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Year: 2013

Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Seven

Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Seven

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kurtzman_flash_gordon_cvr1089218651297“Circea” by Dan Barry was serialized by King Features Syndicate from March 22 to May 29, 1954. This lighthearted story begins with Zarkov encouraging Flash to propose to Dale. Just as he starts to ask her to marry him, the gravity of the area around them is thrown off and Flash and Dale find themselves hurtling past the clouds while the oxygen grows rapidly thinner.

They recover consciousness to find themselves in a rocketship hurtling through space. They leave our galaxy and pass through a comet unscathed before entering the atmosphere of an unknown planetoid in a far distant galaxy. They are brought to rest through the skylight of a large installation perched high on a cliff. They find themselves facing a beautiful woman named Circea who has observed Flash from afar and become infatuated with him.

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Goth Chick News: New (Creepy) Fiction – A Cold Season

Goth Chick News: New (Creepy) Fiction – A Cold Season

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A Cold Season-smallPersonally, I find discovering a new voice in the horror fiction space is like Christmas in July – or in this case, Halloween in September. And the warm, gooey candy corn is all the sweeter when that scary new voice is a woman’s.

So it was with particular relish that I unwrapped an early copy of A Cold Season by British newcomer Alison Littlewood. Littlewood has been a literary presence for some time, with short stories selected for The Best Horror of the Year and Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, as well as The Best British Fantasy 2013, but A Cold Season is her freshman novel and it has already received a very favorable welcome across the pond.

Littlewood tells us the story of the newly widowed Cass and her son Ben as they attempt to escape their grief by moving to the highlands of Darnshaw: a picture-perfect village from Cass’ youth that is not, of course, what it seems. As the snow covers the moors, Ben grows increasingly hostile and a series of strange occurrences begin to disturb Cass. Soon, the two are completely isolated from the outside world by the weather and Cass is forced to confront Darnshaw’s dark secrets, marooned in a sea of snow and with terrifying results.

I applaud Littlewood, who excels at driving home a feeling of discomfort, whether in subtle and early hints at the paranormal or in mundane things such as a lack of Internet access. Creaks and bumps in the semi-isolated apartment building Cass finds herself in are handled as masterfully as the lingering, deceitful, and unnerving sneers from the locals.

And while I do not regret the hours I spent with A Cold Season, it has some of the typical stumbles of a first novel. Cass becomes isolated almost from the start, when the snow comes and cuts off the village even before she and her son are settled. The villagers are immediately odd and Ben begins to act hostile as soon as he returns home from his first day at school.

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New Treasures: The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz

New Treasures: The Revelations of Zang by John R. Fultz

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The Revelations of Zang-smallWe published three stories from John R. Fultz’s baroque and fascinating sword & sorcery Zang Cycle in the print version of Black Gate: “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine,” featuring the famous thief Taizo and his daring heist in spider-haunted Ghoth (BG 12); “Return of the Quill,” in which Artifice’s long-simmering plan to bring revolution to the city of Narr finally unfolds (BG 13); and the prequel story “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15). Next, John took us back in time to Artifice’s first year as a member of the travelling Glimmer Faire in “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” which appeared as part of the Black Gate Online Fiction line here in January.

Those four tales triggered an intense interest among our readers, and over the years John returned to Zang many times. He elaborated on the evolution of the saga in a recent post here on the BG blog:

Once Upon a Time in Zang… a fugitive author and a devious cutthroat began a revolt against the nine Sorcerer Kings whose power displaced the gods themselves. Like the revolt, which began in far-flung places, the Zang Cycle of stories would grow slowly and cover a lot of ground…

It all started with “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” in the pages of Weird Tales #340 (2006). The cover of that issue featured a horde of the faceless warlocks known as Vizarchs, who drag Artifice the Quill away in the story’s opening scene, a scene painted by the talented Les Edwards.

