REVIEW | Swords & Dark Magic ed. by Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders (Eos)

With Swords & Dark Magic editors Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan have amassed an all-original collection of Sword and Sorcery from both new and long established masters of the genre. Overall the volume doesn't disappoint. There are a few ruts which didn't take off for me, but for those that did work well made this a memorable volume. What surprised me most was the pacing of many of the stories. What I'd call the old school authors seem to go for more of a slow build-up while the newer entrants for the most part vie to grab you from the first page with action. Now on to some of the highlights.

“Goats of Glory” by Steven Erikson - A very slow moving story for the most part. I was getting bored until the magic part finally got introduced and at that point I was hooked. Demon hordes are a bunch of pushovers when a group of warriors comes out of the mountains. A very satisfying ending with good action in the last third.

“Tides Elba: A Tale of the Black Company” by Glen Cook - The Company is on a bit of a lull as they have been stationed in one city without anyone to battle for months. When all of a sudden they are again tossed into the machinations of their betters. Definitely one of the better Black Company shorts I've read as it shows they are more than just the brawn and have got brains to back it up. Croaker keeps his usual tone and aplomb as the company figures out away to solve the heart of the matter without getting their own throats cut.

“Bloodsport” by Gene Wolfe -  In some ways this reminds me a lot of a GRRM Dunk & Egg story without Egg. A new Knight is made to play the games of their sovereign, but when the games are over and all else is lost they strive to better the world around them and give themselves a purpose. The world is left vague as Wolfe wants you to connect and care for the characters more, which he succeeds at adequately. Quite good, but felt unfinished.

“The Singing Spear” by James Enge - This was one of my favorites in the collection. It was over before I wanted it to end. Just the right amount of action and humor and wonderfully paced. You don't mess with a mad Wizard's bartender and live to tell the tale. I'll definitely have to get to the copy of Blood of Ambrose I bought a while back soon. Enge has created quite a memorable character I'd like to explore a bit more.

“A Rich Full Week” by K. J. Parker - A zombie Sword & Sorcery tale with a Priestly Philosopher cum Wizard. As with most Parker stories she goes for a different angle than most would as the Philosopher doubts himself yet is still able to project the persona he needs to to survive and get the job done and get the walking deadman. Very good inner dialogue.

“A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet” by Garth Nix - The first Nix I've read and what an inventive world he has here which we just get a peek at. Sir Hereward a injured knight is recuperating as his puppet manservant is off exploring the area they are staying in. The knight wants to get a present for his puppet man Mister Fitz, which leads to a nice battle with a treacherous demon. I definitely want to check out some more Nix now. Nix also has a free story with the same characters available online, which precedes this one.

“Red Pearls: An Elric Story”  by Michael Moorcock - Big literary confession time. I can't remember ever reading an Elric story before in novel or short form. That will be changing since "Red Pearls" introduced me to an amazingly weird world and leading character. I'm not sure where it falls in the pantheon of Elric stories and I have a feeling it fills in a gap that fans have wanted, but nonetheless it was easy to follow and certainly gave you a good flavor for what Moorcock is known for.

“In the Stacks” by Scott Lynch - Hands down the best story in the volume. Lynch's imagination is in top form as Wizards in training must venture into the bowels of an ancient magical library to return books to their proper stations. In some ways this is what we'd get if Jasper Fforde decided to go for more of a traditional Fantasy tale. Splendid and just plain fun. The prose and characters are as always well done and this shows the gentler side of Lynch.

“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” by Caitlin R Kiernan - For some reason this is one of the stories that is most staying in my mind and I'm having a hard time pinning down why that is. It is a story that shows heroes are not always the best people as the heroine in this case has a drinking and attitude problem. In a juxtaposition the Sea Troll's daughter comes off more humane than that of the heroine although it has a bit of a non-ending.

“The Fool Jobs” by Joe Abercrombie - As always Abercrombie does an amazing job at introducing an unusual cast of characters and putting them in a very awkward situation as they search for a magical something, but what that magical something is is not at all clear. This takes place in the North of the First Law world with Craw who some of you may remember unless you blinked. Great twist of an ending like only Abercrombie can do, but I do think his work is more suited to long form. Or it could just be "The Fool Job"s feel too much like a prelude of what is to come in The Heroes. Which in essence it is.

If you are a fan of old school Sword & Sorcery this is a collection not to be missed. It is filled with everything S & S lovers want: action, magic, grey characters, and evil baddies. A few key stories brings this up a few notches in the anthology pantheon with the Nix, Enge, and Lynch being the biggest standouts. As for the goal of being a definitive look at Sword & Sorcery it missed the mark, but not by much. A few of these deserve inclusion in one of the Years Best Anthologies at the least. I give Swords & Dark Magic 8 out of 10 hats. Overall, I'll have to throw some curses at Anders and Strahan for putting such a good anthology together and exposing me to so many authors I've been meaning to try, some for more than a decade, and by extension making me buy a few books by these authors. I'm definitely going to try a Nix and have to decide on what Elric book to start with. Any suggestions?


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REVIEW | Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

INTERVIEW | Lou Anders Editor of Pyr

Lou Anders should need no introduction to the regular readers of this blog as his work as impresario of Pyr Books since its inception has been quite lauded as they are now celebrating their fifth year.  Anders has been nominated for numerous awards including the Hugo and Philip K. Dick as well as winning the Chesley Award for art direction.  He has also edited some well known anthologies such as Sideways in Crime, Fast Forward 1, and the forthcoming  Swords & Dark Magic and recently retitled Masked.

MH: Thanks for taking the time out to update us about your latest happenings.

LA: My pleasure.

