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Carving Out Destiny: Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock

Carving Out Destiny: Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock

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There came a time when the destiny of Men and Gods was hammered out upon the forge of Fate, when monstrous wars were brewed and mighty deeds were designed. And there rose up in this time, which was called the Age of the Young Kingdoms, heroes. Greatest of these heroes was a doom-driven adventurer who bore a crooning runeblade that he loathed.
His name was Elric of Melniboné…

from the Prologue to Stormbringer

⇐ That cover, more than any other, depicts the absolute coolness of swords & sorcery and what I like about it. Michael Whelan’s painting for the 1977 DAW edition of Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer (1965) is the first time in over two hundred essays I haven’t put the first edition cover first. You can talk about heroism, barbarism vs. civilization and whatnot until the end of the day but, ultimately, this is what I dig. That depiction of Elric, runeblade held high, Horn of Fate trailing behind him, under the storm-wracked heavens, says more about what brings me back to the genre than any book-long disquisition ever could. It’s just so stinking cool. Its appeal is purely and mind-blowingly visceral.

When I was in my mid-teens, all my friends and I devoured these books relentlessly. As soon as one of us finished one series we plunged right into the next. The gradual realization that all of Moorcock’s S&S stories were linked in some crazy pattern made our reading even more compulsive. Many, many elements in his books wound up in roleplaying sessions. I ended at least one universe in a very Moorcockian style.

I did a quick count of how many Moorcock books I’ve read and got over thirty. Some of them, particularly the assorted Eternal Champion books (Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum, etc.), I’ve read numerous times. I’ve probably read all six Corum novels five or six times. I have definitely not reread any other S&S books, neither Robert E. Howard’s nor Karl Edward Wagner’s, anywhere near that number of times. Moorcock’s books have done more than any other’s to build the framework of what S&S writing is for me if by no other measure than number of pages read. There’s more creativity when it comes to characters and world-building in almost any of his slim DAW yellow-spine books than nearly any monstrous tome I’ve bludgeoned my way through.

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DEMONS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND: Call of the Cambion (The Cambion Journals — Book Two) by Andrew P. Weston

DEMONS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND: Call of the Cambion (The Cambion Journals — Book Two) by Andrew P. Weston

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Call of the Cambion (The Cambion Journals: Book Two), by Andrew P. Weston. (Raven Tale Publishing. Kindle edition. 190 pages. Released May 2022. Paperback coming soon.)

Augustus Thorne is a Cambion — a human/demon hybrid. Cursed with a hunger he can barely control, it’s been a struggle to retain his humanity. All he’s ever wanted to do is enjoy what everyone else takes for granted. To lead a normal life. Fall in love. Start a family. Alas, such things are denied him because of what he is. Fated to feed off humans, he has channeled his self-loathing into a quest for revenge. For over two hundred years, Augustus has hunted and executed every Incubi and Succubae he can find. But he has yet to track down and kill the one responsible for attacking his mother and causing decades of suffering: his own spawn-father, Fanon.
— From the Prologue to Call of the Cambion

Andrew P. Weston’s second outing is just as good as the first book in his new series, A Hybrid’s Tale, which I have also reviewed here. This time around, in Call of the Cambion, Weston delves deeper into Augustus Thorne’s past, his relationships and his character. Born in 1760, Thorn has sworn to seek out and destroy the Demondim and its “department” of Incubi and Succubae assassins, known as the Forge, as he hunts for Fanon, the Incubus who sired him, then abandoned him and his mortal mother. Thorne is a complicated man: in spite of his supernatural and magical powers, and his killer’s instinct, he is an honorable and loyal man, not without mercy and his own code of ethics. Once again, Weston combines magic, metaphysics, science fiction, and the paranormal to tell his tale and give substance to his world and his characters.
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Lush Fantasy Inspired by Indian Epics: Tasha Suri’s The Burning Kingdoms

Lush Fantasy Inspired by Indian Epics: Tasha Suri’s The Burning Kingdoms

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The Jasmine Throne and The Oleander Sword (Orbit, June 2021 and August 2022). Covers by Micah Epstein

The Jasmine Throne, the opening volume in Tasha Suri’s Burning Kingdoms fantasy epic, was named one of the best books of 2021 by Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Public Library. The second installment, The Oleander Sword, is due August 16, and early reviews have only heightened the anticipation. This is  shaping up to be one of the major fantasy series of the decade.

