Some of the loot I brought home from the Spring Games Plus auction last year (click for bigger version)

Tomorrow is one of the highlights of my year — the Spring Auction at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, Illinois, one of the finest game stores in the Midwest, about an hour’s drive from my house.

I’ve written about the Spring and Fall 2012 auctions (in “Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever” and The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games, respectively), and I’ve been looking forward to returning this year.

The Games Plus auctions are just about the friendliest I’ve ever attended. The store is run by a group of dedicated and professional gamers who know their stuff, and they keep the proceedings running with an experienced hand — and a quick wit. Even if I were unable to bid, I think I’d enjoy sitting in the audience, just for the entertainment value.

Of course, it’s a lot more fun to be able to bid.

As I mentioned in the previous articles, it’s important to have a budget for these things, and to conserve funds for those items you really want.

Ha, ha. A budget! Excuse me while I regain control of my writing limbs.  A budget — that’s a good one.

Let me put it another way: It’s important to keep a running total of your purchases, and always to be aware of how much money you’ve spent. Why? All that constant arithmetic will distract you from non-stop bidding. Eventually you’ll crumble up the sheet and abandon it as futile, but for a while it will help you keep a lid on things.

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Galaxy concluded its first year of publication with this issue. Horace (H. L.) Gold notes some interesting stats in his opening remarks. He mentions that about 60 stories were selected from submissions of about 3,000. That’s a 2% acceptance rate, which is better than Duotrope reports for some professional magazines today.

Still, if you’re an author planning to travel back to 1951 to try your chances on getting into Galaxy, bear in mind that you’re up against some of the founders of science fiction. It’s you vs. Heinlein; you vs. Damon Knight. That might prove more difficult than inventing a time machine.

The Puppet Masters (Part 1 of 3) by Robert Heinlein — Slug-like aliens attach themselves to human hosts and take control of their minds. They begin an invasion by controlling key individuals, city by city, steadily working their way toward the President of the United States.

A government agency, led by the Old Man (as he’s called), works alongside two of his best agents, code-named Sam and Mary. The three of them try to capture a live specimen in order to learn more about the threat and to convince the president to quarantine vast areas of the country. But with so many controlled government leaders assuring the president that there is no danger, it seems impossible to defeat the puppet masters.

I’m familiar with this story from one of its movie adaptations. This story set a standard for parasite-controlling creatures. It’s a frightening concept, not too far from the notion of zombies; in both cases the individual is lost, reduced to involuntary responses.

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Around Christmas in 1985, I walked into The House of Speculative Fiction in Ottawa, Ontario, and after browsing the shelves for a while, selected a volume. The man behind the counter that Saturday was Rodger Turner, who years later would head up the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-nominated SF Site. But back then, Rodger was a humble bookseller — and a very good one.

I asked Rodger what he thought of my selection. He shrugged. “It won’t change your life,” he said. That was one of the marvelous things about Rodger: he always gave his honest opinion. And his taste was excellent.

“You know what will change your life?” he asked. And without another word, he handed me a copy of In Yana, The Touch of Undying. That was my first exposure to the magical worlds of Michael Shea, but it was by no means my last. Today, In Yana is considered a classic of darkly humorous fantasy; it is well worth seeking out.

Bramt Hex is a student of ancient lore until a chance meeting at an inn opens infinite pathways of possibility and, touched by destiny, Bramt abandons his ivory tower for the greater world, hoping to become a maker of legends in his own right.

But the world is a fearful place peopled by cunning nobles and wily wizards, demons and ogres, vampires and vengeful ghosts, sword-wielding warriors and flesh-craving giants. And soon, Bramt’s quest for fame and wealth becomes a battle for survival — and a desperate, magic-led search for a treasure far greater than gold… the secret of immortality which can only be found in the dangerous, illusive realm called Yana…

We lost Michael Shea last month, but the gifts he left us remain. In Yana was published by DAW Books in December 1985. It is 318 pages, priced at $3.50. The cover is by Terry Oakes. It has never been reprinted.

Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Panama Canal was first serialized in Liberty Magazine from November 16, 1940 to February 1, 1941. It was published in book form as The Island of Fu Manchu by Doubleday in the US and Cassell in the UK in 1941. The book serves as a direct follow-up to Rohmer’s 1939 bestseller, The Drums of Fu Manchu, and is again narrated by Fleet Street journalist, Bart Kerrigan.

The previous book in the series was published just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. Rohmer chose to portray characters such as Hitler and Mussolini under thinly disguised aliases. More critically, he chose to have these threats to world peace removed by the conclusion of the book as he naively believed a Second World War would be avoided at all costs. Over a year into the war, Rohmer had to address these issues for his readers. His excuse was a brilliant one. The prior narrative had been censored by the Home Office. Bart Kerrigan was forced to alter names and events. Hitler and Mussolini yet lived.

