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New Treasures: Burrowed by Mary Baader Kaley

New Treasures: Burrowed by Mary Baader Kaley

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Burrowed (Angry Robot, January 10, 2023). Cover by Apostolos Gkantinas

We’re not that far into 2023, and there’s already been a fine crop of debut novelists. The latest to show up on my radar is Mary Baader Kaley, whose first novel Burrowed, a far-future tale of a genetic plague that splits humanity in two, was published by Angry Robot last month. I bought it the week after it came out at Barnes & Noble.

There’s lot of cool ideas in Burrowed (Booklist proclaims it “A great read for fans of postapocalyptic novels,” and Publishers Weekly says it “captivates with inventive science and adventure… [a] riveting thriller”), but the book didn’t really catch my eye until I read the author’s Big Idea post at John Scalzi’s blog, in which she explains that the idea for the novel arose out of the challenges of raising an autistic son.

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Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
(Harper Voyager, February 28, 2023). Cover by Ivan Belikov

I met Shannon Chakraborty at the 2018 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, where she conducted a delightful reading from her second novel The Kingdom of Copper, the sequel to her bestselling debut The City of Brass. Back then she went by the very cool name “S. A Chakraborty.” For her new book The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, she has changed her name slightly to “Shannon Chakraborty,” which is much easier to shout at somebody when you’re trying to get them to hold an elevator.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi will be published by Harper Voyager next week, and I’m going to go on record here as recommending you clear the end of the month for this one. Publishers Weekly calls it a swashbuckling adventure with “playful plot twists and thrilling action sequences [with a] charmingly crooked cast and dry humor,” and BookPage sums it up as “A swashbuckling high seas quest that’s rousing, profound and irresistible.” This sounds like the book I need.

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Vintage Treasures: The Plenty Trilogy by Colin Greenland

Vintage Treasures: The Plenty Trilogy by Colin Greenland

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Take Back Plenty, Seasons of Plenty, and Mother of Plenty (AvoNova, January 1992 and
January 1996, and Avon Eos, June 1998). Covers by Glenn Orbik, Jim Burns, and uncredited

Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty was one of the major British SF novels of the 90s. It won the British Science Fiction Award and the Clarke Award for Best SF Novel, and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Writing about its heroine, Tabitha Jute, in Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, John Clute said:

Colin Greenland, one of the sharpest and most innovative young British critics and novelists, had a bright idea. The old SF was joyous. So why not enjoy it, even now? Why not write Space Opera whose heroine – Tabitha Jute – may not change the universe, but who is superabundantly alive? So he did.

Greenland followed Take Back Plenty with two sequels, Seasons of Plenty, and Mother of Plenty, and one collection, The Plenty Principle, which included a prequel tale using the same setting, a derelict planet-sized starship “populated by gamblers, militarists, and space trash” known as Plenty.

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Repackaging a Classic: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

Repackaging a Classic: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

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Cinder, Volume One of The Lunar Chronicles (Square Fish, February 2020). Cover by Tomer Hanuka

I don’t usually hang out in the young adult section at Barnes & Noble. OK, that’s a blatant lie. I gawk at the colorful table displays like a starving zombie at a Springsteen concert. Let me start over.

I love the young adult section at Barnes & Noble, but I don’t usually buy a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I don’t often come across book descriptions like this one.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move…. Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction.

A Cinderella retelling dressed up as cyberpunk noir, described as “a cross between Cinderella, Terminator, and Star Wars” by Entertainment Weekly? That’s worth twelve bucks. I totally missed Marissa Meyer’s Cinder when it was released in hardcover a decade ago, but I was delighted to bring the new paperback edition home with me, and you know what? I’m glad I did.

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New Treasures: The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles

New Treasures: The Last Blade Priest by W.P. Wiles

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The Last Blade Priest (Angry Robot, July 2022). Cover design by Alice Claire Coleman

I’m a little late out of the gate with this one. The Last Blade Priest came out last summer and I ignored it, despite the warm reviews from most of the usual sources (GrimDark Magazine called it “a brilliant epic… one of my favorite new releases of this year,” and Publishers Weekly said it’s “gripping… demonstrates the value of thoughtful, well-planned worldbuilding.”)

But it wasn’t until I stumbled across Ian Mond’s review at Locus Online last fall (“The Last Blade Priest… unashamedly embraces the tropes of epic fan­tasy – the political shenanigans, complex magic systems, and ancient, enigmatic Gods – that make the genre so much fun to read”) that my interest was finally piqued, and I bought a copy.

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Haunted Trucks, Ghostly Theaters, and Creepy Picnics: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Haunted Trucks, Ghostly Theaters, and Creepy Picnics: The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII (DAW, November 1984). Cover by Vicente Segrelles

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII was the twelfth volume in the DAW Year’s Best Horror series and the fifth edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). The book was copyrighted and printed in 1984. After nine covers by Michael Whelan, we have a new cover artist, the Spanish artist Vicente Segrelles (1940–). I think this is a frightening cover and less fantastic than those that Whelan often did. I had this by my bed one night and actually turned the book over because the lich-woman in the mirror was sort of creeping me out. That’s pretty good horror art!

But an even bigger artistic change is that this is the first DAW Year’s Best Horror without the famous yellow DAW spine and the famous DAW yellow tag on the cover; though the DAW “number” is still ongoing, this one being 603. This major aesthetic switch came about for all of DAW’s titles in late 1984. I assume that the DAW powers-that-be thought after about twelve years a change was needed. Maybe, but it does sadly mark the end of an era in paperback publishing. Nevertheless, the cover font of The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII is still similar to previous volumes, keeping it artistically in a line to some degree.

