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Year: 2013

Locus Online on the Best SF & Fantasy Short Fiction of the 20th and 21st Centuries

Locus Online on the Best SF & Fantasy Short Fiction of the 20th and 21st Centuries

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The Nine Billion Names of GodTwo weeks ago, we reported that Locus Online, the web-based offshoot of the newspaper of the science fiction and fantasy field, had announced the results of their ambitious poll to determine the best science fiction and fantasy novels of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The complete poll had three additional categories: novella, novelette, and short story. Since all votes were write-ins, compiling the short fiction results took a while longer, but LO‘s diligent editor Mark R. Kelly finally published them Saturday, January 5th. Here are the Top 10 vote-getters in the short fiction categories:

20th Century Short Story

  1. Clarke, Arthur C.: “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953)
  2. Le Guin, Ursula K.: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973)
  3. Ellison, Harlan: “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman” (1965)
  4. Ellison, Harlan: “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)
  5. Clarke, Arthur C.: “The Star” (1955)
  6. Bradbury, Ray: “A Sound of Thunder” (1952)
  7. Heinlein, Robert A.: “All You Zombies–” (1959)
  8. Gibson, William: “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981)
  9. Tiptree, James, Jr.: “The Screwfly Solution” (1977)
  10. Jackson, Shirley: “The Lottery” (1948)

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Art of the Genre: Should You Sell Sex?

Art of the Genre: Should You Sell Sex?

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If you have a cover by Brom, are you selling your words or his art?
If you have a cover by Brom, are you selling your words or his art?  Even worse, are you simply selling sex?

Sex… yeah, I said it. Is anyone listening? Probably, because like rubber-necking a car accident, when someone says the word, we all have to take notice, especially here in the U.S. Face it, at our roots, the base Caucasian population is of a repressed Puritanical or Fundamentalist mind, the South, fire and brimstone Baptist, and the fastest growing minority, Latino, inquisition-descended Catholic.

Still, we are Human, and as such, if sex isn’t on our minds, then there is a natural selection breakdown in the root of our Darwin-based evolution.

This creates a hard edge of self-loathing, Hail Marys, and scarlet letters that is terribly hard to overcome, especially for those in the art community. Not that the art community doesn’t produce sexual products, but that doesn’t mean they are accepted without judgment outside that community for it.

I had this problem in 2012, but before I get to that, I’ve got to take the way-back machine to my formative years.

I was raised by a single mother who decided that when my father cheated on her when I was less than a year old, she would dedicate her life to her son, and no other man. So, in that sense, I was raised in a completely sex-free environment. It wasn’t spoken of or seen, and I was educated as a Methodist until my late teens, seeing the church as a counter to the budding feeling of puberty.

However, like my favorite line by Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, ‘Nature finds a way’ and my sexual rebellion was profound, even if I journeyed into that particular bliss blindly. In my home, there was never ‘the talk,’ so when my twelve-year old friends and I entered an abandoned house on the far side of a community woods and found a collection of Penthouse magazines, to say my world was shaken to its foundation is a massive understatement.

At fifteen, I rebelled against the establishment, went to K-Mart and purchased a poster of The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas, which I pinned to the wall at the foot of my bed and waited. Silence… It was the only reprimand that came from my action, the same stoic suffering that my entire family has practiced since it came to Indiana through the Cumberland Gap in 1840.

Visually, buying into the selling of sex was forefront in my mind, and I got to see first-hand the balance trying to be struck in my new gaming passion, Dungeons & Dragons, concerning the female form in fantasy. In the late 70s, selling sex was something that TSR was willing to take a shot at in black and white illustrations by Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, or Bill Willingham, but then the Bible belt constricted a notch in the 80s and they pulled back from this ideal. Still, beautiful women in questionable clothing crept into the covers of Elmore, Easley, Parkinson, and of course the ‘thigh-master’ himself Clyde Caldwell.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye” by John R. Fultz

Black Gate Online Fiction: “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye” by John R. Fultz

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John R FultzThe great playwright Artifice the Quill, who freed the city of Narr from the grip of the dread Sorcerer Kings with but a single performance in “Return of the Quill” (Black Gate 13), returns in a tale of magic, mystery, and the power of performance:

The haunted city lay sleeping at the feet of the mountains, a gray collection of antique architecture encircled by a granite wall. A monolith rose from its central plaza, crowned by a crimson orb that refracted starlight, painting the streets with bloody shadow. Pale ghosts wandered along the avenues, silver phantasms gliding through vermilion, while the living stayed locked inside their shuttered houses.

