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Year: 2015

Interzone #260 Now on Sale

Interzone #260 Now on Sale

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Interzone 290-smallThe September-October issue of Britain’s longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine is now on sale. The cover, by Martin Hanford, is titled “All Change.” (Click the image at right for a bigger version.)

This issue has fiction from John Shirley, Priya Sharma, Jeff Noon, C.A. Hawksmoor, and Christien Gholson. Here’s Lois Tilton at Locus Online on Jeff Noon’s “No Rez”:

An experimental piece in terms of typography and page layout, with several sections that resemble lines of verse… I don’t see much of this sort of thing these days, but I’m not surprised to find it coming from IZ, a zine that doesn’t stand still. This is a cyber future with the motto: “You are what you see.” Or, As you see the world, so you think about the world. But the only way everyone can see the world is pixelated, through implants, and in higher or lower resolution, with or without more vision-pops and ads, depending on how they can pay. Because Aiden is limited, when not on work-time, to low-rez, sometimes even when he closes his eyes, the dark starts breaking up. He has to wonder what he really looks like in the unmediated world, the zero-rez world, whether a girl might find him attractive. Then one day he happens on a mysterious black box that he isn’t supposed to have.

This sort of virtual world isn’t so new, but I’ve rarely seen it expressed with such insight and verve. There are genuinely poetic moments here, not simply apparent versification. This text would have been just about as effective if laid out on the page in a more conventional manner. – RECOMMENDED

Read Lois’ complete comments on the issue here.

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Goth Chick News: The Overlook Gets a Starring Role

Goth Chick News: The Overlook Gets a Starring Role

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The Stanley Hotel
The Timberline Lodge

If you had asked me, when a prequel to The Shining was first green-lighted in July of last year, I’d have said it didn’t sound like such a hot idea.

Initial plans suggested the storyline would center on events leading up to Jack, Wendy and Danny Torrance’s arrival at the remote and ominous Overlook Hotel; and though fans of the book know there is a substantial amount of pre-Torrance material to work with, it just didn’t seem on the same terrifying level as the ultimate fallout of those events.

That early opinion of mine (may have) changed when Mark Romanek became attached to the project this week — a real-deal director with an edgy artistic vision.

Film will be called… wait for it…

The Overlook Hotel.

The premise is based on a deleted prologue written by Stephen King. “Before the Play” is about:

The origin story of the Overlook Hotel through the eyes of its first owner, Bob T. Watson. A robber baron at the turn of the 20th century, Watson scaled the remote peaks of the Colorado Rockies to build the grandest resort in America, and a place he and his family would also call home.

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New Treasures: Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter

New Treasures: Of Sorrow and Such by Angela Slatter

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Of Sorrow and Such-small Of Sorrow and Such back-small

Angela Slatter has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award, both times for her short story collections. Of Sorrow and Such is a Medieval fantasy featuring witches, shapeshifters, and the dark thread of the supernatural in a world of superstition and fear. (Click on the front and back covers above for bigger versions.)

Of Sorrow and Such is the sixth in Tor.com‘s stellar line-up of Fall novellas, which includes exciting new releases from K. J. Parker, Paul Cornell, Nnedi Okorafor, and many others. So far I’ve been tremendously impressed with them — they’re gorgeously packaged and marketed, feature some great names and more than a few exciting debuts, and they’ve been extremely well received. I expect to see several titles at the top of awards lists next year.

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Call For Submissions: Mysterion

Call For Submissions: Mysterion

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A few months ago, I announced that the self-published book review column would be going on hiatus while I worked on a new project. It’s now time to talk about that project here.

Mysterion's cover art by Rob Joseph.
Mysterion’s cover art by Rob Joseph.

My wife and I have decided that we have too much time and money. The obvious way to rectify this situation is to publish a pro-paying speculative fiction anthology. And as you can tell by the beautiful cover art we acquired, we’ve already begun our personal wealth redistribution program of transferring money from us to other artists.