The story was a turning point for me: The fulfillment of a long-standing dream (getting published in Weird Tales) and the introduction of two characters I would return to many times: Artifice the Quill and Taizo the Thief.

I wrote eleven more Zang Tales and moved the series to the welcoming pages of Black Gate, where it flourished for many issues.

Now, seven years after the first story appeared in Weird Tales, the complete Zang Cycle has been collected in a new volume, The Revelations of Zang: Twelve Tales of the Continent, released by 01Publishing this summer.

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An Introduction to King of Chaos

An Introduction to King of Chaos

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Pathfinder Tales King of Chaos-smallWhen I began writing Queen of Thorns, my favorite secondary characters were the bleachling gnome Fimbulthicket and the elven Calistrian inquisitor Kemeili. Before long, however, the elven paladin Oparal grew closest to my heart.

That proved problematic because I was revealing her character through the eyes of my flawed protagonists, Radovan and Varian, each of whom has his own tilted worldview when it comes to elves, paladins, women, or all three. Thus, by the end of the novel I feared Oparal had earned less sympathy from the readers, who had seen her only from the outside, than she had from me, who knew the secrets of her heart.

Thus, as I was finishing revisions on the novel and editor James Sutter and I discussed where the boys might travel next, I added a scene showing that Oparal would leave Kyonin to join the Silver Crusade against the demons of the Worldwound, knowing full well the boys would soon join her. It was time, I decided, to tell part of the story from her point of view.

Elsewhere, you can read about how hard it was to find Varian’s voice after establishing Radovan’s first, in the novella “Hell’s Pawns.” It was slightly less difficult to come up with the “voice” of Arnisant the Ustalavic wolf hound in “Master of Devils.” Finding Oparal’s voice took me several tries, and I probably rewrote this first chapter four or five times before feeling I’d found it and having the courage to move on to the rest of her chapters.

I hope you will find it a voice equal to those of “the boys,” and by the end of the novel, I like to think we’ve seen Oparal from the inside as well as from the outside.

Read the first chapter of King of Chaos right here at Black Gate, and try an exclusive excerpt of Queen of Thorns here.

To order the novels, visit paizo.com.

Cosmic Horror and Gritty Noir: A Review of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

Cosmic Horror and Gritty Noir: A Review of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

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The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All-smallThe Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
By Laird Barron
Night Shade Books (280 pages, $26.99, September 3, 2013)

After having its delivery date pushed back multiple times, Laird Barron’s The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All has finally arrived.

This highly anticipated book marks Barron’s third collection of short stories (and fourth book), following both of his Shirley Jackson Award-winning collections The Imago Sequence and Occultation, as well as his 2012 debut novel, The Croning. As with his prior volumes, this one continues to meet, and exceed, the bar of contemporary horror stories, showing that Barron is still one of the leading horror voices of today.

Let me emphasize that this collection is in keeping with what I, and many others, have come to love and expect from Barron: a great combination of cosmic horror feel — which many associate with the early pulp writer H. P. Lovecraft — as well as Barron’s own gritty noir-like style. I’ll not retread this well-known ground. Rather, in this review I want to emphasize some other merits of this book, which I believe are represented in Barron’s other works as well.

First, I don’t know if this is new, or perhaps I just missed it in his earlier stories, but I noticed some great humor, especially in character dialogue.

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Fall 2013 Subterranean Magazine now Available

Fall 2013 Subterranean Magazine now Available

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Subterranean Magazine Fall 2013-smallThe tireless Bill Schafer has released another issue of the excellent Subterranean Magazine, right on time, continuing to make those of us who struggled with publishing deadlines look bad. Jerk.

The Fall Issue is packed with big names, too. Just check out this table of contents:

“Doctor Helios,” by Lewis Shiner
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” by Ted Chiang
“Hook Agonistes,” by Jay Lake and Seanan McGuire
“What Doctor Ivanovich Saw,” by Ian Tregillis

Lewis Shiner is the author of Deserted Cities of the Heart, Frontera, Slam, and many other novels. “Doctor Helios” is a whopping 30,000 words, practically a novel in itself.

