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Year: 2013

New Treasures: Unfettered, edited by Shawn Speakman

New Treasures: Unfettered, edited by Shawn Speakman

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Unfettered-smallUnfettered is a monster anthology with an unusual genesis.

It started with editor Shawn Speakman, who became friends with Terry Brooks a few years back and wrote his own fantasy novel, The Dark Thorn. When Shawn was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2011, Brooks donated an original short story to help Shawn pay his mounting medical bills — and suggested that Shawn ask some of his writer friends to do the same.

The result is a massive 518-page tome containing original stories in some of the most popular fantasy series on the market, from some of today’s hottest writers — including Tad Williams, Patrick Rothfuss, R.A. Salvatore, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, Peter V. Brett, Lev Grossman, Carrie Vaughn, Jacqueline Carey, Mark Lawrence, and many others.

The tales included are set in the worlds of Shannara, the Wheel of Time, the Demon Cyle, Temeraire, Kushiel, Vault of Heaven, the Broken Empire, and many other top-selling series.

As the title suggests, authors were free to contribute whatever they desired.

This book really is a once-in-a-lifetime event and, as the marketing copy states, a testament to the generosity of the science fiction and fantasy community.

Here’s the impressive Table of Contents.

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When Ideas Collide

When Ideas Collide

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Raj The Making and Unmaking of British IndiaOne of the most common questions I hear from readers and non-writers is Where do you get your ideas? A lot of writers I know have a glib answer like: my cat, my muse (often the same critter), my subconscious (but in other words, we don’t know), or my favorite: a P.O. Box in Spokane.

But sometimes, authors — and I think especially SFF authors — will say a book idea came from two or three separate things considered at once. When they’re brought together, sparks fly and an idea flames up. This happened to me with my latest novel.

It began with serendipity: the discovery of two endlessly fascinating nonfiction books I found on my husband’s book shelf. One was about the British Natural History Museum and the other was a history of the British Raj in India.

I started one, which was a little slow, and while I tried to decide whether to plod on, I began the other book. Then the first book picked up speed and sank its hooks.

I jumped from one to the other so I could keep reading them both. In one, I was reading about the part of natural history museums you don’t realize are there (the research offices and store rooms). There were these eccentric scientists with nicknames like “trilobite man” and “beetle man.” If women had been more welcome in those rarified offices, I might have read about bird woman, or more likely, gopher girl.

In the other book, I found out how the British established an empire in that unlikely place, India, and the stunning arrogance of the Raj. Although colonialism’s stain spread widely on the continent, I was surprised to learn that even as late as the early 20th century, there were people in villages in India who had never heard of the Raj or Queen Victoria. India is a big place.

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‘This is the Real Deal’: Tangent Online on “The Highwater Harbor”

‘This is the Real Deal’: Tangent Online on “The Highwater Harbor”

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The Highwater Harbor-smallBob Blough at Tangent Online reports on Aaron Bradford Starr’s new novella of adventure fantasy, published here last month, comparing it to the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser:

“The Highwater Harbor” by Aaron Bradford Starr is a superior fantasy about a roguish band of three – Gloren, a Gallery Hunter, Yr Neh, a talking cat of noble birth, and their chronicler Aven Penworthy. This novella contains evil magics, pirates, mysteries, secret keys and a plethora of other fun stuff all written in delicious prose that at times is truly humorous…

Oh, and did I mention volcanoes? This is the fourth story in an ongoing series and is complete in itself. It put me in mind of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series of adventures. Each of their tales stood alone but left you wanting to see more. So did “The Highwater Harbor.” And I think that is the highest praise I can give the author. This is the real deal. Please enjoy it.

“The Highwater Harbor” is the fourth story featuring Gallery Hunters Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh. It follows “The Daughter’s Dowry,” in which the two seek a legendary treasure in a sunken tower, “The Tea-Maker’s Task,” which sees them accept a dangerous commission to investigate a deadly island, and “The Sealord’s Successor,” a mystery novella in which the two Gallery Hunters find themselves drawn into a deadly conspiracy involving a powerful kingdom, ancient secrets, and a very peculiar painting.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, Jamie McEwan, Martha Wells, Vera Nazarian, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

“The Highwater Harbor” is a complete 35,000-word tale of adventure fantasy. It is offered at no cost. Read the complete story here.

An Interview with Lonesome Wyatt of Those Poor Bastards

An Interview with Lonesome Wyatt of Those Poor Bastards

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Lonesome WyattI came across Lonesome Wyatt as I nosed about a funnel cake shack in an abandoned amusement park built on a prairie settler boneyard. He had a rotted sack of popcorn in one hand and he dragged a crowbar in the other. Twilight filtered in through a roof hole. Something skittered across his hat. He hummed an old-time dirge.

