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A Fantasy City That Feels Alive: The Burnished City by Davinia Evans

A Fantasy City That Feels Alive: The Burnished City by Davinia Evans

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Notorious Sorcerer and Shadow Baron (Orbit, September 13, 2022,
and November 14, 2023). Cover Design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a groundswell of interest like I’ve witnessed for Notorious Sorcerer, Davinia Evans’ debut novel and the opening book in her Burnished City series. It didn’t get a lot of attention when it was released in trade paperback last year, but over the last twelve months I’ve seen a lot of discussion. Everyone is talking about this book.

The Book Nook says it’s “compelling… a remarkable and ambitious debut,” and Every Book a Doorway calls it “Dazzling… badass and honestly wondrous… the story never has a dull page.” Publishers Weekly labels it an “energetic epic… This is a charmer,” and Book Page doesn’t rein in their enthusiasm, saying it “deploys genre tropes with delirious glee and builds a rich and fascinating world.”

All this recent buzz is good timing, since the sequel, Shadow Baron, arrives next month, and that gives me just enough time to finish the first volume and get some hot cocoa ready in time for Book Two.

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Rogue Blades Entertainment re-unleashes Demons: A Clash of Steel Anthology

Rogue Blades Entertainment re-unleashes Demons: A Clash of Steel Anthology

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Rogue Blades Presents Demons: A Clash of Steel Anthology ISBN-13: 9798863079608 (print) ASIN: B0045Y1LMS (Kindle); Cover Artist: Johnney Perkins. Interior Graphics: M.D. Jackson

 

In 2010, Black Gate announced Rogue Blades Entertainment Conjures DEMONS. This October 2023, the third edition has been issued and with it a revamped Kindle version! The original Kindle edition lacked a functioning, linked Table of Contents, but that’s all brought up to modern standards. It is dedicated to Robert Mancebo, author for several Rogue Blade Entertainment anthologies, who sadly passed away in 2023.

Jason M Waltz is well known amongst adventure fiction readers, especially the Swords & Sorcery crowd. With his Rogue Blades Entertainment Books and associated Foundation, he’s brought us the epic Return of the Sword (BG review) and then Rage of the Behemoth, and Demons.  He’s edited/published a variety of other anthologies with themes of Weird Noir, Pirates, and Sword & Planet with Lost Empire of Sol (BG review), and splendid nonfiction like Writing Fantasy Heroes (BG review) and recently Robert E. Howard Changed My Life (BG review). He recently ran a successful Kickstarter for another anthology as spotlighted on BG: “Neither Beg Nor Yield – A Sword & Sorcery Anthology with Attitude.” As you await Neither Beg Nor Yield, you’ll want to revisit Demons.

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Let’s Found a New Species: Odd John by Olaf Stapledon

Let’s Found a New Species: Odd John by Olaf Stapledon

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Odd John (Beacon/Galaxy Science Fiction Novel #36, 1959). Cover by Robert Stanley

In 1963, in the early issues of X-Men, Stan Lee introduced the expression Homo superior into superhero comics. But the name had a history before then: It was coined in 1935 by Olaf Stapledon, a British philosopher and science fiction writer, in Odd John, the fictional biography of a young superhuman.

The book that established Stapledon’s reputation, Last and First Men, published in 1930, was certainly science fiction but can’t be considered a novel in any normal sense; its two-billion-year history of humanity’s future is presented almost entirely as historical narrative, with only a few paragraphs of dialogue. But Odd John is definitely a novel, with a protagonist, John Wainwright, and a viewpoint character who is, by necessity, an unreliable narrator, as he himself points out on the first page of the story.

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Vintage Treasures: This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

Vintage Treasures: This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

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This Immortal (Ace Books, September 1980). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Two weeks ago I dashed off a Vintage Treasures piece on Larry Niven’s first collection Neutron Star, the first I’d ever done on Niven, and it helped me realize that there are several other major writers sorely underrepresented in these pages. Near the top of that list is Roger Zelazny, one of the most important fantasists of the 20th Century, and the man behind much of the work that turned me into a lifelong science fiction reader.

So today I’d like to talk about This Immortal, Zelazny’s first novel, published as a paperback original in July 1966 by Ace Books. It was the work that cemented Zelazny’s reputation as one of the finest genre writers of his generation, and it tied with perhaps the most famous science novel of all time — Frank Herbert’s Dune — for SF’s highest honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
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Viy by Nikolai Gogol

Viy by Nikolai Gogol

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daguerreotype of Gogol

Viy is the colossal creation of the common folk’s imagination. The Little Russians (Ukrainians) use this name for the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids on his eyes reach all the way to the ground. This whole story is a folk legend. I did not want to change anything about it, so I am narrating it in almost the same simple form which I heard it.

Nikolai Gogol, footnote to “Viy“

None of that is true. There are no Slavic folkloric sources, Ukrainian or otherwise, describing a gnome king, let alone one with great, drooping eyelashes (The name Viy appears derived from the Ukrainian word for eyelash). Some have claimed a Serbian connection, but that appears to be false, as well. Nonetheless, Gogol’s story of a monk, a witch, and Viy has become so deeply embedded in Russian and Ukrainian culture that many people believe the terrible creature is a real part of those countries’ folklore.

