Toads and Diamonds by Heather Tomlinson

I have always loved the Charles Perrault fairy tale called simply “The Fairies.” A girl goes to a well to draw water for her family and is approached by an old, threadbare woman who asks for a drink. The girl gladly gives her water. As a reward for her kindness, the woman (actually a fairy, disguised) gives the girl a gift: for every word she speaks, a flower or a jewel shall fall from her lips. The girl returns to her stepmother, who is astonished at the gift and resolves to send her own daughter to the well. That daughter is rude to the fairy, who this time appears as a wealthy old woman (thereby foiling the mother’s instructions to treat a threadbare old woman with kindness). The fairy therefore rewards the daughter with a different gift: for every word she speaks, a toad or a snake will fall from her lips… Heather Tomlinson has written her own, more modern — and foreign — version of this fairy tale in the young adult novel Toads and Diamonds… It’s easily appropriate for children as young as eight years old, but sufficiently sophisticated that a teenager is likely to enjoy it as well. And for those of us who enjoy fairy tales retold, it is good reading no matter our age. Read the rest.

Medicine Road by Charles de Lint

Some fantasists develop gritty, realistic alternate worlds that draw in the reader. Some swoop us away on flights of gorgeous prose. Some create detailed and intricate magical systems to delight the puzzle-lover and game-player in us. And some, like Charles de Lint, create with character, tone and authorial voice an experience that invites us into the story-telling circle, suggesting we pull up a chair next to the fire, grab a schooner of ale, and settle back to hear the story. Medicine Road is one of de Lint’s most inviting adventures. Set in Arizona, the book follows what happens when desert magic meets the magic of the British Isles… This short novel, under two hundred pages, is sweet and enjoyable, filled with characters we like and understand… Read the rest.

Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

Sisterhood of Dune is the latest installment by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson in the add-ons to Frank Herbert’s classic DUNE series. To be honest, I gave up on the series after The Battle of Corrin — the third book in the opening LEGENDS OF DUNE group — after it continued a downward spiral from a solid if not inspiring book one (The Butlerian Jihad). I wish I could say Sisterhood of Dune recaptured my interest, but unfortunately I found many of the same problems that caused me to give up the earlier series… If you’ve liked the earlier books, my guess is Sisterhood of Dune is not going to feel much different and so you’ll probably enjoy its plot-driven story despite the flat characterization and style and the somewhat mechanical collection of the necessary pieces to put together the original Dune story. If you’ve tried the earlier ones and didn’t care for them, Sisterhood of Dune isn’t going to be an improvement. And if you’ve never dipped into the DUNE world at all, then grab the original, which is a true must-read classic that more than earns its status. Sometimes we should leave well enough alone. Read the rest.

I’m standing in for Justin today because he’s got a major creative writing assignment due soon, and I guess his instructor doesn’t think that Thoughtful Thursday counts for that.

Justin has to write a vignette about a mundane event in his life (he chose visiting Steak ‘n Shake), but he also has to have amnesia and he’s not allowed to use the word “amnesia” in the story.

Justin’s taking this class because of his interest in writing fiction. I’m wondering how many of our readers are also interested in writing fiction? Have you taken a creative writing course? Have you written any fan fiction? Are you working on a story? Have you actually submitted anything for publication, or had your work published somewhere? Tell us about it!

As usual, one commenter will win a book from our teetering stacks.

