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Future Treasures: The Body Party by Jeff Noon

Future Treasures: The Body Party by Jeff Noon

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A-Man-of-Shadows-Jeff-Noon-small The Body Library Jeff Noon-small

Jeff Noon, author of the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke award-winning Vurt (1993), returned after too long an absence with A Man of Shadow last year, which Warren Ellis called “superb… one of our few true visionaries,” and Adrian Tchaikovsky said was “A disturbing and bizarre journey by one of the great masters of weird fiction.” The sequel, The Body Party, arrives next month from Angry Robot, continuing the tale of a P.I. in an weird and inverted city.

Jeff Noon returns with a staggering hallucinogenic sequel to A Man of Shadows, taking hapless investigator John Nyquist into a city where reality is contaminated by the imagination of its citizens

In a city dissolving into an infected sprawl of ideas, where words come to life and reality is contaminated by stories, John Nyquist wakes up in a room with a dead body… The dead man’s impossible whispers plunge him into a murder investigation like no other. Clues point him deeper into an unfolding story infesting its participants as reality blurs between place and genre.

Only one man can hope to put it all back together into some kind of order, enough that lives can be saved… That man is Nyquist, and he is lost.

The Body Party will be published by Angry Robot on April 3, 2018. It is 384 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover design is by Amazing15. Read Part One here.

New Treasures: The Song of All by Tina LeCount Myers

New Treasures: The Song of All by Tina LeCount Myers

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The Song of All-smallI can’t keep up with all the new SF and fantasy released every month, no matter how I try. Fortunately I’m not alone — I’m part of the Black Gate community, and there’s no more knowledgable or connected brotherhood (and sisterhood!) in the field.

Last month David B. Coe, author of “Night of Two Moons” in Black Gate 4, tipped me off to an exceptional debut fantasy novel, The Song of All by Tina LeCount Myers. Dave called it “A compulsively readable tale, steeped in mythology, suffused with magic, and beautifully realized. Highly recommended.” That’s good enough for me.

A former warrior caught between gods and priests must fight for the survival of his family in this dark epic fantasy debut, set in a harsh arctic world inspired by Scandinavian indigenous cultures.

On the forbidding fringes of the tundra, where years are marked by seasons of snow, humans war with immortals in the name of their shared gods. Irjan, a human warrior, is ruthless and lethal, a legend among the Brethren of Hunters. But even legends grow tired and disillusioned.

Scarred and weary of bloodshed, Irjan turns his back on his oath and his calling to hide away and live a peaceful life as a farmer, husband, and father. But his past is not so easily left behind. When an ambitious village priest conspires with the vengeful comrades Irjan has forsaken, the fragile peace in the Northlands of Davvieana is at stake.

His bloody past revealed, Irjan’s present unravels as he faces an ultimatum: return to hunt the immortals or lose his child. But with his son’s life hanging in the balance, as Irjan follows the tracks through the dark and desolate snow-covered forests, it is not death he searches for, but life.

The Song of All was published by Night Shade Books on February 20, 2018. It is 452 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $14.99 for the trade paperback and digital editions. The cover artist is uncredited. It is the first volume of the series Legacy of the Heavens. Read an excerpt here.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Mythic Landscape: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

Mythic Landscape: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

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Weirdstone_of_BrisingamenHalfway through my recent reread of Alan Garner’s 1960 debut novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, it became clear to me that the true protagonist was the land, not the ostensible ones, sister and brother Susan and Colin.

Alderley Edge, in Cheshire, England, is the name of both a village and a great sandstone cliff “six hundred feet high and three mile long.” For Garner there’s a connection between land and myth, artistically at least, that is deep. His depiction of a land of rolling plains littered with farms and woods, riddled with thousands of years’-worth of mines makes it easy to see the svart-alfar, the “maggot-breed of Ymir,” boiling out of the earth. There’s something deeper than that, though; something that reaches beyond mere physical for Garner. It’s as if the land itself bred those stories and they are intertwined with it intimately and inextricably. Just walking the woods and rises around Alderley Edge, they can be felt pushing themselves up from the earth and traveling along on the backs of breezes.

Before the story proper begins, Garner recounts a true legend of Alderley Edge — that of a farmer from the village of Mobberly and the strange white-bearded man he meets on the way to market. The farmer hopes to sell his white mare at market in Macclesfield and when he agrees to sell it to the bearded man instead, he is shown a secret cave protected by an iron gate and filled with treasures. Inside sleep 140 knights, each, save one, with a perfect white mare by his side. The wizard, for that is what he is, tells the farmer why the knights are there:

“Here they lie in enchanted sleep,” said the wizard, “until a day will come — and come it will — when England shall be in direst peril, and England’s mothers weep. Then out from the hill these must ride and, in a battle thrice lost, thrice won, upon the plain, drive the enemy into the sea.”

