Category Archives: The Cloud Roads

RIP, Howard Andrew Jones

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Sean CW Korsgaard is reporting that Howard Andrew Jones has passed away. Howard announced he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer late last summer. Sean also posted the image below which I am shamelessly stealing because it captiures perfectly how I feel.

I met Howard a couple of times over the years. The first time was at the World Fantasy Convention in 2006 in Austin. This was jsut before the first of the Harold Lamb anthologies he edited for Bison Books was published. He had an advanced copy that he held onto. He  didn’t let it get away from. I know bacuase I tried to talk him out of it.

It was because of this meeting that I got interested in Harold Lamb and eventually collected the entire set Howard edited.

So, thank you, Howard, for that.

More recently, we met again at Robert E. Howard Days last year. He told me life was great. He was writing and living on his farm and things couldn’t be better. I was really happy for him and told him so.

How quickly things can change.

Howard cared deeply about sword and sorcery and was a constant promoter of it. He was the inaugural editor for Tales of the Magician’s Skull. When I asked him how I could get on his list of contributors (the magazine didn’t take open submissions), he told me ownership had changed, and he was no longer the editor. I told him that sucked.

Howard was very outgoing, friendly, easy to talk to, genuinely interested in the people he spoke with.

His most recent fantasy series is the Nanuvar series. The third book came out last fall from Baen. I’ve not had a chance to read more than one or two of the Hanuvar short stories. They were great.

Howard was a talented writer who was just hitting his stride. The Hanuvar series was projected to be five books. I don’t know if Howard completed the fourth or had even started it.

The world lost a fantastic writer.

But more than that, we’ve lost an excellent human being.

My thoughts and prayers are with Howard’s famiily and friends tonight, and I’ll raise a glass shortly to his memory. I especially want to extend my condolences to John C. Hocking, who attended Robert E. Howard Days with Howard Andrew Jones this past year. Their friendship goes back years. John, I’m extremely sorry for your loss.

Obituaries: Barry N. Malzberg and George Zebrowski

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I’ve been busy, on the road, and generally distracted lately, so I missed hearing about a couple of deaths in the science fiction and fantasy community.

Barry N. Mazlberg (1939-2024) passed away on December 19 in Saddle River, New Jersey. He was an author, editior, and critic. His essays, collected Breakfast in the Ruins and The Bend in the Road are worth seeking out. Stark House Press has published a couple of collections of his science fiction as well as a series of his mystery novels.

I met Malzberg once back in the 00’s at a ConDFW. I don’t recall which year. He was a pleasant speaker and an approachable guest.

For years Malzberg cowrote a column with Mike Resnick for the SFWA Bulletin until they committed the unforgiveable crime of referring to Bea Mehaffey (an editor from the fifites) as a lady editor and said she was attractive. (She was.) Or something along those lines.

I’ve never really gotten into his science fiction, and I’m not sure why. I think I may not ahve been ready for it when I was younger.

I’ve got the book on the left, and I’ll dip into it later tonight.

The other loss was George Zebrowski (1945-2024), who died on December 20th. It’s December 27 as I’m writing this. His birthday is December 28. Zebrowski wrote space oriented fiction that, from what I understand, tended towards hard science fiction.

I’ve got some of his books but haven’t gotten to them yet. I have read  soem of his short fiction, althoug it’s been so long that I don’t recall much other than I enjoyed it enough to want to read more of his work.

He was married to science fiction author Pamela Sargent.

We at Adventures Fantastic would like to express our condolences to Barry Malzberg’s and George Zebrowski’s faimly and friends.

 

Sailing the Serpent Sea

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The Serpent Sea
Martha Wells
Night Shade Books
Trade Paper, 342 p., $14.99

If you’ve read The Cloud Roads, or my review of it, or just looked at the cover of either it or The Serpent Sea, you can probably guess that I’m using the term “sailing” in the title of this review somewhat loosely.

I’ve been looking forward to this book since I read The Cloud Roads last year, and Night Shade Books was gracious enough to send me a review copy.  It should be hitting store shelves any day now, if it hasn’t already.  I’ve not seen a copy yet, but that doesn’t mean the book isn’t available.  You should pick up a copy (of both if you haven’t read the first one).  That way you can join me in one of my New Year activities, looking forward to the next book in the series.

The story picks up shortly after the close of The Cloud Roads, with the Indigo Cloud court returning to their ancestral home.  This happens to be a Mountain Tree, and the name means exactly what it says.  It’s a tree that’s purt  near the size of a mountain, as we would say where I hail from.  There are entire forests of these things, and they have branches wide enough for herds of herbivores to live on.  The sequences with the Mountain Tree, brief though they were, reminded me of Alan Dean Foster’s Midworld, one of my favorite creations.

Unfortunately, Moon, Stone, Jade, and some of the others don’t get to enjoy their new home for long.  The tree is dying.  Sometime within the last turn, the Three Worlds equivalent of a year, someone broke into the tree and took the seed containing the life essence of the tree, and as a result the tree is dying.  Fortunately, the thieves left enough of a trail for them to follow.

What they find is more than any of them expects, with wonders and surprises outside the predictable.  Part of the story involves tracking the thieves, but the bulk of it involves trying to retrieve the seed once they locate the parties responsible for taking it.  Along the way they encounter a number of races, most we’ve not seen before.

