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Future Treasures: Asteroid Made of Dragons by G. Derek Adams

Future Treasures: Asteroid Made of Dragons by G. Derek Adams

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Asteroid Made of Dragons-smallI love the small press — that’s where a lot of the most creative and innovative work is being done today — but you do have to dig a bit to find the really good stuff. So when do you make of a small press, Kickstarter-funded fantasy novel that gets a write-up like this in Publisher’s Weekly?

An unlikely band of heroes — some of whom are trying to kill one another — must gather together in order to save their world from the return of an ancient menace in an excellent, irreverent mix of sword-and-sorcery fantasy and SF. Adams’s flippant tone recalls Terry Pratchett, taking the skewering of tropes down a very dark path as he establishes a fantasy world built from the ashes of a technological one.

That’s the kind of notice that makes a guy sit up and pay attention. Asteroid Made of Dragons will be released by Sword & Laser in trade paperback next week. Here’s the complete description.

When a lone goblin researcher stumbles across an artifact containing a terrifying message — that the world is in grave and immediate peril — she scrambles to find help. A very unusual asteroid (one constructed as a cage for dragons) is headed straight for the planet, and Xenon is the only person in the world who knows. As she clambers across hill and dale with her quill, journal, and dwindling coin purse to untangle the mystery, she’ll need plenty of luck to find the right clues and the right sort of help.

Meanwhile, our heroes have their own problems. They have a bank to rob, a sea to cross, and a kingdom to infiltrate. Luckily, Rime is a wild mage — the laws of reality quiver when she gives them a stern look–and her guardian, Jonas, wields a reasonably sharp sword. But Rime is slipping ever closer to the abyss of madness, and Jonas is wanted for murder at their final port of call. To make matters worse, the mage-killing Hunt and its commander, Linus, follow the duo like a patient shadow, bent on Rime’s destruction.

When the wise are underfunded, the brave are overbooked, and the cruel are unconcerned, can the world be saved from destruction?

G. Derek Adams is the author of Spell/Sword and its sequel, The Riddle Box. Asteroid Made of Dragons will be published by Sword & Laser on April 5, 2016. It is 278 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $8.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by David Drummond.

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!

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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.

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Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight by Liane Merciel

Future Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Hellknight by Liane Merciel

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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

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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).

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Future Treasures: A Shadow All of Light by Fred Chappell

Future Treasures: A Shadow All of Light by Fred Chappell

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A Shadow All of Light-smallFred Chappell won a World Fantasy Award for his short story “The Lodger” (1993). He’s also the author of the classic horror novel Dagon (1968) and I Am One of You Forever (1985), and was the subject of a deluxe Masters of the Weird Tale volume from Centipede Press last December.

His latest is an epic adventure featuring pirates, master thieves, monsters, and fantasy detectives. It arrives in hardcover from Tor next month.

Fred Chappell’s A Shadow All of Light, a stylish, episodic fantasy novel, follows the exploits of Falco, a young man from the country, who arrives in the port city of Tardocco with the ambition of becoming an apprentice to a master shadow thief. Maestro Astolfo, whose mysterious powers of observation would rival those of Sherlock Holmes, sees Falco’s potential and puts him through a grueling series of physical lessons and intellectual tests.

Falco’s adventures coalesce into one overarching story of con men, monsters, ingenious detection, cats, and pirates. A wry humor leavens this fantastical concoction, and the style is as rich and textured as one would hope for from Chappell, a distinguished poet as well as a World Fantasy Award-winning fantasy writer.

A Shadow All of Light will be published by Tor Books on April 12, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. Read a lengthy excerpt at Tor.com.

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

Future (Video Game) Treasures: Conan – Age of Exiles

Future (Video Game) Treasures: Conan – Age of Exiles

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Conan_ExilesShot1Funcom is the developer of the MMO Age of Conan – Unchained. AoC is the only MMO I ever played more than a few times and stuck with. I think it’s an excellent game with a novel fighting system and superb graphics. It did a nice job of using the Conan world setting and I enjoyed playing it.

Sadly, as with most MMOs which aren’t named World of Warcraft, it just doesn’t have a ton of players. There were many times I would roam an area and only see one or two other characters. But it if you’re looking to check out an MMO, I highly recommend it.

Well, Funcom is bringing Conan to PCs and consoles with Conan Exiles:

An open-world survival game in the brutal lands of Conan the Barbarian.

You are an exile, one of thousands cast out to fend for themselves in a barbaric wasteland swept by terrible sandstorms and besieged on every side by enemies. Here you must fight to survive, build and dominate.
Hungry, thirsty and alone, your very first battle is that against the harsh environment. Grow crops or hunt animals for food. Harvest resources to build weapons and tools. Build a shelter to survive. Ride across a vast world and explore alone, or band together with other players to build entire settlements and strongholds to withstand fierce invasions.

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Future Treasures: Spira Mirabilis, Book 3 of The Wave Trilogy, by Aidan Harte

Future Treasures: Spira Mirabilis, Book 3 of The Wave Trilogy, by Aidan Harte

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Irenicon Aidan Harte-small The Warring States-small Spira Mirabilis Aidan Harte-small

Spira Mirabilis Aidan Harte-back-smallIn her review of Irenicon, the opening novel in Aidan Harte’s Wave Trilogy, Sarah Avery wrote:

Welcome to Rasenna, a shining city-state turned failed state, where river spirits haunt the streets and mistake themselves for the citizens they’ve drowned. Rasenna’s people hide in their towers at night, and even by day fear the river their enemy wielded to cut their city in two…. Can a city recover from two decades of grief, madness, and self-destruction? Can these people change in time to save themselves? They’d better, because the rival city of sorcerous Engineers that smashed them before may well do so again…

Aidan Harte has been justly praised for his world-building in his debut novel. Irenicon is, almost, what we might get if Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities had lingered for a few hundred pages in one of its gem-perfect vignettes… Irenicon would make a perfect action film. Aidan Harte gives us a pretty good view of the movie he must have seen in his mind while he was writing. The flashing banners of Rasenna’s homegrown martial art, the glorious decay of a city that breeds endless tension, the disturbing chill of Concord’s purity and the darkness at its foundation, and (oh my!) the uncanny otherness of the river spirits could be the making of a summer blockbuster.

