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Vintage Treasures: Try a Little Sturgeon Caviar

Vintage Treasures: Try a Little Sturgeon Caviar

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Caviar 1955-small Caviar 1970-small Caviar 1977-small
Lester Del Rey
Lester Del Rey

I started what eventually became a casual series of posts about Theodore Sturgeon back in June 2014, when I wrote a brief piece on his 1979 collection The Stars Are the Styx. It was casual because I’d make another entry in the series only when I acquired another of his collections. The result was eight posts over roughly two years, not a bad stretch, really.

The only real drawback to this system is I’ve been dying to do a post on his 1955 collection Caviar, perhaps my favorite of his many books, and a copy has not tumbled into my hands for many years. So I’m breaking with my system (and had to troop upstairs and root around on the shelves until I found a copy, no small accomplishment) to bring you this report. You’re welcome.

Why is Caviar my favorite? Nostalgic reasons, mostly. It contains “Microcosmic God,” the first Theodore Sturgeon tale I can remember reading, and still one of my favorites.

Also, I had a lot of fun tracking down the various paperback versions, especially the 1977 Del Rey edition with the brilliant cover by Darrell K. Sweet (above right), which pretty clearly has publisher Lester del Rey putting in a cameo appearance as “Microcosmic God”‘s genius inventor James Kidder.

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The Lost Level by Brian Keene

The Lost Level by Brian Keene

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oie_62316zU0eMAQ8Lost worlds, pocket universes, dimensional traveling: these are things that warm my heart. Barsoom, the World of Tiers, and the Land of the Lost are places I want to see. A sword-swinging hero and warrior princess, well that’s pretty great by me. If your reactions are like mine then you are Brian Keene’s target audience for The Lost Level (2015), his love song to a certain kind of glorious pulp adventure that there aren’t enough of anymore. On the acknowledgements page he spells out explicitly the artists whose works helped inspire The Lost Level: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Sid and Marty Krofft, Roy Thomas, Joe R. Lansdale, Mike Grell, John Eric Holmes, Karl Edward Wagner, Otis Adelbert Kline, Carlton Mellick III, and H.G. Wells. A tantalizing roll call of pulp genius. I am definitely this book’s target.

See that cover to the left? Even before I read a glowing review from Charles Rutledge, someone whose opinion I trust, that cover (by Kirsi Salonen) bellowed “BUY ME!” so loud and clear I knew I couldn’t hold out for long. Briefly, The Lost Level is the tale of a man from Earth lost in a different dimension, and his adventures alongside a warrior princess and a furry, blue alien. Now that I’ve read it… well, I really love the cover.

Brian Keene is best known as a prolific writer of gonzo horror (38 novels and 10 story collections over 13 years). His first novel, The Rising is credited with helping spark the current zombie craze, but I think it’s too good to merit the blame. I’ve only dipped a toe into his vast body of work but it’s been fun, if a little bloody. His established talent, coupled with that eye-popping cover, led me to have high hopes for the book.

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Future Treasures: Snakewood by Adrian Selby

Future Treasures: Snakewood by Adrian Selby

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Snakewood-smallHere’s an interesting little artifact. Snakewood, a debut fantasy of “betrayal, mystery, and bloody revenge,” tells the story of the Twenty, a band of mercenaries being hunted down one-by-one by an unknown killer.

What’s really fascinating is the plant-based magic system. The author says “Snakewood is set in a world where magic is in the plant-life, concoctions of which, known as ‘fightbrews’, radically transform the capabilities and appearance of warriors at a terrible cost.” It arrives in hardcover next week from Orbit Books.

A Lifetime of Enemies has its Own Price

Mercenaries who gave no quarter, they shook the pillars of the world through cunning, chemical brews, and cold steel.

Whoever met their price won.

Now, their glory days are behind them. Scattered to the wind and their genius leader in hiding, they are being hunted down and eliminated.

One by one.

Snakewood will be published by Orbit Books on March 15, 2016. It is 432 pages, priced at $26.00 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital version. Read an excerpt from the novel here.

New Treasures: Son of the Morning by Mark Alder

New Treasures: Son of the Morning by Mark Alder

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Son of the Morning-smallUnder the name M.D. Lachlan, Mark Alder has written four novels in the Wolfsangel fantasy series; under the name Mark Barrowcliffe, he’s the author of the D&D memoir The Elfish Gene, Lucky Dog and Girlfriend 44. His newest is the opening volume of a fantasy retelling of the Hundred Years War, in a world where angels and demons choose sides on the battlefield, and England and France are locked in a true holy war. Publishers Weekly calls it “alternate history leavened with wry humor… [a] fast-moving epic.”

