Master smith Angus Bjornson hates growing old. Age and an accident at the forge have crippled him, leaving Angus unable to make the swords and armor that are his passion. To help ease the pain, his children give him a VRMMO headset and a medieval game where he can continue his craft in a manual creation mode that draws upon and rewards all the skills he developed as a smith–as opposed to the convenience of using a menu.

Angus soon creates swords and armor that are better than anything in the game, even the legendary pieces. His work attracts the attention of the local guild, who enforces a monopoly of mediocrity upon the town’s crafters. But Angus will not be coerced into making junk, so the guild plots to bring Angus into their fold. By any means necessary.

Even cheating.

True Smithing, by Jared Mandani, is the most recent in the Second Life subgenre of litRPGs. These stories take retirees, typically widowers, and introduce them to VRMMO settings where they are no longer limited by their aged bodies as they pursue their passion. While most of these stories end up dangling the hope of reuniting these men with their long-dead wives, True Smithing instead reunites Angus with his life’s work–blacksmithing. Read More

Crafter’s dungeons, post-apocalyptic water worlds, MMO blacksmiths, and even a three-headed ogre appear in this week’s science fiction and fantasy new releases.

Aquaria Falling (Aquaria #1) – Finn Gray

Centuries ago, the Memnon War devastated Aquaria. The defeated Memnons fled the Aquarian system in search of a new home. Or did they?

Blamed for the death of his sister, Rory Waring escapes the farm by enlisting in the Aquarian Imperial Marines, but life as a marine recruit is not what he expected. The ranks are divided, with rumors of secret traitors among their number. Who can he trust when his life is on the line?

As granddaughter of the emperor, Lina Navarre has not had a difficult life. Her sole responsibility is keeping her twin sister far from trouble and out of the news vids until an act of terrorism changes her life forever. Suddenly, Lina finds herself in the enemy’s crosshairs. But which side is her sister on?

Commander Dominic Graves can hardly remember the last time he led Dragonfly into combat. Now his days are spent reviewing reports and his brilliant but erratic ace pilot, Serena “Sabre” Sabrakami, out of the brig. But when mutiny breaks out across the fleet, both will find their lives on the line, and the fate of Aquaria in their hands.

The Memnons have returned and Aquaria is falling!

The Bar at the Edge of the Sea (The Watchers #2) – Tom Abrahams

A world underwater. A missing weapon. A fight for redemption.

Zeke Watson has his first mission as a Watcher: a quest to find a kidnapped child who knows the location of a missing weapon. In the wrong hands, the weapon will upset the balance of good and evil across the known universe.

He seeks the child. The weapon. And redemption.

But can he find any of that in a flooded post-apocalyptic world filled with ruthless pirates—where his skills behind the wheel are useless and his newfound power is as unsteady as a skiff on choppy seas?

The Black Knight (The Excalibur Knights Saga #2) – Luke Mitchell

He came. He saw. He stole the freakin’ Merlin.

In the wake of the troglodan attack on Earth, fledgling Knight Nate Arturi and his unruly crew venture into Alliance space in pursuit of the mysterious Black Knight. The mission couldn’t be more simple. Find the Black Knight, recover the Beacon, and save the Merlin.

But simple isn’t always easy, and the title of Excalibur Knight isn’t what it once was.

Arriving in Alliance space, Nate and fellow Knight Iveera quickly find themselves caught in a deadly web of political ambition with ooperian assassins haunting their every step and no one to trust but each other and their rag tag crew.

The clock is ticking. An ancient evil stands on the brink of awakening. But to complete their mission, they’ll have to go renegade and forfeit everything.

Can two rogue Knights stop the rising tides of galactic war?

The Crafter’s Darkness (Dungeon Crafting #4) – Jonathan Brooks

A time of great darkness is approaching, but will Sandra and her dungeon survive?

After being responsible for destroying multiple Dungeon Cores, the consequences of which she has yet to see but knows will be coming, Sandra and her friends must obtain help from the leadership of the nearby lands. The problem will soon become bigger than she can contain, and only by them all working together will everyone survive the dangers represented by the nearby dungeons.

On top of that, Sandra also has to develop a plan to combat the ever-expanding territories of the local dungeons and protect the people still living in her Area of Influence. It is a difficult and complicated problem to solve, but with the aid of some new friends she begins to get a handle on the situation.

Unknown to Sandra and everyone else, however, someone wronged by the craft-loving Dungeon Core has designs of their own that will throw the wastelands into chaos. Those dangers, coupled with some personal issues of Sandra’s own, could usher in a period of darkness that the world hasn’t seen in centuries… Read More

As literary RPGs have demonstrated lasting power in the turbulent mix that is publishing, authors have taken the idea of novelizing immersive gameplay and applied it in new ways. Most litRPGs take up the story of adventurers clearing out dungeons for profit and story progression, describing the adventurers’ growth and skills along the way. But what if the dungeon was the protagonist instead of the adventurers?