Suri is also the author of two well-received fantasy volumes, Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash — though, as Liz Bourke at Tor.com points out in her review of The Jasmine Throne, “[I] admired them as well-constructed epic fantasy with a strong romantic component, but they never made me feel like this — gobsmacked, a little awestruck, violently satisfied, painfully engaged.”

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Vintage Treasures: The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction and The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Science Fiction
(Fawcett Crest, 1980 and 1981). Covers by Jerome Podwil

Back in the day, there was a pretty reliable formula for a successful science fiction anthology.

Went like this: Step one, find a fresh theme. Could be anything. Unicorns, space dreadnaughts, cats (cats were always a good choice). Step two, find a bunch of science fiction stories. Step three, put Isaac Asimov’s name on the cover.

In 1978, Asimov put out his first anthology with Martin H. Greenberg, who was famously gifted at the production side of things, and over the next decade or so they published over a hundred together, usually with Charles G. Waugh, a psychology professor in Maine. Charles picked the stories, Isaac wrote the intros, and Marty did everything else.

It was an inspired partnership, and it produced many celebrated volumes, including Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction (10 books), Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy (12 books), and many Mammoth Books of Science Fiction. But for me the real gems of the enterprise were some of the one-offs, including The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction, and its sequel The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Science Fiction.

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Space Opera at its Most Grandiose: The Sun Eater Series by Christopher Ruocchio

Space Opera at its Most Grandiose: The Sun Eater Series by Christopher Ruocchio

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The Sun Eaters series (so far): Empire of Silence, Howling Dark, Demon in White, and
Kingdoms of Death. All published by DAW. Covers by Sam Weber (book 1) and Kieran Yanner (books 2-4).

Every time an author completes a fantasy trilogy, we bake a cake at Black Gate headquarters. I can’t comment on anyone else, but speaking personally, this job has kept me fat for over a decade. I have no complaints.

The corporate protocol is a little fuzzier when an author produces four books in a series (though I did see Bob Byrne attempt a souffle last month.) And when we see that rare five book milestone? I can’t remember the last time it happened, but I think it involved ice cream and a catapult.

We better figure it out soon, though. The fifth and final book in Christopher Ruocchio’s groundbreaking Sun Eater series is scheduled to arrive this year, and it will bring to a close one of the most popular and acclaimed space operas of the decade. Library Journal called the opening volume a “wow book… stretched across a vast array of planets,” and Eric Flint labeled it “epic-scale space opera in the tradition of Iain M. Banks and Frank Herbert’s Dune.” It won Ruocchio the 2019 Manly Wade Wellman Award.

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Random Reviews: “The Wonderful Conspiracy” by Spider Robinson

Random Reviews: “The Wonderful Conspiracy” by Spider Robinson

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Cover by Vincent di Fate
Cover by Vincent di Fate

Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.

I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I role several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing.  This week, I rolled 40,770 which turned out to be Spider Robinson’s short story “The Wonderful Conspiracy.”

One of the things I’m hoping to get out of this series, from a personal point of view, is to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I’m also hoping to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.

The Wonderful Conspiracy is the final story of Spider Robinson’s first Callahan book, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and it has the appropriately maudlin nostalgia of a bar nearing closing time. Robinson has set the story on New Year’s Eve when the bar is mostly empty, save for employees Mike Callahan and Fast Eddie, as well as inveterate drinkers Long-Drink McGonnigle, the Doc, and Robinson’s narrator.

Although “The Wonderful Conspiracy” has many of the signature tropes of a Callahan story, including the series of puns and breaking of glasses, it is a lower energy story, just five men sitting around talking. Set at the end of the year and in a bar that is practically empty, the discussion between the men turns introspective, led by Long-Drink.

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Adventures in Supernatural Dystopia: The Edinburgh Nights Novels by T. L. Huchu

Adventures in Supernatural Dystopia: The Edinburgh Nights Novels by T. L. Huchu

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The Library of the Dead and Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments (Tor Books, June 2021 and April 2022)

Tor Books seems to have a hit on its hands with the Edinburgh Nights novels by Zimbabwe author T. L. Huchu (who writes non-genre novels under the name Tendai Huchu). The opening book The Library of the Dead hit the bestseller lists in the US, and expectations were high for the second, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, which arrived in April.

