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“A Pleasure to Read. Strongly recommended” — Tangent Online on “Disciple”

“A Pleasure to Read. Strongly recommended” — Tangent Online on “Disciple”

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Emily MahLouis West at Tangent Online reviews Emily Mah’s adventure fantasy short story, published here on Sunday, March 30:

Emily Mah’s “Disciple” is a wonderfully complicated tale about a mage hunter who is herself a mage. The world hates mages, but only the Disciples who had ruled for centuries before being overthrown. Now the king and the people hunt them, executing all they find. Yet free mages, although ignored by the authorities, are uncontrolled and potentially destructive. Disciples hunt and destroy free mages to protect the world and to protect their own craft…

Dina runs the tavern for a small fisherman’s town, and she’s a Disciple. But she’s tortured by her lack of conscience, unable to feel remorse for the thousands of free mages she’s destroyed over the decades. She’s tasked with killing, or converting, Lana, a local young woman who has begun to show a strong aptitude for magic…

Emily Mah’s first sale to us was “The River People” in Black Gate 15. You can read Louis’s complete review here.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, Aaron Bradford Starr, Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, E.E. Knight, Jason E. Thummel, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“Disciple” is a complete 6,000-word short story of adventure fantasy. It is offered at no cost. Read the complete story here.

New Treasures: Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal

New Treasures: Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Without a SummerI attended the launch party for Mary Robinette Kowal’s Without a Summer here in Chicago this week. I don’t get to go to many launch parties — I  tend to eat all the hors d’oeuvres, and word gets around.

The venue was fabulous, the company and conversation were marvelous, and everyone pretended not to notice when I pocketed the leftover cheese. Best of all, my review copy of Without a Summer had just arrived, and Mary told me it was the first copy she had ever autographed. (She wrote a tidy “#1” and “Thanks for being my first” on the title page, which is the kind of thing which makes up for every party you’ve ever missed in your life.)

Without a Summer is the third novel in the Glamourist Histories, which began with the Nebula nominees Shades of Milk and Honey and Glamour in Glass.

Regency pair Jane and Vincent Ellsworth go to Long Parkmeade to spend time with Jane’s family, but quickly turn restless. The year is unseasonably cold. No one wants to be outside and Mr. Ellsworth is concerned by the harvest, since a bad one may imperil Melody’s dowry. And Melody has concerns of her own, given the inadequate selection of eligible bachelors. When Jane and Vincent receive a commission from a prominent family in London, they decide to take it, and take Melody with them. They hope the change of scenery will do her good and her marriage prospects — and mood — will be brighter in London.

Once there, talk is of nothing but the crop failures caused by the cold and increased unemployment of the coldmongers, which have provoked riots in several cities to the north. With each passing day, it’s more difficult to avoid getting embroiled in the intrigue, none of which really helps Melody’s chances for romance. It’s not long before Jane and Vincent realize that in addition to getting Melody to the church on time, they must take on one small task: solving a crisis of international proportions.

Without a Summer was published by Tor Books on April 2, 2013. It is 364 pages in hardcover, priced at $24.99 ($11.99 for the digital edition). Josh Wimmer reviewed the first book in the series, Shades of Milk and Honey, here.

Self-published Book Review: Broken Shell Island by Dalya Moon

Self-published Book Review: Broken Shell Island by Dalya Moon

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I don’t make much effort to make these reviews spoiler-free, but I think this one may have more spoilers than usual. So be warned.

All Opal Button wanted for her birthday was a bike. Instead, her grandfather gave her his old suitcase and a one-way trip to live with his sister on Broken Shell Island. Opal had always assumed that the island was imaginary, as it was the setting of a series of children’s books written by her grandfather’s friend, Flora Fritz. On what real island could goats talk and could real stairs and doorways be drawn with chalk? It sure seems real enough when she arrives by magic suitcase, though.

She’s not the only one arriving at the island that day. The local taxman’s mail-order bride is also supposed to be coming, thus setting up what promises to be an amusing tale of mistaken identity, at least until the body of the murdered fiancée is found. But Broken Shell Island doesn’t turn into a murder mystery either (although the mystery of who killed Svetlana is an important part of the story).

