Browsed by
Category: Books

New Treasures: Brutal Pantomimes by Rhys Hughes

New Treasures: Brutal Pantomimes by Rhys Hughes

Comments 0 Comment

Brutal Pantomimes Rhys Hughes-smallRhys Hughes is an amazingly prolific short story writer with dozens of collections to his credit, including The Smell of Telescopes (2000), Nowhere Near Milk Wood (2002), and Bone Idle in the Charnel House (2014). His novels include The Percolated Stars (2003), The Young Dictator (2013), and Captains Stupendous (2014).

His latest is a handsome new collection of 10 stories (most previously unpublished) from Egaeus Press, with a cover by František Tichý and interior illustrations by Jacques Callot. Check it out.

Brutal Pantomimes contains ten tales of absurd exoticism, weird adventure and wild fantasy from the shockingly prolific and highly acclaimed Rhys Hughes. Most of the stories, novellettes and novella included have not previously been published and some are regarded by their author to be amongst his best works.

Enjoy pirate shenanigans, a globe of the Earth that is a voodoo doll, the dubious gifts of a Greek god, impossible angles, improbable sciences, impractical philosophies, a rare tropical yeti in a submarine and so much more. Featuring an introduction by Michael Cisco…

The book is a lithographically printed, 256 page sewn hardback with colour endpapers and cover by František Tichý, as well as illustrations throughout by Jacques Callot. It is limited to 300 copies.

Brutal Pantomimes was published by Egaeus Press on February 6, 2016. It is 256 pages, priced at £32.00 (including postage). The cover is by František Tichý. Order directly at the Egaeus Press website.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Win a Copy of The Emperor’s Railroad, First Book of The Dreaming Cities by Guy Haley!

Win a Copy of The Emperor’s Railroad, First Book of The Dreaming Cities by Guy Haley!

Comments 0 Comment
The Emperor's Railroad-small The Ghoul King-small

Two weeks ago we had a look at Tor.com‘s impressive catalog of recent fantasy titles, and gave away free copies of each of their March releases. Today, we’d like to do something just as exciting: give you a chance to win one of three advance copies of Guy Haley’s new novella The Emperor’s Railroad, the opening installment of a terrific new adventure fantasy series, The Dreaming Cities.

What’s it about? Zombies! City States! Prehistoric beasts! Mutants and machine relics! Check out this awesome description.

Global war devastated the environment, a zombie-like plague wiped out much of humanity, and civilization as we once understood it came to a standstill. But that was a thousand years ago, and the world is now a very different place.

Conflict between city states is constant, superstition is rife, and machine relics, mutant creatures and resurrected prehistoric beasts trouble the land. Watching over all are the silent Dreaming Cities. Homes of the angels, bastion outposts of heaven on Earth. Or so the church claims. Very few go in, and nobody ever comes out.

Until now…

How do you win a copy? Easy! Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “The Emperor’s Railroad.” That’s all it takes! Three winners will be drawn at random from all qualifying entries, and each will receive one of our precious advance proofs.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Machines That Kill, edited by Fred Saberhagen & Martin Harry Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Machines That Kill, edited by Fred Saberhagen & Martin Harry Greenberg

Comments 2 comments
Machines That Kill-small Machines That Kill-back-small

Today’s Vintage Treasure is a fine example of a recently extinct species: the mass market anthology.

Allow me a moment to mourn the loss of this beautiful and now-vanished creature. In days gone by, mass market anthologies thundered in vast herds across bookstore shelves, terrorizing lesser tomes. A single bookstore ecosystem could support a vast number of anthologies with a spellbinding array of thematic plumage, from horror to romantic fantasy to sword & sorcery and far future SF. In recent years, publishers such as DAW kept a dwindling number of anthologies alive in captivity for breeding purposes, but these efforts generally resulted in weak-blooded specimens about cats and unicorns. Today, the only relatives of the mass market anthology that survive are its larger cousins, the trade paperback and small press hardcover.

