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The Top Black Gate Posts in November

The Top Black Gate Posts in November

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Sean McLachlan was the Black Gate MVP for November, with two articles in the Top 5: “Happy Halloween! Here’s Some Nightmare Fuel” at #3, and “Ten Ways You Know Your Evil Empire Is Doomed,” which scored the #5 slot. Hot on Sean’s heels was Ryan Harvey with two Pellucidar posts, his review of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Savage Pellucidar (#6) and the Series Wrap-Up (#10).

The most popular article last month was our survey of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress anthology series, which has been published semi-continuously since 1984. The post spawned at least one follow-up, a more personal look back on the series by Elizabeth Cady, to be published here in the next next few days. Coming in at #2 was Bob Byrne’s review of the film Murder on the Orient Express. Rounding out the Top Five was our look at S. A. Chakraborty’s new novel The City of Brass.

An update on Beneath Ceaseless Skies placed seventh, followed by Fletcher Vredenburgh’s review of Robert E. Howard’s The Road of Azrael. And Steven H Silver nabbed the ninth slot on the list, with his Michael Moorcock re-read “Elric and Me.”

The complete list of Top Articles for November follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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New Treasures: The Trials of Solomon Parker by Eric Scott Fischl

New Treasures: The Trials of Solomon Parker by Eric Scott Fischl

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The Trials of Solomon Parker doesn’t look it, but it’s part of a series. A loose series maybe, but still a series. The first novel, Dr Potter’s Medicine Show, was published by Angry Robot back in March. At least you don’t have to wait long between installments.

John Shirley called the first novel “A powerful alchemical elixir concocted of post Civil War historical fiction, dark fantasy, and Felliniesque flavoring.” And the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog labeled it a “gritty, down-and-dirty debut.” In her feature review at Tor.com, Arianne Thompson described it as:

An Enthusiastic Carnival of Horrors… even though Dr. Potter rightly belongs on the “horror/occult” side of the Weird Western spectrum, it cleaves apart from the sensational grimdark vogue that so heavily tints our view of the past. Fischl’s command of his characters’ world is grotesque, vivid, joyful, and sublime — an uncommon realism that honors the human side of history, and a reminder that a carnival of horrors is still a carnival, after all, with miracles and spectacles awaiting anyone brave enough to venture into the sideshow tent.

The B&N Sci-Fi Blog says “compelling and broken characters, and damn good storytelling elevates The Trials of Solomon Parker to whole new level of weird western. Two excellent books in a calendar year – Fischl is definitely a writer to watch.”

The Trials of Solomon Parker was published by Angry Robot on October 3, 2017. It is 384 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Steven Meyer-Rassow.

The December Fantasy Magazine Rack

The December Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine December 2017-small Apex Magazine December 2017-small Clarkesworld December 2017-small Lightspeed December 2017-small
Beneath Ceaseless Skies December 7 2017-small The Dark December 2017-small Forever Magazine December 2017-small Pulp Literature Winter 2018-small

The latest crop of magazines includes brand new fiction by BG blogger and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly editor Adrian Simmons, plus Natalia Theodoridou, Lettie Prell, Cassandra Khaw, Mari Ness, Stephen Case, Nin Harris, and many more. Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in early December (links will bring you to magazine websites).

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine — editor Tom Dullemond selects stories by Adrian Simmons, David Versace, Jennifer Hykes, Josh Pearce, DA Xiaolin Spires, Freya Marske, Rae White, and others
Apex Magazine — new stories from Daniela Tomova and Katharine E.K. Duckett, plus a reprint by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and a podcast
Clarkesworld — issue #135 has new fiction from Natalia Theodoridou, Lettie Prell, Josh Pearce, Eleanna Castroianni, and Cassandra Khaw, plus reprints by Ken Macleod and Ian Mcdonald
Lightspeed — the December issue has original fiction by Rachael K. Jones, Cadwell Turnbull, A. Merc Rustad and Mari Ness, plus reprints by Charlie Jane Anders, Robert Reed, Tim Pratt and Sonya Taaffe
Beneath Ceaseless Skies — issue #240 has short stories by Stephen Case and M. Bennardo, plus a reprint by Andrea Stewart
The Dark — stories by MP Johnson and Nin Harris, plus reprints by Robert Levy and Robert Shearman
Forever Magazine — issue #35 of this SF reprint magazine has a novella by Ken Liu (The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary) plus a novelette by Eleanor Arnason, and a story by Peter Watts.
Pulp Literature — issue 17, Winter 2018, has a Christmas ghost story by JJ Lee, a Frankenstein tale for the new world by AJ Odasso, plus Misha Handman, Spencer Stevens, Anat Rabkin, Soramimi Hanarajimi, and Susan Pieters, and the winners of the 2017 Hummingbird Prize for Flash Fiction

Click any of the thumbnail images above for bigger images. Our late November Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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Alfred Bester on “My One Demented Meeting with the Great John W. Campbell, Jr.”

