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Month: October 2018

Handling Wonderful Changes: The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

Handling Wonderful Changes: The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

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Black Gate has some of the best writers in the business, and we’re always proud when one of our bloggers has a new publication. But we’re doubly pleased when one of our writers produces a debut novel — and especially one as widely acclaimed as The Quantum Magician, by our Saturday blogger Derek Künsken.

The Quantum Magician was published in trade paperback by Solaris earlier this month, and it’s already won rave accolades from writers such as Yoon Ha Lee, and Cixin Liu, who said “Technology changes us — even our bodies — in fundamental ways, and Kunsken handles this wonderfully.” In his Black Gate review Brandon Crilly called it “intricate, compelling and absolutely fascinating,” and in a feature review at Locus British SF writer Adam Roberts wrote:

This debut novel will do well. It is a fat, fun SF heist-thriller, a sort of Ocean’s 2487… We’re in a 25th century in which humanity has spread to the stars, enabled by wormhole gates left over from a long vanished interstellar civilization. Access to these gates is, as you’d expect, tightly controlled, and when a group wants to smuggle a fleet of advanced spaceships across the galaxy without paying the requisite fee, they approach the galaxy’s finest con-man, Belisarius Arjona, for help. Belisarius gets the gang back together one last time to pull off the most audacious heist of his career… Künsken has a wonderfully ingenious imagination.

Derek first appeared in Black Gate in issue 15 with his short story “The Gifts of Li Tzu-Ch’eng.” He has been our regular Saturday evening blogger since 2013, writing some 128 articles for us. The Quantum Magician was published by Solaris on October 2, 2018. It is 475 pages, priced at $11.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Justin Adams.

Interested in keeping up to date on the latest from BG bloggers and staff? We do our best to share  news with you here, and you always see the latest from our talented crew by reading posts with the BG Staff tag.

One Alone: First Man

One Alone: First Man

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I am a child of the Space Age. Growing up in Southern California in the sixties as the son of an aerospace worker, the sound of sonic booms from planes flying from Air Force bases in the High Desert were as ubiquitous during my childhood as Beatles’ tunes. I played with Mattel’s Major Matt Mason space toys (go on eBay and prepare to be shocked and awed), I snacked on “space food sticks” (really nasty) and drank Tang (more fun if you shook up the jar, unscrewed the lid, and inhaled the fumes than it was as a beverage), and, along with millions of other people, on the evening of July 21, 1969, I sprawled (in my footie pajamas) in front of a cabinet television set that weighed more than some of today’s cars, and watched as Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon. So, being a child of the Space Age, it only follows that my favorite movies are tearjerkers… tearjerkers like The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, and the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.

In fact, there is nothing that gets my waterworks started faster than a scene from “1968”, the episode in From the Earth to the Moon that chronicles Apollo 8, the first manned mission to reach and orbit the Moon. When the moment comes when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders see what no human beings in the long history of our race had ever seen before — the Earth, still and bright and silent, rising over the surface of another world… well, I need a tissue right now, just thinking about it.

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Birthday Reviews: Amy Thomson’s “Buddha Nature”

Birthday Reviews: Amy Thomson’s “Buddha Nature”

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Cover by David A. Hardy
Cover by David A. Hardy

Amy Thomson was born on October 28, 1958.

Thomson won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author in 1994 on the basis of her debut novel, Virtual Girl. She subsequently published two novels in The Color of Distance series and the stand-alone novel Storyteller, as well as three short stories. She has been nominated for the Prometheus Award for Virtual Girl, the Philip K. Dick Award and Seiun Award for The Color of Distance, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and Endeavour Awards for her novel Storyteller. In the trading card series issued by the Chicago in 2000 Worldcon bid, card number 28 was of Thomson and identified as the “Official Rookie Card.”

“Buddha Nature” was published in the January-February 2013 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact, edited by Stanley Schmidt. The story was Thomson’s first published science fiction in a decade and earned her the Anlab Award for Best Novelette. The story has not been reprinted.

Many authors have explored what it means to be human through the lens of robots in science fiction, most notably, of course, Isaac Asimov. Amy Thomson has also examined the idea that a sufficiently advanced robot can become human through a religious lens in “Buddha Nature.”

The Buddhist monks are surprised when a robot named Raz trundles up to the monastery and asks if it may join the order as a novice. Not entirely sure how to respond, Samsara invites the robot in and introduces it to the abbot, Bodhidharma, who reflects on the question of whether a robot can achieve enlightenment or not and decides that while he feels the robot belongs, it is appropriate to put the question to a vote. Although some of the monks express reservations, none stronger than Henry, Bodhidharma agrees to let the robot into the monastery for a trial period.

Over the course of the story, the monks learn as much from Raz as the robot learns from them. Samsara teaches Raz what it means to have emotions, sympathy, frustration, and other human traits. Although Samsara doesn’t fully understand why Raz needs to learn this, the robot decides it can’t achieve enlightenment without learning what humans must overcome to achieve it. While Raz is learning these things from Samsara, the humans are learning to view the world in a more clinical and detached manner and many of them are learning to accept the non-human, potentially sentient in their midst, although acceptance isn’t universal among the monks.

