Product Description

Eleven stories of magic, mystery and the fantastic future all featuring gay heroes. Swordsmen, cyborgs, magicians, ghosts, psychic lovers and enchanted lords fill this anthology with adventure, humor and passion. Stories by: Steven Adamson, Astrid Amara, Mark Allan Gunnells, Ginn Hale, Tenea D. Johnson, Jeremiah Job Levine, Erin MacKay, Gene Mederos, Jesse Sandoval and Lawrence Schimel.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237090 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-15
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Customer Reviews

An amazing anthology
I bought this anthology for Ginn Hale's novella, Feral Machines-- and it was a great sci-fi read-- but it wasn't the only outstanding story.

Erin MacKay's novella ,Crossing the Distance, was smart, and heart-wrenching in a very good way. She took the whole concept of Soul Mates and built an amazing world around it.

Astrid Amara's two stories were both wonderful; Lord Ronan's Shoes had me grinning like an idiot as the young hero battled to save his lord and lover from a wicked pair of boots and Remember was simply beautiful with all it's Victorian poise and subtle magic.

Los Conversos, by Jesse Sandoval, was one of the best pieces of magical realism that I've read in years, featuring a character who is the descendant of a scarab, panes of glass that turn tears to rubies and a very charming thief.

Monument, by Steven Adamson, was sweet and simple, while Release In A Minor, by Tenea D. Johnson, was HOT!

Moons of Blood and Amber, by Gene Mederos, and The Coming of the Fourth Dawn, by Jeremiah Job Levine, were both high fantasy, adventure stories with heroic gay couples at the centers of the turmoil, duels and daring. I enjoyed them despite the fact that I often find high fantasy a little dull.

All in all, I found the majority of stories in this collection romantic, very imaginative and fun. I definitely recommend it.

Each story a small masterpiece
It's some time I picked up an anthology, and picking up this one reminded me how much fun it is reading one, surfacing from one story and diving into the next one, curious as to what surprises it may hold. They are very different from each other, but none of the eleven stories on 363 pages really disappoints. Three, "Moons of Blood and Amber", "The Coming of the Fourth Dawn" and "Crossing the Distance", are genre-type fantasy, where the last one, a novella of 74 pages, is particularly gripping: please, Erin MacKay, give the world a novel! Ginn Hale's 78 pages "Feral Machines" is a SF story I did not expect in this volume, it has an interesting, preservationist setting, though its love story is perhaps a bit cheesy, and the idea to turn cyborgs into, well, pets, would have profited from a little more drama (what use is freedom if everybody remains well-behaved? shouldn't we expect a bad conscience or similar reaction when the freed machines realize to what awful uses they were put before?). Astrid Amara's two short stories are little masterpieces, and I am looking forward to her novel "The Archer's Heart" scheduled to appear in August. All in all, I enjoyed this anthology probably more than any novel I recently read, so I just want to say thank you for it.

An enjoyable read
I've never written a review before, but for this book I had to do it. Like another reviewer I bought this book because of Ginn Hale's Feral Machines, but now I've found I want more. Several of the writers were so skilled I had to come and search for more what they had written. To my sadness, I found they hadn't written anything.

Astrid Amara, I wish you would write more. Your two novellas made me smile in amusement and almost cry in the other. If you ever write a book, I promise I'll be the first ones to buy them. Lord Ronan's shoes was a sweet story of enchantment and love that wasn't only magic. Remember made me ache for the main character to remember the love he didn't knew he had in front of him.

Gene Mederos and Jeremiah Job Levine, your fantasy stories made me wish more. The way you've portrait the characters gave only a glimpse of their past. It would have been nice to see more. Maybe some time?

The others were also good and enjoyable reading. This book isn't just sex between two men, but simply relationship, learning and falling in love. I thank you for these stories.