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Fantasy Detectives and an Ancient Mystery Cult: The Five Penalties Trilogy by Marina Lostetter

Fantasy Detectives and an Ancient Mystery Cult: The Five Penalties Trilogy by Marina Lostetter

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The Helm of Midnight and The Cage of Dark Hours
(Tor, April 2021 and February 2023). Covers by Sam Weber and Reiko Murakami

Marina Lostetter has had a heck of a career in just the last ten years. She started publishing in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show in 2012, and quickly followed up with sales to Galaxy’s Edge, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Shimmer, Uncanny Magazine, and many other fine outlets. Her first three novels, all part of the Noumenon space opera trilogy (published 2017-2020) won wide acclaim from major outlets (“Brilliant… the genre at its very best.” — Kirkus Reviews; “Lostetter remains at the forefront of innovation in hard science fiction.” — Publishers Weekly).

Last year Lostetter released her first fantasy novel, The Helm of Midnight, and five months later followed up with the aliens-vs-robots adventure Activation Degradation. She’s only published one book this year, The Cage of Dark Hours (sequel to Helm of Midnight, and the second book of The Five Penalties trilogy), but it’s still early.

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New Treasures: Vagrant Gods by David Dalglish

New Treasures: Vagrant Gods by David Dalglish

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The first two novels of the Vagrant Gods trilogy: The Bladed Faith and The Sapphire Altar
(Orbit Books, April 5, 2022 and January 10, 2023). Cover art by Chase Stone

David Dalglish is the author of more than two dozen fantasy novels, including the Seraphim trilogy, the 6-volume Shadowdance series, and The Keepers trilogy. His Vagrant Gods trilogy, which opened last year with The Bladed Faith, takes place in a brand new setting, a world in which an usurped prince dons the skull mask of a legendary assassin to reclaim his kingdom and his slain gods.

Booklist says “This dark adventure will hook genre fans with its detailed world building, strong characters, and gory, action-packed scenes,” and BookPage calls it “beautiful, grandiose and expansive.” The second volume in the series, The Sapphire Altar, arrived in January, and the third book, The Slain Divine, is due on January 9, 2024.

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Talking Tolkien: The Singularity of Vision in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth – By Gabe Dybing

Talking Tolkien: The Singularity of Vision in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth – By Gabe Dybing

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Talking Tolkien took a break last week so my annual Summer Pulp series, A (Black) Gat in the Hand, could pop in. But we’re back to the Professor this week. Gabe Dybing and I talk about RPGing on the side – we even started a short-lived Conan campaign. So I was thrilled when I conned him into…I mean, he agreed to contributed a post on MERP. If you don’t know what MERP is, read-on. Those were some terrific RPG books.

 

I have decided to take “Discovering Tolkien,” the title of this series, as my means of entry into the subject. By doing so, I can only hope that I happen to make (if not “new”) interesting or sideways observations about Tolkien’s awe-inspiring achievement. And this approach moreover gives me the opportunity to address a subject that this series’s editor has wanted me to handle, which is the nature of Iron Crown Enterprises’s (I.C.E.’s) Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP), specifically the 1987 edition that I purchased at Waldenbooks in the Eden Prairie Center in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a game that, incidentally, also introduced me to roleplaying in general.

Some may feel that I add too much detail, by citing precisely where I bought MERP, but I expect that I may find some sympathy with others who are perhaps about my own age – this year I am approaching age 48. These details, the milieu in which I discovered Tolkien, are inextricably bound together with the experiences of reading and re-reading this masterwork of English Language and Literature. They also inform the ways in which I continued and continue to explore this achievement through other media.

Let me pause for a moment on “incomparable.” I don’t want to be misunderstood: of course I can compare all manner of worlds and works to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but, in my view, none will “measure up.” In many ways, my discovery of Tolkien in the fifth grade began a lifelong and – to this day – never ending quest to discover it again, and I don’t think I ever shall.

That’s not to say that some works haven’t come close. I don’t intend to be “critical” in this essay, so please let me deal glancingly with the productions that most obviously were meant to imitate Tolkien.

