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If this doesn't show, it's Golden Age and Other Stories by Naomi Novik

https://subterraneanpress.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/g/o/golden_age_ebook_cover_1.jpg

Naomi Novik ended her acclaimed, beloved nine-volume Temeraire series last year with a stunning finale, League of Dragons. Fans missing their favorite series can now rejoice: Novik returns with an original Temeraire collection as unique as the world she has created, with each tale inspired by an accompanying piece of fan art.
The Temeraire novels provide a window into an alternate nineteenth century populated with Novik’s own richly human and unforgettably draconic characters as they adventure alongside well-known historical figures. That tradition continues here. Readers will delight at appearances by fan-favorite characters from the series and historical figures like the famed explorer Matteo Ricci. In “Planting Season,” Novik shows us an early glimpse of American dragon John Wampanoag at Boston Harbor. “Golden Age” finds a dragon who believes he remembers being called Celeste hatch from a shipwreck-tossed crate onto an island where he meets others of his kind. But other famous fictional characters are to be discovered here as well. Readers will certainly recognize a certain Miss Bennet (here Captain Bennet) and her suitor, Mr. Darcy, in “Dragons and Decorum.”

Filled with the inventive world-building, rich detail, sparkling wit, and deep emotion that readers have come to expect from Novik’s work, Golden Age and Other Stories is a treasure at home on any Temeraire-lover’s bookshelf.

From Kirkus (Starred Review):

“So accomplished, absorbing, and wide-ranging is Novik's creation that the stories elicit enormous pleasure… a must-read for all fans of this outstanding series.”

From Publishers Weekly:

“Novik collaborates with her fans in this welcome return to the alternate 19th-century world of her Temeraire series, in which English naval captain William Laurence befriends the newly hatched Chinese dragon he names Temeraire and the two of them enjoy adventures around the globe. Perhaps the best story in the collection is 'Golden Age,' which tells an alternate version of the first meeting between Temeraire (here called Celeste) and Laurence and the formation of their unusual bond.”

From Library Journal:

“This illustrated collection, which can serve as a stand-alone or as a companion volume for readers of military fiction and dragon fiction, will bring joy to the series’ many admirers.”

Table of Contents:

Volly Gets a Cow
Planting Season
Dawn of Battle
Golden Age
Succession
Dragons and Decorum
(drabbles)

$5.99

dow, Friday, 13 October 2017 16:28 (six years ago) link

James P. Blaylock, River's Edge

We’re pleased to present a new Langdon St. Ives adventure. At more than 40,000 words, this is by far the longest of the novellas!

The body of a girl washes up on a mud bank along the edge of the River Medway amid a litter of poisoned fish and sea birds, casting an accusing shadow upon the deadly secrets of the Majestic Paper Mill and its wealthy owners. Simple answers to the mystery begin to suggest insidious secrets, and very quickly Langdon St. Ives and his wife Alice are drawn into a web of conspiracies involving murder, a suspicious suicide, and ritual sacrifice at a lonely and ancient cluster of standing stones. Abruptly St. Ives’s life is complicated beyond the edge of human reason, and he finds himself battling to save Alice’s life and the ruination of his friends, each step forward leading him further into the entanglement, a dark labyrinth from which there is no apparent exit.
$4.99

dow, Friday, 13 October 2017 16:31 (six years ago) link

*Think* I used to come across this guy's stories in Twilight Zone Magazine, back when the TV series was revived--was he good?
from Subterranean Press:

We've been working with David J. Schow for two freaking decades now, and it's high time we published DJStories: The Best of David J. Schow. Need further conivincing? Read on for the full details on this career-spanning collection.
About the Book:
(BONUS COVER FLAP STORY - ABSOLUTELY FREE!)
Once upon a time, there was a writer named David J. Schow.
One of his specialties was the tale of unsettlement, unease, looming fear, straight-up gross-out, unnerving spookiness, gallows-humor black satire, heart-rending loss, the conte cruel, the ironies of fate, and the seductive sorcery of the otherworldly-in a word, horror.
This was by no means his only specialty.
He wrote short stories, then novels, then TV, then movies, fiction and non. He won various awards for this pursuit, including the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Twilight Zone Dimension Award, and the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award.
As you read this now, he's been engaged in this activity professionally for forty years.
Call him a modern fantasist, a black magic realist, an acerbic satirist, a splatterpunk, a caustic comic, an "urbanized Cormac McCarthy" (John Farris), "smart, scathing, and verbally inventive to an astonishing degree" (Peter Straub), a "literary gunslinger" (Richard Christian Matheson), "the Duke of the Dark" (Mick Garris), "deeply felt but truly chilling" (Weird Tales), "remarkably talented; edgy, insightful, and fearless" (Joe R. Lansdale), a "gifted storyteller" (Robert Bloch), a "cleverly metaphoric literary chameleon" (T.E.D. Klein) ... you get the general drift, right? As Michael Marshall Smith said, "Be prepared to be dragged to some very dark places, and to love every step of the way. Like being punched in the face by a poet."
DJStories is Schow's first "greatest hits" album, covering four decades of his efforts to shake you up, shock you awake, tweak your sensibilities and gun down your preconceptions. Thirty stories- count 'em, thirty!-that cover the entire spectrum of what you may find frightening.
Monsters. Lovers. Spirits. Allies. Killers. The earthly and unearthly. The insane and the too-sane. The dead, the living and the in-between. Fictional folks who just might have an impact on your real, waking life.
This story does not have a happy ending. Guaranteed.
Limited: 1000 signed numbered hardcover copies: $40
(Maybe they'll eventually do a cheapo ebook edition, like those in previous Subterranean post.)