Alfred Bester on “My One Demented Meeting with the Great John W. Campbell, Jr.”

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Alfred BesterI’m a long-time student of science fiction history, and I enjoy reading it whenever I can. On the train yesterday I read “My Affair with Science Fiction,” a delightful bit of memoir by the great Alfred Bester, author of The Demolished Man and The Stars Our Destination. It contains one of the most revealing tidbits on John W. Campbell I’ve ever read.

I wrote a few stories for Astounding, and out of that came my one demented meeting with the great John W. Campbell, Jr. I needn’t preface this account with the reminder that I worshipped Campbell from afar… I sent off another story to Campbell, one which no show would let me tackle. The title was “Oddy and Id” and the concept was Freudian… Campbell telephoned me a week later to say that he liked the story but wanted to discuss a few changes with me. Would I come to his office?….

Campbell arose from his desk and shook hands. I’m a fairly big guy but he looked enormous to me, about the size of a defensive tackle. He was dour and seemed preoccupied by matters of great moment. “You don’t know it,” Campbell said, “you can’t have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished…”

“Oh come now, Mr. Campbell. Surely you’re joking.”

“I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time. Dianetics… Come and have lunch.”

We sat down at a small table while he continued to discourse on dianetics, the greatest salvation of the future when the world would at last be cleared of its emotional wounds. Suddenly he stood up and towered over me. “You can drive your memory back to the womb,” he said. “You can do it if you release every block, clear yourself and remember. Try it.”

“Now?”

“Now. Think. Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You’ve never stopped hating her for it.”

Around me there were cries of “BLT down, hold the mayo. Eighty-six on the English. Combo rye, relish. Coffee shake, pick up.” And here was this grim tackle standing over me, practicing dianetics without a license. The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter. I prayed. “Help me out of this, please. Don’t let me laugh in his face. Show me a way out.” God showed me.

“My Affair with Science Fiction” originally appeared in Harry Harrison’s 1974 anthology Nova 4, three years after Campbell died. It’s been reprinted a handful of times, including in Hell’s Cartographers (1975), and Bester’s collection Starlight (1976). The Stars My Destination is included in the Library of America’s gorgeous boxed set American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, and you can read “My Affair with Science Fiction” online at the Library of America here. It’s long but well worth the read.

Vintage Treasures: Farewell Fantastic Venus! edited by Brian W. Aldiss with Harry Harrison

Vintage Treasures: Farewell Fantastic Venus! edited by Brian W. Aldiss with Harry Harrison

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One of the things I love about pulp SF is its romanticized view of our solar system. The ancient canals and lost cities of Mars, the steaming dinosaur-ridden swamps of Venus. I can still remember the bitter disappointment I felt when I first learned that science had proven Venus completely inhospitable to life. It felt like the solar system had been robbed of its greatest potential for extra-planetary adventure.

Many SF writers felt very much the same way. Two recent anthologies from Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, Old Mars and Old Venus, have done a splendid job re-capturing some of that old pulp magic with a generous sampling of modern tales set in retro-versions of both planets.

But they weren’t the first books to celebrate a cherished (and now obsolete) vision of our solar system. That honor probably goes to Farewell Fantastic Venus!, a 1968 anthology released shortly after the first probes reached Venus, and the hard truth was revealed. The book contains classic Venusian fiction by Arthur C. Clarke and John & Dorothy de Courcy, and two novellas by Poul Anderson, including a Psychotechnic League tale. There’s also a rich sampling of novel excerpts by Olaf Stapledon, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. S. Lewis, and others. All that plus science articles by Frank R. Paul, Carl Sagan, Sir Bernard Lovell, Willy Ley, and others.