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Vintage Treasures: The Gate of Ivory Trilogy by Doris Egan

Vintage Treasures: The Gate of Ivory Trilogy by Doris Egan

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The Gate of Ivory, Two-Bit Heroes, and Guilt-Edged Ivory (DAW Books, 1989-1992). Cover art by Richard Hescox

Doris Egan is a successful screenwriter and producer with a very impressive resume. She’s worked on dozens of shows since the early 90s, with screenwriting credits on Dark Angel, Smallville, Numb3rs, House, Torchwood, Black Sails, and The Good Doctor. She was a producer for Smallville, NCIS, Skin, Tru Calling, House, Krypton, Swamp Thing, and many others.

But before Hollywood came calling, she was a fast-rising science fiction author. Her debut novel The Gate of Ivory (1989) — the tale of an anthropology student stranded on the isolated planet Ivory, the only place in the galaxy where magic actually works — was nominated for a Locus Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and was followed in rapid succession by Two-Bit Heroes (1992) and Guilt-Edged Ivory (also 1992).

While Egan’s Hollywood career made her the envy of every midlist SF writer, there are those of us who wonder what science fiction lost when she was lured to Tinseltown.

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Twelve Kingdoms: But For You, Four!

Twelve Kingdoms: But For You, Four!

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Mustapha and His Wise Dog (Avon, July 1985). Cover art by Richard Bober

You always remember your first time.

Indeed you do, even when it’s actually your second time, but we’ll get to that.

My first novel to see print was Mustapha and His Wise Dog, a fantasy set in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms. The series got its start when I should have been doing my homework. I blame my friend Shariann Lewitt (a.k.a. S.N. Lewitt). Picture it: Yale University, the 1970s. We were both a part of a group of friends who ate together in the dining room of the Hall of Graduate Studies. We might have come from different departments (Spanish, Linguistics, Computer Science, Philosophy, to name but a few) or even different schools (Shariann attended the Yale School of Drama) but we enjoyed each other’s company and became the self-dubbed Stream of Consciousness Table.

Don’t ask.

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Mission Impossible in Space: The Icarus Novels by Timothy Zahn

Mission Impossible in Space: The Icarus Novels by Timothy Zahn

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The Icarus Hunt (Bantam Spectra, August 1999) and The Icarus Plot
(Baen Books paperback reprint, June 27, 2023). Covers by Paul Youll and Dave Seeley

Timothy Zahn is one of my favorite short story writers. I read his early fiction, like the Hugo Award-winning novella “Cascade Point,” in the early 80s in Analog magazine, and in gaming mags like Ares and Fantasy Gamer. In 1983 I thoroughly enjoyed his debut novel The Blackcollar, the runner up for the Locus Award for Best First novel. In the following years he produced some major work, including the bestselling Star Wars novel Heir to the Empire and its sequels, the Cobra series, the Conquerors trilogy, and the popular Dragonback books.

In 1999 Zahn published The Icarus Hunt, the tale of a renegade space pilot named Jordan McKell, who ekes out a living at the edges of the iron-fisted regime of the Patthaaunutth, dabbling in interstellar smuggling for customers who represent the last vestiges of free trade in the galaxy. When McKell and his alien partner Ixil are hired to fly a strange ship named The Icarus and its special cargo to Earth, they soon find themselves caught up in events that could change the course of galactic history.

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New Treasures: Dragonfall by L.R. Lam

New Treasures: Dragonfall by L.R. Lam

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Dragonfall (DAW, May 2, 2023). Cover by Micaela Alcaino

L.R. Lam, who also writes as Laura Lam and Laura Ambrose, is the author of the Micah Grey trilogy (Pantomime, Shadowplay, and Masquerade), about an an intersex youth who runs away from home to become a circus aerialist. Lam is also the author (with Elizabeth May) of the Seven Devils duology, Seven Devils and Seven Mercies.

Lam’s new book is the opening volume in a new fantasy series, Dragon Scales. The tale of a street thief who steals a powerful artifact from the bones of the hated Plaguebringer, Dragonfall is a tale of the world-changing events triggered by that small bit of larceny… beginning with Everen, the last male dragon, dragged him through the Veil and disguised as a human, who find himself unexpectedly in the thief’s power. Publishers Weekly calls it “Sumptuous epic fantasy,” and GrimDark magazine sums it up as “a slow burn, full of angst, moral dilemmas and emotionally damaged characters… an exciting opening to a series with a lot of potential.”

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Talking Tolkien: A Magical Tolkien Celebration – by David Ian

Talking Tolkien: A Magical Tolkien Celebration – by David Ian

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Rarely a day goes by that I’m not listening for at least a few minutes to a radio play or an audiobook. They have become weaved into the fabric of my life. David Ian of Unchained Productions recounts a live performance of The Hobbit at a Middle Earth Convention. This is SO neat! Read on.

