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Year: 2013

New Treasures: Cold and Dark

New Treasures: Cold and Dark

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Cold and Dark-smallI couldn’t go to Gencon in August. I had to work. Someone had to — the rent on our spacious rooftop headquarters here in downtown Chicago doesn’t pay itself.

Certain members of our staff did attend that august gathering, however. I’m not going to point any fingers, but I will point you, without comment, to Howard Andrew Jones’s GenCon Writer’s Symposium 2013 and Andrew Zimmerman Jones’s three-part (three-part! That’s how much fun you can have at Gencon) Post-Convention Recap. That’s right. While some us were putting in long hours, trying to finish that scathing expose on the use of polluted air in model zeppelins, everyone on staff named Jones got to go Indianapolis to party. But I’m not bitter.

I’m lying. I’m totally bitter. What’s a guy got to do to keep up with the Joneses around here? It’s not just all the fun they had; it’s the fantastic loot they brought back. Like Cold and Dark, a new RPG of gritty science fiction horror from Chronicle City — publishers of Dungeonslayers, Achtung! Cthulhu, and the upcoming Punktown — which draws inspiration from Pitch Black, Dead Space, and other classics of dark SF. Here’s the back-cover copy:

Centuries from now mankind lives on in the Sirius galaxy, an enormously vast and dense system of stars. It’s a greedy industrial society run by corporations and the Governmental Industrial Complex. The onslaught of strip-mining has stirred something terrible best left buried and forgotten.

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Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

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screaming skull coverA few years back, I had the pleasure of reviewing B-movies on a page hosted by Nathan Shumate’s Cold Fusion Video Reviews. Yes, I was part of his cabal of Cold Fusioneers — not to be confused with early scientific researchers into the elusive possibilities of cold fusion. Until a “catastrophic server failure” wiped out the main site and all the ancillary sites it hosted, Cold Fusion had been one of the longest-running review sites on the Internet.

Nathan decided to retire Cold Fusion and pursue other popular web projects he has launched, but I still have my reviews safely stored on a hard drive, the only place they currently exist…until now! As part of my October “five weeks of frights,” I’ve dug up my review of The Screaming Skull (1958), a fun film to watch this time of year. Some Black Gate readers will also take note that this film allegedly was inspired by a short story of the same name by classic weird-story author F. Marion Crawford.

[And if you wonder “What’s up with this David guy?” with whom I co-hosted the review, stick around to see my explanation at the end of the post.]

*     *     *     *

DAVID: This is a Manning’s Manly Movies review that reaches its climax in shocking horror. Its impact is so terrifying that it may have an unforeseen effect. It may KILL you! Therefore the reviewers feel it necessary to provide free flowers to anyone who dies of fright while reading THIS REVIEW!

OZ:  What are you doing?

DAVID:  A-ha! About time you pulled your head up out of your books long enough to review another movie with me, professor!

OZ:  What were you doing?

DAVID:  I’m borrowing an idea from the producers of this week’s movie. When The Screaming Skull was screened in theaters back in the fifties, the movie opened with a voice-over narrator as a casket lid slowly opened, revealing a burial contract inside…

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Gentle Sleeper” by David Evan Harris

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Gentle Sleeper” by David Evan Harris

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David Evan Harris2David Evan Harris, author of the acclaimed stories “The Mudslinger” and “Seeker of Fortune,” returns to our pages with the tale of a daring confrontation between the dread Baron Weller and a mysterious assassin known as Arland, “The Gentle Sleeper.”

“You are Arland,” the Baron continued. “First Elder of the House of Elementals in the Kingdom of Corland.”

“You are mistaken, my lord,” said Arland.

“Marraine described you perfectly,” said the Baron. “From your height, to the tangled hair. She claimed you were much stronger than you looked.”

“My name is Edward,” said Arland. “I am a fabric merchant.”

“You are an assassin,” said the Baron casually. “The Gentle Sleeper, they call you. A man of little magical strength but with perfect control, who can stop the air from reaching a man’s lungs. You’ve come to kill me, I expect. And I expect you realize by now that you have failed, and that an unpleasant death will begin for you quite shortly.” The Baron leaned back in his chair, holding the bell against his chest.

“Does this mean you don’t want me to find you some clothing?” Arland asked.

Grasping For the Wind called “The Mudslinger” “An epic fantasy… I look forward to more” and Tangent Online called “Seeker of Fortune” “Exceptional. A must read.”

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Janet Morris and Chris Morris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Peadar Ó Guilín, Vaughn Heppner, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others, is here.

“The Gentle Sleeper” is a complete 5,000-word short story of adventure fantasy. It is offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

The Cold Edge of Forever, II: City

The Cold Edge of Forever, II: City

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The City on the Edge of Forever, by Juan OrtizThis is the second part of my attempt to write about Star Trek, and specifically the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” For reasons which I hope will soon make sense I started off yesterday by writing about the 1954 short story “The Cold Equations.” What I’m about to try to do is tie that into a discussion of the Trek episode, and then go on to look at that episode in the context of the show overall. I am going to assume in what follows that you’re familiar with the episode (the plot synopsis is here; if it helps, it’s the one with the Guardian of Forever, where Kirk and Spock travel back to 1930), and that you know things like who Captain Kirk is, and who Mister Spock is, and so on and so forth. This I think is a fair assumption. Everybody knows these characters. Which is a part of why I want to talk about the episode, and its context. So before anything else, I want first to talk about the exercise of unknowing them. (And as an aside, the poster at right is by artist Juan Ortiz, who did an image for every episode of the original series. Worth taking a look at, and the whole run has been collected in a single book.)