At heart, Broken Shell Island is a coming of age story for Opal. It even includes a heroic quest. Of course, the original quest–to fetch bluebeeswax to polish her great aunt’s floor–gets sidetracked when her guide, a boy her age named Peter, is blinded by a snakebite. Then they’re thrown even further off course by the appearance of a daemon, a creature of the underworld summoned by the use of dark magic. This leads directly to a visit to the witches of West Shore, who aren’t really happy to see them. The witches aren’t evil (mostly), and some of them were friendly to Opal near the beginning of the book, but they do have some dark secrets, one of which sends Opal back to the beginning to try it all again. No, there’s no time loop, but Opal does end up pretty much retracing her steps, this time sans Peter, but with the help of the sheriff and the taxman, Edwin, until she manages to return to the West Shore and try again. One would think this redo would be annoying, but it actually works out fairly well. First, because the author picks up the pace and gets through the sites much more quickly, and second, because things have changed since the first time Opal visited, and more is revealed with each place revisited.

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Can You Hear Me Up There?

Can You Hear Me Up There?

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The Elizabethan World PictureWhat’s the difference between a catfish and a lawyer? One’s an ugly, scum-sucking bottom feeder, and the other is a fish.

An old joke, but a good one. As a joke, it works because of the shock, the unexpected conclusion. As an insult, it works because of a little concept called hierarchy.

Anyone who’s ever studied Shakespeare has read a book called The Elizabethan World Picture. It’s a great book, and essentially describes how people thought about the world back in Shakespeare’s day. I’d highly recommend reading it for yourself, but if I can sum it up quickly for you, it goes like this: up = good, down = bad.

What does that mean? Think it through: everything that’s high in the sky, you know, where the gods live, is good, and the higher the better. So, heaven, the sun, light itself, and so on. Everything that’s lower down is bad, and the lower it is, the worse it is. So, dirt, darkness, etc. Everything, including people, has a place on this scale. There’s a reason it’s the white knight who charges to the rescue, and that Goths dress in black. (I dress in black myself, so no mail please). Even people who’ve never watched a western know what it means to be a white hat.

This hierarchy permeates everything we do and think, everything we write and create – at least here in the western world. And very often without our being aware of it.

Hierarchy is the reason the Greek gods live on Olympus (highest mountain in Greece) and it’s the reason that Zeus (god of sky, thunder, etc.) is the ruler of said gods, and not Poseidon or Hades. It’s why kings had a divine right to rule, (they’re on top of the human hierarchy), and it’s why cleanliness is next to godliness – that is, it’s how we know cleanliness is a good thing.

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Roger Ebert, June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013

Roger Ebert, June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013

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The Best of XeroHere in Chicago, the airwaves and local newspapers are thick with commentary about the life of Roger Ebert, who died of cancer yesterday at the age of 70.

Roger Ebert was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942 and began writing for the News-Gazette at age 15, covering high school sports. While at the University of Illinois, he became a reporter for The Daily Illini in Urbana, eventually becoming editor in his senior year. I lived in Urbana for four years while completing my Ph.D, from 1987-1991, and can attest to the mark he left on the city. Ebertfest, the annual film fest he started in Champaign-Urbana in 1998, continues to this day.

Roger Ebert won renown primarily as the nation’s preeminent film critic, starting at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967. His columns were syndicated in more than 200 newspapers, and he published more than 20 books and dozens of collections of reviews. His TV show Sneak Previews, co-hosted with Gene Siskel, was nationally distributed beginning in 1978. He became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1975.

But Ebert left his mark on the genre as well, starting with early fanzines. A life-long science fiction fan, he wrote for some of the most famous SF fanzines of the 60s and 70s, including Pat and Dick Lupoff’s Xero. He provided the introduction to The Best of Xero, the 2005 Tachyon collection gathering many of its best articles (including some of his).

Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, and underwent multiple surgeries. On July 1, 2006, his carotid artery burst and he narrowly escaped death. He lost the ability to speak, and to eat or drink, taking all nutrition through a feeding tube. But he continued to write. He died on April 4th at the age of 70; the last sentence on his final blog entry, two days before he died, read “So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.”

Perhaps the best way to remember him is to sample his legendary wit. Several blogs have collected some of his finest critiques, including BuzzFeed’s Roger Ebert’s 20 Most Epic Movie Pans, and Inquisitr’s Our 20 Favorite Ebert Quotes. He will be missed.