“In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” the narrator Cindy McGean begins at the microphone. Flanking her on stage is a phalanx of microphone stands where actors, script in hand, play the voices of Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin Oakenshield, Gollum, the trolls Tom, Bert & William, and many other characters of Middle Earth. On the floor in front of the stage, sit two long tables filled to the brim with sound effects props. They will provide the sounds for cracklings fires, clopping ponies, booming thunder storms, creepy spiders in the dark forest, and the drip, drip, drip of Gollum’s cave. The former elementary school gym now turned to small stage theater is filled with audience members, hobbit fans of all ages, and some even dressed up as if they came directly from Middle Earth.

This is the scene at the McMenamin’s hotel and pub housed in a former elementary school in Portland, Oregon, on the weekend closest to JRR Tolkien’s birthday (which is January 3rd). The building is transformed for a day into a Middle Earth convention, which includes Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit films played in the auditorium, and in the gymnasium, a local audio theater troupe, Willamette Radio Workshop, performs a live rendition of Tolkien’s original classic, The Hobbit.

A half-dozen voice actors hold scripts in hand, and play a wide cast of characters famous to the “There And Back Again” tale of Bilbo, the dwarves and the dragon. The sound effects operators bring the scenery backgrounds of Mirkwood, Gollum’s cave, and Smaug’s lair to the mind by using only sound. They also make the clamoring chaos of dwarves eating up Bilbo’s larder, the mighty fury of Smaug’s attack on Lake Town, and the huge vast scope of the Battle of Five Armies.

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Knowing the Rules, and Choosing to Break Them: An Interview with K.B. Wagers

Knowing the Rules, and Choosing to Break Them: An Interview with K.B. Wagers

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The NeoG trilogy, published by Harper Voyager: A Pale Light in the Black
(March 2020), Hold Fast Through the Fire (July 2021), and The Ghosts of Trappist
(June 27, 2023). Covers by Vadim Sadovski and Reginald Polynice

K.B. Wagers is one of the most exciting of the new crop of space opera writers. Their first novel, Behind the Throne, appeared in 2016 from Orbit Books, and it kicked off what eventually became a popular six-volume series featuring Hail Bristol, a runaway princess who becomes one of the most fearsome gunrunners in the galaxy. Packed with alien gods, centuries-long conflicts, treasonous plots, interstellar civilizations, invasions, intrigue, diplomatic missions, a spaceship with a motley crew, and full-scale galactic war, the Hail Bristol universe is terrific rest stop for anyone who enjoys space opera and political intrigue.

K.B.’s new NeoG series, set in our own solar system, follows the adventure of the Near-Earth Orbital Guard, a military force patrolling and protecting space. The first two volumes, A Pale Light in the Black and Hold Fast Through the Fire, will be followed by The Ghosts of Trappist, arriving in hardcover from Harper Voyager on June 27, 2023. Lara Báez, the Publicity Manager at HarperCollins, was kind enough to arrange an interview with K.B. before the release of the new book. The complete text of our email discussion, which took place between May 31 and June 5th of this year, is below. It has been lightly edited for clarity, and to correct the worst of my spelling mistakes.

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Djinn, Disguises, and Dangerous Desert Quests: The Sandsea Trilogy by Chelsea Abdullah

Djinn, Disguises, and Dangerous Desert Quests: The Sandsea Trilogy by Chelsea Abdullah

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The Stardust Thief and The Ashfire King by Chelsea Abdullah (Orbit,
May 17, 2022 and February 20, 2024). Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

Arabian fantasy with a true One Thousand and One Nights feel is rare these days, which is why we celebrate it when it comes along. And Chelsea Abdullah’s debut novel The Stardust Thief, opening volume in The Sandsea Trilogy, has indeed been celebrated, with a bevy of enthusiastic reviews.

The Stardust Thief is a rousing tale of adventure, featuring a young thief with a djinn bodyguard, midnight assassins, dangerous desert quests, ancient lamps, magical disguises, a cruel prince and his softhearted younger brother, the Forty Thieves, and much more. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a beautifully crafted adventure,” and the sequel, The Ashfire King, is already on the schedule for early next year. I bought copy of the first volume last weekend I’m looking forward to diving into it.

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