Night Shade Books, one of the leading small press publishers, is having a 50% off sale. That’s 50% off every book in their catalog, including all existing stock and forthcoming titles.

However the sale only lasts until next Thursday, April 26th, so act fast.

Night Shade publishes some of the most acclaimed authors in the business, including Martha Wells, Manly Wade Wellman, Greg Egan, Glen Cook, David Drake, Paolo Bacigalupi, Kage Baker, Jay Lake, Iain M. Banks, Elizabeth Bear, Charles Saunders, Lucius Shepard, and many more.

Night Shade has also earned a fine reputation for discovering and promoting many of the hottest rising stars in SF and fantasy. Just in the last few years they’ve published Rob Ziegler’s Seed, Cat Valente’s The Habitation of the Blessed, Bradley P. Beaulieu’s The Winds of Khalakovo, J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another, Kameron Hurley God’s War, Jon Armstrong’s Philip K. Dick Award nominee Yarn, and the Hugo Award-winning The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, just to name a few.

Looking for recommendations? Here at Black Gate we’ve recently discussed several excellent Night Shade titles, including:

• Jonathan Strahan’s The Best SF and Fantasy of the Year Vol. 6
• Bradley P. Beaulieu’s The Straits of Galahesh
• Martha Wells’ The Serpent Sea
• Nathan Long’s Jane Carver of Waar
• Manly Wade Wellman’s The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations and Fearful Rock; and
• J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another

as well as one or two I’m doubtlessly forgetting.

I also highly recommend all four volumes of Jonathan Strahan Eclipse series, perhaps the best original anthology line currently on the market, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s nifty pirate anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails, and Charles Saunders’ legendary sword & sorcery novel Imaro.

To get 50% off you need to purchase at least four titles — which won’t be a problem, considering the rich selection you have to choose from.  Get all the details on the sale here, and start shopping their catalog here.

The Middle East has produced some world famous mythology and is fertile ground to base a fantasy novel, as more and more authors are discovering. Over the next several posts I will be exploring this modern day trend and interviewing many of the authors who are mining the lore and culture of the Middle East, and specifically the Arabian Middle East for their work.

My first interviewee is Howard Andrew Jones who sets his novel, The Desert of Souls, in the 8th Century, when the Abbasid caliphate was a center of trade, culture, and learning. In the following interview, I’ve asked Howard what drew him to this particular cultural milieu and how he went about doing the research necessary to create characters and compose their adventures.

Read More »

Amazon.com has announced that J.K. Rowling’s next novel, The Casual Vacancy, will be available September 27.

From the description it’s not immediately clear if the book has an fantastic elements at all, and in fact it may be a straight-up literary thriller:

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town’s council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations? Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.

The Casual Vacancy will be published in hardcover for $35 by Little, Brown and Company on September 27, 2012. No details on page length are available, and the publisher has not yet released the cover art.

Complete details on Amazon.com here.

Last week, beloved editor and big cheese John O’Neill told you about the 2011 Bram Stoker Award winners which included what I consider a travesty of justice perpetuated on the vampire-genre-loving community by the Horror Writers Association (HWA).

In January the HWA, an international association of writers, publishing professionals, and supporters of horror literature, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, announced the nominees for the one-time-only, Bram Stoker Vampire Novel of the Century Award.  The Award was to mark the centenary of the death in 1912 of Abraham (Bram) Stoker, the author of Dracula.

A jury composed of writers and scholars selected, from a field of more than 35 preliminary nominees, the six vampire novels that they believe had the greatest impact on the horror genre since publication of Dracula in 1897.

Eligible works must have been first published between 1912 and 2011, and published in or translated into English.

Beyond this, the criteria for consideration seem a tad vague, but from the descriptions of the six finalists described by the HWA, here are the other points considered.

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Rich Horton has been a Contributing Editor for Black Gate since…. you know, I’m not even sure I remember. When we were in Kindergarten, maybe.  Or possibly since that drunken weekend when we assembled Goth Chick in our old laboratory. Good times, good times.

There was a day when I thought Rich and I would conquer science fiction together. We were two freelance journalists telling it like it is. When Tor started printing books with ink made in Singapore sweat shops, we blew the lid off the whole thing. Sleep didn’t matter, friendships didn’t matter. Only the truth mattered. And hot babes. Babes were on us like… like… well, not really. But anyway, we were unstoppable. The world was ours for the taking. At least, that part of the world that didn’t include women.

Then Rich met Sean Wallace, and Sean offered him something I never could: an actual wage. Rich dropped me like a hot potato for a career as one of the hottest anthologists in the field, and never looked back. Last time I saw him he was driving a Lamborghini Diablo and talking to J.K. Rowling on his cell.

I confronted Sean on the front steps of the Prime Books skyscraper in ‘06. I was in a snarling rage, and threatened his life. He punched me in the nose and made me cry.  Then he bought me a hot chocolate and a bus ticket back to Chicago, and that was that.

