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Author: John ONeill

New Treasures: Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus

New Treasures: Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus

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Sweep of Stars (Tor Books, March 29, 2022). Cover art by Connor Sheehan

Maurice Broaddus is the author of the The Knights of Breton Court trilogy from Angry Robot, the acclaimed Tor.com novella Buffalo Soldier, and now Sweep of Stars, which James Rollins calls the “opening gambit in a great saga… epic,” and which Publishers Weekly labels a “Powerful, sweeping Afrofuturist space opera … A hugely ambitious and notable work of postcolonial science fiction.” If you’re in the market for a fresh and original space opera, this might be just what you’re looking for.

Sweep of Stars is the first novel of the Astra Black trilogy, and it introduces Muungano, a society of space-faring pan-African people who fled oppression on Earth and have now spread across the solar system. It is 2121, and unknown forces are working against Muungano, forcing its ruling families to make hard choices. Meanwhile, thousands of light years away, Muungano soldiers find themselves in the middle of an alien firefight, and faced with tough decisions of their own.

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Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Isaac Asimov

Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Isaac Asimov

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The Hugo Winners, Volumes I & II and The Hugo Winners, Volume 3 (Doubleday, 1972 and 1977).
Cover designs by F. & J. Silversmiths, Inc, and Robert Jay Silverman

I’ve written 1,973 Vintage Treasures articles for Black Gate. (That seems like a lot. Is it a lot? If it were, the paperbacks waiting to be written up wouldn’t be threatening to topple over in a spine-crushing avalanche, right? Still seems like a lot, somehow.) My Vintage Treasures pieces aren’t reviews, sometimes because it’s been so long since I’ve read the book in question that I don’t trust myself to do it justice — and sometimes because I haven’t read it at all.

But mostly because I know from experience it takes me forever to assemble a decently thoughtful piece on a book I really enjoyed (or really didn’t enjoy — that takes even longer). In the time it takes me to produce a review I’m happy with, I can write four or five chatty Vintage Treasures, and that seems like a fair trade.

I’m going to break with that tradition here to offer up at least a partial review of The Hugo Winners, the groundbreaking 1962 anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, and its two follow-up volumes, The Hugo Winners, Volume II (1971) and Volume III (1977), all published in hardcover by Doubleday. They are perhaps the most important SF anthologies ever published, and I’ve read them so many times I’m pretty sure I can talk about them entirely from memory.

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Westside Stories: The Gilda Carr Tiny Mystery Fantasies by W.M. Akers

Westside Stories: The Gilda Carr Tiny Mystery Fantasies by W.M. Akers

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Westside, Westside Saints, and Westside Lights (Harper Voyager, 2019, 2020, and 2022). Cover designs by Owen Corrigan.

First I heard of W.M. Akers’ Westside books was when Jeff Somers blurbed the first volume for the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of May 2019 at The Barnes & Noble Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog. Here’s what he said.

In an alternate 1920s Manhattan in which a heavily fortified wall running along Broadway divides the island into Eastside, where the normal laws of reality still apply, and Westside, where things have gone down the magical drain, the latter has become a magical wasteland where only the dregs of society — criminals, artists, and drunks — remain. Gilda Carr calls Westide home, and works as a private investigator specializing in bite-sized mysteries like recovering lost gloves. Somehow, though, her latest case pushes her into a gangland war that connects to her own long-missing father and the reason for the Westside’s descent into unreal chaos. As much as she might like to, Carr can’t sidestep the responsibility she suddenly feels to get to the bottom of both mysteries, for her own sake and that of everyone living in the magic-ravaged city. Akers’ hugely enjoyable debut marries inventive alt-history with truly strange magic and a protagonist you won’t soon forget.

An alternate 1920s Manhattan, a magical wasteland, and a PI who only takes tiny cases? You know I need to check out this one. Westside was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; sequel Westside Saints arrived a year later. Westside Lights, published in March, closes out the trilogy.

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Space Traders, Backwater Planets, and Rocket Girls: May/June 2022 Print SF Magazines

Space Traders, Backwater Planets, and Rocket Girls: May/June 2022 Print SF Magazines

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May/June 2022 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and
Analog Science Fiction & Fact. Cover art by Alan M. Clark, 123RF, and NASA

There’s a fine batch of print magazines piled on my nightstand this week. But the clear highlight is the return of James Enge’s delightful traveling wizard Morlock Ambrosius, who made his debut in Black Gate 8. “The Hunger” appears in in the pages of F&SF; Sam Tomaino at SF Revu calls it “Richly done fantasy with a lot of detail in so few pages.”

On the thirteenth of Bayring on her world with three moons, Tilsyni escapes her servitude in a house and dares to walk out into Skeleton Park, a very risky venture. She winds up joining a man who looks like an old peddler but is really a warrior named Morlock Ambrosius with a great sword. When animated skeletons attack, Morlock chops them up. But they just come back together. What can they do about them? Morlock finds a way.

The May/June print magazines contain stories by Norman Spinrad, Octavia Cade, Albert Cowdrey, Paul Di Filippo, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Rich Larson, Sheila Finch, R. Garcia y Robertson, James Van Pelt, Bruce McAllister, Robert Reed, Adam-Troy Castro, C.H. Hung, Alice Towey, Jerry Oltion, Sean McMullen, Brendan DuBois, and many others.

