Territory, by Emma Bull, $24.95
It’s Tombstone, Ariz., 1881. Jacob Fox almost had his horse stolen and had to shoot a man before he arrived in town. Taking the injured man to the saloon in town, he interrupts Doc Holliday’s poker game.
Fox isn’t sure what impulse brought him to Tombstone. When he is summoned to Chinatown, his old friend Chow Lung takes credit for it. Lung wants Fox to develop the talent for sorcery he is not using.
Mildred Benjamin is a young widow who sets type at the newspaper and has a secret ambition to write melodramatic stories for the fiction magazines. Jacob makes her uneasy, but she is inevitably attracted by his mystery and intelligence.
Lung connects the murder of a Chinese girl to a magical sacrifice and makes it Jacob’s charge to combat this misuse of power. The reluctant hero postpones his plans for Mexico to track down the girl’s killer.
Whenever something suspicious happens, Wyatt Earp and his brothers always seem to have a connection. What Mildred overhears while visiting the wives of the Earp brothers supports those suspicions.
Bull knowingly winks at traditions of gothic Westerns, from stagecoach robberies to the supernatural tale — with, of course, a romance at the heart of it. She builds an eerie reality from the near mythological world of these western legends. Wyatt Earp remains clouded in mystery, but Doc Holliday is a tragic portrait of alcohol, gambling and lost potential.
Butcher Bird, by Richard Kadrey, $14.95 | When a demon tries to kill tattoo artist Spyder Lee, it introduces him to a radically new world. He can see monsters and buildings that weren’t there before in a world that looks like a Salvador Dali painting.
His best friend, Lulu, is in debt to the Black Clerks who are taking parts of her body in return for bringing her back from drug addiction. They own part of Spyder too when he tries to interfere.
A blind swordswoman saves Spyder from the demon but his life has changed and he is forced out of San Francisco to become part of Lulu’s mission to hell to retrieve a stolen magical book.
Their quest takes them into a Hieronymous Bosch painting-come-to-life. They must make their way thorough a place horrific and grotesque and often darkly funny.
Kadrey injects the traditional elements of fantasy with enough edginess that nothing is ever quite what it seems.
The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe, edited by Eric Flint, $25. | Shortly before his untimely death last year, publisher Jim Baen started a large new venture: an electronic science-fiction magazine. It’s too soon to know if the venture will last, but an impressive number of high-quality stories were published in the first year.
There are no biographical notes on the authors but they range from veteran legends Gene Wolfe and Mike Resnick to relative unknowns such as Denver fan Thea Hutcheson.
The best story in the book is “Every Hole is Outlined,” by John Barnes. Starship 9743 needs a new mathematician. The crew members oppose slavery but are forced to agree that buying Xhrina is the best choice available. The story captures both a culture of space voyagers and the life story of a remarkable person.
Barnes also contends for second best story with the fantasy “Poga,” where the daughter of a famous fantasy writer must contend with her father’s legacy in a world where there really are elves.
The book comes with a CD that not only has the contents of the book but also contains all the individual issues it was based on. The ambitious reader has the chance to second-guess the editor’s choice of the best.
The CD also contains a large anthology of classic stories and Flint’s novel “1634: The Baltic War.”
Fred Cleaver is a freelancer who writes a regular column on new science fiction.
