Into the Woods: War on Rome: Book I, Arminius, Bane of Eagles by Adrian Cole

Into the Woods: War on Rome: Book I, Arminius, Bane of Eagles by Adrian Cole

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Donar wanted to read the depth of my anger, to plumb my sorrow at the loss of Thusnelda. I shared these things with him. What I do next, Argedestes, I do with pain like a banner above me. It is given to me. It is given to me to be the hammer of Rome.

Arminius, Bane of Eagles (2021) is the first volume of Adrian Cole’s new sword & sorcery alternate history trilogy set against the struggle between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes. The book begins as a slow burn, becoming an absolute raging inferno with the slaughter of three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Wald in 9 AD.

From the opening pages, Cole lets the reader know an alternate world is at hand with an extract from a letter between a Roman senator and his nephew. It describes the accidental death of 14-year-old Claudius and the funeral oration made by Horace which essayed a world where the boy might have lived and even become emperor. Of course, in our world, Claudius didn’t die in his youth, and at the age of 50 was made emperor by proclamation of the Praetorian Guard. Clearly, something strange is already afoot.

The first prelude is followed by another, this one set on the druids’ holy island, Ynys Mon. There, amidst a great gathering of British tribesmen and druids, a prophecy is pronounced: the gods of the free peoples of the North, both Celtic and German, will soon be in a war against those of Rome. In the North, a mighty warrior and leader called Sigimund will be born. In Rome, an equally powerful man will be born, a son of the imperial household, he will be known “as Germanicus, after his father, who will so name himself for the blood he will shed in the eastern lands.”

Bane of Eagles follows Sigimund, prince of the Cherusci people, son of Segimer, and better known to history as Arminius. In his youth, he and his brother Sigfrud are sent to Rome to train as soldiers and learn devotion to Rome. The Roman dream is that they will return to their people, loyal and trustworthy, and help bring the Germans, like the Gauls before them, under the eagles of Rome. While Sigfrud, called Flauvus (Blondie) by the Romans, will remain forever loyal to Rome, just as he did in the real world, Sigimund will remain loyal to the Cherusci.
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The Fantastic Realms of Luis Royo

The Fantastic Realms of Luis Royo

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Realms of Fantasy covers by Luis Royo. Row 1: October 1997, April 1998, October 1998.
Row 2: December 1999, October 2001, December 2002. Row 3: October 2004, August 2005, June 2006

Three days ago I wrote a quick piece about a pair of late 90s Ace paperbacks by Cary Osborne, Deathweave and Darkloom. The thing that first attracted my interest — as it often is — was the great covers for both books, in this case the work of the talented Spanish artist Luis Royo. Royo got his start in Heavy Metal in the early 80s, and by the mid-90s was a fixture on SF and fantasy book covers in the UK and US. IMDB credits him with well over 300 covers, for every major book publisher, including Bantam, Tor, DAW, Roc, Ace, Questar, Avon Eos, Pocket Books, HarperPrism, the Science Fiction Book Club, and many, many others.

Royo has a distinctive style, one well suited to selling adventure fantasy, and he helped launch the career of several major genre writers of the era, including Julie E. Czerneda (with her Trade Pact novels), Walter Jon Williams (Hardwired), David Gemmell (Druss the Legend), Elizabeth Haydon (The Rhapsody Trilogy) Sara Douglass (The Wayfarer Redemption), and many others.

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The White Space Novels by Elizabeth Bear

The White Space Novels by Elizabeth Bear

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Ancestral Night and Machine (Saga Press, March 2019 and October 2020). Covers by Getty Images and Jae Song

Elizabeth Bear is chiefly known as a fantasy writer these days. She won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and she’s had a hand in more than eight acclaimed series in the years since, including The Edda of Burdens trilogy, the Eternal Sky trilogy, and The Lotus Kingdoms trilogy, all from Tor. When I wrote about her new space opera novel Ancestral Night back in 2019, I quoted the Publishers Weekly review that first got my attention.

Outstanding… Bear’s welcome return to hard SF after several years of writing well-received steampunk and epic fantasy. As an engineer on a scrappy space salvage tug, narrator Haimey Dz has a comfortable, relatively low-stress existence, chumming with pilot Connla Kuruscz and AI shipmind Singer. Then, while aboard a booby-trapped derelict ship, she is infected with a not-quite-parasitic alien device that gives her insights into the universe’s structure. This makes her valuable not only to the apparently benevolent interstellar government, the Synarche, but also to the vicious association of space pirates… Amid a space opera resurgence, Bear’s novel sets the bar high.

