Blood of Ambrose

Morlock Ambrosius Has Arrived!

James Enge’s Blood of Ambrose is now in stock at Amazon,and at B&N.com. Brick and mortar stores will soon follow!

“James Enge’s work is like Conan as written by Raymond Chandler: rich, witty, aware of its genre’s traditions but not bound by them, with a new surprise of plot or turn of phrase every moment.” —Paul Cornell, Hugo-nominated writer of Doctor Who and Marvel comics

Behind the king’s life stands the menacing Protector, and beyond him lies the Protector’s Shadow…

Centuries after the death of Uthar the Great, the throne of the Ontilian Empire lies vacant. The late emperor’s brother-in-law and murderer, Lord Urdhven, appoints himself Protector to his nephew, young King Lathmar VII and sets out to kill anyone who stands between himself and mastery of the empire, including (if he can manage it) the king himself and his ancient but still formidable ancestress, Ambrosia Viviana.

When Ambrosia is accused of witchcraft and put to trial by combat, she is forced to play her trump card and call on her brother, Morlock Ambrosius—stateless person, master of all magical makers, deadly swordsman, and hopeless drunk.

As ministers of the king, they carry on the battle, magical and mundane, against the Protector and his shadowy patron. But all their struggles will be wasted unless the young king finds the strength to rule in his own right and his own name.

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Free Online Reading: James Enge’s "A Book of Silences"

April will see the release of James Enge’s swords & sorcery novel, Blood of Ambrose,an epic work featuring Morlock Ambrosius, wandering swordsman and master of all magical makers. The book is a stand-alone adventure, but Morlock returns in the (already-delivered) follow-up, This Crooked Way, and we’ve just signed for a third Morlock novel, the wonderfully-titled The Wolf Age. But Morlock Ambrosius already has a significant following, as Enge has been chronicling his adventures in short fiction for some time prior to his novel debut. One such tale,”A Book of Silences,” first appeared in the pages of Black Gate magazine. We are pleased to reprint it in its entirety at the Pyr Sample Chapters page. What’s more, we will shortly be presenting “Fire and Sleet,” which follows directly on the events of “A Book of Silences” and is an original novelette that will debut at the Pyr website for the first time anywhere. So, read and enjoy!

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Books Sold: James Enge’s The Wolf Age

As SFScope, agent Michael Kabongo, and the author himself have already reported, we’ve just completed an agreement with James Enge (via the OnyxHawke agency), to publish a third Morlock Ambrosius novel, this one titled The Wolf Age. The Wolf Age is a third stand-alone adventure featuring his wandering swordsman/master maker Morlock, after the forthcoming This Crooked Way, and the coming-really-soon Blood of Ambrose.

These novels are swords & sorcery at its best, and I’m eager to unleash Morlock on the wider world. Meanwhile, there are a host of Morlock Ambrosius shorts and previews online and aggregated here.

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Sturges & Enge: Talk About Fantastic!

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Part One of an interview with Matt Sturges, author of the forthcoming fantasy Midwinter,is up on Newsarama. He talks about his comic book work – Jack of Fables, Shadowpact, Blue Beetle, House of Mystery, etc… – as well as his long association with Bill Willingham and Chris Roberson.

It wasn’t until I was in college, when my friend Chris Roberson, who is now a novelist and is also the guy who’s writing the new Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love mini-series this year, was the person who introduced me to comics. And the things he liked at the time were Legion of Super-Heroes and all the stuff that would become Vertigo. And because the Legion of Super-Heroes, at the time, made no sense to me, I sort of went for the Vertigo stuff.

Not that I didn’t learn to love superheroes, but for a beginner, the Vertigo type stories were more self-contained. This was the late ’80s, so this was when a lot of great stuff was happening in comics. One of the first things I read was Watchmen, followed by Sandman, then everything Grant Morrison was writing at the time. So those were the books that really formed my sensibilities about what comics could be and should be, and the potential of what you could do in a comic.

