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In 500 words or Less … The Wurms of Blearmouth by Steven Erikson

In 500 words or Less … The Wurms of Blearmouth by Steven Erikson

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the-wurms-of-blearmouth-smallWhen someone asks my favorite fantasy series, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen is usually one that I mention. It’s one of those sprawling epics with great characters and a complex, vibrant world that sucked me in and inspired me to write fantasy of my own.

After the series ended, I grabbed the next Erikson book I could find — The First Collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach — and was delighted. I read the next in that series, Crack’d Pot Trail … and put it down after a couple chapters.

Erikson’s most recent work is a series of prequels (which I avoid) and his other recent books haven’t interested me, so when I found another Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novella, The Wurms of Blearmouth, I almost didn’t pick it up.

Overall, though, this latest tale was satisfying. The theme in the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach stories seems to be that everyone is a terrible person, but the residents of Spendrugle take things to a new level of depravity. I balked a little at first with the female characters specifically, who are stupid or vile or both — but then I realized that you can describe every character from Wurms that way, and so I got over it (mostly). In this case, Erikson is very “equal opportunity” when it comes to negative characteristics, so don’t be turned off by what’s depicted in the opening chapters (you probably will be anyway).

The real point to these stories, after all, is to follow famed necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach and their manservant, Emancipor, from screwed-up situation to screwed-up situation; they’re the real draw for me, and Erikson consistently entertains me with the way that they go about doing evil work without seeming to care about the consequences.

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September Short Story Roundup

September Short Story Roundup

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oie_413844fthp1nteWe’re still in the midst of a swords & sorcery renaissance that started around a decade ago, and now there’s a broader pulp one going on as well. Between the first issue of Skelos and the third of Cirsova, September saw a hurricane of short stories involving swords, wizards, warriors, pirates, and space pirates. Good times ahead! At least that’s my hope.

I first became aware of Skelos‘ then-impending existence with a flurry of internet activity announcing a Kickstarter this past spring. On the pledge page the magazine was heralded as “A horror and fantasy journal featuring short fiction, essays, poetry, reviews, and art by both seasoned pros and talented newcomers!” I found those words impossible to resist, and kicked in enough money to get myself billed in its pages as a benefactor, and be rewarded with a print copy and a four-issue e-book subscription.

When the print copy of Skelos 1 appeared in my mailbox last month, I was very impressed with its look and feel. The cover is decorated with a nicely creepy Gustav Doré illustration and the inside is filled with great black and white art.

Skelos is edited by a triumvirate comprising Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, and Jeffrey Shanks, but the introduction was written by Finn alone. The co-editors are looking to have an an ongoing conversation with their readers and are “willing to learn as we go, if you’re willing to talk to us about the thoughts behind the words and pictures. We want everyone to walk away feeling like they learned something new, or at least, were heard and understood.” It may be “too ambitious to try and bridge the gap between Classic Weird Fiction and New Weird Fiction,” but where they intersect is what the trio find interesting, and what Skelos intends to investigate. While there are very specific references to authors and artists from the early days of weird fiction (Lovecraft, Moore, Bok, and Finlay), there aren’t any contemporary ones. If that sounds a little vague, I believe it’s deliberate, as Skelos is still a work in progress.

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The Fierce Love of Thieves: Thieves of Islar by James Shade

The Fierce Love of Thieves: Thieves of Islar by James Shade

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Some of us think of our siblings as friends for life. Those of us who have siblings also know that much of the time, your bonds can transcend friendship, and sometimes not in a good way. Both forms of love between siblings are lovingly rendered in James Shade’s debut novel, Thieves of Islar.

Young Jaeron, Chazd and Avrilla deAlto lose their father, Henri, in a tragic house fire. To avenge him, the siblings form a guild with their closest friends and relatives in order to squash his murderer under their feet. But that’s not the only mystery Jaeron intends to solve, unbeknownst to his siblings. And their father’s murderer has a diabolical plan in mind.

Shade has a brilliant way of painting exquisite portraits of his characters. His description of the deAlto’s Uncle Ardo and his regrets remains firmly lodged in my memory. Shade gives every character who appears in his tale a purpose, and he renders their purposes with tremendous care. There’s a reason why you’ll come away remembering the names of the core characters.