This being Lonesome Wyatt of Those Poor Bastards. This being the man behind Lonesome Wyatt and the Holy Spooks. This being the author of the pulp horror novel The Terrible Tale of Edgar Switchblade and the composer of its companion album, Behold the Abyss. Which, really, if you’re in the mood for a cloven-hoofed, knife-wielding bounty hunter with step-daddy issues chasing an albino werewolf with supplementary gothic country tunes, there is no better pairing than that which Lonesome Wyatt has provided.

Under normal circumstances…well, you try to avoid talking to mad-eyed men on decrepit fair grounds; but I – being the steadfast and fearsome Black Gate minion I am – AHEMed. Stood my ground. Waited for him to turn around. I am not one to be intimidated. A man can’t hex you by humming. Usually. And this was a man I wanted to talk to.

Lonesome Wyatt turned and sneered, or possibly he smiled; these things are hard to tell. He agreed to do an interview before I had the words out of my mouth to ask. He is a mysterious revelator of mayhem and wonder, and quite possibly he is psychic.*

For your perusal, here lies the exchange Black Gate had with Lonesome Wyatt in that shadowy funnel cake shack…

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Rocket Raccoon! Guardian of the Galaxy: The Early Years (Not in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota)

Rocket Raccoon! Guardian of the Galaxy: The Early Years (Not in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota)

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Rocket_Raccoon_Vol_1_1The upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy movie is the biggest risk yet for Marvel Studios. Last year’s The Avengers was a daring crossover experiment bringing together all the heroes introduced so far into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the five lead-in films were all financial successes and audiences had some prep for what they were about to see. But The Guardians of the Galaxy is a light-hearted space opera starring heroes few people outside of comicdom (and, honestly, quite a few within it) know no better than the main generals of the Thirty Years’ War.* The majority of the characters come from unusual alien species… and one of the heroes is a sentient, blastgun-toting raccoon.

I recently watched an episode of Nature titled “Raccoon Nation.” The scientists interviewed on the program theorized that living in urban environments has pushed raccoons to rapidly evolve higher intelligence. “In a hundred years, they may be running the cities,” one scientist joked. If this pattern continues, the reality of a jet-boot propelled sentient raccoon armed with laser guns is not so far-fetched after all. Rocket Raccoon is already on his way to movie screens in 2014, so how long until his raccoon brethren on Terra follow his example?

Rocket Raccoon, a character introduced in an offhanded way in the mid-‘70s, may turn out to be the popular lynchpin of The Guardians of the Galaxy. Although the furry black-masked space opera hero has gone through publishing dry-spells, he has a loyal following and love that exceeds the other Guardians. (Sorry, Groot.) According to director James Gunn in an interview at SDCC, “Rocket is the heart of this movie. If Rocket doesn’t work the movie’s not gonna work. If Rocket does work the movie’s gonna work.”

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Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The Great Book of Amber-smallI’ve been spending a lot of time with Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide recently, as I guide my young players through a wilderness campaign using Outdoor Survival. The DMG is a treasure trove of handy tables, excellent advice, and fascinating tangents — atrociously organized, of course, but that’s part of its charm. Like the most useful book in all fantasy, the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook (seriously — I’d kill for a copy of that book), you can flip pages at random and never know what indispensable tidbit you’ll find.

Appendix N, which lists the great fantasy writers whose collective contributions laid the groundwork for Dungeons and Dragons, is just one of those finds; but it’s one which has received a great deal of attention. Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan at Tor.com are sampling the work of every author in Appendix N; so far they’ve covered Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Sterling E. Lanier, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack Vance.

Last week, Tim turned his attention to Roger Zelazny and The Chronicles of Amber. He wasn’t impressed:

I merely sampled the first book in the series, Nine Princes in Amber, originally published in 1970, and that was more than enough… if the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series is considered any kind of classic, then it must be because the novel is graded on a curve. A curve called “pretty good for an opening novel in a series that gets a whole lot better,” or maybe a curve called, “better than a lot of other, trashier fantasy novels released in 1970, when there was nothing on television but episodes of Marcus Welby and the Flip Wilson Show…”

It’s not that I found Nine Princes in Amber uninteresting; it’s just that I found the novel shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to actually read all the way through. It’s a novel that slams together jokey Hamlet references in the narration with pop psychoanalysis and superhuman beings and shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes.

Actually, that last sentence is almost exactly how I remember Nine Princes in Amber. Shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes. Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

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The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer

The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer

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When I was a young blogger, I swore I wouldn’t write predictable headlines like “The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer!” Now I’m a middle-aged blogger with deadline pressures and nothing is as satisfying and as reassuring as a predictable headline. Thank you for your indulgence.

Do you watch Sherlock? Of course you do. The BBC One crime drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, which places Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective and his trusted companion Watson in contemporary London and is one of the best things on television. It’s one of the very few shows on television my entire family watches together (the other was Firefly). Famously conceived by Doctor Who writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat while they were commuting back and forth from Cardiff by train, Sherlock has had only two brief seasons so far, in 2010 and 2012, with one episode each season being written by Gatiss, Moffat, and Stephen Thompson.

