Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder by Roy A. Mauritsen, published by Padwolf Publishing and now available in a brand new audibook narrated by Christopher Crosby Morris!
The new audiobook is available at Amazon, iTunes and Audible.com. Over 15 hours long and richly enhanced with music and sound, it’s a whole new way to experience Shards Of The Glass Slipper — the fairy tale fantasy epic that Patrick Thomas (The Murphy’s Lore series) calls “The Brothers Grimm meets Lord of the Rings.”
This past Saturday was the bi-annual Games Plus auction in Mount Prospect, Illinois, an event I celebrate every year (usually by massively blowing my budget in a prolonged bout of auction fever). A lot of folks attend looking for collectible vintage SF & fantasy games, and there’s certainly plenty of those to be had. But the chief reason I go is to find bargains, and especially bargains on new games. Heck, the big reason I sit in an uncomfortable metal chair for seven hours is just to see all the new games that flash by (and to see which ones the crowd goes nuts for). It’s sort of like attending a Paris fashion show for games, a comparison I’ve made previously.
When you’re sitting in the front row and the auctioneer starts fast-talking about a fascinating new game you’ve never seen before, you need to be ready to make a quick assessment. Is it a rare out-of-print title, like that copy of Victory Point Games’ Darkest Night I foolishly let get away for $40? Or are copies still available on Amazon for 20 bucks, like that Star Trek: Five Year Mission from Mayfair Games I agonized over? I kept my smartphone handy, and got pretty adept at fast-thumbing online prices as the auction progressed.
I made out pretty well this year, carting home seven big boxes of games — including plenty that fell into both categories. Some of my most intriguing purchases included Krosmaster Arena (for $20), Z-man Games Tragedy Looper ($10), City of Horror ($12), a shrinkwrapped copy of SoulJar Games’ Torn Amor ($15), and even an unread copy of KenzerCo’s Cattlepunk Chronicles ($5). But when I got home, there was one item I wanted to get my hands on immediately, and I dug through all seven boxes until I found it (nestled at the bottom of the seventh box, naturally): Eyes of the Stone Thief, a massive adventure supplement for the popular 13th Age RPG from Pelgrane Press. Along with it I won a copy of the 13th Age Bestiary, a full color monster compendium for the same system.
The three novels of the Viriconium sequence, The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, and In Viriconium, are not the entirety of M. John Harrison’s intricate, multi-faceted portrayal of the titular city. A fourth book, Viriconium Nights (1984), collects seven stories written between 1971 and 1983. Each is strange, some bordering on the inpenetrable, but all attempt to shine lights onto new aspects of the larger story.
As he did with each succeeding novel, Harrison twists, recasts, and reweaves characters, thematic melodies, and locations first found in The Pastel City. Sometimes, as with that book’s ostensible hero, tegeus-Cromis, things seem to be exactly as they were before. Other times, particularly with the city of Viriconium itself, they are changed considerably. Its very name becomes mutable, one time being Uriconium, another just Vriko. This reminds us of one of Harrison’s central ideas: that there is no real “there” to Viriconium; it is just a bundle of words painted on a page at its creator’s discretion.
Viriconium Nights commences with “The Lamia & Lord Cromis.” tegeus-Cromis is in search of the lamia, a beast which has slain numerous members of his family. Though he appears to have accepted the same will happen to him, still he sets out accompanied by the wonderfully named Dissolution Khan and the dwarf gladiator, Morgante. The hunt ends in a morass of complications, death, and unclarity.
I’m really enjoying these recent Hank Davis anthologies, especially The Baen Big Book of Monsters and Things from Outer Space. As I’ve mentioned before, no one else today is collecting writers like Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber, and Fredric Brown and packaging them in mass market anthologies for under 8 bucks. Davis is making the greatest SF writers of the 20th Century accessible to casual modern readers, and that’s no small thing.
Plus, his anthologies are a blast.
