Over the last few months Matthew Wuertz and Rich Horton have been tag-teaming a series of Retro Reviews here at Black Gate, looking at science fiction digests from the 1950s and 60s — especially H.L. Gold’s Galaxy, which Matthew has been covering issue by issue since the very first, cover-dated October 1950.

Meanwhile, Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews has done his own retrospective, “Changing the Playing Field: H.L. Gold & Galaxy Science Fiction,” a detailed and affectionate look at Gold and the superb magazine he created:

Galaxy appeared in October 1950 as a monthly publication. It paid far better than its competitors, and Gold proved to be a far better editor than his counterpart at Astounding… With Gold at the helm, Galaxy Science Fiction began to change the tone of the genre. Astounding had taken advantage of the scientific rush that followed the development of the atomic bomb, and the resulting doomsday stories that followed. Gold went in another direction, explaining in an editorial that “The shape humanity is in is cause for worry, I believe, but not the kind of paralyzing terror that clutches science fiction writers in particular… Look, fellers, the end isn’t here yet.”

Strong, socially aware and satirical fiction became the mainstay with Galaxy, and 1951 proved to be an excellent year for the publication: “The Fireman,” by Ray Bradbury, appeared in the February issue, set in a dystopian world where literature was burned by government agents, and was later expanded into his landmark novel Fahrenheit 451. April brought Cyril Kornsbluth’s story “The Marching Morons,” and September saw Gold bring Robert Heinlein away from Astounding with his three-part story The Puppet Masters…

Around the same time, Gold began calling Alfred Bester, asking for some work, eventually wearing him down to the point where Bester came up with a series of ideas that became his first novel, The Demolished Man. The first installment started in January 1952, and continued through March. The novel was an immediate hit, and in 1953, it earned the first ever Hugo Award for Best Novel. October of 1953 brought a new Isaac Asimov novel, Caves of Steel, bringing the author’s robot stories from the logic puzzles of Astounding into the more socially oriented world of Galaxy.

This is a companion piece to Andrew’s February article on John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction (which we covered here.) Read the complete article here, and Matthew Wuertz’s review of “The Fireman” and the complete February 1951 issue here. [Thanks to John DeNardo at SF Signal for the tip.]

Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign

I’m a big fan of rule systems. Throughout my experience in role playing, both as a player and a gamemaster, I’ve loved building interesting characters, worlds, and storylines on my own, rarely relying on established modules and setting manuals. But to me the rules are a guide for the game and I try to follow them fairly closely, using them to inspire new ideas on where to go. In a way, it’s the limitations of rule systems that provide the boundaries for the story to evolve off of.

For years running MUSHes, I grew frustrated with characters who would assume knowledge that had no basis in the statistics their characters had. Most of this time was spent on games based on White Wolf’s Storyteller system, in which I mainly focused on Mage: The Ascension, so had to deal with a disturbing number of Mages who assumed that, just by virtue of being a Mage, they knew all about the other supernatural races, like details about the various Vampire: The Masquerade clans. Not without the right Lore rating, buddy!

These days, I’ve returned to fantasy adventure gaming, running a Pathfinder campaign. Still, though, I like using the rules and statistics as my guide. If a character doesn’t have any ranks in Swim, then I roleplay him as if he’s never learned how to swim … and maybe he’s just a little scared of the water because of it. No ranks in Knowledge(nature), then he doesn’t know what poison ivy looks like and mistakes large dogs for wolves.

In fact, I go out of my way to buy ranks that I don’t feel will be particularly useful just because I feel the character needs to have them. A ranger who doesn’t have any ranks in Craft(bows), and is thus unable to craft new arrows while away from town, makes absolutely no sense to me. Even if I have every intention of buying my arrows with adventure loot, I spend the skill points to have a couple of ranks of Craft(bows), because it’s something the character would know!

This is my thinking on the character level, but rarely have I adopted many campaign-level rule systems, letting the overall campaign evolve a bit more freely. In part, this is just because I’ve never seen campaign-level systems that seemed flexible enough to do what I wanted, yet still provided useful guidance for characters. That is until I got my copy of Pathfinder‘s new Ultimate Campaign (Paizo, Amazon) supplement, which instantly got implemented into my current campaign and has enriched the options in just a single game session. Now if my players say, “I want to own a tavern” or “I want to build a kingdom,” I can tell them exactly what it will take, instead of just making something up.

