fantastic books

The Outcasts Story Bundle

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Outsiders. Rebels. Free-Thinkers. Who doesn’t love an underdog? Deep inside, most of us identify with those who are a little—or a lot—different. Those who choose their own path, or for whom fate chooses for them. Sometime in our lives, we’ve felt like we didn’t quite fit in.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Forging your own way builds strength, and makes for a damn good story!

Our authors have taken the outcasts and woven masterful tales of triumph despite adversity. In these times of turmoil, we all need a reminder that such difficulties can be overcome. Check out the Outcasts bundle, which I hope you will enjoy as much as I have. At the least you will get three amazing books for a steal, Amaskan’s Blood by Raven Oak, The Favored by Morgan Bolt, and Three Chords of Chaos by James Chambers. At most, you’ll score not just the three base books plus eleven bonus titles, but two bonus-bonus books thanks to Alma Alexander’s radically awesome reenvisioning of shapeshifters and her generous inclusion of her Were Chronicles Omnibus, which includes the full trilogy Random, Wolf, and Shifter

The Outcasts bundle runs for three weeks only. This is a great deal, and a great way to pick up a batch of books for those times that you need an escape from real-world issues—or just feel the urge to root for your new favorite underdogs! —Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Curator

For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of three books in .epub format—WORLDWIDE.

AMASKAN’S BLOOD by Raven Oak

THE FAVORED by Morgan J. Bolt

THREE CHORDS OF CHAOS by James Chambers

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $20, you get all three of the regular books, plus 11 more books, for a total of 14!

SKYFARER by Joseph Brassey

FOR THE GOOD OF THE REALM by Nancy Jane Moore

WARDEN FALL by Jennifer M. Eaton

FRANKENSTEIN: MONSTERS OF THE ABYSS by John L. French and Patrick Thomas

PHOENIX PRECINCT by Keith R.A. DeCandido

YETI LEFT HOME by Aaron Rosenberg

ETERNAL WANDERINGS by Danielle Ackley-McPhail

ESPRIT DE CORPSE by Ef Deal

RAGS by Ty Drago

THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA by Brenda Cooper

THE WERE CHRONICLES by Alma Alexander

This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get a DRM-free .epub for all books!

It’s also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards—which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle—and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.

Get quality reads: We’ve chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.

Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth. If you can only spare a little, that’s fine! You’ll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.

Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there’s nothing wrong with ditching DRM.

Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to Girls Write Now!

Receive extra books: If you beat the bonus price, you’ll get the bonus books!

Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024)

~ ianrandalstrock ~ 1 Comment

Late last night, I learned that Barry N. Malzberg had died. Born July 24, 1939, he was a writer and editor. His daughter, Erika, wrote: “My dad passed away this evening, around 4:30pm. My sister had been with him for a few hours and I was just getting back after having visited with my mother. He took his last breath almost the moment I arrived. It was very, very peaceful and we are so grateful.”

His fiction was ground-breaking and seemingly everywhere moments after he started publishing (his first science fiction story, “We’re Coming Through the Window,” was published in the August 1967 issue of Galaxy), but I’ll probably remember him more for his non-fiction: his essays on science fiction, literature, and the people in the field, which was his stock-in-trade for the last couple of decades.

I remember Barry as a fixture at the science fiction conventions I attended when I first got into the field, but I never really got to know him: there were too many bright and shiny new things and people clamoring for my attention for me to seek out the austere, somewhat foreboding looking fellow he was. Now, reading the reminiscences of so many of my friends, I’m realizing just how much I missed out by not getting to know him better. Rather than trying to recapitulate them, I commend to you posts on Facebook by John Kessel (https://www.facebook.com/john.kessel3), Adam-Troy Castro (https://www.facebook.com/adamtroycastro), and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (https://www.facebook.com/kristinekathrynrusch). I’m sure there will be more in the coming days.

He was nominated for a dozen Hugo and Nebula Awards, and his novel Beyond Apollo won the inaugural John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1973. His nonfiction works won two Locus Awards: The Engines of the Night (1983), and Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium (2008), and I was pleased and honored to publish his third volume, The Bend at the End of the Road (2018).

