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Month: May 2011

The Novels of Black Gate

The Novels of Black Gate

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childoffire“Why do the review pages always seem to be full of books which no one buys and the bestseller lists full of books no one reviews?”

This was tweeted the other day by a lit. agent called missdaisyfrost and the first thing it brought to my mind was Black Gate.

Day by day, genre short fiction magazines seem to grow more literary even as their sales plummet, while BG — may I call you BG? — is one of the few to proudly assert its pulp roots and to cater to the majority of people who like, you know, something to happen in the stories they read.

So, it’s interesting that while a lot of my fellow BG buddies haven’t had stellar success in most of the Big Mags out there in the wild, many of them are now kicking ass in the real market, novels: the only place outside of Hollywood that writers can make an actual living from their craft.

The first story I ever read in the magazine was Harry Connolly‘s The Whoremaster of Pald. It totally knocked my socks off.

Nor was I the only one to suffer from sudden chills in the foot area — people raved about that story and now, years later, Child of Fire, by the same author has 108 reviews on Amazon.com, most of them equally thrilled.

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The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part One

The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part One

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The Fellowship of the RingWhen I first read The Lord of the Rings I was young enough that I no longer remember how old I actually was. It’s a story that seems to me to have been around forever, a part of the background from which the world was made. I reread it often, though not as often as I’d like; and I’m not sure that ‘reread’ is even the right word here, because every time I go back to it, it’s a new tale.

These are characteristics of a great book: having read it once, you’re drawn back to it again and again; and, once returned to it, you find always something within it that you did not remember. Or else you find a new way of reading it. You are not the same person and the book is not the same book; the rhythm of the plot has a more subtle balance, the imagery aligns in a new way, the characterisation acquires new significance.

I went back to The Lord of the Rings recently, in part because I had some ideas about character and setting and irony, and how they manifest in the book, and I wanted to see if they made sense. That is, I wanted to see if these ideas suggested, not so much a meaningful way to read the book, but a way to read the book to help one approach the meaning within it. I think they did, and now I want to try to work out how and why.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.20 “The Man Who Would Be King”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.20 “The Man Who Would Be King”

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The Archangel Castiel is confronted about his recent actions.
The Archangel Castiel is confronted about his recent actions.

This week begins with the Archangel Castiel praying in a cemetery, recounting to God some of the wonders he’s encountered over the ages: a fish crawling from the water, the Tower of Babel (there’s only so high you can pile dung), Cain/Abel, David/Goliath, Sodom/Gomorrha, and so on … up until the Apocalypse, which “was averted by two boys, an old drunk, and a fallen angel. The grand story and we ripped up the ending and the rules and destiny, leaving nothing but freedom and choice.” (A lot of good dialogue in this one, so it’ll be a quote-heavy review.)

Except now Castiel has doubts, that maybe he’s made the wrong choice, and he’s seeking guidance from God, so he begins to tell his story.

With the Winchesters, Castiel is still pretending that he doesn’t know whether or not the demon Crowley is alive. In reality, not only is Crowley alive, but he’s currently dissecting Eve’s corpse. “Eve’s brain, dead as a tin kipper, and yet, for some reason, she keeps laying eggs.” Creepy, fish-like eggs, which he pulls out of her guts. And when he electrocutes her brain, it causes seizures in a vampire they have tied up (just for these sorts of experiments, apparently).

Crowley’s concerned that Castiel is distracted, that his affection for the Winchesters is putting their plans to open Purgatory in danger. They’re bickering like an old married couple. “The stench of that Impala is all over your overcoat. I thought we’d agreed, no more nights out with the boys.”

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Goth Chick Crypt Notes: A Vincentenial in St. Louis

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: A Vincentenial in St. Louis

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image002Get ready for a shocker.

Vincent Price is my all-time favorite actor.

And not that I ever was delusional enough to think I had Vince (I’m sure he’d let me, of all people, call him “Vince”) all to myself, but I was surprised and excited to hear about a festival in St. Louis, MO celebrating his 100th birthday – the Vincentenial.

Ironic to think that at 100 years old, Vincent Price has finally achieved the exact look he had been berating Hollywood makeup artists to give him in many of his most classic movies.

Vincentenial is happening this month and my own favorite connection to Hollywood and all things indy-horror, writer and director Wyatt Weed, put me on to this fabulous event. He’s helping to organize the festival and many thanks to him for the information below.

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Analog, February 1966: a Retro-Review

Analog, February 1966: a Retro-Review

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analog-feb-66And now the third of three consecutive months of SF magazines I recently bought, each a different specimen of the canonical “Big Three” of that time. The first, the December 1965 Galaxy, is here, and the January 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is here.

