Book Received: The King's Justice: Two Novellas by Stephen R. Donaldson

My presence online has been quiet of late as I have been working on a 219,000-word novel -- Courtney Schafer's The Labyrinth of Flame, book three in her Shattered Sigil trilogy. This is the largest book I've worked on in a few years, and it's been quite the major project. I'll be talking about my work on this novel shortly.

When I wasn't working on Labyrinth, I was catching up on TV shows (Mr. Robot, Humans, Halt and Catch Fire, Defiance, Proof, and probably a few others. And, I've also been creating a database listing of all my vinyl albums using Discogs.com. I haven't played an actual LP in probably ten-plus years and, unfortunately, my turntable (a classic Concept 2QD) remained idle during all that time as well. The tone arm was frozen and thus the turntable had to be serviced: so, a huge shout-out to SerTech Electronics in San Jose, one of only three such service and repair centers in all the Bay Area. Their work queue is at least three weeks long, but by the end of the fourth week they had completed work on my turntable. Now all is right with the world.

Recently I received Stephen R. Donaldson's The King's Justice: Two Novellas. I actually won this book in a giveaway courtesy of SFSignal.com and the publisher, G. P. Putnam's Sons. If you are reading this blog, then I assume you are also a reader of science fiction, fantasy, and other genres, which also means you are probably familiar with SFSignal. (If not, then get ye mouse to that site immediately!) JP Frantz and John DeNardo have been running SFSignal since as far back as I can remember. The site is one of the best for news and reviews, cover reveals, interviews, mind melds, TOC listings, and more. And they do a lot of print and ebook giveaways as well.

I had quite the time reading the first six volumes in Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, which I wrote about in my October 27, 2013, blog post. In that post I had received The Last Dark hardcover, the fourth and final volume in Donaldson's The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I still haven't read those final four books yet (I'm currently reading the equivalent of HBO's season 5 of George R. R. Martin's The Game of Thrones), but as you can see I'm a fan of Stephen R. Donaldson's work.

So go support SFSignal with your page views and Likes; and go read some Stephen R. Donaldson, too.

Books Received...Stephen R. Donaldson and K. W. Jeter

The long-awaited tenth and final volume, The Last Dark (G. P. Putnam's Sons), in Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, has finally been published.

I remember when I first started reading the first volume, Lord Foul's Bane, shortly after the book was published in 1977. I was expecting a fantasy -- you know, some medieval land, or faery land, or bewitched land -- and here was some guy walking down the street on his way to pay his electric bill! So the community started paying his bills for him, and sending him food so that he didn't have to come into town for any reason. But one of those thoughtful meals, a sandwich, contained ground glass. And all of this was being done for, and to, the man because he had leprosy! WTF?

I was so taken aback by the setting -- it was so NOT what I had been expecting -- that I couldn't get into it, and I put the book back on the shelf.

For whatever reason I no longer recall, more than ten years later I picked the book back up and started to read it once again. Now that I knew what to expect, I got sucked in to the story and couldn't put the book(s) down. And by now, of course, there were six volumes to consume! I was working as a technical instructor at the time for a high-tech company. (The hapless company shall remain nameless to protect their innocence.) I would make my way to the classroom as early as possible to prepare for class, and as soon as all the setup was complete, I'd pull out whatever Thomas Covenant volume I was on at the time and continue my reading; and it always seemed to take longer to clean up after class, too.

It's now been more than twenty years since I've read the first six books in this series. Gawd, twenty-plus years.... I've now purchased all four books in The Last Chronicles, but I haven't started reading them yet. First, I don't like to read a series until I have all the volumes in the series in hand; and second, I'm seriously considering starting with book one, Lord Foul's Bane, and reading all ten volumes.

The second book I purchased was another long-awaited title: K. W. Jeter's Fiendish Schemes (Tor Books), sequel to his Steampunk novel Infernal Devices, originally published by St. Martin's Press in 1987. Jeter, by the way, is credited with coining the term "Steampunk" in a letter to Locus magazine, printed in the April 1987 issue.

In October 1988 I was on my way to ArmadilloCon 10, at which K. W. Jeter was the Author Guest of Honor, and the other author guests included James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers. I flew American Airlines from San Jose to Dallas/Fort Worth, and from there to Austin, Texas. Upon boarding the plane to Austin, as I was walking down the aisle to my seat, I spied someone reading a copy of Infernal Devices. I stopped, and made some type of comment like, If you're reading Jeter's novel, then you must be going to ArmadilloCon, too -- to which she responded in the affirmative. That individual was Spike Parsons, well known among Bay Area fandom, whom I met for the first time on that plane. [Hi, Spike!]

You can read a bit more about my attendance at Armadillocon 10 in my blog post entitled "Philip K. Dick & Rudy Rucker's Warez," posted on August 30, 2010.