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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Mist-Torn Witches

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Mist-Torn Witches

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The Mist-Torn Witches15808272
by Barb Hendee
Roc (336 pages, mass market first edition May 7, 2013, $7.99)

The Mist-Torn Witches isn’t exactly the novel I wanted, but it fits into a category of novel I’d like to see more of. It’s modest in the best senses of the word: Focused on a handful of characters, limited to a single setting (a prince’s castle), and with a tightly focused plot, centered around a magically-enhanced murder investigation. It also manages to be relatively light in pacing and tone, something I’d like to see more of in a market seemingly saturated with the gruesome, grim, and gut-splattered.

Orphaned sisters Celine and Amelie are a likable pair. Celine was trained my her mother as an apothecary, but makes most of her income by pretending to have inherited her mother’s powers as a seer and distributing invented fortunes, while Amelie is an armed-and-dangerous tomboy who serves as the duo’s muscle. They’re forced to flee their rural home when Celine, for the first time, has a truly prophetic vision. Unfortunately for her, that vision is of local ruler Sub-Prince Damek murdering his betrothed after the wedding, which drives Celine to warn the girl away from marrying him.  Celine and Amelie are forced to seek refuge with Damek’s younger brother, Anton, and his brave guard captain, Jaromir.

Anton is a just ruler, and his people are happy, but not all is well within the walls of his castle. Young women are being murdered under mysterious circumstances, their bodies turning up as withered husks. Anton offers the sisters a deal: Use Celine’s newfound powers of true prophecy to find the killer and they’ll be rewarded with an apothecary shop inside his walls. Fail, and they’ll be turned out to make their way alone, vulnerable to the wrath of Sub-Prince Damek.

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D.B. Jackson Interviews Ethan Kaille, Thieftaker

D.B. Jackson Interviews Ethan Kaille, Thieftaker

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thieftakerToday I have the pleasure of publishing an interview I’ve had with Ethan Kaille, one of Boston’s leading thieftakers.

Welcome, Mr. Kaille, to my humble office, and thank you for taking time to speak with Black Gate. Please begin by introducing yourself to our readers. Who is Ethan Kaille?

I am no one of consequence, really.  I work in Boston as a thieftaker — for a negotiated fee, I recover property that has been stolen, and return it to its rightful owner.

Surely there is more to your life than thieftaking. What did you do before you began to work in your current profession?

[Long pause.]  I don’t usually like to speak of it, but if you must know, I was a prisoner. Years ago, as a young, foolish man, I took part in a mutiny aboard a ship called the Ruby Blade.  When the mutiny failed, I was placed in the brig, and eventually was tried and convicted.  The Admiralty Court spared my life, but sentenced me to fourteen years at labor on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean.

And before all of that, I was a sailor in the British navy, just like my father before me, and his father before him.  I enlisted during the War of the Austrian Succession and fought at Toulon as a crewman aboard the HMS Stirling Castle.

When was the first time that you became aware of your powers as a conjurer?

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013 Edition

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013 Edition

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grunge border and backgroundWell, look at that. My favorite Year’s Best anthology has arrived — and earlier than I expected.

This is the fifth volume of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. Rich did a handful of volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s Best SF before combining them into one fat mega-volume starting in 2009. I much prefer these generously-sized tomes. They rest nicely in my lap, and pin me to my reading chair.

This year, Rich selects thirty-three short stories and novelettes from a wide range of magazines — Analog, Asimov’s SF, Interzone,, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Eclipse Online, Electric Velocipede, Tin House, and others — as well as anthologies, including The Future is Japanese, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and Robots: The New A.I.

His contributors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Linda Nagata, Jay Lake, Kelly Link, Robert Charles Wilson , Genevieve Valentine, Elizabeth Bear, Aliette de Bodard, Robert Reed, Christopher Rowe, Naomi Kritzer, Michael Blumlein, Catherynne M. Valente, Lavie Tidhar, and many others.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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July/August Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

July/August Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

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Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction July August 2013Pretty sedate cover on the latest F&SF. Especially when you consider recent covers have featured deadly sea creatures, dragons, and floating eyeballs. But hey – magical cats are a time-honored tradition in American fantasy, so who am I to judge?

Colleen Chen at Tangent Online finds lots to like about this issue’s cover story, “The Color of Sand” by KJ Kabza, magical cats and all:

I always have high expectations when reading F&SF, but I found this issue particularly delightful. Much of it read like a selection of folk and fairy tales, complete with talking animals and legendary folk, interspersed with a couple of science fiction stories and a dash of horror for variety.

