Search Results for: ernest cline

A Slick and Stylish Potpourri of Geeky Hipness: Ernest Cline’s Armada

Comments 2 comments

Armada By Earnest Cline Crown Books (368 pages, $26 in hardcover, July 14, 2015) Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut novel Ready Player One was quite the achievement. As I said in my review earlier this year here at Black Gate, Ready Player One was more than just a cute cyberpunk romp. I think it showed real ingenuity, portraying what science fiction could be for a new generation. And I thoroughly enjoyed it! It’s no surprise to me that Steven Spielberg is slated…

Read More Read More

More Than Just an Inventive Cyberpunk Romp: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

Comments 0 Comment

I’m nostalgic for most things that belong to the age of my childhood and teenage years (i.e. the 70s and 80s), especially for things we now mostly think of as geek-ish (though that label was hardly admirable when I was a kid). In this spirit, I recently watched a very interesting documentary on Netflix called Atari: Game Over, about one man’s quest to find the (now legendary) dumping ground of Atari’s fabled mass of unsold game cartridges based upon the…

Read More Read More

Gizmodo on November’s New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

Comments 0 Comment

Covers by Kieryn Tyler, Adam Auerbach, and Timothy Truman We’re getting close to the holiday season, and you know what that means. 2020 will finally be over. But also! Many of us will have enough vacation time to catch up on our reading. The new flurry of November releases hasn’t made that any easier. What we need is a roadmap to the most interesting destinations in this publishing wilderness. Something like Cheryl Eddy’s comprehensive list of November New Sci-Fi and…

Read More Read More

Art of the Genre: Gunsmith Light Novel Now on Kickstarter

Comments 0 Comment

AotG News! Art of the Genre lead author Scott Taylor has just created his first science fiction novel to be released on the Kickstarter platform. This is the 8th novel either written or edited by Taylor on the crowdfunding site, and the first since Airship of Fools in August 2014. Taylor explains, The concept for the novel was born from the Massively Multi-Player Online games that bloomed into popularity at the turn of the millennia, and expanded upon by works…

Read More Read More

A Biography Worthy of the Creator of D&D: Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination

Comments 2 comments

Anyone who has grown up in a small town knows how much of an unrelenting pest, nay enemy, boredom can be. And if you grew up in the days before the internet, or before fairly inexpensive computers or game systems, and when cable television was just getting going, boredom was even more of a specter. However, my young friends and I had one constant respite from boredom: role-playing games (RPGs)! And like most from my generation, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D)…

Read More Read More

November 2015 Lightspeed Magazine Now on Sale

Comments 0 Comment

Editor John Joseph Adams shares some good news in his editorial this month. Back in August, it was announced that both Lightspeed and our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue specifically had been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. (Lightspeed was nominated in the Periodicals category, while WDSF was nominated in the Anthology category.) The awards were presented October 25 at FantasyCon 2015 in Nottingham, UK, and, alas, Lightspeed did not win in the Periodicals category. But WDSF did win…

Read More Read More

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July

Comments 2 comments

While we wait impatiently for the next episode of the popular BBC series Sherlock, the best way to pass the time seems to be to talk about the show with other fans. Bob Byrne proved this with the #1 post at Black Gate in July, his July 13th article “The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Season 3 – What Happened?”, in which he observes the negative fan reaction to the third season: Season three (finally) arrived. Hoo-boy. Not only…

Read More Read More

A Modest Proposal to Improve the Hugos

Comments 5 comments

In thinking about the recent unpleasantness (regarding the Hugo ballot, I mean), it occurred to me that one source of the issues with the Hugos right now has nothing much to do with slates or bloc voting or Sad Puppies or Social Justice Warriors or even taste (that much). It is simply this: there are a lot more SF stories published now than there were in the past. That makes it really hard for any reader to even come close…

Read More Read More

Tomb of Horrors Gets a Fourth Edition Makeover

Comments 16 comments

One of the more intriguing treasures I brought home from the Paris Fashion Week of Games last week was the compact new edition of Gary Gygax’s famous player-killer Tomb of Horrors. Now, if you don’t play role playing games yet still find the name Tomb of Horrors oddly familiar, it’s probably because it’s a touchstone of considerable significance in geek culture and you’ve come across one of the many modern references to it. Most recently, for example, it featured in Ernest…

Read More Read More

A Detailed Explanation

Comments 133 comments

This is going to come out at some point, so I might as well say it here and now: I declined a Hugo nomination for this year’s Best Fan Writer award. I think it’s only fair to the people who voted for me to say why. Be warned, this is going to take a while. (And long-time readers of mine around these parts know that coming from me, that really means something.) Firstly, given the nature of this post and…

Read More Read More