The anthology is called Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith, and it is now open for submissions. As the name gives away, we’ll be publishing stories that engage with Christianity. While the phrase “Christian speculative fiction” occasionally appears on our website, our anthology is not what is often meant by “Christian fiction”: stories written by Christians and for Christians with nary a heresy nor a swear word to raise an eyebrow. We’re not looking for preachy stories, nor are we necessarily looking for unambiguously pro-Christian stories. There’s no need for the writer or the story to pass some theological standard for Mysterion. On the contrary, we’re hoping to be challenged.

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Victorian Horror: Rippers Resurrected

Victorian Horror: Rippers Resurrected

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rippers 1rippers 2I’ve been waiting for this Kickstarter for years. You see, more than a decade ago, when Savage Worlds was newly launched, one of their very first expansions was a setting called Rippers, where brave heroes in Victorian times fought those things-man-was-not-meant-to-know. Those especially daring, or foolish, could harvest the organs or powers of the creatures of the night in the fight against them. These were the Rippers.

It’s only been available as a PDF or (very) expensive used book. I picked it up as a PDF and loved it, both for the setting and included adventures, and for the system. And I’ve been waiting for the an update, rumors of which have been swirling for ages.

I’ve become quite the fan of Savage Worlds because it really is, as advertised, Fast, Furious, and Fun. Savage Worlds places a premium on being streamlined and cinematic so that players and GM can worry about the story and not about the rules.

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Legendary Pictures to Make Godzilla Vs. Kong

Legendary Pictures to Make Godzilla Vs. Kong

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King Kong vs Godzilla

BG blogger emeritus (and part time Hollywood correspondent) Ryan Harvey has slipped us the word that Legendary Pictures, the makers of the 2014 blockbuster Godzilla, has green-lit a trio of sequels featuring the monster-hunting organization Monarch, including a re-make of that tender slice of celluloid heaven, King Kong Vs. Godzilla. Here’s part of yesterday’s  press release from Warner Bros:

All-powerful monsters become towering heroes for a new generation, revealing a mythology that brings together Godzilla and Legendary’s King Kong in an ecosystem of other giant super-species, both classic and new. Monarch, the human organization that uncovered Godzilla in the 2014 film, will expand their mission across multiple releases… The initial trio of films are 2017’s Kong: Skull Island; Godzilla 2 in 2018; and then Godzilla Vs Kong, arriving in theaters in 2020… Production on Kong: Skull Island begins October 19th.

The original King Kong Vs. Godzilla was released by Toho Studios in Japan in 1962, and became an instant monster-movie classic. Trust me, it was biblically awesome.

Read all the details at Deadline.

In the Trenches: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Straight Silver

In the Trenches: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Straight Silver

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Straight Silver Dan Abnett-smallThe world of Aexe Cardinal has been largely separated from galactic civilization for several centuries. Their technology is roughly on the level of ours around the time of the First World War — which is significant, because for almost half a century, the dominant nations of the planet have been in a deadlock with the Chaos-tainted Republic of Shadik. Their war is fought between lines of trenches across an ancient, toxic no man’s land. In all the ways that matter, it is the First World War, amplified in scale, duration, and stakes.

And who better to break a deadlock than the Imperial Guard, spearheaded by the tough-as-nails bravos of the Tanith First-and-Only?

The title, Straight Silver, refers to the foot-long war-knives carried by all the Tanith. I typically imagine them looking something like the classic Swiss bayonet. It’s a fitting title, because the cramped spaces of trench networks offer plenty of opportunity for blade-work.

After the intense battles of Honor Guard and Guns of Tanith, though, Straight Silver feels like a quiet interlude. There’s still plenty of fighting, but the only encounter which really stood out to me was a last-ditch defense of an isolated manor occurring in the last 20-30 pages of the novel. There’s another lengthy sequence where Gaunt personally leads a team across no man’s land to take out a battery of massive bombardment weapons, and while it’s certainly solid, it doesn’t particularly stand out from the other, similar sequences in the series.

