As soon as the aliens decode this, we’re getting inducted into the Galactic League for sure.
{ 4 comments }
- Title: The Prow Beast
- Author: Robert Low
- Genre: Historical
- Year: 2010
It was with some sorrow that I came to the last page in Robert Low’s The Prow Beast — the fourth and, sadly (for now?), final book in the excellent Oathsworn saga. Beginning with 2007′s The Whale Road, the Oathsworn series has followed Orm Ruriksson’s intrepid band of adventurers the length and breadth of the Viking world in the 10th Century, from Scandinavia to Constantinople, from Jerusalem to the steppes of Russia, all the while taking them from an obscure band of raiders to far-famed men the subject of song and saga. And it is this fame that lies heavily around the necks of the Oathsworn in this final volume, for their reputation makes them both a target and an ill fit for a settled life away from the sea.
The novel begins with a bang, in the middle of a grim sea-fight against desperate odds — and a wildly dangerous pack of ulfhednar, the ‘berserkers’ of Viking lore. Orm, our narrator for the whole of the saga, then backtracks to explain how his men’s current predicament came to pass, and how the alliance of revenge-fueled Randr Starki and Pallig Tokeson, King of the Joms, was born. A perfect storm of factors collides upon the Oathsworn, who find themselves hated, their treasure coveted, and the pregnant Queen with whom they were entrusted, Sigrith, wife of the King of Sweden, hunted by rivals who do not wish to see her birth an heir to the throne. The Oathsworn’s Hestreng Hall is looted and burned, their longship the Fjord Elk destroyed by Greek fire, and the remnants of the Oathsworn and their families find themselves hunted and on the run. And that is just the beginning.
{ 0 comments }
This short essay, ‘Future Realities: The First Line of Neuromancer,’ originally appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of The First Line.
William Gibson’s 1984 blockbuster Neuromancer forever changed the way science fiction was written – and the way, too, we look at our own future. Slick and seedy, hardboiled as any noir thriller yet rich with New Wave stylistic pyrotechnics, and packed with enough extrapolative speculation and real-world texture that the future it describes feels, not like the product of one man’s imagination, but more the inevitable revelations of a prophet. This legendary book has an opening line to match, one that points clearly at the themes and questions Gibson explores: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
The most striking part of that line is, of course, the use of television static to describe the natural world. That we can see with perfect, intuitive understanding exactly what this image depicts* with its juxtaposition, and that it feels at once completely natural and perhaps a bit startling to us, only reinforces that we ourselves are living in the world Gibson describes. His near future is a place where a suite of technologies — electronic, genetic, and informational — infuse and inform all human activity. It is our own world to the nth degree, the post-everything world that we already feel spinning out of control around us, one in which we are increasingly uncertain of what it is to be human.
{ 4 comments }
Tomorrow afternoon (3:00 EST) and Monday night (9:00 EST) Paizo will be hosting a chat featuring all of the great names in their fantasy fiction stables. Also, I will be there.
You can follow the link to Paizo’s chat room from this post on the Paizo blog. You don’t have to register, just give your handle.
And if you really want to brush up on your Pathfinder who’s who, check out my interviews with Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, and James L. Sutter.
So far, these are the attendees:
Saturday 3:00pm EST
Dave Gross
Howard Andrew Jones
Liane Merciel
Erik Mona
Kevin Andrew Murphy
Steven Savile
Amber E. Scott
Bill Ward
Monday 9:00pm EST
Richard Lee Byers
Elaine Cunningham
Ed Greenwood
Dave Gross
J.C. Hay
Howard Andrew Jones
Liane Merciel
Erik Mona
Kevin Andrew Murphy
James Sutter
Bill Ward
{ 0 comments }
This interview originally appeared at Black Gate Online.
The great thing about interviewing Howard Andrew Jones is that it is impossible to run out of interesting things to talk about. That’s because Howard has been busy. Busy writing stories, busy preserving the legacy of an unsung founder of historical adventure, busy editing Black Gate Magazine. And, oh yeah, busy writing and selling novels — his first two, the Dabir and Asim origin story The Desert of Souls, and Plague of Shadows for Paizo’s new Pathfinder fiction line, are both out now!
A Conversation with Howard Andrew Jones
Your Dabir and Asim stories are some of the most popular to be featured in Black Gate Magazine. For those readers perhaps still unfamiliar with them, what can one expect from a Dabir and Asim tale? More specifically, what is in store for readers that pick up Dabir’s and Asim’s first novel-length adventure, The Desert of Souls?
Mystery, adventure, swashbuckling swordplay, two brave friends standing against things man was not meant to know… to further sound like a radio announcer, there’s all this and more! I think my two favorite descriptions about their exploits come from John O’Neill and Kevin J. Anderson. O’Neill described their tales as “something like Sherlock Holmes crossed with the Arabian Nights, except Watson has a sword,” and Kevin J. Anderson wrote that the novel read “like a cross between Sindbad and Indiana Jones.” There’s a strong sense of the exotic, because I like to take readers to strange and colorful places, be it a haunted tower in the Baghdad night, or ancient ruins. I had a lot more room to spread out in the novel, so the readers are introduced to more figures from Dabir and Asim’s world, including the brilliant Sabirah, Dabir’s one true love, and the caliph himself.
{ 0 comments }
