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New Treasures: Summer’s End by John Van Stry

New Treasures: Summer’s End by John Van Stry

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Summer’s End (Baen Books, December 6, 2022). Cover by Sam R. Kennedy

John Van Stry is a darling of the indie publishing world. He’s self-published dozens of science fiction novels, including eleven volumes in the Portals of Infinity series, and 18 in The Valens Legacy, written as Jan Stryvant. Summer’s End is his first book with an established publisher, and it caught my eye this week at Barnes and Noble. It’s the tale of newly graduated Ship Engineer Dave Walker, who takes a job on the Iowa Hill, described as:

An old tramp freighter running with a minimal crew and nearing the end of its useful life, plying the routes that the corporations ignore and visiting the kinds of places that the folks on Earth pretend don’t exist. Between the assassins, the criminals, and the pirates he needs to deal with, Dave is discovering that there are a lot of things out there that he still needs to learn.

That’s the paragraph that sold me, and helped move this book up near the top of my already-towering TBR pile.

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Vintage Treasures: Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin

Vintage Treasures: Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin

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Tuf Voyaging (Baen, February 1986). Cover by David Willson

George R.R. Martin is the most successful living American science fiction and fantasy writer. He mostly gets attention for his novels these days, but early in his career he was chiefly known for his wonderfully moody and imaginative short stories, most of which were set in his sprawling Thousand Worlds universe, including the novel Dying of the Light and the famous stories “Sandkings,” “Nightflyers,” “A Song for Lya,” and “The Way of Cross and Dragon.”

Many of Martin’s most ardent fans are unaware of his Thousand Worlds series featuring Haviland Tuf, a small time merchant who inadvertently comes into possession of one of the greatest weapons in the galaxy, a 30-kilometer long seedship known as the Ark. Inspired by the work of the great Jack Vance (and written in a style that sometimes imitates Vance), the tales garnered a number of major award nominations, and were collected in Tuf Voyaging by Baen in 1986.

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Nonstop SF Adventure: The Mickey7 Novels by Edward Ashton

Nonstop SF Adventure: The Mickey7 Novels by Edward Ashton

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Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues (St. Martin’s Press,
February 15, 2022 and March 14, 2023). Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Truth to tell, I missed Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 last year, despite all the breathless praise heaped on it (NPR listed it as one of the Best Books of 2022, calling it “A wildly entertaining mix of action and big ideas peppered with humor and a bizarre love story”). It was our very own Brandon Crilly who tuned me in to the coolness of Mickey7 with his mid-2022 Roundup, in which he wrote:

Gods this was a fun read. Ashton begins with protagonist Mickey stuck at the bottom of a pit and certain he’s going to die, since he’s the Expendable and his colony will just regenerate him. Except things take various turns from there, due to the threat of alien attack, the idiosyncrasies of the colonists, or the bizarre experience of being the seventh iteration of yourself. If you’ve ever spent nights thinking Okay, but the transporter really kills folks and then duplicates them, right, this is most definitely a book for you.

And now the sequel Antimatter Blues, which arrived this week from St. Martin’s Press, is being called “A nonstop SF adventure from beginning to end” (Library Journal).

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New Treasures: Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes

New Treasures: Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes

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Dead Silence (Tor Nightfire, January 24, 2023). Cover by Timo Noack

Nightfire is Tor’s new horror imprint. Launched in 2019, it’s published books by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Catriona Ward, Cassandra Khaw, Ellen Datlow, T. Kingfisher, and lots more.

That’s all well and good, but has it given us a haunted house story in space that’s a successful cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien? No. No it has not.

Well, at least it hadn’t until the arrival of S.A. Barnes’ Dead Silence, which Library Journal calls “a compelling haunted-house-in-space frame [with] excellent worldbuilding and sustained tension,” and Locus says is a “great, immersive, atmospheric space horror that proves that, despite rumors to the contrary, horror belongs in space.” (And yeah, for the record, Mur Lafferty tells us Dead Silence offers “the suffocating claustrophobia of 2001: A Space Odyssey mixed with the horrors of Alien.” That’s just not a blend you see every day.)

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Vintage Detectives: Supernatural Sleuths, Sci-Fi Private Eye, and Isaac Asimov’s Detectives, edited by Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Detectives: Supernatural Sleuths, Sci-Fi Private Eye, and Isaac Asimov’s Detectives, edited by Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg

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Supernatural Sleuths and Sci-Fi Private Eye (Roc, 1996 and 1997), and
Isaac Asimov’s Detectives (Ace, 1998). Covers by Romas Kukalis, uncredited, and Andy Lackow

Science fiction detectives have been a popular theme for anthologies for a couple of generations now. We’ve covered a few (including Tin Stars, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), but there’s lot more out there for the curious and the collector alike.

I’ve recently been dipping into some themed anthologies from the 80s and 90s, and three that have impressed me all have themes of detection: Supernatural Sleuths and Sci-Fi Private Eye (both published by Roc, in 1996 and 1997), and Isaac Asimov’s Detectives (Ace, 1998). They gather a fabulous cross section of 20th Century cross-genre fiction, including a John the Balladeer tale by Manly Wade Wellman, a Black Widowers story by Isaac Asimov, a Solar Pons mystery by August Derleth and Mack Reynolds, a Carnacki adventure by William Hope Hodgson, a Jules de Grandin novelette by Seabury Quinn, and a pair of Gil Hamilton novellas by Larry Niven, plus a rich range of major award-winning and nominated SF from Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Kate Wilhelm, John Varley, and more.