Nikolai Gogol was one of the greatest Russian writers and simultaneously the greatest Ukrainian writer (though, he didn’t write in Ukrainian and both nations have fought over his legacy). Born in Sorochyntsi in 1809, a Cossack town between Kyiv and Kharkiv and over a hundred miles from each. He died in 1852 by starving himself to death during a period of extreme religious asceticism. Before he became famous for absurdist stories like “The Nose” or sharp-eyed satires like his play The Inspector General, he wrote a series of stories that drew on his youth in the Ukraine and its customs and legends. From St. Petersburg where he had moved and gained the friendship of such luminaries as Alexander Pushkin, he would write to his mother asking for descriptions and details about all manner of information on the Ukraine.  “Viy” is one of those early stories, first appearing in his 1835 collection, Migorod, alongside the Cossack epic, “Taras Bulba.”

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Future Treasures: The Queen of Days by Greta Kelly

Future Treasures: The Queen of Days by Greta Kelly

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The Queen of Days (Harper Voyager, October 24, 2023). Cover design by Richard L. Aquan

Greta Kelly is the author of the Warrior Witch duology (The Frozen Crown and The Seventh Queen, both from Harper Voyager). I’m hearing a lot of pre-release buzz about her latest, The Queen of Days, a fantasy heist tale released in hardcover in two weeks.

The Queen of Days is the tale of a lovable band of thieves hired to steal a statue during a religious celebration. Like all tales of great heists, this one goes very wrong — in this case, accidentally ripping open a portal that allows warring gods into the world, threatening the entire city.

Publishers Weekly calls it “A high-stakes heist in a secondary world populated by gods, demigods, and plenty of wily rogues,” and Library Journal says it’s packed full of “”Incredible worldbuilding [and] fast-paced action… a fantasy heist novel filled with interesting characters, a vivid world, and protagonists trying to find their way through.”

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Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales, Part II

Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales, Part II

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Table of Contents for Weird Tales 1, edited by Lin Carter (Zebra Books, December 1980)

For yesterday’s Vintage Treasures post, I finally had the chance to discuss Lin Carter’s early-80s attempt to resuscitate the Magazine that Never Dies, the long-running weird fiction pulp Weird Tales.

Since I examined all four paperbacks, there wasn’t room in that article to look back at some of the fascinating discussions they’ve triggered over the last four decades, including lengthy commentary from Carter himself — especially his (largely unfulfilled) plans for the future volumes — or reviews of the stories within from modern readers. So I took the time to do that today.

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Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales

Vintage Treasures: Lin Carter’s Weird Tales

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Weird Tales , Volumes 1 -4 (Zebra Books, December 1980
– August 1983). Covers by Tom Barber (#1-3) and Doug Beekman (#4)

Lin Carter was one of the finest genre editors of the 20th Century, and Weird Tales magazine was the most important fantasy magazine of the last century, publishing the career-defining work of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and hundreds of other writers. In December 1980 Zebra Books published the equivalent of a genre superhero Team-Up, the first two volumes of a paperback relaunch of Weird Tales helmed by Lin Carter.

The ambitious effort had several things in common with the original pulp incarnation. Namely, it was criminally underfunded, published sporadically, and doomed.

But it also had a hugely talented and hardworking editor, and in three short years it published a total of four volumes containing ‘lost’ stories by Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, an original John the Balladeer story by Manly Wade Wellman, reprints of classic tales from the pages of Weird Tales, and original fiction by Ramsey Campbell, Carl Jacobi, Tanith Lee, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Hannes Bok, Joseph Payne Brennan, Evangeline Walton, Charles Sheffield, Frank Belknap Long, Lin Carter, and a lot more.

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The Mystery of Steven Klaper, Agent of Insight

The Mystery of Steven Klaper, Agent of Insight

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Agents of Insight (Tor, October 1986). Cover by Barclay Shaw

Back in 2017 I bought a copy of Agents of Insight, and thought it would be interesting to do a brief write up of the genre-blending science fiction-P.I. novel for Black Gate. But I immediately ran into a problem. The author, Steven Klaper, was a complete mystery. This was the only work of any kind I can find published under that name. No other novels, short stories, comics, nothing. When that happens, I automatically assume the name is a pseudonym — and I’m usually right. But even after 30 years, I couldn’t find any record of the name “Steven Klaper” used by a more well-known writer.

I made a plea on for information on Facebook, and Gordon van Gelder, publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, immediately offered a useful suggestion.

Thirty-one years isn’t that long ago and there are plenty of Tor Books employees with long memories like Beth Meacham and Claire Eddy who probably know if Klaper was a pen name for, say, the guy who published as Samuel Holt or if in fact Klaper was just a guy who only ever published one book.

Tor Editor extraordinaire Beth Meacham did indeed remember Steven, and this is where things got interesting.

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One of the Best Swordfights in Fantasy: Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers

One of the Best Swordfights in Fantasy: Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers

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Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen (DAW Books, August 1979). Cover by Richard Hescox

About 1979, while in college at Arkansas Tech University, I visited a local used bookstore and found a copy of A Sword for Kregen.

The great cover, drawn by Richard Hescox (who I got a chance to meet), had what looked like a human locked in a sword fight with a creature with four arms and a tail with a hand on it. The four arms immediately reminded me of the Tharks of Barsoom. No way I was leaving the store without that book. It only cost me $1.17. (The price is still written on the cover.)

The book proved to be Sword & Planet and had one of the best swordfights I’d ever read. And, the human hero turned out ‘not’ to be the best swordsman in the fight. I’d never imagined such a thing from reading Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books and the works of Gardner Fox and others. I fell in love. And best of all, the cover said this was #20 of a series! I had a lot more good reading ahead of me, and I didn’t know the half of it.

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