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Month: June 2011

WISCON SATURDAY: In Which We Encounter Monsters, Tacos, Traveling Fates & Faerieland

WISCON SATURDAY: In Which We Encounter Monsters, Tacos, Traveling Fates & Faerieland

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Terrifying banana of later acquaintance.

The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood woke with much gusto. A puppy pile was had, as was a deliciously free, Con-Suite breakfast. There was a random, rather interruptive child building a trebuchet at the table. Sadly, the trebuchet didn’t work.

[The Critic suggests that you never attempt to give C.S.E. Cooney a banana at breakfast or otherwise. She has a mild anger at bananas.]

Overlord O’Neill went down to the dealers’ room. His Saturday activities included zapping book mites with a nano-taser, shouting to all and any of the merits of Black Gate and entertaining Bradley P. Beaulieu, the author of The Winds of Khalakovo. Yes, dear reader, there were so many authors at WisCon you couldn’t itch your back without knocking one off your shoulder.

O'Neill and Beaulieu
O’Neill and Beaulieu

While O’Neill was go-go dancing and having the Drexler-Smalley debate with those that walked by, C.S.E. Cooney and I attended Monsters!, a panel exploring the fascination of anomalous villains, led by David Peterson, P.C. Hodgell, Richard S. Russell and Tuppence.

What is the definition of a monster and how has it changed throughout history? The general consensus was that a monster is that which is unexplainable, unnatural, uncontrollable and has no culture.

frankensteinToday’s monsters usually cause psychological discomfort, whereas Medieval monsters were more of a spiritual bane.

Extending the question to who can be a monster, the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch were examined. Two continually referenced texts were On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma and The Monsters by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.

milgram-experimentMeanwhile, Katie Redding attended the Human, Cyborg or Just Another Robot? panel that, well, I refuse to talk about. We are not convinced that our Ms. K. is all that she used to be. In fact, we think she is more. There was a mech-hole in her noggin, (think Terminator 2 where they unscrew the back of Arnold’s head) and now she can lift mid-sized sedans and calculate large sums quicker than Rain Man.

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A Lone Candle In A Dark Passage

A Lone Candle In A Dark Passage

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muir-candle-2
How fast can you run with a lit candle?

It’s a cliche from the horror genre: a character (almost invariably female), ill prepared for misfortune (as her flimsy nightgown demonstrates), ventures down a newly discovered secret passage. She is wary, but determined, holding aloft her sole source of illumination.

A candle.

We find ourselves wanting to shout “Don’t go down that passage!” Or at least demanding she pause for sensible footwear, a better source of light, a weapon or two, and, time permitting, more clothes.

But we know something she doesn’t: her genre. We know that, as a horror story character, she’s setting herself up for a very bad time indeed. There’s no way I’d do that, we tell ourselves. No freakin’ way.

But, of course, we do similarly things all the time, tempting fates in ways that our fears cry out against. In blackouts, we fumble around in our basements looking for candles. We wedge ourselves into crawlspaces and attics looking through old boxes. We take shortcuts through dicey neighborhoods and across rickety bridges. We hear creaks in the house at night, and roll over and go back to sleep. And we do so with some confidence, because most of us aren’t in a horror story.

We know our genre. That’s one of the differences between us and the characters we watch and read. They just think they know.

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Locus Online Reviews Black Gate 15

Locus Online Reviews Black Gate 15

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bg-15-cover2Lois Tilton at Locus Online is one of the most diligent short fiction reviewers in the industry, and she’s been a friend and frequent champion of Black Gate for years. She’s the first to check in with a complete (and I do mean complete) review of our latest issue, although as usual she’s cranky about our fondness for series fiction:

I found much to praise in the last issue, and particularly the absence of the usual series stories. Possibly just to vex me, this time the zine has at least four new series and more sequels.

She had many kind words for the issue, including this about Jonathan L. Howard’s “The Shuttered Temple”:

Kyth the Taker… has taken a commission from the priesthood of Prytha to enter the Shuttered Temple, originally built years ago by an emperor whose power was being eroded by the Prythians. No one has yet survived the attempt… What Kyth is, besides broke, is apt at recognizing a trap when she sees it.

This one features the protagonist from one of the most enjoyable tales I’ve read in this zine, and the current story shares the same qualities of cleverness and ingenuity, with a light, engaging narrative.

–RECOMMENDED

We’re fans of sequels and series, of course, because truly great characters and stories aren’t always recognized immediately. Sometimes it takes a few installments for rich, complex fantasy to really find its audience.