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Future Treasures: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Future Treasures: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

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Some Desperate Glory (Tor.com, April 11, 2023). Cover by Cynthia Sheppard.

I’m hearing good things about Emily Tesh’s debut novel Some Desperate Glory, coming next month from Tor.com.

Tesh won a World Fantasy Award for Silver in the Wood, the first novella in her Greenhollow Duology, also published by Tor.com. Some Desperate Glory is the tale of the warrior Kyr, raised among the scraps of humanity to avenge the death of the planet Earth, and what happens when she’s thrust into a universe far more complicated than she was taught. Library Journal proclaims it “A monumental journey,” and Booklist says it’s “One of the best sf novels of 2023… with an action-packed pace full of exciting battles and gut-wrenching twists.”

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Noir, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Bang!, edited by Andrew Hook

Noir, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Bang!, edited by Andrew Hook

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Bang!: An Anthology of Modern Noir Fiction (Head Shot Press, March 1, 2023)

For reasons I don’t quite understand I love horror fiction but I hate horror movies.

By contrast, I love noir films but I don’t particularly like noir fiction. 

Yet, this anthology of noir stories has made me change my mind.

I’m not saying that I liked all the stories (that would be statistically impossible, even with horror anthologies) but certainly I was pleasantly surprised by my own response to several of the dark tales featured here.

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New Treasures: Ion Curtain by Anya Ow

New Treasures: Ion Curtain by Anya Ow

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Ion Curtain (Solaris, July 19, 2022). Cover by John Harris

I love Space Opera but, wow. Why does is exclusively seem to come in 5-book series? Aren’t there any bite-sized nuggets of Space Opera out there that don’t require a three-month commitment? Something that I could enjoy in, say, a weekend in early March?

Solaris Books to the rescue. Anya Ow’s second novel Ion Curtain is a fast-action slice of Space Opera that includes sinister machine intelligences, derelict spacecraft, galactic war, and a plucky crew of space rogues. Publishers Weekly calls it an “addictive space opera… Unexpected humor and thrilling action punctuate this space opera adventure,” and that pretty much tells me everything I need to know.

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Vintage Treasures: Poseidonis by Clark Ashton Smith

Vintage Treasures: Poseidonis by Clark Ashton Smith

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Poseidonis (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #59, July 1973). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo

I’ve been collecting Clark Ashton Smith recently, and I keep coming back to the wonderful Ballantine Adult Fantasy editions edited by Lin Carter in the early 70s.

It’s not nostalgia (well, maybe it’s a little nostalgia). And it’s certainly not that the stories aren’t available in other editions — Smith’s work has been annotated and collected by more than half a dozen publishers this century alone, including Night Shade, Penguin Classics, Hippocampus Press, Prime Books, Bison Books, Centipede Press, and others. It’s not even the great cover art — great as it is (and it’s pretty darn great), Smith has benefitted from some truly excellent cover art for most of his reissues.

What draws me to these editions is Lin Carter’s excellent commentary and editorials. When Carter was assembling these books in the early seventies most of Smith’s work was long out of print, available only in moldering pulp magazines (and a handful of expensive hardcovers from Arkham House), and Carter was introducing one of the greatest pulp writers of the 20th Century to an audience that was woefully unfamiliar with his work. He did a fabulous job of preparing readers for the wonders that awaited them.

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Might For Right: The Once and Future King, Part 1 by T.H. White

Might For Right: The Once and Future King, Part 1 by T.H. White

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“I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them.”

King Arthur, p. 239 The Once and Future King

I first read English author T.H. White’s The Once and Future King when I was seventeen, fresh from seeing the movie Camelot (1967) for the first time (the musical Camelot, by Lerner and Lowe was based on parts of White’s novel). The tale of Arthur Pendragon, by turns both comic and tragic, told in a thoroughly anachronistic and post-modern way, reached me as few other books had. The story of Arthur’s education and effort to create a better world and his ultimate failure and downfall broke my heart. I absolutely loved the book and used it as the basis for my AP English exam essay instead of any of the books I’d read in class (I aced the test). More than any other Arthurian book or movie, White’s book forms my image of Arthur’s doomed noble reign.

I know I reread the book once during college or grad school, but that was over thirty years ago and my memories are dim. To say I approached The Once and Future King last month with some trepidation is an understatement. There’s been more than one greatly admired book I’ve revisited only to find out that whatever affection I held for it had flown. I did not want that to happen here. Nonetheless, spurred again by watching Camelot recently, I was determined to read the book. Having finished the first two parts of the novel, I am happy to find that not only do I still love the book, I’m impressed more than ever by its power and White’s artistry. Note: To convey the latter point, I’ll be quoting the book generously.

The Once and Future King is really four books; The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Witch in the Wood, later retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and The Candle in the Wind (1958). The first three were all published as standalone novels, the fourth only as part of the unified four-book collection. A fifth part, The Book of Merlyn (1977), was written in 1941 but wasn’t published until long after White’s death in 1964. For today, I’m going to write on the first two parts.
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