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Year: 2013

Did I Do That? Or, We’ve Had the Sword, Where’s the Sorcery?

Did I Do That? Or, We’ve Had the Sword, Where’s the Sorcery?

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ElricA while ago, when I started writing these posts, I talked about how to put the sword in Sword and Sorcery, and while doing my latest posts on the Fantasy and SF hero, it struck me that, in a way, I was still really talking about the sword. Maybe it’s time to talk about the sorcery.

This is not to say that our heroes can’t be wielding some kind of magic at the same time they’re wielding swords – but that’s not the way things started out. Most of the early heroes of the genre that we’re familiar with, Conan, for example, and yes, even Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, weren’t magic users. In fact, many of these early heroes were fighting against those who were. Sorcerers were often seen as the enemy, or, at best, as very gingerly tolerated allies.

Along came some notable exceptions to this idea, particularly Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, and, someone I mentioned last week, Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish the Damned. But these two, we might argue, are representatives of the “New Wave” in Fantasy, which in part introduced the concept of the more complex, multidimensional, anti-hero. They also fall into a special category of sorcerer, in that they’re at least partially magical beings, not humans. Which brings us to the first major subdivision of sorcery or magic that any writer in our genre has to consider: Is the magic internal, or external? Does it come from within, or without?

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Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Four

Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Four

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kurtzman_flash_gordon_cvrflabarry“Mr. Murlin” was artist Dan Barry and writer Harvey Kurtzman’s follow-up to “The Awful Forest” and was published by King Features Syndicate from December 31, 1952 to April 20, 1953. The story would be the last pairing for the team, although Barry would continue on with the strip until 1990.

Their finale marks another departure from the formula. Flash and Ray stumble upon a medieval cottage in a forest clearing and, knocking upon the door, they encounter Mr. Murlin, an alchemist from 14th Century Earth who inexplicably recognizes Flash and Ray. The old man has an adolescent daughter, Marilyn, with whom Ray has his first crush. Murlin explains how he invented a time case through which he traveled far into the future and to another world.

Flash views the future by looking in the time case and sees he is reunited with Dale. Eager to know when the reunion will occur, Flash is startled to see Dale emerge from the back of the cottage. Murlin tells him he found her wandering in a dazed state in the forest and gave her refuge. Dale explains that she looked into the time case and saw that she would be reunited with Flash in the cottage and so has waited for him. This accounts for Murlin’s knowledge of Flash and Ray’s identities.

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Goth Chick News: Zombies and the Lost Art of Radio Drama

Goth Chick News: Zombies and the Lost Art of Radio Drama

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image002Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Before we begin, I should warn you that some of you may find what you are about to hear rather… disturbing.

(Evil laugh and blood-curling scream).

Before TV and way before DVD’s and the Roku, home entertainment consisted of the family radio and more specifically the radio drama. As purely acoustic performances with no visual component, radio dramas depended on dialogue, music, sound effects and talented actors to help the listener imagine the characters and story, making radio drama the perfect mind theater to play host to some extremely effective tales of terror.

Inner Sanctum, Quiet Please, Suspense and The Shadow have become neo-classics with a cult following. But sadly, radio dramas in the US have become very difficult to find in the modern day, though they still enjoy mainstream popularity in the UK and Germany.

That is until KC Wayland and Shane Salk decided what the world really needed was a revival of the radio drama, or rather radio horror, and what better subject to explore than a zombie apocalypse?

These days, of course, no radio is required.

Point the web accessible device of your choice to www.zombiepodcast.com and discover what over a million of us other zombiephiles already know; We’re Alive is a contemporary radio drama about a zombie outbreak in Los Angeles and the band of survivors that are struggling to stay alive day to day.

And it is awesome.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Murray Leinster

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Murray Leinster

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The Best of Murray LeinsterI first encountered Murray Leinster… wow, I don’t even know when. Probably in The Hugo Winners, Isaac Asimov’s 1962 anthology collecting the first short stories to win science fiction’s coveted prize.