Three brightly canopied wagons descended the ancient road to Mornitetra. Artifice sat on the driver’s bench of the lead wagon. As the confining walls of the mountain pass fell behind, he looked down upon the shunned city at last. He watched spectral shapes swim through the avenues.

What would the ghosts think of his play?

John’s first first story for Black Gate was “Oblivion is the Sweetest Wine” in Black Gate 12, a classic sword-and-sorcery tale of spider-haunted towers and a terrifying secret. His contributions to our pages also include “Return of the Quill” (in BG 13) and “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15).

His epic fantasy novel Seven Princes is available from Orbit Books. Seven Kings, the second book of the Shaper Trilogy, will be released on Jan. 15, with the concluding volume, Seven Sorcerers, coming in Jan. 2014. Read an exclusive chapter from Seven Kings here.

You can see the complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Donald S. Crankshaw, Aaron Bradford Starr, Sean McLachlan, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and Jason E. Thummel, here.

“When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye” is a complete 6,800-word novelette of heroic fantasy offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

Teresa Edgerton’s Goblin Moon

Teresa Edgerton’s Goblin Moon

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Goblin MoonI’ve mentioned before that I’ve an idea that there’s a lot to be learned from some of the overlooked fantasies of the 1980s. Teresa Edgerton’s Goblin Moon was published in 1991, and it’s less obscure than some — in fact, it’s just come out as an ebook (you can find a trailer here) — but it’s still a good example of what I have in mind. And a fine and delightful tale in its own right.

Goblin Moon is the only book I’ve read by Edgerton. From what I’ve found online, she began writing with a series of alchemical fantasies, the Celydonn trilogy: Child of Saturn and The Moon in Hiding in 1989, followed by The Work of the Sun in 1990. Goblin Moon came out in 1991, as did its sequel, The Gnome’s Engine; the two books together make up the “Masks & Daggers” duology. A second Celydonn trilogy followed (The Castle of the Silver Wheel in 1993, The Grail and the Ring in 1994, and The Moon and the Thorn in 1995), but after 2001’s The Queen’s Necklace, the vagaries of the publishing industry led Edgerton to assume a pseudonym. Under the name Madeline Howard, she’s published two books of a projected trilogy — The Hidden Stars and A Dark Sacrifice. Having acquired the electronic rights to her older books, she’s begun re-releasing them as ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks. Goblin Moon’s now available at her website, with The Gnome’s Engine apparently planned to re-appear in a few months.

Moon’s an intricate and surprising book. The plot follows the fortunes of several characters: river scavengers who make a surprising find, an old used bookman who thinks he knows how to use said find, his granddaughter who is the best friend of an ailing upper-class cousin, and a mysterious nobleman with strange and possibly dreadful secrets. These plot strands run into each other unexpectedly, branch out in surprising directions, and finally more or less dovetail into a conclusion. There are elements in Goblin Moon of romance, mystery, and adventure out of Dumas or Orczy. But what really makes the book stand out is its setting, an elaborate secondary world. Most of the book takes place in and around Thornburg, a pseudo-German city in an eighteenth century filled with magic, fairies, dwarves, gnomes, trolls, and a moon whose orbit brings it visibly closer to the earth at its full. The outlines of Thornburg and the wider world are familiar, evocative of the exploits of Casanova or Cagliostro, but the details are specific, unique, and highly detailed: Edgerton’s imagined her world’s folkways and superstitions, its magic and iconography, its habits of thought and obsessions.

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Gerry Anderson, April 14, 1929 – December 26, 2012

Gerry Anderson, April 14, 1929 – December 26, 2012

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Space 1999I read on Tor.com that television writer, producer, and supermarionation pioneer Gerry Anderson died last week.

His name may not mean much to modern audiences, but Gerry Anderson was beloved among science fiction fans of the 1960s-1980s — and boy, did we love him. He had a long and fruitful career, especially with science fiction-themed children’s shows such as Fireball XL5 (1962), Stingray (’64–65), Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (67-68), Joe 90 (68-69), and his biggest success, Thunderbirds (1965-1966).

Most of Anderson’s TV shows were co-produced with his wife, Sylvia Anderson. They were married from 1960 to 1981. Sylvia frequently directed the overdub sessions for the supermarionation programs, and even provided the voices of many characters, including Lady Penelope of the Thunderbirds.

Thunderbirds may have been his biggest success — and the defining kid’s show for an entire generation of science fiction fans — but there was nothing that could get my young heart rate up like the opening credits for Joe 90.

Gerry’s television career culminated in Space: 1999, the groundbreaking science-fiction television series that was the last Gerry and Sylvia Anderson co-production, and the most expensive series produced for British television up to that time. It ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1977, and starred Martin Landau, the painfully wooden Barbara Bain, Barry Morse, and (in season two) Catherine Schell as Maya, the shape-changing alien hottie.