Whereas much of the excitement and suspense in The Cloud Roads came from the threat of the Fell and some intense aerial combat scenes, in The Serpent Sea the suspense comes from the group’s efforts, especially Moon and Stone’s, to locate the seed and retrieve it.  The book is no less suspenseful.  It’s every bit as good as the first without being repetitive. 

Nor is this just a suspenseful novel.  The characters continue to grow, as do their relationships, and Wells makes it all look easy.  Even some of the characters who only show up for one or two scenes come across as individuals.

Of course, since this book is told from Moon’s point of view, his character development is where the emphasis is.  Much of this revolves around Moon trying to make a place for himself in the court, something that becomes harder after the group visits a neighboring court.  Moon commits a faux paus that results in Jade having to engage another queen in combat.  By the time the book is over, Moon will experience a number of things and will grow into a true leader.

A few weeks ago, Martha Wells wrote in a post on The Night Bazaar, that after her last contract ended in 2007 and five novels “died on the vine”, she was on the verge of giving up writing for good when the book that became The Cloud Roads resurrected itself.  I’m glad it did, and I hope those other novels come back and are published, either by Night Shade, someone else, or Martha herself.  There was a time, more in science fiction than in fantasy, where authors created detailed worlds or universes, such as Known Space (and especially Ringworld), Dune, or more recently Karl Schroeder’s Virga, places unique and filled with that sense of wonder that seems to be missing from so much of contemporary fantastic literature. The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea are brim full of sense of wonder.  It would have been a shame if Martha had given up before these books got published.  Kudos to Night Shade for publishing her, and the other new writers they’ve brought into print.  It’s one of the reasons I listed Night Shade as a publisher to read in 2012.

As I mentioned, there are a number of races in the Three Worlds.  I hope when Martha is done telling the story of Moon, or if she just wants to take a break, she’ll introduce us to more of them.  The Three Worlds is a fascinating place, and I, for one, am eager to explore more of it.  With these books Wells is writing at the top of her game, and given their breath, originality, and complexity, this series is showing indications it could become one of the landmark series of the genre.

Long Looks at Short Fiction: The Forest Boy by Martha Wells

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It’s been a while since I’ve done one of the Long Looks at Short Fiction posts.  Far too long a while.  A few weeks ago I reviewed The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells and griped a little bit about having to wait on the order of a year before the sequel is published.I really enjoyed the world Wells created and have wanted to see more of it since before I finished the last page and closed the book.  Fortunately, I have.  On her webpage, Martha Wells has made available a selection of novel excepts and short stories.  You should really check some of them out.  One of them is entitled “The Forest Boy“, and it’s a prequel to The Cloud Roads.  In that book we learned that the protagonist, Moon, had been orphaned as a young boy.  Because of his ability to shape shift, he was never able to settle down and find a home, instead continually being forced to leave because of the fear his other form caused the people around him.

In “The Forest Boy” we get to see an episode from Moon’s early life, one of the attempts he made to find a home and acceptance, and how jealousy drove him from it.

Instead of making Moon the viewpoint character, Wells has chosen instead to tell the story from the point of view of Tren.  Tren is one of six foster children adopted by Kaleb and his wife Ari.  The settlement where they live is along a trading route called the Long Road, and the children are primarily those abandoned along the road.

Tren and his foster sister Lua are searching the settlement’s midden when they discover Moon caught in a trap.  They get Kaleb, who frees Moon, takes him home, and oversees his recovery.  Moon is accepted into the family without question.

During the course of his recovery, Moon and Lua become quite close.  Since Tren had assumed he and Lua would one day be married, Lua’s growing relationship with Moon naturally causes problems.

That’s all I’ll say about the plot.  The story is a character driven one, not an action tale, although there is one fight scene near the end that was well done.  The choice to use Tren rather than Moon as the viewpoint character was a wise one.  If the story had been told by Moon, it would have simply rehashed things told in The Cloud Roads.  Instead, by focusing on a character who isn’t seen in the novel, and probably won’t ever be again, Wells breaks new ground by giving us a detailed look at the impact Moon has on the lives of the people he encounters.

Adolescence can be a turbulent time in the life of a person, and Wells shows in a few thousand words just how difficult and unsettling such a time is.  Tren’s feelings are complex, and even as he knows many of his feelings are unfounded and irrational, that doesn’t stop him from having them.  Or of despising the jealousy he feels even as it grows.  The ultimate lesson Tren learns, that things aren’t always what they seem, and that the people we envy often envy us for the things in our lives we take for granted, is a bitter lesson.  It’s one of life’s most powerful lessons, though.

Not only is Tren a fully developed character, but so is Lua, even though her character is revealed indirectly, through her words and actions, and not her thoughts.  Kaleb and Ari are shown to be loving, caring parents, even though they don’t get much stage time.

Finally, I found the descriptions of the round-trees and the brief mentions of the forest fauna lent an air of exoticism to the story reminiscent of the best ecology building of James H. Schmitz or Alan Dean Foster.  With only a few lines, I was transported to another world, different yet at the same time familiar enough that I could relate to it.

I still haven’t figured out if this series is ultimately going to turn out to be fantasy or science fiction, and at this point, I really don’t care.  I see elements of both, but that could be my training as a scientist imposing an order that may not be there.  It’s a fascinating world no matter how the stories are classified.  I’m looking forward to seeing more of it.