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To Ride a Rathorn by P. C. Hodgell

To Ride a Rathorn by P. C. Hodgell

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oie_11225225XvvToolIt’s taken me two years, but I’ve finally returned to P. C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath Cycle, with the fourth book, To Ride a Rathorn. A rathorn is a deadly, carnivorous, horned, horse-like animal covered in heavy plates of ivory. For the Kencyrath, to ride a rathorn is to try to do something insane, and our heroine Jame is about to do just that. She has accepted her destiny as a crucial element of the final showdown with Perimal Darkling, a world-devouring force of chaos and evil. At the same time, several forces are arrayed against her: the enemies of her family, the weight of millennia of traditions, and terrible agents of utter darkness. Instead of just crawling away and hiding, Jame has decided to take on all comers, and figuratively — and perhaps literally — ride a rathorn.

Four books in, to say the series is complicated is like saying the sun is hot or the oceans wet. Hodgell has created one of the densest and tremendously detailed fantasy settings, and to even look at this book without having read its predecessors just might make a reader’s brain explode. But as I often ask: have you taken my advice and read the other books yet? Because you should have by now. To get a better understanding of what’s gone on before, you can read my reviews of the first three — God Stalk, Dark of the Moon, and Seeker’s Mask — right here at Black Gate. If you don’t have time, though, here’s a relatively brief synopsis:

Thirty thousand years ago, Perimal Darkling began to devour the series of parallel universes called the Chain of Creation. To fight against it, the Three-Faced God forged three separate races into one; feline-like Arrin-Ken to serve as judges, the heavily muscled Kendar to serve as soldiers and craftsmen, and the fine-featured humanoid Highborn to rule them. For 27,000 years, the Kencyrath fought a losing battle, one universe after another falling to the darkness. Three thousand years ago, the High Lord Gerridon, fearful of death, betrayed his people to Perimal Darkling in exchange for immortality. Fleeing yet again, the Kencyrath landed on the world of Rathilien. Since then, they haven’t heard from their god, and Perimal Darkling has seemed satisfied to lurk at the edges of their new home. Monotheists trapped on an alien world with many gods, the Kencyrath have had to struggle to find their own place and survive on Rathilien.

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Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Also Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, and a Tangent on Modernism

Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Also Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, and a Tangent on Modernism

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Astro_City_A_Visitors_Guide_Vol_1_1This is mostly an homage to Kurt Busiek and Astro City, and to one story in particular, but buckle in because we’re going to cover a lot of rambling ground getting there in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way, taking in stuff by random association — sort of like the streets of Astro City itself…

Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is one of my favorite superhero comics. It consistently delivers brilliant, funny, poignant, human stories in a colorful, wonderfully idiosyncratic comic-book world. It is Busiek’s magnum opus — like Bendis’s Powers, it towers above his other work for the big publishers using their branded characters. He brings the sensibilities he honed in the groundbreaking Marvel miniseries Marvels to his own universe and, beneath all the ZAP! BANG! POW!, weaves tales you will never forget.

What Marvels did that was so fresh in 1994 is it “lowered the camera” from the god-like supers knocking each other through buildings and focused in on the ordinary humans down here at street level, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, watching it happen. What impact did the existence of such powers have on their day-to-day lives?

In Astro City the camera is completely unfettered, ranging to the heights to reveal very human dramas among people who have the power to level cities and then zooming down to the alleys to follow a day in the life of a two-bit petty thief who is really a pretty ordinary, decent human being (with the exception that his skin is covered with a steel alloy). Through the course of following Carl Donewicz, aka Steeljack — in the classic story “The Tarnished Angel” — we come to sympathize with and like him, and even find ourselves rooting for him: just once, could one of his heists go off without a hitch and not be foiled by The Jack-in-the-Box? And in Astro City, where narratives don’t always follow the comic-book formula, he does have his day. A fun, feel-good story, that one.

And then there are Astro City stories that rip your heart out. “The Nearness of You,” I contend, is among the great American short stories of the late twentieth century, and I think it could be anthologized as such. (Wizard Magazine does rank it number 6 on their list of “100 Greatest Single Issue Comic Books Since You Were Born.”) Publishers these days would have no problem formatting a four-color comic story into their prose collections. But should they? It is, after all, a comic book.

