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Future Treasures: Cave 13 by Jonathan Maberry

Future Treasures: Cave 13 by Jonathan Maberry

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Cave 13 (St. Martin’s Griffin, August 29, 2023). Cover design by Rob Grom

Brandon Crilly introduced me to Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger novels, with his enthusiastic review of the ninth volume in the series Dogs of War in 2017.

This series is about way more than its main protagonist, Joe Ledger, and is filled with a host of deeply-imagined heroes and villains… Every Joe Ledger novel features some sort of established horror premise – like vampires, zombies, and even Cthulhu – and gives it a mad science twist…

But amid the nonstop, Die Hard-esque action that inevitably occurs, there remains that core character development, which continues from several books previous, as Joe Ledger’s allies struggle to remember who they are, why they fight, and why they can win, no matter what odds they face. And with a touch akin to J.J. Abrams, Maberry slowly reveals some key mysteries that go back to the beginning of the series and which, I hope, will be continue to be explored in an eventual tenth book.

The latest installment Cave 13, published in trade paperback next week by St. Martin’s Griffin, is the third volume of spin-off series Rogue Team International, in which detective Joe Ledger leads a team of elite specialists to deal with global threats.

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A Far Future Journey Across a Strange Earth: The Song of Phaid the Gambler (Phaid the Gambler/Citizen Phaid) by Mick Farren

A Far Future Journey Across a Strange Earth: The Song of Phaid the Gambler (Phaid the Gambler/Citizen Phaid) by Mick Farren

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The Song of Phaid the Gambler (New English Library, October 1981). Cover by Tim White

Mick Farren (1943-2013) was for a time a sure enough rock star, front man for the Deviants, a sort of proto-punk band in England in the late 1960s. He did a couple solo albums too, then turned to journalism, particularly for the important UK magazine New Musical Express, where he was one of the first to herald the arrival of the official punk movement. And he also began to write fiction, much of it SF — some two dozen novels in all.

The Song of Phaid the Gambler was published in the UK in 1981. It was split in two (sensibly enough, I think, for marketing reasons) for US publication, from Ace in 1986 and 1987 as Phaid the Gambler followed by Citizen Phaid. There are differences between the two versions — I suspect, though I’m not sure, primarily to smooth out the separation into two separate books. I read the US version.

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This is Hanuvar’s Moment: Howard Andrew Jones’ Lord of a Shattered Land

This is Hanuvar’s Moment: Howard Andrew Jones’ Lord of a Shattered Land

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Lord of a Shattered Land (Baen Books, August 1, 2023). Cover Art by Dave Seeley

From the beginning, Sword and Sorcery has been an existentialist literature of the outsider. The rogue, the mercenary, the outcast, the criminal: from Conan to Elric, Fafhrd to Corwin of Amber, Jirel of Joiry to Grimnir the Corpse-maker, the S&S protagonist finds themselves at odds with their society, confronted with aggressive meaninglessness and called upon to carve out their own meaning in a chaotic, ever-changing, and often hostile world. This allows them to critique their society, test its values, and even challenge its assumptions. It is an intriguing literary tradition that has been a creative sandbox for several ambitious literary artists.

But this is not how most readers vaguely familiar with the term understand the genre. Sword and Sorcery has a reputation for being puerile and violent male wish-fulfillment fantasy. This stereotype derives from several obscure causes. One major cause might be the 1960s and 70s “Clonan” (Conan + clone) type of Sword and Sorcery, an assembly of several barbarian warriors and their formulaic adventures inspired by the commercial success of the Lancer reprints of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian stories (beginning in 1966 and featuring the famous covers by Frank Frazetta). Though not entirely without entertainment value, this group of works features the adventures of Lin Carter’s “Thongor,” John Jakes’ “Brak the Barbarian,” Gardner F. Fox’s “Kyrik,” and many more.

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New Treasures: Loki’s Ring by Stina Leicht

New Treasures: Loki’s Ring by Stina Leicht

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Loki’s Ring (Saga Press, March 28, 2023). Cover by Tomer Hanuka

Stina Leicht’s previous novels include Persephone Station, And Blue Skies From Pain, and Cold Iron. Loki’s Ring is her first space opera, but I strongly suspect it won’t be her last. Publishers Weekly calls it “Thrilling… a riveting cocktail of high-stakes adventure, philosophical musing, complex family dynamics, and cloak-and-dagger intrigue,” and Locus Online proclaims it “really strong and engaging, sciency and full of adventure.”

Loki’s Tale is the story of Gita Chithra, captain of the Search and Rescue ship The Tempest, who receives a frantic distress call from Ri, the AI she raised like a daughter. Ri is trapped on Loki’s Ring, an alien-constructed world, and when Gita and her crew arrive they discover everyone in the vicinity has fallen victim to a highly contagious biomechanical agent from an illegal mining operation. Things quickly degenerate from there as Gita and her team find themselves up against horrors at every turn.

Mysterious contagions, artificial megastructures, competing corporate entities, shadowy government agencies, spunky AIs, and horrors in the dark of space — this one checks all my boxes. I’ve already cleared the weekend and got my snacks ready.

