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Month: April 2020

Stories That Work: “Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars” by Mercurio D. Rivera, and “The Million-Mile Sniper” by SL Huang

Stories That Work: “Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars” by Mercurio D. Rivera, and “The Million-Mile Sniper” by SL Huang

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Asimov's Science Fiction March April 2020-small Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction March April 2020-small

The March/April 2020 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Covers by John Picacio and Mondolithic Studios

I’ve always liked big-idea fiction. That’s the stuff whose premise is so mind-boggling that even if I forget the characters and plot, I keep thinking about the story’s implications.

H.P. Lovecraft struck me that way. I started reading him in my 20s, and once I got past the prose (I used to think of him as Edgar Allen Poe on steroids and methamphetamines), the big ideas behind his stories weaseled their way into my head. Imagine the universe we know as a thin veneer over a cauldron of omnipotent indifference. Brrr! Lovecraft’s creation encouraged me to picture every cave as endless, and every unfathomable shadow at night to be a part of the pupil of a great old one’s eye, staring.

Other writers did a similar trick. Edgar Rice Burroughs gave me ancient civilizations of strange creatures on Mars (and the ability of get there if my desire was as strong as John Carter’s); Larry Niven built a ring structure around a planet so vast that it contained three million times the area of Earth; Alfred Bester imagined personal-teleportation so powerful that “the stars, my destination” was practical, not aspirational; and Douglas Adams relegated Earth to a role so small that it is destroyed to make way for a hyper-spatial express route.

See? Big ideas.

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Vintage Treasures: Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov

Vintage Treasures: Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov

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NIghtfall Fawcett Asimov-small NIghtfall Fawcett Asimov-back-small

Nightfall and Other Stories (Fawcett Crest, 1970). Cover artist unknown.

I’ve been buying small collections recently, and writing about some of the more interesting items here. Two months back I was unpacking a box of 70s paperbacks, and I made a genuinely interesting find: a copy of Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov.

Asimov was one of my heroes. There was a time in the 70s and 80s when he was science fiction, the embodiment not just of what was best in modern SF, but its living history. Asimov was one of John W. Campbell’s early discoveries in Astounding, part of that famous group of brilliant writers that shook up the genre and remade it from the ground up. He began his career as a teenage writer for the pulps in the late 30s, and produced some of the most important SF of the 20th Century in his early years, including the cycle of futuristic mysteries starring Susan Calvin that became I, Robot, the decades-long bestseller Foundation and its sequels, and many, many others.

A generous selection of those tales are collected in Nightfall and Other Stories, including the title story “Nightfall,” selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America as the best science fiction story of all time in 1968, when it was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964. “Nightfall” is the oldest story in the collection, but there are plenty more from Asimov’s most productive period in the magazines, including “Breeds There a Man…?”, the Multivac tale “The Machine That Won the War,” and “Eyes Do More Than See.”

It’s an understatement to say that Nightfall and Other Stories was popular. It was required reading among SF fans, back in the days when kids hung out in cafeterias at lunch and talked about books. Like Dune, Starship Troopers, and The Lord of the Rings, it was simply expected that you were conversant with it, and could keep up with a conversation that referred obliquely to the stories. I’m sure there were a handful of other collections that were accorded similar respect… but I can’t think of any at the moment.

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In 500 Words or Less Returns! Annihilation Aria by Michael R. Underwood

In 500 Words or Less Returns! Annihilation Aria by Michael R. Underwood

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Annihilation Aria-smallAnnihilation Aria (The Space Operas #1)
By Michael R. Underwood
Parvus Press (400 pages, $15.99 trade paperback, July 21, 2020)

I love a space fantasy adventure. Maybe I’m missing release announcements, but I feel like we’re not getting as many of those novels these days. Hyper-realistic far-future SF like The Expanse or hard science fiction like Alastair Reynolds’ work is great, but sometimes I want FTL and myriad aliens and whatnot, like Tanya Huff’s Confederation novels or, really, Star Wars.

