New Treasures: Beyond Enemies by Marisa Wolf

New Treasures: Beyond Enemies by Marisa Wolf

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Beyond Enemies (Baen, February 6, 2024). Cover by Sam R. Kennedy

I was Capricon 44 here in Chicago over the weekend and, as usual, brought home a bag full of books. I picked up the latest from local author R.J. Howell (including the Wicked West anthology), and found a bunch of treasures at Sally Kobe’s delightfully well-stocked booth, including debut SF novel Under Fortunate Stars by Ren Hutchings, the new volume of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror from Paula Guran, Sunny Moraine’s creepy novella Your Shadow Half Remains, and lots more.

But the book that really leaped into my hands was Beyond Enemies, the debut novel by Marisa Wolf, who’s appeared in a couple of Baen anthologies and co-authored a number of titles from Seventh Seal Press. Beyond Enemies is the story of a girl and her tank on a backwater planet that becomes the pivot point in an interstellar war. Just what I’m in the mood for.

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Andrew Offutt’s Greatest Contribution to the Genre: Swords Against Darkness

Andrew Offutt’s Greatest Contribution to the Genre: Swords Against Darkness

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The complete run of Swords Against Darkness (Zebra Book, 1977-1979).
Covers by Frank Frazetta, Larry Kresek, Greg Theakston, and Luis Bermejo

In my opinion, Andrew Offutt’s greatest contribution to literary history is the five book anthology series he edited called Swords Against Darkness. They were simply called I through V and published between 1977 and 1979, all by Zebra.

I’ve got them all and have read them all. They knocked my socks off. I was just beginning to write around the time the series ended and one of the first pie-in-the-sky goals I had for myself was to write something good enough to be included in the series. The series ended before I got close to making it, or even submitting.

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A to Z Reviews: “Alexandria,” by Monica Byrne

A to Z Reviews: “Alexandria,” by Monica Byrne

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A to Z ReviewsMonica Byrne offers a romance in her story “Alexandria,” which was published in the January 2017 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Aside from being set in the future, there is very little about the story that reads as science fiction.

Beth Miyake is coming to terms with the death of her husband, Keiji. Through her memories of him, the reader learns that while they had a deep love for each other, it manifested itself in ways which were not obvious to outsiders. Beth’s family never understood their relationship and Keiji tended to be quiet when the two of them weren’t alone.

When they were along, they understood each other perfectly, although Beth could never understand why Keiji insisted that she memorize and then destroy the love poems that he wrote for her, refusing to allow her to discuss them with anyone else. They were emblematic of their love for each other.

Aside from one disappointing trip they took for their honeymoon, the two didn’t leave Kansas. Upon arriving in Alexandria, Egypt on that trip, they discovered that the Lighthouse of Alexandria had been destroyed seven centuries earlier. It had never occurred to them that it was no longer standing. Since then, their travels had been done virtually through reading books about the places they would never physically visit.

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Goth Chick News: Here Comes Your 2023 Reading List…

Goth Chick News: Here Comes Your 2023 Reading List…

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Gather round friends – it’s once again time to don the footie pajamas, pour a steaming hot-toddy and hunker down until spring with the most awesome reading list of the year: namely the annual nominees for the coolest award ever.

The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA).

Several members of the HWA including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA therefore went to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.

Which is lovely and all, but I believe I would not be above doing something mean-spirited if not downright evil to get my hands on the award itself, a haunted house whose front door opens to reveal the category and winner.

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The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz released by Rogues in the House: Read the Foreword and Interview

The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz released by Rogues in the House: Read the Foreword and Interview

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The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz. The Rogues
in the House Podcast (2023). John Molinero cover art.

The Rogues in the House Podcast, publishers of the Sword & Sorcery anthologies A Book of Blades Vol I and Vol II, now bring us a re-release of John R. Fultz’s The Revelations of Zang (available now in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover).

John R. Fultz is no stranger to Black Gate having published in the hardcopy magazine and hosting his Skulls graphic story plus two of his short stories on our website. We recently highlighted a 2017 interview with the author on his approach to creating weird worlds that are both beautiful and dark (reposted on Black Gate Dec. 2023). I was honored to provide the Foreword and Interview for the re-release, and share those here to reveal what you should expect, and why you should read, The Revelations of Zang!

John R. Fultz has a burgeoning library. His published novels include Seven Princes (2012), Seven Kings (2013), and Seven Sorcerers (2013), as well as The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015) and Son of Tall Eagle (2017). His short stories have appeared in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Weird Tales, Black Gate, Weirdbook, That Is Not Dead, Shattered Shields, Lightspeed, Way of the Wizard, Cthulhu’s Reign, and plenty of other strange places. His story collections include World Beyond Worlds (2021), Darker Than Weird (2023), and The Revelations of Zang (re-released now, 2023)!  Now, we will reveal to you the secret arcana of that last volume…

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The Creative Friends Problem

The Creative Friends Problem

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Image by Elisa from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn!