It’s an idea that’s been done before in games. Dungeon Keeper, the Dungeons series, and Evil Genius have taken the mechanics of empire building games and crossed them with real-time strategy gameplay to create a tongue-in-cheek genre where evil overlords map out cunning and cruel traps inside dungeon to protect their loot from waves of raiding heroes. But something unusual happened on the way from darkly humorous gaming to popular novels.

The intellect guiding the dungeon’s growth was no longer humorously and sadistically evil. Instead, it became crystallized into an item called a dungeon core; its growth now dependent upon the adventurers braving its depths. Cull too many too quickly, and powerful adventurers will smash the core. But provide a suitable challenge and pick off the careless and the inept, and both the adventurers and the dungeon core prosper. This has resulted in a shift away from satirical evil to what might be the coziest of fantasy genres. Read More

Final battles approach, families clash, and traitors abound in this week’s science fiction and fantasy new releases.

Burning Core (School of Swords and Serpents #4) – Gage Lee

The quest for the Empyrean Flame has begun, and a deadly new threat has appeared from beyond the realms of mortals.

As the new school year begins, Jace and his friends must puzzle out the meaning behind the map sent by a mysterious benefactor. But as Jace’s daunting quest leads him to the most exotic destinations on Earth, he finds himself hunted by the last person he’d expected to oppose his mission: his own mother.

With the heretics hot on his trail and a chaotic invasion looming, Jace and his friends must overcome challenges like none they’ve ever faced.

Because the end of one myth is often the beginning of a new legend…

Dark Fantasies – Misha Burnett

This short story collection will keep you on the edge of your seat to the last sentence. Misha Burnett has been published in a wide variety of modern fiction magazines, and here we’ve collected some of his best fantasy work.

From the introduction:

“I’m a tourist, not a colonist. I want to take a couple of pictures, hit an antique mall, get a meal, and get back on the highway. And that’s what I write—what you’ll get in this book is the casual visitor’s view of other worlds than ours. I promise to have you back safe in your own home town by nightfall.”

The Earthling’s Daughter (Soldiers of Earthrise #5) – Daniel Arenson

The world of Bahay, once a jewel of the galaxy, smolders after a devastating war.

The survivors rummage through the charred remains. The dead litter the killing fields. The crows feast. And from the ashes, new evil rises.

He appears as an ancient man, clad in black robes, an inverted cross hanging from his neck. His inquisitors spread across the planet. His tyranny crushes all hope.

Maria de la Cruz is a war heroine. She has fought for Bahay in merciless jungles and neon slums. Yet now she faces her most terrifying foe.

To defeat this mysterious despot, Maria must abandon all she has ever known. She must travel deeper than ever into the wilderness of her world. She must uncover the darkest secrets of Bahay . . . or the oceans will run red with blood.

Extinction Darkness (The Extinction Cycle: Dark Age Book 4) – Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Darkness descends over the survivors of the Extinction Cycle…

With nowhere left to run, the Allied States fortifies their few remaining outposts and relocates Central Command to prepare for their final stand. President Jan Ringgold and her generals know beating the enemy on the battlefield is impossible. The only path to victory seems to be taking down the leader of the New Gods, a sinister Chimera known as the Prophet, before he can complete his campaign to enslave humanity.

While Captain Reed Beckham trains new troops, his wife Doctor Kate Lovato returns to the tunnels to infiltrate the bioengineered enemy communication network. Injured and exhausted, Master Sergeant Fitzpatrick and Team Ghost make their way back from Canada with a Chimera prisoner that might be the key to finding the Prophet and raising a new army.

In this thrilling conclusion to the Extinction Cycle series, humanity bands together one last time against the Variants. But time has run out for the heroes of the first war to save what remains of the Allied States and perhaps, the world. Read More

One of the delights in reading the pulps is being able to trace various sources of inspiration, such as Manly Wade Wellman’s wild west plots or C. L. Moore’s use of the Gothic poisoned garden. Some of these inspirations are more direct and well-known. The Secret Six millionaires who funded the fight against Al Capone resurfaced in Amusement, Inc. The Shadow and Doc Savage both drew heavily on the adventures of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, most recently of The Lost City of Z fame.

I recently came across another direct pulp inspiration in another media. Inside the pages of Hitchcock, by Francis Truffaut, the famed suspense director Alfred Hitchcock is interviewed about many of the movies in his career. One in particular sounded familiar, 1938’s The Lady Vanishes, the film that brought Hollywood’s attention to Hitchcock. From Wikipedia:

“The film is about a beautiful English tourist travelling by train in continental Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is helped by a young musicologist, the two proceeding to search the train for clues to the old lady’s disappearance.”

Swap the train for a plane, the elderly lady for a wife and daughter, the menacing spy ring for the mob, and the young woman for a Doc Savage style adventurer, and you have the origin story for 1939’s The Avenger, as Richard Henry Benson’s adventures begin when his wife and daughter vanished mid-flight from the seats next to his. Everyone thinks Benson is insane, with a brain flu that tells him he has family not his own. The shock turning Benson’s skin and hair a steel gray is a unique touch though.