But those elements aren’t enough, since anyone can slap together a Star Wars rip-off and call it a day. The most important thing is characters to root for, who are more nuanced than just being a Han Solo stand-in.

Maybe all of that’s a tall order. If it is, then even more kudos to Michael R. Underwood, for producing exactly that kind of novel.

(I missed these rambling, context-setting intros before I ever mention what I’m reviewing. I really did.)

Annihilation Aria is basically Star Wars, Star Trek and Serenity mixed together, but with a plot closer to The Mummy (or The Mummy’s plot with Rick and Evelyn already a couple). Max, Lahra and Wheel are delightful as a found family in how different they are, and that those differences are what makes them endearing to each other. Lahra was the character who shone the most for me; her solar-powered weaponry is a nice solarpunk touch, and her people’s ability to use songs to focus in battle and subtly manipulate their encounters is varied and well-utilized. Plus, I love how it’s never explained as anything more than basically magic. Max can’t find a rational explanation but knows it has more power than Lahra realizes – like how you can’t always hear how you speak while you’re speaking.

One of the other things that stands out is Arek, our principle antagonist within the Vsenk Imperium. You get the almost monolithic Big Bad Empire at first, but then learn that it’s rife with ongoing political feuds, with Arek’s faction representing a more moderate ideology. What I found particularly cool is that Arek is progressive for a Vsenk. He’d never consider giving the lesser races complete freedom, but he sees the practical value of things like speaking respectfully toward subordinates and the police not using excessive force. It makes him seem much more natural as a character, and oddly made me more sympathetic toward him, even though the Vsenk in general are brutal subjugators.

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Coming to Grips with the Force in Star Wars: Force and Destiny

Coming to Grips with the Force in Star Wars: Force and Destiny

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In a previous article, I praised Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars role-playing game for its narrative dice system. With its emphasis on cinematic moments, fast play, and narrative moments inspired by the dice, the mechanics work well with playing in the Star Wars universe.

The Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion core rulebooks had rules for Force users, but their focus was more about scum and villainy at the edges of space or serving the Alliance for the Restoration of the Republic (i.e., the Rebellion) than about space wizards with lightsabers.

The third and final core rulebook, Force and Destiny, is where players and game masters can get their fun in with using the Force at the tabletop. Fully compatible with the other two rulebooks, Force and Destiny and its subsequent splatbooks expand the options for characters with Force powers. This article will not dive into the powers so much; rather, I want to focus on the mechanics of the Force and how it plays out and feels in this version of a Star Wars role-playing game.

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 2020 Stay at Home – Days Three and Four

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 2020 Stay at Home – Days Three and Four

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As I explained in the last post, I am channeling my inner Archie Goodwin and writing his notebook entries as he and Nero Wolfe are bunkered down during New York City’s ‘Stay at Home’ order. I’m putting these up over The Wolfe Pack’s Facebook page – highly recommended for Wolfe fans. And I’m taking them two at a time and running them here at Black Gate. Hopefully you’ll enjoy them.

DAY THREE – 2020 Stay at Home (SaH)

It was a day of pure excitement at the old brownstone. Rain cancelled my early morning walk. Fritz vacuumed the second floor. I spent some time with the orchids when Wolfe wasn’t there. I have to admit, he has put together one impressive flower garden up there.

I gave the office a good cleaning. It would make more sense to do that when we had traffic in and out, but now is now. I figured it couldn’t hurt anything, and I certainly didn’t have anything mentally taxing to work on. Of course, the weekly cleaning and oiling of the two guns I kept in my desk went on as scheduled.

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A Land Beyond Even Faerie: The Back of the Beyond by James Stoddard

A Land Beyond Even Faerie: The Back of the Beyond by James Stoddard

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The Back of the Beyond-back-small The Back of the Beyond-small

Cover by Bryan Burke and Scott Faris

This review is jointly composed by Gabe Dybing and Nick Ozment

Back in 1998 there appeared a book that we bought more than once. We were so excited about it that we were prepared to force it as a gift on anyone who expressed the remotest interest in reading it. The book was The High House, by James Stoddard. It was the most numinous novel we had read since… well, since encountering J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, which was when we were much younger.

