Black Gate – Page 291 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Starship Alchemon by Christopher Hinz

Thursday, November 28, 2019 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Covers: unknown (left) , and Francesca Corsini

Christopher Hinz’s 1987 SF classic Liege-Killer won the Compton Crook Award, and came in fourth for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. It’s part of the Paratwa Saga, which also includes Ash Ock (1989), The Paratwa (1991), and Binary Storm (2016). I picked up his latest novel Starship Alchemon on Saturday, only to discover it’s a rewrite of his second novel, Anachronisms, from 1988. Here’s an excerpt from the Strange Alliances review by Elaine Aldred, who is clearly better informed than I am.

The nine members of the crew of the Starship Alchemon are sent to investigate a mysterious anomaly on a distant planet. But the mission is far from straightforward and the crew are soon battling for their lives.

Starship Alchemon started life as Christopher Hinz’s 1980’s novel Anachronisms, but this version is not a simple rehash. It has an up-to-date feel and explores the characters in more depth, as well as tightening the whole worldbuilding experience. Each of the crew has their own particular skill set, with some possessing extraordinary abilities, like the character LeaMarsa de Host’s powerful psionic qualities. But there is careful attention paid to giving each of the characters a significant role in the story. The first half of the novel is slow, but the moment strange and ominous events begin to kick off, there is an Alien narrative in the sense of the crew just fighting to survive the escalating events.

Anachronisms could probably be thought of as being “of its time” however, put in the context of 1980’s science fiction, it still makes for an interesting read. Despite having been exposed to the novel in its first incarnation, I enjoyed this second outing, which can be thought of as having its own personality…

Despite being a rewrite of an older book, there’s a lot that appeals to me about Starship Alchemon — not the least of which is Aldred’s comparison to Alien. She’s not the only one to make that connection; keikii Eats Books on Reddit has the same idea.

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Rich Horton on Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, and L. Sprague de Camp

Wednesday, November 27, 2019 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Cover art by John Pederson, Jr., Richard Powers, and Bob Pepper

I know a lot of writers, and one of the reasons I hang out on Facebook is to find out what the heck they’re all up to. For example, this morning Rich Horton left this brief but intriguing update:

For the third day in a row, I have posted a Birthday Review compendium of reviews of older short fiction from an SFWA Grand Master. In this case, it’s for L. Sprague de Camp.

I checked out his blog Strange at Ecbatan, and sure enough, Rich has had a busy week. It started Monday:

Here’s my first Birthday Review is a while. (I’ve used up most of the birthdays!) This is a pretty significant one — Poul Anderson. He’d have been 96 today. This is a collection of reviews of magazine fiction (with one very late anthology story), including two serializations of a couple of his lesser known novels. And most of the stories here are not that well known either.

In a lengthy post, Rich reviewed 16 Anderson pieces from Super Science Stories, Worlds Beyond, Planet Stories, Space Science Fiction, Science Fiction Adventures, Cosmos, Galaxy, and many more. Here’s his thoughts on Anderson’s cover story for the May 1963 issue of Worlds of If (above left).

“Turning Point” is a neat little story. Kind of Cargo Cult in reverse. Humans come to an isolated alien planet, where the people apparently live primitive lives. But it turns out they are incredible geniuses, who simply never had the spur to develop technology. Once they see human tech, all bets are off.

Read Rich’s complete tribute to Poul Anderson here. Next up was the centenary of Frederik Pohl’s birth, which Rich celebrated with another lengthy review survey yesterday.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Gunslinger Girl by Lyndsay Ely

Wednesday, November 27, 2019 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Covers by Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (left) and uncredited

While I was at Windycon here in Chicago last week, I stopped by Larry Smith’s booth in the Dealer’s Room and ended up buying a small pile of books from Sally Kobee. Gunslinger Girl by Lyndsay Ely was an impulse buy, but a good one, I think. It’s part of the James Patterson Presents line, and was an Amazon and B&N Best Book of the Month, and an Indie Next pick. It’s also the tale of a female sharpshooter in a dystopian near-future West, and I like the sound of that. Here’s the description.

Seventeen-year-old Serendipity “Pity” Jones inherited two things from her mother: a pair of six shooters and perfect aim. She’s been offered a life of fame and fortune in Cessation, a glittering city where lawlessness is a way of life. But the price she pays for her freedom may be too great….

In this extraordinary debut from Lyndsay Ely, the West is once again wild after a Second Civil War fractures the U.S. into a broken, dangerous land. Pity’s struggle against the dark and twisted underbelly of a corrupt city will haunt you long after the final bullet is shot.

