Thursday, June 24, 2021

Speculative Fiction Links of the Week for June 25, 2021


It's time for the latest weekly round-up of interesting links about speculative fiction from around the web, this week with Loki, Black Widow, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general, the various DC Comics based TV shows,, Star Trek in general, The Bad Batch and Star Wars in general, the season 4 finale of The Handmaid's Tale, Werewolves Within, Katla, season 2 of Evil, False Positive, Luca, Lisey's Story, the return of Warren Ellis less than a year after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, an uproar involving the 2021 Worldcon and much more.

Speculative fiction in general:
 
Comics and Art: 
 
Film and TV:
 
Comments on Loki, Black Widow and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general (spoilers):
 
Comments on the various DC Comics based movies and TV Shows:
 
Comments on the season 4 finale of The Handmaid's Tale (spoilers):
 
 
Comments on season 2 of Evil: 
 

Comments on Lisey's Story: 
 
Comments on False Positive: 
 
Comments on Luca: 
 
Awards: 
 
Writing, publishing and promotion:

Interviews:

Reviews:

Classics reviews:

Con and event reports:
 
Crowdfunding:
 
Science and technology:

Free online fiction:
 
Trailers and videos: 
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Tuesday, June 22, 2021

The Black Knight (Kurval, Book 5) by Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert

 

Release date: June 19, 2021
Subgenre: Sword and Sorcery
 

About The Black Knight:

 

 The Lords of Angilbert have been a thorn in the side of the Kings of Azakoria for decades, refusing to pay taxes or to accept the authority of the throne.

King Kurval of Azakoria inherited the conflict with the Black Knight of Angilbert from his predecessor. Determined to bring the Black Knight to heel once and for all, Kurval besieges Castle Angilbert. But when he finally comes face to face with the mysterious Black Knight, he's in for a shock.

The law demands that the Black Knight be executed for treason. However, Kurval does not want to sentence the Black Knight to death, especially once he learns that the Lords of Angilbert have a very good reason to hate the Kings of Azakoria.

But is it even possible to find a peaceful solution or can the feud with the Black Knight of Angilbert end only in bloodshed and death?

The new sword and sorcery adventure by two-time Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert and her occasional alter ego, 1930s pulp writer Richard Blakemore. This is a novella of 33400 words or approx. 112 print pages in the Kurval series but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

Warning: This is a dark story, which contains scenes of a violent and sexual nature.

 

Excerpt:

 

The castle of Angilbert clung to the side of the mountains of Harlovec on the eastern border of the Kingdom of Azakoria, a stark black silhouette against the flaming dawn sky.

There were countless legends about those mountains, tales of fearsome beasts and daring outlaws who had made their home on these hostile peaks. And there were just as many tales and legends about Castle Angilbert itself and its Lords. Depending on which legend you chose to believe, the Lords of Angilbert were either heroic liberators and protectors of the downtrodden or cruel tyrants who engaged in unspeakable rites in the dungeons that reached deep into the black rock. The truth, as always, was likely somewhere in the middle.

From the saddle of his stallion Shadowmane, Kurval, King of Azakoria, gazed up at the castle, wondering what was going on behind those forbidding walls.

“They say that Castle Angilbert is impregnable, Sire,” Izgomir, Kurval’s vizier and chief councillor said with as much awe in his voice as Kurval had ever heard, “Never in a thousand hundred years have its walls been breached, though not for lack of trying.”

“We don’t need to breach those walls,” Kurval said. He was in full armour — silver chased with gold — though he was not wearing his helmet. “We just need to besiege the castle and make sure nothing and no one gets out or in. Sooner or later, they will give up.”

“The Black Knight of Angilbert never gives up,” Izgomir said darkly, “More than twenty years ago, King Brogan thought he had the Lord of Angilbert brought to heel, when he captured the Lord’s only daughter and her escorts. The attendants were punished and the girl held for ransom until the Lord of Angilbert bowed his knee to the throne. Which he did. But that was only a brief respite, for as soon as the girl was reunited with her father, the Black Knight of Angilbert started up his reign of terror again.”

Privately, Kurval sympathised with the rebellious Lord. He certainly wouldn’t have been kindly inclined towards anybody who kidnapped a child of his.

