The Content Warning Debate

The Content Warning Debate

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This is a trigger fish, apparently: Image by Brigitte Werner from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn!

In an effort to try and get myself “out there,” so to speak, and figure out what marketing tricks I can use that don’t feel horrendously icky to me in order to try and inch towards making a living from my writing, I spend a lot of time on TikTok. I sometimes attempt to get my books out there, but those videos never get any views. When I’m just fooling around with the various filters they have, I often get far more views; in the hundreds or thousands. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the algorithm, or how to take advantage of it. I am terrible at marketing. Still, I try. And I’ll keep trying. Maybe I’ll have it work out randomly. Mostly, I just waste hours of my life scrolling through my feed, which currently consists of international news, Hozier (I watched two videos and TikTok has decided I’m obsessed), and a lot of book content. As is usually the case in BookTok, there is a debate raging right now regarding content/trigger warning appearing at the front of the book.

It’s quite an interesting debate.

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Glen Cook: The Garrett, PI Q&A – at Black Gate

Glen Cook: The Garrett, PI Q&A – at Black Gate

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Today we’ve got a real treat here at Black Gate. Glen Cook, best-selling author of The Black Company, as well as The Dread Empire, talks about his fantastic Garrett, PI, series. Glen is one of the founding fathers of dark fantasy, and The Black Company is a bedrock series. I wrote about his wonderful hardboiled fantasy series starring Garrett, here. Today, he’s doing a Q&A about the Garrett, PI books.

Garrett is a private investigator in the fantasy city of TunFaire. He has a huge, brilliant, dead-but-sentient partner, known as the Dead Man. Garrett gets swept up in some large-scale problem each book. There’s far more involved than just figuring out why someone got themselves dead. ‘Cataclysmic’ sometimes applies, without hyperbole. It is a fun, mystery, fantasy adventure series, which is one of my favorites. I often recommend it to folks who ask for something after Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. And if you like Nero Wolfe, this should be your very next read (that vibe starts in book two).

 

Hi Glen. You are probably best-known for your terrific dark fantasy series, The Black Company. I’ve read through that three or four times. But my favorite work of yours is the hardboiled fantasy PI series featuring a rugged ex-Marine, Garrett. It’s a terrific mix of fantasy and hardboiled private eye, with some other classic influences.

Thanks for agreeing to answer a few questions about the Garrett books.

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Neil’s Horror Corner: The Weird, Weird West, Part 2

Neil’s Horror Corner: The Weird, Weird West, Part 2

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The Wind (IFC Midnight, 2018), Devil Rider (Curb/Esquire Films,
1989), and Luz, the Flower of Evil (Afasia Films, 2019)

The Wind (2018) – Prime

Stand-off with six guns?

A bit of shotgun.

Uncomfortable chaps?

Demons of the Prairies.

Any good?

Yes, very good. A slow burn, ensemble production with stunning cinematography and an awesome soundtrack.

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The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein

The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein

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In the town where Kicsi grew up there was a rabbi who could work miracles. It was a small town, and borders — Hungarian, Czech, Russian — ebbed and flowed around it like tides. Once, Kicsi remembered, she went too far from home and came to a place where the people spoke a different language. In the distance, on the horizon, stood the mountains, fat and placid as cows.

The Red Magician (1982) by Lisa Goldstein is a young adult, magical realist novel about a Jewish girl, during, and after the Holocaust. The author, herself the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, won a National Book Award for paperback original. The book, while short by today’s dreadful standards, is a compelling meditation on willful blindness in the face of great horror, misplaced vengeance, and the harrowing effects of survivor’s guilt.

Kicsi, which means little in Hungarian, lives with her family in a small town completely isolated from the evil smothering much of Europe. We meet her as she listens in on a conversation between her father, Imre, and the town’s rabbi. The rabbi threatens anyone who doesn’t remove their child from the town school with a curse. The school, in defiance of traditional belief, teaches Hebrew. The language, the rabbi insists:

will be spoken only when the Messiah comes and we return to the Holy Land. That is to say, when God wills it. Until then Hebrew is to be spoken only in prayer.

As punishment, the rabbi curses anyone connected to the school to be tormented by forty demons for forty days and nights. Imre insists that he isn’t scared of any curse and that his daughters will continue to attend the school Fortunately, a stranger arrives in the town, first appearing in the synagogue on Friday night.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Scapegoat Factory,” by Ofir Touche Gafla

A to Z Reviews: “The Scapegoat Factory,” by Ofir Touche Gafla

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A to Z Reviews

Over the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from last year.

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Goth Chick News: Creepy “Found Footage” Pops Up on YouTube

Goth Chick News: Creepy “Found Footage” Pops Up on YouTube

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The found-footage short Exposure, now available on YouTube

I dearly love guerilla marketing.

