Overview
Do you love the sound of a peg leg stomping across a quarterdeck? Or maybe you prefer a parrot on your arm, a strong wind at your back? Adventure, treasure, intrigue, humor, romance, danger - and, yes, plunder! Oh, the Devil does love a pirate - and so do readers everywhere!Swashbuckling from the past into the future and space itself, Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, presents an incredibly entertaining volume of original stories guaranteed to make you walk and talk like a pirate.
Synopsis
Do you love the sound of a peg leg stomping across a quarterdeck? Or maybe you prefer a parrot on your arm, a strong wind at your back? Adventure, treasure, intrigue, humor, romance, danger - and, yes, plunder! Oh, the Devil does love a pirate - and so do readers everywhere!
Swashbuckling from the past into the future and space itself, Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, presents an incredibly entertaining volume of original stories guaranteed to make you walk and talk like a pirate.
Publishers Weekly
Saintly pirates, loony pirates, pirate cooks and talking animal-buccaneers slash and swagger through the Caribbean, the Internet, the perpetually frozen Atlantic and the seas of distant planets in this collection of 18 original stories. The anthology begins strongly with Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Boojum," a tale of one space pirate's self-discovery, and concludes equally well with a gentleman rogue and his magical puppet in Garth Nix's "Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe." The levity of "Castor on Troubled Waters," Rhys Hughes's playful romp through time and space, and Howard Waldrop's conflation of fictional pirates, "Avast, Abaft!," are balanced by "68° 07' 15" N, 31° 36' 44" W," Conrad Williams's baffling little chunk of horror. These ingenious variations on a theme deserve to be savored slowly. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Saintly pirates, loony pirates, pirate cooks and talking animal-buccaneers slash and swagger through the Caribbean, the Internet, the perpetually frozen Atlantic and the seas of distant planets in this collection of 18 original stories. The anthology begins strongly with Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Boojum," a tale of one space pirate's self-discovery, and concludes equally well with a gentleman rogue and his magical puppet in Garth Nix's "Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe." The levity of "Castor on Troubled Waters," Rhys Hughes's playful romp through time and space, and Howard Waldrop's conflation of fictional pirates, "Avast, Abaft!," are balanced by "68° 07' 15" N, 31° 36' 44" W," Conrad Williams's baffling little chunk of horror. These ingenious variations on a theme deserve to be savored slowly. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
The award-winning editors of Steampunk and The New Weird tap into another fantasy subgenre with this collection of 19 tales about swashbuckling pirates and the corsair's life by Elizabeth Bear, Naomi Novik, Eric Flint, Kage Baker, Michael Moorcock, and others. From Rhys Hughes's story of a past-his-prime Welsh pirate who lives for his bygone days ("Castor on Troubled Waters") to Paul Batteiger's story featuring Sir Francis Drake ("A Cold Day in Hell"), these stories should satisfy pirate and pirate fantasy fans, and they belong in large libraries.
—Jackie Cassada