The worst thing about Sherlock has been that there’s so very little of it, with only three 90-minute episodes per season, and a long drought between seasons. First time I watched Season One on Blu-ray, in fact, I kept checking the box to make sure I hadn’t missed a disk.

Season Two ended — naturally — on a killer cliffhanger, with Sherlock faking his suicide while Watson looked on. American fans in particular have been waiting impatiently for Season Three, which is slowly wrapping production in the UK. Two of the three episodes have been completed and on August 2 the brief Season Three teaser below was finally released by the BBC. No air date has been given, so for now it’s all we have. Enjoy.

New Treasures: Terminated by Rachel Caine

New Treasures: Terminated by Rachel Caine

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Terminated Rachel CaineI first discovered Rachel Caine a decade ago with her intriguing first novel, Ill Wind, which followed the adventures of Joanne Baldwin, a Weather Warden, part of an international organization that tracked and confronted natural disasters head-on. Kind of an intriguing premise and I was impressed to see it become the first installment in a nine (nine!) volume series, the most recent being 2010’s Total Eclipse.

Now, if I had written nine novels in seven years, first thing I would do is find a soft couch and lie down for, I dunno, maybe the rest of my life. Not so with Rachel Caine, however. No, she elected to start another series, The Morganville Vampires (fifteen volumes in seven years) in 2006. Followed by another one, Outcast Season (four volumes in three years) in 2009, and then another, Revivalist (three volumes in two years) in 2011. For those keeping score at home, that’s 31 novels in the last decade, during most of which she also had a full-time job as a Communications Director (writing, in other words).

I could go on — there are four more novel series, and several standalone books itemized on her Wikipedia page — but, man. I’m exhausted just trying to keep up. How does she do it?

Her most recent release is the third in her Revivalist series. The opening novels, Working Stiff and Two Weeks’ Notice, introduced us to Bryn Davis, killed on the job after she discovered her employers were designing a drug to resurrect the dead. Brought back to life by the same drug, she became a soldier in a nasty corporate war against her previous employer.

Already addicted to the pharmaceutical drug that keeps her body from decomposing, Bryn has to stop a secretive group of rich and powerful investors from eliminating the existing Returné addicts altogether. To ensure their plan to launch a new, military-grade strain of nanotech, the investors’ undead assassin — who just happens to be the ex-wife of Bryn’s lover Patrick — is on the hunt for anyone that stands in their way.

And while Bryn’s allies aren’t about to go down without a fight, the secret she’s been keeping threatens to put those closest to her in even more danger. Poised to become a monster that her own side — and her own lover — will have to trap and kill, Bryn needs to find the cure to have any hope of preserving the lives of her friends, and her own dwindling humanity…

Terminated was published today by Roc Books. It is 320 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and the digital edition.

The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

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free-standing-dry-stone-archAs of Sunday, August fourth, the last installment of my Gemen trilogy is up and published right here on the Black Gate site.

It’s a curious feeling to have these three closely linked tales “on display” at last. I wrote the first entirely on a whim back in 2004, but the storyline itself had actually evolved decades before, in 1986. How Gemen got to where he is today — that is to say, fictionalized, and available for public scrutiny — is a tale that will perhaps be instructive to rising writers, and hopefully of some interest also to those readers who’ve kept pace with my hero’s travails.

Yes, Gemen is the love child of Dungeons & Dragons (possibly too much Dungeons & Dragons, although that, I hope, will be left to the eye of the beholder), but consider this: in all the literally thousands of hours of role-playing in which I immersed myself from approximately 1980 until 1989, only one idea, one small glimmer of a scenario, presented itself later as worthy of being translated to fiction. Lucky Gemen: alone among my endless sword & sorcery imaginings, he has stumbled into a literary afterlife.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

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the-black-operaThe Black Opera
By Mary Gentle
Night Shade Books ($15.99, trade paperback, 531 pages, May 2012)

I bought a copy of The Black Opera based on the sheer strength of its premise. A fat fantasy novel set in the baroque world of opera, centered around a production engineered to call Satan himself up from Hell? Sign me up for a first class ticket. If there’s anything that Andrew Lloyd Weber has taught us, it’s that opera is the perfect setting for burning passion, dark secrets, and adventure in the shadows. Adding a diabolical scheme into the mix seems like a perfect way to roll the awesome dial up past 11.

However, the first thing I noticed about The Black Opera is that it wasn’t anything close to the lurid, swash-buckling, cult-fighting novel I wanted. It is, in fact, a rather restrained and stately affair, more concerned with the enlightened intellectual climate of the early 19th century than with blood, romance, and action.

Our hero is Conrad Scalese, an opera librettist living in Naples in the third decade of the 18th century. His first great success, a heretical opera entitled Il Terrore di Parigi, has earned him the malicious regard of the iron-handed Inquisition. Only the intervention of the King Ferdinand saves him from imprisonment, but in return for the king’s protection, Conrad must accept a difficult task.

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