While it had an original premise and showcased enough intriguing plotlines to captivate its teenage fans, Space: 1999 is primarily remembered today for the superb results of effects artist Brian Johnson, whose detailed model work was hugely influential on Alien and other films that decade. His work was so impressive that George Lucas visited Johnson during production and offered him the role of effects supervisor for Star Wars. He later received an Academy Award for his work on The Empire Strikes Back.

Gerry Anderson continued to work well into the last decade; his New Captain Scarlet premiered in the UK in February 2005, and was said to be the most expensive children’s programme ever made in the UK. He died peacefully in his sleep on December 26, 2012 at the age of 83.

New Treasures: Piers Anthony’s Luck of the Draw

New Treasures: Piers Anthony’s Luck of the Draw

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Luck of the Draw-smallI admit that I was surprised to find a new Xanth novel among this week’s new arrivals — but I suppose I shouldn’t have been. This is the 36th in the series, following 2011’s Well-Tempered Clavicle, and Anthony shows no sign of slowing down; the next two, Esrever Doom and Board Stiff, have already been announced.

The Xanth series, for those of you completely unfamiliar with American fantasy, began with A Spell for Chameleon, published in paperback by Del Rey in 1977. I was in high school in 1977, and I remember the immediate impact it had. It was fast-paced and genuinely funny, and that made it virtually unique on book store shelves groaning under the weight of numerous Tolkien rip-offs

The first nine Xanth books were published in paperback by Del Rey; starting with Vale of the Vole in 1987, the series switched to Avon Books. Anthony switched publishers again in 1993 for Demons Don’t Dream, the sixteenth installment. It’s pretty unusual for a successful author to hop publishers like that; I found this cryptic explanation on Anthony’s Wikipedia page (with no citation):

On multiple occasions Anthony has moved from one publisher to another (taking a profitable hit series with him), when he says he felt the editors were unduly tampering with his work. He has sued publishers for accounting malfeasance and won judgments in his favor.

Yikes. That doesn’t sound good. Not sure what the true story is, but have no fear. Team Black Gate will investigate.

But not until we finish reading Luck of the Draw, of course. And maybe get a snack.

Luck of the Draw was published by Tor Books on December 24, 2012. It is 350 pages in hardcover, priced at $25.99 ($12.99 for the digital edition).

Vintage Treasures: Andre Norton’s Velvet Shadows

Vintage Treasures: Andre Norton’s Velvet Shadows

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Andre Norton Velvet Shadows-smallMy home is pretty cool. There are teetering piles of unread books everywhere, ready to topple like late August sunflowers. And if I only had time to review a few, it might be even cooler.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who lives here. Occasionally, the other inhabitants find something that catches their eye, and when I see that happen I grab a notepad and try and coerce some comments out of them. It’s not the perfect family dynamic, but at least it’s something we do together.

I don’t get to choose what my family reads, obviously, so these reviews-by-proxy tend to be an odd lot (the last one was The House of Dead Maids, which I discovered my daughter enjoying a while back). Last weekend, I noticed my wife had casually picked up a copy of Andre Norton’s Velvet Shadows. I debated for a second before grabbing my notepad. Andre Norton, vintage paperback, gothic romance… Well, close enough to Black Gate territory for our purposes.

What follows is a raw transcript of our conversation, which she agreed to have published here only after I promised not to use her real name on the Internet. Not everyone has a taste for fame, I guess.

John O’Neill: Well, how was it?

Unidentified Reviewer #1: It was terrible.

JO: Okay that’s a little more, uh… concise than our usual reviews. What else you can tell us?

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Apex Magazine #44

Apex Magazine #44

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Apex Magazine 44-smallEugie Foster portrays a god of vengeance in “Trixie and the Pandas of Dread,” Lettie Prell writes about “The Performance Artist” and Tansy Rayner Roberts provides something of a romance in “The Patrician.”

Sarah Kuhn’s column explores the phenomenon of well-known genre figureheads making ill-conceived statements about women genre participants and fans, Maggie Slater interviews Eugie Foster, and editor Lynne M. Thomas’s regular “Blood on the Vellum” column rounds out the 44th edition of this e-magazine.

The issue is available for download from:

Buy issue 44 from Apex
Buy issue 44 from Amazon

The issue can also be read for free online at www.apex-magazine.com.

Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Best Fantasy Releases of 2012: Jones, Fultz, Cole, Lawrence

Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Best Fantasy Releases of 2012: Jones, Fultz, Cole, Lawrence

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bones-of-the-old-ones-contest-win11The editors and staff of Black Gate are very proud to note that the Barnes & Noble Book Club’s annual list of The Best Fantasy Releases is thick with Black Gate authors, including Howard Andrew Jones, John R. Fultz, Myke Cole, and Mark Lawrence. Here’s reviewer Paul Goat Allen:

2012 was a surprisingly strong year for fantasy… In fact, several debut novels made my year’s best fantasy list: John R. Fultz’s Seven Princes, Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, Myke Cole’s Control Point, and Scourge of the Betrayer by Jeff Salyards.

Mark Lawrence’s sequel to his debut novel Prince of Thorns was absolutely breathtaking; John R. Fultz’s debut was flawless epic fantasy… The sheer diversity of fantasy releases this year was impressive. From the epic fantasy sagas of Fultz, Weeks, and Lawrence to the glorious sword-and-sorcery adventure of Howard Andrew Jones and Saladin Ahmed to the military-powered fantasy of Myke Cole and Joe Abercrombie, the releases of 2012 were as diverse as the realms in which they were set.

While we’re pleased to see Mr’s Jones, Fultz, Cole, and Lawrence get some well-deserved recognition, I can’t say we’re too surprised. Black Gate readers were treated to early work from all four authors — and we recently published generous excerpts from both Prince of Thorns and The Bones of the Old Ones.

And you can read an advance excerpt from the sure-fire candidate for next year’s list, John R. Fultz’s exciting Seven Kings, the sequel to Seven Princes, on sale January 15, 2013.

Howard Andrew Jones is the Managing Editor of Black Gate magazine; his Dabir & Asim stories, “Sight of Vengeance” and “Whispers from the Stone,” appeared in Black Gate 10 and 12. John R. Fultz has published four stories in our pages; his epic sword & sorcery tale, “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” will be published this Sunday as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction line.

Myke Cole’s “Naktong Flow” appeared in Black Gate 13 and Mark Lawrence’s “Bulletproof” will be published as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction line late this Winter.

Paul Goat Allen’s complete list of The Best Fantasy Releases of 2012 is available here.

Review of K. Bird Lincoln’s Tiger Lily

Review of K. Bird Lincoln’s Tiger Lily

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Tiger Lily cover
Tiger Lily cover

About a month and a half ago on this blog, I solicited submissions of self-published novels for review.  I know firsthand how difficult it is to sell fiction on your own, so I wanted to give some attention to books that are often underappreciated, both by the industry and by readers.  I received more than a few submissions–not so many that I was completely swamped, thankfully, but enough that I had to sort through the entries and decide on the one that I thought was most promising. That one was Tiger Lily by K. Bird Lincoln.

I selected this novel because the sample chapter was well-written and the premise was unique and intriguing. However, I was going out of my comfort zone in choosing it. Tiger Lily could be best described as a fantasy historical romance taking place in feudal Japan.  I’ll readily admit that that is not my normal reading material.  Since I am not as familiar with this subgenre, it’s quite possible that common and accepted tropes of it struck me the wrong way, and that I completely missed things that would bother the normal audience.  So in this review, I’ll just point out what worked for me and what didn’t, and those with more familiarity with the subgenre can take what I say with a grain of salt.

The title, Tiger Lily, refers to the main character, Lily-of-the-Valley, who was born in the year of the Tiger, which she blames or credits for every stubborn and rebellious decision she makes.  She’s unmarriageable, she’s a failure as a dutiful daughter, and worst of all, she keeps the old ways of Jindo, rather than the new Buddhist religion embraced by the Emperor.  The author admits that she sharpened the conflict between Buddhism and Jindo in the novel, as compared to the historical competition between the two faiths in Japan. Though it may be more fantasy than history, this conflict is effective as the driving force in the novel.  It’s the main motivation for Lily to keep her connection to the spirits, or kami, hidden, and is the ultimate reason behind the war she finds herself embroiled in, between the Buddhist Emperor and the Jindo-following rebels.

At the beginning of the novel, Lily doesn’t consider herself a follower of Jindo so much as of her vanished mother, who was a true practitioner. She merely enjoys walking alone in the forest, singing the forbidden songs that her mother taught her.  Until one day she runs into the local lord’s son, Prince Ashikaga, injured in the forest, and she must protect him from the fox spirit rebels.  Her songs are what allow the prince to fight and defeat the rebels in the early skirmishes.  Soon she’s swept up in the war against the Jindo rebels, where the prince sees her as the key to success, and maybe as something more.  But as they become closer, she learns that the prince has his own secrets. I won’t reveal that here, but if you know that he has a secret (which the book description tells you straight out), it’s fairly obvious what it is.

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