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Category: Future Treasures

Goth Chick News Crypt Notes: Holy Millennium Falcon Han Solo!

Goth Chick News Crypt Notes: Holy Millennium Falcon Han Solo!

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Holy Millenium Falcon Han SoloWhere Star Wars is concerned, even a goth chick can go fan-girl.

Just in from the UK today: A pilot taking publicity photos for a flying school accidentally buzzed one of the sets of the new Star Wars movie with pretty impressive, if unintentional, results.

Matthew Myatt originally thought his pictures were of experiment aircraft at the Greenham Common airfield in Berkshire, England. Greenham Common is a former RAF airbase. Myatt was photographing one plane from another and it wasn’t until he got back and started reviewing his images that he realized what he had captured: none other than a partially built Millennium Falcon and an X-Wing fighter.

It appears that, at least in part, director J.J. Abrams will use models for filming rather than pure CGI. As one excited fan wrote on www.theforce.net, “Who’d’ve guessed filmmakers still build physical models?” and “Looks like the Falcon got a paint job!”

Star Wars is due out in December, 2015

Future Treasures: Shattered Shields, edited by Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Future Treasures: Shattered Shields, edited by Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

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Shattered Sheilds-smallWell, here’s a fun thing: an upcoming anthology packed with tales of epic battles and soldiers struggling against overwhelming odds, with a stellar cast of contributors.

Shattered Shields is edited Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt, and will be available in November. Jennifer — who got her start as an RPG reviewer in Black Gate magazine back in 2002 — has previously edited no less than ten anthologies, including Space Tramps and Human for a Day. Her co-editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt has also edited Space Battles and Beyond The Sun, among others.

The book includes a brand new Black Company story from Glen Cook, a Paksenarrion tale from Elizabeth Moon, a Runelords story by David Farland, a tale of October Daye from Seanan McGuire — and a story set in the World of Zang by our very own John R. Fultz. Here’s John on his story:

“Yael of the Strings” is my contribution…  Most of the Zang Cycle stories were collected this year in The Revelations of Zang, but this is a brand-new excursion into that world. The protagonist isn’t a soldier at all, but a minstrel whose fencing skills become his only chance at survival when the red tide of battle overwhelms. “Strings” revisits the nation of Ghoth with its behemoth spiders (from “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine”), and introduces Sharoc, Land of the Griffon.

Readers who remember John’s terrific sword and sorcery tale, “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine” (from Black Gate 12) will surely want this one. Other contributors include Cat Rambo, Robin Wayne Bailey, Dave Gross, James L. Sutter, and many others.

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Future Treasures: The Baen Big Book of Monsters, edited by Hank Davis

Future Treasures: The Baen Big Book of Monsters, edited by Hank Davis

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The Baen Big Book of Monsters-smallMonsters!! And lots of ’em.

That’s all you need to know. Big monster book comin’. A Halloween-themed monster anthology, with a tantalizing a mix of classic reprints and original stories, all featuring REALLY BIG MONSTERS. Contributors include names that will be very familiar to Black Gate readers, such as Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, William Hope Hodgson, Murray Leinster, James H. Schmitz, Arthur C. Clarke, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, David Drake, and many more.

It even includes the pulp classic “The Monster-God of Mamurth” by Edmond Hamilton. And Harlan Ellison told us that story sucked when we wanted to reprint it. What does he know?

I approve of this Hank Davis fellow. His last anthology for Baen was the awesome In Space No One Can Hear You Scream, released last Halloween. This man is doing God’s work. Next time you run into him tell him he is blessed, and we’ll be rubbing elbows with the saints in the line to buy his book.

Here’s the book description, and the complete Table of Contents.

SIZE MATTERS

From the dragons of legend to Jack the Giant Killer’s colleague to King Kong and Godzilla, people have found the idea of giant creatures both scary and fascinating. Why so many should find accounts of a critter big enough to gulp down a puny human like an insignificantly small hor d’oeuvre or step on said human and leave a grease spot might be explained by the psychologists, but such yarns are undeniable fun.

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Future Treasures: The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures edited by Sean Wallace

Future Treasures: The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures edited by Sean Wallace

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The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures-smallLast January, we told you about Sean Wallace’s intriguing anthology The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, a generous collection of short fiction from Amal El-Mohtar, Barth Anderson, Jeffrey Ford, James Morrow, Mary Robinette Kowal, Aliette de Bodard, N.K. Jemisin, and many others.

The book was a solid success and no publisher can resist success. So it should be no surprise that the sequel, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures, is scheduled to arrive next month here in the US (it’s already on sale in the UK).