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Jill Archer’s first Noon Onyx novel, Dark Light of Day, served up a truly post-apocalyptic setting. And I don’t mean global warming or an inconvenient economic collapse. Armageddon is over, the demons won, and the few surviving humans worship patron demons just to survive. Sorta makes Mad Max look more like Mad Men, just with cooler fashions.

The second book in the series, Fiery Edge of Steel, has now arrived and it looks even more intriguing. It tosses an unusual mystery, a remote outpost, and an ancient and evil foe into the mix.

Lucifer and his army triumphed at Armageddon, leaving humans and demons living in uncertain peace based on sacrifice and strict laws. It is up to those with mixed demon and human blood, the Host, to prevent society from falling into anarchy.

Noon Onyx is the first female Host in memory to wield the destructive waning magic that is used to maintain order among the demons. Her unique abilities, along with a lack of control and a reluctance to kill, have branded her as an outsider among her peers. Only her powerful lover, Ari Carmine, and a roguish and mysterious Angel, Rafe Sinclair, support her unconventional ways.

When Noon is shipped off to a remote outpost to investigate several unusual disappearances, a task that will most likely involve trying and killing the patron demon of that area, it seems Luck is not on her side. But when the outpost settlers claim that an ancient and evil foe has stepped out of legend to commit the crimes, Noon realizes that she could be facing something much worse than she ever imagined…

Fiery Edge of Steel was published by Ace Books on May 28. It is 330 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

I’m not going to stand on a soapbox here and tell you my views on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, that released this past Christmas; but having seen it, I was prompted to once again take out my old Middle-Earth Role-Playing books and relive what I believe to be the prettiest RPG ever created.

Now I’m not saying that New Zealand isn’t gorgeous, but there is a big part of me that believes literature should stay more firmly based in fantasy, thus real actors and real sets somehow diminish the very nature of the words and images that helped define them in the first place.

In the case of The Hobbit, computers, no matter how sophisticated, couldn’t rekindle the joy I feel from the images I’ve seen painted and drawn concerning Tolkien’s world throughout my youth.

And speaking of youth, I’m constantly reminded that I’m from a quickly aging generation that now seems incredibly antiquated in the world. Technology is moving so fast, it sometimes makes my head spin to think that I grew up without cable television, cell phones, computers, the Internet, microwave ovens, and a plethora of other standard issue American items in today’s world.

I’d like to say that color was something that was always present in my favorite pastime, gaming, but again that would be fooling myself. It wasn’t really until the turn of the millennia that interior color pages were standard issue in gaming. I well remember, back in the late 1980s, how revolutionary FASA was for bringing out color interior images for games like Battletech and Shadowrun, the latter of which actually used glossy pages now found standard on all gaming material.

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When I was a kid in the late 60s/early 70s, I was fascinated by the fantastic. It didn’t matter what it was: films, comics, television, or books. Although, until I learned to read, my exposure to the genre — and especially horror — was through purely visual media such as comics and whatever was on TV.

Luckily my earliest talent, which later turned out to be pretty much my only one, was that I took to reading like a cultist takes to, well, cults! This opened up a whole new world for me, as our elementary school had a well stocked library.

And it didn’t take long to catch on that the best books didn’t have any pictures in them. Sure, they had great covers, but inside there was nothing but words! Lots and lots of wonderful words that helped me fill my mind with images that no film or comic could match.

Another important thing that I learned was that adults didn’t care what you read as long as it was a genuine book. Comics brought only disdain and suspicion.

Especially those wonderfully gory black and white comics published by Warren, Skywald, and Eerie Publications, those you had to hide from the adults. My dad always called those comics “Doug’s damned weirdo books.”

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It’s been far too long since I’ve game mastered a Lovecraftian horror RPG. I miss the high-stakes drama, the desperate battles, the sheer cosmic scale and invention of Lovecraft’s horrors. Most of all, I miss the shell-shocked expressions on my players faces, the cries of “Dear God! Why would you do that to us? Why — why??” Good times, good times.