The formal definition of guerilla marketing is a marketing strategy that uses unconventional methods to attract interest in a brand or business through viral social media messaging, and the master of this approach in my opinion is J.J. Abrams. For his films Super 8 and Coverfield, Abrams sent fans on Easter egg hunts through fake commercials and misdirected websites. LinkedIn even wrote an article about it, and at the time I thought it was just about the coolest way to generate buzz for a film, which I had ever encountered.

Whether or not this is what writer/director Kris J. Cummins intends with his latest horror short is unknown, but he is definitely generating online buzz.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Young Horatio Hornblower

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Young Horatio Hornblower

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Hornblower 1: The Duel (UK, 1998)

When you think about swashbucklers at sea, two time periods come to mind: that of the pirates and privateers, from the 16th through 18th centuries, and the Napoleonic naval era at the beginning of the 19th. British captains and crew figure prominently in both these milieus, as you’d expect from an island nation that depended on sea trade and effective warfare on the waves.

The British, of course, are proud of their naval heritage, so in the late ‘90s, when the ITV Network set out to make a series of television adaptations of C.S. Forester’s classic Hornblower novels, somehow enough money was found to shoot film adaptations with production values rarely seen on TV before Game of Thrones. The films, well-cast and well-written, were popular enough, though the size of the productions meant that only one or two could be produced per year. And fortunately for us, they still hold up, by and large (that’s nautical lingo!), a quarter-century later.

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Cloud Painters, Alien Blobs, and War in the Asteroids: March-April 2024 Print SF Magazines

Cloud Painters, Alien Blobs, and War in the Asteroids: March-April 2024 Print SF Magazines

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March-April 2024 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and the
Winter 2024 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Covers by Eli Bischof (for “Ganny Goes
to War”), Eldar Zakirov (for “How Sere Kept Herself Together”) and Mondolithic Studios.

There’s some great old-time serial adventure in this month’s print SF magazines. In the Asimov’s SF novella “How Sere Kept Herself Together,” Alexander Jablokov brings back his cynical detective Sere Glagolit (introduced in “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry,” in July/August 2017, and “How Sere Looked for a Pair of Boots,” January/February 2019) to discover why her client is being aggressively stalked by an enigmatic alien Cryptor.

And in “Brood Parasitism” Auston Habershaw gives us another exciting tale of the shape-shifting alien Tohrroid (first seen in Analog in Jan/Feb 2019, and most recently in the Nov/Dec 2023 issue), this time on a mission to assassinate the leader of an invading alien army. And in “Charon’s Final Passenger” in Asimov’s, Ray Nayler  returns to the setting of his popular story “Berb by Berb” in the November/December 2023 issue.

We covered the contents of the Winter 2024 F&SF (delayed by printer problems) last month, but don’t despair! The new issues of Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction are packed with intriguing new fiction by David Gerrold, Sandra McDonald, Ashok K. Banker, Lavie Tidhar, Faith Merino, William Ledbetter, Sean Monaghan, Matt McHugh, Adam-Troy Castro, Don D’Ammassa, Karen Heuler, and lots more. The enticing details await below.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Truth About Sherlock Holmes (Doyle on Holmes)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Truth About Sherlock Holmes (Doyle on Holmes)

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I have about 500 Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle-related books on my shelves. No surprise, there are some pretty neat things. I’m going to do a couple posts over the next few weeks, looking at some things written by Doyle – or directly involving him.

The first is in my copy of Peter Haining’s The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It’s a really nifty book put out by Barnes and Noble in 1995 (with Jeremy Brett on the cover). If you don’t have a copy of Jack Tracy’s essential The Published Apocrypha, this has several items included in that hard-to-find classic. It’s also got some additional things including a really cool essay by Doyle.

In 1923, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Truth About Sherlock Holmes, for Collier’s Magazine.

In 1903, Collier’s offered Doyle big money to write new Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle had set The Hound of the Baskervilles back before tossing him over the Reichenbach Falls. So, Holmes was still dead. It was too big an offer to refuse, and Doyle agreed to write eight new stories. They all appeared in Collier’s, and then immediately after in The Strand. Colliers included terrific color covers by Frederic Dorr Steele.

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My Three Problems with the Three-Body Problem

My Three Problems with the Three-Body Problem

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The Three-Body Problem (Tor Books, November 11, 2014). Cover by Stephan Martiniere

In the middle of trying to explain quantum mechanics to me, my physicist friend stopped in frustration and said, “This would all make a lot more sense if you understood math.”

Alas, I am one of those recovering English majors who never could wrap their heads around anything more basic than simple arithmetic (and not so good at even that). Intellectually, I can intuit how mathematical prowess unleashes secrets of the universe, while also presenting further paradoxes. (I kinda, sorta get Schrödinger’s cat, but not really.) But my eyes glaze over at the actual work of adding it all up. Which explains my barely passable grades back in college for courses such as Science for non-Science Majors.  

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