In a rather dangerous pastime, I’ve been thinking. I’m a writer, you see (like I don’t mention that as much as possible. How insufferable. Anyway…), and as a writer, I’ve made a good many friends who are also writers. We attend conventions together, we join writing groups, or go out for coffee and chat. In fact, I’m quite certain that the majority of my friends are creatives of one sort or another, and the vast majority of those are fellow writers.

Which, frankly, is fantastic.

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Bob’s Books – Shelfie #10 (The US Civil War)

Bob’s Books – Shelfie #10 (The US Civil War)

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It’s installment number ten in Bob’s Books Shelfie series. Links to the prior shelfie posts can be found at the end of this one. If you’re new to this column, I posted shelfies of over a thousand of my books, in the r/bookshelf subreddit. The mods got too annoying for me, and I quit the group. I already did a post with my shelves related to the American Constitutional Convention of 1787 and that Era. I’m a man of many layers – you just have to keep peeling the onion. I’m also a big US Civil War buff – especially the ironclad battle at Hampton Roads.

CIVIL WAR SHELFIE #1

I’ve got three shelves of a pretty nice US Civil War collection. This is the main ‘general’ shelf.

I like map books of CW battlefields, and I’ve got two on the left. Plus that floppy one laying across the top.

The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War is a nice-looking, slipcase set. Kind of like CW coffee table books. Thick ones…

Those three blue ones are part of a six-volume Battle Chronicles of the Civil War, edited by James McPherson. McPherson (whose classic one-volume history is at the end of this shelf) is one of America’s finest ever CW historians. If I didn’t own so many books not yet read, I’d get the other three of these. Neat series.

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Vintage Treasures: Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury

Vintage Treasures: Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury

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Courtship Rite (Timescape/Pocket Books, September 1983). Cover by Rowena Morrill

I still remember the buzz of excitement in Ottawa fandom when a young local writer named Charles de Lint sold his first novel to Ace Books. Riddle of the Wren wasn’t particularly groundbreaking —  not like the breakout books soon to come from Charles — but everyone read it, and it was passed around and enjoyed with the kind of hometown pride that quickly catapulted Charles into literary stardom, at least on the local Ottawa scene.

The kind of thing didn’t happen often in Ottawa in those days. In fact, the only thing like it was the fuss made about Donald Kingsbury, a math professor at McGill University in Montreal, who burst out of the gate in the late 70s with a series of major award noms for his early fiction. His first novel Courtship Rite won the Locus and Compton Crook Awards for Best First Novel, and was shortlisted for the Hugo Award. In 2016 it won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. That’s the sort of thing that got Canadian fans worked up — and that hasn’t changed much over the years.

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Neverwhens: Hannibals’ Ghost(s) roams a City of Marble and Blood and a Genre is Reborn

Neverwhens: Hannibals’ Ghost(s) roams a City of Marble and Blood and a Genre is Reborn

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The Chronicles of Hanuvar: Lord of a Shattered Land and The City of Marble and Blood
by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen, August 1, 2023 and October 3, 2023). Covers by Dave Seeley

Friends, Carthaginians, Dog-Brothers, I come to praise Howard Andrew Jones, not to bury him…

That was a lot of mixed-metaphors, but Howard’s mixed a lot of themes, tropes and reached back into the very roots of early heroic fantasy in his Chronicles of Hanuvar to breathe new life into what was considered a dead sub-genre, so perhaps appropriating Marcus Antonius’s funeral oration for Caesar and mentioning the Republic’s greatest rivals is appropriate.

Howard Andrew Jones is the leading Sword & Sorcery author of the 21st Century, and the growing saga of Hannuvar of Volanus (promised to be a five-volume series by Baen books) is his masterwork. The saga is the story of Hanuvar, the aging, last general of Volanus. Once a great city-state and naval power, Volanus has fallen to the legions and sorcery or the aggressive Dervan Empire.

Determined to make Volanus an object lesson to other nations, Derva leveled the city, scattered its stones, and carried its remaining survivors away in chains. But Derva has not reckoned with Hanuvar.

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A to Z Reviews: “Simple Sentences,” by Natalie Babbitt

A to Z Reviews: “Simple Sentences,” by Natalie Babbitt

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A to Z ReviewsNatalie Babbitt first published “Simple Sentences” in her collection The Devil’s Other Story Book, which includes a variety of tales about humanity’s encounters with the Devil. The book is a follow-up to her collection The Devil’s Story Book, so there are plenty of tales for Babbitt’s fans. This particular story was selected by Terri Windling for inclusion in The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection, which Windling co-edited with Ellen Datlow and became the first volume of the twenty-one volume series that was later called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

Best known for writing the novel Tuck Everlasting, Babbitt clues in the reader with the first line that “Simple Sentences” will be a humorous story. The demons processing new arrivals to Hell are having trouble determining what to do with two men who arrived simultaneously. One of the men is a professional pick pocket, the other an author of complex books the surpassed the understanding of readers.

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