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Month: September 2013

Enter to Win One of Five Copies of King of Chaos by Dave Gross

Enter to Win One of Five Copies of King of Chaos by Dave Gross

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Pathfinder Tales King of Chaos-smallLast week, we announced a contest to win one of five copies of Dave Gross’s new Pathfinder Tales novel, King of Chaos.

You still have a week to enter. All you have to do to be eligible to win is send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the title “King of Chaos” and a short 2-3 sentence review of your favorite Pathfinder product, novel or short story, before October 1, 2013.

Need a quick primer on Pathfinder? No problem! You can check out the latest right here at Black Gate — including the first chapters of both King of Chaos and Dave’s previous novel, Queen of Thorns.

Want to read a complete story instead? Try Bill Ward’s 4-part tale, “The Box,” or Howard Andrew Jones’s 4-part mini-epic, “The Walkers from the Crypt,” both available for free at Paizo.com as part of their expansive library of free Pathfinder Tales web fiction — which also includes stories from Elaine Cunningham, Richard Ford, Tim Pratt, Ari Marmell, Robin D. Laws, James L. Sutter, Monte Cook, Ed Greenwood, Erik Mona, Richard Lee Byers, and many others.

If you want to try a complete novel, may we suggest Howard’s Plague of Shadows, or Tim Pratt’s Liar’s Blade?

Interested in the Pathfinder game instead? Read all about the latest releases at the Pathfinder Booth at Gencon last month. We also recently covered Ultimate Campaign, Fey Revisited, and Chronicles of the Righteous.

Dave Gross is the author of Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns. You can read Dave’s introduction to King of Chaos here and his free stories, “Killing Time” and “The Lost Pathfinder“, at Paizo.com.

And when you’re done, don’t forget to send us an e-mail with your one-paragraph review before October 1, 2013. We’ll draw five winners from all eligible entries and those lucky folks will receive a free copy of King of Chaos.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Terms and conditions subject to change as our lawyers sober up and get back to us. Not valid where prohibited by law. Or anywhere postage for a hefty paperback is more than, like, 5 bucks. Good luck!

A Point of Transition: Andre Norton’s Witch World

A Point of Transition: Andre Norton’s Witch World

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Witch WorldSomehow, when I was growing up, I missed Witch World. Some of the books in the series were always around, as I remember it, in my local libraries and bookstores, but I don’t think I ever read one — if only because I always try to read a series in order, and finding Witch World itself was not always easy. Somewhere along the line, though, I picked up a used copy, and set it aside to be read later. As it happens, there’s been a certain amount of talk about Andre Norton lately, here and elsewhere, and that prompted me to finally turn to the original Witch World novel, and see what I could make of it.

The book was first published in 1963 and ultimately gave rise to well over two dozen sequels, some of them collaborations and some written by other hands. That’s an incredible commercial success, particularly given that this was before the real establishment of fantasy as a well-defined commercial genre. Reading the book now, you can see in it much of what came later; but then also elements of what came before. So to me it feels like a kind of transitional or perhaps transformational work, a significant influence on the development of the genre as a genre.

The story begins with ex-colonel Simon Tregarth on the run from a criminal organisation. He escapes them through the Siege Perilous, a gateway which, Tregarth is promised, will lead him to a new world that will perfectly suit his abilities and desires. He ends up in the Witch World. Largely medieval in its social structure and technology — though there are elements of super-science present as well — it’s also home to magic, psychic powers controlled by the witches of the land of Estcarp, who’re seeking to maintain their realm against their aggressive neighbours. Most aggressive are the mysterious folk of Kolder, who have conquered the nearby island of Gorm with unknowable powers of their own. Tregarth signs on with Estcarp and the book follows him as he and the witches go to war with Kolder, throw their enemies back, and learn something about who it is they fight.

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“A Fun Story That Reminded Me of Conan”: Tangent Online on “Stand at Dubun-Geb”

“A Fun Story That Reminded Me of Conan”: Tangent Online on “Stand at Dubun-Geb”

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Ryan Harvey-smallLouis West at Tangent Online reviews Ryan Harvey’s newest Ahn-Tarqa tale, published here on September 15th:

Ryan Harvey’s “Stand at Duben-Geb” tells of a fantasy world with ancient Shaper magic, domesticated hadrosaurs and a clan of Mongol-like nomadic peoples desperately trying to survive the genocidal attacks of a rival clan. Holed up in a cleft in the steep Duben-Geb mountains in the middle of drenching rains, what’s left of Clan Molghiz squabbles among themselves as their talahn leader lies dying…

A landslide uncovers an ancient colossus, a forty-foot soulless, dead metal giant. But Khasar’s years with a magic-wielder have given him a sensitivity to the Arts and the craft that could perhaps reawaken this creature… A fun story that reminded me a bit of the old Conan tales.

“Stand at Dubun-Geb” is the second Ahn-Tarqa tale published here, following “The Sorrowless Thief,” an exciting  science-fantasy tale packed with “magically tamed dinosaur beasts… [and] a lot of intrigue.” (Tangent Online).

