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Vintage Treasures: The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

Vintage Treasures: The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

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Today’s Vintage Treasure is The Demon Breed, a 1979 Ace paperback by James H. Schmitz, which I bought the year it came out. Over the next few decades Schmitz would become one of my favorite SF short story writers, with delightful tales such as “The Second Night of Summer” (which I read in Gardner Dozois’s terrific anthology The Good Old Stuff), “Grandpa,” the Nebula nominee “Balanced Ecology,” and many others.

But in 1979 I was a fifteen year-old teenager, haunting the W.H. Smith on Sparks Street in Ottawa every Saturday, and I’d never heard of James H. Schmitz. But I knew what a bikini was. And Bob Adragna’s eye-catching cover, featuring special field agent Nile Etland and her otter companion crossing the floating atoll on the ocean world of Nandy-Cline as two sinister Parahuan observe from behind, spoke to my very soul. On the back of the book Andre Norton said something about a “detailed alien background” and “could not put it down,” but who paid attention to that? That cover told me everything I needed to know in two seconds. Bikinis, blasters, and bug-eyed monsters? Sold.

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Watching the Prince of Darkness Do His Work: Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Watching the Prince of Darkness Do His Work: Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

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Throughout much of the staggering medieval fantasy Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the characters live as actors. Don Rumata, the protagonist, acts as an arrogant nobleman in order to conceal his true identity. In reality, he is a scientist visiting the distant planet of Arkanar from Russia.

Arkanar has halted its development in the Middle Ages. As a consequence of an evil overlord’s actions, the planet has descended into hellish chaos. Though he lives as a nobleman with all the power the fragile planet can offer, Don Rumata can do nothing but watch the Prince of Darkness at work from on high, as would a God.

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Future Treasures: Flamecaster by Cinda Williams Chima

Future Treasures: Flamecaster by Cinda Williams Chima

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Flamecaster-smallCinda Williams Chima is the author of two previous series that made her a New York Times bestselling writer: Heir Chronicles and Seven Realms. Her latest novel, Flamecaster, the opening volume in the four-volume Shattered Realms series, returns to the world of Seven Realms to tell the tale of the next generation.

Flamecaster introduces Ash, a trained healer with a powerful magical gift, and Jenna, an independent girl abandoned at birth who finds herself hunted by the King’s Guard because of a strange magemark on the back of her neck. Shattered Realms stands alone, and doesn’t require knowledge of the previous volumes to fully enjoy.

Adrian sul’Han, known as Ash, is a powerful healer with a gift of magic – and a thirst for revenge. The son of the queen of the Fells, Ash is forced into hiding after a series of murders throws the queendom into chaos. Now Ash is closer than he’s ever been to killing the man responsible, the cruel king of Arden. As a healer, can he use his powers not to save a life but to take it?

Jenna Bandelow lives a reckless as a spy and saboteur, striking back against the king. She has been warned that the mysterious magemark on the back of her neck would one day make her a target, but she never believed in the curse… until the King’s Guard launches a relentless search for a girl with a mark like hers. Jenna doesn’t know why she’s being hunted. She only knows that she can’t get caught.

In a twist of fate, Ash’s and Jenna’s paths collide in Arden, where chilling threats and dark magic abound. Ultimately, they’ll come to recue each other in ways they cannot yet imagine.

Flamecaster will be published by HarperTeen on April 5, 2016. It 536 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

Canadian Steampunk: Chatting with Anthologist and Editor Dominik Parisien

Canadian Steampunk: Chatting with Anthologist and Editor Dominik Parisien

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Clockwork-Canada 2In December, Black Gate editor John O’Neill scooped the world with the cover of Clockwork Canada, Dominik Parisien’s newest offering as an anthologist. Dominik is best known as a poet and writer, but also for his editorial work with the Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and Saga Press. Exile Editions is launching Clockwork Canada this month and I wanted to chat with Dominik about his intriguing vision behind this anthology.