In payment, the wizard tells the farmer to take whatever gold and gems he can fit into his pockets. He does, with unexpected and dire consequences for the future.

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The Galaxy in Scale: James Blish’s Cities in Flight

The Galaxy in Scale: James Blish’s Cities in Flight

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Cities in Flight James Blish

There’s more windup than pitch in Thomas Xavier Ferenczi’s Tor.com column about Blish’s Okie series. But it’s someone writing about James Blish — not often seen these days.

I can’t exactly agree that these books are overlooked classics. They have a lot of the weaknesses and strengths of magazine sf at midcentury. They’re most interesting for their corrosive pessimism regarding democracy (as it is generally called), and their big-dumb-object sense of wild-eyed adventure. But the different parts of the fixups don’t work very well together; the world-building has inexplicable gaps; one gets tired of the characters out-wiling each other.

And gradually, in spite of all the repetition and confusion, the packrat crowding of irrelevant information, a symmetrical and moving story appears. Out of all the details in the book, some will be for you — not the same ones that hit me, very likely, but they will build up much the same impressive picture. Blish’s scale is the whole galaxy, a view that has to be awe-inspiring if he can only make you see it: and he does, I think, more successfully than any previous writer.

That’s from Damon Knight’s review of the core book in the group, Earthman Come Home. It was probably truer in the 1950s than it is now but, to the extent that it is still true, Cities in Flight is still worth reading.

Experience a Darkly Gripping Vision of the Future with the San Angeles Trilogy by Gerald Brandt

Experience a Darkly Gripping Vision of the Future with the San Angeles Trilogy by Gerald Brandt

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The Courier Gerald Brandt-small The-Operative-Gerald-Brandt-smaller The Rebel Gerald Brandt-small

Every time a trilogy completes, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

Today’s cake is in honor of Gerald Brandt’s San Angeles series. It opened with The Courier, which the B&N Sci-fi Fantasy Blog called “a darkly gripping vision of the future.” It was published in hardcover by DAW in March 2016. Here’s the description.

The first installment in the San Angeles trilogy, a thrilling near-future cyberpunk sci-fi series

Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level 2 trash in a multi-level city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border — a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of fourteen, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone’s help.

But a late day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients. Now she’s stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants. It looks like the corporations want Kris gone, and are willing to go to almost any length to make it happen.

Hunted, scared, and alone, she retreats to the only place she knows she can hide: the Level 1 streets. Fleeing from people that seem to know her every move, she is rescued by Miller — a member of an underground resistance group — only to be pulled deeper into a world she doesn’t understand.

Together Kris and Miller barely manage to stay one step ahead of the corporate killers, but it’s only a matter of time until Miller’s resources and their luck run out….

The Rebel, the third and final volume, arrived in hardcover November 14.

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Future Treasures: Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

Future Treasures: Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

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Quietus-smallTristan Palmgren is a Missouri writer; his ambitious debut novel Quietus arrives from Angry Robot next week. Una McCormack calls it “A truly outstanding debut… Palmgren takes the staples of science fiction – post-apocalypse, first contact, interventionism – and integrates them seamlessly, breathing new life into familiar forms.” Here’s the description.

A transdimensional anthropologist can’t keep herself from interfering with Earth’s darkest period of history in this brilliant science fiction debut

Niccolucio, a young Florentine Carthusian monk, leads a devout life until the Black Death kills all of his brothers, leaving him alone and filled with doubt. Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe racked by plague, is overwhelmed by the suffering. Unable to maintain her observer neutrality, she saves Niccolucio from the brink of death.

Habidah discovers that neither her home’s plague nor her assignment on Niccolucio’s world are as she’s been led to believe. Suddenly the pair are drawn into a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.

As interesting as all that is, I’m more fascinated by this snippet from an interview with Palmgren at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

Every time we read history, we change it. We bring our biases and myopias. If we’re honest, we can be aware of them. (And if we’re naive, we can convince ourselves that we’ve found all of them, or that being aware means we escaped them.)