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Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

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Penny Blackfeather
“Brilliant!” (But the cover is less grown up than the content.)
The Girl Reads Blackfeather
“…compares well to the Goth Girl series.”

“This is brilliant...” says “The Girl,” 12, one of my son’s friends.

We’re in the cafe of the kid’s music school and I’ve asked her what she thinks of Penny Blackfeather, a Regency Punk graphic novel that Sloth Comics sent me.

She reads it until we prise it away from her so she can dash off to her recorder lesson.

The next week, we all go for coffee and she dives back in.

She still rates it as brilliant, and thinks it compares well to the Goth Girl series.

“Morgenstern”, my steampunk-loving daughter, 8, is also mesmerised.

She reads it twice and compares it to Adventure Time, her favourite cartoon, and also pronounces it, “Brilliant!”

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The Conclusion to a Grand Adventure: Hobgoblin Night by Teresa Edgerton

The Conclusion to a Grand Adventure: Hobgoblin Night by Teresa Edgerton

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oie_433623CB5VCFSUHobgoblin Night (2015) is an e-book rerelease (and revision, and repackaging, along with three previously published short stories) of The Gnome’s Engine (1991), Teresa Edgerton’s charming follow-up to Goblin Moon (1991). In it, the adventures of brave Sera Vorder and dashing Francis Skelbrooke, and the evil machinations of the faerie-human hybrid, the Duchess of Zar-Wildungen, continue.

In my Black Gate review of Goblin Moon, I wrote,

Goblin Moon is a model of what light entertainment can be. It’s not going to change your world, but it will definitely bring a smile to the face of anyone with a taste for some swashbuckling and Gothic mystery. This tale, smelling just a little of lavender and gunpowder, is a fun respite from all the bloody, cynical “realism” permeating much of modern fantasy — come to think of it, much of modern life.

Those words hold true for Hobgoblin Night, as well. There’s a little less swashbuckling and a little more Gothic mystery in this volume, but it’s just as much outright fun as its predecessor. If you have any desire to visit a world suspiciously like Europe during the Enlightenment, but with Gnomes, Fairies, Trolls, magic, and alchemy, these two books are for you.

At the end of Goblin Moon Sera, her cousin Elsie, and Jed Braun were headed off over the Alantick Ocean to the hoped-for safety of the New World. Though they had thwarted the Duchess’ evil plan to wreak dire harm on Elsie as revenge for a slight perpetrated by Elsie’s mother, they hadn’t stifled her desire for satisfaction. By stealing an ancient, mysterious parchment from the Duchess before fleeing, they had, in fact, only enraged her more.

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Self-published Book Review: Forgotten Soldiers by Joshua P. Simon

Self-published Book Review: Forgotten Soldiers by Joshua P. Simon

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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.

Forgotten Soldiers coverForgotten Soldiers is the story of Tyrus, a sergeant in the Turine army. Turine has been at war with the Geneshan Empire for over a decade, and the war is almost over, the Empire on the defensive. Tyrus’s tactical skill and magic resistance make him a highly valued asset, and he is sent, along with his well-trained unit and powerful mage sister, on the critical mission of recovering a magical artifact, an ancient superweapon in the hands of the Geneshans. He succeeds, and the Geneshans immediately surrender. It turns out the Geneshans are even more afraid of the artifact than the Turines are, and the only condition of their surrender is that the Turines not use the artifact. Tyrus and what remains of his unit are discharged.

Their reception is not quite as warm as they anticipated. Many people have heard rumors of what the army has been up to, and it’s not pretty. People regard the soldiers with suspicion, refuse to do business with them, and there is even an attack by a mob at the first town they visit. When Tyrus and his friends are forced to defend themselves, the situation becomes worse and they have to leave town in a hurry, every soldier hoping that they’ll at least be welcomed back in their hometowns.

For Tyrus and his friends, that’s not to be. Tyrus returns to find himself presumed dead, and his family in dire straits. The town has changed, consisting mostly of newcomers hostile to him, and even his old friends are either suspicious of him themselves or too afraid of the current climate to help. It’s up to him to rescue his son and daughter, Zadok and Myra, from indentured servitude and try to find a place for his family.

