Search Results for: archipelago

Weird Sea Adventures: Archipelago – Calendar Year 1

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Archipelago Portal Some time back I posted a brief review of the Archipelago Kickstarter reward chapbook. I was impressed, and joined the Archipelago crew at their chosen home, Patreon, becoming a Crew Member for the princely sum of $2 per month. This slightly higher rank than the run-of-the-mill $1-paying Bilge Rats allows for certain privileges, such as voting in the occasional Blood Pearl polls, through which one can guide the direction of certain stories. The main privilege of course is access to the…

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Weird Sea Adventures: A Review of the Archipelago Kickstarter Reward Magazine

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First there was the Weird Tale, which hit the mark. Then there was the Weird Western, which hit the mark for many, but not all. Now there is the Weird Sea… The advent of Archipelago came to my attention on Black Gate via Brandon Crilly’s post post earlier this year, which included some cool art and a teaser story – “The Ur-Ring” by Charlotte Ashley. As a longstanding fan of maritime literature, specifically the Richard Bolitho stories by Alexander Kent (pseudonym…

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Exclusive Preview: Archipelago by Charlotte Ashley, Andrew Leon Hudson & Kurt Hunt

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As I’m sure you’ve figured out, I’m a huge fan of propping up and promoting other writers. Most of the time that has been spotlighting and reviewing new novels and short fiction, but today I present to you Archipelago, a serialized online adventure fantasy series jointly written by authors Charlotte Ashley, Andrew Leon Hudson and Kurt Hunt. This isn’t just serial fiction that you can read and enjoy – it’s collaborative and competitive, where the readers get the opportunity to…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Death (of a Detective) in Paradise

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And we kick off 2025 with the return of the column that earned me regular gig here at Black Gate. I’m ostensibly the in-house mystery guy around here, though I’m way beyond all over the place. Death in Paradise is a police procedural (it is not, however, a buddy cop show) with a fair amount of humor, and it debuted on BBC1 on October 25, 2011. The show started airing a Christmas special a few years ago, and episode number…

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A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

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Impossible Creatures (Knopf Books for Young Readers, September 10, 2024). Cover by Ashley Mackenzie Katherine Rundell is a British writer who has been publishing YA novels for some time now, though I was unaware of her. Last year she published the first novel of a prospective series in the UK: Impossible Creatures. This became a big hit, and has now been published in the US. The book is quite good, fun to read, clever, also serious and quite moving, with…

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Neverwhens: In His Sunken House of… Doggerland… Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming

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Yeah…Doggerland. For those not in the know, during the last Ice Age Earth’s seas were about 300 feet lower, revealing a vast amount of land. While no true Atlantis or Mu have been found, examples include a broad plain — and now sunken lakebed — connecting Australia to New Guinea, the Sunda Shelf — a massive sub-continent that unites most of Southeast Asia in a single landmass that includes places as far flung as Java and the Philippines, and Doggerland….

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Neverwhens: Ancient Civilizations Topple and the Age of Heroes ends in the Blades of Bronze Trilogy by Mark Knowles

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I sincerely doubt any Black Gate reader needs an education in who Ray Harryhausen was or why his films, despite the sea-change in special effects technology, remain seminal classics (I’ve been making my way through a bunch of his swashbuckling adventures with my Zoomer son, who notes, time and again, how ‘cheesy and awesome’ the stop motion is, but also calls out how perfect at times the strange movements are at making monsters seem, well…strange and *monstrous* in a way…

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Christopher Priest, July 14, 1943 — February 2, 2024

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Galaxy December 1973, containing Part I of The Inverted World. Cover by Brian Boyle I find myself writing another obituary for a major SF writer — this has been a terrible couple of months. Christopher Priest, one of the true giants of our field, has died at 80. He is survived by his partner, Nina Allan, a brilliant SF writer in her own right. (I suppose Priest had a “type,” as his two ex-wives, Lisa Tuttle and Leigh Kennedy, are also…

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New Treasures: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

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The Mountain in the Sea (Picador reprint edition, May 30, 2023). Cover by María Jesús Contreras Ray Nayler has published dozens of short stories in many of the major genre fiction markets. His debut novel The Mountain in the Sea was published in hardcover by MCD last year and nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. But I ignored it because it pretty much had the most boring cover for a science fiction…

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What I’ve Been Watching: (A BritBox) December 2021

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During my hiatus from Black Gate, I watched a lot of shows, and some movies. And I grabbed a BritBox subscription, so today, we’re going across the pond. I might drop a minor item here and there, but these reviews are mostly spoiler-free. DEATH IN PARADISE I had just finished season four of this enjoyable British police show on Netflix, back when the newly-created BritBox snatched this – and many other shows – away. I recently got a ‘two months…

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