MH: With Pyr celebrating its 5th anniversary this year it seems you are growing the imprint in many new and different directions. One of those seems to be Steampunk. Are you at all worried about doing too many Steampunk related books? I'm still a huge fan of the subgenre, but with Akers' The Horns of Ruin, Resnick's The Buntline Special, Clay and Susan Griffith's Vampire Empire, and Mark Hodder's Burton & Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack it does seem like a lot. Plus George Mann's Ghosts of Manhattan just came out and Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt has elements of Steampunk as well. Do you feel Steampunk is that in and will be for years to come? Or do all these books just rock too much not to publish?

LA: No, Yes, and Yes. Or, to elaborate. We'll hit our 100th title around this coming September, with only the Tchaikovsky and Ghosts of Manhattan available then, so while it may look like a lot of steampunk coming down the pike, there are still plenty of alternatives in our list. We're also up to publishing over 30 books a year, so the books remaining aren't even that big a percentage of the overall. I've taken an oblique angle on steampunk too - the Tchaikovsky are really epic fantasy with hints of steam, in the same way that steam works its way into China Mieville's Bas Lag books. The Akers is, interestingly, what China has been calling noird, a sort of fusion of New Weird and Noir, and has elements of both epic and urban fantasy in there as well. Mann's book is 1920s New York, not Victorian England, and Resnick's is Weird West. The Hodder is actually the only Victorian steampunk of the batch. Though I should admit to having just bought The Society of Steam from Andrew P. Mayer, a duology about a sort of steampunk Justice League-type association of superheroes. So, okay, yes, there's a lot of steam coming, ahem, down the pipe. But we're also moving into vampire fiction, with Jasper Kent's Twelve and Thirteen Years Later and Clay & Susan Griffith's Vampire Empire series, werewolves with MD Lachlan's Wolfsangel and James Enge's The Wolf Age, and have just purchased our first YA title, Ari Marmell's Household Gods. You'll see more sword & sorcery in the fall with Sam Sykes Tome of the Undergates (as well as the Enge), more epic with the fourth book in Tchaikovsky's series, and, of course, we have Ian McDonald's next science fiction masterpiece out in a few months.

Now as to whether steampunk is "that in" - that is certainly the impression I get when I talk to B&N and Borders. But I'd say that rather than being a subgenre, we'll see it as a spice you can choose to add to the mix, as the Tchaikovsky books do, which is why I am perhaps interested in so much that touches on the edges without the Victoriana, which I was hesitant to approach head on. That being said, the Mark Hodder book just rocked too much not to publish. As did they all.

MH: You mentioned quite a few Pyr books in the pipeline, but the only Sci-Fi read mentioned was McDonald's new book. What other Sci-Fi is upcoming?

LA: Actually, I would argue that, although in fairness it may not be clear from our description, Mark Hodder's Burton & Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is very much SF. The book is one of the best time-travel novels I've ever read, and the only steampunk novel I've read to explain the steampunk setting as the result of a very specific divergence between this world's history and our own. We also have Paul McAuley's utterly brilliant Cowboy Angels, about a secret branch of the CIA that are conducting Black Ops projects into parallel universes, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch is currently hard at work on the sequel to Diving into the Wreck.

MH: You mentioned Ari Marmell's Household Gods as your first entry into YA, but I read Finlay's The Prodigal Troll, which Pyr published a few years back and that definitely had a YA feel to it as well so this doesn't feel that far afield. I know some publishers end up putting YA books in the normal adult SFF section like Tor did with Zoe's Tale rather than YA. Do you know what kind of strategy you'll be taking with it? Was there anything in particular that drew you to this Household Gods?

LA: Well, first, it's early days here, and this is our first and only YA acquisition as of this moment, but we took it on with the expectation of publishing it in the YA section of the bookstore, not the adult section. It's too soon for me to discuss strategies though as to what drew me to it, Household Gods was actually submitted to me first, as an adult fantasy offering, and I fell in love with it, and Ari's writing style and imagination, but felt it was too short for the adult SF&F category. I asked him if he could expand it, and to his credit, he told me honestly that he could not. But I loved - loved! - his style, and let him know how much I'd like to work with him, so we put our heads together, he showed me five different proposals, and The Goblin Corps, a tale of an elite military force of orcs, goblins, trolls, kobolds, etc... in a Dark Lord's army, was the one I chose. He's just delivered that manuscript as of a few weeks ago - and it rocks! Meanwhile, I never forgot Household Gods, and then one day it hit me like a ton of bricks that with its teenage protagonist it really was a YA, and its word count wasn't problematic for that category either.

MH: What gets you excited about a new submission?

LA: Depends on how you mean. If it's excited *about* a submission, since I demand a few paragraphs synopsis before I agree to read, then there has to be a hook in the description that interests me. But if you mean, while I'm reading, which is how I think you mean it -- then its excitement itself. There's a great scene in the movie Ronin where DeNiro is going to an arms deal and says to his partner, "Remember, if there is any doubt, there's no doubt." That's how I read. If I am in a manuscript and I look up at my wife and say, "I am not sure what I think about this," she replies, "You don't like it. Put it down and move on." But if I am jumping up out of my chair to run tell her about it, and she says, "Hey, shouldn't you be reading it?" and I say, "But..but... you wouldn't believe what just happened?" then we know I am going to go after it. Whenever they survey kids about why they like Harry Potter the answer is always something like "because something happens on every page." Which I take to mean that people want their entertainment to, you know, entertain them.

MH: I've had similar things happen with my wife, especially when reviewing books. She'll say things like "I don't think you liked it much. You barely told me anything about it." Which is a bit of a check for me to get at what didn't click. Once you know you like a project enough to want to publish it what is the process? And without mentioning any specific titles do any of the projects you ever want to do get turned down?

