New Treasures: Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus

New Treasures: Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus

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Sweep of Stars (Tor Books, March 29, 2022). Cover art by Connor Sheehan

Maurice Broaddus is the author of the The Knights of Breton Court trilogy from Angry Robot, the acclaimed Tor.com novella Buffalo Soldier, and now Sweep of Stars, which James Rollins calls the “opening gambit in a great saga… epic,” and which Publishers Weekly labels a “Powerful, sweeping Afrofuturist space opera … A hugely ambitious and notable work of postcolonial science fiction.” If you’re in the market for a fresh and original space opera, this might be just what you’re looking for.

Sweep of Stars is the first novel of the Astra Black trilogy, and it introduces Muungano, a society of space-faring pan-African people who fled oppression on Earth and have now spread across the solar system. It is 2121, and unknown forces are working against Muungano, forcing its ruling families to make hard choices. Meanwhile, thousands of light years away, Muungano soldiers find themselves in the middle of an alien firefight, and faced with tough decisions of their own.

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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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The Fantastic Novels of Harlan Ellison

The Fantastic Novels of Harlan Ellison

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Harlan Ellison speaking to the audience at the Los Angeles
Science Fantasy Society, May 1982. Photo by Pip R. Lagenta

Harlan Ellison published three novels early in his career, and spent the rest of his life trying to complete another1. Despite a large and successful body of work, and the willingness of publishers to pay large advances for a novel, he never succeeded.

Returning to the novel form was important for Ellison; he announced the titles of works in progress as “forthcoming” in the front matter of his short story collections, ghost titles that would appear in successive volumes, sometimes for years, then vanish to be replaced by new ones. In 2010, when he was 76 and announced he was dying, Ellison said that he was working on a new novel, The Man Who Looked for Sweetness;2 and in 2014, shortly before he suffered the stroke that ended his writing, he returned to an earlier project.3 Completing another novel was a dream he never relinquished.

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Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Isaac Asimov

Vintage Treasures: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Isaac Asimov

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The Hugo Winners, Volumes I & II and The Hugo Winners, Volume 3 (Doubleday, 1972 and 1977).
Cover designs by F. & J. Silversmiths, Inc, and Robert Jay Silverman

I’ve written 1,973 Vintage Treasures articles for Black Gate. (That seems like a lot. Is it a lot? If it were, the paperbacks waiting to be written up wouldn’t be threatening to topple over in a spine-crushing avalanche, right? Still seems like a lot, somehow.) My Vintage Treasures pieces aren’t reviews, sometimes because it’s been so long since I’ve read the book in question that I don’t trust myself to do it justice — and sometimes because I haven’t read it at all.

But mostly because I know from experience it takes me forever to assemble a decently thoughtful piece on a book I really enjoyed (or really didn’t enjoy — that takes even longer). In the time it takes me to produce a review I’m happy with, I can write four or five chatty Vintage Treasures, and that seems like a fair trade.

I’m going to break with that tradition here to offer up at least a partial review of The Hugo Winners, the groundbreaking 1962 anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, and its two follow-up volumes, The Hugo Winners, Volume II (1971) and Volume III (1977), all published in hardcover by Doubleday. They are perhaps the most important SF anthologies ever published, and I’ve read them so many times I’m pretty sure I can talk about them entirely from memory.

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Goth Chick News: Way More Fun Than the Jubilee, Draculas Gathered to Celebrate Stoker

Goth Chick News: Way More Fun Than the Jubilee, Draculas Gathered to Celebrate Stoker

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As you have probably heard by now, Queen Elizabeth II is marking 70 years on the throne of England with her Platinum Jubilee Celebration, set to kick off across the UK today, on the anniversary of her coronation in 1953. Yes, it is all quite grand that her 96-year-old Majesty is now the third longest reigning monarch in world history. Taking the top spot is Louis XIV from France, who reigned total of 72 years and 110 days, while in second place is Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) from Thailand who reigned for 70 years and 126 days.

And we’re all really impressed over here in the colonies, I can tell you. Unless of course you consider that Vlad Dracula (ne Tepes) took the throne of Romania (ne Wallachia) in 1448 and has remained in some portion of the collective conscience ever since.

Okay, I might be stretching this connection just a bit, but here’s where it’s going.

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The Sound of Far-Away Music: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The Sound of Far-Away Music: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

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“Hullo, Mole!” said the Water Rat.

“Hullo, Rat!” said the Mole.

So begins one of the greatest of literary friendships. That simple introduction between two soon-to-be-best friends has stuck with me ever since my dad first read me The Wind in the  Willows (1908). They’re the opening chords of a song like the dream-music Mole and Rat hear on a mysterious river island, that has remained with me my entire life. Even, if like them, I can’t remember all the words, it’s a song that’s “simple–passionate–perfect.”

This book, one I find wonderful beyond measure, is a collection of several distinct tales. The most famous, probably due to Walt Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) and the attendant amusement park ride, involves the foolish escapades of Toad. Those chapters are riotously funny and, I’d imagine, the most easily enjoyable to any child hearing them. More of the book, however, involves Mole and Rat, and those parts are by turns wistful, melancholic, and wondrous. In his memoir, Christopher Robin Milne wrote:

A book that we all greatly loved and admired and read aloud or alone, over and over and over: The Wind in the Willows. This book is, in a way, two separate books put into one. There are, on the one hand, those chapters concerned with the adventures of Toad; and on the other hand there are those chapters that explore human emotions – the emotions of fear, nostalgia, awe, wanderlust. My mother was drawn to the second group, of which “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” was her favourite, read to me again and again with always, towards the end, the catch in the voice and the long pause to find her handkerchief and blow her nose. My father, on his side, was so captivated by the first group that he turned these chapters into the children’s play, Toad of Toad Hall. In this play one emotion only is allowed to creep in: nostalgia.