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Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1951: A Retro-Review

Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1951: A Retro-Review

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Thrilling Wonder Stories April 1951-smallI felt like looking at a classic pulp from the great late stages of the true SF pulps.

A moment of definition is in order here: I consider a true pulp magazine to have been printed on pulp paper, in approximately the traditional pulp size (7″ by 10″), during the heyday of the SF pulps (say, 1926-1955). This is meant to exclude digests (like Astounding after about 1943; and most SF magazines after 1955), and of course slicks. The great pulps (in my opinion) of the early 1950s were the Standard Magazines companion pair, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, and Planet Stories (published by Love Romances).

So this is Thrilling Wonder Stories for April of 1951. Thrilling began publication in 1936, though it was essentially a direct descendant of Wonder Stories, which was founded by Hugo Gernsback after he lost control of Amazing, first as two magazines, Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, that soon merged into one. The editor is uncredited but at this time was surely Sam Merwin, Jr., who took over the magazine in 1945, and who left at the end of 1951, Sam Mines taking over. Sam Merwin, little enough celebrated at the time, was actually a quite effective editor, raising the quality of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories to at least shooting distance of Astounding – perhaps the quality at the top wasn’t as good, but the vibe was a bit more entertaining, less didactic.

Indeed, I discussed this premise – that Thrilling Wonder and Startling were nearly the equal of Astounding – with a few other folks who know the magazines of that time as well or better than I do, and we came to the conclusion (some holding this view more strongly than others) that in about 1948-1950 that was a very defensible statement, but that by 1951 they were falling behind. And the reason seemed obvious once suggested: the appearance in late 1950 of Galaxy (not to mention the appearance slightly earlier of F&SF) provided a new market that quickly attracted most of the best stories that Campbell didn’t or couldn’t buy.

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Your Dreams are on You: The Throme of the Erril of Sherril by Patricia A. McKillip

Your Dreams are on You: The Throme of the Erril of Sherril by Patricia A. McKillip

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The Throme of the Erril of Sherill-small The Throme of the Erril of Sherill-back-small

The Throme of the Erril of Sherril
by Patricia A. McKillip
Tempo/Berkley (165 pages, $2.25, January 1984)
Cover by Stephen Hickman; interior illustrations by Judith Mitchell

The Throme of the Erril of Sherril by Patricia A. McKillip reads like a running brook in a quiet forest on a peaceful summer afternoon. You can read it in a trance and still retain its message.

What McKillip means to tell her readers comes down to this: If you want your dreams to come true, you have to make them so. Don’t leave it to an omniscient being. It’s all on you, buddy.

This brings us to Caerles, a Cnite of the possessive King of Everywhere. The King’s daughter, Damsen, weeps within the sepulchral darkness of her father’s castle. Caerles intends to wed her and end her misery. The King, however, demands the Throme before their dreams can come true. But it is the stuff of fantasy. Then surely the Cnite cannot save his lady love from her boundless misery?

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The Series Series: The Ever-Expanding Universe by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal

The Series Series: The Ever-Expanding Universe by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal

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Mothership-small A Stranger Thing-small The World Forgot-small

Two publishers asked if we’d try something unusual. It was the same unusual thing — reviewing an entire trilogy in one go — for two different series and two different reasons.

One series, Brian Stavely’s The Emperor’s Blades, was about to conclude. The other, Martin Leicht and Isla Neal’s The Ever-Expanding Universe, had been published by one imprint as YA, and was being given a second chance as a series for adults by another imprint of the same house. Though I knew reviewing two trilogies in this way would reduce the number of posts I made to BG this year considerably, I was curious. So here we are.

The Ever-Expanding Universe follows the adventures of a daring young engineer whose dreams of interplanetary exploration and college, not necessarily in that order, seem at first to be dashed by a bout of teen pregnancy. Thanks to the cover copy, it’s no spoiler to tell you that the young engineer’s baby daddy and not-quite-boyfriend turns out to be of extraterrestrial ancestry, and the most contested commodities in a resource war between two alien species are the bodies of the girls at the near-earth-orbit boarding school for unwed mothers where Elvie Nara has gone to hide from her high school nemesis.