Hitchcock’s movie is drawn from the 1936 book by Ethel Lina White, The Wheel Spins, but he indicates that there might be an earlier source:

The whole thing started with an ancient yarn about an old lady who travels to Paris with her daughter in 1880. They go to a hotel and there the mother is taken ill. They call a doctor, and after looking her over, he has a private talk with the hotel manager. Then he tells the girl that her mother needs a certain kind of medicine, and they send her to the other end of Paris in a horse-drawn cab. Four hours later she gets back to the hotel and says, “How is my mother?” and the manager says, “What mother? We don’t know you. Who are you?” She says, “My mother’s in room so and so.” They take her up to the room, which is occupied by new lodgers; everything is different, including the furniture and the wallpaper.

It’s supposed to be a true story, and the key to the whole puzzle is that it took place during the great Paris exposition, in the year the Eiffel Tower was completed. Anyway, the women had come from India, and the doctor discovered that the mother had bubonic plague. So it occurred to him that if the news got around, it would drive the crowds who had come for the exposition away from Paris.

The criminality and spycraft is distinctly White’s addition to the story, and the close parallels to The Wheel Spins and The Lady Vanishes suggest that Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, or Paul Ernst was familiar with either the book or the movie. However, Gibson also drew heavily on French influences for The Shadow, so it would not be a surprise to find out that he drew on the Paris version of the story to help create The Avenger. The real answer might be hidden within the Street & Smith archives.

At the end of the day, this story became a springboard for Richard Henry Benson and a handful of those victimized by crime to fight back as Justice, Inc.

This week’s new releases features elemental mages, world-wide disappearances, future tech thieves, and the penultimate volume of Blood on the Stars.

Descent into Darkness (Blood on the Stars #17) – Jay Allan

Victory or Death.

Tyler Barron and his associates are divided, split between two courses of action. Barron doesn’t believe in the desperate plan to eradicate the Highborn, the strange virus that has been created for that purpose, but may or may not be the exact formula used by the empire three hundred years ago. There are too many possible problems…a small difference in the virus, a cure created by the enemy…for him to accept the plan. Barron commits instead to a traditional defense, even though he knows the chances of ultimate success are almost zero.

Many of Barron’s cohorts are on his side, but not all. The leader of the other party is none other than Andi Lafarge, Barron’s wife. If the odds were any less gruesome, either one would have given in to the other. But Andi wants nothing less than the extinction of the Highborn, and she believes the virus will work. She will do anything to see it used. Anything.

The two work together, somewhat at least, and apart as well, striving to end the conflict in any way possible, with millions of spacers fighting…and facing probable doom either way. It is the last stand of free humans on the Rim, the final chance to evade slavery…or worse.

Exiled (Fall of Radiance #4) – Blake Arthur Peel

War has torn Tarsynium asunder. However, the true war lies just ahead…

After the defeat of the king’s army at Dunmar City, a letter arrives from the Conclave’s High Magus seeking a truce. The Nightingales, in desperate need of friends, leave their mountain stronghold to forge a new alliance with rangers and mages, to unite themselves against the king. But when political intrigues lead our young heroes into a trap, they face a punishment reserved for only the vilest of criminals: exile.

In order to survive the wastes beyond the Arc of Radiance, Owyn and Zara must rely on each other’s strengths. Together, they must somehow return to their homeland, to unite its warring factions and help change its uncertain fate.

They soon learn that the gravest threat lies not in the elements, but in the encroaching demon armies that are drawing ever closer to the kingdom…

Final Days – Jasper T. Scott and Nathan Hystad

The countdown to the end of the world has begun.

A mysterious convergence of natural disasters threatens to destroy life as we know it, and people across the United States are going missing. With no one left to investigate, Special Agent Kendra Baker takes the case, trying to solve the disappearances before she’s out of time.

Among those abducted is Valeria Miller, the daughter of ex-Marine Corporal Andrew Miller, and he’ll stop at nothing to find her.

With the help of an unstable conspiracy theorist, they find themselves on the trail of a reclusive billionaire who just might have all the answers.

As the natural catastrophes escalate and the evacuations commence, it becomes a race against the clock to find the abductees before it’s too late.

Radical Dreamer (The Messenger #9) – J. N. Chaney and Terry Maggert

The galaxy itself is under siege, and only the Messenger can save it.

The Verity are in collapse. Clan Shirna is gone. And all along, the ships of the Cygnus Realm have been pushing back until only the Golden are left.

Or so Dash thought.

With the discovery of two new races and a sphere of stars embroiled in war, Dash hurls the Forge ever deeper into territory where no human can live free. The Golden are no longer merely advisors—now, they are present in the fights themselves, their silver ships gleaming with menace in a war that threatens to incinerate an entire arm of the galaxy.

With mechs, and carriers, and a tough survivor named Jexin, Dash will strike at the first defensive line of an empire older than human history, and with it, set events in motion that can only end in victory for one side and the total destruction of the other.

For Dash, the choice is clear. Only absolute victory will do, and he will spill his own blood to achieve it.

One battle at a time. Read More