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Author: John ONeill

Future Treasures: Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore

Future Treasures: Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore

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Battle of the Linguist Mages (Tor.com, January 11, 2022)

If there’s a more exciting publisher in SF and fantasy at the moment than Tor.com, I don’t know what it is. They’ve dominated both award lists and bestseller lists with their recent powerhouse releases, including Martha Wells’ hugely popular Murderbot chronicles, Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. Just in the last few months they’ve released brand new books by Tochi Onyebuchi, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Catherynne M. Valente, Alix E. Harrow, Charlie Jane Anders, Becky Chambers, and Peter F. Hamilton & Gareth L. Powell.

They’ve got a stellar line-up in place for next year as well, and we’re looking forward to sharing all the details. But the one I’ve got my eye on next month is Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore, author of Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You (Tor.com, February 2019). Charles Stross says, “It reads like Snow Crash had a dance-off with Gideon the Ninth, in a world where language isn’t a virus from outer space, it’s a goddamn alien invasion,” and that sounds like something worth canceling a few meetings for.

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New Treasures: The Godstone by Violette Malan

New Treasures: The Godstone by Violette Malan

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The Godstone (DAW Books, August 2021. Cover design by Faceout Studio/Jeff Miller.

Violette Malan will be familiar to many of you. She’s the author of the acclaimed Dhulyn and Parno series of modern sword & sorcery novels, and The Mirror Prince fantasy series. She was also our Friday blogger here at Black Gate for many years.

Her new novel The Godstone vaults her into the front ranks of modern fantasy. Publishers Weekly raves that it “transports readers to an exciting world of high-stakes magic,” and Kirkus Reviews calls it “An original, enigmatic fantasy about reluctant heroes drawn into a quest to save the world.” It’s the launch of a major new series, released in hardcover by DAW in August. Here’s all the details.

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Forbidden Magic, Murder, and Disco: The Carter Archives by Dan Stout

Forbidden Magic, Murder, and Disco: The Carter Archives by Dan Stout

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Dan Stout’s The Carter Archives: Titanshade, Titan Day, and Titan Song (DAW, 2019-21). Covers by Chris McGrath

Whenever an author wraps up a trilogy, we bake a cake in the Black Gate offices.

But what if it’s not actually, like, a trilogy? What if the third book is just a rest stop on a long and exciting journey toward five books? Or seven? Or, Wheel-of-Time like, a stupendous 12 volumes (or 14, or whatever the heck it is)?? If it’s not clear should we bake, or not bake?

Ha! You’re right, of course. Like we’d let nuance like that get in the way of cake. Fire up the oven, lads.

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Explore Jack Vance’s Rich and Dangerous Universe in The Gaean Reach from Pelgrane Press

Explore Jack Vance’s Rich and Dangerous Universe in The Gaean Reach from Pelgrane Press

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The Gaean Reach and The Gaean Reach Gazetteer (Pelgrane Press, 2014). Covers by Chris Huth

The great Jack Vance doesn’t get a lot of love from role players. Despite his huge influence on the field (Gygax based the fundamental cast-and-forget spellcasting system of Dungeons and Dragons on the Vancian magic system the author developed for his Dying Earth tales, just as an example), there aren’t a lot of ways to use dice to explore the wonderful worlds Vance created.

Twenty years ago Pelgrane Press released The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game by Robin D. Laws, which went a long to rectifying this artistic injustice. More recently Laws and Pelgrane Press took the versatile Gumshoe System, designed for running investigative games like Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars, and used it as the basis for The Gaean Reach, a science fiction RPG set in the lusciously detailed setting for much of Vance’s best science fiction, including The Demon Princes novels, the Cadwal Chronicles, the Alastor Cluster trilogy, and the Ports of Call novels.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Robert Silverberg

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Robert Silverberg

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The Best of Robert Silverberg (Pocket Books, February 1976). Cover by Alan Magee

Recently James McGlothlin wrapped up an ambitious multi-year review project at Black Gate, reading each of the 23 volumes in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series from the 70s, including The Best of Fritz Leiber, Edmond Hamilton, John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, C.L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and over a dozen others. Over the years many of our contributors have shared their love for these seminal volumes, including Ryan Harvey, Jason McGregor, and others.

Del Rey wasn’t the only publisher to pick up on the idea of promoting authors in their catalog with Best of volumes, however. Between 1976 and 1980 Pocket Books produced nearly a dozen weightily collections showcasing their own impressive stable of SF authors, including Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Harry Harrison, John Sladek, Keith Laumer, Damon Knight, Barry N. Malzberg, Mack Reynolds, and Walter M. Miller. Pocket (and others) did a splendid job keeping these fine books in print over the years, sometimes freshening up the covers in the process.

One of my favorites in the set is The Best of Robert Silverberg (1976), published no less than half a dozen times over the next decade by five different publishers. It’s a terrific volume that’s still easy to find to today.

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The Controversy over Nebula Awards Showcase 55, edited by Catherynne M. Valente

The Controversy over Nebula Awards Showcase 55, edited by Catherynne M. Valente

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Nebula Awards Showcase 55 (SFWA, August 2021). Cover by Lauren Raye Snow

I’m hearing some grousing about the latest Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by the distinguished Catherynne M. Valente.

