Prophecies, Libels & Dreams
Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Praise for Ysabeau S. Wilce's previous books:
"This fresh and funky setting is rich with glorious costumes, innovative language, and tantalizing glimpses of history."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
These inter-connected stories are set in an opulent quasi-historical world of magick and high manners called the Republic of Califa. The Republic is a strangely familiar place—a baroque approximation of Gold Rush era-California with an overlay of Aztec ceremony—yet the characters who populate it are true originals: rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three-year-old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig. By turn whimsical and horrific (sometime in the same paragraph), Wilce's stories have been characterized as "screwball comedies for goths" but they could also be described as "historical fantasies" or "fanciful histories" for there are nuggets of historical fact hidden in them there lies.
Ysabeau S. Wilce is the author of Flora Segunda, Andre Norton Award–winner Flora's Dare, and Flora's Fury, and she has published work in Asimov's, Steampunk!, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. She lives in San Francisco, California.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Republic of Califa remarkably like the U.S. Old West, were it saturated with chaotic and cunning magic is long past its glory days, but the wild stories remain. Wilce (the Flora Segunda series) leaps into this rollicking past with the "true" story of Springheel Jack in "The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!" and only gets more fantastical from there. "Quartermaster Returns" demonstrates that great lengths are sometimes required to get someone to square their debts. In "Scaring the Shavetail," Arizona soldiers invoke dangerous magic to rid themselves of a na ve and inexperienced commander. Each rowdy and bloody story is followed by an afterword judging its historical and mythical merits, in one case determining that the work was "utter balderdash." Magic and mundane mix and crash like a party falling in with a bar fight; sigils might be dug out of a mine alongside gold nuggets, and settlers die by daemon attack as often as by high-noon showdown or an Apache knife. Historical fantasy fans will want to saddle up with Wilce's boisterous and skewed chronicle.