“Black Knight or not, the Lord of Angilbert and his people still have to eat,” Kurval pointed out, wondering not for the first time just why Izgomir was so impressed by this recalcitrant Lord. “It’s the end of the winter, so their stores will be largely depleted. So either this Black Knight surrenders or he shall starve along with his men.”

“No one knows if the Lords of Angilbert are even fully human,” Izgomir continued, “There are rumours that deep inside the mountain, there is a portal to the underworld itself, where demons and creatures from the pit dwell. There even are stories…” Izgomir shuddered theatrically, “…that those of Angilbert are mating with demons down there.”

“I don’t care if the Lords of Angilbert mate with the Great Old Ones themselves…” Kurval countered, “…as long as they accept the authority of the crown.”

This was obviously not the response Izgomir had expected. With sniffy disdain he said, “They’re not fully of noble blood, at any rate.”

“Well, I’m not of noble blood at all, so we should get along just fine,” Kurval remarked.

 

Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Apple | Google Play | Smashwords | Scribd | DriveThru | Thalia

 

About Richard Blakemore:

Richard Blakemore (1900 – 1994) was a prolific writer of pulp fiction. Nowadays, he is best remembered for creating the Silencer, a masked vigilante in the vein of the Shadow or the Spider, during the hero pulp boom of the 1930s. But Richard Blakemore also wrote in many other genres, including an early sword and sorcery series about the adventures of a sellsword named Thurvok and his companions and another about a barbarian king named Kurval.
 
Richard Blakemore's private life was almost as exciting as his fiction. He was a veteran of World War I and II as well as a skilled sportsman and adventurer who travelled the world during the 1920s. He may also have been the person behind the mask of the real life Silencer who prowled New York City between 1933 and 1942, fighting crime, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty, though nothing has ever been proven.

Richard Blakemore was married for more than fifty years to Constance Allen Blakemore and the couple had four children.

 

Blog | Twitter  

 

About Cora Buhlert:

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently working towards her PhD. 

Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres.

When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher. She also runs the Speculative Fiction Showcase and the Indie Crime Scene and contributes to the Hugo-nominated fanzine Galactic Journey. Cora is a two-time finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer and the winner of the 2021 Space Cowboy Award.

 

Website | Mailing list | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | YouTube | ISFDB

 

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Monday, June 21, 2021

The Bridge by J.S. Breukelaar

 

Release date: June 22, 2021
Subgenre: Dark Fantasy, Horror
 

About The Bridge:

 
Meera and her twin sister Kai are Mades—part human and part not—bred in the Blood Temple cult, which only the teenage Meera will survive. Racked with grief and guilt, she lives in hiding with her mysterious rescuer, Narn—part witch and part not—who has lost a sister too, a connection that follows them to Meera’s enrollment years later in a college Redress Program. There she is recruited by Regulars for a starring role in a notorious reading series and is soon the darling of the lit set, finally whole, finally free of the idea that she should have died so Kai could have lived. Maybe Meera can be re-made after all, her life redressed. But the Regulars are not all they seem and there is a price to pay for belonging to something that you don’t understand. Time is closing in on all Meera holds dear—she stands afraid, not just for but of herself, on the bridge between worlds—fearful of what waits on the other side and of the cost of knowing what she truly is.

 

Excerpt:

 

CHAPTER 1

TOWER

 

I was raised by three sisters—one a witch, one an assassin and the third just batshit crazy. By the time I left our home deep in the Starveling Hills, I’d met the middle one, Tiff, once, but I never told the others. She’d run off or something, and they didn’t talk about her much, and maybe it was for that reason that she was my favorite—her ghostly absence having as big an impact on my growing-up as the others’ larger-than-life presence. When I finally came to live in the Hills, carrying my own dead twin in my arms, Tiff was already gone, leaving behind nothing but bad blood and a trunk filled with old clothes from across the ages. Among them were a pair of Roman sandals that fell apart in my hands, some rusted crinolines, a moldy cat-o’-nine-tails, some concert T-shirts and even a notebook from her days at the Blood Temple with the Father—bound in the skin of one of her victims, for all I knew. The pages were scribbled in with illegible symbols which set something humming inside me, convinced me from day one that “Aunty” Tiff wanted me, and only me, to find her.

I was good at finding lost things, Kai always said, and they were good at finding me.

