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Year: 2015

September 2015 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

September 2015 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

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Nightmare Magazine September 2015-smallThe September issue of the online magazine Nightmare is now available. In his editorial this month, John Joseph Adams justly celebrates his recent awards, nominations, and publications:

We won another Hugo! Our sister-magazine Lightspeed took home the rocket for Best Semiprozine, but also, just as exciting there were two other Lightspeed Hugo victories: Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s story from Lightspeed, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” won the Hugo for Best Novelette, and one of our illustrators, Elizabeth Leggett, won the Hugo for Best Fan Artist…

In other awards news, the World Fantasy Award nominations were also announced recently, and I’m pleased to report that I have been once again nominated in the “Special Award, Professional” category. I am extremely honored to be nominated again (now for the seventh time overall, including three Anthology nominations), and I will be in Saratoga Springs, New York for the World Fantasy Convention (November 5-8) when the awards are presented (where I look forward to losing to Gordon Van Gelder in person)… And ICYMI last month: Both Lightspeed generally and our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue specifically have been nominated for the British Fantasy Award!

Releasing this month, on September 15, is a new anthology I edited called Loosed Upon the World, the definitive collection of climate fiction… Then in October comes the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, part of the prestigious Best American series. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy).

As we’ve noted previously, John Joseph Adams is one busy guy. It’s a full time job just keeping up with him.

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Conan is My Spirit Guide

Conan is My Spirit Guide

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ByCrom2
What if Conan were your spirit guide?

What if Conan were your spirit guide?

It’s such a lovely high concept and the implicit conflict — modernity versus barbarity — gives it instant viral appeal for those in the know (a bit like, I hope, Swords Versus Tanks). It also pings that contrast we Blackgate folk all experience: reading heroic fantasy on the way to a desk job, pausing Halo to change a diaper, leaving off writing a fight scene to print off My Little Pony coloring in sheets.

hunk-raSo I clicked the link and found the tumblr (now mostly gone because the comic has been published). I was expecting the hilarity of Doonesbury’s Boopsie channelling Hunk Ra. Instead I got something different. Just as funny, but deeper laughs and some profound thoughts about modernity and why we still need Conan.

Rachel Kahn, the creator of Conan is My Spirit Guide, By Crom! is a real Conan fan and the joke is always on the modern character.

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Laxmi Hariharan on Marketing Books in India, Her Ruby Iyer Series, and Bombay as a Modern Day Dystopia

Laxmi Hariharan on Marketing Books in India, Her Ruby Iyer Series, and Bombay as a Modern Day Dystopia

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LaxmiRubyLaxmi Hariharan is both an indie author and a marketing professional. Her latest book, The First Life of Vikram Roy, is now for sale.

Black Gate readers will appreciate that Laxmi helped launch the SyFy Channel in Europe. Her Ruby Iyer Series is about a young woman in present day India, who is knocked off a train platform one morning, onto a live wire. 10,000 volts of electricity later, she doesn’t die as might be expected, but rather becomes much more than she ever dreamed she could be. Interlaced with her story is the mileau of modern India and ancient Bombay.

While most indie authors focus primarily on western publishing markets, Laxmi put a good portion of her resources towards marketing in her native India. As one of the first indie authors to break into this market, she’s in the ideal position to share what she’s learned from the experience.

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New Treasures: The Death House by Sarah Pinborough

New Treasures: The Death House by Sarah Pinborough

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The Death House-smallSarah Pinborough won a British Fantasy Award last year for her novella “Beauty,” and she was nominated for a Bram Stoker in 2013 for her novel A Necessary End, written with F. Paul Wilson. Her latest novel, The Death House, has gotten a lot of attention, including a cover blurb from Stephen King: “Moving and totally involving. I couldn’t put it down.” The publisher’s release that came with it described it as “a contemporary novel with a compelling dystopian setting… with strong YA crossover appeal.” I suppose I could just wait for the movie then.

Toby’s life was perfectly normal… until it was unravelled by something as simple as a blood test.

Taken from his family, Toby now lives in the Death House; an out-of-time existence far from the modern world, where he, and the others who live there, are studied by Matron and her team of nurses. They’re looking for any sign of sickness. Any sign of their wards changing. Any sign that it’s time to take them to the sanatorium.

No one returns from the sanatorium.