The brilliant Ted Chiang has won four Nebula awards and four Hugo awards for his short fiction — pretty good considering he’s written only 14 stories in the past 23 years. A new Chiang story is a major event, and it’s not often you’re offered one for free.

Jay Lake has been published twice in Black Gate magazine (“Fat Jack and the Spider Clown,” in BG 8 and “Devil on the Wind,” in collaboration with Michael Jasper, in BG 14); his collaborator here, Seanan McGuire, has never been published in Black Gate, but we don’t hold that against her. She has written 10 novels in the October Daye series, and (as Mira Grant) the Newsflesh trilogy and the upcoming Parasite.

I saw Ian Tregillis give a reading at the World Science Fiction Convention last year — and that man knows how to pack a room. His most recent novels are Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War, and Necessary Evil, the final book in the The Milkweed Triptych.

Subterranean is edited by William Schafer and published quarterly. The Fall 2013 issue is completely free and available here; see their complete back issue catalog here. We last covered Subterranean magazine with their previous issue, Summer 2013.

Vintage Treasures: The Lords of Underearth

Vintage Treasures: The Lords of Underearth

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Lords of Underearth-smallI’ve written before about the marvelously compact games from Metagaming that first introduced me to role playing, both in my editorial in Black Gate 12 and here on the blog.

It was the ubiquitous Metagaming ads on the inside cover of Analog and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the late 70s that first caught my eye. I carefully clipped out the order form (I bet you kids have never clipped an order form out of a magazine in your life. Bah! You don’t know what you’re missing. A gaping hole in the cover of your magazine, that’s what you’re missing) and mailed off my $2.95 for copy of Melee and $3.95 for the fabulously deluxe Wizard.

Both games were written by Steve Jackson — yes, the same genius designer behind Ogre, GURPS, Car Wars, Munchkin, and numerous others. For my money (all $6.90), those two early games still rank as perhaps his finest creations.

Steve Jackson left Metagaming in the 1980 to found Steve Jackson Games and his loss was keenly felt. But the rights to Melee and Wizard remained with Metagaming and its owner, Howard M. Thompson. Thompson supported the system with a series of excellent releases, including some of the best solitaire products this industry has ever seen, including Death Test, Death Test 2, Orb Quest, and Grail Quest.

I’ve been playing Grail Quest since 1980 — the last few years with my son Drew at my side — fruitlessly searching the treacherous woods and castles outside Camelot for the Holy Grail. It’s got to be in that damn game somewhere. I’m going to find it some day, I swear.

Anyway, Metagaming produced a total of 22 microgames before the company folded in 1983. Virtually all of them were science fiction and fantasy in theme, and they exhibited an imaginative range of settings and themes, from Rivets — the game of two dueling robot colonies — to Sticks & Stones, the first (and only) stone age RPG. I’ve gradually collected all of them over the years, and it was with some satisfaction that I finally completed my collection this year with the one that was the most difficult to track down: the fantasy game of subterranean warfare in an ancient Dwarven Stronghold, The Lords of Underearth.

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Frederik Pohl, November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013

Frederik Pohl, November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013

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Frederik PohlScience Fiction lost one of its brightest lights yesterday.

Frederik Pohl — award-winning writer, editor, agent, and fan — entered the hospital in Palatine, Illinois, in respiratory distress yesterday morning, and died that afternoon. He was 93 years old.

Pohl was one of the most important genre figures of the 20th Century. His first publication, at the age of 17, was the poem “Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna,” in the October 1937 issue of Amazing Stories. He followed it with over 200 short stories and dozens of novels, including the back-to-back Nebula Award winners Man Plus (1976) and Gateway (1977).