Shadow City by Diana Pharaoh Francis

At the end of Crimson Wind, Max gave herself up to the demigod Scooter to save Horngate. In Shadow City, the third HORNGATE WITCHES novel, we find out what Scooter needs Max for, and also what happens at Horngate while she’s gone. Diana Pharaoh Francis has split the narrative into two points of view from the beginning: Max’s and that of her maybe-lover, Alexander. This split enables her to show both storylines in alternating chapters. Unfortunately, one of these storylines is much more riveting than the other… The two threads weave together at the end for a big battle royale with high stakes. If our heroes win, Scooter survives; if they lose, they all die or are enslaved. There’s a strong sense of tension going in, but unfortunately, once battle is joined, it’s not nearly as tense or wrenching as the earlier climactic battle at Horngate. What does work really well are the emotional aspects of the story… These interpersonal developments kept me reading even when aspects of the plot had me frustrated… In the end, I didn’t find Shadow City as enjoyable as Crimson Wind. I hope the next book features more of Horngate and of the magical apocalypse. Read the rest.

All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson

… Gibson’s fans know that you don’t read his books for a fast-paced straight-forward plot. Gibson’s brilliance is in creating ideas, settings, technologies, and especially, vivid characters you can’t easily forget. Even minor characters are memorable when he gives them extensive backstories and names like Silencio, Boomzilla, Playboy, and my favorite, Praisegod Satansbane. Gibson’s “post-post-industrial” settings are fascinating. All Tomorrow’s Parties, and its two related BRIDGE trilogy books, Virtual Light and Idoru, take place in a future ruined California which has been divided into Northern (NoCal) and Southern (SoCal) states. Much of All Tomorrow’s Parties is set on and around the decaying San Francisco Bay bridge which is now stacked with ramshackle plywood dwellings and vendor stalls. That’s an unforgettable image. Cool tech is also to be expected in Gibson’s novels, and you’ll definitely find some in All Tomorrow’s Parties… Read the rest.

In the coming weeks, if you find something interesting you think everyone should read, drop me a line via the contact form and let me know, or just post it below. Let’s get started:

1) Movies from an Alternate Universe, by Peter Stults: A very cool series of poster reinterpretations.

2) 60 second Interviews: David Gemmell award nominees are interviewed in 60 seconds.

3) Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons: Free Ebook…and apparently a good one at that.

4) Digital Rights Showdown: HarperCollins v. Open Road: Harper and Open Road do a battle of digital copyrights.

The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green

The Bride Wore Black Leather starts off with John Taylor walking along Nightside’s streets on the way to his office, a place he rarely goes. At first I thought that Simon R Green was taking his time because this is the reportedly the final NIGHTSIDE novel. As the chapter progressed, though, I realized that John Taylor the character was saying farewell, as he leaves behind one aspect of his life and moves into unfamiliar ones, first as Nightside’s new Walker, or agent of the shadowy Authorities who run the place, and secondly as a husband and father. Nightside, where it’s always three a.m., where dimensions, realities and timelines intersect and collide, where for a price you can have your heart’s desire or your worst nightmare and they are often the same thing, will never be the same for John after tonight… The Bride Wore Black Leather has everything I expect from a NIGHTSIDE book. Taylor is the Sam Spade for the twenty-first century, willing to stare down an angel, a demon or a god. Nightside has the meanest of the mean streets, and John Taylor is right at home there. Sunnyside? Not bloody likely. Read the rest.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Julian Comstock is set in a vastly changed 22^nd-century USA — after the end of the age of oil and atheism has resulted in disaster. Technology is mostly back to pre-20th century levels, and the population has been vastly reduced due to social upheaval and disease. Society has become fully class-based, divided into a Eupatridian aristocracy, middle-class lease-men, and indentured servants. The country — which now stretches across most of the North American continent — is involved in a lengthy and brutal war with the Dutch over control of the recently opened Northwest Passage.