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Vintage Treasures: The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural compiled by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, and Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural compiled by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, and Martin H. Greenberg

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The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (Arbor House, May 1981)

Back in February I surveyed all ten Arbor House Treasuries, calling them a “Hearty Library of Genre Fiction.” I wanted to take a closer look at a few (and I did crack open The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg), and this long Memorial Day weekend I’m settling down with The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, a massive volume compiled by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, and Martin H. Greenberg.

This is a feast of a book, nearly 600 pages in hardcover, packed with 41 stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Winston Churchill, H. G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Cornell Woolrich, William Faulkner, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Fredric Brown, Karl Edward Wagner, Thomas M. Disch, Robert Silverberg, Ramsey Campbell, Jack Dann, C. M. Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and dozens of others. It’s a the kind of thing you build a month-long book club project around.

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High Fantasy Noir: Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

High Fantasy Noir: Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

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Black Sun (paperback reprint) and Fevered Star (Saga Press, June 2021 and April 2022). Covers by John Picacio

My first novel The Robots of Gotham was released in June 2018, and it was gratifying to see a summer debut could quickly climb bestseller lists, receive wide attention and praise from numerous venues, snag a Nebula and Hugo nomination, and win a Locus Award.

Not mine, of course. No, all that breathless acclaim went to Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning, released a week after Robots. It was consistently annoying to hear the excited chatter about that book from friends, coworkers, parents, children, and people standing next to me at the damn post office.

I decided to read Roanhorse’s book so I could see what I was up against. That was a huge mistake. Pretty soon I was talking it up to anyone who would listen — or even make eye contact. You haven’t read Trail of Lightning?? I heard myself say. Check it out first — it’s fantastic. I guess I suck as a self-promoter, but I’m still your guy for honest book recs.

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Vintage Treasures: Nebula Award-Winning Novellas edited by Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Nebula Award-Winning Novellas edited by Martin H. Greenberg

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Nebula Award-Winning Novellas (Barnes & Noble, 1994)

It’s become fairly routine for the Nebula Awards Showcase, the annual anthology gathering the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula award winning fiction, to omit the Best Novella. In fact, in the last five years only one novella, Martha Wells’s Murberbot tale All Systems Red, has been included in its entirety. Most of the others have been represented by brief extracts.

This isn’t a new problem. In his introduction to Nebula Award-Winning Novellas, B&N buyer Stephen Pagel complained that novellas, beloved by readers and writers alike, get no love from publishers and editors. Here’s his take.

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Exploring the Dark Underbelly of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer Crime From Black Library

Exploring the Dark Underbelly of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer Crime From Black Library

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Three Warhammer Crime volumes: Bloodlines by Chris Wraight, Grim Repast
by Marc Collins, and the anthology Sanction & Sin (Black Library, 2020-21)

I flew to Tampa this spring, my first business trip of the year. Felt weird to be on a plane in a pandemic, even if we are at the tail end. Last thing I packed, as usual, was something to read.

My reading calendar for the month is always jammed up with books I’m covering for the blog, so I usually indulge myself in reading material on flights. I could have selected anything — the latest space opera, a magazine, some graphic novels, a Best of the Year collection. But what I brough instead was Sanction & Sin, a Warhammer Crime anthology, and it was a terrific choice.

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Vintage Treasures: Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree, Jr.

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Out of the Everywhere (Del Rey, 1981). Cover by Rick Sternbach

Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions was the last paperback Tiptree collection to appear in her lifetime, and the third from Del Rey. It includes two original novellas, “Out of the Everywhere” and “With Delicate Mad Hands,” the Hugo nominee “Time-Sharing Angel,” and one of the greatest science fiction stories of the 20th Century (very possibly the greatest), “The Screwfly Solution.”

The first four stories in the collection, including “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” and “The Screwfly Solution,” were published under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon (instead of Tiptree, also a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Alice Sheldon). These are the bulk of the Raccoona Sheldon tales, the only one not collected here is “Morality Meat,” which eventually appeared in Crown of Stars (1988). In his article “Where to Start with the Works of James Tiptree, Jr.” at Tor.com, Lee Mandelo argues that the Sheldon and Tiptree stories are fundamentally quite different.

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Future Treasures: Hide by Kiersten White

Future Treasures: Hide by Kiersten White

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Hide by Kiersten White, coming May 24 from Del Rey

Kiersten White won a Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel for The Dark Descendent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, which Goth Chick reviewed for us in 2018, calling the audio version “my Audible obsession for nearly eleven hours… I am completely hooked.” White is the New York Times bestselling author of the Paranormalcy series and the Conqueror’s Trilogy, which began with And I Darken (2016).

Hide is her first adult offering, and I’ve been hearing good things. It’s a supernatural thriller about a homeless woman with a dark past who takes part in a high-stakes competition to spend a week in an abandoned amusement park without getting caught. Booklist says it “combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre… with revelatory pacing reminiscent of Spielberg’s Jaws.”

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