His most recent, If This Goes Wrong…, showed up just after Christmas. It collects 17 tales of off-kilter futures originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy, World of IF, Analog, and other fine publications. Just think — some kid in Oklahoma picked this book up and discovered the science fiction of the pulps for the first time. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
Michael Penkas took on the lion’s share of our magazine coverage this month, with in-depth reviews of the latest issues of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Nightmare. Mike joins our current magazine reviewer, Fletcher Vredenburgh (whose beat is primarily sword & sorcery), as well as our Retro-reviewers, Rich Horton and Matthew Wuertz.
In other magazine news this month, Rich Horton presented his 2017 Hugo Nomination thoughts, recommending dozens of stories from all of the major magazines. See all the details here.
Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our February Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.
We’re in to March and The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes has made it to three years here at Black Gate. Every Monday morning, I’ve written about a thousand words about some topic I hoped would be interesting, without missing a deadline. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this column and very thankful that Black Gate was willing to let me ramble on about a wide range of topics. For I certainly did that!
But I’m having trouble keeping up with the demands of weekly blogging (I know it appears I just slap these things together, but I actually do a lot of reading and research) and there are a couple of writing projects I want to tackle in 2017, and for me as it is for most folks, time is a scarce commodity. So, I’ll be wrapping up The Public Life of SherlockHolmes with the March 20th post. I convinced the powers that be here not to put a restraining order on me at Black Gate World Headquarters (in large part by signing over all future post royalties…) and I’ll be allowed to post something once in a while. And I’m going to continue contributing to the Modular column. This is a great blog to write for and I’m pleased to still be part of the family. If still the odd cousin that doesn’t get talked about at the reunions.
One of my two major writing projects for the year involves my favorite mystery series, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.
In early 2000, A&E aired a one-off movie, The Golden Spiders. It starred Canadian Maury Chaykin as Rex Stout’s famous detective, Nero Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton as his man Friday, Archie Goodwin. Reviews were positive and a year later, the first of an eleven-episode series aired, The Doorbell Rang.
It’s been a few months since I’ve done one of these. Partly that’s for personal reasons that I won’t go into here, and partly it’s because I haven’t received a lot of submissions lately, so I went looking for a book to review, and I ended up with one that proved a little longer than I anticipated. (If you’d like to submit a book for me to review, please see the instructions.)
This month’s self-published book review is of Dawn of Wonder, by Jonathan Renshaw, a 700-page novel of epic fantasy. Mr. Renshaw doesn’t need my help selling his book, as he’s sold over 200,000 copies, has over 2,500 Amazon reviews, and has won a bevy of awards. But it is a self-published book, and I was curious whether it could live up to the expectations.
It is certainly a well-written book, with rich and poetic language and strong characterization. Aedan, the main character, is instantly likeable, adventurous and bold but with a grave weakness that will haunt him throughout the novel. We’re first introduced to Aedan as a boy, together with his friends, most notably Kalry, the daughter of the local noble. When tragedy strikes and Kalry is lost to slavers, Aedan is blamed, and his family has to leave the area. It is here that we are introduced to the source of Aedan’s fears and weakness, his father’s abusive temper. When they arrive in the city of Castath, Aedan’s father separates from his family to return to the criminal lifestyle he had practiced before marrying.
Aedan quickly decides that what he wants is to become a soldier, independent of his father and the domineering woman his mother finds shelter with, and more importantly, able to pursue revenge on the nation of slavers who took Kalry. When he seeks out the training to become one, he quickly catches the eye of General Osric, and is offered a place at the Academy, studying to become a gray marshal, the spies and scouts who are Castath’s first line of defense. Believing that becoming one would give him an even better chance to avenge Kalry, he leaps at the opportunity.
I was reminded of something while perusing Thomas Parker’s laudable Master List of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror Literature last week ( or “The List” — posted HERE on Black Gate).
Each of us likely has a book or two (or ten) we adore – absolutely cherish and consider indispensible – that will never appear on any of these lists (unless we compile our own list).
These are gems worthy of our love, yet they are just not that well known, or they have been overlooked or mostly forgotten. Some books, after all, are trees that grow for hundreds of years, while others are flowers that bloom in glory and then are gone.