But not so long ago this creature strode proudly across the publishing savannah, introducing the curious to new writers, helping readers discover a wide range of different voices they might not otherwise encounter. The one I want to talk about today is the 1984 Ace paperback Machines That Kill, edited by Fred Saberhagen & Martin Harry Greenberg.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight by Liane Merciel

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight by Liane Merciel

Comments 0 Comment
Pathfinder Hellknight-back-small Pathfinder Hellknight-small

Liane Merciel is the author of Dragon Age: Last Flight and The River Kings’ Road. Her first two Pathfinder Tales novels, Nightglass and Nightblade, both followed the adventures of Isiem, raised as a wizard-priest of the dark god Zon-Kuthon in the grim nation of Nidal.

For her third Pathfinder Tales novel she switches setting to the city of Westcrown, and introduces us to the devil-blooded Jheraal, a member of the brutal organization of warriors known as the Hellknights, dedicated to maintaining law and order at any cost. When a serial killer starts targeting hellspawn like Jheraal and her child, Jheraal is forced to partner with a paladin and a cunning diabolist to defeat an ancient enemy to whom even death is no deterrent.

Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight will be published by Tor Books on April 5, 2016. It is 418 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jason Rainville. It also includes a 14-page sneak peek of Tim Pratt’s upcoming novel Liar’s Bargain (sequel to Liar’s Blade and Liar’s Island), and 13 bonus pages of ads for other Pathfinder novels and game books, which were a lot of fun to flip through.

The Library of America Publishes Ross Macdonald

The Library of America Publishes Ross Macdonald

Comments 5 comments
Ross Macdonald Four Novels of the 1950s-small Ross Macdonald Three Novels of the Early 1950s-small

The Library of America has been busy as all get-out recently, pumping out archival quality omnibus volumes of Kurt Vonnegut, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Philip K. Dick, H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, David Goodis, and other 20th Century genre authors. The latest beneficiary of all this attention is hardboiled crime fiction writer Kenneth Millar, who published under the name Ross Macdonald.

The first volume, Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s, packed in four novels featuring popular private detective Lew Archer:

The Way Some People Die (1951)
The Barbarous Coast (1956)
The Doomsters (1958)
The Galton Case (1959)

Here’s a look at the original paperback editions (click for bigger images).

…

Read More Read More

Series Fantasy: The Duelists Trilogy by Julia Knight

Series Fantasy: The Duelists Trilogy by Julia Knight

Comments 2 comments
Swords And Scoundrels-small Legends And Liars-small Warlords and Wastrels-small

Every time a fantasy series successfully wraps up, we bake a cake.

This week we celebrated the completion of Julia Knight’s Duelists trilogy, published by Orbit in quick succession late last year, all with covers by Gene Mollica:

Swords and Scoundrels (400 pages, $14.99/$9.99 digital, October 6, 2015)
Legends and Liars (400 pages, $15.99/$9.99 digital, November 10 2015)
Warlords and Wastrels (400 pages, $15.99/$9.99 digital, December 15, 2015)

What’s so special about The Duelists trilogy? It’s an adventure fantasy series “full of ruffians, scoundrels and rogues,” and I absolutely love the series description. Here’s Anna Gregson talking about the books on Orbit’s website.

…

Read More Read More

Ramez Naam’s Apex Wins 2016 Philip K. Dick Award

Ramez Naam’s Apex Wins 2016 Philip K. Dick Award

Comments 0 Comment
Apex Ramez Naam-small APEX by Ramez Naam-back-small

Ramez Naam’s novel Apex, the third and final volume in the Nexus Trilogy, received the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award yesterday.

The Award is given each year to a distinguished original science fiction paperback published for the first time in the U.S.A. It’s named after Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Valis, and many other groundbreaking SF novels — most of which were originally published in paperback.

The judges also issued a special citation to Archangel by Marguerite Reed.

Apex was published by Angry Robot on May 12, 2015. It is 608 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The previous volumes in the Nexus Trilogy are Nexus (2012) and Crux (2013). Nexus, the opening book in the series, was also an NPR Best Book of the Year, and won the Prometheus Award and the Endeavour Award.

Read the full award announcement at the Official Philip K. Dick Awards Home Page.

