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Month: March 2012

Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes

Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes

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cinderella-jump-rope-rhymes1Cabinet des Fées presents Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes!

These are not the rhymes you jumped rope to as a child.

Erzebet YellowBoy announced on March 12th:

“Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes shows you what a childhood pastime looks like when you dial macabre up to eleven. If playground fun got married to the genetically engineered child of Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, their offspring would be Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes.

…In tribute to all of the animal friends and helpers without whom our fairy tale heroines and heros would themselves be lost, CdF has decided to fund animal charities with this publication. Fifty percent of all profits will be donated each quarter, beginning with the quarter starting April 1, 2012.

Our first batch of proceeds will be donated to HULA Animal Rescue: Home for Unwanted and Lost Animals. HULA is an independent UK charity with a non-​​destruction policy for every healthy animal, in service since 1972.

Our second batch of proceeds will be donated to the Oldies Club, and our third to Dolly’s Foundation. We’ll post more information about those two charities when their times comes. If you have any suggestions for the fourth quarter donations, please send them along!”

Edited by Francesca Forrest, illustrated by Adam Oehlers (for an interview with the illustrator, click here), this chapbook contains contributions from Francesca Forrest, Sonya Taaffe, Samantha Henderson, Erik Amundsen, Rose Lemberg, Nadia Bulkin, Julia Rios, and Kyle Davis.

Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes can be purchased at Amazon​.com, Amazon​.co​.uk and  The Book Depository as well as at other online sellers. Please support independent sellers if you can!

Goth Chick News: The Best of The Haunted Attractions Show

Goth Chick News: The Best of The Haunted Attractions Show

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Ernie
Ernie
“You brought back a what?”

“A shrunken head.”

“A shrunken head of what?”

“Umm…supposed to have been a person I guess.”

“And you’re happy about this acquisition?”

“More like ecstatic, actually.  I mean as souvenirs go…”

Sometimes the Black Gate staff still isn’t sure what I’m doing in their offices or whether they just left the front door unlocked once too often and I somehow just wandered in; left behind by a traveling midnight showing of  The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Still, when I returned from my St. Louis road trip, fresh from attending the 2012 Haunted Attractions Show, the curiosity was palatable and far be it from me to disappoint.

The 17th annual gathering of all things disturbing and their creators was a huge success, cram-packed with enough material to keep me in posts for several weeks to come.

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Keep up with the Black Gate Staff with the BG Staff tag

Keep up with the Black Gate Staff with the BG Staff tag

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bg-patty-claire
Two members of the Black Gate staff, having more fun than you.

How is it that we have so much fun here at Black Gate? How are we so well connected to the very heartbeat of modern fantasy? How is it that so many incredible and exciting people stop by every month, to guide you towards the literature, art and music that will change your life?

Don’t look at me. I have no idea either.  I just pay the bills, and shut down the parties when the police show up.

But you don’t need me to tell you. The talented and rambunctious staff of Black Gate magazine bare all their secrets right here each week. And to help you keep up, I’ve finally added a BG Staff tag to the Categories section of our navigation menu at left.

What’s a BG Staff tag? You’re not paying attention, are you? You just drop by once a week hoping Scott Taylor will post more pics of near-naked redheads. All right, look. See that narrow column on the left, with the Search box at the top? About halfway down the page is a CATEGORIES section. That’s how we sort the thousands of blogs posts we’ve done here at Black Gate. Now you can just click “Art of the Genre” and ogle all the art you want, without all those pesky posts about books and stuff. You’re welcome.

And right below that link is the new BG Staff tag. It collects about 250 articles from the last few years covering news, interviews, and embarrassing personal revelations from the people behind Black Gate, including the many authors, artists and editors who’ve contributed to our pages over the years. It’s your one-stop-shop to discover the latest books from Devon Monk, John R. Fultz, Martha Wells, James Enge, Jonathan L. Howard, Harry Connolly, Peadar Ó Guilín, C.S.E. Cooney, Shawn L. Johnson, Rich Horton, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others.