An Open Letter from Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books

An Open Letter from Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books

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Jeremy LassenThere’s been a great deal of debate among authors and editors over this week’s announcement from Night Shade Books regarding a sale to avoid bankruptcy.

SFWA sent an advisory note to members, advising them that the settlement is “likely in the best interest” of writers. Respected authors such as Michael Stackpole strongly disagreed, pointing out that the contracts offered by Skyhorse/Start cut ebook royalties in half and demand audio and second serial rights — whether or not NSB originally purchased them.

It’s a painful situation for all involved. For readers anxious to see Night Shade’s future releases — including several volumes of popular ongoing series — this sale is the only way to avoid the rights to those titles ending up in bankruptcy court (where the majority may well simply die).

There’s no question that Night Shade made mistakes and burned a lot of bridges over the past few years, and that this latest unpleasantness has brought out more than a few writers with an axe to grind. As a publisher who ran a fantasy magazine as a labor of love for over a decade, until the mounting losses simply became too great to bear, I know well the kind of pain owners Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen are experiencing now. Night Shade was one of the most dynamic and exciting publishers in the genre, willing to take extraordinary risks buying and promoting work from many new writers, and it’s undoubtedly painful to see so many of those writers apparently delighted to dance on their corpse.

Jeremy Lassen has written an open letter to his writers, and the industry at large, articulating just what’s at stake with this offer from Skyhorse and Start. The complete text of Jeremy’s letter follows.

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P.G. Sturges Delivers His Best Yet

P.G. Sturges Delivers His Best Yet

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angelgatetribulationspbkAngel’s Gate is the third entry in P. G. Sturges’s award-winning Shortcut Man hardboiled mystery series. The book sat on my night stand untouched for a week or so as I couldn’t shake the suspicion that it would mark the descent into formula that befalls most series. It would still be amusing and Sturges’s prose would still be engaging, but it would be the inevitable come down after the joy and freshness of the first two titles.

Early on in the book, there is a sequence where Dick Henry, the Shortcut Man, is hired by a client to find her sister who came out to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune ten years before and has since fallen off the map. It’s a familiar scene that immediately recalls Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, likewise a hardboiled mystery about Hollywood scandal and hypocrisy. That book was Chandler’s fifth and, while still essential reading, it lacks the freshness and vitality of his early Philip Marlowe mysteries.

I was certain I would feel the same way about Angel’s Gate. Happily, I was dead wrong.

The premise this time revolves around a highly successful movie director who disfigures and tortures a starlet during a drug-fueled sex romp and the lengths his handlers are willing to go to protect the director’s reputation and prevent bad publicity coming down upon his current production. Complicating matters is the fact that the starlet is one of a stable of nearly thirty nubile women that the reclusive and highly idiosyncratic movie mogul Howard Hogue has selected as his personal concubines. Hogue doesn’t share his women. Hogue is also the director’s producer. Early on, Sturges establishes the madness of big studio Hollywood as a house of cards just waiting for the Shortcut Man to blow it down.

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Art of the Genre: The Joy and Pain of Kickstarter [and How Backed Projects Still Fail]

Art of the Genre: The Joy and Pain of Kickstarter [and How Backed Projects Still Fail]

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The first Kickstarter success, and it was a true joy!
The first Kickstarter success, and it was a true joy!

In early November 2011, I attended World Fantasy Con in San Diego with John O’Neill and the Black Gate crew. It was a truly eye-opening experience for the ‘writer me’ as I’d attended many conventions in my day, but nothing that was so cloistered and dedicated specifically to the art of writing.

I well remember sitting in my room after the first day of listening to readings and thinking to myself, ‘Holy Crap, you absolutely C-A-N’-T do this!’ [Seriously, just listen to Claire Cooney recite any of her works from memory and tremble beneath the power of a truly gifted writer].

After I got home from the convention, I crawled into bed for three days and didn’t come out again because for the first time in my life I felt the power of ‘real’ writers and how far I had to go to reach the level of their talent.

When I finally emerged from my cocoon of despair, I clicked on Facebook and found a post from old time D&D artist Jeff Dee concerning something he called Kickstarter. It was a curious thing, this Kickstarter platform, and the more I researched it, the more I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’m not Claire Cooney, but I bet I can get a book made anyway.’