Is it worse when Cole Archer, the sort-of-boyfriend, turns out to be an alien commando, or when Cole’s definitely-girlfriend and Elvie’s aforementioned cheerleader nemesis Britta McVicker turns out to be one of Elvie’s classmates for prenatal yoga? The three of them, and an impressively varied passel of other gravid girls seriously irked at having been tricked by alien boyfriends, spend the first volume of the series, Mothership, dodging ruthless alien attackers and fleeing through a booby-trapped and sabotaged space cruise ship refitted as a high school.

It’s a delightful mix of suspense, fight scenes, engineering puzzles involving transitions from one gravity or atmospheric environment to another, slapstick comedy, social satire, secret history, and stuff blowing up real good, all delivered by a hilariously smart first-person-smartass narrator you want to see triumph. How could any SFF reader resist? How did we miss this series when it first came out? Why is it not already a classic of humorous science fiction?

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May Short Story Roundup

May Short Story Roundup

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oie_2824427axWPyjIhWell, sad to say, there are just not that many swords & sorcery stories to round up this month. The big guns, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Grimdark Magazine, (the latter delayed while they run the Kickstarter for their anthology, Evil Is A Matter of Perspective) were silent. Beneath Ceaseless Skies’ two May issues didn’t have anything that fit the S&S bill. None of the other magazines yielded stories to review either. Only the stalwart Swords and Sorcery Magazine came through, just like it does every single month for over four years now.

According to the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a skimmington is “a boisterous procession intended to ridicule an unfaithful spouse or a shrewish wife often with effigies and a mock serenade” and “The Skimmington” is the title of B.C. Nance’s story in this month’s issue of SSM. No one in town believes wealthy landowner Daegal’s claim that his wife, Esma, ran out on him. Alden, a man who once loved the missing woman, convinces his fellow citizens to conduct a skimmington parade out to Daegal’s estate. His hope is they can shame Daegal into revealing where Esma really is. While there’s a supernatural element to the tale, it could just as easily be set in any small pre-industrial town. In any setting, though, it would remain a well told story with a haunting ending.

“Rivenrock,” by Connor M. Perry (whose previous story in SSM, “Stragglers in the Cold,” I enjoyed very much), tells of Elegia, the reborn Shepherd of Night, and her lover, Darza. Together, they are searching for the Shepherd’s ancestral home, a place called Rivenrock. Their guide is a man named Averon Thorn whom neither fully trusts, even though he claims to be a supporter of their cause. The concluding spasm of violence is brutal and affecting, but it doesn’t really provide a satisfying conclusion to the story.

Behind the events of “Rivenrock” is an ongoing struggle between the Shepherd of Night and the Lord of Morning. Each appears to have been recently reborn after having been gone for sometime. The Lord seems to have come back earlier and wields more temporal and magical power at present. The Shepherd is still finding her way, thus her need to reach Rivenrock. It’s all very vague and makes following the story less than compelling.

So that’s all there is to review this month. As usual, you should go read them and let the authors and editor know what you think.

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OMG They Found It! Osprey’s The Catalaunian Fields AD451

OMG They Found It! Osprey’s The Catalaunian Fields AD451

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Osprey Catalaunian FieldsIt’s the one thousand, five hundred and fifty sixth anniversary of the Battle of the  Catalaunian Fields, otherwise known as the Battle of Chalons!

Not heard of it?

AD451. Just as the Roman Empire fades into the Dark Ages. At the Catalaunian Fields near Chalons, a grudging alliance of Romans and Germannic tribes confronts Attila the Hun’s confederation of Huns and yet more Germannic tribes.

Hundreds of thousands of warriors grind through a Ragnarok-grade battle on the scale of Waterloo but fought with cold steel… a battle so murderous that, in the morning, nobody much feels like doing any more fighting.

I’m fascinated by this forgotten battle — I’m even writing a YA Historical series that will put the hero in the midst of the mayhem — so I was overjoyed to receive a review copy of Osprey’s new book, The Catalaunian Fields AD451. Imagine, then, how I felt when, I discovered the chapter called, “The Battlefield Today.”

What? OMG they found it!

The location of this battle has been hotly debated for centuries. Now here’s an Osprey book casually pinpointing the battlefield and using it as the basis for its maps and diagrams!

And it’s convincing.

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