Black Gate

The omnibus editions of The Adventures of Vlad Taltos from Ace Books, collecting
the first seven volumes: The Book of Jhereg (1999), The Book of Taltos (2002), and
The Book of Athyra (2003). Covers by Stephen Hickamn, Kinuko Y. Craft, Ciruelo Cabral

Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels are unique in modern fantasy. They’re caper novels in which a supremely gifted assassin, Vlad Taltos, teams up with a group of like-minded companions (including pickpockets and vampires) to right wrongs, alter the course of destiny, and sometimes make a little coin. The odds are always against them, and things don’t always go their way, but Vlad, our protagonist and narrator, has a wry and self-deprecating sense of humor that makes the books highly entertaining. There are plenty of great reviews out there I could point you to, but one of my favorites is this concise one-paragraph bit from Amazon reviewer Wizard’s Apprentice:

Vlad is a human in a city dominated by eight-foot Dragaerans, who never have to shave and live to be a thousand. It’s their turf, and their rules, and they routinely conquer and abuse “Easterners” like Vlad. He’s not the type to take this, so he becomes a “Jhereg” assassin, working up the ranks of a criminal syndicate until he comes to boss dozens of Dragaerans around, befriending some and terrorizing others. He adopts a new-hatched mini-dragon or jhereg, finding that the cat-sized beast has a humanlike intelligence and a nasty sense of humor, and wins a grudging respect from the dominant species. All his friends are 900 years old, or undead vampires, or legendary thieves; but don’t hold it against them. Vlad solves mysteries and evades death, and cooks fiery fungus-laced omelets, in a bizarre semi-alien milieu. He finds love. He sharpens knives. He gloomily bandages his jhereg bites. He’d be right at home in a Zelazny novel, which is reason enough to buy this or any other Brust book.

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We’re continuing with our look at the extraordinary 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who passed away on May 24th. We started with The Wars of Vis trilogy and her acclaimed Tales From the Flat Earth, and today we turn to her four-volume saga, The Secret Books of Paradys, published in the US by The Overlook Press between 1990-1993, with a striking series of covers by Wayne Barlowe (above).

Matthew David Surridge wrote a fine summary of the entire series for us two years ago, and I doubt I could do a better job of summarizing them than he did:

The fictive city of Paradys itself seems to accrue layers of meaning and complexity like a recurring landscape in a lucid dream. Above all, the books are weird with the weirdness of nightmare; though written with incredible technical skill, it’s difficult to articulate a single overall theme to the books, though multiple meanings suggest themselves.

Paradys is a city in northern France, originally a Roman settlement based around the exoploitation of soon-played-out silver mines. It developed over time into a major city, with a cathedral and taverns and damned poets and all the appurtenances of decadent gothic romance. The various stories of Paradys take place in different eras of the city’s life, told from different perspectives, using different styles. They’re linked by certain patterns of imagery — notably the ambiguous symbol of the moon — and a concentration on colour: each book, or long story, has a certain colour which defines it, and all colour-references within that story will refer either to white, black, or that specific hue. I can only imagine how difficult that technique is, but it’s incredibly effective at building distinct and distinctive atmospheres…

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Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern is one of the most famous and bestselling science fantasy series of all time. All told there are sixteen novels, written between 1968 and 2006, the last two in collaboration with her son Todd.

The artist most closely associated with it is probably Michael Whelan, who was hired to paint the cover for the third novel, The White Dragon, published in June 1978. The White Dragon became the first bestseller in the series, and Whelan was hired by Ballantine to create new covers for the first two novels, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, late in 1978. He did a fine job, and was subsequently hired for the next four volumes in the series.

But I still admit a great fondness for the early 70s covers of the first two books (above), both painted by Gino D’Achille. Both books were Ballantine paperback originals. The covers are more whimsical and fairy-tale like, and speak to me of 1970s fantasy.

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We’re continuing with our look at the monumental 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who died last week. We started with The Wars of Vis trilogy, and today we continue with her most acclaimed fantasy series, Tales From the Flat Earth.

I say “most acclaimed” because — in addition to the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Mythopoeic, and Balrog award nominations these books have accumulated over the years — in the Comments section of her obituary, this series was called “the towering pinnacle” (by Joe Hoopman), “towering legend” (by John R. Fultz), “my faves” (by Arin Komins), and “engrossing” (by rrm). It’s a small sample of fandom, but a compelling one. In my experience, Black Gate readers know what they’re talking about.

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I had planned to look at a Ray Bradbury anthology as my Vintage Treasures post for tonight, but I set that aside when I learned about the unexpected death of Tanith Lee today. As I was preparing a brief obituary, I was struck by just how many novels she completed in her lifetime, and how little of her considerable output I’ve sampled over the years. I thought, if it’s okay with all of you, I’d deviate from our flight plan slightly to take a look at some of the marvelous books she left us.

To start with, I’d like to showcase the pairing of Lee with one of my favorite cover artists. Sanjulian painted the covers for the 1988 DAW editions of all three novels of The Wars of Vis: The Storm Lord, Anackire, and The White Serpent, a series which the publisher labeled a “best-selling epic of war torn-empires, alien gods, and a Witch race with the power to reshape a world…” Over her long career Lee has been blessed with some of the best cover artists in the business — including Michael Whelan, Carl Lundgren, Paul Lehr, Don Maitz, and many others — but she rarely did better than these three.

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