Later on I might mention a few that I admire, but I will not be arguing that any of them should be on Parker’s or any of the other lists. My thesis here is simply that there are far more great books than can be squeezed onto a top 500 or top 700 or top 5,000. And that’s wonderful news, isn’t it?
Put another way: If some horrible cosmic accident occurred in the multiverse that wiped out all 700 of the books (and book series) on Parker’s list – suddenly none of them existed here on our version of Earth – much of our great fantasy, science-fiction, and horror literature would be lost, granted. Still, I believe we could, from what remained, start right back at square one and compile another list of 700 books just as worthy and strongly representative of the genres.
Of course, why we even need such lists is simple: One reason there are so many great books and so many good books is because there are so many books. Period. (With between 600,000 and 1,000,000 new ones being added each year in the United States alone.) And, as you might guess, the ratio of the good to the bad, mediocre, ambivalent, hackneyed, limp is, well, daunting. If you try to find the great or the good without guidance, the odds are stacked against you. Like going alone to Manhattan without a map and just assuming you’ll walk around and stumble into the best places.
In Ireland in 1895, a woman named Bridget Cleary was burned following accusations that she was a changeling. Her horrific demise serves as the inspiration for The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood, a book of arresting power and unbearable sadness. I can understand why. Try to think of something more tragic than being executed for a crime you’re powerless to understand.
Albie Mirralls, the novel’s protagonist, faces a similar dilemma. When he learns that his sweet-natured cousin, Lizzie, was murdered by her husband after he became convinced she was one of the fae, he travels to her home in Yorkshire. There he uncovers the sordid tale of her death in the shelter of her cottage, all the while succumbing to an exquisite madness. When his wife, Helena, travels from London to join him, the situation becomes perilous. But compared to a shocking revelation concerning a supposed friend, it pales.
Littlewood’s writing routinely takes your breath away with its astonishing beauty. She wields a tremendous command of language, bordering on peerless in the way she describes the ethereal nature of the surroundings. I visualized the sickening idyll of Halfoak, the bucolic village nestled in the heart of Yorkshire, so clearly that I could have closed my eyes and awoken in the novel. In a novel that places tremendous importance on the endless summer of the village, Littlewood’s descriptions resonate powerfully. They add a definite sense of unease to the plot.
Among the additional effective qualities of the book were the bleak plot points and suffering characters. No one has an easy time of it. Even some of the most famous tragedies, like Romeo and Juliet, have nuggets of humor, but not so with Littlewood’s tale. Chapter after chapter, Albie suffers agonizing emotional and physical ordeals, never once receiving the much-needed comfort of comic relief. It’s possible Littlewood could have included nuggets of dark humor about the superstition surrounding the fae. But the novel offers not a moment to laugh with yourself.
Nor do the characters have any reason to feel joyful. Least of all Essie Aikin, the mother of a baby who is stolen from her home. I felt a stronger amount of pity for her than for Albie, whom I admit I had no strong feelings for until the end.
Another character I cared for was Albie’s wife, Helena, who tries to support Albie through the visit. The dissolution of love for devastating reasons will twist your heart.
There are a few novels I will return two over and over. García Marquéz’ One Hundred Years of Solitude is one. Dan Symmons’ Hyperion is another. I’ve been back to R. Scott Baker’s Prince of Nothing series a few times.
But my pile is shrinking. I’ve grown as a reader and can’t read Dune anymore, and I haven’t tried to go back to Tolkein in probably a decade. But one truly haunting work is Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood and Lavondyss. The novels won the World Fantasy Award in 1985 and the BSFA Award in 1988 respectively, if my dates aren’t off.
The two novels center on three families who live around Ryhope Wood, which is one of the last ancient, undisturbed forests in England, meaning that its roots and its ghosts are truly ancient. Now, there are lots of people who evoke deep time in their writing. Tolkein obviously. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Steven Erikson.
But reading Holdstock is to viscerally experience layers of deep, Jungian time. The wood is haunted not by ghosts of the past per se; it is haunted by the ancient memories of ghosts that each person carries within them, all the legends, remembered in story and forgotten.