The international press raved about the first book. The Times called it “A fast-paced, future-set Edinburgh thriller… mixes magical mysteries with a streetwise style of writing,” and SFX labeled it “One of the strangest and most compelling fantasy worlds you’ll see all year.” But my favorite coverage was Stuart Kelly’s thoughtful review in The Scotsman, which said, “Contemporary fantasy, at its best, is both escapist and urgent: this does both admirably.” Here’s a longer snippet.

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Vintage Treasures: The Budayeen Trilogy by George Alec Effinger

Vintage Treasures: The Budayeen Trilogy by George Alec Effinger

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The Budayeen Trilogy: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss
(Bantam Spectra, 1988, 1990, and 1992). Covers by Jim Burns (When Gravity Fails), and Paul Youll & Steve Youll

George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen trilogy, sometimes called the Marîd Audran trilogy, is one of the enduring early classics of cyberpunk.

It had its birth in his short story “The City on the Sand,” originally published in the April 1973 issue The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was his first story set in the futuristic walled city of Budayeen, the city in the sand, a place of dark shadows and even darker inhabitants. Eventually Effinger set nine tales in Budayeen, including his most famous story, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winner “Schrödinger’s Kitten,” and all three of his most popular novels: When Gravity Fails (1987), A Fire in the Sun (1989), and The Exile Kiss (1991), featuring the street-smart detective Marîd Audran.

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Magic, Dinosaurs, and Mad Scientists: The Tensorate Series by Neon Yang

Magic, Dinosaurs, and Mad Scientists: The Tensorate Series by Neon Yang

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The Tensorate Series (Tor.com, September 21, 2021). Cover by Yuko Shimizu

I love omnibus volumes. They’re the safety blanket of the fat fantasy market. Let’s face it, if your plane’s going down over a desert island and you can only grab one book, you’re gonna secure yourself a thick omnibus, right? Of course you are. Heaven knows how long it will take until that stately cruise liner arrives to rescue you. I plan all my book purchases with this in mind, and it’s worked out well so far.

It’s great to see Tor.com start to produce omnibus editions of their popular novellas. They did it with Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti. The did it with Andy Remic’s An Impossible War novellas, and Sarah Gailey’s American Hippo stories. They did it with Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour. They did it with…. well, actually, I think that’s it. But what the hell, it’s a start.

Late last year Tor.com published a tidy omnibus volume of all four of Neon Yang’s Tensorate novellas, a series that has been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Locus awards, and it was such a great value I snatched it up immediately. I’m ready for the plane to go down, Captain.

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All My Robert E. Howard Essays (April 2023)

All My Robert E. Howard Essays (April 2023)

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I am the in-house mystery guy (that’s how I hoodwinked John O’Neill into giving me a weekly column). Eight years later, he’s still trying to configure the Fire Wall to keep me from getting up my Monday morning post! I organized the Discovering Robert E. Howard, and Hither Came Conan series’ here at Black Gate. And contributed, of course. That’s the advantage of being in charge of them!

Robert E. Howard is my second-favorite writer (trailing only the terrific John D. MacDonald), and I’ve written quite a bit about him here at Black Gate. With more to come, of course. I’ve got part of a series written, in which I’ll look at the first dozen of Roy Thomas’ Conan the Barbarian comics; including how the series came about. And I’m pretty sure Solomon Kane will succeed Hither Came Conan in the all star contributor series.

I came late to Howard. I have loved mythology since grade school. The Iliad remains one of my all-time favorite stories, and I have a copy of Schleimann’s Ilios. That led me to Dungeons and Dragons in Middle School, and I know I was reading The Lord of the Rings somewhere around the 8th grade. I was a fantasy fan for life.

I bought the first Ace Conan paperback, but it sat on my shelf, unread. Not sure why. I know I read David C. Smith’s Oron, but not that one. As my son was playing with the Thomas the Train layout in the kids section of Barnes and Noble one day, I started reading the first Dely Rey Conan book. I read that the next time we were there. And I bought it. And Robert E. Howard would move up the ranks of my favorite writers, as I bought more Del Reys. Conan still holds the top REH spot, followed by El Borak, and then Solomon Kane. But I just continued to like Robert E. Howard, more and more.

I’m off to my first-ever Howard Days in a few days! It’s gonna be great!!  Here are all of my own Robert E. Howard-related essays here at Black Gate. A couple are pretty good, I think. Mostly in the first two sections below. Check out a couple, please. By Crom!

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