Urban Fantasy this Saturday at the SF in SF reading series —

Fantasy writers Steven Boyett and Bruce McAllister will read from their contributions to the new Peter Beagle-edited The Urban Fantasy Anthology at this weekend's free SF in SF reading series, at San Francisco's Variety Preview Room Theatre (The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor, 582 Market Street @ 2nd and Montgomery), kicking off at 6PM. No charge, but the organizers do ask for donations for the Variety Children's Charity of Northern California. — Cory •

Starship Sofa has just podcasted Neil Gaiman's novelette "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains," which won this year's Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette. Here's the text of the story, and above is a video of Neil reading from it.

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to my family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.

I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease that, not even what happened that night, on the side of the mountain.

I had searched for nearly ten years, although the trail was cold. I would say that I found him by accident, but I do not believe in accidents. If you walk the path, eventually you must arrive at the cave.

StarShipSofa No 232 Neil Gaiman, MP3 link (Thanks, Tony)

R. Scott Taylor, a senior editor at Blackgate Magazine, is running a Kickstarter project to raise money for a Mayan-themed fantasy shared-world series. The stories are already written, with contributions by Lynn Flewelling, Harry Connolly, Juliet McKenna, Martha Wells, Robert Mancebo, Julie Czerneda, Michael Tousignant and Todd Lockwood. They're nearly at their goal of $10,000, which will pay for printing and distribution of physical books. If they get oversubscribed, they'll use the extra money to commission more volumes in the series.

Editor and contributor R. Scott Taylor helps create the shadowed metropolis of Taux, where Razor Duelists and mailed and heavily armed Sturgeons try to hold back the tide of ghosts, Moon Cultists, and shadow magic that lurks inside the slithering coils of Wizard’s Mist. Rogues, harlots, and merchant princes share the same streets, and all watch their backs as the stones of the city call out to the living in a never ending game of cat and mouse for the true ownership of the great port.

Memories of Lankhmar, Sanctuary, and Waterdeep merge in each unfolding tale, and fantasy artists Jeff Laubenstein and Janet Aulisio bring form to each story with their incredible pen and ink renderings. Contributor Todd Lockwood also lends his artistic vision to an epic cover that wraps this project in a package so special it’s almost too good to be true.

Tales of the Emerald Serpent: Shared World Mosaic Anthology (Thanks, Julie!)

On Reddit, KelseyPolo describes a friend's awesome gift for her (presumably Narnia-obsessed) 9-year-old-daughter, which features a through-the-wardrobe entrance leading to a playroom annexed off of the bedroom sporting lovely floor-to-ceiling Narnia murals.

My friend got her 9 yr old daughter a wardrobe for her bedroom, but it's not just any old wardrobe... (imgur.com)

You've probably heard that an old pub called The Hobbit in Southampton is under threat from the film company that controls the licensing for the Tolkien canon. After a public outcry, the company agreed to sell the pub a license to go on using the name it has had for decades. Stephen Fry and Ian McKellan -- who are both in the Hobbit movie (Fry is in NZ right now, shooting) -- decided that this was stupid, so they've paid the license fee themselves.

She said: "I had a telephone call on Saturday evening, while we were trading, from Stephen Fry's business partner and manager. That's when he told me.

"I was very shocked.

"They've said as soon as they finish filming they would like to come down and visit the pub."

...Sir Ian, who plays Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings films, described the film company's actions as "unnecessary pettiness" and Fry said it was "self-defeating bullying".

Hobbit pub copyright row: Stephen Fry and Ian McKellen to pay licence (via Techdirt)

Update: Simon Phipps writes, "The Hobbit is one of my locals, and I thought you'd like some background. I wrote about the case here. While the pub has existed for a long time, The Hobbit started opportunistically abusing their movie-related paraphernalia a while back and has been trading on it for years without seeking permission - presumably because someone there knew they'd never get it. They could have commissioned their own artwork but they didn't. Far from it being a case of a bully acting improperly, I think actually Zaentz acted uncharacteristically well here. This wasn't about the pub calling itself 'The Hobbit' primarily, it was about ripping off movie stills and using them for advertising. They challenged that abuse and then offered an amazingly easy settlement. Meanwhile, instead of any sign of a mea culpa, some people have been wildly slandering Zaentz. Given how much the law sucks and is being weaponised, I think we should be encouraging previously abusive companies like Zaentz to act this generously in future."

Charles sez, "Naomi Novik's new Temeraire novel, Crucible of Gold, arrives in bookstores this week, accompanied by a stylish video trailer designed to get readers' curiosity piqued and pulses racing. Is that a glimpse of the Inca Empire, you wonder? Why, yes -- yes, it is."

Novik is a wonderful writer and her Temeraire series is a delightful and inventive re-imagining of the Napoleonic Wars, fought with a dragon air-force.

Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik: book trailer (Thanks, Charles!)

Victoria Johnson revisits the maps we "wandered into" as kids:

If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction—doesn't matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps.

I did not accept that I was a map nerd until the day I caught myself scoffing at geological implausibilities in a map in a pulp fantasy novel. An excellent coffee-table compendium is J.B. Post's Atlas of Fantasy, but the itch may be scratched immediately with Google and TVTropes' entry on Fantasy World Maps. Artist Jon Roberts specializes in making them. Mapblogger Jonathan Crowe has an overview of resources for following suit.

Pictured above is fantasy epic Elfquest's world of Abode, a personal fave, and refreshingly geologically plausible until you start thinking about biomes.

Previously: Wondrous, detailed map of the history of science fiction and Maps.

I just got through re-reading Tim Power's World Fantasy Award-winning 1996 novel Last Call, which is truly one of the triumphs of modern fantasy literature. Powers, one of Philip K Dick's three proteges (the others are James Blaylock and KW Jeter), is a tremendous writer, and his whole catalog deserves your attention, but even against the field of standout Powers novels, Last Call stands out further.

Last Call's premise, at its core, is that Bugsy Siegel built Las Vegas in order to become a living avatar of the Fisher King, but that he was prevented by doing this when a French mystic named Georges Leon assassinated him, stole his head from the morgue, tossed it into Lake Mead, and set about turning his sons into mindless soldiers in his mystic army by conducting dark rituals involving a handpainted Tarot deck that could drive you mad.

One of Leon's sons survives, though he loses his eye to his father's violence, and his dying mother smuggles him away from his father and tosses him, blindly, over the transom of a passing yacht on a trailer. He is found by a professional gambler, Ozzie Crane, who raises Scott as his foster son, and later adopts another girl, Diana, and raises her as his foster sister. From Ozzie, Scott learns of the gambler's mysticisms and superstitions: fold out your hand when the smoke gathers in the middle of the table or the drinks in the glass start to sit off-level, lest you buy or sell more than what's in the pot. Twenty years later, Scott -- now a professional gambler -- ignores Ozzie's pleas to stay clear of a game played on a houseboat on Lake Mead ("You want to play on tame water? Are you crazy?") and finds himself playing a queer sort of poker with 13 players and a deck of Tarot cards, playing (he later learns) against his own biological father, who has taken over the body of the game's host, and who is using the game to steal the bodies of more people so that he can attain true immortality.

This is a book that swirls with mysticism and resonances: everyday superstition, Sumerian and Egyptian religious doctrine, the Tarot and Carl Jung's archetypes, and the Arthurian mythos. Powers is clearly in some way the spiritual son of Philip K Dick (he certainly tells some pretty awesomely hilarious and terrifying stories about being Dick's confidante, driver, helper, and rescuer) and he's got Dick's knack for imagining catastrophically superstitious worlds where you're never sure who is the madman and who is the sage. He's also got Dick's flair for the bizarre, the sense that he's tapped into something very deep in the lived human experience of weird. But Powers is an infinitely better writer than Dick ever was: better at plot, characters and dialog.

Last Call is the first of three loosely joined books, the next two being Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather, and all three are brilliant in their own way, but Last Call remains my favorite. I caught up with it again via the audiobook, which is available as a DRM-free audio CD read by Bronson Pinchot (who is a surprisingly good and subtle audiobook voice-actor).

Last Call

Rick sez, "Ayize Jama-Everett, Lisa Goldstein in discussion with live music by Fenyang Smith at the Capitola Book Cafe. Ayize's book, The Liminal People (MP3), and Lisa's book, The Uncertain Places (MP3) are easily two of the best books this year."

I haven't read Liminal People yet (though Rick is a good source of book recommendations!), but I heartily agree about Uncertain Places, which I reviewed earlier this year: "Like all of Goldstein's fantasies, this is a novel that is clearly a part of the genre, but also something quite apart from the bulk of what gets published as fantasy today. Goldstein uses fairy and its bewitchments to rip apart and reassemble the question of wonder: to ask what we pay for our sense of wonder and whether it's worth it. It's a long-awaited return to the field for Goldstein fans, and a great one"

Honors for Under the Poppy: —

Many congratulations to author Kathe Koja on winning the Gaylactic Spectrum award (a prize given to queer-friendly science fiction and fantasy) for her stellar novel Under the Poppy. — Cory •

Little Brother II naming rights up for bid —

Fantasy literature doyenne Terri Windling is in the midst of a serious financial and health crisis and her friends are pitching in to run a fundraising auction for her benefit. My contribution: naming rights for a character in the sequel to Little Brother, to be published by Tor Teen in late 2012/early 2013. — Cory •