What we should clarify is that, chronologically, in terms of years of publication, Stoddard’s The High House was our most notable find composed after the works of those two most esteemed Inklings. We had been publishing Mooreeffoc Magazine: Fiction in the Mythic Tradition, and, while doing so, we were specifying the kind of material we wanted to publish. We ended up using as models works gathered around or before Tolkien’s most notable publications, and many of those productions were printed or reprinted within Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

And it was precisely this series — or favorite works from this line — that Stoddard channeled into his late-century creation. In short, The High House (and its sequels, The False House and Evenmere) reference (often in a form that today we call “Easter eggs”) those foundational fantasies, while simultaneously synthesizing them into its own original expression deserving of a place on the shelf right in among the beloved volumes it celebrates.

We say the same now for Stoddard’s latest original work (this one not precisely related to The High House “universe”) The Back of the Beyond. The “call outs” to the classic works of mythopoeic literature, in this one, aren’t as pronounced as they are in The High House (though we believe we detected a few). If The High House and its successors might be described as a tribute to or celebration of the masters that came before it (while crafting its own personality and its own expression), The Back of the Beyond sees all of its antecedents dissolved into a fine and rich loam out of which (Tolkien once described the creative process as producing out of “the leaf-mould of the mind”) Stoddard’s current expression rises in full bloom. Stoddard here produces a unique and arresting vision, (hopefully) the beginning of a new fantasy series in conversation with the greats, this time as a full-grown peer, whereas, within the composition of The High House, Stoddard might have been more of a student.

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Future Treasures: The Girl and the Stars by Mark Lawrence

Future Treasures: The Girl and the Stars by Mark Lawrence

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The Girl and the Stars-smallBack in 2011, just before his breakout novel Prince of Thorns arrived and catapulted him to the front ranks of modern fantasy, we published one of my favorite guest posts, an article by Mark Lawrence on the rejection letters he used to get from Black Gate. He’s come a long way since then, with multiple bestselling series, including a complete trilogy in rapidfire succession last year: One Word Kill, Limited Wish, and Dispel Illusion, on May 1, May 28, and November 14, 2019, respectively.

You’d think after that he’d need to take a few months off, maybe. But no. He’s hitting the shelves again next week, with the first installment of a new epic fantasy series which shares a setting with his Book of the Ancestor trilogy (Red Sister, Grey Sister, and Holy Sister), though taking place thousands of years earlier. When a young outcast is tossed into the Pit of the Missing by her people, she find herself in an ancient maze of tunnels under the ice. There she find a lost community of discarded people… and something much more dangerous, deep under the ice. Here’s the description.

In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown. Yaz’s people call it the Pit of the Missing and now it is drawing her in as she has always known it would.

To resist the cold, to endure the months of night when even the air itself begins to freeze, requires a special breed. Variation is dangerous, difference is fatal. And Yaz is not the same.

Yaz’s difference tears her from the only life she’s ever known, away from her family, from the boy she thought she would spend her days with, and has to carve out a new path for herself in a world whose existence she never suspected. A world full of difference and mystery and danger.

Yaz learns that Abeth is older and stranger than she had ever imagined. She learns that her weaknesses are another kind of strength and that the cruel arithmetic of survival that has always governed her people can be challenged.

Our previous coverage of Mark Lawrence’s work includes Red Sister, The Red Queen’s War trilogy, and a 2014 interview with Howard Andrew Jones.

The Girl and the Stars will be published by Ace Books on April 21. It is 384 pages, priced at $27.00 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme. Reac an excerpt from Chapter One here.

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

These Violent Delights: HBOs Westworld

These Violent Delights: HBOs Westworld

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I don’t often find a lot I enjoy on TV. There are notable exceptions. I loved Battlestar Galactica and Sons of Anarchy, enjoyed a few seasons of Game of Thrones, Justified and Banshee, and dabble in Star Trek: Discovery.