Quietus embraces the observer. It’s about the paradox of being an observer – the biases we bring to history, the urge to touch…. Every time we read history, we bring ourselves to it like we bring ourselves to everything else we read. Our perspective lurks between the lines. Quietus, as does other science fiction and fantasy about history, takes the observer out of the hidden space and into the text. We confront ourselves as observers, and see what we bring without intending to. And by using the freedom of fantasy to play with the facts of the past, I want to make that past feel like the present.

Quietus will be published by Angry Robot on March 6, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Dominic Harman. A sequel, Terminus, is already scheduled for November 6, 2018.

New Treasures: The Throne of Amenkor by Joshua Palmatier

New Treasures: The Throne of Amenkor by Joshua Palmatier

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The Throne of Amenkor Joshua Palmatier DAW-small The Throne of Amenkor Joshua Palmatier DAW-back-small

Joshua Palmatier is a high-energy guy. I wrote about his science fictional Ley Trilogy last year, and I backed his 2017 Kickstarter for the Guilds & Glaives anthology because it contains stories by no less than four Black Gate authors: David B. Coe, James Enge, Howard Andrew Jones, and Violette Malan.

That ought to be enough from one guy to satisfy even the most demanding readers. So I was surprised to find a fat 840-page volume from Palmatier during my last trip to Barnes & Noble: The Throne of Amenkor. It turns out to be an omnibus reprint collecting three of his early fantasy novels:

The Shewed Throne (384 pages, $8.99 in paperback, January 3, 2006)
The Cracked Throne (400 pages, $7.99 in paperback, November 7, 2006)
The Vacant Throne (480 pages, $8.99 in paperback, January 2, 2008)

All three were published in hardcover by DAW, and are still in print in mass market paperback a decade later — an impressive feat. K. Tang and Charlene Brusso reviewed them enthusiastically for Black Gate, but I never had the chance to enjoy them myself. I already have a handful of Joshua Palmatier novels sitting on my nightstand, and an anthology on the way, but I’m a sucker for these big omnibus editions from DAW and I ended up bringing The Throne of Amenkor home with me anyway.

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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

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A Wrinkle in Time-smallGiven to me by the same friend who told me about A Wizard of Earthsea, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) is another of the books that introduced me to fantasy and science fiction. The novel is a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and good dose of Christianity, and is completely unbound by any rules or expectations about genre. A children’s book, it is also an artifact of a time when fantasy wasn’t primarily a commercial designation. There’s a freshness to the book all these years later, and rereading it was an absolute joy.

Meg Murry is the fourteen-year-old daughter of scientists, and sister to twins Sandy and Denys and the strange, brilliant five-year-old Charles Wallace. Her father, employed by the government, has been missing for some time before the book’s opening, and there has been no word about what happened to him.

In her own eyes Meg is gawky and ugly, made so by her “mouse-brown” hair, glasses, and “teeth covered with braces.” Her self-impression and her worry over her father’s disappearance have caused her to become a poor student. Her principal, a man unsympathetic to her worry to the point of telling her she needs to “face the facts” about her father (implying he’s never returning), warns her she’s in danger of having to repeat ninth grade.

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When Immortals Die: The Arc of a Scythe Series by Neal Shusterman

When Immortals Die: The Arc of a Scythe Series by Neal Shusterman

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Neal Shusterman is the author of dozens of books for young readers, including The Dark Side of Nowhere, The Shadow Club, The Star Shards Chronicles, The Skinjacker Trilogy, and the Unwind Dystology. His latest series, set in a far-future world of eternal life, where teenagers train to become sanctioned killers to control the population, began with Scythe in 2016 . Here’s Kirkus Reviews on the opening novel.

On post-mortal Earth, humans live long (if not particularly passionate) lives without fear of disease, aging, or accidents. Operating independently of the governing AI (called the Thunderhead since it evolved from the cloud), scythes rely on 10 commandments, quotas, and their own moral codes to glean the population. After challenging Hon. Scythe Faraday, 16-year-olds Rowan Damisch and Citra Terranova reluctantly become his apprentices. Subjected to killcraft training, exposed to numerous executions, and discouraged from becoming allies or lovers, the two find themselves engaged in a fatal competition but equally determined to fight corruption and cruelty… Elegant and elegiac, brooding but imbued with gallows humor, Shusterman’s dark tale thrusts realistic, likable teens into a surreal situation and raises deep philosophic questions. A thoughtful and thrilling story of life, death, and meaning.

The second volume in the series, Thunderhead, arrived last month. It was published by Simon & Schuster on January 9, 2018. It is 504 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Kevin Tong. Read an excerpt at Entertainment Weekly.