Meanwhile, James Enge, whose Blood of Ambrosewe publish in April, is on Rogue Blades talking about the character of Morlock Ambrosius, and the short story “The Red Worm’s Way,” which forms part of the backstory for the novel and appears in the anthology Flashing Swords Presents: The Return of the Sword.

I did a little fencing in high school, so I have some sense of how some parts of a sword fight might work. On a couple of occasions I’ve walked through part of a fight, just to have a sense of whether the footwork was possible. But I try not to over-identify with my viewpoint character: my job as the storyteller is very different from his.

Both are very interesting guys, set to make a spalsh in fantasy when their respective novels debut in just a few short weeks. Hmmm. Maybe they should read & interview each other?

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Unicorns: Have they been mylittleponied into blunt four-color rainbows?

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Every time James Enge pontificates about fantasy fiction, I am fascinated. Here, on the new Black Gate Group Blog, he pontificates about unicorns:

…unicorns have been used and imagined and reimagined so much that their emotional halo has been mylittleponied into blunt four-color rainbows. They’re overfamiliar. …In a way, this is inevitable. Any symbol, if it penetrates deeply into a culture, attracts parody and appropriation—it’s one way you can start to actually see the thing again, as opposed to scanning past it and saying, “Yeah, I know what that is.” …But it seems as if the poppification of the unicorn has gone beyond this, banalizing the image so that it is almost impossible to use it in a semi-serious context, even in fantasy where, one would think, an occasional unicorn might find an unspoiled field to roam in. Can the unicorn be saved? Or is the image just used up and does it need to lie fallow for a century or two before it’s usable again?

Now, “mylittleponied into blunt four-color rainbows” is just priceless.

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The Politics of Fantasy and Books You Read Twice

Author James Enge, whose Blood of Ambrosecomes out from Pyr this coming Spring, guest-blogs at Deep Genre.

Here’s a sample:

Fantasy is most effective when it acts through symbols that rest pretty deep in the awareness (or beneath the awareness, if you buy into the whole subconscious thing). At the center of every adult’s emotional life is a struggle for autonomy that occurs in adolescence. One may be struggling against well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) caregivers who are reluctant to surrender their authority. One may be raised in perfect environment that encourages autonomy and self-responsibility, but one still has to go out and face the world, make one’s place in it. Somehow, this is part of everyone’s story.

Why do so many fantasies involve young sons of widows who grow up to kill the monster, defeat the king, marry the princess and rule the kingdom happily ever after? Some point out that these stories are very old; this is true, but it’s just begging the question. A story appeals to audiences because it speaks to them emotionally. Why does this story appeal to modern audiences or ancient ones?

It appeals to them because it’s a symbolic representation of the struggle for autonomy that everybody engages in. The kingdom isn’t necessarily a kingdom; it’s just a life where you get to decide what happens. The princess isn’t a princess; she’s the hot checkout lady at the grocery store or maybe the likeable mechanic at the gas station, depending on how you roll. In fact, the hero may be a daughter, more like Atalanta or Camilla, nowadays: the dynamic of the story is essentially unchanged. The story has a wide appeal because its symbols are wired into emotional hot-buttons that are part of everybody’s life.

Meanwhile, Yours Truly is one of several authors to partake of SFSignal’s latest Mind Meld. This one asks, “Which speculative fiction books are worth reading twice? Why?” Answers are from Louise Marley, Cheryl Morgan, James E. Gunn, Gardner Dozois, Sarah Langan, Abigail Nussbaum, Anna Genoese, Scott Edelman, Jo Graham, and Dominic Green. Not surprisingly Dune, Lord of the Rings, and Mists of Avalon appear several times across everyone’s lists. And Cheryl Morgan sums up the problems of rereading nicely:

I have too many books. Probably more books that I will be able to read in the rest of my allotted span as a living human (though I entertain hopes of being uploaded in some way or another). In order to read a book for a second time, therefore, I have to make a conscious decision not to read a book that I haven’t yet read. That’s a hard thing to do.

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