In time Narn, the eldest sister, sent me away to Wellsburg college, ten thousand miles away and on the other side of the planet. To the ends of the earth, may as well have been.

 

I had arrived at the campus just before the start of the semester and was soon sick with one of my frequent chest infections. I lay awake in the Tower Village dorm room, feverish and snotty, too ill to go to the first week of classes, forgetting why I was here. The damp pillowcase chafed my cheek. The weary thwack of a campus security pod overhead tangled in the jerky drum of my heart, and I tried to push thoughts of the Father’s birds away, couldn’t help wondering how far I had really come from all that—Narn and her crazy sisters and my sister Kai, buried under a bloodwood tree, high in the Starveling Hills. I tried not to think. I tried not to ask myself if it would ever be far enough.

My pajamas, blue plaid with pink elephants, were damp with sweat. They insistently nudged between my legs. I shifted on the mattress, trying not to think of the downy young shearers who drank at the pub in the nearest town to our hut—a twenty-kilometer drive in Narn’s truck, but worth every pothole. I was nineteen and Kai would be too—my better half as Narn called her, not joking. Narn never joked. Maybe that’s why Kai had been her favorite from the beginning—law of opposites or something. My sister always joked, even when she lay in the Blood Temple infirmary covered with sores and the Father already sharpening his scalpels for the unmaking.

Even then.

The door opened with a click. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping my roommates, Lara and Trudy, would leave me alone. Their laughter subsided when they saw me still in bed, but they continued their conversation in whispers—something about an urban myth of a ghost of a fur hunter from the 1800s who crawled out from under the bridge after being pushed to his death by a witch.

“Yes, but don’t most old colleges in the Slant come with some kind of scary story?” Trudy was saying. “In orientation they told us . . .”

I couldn’t resist. Partly because in the mostly bedridden week that I’d been at Tower Village, I’d barely spoken or been spoken to, but also because long before I’d even gotten here, Narn had versed me in the history of witches’ rights. “He jumped!” I croaked. “Probably. They had to blame somebody. Why not witches?”

“Know-it-all,” Lara said beneath her breath.

No, Kai was the know-it-all. Always had been. My cheeks burned with fever, but there was no stopping me now. Kai always said how just a sniff of threat was enough to make me see red.

“Witches got the blame for the fur trade drying up in Upper Slant,” I continued. “People said they poisoned the game—even after the Apology it wasn’t safe for them here.”

The air in the dorm room was stale. My nose was blocked with congestion so I drew it in as best I could through my mouth, watching Trudy dart through the shadows like a bottom feeder through lakeweed, for a moment the meds and the fever telling me that it was Kai. That my twin was not dead after all and I was home in the Starvelings and the Father had not found us as she always said he would. But then Lara flicked on the light and I blinked into the reality of what I’d lost.

Lara moved to check her roots in the mirror for telltale regrowth. Like all Mades, her hair was course and dull, but she’d applied conditioning treatments and lightened it to a chestnut brown, had it cut into a curly bob that suited her. “It stinks in here,” she said.

“Anyway, what do you care about myths?” I propped myself up on a wobbly elbow. “We have enough problems with reality.”

Lara and Trudy were made on the Blood Temple’s mainland property but the Father’s synthetic reproductive protocol was the same there as it was in Rogues Bay, where I was from. Their teeth looked ultraviolet in the blue-stippled light from the bridge outside our window. Their forms were limned in a milky afterglow which seemed to slow their movements one minute, speed them up the next, silvery jetsam shredding in their wake. Or maybe it was just the meds.

“The counselor in pain clinic said we shouldn’t fixate on the past, Meera,” Trudy shivered mechanically, “if we want to belong to the future.”

I wanted nothing less.

“Well, we can’t fixate on the past,” I said. “It’s not how we’re, um, made.”

It was something my sister would do—hiding good intentions behind a dark pun, an offhand joke—but I sucked at reading the room, something Kai never let me forget. Instead of admiring my cleverness, Trudy’s eyes brimmed and she reddened in the shame of our shared congenital amnesia.

“Myth or not,” Lara turned defensively from the mirror, fastening a chain around her wrist from which dangled a rose-gold feather, “they’ve put a curfew out now that semester’s started. The bridge is off-limits after ten.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To keep us where we belong,” Trudy sniffled. “Especially after dark.”