Part of the problem is that, in recreating the conditions of a World War One style deadlock, Abnett hasn’t really given the Shadik troopers any unique features to make them more than generic bad guys — not even funny hats. It’s also not specified exactly how Chaos has affected them. The Shadik Republic thus stands out among the Ghosts’ adversaries only for its blandness.

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Vintage Treasures: The Great White Space by Basil Copper

Vintage Treasures: The Great White Space by Basil Copper

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The Great White Space-small The Great White Space Basil Cooper Sphere-small The Great White Space Basil Cooper-small

Basil Copper received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Horror Convention in 2010, and is remembered today for his short fiction (collected in the mammoth two-volume set Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper from PS Publishing), and for his much-loved Solar Pons stories, which Bob Byrne has discussed in detail right here at Black Gate.

But he also published a handful of fondly remembered novels, such as Necropolis (1980), The House of the Wolf (1983), and Into the Silence (1983). His first novel, The Great White Space (1974), is considered one of the best Lovecraftian horror novels ever written. Valancourt Books, whose impressive horror catalog I surveyed after getting a glimpse of their glorious table at the World Fantasy Convention last year, reprinted it in a handsome trade paperback in 2013 (above right). But the copy that tumbled into my hands was the 1976 Manor Books edition (above left), which I found in a recently-acquired collection on eBay.

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The Morbidly Beautiful Art of Chris Mars

The Morbidly Beautiful Art of Chris Mars

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Trial-by-Smoke-Chris-Mars-small

Two weeks ago I posted an article about Thomas Ligotti’s new Penguin collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. I was quite taken with the cover art, but was unable to track down the name of the artist. In the Comments section, Robert Adam Gilmour correctly fingered the artist as Chris Mars, with a piece titled “Puppeteer.”

While confirming the details, I educated myself on the entirely splendid and macabre art of Mr. Mars. His work is simultaneously gleefully traditional — filled with spooky landscapes and close set, haunted villages — and relentlessly modern, refusing to give us what our eyes expect, instead cramming every inch of his canvas with vibrant colors and tortured visages. A fine example is the above piece, titled “Trial by Smoke.”

But as they say, writing about art is like dancing about architecture. I’ve collected a few of my favorite samples of Mars’ art below, so you can see for yourself.

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Did the Butler Do It? Dean R. Koontz’s A Werewolf Among Us

Did the Butler Do It? Dean R. Koontz’s A Werewolf Among Us

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A Werewolf Among Us-small A Werewolf Among Us-back-small

A Werewolf Among Us
by Dean R. Koontz
Ballantine Books original paperback edition (211 pages, $1.25, January 1973)
Cover art by Bob Blanchard

Wow — check out that price! $1.25! Hard to believe, isn’t it?

I can’t recall exactly how I discovered this enjoyable mash-up of two very different genres. I was probably hanging out in one of the many bookstores that were, in those days, like Starbuck’s: one on almost every other street corner. We had the big chain stores like Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and Walden’s (later Waldenbooks) here in Chicago, of course, among smaller, local chains like Barbara’s Bookstore (still around), and then later we had The Stars My Destination and The Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Shop, two of the best book stores I’ve ever patronized. Crown Books came along in 1977, founded by Robert Haft, and then Barnes & Noble emerged, followed by the rise and fall of Border’s Books and Music, plus a chain called Books-A-Million, which I haven’t seen around in a long time. There were also scores of “Mom and Pop” operations, selling both new and used books, and you could go into any Sears-Roebuck, Marshall Field’s, Montgomery Ward, Woolworth’s, Post-Office News, drug store, and candy store and find books of all kinds. In the early 1970s I worked across the street from a small but very eclectic book store called Brainfood, and I’d spend my 30-minute lunch break (often extended beyond that time), browsing and shopping.

It was the best of times. Period.

Then along came the internet and Amazon.

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