Sounded pretty dang good to me, but I resisted the urge to dive in right away. Partly because I gave Sarah our only review copy. But mostly because these days I avoid trilogies until I can hold all three titles in my greedy little hands. That resolution became harder and harder to keep as the accolades continued to pile up (click on the back cover of the third volume, at right, for some examples). But my long wait is finally over. The Warring States, the second volume, was published on April 7, 2015, and the final book, Spira Mirabilis, will be released in two weeks… and our review copy arrived last week. Interns, hold all my calls. I’m on assignment.

Spira Mirabilis will be published by Jo Fletcher Books on April 5, 2016. It is 522 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover. The cover is by Ghost.

ChiZine Announces Don Bassingthwaite’s Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight

ChiZine Announces Don Bassingthwaite’s Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight

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Cocktails at Seven Apocalypse at Eight-smallDon Bassingthwaite is a man of many talents. We published his terrific sword & sorcery tale “Barbarian Instinct” in Black Gate 5, and an excerpt from his unpublished Kingdoms of Kalamar novel Point of the Knife in Black Gate 7. On top of that, he was the magazine’s Games Editor for our first four years, recruiting top-notch talent to write reviews for us, including Jennifer Brozek, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Webb, Johanna Meade, and Michael Thibault.

Don’s writing career has taken him to the top of the industry, with a dozen novels in the last ten years, from publishers like Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf. Over the years he’s also produced a series of highly regarded holiday tales, collectively known as the “Derby Cavendish” stories.

Earlier this month Don revealed the cover of his first short story collection, Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight: The Derby Cavendish Stories, in a Facebook post.

What’s this? A collection? Oh, you shouldn’t have!

ChiZine Publications has just revealed the cover (by the incomparable Erik Mohr) for my forthcoming collection Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight: The Derby Cavendish Stories — more details to come but look for it this fall!

Cocktails at Seven, Apocalypse at Eight: The Derby Cavendish Stories will be available in both ebook and print editions. Look for it from Canadian publisher ChiZine later this year. I don’t have many more details at the moment — but trust me, as soon as I know more, so will you!

See our survey of ChiZine’s gorgeous 2014 catalog here.

Future Treasures: The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

Future Treasures: The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

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The Nameless City-small The Nameless City-back--small

Faith Erin Hicks has had a pretty enviable career in comics, as a writer for Lumberjanes, Buffy: The High School Years and The Last of Us: American Dreams, and as an artist for Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, and Brain Camp. On her own she’s created Friends with Boys, Zombies Calling!, and the Eisner-Award winning The Adventures of Superhero Girl.

Her latest, The Nameless City, has the look and feel of epic fantasy. Built on an ancient mountain pass, cut through sheer rock by some long-lost technology, the Nameless City has been conquered so many times that its long-suffering inhabitants — a melting pot of an unknown number of previous civilizations — can’t even agree on what to call it. Thirteen year-old Kaidu, the privileged son of a tribal leader, comes to the city to meet his father, a general with the ruling Dao army, for the first time. General Andren is a kind man, but too busy to spend more than a few minutes a day with a son he’s never known.

Disappointed and lonely, Kaidu sneaks out of the protective enclave of the Palace each day to wander the city. There he meets Rat, a starving street urchin who steals his most precious possession: the ancient knife his father gave to him when they first met. Lost and humiliated, Kaidu chases Rat through the streets and across the rooftops of the city until he tackles Rat, retrieving his precious knife.

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Future Treasures: The Human Chord/The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood

Future Treasures: The Human Chord/The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood

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The Human Chord The Centaur Algernon Blackwood-small The Human Chord The Centaur Algernon Blackwood-back-small

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve not read much Algernon Blackwood. But I’ve been educated on his substantial contributions to the American horror genre by my fellow Black Gate writers, especially Ryan Harvey and Bill Lengeman. In his 2009 post “The Incredible Adventures of Algernon Blackwood,” Ryan wrote:

Of all the practitioners of the classic “weird tale”…  none entrances me more than Algernon Blackwood. Looking at the stable of the foundational authors of horror — luminaries like Poe, James, le Fanu, Machen, Lovecraft — it is Blackwood who has the strongest effect on me. Of all his lofty company, he is the one who seems to achieve the most numinous “weird” of all.

Blackwood is often referred to as a “ghost story” writer… But true ghosts rarely appear in his fiction. Blackwood liked to dance around the edge of easy classification, and as his work advanced through the 1900s and into the teens, it got even harder to pinpoint. Blackwood’s interest in spiritualism, his love of nature, and his pantheism started to overtake his more standard forays in supernatural terror. His writing turned more toward transcendentalism and away from plot. The most important precursor to this development is his 1911 novel The Centaur, which critic S. T. Joshi describes as Blackwood’s “spiritual autobiography.”

And in his 2015 review of Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, Bill Lengeman clearly agreed.

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