They moved about, preparing for the night. Later they would come home smelling of beer, faces bleached in the light of their program-issued phones, and fall immediately asleep dreaming, I imagined, of a new tomorrow.

What I really felt like was a drink, but before I could ask them to wait while I dressed, Lara reminded me that today, Thursday, was the last day to sign up for our second-choice electives. And that we needed these for credit point requirements to complete our transfer program in the specified time of eighteen months.

“The sooner we complete the program,” she said, “the sooner we can get out of here.”

“I almost forgot.”

“You did forget,” Lara eyed my pile of snotty tissues. “And you need to get up now, Meera, or you never will.”

I hacked phlegm into another tissue. My nostrils were chaffed and there was blood in my snot. Unlike most of the Redress Award recipients, including my roommates, who had followed the award recommendations and arrived during the summer, my body had not had time to build up the required immunities. Nor had my brain gone through the regulation mnemonic and behavioral reconditioning. The dormitory pulsed black and blue in the light from the illuminated bridge. It wasn’t much different from how my eyes would open into the half-light of the little room I shared with my dead sister in the Starvelings, before closing once more on the shifting optics of a digital dream.

Unfamiliar constellations pricked the alien September sky. I looked through the window high up in my Tower and thought how I wanted to be here—didn’t I? Yet a part of my consciousness did not. Some part of me—my mind—remained in South Rim where, beneath Crux and the Jewel Box, blossoms would be blowing across my twin sister’s grave beside the bloodwoods. Where Mag would be cleaning their gun and Narn would be peeling potatoes while she stirred a cauldron of beans on the stove—she was a terrible cook of everything but sweets and libations, and even from here, I could taste the burnt scum from the bottom of the pot, smell the lemon myrtle in her velvety pudding and the stinking hellebore in her soup.

But my heart could not.

The walls spasmed in another flash of electric blue. I closed one eye. Through the window of the high dorm, saw a shadow haltingly separate from a row of unintegrated shapes on the bridge and unfurl what looked like fleshy wings before drawing them once again into itself and settling hunched in the cold blue light. When I opened my eye, it was gone.

The medication I’d stolen from the bathroom made my head fuzzy. In my footlocker I kept some of Narn’s A. sarmentosa tea for pain, but I couldn’t recall the sorcery required to activate it. The words were written down somewhere—Kai had seen to that—but ink in the hands of the dead tends to ravage the paper it’s written on.

The Regulars called us survivors—although none of us saw ourselves that way: we called ourselves Mades. The Father made us by inserting a soluble microscopic implant laced with his Forever Code into a human female zygote in vitro, birthed from a surrogate we would never know. I was raised along with thousands of others in the Blood Temple, which flourished in remote Southern Rim camps for just shy of three decades, although the first years were much less productive than was hoped. According to our Father, Mades, by virtue of our . . . virtue, would be the bridge to lead man back into the Paradise from which he’d been so unjustly expelled. It made perfect sense at the time. We understood the Father. He made us feel his pain as if it was our own.

It was our own.

My roommates went out, leaving me alone with nothing except a reminder of my own amputated singularity. Lara was right. I needed to get out of here and the sooner the better. I crawled from the bed to Trudy’s bunk and helped myself to two pills from one of her many bright jars purchased from the pharmacy. If they knew I was stealing their meds, they didn’t say. They brought me things sometimes—cough drops and once, some soup. My throat was on fire, and my nose so congested that I’d dreamed last night of drowning, of hanging, of a hand across my face.

I heard a snuffling under the bed, that cheap-carpet drag, and slowly lifted the sheet, my breath coming quick. I was maybe expecting the spotlit eyes of a lost flying fox, like once back in the Blood Temple—dragging itself by its broken wings, it had looked more insect than mammal—but there was nothing. Each night since arriving in Upper Slant, I’d had the same dream, or different versions of it. Kai and me playing on the lichen-striped outcrop even though I am already too old for games and Kai is already dead. She taunts me through lips black with rot, teeth hanging by ropy gums in her still beautiful face. In my dream the shadow when it first appears is both distant and too close, a shadow without a shadow, erect as a monument, the ravens circling overhead with their iridescent wings and their sad-baby cries, Kai rank and rotting beneath a sky too high and never high enough. “He’ll always find us,” she gurgles. “We’ll never be free.”