Ryan Harvey won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2011 for his Ahn-Tarqa story, “An Acolyte of Black Spires.” Ahn-Tarqa is also the setting for his e-book novelette, “Farewell to Tyrn,” and his upcoming novel, Turn over the Moon.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Peadar Ó Guilín, Dave Gross, Mike Allen, Vaughn Heppner, Mark Rigney, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others, is here.

“Stand at Dubun-Geb” is a complete 5,500-word short story of heroic fantasy. Read the complete story here.

Vintage Treasures: Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison

Vintage Treasures: Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison

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Hell's Cartographers-smallI’ve been enjoying writing my ongoing series on the Ballantine Best of… books. It’s nice to be able to celebrate all those classic SF and fantasy writers, sure, but it’s also an excuse to talk about how I discovered each of them and what their books meant to me personally.

I don’t think I’m unique in this. SFF readers love to talk about the favorite authors of their youth. Look at the comment threads for any of my Ballantine articles — it’s just a bunch of us old fans yakking about the good old days (and yelling at those kids with their Kindles to get off our lawn).

In truth, this is a long-established tradition. Respected, even. Lots of SF authors did it. Asimov and Damon Knight did it, in Before the Golden Age and Science Fiction of the 30s. So did Brian Aldiss, in Billion Year Spree, and Sam Moskowitz, in Seekers of Tomorrow, Under the Moons of Mars, and just about every book he ever wrote. Perhaps most famously, Kingsley Amis did it in New Maps Of Hell, his celebrated survey of science fiction from 1960.

But probably my favorite example is Hell’s Cartographers, a marvelous collection of “personal histories” from six top science fiction writers: Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, and Brian Aldiss. This book is packed with countless anecdotes, fascinating references to SF magazines and ground-breaking stories, and tales of awkward adolescences. And for those of us interested in the history of the field, there is treasure on every page.

There are numerous quotes I could tease you with, but I’ll limit myself to this one, from Damon Knight’s entry, “Knight Piece,” which effectively communicates just how hapless these accomplished young men were around women.

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When is Writing Like a Magic Trick?

When is Writing Like a Magic Trick?

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Penn & TellerSimple. When giving the explanation ruins things. When what you don’t tell is as important as what you do tell. Or, at times, when it’s who you tell, not what you tell. After all, magicians’ assistants generally know a great deal more about the trick than the audience does – though there might be things even the assistants don’t know, at least not at first.

Most exposition deals with items and details known to the characters, which then have to be conveyed to the readers. What about things the characters don’t know, but the readers must? When we talk about exposition, and giving explanations, along with the how and the when, we also have to consider the who.

Writers are like magicians in this sense – we’ve got to keep our secrets, at least until the right moment when all (ahem) will be revealed. But here’s what makes our lives trickier than those of stage magicians: our readers are both the audience and the assistants. They’re watching the trick unfold, even while they’re participating in the unfolding.

Probably the most obvious example of this is the use of dramatic irony. You know, when the audience knows something the other characters in the play don’t know, because we’ve witnessed action or events that took place when they were off stage. Plays and movies manage this by, well, moving the other characters off stage – or by soliloquies if it’s Shakespeare (think of the beginning of Richard III, where he tells us what he’s going to do, and the other characters don’t know).

[Aside: ever notice that it’s always the bad guy who tells you his plans? That’s because it’s the bad guys who have plans. Good guys are just minding their own business until the bad guy acts up. I’m sure there’s a language in which “good guy” means “has no particular plans.”]

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Drums of Fu Manchu, Part One

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Drums of Fu Manchu, Part One

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imagesCA33UWU0imagesCAUEKJGUSax Rohmer’s The Drums of Fu Manchu was first serialized in Collier’s from April 1 to June 3, 1939. It was published in book form later that year by Cassel in the UK and Doubleday in the US. The book marked a welcome return to the first person narrative voice in the tradition of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries and constituted a return to the series’ roots with a close re-creation of the very first Fu Manchu episode, “The Zayat Kiss” in the opening chapters of the new novel.

The narrator is Fleet Street journalist Bart Kerrigan, a Dr. Petrie substitute who is an old friend of Sir Denis Nayland Smith from his days as a colonial administrator. As in the first book, our narrator is disturbed one night by the unexpected arrival of Nayland Smith, seeking shelter from the Si-Fan agents on his tail. Smith has once again returned to London to save the life of a man marked for death by the Si-Fan.

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Goth Chick News: New Indy Horror — Skinwalker Ranch

Goth Chick News: New Indy Horror — Skinwalker Ranch

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image002I’m not saying the world is over the whole handheld camera, first person horror thing.

I mean, as long as Paranormal Activity 4 can take a $5M production budget and turn it into $54M in box office receipts, we will continue to be treated to a format that was once a novelty, but now needs to be really impressive to get serious audience attention.

Or attention at least.

Skinwalker Ranch may or may not fit the bill.

The premise is solid enough. Skinwalker Ranch, also known as Sherman Ranch, is a property located on approximately 480 acres southeast of Ballard, Utah, that is allegedly the site of paranormal and UFO-related activities. Its name is taken from the “skin-walker” of Native American legend.