That was nearly a dozen acclaimed anthologies ago, including three volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, my favorite of the annual survey anthologies. Now Rich and Sean have teamed up for War and Space: Recent Combat, a reprint anthology collecting some of the best tales of space warfare from the last few decades, including “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359” by Ken MacLeod, “Art of War” by Nancy Kress, and “The Political Officer” by Charles Coleman Finlay. This isn’t your typical military SF collection however, as Sean makes clear in a question to a reader in the comments section of his blog:

Will you still like it even if it’s not, well, in the vein of Baen military sf? I have to admit that we went a bit broader with this, and while we love it a lot, I just hope people aren’t expecting something a bit more militaristic?

Coming from a guy with a mean right hook, that sounds great to me.  War and Space will be released on May 2 by Prime Books. It is $15.95 for 384 pages in trade paperback.

The nominations for the 2012 Hugo Awards have been announced by Chicon 7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention. Chicon 7 will be held over Labor Day weekend right here in Chicago. The nominations are:

Best Novel

• Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)
• A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra)
• Deadline by Mira Grant (Orbit)
• Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan / Del Rey)
• Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (Orbit)

Best Novella

• Countdown by Mira Grant (Orbit Short Fiction)
• “The Ice Owl” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2011)
• “Kiss Me Twice” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, June 2011)
• “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, September/October 2011)
• “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” by Ken Liu (Panverse 3)
• Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld / WSFA)

Complete list after the jump.

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John R. Fultz’s second novel Seven Kings, the sequel to his breakout fantasy epic Seven Princes, will be available January, 2013.

Seven Kings, the second volume in The Books of the Shaper, will be published by Orbit in trade paperback. The cover is by Richard Anderson.

On his blog Fultz’s spills some additional details on the new installment:

I finished the final revisions about a month ago. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but you will see much more of Khyrei and its poisonous crimson jungles than in the first book.

Plus: More Giants…

Barnes & Noble’s inhouse magazine Explorations called Seven Princes “flawless – and timeless – epic fantasy… Seven Princes is as good as it gets.” Here on the blog Brian Murphy said:

Seven Princes is bold, brash, and big. This is a novel written with bright strokes of character and setting, bursting with world-shaking adventure, intrigue, and conflict. It reads big, and feels big, and it’s unrepentantly so.

Stay tuned — we’ll keep you posted on the latest Books of the Shaper news as word escapes from the haunted towers of Castle Fultz.

This week the Horror Writers Association announced the winners of the 2011 Bram Stoker Awards at its annual banquet at the World Horror Convention. This year it was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it marked the 25th Anniversary of the awards. A total of 12 awards were given in 11 categories, including one tie:

Superior Achievement in a NOVEL
Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney (Pinnacle Books)

Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL
Isis Unbound by Allyson Bird (Dark Regions Press)

Superior Achievement in a YOUNG ADULT NOVEL (tie)
> The Screaming Season by Nancy Holder (Razorbill)
> Dust and Decay by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

Superior Achievement in a GRAPHIC NOVEL
Neonomicon by Alan Moore (Avatar Press)

Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION
“The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” by Peter Straub (Conjunctions: 56)

Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION
“Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” by Stephen King (The Atlantic Magazine, May 2011)

Superior Achievement in a SCREENPLAY
American Horror Story, episode #12: “Afterbirth” by Jessica Sharzer (20th Century Fox Television)

Superior Achievement in a FICTION COLLECTION
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious Press)

Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY
Demons: Encounters with the Devil and his Minions, Fallen Angels and the Possessed edited by John Skipp (Black Dog and Leventhal)

Superior Achievement in NON-FICTION
Stephen King: A Literary Companion by Rocky Wood (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers)

Superior Achievement in a POETRY COLLECTION
How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend by Linda Addison (Necon Ebooks)

The HWA, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, also presented the special one-time only Vampire Novel of the Century Award to:

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Read complete details about this year’s awards at the Horror Writers Association website.

Years ago, before I started Black Gate magazine, I worked with David Kenzer in the Commerce Drive offices of Motorola here in Chicago. Dave is the founder of Kenzer & Company, publishers of the award-winning Hackmaster role playing game and the brilliant Knights of the Dinner Table comic.

KenzerCo was the first investor in Black Gate, and without Dave’s early advice and guidance I never could have gotten off the ground. But perhaps the most important contribution he made to our success was his offer to include an original Knights of the Dinner Table strip in every issue. It was an incredible gesture of faith in my fledgling enterprise, and it helped bring my new magazine to the attention of thousands of gaming fans. Brian Jelke at KenzerCo wrote a proposal for a strip centered around a coffee shop, Steve Johansson signed on to do the art, and The Java Joint was born. It has appeared in virtually every issue of Black Gate, and in July of last year KenzerCo packaged up all the stories — together with a brand new 8-page strip — in Knights of the Dinner Table: The Java Joint Strips, published in print and PDF format.