It featured Leinster’s 1956 novelette, “Exploration Team,” about a desperate rescue attempt on a distant planet — involving an illegal settler blackmailed into helping a lost colony, and his team of Kodiak bears. Lost colonies, deadly aliens, and even more deadly bears… that’s the kind of story that sticks in your mind when you’re twelve, believe me.

Leinster died in 1975; he published his last book, a novelization of the Land of the Giants TV series, in 1969. But he was a steady presence on bookstore shelves during my formative reading years for well over a decade after his death, with reprint titles like The Med Series (Ace, 1983) and The Forgotten Planet (Carroll & Graf, 1990).

The mass market reprints have tapered off over the last few years. The last were all from Baen, a trio of excellent collections all edited by Eric Flint and Guy Gordon: Med Ship (2002), Planets of Adventure (2003), and A Logic Named Joe (2005).

Since then, the wheels of publishing have ground on, as they do, abandoning Leinster by the side of the road. We did our part to keep his memory alive, of course. I reprinted one of Leinster’s earliest pulp tales, “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” from the January 1931 Astounding Stories of Super-Science, in Black Gate 9.

There have also been low-budget digital editions of his out-of-copyright pulp fiction, sure, but by and large the genre — as living genres should — has focused instead on new and emerging authors.

I used to think that was inevitable. Readers have long memories, but publishing industries don’t, and when an author has been out of print for over a decade, she’s likely to remain that way.

But the brilliant Lester del Rey, publisher of Del Rey Books, proved me wrong. In fact, he proved me wrong nearly four decades ago, with a fabulous line of top-selling paperbacks collecting the best short science fiction and fantasy from the writers of the Golden Age of SF — including The Best of Murray Leinster, a collection of some of the best short SF and fantasy of the 20th Century.

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Kim Thompson, September 25, 1956 – June 19, 2013

Kim Thompson, September 25, 1956 – June 19, 2013

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Kim ThompsonKim Thompson, one of the most important figures in independent American comics, died today at the age of 56.

I first encountered Thompson during his days as editor of Amazing Heroes in the early 1980s. Amazing Heroes, which ran 204 issues from 1981 through 1992, was Fantagraphics’ version of The Comics Journal for superheroes, a serious (or at least, semi-serious) critical fan journal that ran articles on overweight superheroes, how Bob Burden narrowly escaped flaming death in Chicago, every move Jack Kirby ever made — and even produced an annual swimsuit issue. The first time I can remember reading his words was his announcement, some time in the early 80s,  that Amazing Heroes would run a Top 100 Comics on the back page (which quickly collapsed due to the sheer effort involved).

Thompson began working for Fantagraphics in 1977, and became a co-owner with Gary Groth the next year. According to an article in The Comics Journal #254, Thompson saved the company from bankruptcy by investing his inheritance in 1978.

He edited many of Fantagraphics’ most popular comics, including Linda Medley’s superb Castle Waiting, Peter Bagge’s Hate, Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, and many others. He edited all 50 issues of funny-animal anthology Critters (1985-1990) and the alternative comics anthology Zero Zero (also 50 issues, 1995-2000).

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The Best New Sword & Sorcery of the Last Twelve Months

The Best New Sword & Sorcery of the Last Twelve Months

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stormbringerMy name’s Fletcher Vredenburgh and I blog and yammer on the Internet (and comment here on Black Gate) as the Wasp. When Dale Rippke’s super-informational swords & sorcery site Heroes of Dark Fantasy went dark, I wanted to create a site to fill that void, but I wasn’t sure what shape it would take.

Initially, Swords & Sorcery: A Blog was going to be dedicated solely to classic heroic fiction. I figured I would just re-read and write about the books I already knew and loved, like Death Angel’s Shadow or Stormbringer, and that would be enough.

Then I discovered I was living in the midst of a S&S revival. Spurred by magazines like Black Gate and fueled by authors like James Enge and Howard Andrew Jones, new stories at least as good as anything from the genre’s heyday in the seventies were being created.

That led me on a hunt for anything new in S&S. I quickly learned that for every Enge or Jones, there were a dozen writers regularly gracing the electronic pages of numerous online magazines.