You’ll find all the news about Ryan Harvey’s Writers of the Future Award; Harry Connolly on making his first book trailer with a hot model; how Howard Andrew Jones introduced C.S.E. Cooney to C.L. Moore; Bud Webster’s advice on book selling; which Black Gate author reached #1 on Amazon sales list; which BG staffer interviewed his own daughter, and a road trip to clone a woolly mammoth.

All that plus numerous convention reports, book excerpts, reviews, award news, self-publishing advice, agent hunts, first novel sales, online comics, zeppelins, and sadly even a few obituaries. It’s the entire circle of life here at Black Gate. Enjoy.

Art of the Genre: Jean Giraud ‘Moebius’ 1938-2012

Art of the Genre: Jean Giraud ‘Moebius’ 1938-2012

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moebius-flightThis week I take on the sad task of doing the obituary piece for the passing of another great industry artist. I don’t think these things hit me quite as much when I simply read about the death of an artist until I started doing Art of the Genre, but now that I take the time to look back and speak about a career, it’s somehow even more of a loss.

To me, Jean Giraud was simply a man with a strange alias, Moebius. I didn’t know him well, or his work for that matter. He was a Frenchman, a comic guy, and the two didn’t run into my creative circle of artistic knowledge as well I they probably should have.

Still, Moebius was ever my enigma, and when I did my list of the Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years back in 2011, Moebius might not have made the final list but he did receive a healthy number of votes from all the industry insiders I polled. This fact wasn’t lost on me, but as time is ever crunched and fleeting I went about with other work and never got back to studying why it was that Moebius had placed so highly on knowledgeable people’s lists.

Today, as I write this, I’ve finally come to realize why. I may not have known Moebius in his personal art, but that isn’t to say I don’t know him in so much of the art I love. You see, Moebius, for all the wonderful things he did with his own hand, was perhaps better known for those he influenced with that work.

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Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

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deserterIf you’re a long-time Black Gate reader you know the name Peadar Ó Guilín.

His first story for us was “The Mourning Trees” (Black Gate 5), followed by “Where Beauty Lies in Wait” (BG 11) and “The Evil Eater” (BG 13), which Shedrick Pittman-Hassett of Serial Distractions called “a lovely little bit of Lovecraftian horror that still haunts me to this day.”

Peadar’s first novel The Inferior was published to terrific reviews in 2008. School Library Journal called it

[An] epic story of survival, betrayal, and community… intriguing at every turn, The Inferior will hold readers from page to page, chapter to chapter, to the very end.

After nearly four years the sequel has finally arrived, and it promises to be everything we’ve waited for. Here’s the book description:

The humans are weak and vulnerable. Soon the beasts that share their stone-age world will kill and eat them. To save his tribe, Stopmouth must make his way to the Roof, the mysterious hi-tech world above the surface. But the Roof has its own problems. The nano technology that controls everything from the environment to the human body is collapsing. A virus has already destroyed the Upstairs, sending millions of refugees to seek shelter below. And now a rebellion against the Commission, organized by the fanatical Religious, is about to break.

Hunted by the Commission’s Elite Agents through the overcrowded, decaying city of the future, Stopmouth must succeed in a hunt of his own: to find the secret power hidden in the Roof’s computerized brain, and return to his people before it is too late.

The Deserter is on available today in hardcover, and in digital format for the Kindle and Nook. It is 448 pages, and published by David Fickling Books.

To promote it, Peadar has released Where Beauty Lies In Wait, a free e-book collecting a dozen of his short stories, including all three from Black Gate. It’s available in Kindle, ePub and PDF versions, and you can get it here.