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Tabletop Terror: Pathfinder Edition

Tabletop Terror: Pathfinder Edition

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Pathfinder Occult AdventuresHumans hate to be frightened … except when we love it. There’s a small, sinister part of our brains that love terror and menace, not in real life so much as in our entertainment. This shows up regularly in our fiction and films, of course, as shelves are stocked with horror and thriller novels, as well as slasher flicks and suspenseful films and television series (some of which, I hear, even feature zombies).

Over this month leading up to Halloween, I’ll be focusing on how this horror element manifests itself in some great tabletop games which, among other things, can add immense fun to the Halloween holiday seas. (Am I the only one who celebrates all month long?)

To begin, I’d like to focus on some recent releases from one of my favorite RPG systems: Pathfinder RPG. While there has never been a shortage of monsters in the Pathfinder world of Golarion, over the last year they have had two major releases that really up the ante on the terror quotient, by introducing dynamic new game mechanics related to exploring these horrors. These manuals, together with their current Lovecraftian-themed horror Adventure Path series Strange Aeons [Paizo, Amazon], means that if you want to dive directly into a world full of terror and occult mysteries, you’ve got everything at your disposal to do so.

Occult Adventures

Released in August of 2015, Occult Adventures [Paizo, Amazon] formally introduces a psychic-based magical system into the Pathfinder RPG. These powers draw from the internal mental powers of the individual (or other individuals), rather than from the sources that fuel arcane or divine magic, and they provide a wealth of new approaches to magic to mix things up for people who have been playing wizards and clerics for several decades. In addition to six new psionics-based occult classes, and a variety of archetypes to offer psionic variations on existing classes, it introduces psychic magic, various new occult rules and mechanics, and occult-related equipment and magical items.

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Return to Enoch: The King of Nightspore’s Crown by Raphael Ordoñez

Return to Enoch: The King of Nightspore’s Crown by Raphael Ordoñez

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“Answers, he wants! Do you really think you can just go out and find the whole story somewhere, complete and cross-referenced, without any gaps or inconsistencies? I’m sorry to disillusion you, my boy, but that’s not the sort of world we live in. It’s a messy place. There are no infallible interpreters walking among the living, no emissaries sent from the blessed realm to dole out bits of lore that move history along and need never be questioned.”

Astyges speaking to Keftu, from The King of Nightspore’s Crown

oie_201222utyzw9lrIt’s a rare fantasy story that really surprises me. Partly, I have read a lot, but often there appears to be a collective dearth of imagination. I know readers — myself included — enjoy and find easy comfort in stories filled with familiar characters and plots, but once upon a time, before fantasy became a mass-market commodity in the 1970s, there seemed to be limitless inspiration in the stories that were told. Contemporary fantasy keeps getting stuck in homage and mimicry. When faux-European settings weren’t the norm, a reader could be transported to worlds as strikingly weird as Hodgson’s sunless Night Land, Burroughs’ dying Barsoom, or the haunted corridors of Peake’s Castle Gormenghast. When there’s no limit to the colors on a fantasy writer’s palette, why do I feel like I keep seeing the same dozen or so?

It was exactly three years ago that I first encountered Raphael Ordoñez’s writing. “The Goblin King’s Concubine” (BCS #129), a captivity narrative set in a deadly, spider- and fungus-infested jungle swamp on the dying world of Antellus, was like nothing else I was reading at the time. I sought out Ordoñez’s blog, Cosmic Antipodes, and spent hours reading his older posts on things ranging from planetary adventure to painting to autism. His love for storytelling unconstrained by the modern expectations of genre fantasy were refreshing. By the end I was ensnared, and watched for new stories with anticipation. Each is strange and unique and couched within a complex cosmogony which is a mix of Old Testament, William Blake, and pulp nuttiness, among other things. It can be read about at length here.

Last year, Ordoñez self-published the novel Dragonfly (read my review here). It brings together several characters introduced previously in short stories. Unlike the discrete events of those tales, the novel is a full-blown epic. Keftu, sole survivor of a desert tribe, thinks he is the only person alive in the entire world, until he espies a glowing city floating above the ocean. He is prevented from reaching the sky-city Narva when he falls into the clutches of the Cheriopt. The Cheripot is the the “semi-divine headless social machine” that controls everything in the crumbling, ocean-encircling megacity, Enoch. He becomes by turns, a famous gladiator, a liberator, and finally, the last hope to thwart the half-goblin Zilla’s nefarious plans to throw Enoch into total chaos.