I’ve written about my days with Dave at Commerce Drive, the multi-million dollar software deals and creative projects we did together, a few times now, including in  ”How To Succeed in Business,” my editorial for Black Gate 11, and in my portion of the Tribute to Gary Gygax here on the blog in 2008. In my introduction to this new collection I tell the full story of our adventures together for the first time. Concerning the comic, James Lynch at The Armchair Critic had this to say in his review:

Knights of the Dinner Table is primarily a bunch of buddies sitting at a table and playing games — but what happens when several of them sit around a table and talk about books? This is the premise and setting of Java Joint… Most strips have the trio sitting around and discussing (or trying to discuss) a fantasy book; there are a few exceptions, as when Eddie enters into extended dealings with a Nigerian internet scam, or when he confronts Neil Gaiman about stealing all the ideas Eddie wrote in a notebook in seventh grade that got lost at “Sister Eileen’s Discount Summer Camp for Laconic Youth.”

As with the Knights of the Dinner Table comic, this is about the dialogue… this is often very funny. Most of the humor comes from Eddie who, like Cartman on South Park, is a character you seldom agree with but usually laugh at. He has a resistance to anything out of the ordinary (”So what you’re saying is… reading books I don’t like will get me women?”), loves a Danielle Steel novel after imagining the main character as a vampire, and bemoans the supernatural in romance novels. (”Publishing today is all about getting hot and heavy with the unholy.”)…

The Java Joint has plenty of laughs — and a surprisingly touching final story. This is an enjoyable little comic book collection that’s a nice read for anyone who likes discussing books — even with that one person who always manages to go off in a bizarre direction.

Knights of the Dinner Table: The Java Joint Strips is 64 pages in comic format. The print version is nearly sold out, but you can buy the PDF for $9.99 directly from Kenzer & Company.

While I was at the games auction at Gary Con on Sunday, Luke Gygax solemnly paid tribute to those industry giants we lost in the last year, including Jim Roslof and Jean Wells, both early and influential TSR employees.

But I was startled when Luke added that M.A.R. Barker, the grand old man of role playing, had died last week at the age of 82.

M.A.R (Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman) Barker is not particularly well remembered today. He wasn’t especially prolific as an author, with five novels to his credit — the last three published by obscure small press publishers. But everyone who paid attention to TSR in the heady early days of role playing knew M.A.R. Barker, the creator of Empire of the Petal Throne and the fantasy world of Tékumel.

Barker created Tékumel in the decades from 1940 to 1970. Wholly unique, Tékumel was a science fantasy setting inspired by Indian, Middle Eastern, Egyptian and Meso-American mythology, a world colonized by humans and alien species some 60,000 years in the future. Perhaps most intriguing, Tékumel was largely free of Tolkien’s influence as it was well established long before the publication of The Lords of the Rings — the only major RPG setting of the 20th Century that could make that claim.

In the early 1970s Barker met one of the original Dungeons & Dragons playtesters, Mike Mornard, and was introduced to the game. It didn’t take long to realize the potential of the D&D ruleset, and he quickly adapted it for his own use and self-published Empire of the Petal Throne in 1974. One of his occasional players was D&D co-creator Dave Arneson, who called Barker his favorite Game Master — and EPT his favorite RPG.

TSR published a revised version of Empire of the Petal Throne in 1975, bringing it to the attention of tens of thousands of young role players eager for anything new. Barker was a professor of Urdu studies, which instantly made him cool (even if we weren’t exactly sure where Urdu was).

But with its baroque and dense setting and unfamiliar trappings, EPT largely mystified its early audience, and the game went nowhere. Far more copies were purchased than played, and just about every copy I’ve ever seen of this rare game is in mint, unplayed condition.

The game — and especially its setting — struck a chord with older, more sophisticated gamers however, and over the decades no less than four major role playing releases used Tékumel as a setting, including a later reprint of Empire of the Petal Throne (Different Worlds Publications, 1987), Swords & Glory (Gamescience, 1983/84), Gardasiyal: Adventures in Tekumel (Theater of the Mind Enterprises, 1994), and Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne (Guardians of Order, 2005). All of them are interesting, but Gardasiyal and its supplements — including a lavish collection of sophisticated solitaire adventures — are excellent, and highly prized collectibles today.

Barker’s first two novels, Man of Gold (1984) and Flamesong (1985), were published in paperback by DAW, and are still read and collected today. By the mere act of disassociating RPGs from the worlds of Tolkien and the sword-and-sorcery legacy of Robert E. Howard, Barker demonstrated the rich potential of role playing to an entire generation of gamers. He was an enormously creative man, and he will be missed.