To set this up, I include the back-cover blurb:

Welcome to an alternate Canada, where steam technology and the wonders and horrors of the mechanical age have reshaped the past into something both wholly familiar yet compellingly different. These fifteen supercharged all-new tales reimagine Canadian historical events, explore alternate Canadas, and gather inspiration from the northern landscape to make us wonder: what if history had gone a different way?

Experience steam-powered buffalo women roaming the plains; join extraordinary men and women striking out on their own or striving to build communities; marvel as giant rampaging spirits are thwarted by a miniscule timepiece; cringe when a great clock chimes and the Seven O’Clock Man appears to terrorize a village in Quebec; witness a Maritime scientist develop a deadly weapon that could change the course of the American Civil War.

Anachronistic technologies, retro-futuristic inventions, alternative history, fantasy, horror, historical fiction, and other branches of speculative fiction all culminate in this uniquely Canadian search for identity.

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New Treasures: Leviathan’s Blood by Ben Peek

New Treasures: Leviathan’s Blood by Ben Peek

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Over at his blog, The Urban Sprawl Project, Ben Peek celebrates the release of Leviathan’s Blood, the sequel to 2014’s The Godless.

You should buy it. You should review it. You should tell your friends about it. Perhaps even your enemies.

I’m pretty happy with it, myself. It’s the middle of the trilogy, the Empire of the Children Trilogy, and there are things in this book that I am absurdly pleased with. There is a set of scenes here that I worked towards from the moment I settled on the narrative structure of the book. (It is, for those of you who have not heard me say it before, a structure that echoes the 12/13 episode structure that TV shows have adopted in the last decade. One of my favourite shows of this was Deadwood, and I remember, way back when I began work on The Godless, how interesting it would be for a fantasy book to echo that.) It’s strange to have a moment laid out in a book beyond the first while you’re writing it, but frankly, the whole series is laid out in that fashion, which will hopefully make for an interesting rereading for people. But anyhow, I am absurdly pleased with this.

Any novel with a structure inspired by Deadwood is okay in my book.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Ellen Kushner on Basilisk

A Tale of Two Covers: Ellen Kushner on Basilisk

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August 1980

May 1984

Last month I was delighted to find a brand new copy of Ellen Kushner’s first anthology Basilisk on eBay for the criminally low price of $1.50 — less than cover price! The copy I found was the original 1980 edition (above left), with the gorgeous Rowena cover. In fact, it wasn’t until I started researching it that I discovered it was re-issued in 1984, with a brand new cover by Stephen Hickman (above right).

Well, here was a curious mystery. Why would Ace Books, no newbie to fantasy publishing, replace such a colorful and effective cover? Nothing against Hickman’s cover — which, in fact, I think is tremendously effective — but it’s hard to compete with a life-and-death knife fight between a beautiful desert princess and a buck-naked green guy. And let’s face it, if you have to have a topless princess and a naked green guy on your cover, Rowena is the artist to put them there.

Maybe 1980 was a little too early to introduce naked green butt to mass market? Maybe Basilisk was intended as the first in a series, and when that didn’t happen, Ace thought Hickman’s cover more suited to a one-off anthology? Obviously, there’s a story here. And the person to tell that story is Ellen Kushner. I reached out to her last week with a few questions, and was very pleased to get a lengthy (and very entertaining!) response. Rather than edit it to fit a shorter article, I decided to reproduce the entire thing here. Ladies and gentlemen, the marvelous Ellen Kushner.

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Future Treasures: Street Magicks, edited by Paula Guran

Future Treasures: Street Magicks, edited by Paula Guran

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Paula Guran is one of the most accomplished editors in the business. She’s done some of the best anthologies of the past few years, including my favorite book from 2015, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas — not to mention Weird Detectives, New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, Warrior Women, and many others.

Her newest is Street Magicks, a collection of the finest recent urban fantasy, and it looks right up there with her best. It includes stories by Charles de Lint, Scott Lynch, Ellen Klages, Delia Sherman, Neil Gaiman, Nisi Shawl, Jim Butcher, Jeffrey Ford, Nnedi Okorafor, and many others. It will be available in trade paperback this month from Prime Books. Check out that great cover by Scott Grimando (click for bigger version.)