New Treasures: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

New Treasures: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

Comments 1 comment

Rebel of the Sands-smallIf you’ve noticed me covering a lot of Young Adult new releases recently, you’re not wrong. It’s a full time job keeping up with all the intriguing YA fiction flooding the market, and I’ve had to become a lot more selective than I used to be.

Alwyn Hamilton’s Rebel of the Sands cries out for some attention, however. It features a desert kingdom, mythical beasts, djinn, and an orphaned girl who becomes a gunslinger. Bestselling author Alison Goodman calls it “a wild ride… a stunning debut full of irresistible energy, heart-stopping action, and a new voice that sings.” It’s available in hardcover from Viking.

Mortals rule the desert nation of Miraji, but mythical beasts still roam the wild and remote areas, and rumor has it that somewhere, djinn still perform their magic. For humans, it’s an unforgiving place, especially if you’re poor, orphaned, or female.

Amani Al’Hiza is all three. She’s a gifted gunslinger with perfect aim, but she can’t shoot her way out of Dustwalk, the back-country town where she’s destined to wind up wed or dead.

Then she meets Jin, a rakish foreigner, in a shooting contest, and sees him as the perfect escape route. But though she’s spent years dreaming of leaving Dustwalk, she never imagined she’d gallop away on mythical horse — or that it would take a foreign fugitive to show her the heart of the desert she thought she knew.

Rebel of the Sands reveals what happens when a dream deferred explodes — in the fires of rebellion, of romantic passion, and the all-consuming inferno of a girl finally, at long last, embracing her power.

Rebel of the Sands was published by Viking Books for Young Readers on March 8, 2016. It is 320 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $10.99 in digital format.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Your Favorite Novellas In One Sentence: Announcing the Winners of Tor.com‘s March Releases!

Your Favorite Novellas In One Sentence: Announcing the Winners of Tor.com‘s March Releases!

Comments 2 comments

The Martian Way Isaac Asimov-smallLast week we invited the readers of Black Gate to submit a one-sentence review of their all-time favorite novellas.

Every qualifying entry was entered into our contest to win one of Tor.com‘s March novella releases: The Devil You Know by K. J. Parker, Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal, or Pieces of Hate by Tim Lebbon.

We received a huge number of entries, covering a vast number of novellas both famous and obscure — proof once again (as if we needed it) that you folks are the most widely-read fantasy fans on the planet. At the bottom of this article we announce our three winners.

But first, we’ve selected ten of the best entries to share with you here. The very first one we received was from Jeff Rogers, who kicked things off with an old school classic from a science fiction master, Isaac Asimov:

Hard to beat the classics: “The Martian Way” by Asimov stands out for its elevation of rational, evidence-based thought; its portrayal of can-do attitude mixed with engineering know-how; and its foreshadowing of The Expanse in setting!

Nice one, Jeff. I re-read “The Martian Way” just a few months ago, and you’re quite right… it put me in mind of The Expanse immediately.

Next up is Andrew Slater, who went really old school.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Voice of Our Shadow by Jonathan Carroll

Vintage Treasures: Voice of Our Shadow by Jonathan Carroll

Comments 2 comments
Voice of Our Shadow Jonathan Carroll-small Voice of Our Shadow Jonathan Carroll-back-small

Jonathan Carroll has been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy Award, and British Fantasy Awards multiple times. He won the World Fantasy Award for his short story “Friend’s Best Man,” the British Fantasy Award for his novel Outside the Dog Museum (1991), and the Bram Stoker for his collection The Panic Hand (1995).

I read his first novel The Land of Laughs (1980) the year it was released, and was enormously impressed. Carroll is a true original — his fantasy is hard to quantify, but I consider it an effective blend of magic realism and horror. His second novel, Voice of Our Shadow, appeared in hardcover from Viking in 1983, and was reprinted in paperback by Ace the following year. As you can see from the cover above, it was originally marketed as horror, but later printings have treated it more as dark fantasy. In 1992, it was reprinted by Gollancz as Fantasy Masterwork #25, and published in ebook format by Open Road Integrated Media in 2012.

Voice of Our Shadow was published by Ace Books in December 1984. It is 197 pages, priced at $2.75. The cover is by Joe DeVito. It is not hard to find; I bought an unread copy for $1 on eBay earlier this month.