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Year: 2016

Adrian Tchaikovsky Suggests Five Books Featuring Adventuring Parties

Adrian Tchaikovsky Suggests Five Books Featuring Adventuring Parties

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the-copper-promise-smallAdrian Tchaikovsky’s Spiderlight, published last month by Tor.com Publishing, is fast becoming one of the most talk-about books of the fall. What begins as a familiar tale of a small band of adventurers on an epic quest to defeat the Dark Lord quickly becomes something else entirely. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog calls it “A master class in subverting our expectations to surprise, engage, and deliver a fantastic story,” And Django Wexler says, “If, like me, you’re a D&D fan who always wondered about the ethics of Detect Evil or what the orcs eat in Mordor, you will love this one.”

Tchaikovsky sounds like someone who’s fond of old-fashioned heroic fantasy — in particular, the trope of the Adventuring Party — and also someone who isn’t afraid of messing with the genre. So I was particularly interested in his August article at Tor.com “Five Books Featuring Adventuring Parties,” which begins:

My new book, Spiderlight, is something of a deconstruction of the fantasy adventuring party, as seen in plenty of post-Tolkien works, and as beloved of Dungeons & Dragons players everywhere. It’s not as common as you’d think in fiction — often the action is a single individual or a hero-and-sidekick pair, or something larger, like a military company. What I’m after here is an ensemble cast with a particular feel to it — that mix of clashing characters and different skillsets. Here are some of my favorites.

Yeah, that sounds good to me. One of his choices is a book that completely slipped past me: The Copper Promise by Jen Williams, published in July by Angry Robot.

When there’s a wizard and a warrior but the rogue gets a chance to shine.

Jen is one of the best new voices in UK fantasy, and it’s a testament to her writing skill that Wydrin, the “Copper Cat” and a proper fantasy rogue through and through, does not actually eclipse her companions Frith and Sebastian as they fight, trick and run their way through a world that has gone from run-of-the-mill dangerous to actively-being-set-on-fire-by-a-dragon dangerous thanks, chiefly, to their own poor life choices. “Let sleeping gods lie,” goes the tagline. No need to tell you how that one works out.

We previously discussed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novels The Tiger and the Wolf and Guns of the Dawn. Learn more about his Tor.com novella Spiderlight here.

Read Tchaikovsky’s complete article at Tor.com here.

Ares Magazine 3 Now Available

Ares Magazine 3 Now Available

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ares-magazine-3-smallSPI’s Ares Magazine was one of the best things about the 70s and 80s. Seriously, a top-notch game magazine with an original SF or fantasy boardgame crammed into every issue? You know that was just too cool to last.

It didn’t, of course. The magazine folded after only  19 issues, but in that time it produced many games that are still fondly-remembered today, like Greg Costikyan’s Barbarian Kings, the Alien-inspired The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora, the post-apocalyptic strategy title The Omega War, the haunted house exploration game Nightmare House, and lots more.

In early 2014 Matthew Wuertz reported here on the successful rebirth of Ares Magazine. The first issue shipped that year, and issue #2 arrived late last year. I was especially intrigued by the fantasy-themed third issue, containing the extremely ambitious game Born of Titans, a game of quests and heroes in Mythological Greece.

Born of Titans is the issue game in Ares issue 3. It is a game of heroism in the world of ancient Greek mythology. One to four may play, with special rules at the end for one and two-player games. Each player portrays a hero from legend who undertakes quests to battle with fierce monsters and retrieve epic artifacts.

Each player controls the actions of one Hero selected at the start of the game. Hero counters are moved on the map… A Hero with no remaining Crew is essentially alone on a raft. Her crew is dead or has run off…

In the fashion of good mythology, BoT relies on a generous amount of Prophesy… This is important so a player can know what sort of challenge she faces on her next Quest or what a particular Sea Monster is… The first player to gain a third Completed Quest wins the game!

Sadly, Born of Titans experienced several significant delays, and eventually Ares #3 shipped without it. The company store still lists the standalone version of the game for pre-order, with estimated arrival in May 2016. However, sites like FRP Games are now listing the magazine available with game included, for shipment this month.

