February 2019 – Page 6

New Treasures: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Thursday, February 7, 2019 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

Last year I bought a copy of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, a widely praised novel that won the Man Booker Prize. His latest, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a 640-page fantasy epic published this week, arrives with the kind of advance praise most writers can only dream of. The New York Times calls it “The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe,” Rolling Stone labels it ”a stunning, word-drunk take on sword-and-sorcery sagas,” Neil Gaiman says it’s set in “A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made,” and the LA Times proclaims it “Absolutely brilliant.” But my favorite quote is from Entertainment Weekly, which said:

Drenched in African myth and folklore, and set in an astonishingly realized pre-colonized sub-Saharan region, Black Leopard crawls with creatures and erects kingdoms unlike any I’ve read… This is a revolutionary book.

Over at Tor.com, Alex Brown gives us a better sense of what folks are so excited about.

Y’all, Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a miracle. It’s a gift from Anansi himself. This book. This book. THIS BOOK.

Dead. I’m dead. I have died. It is so good it killed me. Murdered by my own ARC. Please bury me in my To Read pile.

The basic story is this: a man known only as Tracker, and several of his acquaintances and enemies, are hired to find a boy. The boy is missing (or not) and may be dead (or not). Of the hired group, there are those wish to find the boy, those who plan to kill him, and those who want him to remain missing. Some are human, some witches, some mercenaries, and some are magical beings. Who is the boy? What happened to him? What was really going on? Is Tracker lying? What if he’s really telling the truth?

But the plot isn’t really the plot. Finding the boy provides the skeleton, but the muscles, blood, and heat come from everything that happens along the way. This is no stroll through a dreamland of fairies and pixie dust. James drags us through a nightmare world of shapeshifters, witches, mermaids, mad scientists, cannibals, vampires, giants, sadistic slavers, selfish monarchs, and a sentient buffalo…

If Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro series opened the door to new ways of telling epic fantasy, and N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy leapt over the threshold, then Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf just ripped the whole damn door off its hinges.

Good things continue to happen for this book. The film rights were snapped up just yesterday by Warner Bros and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf was published by Riverhead Books on February 5, 2019; it is the first installment of The Dark Star Trilogy. It is 640 pages, priced at $30 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover artist is uncredited. Read the complete first chapter here, and see our recent New Treasures here.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Marilyn Pride

Thursday, February 7, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Lewis Morley & Marilyn Pride, photo by Cat Sparks

The Ditmar Awards are named for Australian fan Martin James Ditmar Jenssen. Founded in 1969 as an award to be given by the Australian National Convention, during a discussion about the name for the award, Jenssen offered to pay for the award if it were named the Ditmar. His name was accepted and he wound up paying for the award for more years than he had planned.

The Best Australian Fantasy/SF Artist category was not one of the original Ditmar Award categories in 1969, and the award had several names after it was introduced. The first art awards given by the Ditmar Awards occurred in 1980 when the category was called Best Australian Fantasy/SF Artist and was won by Marilyn Pride. Over the years, the category has changed titles and direction several times, sometimes being for “Best Australian SF or Fantasy Artist,” sometimes being for Best SF or Fantasy Artist, without concern about origin, sometimes being specifically for Best Fan Artist, and once being for Best Australian SF or Fantasy Artist, Cartoonist, or Illustrator. There have also been times that the award has disappeared or replaced by an away for Best Artwork (or given in addition to a Best Artwork Award. The most recent Best Fan Artist Award was presented in 2016, with Best Artwork being awarded as recently as 2018.

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The Astounding Life of John W. Campbell

Wednesday, February 6, 2019 Thomas Parker Comments 8 comments

Every now and then, amid your fevered cries for net neutrality, free soil and free silver, the restoration of the house of Stuart, more episodes of Firefly, or whatever other hopeless cause gets your blood racing and your family members fleeing (they recognize a wind-up to a full fledged rant when they hear one), against all odds the universe actually hears, takes note, and gives you precisely what you’ve asked for — not often, dammit, but sometimes.

Thus it was that after decades of buttonholing strangers and lecturing them on the nation’s desperate need for a biography of John W. Campbell, the pioneering science fiction writer and influential editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog) from 1937 until his death in 1971, a couple of months ago I discovered that just such a book had finally been written. (Where did I find this out? I saw it mentioned on some fantasy web site or other… hold on… I’ll think of the name in a minute…)

I Immediately put Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee at the top of my Christmas list, and I have just finished devouring it, blurbs, book jacket, binding glue, and all. Give me a second to belch, and I’ll tell you what I thought.