T. Jackson King (1948-2024)

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I’ve just learned of the death of Thomas King, Jr., who wrote as several dozen books as T. Jackson King, on December 3, at the age of 76. In his last post on Facebook, dated November 24, he wrote:

Sorry for the delay on AI SURVIVAL [his planned next novel]. 2024 has been traumatic for me. Wife divorced me. Coping with Diabetes and Asthma. Now diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure! Still hanging in there. Planning to write on the novel come Jan. 1, 2025. Thanks for being loyal readers! Tom. FYI, Readers can contact me via email. Or visit my Facebook page for T. Jackson King. Tom.

His YA novel, Little Brother’s World, was one of the first original books I accepted for Fantastic Books. In 2014, we launched his novel The Memory Singer at Balticon, which is when I met him in real life (whence the attached picture; apparently I didn’t get a picture of the two of us together). I think that convention was the only time we were physically in the same space together, but he seemed to relish life, taking great joy from whatever he was doing. And his tales of his life beyond the walls of the convention hotel seemed to reflect that, too.

He was much more than just a science fiction writer, but it’s probably easiest to let him tell that story (this is his biography from his web site, https://www.tjacksonking.com/):

T. Jackson King (Tom) is a professional archaeologist and journalist. He writes hard science fiction, anthropological sci-fi, dark fantasy/horror and contemporary fantasy/magic realism—but that didn’t happen until he was 38.

Before then, college years spent in Paris and in Tokyo led Tom into antiwar activism, hanging out with some Japanese hippies and learning how often governments lie to their citizens. The latter lesson led him and a college buddy to publish the Shinjuku Sutra English language underground tabloid in Japan in 1967. That was followed by helping shut down the University of Tennessee at Knoxville campus in 1968 and a bus trip to Washington, D.C., for the Second March on Washington where thousands demanded an end to the Vietnam War.

Temporary sanity returned when Tom worked in a radiocarbon lab at UC Riverside and earned an MA degree in Archaeology from UCLA. His interests in ancient history, ancient cultures and journalism got him several government agency jobs that paid the bills, led him to roam the raw landscape of the Western United States, and helped him and his wife Leslee raise three kids.

A funny thing happened on the way to normality. By the time he was 38 and doing federal arky work in Colorado, Tom’s first novel Star Traders was a stage play in his head that wouldn’t go away. So he wrote it down. It got rejected. His next novel was published as Retread Shop (Warner Books, 1988). It was off to the writing races and Tom’s many voyages of imaginative discovery have led to 24 published novels, a book of poetry, and a conviction that when Humans reach the stars, we will find them crowded with space-going Aliens. We will be the New Kids On The Block! This theme appears in much of Tom’s short fiction and novel writing.

Tom lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA and hangs with a group of smart and tolerant Westerners. Divorce has taught him to smile a lot and to work at being a Nice Guy. Still, he is pretty weird. Has been since fourth grade when he began reading sci-fi. Since then, he and Authority have rarely been in agreement.

Future Boston

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A press release from Fantastic Books:

Fantastic Books is pleased to bring the Future Boston series back into print.

First appearing in 1994, this four-book cycle tells the history of New England’s most populous city from 1990 to 2100. In those years, Boston is slowly sinking into the sea. The citizens of Boston plan a revolution against the governments of Earth. Alien races occupy the city and must decide if the human race deserves full galactic citizenship—or total destruction.

The mosaic novel Future Boston is the sweeping saga of a handful of dreamers—artists and scientists, scufflers and survivors, revolutionaries and thieves—who dream of a new society as their ancestors did before them. From slums to Brahmin boardrooms, Future Boston is a rich mosaic of history and human drama, as real as the great metropolis that inspired it. It features the work of Jon Burrowes, Alexander Jablokov, Geoffrey Landis, Resa Nelson, Steven Popkes, David Alexander Smith, and Sarah Smith.

Publishers Weekly called it “Adventure-filled… a wealth of evocative detail.… The real star is a painstakingly constructed future Boston,” while Locus said “Future Boston is more than the sum of its parts—and its parts are very good.”

Following Future Boston is Jon Burrowes’ novel Vubré the Great, in which a space ship breaks down, and the aliens check into little old Motel-o Earth-o to see if they can find a new conduction bolt for their night-drive. And the next thing you know, alien technology and ideas are erasing the cultures of Earth forever.