In this setting we meet the novel’s extraordinary hero, Julian Comstock, the nephew of the dictatorial president Deklan Comstock. Julian is a free-thinker with a deep interest in the apostate Charles Darwin (whose heretical theories are anathema to the Dominion of Jesus Christ, one of the three branches of the government with the president and the senate). Julian is forced to flee his country hide-out with his friend Adam (the amazing narrator of the novel) and Sam Godwin, who is Julian’s mentor since his father died in battle — his father being Bryce Comstock, army commander and brother of the president, who was sent into a hopeless conflict by Deklan, fearing his brother’s growing popularity would endanger his own tyrannical rule. Read more »

Lady Lazarus by Michele Lang

Lady Lazarus by Michele Lang is a historical fantasy set just before the beginning of World War II, in a slightly skewed version of our world. What makes it skewed is that in this alternate history, magic exists and plays a major role in world events. For example, Hitler’s werewolves are literal here… Lady Lazarus has plenty of action but often strikes an elegiac tone rather than that of a thriller. Magda narrates the events of 1939, but is writing them down in the year 1945, and she strongly implies that not all of her loved ones will survive to the end of the series. She mourns a lost world, too, in the form of the cafes of Budapest. Lang paints an elegant setting, embellished with curls of coffee-steam and cigarette smoke, that would be right at home in an old movie; in fact, I realized at several points that I was picturing people and places in black and white. It wasn’t for lack of vivid description — quite the contrary! — but because it fit the mood Lang evokes. This elegant world is dying as the Third Reich advances, and we keenly feel its loss along with Magda… Read the rest.

Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon

You know it’s going to be a bad day when, first thing, someone steps in front of a moving subway train right next to you; and next, when you have a major fight with your ex-wife about your daughter, it’s hard to believe things will get any better. When the third thing that happens is you have a heart attack and die, it can’t really get any worse, can it? But maybe it can get better. Maybe you can come back to life with the aid of a passerby. Things might get confusing in the immediate aftermath — why is the old lady who came to your aid so intent on making sure you don’t get to a hospital? How did she manage to transport you from the back of an ambulance to a grassy plain and back again? And why is she calling you “Rabbit”? It must be hard, after decades of a normal life, to find that you are not entirely human. When you get that information on top of the morning you’ve already had, well, that’s the stuff novels are made of. And it’s quite a beginning to Mike Shevdon’s first novel, Sixty-One Nails… Even when Shevdon finds his historically fascinating plot, though, the pace remains a serious problem. There is a fine novella hiding inside this novel… Read the rest.

Songs of Love and Death by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (editors)

George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois have collected a nice batch of all-new stories from an all-star cast in Songs of Love and Death. The theme is “star-crossed lovers,” and as you might guess from the title, each tale is a love story, and many are death stories, too. Some are sad, some are sexy, and one or two are slightly sappy. Overall, I enjoyed the collection… Brilliance Audio has a very good production of Songs of Love and Death which is read by a small cast of narrators… There were a few weak stories in Songs of Love and Death, but some excellent ones, too. Don’t miss the stories by M.L.N. Hanover, Robin Hobb, Neil Gaiman, Jacqueline Carey, Tanith Lee, Peter S. Beagle, and Diana Gabaldon. Fans of the DRESDEN FILES should not miss Butcher’s story. Read the rest.

My favorite email every other week is the one containing the new issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Each issue contains two stories of what the online magazine calls “literary adventure fantasy.” The quality of the stories has been high throughout the year or so I’ve been reading the magazine, but it seems to be getting even better with recent issues.

Issue #83, published December 1, 2011, opens with “The Gardens of Landler Abbey” by Megan Arkenberg. The tone and setting of the story remind the reader of Jane Austen or other Regency fiction, and the tale’s emphasis on issues of manners and class reinforces this initial impression. The major difference between this tale and anything Austen conceived of, however, is that a woman is the principal actor here, and more than that, she is a woman who served honorably in the military in her country’s recent war. Gethsemane von Reis has purchased an estate formerly owned by another branch of her noble family, and is revitalizing the extensive gardens. The narrator, a professor at a nearby university, asks von Reis for a tour, and she grants his request. Lady Xavior, piqued at being excluded from von Reis’s hospitality, seems ready to embark on a long conversation condemning von Reis at a later social gathering, and her husband, in an effort to avoid the embarrassment of such gossip, turns the discussion to a newspaper article about war criminals from the recent conflict. It appears that the countrymen and women of those gathered were tortured, a practice that all abhor. But when the next question is asked — did we commit torture as well? –  the professor begins to believe that knows more about von Reis than he has been told outright, both because of her injuries and because of his own wartime experience. And the dead do not lie easy. This story becomes Austen crossed with an M.R. James ghost story, a combination skillfully handled to the inevitable conclusion.