This is the 55th volume in the long-running series, and the second to be published directly by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. As is customary, it contains the complete Nebula award-winning stories, as selected by that august body, as well as a tasty selection of the other nominees, as selected at the whim of the editor.

Well — not exactly. And that seems to be the crux of the problem. For the first time I can remember, the Nebula Awards Showcase contains only one of the winners from last year, A. T. Greenblatt’s short story “Give the Family My Love,” originally published in Clarkesworld. All the others — including the winners in novelette, novella, and novel category — are represented only by brief excerpts.

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Future Treasures: Sword & Planet edited by Christopher Ruocchio

Future Treasures: Sword & Planet edited by Christopher Ruocchio

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Sword & Planet (Baen Books, December 21, 2021). Cover by Kieran Yanner

Sword & Planet is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. Jason M Waltz and Fletcher Vredenburgh edited the fine The Lost Empire of Sol just this year, and even George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois dabbled recently with the genre in the acclaimed S&P anthologies Old Mars and Old Venus. Inspired by all this love for classic space fantasy, Howard Andrew Jones and I (under my ‘Todd McAulty’ moniker) chatted happily about Five Classic Sword-and-Planet Sagas over at Tor.com a while back.

Christopher Ruocchio, co-editor of Star Destroyers and Space Pioneers, presents his latest big anthology this month, and it looks like a treat. Sword & Planet has stories by Tim Akers, Susan R. Matthews, D.J. Butler, Jody Lynn Nye, Simon R. Green, Christopher Ruocchio, and many others. Weighing in at a generous 352 pages, it lands in less than two weeks — just in time for your last-minute holiday shopping.

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New Treasures: Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter

New Treasures: Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter

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Activation Degradation (Harper Voyager, September 2021)

Marina J. Lostetter is the author of the acclaimed Noumenon space opera series, and the fantasy novel The Helm of Midnight, released just this past April. She doesn’t appear interested in just soaking up the glory of those accomplishments, however — her next novel (and her second this year) arrived in September. Activation Degradation features a spunky robot hero in a fast-paced tale of alien invasion in high orbit over Jupiter, one with plenty of twists and turns along the way.

The Suspected Bibliophile calls it “Murderbot mixed with first contact with a heavy dash of body horror… from there it’s its very own being, filled with the horrors of space, the horrors of humanity, and the rising and falling implications of the reverberations of the past continuing to slam dunk on the present.” That definitely sounds like something I need.

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Watch the Windycon Sword & Sorcery Panel with Mike Penkas, David C. Smith, Adrian Simmons, and John O’Neill

Watch the Windycon Sword & Sorcery Panel with Mike Penkas, David C. Smith, Adrian Simmons, and John O’Neill

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Mike Penkas moderates the Sword & Sorcery panel at Windycon 47

Windycon 47 was held in Lombard, IL from November 12-14. I was a guest of the convention, with a reading and several panels, and it was an absolute delight to attend an in-person convention again. Carlos Hernandez was the Author Guest of Honor, and his wife Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney (former Managing Editor of Black Gate) was the Poetry G.O.H. In addition to their other activities, the two conducted a public demo of their new card-based role playing game Negocios Infernales, and it was a ton of fun to participate. It was also great to meet up with so many other friends of BG, including Rich Horton, Steven H. Silver, Arin Komins, Rich Warren, Tina Jens, Brendan Detzner, Richard Chwedyk, and many others.

But the highlight of the convention for me was Sunday’s Sword & Sorcery panel, a lively discussion of S&S past and present. Michael Penkas moderated, and the speakers were Adrian Simmons (distinguished editor of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly magazine), author David C. Smith (Red Sonja, Oron, Coven House, and Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography), and yours truly.

The discussion ranged far and wide — the golden age of the S&S in the pulps, Sword & Soul, Howard Andrew Jones’ groundbreaking Hanuvar stories, the work of James Enge, the Red Sonja comics of the 70s, the artist Frank Thorne, S&S in video games and RPGs, the new S&S boom in magazines like Tales From the Magician’s Skull and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Andre Norton and The Beastmaster, and much more. The SMOF masters of Windycon recorded the entire thing, and you can listen to it in its entirety here (the panel kicks off right around the 2:04:00 mark).

Vintage Treasures: High Tension by Dean Ing

Vintage Treasures: High Tension by Dean Ing

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High Tension (Ace Books, 1982). Cover by Walter Velez

Dean Ing was a staple in James Baen’s paperback magazines of the late seventies, Destinies (eleven volumes from Ace Books, 1978-1981) and the copycat series Baen kicked off after he left Ace to found Baen Books, Far Frontiers (seven issues, 1985-86). I also saw Ing’s name semi-regularly in Analog and OMNI around the same time. He produced four collections: Anasazi (1980), a set of three connected tales of first contact with a group of surprisingly violent aliens stranded in west Texas in near future 1996; High Tension (1982); Firefight 2000 (1987), later re-released in 2000 as Firefight Y2K, in an attempt to stay cool; and the linked story cycle The Rackham Files (2004).

Ing was an academic with a military background, and that was definitely reflected in his fiction. He served as an interceptor crew chief in the United States Air Force, and he became an aerospace engineer, and eventually a university professor with a doctorate in communications theory. His fiction captured a lot of the public anxieties towards rapidly-advancing technology, especially weapons tech, including his 1989 New York Times bestseller, The Ransom of Black Stealth One.

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