In my dreams it was Kai the guilty survivor instead of me.

  

Indiebound | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

 

About J.S. Breukelaar:



J.S. Breukelaar is the author of Collision: Stories, a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and winner of the 2019 Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Previous novels include Aletheia and American Monster. Her short fiction has appeared in the Dark Magazine, Tiny Nightmares, Black Static, Gamut, Unnerving, Lightspeed, Lamplight, Juked, in Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy 2019 and elsewhere. She currently lives in Sydney, Australia, where she teaches writing and literature, and is at work on a new collection of short stories and a novella. You can find her at thelivingsuitcase.com and on Twitter and elsewhere @jsbreukelaar.


 Website | Twitter

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Friday, June 18, 2021

Simultaneous Time Vol. 2, edited by Jean-Paul Garnier

 

Release date: June 18, 2021
Subgenre: Science Fiction Anthology
 

About Simultaneous Times Vol. 2: 

 

From Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, California. The second volume of the companion book series to the Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times science fiction anthology podcast. In Simultaneous Times Volume Two Space Cowboy Books brings you a collection of science fiction short stories from our local Hi-Desert authors, featuring both stories that have been featured on the podcast, as well as some appearing for the first time. An eclectic mix of approaches to the science fiction genre which range from rebellions against oppressive robots to alien encounters to pure campy fun, with writing styles varying from traditional to experimental. The collection features nine different authors, each paired up with five different illustrators to bring each story to life with original artwork.


Featuring stories by:

Julie Carpenter

Susan Rukeyser

Jon Christopher

Anastasia Wasko

Brent A. Harris

Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Dain Luscombe

Gabriel Hart

Mari Collier


With illustrations by:

Austin Hart

Zara Kand

Rik Verlin Livingston

Jeremy Szuder

Reagan Louise Wilson

Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction anthology podcast featuring cast readings with original soundtracks, from a wide variety of international authors and composers. New episodes are released on the fifteenth of each month and can be found on most podcast players.

 

Bookshop.org


About Jean-Paul Garnier:


Jean-Paul L. Garnier lives and writes in Joshua Tree, CA where he is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, a science fiction bookstore, independent publisher, and producer of Simultaneous Times podcast. In 2020 his first novella Garbage In, Gospel Out was released by Space Cowboy Books and in 2018 Traveling Shoes Press released Echo of Creation, a collection of his science fiction short stories. He has also released several collections of poetry: In Iudicio (Cholla Needles Press 2017), Future Anthropology (currently being translated into Portuguese), and Odes to Scientists (audiobook - Space Cowboy Books 2019). He is a two time Elgin Nominee and also appeared in the 2020 Dwarf Stars anthology. His new collection of SF poetry, Betelgeuse Dimming has just been released and is available as a free download audiobook / ebook at spacecowboybooks.bandcamp.com. He is also a regular contributor for Canada’s Warp Speed Odyssey blog. His short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in many anthologies and webzines.

 

Blog | Space Cowboy Books | Simultaneous Times | Twitter

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Thursday, June 17, 2021

Speculative Fiction Links of the Week for June 18, 2021

 


It's time for the latest weekly round-up of interesting links about speculative fiction from around the web, this week with The Bad Batch and Star Wars in general, Loki, Black Widow, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general, the various DC Comics based TV shows,, Star Trek in general, the season 4 finale of The Handmaid's Tale, In the Earth, Censor, A Quiet Place Part II, Luca, Lisey's Story, Raiders of the Lost Ark at forty, trouble at Fireside Magazine, a debate about content warnings, the 2021 Robert E. Howard Days and much more.

Speculative fiction in general:
 
Comics and Art: 
 
Film and TV:
 
Comments on Loki, Black Widow and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general (spoilers):
 
Comments on the various DC Comics based movies and TV Shows:
 
Comments on the season 4 finale of The Handmaid's Tale (spoilers):
 

Comments on Lisey's Story: 
 
Comments on In the Earth: 
 
Comments on Luca: 
 
 
Awards:
 
Writing, publishing and promotion:

Interviews:

Reviews:

Classics reviews:

Con and event reports:
 
Crowdfunding:
 
Science and technology:

Free online fiction:
 
Trailers and videos:

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