Interestingly, Rohmer chose to pick up the story some months after the last title and reflect changes in the lives of his characters. The Si-Fan has fallen under an unnamed pro-Fascist president who counts Fu Manchu’s duplicitous daughter among his closest allies. The Devil Doctor himself has fallen from grace within the Si-Fan, as he opposes fascism at all costs. This rift threatens to tear the secret society apart as much as the war was doing the same to governments around the world.

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ERB is probably best known to people who enjoy Fantasy and SF as the creator of the John Carter of Mars series, the Carson of Venus books, and the Pellucidar world-in-the-centre-of-the-earth stories. Then, of course, there’s Tarzan, probably second only to Dumas’s Three Musketeers as a source of movies, TV shows, and comics.

Following up on my recent sword-fighting posts, I’d like to talk about two ERB novels that are much less well-known than the ones I refer to above, and yet which have the same spirit of adventure and, for me almost more important, the same emphasis on sword play.

Both The Outlaw of Torn (1914) and The Mad King (1915) are what used to be called “romantic adventures.” This wasn’t because there was a love interest (though everyone familiar with ERB’s work knows there was), but because of the extraordinary demands placed on the hero, usually for extreme action, courage, fortitude, and sacrifice.

The Indiana Jones films are probably the closest deliberate modern equivalent to this genre, and while it’s hard for us to think of Iron Man, or Spiderman, as romantic adventurers, in the way the term was understood back then, that’s exactly what they would be.

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You want to know my three favorite things? (It’s a rhetorical question; you don’t actually have to email an answer. Seriously, don’t.) Dabir, Asim, and Kaiju. Sometimes Kaiju is #2, ’cause Asim is occasionally kind of a lunkhead.

So how awesome would it be to have Howard Andrew Jones’s Arabian adventurers Dabir and Asim in the same volume as some of the most diabolical Kaiju of the decade? (Again, rhetorical question. Stop e-mailing me stuff.) For the record, if would be thoroughly awesome.

Well, I think you can tell where this is going. Kaiju Rising, the Kickstarter-funded anthology we pulled the lid back on last September, has finally landed — and left a Godzilla-sized footprint on the industry. The Kickstarter campaign was a rousing success, raising $18,562 against a $10,0000 goal, and one of the unlocked stretch goals was a new Dabir and Asim story from the distinguished Mr. Jones. Here’s what Howard had to say about his contribution:

Monsters turn up a lot in my fiction, and Kaiju style critters wandered across the stage in the first two Dabir and Asim novels. In true Ray Harryhausen fashion, The Bones of the Old Ones features a titanic battle between a Roc (the giant predatory bird of Arabian Nights fame) and a huge spirit wolf fashioned of snow and ice.

Given my interests, I naturally jumped at the chance to create a story for Kaiju Rising. In one or two of the Dabir and Asim stories I’ve referenced a deadly encounter the boys had on the ocean, and now I’m finally setting the tale down.

Howard’s story is “The Serpent’s Heart,” and it appears alongside 22 other stories focused on the theme of gargantuan creatures in the vein of Pacific Rim, Godzilla, and Cloverfield. The authors include Larry Correia, James Lovegrove, Gini Koch (as J.C. Koch), James Maxey, C.L. Werner, Joshua Reynolds, Jaym Gates, Shane Berryhill, Natania Barron, Paul Genesse & Patrick Tracy, and many others. Howard’s tale isn’t the only one to draw on existing characters; Edward M. Erdelac’s story is set in the world of the Dead West and James Swallow contributes a Colossal Kaiju Combat tie-in.

Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters was published February 9, 2014 by Ragnarok Publications. It is a massive 493 pages, priced at $4.99 for the digital version. The print version is forthcoming; its price has not yet been announced.

…began as a tool for creating Mystara-style maps and cheerfully emulates the World of Greyhawk feel.

I dare say that we Black Gate types love maps and charts of imaginary lands.

As kids, we pored over the maps in CS Lewis’s Narnia books or Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Most of us have had posters of Middle Earth or the Hyperborian Age on our walls and almost all of us have scratched out maps of imaginary places, either for the joy of it or as a DM/GM or Fantasy writer.

It’s great fun to draw a map using pencil and paper. However, there are practical limitations. It’s hard to make changes neatly, difficult to produce different versions of the same map, a fiddle to create small scale local maps, and ultimately a chore to curate all the bits of paper.

For most of us, digital is our friend, which is why I am reviewing Hexographer, a relatively inexpensive Fantasy map making tool.

Hexographer very much has its roots in old-school roleplaying.

