Search Results for: steven brust

Magic, Intrigue, Adventure, and a Bit of Piracy: The Shades of Magic Trilogy by V. E. Schwab

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The second book in V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy, A Gathering of Shadows, made her a New York Times bestselling author. It has become one of the most acclaimed and popular fantasy series in recent memory. Booklist says it’s “Full of magic, intrigue, adventure, deception, a bit of piracy,” and NPR called it “Compulsively readable.” The Wall Street Journal labeled it “a multiple split-screen adventure, with an engaging hero/heroine pair,” and Steven Brust says “is as twisty-turny, dark, and gorgeous as…

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Future Treasures: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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I love a good caper novel. Fantasy doesn’t have enough of them. There’s Steven Brust’s Jhereg books, of course, and Scott Lynch’s marvelous Gentleman Bastard trilogy (The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves). But we could certainly use a few more. Leigh Bardugo sets out to correct that deficiency with Six of Crows, a very promising new novel featuring “a cunning leader with a plan for every occasion, nigh-impossible odds, an entertainingly combative…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in June

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Everyone loves an underdog, and last month the underdog was definitely Irene Gallo, the Creative Director of Tor Books and Associate Publisher of Tor.com. Ms. Gallo had a rough month in June, as she endured a series of scathing attacks from Sad Puppies, writers, and others who took offense to a personal comment she made to a friend on her Facebook page. The industry rallied strongly to her defense, however, and the two articles we wrote covering the affair, “Internet…

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The Omnibus Volumes of Murray Leinster

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Last week, in my article on The Omnibus Volumes of James H. Schmitz, I noted how Eric Flint edited seven omnibus volumes collecting the science fiction of James H. Schmitz, starting in 2000. Those books were successful enough that Eric expanded his project to include other great SF and fantasy writers of the mid-20th Century. And boy, did he expand it. By the time he was done, Baen had published volumes dedicated to A. E. Van Vogt, Michael Shea, Howard…

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Book Pairings: Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells and Royal Airs

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Ah, a rainy night in December. I was going to try to augment my blogging-to-raindrops experience by listening to Chopin, but after iTunes had been pianoing at me for a while, I admitted defeat, and realized once more that it’s difficult for me to blog and listen to music at the same time. (Hildegard of Bingen is, of course, an exception to this rule. Sometimes.) Tonight I am feeling VIRTUOUS and TRIUMPHANT, for I have AT LONG LAST finished Queen…

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Ancient Worlds: Gilgamesh and Enkidu

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I like a good romance. (Yes, we’re still talking Gilgamesh, I haven’t hit my head. Just give me a second. Haven’t we developed that kind of blogger/reader trust yet?) In fact, I love a good romance. Give me a lady in a corset and a handsome young duke/earl/suitably wealthy gentleman/starving but really charming young artist, 300 pages and a stretch of time that my weesters are occupied elsewhere and I am all yours. I think the romance genre of fiction…

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The Series Series: Dreamweaver Road by Kelly Ann Jacobson

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Know what I’ve always wanted to see in a past-lives-intrude-on-present story? A protagonist who finds out about her past lives and, instead of taking that as an immediate mandate to robot out the dubious decisions of her previous selves, tries something new. Were you married to someone in a past life? Okay, but that doesn’t mean you have to marry him again. I mean, what if he was a thug or a dud? If a story’s world dictates that people…

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New Treasures: Bone Dance by Emma Bull

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I’m not all that familiar with the fantasy of the 90s. That’s the decade I graduated, got a job, got married, had three kids… and my leisure reading time fell to zero. Things got better after the year 2000 as life settled back into a routine, but when I look back at the major publishing events of that decade, things are still kinda fuzzy. Fortunately, I’m not the only person working at Black Gate. In fact, I’m surrounded by annoying…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

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The top article on the Black Gate blog last month was the 13th installment in our ongoing examination of Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line, a look at the 1977 paperback The Best of Fredric Brown. (Brown also showed up a little further down the list, in our take on the Brown and Weinbaum chapters of the Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D series over at Tor.com). Second on the list was Alex Bledsoe’s appreciation of one of my favorite films of…

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Jo Walton’s Eight Books From the Last Decade that Made Me Excited About Fantasy

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Over at Tor.com, Hugo Award-winning author Jo Walton celebrates the eight fantasy novels that most excited her about the genre in the last decade. Her list includes Yves Meynard’s Chrysanthe, which we last discussed here. Here’s what she said: Yves Meynard’s Chrysanthe is in the tradition of Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny, and beyond that of Dunsany and Mirrlees. It also has modern sensibilities, and because Meynard is from a different culture — he’s an award-winning novelist in French —…

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