“Princess Courage,” by Nadia Bulkin tells the tale of how King Courage led his people to explore and conquer new lands, as prescribed in the Secret Atlas – this people’s holy book. That the new lands are already populated appears not to matter, especially since the Atlas demands that the king confer “order” on them. The native peoples are (oh, this sounds so familiar) discovered to be “not more than animals.” One of them, a child called Isadore the Blue, meets the king when he visits one of the settlements: “What savagery, I thought, what coarseness,” is his reaction to meeting her and noting the handprint painted on her face. Yet these savages somehow manage to survive in the forest despite the presence there of a species of half-man, half-lizard that seems to prey upon the settlers. King Courage proposes a pact between his people and the natives against the Garrow-Low, as the half-lizards are called, but the natives refuse. “The Garrow-Low do not hunt us if we stay out of their way. But your people do,” they tell the surprised king. The tale continues as it must, into war and madness, as Isadore the Blue transforms into Princess Courage as she defies the king. This story is predictable but well-told, with a lesson that bears retelling.

Issue #84 opens with “Heartless” by Peadar O Guilin, a story that will tear the heart from you much as it is torn from the narrator in the first few paragraphs. “Heartless” is a tour de force about a land in which magic does everything for everyone, all the time. For instance, rocks are made into food, into feasts; no other food is even available. But the magic comes at a terrible price: a family member must be bathed in the town’s springs, and then caged in the family home, working magic at the order of the head of the family and becoming more and more insane and sickly as he or she accomplishes more and more magic, life growing shorter with each new trick. As each family member dies, another must take his or her place. When brought to the spring, though, the person to be sacrificed to his or her family’s honor is asked: “Do you ask for death?” No one ever does, until Malern is asked. And the town leader grants her death, of a sort, by tearing her heart from her, but keeping her alive with magic. The leader learns that acts have consequences — and so, ultimately, does Malern. This story is new, challenging, exciting, unlike anything I’ve read before. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more by O Guilin.

Derek Kunsken’s “The God Thieves” is another highly original tale set in an Italy not of this world, in the time of a Renaissance different from ours. In Don Mateo’s world, one can harbor the soul of another being — a gryphon, a dragon — in one’s own brain, and with it, wield superhuman powers to achieve the destruction of another city — Venice, in this case — in defense of one’s own — here, Genoa. The powers are necessary to prevent Venice from harvesting the power of a nearly forgotten god to use as a weapon of enormous destructive power, power sufficient to destroy Genoa entirely in a cataclysm that sounds much like nuclear annihilation. Only Christ will not fight in this continual war; or so it seems. Is there a way to force his hand? Don Mateo must make choices that will literally sunder his very soul.

Issue 85 begins with “The Death of Roach” by Spencer Ellsworth. It is about a girl and boy raised by their father to be vicious assassins, told from the perspective of the girl, who always seems to fall short of her father’s expectations. She kills her first man when she is five years old, but her inability to slaughter her own brother when her father orders her to makes her inferior in his eyes. What effect must such an upbringing have on a girl as she becomes a woman? When everything appears to be a test, where can such a woman find rest?