England, 1337: Edward III is beset on all sides, plagued by debt and surrounded by doubters. He refuses to pay homage to the newly crowned Philip Valois of France and seeks to secure his French holdings, but he’s outmanned. Philip can put 50,000 men in the field, but he is having his own problems: he has summoned the angels themselves to fight for France, but the angels refuse to fight. Both kings send priests far and wide, seeking holy relics and heavenly beings to take up the cause of their country, but God remains stubbornly silent, refusing to grant favor to either side.

Meanwhile, among the poor and downtrodden, heretical whispers are taking hold: what if God — who has never been seen to do anything for them — is not the rightful leader of the heavens after all? And as Edward’s situation becomes increasingly desperate, even his counselors begin to believe that if God won’t listen, perhaps they can find a savior not from Heaven, but from Hell.

In a sweeping tale packed with courtiers and kings, knights and priests, and devils and angels, Mark Alder breathes fresh and imaginative life into the Hundred Years War in this unique historical epic.

Son of the Morning was published by Pegasus on February 15, 2016. It is 727 pages, priced at $26.95 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The cover painting is a detail from Luca Giordano’s painting of St. Michael.

Book Review: The Mark of the Shadow Grove by Ross Smeltzer

Book Review: The Mark of the Shadow Grove by Ross Smeltzer

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see this post for instructions to submit. I am officially out of stories, since I haven’t received any recently and I’m reluctant to go back to submissions from more than a year ago.

Shadow Grove CoverWhile I usually limit myself to self-published books in my reviews here, I’ll occasionally review small press publications if I’m asked. This month’s review is of one such book, Ross Smeltzer’s The Mark of the Shadow Grove.

The Mark of the Shadow Grove is somewhere between a novel and a story collection. It contains three novellas, “The Witch of Kinderhook,” “Lord of All High and Hidden Places”, and “The Rule of Old Blood.” These three stories are all first person, but each one has a different narrator from a different time period: a necromancer’s apprentice in the 1820s, a young coed in the 1880s, and a journalist in the 1920s. But though the stories are from different perspectives and different times, they are ultimately connected, telling the story of two intertwined families, and the dark secrets that bind them. It is Lovecraftian in its horror, with gods beyond human ken who cause madness in those who encounter them, but it has eschewed any of Lovecraft’s deities for more familiar ones.

“The Witch of Kinderhook” tells its story both through the recollections of Tom, the aforementioned apprentice, and the journal of his missing master, Carver. Carver is not much of a necromancer. In reality he is a medical examiner with a history of fraud, an unhealthy obsession with old books of supposed occult lore, and an ill-founded belief in his ability to apply science to the ancient search for reviving the dead. He has come to Kinderhook to find the witch who dwells there, sure that she knows the secrets he seeks. Carver is disappointed with what he finds, and holds the witch’s attempts to teach him in contempt. Tom, meanwhile, is drawn to the beautiful witch Katrina.

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The Books of David G. Hartwell: Visions of Wonder and The Science Fiction Century

The Books of David G. Hartwell: Visions of Wonder and The Science Fiction Century

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Visions of Wonder-small The Science Fiction Century-small

We lost David Hartwell on January 20th. This is our sixth article in a series that looks back at one of the most gifted editors in our industry.

With the publication of The Dark Descent and The Ascent of Wonder, David quickly established himself as the go-to guy for big genre survey volumes, and he produced many of them. These massive books were popular with libraries and book clubs, and many stayed in print for years. David had found a fine niche for himself that showed off his considerable talents for genre scholarship (not to mention his excellent taste), and he continued to compile these giant books for the rest of his life.

His next two major anthologies were huge science fiction retrospectives. The first, Visions of Wonder (1996), weighing in at a mere 798 pages, was co-edited with Milton T. Wolf, Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association, and was a fine attempt to create an up-to-date SF textbook, mixing in critical essays by Damon Knight, John W. Campbell, Jr., Judith Merril, Samuel R. Delany, and others — plus a comprehensive guide to modern SF scholarship compiled by Gary K. Wolfe — with a generous sample of top-notch fiction. The 1005-page The Science Fiction Century (1997) was nothing less than a comprehensive survey of a hundred years of science fiction, containing works by H. G. Wells, C. S. Lewis, E. M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, A. E. van Vogt, Jack Vance, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, Roger Zelazny, James Tiptree, Jr., Bruce Sterling, Nancy Kress, William Gibson, and dozens of others.

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Future Treasures: Stories of the Strange and Sinister by Frank Baker

Future Treasures: Stories of the Strange and Sinister by Frank Baker

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Stories of the Strange and Sinister-small Stories of the Strange and Sinister-back-small

Stories of the Strange and Sinister first-smallI first discovered Valancourt’s marvelous 20th Century Classics line when I stumbled on their booth at the 2014 World Fantasy convention in Washington D.C.. I was so impressed, in fact, that I wrote up a lengthy survey of their back catalog as soon as I got home.