LA: Once I want to go for a project, I call an acquisition's meeting, which is a phone conference where I will present 1 to 4 titles to my boss and a few other board members, discuss what the book is and why I want to go after it. I've only been turned down at this stage maybe four times in 100 books, which is a testament both to their trust in me but also that we've been a team for six years now and have a pretty good understanding of what it is we're going for with the line. Once approval has been given, I email or phone the agent with an offer and negotiations start. This is a boring, tedious process and not worth going into here. Then the book goes into production and we put an illustrator on the cover and the fun starts. Having been at this for six years now, I've obviously seen plenty of books that I either passed on or was outbid on come out from other houses (as has everyone). I'm very proud that when I've tracked their performance, I've been pretty accurate in my judgment as to how the books I've passed on would do, and also right about how good the ones that got away were.

MH: Do you have any particular pet peeves about submissions and manuscripts? Or any habits when reading them?

LA: I'm not quite sure if this is what you mean, but basically I require synopsis first before agreeing to read the manuscript, and I say "no" to a lot right at this stage. I take all my submissions as Word docs, and read on Stanza for iPhone and now iBooks for iPad. I tend to read either while walking or while in Starbucks.

MH: Are there any bad or over used tropes of genre fiction or are they just author tools to be twisted?

LA: There is nothing new under the sun. Nor are there any bad tropes. It is entirely in the execution, always.

MH: You've been quite busy on the anthology front lately with two really interesting line-ups. First you have Swords & Dark Magic, which looks to be quite an authoritative look at the Swords & Sorcery genre from the last 50 years albeit with all-original stories. And you also have With Great Power..., which is a awesome line-up of authors taking on superheroes in prose form. How did the process for selection and procuring the stories differ? Was it easier or harder to work with a co-editor as you are doing with Swords & Dark Magic?

LA: Thank you. When Jonathan Strahan and I set out to do Swords & Dark Magic, we wanted it to be a definitive look at today's S&S, and we feel we've really succeeded. With names like Abercrombie, Cherryh, Cook, Erikson, Keyes, Lee, Lynch, Moorcock, Silverberg, Wolfe, we feel like it really is a great mix of the masters and the new guard, and has every indication of being the book folks are expecting it to be. With Great Power... (which may be getting retitled for reasons you can probably guess at [retitled to Masked: see update here]), stands out for me in that apart from being a book of costumed heroes in prose adventures, the book actually boasts that 9 of its contributors currently write for DC or Marvel. We've got Mike Carey, Paul Cornell, Peter David, Gail Simone, Matthew Sturges, Bill Willingham, and others -- all names that are very well known to contemporary comics readers, which is something other super-prose anthologies haven't had. As to the process - anthologies can either be open read or invite only, meaning that you either have a reading period, during which you get a deluge of submissions and after which you pick the best, or you have a closed anthology in which the editorial discernment occurs at the level of who you invite. I do all my anthologies invite only. I couldn't possible read all the Pyr Books submissions and read short story submissions too, and I view anthologies as a change for me to both say something about the genre that I think needs to be said and to work with writers that I've always wanted to work with. So the process for both books was very similar, with the difference that I've never co-edited before, and I really enjoyed working with Jonathan. With the caveat that you should never say never, I'm not sure that I'll be doing too many more solo anthologies in future. I have some other projects I want to devote myself to for the immediate future - my own writing not least among them - but I really enjoyed working with Jonathan and we've left the door open for future collaborations between us.

MH: Does that mean we'll have some new Anders authored work to look forward to? So far all I've found is your story And How His Audit Stands in the The Clockwork Jungle Book, which was a hoot and a half. Any chance you're trying to do more with it?

LA: Thank you very much for that! No, that was a one-off. I have a swords & sorcery novelette that is out on submission right now though, which began bubbling unbidden out of me while I was (co)editing Swords & Dark Magic, which I hope to be the first of a planned series of at least five loosely-linked tales, maybe more. And I'm exactly at the half way point of a Young Adult urban fantasy novel that I plan to have finished and ready to shop by the end of the year. There is a short story related to the novel (and actually a sequel to it, though it was written first) that is also out on submission now.

MH: Sounds great. Did any of this have to do with your NaNoWriMo experience last year? How did it feel to push out 50,000 words in a month?

LA: Ah, well, basically early last year George Mann asked me for a fantasy short for the Solaris Book of New Fantasy series, and then did me an immense favor by not telling me that the project was off when Solaris went up for sale (else I never would have finished it). I used the opportunity to test the characters for the YA - they've been in my head for several years now - and wrote the story as occurring six months after the end of the novel. Though the anthology never came out, George and enough test readers were happy with the story that I was encouraged to tackle the novel for my NaNoWriMo. I have to say NaNoWriMo was one of the hardest experiences of my life, mostly for the strain it put on my family, who were very patient with me, and because I had not one but two convention appearances to make during the month of November (including a GoH spot at OryCon). I actually finished the 50k words at Friday night between 2am and 3am at the hotel room in Portland. I put it all aside, and have spent the time in between polishing the S&S short. I thought the NaNoWriMo results were all a jumbled, disjointed mess, but just read them through this past Sunday and was stunned to find that's only true of the last two to three thousand words. The first forty-eight thousand are actually pretty damn solid! My harshest critic (my wife) is currently reading through it now, and after I get her feedback I'm going to start in on the second half. So I have to say I found NaNoWriMo incredible beneficial, if an exhausting marathon. What was the most amazing to me was the way it forced you to write even when the tank was on empty, and related to that, how what came out at such times wasn't the garbage you would expect.

MH: Who is the dream author, living or dead that you've never had a chance to work with? And why them?