Black Gate Interviews Nathan Long, Part One

Black Gate Interviews Nathan Long, Part One

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nathan-longNathan Long is a novelist best known for his work in the Warhammer universe, most notably for his Black Hearts series and Ulrika the Vampire series, as well as penning the new adventures of the classic Warhammer duo, Gotrek & Felix. Recently, Nathan’s Jane Carver of Waar has been released to some great reviews, and is getting a lot of attention in light of the recent big budget movie adaptation of the Burroughs novel that inspired it.

Welcome, Nathan, and thanks for sitting down with Black Gate to talk about your latest novel.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jane Carver of Waar is a Barsoomesque adventure for the modern reader, and something that treads the line between loving homage and knowing send-up of classic pulp SF. Tell us a bit about the book, and do you think readers need to be familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Barsoom, and other stories of that era to fully appreciate Jane Carver?

Jane Carver of Waar is what I used to call, before I knew any better, a “Sword and Raygun” adventure. Now I know I’m supposed to call it a Planetary Romance, but I still like mine better. It tells the story of Jane Carver, a hard-riding biker chick who gets herself on the wrong side of the law and ends up hiding in a cave that transports her to a world full of strange aliens with stranger customs. There she has a sequence of wild adventures while trying to help a not-very-heroic young alien noble rescue his kidnapped bride.

I really hope readers won’t need to be familiar with the Planetary Romance genre to enjoy the book. I did my best to make sure they wouldn’t, as that is one of my pet peeves. I dislike parodies and homages that require some knowledge of the thing being parodied. It is my belief that a book should stand on its own, even when commenting on another book or genre. A book should be a book first, thoroughly enjoyable by itself, and anything else the author wants to make it second.

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This week’s Bargain SF & Fantasy at Amazon.com

This week’s Bargain SF & Fantasy at Amazon.com

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batmanbeyond_s2Once again we report back from the deep-discount frontier, to let you know what Amazon.com is unloading on the cheap from the back of the warehouse.

This week’s selection includes over half a dozen top animated shows on DVD, including two seasons of my modern favorite, Batman Beyond. Season Two is marked down 81%:

halo_legends1

The last two books, Metatropolis and Mechanics of Wonder, also look pretty intriguing. As always, qualities for most of these titles are limited at these prices, so act fast. Shipping is not included, but for US buyers Amazon ships free if your total is above $25.

Many of last week’s discount titles are still available; you can see that list here.

Good luck, fellow bargain hunters!

The Quantum Thief: A Review

The Quantum Thief: A Review

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The Quantum ThiefThe Quantum Thief
Hannu Rajaniemi
Tor Books (A Tom Doherty Associates Book; 330 pp, $24.99 USD, $28.99 CDN; hardcover 2010)
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

Centuries in the future, Jean le Flambeur is a master thief, imprisoned in a virtual-reality jail: every day he makes choices, and dies, and is reborn. Until he’s freed by a violent woman named Mieli from the edge of the solar system, and taken to Mars. There, he must regain old memories he locked away from all possible recovery when he was literally a far different person than he is now. A youthful detective, hi-tech superheroes, and posthuman intelligences are waiting to complicate his task, which seems to have ramifications on an interplanetary scale.

That’s a basic description of Hannu Rajaniemi’s novel The Quantum Thief, the first in a series following le Flambeur’s adventures (the second, The Fractal Prince, will be coming later this year). Uncertainty and possibility and identity are key themes in this book; appropriate, then, that its own identity is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand it’s aggressively bleeding-edge, incorporating quantum theory and game theory and any number of up-to-the-nanosecond science-fictional ideas. But on the other it’s highly traditional, drawing from different lineages within the genre and outside it.

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John Carter of Mars Post-Game: Six Reasons to Feel Better

John Carter of Mars Post-Game: Six Reasons to Feel Better

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tars-tarkas-cheers-up-john-carter-of-marsJohn Carter of Mars (yes, I have chosen to flat-out call the film by that name going forward, as per its end title card) drew in approximately $30.6 million in domestic box-office over the weekend according to online tracker Box Office Mojo. This is better than some of the gloomier Cassandra predictions, and even superior to the lowered tracking numbers from the days right before the film’s release that pegged it at $25 million.