Pohl was equally lauded as an editor, starting with two pulp magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, in 1939 (when he was still a teenager). In the late 1950s, he took the helm at Galaxy and IF magazines as H.L. Gold’s health began to decline, and under his tenure IF won the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine in 1966, 1967, and 1968.

By the mid 70s, Pohl was editing novels at Bantam Books; his acquisitions were cover-labeled “A Frederik Pohl Selection,” a rare honor. They included Samuel R. Delany’s groundbreaking Dhalgren, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, John Brunner’s Web of Everywhere, and many others.

Pohl was a fixture in the field; well-connected and respected, extremely hard-working, highly talented, and good at almost everything he did. I can’t count how many times I’ve mentioned his accomplishments here on the blog; just in the last few weeks, I commented on his successful collaborations with Jack Williamson and C. M. Kornbluth. Rich Horton, who has been examining vintage SF digests for us, recently reviewed the July 1961 issue of IF, in which Pohl officially became editor.

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New Treasures: Weird Detectives, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: Weird Detectives, edited by Paula Guran

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Weird Detectives-smallMan, this book is right up my alley. More than that, this book has backed up my alley, unpacked, and moved into my house.

The book in question is Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations, a fat anthology of modern fantasy reprints (nothing older than 2004) edited by Paula Guran, focusing on the new generation of occult detectives and paranormal investigators.

We love occult detectives at Black Gate — witness all the recent attention to the classics of the genre, including Josh Reynolds’s encyclopedic Nightmare Men series, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki The Ghost Finder, the short fiction of Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman’s Complete John Thunstone and Silver John stories, and many, many others.

But it never occurred to me that people were still writing the stuff, despite the resurgence in urban fantasy over the last decade. This is why Paula Guran is a genius. She never lost sight of the thread connecting the pulp classics and the work being done in the same mold today by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, Joe R. Lansdale, Carrie Vaughn, P.N. Elrod, Bradley Denton, Tanya Huff, Jonathan Maberry, Patricia Briggs, Faith Hunter, and many others. Here’s an excerpt from her excellent introduction:

Ghosts appear to Harry Escott in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Pot of Tulips,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of November 1855… In 1859 Escott appeared again (in O’Brien’s “What Was It? A Mystery,” also published in Harper’s) and is attacked by a supernatural entity that is, itself, the mystery.

The occult detective had been born. Also known as psychic detectives or ghost hunters, they were more often portrayed as scientists or learned doctors than as true detectives. Rather than dealing with human crimes, these investigators were involved in cases dealing with ghosts, malevolent spirits, arcane curses, demons, monsters, and other supernatural events and entities… A number of these sleuths made appearances in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction.

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Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

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fanlgTwo weeks back, my Black Gate post took a stab at identifying a handful of the most hair-raising, spine-tingling short fiction ever written (in Vintage Scares). The more I looked at the stories that I (and others) came up with, the more excited I became about them. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm only served to underscore a curious fact that I have not always been ready to claim: I have become both a consumer and a writer of horror fiction.

That’s not something I would ever have expected. My version of horror, my “elevator speech definition,” would for years have centered on the gross-out work of Clive Barker (Hellraiser) and the voyeuristic nastiness of the movies I saw growing up: A Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead 2, and Friday the 13th. Horror to me meant attractive but stupid teenagers getting slaughtered and it was strictly low-brow. Not worthy of serious consideration.

Never mind that I’d already read Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle and a fair amount of Poe. By the time I’d been thoroughly eddicated by college, I’d relegated horror to a very distant cultural bayou. It was, at best, the literary equivalent of junk food.

But then a funny thing happened. I bought a copy of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 14th Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. As with all of those (sadly now defunct) collections, fantasy and horror were presented back-to-back and face-to-face, bumped up against one another as inescapably close kissing cousins. Confronted by the likes of Susanna Clarke, Esther M. Friesner, Ian Rodwell & Steve Duffy, Tanith Lee, and Kelly Link, it was time to re-evaluate.

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