In David Alexander Smith’s In the Cube, private detective Beverly O’Meara is paired with Akktry, a small, sharp-clawed animal that has an inhuman affinity with the past and an ability to recreate the history of any place or person from the remains of the present. They’re on the trail of Diana Sherwood, the missing daughter of the most powerful—and hated—woman in sinking Boston. Unfortunately, that trail leads straight into the Basement, the oldest, lowest, most dangerous part of Boston. The part below sea level. The part you can down in…

Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author James Patrick Kelly said “In the Cube is David Alexander Smith’s best book.… Not only do his humans live and breathe, but he has drawn some of the strangest and most convincing aliens you’ll ever meet.”

Rounding out the series is Steven Popkes’ Slow Lightning, in which Ira and Gray find an egg on an abandoned ferryboat. It’s wrinkled, with smears of red and yellow, and bigger than a basketball. They’re not sure why it’s there, only that it must have been left there on purpose.

Science fiction Grand Master Poul Anderson said “Slow Lightning does a remarkable job of conveying the sheer strangeness of the universe and the future.”

Future Boston
Edited by David Alexander Smith
ISBN: 978-1-5154-5823-4
$17.99, 328 pages, trade paperback; $7.99 ebook

Vubré the Great
by Jon Burrowes
ISBN: 978-1-5154-5824-1
$16.99, 256 pages, trade paperback; $7.99 ebook

In the Cube
by David Alexander Smith
ISBN: 978-1-5154-5825-8
$16.99, 242 pages, trade paperback; $7.99 ebook

Slow Lightning
by Steven Popkes
ISBN: 978-1-5154-8526-1
$12.99, 124 pages, trade paperback; $6.99 ebook

The Future Boston series—and all Fantastic Books books—are distributed via Ingram. Review copies are available upon request.

Tales of Fortannis

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Adventure! Drama! Mystery! Humor!

Author Michael A. Ventrella introduced the world of Fortannis in his well-received comic fantasy adventure series following the exploits of Terin Ostler. Now Editor Michael A. Ventrella opens the doors to the kingdom by inviting other authors to play in Fortannis, and the result is the wonderful new anthology Tales of Fortannis.

Some of the stories are simply amusing, some tragic, and others heartwarming. Taken together, they give us a picture of a living, immense world which can cover the span of human (and biata, dwarf, elf, ogre, and goblin…) endeavor and passion.

Contributing authors: Derek Beebe, Susan Bianculli, Dominic Bowers-Mason, W. Adam Clarke, Jon Cory, Tera Fulbright, Jesse Grabowski, Christine L. Hardy, Henry “The Mad” Hart, Jesse Hendrix, Miles Lizak, Mark Mensch, Bernie Mojzes, Beth Patterson, Sarah Stegall, and Mike Strauss.

“A wild and weird collection of fantasy stories that present some of the freshest writing around. Derring-do with a great sense of fun. Highly recommended.” —New York Times bestseller Jonathan Maberry

“You don’t need to know the background material to enjoy the range of stories from the talespinners assembled here. It has plenty of adventures that end with a twist that leave you shaking your head in pleased surprise.” —Jody Lynn Nye, author of Dragon’s Deal

Tales of Fortannis
edited by Michael A. Ventrella
$15.99, trade paperback, 256 pages, ISBN 978-1-5154-5829-6
$5.99 ebook

Tales of Fortannis—and all Fantastic Books publications—are distributed through Ingram, and available through all major online retailers and specialty sf shops via direct order from the publisher. And don’t miss the previous four books: Terin Ostler and the Arch Enemies (ISBN: 978-1-5154-2417-8), Terin Ostler and the War of the Words (ISBN: 978-1-5154-2418-5), Terin Ostler and the Axes of Evil (ISBN: 978-1-5154-4776-4), and Terin Ostler and the Zombie King (and Other Stories) (ISBN: 978-1-5154-4781-8). Review copies are available upon request.

Science fiction convention (twelfth of 2024)

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Next Friday I’ll be at Philcon, which is my last scheduled convention of the year. Last! (For those of you counting along at home, I’ve already been to eleven sf conventions and seven Mensa conventions, and that’s not counting meetings, speeches, and more personal out-of-town trips.)

