Skirling clarinets and bagpipes for Christine Lucas, whose haunting, echoing collection Fates and Furies sails from the harbor today! The stories are seamless fusions of SFF, myths and little-known history that murmur in the reader’s bone marrow, ranging from the uplands of Minoan Crete to the valleys of Mars and everything in between. This is the fourth ship launched from The Reckless digital imprint of Candlemark & Gleam, after Athena Andreadis’ Wisps of Spider Silk: First Thread, M. Fenn’s Piper Deez and the Case of the Winter Planet, and Elana Gomel’s Dreaming the Dark.
Christine Lucas lives in Greece with her husband and a horde of spoiled animals. A retired Air Force officer and mostly self-taught in English, she has had her work appear in many SFF magazines, including Daily Science Fiction, Pseudopod, and Nature: Futures. Her stories appear in highly-claimed anthologies; among them Ellen Datlow’s Tails of Wonder and Imagination (“Dominion”, Night Shade, 2010), and Athena Andreadis’ The Other Half of the Sky (“Ouroboros”, Candlemark & Gleam, 2013). She was a finalist for the 2017 WSFA award; her story “Χίλια Μύρια Κύματα” (“A Thousand Waves from Home”, included for the first time in English in Fates and Furies, translated by Christine herself) won the 2017 Φανταστιcon Award; and she’s working on her first novel. You can visit her at Of (Wo)man and Mau.
Genre legends Gwyneth Jones and Melissa Scott were ecstatic over Fates and Furies.
Gwyneth Jones: “Visions of the fate of our flesh, set in the far future and in our own bitter times, all informed by ancient Hellas: I think I liked the alien migrants in modern Greece best, but I loved all these stories. A very fine cover too!”
Melissa Scott: “This is an extraordinary collection. Myths old and new sing to readers, drawing them ever deeper into a world deeply informed by the Hellenic world. My only regret is that I would gladly have read more of every one of them.”
Fates and Furies is available on Amazon and on our website, where a purchase brings along the full digital bundle (PDF, Epub and Mobi, with the PDF containing the usual bells and whistles) . All C&G ebooks are DRM-free. The stunning mosaic that graces the collection’s cover, embedded in the deep sea-blue background created by Alan Caum, perfectly distills the collection’s essence in both appearance and backstory.
This unique mosaic, titled The Personification of the Sea, is in the Church of Apostles in Madaba, Jordan, a city in continuous existence since the Bronze Age. The Madaba mosaics date from the 5th to the 7th century, among the few to survive the successive iconoclast sweeps in that part of the world. I’m immensely grateful to the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, Mt. Nebo, and The American Center of Oriental Research for graciously granting me permission to use this deeply resonant image as the visual representation of Christine’s collection.
Hold on to the mermaid’s hand as the haunting echoes of Hellenic myths swirl around you!