LA: As a kid, and after a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs kick, my two favorite authors were Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. They defined fantasy for me far, far more than Tolkien ever did -- which is not to knock Tolkien, who was a genius. But I am much more of an S&S guy than an epic fantasy guy - I always responded to antiheroes, moral ambiguity, and reluctant protagonists no matter what the genre is. Childhood heroes were Batman (over Superman), James Bond, Spock (over Kirk), the Outlaw Josey Wales. As an adult, it's been my privilege to work with Mike Moorcock five times now, most recently with a new Elric story (!) for Swords & Dark Magic, and so it seems greedy to wish that I could have worked with Leiber too. But I wish that I had known about and involved myself in the convention world sooner than I did, so that I could have at least met him. Given that it was possible, it's actually a fairly big regret of mine.

MH: To go along with my other obsession what is your favorite type of hats? (or just your favorite hat)

LA: I wish that I looked good in hats, but sadly I look horrible in them. I even look bad in most baseball caps. This is doubly tragic given that I shave my head and frequently need sun-protection. I have found one baseball cap that I don't look utterly goofy in, and that's it. But I did have a huge hat collection at one time, which included cowboy hats, a Trilby of the style worn by Inspector Clouseau, and, of course, a Deerstalker (though Holmes never actually wore one). But I've a question for you - before the Batman: The Animated series cartoon reconciled them into one person, which of the two Mad Hatter villains was your favorite - Jervis Tetch or the red haired "imposter" from the 1980s?

MH: Honestly, the way DC handled the Mad Hatter character confused me at the times.  But I'd say I'm more of a fan of Tetch, since he was the real crazy one not being able to tell what is real and what isn't instead of just trying to control everyone's mind.  Although one of them had a monkey, which would sway me, but I can't for the life of me remember which one any more. I just recently read the first of Frank Beddor's Hatter M graphic novels and found the way he twisted Carroll's world really intriguing. The Hatter is a badass bodyguard to the Queen with knifes that sprout from nowhere.

Thanks for playing along. I'll let you play us out. Feel free to plug away.

LA: Plug you say? Well, everybody keep an eye out for Jon Sprunk's Shadow's Son, first in a fantasy trilogy about an assassin with the power to melt into the shadows who has an invisible girlfriend. Also forthcoming is Matthew Sturges's (of DC/Vertigo fame) next work, The Office of Shadow, which might best be described as Sandbaggers in the world of the Fae. For more, see: http://www.louanders.com/, http://www.pyrsf.com/, or Twitter @Pyr_Books.  On Facebook as "Lou Anders" and also at here.


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INTERVIEW | Kristine Kathryn Rusch author of Diving Into the Wreck

Lou Anders' With Great Power... superhero anthology retitled

(Cover art by Trevor Hairsine)

I've been conducting an interview with Lou Anders over the past couple of weeks and in our chat he revealed that his superhero prose anthology With Great Power... would be retitled.  The title and revised cover have just been release and the anthology is hence forth known as Masked.  The release date is still July 20th so don't have any fear of it being late because of the change.

(Limited Edition cover for Subterranean Press. Art by Dominic Harman)

I'm about a third of the way through Lou's other forthcoming anthology Swords & Dark Magic which is co-edited with Jonathan Strahan. So far it is living up to the editors goal of creating a definitive view on Swords & Sorcery. I found the James Enge story The Singing Spear, starring his Morlock, quite a fun read and was surprised how much I liked the Steve Erickson story Goats of Glory, despite its slow and somewhat stale beginnings.  He certainly turned the volume way up the last few pages.


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What is the Weirdest Book You've Ever Read?

Every so often a book comes along that leaves you shaking your head. Whether that shaking is a good or bad thing can often be very subjective as well. In some ways aren't the books that confound you the very books that stay with you because they provoke much thought even long after you've finished? Well, I am always curious about these books, which is why I asked more than a dozen authors: What is the weirdest book you've ever read? The earliest response by Lavie Tidhar is already up, but seeing all the different takes gives some wonderful perspective of what people consider weird.

The last entry is my own as Gail Carriger politely asked whether I was going to participate.  Me thinks she was merely goading me into taking a bit of my own medicine, but I laud her for it.  Please feel free to chime in with your own weirdest read in the comments.

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Mark Teppo

In many ways, I prefer weird, but at the same time, there are levels of weird. Jeff Vandermeer's Finch is weird, but it's a comprehensible weird. William Burroughs gets really weird, but you sign on for that ride when you open one of his books, and part of the ride is the alien landscape. The truly weird are books that I realize I don't have the right cipher keys to completely decode. Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books fall into this category. I understand the words on the page, but I'm very conscious that I'm not fully grokking the sub-text. You have to keep coming back to these sorts of books because they test your growth as a reader and as a thinker. It's only been in the last year that I feel that I've finally unlocked most of the secrets in Gene Wolfe's Books of the New Sun and Philip K. Dick's Valis.

These are the sorts of things that are constantly fascinating to me: how a writer can bury story in their language, how much meaning can be imparted by a single word choice, how they rely on the knowledge of the reader to supply context and meaning. These books stop being story--a defined tale with a beginning, middle, and end that communicates a linear progression of events that lead to a authorial summation of human nature--and become a clandestine transmission--a secret message passed between two people that is unique to their connection. What is written and what is read are never the same thing, really.

Mark Teppo is author of the Codex of Souls series which includes Lightbreaker and the recently released Heartland both published by Night Shade Books.

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Blake Charlton

Okay, so, so far the strangest book I've ever read I'm actually reading right now. It's titled Kill as Few Patients as Possible: and Fifty-Six Other Essays on How to be the World's Best Doctor by Oscar London.