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A Rich Library of Modern Science Fiction: The SF Gateway Omnibus Editions

Wednesday, February 6, 2019 John ONeill Comments 18 comments

Yesterday I posted a brief article on Jack Vance, and as one of the header images I included a pic of the Jack Vance SF Gateway Omnibus, a massive volume from Orion Publishing/Gollancz containing three complete works: Big Planet, The Blue World, and the collection The Dragon Masters and Other Stories. I did it because I thought the book was very cool, and I wanted readers to know about it. And it paid off — in the comments section Glenn posted the following:

Just an aside John. Has anyone at Black Gate taken a look at the Gateway Omnibus series? I saw a whole bunch of them turn up at my local Half Price Books. The covers are weird but they seem dedicated to getting some lesser read classics out there in an inexpensive format.

Glenn read my mind. And in fact, he had the exact same experience I did. In April last year, while I was in Lombard, Illinois for the Windy City Pulp & Paper Show, I dropped into the local Half Price Books. I came out with a few interesting vintage paperbacks, but the real find was a handsome assortment of bright yellow oversized trade paperbacks with the Gateway Omnibus logo. All were brand new, and each volume contained a generous sampling of reprints from a well-known science fiction name. I’d never seen them before, but I was struck by both the eclectic mix of titles, and the wide range of authors: folks like Algis Budrys, C.L. Moore, Damon Knight, Clifford D. Simak, Edmond Hamilton, E.C. Tubb, Edgar Pangborn, John Brunner, Jack Williamson, Kate Wilhelm, James Blaylock, Joe Haldeman, Frank Herbert, Henry Kuttner, and many others. Best of all, the books were very reasonably priced — $7.99 each. I ended up taking four home with me that day (the Wilhelm, Kuttner, Williamson and Moore), and doing an online search to find just how many were out there.

What I discovered was an extremely impressive catalog of over 50 titles. All were originally published in the UK, so distribution in the US is spotty at best, but many are still widely available (and still reasonably priced). To give you an idea of the amazing scope of the collection, I’ve gathered 51 thumbnail images for you to browse below.

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Nora Roberts meets Neal Stephenson: The Felicia Sevigny Trilogy by Catherine Cerveny

Tuesday, February 5, 2019 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I first discovered Catherine Cerveny’s Felicia Sevigny trilogy when Unbound Worlds selected the second novel, The Chaos of Luck, as one of the Best SF Titles of December 2017. The tale of a Brazilian tarot card reader and a Russian crime lord and their desperate race to unmask a conspiracy sounded different enough to be very appealing, and I took a chance and bought the first two books.

The series opened with The Rule of Luck (2017), Catherine Cerveny’s debut novel, an unusual blend of romance and SF thriller in which tarot card reader Felicia Sevigny discovers she’s at the heart of a far-reaching plot to manipulate human genetics. Alison Spanner at Booklist gave the book a starred review, saying

In the year 2950, dark days of floods, war, famine, and devastation are over, but the world has been reshaped forever. Terraforming on Venus and Mars, tech implants allowing for seamless access to the Internet-like CN-net, genetic modification to enhance beauty, government-sponsored anti-aging treatments, and strictly regulated population control are the new normal under the world’s new government, One Gov. Felicia Sevigny grows up blindly believing her life is her own until she discovers, for reasons unknown to her, she has been blacklisted from having a baby. Felicia has made a name for herself as a skilled fortune-teller, and her life changes the day Alexei Petriv, a high-ranking member of the Tsarist Consortium, a shadow organization set to take One Gov down, walks into her shop and demands a reading. In return for a promise to remove her blacklisted status, Felicia agrees to help Alexei in his quest to take power from One Gov… Cerveny’s first novel in a planned trilogy mingles romance and science fiction — think Nora Roberts meets Neal Stephenson — and is certain to satisfy audiences of both genres.

The final novel, The Game of Luck, arrived in September 2018. All three volumes were published in trade paperback and digital formats by Orbit Books; the striking covers were designed by Lisa Marie Pompilio. The digital version of The Rule of Luck is priced at just $4.99 at most major online bookstores — well worth checking out.

See all of our recent coverage of the best SF and fantasy series here.

Hector DeJean on Why Jack Vance Was Science Fiction’s Tightest Worldbuilder

Tuesday, February 5, 2019 John ONeill Comments 23 comments

Jack Vance died in 2013, but his work continues to be avidly discussed and appreciated. New readers are still discovering his timeless SF adventures like Big Planet, and publishers like Subterranean have produced gorgeous collections like The Early Jack Vance (five volumes) and The Jack Vance Treasury. And his mass market paperbacks from DAW, Ace and others remain inexpensive and continue to circulate, winning him new readers.

