Black Gate

The Black Opera
By Mary Gentle
Night Shade Books ($15.99, trade paperback, 531 pages, May 2012)

I bought a copy of The Black Opera based on the sheer strength of its premise. A fat fantasy novel set in the baroque world of opera, centered around a production engineered to call Satan himself up from Hell? Sign me up for a first class ticket. If there’s anything that Andrew Lloyd Weber has taught us, it’s that opera is the perfect setting for burning passion, dark secrets, and adventure in the shadows. Adding a diabolical scheme into the mix seems like a perfect way to roll the awesome dial up past 11.

However, the first thing I noticed about The Black Opera is that it wasn’t anything close to the lurid, swash-buckling, cult-fighting novel I wanted. It is, in fact, a rather restrained and stately affair, more concerned with the enlightened intellectual climate of the early 19^th century than with blood, romance, and action.

Our hero is Conrad Scalese, an opera librettist living in Naples in the third decade of the 18^th century. His first great success, a heretical opera entitled Il Terrore di Parigi, has earned him the malicious regard of the iron-handed Inquisition. Only the intervention of the King Ferdinand saves him from imprisonment, but in return for the king’s protection, Conrad must accept a difficult task.

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Sorrel in Scarlet is an old-fashioned sword and sorcery tale (with just a little bit of early industrial technology), which put me in mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series, not least because of the abundance of red and the scantiness of clothing. But there’s also the obvious parallel of the heroes finding themselves lost in a strange land and coming to the rescue of the people there. I do think this book comes across favorably in the comparison, since the heroine, Sorrel, is less superhuman than Captain Carter, and thus her adventures are more believable.

In the years before the story begins, the humans of Sendaal rose up against their dragon overlords… and lost. Sorrel is one of the few remaining pilots in Sendaal, and part of a group of rebels looking to achieve some measure of revenge. To that end, she steals a jasq–the living symbiote that provides sorcery to both humans and dragons–from Wrack, the very dragon who had cut her own jasq out and stolen her sorcery. Her daring escape goes less smoothly, and Sorrel crash lands her triplane in the Chasm. This deep rift in the ground is perpetually shrouded in mist, and those on the surface believe that it either leads to a sea or the center of the Earth. Instead, there’s a vast scarlet forest at the bottom of the rift. With her co-pilot dead and suffering from fatal injuries herself, Sorrel implants the jasq in herself in a desperate attempt to save her life. Implanting a second jasq is usually fatal, but in this case works… mostly. It heals her injuries, but causes agony whenever she tries to enter the magerealm to use sorcery.

One would think that being trapped in the Chasm with a dragon, a destroyed plane, and a non-functional jasq would be enough of a challenge, but Sorrel soon discovers that there are worse things in the Chasm. The red forest is crawling with deadly predators, orc-like graalur, and worst of all, the serpentine lloruk, creatures of legend thought to be extinct after their war with the elves. Fortunately, there are more or less friendly humans there too, and Sorrel soon finds herself trying to help them against the graalur. The lloruk are on the warpath, conquering and enslaving city after town, and preparing to use something worse on the surviving humans–a modified jasq called a larisq that can control the mind. Sorrel is desperate to help those who took her in; but it’s a task she can’t perform on her own, without any technology or magic, and she finds herself relying on her worst enemy, Wrack.

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In recent months, I’ve been trying to check out newer writers in the fantasy field. As visitors to this site know, one of the best ways to do this is by investigating the New Treasures posts and Black Gate Online Fiction.

But, another good way I’ve found is by keeping an eye out for newer fantasy anthologies (which are often listed as New Treasures on Black Gate). In my opinion, some of the best include David Hartwell’s Sword and Sorcery, Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan’s Swords and Dark Magic, and John Joseph Adams’s Epic: Legends of Fantasy.

When Black Gate recently announced Fearsome Journeys: The Solaris Book of Fantasy edited by Jonathan Strahan, I immediately wanted to check it out. Though I’m fairly new to the contemporary SF&F scene, I recognized most of the star lineup of authors that editor Jonathan Strahan had commissioned. Therefore, I was very interested in acquiring and reading Fearsome Journeys.

I ordered posthaste, received it, and the reading mission was accomplished. Now to rave.

Many of Fearsome Journeys’ stories fit squarely within the tradition of fantasy — which I love! For instance, many contain typical tropes such as magic, dragons, wizards, fighters, thieves, etc., as well as familiar plot angles like quests to recover treasure or kill some monster or dragon. However, as one would expect from this lineup, many are fairly experimental attempts to push the boundaries of what is, or should be, considered fantasy. Let me give a few highlights.

Glenn Cook provides another great tale of the Black Company, his popular fantasy military troop, with his story “Shaggy Dog Bridge.” Similar to Cook’s Black Company, Scott Lynch’s “The Effigy Engine” centers upon a group of (wizard) warriors called the Red Hats, who are battled-hardened cynics often attempting to just get by. This was a very interesting tale describing war contraptions that reminded me of medieval versions of the AT-AT Walkers from The Empire Strikes Back. Very cool!

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