While shipping for some Christmas break reading at B&N last week, I laid eyes on the sequel for the first time. The trade edition of Machine was released in July of 2021, and now looks very handsome on my bookshelf next to the first one.

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Random Review: “The Devil Was Sick” by Bruce Elliott

Random Review: “The Devil Was Sick” by Bruce Elliott

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Cover by George Salter
Cover by George Salter

Bruce Elliott was the author of ten short stories and three novels during a career that ran from 1944 until 1970, with seven of his stories appearing between 1951 and 1953. “The Devil Was Sick” appeared in the April 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was promptly reprinted in the anthology Adventures in Tomorrow, edited by Kendell F. Crossen.  It was subsequently reprinted in Deals with the Devil, Heaven and Hell, and Isaac Asimov’s Magical Worlds of Fantasy #8: Devils.

Set in the distant future (the forty-sixth century is well in the past), the only route off Earth is through original research. Acleptos is hoping to leave the home planet for a planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri, where the love of his life had emigrated following her successful research. Running some ideas for research through the almost-all-knowing Machine, he comes up with the question of whether devils and demons are real or hallucinatory. Ascleptos tackled the issue with the hopes of being reunited with his lost love.

Acleptos’ research leads him to an attempt to summon a demon with the assistance of his friend Ttom. Although they are successful, it is the appearance of the demon that causes the story to fail. Elliott offers up some interesting ideas, but there is a lack on internal consistency in the story and it seems he wasn’t able to decide exactly what was happening. It is possible this is caused by Acleptos’ inability to accurately understand the situation, but it feels as if Elliott hadn’t thought it through carefully enough. …

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Vintage Treasures: Deathweave and Darkloom by Cary Osborne

Vintage Treasures: Deathweave and Darkloom by Cary Osborne

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Deathweave and Darkloom (Ace Books, 1998 & 1999). Covers by Royo

I bought a collection of vintage paperbacks on eBay a while back (I do that a lot), and buried in the mix was one I knew nothing about, a midlist ACE SF adventure titled Deathweave by Cary Osborne.

Now, I love midlist paperbacks. They’re basically an undiscovered country. If you’re an entry-level author, the theory is that if you work long enough, like countless writers before you, you’ll eventually build an audience large enough to break out of midlist and start hitting the bestseller lists. Of course, the vast majority of writers never make it, which means that most midlist titles vanish after a few months in the sun, never to be seen or mentioned again. There are many, many talented writers who never had the good fortune (or perseverance, or celebrity connections, or whatever pixie dust it takes) to break into the front rank, and toil away in undeserved obscurity their entire career.

What does all this mean? It means these eBay lots I buy are littered with undiscovered gold, that’s what it means. Which means that when Deathweave finally fell into my eager hands 24 years after Ace first published it, I treated it as exactly that. Especially when I found out it had a sequel, Darkloom, which I tracked down a few weeks later.

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Mars Missions, Vengeful Djinn, and Haunted Dolls: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952, a Retro-Review

Mars Missions, Vengeful Djinn, and Haunted Dolls: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952, a Retro-Review

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The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952 (Mercury Press). Cover by George Salter

In its early years, one of the most notable characteristics of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was its regular use of reprints — fantastical stories from outside the genre, often by very well-known writers, given exposure to SF and Fantasy readers. Another notable characteristic was covers by its art director, George Salter.

Both aspects are features of this issue — indeed, this seems almost a comically pure exemplar of the Boucher/McComas era. I’ll highlight the non-genre history of some of the writers in the issue. (As for Salter, I enjoy his delightfully weird art quite a bit.)

Here are the stories. There is also one feature, “Recommended Reading,” by the Editors.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes – Holmes Shelfies (#1)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes – Holmes Shelfies (#1)

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So…I found a kinda cool group over on Reddit. And it wasn’t LotR_on_Prime – yeesh. R/bookshelf is a subreddit where people post their shelfies. With over 2,000 books on 90-ish shelves/cubes, that appealed to me!