It's a bit dated, creative-nonfiction humor. Sometimes funny, sometimes not. Never laugh-out-loud funny. But it is often insightful--albeit sometimes in an ironic or roundabout way--regarding the medical life (so far as I know as a med student). But what's odd about it is how earnest it is. One gets a sense of how much the author cares about and loves medicine. Most other medical humor I've encountered (many will be familiar with the laugh-out-loud House of God by Samuel Shem) is cynical and ultimately corrosive, using medicine's foibles to tear medicine into pieces. Reading London, however, is both frightening and encouraging.

I'm presently writing a novel with a physician protag, and I'm hoping to make her cynical, witty, and yet sympathetic (i.e. _not_ House MD). Add on to that the fact that in a few years I'll enter the hospital as a clinical med student, and try to get a hold on when and how to use humor appropriately. So reading this book feels a bit like my present is smashing up against a possible future in a disconcerting but at least interesting way.

Currently, Blake Charlton is writing fantasy novels, science fiction short stories, and academic essays on medical education and biomedical ethics. His debut Spellwright is due to be published in March by Tor. His short story Endosymbiont is featured in the anthology Seeds of Change.

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Lev Grossman

I initially said The Falls, by Peter Greenaway, but I'm reneging. It is, undoubtedly, a strange book, but I think some of the strangeness comes from its connection to the film of the same name. (Which I haven't seen.) Seems like cheating.

So instead I'm going to go hearken back to a time when I actually almost knew French well enough to read novels in it, at which time I read Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style. It's about a guy who sees another man, a stranger with a long neck, get into a disagreement with somebody else on a bus. Later that day he sees the same man in a railroad station. The man is explaining to a friend that he should get a button put on his overcoat.

That's it for action. It takes about two pages. For the rest of the book Queneau goes on to retell the same pointless story 99 times, in 99 different literary styles. He tells it from all points of view, in all tenses and moods. He tells it as a sonnet, as a word game, as a telegram, in anagrams, in different dialects, as a blurb for a novel, without using the letter 'e,' and on and on and on.

It's also impossible to say, when you're done, whether or not you enjoyed it, or what it meant, or if it meant anything. But it is unquestionably weird.

Lev Grossman is the New York Times best-selling author of The Magicians and Codex.  He is hard at work on the sequel to The Magicians currently titled The Magician King.  Grossman is senior book reviewer for Time and also the creator of the Nerd World blog.

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Ekaterina Sedia

Boy, that's a tough one. I have to say, for me it's a toss up between Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, and Michael Cisco's The Traitor. Both are difficult to describe, but manage to create a very profound sense of surreal displacement within one's own skin -- these two books permanently tilt your point of view some imperceptible degrees, and you feel like you have a new set of eyes to look at the world with. This is not a pleasant feeling, necessarily, but for me these two books were terribly effective. They were so strange that they could not exist in the world as I perceived it, and thus the world needed to be expanded to accommodate them.

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. She is also an award-winning editor of Paper Cities anthology, with Running with the Pack forthcoming.

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Lou Anders

The weirdest book I ever read was Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, his debut novel, published in 1984 and written without the middle initial. Oddly, it's the only Banks I've ever read, but it made a huge impression on me. It's impossible to talk about without spoiling, but its a deeply disturbing novel with a most unusual, and most unreliable, narrator/protagonist. I think if I didn't work in SF&F, I'd be a Chuck Palahniuk kind of reader, and Banks was in that space before there was a space. But since I do work in SF&F, I'll take a moment to shameless plug James Enge's Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way. As books that evolve directly out of the sword & sorcery stories of the Weird Tales tradition, these would be the "Weirdest" books we publish!

Lou Anders is the three-time Hugo nominated editor of Pyr Books, as well as the editor of 9 critically-acclaimed anthologies. He has been nominated for the PKD and WFC awards, and won the Chesley Award for Best Art Director.

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Sam Sykes

Probably the weirdest book I've ever read was Talyn by Holly Lisle. It had a very cool setting (two armies at war) with a very neat premise (fought entirely through magic). Somewhere along the line, though, the story began a very dramatic change that I will describe through my reactions in parentheses: it began as a war story (cool), a war story with MAGIC (COOL), a sudden peace breaks out (oh), a brief view of soldiers trying to cope without the war that gave them identity (very cool), a romance story (uh), a bondage fetish story (wait), a betrayal by a bondage fetishist mind controlling wizard (I said wait!), and then the last hundred pages were basically any excuse to do a strange sex scene at all points. By the time I read a character say (paraphrased): "Shit, she's (the main heroine) in shock! Get her naked! GET HER NAKED RIGHT NOW!" this book had basically secured the top list in my most unforgettable reads. It wasn't so much the weird sex fetishes that came out, but rather how abruptly they came out. Basically, it was like going to a dinner theater to watch a magician, only instead of seeing the magician pull a rabbit out of his hat, my waitress hopped up on my table, hiked up her skirt and peed on my steak. I was surprised, but not necessarily in a good way.

I also keep a running list of weird sexual phrases from books I've read. Currently topping that list is the phrase "his clockwork balls" from Andy Remic's Kell's Legend, with "the whorl of his anus" and "the root of his cock" from Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold coming in second and third, respectively.

Sam Sykes is the author of Tome of the Undergates, published in the UK by Gollancz in April of this year. He once wrestled an African White Rhino to the ground, can defeat nine out of ten Prime Ministers and is largely suspected to be the chief culprit behind reality television.