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A Story Checklist for Writers

A Story Checklist for Writers

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Checklists were developed because nobody could fly the B17 without crashing it
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“Can Conan raid the Tower of the Elephant? Yes, but rather than looting, he ends up liberating the enslaved alien demon. Now he must continue his adventures.” (Read on to find out why this is relevant!)

I read this book by a surgeon. It was called The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right and it was mildly terrifying (and I promise this relates to writing…).

Nowadays before an operation it’s the thing for — usually — a senior nurse to work through a list with items like: “Does the patient have any allergies? Has the anaesthetist raised any concerns…? Is this even the right patient for this operation..?” There are also checklists for  emergency situations such as reviving somebody fished out of a pond to make sure critical injections aren’t missed.

Why this is mildly terrifying is because (a) checklists significantly raise patient survival rates, and (b) the medical profession has only recently adopted them! (It’s a bit like that time my doctor mate remarked, “Oh that was before we went over to evidence-based medicine….” Erk?)

Why this is interesting for writers — and why I’m talking about this book here — is because  checklists help in situations when people are working “in flow.”

They were first developed because nobody could fly the B17 without crashing it. The test pilots got together and made up a list for the co-pilot to read out at different stages: “Engine revving enough? Flaps at right setting…?” Now checklists are pretty standard not just for the aviation industry, but also for manufacturing and construction.

Checklists work because they are not procedures. They don’t tell the surgeon, “cut along dotted line A” or the pilot, “Steer down the runway.” Rather they act as gates between different phases of a project or procedure. They don’t get in the way of flow, so much as force you to pause and take stock before getting going or moving on.

For a writer like me this is interesting because it’s all too easy to dive in too early to drafting — because flow is addictive — without planning properly, and even easier to send off work that’s not properly polished — because writing is both exhilarating and mentally tiring.

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John DeNardo Proves Lovecraftian Fiction is Alive and Well

John DeNardo Proves Lovecraftian Fiction is Alive and Well

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Over at Kirkus Reviews, the tireless John DeNardo gives us the rundown on the latest in Lovecraftian horror, including The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson.

In this haunting novella, Kij Johnson takes readers on a journey across a dream landscape reminiscent of Lovecraft’s weird and wonderful writing. The protagonist, Professor Vellitt Boe, who teaches at the prestigious Ulthar Women’s College, learns that one of her most gifted students elopes with a dreamer from the waking world. Because this student may be the only one who can save the community, Vellitt must retrieve her – a quest that introduces her to fantasy landscapes and creatures that should exist only in nightmares. Johnson’s enthralling tale is both a commentary of Lovecraftian fiction as well as an example of it.

He’s equally intrigued by Swords v. Cthulhu, edited by Jesse Bullington and Molly Tanzer.

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Future Treasures: The Evil Wizard Smallbone by Delia Sherman

Future Treasures: The Evil Wizard Smallbone by Delia Sherman

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the-evil-wizard-smallbone-smallDelia Sherman is the author of the Andre Norton Award-winning The Freedom Maze,  Through a Brazen Mirror, The Porcelain Dove, and The Fall of the Kings (2002, with Ellen Kushner). Her latest novel is an ambitious (and very funny) tale of Nick, a lost boy who finds himself an unlikely apprentice to the ancient, sorta evil, but mostly just grumpy wizard Smallbone. It contains magic spells, enchanted animals, dueling wizards, biker werewolf minions, and much more.

When twelve-year-old Nick runs away from his uncle’s in the middle of a blizzard, he stumbles onto a very opinionated bookstore. He also meets its guardian, the self-proclaimed Evil Wizard Smallbone, who calls Nick his apprentice and won’t let him leave, but won’t teach him magic, either. It’s a good thing the bookstore takes Nick’s magical education in hand, because Smallbone’s nemesis — the Evil Wizard Fidelou — and his pack of shape-shifting bikers are howling at the borders. Smallbone might call himself evil, but compared to Fidelou, he’s practically a puppy. And he can’t handle Fidelou alone.