This volume collects over 30 steampunk tales, including three originals from Benjanun Sriduangkaew, E. Catherine Tobler, and Jonathan Wood. Other contributors include K.W. Jeter, Tobias S. Buckell, Cherie Priest, Jay Lake, Christopher Barzak, Carrie Vaughn, Chris Roberson, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Tony Pi, Aliette de Bodard, Nisi Shawl, Genevieve Valentine, Sofia Samatar, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Cat Rambo, Margaret Ronald, Ken Liu, and many others.

Our very own C.S.E. Cooney contributes a reprint, her marvelous tale “Canary of Candletown,” from Steam-Powered II. Ann VanderMeer provides the introduction.

Sean Wallace is also the editor of the upcoming The Mammoth Book of Warriors and Wizardry, a very promising sword & sorcery collection with a story reprinted from Black Gate (Matthew David Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael”), as well as contributions from James Enge, Chris Willrich, Aliette de Bodard, Mary Robinette Kowal, N.K. Jemisin, Saladin Ahmed, and many others.

I’m a big fan of these Mammoth anthologies. They’re attractive, well edited, and a great value for the money. Keep your eye out for this one.

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Discover the Prototype for Lord of the Rings: The Zimiamvia Trilogy by E. R. Eddison

Discover the Prototype for Lord of the Rings: The Zimiamvia Trilogy by E. R. Eddison

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The Mezentian Gate-small The Worm Ouroboros-small
A Fish Dinner in Memison-small Mistress of Mistresses-small

Many decades ago, I discovered four volumes of fantasy by the British author E. R. Eddison: The Worm Ouroboros, and its sequel, The Zimiamvia Trilogy (Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, and the uncompleted The Mezentian Gate.) They were a handsome set of Ballantine paperbacks from 1967, all with gorgeous covers by Barbara Remington.

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Future Treasures: The Cobbler of Ridingham by Jeffrey E. Barlough

Future Treasures: The Cobbler of Ridingham by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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The Cobbler of Ridingham-smallJeffrey E. Barlough is one of the most gifted and ambitious fantasists at work today and his seven volume Western Lights series is unlike anything else on the shelves. In his review of the fifth volume, Anchorwick, Jackson Kuhl sums up events as follows:

Eugene Stanley has come to the university at Salthead (a parallel Seattle? Vancouver?) to assist his professor uncle in preparing a book manuscript. One night, while working in a deserted turret room at the college…  Stanley is accosted by a phantasmal form. This ignites a definitive search for the missing don as Stanley and friends uncover lost civilizations, ancestral curses, whole companies of ghosts, monsters from Greek myth, and a few red herrings, all told in rich, dryly humorous style. It’s P.G. Wodehouse with woolly mammoths.

Those who complain that there’s nothing new in fantasy today aren’t looking hard enough. And they’re definitely not reading Jeffrey E. Barlough.

The eighth volume in the Western Lights series, The Cobbler of Ridingham, will be released in November and it features Richard Hathaway, who previously appeared in Bertram of Butter Cross and the short story “Ebenezer Crackernut” (from A Tangle in Slops).

A creeping shadow, a bump in the night, a thing in the trees — these are but a few of the surprises lurking in the pages of The Cobbler of Ridingham… The new work relates a curious adventure that befell Richard Hathaway while visiting at Haigh Hall, the home of a family acquaintance, Lady Martindale, on the marshes outside the picturesque old country town of Ridingham.

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Future Treasures: Clariel, The Lost Abhorsen, by Garth Nix

Future Treasures: Clariel, The Lost Abhorsen, by Garth Nix

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Clariel Garth Nix-smallGarth Nix is one of my favorite young adult writers. I was tremendously impressed with his dark, gritty, and fast-paced Shade’s Children — talk about your dystopian settings! — and I’ve heard great things about his Seventh Tower series.

But it was his Abhorsen series — Sabriel (1997), Lirael (2002), and Abhorsen (2004) — that really made a splash in this house. My kids absolutely loved them, especially my oldest, Tim. So when the advance proof of Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen arrived last month, it was barely on my desk 24 hours before my kids ran off with it. It’s taken me this long to get it back so I can write about it.

Clariel is a prequel to the earlier volumes, returning to the Old Kingdom for a tale of dark magic, royalty, dangerous action, a strong heroine, and Nix’s usual superb world-building.

Clariel is the daughter of one of the most notable families in the Old Kingdom, with blood relations to the Abhorsen and, most important, to the King. She dreams of living a simple life but discovers this is hard to achieve when a dangerous Free Magic creature is loose in the city, her parents want to marry her off to a killer, and there is a plot brewing against the old and withdrawn King Orrikan. When Clariel is drawn into the efforts to find and capture the creature, she finds hidden sorcery within herself, yet it is magic that carries great dangers. Can she rise above the temptation of power, escape the unwanted marriage, and save the King?