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I have a lot of contenders for the weirdest book I ever read. I thought of including some truly strange books, including things I’d read in galleys that were nearly unreadable, but then decided that wouldn’t be fair. Then I decided to define “weird” my way, which is “I can’t believe someone published this” primarily because the book breaks a bunch of rules. The problem is that most of the books that I define as weird in that way have become classics or familiar to us now, but they were so revolutionary in their time that people talked about them. I’m thinking in particular of Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, which is all diary entries, homework assignments, and e-mails, and yet manages to have a great voice and a riveting style. (Now everyone is doing this.) By that definition, though, the weirdest book I can remember reading is Flowers in the Storm by Laura Kinsale. It’s an historical romance novel, so our handsome hero and our beautiful heroine should suffer the slings and arrows of love, separating and getting together again, with a happily ever after. But...her hero, while handsome and rich, has just suffered a stroke. In Regency England. While alone. So everyone thinks he went crazy—and he’s put into Bedlam, the insane asylum, where our heroine, a Quaker, helps her father care for the demented. Kinsale portrays the insane asylum in a historically accurate way—in other words, it’s a horrible place—and the romance continues from there, as our hero slowly recovers from the stroke, but doesn’t really recover the power of speech. It goes from there. It’s now considered a romance classic, but when it was published, it was revolutionary. (I really love this book—and recommend Kinsale to everyone who likes to read. She did some paranormal stuff before it became popular too, for you who like fantasy with your romance.)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written some weird books in her time as well, including a romance (as Kristine Grayson) whose hero is a garden gnome, kinda. (Completely Smitten) Her current novel is Diving into the Wreck, which is science fiction adventure, and was published by Pyr. Her next book is a collection of her award-winning short stories, called Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories to be published in the spring from Golden Gryphon. An even weirder Grayson novel, The Charming Way, in which Prince Charming (one of them, anyway) falls in love with the Evil Stepmother, will be published in Spring of 2011.

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Gail Carriger

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is my first pick. It wasn't until I read this book that I realized how utterly acid-trip bizarre a story could be and get away with it, especially if it also happened to be side-achingly funny. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is right there in the same arena.

Ms. Gail Carriger began writing in order to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She is fond of teeny tiny hats and tropical fruit. She is the author of the Parasol Protectorate series, Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless.

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Jeffrey Thomas

I've read a lot of bizarre books, perhaps more bizarre than my choice, but I also have to consider literary merit...so the book that comes to mind is the novel The Other Side of the Mountain by Michael Bernanos. Bernanos was the son of the well known French author, George Bernanos, and if I recall correctly he was a troubled soul who died young. My aunt gave me this novel when I was a teenager, and its haunting imagery and desolate atmosphere have remained with me over the decades. The story itself is simple: a merchant vessel becomes becalmed at sea, and then wrecked, the only survivors being the young protagonist and an older cook. They reach an eerie island, where the trees all bow down to the ground at night, and where the statues (or are they statues?) of human beings can be found on the slopes of the island's ominous central mountain. Did the characters survive the wreck after all, or are they actually in Hell? Their efforts to survive are both depressing in their futility, and inspiring, in that the characters never cease to struggle against their circumstances, and their friendship sustains them where nothing else can. The story can be seen as a descent into madness (the author's?), and its hellish feel may have been inspired in part by the fact that Bernanos' father was a devout Catholic. The novel was republished a few years ago by Cherokee Publishing Company; it's a short read and I encourage readers of horror, dark fantasy, and the surreal to check it out.

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Blue War, Deadstock, Punktown, Letters from Hades, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers, and the forthcoming The Fall of Hades. He lives in Massachusetts.

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Alex Bledsoe

The strangest book I've run across is a slender little volume called Dragons: The Modern Infestation, by Pamela Wharton Blanpied, first published in 1980.  I discovered it in one of those remainder stores that pop up every so often in otherwise abandoned shopping centers. This one was in Florence, Alabama, in the late 80s. They had two big stacks of the book, probably fifty copies in all. I picked it up because the title seemed intriguing, and when I flipped through it, it perplexed me even more. It seemed to be a straight non-fiction book, complete with diagrams, a bibliography, and photographs detailing the current efforts to understand dragons, real fire-breathing dragons, throughout the world. Yet even with helpful arrows indicating where the dragons were supposed to be in the photos, I couldn't see them. Or could I? Because if you stare at anything long enough, you start to see what you're looking for....

It wasn't until the advent of the internet a decade later that I finally learned the book was intended as a parody of scholarly works poking fun at their seriousness by applying it to a ridiculous topic like dragons. And I guess in a sense the joke was on me, because even after reading the book and realizing it couldn't be legitimate (one dragon converses, Pern-like, with a researcher) I still didn't understand the point.

When I began researching dragons for my novel Burn Me Deadly, I tried unsuccessfully to track down Ms. Blanpied. She is evidently as elusive as the beasts in her book, if she even truly exists (if you read this, Ms. Blanpied, I'd still love to talk to you). But whoever she is, wherever she is, I hope she finally got her laugh.

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He has been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. I now live in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls. The author of the Eddie LaCrosse high fantasy/hardboiled mysteries (The Sword-Edged Blonde, Burn Me Deadly and the forthcoming Dark Jenny), two novels about vampires in 1975 Memphis (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood) and the first Tufa novel, The Hum and the Shiver, due in 2011.

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Victor Gischler

In the broadest sense of the word "weird" I shall pick Joe Meno's wonderful The Boy Detective Fails. I think there are many books that are much, much weirder, but Meno's book was an odd, strange little fairy tale that I enjoyed so much it still stays with me. What struck me as most "weird" was less the story itself and more the way I enjoyed the book. Usually I want to be driven through a story. I want the pace to keep me flipping pages. But I found myself sort of gently floating through The Boy Detective Fails as this gentle, whimsical story unfolded.

Victor Gischler is the author of author of 4 hard-boiled crime novels. including his debut novel Gun Monkeys which was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his novel Shotgun Opera was an Anthony Award finalist. His fifth novel Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse and most recent novel Vampire A-Go-Go actually have nothing to do with one another. He is also hard at work on many Deadpool comics for Marvel.

