof consult with another inventor, the great Mycroft Holmes, about who has taken it. But it is really Mr. Holmes’ Reasoning Machine who they are there to see, for it is only fitting for one automaton to opine on a matter concerning the fate of another of its kind. This charming story by award-winning fiction writer Delia Sherman is a delightful romp set within an a slightly altered version of one of our most beloved literary universes.

Patty Templeton interviewed Delia Sherman for Black Gate here, and C.S.E. Cooney reported on her Podcastle story “The Wizard’s Apprentice” here. She is also the editor of Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts; we reported on the latest issue here.

“The Great Detective” was posted at Tor.com on February 17. It was edited by Liz Gorinsky, and illustrated by Victo Ngai. It’s available here.

We last covered Tor.com with K. M. Ferebee’s dark fantasy “Tom, Thom.” For more free fiction, see our recent online magazine coverage.

Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

Vintage Treasures: The Riverworld Series by Philip Jose Farmer

Comments 7 comments
To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-small To Your Scattered Bodies Go Berkley 1971-back-small

When I was a wee lad discovering science fiction for the first time, I eagerly read and enjoyed all the most famous SF series. Dune, Foundation, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Amber — and Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga.

The first volume, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, won the 1972 Hugo Award, and it’s not hard to see why. The premise, that every human who ever lived wakes up one morning on the shores of a great river, was thoroughly original, and Farmer built on it brilliantly, crafting a science fiction novel peopled with famous historical figures, including Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Hermann Göring, a fictionalized version of Farmer himself (“Peter Jairus Frigate”), and especially the famed explorer Richard Francis Burton, who sets out to solve the mystery of this strange world.

…

Read More Read More