Wildly funny and cozily heartfelt, Delia Sherman’s latest is an eccentric fantasy adventure featuring dueling wizards, enchanted animals, and one stray boy.

Our previous coverage of Delia Sherman includes:

Read “The Great Detective” by Delia Sherman at Tor.com
Time Travel and YA Lit: A Talk with Delia Sherman, by Patty Templeton
Delia Sherman’s “The Wizard’s Apprentice” at Podcastle, by C.S.E. Cooney

The Evil Wizard Smallbone will be published by Candlewick on September 13, 2016. It is 416 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover, and $9.99 for the digital edition.

Goth Chick News: New Horrific Enchantments – The Motion of Puppets

Goth Chick News: New Horrific Enchantments – The Motion of Puppets

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the-motion-of-puppets-smallPuppets have always had a mystical (if not slightly creepy) appeal.

Sure, you may think of Disney’s Pinocchio when you think puppets, but I think stuff like “Fats” from Magic; I mean come on, they have been the subject of over thirty horror movies after all. Personally, anything that mimics a human being has an unsettling aspect – like dolls and mannequins… or clowns. For this reason I was pretty excited to learn about the new offering from bestselling author Keith Donohue, who last brought us the story of that disturbing little kid in The Boy Who Drew Monsters, and now serves up a masterpiece of psychological horror that will forever change the way you look at puppet.

Described as intricately plotted, absorbing, dark, and suspenseful, The Motion of Puppets takes the unsettling idea of marionettes and mixes it up beautifully with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

In the Old City of Québec, Kay Harper falls in love with a puppet in the window of the Quatre Mains, a toy shop that is never open. She is spending her summer working as an acrobat with the cirque while her husband, Theo, is translating a biography of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Late one night, Kay fears someone is following her home. Surprised to see that the lights of the toy shop are on and the door is open, she takes shelter inside.

The next morning Theo wakes up to discover his wife is missing. Under police suspicion and frantic at her disappearance, he obsessively searches the streets of the Old City. Meanwhile, Kay has been transformed into a puppet, and is now a prisoner of the back room of the Quatre Mains, trapped with an odd assemblage of puppets from all over the world who can only come alive between the hours of midnight and dawn. The only way she can return to the human world is if Theo can find her and recognize her in her new form. So begins the dual odyssey of Keith Donohue’s The Motion of Puppets: of a husband determined to find his wife, and of a woman trapped in a magical world where her life is not her own.

Donohue delivers a moving, modern story is set in what could feel like a fairytale world, but is actually terrifyingly realistic. It is a tale of true love, missing persons, and obsession tangled in the strings that bind us all and wrapped up in one awesome creeptastic package. If you love eerie doll stories like those in Ellen Datlow’s award winning The Doll Collection, or are a fan of Neil Gaiman, you will thoroughly enjoy The Motion of Puppets – scheduled for release in October of this year, from Picador.

Have a question or comment (or a disturbing puppet)?  Post a comment and tell us about it here, or drop a line to sue@blackgate.com.

New Treasures: Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales edited by Jonathan E. Lewis

New Treasures: Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales edited by Jonathan E. Lewis

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Here’s a fun little artifact, eminently suitable for late summer reading: Jonathan E. Lewis’s anthology of classic (and pulp) Egyptian dark fantasies, Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales, published in trade paperback in July as part of the Stark House Supernatural Classics line.

Lewis has done a fine job assembling a stellar line-up of dark fantasy and horror stories featuring mummies, curses, ancient Egyptian vampires, and lots more. In addition to classic tales from Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, and Sax Rohmer, there’s a quartet of stories from Weird Tales (by Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffmann Price, John Murray Reynolds — and Tennessee Williams!), Algernon Blackwood’s novella “A Descent Into Egypt,” and two excerpts: one from the first mummy novel ever written in English, Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy (1827), and one from Bram Stoker’s classic The Jewel of Seven Stars.