If I thought I could get away with it, I’d just write out all of The Pipers at the Gates of Dawn for this piece and leave it at that. I believe it is one of the most affecting things I’ve ever read. Its beauty only grows with each read. Sadly, I must write more (but I’ll still quote it a lot).

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Random Reviews: “Faith” by Mario Milosevic

Random Reviews: “Faith” by Mario Milosevic

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Cover by Tais Teng
Cover by Tais Teng

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 11,028 which turned out to be Mario Milosevic’s short story “Faith.”

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.

Mario Milosevic’s short story “Faith” was published on Daily Science Fiction on November 1, 2010. It would eventually be reprinted in the anthology Not Just Rockets and Robots, which collected the short fiction published during the first year Daily Science Fiction was on-line.

The story is told from the point of view of a man who is undergoing an interrogation. The details of the questioning are not directly provided and everything about the events that preceded the interview and the background to the world Milosevic builds up at second hand.

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There No School Like Old School: Four Against Darkness

There No School Like Old School: Four Against Darkness

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Not all nostalgia trips are created equal. Revisiting a favorite movie or an old neighborhood or some childhood hobby is a great way to reignite that sense of wonder most of us had when we were younger. It’s a way of seeing subtle magic that either fades or is drummed out of us as we grow older.

But just about everyone who frequents this site already knows that there’s a very dark underside to nostalgia, the sort of thing that breeds resentment and a perpetual backward glance. The sort of nostalgia that brings no joy or sense of wonder. The sort of nostalgia that becomes a destructive addiction.

I’m talking about the people who have been collecting comic books since they were children, but haven’t read one in years, just buying and bagging them, stuffing them in boxes never to be seen until they die and their relatives go through their stuff. I’m talking about the Star Trek fans who haven’t enjoyed an episode of the show for decades, but continue watching it regularly, just so they can post another Youtube video about how much the franchise sucks since its “glory days.” I’m talking about music fans who haven’t listened to a new band since they were in college, just replaying the same few hundred albums over and over again, convinced that nothing new is good. And I’m talking about “old school gamers” who never play the game any longer and only post long rants about how the game has grown too P.C., too woke, or too whatever the latest term for “politics that are different from mine.”

I discovered the OSR (Old School Revival, if you didn’t know) movement a few years ago. And while there certainly are the usual trolls that younger gamers would expect to find there, a lot of it is surprisingly forward-looking. Sure, a lot of OSR enthusiasts insist on playing first edition Dungeons & Dragons just as it was written forty-plus years ago. But plenty of others have taken that bedrock of a rule system and cleaned it up, stripping out what they don’t like and adding in new innovations.

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Westside Stories: The Gilda Carr Tiny Mystery Fantasies by W.M. Akers

Westside Stories: The Gilda Carr Tiny Mystery Fantasies by W.M. Akers

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Westside, Westside Saints, and Westside Lights (Harper Voyager, 2019, 2020, and 2022). Cover designs by Owen Corrigan.

First I heard of W.M. Akers’ Westside books was when Jeff Somers blurbed the first volume for the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of May 2019 at The Barnes & Noble Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog. Here’s what he said.

In an alternate 1920s Manhattan in which a heavily fortified wall running along Broadway divides the island into Eastside, where the normal laws of reality still apply, and Westside, where things have gone down the magical drain, the latter has become a magical wasteland where only the dregs of society — criminals, artists, and drunks — remain. Gilda Carr calls Westide home, and works as a private investigator specializing in bite-sized mysteries like recovering lost gloves. Somehow, though, her latest case pushes her into a gangland war that connects to her own long-missing father and the reason for the Westside’s descent into unreal chaos. As much as she might like to, Carr can’t sidestep the responsibility she suddenly feels to get to the bottom of both mysteries, for her own sake and that of everyone living in the magic-ravaged city. Akers’ hugely enjoyable debut marries inventive alt-history with truly strange magic and a protagonist you won’t soon forget.

An alternate 1920s Manhattan, a magical wasteland, and a PI who only takes tiny cases? You know I need to check out this one. Westside was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; sequel Westside Saints arrived a year later. Westside Lights, published in March, closes out the trilogy.

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When Venice Ruled the… Galaxy? Miles Cameron’s Artifact Space

When Venice Ruled the… Galaxy? Miles Cameron’s Artifact Space

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Artifact Space by Miles Cameron (Gollancz, June 14, 2022)

Although I love to watch Sci-Fi shows & movies, I don’t tend to read a lot of Sci-fi, and never have; even though Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos remains one of my favorite set of novels in any genre, and I have an incredible soft-spot for sword & planet pulp.

OTOH, good space opera often blurs the line between fantasy and Sci-Fi, or takes themes we see in historical fiction and contemporary society and plays with them, free from the constraints of, well, history. So, when one of your favorite his-fic/fantasy writers sets out to write a space opera, you need to take the plunge.

It’s a great plunge, indeed. I keep trying to come up with an analog and failing but here is the best I can come up with:

Patrick O’Brien’s Captain Aubrey novels + Horatio Hornblower + Top Gun in Star Trek’s Federation if the Federation had been founded by the Renaissance Venetians.

That’s a lot to unpack, right?

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