My problem with the book is that I bought the trade paperback on the left, and when I was checking out the details online I discovered the mass market paperback edition on the right, with the gorgeously colorful cover. It was vividly different and inexpensive enough ($5.49) that I decided to get a copy of that one as well, this time as a gift for my daughter. I ordered it from Amazon… and promptly received a second copy of the book at left. Every edition Amazon lists online has the cover at right (including the audio, paperback and hardcover editions), but I don’t see any way to actually get one.

Well, I love a book challenge, and I’m not ready to give up yet. I’ll let you know how it turns out. Here’s the back cover of the trade edition.

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Happy Book Birthday to Starlight, Book 2 of Skyward, by Brandon Sanderson

Tuesday, November 26, 2019 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Covers by Charlie Bowater

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most ambitious fantasy authors at work today. (To give you some idea what I mean, he’s already 3,424 pages into his projected 10-volume Stormlight Archive series — and that just the first three books.) He has multiple series on the go at the moment, including Skyward, projected to reach four books.

Skyward is being marketed as Young Adult (unless you’re in the UK, where it’s being marketing as adult fiction — go figure.) Deana Whitney and Darci Cole at Tor.com call it a “girl and her starship” story, and that seems to be right on the money. Here’s an excerpt from the Kirkus review of the first novel, Skyward.

Eager to prove herself, the daughter of a flier disgraced for cowardice hurls herself into fighter pilot training to join a losing war against aliens.

Plainly modeled as a cross between Katniss Everdeen and Conan the Barbarian (“I bathed in fires of destruction and reveled in the screams of the defeated. I didn’t get afraid”), Spensa “Spin” Nightshade leaves her previous occupation — spearing rats in the caverns of the colony planet Detritus for her widowed mother’s food stand — to wangle a coveted spot in the Defiant Defense Force’s flight school. Opportunities to exercise wild recklessness and growing skill begin at once, as the class is soon in the air, battling the mysterious Krell raiders who have driven people underground… Meanwhile, hints that all is not as it seems, either with the official story about her father or the whole Krell war in general, lead to startling revelations and stakes-raising implications by the end… Sanderson plainly had a ball with this nonstop, highflying opener, and readers will too.

The second volume Starlight was released today by Tor. It is 461 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover and $10.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Charlie Bowater. Read a huge excerpt from Skyward (the first 15 chapters) at Underlined and another one at i09.

Judith Tarr on The Golden Age of Andre Norton

Tuesday, November 26, 2019 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Covers by unknown, Gino D’Achille, and Paul Alexander

I’ve been enjoying Judith Tarr’s detailed and enthusiastic Andre Norton reread over at Tor.com. So far she’s covered…. whew, so many novels I’ve lost count. 70? 75? Seriously, it’s a lot.

The fact that there’s a science fiction writer with 70+ novels worth talking about is astonishing in itself. Andre Norton was a genre onto herself in her heyday, roughly 1952-1998, but very little of her work remains in print. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeking out for modern readers. In last week’s post, “Agency and Mind Control in Andre Norton’s Ice Crown,” Judith makes a case that the Golden Age of Andre Norton was 1962-76, and she may have a point. Anyway, who’s going to argue with someone who’s read 72 Andre Norton novels in a row?

Now that I’ve read and reread a wide range of Norton novels from the Fifties to the early years of the new millennium, I’ve concluded that, for me, her “golden age” ran from the early Sixties through the mid-Seventies. Her official “Golden Age of SF” books of the Fifties have a distinct retro charm, and her later works kept on trucking for decades, delivering the patented Norton themes and settings and the occasional new one — and then there are her many collaborations with younger writers, some of them truly fine. But from about 1962 until about 1976, she wrote the novels that spoke to me most clearly and influenced my own writing the most.

I managed to miss Ice Crown at the time (1970). It hasn’t displaced any of my favorites from the period. But it’s classic Sixties/Seventies Norton.

The strong female protagonist, the overt feminism (so different from her all-male Fifties universes), the attempts at deeper characterization — it’s all there. Along with some of her patented themes and settings: alienation, psychic powers and mind control, political intrigue, and the just about inevitable subterranean adventures. Norton did love her caves.

Read the complete article here, and check out all 72 installments (so far) in the Andre Norton Reread at Tor.com. Here’s the back covers for the novels above: Android at Arms (Ace Books, 1973), Star Born (Ace, 1978), and Ice Crown (Ace, 1981).