Todd Mason complained last time about this designation of Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF as the “canonical Big Three” SF magazines of the ’60s. He noted, correctly, that Galaxy‘s sister magazine If was winning Hugos as best magazine, and that Amazing and Fantastic were tremendous magazines under Cele Goldsmith Lalli (though by 1966 the magazines had been sold and Lalli was no longer editing them — and their quality suffered immensely).

Fair enough comments — but there is little doubt that Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF were regarded then — even by those who voted for If for the Hugo! — as the most prestigious SF magazines in the US. They paid better. Analog and Galaxy published more fiction per issue, though F&SF was as slim as If and Amazing/Fantastic. They were regarded as more “serious” — each in different ways, mind you. (And I think that very lack of seriousness was a big part of If‘s appeal.) Anyway …

This issue of Analog comes very late in John W. Campbell’s long tenure. The magazine is all but universally regarded as having declined in quality by this point, relative to Campbell’s best years. But this issue is really quite a good one.

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E. E. Knight Reviews The Stepsister Scheme

E. E. Knight Reviews The Stepsister Scheme

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the-stepsister-schemeThe Stepsister Scheme
Jim C. Hines
Daw (344 pp, $7.99, January 2009)
Reviewed by E.E. Knight

Jim C. Hines has penned a worthy follow-up to his Jig the Goblin books, a delightfully funny series that established Hines as the go-to guy for humorous fantasy between Pratchett publication dates.
Jig was short on size and muscle but long on moxie and chutzpah. Hines has glammed up his protagonists for this new series, taking on one of the most popular public domain franchises (thanks to Walt Disney): Fairy Tale Princesses, cleverly mashing them up with a Charlie’s Angels-style setup.

Sleeping Beauty (“Talia”) is more or less the leader, Snow White (“Snow”), the series sexpot and owner of some handy mirror-magic, and Cinderella (“Danielle”) is the bride with the kidnapped Prince and husband who needs rescuing. During her quest Danielle discovers her own power (no fear, it is delightfully Disneyesque) as she risks all to return her bridegroom Prince Armand to her bedchamber and his position as future heir to the Kingdom of Lorindar, currently under Queen Beatrice. Queen “Bea” is the royal voice dispatching the gals on their assignments, sometimes contracted through Snow’s magic mirror.
The Stepsister Scheme is a blend of Maguire’s Oz updates, Shrek’s madcap fairy tales, and gal detective stories.

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Thoughts on Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

Thoughts on Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

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69150827_130420433114I first read Joanna Russ as an assignment for a graduate seminar in science fiction. The story was “When it Changed.”  The 1972 Nebula Award winner for Best Short Story, and a 1973 Hugo nominee, it depicts the visitation of male astronauts on the entirely female world of Whileaway.

I didn’t get it.

In this exemplar of feminist SF, women on a (temporarily, it turns out) manless world act in many ways like men, particularly in terms of violent behavior. The casual way the female narrator notes she has fought three duels and that the funny thing about her wife is that “she will not handle guns” bothered me. Here I thought feminism was supposed to be about rejecting this kind of macho behavior.

What I didn’t get was that the story isn’t advocating gunplay as necessarily a good thing, but rather that women should have the right to make the same choices as men, unhampered by patriarchal-imposed expectations and restraints. Even if they are not very good choices that don’t fit into some mother-goddess worshipping, nourishing pacifist utopia.

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The moral of “When I Changed” is that even when women are somehow allowed to make whatever choices they want, without imposing values of “masculine” or “feminine” on what those choices should be, men get involved to screw things up.

Here’s a quote from The Female Man, which features Janet Evason, the narrator of “When It Changed,” as one of four women from alternate universes who cross over into each other’s realities:

As my mother once said, ‘The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.”

You don’t need to be from an alternate universe to realize the truth of that.

Neil Gaiman is a Pencil-necked Weasel

Neil Gaiman is a Pencil-necked Weasel

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neil-adSo by now you’ve probably heard that Minnesota Republican and House of Representatives Majority Leader Matt Dean on Tuesday called Neil Gaiman a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota.”

Why the extraordinary rhetoric against one of the most respected fantasy authors on the planet? Dean is upset that Gaiman accepted money from a Legacy Fund to speak at a public library in Stillwater, Minnesota, in April, 2010. Gaiman was paid $45,000, which he donated to charity last year.

Dean said Gaiman, “who I hate,” was legally within his rights to take the money, but found the payment “infuriating,” and wanted Gaiman to return it.

With customary good humor Gaiman has accepted Dean’s “Pencil-necked Weasel” label, saying:

It’s kind of nice to make someone’s Hate List. It reminds me of Nixon’s Enemies List. If a man is known by his enemies, I think my stock just went up a little… I like “pencil-necked weasel”. It has “pencil” in it. Pencils are good things. You can draw or write things with pencils. I think it’s what you call someone when you’re worried that using a long word like “intellectual” may have too many syllables.

