Guest Post

Guest Review: FALL OF THE DAGGER by Glenda Larke (Orbit)

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LarkeG-FL3-FallOfTheDaggerThe Forsaken Lands Concludes

Excommunicated cleric Saker returns from exile in the Spice Islands to find his homeland in chaos.

A dark sorcerer controls the ear of the King, turning him against his own son and heir, while a corrupted army gathers in the shadows.

With the illusionist Sorrel and islander Ardhi, armed with magic from Ardhi’s homeland, Saker now must stand between his city and the corruption that threatens to cripple it before it is too late…

Reviewed by Ryan Frye

The Forsaken Lands series has been my favorite fantasy series of the past year or so. The first two books of this series were so good that I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the final installment, The Fall of the Dagger. Easily my most anticipated book of 2016, I’m happy to say that Larke more than delivered the goods with this finale. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “The Cliches of Prophecy’s Ruin – Original Ways with Old Cliches” by Sam Bowring

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BowringS-AuthorPicIn Prophecy’s Ruin, book one of the Broken Well trilogy, a child is prophesied to be born on a dark and stormy night (of course) who will end the age-old battle between the forces of shadow and light. Pardon me, but YAAAAAAAAAAAWN. We’ve all heard this shit a hundred times before.

I realise this might be a strange sentiment coming from the author of a book with such a title, but I detest prophecy as a plot device. The idea that anything is inevitable lies in stark opposition to the notion of free will, something we all probably prefer to believe in. And when hearing a particular prophecy leads you to somehow create the circumstances you were actively trying to avoid? I mean, come on. How many more times do we really need to see that clever crap play out? Continue reading →

Guest Post: “On Writing and Completing a Trilogy” by Gerrard Cowan

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CowanG-AuthorPic2I’ve started writing the third book in my fantasy trilogy, and it is a very strange experience.

Book One was obviously a difficult process. It took years – four, to be precise, from the germination of the idea to the day I cried ‘enough is enough’ and began sending it to agents. In fairness, I was only properly working at it for the final two of those four years, as it took me a while to get into the rhythm. Still, it was with me for quite a long time.

When you write the first part of a trilogy you have a certain amount of scope. It’s liberating, really. Of course, you need to plan out the overall story, and know how you’re going to get to where you’re going. But you can allow certain threads to dangle.  Continue reading →

Guest Post: “The World Around Me (And the World Within Leviathan’s Blood)” by Ben Peek

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PeekB-AuthorPicI was a teenager when I walked through my first snowfield. The snow was artificial, of course. It was winter in Australia and the snow machines sat on the side of the fields, like fallen barrels.

The High School I went to took us up to the snowfields on an excursion. To be honest, I can’t tell you why. It’s strange, but over the years, I’ve forgotten the reasons for all of the excursions I went on in school. Like an amnesiac super soldier, I can’t explain to you why I was in Canberra in 1990, or in Melbourne in 1989. It would be nice if I was part of a secret cartel of child assassins, but in all honesty, I suspect we were just there because our parents needed a break. Whatever shadowy deal the school did with our parents (as schools everywhere do shadowy deals with all parents) the deal was made to take us up to snow fields in June. There, we rode ski lifts up to the top of a mountain that none of us could ski down. Later, we rode the lifts back down. Continue reading →

Guest Review: A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS by Marie Brennan (Tor/Titan)

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BrennanM-LT1-ANaturalHistoryOfDragonsUSThe first Memoir of Lady Trent

You, dear reader, continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart — no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon’s presence, even for the briefest of moments — even at the risk of one’s life — is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten…

All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world’s preeminent dragon naturalist. She is the remarkable woman who brought the study of dragons out of the misty shadows of myth and misunderstanding into the clear light of modern science. But before she became the illustrious figure we know today, there was a bookish young woman whose passion for learning, natural history, and, yes, dragons defied the stifling conventions of her day.

Here at last, in her own words, is the true story of a pioneering spirit who risked her reputation, her prospects, and her fragile flesh and bone to satisfy her scientific curiosity; of how she sought true love and happiness despite her lamentable eccentricities; and of her thrilling expedition to the perilous mountains of Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever. 