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Could Hitler Have Built the Bomb? Find Out in Against the Odds #50

Could Hitler Have Built the Bomb? Find Out in Against the Odds #50

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Against the Odds 50 Building the Bomb-smallAgainst the Odds magazine is a throwback to the great era of tabletop gaming, when magazines like Strategy & Tactics and the much-missed Ares contained complete games in each issue. Issues are expensive ($35, more than the cost of a hardcover book), but for gaming fans it’s well worth the price. The latest issue, #50, contains Building the Bomb, a chilling card game that simulates the Nazi efforts to build the first atomic bomb.

In late 1941 with senior officials across Germany becoming increasingly aware that Operation Barbarossa would fail somewhere short of Moscow… many worriedly began looking for an “out.” Some, like Ernst Udet, head of Luftwaffe Development, and Walter Borbet, a leading industrialist, shot themselves over the shock of the failure. Others, like General Fromm, in charge of the Army Weapons Office, turned their attention to an extraordinary proposal by Germany’s leading physicists to unlock the secrets of the atom and provide limitless power, and a possible war winning explosive device, the atomic bomb.

Building the Bomb is a card game for 2 to 5 players. Each player represents a faction inside German government, military or industrial circles, seeking to engage one of the Reich’s prestigious research institutes to start work on a nuclear program.

Acting through the Director of each center, players will need to size matters up, recruit other scientists, acquire scarce resources, (plus spy on their rivals, this is the Third Reich remember) and certainly go all out if they hope to develop atomic weapons…

Building the Bomb includes 108 colorful playing cards, 40 die-cut counters, and a 10-page rulebook. Playing time is 1 to 2 hours. It was designed by Steven Cunliffe and developed by Lembit Tohver, with graphic design by Mark Mahaffey.

Against the Odds: Journal of History and Simulation is edited by Andy Nunez and published by LPS, Inc. It appears four times per year, yearly subscriptions are $80 in the US. Individual issues are priced at $39.95; issue 50 is around 56 pages. Order copies or get more details at the website. We last covered Against the Odds with Issue #35, which contained the game Boudicca: The Warrior Queen.

See our late November Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

A Return to Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year

A Return to Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year

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Terry Carr Best Science Fiction of the Year-small

My taste in science fiction — like my taste in music and film — was shaped early. What I learned to love as a teen I largely still enjoy… with some exceptions. One of those exceptions is Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year. I picked up my first one in 1977, at the age of 13, and I discovered pretty quickly that they weren’t for me. I went back to reading pulp SF in books like Before the Golden Age, and was blissfully happy to do so for many years.

I’ve returned to Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year recently, and discovered why I didn’t connect with them four decades ago: unlike many of his contemporaries, Carr brought an adult eye to SF, and the fiction he selected spoke to adults. It still speaks to adults today, clearly and with no loss of voice, and I now consider Carr’s Best volumes — especially the ones he did in the mid-70s — to be some some of the best SF anthologies ever printed. Here’s what I said last year about #3, published in 1973.

How incredible was The Best Science Fiction of the Year #3? It contains some of the finest science fiction stories of all time, packed into one slender volume. Like “The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree, Jr… perhaps her most famous story, and that’s saying something. And Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula Award-winning “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” which became the basis of her 1978 novel Dreamsnake (which swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards the following year.) And Harlan Ellison’s classic “The Deathbird,” the Hugo and Locus Award-winning title story of his celebrated 1975 collection Deathbird Stories. Plus Gene Wolfe’s famous “The Death of Dr. Island,” winner of the Locus and Nebula awards for Best Novella.

And an unassuming little story by a young writer named Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and is considered by many (me included) to be one of the finest short stories ever written. And lots more — including a Jack Vance novella, plus stories by Philip José Farmer, Alfred Bester, R. A. Lafferty, Robert Silverberg, and F. M. Busby. All for $1.50!

Last month I purchased a fine collection of six Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes (pictured above) on eBay for the criminally low price of $7. They arrived a few weeks ago, and I’ve stolen a few minutes here and there to dip into them. It’s been an enormously rewarding experience.

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New Treasures: The Witches of New York by Ami McKay

New Treasures: The Witches of New York by Ami McKay

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The Witches of New York-small The Witches of New York-back-small

When a book loudly proclaims “International Bestseller” on the cover, that’s usually code for “Translated from French,” or some equally strange language. A little digging on the copyright page of The Witches of New York reveals that it was, indeed, originally published in a foreign land in 2016… in this case, Canada. Well, that means I can be reasonably sure the author has at least been to New York. You can see why this kind of literary detective work is so important.