I’ve quite enjoyed some of the more recent discussions of Vance, like Hector DeJean’s January 11 Tor.com article “A Lean, Mean, Writing Machine: Jack Vance Was Science Fiction’s Tightest Worldbuilder,” which looks at three of Vance’s early novels from a rather different perspective. Here’s the opening paragraphs.

I’m a big fan of concise stories. If a writer fills a three-volume science fiction epic with 2000 pages of detailed worldbuilding, intriguing speculative concepts, and captivating character arcs, that’s all well and good, but if that writer can get that down to 300 pages, that’s better. And if a writer goes further and nails it in 150 pages — well then, that writer can only be Jack Vance.

Vance produced well over 70 novels, novellas, and short story collections over the course of his writing career, creating fantasy stories and mysteries as well as science fiction, and even producing a substantial number of doorstoppers that would have impressed George R. R. Martin with their girth. Vance’s extensive oeuvre has its imperfections — especially glaring today is his near-complete lack of interesting female characters — but at their best the books set an excellent standard for the construction of strange new worlds. Three tales in particular, The Languages of Pao (1958), the Hugo Award-winning The Dragon Masters (1962), and The Last Castle (1966), squeeze artfully assembled civilizations into focused, tight paragraphs. Other authors might have used these worlds as settings for bloated trilogies, but Vance quickly builds each society, establishes his characters, delivers the action, and then is off to create something new. I can’t think of any other author who put together so many varied worlds with such efficiency.

I think DeJean has a fine point. Vance’s early experiences writing for the markets, and especially the painful and arduous task of substantially cutting his first novel, Big Planet for publication in hardcover (and later at Ace), taught him the valuable skill of spinning a complex tale in a very small space.

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Future Treasures: Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited by Ken Liu

Monday, February 4, 2019 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Science Fiction has a reputation — deserved, I think — for being an inhospitable market for non-English writers. Some of the great science fiction writers of all time, like Jules Verne, Jorge Luis Borges, Stanisław Lem, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Pierre Boulle, Elizabeth Vonarburg, and Karel Čapek, wrote in languages other than English…. but remarkably few found real success with American readers.

But that’s changing rapidly as the world gets smaller, and the American appetite and appreciation for international culture grows, especially among the young. Japanese anime, manga, and videogames have been hugely popular in the US for decades, and that helped open the door for Asian cinema, Bollywood, K-pop, Afrofuturism… and much, much more. Clarkesworld magazine has published a Chinese SF story in translation every issue for the past two years, and writers like Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) have achieved breakout success in the U.S.

Ken Liu (The Grace of Kings, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories) has been at the forefront of the Chinese SF invasion, as both promoter and translator. Invisible Planets, his 2016 anthology of contemporary Chinese SF in translation, came in #2 in the Locus Poll for Best Anthology. This month he builds on that success with Broken Stars, a brand new collection of 16 short stories from Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Chen Qiufan, and many others. It also includes three essays that explore the history of Chinese SF, survey modern Chinese fandom, and the impact of the growing popularity of SF in China. Broken Stars arrives in hardcover from Tor on February 19.

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Hither Came Conan: John C. Hocking on “The Scarlet Citadel”

Monday, February 4, 2019 Bob Byrne Comments 24 comments

I’m here to sing the praises of Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “The Scarlet Citadel.” This classic yarn first appeared in the January 1933 issue of Weird Tales and was the second Conan story to see print, following “The Phoenix on the Sword.” This is a tale of Conan when he was King of Aquilonia, and many, Karl Edward Wagner among them, have noted it shows clear parallels to Howard’s only Conan novel, the peerless The Hour of the Dragon.

In “The Scarlet Citadel,” Amalrus, King of Ophir, requests military aid from Aquilonia, saying that the kingdom of Koth, ruled by Strabonus, is pushing over his borders. Conan comes to the aid of an ally in need, of course, but soon finds he has been deceived, that Amalrus and Strabonus are in league to betray and entrap the Cimmerian and his army. Conan’s forces are mercilessly destroyed, and he is captured and tossed into the dungeons of a sorcerer of Koth, Tsotha-lanti. This wizard has been using his dungeons to work eldritch experiments and otherwise practice occult deviltry, the result being a dark underworld setting as memorable as Tolkien’s Moria.

Attempting to escape the dungeon, Conan encounters Pelias, a wizardly foe of Tsotha-lanti, and sets him free from the embrace of a grotesque plant. Pelias, sinister but apparently genuinely grateful, helps Conan escape and get back to Aquilonia, where the barbarian eventually leads an army against his enemies in a spectacularly described battle.