The story only gets weirder from there. It was picked up by Wired, The New York Times, and other news outlets, and when Gaiman tweeted about the controversy, linking to Dean’s blog, traffic from Gaiman’s fans brought down the entire site. On May 5th Dean reported that his mother, upset with him for name-calling, forced him to apologize. “She was very angry this morning and always taught me not to be a name caller,” he said. “And I shouldn’t have done it, and I apologize.”

Predictably, Gaiman’s fans have begun to mock Dean in numerous forums online.  So far my favorite is the Charles Atlas-inspired comic at Evil Reads. Click the panel above right to see the entire strip.

John Devil and the World of Paul Feval

John Devil and the World of Paul Feval

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john-devil-301888-4fantomasJohn Devil was my first introduction to the works of Paul Feval. At nearly 650 pages, it is a massive tome and without the efforts of scholar and translator Brian Stapleford and editor and publisher Jean-Marc Lofficier and his Black Coat Press imprint (named after Feval’s long-running crime series) it is likely few readers outside of France would ever have discovered the work or any others by its author.

John Devil is noteworthy as a book of firsts. Written in 1861, Jean Diable is believed to be the first novel detailing a police detective hunting down a master criminal. That is not to suggest that John Devil offers anything approaching standard fare for the genre. The novel was originally published as a serial and consequently is heavily padded with literally dozens of characters, dual identities, and countless interconnecting plotlines. While certainly not as difficult a read as the seminal penny dreadful, Varney the Vampire, John Devil is nonetheless a far cry from Feval’s later more polished works.

John Devil is the code name for a long line of brilliant, but savage criminal masterminds. When one John Devil is killed or imprisoned, another comes along to take his place. The character reads like a dry run for both Dr. Mabuse and Fantomas. Feval’s emphasis on contrasting the lives of the aristocracy with that of the common working class very much put me in mind of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s Fantomas series in particular. The similarity is emphasized by the cover art for the US edition of John Devil from Black Coat Press which deliberately recalls the famous artwork for the original Fantomas.

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Now Shipping: Black Gate 15

Now Shipping: Black Gate 15

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bg-15-cover2Black Gate 15 is now shipping.  The last subscriber copies will go in the mail early next week.

The issue is for sale through our online store.  Copies are available to US subscribers for just $18.95 including shipping (just select “Sample Issue”), or as part of a 2-issue subscription for only $32.95.

BG 15 is a massive 384 pages, packed with the best in modern adventure fantasy. This issues’s theme is Warrior Women, and it includes tales of female warriors, wizards, weather witches, thieves, and other brave women as they face deadly tombs, sinister gods, unquiet ghosts, and much more. Contributors this issue include Frederic S. Durbin, Harry Connolly, John Fultz, Darrell Schweitzer, Chris Willrich, Maria V. Snyder, and many others.

BG 15 is notable for more than just its epic size. This issue we celebrate the triumphant return of the fantasy series to our pages — starting with Jonathan L. Howard’s “The Shuttered Temple,” featuring the resourceful thief Kyth the Taker in the sequel to “The Beautiful Corridor” (BG 13).

Plus the opening installments of five exciting new serials that will continue in Black Gate 16 and beyond:

  • Vaughn Heppner’s rollicking sword & sorcery tale of the barbarian Lod in a decadent city, “The Oracle of Gog”
  • Brian Dolton’s Yi Qin the exorcist in a mystery of the ancient Orient, “What Chains Binds Us”
  • John C. Hocking’s tale of The Archivist and a deadly desert tomb, “A River Through Darkness and Light”
  • Jamie McEwan’s intrepid prince Tanek and his desperate solo campaign against a relentless invader, “An Uprising of One”
  • S. Hutson Blount’s story of Hautbee and the dread sorceress Gambetzo, “The Laws of Chaos Left Us All in Disarray”

That’s not all.  Howard Andrew Jones offers up a tantalizing slice of his blockbuster new novel The Desert of Souls; and Mike Resnick , Bud Webster, Scott Taylor, and Rich Horton contribute feature articles. Plus over 30 pages of book, game, and DVD reviews, edited by Bill Ward, Howard Andrew Jones, and Andrew Zimmerman Jones — and a brand new 4-page Knights of the Dinner Table strip! Plus 22 full pages of art from Kent Burles, Storn Cook, Mark Evans, John E. Kaufmann, Jim & Ruth Keegan, Malcolm McClinton, and many others. See the complete Table of Contents here.

Don’t forget our Back Issue Sale: any two back issues for just $25 plus shipping — including the massive BG 14 (384 pages, cover price $18.95) and our rare first issue (regularly $18.95).

Cover by Donato Giancola.