A few years ago though, I was absolutely blown away by the first season of Westworld. Physical distancing has given me a bit of extra time and in Canada Westworld is on Crave premium, so I rewatched season one, blew through Season Two and found to my delight that new episodes of Season Three are appearing weekly.

What is it and why am I talking about it on Black Gate? It’s probably the most scientifically faithful science fiction I’ve ever seen on TV or the big screen, and yet it has the powerful literary and narrative qualities you’d expect in an HBO series. There is no hand-holding here for the viewer and no clumsy exposition. It’s keep up or go home all the way — the series treats you like you’re smart enough to keep up, which really means that Westworld has enough depth of character and story to leave you turning it over in your mind for quite some time.

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An Entire World in HD: Crescent City, Book 1: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

An Entire World in HD: Crescent City, Book 1: House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

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House of Earth and Blood-small House of Earth and Blood-back-small

Cover by Carlos Quevado

Bryce Quinlan is half fae, with just enough fae blood to make her ears come to a point and her nails hard as daggers. She also has an intense sense of smell. Besides these small physical attributions, she’s lacking any sense of the power that courses through full blooded fae. She navigates society as a half-breed, not belonging to either human or fae society fully; an outcast in many ways. To cope, Bryce parties. Her small but close-knit group of friends join the hazy, drug- and dance-fueled nights. Until every one of them is suddenly, abruptly, murdered by a demon that hasn’t seen the light of day for a millennium.

Hunt Athalar is a fallen angel, enslaved to the Archangels he once tried to overthrow. Hunt is known as the Angel of Death, the Umbra Mortis, due to his immense strength and the literal lightening coursing through his veins. He is the deadliest assassin in Crescent City.

After the attack that kills Bryce’s friends, she and Hunt are paired together by the Archangel Micah himself to piece together what happened that night, and discover who unleashed such a dangerous creature. As Bryce and Hunt dig deeper into the case, they uncover a dark plot that runs much deeper than they once thought. A force powerful enough to end life as they know it brews beneath the surface, and they have to figure out how to stop it.

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New Treasures: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

New Treasures: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

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The Sound of Stars-smallThe cover blurb on Alechia Dow’s debut novel The Sound of Stars is “Can Their Love of Books and Pop Music Save the World?”, and I’ve never seen a more obvious question in my life. Every science fiction fan knows books and pop music are the only damn things keeping the world together. Duh.

Still, The Sound of Stars has a few surprises. It’s the story of a human teenager and a lab-created alien invader who team up for an epic journey with a bag of books and their favorite albums, while the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, and that’s not exactly the kind of plot summary I write every day.

It was released in hardcover last month, and Zoraida Córdova at Tor.com called it “a charming sci-fi novel… [set in] a delightful futuristic New York full of pop culture and impossible moral dilemmas,” and Kirkus Reviews says it’s “A promising debut that begs for a sequel.” Here’s a slice of the feature review from Kirkus.

When the spaceships came to Earth, there was confusion and then conflict — large numbers of humans died and the Ilori took over. Seventeen-year-old Ellie Baker managed to hold onto a trove of forbidden books, but her mother is falling into alcoholism and her father receives injections that make him an obedient Ilori servant. Lending books from her secret library makes Ellie feel less helpless even though she risks death for her transgression. Morris (or M0Rr1S) is a labmade, created to appear human and part of a unit sent to Earth to prepare for the true Ilori, who are susceptible to the Earth’s pollution. Although his father is a high-ranking true Ilori, disdainful of feelings, Morris harbors a secret love of human music. He uses his knowledge of Ellie’s secret library to convince her to collect music for him, and their bond deepens when he saves Ellie from execution… A promising debut that begs for a sequel.

The Sound of Stars was published by Inkyard Press on February 25, 2020. It is 432 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Mary Luna. Read the complete Prologue and first chapter at VickyWhoReads.

See all our recent New Treasures here.