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Bob Shaw

Tuesday, November 26, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

The Hugo Award was first presented at the 11th World Science Fiction Convention (sometimes called Philcon II), held in Philadelphia from September 5-7, 1953. The awards were not perceived as an annual event at that time and, in fact, no awards were presented the following year. They were presented again in 1955 and have been presented annually since. Although a #1 Fan Personality Award was presented in the first year, to Forrest J Ackerman and a Best Actifan was awarded to Walt Willis in 1958, the Best Fan Writer Award wasn’t created until 1967, when it was won by Alexei Panshin and has been awarded ever since. The Hugo Awards are nominated and voted on by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention. Bob Shaw won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer Award twice, in 1979 and 1980. He was also nominated for the Best Short Story award in 1967 and the Best Novel award in 1987. In 1980 the Hugo Award was presented at Noreascon Two in Boston, Massachusetts on August 31.

The Doc Weir Award was established in 1963 in memory of Arthur Weir. Selected by the membership of Eastercon, the award is presented to individuals who are seeing as making a significant contribution to fandom who have largely gone unrecognized. The first Doc Weir Award was presented to Peter Mabey. The award takes the form of a silver cup with names of early winners engraved on the base. The cup comes with a presentation box which has plaques on it that contain the names of the winners since the cup’s based was filled. A new box was created by John Wilson in 2019. The winner is responsible for having their own name engraved and running the following year’s voting process.

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A Game of Moons: Ian McDonald’s Luna Trilogy

Monday, November 25, 2019 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Covers by Victor Mosquera

Ian McDonald has had a heck of a career, and I’ve managed to miss all of it. He won the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Desolation Road (1989), the Philip K. Dick Award for King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), and has been nominated for a Hugo so many time I’ve lost count, including for his novels River of Gods (2005), Brasyl (2008), and The Dervish House (2011). I haven’t read any of those. I suck.

But redemption beckons. We’re heading into the holiday season, with its vacation days and reading time, and I’m casting around for a good, crunchy, science fiction epic. And McDonald just happens to have completed his widely acclaimed Luna series with Luna: Moon Rising in March of this year. The Guardian calls it “Splendid, space-age Game of Thrones-style entertainment. A Game of Moons, if you will. Play it to win, or die.” Boy, I like the sound of that. I just ordered the entire series, and I’m looking forward to long hours in my big green chair.

While I wait for the books to arrive, I’ve been heightening my anticipation by re-reading the reviews. Here’s a snippet from the full review by Adam Roberts.

McDonald’s world of lunar colonists is dog-eat-dog, or indeed dog-push-dog-out-of-airlock. Rival families compete to exploit lunar resources: the rich prosper and the majority poor go to the wall. Helium-3 is plentiful, and mining it provides cheap energy for Moon and Earth both. Five family-owned corporations, or “dragons”, dominate, and although they operate within the law, they are all mafia-style organisations… The story largely concerns the powerful Corta family, originally from Brazil, ruled by the fierce but dying matriarch Adriana Corta. Her first-born son and heir, Rafa Corta, is a hothead, the Sonny Corleone of the novel; his younger brother Lucas, calmer and a better tactician, is more Michael Corleone. The Cortas are effectively at war with the “Mackenzie Metals” family, originally from New Zealand. After somebody tries to assassinate Rafa with a cyberengineered fly, and when the Cortas snatch a lucrative new mining property from under the noses of the Mackenzies, matters heat up fast…

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The Mandalorian: Star Wars goes Old Wild West

Monday, November 25, 2019 Bob Byrne Comments 7 comments

I read my buddy William Patrick Maynard’s post on Guy Boothby’s The Curse of the Snake, and I decided to write a The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes essay on Boothby’s gentleman thief, Simon Carne. But then, I signed up for a one-week Disney+ free trial. And my son and I watched the first three episodes of The Mandalorian, and I knew that Boothby could wait.

I was ten years old when my dad took me to see the first Star Wars movie at the theater. So, I go back to the beginning. I like Star Wars, but I’m not a fanatic. I didn’t care for the second trilogy and I think it was more than ten years before I saw one (I forgot which). I liked Solo, but didn’t like The Last Jedi. I quite enjoyed Star Wars Rebels, but my son likes Star Wars Resistance way more than I do. I’m not predisposed for, or against, a Star Wars production. I judge each one on how much I enjoy watching it.

And right out of the gate, I like The Mandalorian more than a chunk of the movie franchise. Most of my knowledge of Mandalorians comes from Rebels. I don’t know that I ever pondered that Boba and Jango Fett were ones. I just knew they were bounty hunters.