“The Color of Sand” by KJ Kabza is a whimsical tale of a five-year-old boy named Catch who lives on the edge of the dunes with his mother and his only neighbor, a talking sandcat named Bone. Catch and his mother, who pick up mysterious colorful pebble-like objects on the beach to trade and sell, discover one day that the objects, called refulgium, are magic. Catch swallows a red one and becomes a giant. Guided by Bone, he and his mother embark on a journey along the coast to the perilous Final Atoll to seek a black refulgium that will return him to normal size.

This story was such a pleasure to read. It’s smart and funny enough to appeal to adults but would also enrapture children of any age.

The issue also contains fiction by Eleanor Arnason, Tim Sullivan, Adam Rakunas, Chen Qiufan, Harry R. Campion, and many others. In a startling development, there is no contribution from Albert E. Cowdrey this issue – for the first time in two years.

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Professor Jameson’s Space Adventures, or Zoromes Make the Happiest Cyborgs

Professor Jameson’s Space Adventures, or Zoromes Make the Happiest Cyborgs

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Amazing Stories April 1938-smallI first ran across Neil R. Jones’s Prof. Jameson stories in junior high while reading Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age — which, by the way, is one of my favorite anthologies.

Neil R. Jones’s first Prof. Jameson adventure appeared in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. In this first story, “The Jameson Satellite,” Mr. Jones gives us all the background information that we’ll ever need to follow this wonderful over-the-top space adventures of Professor Jameson and his Machine Men colleagues, the Zoromes!

Within the first few pages, we learn that Professor Jameson of the 20th century had a horrible revulsion against being buried and subsequently becoming worm food after his death. So, to ease his mind, he arranged to have his body placed in a hermetically sealed rocket after his death and then launched into orbit around the Earth.

Following me so far? Good. So now we skip ahead 40,000,000 years to find the Professor’s orbiting Tupperware bowl still circling a now-dead Earth, which is itself orbiting a dying Sun which has cooled off and become a Red Giant (we now figure that this’ll actually take somewhere around 5 billion years to happen). So far so good? Good!

We then meet a group of intergalactic explorers who are at this very moment investigating our dying solar system. Their sensors pick up a metallic object orbiting the Earth.

Now of course the reader knows immediately what the object actually is. When they finally approach Earth and discover Prof. Challenger’s coffin-ship, they take it aboard their own greatly larger ship.

It turns out that the Zoromes aren’t your run-of-the-mill extra-terrestrial explorers. Nope, they are actually cyborgs! The Zoromes wanted dearly to explore the galaxy, but knew their mortal bodies wouldn’t survive a journey that might entail thousands of years, so they traded flesh and bone for metal and circuitry. Makes sense to me.

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Mask of the Macabre by David Haynes

Mask of the Macabre by David Haynes

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Mask of the Macabre by David HaynesLooking for some new horror, but sick of zombie apocalypses, vampire/werewolf boyfriends, philosophic serial killers, and all those ghost children? Something fresh? Or something that pulls from an older tradition? David Haynes’s Mask of the Macabre is available for ninety-nine cents.

This ebook is broken down into four interconnected stories set in 1860s England. The style borrows more from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than Saw or The Walking Dead. The first story in the series, “Mask of the Macabre,” concerns a decadent patron of a decadent theatre whose life is touched unexpectedly by a string of mutilations that predates the Ripper murders by a quarter century. The second story, “Doctor Harvey,” delves into the background of a psychiatrist who has no business judging the sanity of others. “Memento Mori” concerns an early photographer who specializes in capturing the images of the recently deceased, whose latest commission is even grislier than mere corpses. Finally, “A New Costume” wraps up the series, explaining some mysteries of how the three previous stories are inter-connected, as well as leaving hints to future horrors that await those who continue with the series.

This is the first in a series of e-novelettes by David Haynes. If you want to learn more about the author, check out his website.

Michael Penkas has been writing for years. His first collection of stories, Dead Boys, is available through Amazon and Smashwords.

Check Out the Humble ebook Bundle: Pay What You Want for 6 Great Books

Check Out the Humble ebook Bundle: Pay What You Want for 6 Great Books

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boneshaker3I had a look at the Humble ebook Bundle today, and was very impressed.

I’ve heard rumblings about this Humble thing for a while, but to be honest I never looked into it. They sold video game and music bundles, or something, on a “pay-what-you-want” basis, raising over $13.5 million for charity. That’s cool. You go, humble peeps.