Lately I’ve been watching the first season of Star Trek week by week, on a TV network that airs old shows from the 50s through 70s. Seeing the series in that context means seeing it as part of the fabric of its time. Some series, I`ve found, become very different: the original Twilight Zone, always a good show, becomes downright mind-bending. Watching Trek in that way I find myself caught up in the craft of the writing, direction, and (yes) acting; and I seem to forget everything I know about what happens outside of the show I’m seeing.

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An Open Letter to Amy Farrah-Fowler, Ph. D.

An Open Letter to Amy Farrah-Fowler, Ph. D.

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Puzzled Indiana JonesDear Dr. Farrah-Fowler,

Regarding your erroneous conclusion that Indiana Jones played no role in the outcome of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I can only express disappointment that your usual disciplined reason failed you in this instance.

Let us explore your thesis and remove Indiana Jones entirely from the equation. The year is 1936 and the Nazis are exploring a sand-covered ruin of a largish ancient Egyptian city (Tannis, a major religious center, was comparable to Thebes) in search of the Ark of the Covenant. Without the headpiece to the staff of Ra, brute manpower would not have been equal to the task before them in the short time available to the Nazis. The only similar ancient city destroyed by catastrophe and quickly preserved in such a manner is that of Pompeii. As you are no doubt aware, Pompeii has been excavated and explored off and on since 1748, and intensively between 1924-1961, yet we still have not progressed much outside the main streets or into second floors and basements. The Nazis, in theory, would have until the outbreak of war in September 1939 at the very latest to carry out their dig, a span of 3 years. Unless you posit the British Army would have been willing to let a detachment of Afrika Korps poke around Egypt within spitting distance of the Nile in wartime. If you believe that, I have a piece of the True Cross made out of Georgia Sweetgum you may be interested in buying.

I think we can dispense with the idea that the Nazis would have found the Ark without the headpiece to the Staff of Ra.

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Fierce and Fey: An Interview with Artist Lauren K. Cannon

Fierce and Fey: An Interview with Artist Lauren K. Cannon

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Baalhu_by_navateI think I first saw Lauren K. Cannon’s art at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, 2011. John O’Neill and I were brainstorming about cover art for Mike Allen’s book and the moment I saw Cannon’s work, I was riveted.

I took home one of her postcards. It’s still pinned up by my writing desk, where I can watch the woman in her bird-skull headdress, kneeling by a bone-embedded riverbed and feeding her creepy little bird friends from bowls of blood.

I love that bird woman. I’d love to write about her, this Baalhu of the Ancients. But even when I didn’t know her name, I adored the bones of her. That’s what Cannon’s art does to me: catapults me from the quotidian into INSTANT STORYBRAIN.

By and by, John bought “Black Bride” to be the cover art for Mike Allen’s Black Fire Concerto. You should have heard the squeals of ecstatic (and perhaps mildly terrified) joy coming from my corner of Rhode Island. John didn’t even need a cell phone, probably. He could’ve just stepped out into his driveway somewhere in Suburbia, Illinois and heard the echoes. I couldn’t have been happier.

And then, as I began this series of Fantasy and the Arts Interviews (1 and 2 here and here), I knew immediately I wanted to interview her.

Cannon very graciously agreed to answer my questions in an email, and here I have them for you, dear Black Gate readers.

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The Cold Edge of Forever, I: Equations

The Cold Edge of Forever, I: Equations

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Astounding Science Fiction, August 1954I want to write about Star Trek. Specifically, about the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” But I’m not going to do that right now. I’ll get there, but I’m going to start off by writing about a well-known prose sf story that to me parallels “City” in some interesting ways. Then, in my next post, I’ll go on to write about the Trek episode and make a fuller comparison (edit to add: time having passed, you can find the post here). First up, though: “The Cold Equations.”

“The Cold Equations” was written in 1954 by Tom Godwin for editor John W. Campbell and published in Astounding. Some, including writers Kurt Busiek and Lawrence Watt-Evans, have stated that the story was largely borrowed from an EC Comics short story by Al Feldstein with art by Wally Wood, “A Weighty Decision,” itself perhaps copied from an E.C. Tubb story (“Precedent”). At any rate, Godwin’s tale is well-known, having been adapted for the screen and frequently anthologised; I read it in The Road to Science Fiction 3: From Heinlein to Here.

A man, Barton, piloting a small spaceship carrying medicine to an isolated colony, discovers an eighteen-year-old stowaway, Marilyn, who wanted to see her brother on the colony world. But Marilyn, from Earth, doesn’t understand the way things work out on the frontier of space: the ship had exactly as much fuel as it needed to get to the planet — before Marilyn’s unexpected weight was added. With Marilyn, it won’t be able to land safely. For the people on the colony world to live, she has to be ejected from the ship. Barton frantically tries to find some way out, some way to keep her alive, but cannot; and so, willingly, she goes into the airlock, and dies out in the void of space. Physics and mass and momentum cannot be argued with, the story tells us; the cold equations must balance.