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Why I Went Old School — or Swords & Wizardry vs. Pathfinder

Why I Went Old School — or Swords & Wizardry vs. Pathfinder

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Swords&Wizardry_CoverWhen I got back into playing RPGs, I chose Pathfinder over 4th Edition D&D (as a whole lot of people seemed to do). I was familiar with 3rd Edition and the plethora of rules, skill checks, etc… I’m still pretty well versed in Pathfinder, which is a great product, and I’m a big fan both of Golarion, the campaign world, and of the company, Paizo.

Two members of my gaming group have never played an actual pen and paper RPG. One (she) is a hardcore World of Warcraft player, and the other (he) is a veteran PC gamer, with a lot of hours on Baldur’s Gate and Oblivion (among others). Both have also played the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords (which I LOVE!) with me. So, they get the skill check concept.

I decided to run them through a dice-rolling, paper mapping, minis on said paper, character-sheet adventure.

I initially considered Pathfinder. I have a lot of resources available, and I definitely know the system well enough to teach it to them. I even have a Beginner’s Box, still in the plastic (how about that, John O’Neill!).  But I quickly discarded that system.

Pathfinder is extremely rules heavy. I’ve seen it grow over the years and, as seems inevitable for any ongoing, lively edition, suffer from rules bloat and options bloat. The last game I ran, I limited players to the core rulebook just because I didn’t want to deal with so much “stuff.” Also, I’m not particularly interested in half-angel, half-goblin mammoth-riding gunslingers.

BTW – Gary Gygax had some very specific thoughts related to the expansion of the game (presumably through options), in his book, Role Playing Mastery:

Too often, new material purporting to add to a game system is nothing more than a veiled attempt to dominate the game milieu through power, not skill. Such creativity, if it can be called that, amounts to a perversion of the game. It is much like cheating at solitaire. Understanding the scope of opportunity offered to PCs by the game system will certainly discourage the intelligent player  from such useless activity.

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Alan Moore’s Jerusalem Arrives Next Week

Alan Moore’s Jerusalem Arrives Next Week

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Alan Moore is one of the most celebrated writers of the last 30 years. His most famous work — including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, Batman: The Killing Joke, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — is arguably the canonical literature of modern comics. And let’s face it, whether you’re a comics reader or not, the most valuable media properties on the planet today (Batman, Iron Man, Superman, X-Men, Spider-Man, Captain America, and Deadpool, just to name a handful) all trace their first seminal steps into the world of adult literature directly to the early comics of Alan Moore.

Jerusalem is — by far — Moore’s most ambitious work. Among comics fans it has acquired an almost legendary status, as Moore has been working on it — and dropping cryptic hints about it — for roughly a decade. In his 2012 review of Moore’s first novel, Voice of the Fire, Matthew David Surridge summarized some of the anticipation surrounding Jerusalem.

How do you follow a book like this? Moore’s currently working on his second novel, Jerusalem. It’s scheduled for publication in autumn of 2013; reports suggest it’ll be 750,000 words long (about the length of two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire put together), be set entirely in an area of a few city blocks in Moore’s home of Northampton, and, according to Moore, disprove the existence of death. It’ll be concerned with time, different chapters set in different eras; like Voice of the Fire, it seems. What transformations will we see in it? How different will it be? Voice of the Fire‘s a strong book that, in its ellipses, promises more. Now that we shall have. What spirits shall we see? What work shall it accomplish?

At 1280 pages, one thing’s for certain: Jerusalem certainly delivers more. What’s it about, then? Well, that’s sort of hard to describe.

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Phoenician and Roman Cádiz: The Original Pillars of Hercules

Phoenician and Roman Cádiz: The Original Pillars of Hercules

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Phoenician bling.Jewelry found in the Phoenician cemetery dating
from the 5th to 2nd centuries BC. The finds include many imports,
even amulets of Horus and Sekhmet from as far away as Egypt

Europe is known for its ancient cities, with many dating to Roman or even pre-Roman times. One of the oldest continually inhabited cities in Europe is Cádiz, on the southwestern coast of Spain near the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been a city since at least Phoenician times and has been of crucial importance to the region ever since.

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