It began as a tool for creating Mystara-style maps and cheerfully emulates the World of Greyhawk feel. However, with a range of symbol sets to choose from, it’s grown into a flexible Fantasy cartography tool. What makes it distinct is that it explicitly treats maps as collections of hexagons (though you can place items freehand as well), which makes it almost perfect for writers and gamers.

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Regarding the actual item you get to put on your mantel; as awards go, forget the Oscar statue and give me a Stoker any day. You have to admit – it’s pretty darn cool.

The Horror Writers Association (HWA), who have been honoring the premiere writers in horror and dark fiction since 1987, announced their nominees for the 2013 Bram Stoker Awards last week.

So if you don’t have time to sit cross-legged in the horror section of your fast-dwindling local bookseller to get a bead on the best new writers in this genre, then the annual Stoker nominees announcement could be a shortcut to creating your reading list for the next twelve months — if you’re so inclined.

And I am.

So without further pontificating, here are the 2013 Stoker Award nominees.

Superior Achievement in a Novel

NOS4A2, Joe Hill (Morrow)
Doctor Sleep, Stephen King (Scribner)
Malediction, Lisa Morton (Evil Jester)
A Necessary End, Sarah Pinborough & F. Paul Wilson (Thunderstorm)
The Heavens Rise, Christopher Rice (Gallery)

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We tend to focus on fantasy here at Black Gate. Nothing against science fiction, but there are plenty of other sites that cover that ground pretty well.

Of course, the line between SF and fantasy gets blurred pretty quickly. Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light is technically SF, for example, but we include it here because it’s pure-bred fantasy adventure with a science fiction reveal late in the text. Plus, it’s awesome. Most folks consider Star Wars SF, but we know it’s fantasy because it has light sabers, rancors, and a babe like Natalie Portman marrying a whiney kid ten years younger than she is. Admit it, that’s a big fat fantasy.

Which leads me to what I like to call the O’Neill Fantasy Inclusion Principle: if it’s set in the far future, there’s adventure and stuff, maybe alien monsters (especially monsters), it’s exciting like a fantasy novel, maybe there’s swords (or any cool weapons, really) and a spiffy alien planet or space station, Black Gate readers would like to know about it, and it’s past deadline and you don’t have any decent fantasy novels handy, or it has a cool cover, or if Ian McKellen, Johnny Depp, Jennifer Lawrence, Vin Diesel or Benedict Cumberbatch could conceivably be cast in the film version, then it’s practically fantasy. Q.E.D. Write that baby up.

In that spirit, I’d like to direct your attention to Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci, which has a gorgeous cover, a plucky heroine, a remote space station, and mysterious aliens. Frankly, I was sold the moment I saw the cover, but the space station is a definite plus.

On their way to start a new life, Tula and her family travel on the Prairie Rose, a colony ship headed to a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy. All is going well until the ship makes a stop at a remote space station, the Yertina Feray, and the colonist’s leader, Brother Blue, beats Tula within an inch of her life. An alien, Heckleck, saves her and teaches her the ways of life on the space station.

When three humans crash land onto the station, Tula’s desire for escape becomes irresistible, and her desire for companionship becomes unavoidable. But just as Tula begins to concoct a plan to get off the space station and kill Brother Blue, everything goes awry, and suddenly romance is the farthest thing from her mind.

Tin Star was published February 25, 2014 by Roaring Brook Press. It is 234 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version. See all of our recent New Treasures here.

I’ve been very intrigued by the novels of Tim Lebbon, especially in the last few years as he’s turned to more overt dark fantasies. Echo City was an ambitious post-apocalyptic fantasy set in a sprawling, ruined city, and his Noreela novels (Dusk, Fallen, The Island) are epic adventures set in a land of magic and terror.

His latest, hitting the shelves next month, is a zombie novel with echoes of Stephen King’s The Mist and Valve’s classic Half-Life. A secret government lab hidden in the Appalachian Mountains achieves an incredible breakthrough to another dimension… and you know what that means. Grab the flamethrower, Ethel. It’s the end of the world again.

The facility lay deep in the Appalachian Mountains, a secret laboratory called Coldbrook. Its scientists had achieved the impossible: a gateway to a new world. Theirs was to be the greatest discovery in the history of mankind, but they had no idea what they were unleashing.

With their breakthrough comes disease and now it is out and ravaging the human population. The only hope is a cure and the only cure is genetic resistance: an uninfected person amongst the billions dead. In the chaos of destruction there is only one person that can save the human race. But will they find her in time?

Tim Lebbon won the Bram Stoker Award in 2001, for his short story “Reconstructing Amy,” and Dusk won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award for best novel of the year in 2007. He had a bestseller in 2007 for his novelization of 30 Days of Night. Coldbrook has already received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and looks like it could be a breakout book for him.

Coldbrook will be published by Titan Books on April 8. It is 512 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version.