I started with my Jack Higgins shelf, and then my Clive Cussler one. I’ve done a couple fantasy shelves, but mostly I’ve been sharing pics of my over-500 Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle books. And I’ve been adding a comment, talking about some of those pictured. Its’ been neat.

So, I thought for this week’s entry, I’d bring back The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes again, and share the shelfies and comments. So far, anyways.

Holmes Shelfie #1

Titan Books has two lines of Holmes pastiches. The colorful ones on the left, are traditional stories in the Doyle style. They were originally reissues of hard-to-find volumes by folks like Philip Jose Farmer, Fred Saberhagen, Manly Wade Wellman, and David Stuart Davies (my editor at Sherlock Magazine). Then they started adding new novels by Davies and a few other authors.

The other line, with the covers like the ones on the right, are all new novels, and horror-ish / steampunk / gothic. Not traditional Doyle. They continued this line through the Pandemic. If you want some horror-ish Holmes, this is a good place to go. I like James Lovegrove quite a bit. And I think Caravan Scott was pretty good.

I have 38 of the Titan books, I think. Here’s a review I wrote of a couple of the early ones from George Mann.

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Merry Christmas from Black Gate

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Things have finally calmed down in the O’Neill household. Presents have been opened, snacks are munched, and hordes of Chaos Space Marines have been defeated in a family game of Dawn of War (I would have been exterminated if Tim and Drew hadn’t rushed to my base to assist. But we delivered the Emperor’s justice in the end.)

It’s been a trying year. We experienced intermittent site outages as we continued to adjust to our new service provider. At the day job, I had to fire a hard-working employee, and five months later was fired myself. I started two new writing projects, and accepted a full-time writing gig for the first time in my career. My wife retired. My kids started new jobs. And I read a lot of great fiction — but not nearly as much as I’d hoped to.

Black Gate, for me, continues to be a place where I share my love of fantastical literature and, through the depthless generosity of the loyal community it has attracted, I constantly discover new books, films, and writers. Far more than that, I find my own love of the genre deepened and expanded, as I learn to appreciate writers — many of whom I’ve been reading for decades — in brand new ways. That’s all down to you, our loyal readers, and the joy, enthusiasm, and amazing insights you bring.

So once again, as we close out another year, I’d like to thank all the BG readers who drop in with a book suggestion, a thoughtful comment, an encouraging word. It means a lot. You make the effort we put in every day worthwhile. On behalf of the vast and unruly collective that is Black Gate, I would like to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Continue being excellent — it’s what you’re good at.

Monsters, Mechs, and a Multi-Book Saga: Nightwatch Over Windscar by K. Eason

Monsters, Mechs, and a Multi-Book Saga: Nightwatch Over Windscar by K. Eason

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The novels of The Weep: Nightwatch on the Hinterlands and Nightwatch Over Windscar
(DAW, October 2021 and November 2022). Covers by Tim Green/Faceout

I’m pretty much an impulse buyer. When I pick up a book and it mentions monsters, interstellar Confederations, extra-dimensional horrors, subterranean ruins, witches, and decommissioned battle mechs — all in the first two paragraphs — I’m usually sold.

That’s exactly what happened when I read the inside jacket copy for Nightwatch Over Windscar, the new novel by K. Eason. I paid for that damn thing and had it home before I even finished the third paragraph of the jacket copy.

If I’d paid even the teeniest bit of additional attention, I might have also noticed that it’s the second book of The Weep, a two-book series set in the world of Eason’s popular science fantasy Thorne Chronicles, which opened with How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse and continued in How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge. Doesn’t look like you need to read those books to enjoy The Weep… good thing, because tracking down the first book, Nightwatch on the Hinterlands, is effort enough. I was looking forward to riding out this massive winter storm and Christmas break with what I have on hand.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai Stocking Stuffers

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai Stocking Stuffers

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Master Swordsman Hirate Miki (Japan, 1951)

If you’re just getting into watching older samurai adventures movies, you can’t go wrong picking those directed by Akira Kurosawa or starring Toshiro Mifune and/or Tatsuya Nakadai. However, eventually you’ll run through all those, and then where do you look?

Fortunately, in the ‘50s through ‘70s, chambara action films were as common in Japanese movie theaters as Westerns were in America, and a lot of the very best samurai features are available with fairly decent English subtitles. This week we’re going to look at four lower-profile samurai films from the 1950s, the first three of which, though obscure, are well worth the trouble of seeking them out.

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