Author Archives: Keith West

Reminder: Voting Deadline for Gemmell Awards is Friday

Just a reminder to those of you who are interested but haven’t yet voted, that the deadline to cast your ballots for the David Gemmell Awards is midnight, Friday, July 17.

There are three awards, the Legend (best novel), the Morningstar (best first novel), and the Ravenheart (best cover illustration). That’s the trophy for the Legend Award there on the right. It’s a life size model of the axe Snaga. How cool is that?

Anyway, you’ve only got a couple of days left if you haven’t voted and want to.

RIP, Tom Piccirilli

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Apologies for this being so short. I am on the road and posting from my phone. Ed Gorman is reporting that Richard Chizmar informed him this morning that Tom Piccirilli has died. Piccirilli had been battling brain cancer for several years. I first read Piccirilli a couple of years ago and liked what I’d read. There are at least three of his works in my TBR pile. Adventures Fantastic extends deepest condolences to Mr. Piccirilli’s family, friends, and fans.

Has it Really Been That Long Since I Posted?

Bradley Beaulieu Knocks it Out of the Park

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Twelve Kings in Sharakhai
Bradley P. Beaulieu
DAW Books
Hardcover $24.95, ebook $9.99, audiobook $14.68
Available September 1, 2015

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll know I’m a big fan of Bradley P. Beaulieu. So when he asked me if I would be interested in an advance ebook for review purposes, there was only one answer. (Many thanks, sir.)

Twelve Kings in Sharakhai is the first volume in The Song of Shattered Sands. It’s an ambitious book, and it’s clear that the series is going to be ambitious.

Now, I’ve long said that writers, in an ideal world at least, should continue to improve and get better as time goes on. If the quality of the first book is any indication, this is going to be a major series. I loved The Lays of Anaskaya, but The Song of Shattered Sands looks to be even better.

I’ll explain why after I give you a brief description of the setup. Continue reading →

The Rest of the Summer

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The July 4th holiday, AKA Independence Day, is fast approaching, which means for me that the summer is half over. I’ve done a bit of traveling but that’s about to stop for the most part.

I’ll be teaching a class the second summer term, which starts on Tuesday. It’s at 8:00 a.m. That’s early, but that’s okay. I’m tanned, ~~I’m rested,~~ ~~I’m ready.~~ What that means is I’ll have a lot less free time on my hands.

Current projects are to finish Bradley Beaulieu’s new novel, Twelve Kings in Sharakhai. I’ll do that in a bit and try to get the review up tomorrow night. (Spoiler: It’s awesome.)

I’ve not done a BAF post in a while, but I’ll start on the next book this weekend. I’m going to try to read the short fiction that’s up for the Hugo that I’d not already read when the ballot was announced. Ditto for the Gemmell Awards. I won’t be able to finish everything on the Gemmell ballot before the deadline, but I’ll at least get a couple of books out of the way.

I was accepted into the Ace Roc Stars program earlier this year. What that basically means is that i get advanced copies of most of the upcoming books by either Ace or Roc. The first batch of titles didn’t have much that interested me, but the second batch is a gold mine. The first volume in Jim Butcher’s new series, the second Lizzie Borden novel by Cheri Priest, a couple of new fantasy novels and the first volumes in some space opera series.

In addition I”ll be trying to read as much fantasy, science fiction, and crime as possible. I want to read as many of the Shamus Award nominees as I can. Anyway, that’s what’s going on with reviewing and blogging. Writing I’ll discuss in another post once i have some things in better shape.

Cthuloid Encounters

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This past weekend my son had a dive meet in Corpus Christi. (That was why some of my responses to comments in the last post were a little short. I was replying from my phone, something I hate.)

Anyway, afternoons were free tome. On Friday we went to the aquarium. The octopus, as seen in the first photo was calm and not moving when I walked up. You can just see it in the front to the left of the red ball.

Every time I’ve seen an octopus in an aquarium, assuming it wasn’t hiding and I could see it at all, it was usually not moving much. If it did move, it would be moving slowly.

Right after I walked up and took that picture, the octopus ~~went berzerk~~ became very active.

Now I’m not sure why it would react this way. The flash on the camera didn’t go off when I too the first picture, nor did it go off when I took the second. You can see it pushing its head against the glass.

It sure seemed to be trying to get at me through the glass for some reason…

If You Were Stranded on a Desert Island…

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If you were stranded on a desert island and could have one complete run of a pulp magazine to help you while away the hours, which one would it be? For those of you who are anal retentive, assume that food, water, and shelter are not an issue.

Oh, and you’re alone. I don’t want to know what type of harem you would have on a desert island. That’s a different blog post on a different blog written by a different blogger. The thought of what some of you people might come up with on that one frankly scares me.

For the purposes of this thought experiment, any pulp that survived after the early 1950s (I’m thinking Astounding here) when the pulp market collapsed can only be included up through 1953. Any magazine that started in the 1950s (F&SF, Galaxy, etc.) is outside the bounds of consideration. Here are my top ten choices: Continue reading →

Manly Wade Wellman’s Kardios of Atlantis

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“Straggler From Atlantis”
Swords Against Darkness
Andrew J. Offutt, ed.
mmpb, Zebra Books, 1977, $1.95

In the late 1970s, Manly Wade Wellman began a series of novelettes about the last survivor of Atlantis, a warrior bard named Kardios. Or at least he began publishing them in the late 1970s. In his introduction to “Straggler from Atlantis”, Adrew Offutt says that Wellman tried to publish them in the 1930s, but some other chap was writing about an Atlantean named Kull at the time and no editor was buying.

Be that at it may, the Kardios stories were published, although to the best of my knowledge, they’ve never been collected in book form. The ISFDB shows a total of five, with the first four appearing in the first four volumes of Swords Against Darkness and the final one in an anthology from DAW books with the generic title of Heroic Fantasy. Continue reading →

Half a King is a Whole Lot of Fun

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Half a King
Joe Abercrombie
Del Rey
Trade Paper, $15, 346 p.

Half a King is on the shortlist for this year’s Gemmell Awards. It has been a few years since I read Abercrombie. (I’m still holding out for a British edition of Red Country.) I’d forgotten just how good a writer he is. It’s easy to see why this book is on the shortlist.

Half a King isn’t as dark as some of Abercrombie’s other books. Still, it’s not all sunshine at light. The book was written by the man whose Twitter handle is LordGrimDark, after all. Continue reading →

Report on Howard Days, Part 2: Saturday

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Things started a little later on Saturday than they did on Friday. I slept late (or what passes for late for me), showered, went into Cross Plains, and joined some folks for breakfast. After some good conversation, I toodled over to the pavilion and hung out there for a while.

The first panel (all panels where held in the library) was another great discussion. Entitled “A Means to Freedom”, Rusty Burke led the conversation about the correspondence between Lovecraft and Howard. The general consensus was that it was a good thing the internet wasn’t around in those days, or the two men would never have gotten any fiction written. Continue reading →