dow, Monday, 23 October 2017 19:43 (six years ago) link

About to read Women of Wonder---The Contemporary Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, edited by Pamela Sargent, Harvest Original trade paperback published 1994.
Contributors:
Octavia E. Butler
Pat Cadigan
Jayge Carr
Angela Carter
Suzy McKee Charnas
C.J.Cherryh
Storm Constantine
Carol Emshwiller
Sheila Finch
Karen Joy Fowler
Mary Gentle
Lisa Goldstein
Nancy Kress
Tanith Lee
Rosaleen Love
Judith Moffett
Pat Murphy
Rebecca Ore
Pamela Sargent
Sydney J. Van Scyoc
Connie Willis

dow, Tuesday, 24 October 2017 15:47 (six years ago) link

I've been meaning to get that series of anthologies someday.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 24 October 2017 15:50 (six years ago) link

Would like to read the first Women of Wonder, also edited by Sargent and published ib 1975 or '74:

"Introduction: Women in Science Fiction" – Pamela Sargent
"The Child Dreams" – Sonya Dorman
"That Only a Mother" – Judith Merril
"Contagion" – Katherine MacLean
"The Wind People" – Marion Zimmer Bradley
"The Ship Who Sang" – Anne McCaffrey
"When I Was Miss Dow" – Sonya Dorman
"The Food Farm" – Kit Reed
"Baby, You Were Great" – Kate Wilhelm
"Sex and/or Mr Morrison" – Carol Emshwiller
"Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" – Ursula K. Le Guin
"False Dawn" – Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
"Nobody’s Home" – Joanna Russ
"Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" – Vonda N. McIntyre

dow, Tuesday, 24 October 2017 15:53 (six years ago) link

hmm I've only read like half of those stories

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 24 October 2017 15:56 (six years ago) link

bah local library copy is "in library use only"

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 24 October 2017 15:59 (six years ago) link

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?12580

Three volumes in the 70s then the later two select from the 70s series.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 24 October 2017 16:03 (six years ago) link

couldn't finish Tidhar's "Osama". Very good with the descriptive turns of phrase, and a premise/setup that I was into but totally falls apart plot-wise, he seems to have completely missed that one of the most crucial elements of a noir story is forward motion, dangling enough clues to keep the reader guessing. You can't just throw in a femme fatale and some hired goons and expect the tropes to do all the work. What's left is a shapeless meditation on terrorism that has a lot pretty sentences + imagery but never goes anywhere. I skimmed the last 50 pages.

On to David Hutchinson's "Europe in Autumn"

Οὖτις, Thursday, 26 October 2017 21:15 (six years ago) link

Good move

Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, 27 October 2017 00:35 (six years ago) link

"Introduction: Women in Science Fiction" – Pamela Sargent"

this is one of the best things ever by the way.

scott seward, Friday, 27 October 2017 20:02 (six years ago) link

it's also longer than any of the stories in the collection but i totally could have read a whole book of it.

scott seward, Friday, 27 October 2017 20:02 (six years ago) link

This just in: according to Wilum Pugmire, Joshi wanted to include "Great God Pan" in the Machen collection but Penguin wouldn't allow it, because it had been in a recent book. That's a dumb reason, Penguin.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 31 October 2017 19:39 (six years ago) link

Penguin Classics have done stupider things.

https://publishingperspectives.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Morrissey-cover.jpg

Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Tuesday, 31 October 2017 22:39 (six years ago) link

Fuck, sorry for huge Morrissey

Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Tuesday, 31 October 2017 22:40 (six years ago) link

Would like to read the first Women of Wonder, also edited by Sargent and published ib 1975 or '74

Review by Budrys here

alimosina, Wednesday, 1 November 2017 03:30 (six years ago) link

Fuck, sorry for huge Morrissey

He's a classic, after all

alimosina, Wednesday, 1 November 2017 03:31 (six years ago) link

I may have mentioned above that Joshi wanted the Clark Ashton Smith book to be mostly poetry but Penguin insisted on mostly stories. Reading CASmith stories recently, I think Penguin may have made a mistake. I find a lot of the stories very padded and often uninteresting, saved by a few powerful descriptions. I've read a few properly good stories so far.