But now they’re offering four great SF and fantasy titles, at a price you set yourself, for the next nine days. Suddenly I’m at lot more interested. The titles are:

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson
Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold

Yes, you get to decide what price you’re willing to pay for this awesome book bundle. Even if it’s only 1 cent, you cheap bastard. The titles are DRM-free, and available in multiple formats for most e-readers, including Kindle and iPad. You even get to choose where your money goes, allocating a portion (or all) of your payment the Electric Frontier Foundation, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, or Child’s Play Charity.

This is the second book promotion these Humble geniuses have strung together. As of press time, over 35,000 bundles have been sold, which is pretty darned amazing. The site tracks the average donation amount ($9.55 last time I checked), which lets you know just how cheap you really are — and also makes it possible to offer a special premium of two additional titles for those willing to pay more that. Those titles are:

The Last Unicorn: Deluxe Edition by Peter Beagle
Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton

Yeah, that’s six great titles for less than ten bucks. That’s a steal. Check it out here.

Weird of Oz Dissects a Zombie!

Weird of Oz Dissects a Zombie!

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world war zNow that zombie apocalypse has gotten its most mainstream imprimatur with a big-budget summer blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, I thought I’d take a break from my reading of Arak comic books this week to chime in on the trend. I’ll also revisit and share my original review of the book on which Pitt’s new star vehicle is “based” (and, for those of you who have read World War Z, you’ll know why I put that word in quotes).

I’ve been a fan of zombie films since I was a teen (back in the ‘80s, Barbara Mandrell sang, “I was country when country wasn’t cool”; I guess I could say much the same thing about zombies), ushered into the land of the undead by late-night viewings of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and White Zombie (1932, starring Bela Lugosi, and that’s way old-school).

Zombies are big business these days, the virus finding new vectors to infect untapped audiences and turn them into fans. This unprecedented outbreak began in the early years of the new century with some very well-done and popular films including 28 Days Later (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004 remake) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). Romero himself, the granddaddy of the whole genre, returned with Land of the Dead (2005) and a couple of subsequent installments in his ever-expanding zombie mythos.

walking deadMore recently, the comic-book series The Walking Dead became a big hit among readers, then went on to be adapted into the AMC series that is currently one of the most popular shows on cable television. Zombie novels have become so ubiquitous, they now constitute their own sub-genre, like vampire or werewolf novels. You might also say zombies have now “jumped the shark,” following the lead of Twilight into teen romance territory (Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, as well as, apparently, a slew of others in this latest fad. I haven’t read any of these, but I can only imagine: “Is that part of your lower intestine leaking from your abdomen, or are you just happy to see me?”).

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King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

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41EQ75FAXGLThe legend of King Arthur has become one of literature’s greatest footballs, and it gets punted hither and yon with often quite careless abandon. Legions of celluloid spinoffs litter the vaults of Netflix, and on the printed page, one can select from heavyweights like Mallory, White, or Steinbeck to enjoy your Age of Chivalry fix.

Flying well under the radar is one of the twentieth century’s best known metafictional writers, Donald Barthelme. His story collections, including City Lights and Sixty Stories, are classics of the form, endlessly inventive, cartwheeling-freewheeling-Catherine wheeling lunacies that manage nonetheless to pack a surprising emotional punch.

Most of Barthelme’s output centered on short fiction, but every so often he ventured into the realm of the novel, as with his knowing, nudge-nudge/wink-wink Snow White and his unjustly forgotten Arthurian outing, The King.

Released by Harper & Row in 1990 and featuring the evocative, jutting illustrations of Barry Moser, The King is an anachronistic treat from start to finish, and hilarious besides.

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New Treasures: Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy

New Treasures: Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy

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Fearsome Journeys The New Solaris Book of FantasyI have to admit I’ve been a bit frustrated with Ian Whates’s recent anthologies from Solaris: Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (2011), and the brand new Solaris Rising 2 (March 2013).

Oh, they’re fine anthologies. Whates is establishing himself as an editor with a keen eye for talent, and he’s attracted some terrific names.

But that’s a lot of science fiction. Nothing wrong with science fiction but… what about fantasy? Come on Solaris — where’s the love?

Apparently, it was in the mail. Last month it arrived in the form of Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy, edited by uber-editor Jonathan Strahan.

Fearsome Journeys is the first volume in a new series of fantasy anthologies featuring all-original fiction. Authors in the first volume include Ellen Klages, Trudi Canavan, Elizabeth Bear, Daniel Abraham, Kate Elliott, Saladin Ahmed, Glen Cook, Scott Lynch, Ellen Kushner & Ysabeau Wilce, Jeffrey Ford, Robert Redick and KJ Parker.

That’s a damned impressive line-up. All is forgiven, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy was edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by Solaris on May 28, 2013. It is 416 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. Find out more at the Solaris website.

See all of our recent New Treasures articles here.