For what I now wanted, which was to get a sense of what was going on down on the ground and then convey that to any readers I might have, the standout publications were Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, edited by Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and William Ledbetter and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, edited and published by Scott H. Andrews.

For over a year now I have continually struck genre gold in both magazines.

Over the past year of reviewing, I’ve read thirty stories from HFQ and BCS. Re-reading my reviews, I was struck both by how many of the stories I liked, and how many I recalled in detail. In fact, there was only one story I actively disliked. There was straight up no-holds-barred swords & sorcery, techno-fantasy, some chinoiserie, and an Arthurian tale thrown in for good measure.

I went out looking for heroic fantasy, and was rewarded instead with an antidote for all the monstrously long and never-ending series weighing down Barnes & Noble’s shelves.

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The Kids Are More Than All Right: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome on Blu-ray

The Kids Are More Than All Right: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome on Blu-ray

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Mad MAx Beyond Thunderdome CoverMad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie. Starring Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Helen Buday, Frank Thring, Bruce Spence, Robert Grubb, Angelo Rossitto, Angry Anderson, George Spartels, Edwin Hodgeman.

“This you knows. The posts on Black Gate travel fast, and time after time I’ve done the tell. But this ain’t one body’s tell. This is the tell of us all who love the Mad Max franchise. And you gotta listen to it and remember. ‘Cause what you hear today, you gotta tell the newborn tomorrow. I’s looking behind us now, into history-back. I sees those of us who got the luck and started the haul for hi-def. And I remember how it led us here and we were heartful ‘cause we saw the pan-and-scan VHS of what was. And we knewed we got it straight.”

If it weren’t for my aversion to camping and having to use porta-potties, I would attend Wasteland Weekend every year, a “360° post-apocalypse environment” held each September in the Southern California desert for other Mad Maxians. I’m that much of a fan. I prefer an air-conditioned theater and a marathon of the three films (to which a fourth will be added next year) over risking a Gila monster bite, however.

Now I can hold the movie marathon in my less-well air-conditioned apartment — with indoor plumbing and absolutely no Gila monsters! — because Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome made its debut on Blu-ray last week, completing the trilogy in hi-def.

For both fans and the general public, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome generally ranks below the other two movies, Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior/Mad Max 2 (1981). The third film plays a lot nicer with other children than its predecessors: the low-budget exploitation biker/revenge flick of Mad Max and the violent action spectacle of The Road Warrior took a Spielbergian mid-‘80s shift that’s positively heartwarming. This was when the series went from an earned “R” rating to a family-friendly PG-13, and its rough wasteland-traversing hero came to the rescue of a clan of K-through-12s.

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Kirkus Looks at Galaxy Science Fiction

Kirkus Looks at Galaxy Science Fiction

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Galaxy February 1951Over the last few months, Matthew Wuertz and Rich Horton have been tag-teaming a series of Retro Reviews here at Black Gate, looking at science fiction digests from the 1950s and 60s — especially H.L. Gold’s Galaxy, which Matthew has been covering issue by issue since the very first, cover-dated October 1950.

Meanwhile, Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews has done his own retrospective, “Changing the Playing Field: H.L. Gold & Galaxy Science Fiction,” a detailed and affectionate look at Gold and the superb magazine he created:

Galaxy appeared in October 1950 as a monthly publication. It paid far better than its competitors, and Gold proved to be a far better editor than his counterpart at Astounding… With Gold at the helm, Galaxy Science Fiction began to change the tone of the genre. Astounding had taken advantage of the scientific rush that followed the development of the atomic bomb, and the resulting doomsday stories that followed. Gold went in another direction, explaining in an editorial that “The shape humanity is in is cause for worry, I believe, but not the kind of paralyzing terror that clutches science fiction writers in particular… Look, fellers, the end isn’t here yet.”