And yes, it is a real place.

Claims about the ranch first appeared in the Salt Lake City, Utah Desret News back in 2006 and later in the alternative weekly Las Vegas Mercury as a series of articles by journalist George Knapp. Knapp and co-author Colm Kelleher subsequently authored a book, Hunt for the Skinwalker, in which they describe the ranch being acquired by the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDSci) to study anecdotal sightings of UFOs, bigfoot-like creatures, crop circles, glowing orbs, and poltergeist activity reported by the former owners of Sherman Ranch.

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New Treasures: The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig

New Treasures: The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig

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The Blue Blazes-smallAnd so we continue our celebration of the latest crop of fabulous new paperbacks from Angry Robot.

Angry Robot is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishers. Sure, we highlight a lot of great independent publishers here — folks like Haffner Press, Night Shade, Prime Books, Paizo, Pyr, Orbit, Titan, Solaris, and many others — but most of them concentrate on hardcovers and trade paperbacks, where profit margins are much higher. The low-margin mass market paperback is a much riskier proposition these days, especially when you’re taking a risk on new writers without an established audience.

But we still love paperbacks here at Black Gate. We love the way they’re packaged, and even the way they smell. And we especially love publishers willing to take chances on new writers. And those paperback publishers willing to take chances on gonzo, edgy, hugely original ideas from daring new writers… we just want to take them home and snuggle them. And make them a warm batch of chocolate chip cookies.

The Blue Blazes is the third Chuck Wendig novel from Angry Robot. They’ve also published Blackbirds and Mockingbird, as well as the upcoming The Cormorant. But it was The Blue Blazes that really grabbed my attention last time I was at Barnes & Noble. Sure, the marketing text on the back was intriguing:

Meet Mookie Pearl. Criminal underworld? He runs in it. Supernatural underworld? He hunts in it. Nothing stops Mookie when he’s on the job. But when his daughter takes up arms and opposes him, something’s gotta give…

But it was the blurb from Empire State author Adam Christopher that really sealed the deal:

The Blue Blazes is exactly my kind of supernatural mob crime novel: dark and visceral, with an everyman hero to root for and Lovecraftian god-horror to keep you awake at night… this is the good stuff, right here.

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Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

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The first time I saw a James Enge novel on the shelf of my local bookstore, I broke into a little dance of jubilation. I’d been reading Enge’s short stories about Morlock the Maker in the pages of Black Gate — this was when BG had literal paper pages — and it was news to me that Enge had made the leap from short fiction to novels.

The blurbs on Enge’s books all say some variation on this theme: you will find no other character in fantasy literature, or maybe in literature generally, who is like Morlock the Maker. He’s a traumatized combat veteran who’s still one of his world’s great ass-kickers, yet he’s also an enthusiastically geeky mad scientist. He’s a cynic who will risk all he has to protect innocence where he finds it. He’s wickedly funny, in fewer words of dialogue than should really be possible. Read around in Morlock’s world a while, and you feel pretty soon like you know him, but you can never guess what he’ll do next. A Morlock novel! Could anything be better?

Over the next few years, Enge followed Blood of Ambrose with This Crooked Way and The Wolf Age, and it turned out the one thing better than a Morlock novel was a whole trilogy of Morlock novels.

I loved the cranky old Morlock, the character whose curmudgeonliness sometimes verged on becoming a superpower, so I am still getting used to Enge’s new Tournament of Shadows trilogy about Morlock’s origin story, which began with A Guile of Dragons and now continues with Wrath-Bearing Tree. As a young man, our hero is every bit as odd, unpredictable, noble, hilarious, tragic, clear-eyed, and difficult as his future self, but he hasn’t yet put the damage on and become the ugly old man we loved in the short stories that became This Crooked Way.

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Why I Write Fantasy

Why I Write Fantasy

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Shadow's Master Jon Sprunk-smallI’ve been doing book signings for the last few years, at bookstores and conventions. Most people you meet are very nice. Few actually buy one of your books, but they usually enjoy chatting with the author. Some are writers themselves, looking for a scrap of insight into the industry. But every so often I am asked a variant of this question:

“So why don’t you write books about real stuff?”

I’m sure these folks don’t mean to be rude. They don’t mean to insult my entire career and imply that the genre I’ve loved all my life, a genre which I personally believe has produced some of the most beautiful works of art in human history, is only suitable for children.

Of course, all fiction is “not real” in a sense, and fantasy is perhaps the genre which can seem the farthest from true life. As such, it is sometimes viewed from the outside as a literary ghetto: a kingdom of nerds, geeks, and perpetual adolescents who spend too much time at Renaissance Faires and roleplaying-game conventions. The stereotypes come fast and furious when talking about fantasy fandom.

It’s interesting how some people will accept a story about an alien from another planet who comes to Earth as an infant with superhuman powers and grows up to become humanity’s guardian. Yet, a story about a dragon (essentially a fire-breathing, sometimes-winged dinosaur) is a bridge too far for them. I feel bad for them.

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