Living in his memories of the past, Toby spends his days fighting his fear. But then a new arrival in the house shatters the fragile peace, and everything changes. Because everybody dies. It’s how you choose to live that counts.

We last covered Sarah here with her 2013 novel A Matter of Blood, the first book in The Forgotten Gods trilogy.

The Death House was published by Titan Books on September 1, 2015. It is 286 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover design is by Julie Lloyd.

Feeling Cozy?

Feeling Cozy?

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Macleod VaultMost of you already know that I’m a big fan of mystery fiction. I’ve been reading all kinds of it for almost as long as I’ve been reading Fantasy and SF, starting with Agatha Christie’s Mystery on the Blue Train when I was fourteen. For that matter, I was the co-founder of the Wolfe Island Scene of the Crime Festival, and many of my friends are crime writers.

I’ve often talked about crossovers, and mixed genre novels, but I don’t think we have anything in our world that’s the equivalent of the cozy mystery. Read on, and let me know what you think.

The easiest way to describe cozies is to say they’re like Agatha Christie mysteries. Though she wasn’t deliberately trying to write cozies – there being no such thing at the time – Christie established many of the standard conventions used by the cozy mystery today. See if any of this sounds familiar to you:

There will be a murder, which often takes place “off stage” and of which no graphic or gory details are given.

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Future Treasures: Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

Future Treasures: Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

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Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe-smallBack in 1990 I bought a remaindered copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer at a Waldenbooks in Champaign, IL. I’d never heard of the author, Thomas Ligotti, but the book sounded kind of interesting. I added it to my to-be-read pile, where it was quickly buried, and years went by before I really thought of it again.

In those intervening years, I learned the name Thomas Ligotti. So did anyone who read Weird Tales, Grue, or other horror magazines in the late 80s and early 90s. He was a singularly unique talent, and his fame quietly grew during those decades. In fact, when I launched the first issue of Black Gate in the year 2000, I had more-or-less decided not to put the names of authors on the cover, to keep the artwork clean and give the magazine a unique look, but I talked to a few other editors to get their opinion first. One of them was Darrell Schweitzer, co-editor of Weird Tales.

“We never noticed a bit of difference in sales when we put authors names on the cover,” he confided. “Unless the name was Thomas Ligotti.”

Ligotti’s first two collections were Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1985) and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991), both of which appeared first in small print-run hardcovers. Those editions — including the one I bought at Waldenbooks for three bucks — became highly prized collectors items. Both appeared in paperback, in June 1991 and October 1994, respectively. Those editions shortly went out of print, and also became became highly sought-after. In 2010 and 2011, after both volumes had been out of print for nearly two decades, Subterranean Press re-issued them with matching dust jackets. Those editions quickly sold out, and routinely command prices of $200-400 in the collectors market.

In short, if you wanted a print copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer or Grimscribe any time in the last 20 years, you pretty much needed to be very wealthy, very lucky, or both. So you can understand why the impending release of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, an omnibus 464-page collection of both volumes in a handsome and affordable trade paperback from Penguin Classics, has generated excited buzz in horror circles.

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Goth Chick News: Kicking the Apocalypse’s Ass

Goth Chick News: Kicking the Apocalypse’s Ass

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The 5th Wave poster-smallThough she has been in the biz since she was six years old, we only really got a chance to fall in love with Chloë Grace Moretz in 2010, when she was all of thirteen and played the little purple-wigged assassin in Kick Ass.

From that point forward it sure seemed as though either someone was giving Moretz awesome advice on what roles to take on, or her own quirky tastes in characters was leading her to some juicy parts. Either way, and if the movie was a hit or not, Moretz’s performances always left an indelible impression; whether it was her reworking of blood-drenched Carrie or the vampire Abby in Let Me In.

So imagine the anticipation when last week we were gifted with the first trailer for The 5th Wave and found the now 21-year-old Miss Moretz continuing her tradition of headstrong, revenge-dishing, ass-kickery.

The 5th Wave began as a 2013 young adult science fiction novel by Rick Yancey; the first installment in a trilogy. Critics have compared the book favorably to The Hunger Games and noted that it “should do for aliens what Twilight did for vampires.”

Okay, let’s hope the heck not. But moving on…

The story follows 16-year-old Cassie Sullivan as she tries to survive in a world devastated by the waves of alien invasion that have already decimated the population and knocked humankind back to the Stone Age.