If you’re looking for me at Philcon (in Cherry Hill, New Jersey), I will, as always, be spending a lot of time at the Fantastic Books table in the dealers’ room. But I’m also on programming. You’ll be able to see me at:

Friday at 7:00pm in Grand Ballroom: “Whose Line, SFF Style!” with Melody Cryptid, Randee Dawn, Odele Pax, Michael A. Ventrella, and Abigail Welsher.

Friday at 9:00pm in Crystal 3: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Con” with Tony Finan, Brian T. Price, Roberta Rogow, and Michael A. Ventrella.

Saturday at 12:00n in Plaza 5: “Remembering Tom Purdom” with Barbara Purdom, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Michael Swanwick.

Saturday at 6:00pm in Plaza 5: “How to Write a Cover Letter for Your Novel” with Ken Altabef, Isabel J. Kim, and David Walton.

Hoping to see many of you there, because I don’t have another convention scheduled for more than two months.

Science fiction convention (eleventh of 2024)

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I neglected to mention that this weekend is a convention, but it’s not like my typical sf convention. This weekend, I’ll be at Sci-Fi Valley Con in Altoona, Pennsylvania. This is a much bigger (than my usual) media convention, with a much greater focus on the media guests of honor, on the dealers’ room, on costuming, and somewhat less emphasis on programming. In fact, I’ll be at the Fantastic Books table all weekend, and not on programming. I was there in June and had a good time, so I’m looking forward to even more this weekend. Come, join us!

A Vampire is Running for President: Thank God!

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A press release from Fantastic Books:

It’s been a horrific election season. Supporters on both sides are quite certain the other candidate can’t be human. Maybe we’d be better off voting for an actual monster!

Should being outed as a real vampire disqualify one from running for the presidency of the United States? Michael A. Ventrella’s hilarious Bloodsuckers answers that question.

Disgraced journalist Steven Edwards considers the “Batties”—the loonies who believe that vampires are real and Norman Mark is one—just another crazy tin-foil-hat extremist group. Then someone shoots at Mark, changes into a bat, and flies away before Steve’s eyes, leaving him as the prime suspect. With the help of the Batties, Steve goes underground. The only way he can establish his innocence is by proving vampires exist—not an easy task while on the run from both the FBI and the bloodsuckers.

Fantastic Books is releasing a new edition of Bloodsuckers right now, timed to coincide with “the most consequential presidential election in American history.” But aren’t they all? We’ve been tuned in to news of this election non-stop for years; it’s time to take a break. Read Bloodsuckers, and put it all into perspective.

Bloodsuckers: A Vampire Runs for President
Michael A. Ventrella
$15.99, 250 pages, trade paperback (ebook $7.99)
publication date: October 29, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-5154-5828-9

Bloodsuckers—and all Fantastic Books books—are distributed via Ingram. Review copies are available upon request.

    Reviews!

    ~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

    The new issue of True Review has just been posted. In this one, they’ve reviewed two Fantastic Books titles: one six years old, the other still two months from being published.

    Of Susan Casper’s The Red Carnival, reviewer Andrew Andrews writes “I love Casper’s style. It is truly gritty, edgy, compelling, dark and emotional. In this case, there is a stark and sinister force at this carny in the town of Somerset that makes all the festival lights turn red. There is a ride that appears out of nowhere, not attested to by the carny operators, called ‘Golgotha, Place of Skulls,’ and there comes a frenzy of violence by the carnygo’ers and carny staff. There is an impulsivity to this narrative that is disturbing, yet almost amusing.”

    That’s a good review of a very good book, and I don’t want to take anything away from it.

    But of far more personal import is his review of my forthcoming collection, Wandering Through Time. He writes: “Ian Randal Strock is the Harry Turtledove of short-short SF. His alternate-history stories have punch. The take on a geographically divided America in the time of the Civil War rings strongly in ‘Shall Not Perish from the Earth.’ I think it’s Strock’s best tale. In ‘The Necessary Enemy,’ it’s always wars, it seems, that drive humankind’s progress and destiny. ‘Rockefeller on the Rocks’ proves that unique tales, true or not, of U.S. vice presidents could perhaps work, with sufficiently advanced technology. Why can’t we replace veeps with robots? Who would know?”

    I’m thrilled, honored, and a humbled to be compared to Harry Turtledove. My book is being released on December 3.