Reviewed by Ryan Frye

A Natural History of Dragons is set in a Victorian-era-esque, male-dominated world where women, particularly those like Isabella (of noble birth) are meant to host teas, plan dinners and keep their interaction with the natural world limited to gardening. Obviously, Isabella wants none of that life and instead yearns to be accepted into the scholarly life as a Natural Historian who studies dragons. As luck would have it, she winds up marrying possibly the one man in all of Scirland who is willing to help her achieve her goals. Through her husband’s connections, she finagles her way into an expedition that is set to study dragons in a far-off land. Upon arrival, they are attacked by one of the region’s dragons, (attacks of this sort are a rare occurrence), and from there, the expedition continuously veers away from its original purpose. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Fire Lookout, Monk, Water-Skier, Teacher; the Best Profession for a Writer” by Brian Staveley

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StaveleyB-AuthorPicI got an email a few weeks ago from a young man just graduating from college, an aspiring writer, who wanted to know which careers I thought might be most conducive to the writing life. I suspect the answer might be Fire Lookout. Or maybe Monk. Professional Writer seems promising, at least at first glance, but turns out to entail all kinds of stuff that’s not actually writing.

In fact, I’m not in the greatest position to answer this question. Aside from college stints as a waiter and a rock climbing instructor and a short time immediately after graduation in which I worked at a halfway house for convicted felons, the only job I’ve ever had, the one I held from my early twenties until I quit to write full time, was teaching. For all I know, Professional Water Skier might facilitate the hell out of some good writing, but I can only talk teaching. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “From Funny Book to Fleshy Series: The Finn Fancy Evolution” by Randy Henderson

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HendersonR-AuthorPicWriting a fantasy series is a strange and daunting process. Over the course of transforming a single book into a series, I personally realized that rather than planning a whole series in advance, there were some basic things I could include that would allow a series to create itself.

First, sometimes writers plan ahead. Sometimes, we make s#!te up as we go along. Often we do some combination of the two. This applies to books, but also to entire series I’ve learned.

For Finn Fancy, I didn’t plan to write a series. I wrote some chapters for fun, which got turned into a finished book because an editor expressed interest. That book got purchased as the first in a series. Did I have a series? Not really. I had a book. And a few one sentence concepts I’d written out after finishing that book for potential sequels. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “The Long Orbit of RADIANCE” by Catherynne M. Valente

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ValenteCM-AuthorPicSometime in 2009 I was asked to write a science fiction story for Clarkesworld Magazine. At the time, I had mainly written fantasy — I was eager to dive into the other side of the speculative field. Two things had been bouncing around my head, and they bashed together at once. I had sprouted a fascination with the pulp SF planets of Zelazny, Bester, Burroughs, and Asimov’s day. The worlds we thought might be out there before satellite footage assured us it was not. Savage deserts of Mars, undersea Neptune, Venusian waterways. I wanted to make a planet like that. I didn’t want to follow the trend of hewing closely to established scientific fact. I wanted to go back to the wild, free-wheeling pulp universe, where there are no shackles on what you can imagine out there.

At the same time, I had read an interview with Mark Danielewski, who wrote House of Leaves, one of my favorite novels. He talked about his father, a cinematographer, and what a profound influence on his writing his father’s profession had been. And I thought: I was raised by a film director. It shaped every way I see the world and the ways I make my own. And I’ve never written about it even a little.
Continue reading →

Guest Post: “What to do if You’re Set Adrift in Space?” by Rob Boffard

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BoffardR-AuthorPicCropYou’re in trouble. On a mission of international importance and life-saving significance that only you can complete, you have been set adrift in space. Your heroic attempt to repair a crucial bit of satellite technology has gone awry, and now you’re drifting further and further away from your buddies — who, you’re convinced, are already preparing their tearful yet stoic remarks to the news media about how you died furthering the cause of space science. What do you do?

If your answer was something along the lines of “Spend a few minutes screaming then quietly begin peeing yourself”, then you need to chill out. Also, you probably wouldn’t have been selected for the space program. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Looking for God in Melnibone Places : Fantasy and Religion” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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TchaikovskyA-AuthorPicI ran a workshop at a convention last year on world building. It would be accurate to say that it was a section of a world building workshop I’ve been running for several years, because whenever I set out a bunch of topics, I generally manage about a third of them before we get hung up on something, and the rest never gets touched.

This time round, I dived into social conventions: governments, class systems, and then we hit the brick wall of religion and that is where the discussion firmly stayed.

This recurred to me while editing The Tiger and the Wolf because one of the main ways this series differs from Shadows of the Apt is the spiritual dimension. The insect-kinden of Shadows are aware of the concept of gods but have no truck with the idea. Their attitude to the numinous (those who can even conceive of it) is as something to master and control, not appease or worship. For Tiger I wanted to explore a culture that lived in constant dialogue with the spiritual. The various tribes’ ability to shapeshift is the cornerstone of a religion that, though it finds different expressions in different tribes, links them all together with a common cosmology. Continue reading →