Case in point: it’s great to see that Lois now considers the first Kyth story, “The Beautiful Corridor” (BG 13), “one of the most enjoyable tales I’ve read in this zine.” Especially since she dismissed it with faint praise in her original review, giving a “Recommended” label to the tale that followed it instead. It’s frequently only in retrospect that rich fiction truly reveals itself, and the best way we know to keep exciting characters fresh in your mind  is to present them to you as often as we can.

And that’s why we publish sequels. I’m glad it’s working.

WISCON FRIDAY: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Crashes A Zeppelin Into the State Capital

WISCON FRIDAY: In Which the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Crashes A Zeppelin Into the State Capital

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The Harold Lamb Comes to East Dundee
The Harold Lamb Comes to East Dundee

It was a partly cloudy day in East Dundee, IL.

There we were, three youngish women, frolicking in the flower garden, drinking tea and entertaining toddlers, when all of a sudden, a shadow moved over the sun.

It was Black Gate’s zeppelin, the Harold Lamb, on the descent.

“Ef!” Ms. Templeton twirled her stealth parasol in alarm. “The Gee-Dee thing’s coming down on the roof!”

“Not my roof!” Ms. Redding shouted, a baby on one stylishly jutted hip and a chaenomeles speciosa (a nasty and ubiquitous shrubbery, recently uprooted by dint of chain and pickup truck from her front garden) brandished high in her free arm.

For myself, I was convinced Ms. Redding was set to hurl the shrub (or, at the very least, the baby) at the Harold Lamb in an effort to knock it off its fatal course. Thankfully, at the last moment, the zeppelin veered, mooring itself between two surviving elms. A rope ladder unfurled. A familiar voice over the loudspeaker boomed down:

“Will the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood please climb aboard?”

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A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

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curse-necrarchCurse of the Necrarch
Steven Savile
BL Publishing (410 pages, $7.99, 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The world of Warhammer Fantasy borrows heavily from many sources, everything from Tolkienesque dwarves and Da Vinci-inspired machines, to Moorcockian chaos creatures, a Renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire, and monsters straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. But, maybe because it’s been around for so long or because it’s been so successfully added to over the years, the Warhammer world blends all these outwardly derivative elements into a setting that works very well — both as the backdrop for their fantasy game and as a surprisingly rich source of sword & sorcery and heroic adventure style dark fantasy fiction.

Steven Savile is one of the most skilled writers working in the Warhammer stables, and showcases his abilities nicely. Savile is primarily a horror writer, and his Warhammer fiction is imbued with a healthy dose of the morbid and the dreadful without ever forsaking the golden rule of Warhammer fiction – namely, putting the action first. Curse of the Necrarch is a standalone novel, but it matches nicely with Savile’s other Warhammer books in that its all about vampires and their undead minions.

But these vampires are not Bela Lugosi in a tuxedo, nor are they the sexy-chic goths of today’s urban fantasy. Instead they are withered, rotting, monstrous things, more akin to Murnau’s Nosferatu than Rice’s Lestat. Curse of the Necrarch opens with a confrontation with one such powerful Necrarch vampire, as Felix Metzger, hereditary Lord of Kastell Metz, meets his doom while defending his lands from an invading force of undead.

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Art of the Genre: The Art of Gor

Art of the Genre: The Art of Gor

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Vallejo does Tarnsman of Gor in 1966, and the 'legend' begins...
Vallejo does Tarnsman of Gor in 1966, and the 'legend' begins...

Why the Art of Gor? Well, why not. I mean, I could title this piece ‘The Art of Boris Vallejo’, but that just isn’t as much fun. You could also go with ‘The Art of BDSM’ but I’m afraid of where Google would link me.

Anyway, The Art of Gor is apt because I’ve never read a book by John Norman, but as an avid reader and hardcore gamer, I can hum a few bars of what Gor is about, as anyone could if you’d ever seen one of these book’s covers.

The more famed covers of the first seven novels [in the original DelRey/Ballantine editions] were done by Boris Vallejo. Vallejo, in most circles considered the greatest of the Frazetta clones, hammered out resounding images of male dominance in a bleak world. These images rise out of the late 60s, and I see them as showing what I would consider the pinnacle of Vallejo’s raw talent before the artist’s mastery turns into something with less anima.

Each cover is so powerful, so primal, that as I look over them I’m moved to the world in which they take place. I feel the dread, the strength, and the dry heat of it all. That, for those of you scoring at home equates to Vallejo/FTW.

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