I gather that he written stories to support his family but poetry was his true passion.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 1 November 2017 13:39 (six years ago) link

I am unconvinced that his poetry is any better:

At Sunrise
Clark Ashton Smith
The moon declines in lonely gold
Among the stars of ashen-grey—
Veiling the pallors of decay
With clouds and glories, fold on fold.

Now, in a crystal interlude,
Stillness and twilight briefly rest,
Ere sudden gules illume the crest
Of peaks where solemn purples brood;

And from the low Favonian bourn
A sweet wind blows so lightly by
It seems the futile silver sigh
Breathed by the lingering moon forlorn.

mark s, Wednesday, 1 November 2017 13:48 (six years ago) link

I liked that fine until the futile sighing forlorn moon.

Here's Joel Lane...

I think Smith is at his best when delivering undiluted Gothic horror, whether it's set in our world or some other landscape. His bleak sensibility, his distaste for religion and his passion for strange imagery all point to his having been an influence on Ligotti.

I'm less enthusiastic about Smith's poetry, which strikes me as hollow, imitative and often quite banal. Stories gave him an opportunity to take a run at the macabre, striking it with force and intensity. Poems dropped him into a swamp of passive and faux-Romantic posturing, with little of the grim urgency that informs his best stories. I may be missing the point of course.

The problem with Smith's poetry is his conscious imitation of a poetic idiom from the early nineteenth century, which renders his poetry something of a static technical exercise rather than part of a living tradition. 'The Hashish Eater' is impressive, certainly, and benefits from being blank verse rather than formal verse – blank verse remains a potent approach within modern poetry, as the late Seamus Heaney demonstrated many times.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 1 November 2017 14:28 (six years ago) link

Listening to a panel where people try to define a current genre is boring as shit. "How does this genre speak to us about our times". Fuck off.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, 9 November 2017 23:51 (six years ago) link

otm

Daniel_Rf, Friday, 10 November 2017 11:59 (six years ago) link

Reading "Bloodchild" again in xpost Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years reminds me that I long ago had the impression that Butler was taking self-discipline too far in one of her Patternist novels (forget which one, but the Patternmaster *seemed* to be getting his comeuppance, so may or may not have been the finale). That is, she maybe didn't want to pander to the then-mighty cheesy horror boom, so maybe was a little too dry at times, way past effective undercutting of inherent melodrama--if you're gonna set up this kind of scene, c'mon, author---also impression of some arid stretches in the Xenogenesis trilogy---but all that reading really was a long time ago, and right or wrong, I recalled those takes in contrast to re-reading this, and finally realizing that what was always most mind-blowing about it was the compression, the containment, which is what the characters (or some of them) are determined (in more ways than one) to do: to contain the situation, the latest mainfestion of an ongoing precarious balancing act---call it symbiosis or parasitism, either way or both, it's a potential explosion made into something like an implosion---
I thought editor Pamela Sargeant's own story might find this a hard act to follow, but it's effective too--all selections so far are built around fraught, often combustible relationships, within as well as between genders, races, species.

dow, Friday, 10 November 2017 17:36 (six years ago) link

I'd very much recommend the Butler episode of Geek's Guide To The Galaxy on youtube. The talk of her trying to write less fucked up books in the hopes of being a bestseller is fascinating. Also how much unfinished work she left behind.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Monday, 13 November 2017 20:14 (six years ago) link

I don't recall ever reading anything by her that seemed fucked-up in the least, but yeah there was (sometimes) a sense of muted conflict behind the words ---and at least part of that may well have been trying to find a way to make a living at it and live with herself. "Bloodchild" and Kindred and a number of others seem fully realized though, at least from this reader's POV (I mean wtf more could she ask of herself or her creations---but I've been there as a scribbler).

dow, Monday, 13 November 2017 22:56 (six years ago) link

https://theslot.jezebel.com/trumps-wildly-unqualified-judicial-nominee-is-also-a-gh-1820431214/amp

I remember this guy being interviewed and saw a fair amount of middling to positive reviews of his books. I bet a shitload of people are going to delete those reviews and pretend they never liked him.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, 16 November 2017 16:09 (six years ago) link

the shadow over innsmouth is bad not good

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/gerryanderson/images/e/ee/Aquaphibians.png/revision/latest?cb=20170525172404

mark s, Friday, 17 November 2017 15:17 (six years ago) link

blank verse remains a potent approach within modern poetry, as the late Seamus Heaney demonstrated many times.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, November 1, 2017 2:28 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah no

the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Friday, 17 November 2017 23:58 (six years ago) link

Remember that's Joel Lane not me. I've never read Heaney.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 18 November 2017 01:22 (six years ago) link

yeah, i got that, sorry. its just an annoying sentence to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i tried with the penguin clark ashton smith but just couldn't. i think i felt more sympathetic to it when i had a bunch of it in a gollancz fantasy masterwork with a lord leighton on the cover or smth.

the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Saturday, 18 November 2017 03:39 (six years ago) link

I'm sure the fantasy masterworks cover was JK Potter.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 18 November 2017 10:39 (six years ago) link

mark, if that is a screengrab of a Shadow Over Innsmouth adaptation I'd like to see it!

