Black Gate

Welcome to February, a month absolutely packed with new releases. There’s lots to keep your eyeballs busy but, no big surprise, I find my eyes are drawn to the debuts.

R.W.W. Greene, whose fiction has appeared at Stupefying Stories and Daily Science Fiction, releases his first novel The Light Years next week, and in a cover reveal/interview at SciFiNow, he talked about how he was inspired to write book after attending Boskone (and the story story it grew from, “Love in the Time of Light Speed,” originally published at NewMyths.com).

This book is an unusual blend of ideas — relativity, refugees, devolution, folk music, and arranged marriages. Where did they all come from?

R. W. W. Greene: The Light Years revealed itself as a short story first (‘Love In The Time Of Light Speed’). We’d just gotten home from the 2014 Boskone (an annual sci-fi convention in Boston), and I was buzzing from all the panels and conversations and thinking about the week of classes ahead. At the time I was teaching at a really diverse high school and I had all these kids – Indian kids, Hispanic kids, gay kids, trans kids, kids from the Middle East – and their lives stomping around in my brain… The story downloaded into my head while I showered off the convention. As soon as I turned the water off, I grabbed a towel and hit the writing room. About a year after that I started expanding the thing into a novel.

The Light Years is already accumulating good notices, including this great review at Publishers Weekly.

The toll difficult moral choices take on families is the core conflict of this clever far-future debut from Greene. In the 33rd century, wealthy Traders travel space while the poor struggle to survive planetside. Trader Adem Sadiq enters an arranged marriage with faster than light worm-drive technology expert Hisako Saski at the urging of his mother, Maneera. Hisako’s parents agree to the marriage contract that gives Hisako money in exchange for studying supposedly obsolete worm-drive technology… Sophisticated worldbuilding and diverse, emotionally-resonant characters make Greene an author to watch.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb.

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What’s cooler than a cave cty? Nuthin’! Juliette Wade understands this fundamental truth, and she has set her debut novel Mazes of Power in the thousand-year-old cave city of Pelismara.

Just to be clear, that’s all I needed to be sold on this novel. However, I admit it does have other things going for it. Publishers Weekly calls it (in a starred review), “Excellent… [it] invites readers into an intricately constructed and morally ambiguous world full of complex political maneuvering,” and Laura Anne Gilman says it’s “A twisty ride… into a world of love and treachery.”

Mazes of Power is being described as a “work of sociological science fiction,” which strikes me as kind of heavy for a novel set in a cave city. Well, let’s not be picky. Here’s the publisher’s description; make up your own mind.

The cavern city of Pelismara has stood for a thousand years. The Great Families of the nobility cling to the myths of their golden age while the city’s technology wanes.

When a fever strikes, and the Eminence dies, seventeen-year-old Tagaret is pushed to represent his Family in the competition for Heir to the Throne. To win would give him the power to rescue his mother from his abusive father, and marry the girl he loves.

But the struggle for power distorts everything in this highly stratified society, and the fever is still loose among the inbred, susceptible nobles. Tagaret’s sociopathic younger brother, Nekantor, is obsessed with their family’s success. Nekantor is willing to exploit Tagaret, his mother, and her new servant Aloran to defeat their opponents.

Can he be stopped? Should he be stopped? And will they recognize themselves after the struggle has changed them?

Mazes of Power is the opening novel in The Broken Trust series. It will be published by DAW on February 4, 2020. It is 405 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Adam Auerbach. Read the first seven pages of Chapter One here.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming science fiction and fantasy here.

Mike Ashley has been editing anthologies since at least 1977 (with the Year’s Best volume SF Choice 77 from Orbit), and in the last 40 years he’s produced dozens, including no less than 19 volumes of The Mammoth Book of.. (such as The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales, etc.), and over a dozen for British Library Publishing, including Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet and Moonrise: The Golden Era of Lunar Adventures. He’s also edited multiple volumes of the Stark House Algernon Blackwood.

His latest is Fighters of Fear, a collection of 31 classic occult detective tales from Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, Victor Rousseau, Sax Rohmer, Seabury Quinn, Henry S. Whitehead, Manly Wade Wellman, Joseph Payne Brennan, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and many, many others — including a handful that have never before been reprinted.

It’s a fat 624-page volume that belongs in the library of every serious fantasy fan, and it’s easily one of my most anticipated volumes of winter. It got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, pretty much unprecedented for a collection of generally obscure, mostly 19th Century genre fantasy. Here’s a snippet:

Ashley… has never been better in conveying his genre expertise than in this impressive assembly of 31 short stories featuring psychic or occult detectives from the mid-19th century (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”) to the late 20th century (Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s “Jeremiah”). While usual suspects Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson are deservedly included, the volume’s real value lies in its introducing fans of those writers to more obscure authors, such as Max Rittenberg, whose “The Sorcerer of Arjuzanx,” concerning a possible case of bewitchment at Lourdes, makes the case that his consulting psychologist, Xavier Wycherley, merits having all his stories republished. And few setups are more tantalizing than Victor Rousseau’s “The Woman with the Crooked Nose,” in which a man consults a doctor after seeing a ghost resembling a dead woman in every particular, except that it has a straight nose, unlike the deceased.

It’s been a lean few years for occult detective fans. The most recent really comprehensive anthologies I can think of were Stephen Jones’ Dark Detectives: An Anthology of Supernatural Mysteries (Fedogan & Bremer, 1999), Paula Guran’s Weird Detectives (Prime, 2013), and of course The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, by Seabury Quinn (Night Shade Books, 2017-18). And we mustn’t forget Occult Detective Magazine, which just published its 6th issue last month.

Fighters of Fear will be published in trade paperback in two weeks. Here’s the complete description and Table of Contents.

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