My favorite recent Lovecraftian horror RPG is Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu, from the marvelous Pelgrane Press. They’ve been supporting it with a series of terrific PDF releases, including The Repairer of Reputations a massive 44-page adventure based on the classic story of the same name by Robert W. Chambers, in which the alien beings described in the play are as real as the players believe them to be. And the 40-page Hell Fire, set in the seedy underclass of 18th century London, where a horrifying plague is ravaging the city, its victims in the grip of a sinister entity bent on engulfing the world in disease and death.

Now Pelgrane Press has assembled both of those adventures, and three more — Flying Coffins, set in Winter 1918 above the skies of France, as players take the role of members of the Royal Flying Corps stationed near the Front, confronting rumors that the next big push is about to begin… and that recent Germany victories in the air are due to supernatural assistance; Many Fires, in which the Investigators take on Pancho Villa’s bandit army in the mountains of northern Mexico, as well as something ancient and obscene that lies smoldering among ruins older than the Aztecs; and finally The Millionaire’s Special, which invites the players to travel first class on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, where they are invited to a private viewing of one of the world’s great curiosities, a cursed Egyptian mummy.

The adventures in Out of Space were created by Gumshoe designer Robin D. Laws, Adam Gauntlett, and Jason Morningstar. It also features extensive player handouts, pre-generated characters and exclusive new essays from the authors. It follows the Trail of Cthulhu collection Out of Time, which collected four earlier adventures. We last covered Pelgrane Press with their ENnie Award-winning Ashen Stars, their epic fantasy release 13th Age, and one of my favorite RPGs, The Dying Earth.

Out of Space was published by Pelgrane Press in January, 2013. It is 182 pages, printed on glossy paper with black and white illustrations. It is priced at $24.95. Cover art by Phil Reeves. Read more at the Pelgrane Press website.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

As I embark on a close reading of the complete 50-issue run of ARAK, Son of Thunder, I believe an introductory post is justified, wherein I try to rationalize why I would want to do such a thing. Why Arak? Why now? Why me? (And, for some of you: Who the heck is Arak?)

First, a series of snapshots. These will get at the “Why me?” part, I think:

* I am lying in a hammock outside my grandparents’ cabin, nestled in the ponderosa pine forest on the Mogollon Rim of Arizona…White clouds skim across a blue sky, so close you can almost reach up and touch them… The smell in my nose is pine mixed with the crisp scent of newsprint, courtesy of a Marvel Comics Star Wars and a DC House of Mysteries.

** I am curled up on the top bunk of my bunk bed (bunk beds rocked! — they were like having a tree-house/fort in your own bedroom), home sick from school. My dad (Happy Father’s Day, Dad!) walks in bringing the latest bounty from the mailbox: the new G.I. Joe comic. I eagerly rip off the plastic bag, anxious with bated breath to find out if Snake Eyes escaped the exploding bunker at the end of last month’s issue.

*** I am pedaling my bicycle down to the local gas station, eager to check the revolving display stand to see if the new installment of ROM or Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew has hit the stand (and, damn, I was in good shape back then, pedaling hither and yon. It was all downhill once I got my driver’s license).

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Black Gate is very proud to present Part Three of Martha Wells’s Nebula Award-nominated novel, The Death of the Necromancer, presented complete online for the first time. Here’s a quote from Donna McMahon’s SF Site review:

It’s relatively easy to convey the plot of Necromancer, but far more difficult to describe the extraordinary texture of its setting. The city of Vienne has an Italian Renaissance flavour, plus nineteenth century technology, hints of Victorian England, and even whiffs of A Tale of Two Cities and The Tempest. From this seemingly improbable mix of historical and fantasy elements, Martha Wells creates a stunningly vivid society…

Wells’ characters are equally compelling: among them Nicholas, who is a gentle man with a dark streak of rage; Madeline, the ambitious actress who lives with him; Reynard, the disgraced but proud army officer; and Crack, the tough, terse henchman. And there are many more, none of them forgettable.