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Get Graphic Classics Volume 23: Halloween Classics for only $10 in October

Get Graphic Classics Volume 23: Halloween Classics for only $10 in October

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Graphic Classics Halloween Classics-smallI’m a big fan of Tom Pomplun’s Graphic Classics comic anthologies. I’ve lost track of exactly how many he’s published so far, but it’s a lot — including volumes showcasing Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, R.L. Stevenson, O. Henry, Rafael Sabatini, Oscar Wilde, and my favorite, H.P. Lovecraft.

Each book is 144 pages in graphic novel format, collecting some the best stories from each of the featured authors, illustrated by a stellar line-up of artists. And seriously, that Lovecraft release is the bee’s knees.

He’s also done a series of special theme volumes, including Western Classics, Fantasy Classics, Gothic Classics, Horror Classics, and Adventure Classics. As an added bonus, the most recent of these (including Science Fiction Classics, Poe’s Tales of Mystery, and Native American Classics) are in full color.

Now Graphic Classics Volume 23: Halloween Classics is just $10 for the entire month of October (reduced from $15 ). This volume features an EC-style introduction, by Mort Castle and Kevin Atkinson, and contains Matt Howarth’s adaptation of the screenplay of the classic silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, alongside adaptations of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Ben Avery and Shepherd Hendrix, H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” by Rod Lott and Craig Wilson, Mark Twain’s “A Curious Dream’’ by Antonella Caputo and Nick Miller, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” illustrated by Simon Gane.

We covered Halloween Classics when it was first released last September. Get more details or order a copy on their website and see the complete line-up of fabulous Graphic Classics here.

Vintage Treasures: Strange Eons by Robert Bloch

Vintage Treasures: Strange Eons by Robert Bloch

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Strange Eons Robert Bloch-smallBack in July, I did a Vintage Treasures article on The Best of Robert Bloch, the second in my series on Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction. In doing the research for that article, I came across references to Bloch’s book of Lovecraftian fiction, Strange Eons, first published in 1979.

My curiosity was piqued. It took a while to track down a copy, but this is the age of the Internet, when all things are possible. I settled in to read it this morning and I was surprised to find it’s a novel, not a collection, as I assumed. Given the big Doctor Who news today, I was also amused to find the last page given over to a house ad for Pinnacle’s Doctor Who novelizations, with a banner quote from Harlan Ellison: “Incomparable… extraordinary… my hero, Doctor Who!”

The book is dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft — at least that wasn’t a surprise. As the publisher notes on the back of Strange Eons, Bloch was a protégé of Lovecraft and, at the age of fifteen, the youngest member of the “Lovecraft Circle” of writers. The novel builds unabashedly on the work of the master, starting with the premise that the creatures he wrote of are real, and his books form a dire warning for mankind:

What men know is called science; what they have not yet learned they call magic. But both are real….

In the world of today and the near future, three people inexorably linked by a common interest in the work of H. P. Lovecraft, discover: that the legendary creatures he created in his fantasies have hideous counterparts in reality… that his fiction is incredible fact… that his message is a warning…

Spooky stuff. I’ll see if the execution lives up to the promise. Strange Eons was published by Pinnacle Books in June 1979, with cover art by David Hada. It is 249 pages, priced at $1.95 in paperback. I paid $5.50 for a fine condition copy on eBay.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasure articles here.

Nine Long-Lost Doctor Who Episodes Found in Nigeria

Nine Long-Lost Doctor Who Episodes Found in Nigeria

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The Web of Fear DVD-smallThanks to the BBC’s notorious policy of erasing and re-using video tape, there are still 106 missing classic Doctor Who episodes — and the only reason that number isn’t a lot larger is due to the tireless efforts of fans who have, over decades, tracked down individual episodes in the hands of private collectors or sitting on dusty shelves in overseas television stations.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’re aware of the rumors that have been flying around for months about a new trove of lost episodes found in Ecuador, or Africa, or some such place. If you’re a true fan, you’re probably aware that rumors like this tend to pop up from time to time and most of them aren’t true.

Well, it appears there was more than a grain of truth to this one. On Thursday, the BBC released nine previously lost episodes found in a television station in the Nigerian city of Jos — reducing the number of lost episodes to 97.

The BBC says it believes this is “the largest haul of missing episodes recovered in the last three decades.” It includes the complete six-part serial The Enemy of the World from 1967-68 (only episode 3 had previously been found), and most of the six-part The Web of Fear from 1968 (episode 3 is still missing, and episode 1 was already in archive). Both black-and-white serials star Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor.

The BBC has announced that newly-remastered versions of both serials will be released on DVD, with The Enemy of the World coming on November 25, 2013, followed by The Web of Fear on February 24, 2014. See the provisional artwork and details for both here. Both have also been released online as iTunes exclusives for $9.99 each — see the trailers at EnGadget.