At the same time, John O’Neill, our fearless leader at Black Gate, was thinking of creating his own line of novels from Black Gate under the power of the current business model he’d used to help found the magazine, namely his own pocket venture capital. I asked him to try Kickstarter and he declined, so I bet him, in no uncertain terms, that no matter what he managed to do with his book line at Black Gate, that using Kickstarter I would outsell him by a multiple of 10 and produce twice as many original books as he could.

Thus began 2012, something I like to call ‘The Year of Kickstarter’. Not only had I discovered this platform, now three years old in the marketplace and ready to tip the balance of acceptability, but so had EVERYONE else.

By February of 2012, Kickstarter money contribution records were falling almost weekly in every category imaginable, especially in computer games. Funding was surging to unforeseen levels with millions of dollars going to video games, art books, albums, miniatures, you name it.

I watched, I studied, and I saw the evolution taking place right before my eyes, but in so doing I also caught the wave and road with it on my new publishing company I’d affectionately named Art of the Genre after this blog. By February, I’d managed my first successful Kickstarter, The Cursed Legion novel, with former AD&D art legend Jeff Easley.

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Goth Chick News: Conjuring a Good Old-Fashioned Scare

Goth Chick News: Conjuring a Good Old-Fashioned Scare

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image001Admittedly, I’m a complete sucker for ghost hunting shows.

Yes, they can be painfully cheesy; from Grant Wilson’s (Ghost Hunters – SciFi Channel) earnest takes to the camera while expounding on how blessed he is to be able to help tormented souls, to Zak Bagans’s (Ghost Adventures – Travel Channel) shameless dramatics, I love every one of them.

But here’s a question for those who’ve tuned in: did you ever wonder what would happen if just once something truly horrifying actually reached out and touched one of them?

It’s an amusing thought – there’s Zak asking the “ghost” if it would give a sign it can hear him and suddenly a full bodied apparition shows up, pokes him in the nose, and says, “Yeah, I’m standing right here you tool.”

And the next thing you know, Zak and the whole GA crew are “retired.”

Well apparently I’m not the only one who imagined something similar – only they’ve taken it several steps (miles?) further.

Director James Wan already has some pretty substantial horror “street-cred” as the mind behind Saw, Dead Silence and Insidious.  And as these films represent a more in-your-face kind of scare than generally appeals to me, I am really anticipating his latest outing.

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Night Shade Attempts to Avoid Bankruptcy with a Sale to Skyhorse Publishing

Night Shade Attempts to Avoid Bankruptcy with a Sale to Skyhorse Publishing

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Night Shade BooksWord has begun to spread this morning that Night Shade Books is in negotiations with Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy.

Night Shade has contacted authors to explain the situation, and excerpts from those letters have been posted online:

As you probably know, Night Shade Books has had a difficult time after the demise of Borders. We have reached a point where our current liabilities exceed our assets, and it is clear that, with our current contracts, sales, and financial position, we cannot continue to operate as an independent publisher. If we filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or liquidation, the rights to your books could be entangled in the courts for years as could past or current unpaid royalties or advances. However, we have found an alternative, which will result in authors getting paid everything they are due as well as finding a future home for their books, subject to the terms and conditions stated in this letter.

The deal is not yet finalized and, in fact, hinges on how many authors approve changes to their existing contracts.

Some, including Jeff VanderMeer, have asked the publisher to revert rights back to authors prior to declaring bankruptcy. That’s not likely to be an option however, as its existing publishing contracts are Night Shade’s most valuable asset. As Harry Connolly points out on his blog, bankruptcy courts generally frown on publishers who do that, and such revisions are routinely overruled in court during bankruptcy proceedings.

The loss of Night Shade would be a real blow to the field. Known for taking risks on new writers, they’ve also published some of the most celebrated authors in the genre, including Paolo Bacigalupi, Iain M. Banks, Martha Wells, Manly Wade Wellman, Greg Egan, Glen Cook, Kage Baker, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepard, and many others. But there have been omnibus signs for the past several years, including a deep sale last April, authors leaving their stable, and others. Publishers Weekly has more detail on the potential sale here; io9‘s report is here.