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A Fun Hardboiled Ride with Classic Barron Horror: The Wind Began to Howl by Laird Barron

A Fun Hardboiled Ride with Classic Barron Horror: The Wind Began to Howl by Laird Barron

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The Wind Began to Howl (Bad Hand Books, May 16, 2023). Cover by Mayra Fersner

Laird Barron has been one of most exciting authors and one of the freshest voices in horror literature for several years now. His amazing short story collections include The Imago Sequence (2007), Occultation and Other Stories (2010), The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and Other Stories (2013), as well as novels such as The Light Is the Darkness (2012) and the incredibly creepy The Croning (2012). Barron’s output has been prolific and consistently excellent.

However, like many genre writers, I am sure that Barron has sometimes wanted to break out of being “typecast.” And in 2018 that became a possibility when he released his first hardboiled detective novel Blood Standard with major New York publisher Putnam. This was Barron’s first novel about Isaiah Coleridge, an ex-mob enforcer turned private detective.

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New Treasures: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

New Treasures: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

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The Mountain in the Sea (Picador reprint edition, May 30, 2023). Cover by María Jesús Contreras

Ray Nayler has published dozens of short stories in many of the major genre fiction markets. His debut novel The Mountain in the Sea was published in hardcover by MCD last year and nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. But I ignored it because it pretty much had the most boring cover for a science fiction novel in 2022, and in my experience that’s often a more reliable sign than major awards.

However, Picador published the trade paperback edition in May of last year. And this version does not have a boring cover. No no no. This version features a giant intelligent octopus, and a bunch of intriguing quotes on the front and back that say things like “Superb” (Bloomberg Businessweek), “Planetary science fiction and a profound new kind of adventure” (Robin Sloan), “A taut exploration of inhuman consciousness” (Publishers Weekly), “A creepy eco-dystopian novel” (Buzzfeed), and “The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence.”

Anytime you mix ‘creepy’ with ‘octopus,’ you have my immediate attention.

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Future Treasures: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

Future Treasures: Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

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Vampires of El Norte (Berkley, August 15, 2023)

Isabel Cañas’ first short story, “The Weight of a Thousand Needles,” appeared in the June 2019 issue of John Joseph Adams’ Lightspeed magazine. Since then she’s published nearly a dozen stories in some of the top markets in the field, including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Fireside Magazine, Giganotosaurus, and many others. Her first novel The Hacienda, a gothic horror set in post-Independence War Mexico, was one of the most acclaimed horror debuts of last year, called “A thing of uncanny, chilling beauty, [with] hauntings, exorcisms, incantations, and forbidden love,” by The New York Times and “the perfect Gothic novel… a brilliant piece of historical fiction and a, ‘Okay, I’m gonna need to sleep with the lights on now,’ horror novel” by Jezebel.

Her sophomore effort Vampires of El Norte, due in hardcover from Berkley Books next week, is one of the most anticipated novels of the summer. Booklist labels it “a lush, supernaturally infused historical romance mixing vaqueros, vampires, and the Mexican-American conflict of 1846–48,” and Kirkus says “The vampires of this tale are incredibly original… There are three different narratives here: a love story, a war story, and a horror story. Each is compelling.”

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Vintage Treasures: Frontier of the Dark by A. Bertram Chandler

Vintage Treasures: Frontier of the Dark by A. Bertram Chandler

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Frontier of the Dark (Ace Books, January 1984). Cover by Attila Hejja

A. Bertram Chandler was an enormously prolific science fiction author whom we haven’t covered much at Black Gate. He wrote some 200 short stories and over 40 novels, and is chiefly remembered today for his popular tales of the pioneer Rim Worlds, especially the adventures of John Grimes.

Chandler began his career as a merchant marine officer in the UK, eventually commanding ships in the Australian and New Zealand merchant navies, including the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne. He drew heavily from his long career sailing everything from tramp steamers to troop ships to infuse his fiction with a distinctly naval flavor.

His 1984 novel Frontier of the Dark, published the year he died, is a significant departure. A science fiction horror tale featuring werewolves in space, it bears the dedication, “For Harlan Ellison, who made me do it.”

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Only the Beginning: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Only the Beginning: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

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St. Martin’s Press – 1st , 1983

IN A DISTANT AND SECONDHAND SET OF DIMENSIONS, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part…

See…

Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.

In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.

Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests,  garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.

Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.

So begins The Colour of Magic (1983), the first volume of the eventually forty-one-book-long Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I was lent this book (along with another Pratchett book, Strata (1981), which I’ve still never read — or returned, possibly) back in 1985 when it first hit US shores. He said it was funny and it was.

I hadn’t laughed much during earlier run-ins with fantasy and sci-fi comedies, save for Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Too often, puns were what passed for wit and the satire was shallow. Returning to Colour for the first time in many years, I’m impressed with how sharp Pratchett’s eye was when it came to picking his genre targets and just how good his prose was. His writing would become more complex, deeper, and much darker over the decades, but already, it’s witty and effervescent. In an age of such po-faced seriousness, we could use more of it.

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