Search Results for: tale covers

Future Treasures: The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

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You know how much I enjoy a good debut. And The Year of the Witching, arriving in hardcover from Ace next week, looks very promising indeed. Publishers Weekly calls it “riveting… [it] announces Henderson as an exciting new voice in dark fantasy,” and Dhonielle Clayton says it “takes witchcraft to its very depths… horrific.” Here’s the description. A young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society discovers dark powers within herself in this stunning, feminist fantasy debut. In the lands…

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If I Were a Movie Maker: Dell Science Fiction Reviews

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Analog cover by Dominic Harman This issue of Asimov’s starts out with a bang, with two standout stories. In a perfect world, the first of them, “Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Relationship,” by Will McIntosh, will be optioned for a feature length romantic comedy starring the latest and hottest Hollywood crushes. The female lead will be played by someone who can convincingly be a pragmatic professional. The male lead will be well-liked and unpretentious. We also should enjoy the two other important…

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Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Of Lambs and Lizardmen

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The Ring-Sworn Trilogy by Howard Andrew Jones: For the Killing of Kings (Feb 2019), Upon the Flight of the Queen (November 2019) and the forthcoming When the Goddess Wakes (April 2021) A bit of prologue and some full disclosure to the Gentle Reader The purpose of this column has been looking at the challenges of historicity vs. fantasy in the process of world-building; well at least when the fantasy in question is trying to be either realistic or set in…

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Revisit the Fabled City of Brass: S. A. Chakraborty Wraps The Daevabad Trilogy with The Empire of Gold

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It’s always a delight to watch a talented writer successfully wrap up a fantasy series. And that’s especially true of S. A. Chakraborty’s The Daevabad Trilogy, which opened with one of the most popular debuts of the last few years. The City of Brass. Here’s what Brandon Crilly’s said in his enthusiastic review right here at Black Gate in 2018. Chakraborty creates a world that’s nuanced and detailed. It has exactly the vivid freshness we continue to need in the fantasy genre, as…

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Return to Dragon Pass with The Red Cow Campaign by Ian Cooper, Jeff Richard, and Greg Stafford

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The Coming Storm (March 2016) and The Eleven Lights (April 2018), published by Chaosium We live in a Golden Age of board gaming, and if you’re in the market for a fantasy game, you literally have thousands to choose from. Mind you, that wasn’t the case 40 years ago. In fact, if you were looking for a serious fantasy-based pastime in those days, there were literally only a few games in town: SPI’s War of the Ring (1977), TSR’s Divine Right (1979),…

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Andrew Liptak on 22 New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books in June

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Covers by Larry Rostant Polygon has discontinued Andrew Liptak’s excellent monthly new SF book column, which is a shame. John DeNardo’s column seems to have vanished from Kirkus as well, and since the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog folded up shop at the end of last year, that leave us with no regular new columns at any of the major sites. Fortunately, Andrew hasn’t given up. At least according to this notice in his bi-weekly newsletter: My regular column with Polygon…

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The Importance of Good Fantasy Art

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Art by Frank Frazetta, Michael Whelan, and Jeffrey Catherine Jones An adventure tale isn’t good just because it features a bare-chested hero and a sword, and neither is a painting. Stories and art are successful because they are created by talented people who have devoted long hours (usually 10,000 or more) to educate themselves about their field and develop the proper skills and style to express that talent. And the presentation of that talent is absolutely vital to the success of the…

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Vintage Treasures: Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman

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Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman. Berkley Books, June 1979. Cover by Wayne Barlowe Robert Aickman was not part of my early genre education, and even today I’ve read only a handful of his stories. But he had a fine reputation; one that hasn’t faded at all since he died in 1981. Today he’s highly collectible, and his collections are tough to find, especially in the original paperback editions. I recently came across a copy of the 1979 Berkley edition of Cold…

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The Ordinary is Ephemeral: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Battle Against Modernism

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Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft Jason Ray Carney McFarland & Company (205 pages, $39.95 in paperback/$23.99 digital, July 26, 2019) Jason Carney’s thesis in Weird Tales of Modernity is that, in their reaction to modernism, the artistic and literary movement that upended culture as it had been accepted in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Weird Tales Three — Howard, Smith, and Lovecraft…

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Vintage Treasures: Sword-Dancer by Jennifer Roberson

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Sword-Dancer by Jennifer Roberson. DAW paperback original, 1986. Cover by Kathy Wyatt Jennifer Roberson was one of the 80s class of DAW women writers. Her first short short story, “The Lady and the Tiger,” the genesis for the Tiger and Del series, appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s groundbreaking Sword and Sorceress 2 in 1985. Like Mercedes Lackey, Mickey Zucker Reichert, Cheryl J. Franklin (whom I covered last week) and others, Roberson was a fixture on bookstores shelves and the DAW catalog all through the 80s and…

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