Seth Dickinson’s “The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds” completes the issue. It is a fascinating tale of a particular physical wound suffered by Baru Cormorant, a wound that swallows half her world, a neurological injury that literally makes everything that happens on her right side invisible in every way: not only invisible because she is blind in her right eye, but unthinkable as well; it is as if what happens to her right has been wiped from existence.  She considers it a wound she deserves. Her ruler poses her a test, sending her a woman who is an enemy of the state, demanding that Baru put her to death. The ruler knows that the woman is Baru’s lover, Tain Hu. Baru finds that turning away from the woman, once in her hands, does away with the sight of the woman, but not with the pain of her presence. Baru’s own future lies upon whether she will do as she is ordered. The story, while not altogether surprising is original, is so well-told that it resonates with the reader long after the last word is read.

The first issue of the new year, Issue #86 (January 12, 2012), gives us every reason to believe that Beneath Ceaseless Skies will continue to flourish and grow. “Calibrated Allies” by Marissa Lingen is a steampunk tale of a world similar to ours except for the early discovery of clockwork automata. In a time that appears to be the equivalent of our nineteenth century, slavery is still the way of life in “the colonies,” but is a more flexible institution than it came to be in the Deep South in the decades just prior to the Civil War. A black man might be freed to attend school and learn to use his talent with machinery to greater advantage, as is the case with Okori. Okori becomes involved with a group of students who speak of revolution. He sympathizes with them, but points out that they know only of metaphorical slavery. Yet he allows his sympathy to outweigh his — not contempt, precisely, but his perception of their naivety. Not surprisingly, it is he who comes up with the tool that makes their revolution possible. This look at slavery through the lens of a different world in a different universe makes the horror of the peculiar institution all the more apparent.

“The Lady of the Lake” by E. Catherine Tobler is set in a Japan full of dragons and princes and, of course, the titular lady of the lake, a woman strangled by her own mother and transformed by the water. Susanoo is a prince who rises from the lake to demand the lady’s help in completing a task before he can be married:  he must retrieve a sword embedded in the tail of an eight-headed dragon. To say more would be to say too much about this story, which seems to have a surprise on every page. The language of the story is poetic in places, funny in others, and the story is altogether satisfying.

Not a single story in these issues is less than a fine example of adventure fantasy. The range of the stories is epic, reaching from one century to another, one culture to another, creating new worlds and referring back to the old. The editors, Scott H. Andrews and Kate Marshall, are doing a fine job of finding and publishing excellent fiction. Beneath Ceaseless Skies is well worth a subscription.

Percepliquis by Michael J. Sullivan

Royce and Hadrian, the former professional thieves collectively known as the Riyria, along with their companions, are on a dangerous quest to recover an ancient horn that has the power to stop the merciless onslaught of the elves. They will discover that their world, Elan, has a deadly secret history and that many key people are not who they are thought to be. Percepliquis is the grand conclusion of the RIYRIA REVELATIONS. What started out as a straightforward fantasy adventure in The Crown Conspiracy has evolved into a full-blown epic in Percepliquis. Mr. Sullivan accomplished this so discreetly that I didn’t even realize how complex the story had become until I cracked open this book. The exciting escapades of two partners in crime have grown to be a world-encompassing high fantasy conflict, complete with many characters who have their own backstories and subplots. That’s not to say the sheer fun of it has been sacrificed… Percepliquis is everything that the end of an epic should be and more. Read the rest.

Indigo Springs by A.M Dellamonica

… The dialogue alone in this book reassures us that we are in the hands of a pro. Two things stand out: the descriptions of the “spirit water” and the depiction of the three main characters. Astrid, Jacks and Sahara are vividly realized and interact like real people, even if we don’t have physical descriptions of them. Their history, strengths and flaws are revealed in a convincing manner. Dellamonica’s use of a “frame” story and narrative flashbacks to create a how-did-we-get-here sense of urgency is not completely successful, at times throwing off the pacing and turning a potentially strong ending into a mere sequel set-up. Overall, though, this is a different approach to fantasy, and a suspenseful, compelling read with characters I care about. I certainly will seek out the second book when it is published in the spring. As a bonus, Indigo Springs has an exquisite and intriguing cover. Read the rest.