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Jesse Bullington

Upon first being asked my mind started turning to William S. Burroughs and other experimental authors that seemed way out on the outer fringes, but upon reflection I think that one book that really struck me as intrinsically weird when I first read it was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Unlike Naked Lunch, which is a weird book full of weird stuff, sure, Invisible Cities actually caught me off guard as a teenager--it wasn't that crazy stuff happened or the style was unusual, it was that the entire book as a whole seemed alien to me. The book consists of Marco Polo describing cities he has supposedly encountered to Kublai Khan but the novel is so much more than that--in addition to being a superficially fun read it's also an intricate puzzle, an incredibly nuanced work passed off as a casual series of descriptions. While not as well known as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (the single best piece of post modern fiction ever written) or The Baron in the Trees (a comparatively straight-forward fable), Invisible Cities remains a masterpiece, and quite possibly the weirdest book I've ever read--it was certainly the weirdest I'd ever read at the time, and don't know of any book that has matched it since.

Jesse Bullington is the author of the novel The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, as well as numerous articles and pieces of short fiction.  He is currently at work on his second novel The Enterprise of Death.

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Michael, The Mad Hatter

For me it would have to be The Shape We're In by Jonathan Letham. It is a bit of a cheat as I asked everyone else to stick to novels, and The Shape We're In is a novelette at best.  Yet, it is the story that had me scratching my head days after finishing.  Told from the point of view of an alcoholic garbage man charged with moving trash from one section of a giant immobile vessel shape of sorts to another it is cynical yet hilarious at the same time. In search of his missing son the garbage man ventures into far off sections of the shape and meets hordes of odd cultures that have evolved there. I hesitate to say more as there is a big reveal that is worth uncovering on your own.

Michael, The Mad Hatter is an elusive hat and book collector spending far too much money and time on both.  He is secretly planning to open the world's first Haberdashery and Book Emporium. He also runs a little book review blog of some sort.

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REVIEW | The Clockwork Jungle Book (Shimmer 11)

I meant to do a review of Shimmer 11: The Clockwork Jungle Book a few weeks back, but I misplaced my copy during all of the hullabaloo of moving and remodeling. Now that everything is unpacked things should be getting back to normal.

The Clockwork Jungle Book as the name implies is based on the theme of Steampunk animals. This simple theme was carried above and beyond my expectations. Most of the authors were new to me, but some well known names do appear in the volume such as Jay Lake, Chris Roberson, along with the first fiction I've read from Lou Anders the impresario of Pyr. Overall, The Clockwork Jungle Book is a sumptuous feast of all things Steampunk with many stories that I hope are only beginning glimpses inside these wonderful and sometimes weird alternative worlds. Now on to some of the highlights.

Shedding Skin; Or How the World Came to Be by Jay Lake - To start we have Jay Lake's take on a mechanical animal filled Eden. This story sets the tone for the volume well, but they only get better from here, which says quite a bit as Lake is one of the better short stories writers out there.

The Jackdaw’s Wife by Blake Hutchins - This was one of my favorite tales. Hutchins's managed to do a lot with a little, creating an incredible monster from scratch within a few pages. Some of the development happens a bit too quickly though.

The Student and the Rats by Jess Nevins - A nice tale about a man tinkering with creatures to see how they work and make them better. It is almost a Steampunk retelling of the myth of Prometheus only with rats.

Otto’s Elephant, by Vince Pendergast - Stories within a story about what mechanical elephants of the past could do if they existed throughout history. Beautiful telling as if a bard were right there next to you. It felt like this was only the beginning to a much larger book of tales that I hope Pendergast revisits.

The Monkey and the Butterfly by Susannah Mandel - Hands down the cutest story in the bunch. A monkey who falls in love with a cat in a Victorian setting where most animals are highly intelligent, but still give into their animal instincts at times. Great character building in such a scant space.

The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar by Shweta Narayan - Possibly the biggest standout in the collection. This tale could have easily fit in Arabian Nights as it evokes a desert setting as well as a moral beautifully done. It is also another story within a story.

Message in a Bottle by James Maxey - This is a story Jules Verne could almost have written. Maxey’s great adventure tale on the moon goes in unexpected directions.

The Clockwork Cat’s Escape by Gwynne Garfinkle - The shortest tale in the bunch, but most definitely one of the most heartfelt about knowing when to let go of something you love.

The Wolf and the Schoolmaster by James L. Cambias - Cambias needs a contract right now to write a book based off this story as this is clearly only the impetuous to a much longer story with a rich world history at his finger tips. This story is also startling similar in terms of tone and setting to what Scott Westerfeld did with Leviathan, so if you're a fan of that book you'll absolutely love Cambias. That said Cambias does put his own unique spin on this tale in some very good ways.

And How His Audit Stands by Lou Anders - Anders surprised me with one of the most well thoughtout and adventurous stories in the bunch yet the animal theme is a bit lost. He somehow gives a new life to trains with great Western style flair. I recently learned that Mike Resnick upcoming Steampunk themed series Weird West was initially Lou's idea. I now understand where Lou gestated the thought.

The Story In Which Dog Dies by Sara Genge - The anthology starts at the beginning of creation so it was only fitting to include a story about the end of the world with this tale of how the last dog on earth keeps moving.

The Fishbowl by Amal El-Mohtar - A perfect use of the theme in which the world's oceans are now populated by clockwork fish because of the proliferation of steam tech.

His Majesty’s Menagerie by Chris Roberson - A clockwork animal arms race followed by a clockwork animal war. Wonderfully done.