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Gods, Robots, and Man: The Best of Lester del Rey

Gods, Robots, and Man: The Best of Lester del Rey

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The Best of Lester del Rey-small The Best of Lester del Rey-back-small

Lester del Rey was born in Minnesota in 1915 and died in 1993. One of his boldest fictions was claiming that his full name was Ramón Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes, when it was actually Leonard Knapp. However, it was his other fictions, beginning in 1938 for Astounding, and his work as an editor, a reviewer, and in a literary agency, which resulted in his being made a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1991.

While he was active in science fiction until near his death, he never collected anything published after 1964 and published very little of his own fiction at all after 1971, the year he married Judy-Lynn Benjamin. She became an editor at Ballantine Books, later joined by him, and created the Del Rey imprint. In the meantime, it was this publishing house which began the Classics of Science Fiction (“Best of”) series, the eighteenth of which was devoted to Lester del Rey, himself.

In his afterword del Rey says, “I love robots,” and that comes through in the number of stories in The Best of Lester del Rey that feature them. The most famous is “Helen O’Loy,” which was selected for the SFWA’s “Science Fiction Hall of Fame.” In it, Dave is a robot repairman, Phil is an endocrinologist, and Lena is a robot who develops a glitch and is worked on until the two friends decide to equip a new model with emotions. When Phil is called away on business and Helen imprints on some fiction and on Dave, the situation becomes complicated. The quiet twist at the end adds a deep layer of pathos which is a feature of many of del Rey’s stories. This might be read today as a sexist tale about gender, and some casual attitudes expressed in it could be seized on as confirmation, but it’s really a story about the nature of humanity, our emotions, how they might be emulated, and how humans might respond to the “spiritual” (or differently mechanical) despite biology. Published before Heinlein and technically “before the Golden Age,” it is nevertheless written in a direct style which efficiently backgrounds numerous then-futuristic elements to flesh out its foreground, and is effective.

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Derek Strikes the TBR pile and finds Fonda Lee’s Jade City

Derek Strikes the TBR pile and finds Fonda Lee’s Jade City

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I think everyone’s to-be-read pile is always in danger of collapsing on them so that rescuers can only find cat-gnawed bones. For that reason, I listen via Audible and don’t have a cat.

But still, my to-be-read pile is huge and growing and I’d been wanting to read Fonda Lee’s Jade City for some time. It just won the Aurora and did quite well with Hugo and Nebula readers. Also how cool does a magical Asian Godfather story sound?

Lee has created the world of Janloon, what felt to me as a kind of magical Hong Kong, set sometime after cars, airplanes and phones, but before cell phones and computers. It’s a world of increasing modernity and one where ancient traditions (magical jade) come into conflict.

The Kaul family and the Ayt family are the two big mafia families that run Janloon through politicians and businesses. The people of Janloon are the only ones who can wear magical jade without having major toxicity/withdrawal/addiction problems. In the hands of a trained green-bone, jade can enhance perception, strength, speed, toughness, etc and the uneasy stalemate between the No Peak Clan (the Kauls) and the Mountain Clan (the Ayts) begins to unravel with the possibility of a drug called SN1 which allows foreigners to use jade.

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October Is Hammer Country: The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

October Is Hammer Country: The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

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I wanted to close out my Hammer-for-October articles with The Plague of the Zombies, but hesitated because the movie isn’t easily available in North America. The Anchor Bay DVD has been out of production for more than fifteen years and used copies don’t come cheap. Then, just as I was about to scratch it off the calendar and substitute The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll or Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, the news hit — Shout! Factory will release The Plague of the Zombies to Region A Blu-ray in January. For once, I picked up on the Blu-ray release announcement before making a hasty prediction about a movie never showing up in HD and looking like a dope again. So consider this a pre-release celebration.

Anyway … Zombies! Yes, Hammer Film Productions made a zombie film. The Plague of the Zombies was released in 1966 as the second half of a double bill with Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Although the Dracula film brought Christopher Lee back to the role of the count for the first time since Dracula (1958) and was the main selling point of the double feature, The Plague of the Zombies is the more intelligent and gripping film. Dracula: Prince of Darkness is beautiful but plodding, while The Plague of the Zombies is one of the best of Hammer’s mid-‘60s pictures, with a few memorable shock scenes and underlying themes that have encouraged a range of readings.

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Birthday Reviews: Brad Strickland’s “Hero’s Coin”

Birthday Reviews: Brad Strickland’s “Hero’s Coin”

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Cover by Don Ivan Punchatz
Cover by Don Ivan Punchatz

Brad Strickland was born on October 27, 1947.

Strickland received a Phoenix Award at DeepSouthCon. In 200, he won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for his novel When Mack Came Back. He has collaborated John Michlig, Thomas E. Fuller, and his wife, Barbara. Strickland has also completed several novels which were originally outlined by John Bellairs prior to his death.