Strong, socially aware and satirical fiction became the mainstay with Galaxy, and 1951 proved to be an excellent year for the publication: “The Fireman,” by Ray Bradbury, appeared in the February issue, set in a dystopian world where literature was burned by government agents, and was later expanded into his landmark novel Fahrenheit 451. April brought Cyril Kornsbluth’s story “The Marching Morons,” and September saw Gold bring Robert Heinlein away from Astounding with his three-part story The Puppet Masters…

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Pathfinder’s Ultimate Campaign Boosts Gaming Options

Pathfinder’s Ultimate Campaign Boosts Gaming Options

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Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign
Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign

I’m a big fan of rule systems. Throughout my experience in role playing, both as a player and a gamemaster, I’ve loved building interesting characters, worlds, and storylines on my own, rarely relying on established modules and setting manuals. But to me the rules are a guide for the game and I try to follow them fairly closely, using them to inspire new ideas on where to go. In a way, it’s the limitations of rule systems that provide the boundaries for the story to evolve off of.

For years running MUSHes, I grew frustrated with characters who would assume knowledge that had no basis in the statistics their characters had. Most of this time was spent on games based on White Wolf’s Storyteller system, in which I mainly focused on Mage: The Ascension, so had to deal with a disturbing number of Mages who assumed that, just by virtue of being a Mage, they knew all about the other supernatural races, like details about the various Vampire: The Masquerade clans. Not without the right Lore rating, buddy!

These days, I’ve returned to fantasy adventure gaming, running a Pathfinder campaign. Still, though, I like using the rules and statistics as my guide. If a character doesn’t have any ranks in Swim, then I roleplay him as if he’s never learned how to swim … and maybe he’s just a little scared of the water because of it. No ranks in Knowledge(nature), then he doesn’t know what poison ivy looks like and mistakes large dogs for wolves.

In fact, I go out of my way to buy ranks that I don’t feel will be particularly useful just because I feel the character needs to have them. A ranger who doesn’t have any ranks in Craft(bows), and is thus unable to craft new arrows while away from town, makes absolutely no sense to me. Even if I have every intention of buying my arrows with adventure loot, I spend the skill points to have a couple of ranks of Craft(bows), because it’s something the character would know!

This is my thinking on the character level, but rarely have I adopted many campaign-level rule systems, letting the overall campaign evolve a bit more freely. In part, this is just because I’ve never seen campaign-level systems that seemed flexible enough to do what I wanted, yet still provided useful guidance for characters. That is until I got my copy of Pathfinder‘s new Ultimate Campaign (Paizo, Amazon) supplement, which instantly got implemented into my current campaign and has enriched the options in just a single game session. Now if my players say, “I want to own a tavern” or “I want to build a kingdom,” I can tell them exactly what it will take, instead of just making something up.

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New Treasures: Fiery Edge of Steel

New Treasures: Fiery Edge of Steel

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fiery-edge-of-steelJill Archer’s first Noon Onyx novel, Dark Light of Day, served up a truly post-apocalyptic setting. And I don’t mean global warming or an inconvenient economic collapse. Armageddon is over, the demons won, and the few surviving humans worship patron demons just to survive. Sorta makes Mad Max look more like Mad Men, just with cooler fashions.

The second book in the series, Fiery Edge of Steel, has now arrived and it looks even more intriguing. It tosses an unusual mystery, a remote outpost, and an ancient and evil foe into the mix.

Lucifer and his army triumphed at Armageddon, leaving humans and demons living in uncertain peace based on sacrifice and strict laws. It is up to those with mixed demon and human blood, the Host, to prevent society from falling into anarchy.

Noon Onyx is the first female Host in memory to wield the destructive waning magic that is used to maintain order among the demons. Her unique abilities, along with a lack of control and a reluctance to kill, have branded her as an outsider among her peers. Only her powerful lover, Ari Carmine, and a roguish and mysterious Angel, Rafe Sinclair, support her unconventional ways.

When Noon is shipped off to a remote outpost to investigate several unusual disappearances, a task that will most likely involve trying and killing the patron demon of that area, it seems Luck is not on her side. But when the outpost settlers claim that an ancient and evil foe has stepped out of legend to commit the crimes, Noon realizes that she could be facing something much worse than she ever imagined…

Fiery Edge of Steel was published by Ace Books on May 28. It is 330 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.