The Emperor’s Gift by Rajan Khanna - With an Asian flare the workings of a clockwork builder come to life.

There was not a clunker in this bunch. I give The Clockwork Jungle Book 9 out of 10 Hats. This is a volume that had it been a little longer could have easily found a home with a large publisher for the mass market. If you are a Steampunk fan go out and order this book or if you've always wondered what keeps me reading this genre it would be a great volume to induct yourselves into the fold. You'll thank me later. Now Shimmer has got me wondering whether every issue is as high quality as this so much that I'll have to check out another.


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MISHMASH | Tim Akers and Coming Attractions

Tim Akers confirmed via twitter that he has just signed a contract for the sequel to Heart of Veridon, which is titled Dead of Veridon.  Jacob Burn has been resurrected from the ashes to kick some butt and discover more secrets.  Congratulations to Akers, who is working on The Horns of Ruin for Pyr first.  Dead of Veridon should appear sometime in the first quarter of 2011 from Solaris. 

Lou Anders is asking for opinions on Matte vs. Gloss cover finishes.  I chimed in a bit, but feel free to add your own thoughts as Lou is looking for as many data points as he can get.

I'll be posting an interview with Couch author Benjamin Parzybok this coming week.  I've got loads of other interviews in the pipes as well including my first group interview, a debut fantasy author's first interview, and a World Fantasy Award winner.  Also, my next installment of Looking Forward should be going up in the next week or two.


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MISHMASH | Swords and Dark Magic Contents & Recent Deals

According to Publisher's Marketplace Alex Bledsoe has signed with TOR for 2 more Eddie LaCrosse adventures following The Sword-Edged Blonde and Burn Me Deadly.  The third book in the series is titled Dark Jenny, in which the sword jockey is suspected of murder in an island kingdom, and forced to find the real killer to save his own life for publication in 2011 with the fourth book in 2012.

John Joseph Adams recently signed with Night Shade Books for yet another reprint anthology titled Brave New Worlds, which will feature the best of dystopian fiction from best-selling authors.

Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan have officially posted the table of contents for their anthology Swords and Dark Magic: The New Swords and Sorcery coming from EOS in June 2010 along with a limted edition from Subterranean Press as well.

1.Introduction, Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan
2.“Goats of Glory”, Steven Erikson
3.“Tides Elba: A Tale of the Black Company”, Glen Cook
4.“Bloodsport”, Gene Wolfe
5.“The Singing Spear”, James Enge
6.“A Wizard of Wiscezan”, C.J. Cherryh
7.“A Rich Full Week”, K. J. Parker
8.“A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet”, Garth Nix
9.“Red Pearls: An Elric Story”, Michael Moorcock
10.“The Deification of Dal Bamore”, Tim Lebbon
11.“Dark Times at the Midnight Market”, Robert Silverberg
12.“The Undefiled”, Greg Keyes
13.“Dapple Hew the Tint Master”, Michael Shea
14.“In the Stacks”, Scott Lynch
15.“Two Lions, A Witch, and the War-Robe”, Tanith Lee
16.“The Sea Troll’s Daughter”, Caitlin R Kiernan
17.“Thieves of Daring”, Bill Willingham
18.“The Fool Jobs”, Joe Abercrombie

What a line up.  Lou and Jon, you had me at Abercrombie and Lynch.  2010 is looking to be one of the strongest years for anthologies in quite a while.  We have Christopher Golden's impressive The New Dead, Lou Anders next anthology With Great Power that has an equally good line-up, GRRM and Gardner Dozois's all-star Warriors, Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio are doing something called Stories, plus GRRM and Dozois are working on another anthology called Star-Crossed Lovers for the second half of next year with stories from Jim Butcher, Robin Hobb, and Diana Gabaldon.

MISHMASH | Abercrombie, Lynch, and Inside Fantasy Worlds

Quite a bit has been happening in the SFF world. Here are some of the highlights: Scott Lynch has posted the prologue to the long awaited The Republic of Thieves on his site. Lynch also mentioned he will be contributing to a new Swords & Sorcery anthology titled Conquering Swords edited by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan with contributions by Glen Cook, James Enge, Steven Erikson, C.J. Cherryh, Joe Abercrombie, and Michael Moorcock. This should be released in mid to later 2010 and will be published by EOS. I'm quite excited by this line-up. Speaking of Abercrombie he has announced the title of his next First Law World book: The Heroes. Here is the synopsis from his site:

Both because the action centres around a ring of standing stones called the Heroes, and because it's about heroism and that (meant semi-ironically, of course). It mostly takes place over the course of three days, and is the story of a single battle for control of the North. Think Lord of the Rings meets A Bridge Too Far, with a sprinkling of Band of Brothers and Generation Kill. It's about war, you get me? Principally it follows the (mis)adventures of six assorted persons on both sides and different levels of command, whose paths intersect during the course of the battle in various fateful, horrible, wonderful, surprisingly violent, surprisingly unviolent, and hilarious ways. With the Northmen: a veteran losing his nerve who just wants to keep his crew alive, an ex-Prince determined to claw his way back to power by any means necessary, a young lad determined to win a place in the songs for himself. With the Union: A depressive swordsman who used to be the king's bodyguard, a profiteering standard-bearer, and the venomously ambitious daughter of the Marshal in command. But of course a fair few familiar faces show up on both sides...

I'm a little surprised Abercrombie is heading back to the North already as I was hoping for something South of the Union, but it will certainly be at the top of my to-read list. The Heroes most likely will not be published until around February 2011, so his short story to Conquering Swords will have to tide us over until than.

Lastly, John at Grasping included me in his latest Inside the Blogosphere question with this edition focusing on Fantasy Worlds. I'm included in the first post as the second entry here. Check out the 2nd half of the posting here.