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Much of a Muchness: Phyllis Eisenstein’s Born to Exile

Much of a Muchness: Phyllis Eisenstein’s Born to Exile

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First edition of Eisenstein’s Born to Exile
Fantasy Fiction, editorial, detail
Why was the editor of Fantasy Fiction getting stories full of mystical strangeness? We cannot tell.

Recently I was reading an editorial in Fantasy Fiction, an old magazine from near the end of the pulp era. This is the kind of thing I’m apt to do, especially when I should be getting some work done, but in this case I was hooked by the title, which was one of Latin’s greatest hits about reading: NON MULTA, SED MULTUM (“not many things, but much of a thing”).

The message of the editorial was that the editor was seeing too many stories that overdid the number of fantastic elements: “Recently a story came in which had everything — ghosts were making a compact with a group of trolls to defeat the Greek gods, now about to retake the world with a bunch of Hebraic letter incantations.”

The editor felt this was bad and stopped reading on the third page. I say it sounds awesome and the editor should have been banished to the outer darkness where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. But I’m of the opposite school of fantasy — the “more cowbell” school, you might call it (to allude to another classic). Some people will try to tell you that less is more, but “more cowbell” people insist that only more is more: more miracles, more fireballs, more talking squids in space.

The truth is that neither school is right or wrong; it’s just a question of what works in a given story. The advantage of the non multa, sed multum approach is that it allows the writer to explore the ramifications of a fantastic concept, and maybe work in a character or two, not to mention a more carefully detailed world.

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You Say Acolyte, I Say Assassin

You Say Acolyte, I Say Assassin

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grayshade-smallStormtalons 02: Grayshade
by Gregory A. Wilson
The Ed Greenwood Group ($9.99 CAN digital, released September 30; $49.99 CAN hardcover, January 1, 2017)
Website

Servants of Argoth maintain balance in the world by meting out justice; sometimes, that justice can only be obtained through death. That’s where the Acolytes — some call them assassins — come in. Grayshade and his brethren receive assignments from Father Jant, the head of the order, who is guided by Argoth’s will.

When Grayshade receives an assignment to kill Lady Ashenza, a member of the government of Cohrelle, he accepts it as a matter of course. Being a power broker in the local government isn’t why she’s been marked for a hit, however. She’s also rumored to be a part of the Vraevre, a religious sect that in recent weeks has begun to assassinate Cohrelle political figures. In order to restore balance, she must die, and Grayshade is sent to do his duty.

However, when he enters her room, Lady Ashenza tells Grayshade that she isn’t a threat to him or his order; no, the real threat is the Order of Argoth itself. While this gives Grayshade pause, he does complete his mission. During his exit, he spots another Acolyte near the Ashenza home, and he soon realizes the evening’s events are more complicated than they appear. Before long he questions everything he’s ever been taught, and soon realizes he can only trust himself.

Grayshade by Gregory A. Wilson has everything I love in a fantasy novel: a fully-realized setting, complex characters with hidden motivations, political intrigue, and a touch of humor. As I read, I felt the clay-tiled rooftops beneath my feet and smelled the stench of garbage in alleyways. By the end of the first few chapters, Cohrelle felt very much like a real city with a life of its own.

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The Religion by Tim Willocks

The Religion by Tim Willocks

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oie_1331351pip0pgfdOne of sword & sorcery’s primary inspirations is historical adventure, like that of writers Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. That noble genre continues today in Tim Willocks’ insanely violent The Religion: Vol 1 of the Tannhauser Trilogy (2006), for one, set in the cauldron of the Great Siege of Malta. Into it, Willocks introduces the rogue Mattias Tannhauser, son of a Saxon blacksmith from Transylvania. At the age of 12, Mattias’ mother and sister are killed by Ottoman militia and he is taken captive. Every five years, the Turks would take Christian boys, convert them, and raise them up to be ferocious, elite soldiers, known as the Janissaries.

For thirteen years, Tannhauser served as a true and loyal soldier of the sultan, but eventually he leaves and returns to the West. A dozen of so years later, Tannhauser and a pair of friends, English soldier Bors of Carlisle and Sabato Svi, Jewish trader, have established themselves as important arms and opium dealers in Messina, Sicily.

Now, as the Ottoman tide is ready to break on Malta, Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, lures Tannhauser to Malta. The great powers, Spain and France, embroiled in their own internal problems, have lent only token aid to the island’s defense. De Valette wants every resource he can lay his hands on, and what better than Tannhauser’s intimate knowledge of the Turks he once served with?