But I won’t sugarcoat this for fans or lie based on my long experience tracking box-office results: these numbers do not augur well. (If you want to hear a more objective — and therefore grimmer — analysis, read Box Office Mojo’s take on this. It isn’t pretty.) The new film couldn’t even best last week’s #1 film, The Lorax, which held over to take the top spot despite a standard a 44% drop in attendance. It performed $5 million less than last year’s Battle: Los Angeles, a more modest film that cost a third of John Carter of Mars’s $250 million budget.

In the contemporary crowded marketplace, films live and die based on opening weekends. Only occasionally can a film continue to coast for weeks at a time on steady attendance. But this sort of support doesn’t usually happen for big event films, which tend to be front-loaded. Smaller movies like The Help can get a slow-burn going, but not $250 million tent pole epics and hopeful franchise catalysts like John Carter of Mars.

The film did pull in an impressive $70 million at overseas markets, and in the long run the movie will turn a profit for Disney, albeit not a huge one. But the chance of us seeing Andrew Stanton direct The Gods of Mars feels remote at this point. Prince of Persia did similar numbers in 2010, with a $30 millions U.S. opening leading to a poor $91 million overall domestic gross, while pulling in big international coin — and you aren’t hearing about a sequel to that coming out next year. Disney will probably announce during this week that they will go ahead with a John Carter sequel, but that’s standard promotional talk to make a show to the public that the company has confidence in the film, and perhaps get a few more folks into the cinemas during the second weekend. Remember, Disney immediately announced a sequel to Tron: Legacy, and Warner Bros. for Green Lantern — and neither of those will happen.

At this point, the best hope that filmgoers have to see more Barsoom is for John Carter of Mars to keep steady attendance through the next few weeks. With The Hunger Games poised to take a big bite out of its demographic in two weeks, this battle will be fought uphill against a raging horde of warriors from Warsoon on thoat chargers.

But in the face of this negative news, there are some reasons for pulp literature, science-fiction, and fantasy fans to feel good about John Carter of Mars. Taking the path of the Stoic, I present six things to consider that might give you some cheer about the film’s performance:

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Is John Carter a Flop?

Is John Carter a Flop?

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john-carterI’ve been enjoying Ryan Harvey’s enthusiastic review of the new Disney film John Carter, although I wasn’t able to make it to the local metroplex to see it myself this weekend. Apprently, I wasn’t the only one.

Entertainment Weekly, in assessing the weekend box office take, calls the film “one of the most high profile box office misfires in years.”

Carter really needed to open to $50 million at a bare minimum. Other films that reportedly cost around $250 million include Spider-Man 3, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Avatar, and those four movies debuted to an average of $99 million. John Carter, on the other hand, collected an estimated $30.6 million this weekend… a dismal showing for such a costly project.

Today’s New York Times, in an article titled Ishtar Lands on Mars, estimates the film’s total cost at closer to $350 million:

John Carter, which cost an estimated $350 million to make and market… took in about $30.6 million at the North American box office… That result is so poor that analysts estimate that Disney will be forced to take a quarterly write-down of $100 million to $165 million. The amount will depend on ticket sales overseas, where John Carter took in about $71 million over the weekend, a better total than Disney had feared…

Because of its enormous cost and the way ticket sales are split with theaters, analysts say the film needs to take in more than $600 million globally to break even. The only silver lining for Disney may be a dubious one: last March the studio’s Mars Needs Moms flopped so badly that it also required a write-down, making year-on-year performance comparisons less brutal.

Although the numbers look grim, $71 million overseas is nothing to sneeze at. With a combined weekend take over over $100 million, it may be too early to label John Carter a clear bomb. We’ll see what the future holds… and I still plan to see it this week.