“Hero’s Coin” was written for the 1993 anthology Quest to Riverworld, edited by Philip José Farmer. This was the second volume in which Farmer opened up his Riverworld series to other authors. The story has never been reprinted.

Because all of the stories in Quest to Riverworld took place in Farmer’s established universe, the was no need for Strickland to explain the rather strange setting. Read without the context of the other stories or Farmer’s original work, however, the story suffers from vagueness brought on by its expectation that the reader knows how the world works. Had Strickland included that background, however, it would have seemed repetitive in the story’s original (and only) publication.

Farmer’s world contains a seemingly-infinite river along the banks of which everyone who has ever lived has been reincarnated, their needs provided for by a grail which fills with food. Strickland’s story focuses on Brother Aelfstan, an anonymous Anglo-Saxon monk who worked on a chronicle of his times in both our world and the Riverworld. Aelfstan makes friends with a stranger who was reincarnated near his part of the river and the two eventually set off together.

As the stranger, who Aelfstan calls “Nemo” helps people during their journey, with technological innovations, military decisions, and in other areas, the people they meet assume he must be Robert E. Lee, Archimedes, and other famous people in history. Nemo denies being any of them and questions Aelfstan about what makes a hero, emphatically denying he was any such.

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Secret Magical Orders and an Occult Underworld: The Nightwise Novels by R.S. Belcher

Secret Magical Orders and an Occult Underworld: The Nightwise Novels by R.S. Belcher

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R.S. Belcher’s Golgotha series is one of the more popular Weird Westerns on the market. Booklist called the opening volume “nothing short of fantastic… a setting so sharp you can feel the dust in your mouth,” and San Francisco Book Review summed it up as “a whirlwind of shootouts, assassins, cults, zombies, magic, attractive ladies, dubious morals, and demonic possession.”

Belcher kicked off a new series set in a seedy occult underworld with Nightwise in 2015. RT Book Reviews called it “brilliant… [a] sensational noir urban fantasy.” Sequel The Night Dahlia arrived earlier this year, making it a real series, and Tor re-issued the first volume with a matching cover.

I picked up both books earlier this month, and they look very attractive on my bookshelves — not to mention intriguing. They’ll make terrific Halloween reading to close out the month.

Here’s the description for both volumes, starting with Nightwise.

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Pie and a Slice of Sky: An Interview with Brooklyn Writer Rob Cameron

Pie and a Slice of Sky: An Interview with Brooklyn Writer Rob Cameron

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Writer Cameron Roberson (Cam Rob)
of Brooklyn SF Writers group & Kaleidocast

Greetings, Black Gaters! I’m here today with an interview for you with Rob Cameron, or “Cam” as I like to call him, a New York speculative fiction writer, among — as you will see — other things.

Cam was one of the first friends I made in New York City. Wait, let me take that back a few steps. It all started with Readercon, as so many things (including my marriage) do! It was probably Readercon, circa 2015. I was attending a panel to hear Ellen Kushner talk about something very interesting that I cannot now recall. I do recall that she opened the panel up to questions very early — which is one of her neat tricks: she’s there to serve the audience, and wants to talk about what interests them most. One of the first questions from the audience — and I remember thinking it was very keen and interesting — came from a bright-eyed young man who was sitting on the edge of his seat, leaning forward, as if he wanted to be the first to hear everything. He obviously knew Ellen, and she him, but I didn’t know him, and I thought, “Well! He must be a friend I haven’t met yet!” and determined at that moment to fulfill my own prophecy and get to know him better.

It turns out that this gentleman was none other than Rob Cameron, writer, gamer, teacher, as well as one of the main movers and shakers of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers and Kaleiodocast, the podcast they produce, which features fiction by and interviews with speculative fiction writers, and also stories that occur in a shared world.

The more I got to know him, the more I realized Cam was at the heart of New York’s electric, eclectic, thunderous spec fic scene, deeply involved in a community of writers all rising together, reading and critiquing each other’s work, attending events and conventions, and learning the business of being a writer. I thought he’d be a fantastic person to interview for Black Gate, so that we could all share in some of his knowledge, wisdom, and love of pie. After all — ’tis the season for pie. But then, when isn’t it?

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“What A Wonderful Smell You’ve Discovered”

“What A Wonderful Smell You’ve Discovered”

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Harold_and_Maude_(1971_film)_posterWe all do it. We all have favourite lines that we quote at appropriate – and inappropriate – times. It happens even when you’re out of the house, and sometimes leads to the person you’re with asking “That’s from a movie, isn’t it?” To which the answer is pretty much always, “yup.”

The movie that gets quoted most around our house is the one I was talking about last time: The Princess Bride. Back when I was working as a temp, I used to say “Murdered by pirates is good” every time I left a particular doctor’s office. (When I passed a certain other person in the corridor, I would whistle the witch’s theme from The Wizard of Oz)

When we’re watching Jeopardy, and the contestant misses something we consider an easy one, we shout “Morons!” at the screen. It’s both an accurate representation of our feelings at that moment, and a reference to our favourite movie. It  relieves our feelings of outrage, and it’s fun.

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