Jon Favreau, who played a huge part in the success of the Marvel franchise, is the creator of this one, and I think he nailed it.

The imdb.com description is pretty accurate:

The travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic.

I immediately picked up on the vibe of the lone gunslinger, wandering from town to town – in this case, as a bounty hunter on a job. We never see star Pedro Pascal’s face, as he never takes off his helmet. He only speaks the bare minimum, making him the stranger of few words.

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Vintage Treasures: The Tomorrow’s Warfare Anthologies, edited by Joe Haldeman, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin Harry Greenberg

Sunday, November 24, 2019 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Covers by Walter Velez

One of the things I miss about modern publishing is mass market anthologies. There’s still loads of anthologies being published, of course — we’ve covered dozens in just the last few months — but most come from small presses, and all of them are in hardcover or trade paperback. Casual buyers just don’t buy short fiction these days. Certainly not in enough volume to make inexpensive paperback anthologies viable, anyway. Which is a shame, since there were a ton of ’em in the 70s and 80s, and it was pretty much the way you discovered new authors back then. This fact was not lost on publishers, and the savvy ones — like Ace and DAW — promoted their stable of authors pretty regularly in themed anthologies.

Take the Tomorrow’s Warfare trilogy of anthologies, for example. Edited by the powerhouse trio of Joe Haldeman, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin Harry Greenberg, they appeared between 1986-88 from Ace Books. Each followed a loose future-war theme, and each was packed with stories from the top writers in the industry.

And such stories! A Hugo-nominated Alliance-Union novella by C. J. Cherryh, a Hammer’s Slammers novella by David Drake, the complete short novel Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny (a 1968 Hugo nominee), a Bolo story by Keith Laumer, a Berserker novelette by Fred Saberhagen, the original short story “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card, an Instrumentality of Mankind tale by Cordwainer Smith, plus stories by Gene Wolfe, Harry Harrison, George R. R. Martin, Robert Sheckley, Gordon R. Dickson, Terry Carr, Christopher Anvil, Joe Haldeman, Edward Bryant, Ben Bova, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Keith Laumer, Ian McDonald, and many, many more.

Anthologies like this don’t exist in paperback anymore. But that’s okay, because I’m still discovering the old ones — and they’re are still widely available, and they’re still cheap. I wasn’t even aware of this series until I stumbled on two of the three anthologies above in that gargantuan haul of $1 paperbacks I brought home from Windy City Pulp and Paper in April. And I just ordered the third one (Supertanks) on eBay for $1.94.

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Howard Andrew Jones and Todd McAulty on Five Authors Who Taught Me How to Write Fantasy

Sunday, November 24, 2019 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Howard Andrew Jones’ new novel Upon the Flight of the Queen arrived in hardcover on Tuesday, and the day before Howard and I (under my Todd McAulty pseudonym, the name I use to write and promote fiction) appeared at Tor.com to talk about authors who teach you how to write fantasy. Here’s a snippet.

Todd: How have you followed Zelazny’s dictum on keeping the readers in the dark in the second book?

Howard: Throughout [The Chronicles of] Amber, Zelazny had masterful twists and surprises, although none can really compare with the end of book 4, The Hand of Oberon, which literally made me dive across the bed, where I was reading, to grab the final book to find out what happened next. No book conclusion, ever, in all my years of reading, has worked so well, and it’s a high water mark I’ve yet to hit myself.

But it’s something I certainly keep in mind as I build a story. Keep your readers interested and wanting more. With Upon the Flight of the Queen I worked hard to implement the lessons we’ve discussed. Zelazny continues to surprise as Amber rolls along because there were always a few more secrets to be learned, both about character motivation and about how the world actually worked. Information you thought was accurate proves either to be more complicated, or to have been completely wrong. In my own books, there are definitely more secrets to learn, and as some mysteries are solved, other related mysteries are introduced.

This is our third article for Tor.com. The first two, Five Forgotten Swordsmen and Swordswomen of Fantasy and Five Classic Sword-and-Planet Sagas, were surprisingly popular, with nearly 250 comments between them, and that’s been hugely gratifying. We’re having a lot of fun with this series; our next one will likely be about Traveller and classic science fiction gaming.

Howard’s had a good week at Tor.com; on Wednesday reviewer Paul Weimer called Upon the Flight of the Queen “entertaining fun. Sieges, infiltrations, dragon riding, high magic, duels, and larger than life characters trying… to be big damn heroes of their own story. Jones does an excellent job.” Check out his feature review here.