In the 16th century, the centuries long struggle between Christendom and the Moslem world seemed to be coming to a conclusion. In the century following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Christian West seemed headed for ultimate defeat. Under the brilliant Suleiman the Magnificent, the Knights of St. John, one of the last remaining military orders, had been driven out of the Eastern Mediterranean when Rhodes was captured in 1522. The knights, also known by their nickname the Religion, had been established in in 1099 to escort pilgrims to the Holy Land.

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Cugel in Golarion: Song of the Serpent by Hugh Matthews

Cugel in Golarion: Song of the Serpent by Hugh Matthews

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The woman looked over at Krunzle, who was making sure no morsel of the meal escaped his needs. “What of you, errand-runner? Do you know much of where we are heading? Or anything, for that matter?”

The thief returned her a level gaze. “I know who I am and what I can do,” he said. “I find that usually suffices.” He arranged a piece of fish on a crumb of bread and popped both into his mouth.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       from Song of the Serpent

I have read only a tiny fraction of Matthew Hughes’ prodigious output. What I have read, his Jack Vance-inspired stories of the Purloiner Raffalon, I like very much (see my reviews here, here, here, and here). Those four stories, plus five others, will be collected and released next year. I can safely write that that will be an immediate purchase for me.

A few weeks ago, when he posted about a novel he wrote back in 2012 for Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales, I was intrigued.

Back in 2008 at World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, I was in the bar when Erik Mona, publisher of Paizo Books, told me he was a great Jack Vance fan and that he liked my work. He asked me if I had a book for him. As it turned out, I was looking for a publisher for Template, my stand-alone Archonate space opera that had been brought out as limited collector’s editions by PS Publishing.

I sent it to him and he brought it out as part of the series, Planet Stories, which (like Template) were decidedly retro science fiction.

Later, Erik told me that he also published novels set in the Pathfinder RPG universe’s world of Golarion, and asked me if I would be interested in doing one. He also said he would really like it if I would do a Cugel the Clever story. I love the Cugel stories and said I’d be delighted.

So we made a deal and I wrote a novel originally called Out of the Blue that was retitled Song of the Serpent before publication in 2012. It told the tale of a thief named Krunzle the Quick who, like Cugel, is fast on his feet – he has to be because, again like Cugel, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

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Self-published Book Review: Valley of Embers by Steven Kelliher

Self-published Book Review: Valley of Embers by Steven Kelliher

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see this post for instructions to submit. I’ve received very few submissions recently, and I’d like to get more.

Valley of Embers by Steven KelliherValley of Embers by Steven Kelliher is primarily the story of Kole Reyna and Linn Ve’Ran. Although Linn Ve’Ran is a skilled and dedicated hunter and warrior, she is not an Ember like Kole, a Landkist given power to control flame by the land. But the land from which Kole’s power comes is not the titular valley where Kole’s and Linn’s people live, but the desert from which their ancestors fled from the war between the Sages. Before he fell in battle, the King of Ember struck a bargain with the Sage White Crest to shelter his people in the valley. Separated from the desert for decades, those born as Embers are fewer and weaker each generation. Instead, some are gifted with the native Landkist power of the valley, the healing and dreaming of the Faeykin. But it is the Embers who are especially valued, to fight the Dark Kind who have returned, bearing the corruption of the Eastern Dark from whom the Emberkin fled years before.

Everyone wonders what had become of the White Crest, who was to be their protector. Some think that he fell shortly after the King of Ember, when he shattered the land to turn back the Eastern Dark. Others think that in his isolation, he is unaware of their plight, or thinks that they can handle things themselves, or is too busy fighting the far greater threat of the Eastern Dark. Since the night of his mother’s death while seeking out the White Crest and the dream he had of her fall, Kole has believed that the White Crest has turned against them, and it is he who sends the Dark Kind.

But while Kole is given permission to seek out the White Crest and get some answers, he is delayed when he suffers a grievous injury by a Sentinel, one of the Dark Kind’s lieutenants, who can convert humans to their cause. While he fights the darkness that seeks to turn him, Linn Ve’Ran gathers some friends and strikes out without him. Her party quickly runs into trouble when they encounter an army of Dark Kind besieging the Valley’s largest city, Hearth, and only half of them make it to the mountains where the White Crest dwells.

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