First, they wiped out the power. Then, an earthquake hit, causing worldwide devastation. Third, a massive epidemic, spreading across the globe.  And for the fourth wave, the alien invaders responsible for all this chaos finally descended to Earth — with the ability to inhabit human bodies. So the question is: What is the fifth wave going to look like?

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How One Award-Winning Author Thinks About Awards

How One Award-Winning Author Thinks About Awards

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Sarah L. Avery (photo by Theodora Goss)
Sarah L. Avery (photo by Theodora Goss)

A funny thing happened on my way to lifelong obscurity. I accidentally won a book award.

The award didn’t quite fall out of the sky and land on my head. After all, I had put the best I had to give, day after day, for many years, into the book’s drafts. Then I’d sent it to the most exacting readers I knew, and put the absolute best I had to give into revising it. Tales from Rugosa Coven was worthy. I had just stopped expecting anyone who didn’t already know me to notice.

And that was all right. I had other projects in process, and I when I sat down to work at them, I put the best I had to give into them, too. It’s joyful work. Universe willing, I’ll get to do it for the rest of my life.

Well, someone noticed. When the Mythopoeic Society shortlisted me for their award, it was such good news I was sure it had to be an error. The award may not be widely known in mainstream literary circles, but in the world of fantasy literature, it’s a big deal. I traveled to Mythcon to meet my unexpected readers, who were excited to see me. People who’d never met me had actually read my book and wanted to talk about it. I’m not being facetious when I say it was an utterly disorienting experience. The strength of the rest of the shortlist was such that, every time I sat down to write acceptance remarks just in case I won, I found myself drafting congratulatory emails and rehearsing what I’d say to my hotel roommate, a fellow nominee. If she hadn’t insisted that I must at least prepare a few notes, I have no idea what I’d have said at the podium when my hosts put the Aslan in my hand.

Even now, a month later, it’s hard to believe it really happened. Now I know what trophies are for. They’re how dark horse candidates who win things confirm for themselves that it wasn’t all a dream.

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Check Out the Table of Contents for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill

Check Out the Table of Contents for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015-smallAs anyone who’s paid attention to our regular magazine coverage or glanced at our bi-weekly Fantasy Magazine Rack could tell you, there’s far too much new fiction published each month for one person to keep up (unless you’re Rich Horton, of course).

Which is why our field has a long tradition of Best of the Year anthologies, created by a small fraternity of experienced editors who point us towards the most exciting and important fiction published each year — and the up-and-coming authors most worth our attention. And why I was so delighted when I discovered a brand new one launching this year: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, with the 2015 volume edited by Joe Hill, and the extremely capable (and busy) John Joseph Adams serving as Series Editor.

According to JJA’s website, the selection process began with him winnowing down the year’s fiction into the top eighty stories, which were then sent (blind) to Joe Hill. Joe selected the ten best SF and ten best fantasy stories, and that became the TOC for the 2015 volume.

The complete 80-story long list is here, and here’s the table of contents for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 — including stories from Sofia Samatar, Kelly Link, Nathan Ballingrud, Theodora Goss, Seanan McGuire, T.C. Boyle, and many others. The book goes on sale in two weeks from Mariner Books.

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 182 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 182 Now Available

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 182-smallBeneath Ceaseless Skies #182 has new stories by Margaret Ronald and Jack Nicholls, a podcast by Suzanne Palmer, and a reprint by Wendy N. Wagner.

“Murder Goes Hungry” by Margaret Ronald
“It’s not—” I sighed as we reached the doors of the veterans’ wing. “It was a cruel thing for him to do. She has her vows, and too many of us veterans are too scarred to be any sort of decent companion.”

“Flying the Coop” by Jack Nicholls
They were in sight of the churchyard gates when the witch’s hut hopped out from between two buildings, thirty paces behind them.

Audio Fiction Podcast: “Moogh and the Great Trench Kraken” by Suzanne Palmer
It was more water than ever should be in one place, something so vast he scarcely could find the words. “Oh,” he said. “This is a very large river indeed.”

From the Archives: “Cold Iron and Green Vines” by Wendy N. Wagner (from BCS #69, May 19, 2011)
Most people didn’t bother replacing teeth; they all went wicker-and-cogwork as young as they could.

Issue 182 was published on September 17, 2015. Read it online completely free here.

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