Valancourt has been bringing neglected horror and thriller classics back into print in handsome new editions for years now. Their latest subject is Frank Baker, whose first novel, The Twisted Tree, was published in 1935. He published an odd little book titled The Birds in 1936… it sold only about 300 copies, and Baker labeled it “a failure.” It likely would be utterly forgotten today, if Alfred Hitchcock had not turned it into a hit with his 1963 horror film of the same name.

Perhaps Baker’s most successful work was Miss Hargreaves (1940), a comic fantasy in which two young people invent a story about an elderly woman, only to find that their imagination has brought her to life. He published more than a dozen others, including Mr. Allenby Loses the Way (1945), Embers (1947), My Friend the Enemy (1948) and Talk of the Devil (1956), before his death in 1983.

Stories of the Strange and Sinister is his only collection. It was first published in 1983 (see cover at right), and has long been out of print.

The new edition will be published by Valancourt on March 15, 2016. It is 184 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version. See more details at the Valancourt website.

See all of our coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy here.

The Goblin King, New York Sorcery, and Demon Pirates: The New and Upcoming Fantasies of Tor.com

The Goblin King, New York Sorcery, and Demon Pirates: The New and Upcoming Fantasies of Tor.com

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Lustlocked-small The Ballad of Black Tom-small The Devil You Know-small Pieces of Hate-small

I’ve been very much enjoying Tor.com‘s new line of novellas, which has produced a number of clear winners already. We’ve covered the first dozen or so, but they haven’t been resting in the past few weeks and months — far from it. When I checked this morning, I discovered more than a dozen new titles scheduled for the rest of this year, from authors such as Mary Robinette Kowal, Andy Remic, Tim Lebbon, Seanan McGuire, Michael R. Underwood, Matt Wallace, K. J. Parker, and many others.

It’s time to play catch-up. So here’s a detailed look at the next eight volumes on their schedule, including covers and (where available) links to cover reveals, sample chapters, and audio excerpts. It’s a smorgasbord of future fantasy from one of the best publishers in the business. Check it out.

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New Treasures: Clarkesworld: Year Eight, edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

New Treasures: Clarkesworld: Year Eight, edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

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Clarkesworld Year Eight-small Clarkesworld Year Eight back-small

If you’re like me, you don’t have time to read every issue of Clarkesworld — even though you probably should. It is a three-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, and in 2013 it received more Hugo nominations for short fiction than all the leading print magazines combined. Wouldn’t it be great if every year editors Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace gathered all the fiction in Clarkesworld into one big volume, so you could catch up on everything you missed at the end of the year?

Well, actually, they do. Every year Neil and Sean assemble every story from the previous year into a single generous volume, and this year is the biggest yet: 448 pages, collecting all 38 stories published in 2015, from authors like Michael Swanwick, Robert Reed, Sean Williams, N. K. Jemisin, James Patrick Kelly, Dale Bailey, Naomi Kritzer, Maggie Clark, E. Catherine Tobler, Ken Liu, Matthew Kressel and many others. The book also serves as a fund-raiser for the magazine (which is available free), and every purchase helps support the magazine.

It’s a marvelous bargain, and it helps support one of the finest publications in the industry. What more could you ask for?

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Vintage Treasures: Worlds Imagined: 14 Short Science Fiction Novels, Compiled by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Worlds Imagined: 14 Short Science Fiction Novels, Compiled by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg

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Worlds Imagined Robert Silverberg-smallI bought a fine anthology of science fiction novellas on eBay last week for 5 cents. With $3.99 shipping, that brought the whole thing to $4.04 — about 28 cents per novella. Pretty sweet deal.

The anthology is Worlds Imagined, published by Avenel in April 1989, and edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg. Excuse me, ‘Compiled by,” not edited by. I guess Silverberg and Greenberg didn’t feel comfortable with the title of editors, for merely selecting the fiction. That’s editorial integrity for you.

One of the things I love about this book is the editors’ (erm, compilers’) impassioned defense of the novella in their intro. I read it years ago, and much of it stayed with me. Here it is, in part.

The short novel — or “novella,” as some prefer to call it — is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms. Spanning twenty to thirty thousand words, usually, it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book… Some of the greatest works in modern literature fall into the class of novellas. Consider Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Joyce’s “The Dead,” Melville’s “Billy Budd,” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” — or Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Tolstoi’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Carson McCuller’s “Ballad of the Sad Cafe”…

Since a prime task of the science fiction writer is to create carefully detailed worlds of the imagination, room for invention is a necessity. The short story can give only a single vivid glimpse of the invented world; the full-length novel frequently becomes so enmeshed in the obligations of plot and counterplot that the background recedes to a secondary position. But the short novel, leisurely without being discursive, is ideal for the sort of world-creation that is science fiction’s specialty. and since the days of H.G. Wells and his classic novella “The Time Machine” it has exerted a powerful attraction for science fiction writers.

Preach, brothers!

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