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The Most Ambitious First Contact Saga in Science Fiction: The Foreigner Series by CJ Cherryh

Sunday, February 3, 2019 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Art by Michael Whelan (1,2,6,7), Dorian Vallejo (3), Stephen Youll (4,5), Donato Giancola (8,9), and Todd Lockwood (10-19)

I like to talk about SF and fantasy series here, and last week I dashed off a quick article about a 9-volume space opera that caught my eye, Lisanne Norman’s Sholan Alliance. The first two commenters, R.K. Robinson and Joe H, both compared her novels to the queen of modern space opera, C.J. Cherryh. That certainly got me thinking. Like Norman, Cherryh is published by DAW, and as I said last week,

For many years DAW’s bread and butter has been extended midlist SF and fantasy series that thrive chiefly by word of mouth… You won’t connect with them all of course, but when you find one you like they offer a literary feast like no other — a long, satisfying adventure series you can get lost in for months.

More than any other writer, Cherryh may be responsible for DAW’s success with space opera. She’s been associated with the publisher for over four decades, since her first two novels, Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth, were purchased by founder Donald A. Wollheim in 1975. Cherryh has produced many of DAW’s top-selling series, including the popular Chanur novels, the Company War (including the Hugo Award-winning Downbelow Station), The Faded Sun trilogy, and especially the 19-volume Foreigner space opera, perhaps the most ambitious and epic first contact saga ever written.

C.J. Cherryh became a SFWA Grand Master in 2016, and the Foreigner books are perhaps her most celebrated achievement. The first, Foreigner, was published in 1994, and has remained in print for the last 25 years; the most recent, Emergence, arrived in hardcover last year, and was reprinted in paperback less than four weeks ago. Four of the books were shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and all 19 titles remain in print today.

If you’re truly on the hunt for “a long, satisfying adventure series you can get lost in for months,” Foreigner — all 7,200 pages of it — may be the most important literary discovery you ever make.

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Tiny Epic Defenders and the Table-top gaming Renaissance

Sunday, February 3, 2019 Nick Ozment Comments 2 comments

Funny how some of us predicted video games would virtually wipe out RPGs and board games, and yet here we are. We have entered a golden age of tabletop gaming. So many new games, with great graphics, great playing pieces, and game mechanics that expand on systems that have been tried, tested, and improved on for decades.

I’m certainly not the first to make this observation, but much of this game renaissance must be thanks to funding platforms like Kickstarter. No longer limited to what a few big corporations deemed were mass-marketable enough to release to retail outlets, we could now team up with a few hundred or a few thousand other people who wanted what we did and JUST PAY TO MAKE IT HAPPEN OURSELVES.

Also, tabletop games, for families, have become a welcome alternative to everyone having their heads planted on a screen in their own little world-shells. A way to gather the family collectively around a table again to interact face to face. But for online-game-savvy kids, old chestnuts like Sorry aren’t necessarily going to cut it (no knock on Sorry; I played the heck out of that game when I was about 6).

Just consider: We live at a time when the original TSR game Dungeon! has made a big comeback – a perfect starting point to introduce young players to the wonders that await with a flat surface, a few dice, and a little bit of imagination. And beyond Dungeon!, there are now dozens of games that have picked up where that 1970s oldie-but-goody left off.

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Black Gate

Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Browsed by
Month: February 2019

New Treasures: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Thursday, February 7, 2019 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Marilyn Pride

Thursday, February 7, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

The Astounding Life of John W. Campbell

Wednesday, February 6, 2019 Thomas Parker Comments 8 comments

A Rich Library of Modern Science Fiction: The SF Gateway Omnibus Editions

Wednesday, February 6, 2019 John ONeill Comments 18 comments

Nora Roberts meets Neal Stephenson: The Felicia Sevigny Trilogy by Catherine Cerveny

Tuesday, February 5, 2019 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Hector DeJean on Why Jack Vance Was Science Fiction’s Tightest Worldbuilder

Tuesday, February 5, 2019 John ONeill Comments 23 comments

Future Treasures: Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited by Ken Liu

Monday, February 4, 2019 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Hither Came Conan: John C. Hocking on “The Scarlet Citadel”

Monday, February 4, 2019 Bob Byrne Comments 24 comments

The Most Ambitious First Contact Saga in Science Fiction: The Foreigner Series by CJ Cherryh

Sunday, February 3, 2019 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Tiny Epic Defenders and the Table-top gaming Renaissance

Sunday, February 3, 2019 Nick Ozment Comments 2 comments