Still, Necromancer’s most impressive feature may be its complex, twisting plot and swift pacing, which kept me glued to the pages… this is a terrific novel. Wells is in a league with top writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and Barbara Hambly.

Martha Wells is the author of fourteen fantasy novels, including City of Bones, The Element of Fire, The Cloud Roads, and The Serpent Sea. Her most recent novel is the YA fantasy, Emilie and the Hollow World, published by Strange Chemistry Books in April. Her previous fiction for us includes “Reflections” in Black Gate 10, “Holy Places” (BG 11), and “Houses of the Dead“ (BG 12). Her most recent article for us was “How Well Does The Cloud Roads Fit as Sword and Sorcery?,” which appeared here March 13. Her web site is www.marthawells.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mary Catelli, Michael Penkas, Vera Nazarian, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

The Death of the Necromancer was originally published in hardcover by Avon EOS in 1998. The complete, unedited text will be presented here over the next three weeks; it began on June 2 with the first four chapters here.

Part Three includes Chapters Nine through Thirteen. It is offered at no cost.

Read Part Three of the complete novel here.

I recently stumbled across a copy of a gaming magazine I’d never encountered before: The Last Province, a bi-monthly British publication that apparently lasted five issues, from October 1992 to September 1993.

This doesn’t happen very often, so it was definitely worth investigating. And I’m glad I did, as it turned out to be a delight.

I think the cover — a Martin Lennon character study of three very different adventuring fellows striding confidently across a green and pleasant land — effectively communicates both the content and editorial attitude. If the art doesn’t do it, the tag words “Independent British Roleplaying” at the top should give you the idea.

Paz Newis’s page 4 editorial is a perfect mix of defensiveness towards gaming stereotypes, and contempt for what others consider ‘normal.’ Pretty much exactly how I remember gamers talking in the 90s.

To my mind ours is one pastime with a wealth to offer its participants. It is to those of you who wish to take roleplaying out of the ‘spotty adolescents’ stereotype that this magazine is aimed.

Recently… I thought it would be a good idea to sit in front of the television. I was appalled! It really was brain numbing. All of my higher brain functions seized up. If this is what the majority of ‘normal people’ spend their time doing I have no desire to be normal.

The news section is jammed with headlines on the big events of the day — including Steve Jackson’s quarter-million dollar judgment against the US Secret Service for seizing their computer equipment during an investigation of GURPS Cyberpunk, the report that a young employee at a Glasgow branch of a well known game store chain was apparently fired for being female, and the release of a major new RPG from FASA with the strange title Earthdawn.

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Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were perhaps the most important and successful comic team of the 1940s and 50s. Together they created Captain America (among many other popular creations) and produced an incredible body of work spanning numerous genres. Joe Simon was the first editor of Marvel Comics and the legendary Jack Kirby later partnered with Stan Lee to create some of the most enduring characters of the 20th Century, including Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, The Silver Surfer, Daredevil, Thor, the X-Men, and countless others.

The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction is packed with dozens of stories, many of them photographed from the original artwork. This is essential pulp science fiction, with tales of brave spacemen, intrepid jungle explorers encountering lost civilizations, living shadows, crash landings on bizarre alien worlds, sinister robots, giant monsters battling desperate armies, beautiful barbarian princesses, impossible inventions, and much more.

The Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction spans more than 20 years, beginning with the first stories Joe Simon and Jack Kirby ever produced together (beginning in June 1940) — their ten-issue run of Blue Bolt adventures. Then the Cold War years will be represented by Race For the Moon, featuring pencils by Kirby and inked artwork by comic book legends Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres, and Al Williamson.

Other rarities from both decades are included, and as a bonus for readers, the volume features stories illustrated by Crandall, Torres, and Williamson — without Kirby.

The book also includes an introduction by Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons. This is the fourth volume in The Simon & Kirby Library, following Superheroes, Crime and the best-selling Horror.

The book is in full-color throughout, and most of the art has been restored and vibrantly re-colored by Harry Mendryk. My only complaint about this volume is that only a handful of covers are included, in a sparse 3-page cover gallery in the back.

The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction was published by Titan Books on June 4. It is 352 pages in hardcover, priced at $49.95. There is no digital edition.