Daniel_Rf, Monday, 20 November 2017 10:40 (six years ago) link

the aquaphibians are quite innsmouth-esque : supermarionation as a whole is (mostly, sadly) less than lovecraftian

mark s, Monday, 20 November 2017 11:15 (six years ago) link

In the home stretch of xpost Women of Wonder 70s-90s volume: a few relative clunkers, but most everybody getting their groove on---a sense of cadence, well-timed compression and expansion and a few sleeper cells are all I ask---recently, in Nancy Kress's "And Wild For To Hold", future experts take Holy Hostages, fulcrums in power struggles, to ward off war (Hitler seems cool with it, "spends all his time reading power fantasy novels": no list provided alas). They've also got the "historical" Helen of Troy, which suggests that either they've really really done their homework, or these "timestreams" are not what they think (or both, I think). In any case, Anne Boleyn means to tear their play house down, room by room by room, though she seems to know she can't get 'em all (got her own realpolitik)

dow, Monday, 20 November 2017 19:36 (six years ago) link

And the story's last three words provide a true punchline.

dow, Monday, 20 November 2017 19:38 (six years ago) link

That Kress story sounds good, and I am annoyed it is not in the Kress collection I have :(

Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Monday, 20 November 2017 23:09 (six years ago) link

did anyone else get the big coffee-table annotated lovecraft of 2014? i have been reading it lately and finding it pretty enervating. i also recently read a pdf of a 500-page call of cthulhu campaign entitled 'beyond the mountains of madness', that felt closer to the echt lovecraftian vibe for me somehow; feel like putting oneself in a posture of enough physical comfort to sit and read a two-kilo foot-tall book is enough to make achieving existential dread a bit of a write-off for me

the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Tuesday, 21 November 2017 05:23 (six years ago) link

The Leslie Klinger one?

Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 21 November 2017 13:51 (six years ago) link

yep

the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Wednesday, 22 November 2017 04:13 (six years ago) link

I didn't really like the sound of it because people said Klinger's commentary acts as if the mythos is real. That seems tiresomely fannish.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 22 November 2017 13:03 (six years ago) link

That Klinger's MO - he's done it with Sherlock Holmes and Dracula too. I don't think it's 'fannish' so much as 'differently scholarly'; it allows him to introduce an awful lot of background material and info in an entertaining way (he has to be especially inventive with the many contradictory parts of the Holmes stories). Besides, maybe it is all true.

Ward Fowler, Wednesday, 22 November 2017 14:10 (six years ago) link

I know some people disliked it but I won't find out because I've got enough books containing the same stories.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 22 November 2017 14:17 (six years ago) link

Wondering about this new novella

https://images.macmillan.com/folio-assets/macmillan_us_frontbookcovers_1000H/9780765398048.jpg

If the image doesn't work, here's the pitch:

Mandelbrot the Magnificent
Liz Ziemska

Mandelbrot the Magnificent is a stunning, magical pseudo-biography of Benoit Mandelbrot as he flees into deep mathematics to escape the rise of Hitler.

“Liz Ziemska has fashioned a beautiful story about one famous survivor and the magic and mathematics he's brought to the world.” —Karen Joy Fowler
Corny premise as presented here by MacMillan, but Fowler's an astute writer and editor, so her blurb tips the scales interest-wise.

dow, Wednesday, 29 November 2017 20:17 (six years ago) link

Anyway it's a $3.99 ebook, so maybe...

dow, Wednesday, 29 November 2017 20:18 (six years ago) link

A book about Mandelbrot with a Fibonacci spiral on the front...

koogs, Wednesday, 29 November 2017 21:10 (six years ago) link

lol I thought that too

Οὖτις, Wednesday, 29 November 2017 21:12 (six years ago) link

I’m sold

Modern Zounds in Undiscovered Country (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 29 November 2017 22:49 (six years ago) link

i have yet to encounter any egregious examples of 'in-universe style', as wikipedia types have it, in klinger

meanwhile i just glanced over a bunch of s.t. joshi's blog entries and my gosh, what a prick

the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Tuesday, 5 December 2017 14:32 (six years ago) link


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