Clariel will be published by HarperCollins on October 14, 2014. It is 400 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our upcoming book reports here.

Future Treasures: The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

Future Treasures: The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

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The Slow Regard of Silent Things-smallPatrick Rothfuss’s The Kingkiller Chronicle includes only two volumes so far — The Name of the Wind, reviewed for us by Robert Rhodes, and the Gemmel Award winner The Wise Man’s Fear — which doesn’t make it much of a chronicle by fantasy standards, really. But it has already vaulted into the front rank of modern fantasy, with great critical acclaim and a growing body of fans. Expectations are high for the third volume.

Now comes word that Rothfuss’s next book, featuring a character from the previous novels, is not the long-awaited third volume in The Kingkiller Chronicle. Instead it’s a novella featuring Auri, former student at The University, titled The Slow Regard of Silent Things.

This is the second of three novellas set in Temerant (known as the Four Corners of Civilization in the novels) that Rothfuss reportedly has planned. The first, “The Lightning Tree,” was centered on Bast and was recently published in Rogues, the massive heroic fantasy anthology edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. The third, a very lengthy (100,000-120,000 words) volume featuring Laniel Young-Again, has not yet been officially announced.

The upcoming third volume in The Kingkiller Chronicle, The Doors of Stone, has a title but no firm release date.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things will be released as a standalone hardcover by DAW this October. Here’s the book description.

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Future Treasures: Willful Child by Steven Erikson

Future Treasures: Willful Child by Steven Erikson

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Willful Child Steven Erikson-smallSince we’ve been talking about Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont’s Malazan books this weekend, I thought I’d slip in a mention of Erikson’s upcoming novel Willful Child — which looks like a pretty significant departure from his epic fantasy roots.

Erikson completed his monumental Malazan Book of the Fallen with the tenth volume, The Crippled God, in March 2011. He didn’t take much of a breather: Forge of Darkness, the first novel in his new Kharkanas Trilogy, appeared a year later; the second, Fall of Light, is scheduled to arrive next February. He’s also been writing short tales featuring the necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach — five so far, including Crack’d Pot Trail.

But now comes word that his latest book is a tongue-in-cheek space opera called Willful Child, which Robert Sawyer calls “A love letter to Star Trek and its fans — a pitch-perfect tour de force.” Given Steven Erikson’s gifts as a storyteller, and my own love of Star Trek, this has immediately become one of the most anticipated novels of the year for me.

These are the voyages of the starship A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life-forms, to boldly blow the…

And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through ‘the infinite vastness of interstellar space.’

The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence has taken his lifelong passion for Star Trek and transformed it into a smart, inventive, and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-high-tech-gadgets-along-the-way, overblown adventure. The result is an SF novel that deftly parodies the genre while also paying fond homage to it.

Willful Child will be published by Tor Books on November 4, 2014. It is 352 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital version.

Goth Chick News Reviews: Fearie Tales, Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome

Goth Chick News Reviews: Fearie Tales, Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome

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Fearie Tales Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome-smallIf you have had the opportunity to read the original tales of the Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, then you know that their stories are a far cry from the Disney and Warner Brothers’ versions.

Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are eaten, Snow White’s step-mother must dance at Snow White’s wedding wearing hot, leaden shoes until she dies, and Sleeping Beauty’s mother-in-law tries to eat her along with her two children as soon as her prince turns his back.

Apparently, in-laws were a problem even in 1812…

As an aficionado of all things creepy, Children’s and Household Tales (a.k.a. Grimm’s Fairy Tales) have long since been a staple in my library, which may explain why I don’t get asked to babysit more often. So I was thrilled to open a package from Quercus Publishing this week containing their newest offering, Fearie Tales, Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome.

Fearie Tales is a compilation of stories, entirely in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm, but penned by a thoroughly modern list of storytellers such as Garth Nix (The Seventh Tower series), Ramsey Campbell (most award-winning author in the horror genre), and my personal favorite, the legendary Neil Gaiman. The book is decorated with several disturbing illustrations by Oscar-winning Tolkien artist Alan Lee.

Containing thirty-one tales ranging in length from three pages to over fifty, it was easy to immediately dig in to — so I can give you at least a preliminary report. “Rapunzel” is a direct reprint of the 1812 Grimm tale, which itself is a retelling of the French story of Persinette originally published in 1698. The prince does indeed climb up to Rapunzel’s chamber using her hair, leaving her pregnant with twins and without his last name.

They all do live happily ever after… eventually.

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