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Vintage Treasures: Space Opera and Space Odysseys edited by Brian Aldiss

Vintage Treasures: Space Opera and Space Odysseys edited by Brian Aldiss

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Space Opera and Space Odysseys (Futura, July and December 1974). Covers by Eddie Jones

Brian Aldiss had a long and enviable career at the top of the science fiction field, with dozens of novels to his credit, and nearly three dozen collections.

But in his long career he also produced some excellent anthologies. In partnership with Harry Harrison he released nine annual volumes of Best SF (1967-1975), three retrospective titles looking at SF of the 1940s to the 1960s (Decade: The 1940s and its sequels), and fine standalone titles such as The Astounding-Analog Reader and Farewell Fantastic Venus! But on his own he also assembled several terrific volumes, including a few we’ve looked at in the past, including Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two and Perilous Planets.

Today I want to examine two wonderful paperback anthologies he released in 1974 with Futura in the UK (and later reprinted in the US in incomplete editions): Space Opera and Space Odysseys, which contain stories by Robert Sheckley, Donald Wandrei, Daniel F. Galouye, Edmond Hamilton, James E. Gunn, Philip K. Dick, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, A. E. van Vogt, Charles Harness, Randall Garrett, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Edward E. Smith, Alfred Bester, Frank Belknap Long, James Tiptree, Jr. Ross Rocklynne, F. M. Busby, Poul Anderson, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and many others.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

Goth Chick News Reviews: Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

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Ghost Eaters (Quirk Books, September 20, 2022)

Author Clay McLeod Chapman only recently teamed up with Quirk Books, one of my all time favorite sources of strange and unusual stories. For that reason alone he should have been on my radar, not to mention that he is a prolific writer of comics, short stories and several other novels, most of the creepy variety. No, I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I made Chapman’s acquaintance via a suggestion from Amazon, whose algorithms, I must now grudgingly admit, know me pretty well.

In searching for some fun reading material to see me through a mind-numbing four-day business trip bracketed by an even more mind-numbing 9 hour round trip flight, Amazon served me up Ghost Eaters: A Novel as something I might like. Described by Esquire magazine as “Trainspotting meets Requiem For A Dream, rewritten as an avant-garde horror movie soundtracked by Nine Inch Nails,” it was a no-brainer that I was going to load this one on my tablet. However, I also hedged my bets by loading several other e-books by more familiar writers just in case this story couldn’t hold me.

Let me just tell you now, I needn’t have bothered.

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The Spoils of Capricon: Rooks and Ruin by Melissa Caruso

The Spoils of Capricon: Rooks and Ruin by Melissa Caruso

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The Rooks and Ruin trilogy: The Obsidian Tower, The Quicksilver Court, and The Ivory Tomb
(Orbit, 2020, 2021, and 2022). Covers by Peter Bollinger, Mike Heath, and Peter Bollinger

On Saturday I was wandering through the well-stocked Dealer’s Room at Capricon 43 in Chicago with Rich Horton, looking for new books of all kinds. (And if there’s a guy you want at your side as you struggle to find quality books, believe me, it’s Rich Horton. He has great taste and a well informed opinion on everything — and I do mean everything.) I stumbled on the newly-released The Ivory Tomb, the concluding novel in Melissa Caruso’s Rooks and Ruin, and read the first paragraph of the back cover.

The Dark Days have returned. The Demon of Carnage mercilessly cuts through villagers and armies. The Demon of Corruption rots the land. The Serene Empire and the Witch Lords race towards war. And in the middle of it all stands Rxyander, the Warden of Gloamingard.

That’s a lot of demons. Do I really want to read a trilogy about Dark Days, demons, Witch Lords, and a gloom-shrouded castle called ‘Gloamingard’??

Ha! You know me so well. Of course I do. I bought that book so fast Rich didn’t even know what happened.

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The Brownstone of Nero Wolfe: Death of a Doxy – And Koufax or Mays?

The Brownstone of Nero Wolfe: Death of a Doxy – And Koufax or Mays?

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We haven’t been to the Brownstone since April of last year. Pfui! So here we have the forty-third Nero Wolfe post at Black Gate. The Wolfe stories are my favorite private eye series. Which, given my Solar Pons, and Sherlock Holmes, credentials, is saying something. I am pretty much always re-reading or listening yet again to Michael Prichard’s terrific audiobooks. I never tire of Wolfe’s World.

Rex Stout was a baseball fan, keeping score at Mets’ games (and possibly NY Giants’ ones as well). Archie uses some baseball terms, and even (briefly) watches a Mets game on TV, with actual players mentioned. And of course, there’s Ron Seaver. “Three Men Out” is set at game seven of a World Series game between Boston and the Giants, though all of the characters are entirely fictional in that one.

I’ve written some baseball snippets for inclusion in future stories, including Archie annoying Wolfe by talking about the Rocky Colavito – Harvey Kuenn trade; and Archie recounting attending Willie Mays’ last World Series, against the A’s. Archie and baseball go together.

Which leads us to talking about Death of A Doxy today. This may well be my favorite Wolfe novel. And I think that A&E did a terrific episode of it. It’s got a neat little baseball reference, which I’ll tease out for this essay. But first, let’s talk about something that should be banned by law – The Epithon!

THE EPITHON

In Death of a Doxy, Archie is at Lily Rowan’s penthouse, listening to a poet read a self‐dubbed ‘Epithon.’ It is called such because it was epic, and took hours to read. Add in that the man wrote it himself, and you’ve got the idea. ‘Pfui’ isn’t strong enough.

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