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New Treasures: Those Below, Book II of The Empty Throne by Daniel Polansky

New Treasures: Those Below, Book II of The Empty Throne by Daniel Polansky

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Daniel Polansky’s first novel, Low Town, was followed by two sequels, Tomorrow the Killing (2012) and She Who Waits (2013). His recent entry in Tor.com‘s line of novellas, The Builders, is a dark anthropomorphic fantasy featuring a company of warriors keeping a low profile after being on the losing end of a grueling war. In our recent contest, in which we invited readers to summarize their favorite novella in one sentence, it was hands-down the most popular choice, with entries like these:

The Builders by Daniel Polansky is Beatrix Potter as directed by Sam Peckinpah — Greg Hersom
The Builders by Daniel Polansky: Redwall meets The Wild Bunch, and it all goes to hell — Rich Miller
The Builders is the best critter tale ever: Winnie the Pooh this ain’t! — Lee Hunter

His 2015 novel Those Above, the opening entry in The Empty Throne, was called “Machiavellian clockwork glory” by Mark Lawrence. The second and final novel in the series, Those Below, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK last month.

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Series Fantasy: The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham

Series Fantasy: The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham

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Daniel Abraham has had quite a career. Under his own name he wrote the four volumes in the Long Price Quartet for Tor, starting with A Shadow in Summer (2006). Under the name M. L. N. Hanover, he produced five novels in the popular Black Sun’s Daughter urban fantasy series for Pocket, starting with Unclean Spirits (2008). And writing with Ty Franck under the name James S. A. Corey, he’s released five books in the breakout space opera series The Expanse for Orbit, currently being adapted by SyFy.

On top of all of that, he also found time to complete The Dagger and the Coin, an epic fantasy series for Orbit that wrapped up last month with its fifth volume, The Spider’s War. That’s…. let me do the math… nineteen novels in the last decade. Throw in the additional books he dashed off in his spare time (the Star Wars novel Honor Among Thieves (2014), his 2010 collection Leviathan Wept and Other Stories, the collaborative novel Hunter’s Run with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, four A Song of Ice and Fire graphic novels, plus assorted chapbooks and numerous short stories), and I quickly lose count. Suffice to say, I think you could make an effective case for Abraham as the busiest writer in fantasy.

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Future Treasures: Masks and Shadows by Stephanie Burgis

Future Treasures: Masks and Shadows by Stephanie Burgis

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Masks and Shadows-smallStephanie Burgis is the author of the Kat, Incorrigible trilogy of Regency fantasy adventures for kids. Masks and Shadows, a tale of music, masquerades, and magic, is her first historical fantasy novel for adults, and it looks very promising indeed.

It’s getting some marvelous notices from writers I admire, including Aliette de Bodard (“Romance, music, and dark alchemy rise to a pitch-perfect ending”), Ellen Kushner (“Elegant and exciting… [it] delighted and enlightened me as much as it entertained”) and Kate Elliot (“Deftly told and hugely engaging… weaves together… a thrilling taste of love and politics, and the bitter threat of a deadly magic.”)

The year is 1779, and Carlo Morelli, the most renowned castrato singer in Europe, has been invited as an honored guest to Eszterháza Palace. With Carlo in Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s carriage, ride a Prussian spy and one of the most notorious alchemists in the Habsburg Empire. Already at Eszterháza is Charlotte von Steinbeck, the very proper sister of Prince Nikolaus’s mistress. Charlotte has retreated to the countryside to mourn her husband’s death. Now, she must overcome the ingrained rules of her society in order to uncover the dangerous secrets lurking within the palace’s golden walls. Music, magic, and blackmail mingle in a plot to assassinate the Habsburg Emperor and Empress — a plot that can only be stopped if Carlo and Charlotte can see through the masks worn by everyone they meet.

Masks and Shadows will be published by Pyr on April 12, 2016. It is 300 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition.