The Merry Blacksmith Press

Yep! A new Marla Mason book from TA Pratt is on its way for the 2015 season. We’re in the final proof stages and the book will be available for order as soon as the start of April.

In Lady of Misrule, Marla awakens for her month on Earth and finds her allies missing, and an old enemy causing trouble in her home city of Felport. If that wasn’t bad enough, a charming gentlemen from beyond the multiverse has decided that murdering gods might make for an amusing pastime. He figures he will start with Marla. Now, with the help of her former apprentice Bradley Bowman, Marla must rescue her friends, crush her enemies, and eliminate the aforementioned existential threat—before her month runs out and she returns to the underworld.

Battles and airships and alien gods (oh, my)!

For our next holiday season offer, we bring you some old-school high adventure!

Join displaced Earthman John Carter as he explores Barsoom and gets caught up in ancient intrigue and powerful, planet-wide forces. This is where adventure starts, and for a very limited time, we’re offering all three of the original trilogy of books for only $15.oo plus $4.00 shipping. Don’t miss out on this incredible deal.

See our Holiday Specials page for details.

From now until January 5th, you can order our two books aimed specifically at aspiring writers: Nascence by Tobias Buckell and Letters From Gardner: A Writer’s Odyssey by Lou Antonelli for only $20 plus shipping. They also make great gifts for your fellow writers.

For more information on these great titles, and for ordering, visit our December Holiday Specials page.

From now until January 5th, you can order all three Bud Webster books from Merry Blacksmith Press for only $35 plus $6 shipping.  That’s almost $15 in savings.  These books make great gifts for friends and family, or yourself! (And hey, you’ve earned it, so why not?)

For ordering, visit our December Holiday Specials page.

Order by December 12, and Anthopology 101, Past Masters, and The Joy of Booking will wing their way to you  just in time for Christmas (continental US only). Even if you order later, these books make great New Year’s reading.

The best in science fiction scholarship!

Huzzah, huzzah!

Ayep, we’re getting into the holiday spirit with an offer–more like a series of offers. Every Monday we’ll be announcing a new December special offer which will not expire until January 5th. That’s five great deals all in one month (or so). Click here for details.

First up is a buy-three-get-the-fourth-free sort of deal…

We are bundling all four of our Timothy C. Lockley collections together, but at the cost of only three–$36.00 + $4.00 shipping. That’s a $12.00 savings.

Check out our December Holiday Specials page and order now. (Order this week, get the set in time for Christmas!)

Holy smokes!

We have two new great titles to announce the release of–just in time for holiday shopping.

First up is our fourth collection of outrageous cartoons from the genius-warped mind of Timothy C. Lockley: The Worst Case Scenario Is Coming.

Enjoy more of that signature Lockley wit and skill in puns and other wordplay. As usual, we warn you not to read this in public–unless you enjoy startling those next to you with sudden outbursts of laughter.

Also new to our roster of fine books is this first in a three-book series, 2050: A Future History by J. Zornado: 2050: Gods of Little Earth.

Set two thousand years after the fall of civilization, a wanderer named Vilb sets out on a pilgrimage and discovers that he may be little more than a pawn of mysterious gods—remnants of ancient beings who have been waiting for this very moment to fulfill their destiny.

Vilb’s story explores in a post-apocalyptic Antarctica, which, though habitable, has fallen into perpetual drought. The lack of water and food has set this new “Little Earth” on a course for crisis, and Vilb holds— though he hardly knows it—both its cause and its resolution. Vilb is on a journey for information and for self-discovery. Understanding his own past is critical if his crisis is to be understood. Now he learns about the history of Little Earth at the critical year from which it emerged: 2050 a.d.

GREAT NEW BOOKS, WITH MANY MORE TO COME IN 2015!

Now available for order!

This book is hard to classify, difficult to categorize.

If you flip randomly through the pages, you’re most likely to think it is a short fiction collection, specifically of science fiction and fantasy stories.

But look some more, and you might think it’s a how-to book, the topic being How to Break Into Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy.

On the other hand, you’d be justified in thinking it’s a memoir of a kind, of one author’s efforts to break in as a published science fiction and fantasy author.

Finally, you could even be forgiven in thinking it’s a history, telling the tale of the last days when science fiction and fantasy original fiction was mostly propagated in print, not pixels, in real magazines made of paper compounded from ground up trees.

You’d be right in all cases, because this book combines all those threads and tells a narrative I hope you will find interesting combined with science fiction and fantasy stories I know you will find entertaining.

We’re very happy to announce that Gallows Hill by Rory O’Brien is now available for order!

First day back on the job, and there’s a corpse hanging at the infamous Gallows Hill in Salem, Massachusetts.

In therapy and still shaken after having killed a suspect, introverted police detective Andrew Lennox hasn’t revealed the full story behind the shooting that sent him into therapy and put him on Xanax. He and his partner soon discover that the hanged man is the lost heir of the Musgraves, an old family with a twisted history, who deny all knowledge of the victim. Solving the case takes Lennox through the colorful byways of modern Salem, a city still haunted by its own dark history of Puritan hysteria and witch-hunting zealots. He must deal with Halloween tourists, self-styled witches, college students, tarot readers, local politicians, retired cops and recent immigrants. Lennox discovers that everyone in Salem keeps secrets, and some will kill to keep them.

Gallows Hill is available for order here, or via Amazon (by Feb 13) or your local bookstore (within a couple of short weeks).

Congratulations to Tim Pratt and Bud Webster who each have a Merry Blacksmith title on the 2013 Locus Recommended Reading List. Way to go!

Tim Pratt’s Antiquities and Tangibles: And Other Stories is a collection of 23 incredible works of science fiction and fantasy including such favorites as “The River Boy,” “A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness,” and a special Marla Mason story, “Cages”.

Past Masters and Other Bookish Natterings collects together some of Bud Webster’s best columns and author profiles from a lifetime of devoted scholarship in the field of speculative fiction–a must for researchers and fans alike.

Both can be ordered here, on Amazon, through your local bookstore… or maybe you’ll find us at a nearby convention.

Congrats to both Tim and Bud!

Catherine Lucille (C.L.) Moore, 1911-1987

A recent conversation I had on Facebook about biographies led to me wondering I don’t run across many biographies or autobiographies of female writers–particularly from the genre community. While this could easily be a personal failing on my part for not being aware enough, it didn’t take long to confirm that there really is a shortage–but there is no shortage when it comes to female genre writers. Sure, there are collections of biographical essays which contain women, but none that I could readily find solely about women or even equally about women. And again… it’s not like there’s a shortage.

So, with that in mind, we’d like to welcome any submissions of biographical works, essay collections, comics, or the like featuring female genre writers.  Drop us a line at submissions@merryblacksmith.com.

Cheers!