Ami McKay lives in Nova Scotia (the greatest land on Earth), and her debut novel The Birth House was a # 1 bestseller in Canada. Her second, The Virgin Cure, was inspired by her great- great grandmother, Dr. Sarah Fonda Mackintosh, a female doctor in nineteenth century New York. McKay was born and raised in Indiana, which is actually farther from New York than Nova Scotia. But we won’t hold that against her.

Publishers Weekly calls The Witches of New York “Wonderful… a sidelong glance at misogyny through a veil of witches, ghosts, and other mystical entities in 1880 New York.” And The Globe and Mail says “Society types straight out of Edith Wharton pursue spiritualism for fun… but McKay widens her scope with grimier episodes… She has a nose for the Dickensian.” It is a Buzzfeed Best Gift Book of the Year.

The Witches of New York was published by Harper Perennial on July 11, 2017. It is 560 pages, priced at $15.99 in paperback, and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Stephen MacKey. Read an excerpt here.

Future Treasures: Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

Future Treasures: Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

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Elysium Fire-smallAlastair Reynolds’ 2007 novel The Prefect introduced Prefect Tom Dreyfus, a hardened law enforcement officer tasked with maintaining democracy throughout the Glitter Band, part of Reynolds’s Revelation Space milieu. Publishers Weekly called the book “a fascinating hybrid of space opera, police procedural and character study… solid British SF adventure, evoking echoes of le Carré and Sayers with a liberal dash of Doctor Who.”

A decade later Reynolds has written a sequel, in which Dreyfuss finds himself caught in a web of murderers, secret cultists, tampered memories, and unthinkable power. It arrives in paperback from Orion next month.

Ten thousand city-state habitats orbit the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise.

But even utopia needs a police force. For the citizens of the Glitter Band that organization is Panoply, and the prefects are its operatives.

Prefect Tom Dreyfus has a new emergency on his hands. Across the habitats and their hundred million citizens, people are dying suddenly and randomly, victims of a bizarre and unprecedented malfunction of their neural implants. And these “melters” leave no clues behind as to the cause of their deaths…

As panic rises in the populace, a charismatic figure is sowing insurrection, convincing a small but growing number of habitats to break away from the Glitter Band and form their own independent colonies.

Elysium Fire is Book 2 of 3 in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergency series. Our most recent coverage of Reynolds includes Brandon Crilly’s review of Revenger (which won the 2017 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book), and a look at The Medusa Chronicles, co-authored with Stephen Baxter. Brit Hvide at Orbit shares this take on the cover art:

Peer into the darkness! Gaze upon the future! And admire that sweet, sweet new cover for Alastair Reynolds’ latest space opera, Elysium Fire! That gold band you see on the cover? Nope, it’s not one of Jupiter’s rings, fancy space debris, or a futuristic engagement ring. It’s the Glitter Band, the setting for Reynolds’s latest adventure: ten thousand city-state habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, forming a near-perfect democratic human paradise. How’s that for scale?

Elysium Fire will be published by Orbit on January 23, 2018. It is 432 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital editions.

True to the Specters of the Dead: The Big Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

True to the Specters of the Dead: The Big Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

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Two weeks ago I wrote a quick piece on Otto Penzler’s latest anthology, The Big Book of Rogues and Villains. I dashed off a list of the previous Penzler books we’d covered over the years… and I realized to my dismay that we’d somehow overlooked one of my favorites, The Big Book of Ghost Stories, an 836-page treasure trove released in 2012. I figured the time was right to rectify that oversight.

Michael Dirda gives a great summary in his Washington Post review.

Otto Penzler’s The Big Book of Ghost Stories largely focuses on classic tales. No one should go through life (let alone death) without experiencing W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” Perceval Landon’s “Thurnley Abbey,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Moonlit Road” and M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad.” But Penzler also includes many stories that should be equally well known. This year, for instance, I read for the first time Ellen Glasgow’s “The Shadowy Third,” a wonderfully ambiguous tale of a nurse hired by a charismatic doctor to care for his apparently demented wife. Yet Mrs. Maradick is strangely afraid of her handsome husband, and there is something odd about her silent young daughter. Glasgow’s narrative is deeply haunting, in more ways than one.

Penzler stresses that he has “tried to remain true to the notion that ghosts are spirits or specters of the dead. Some stories that frequently have appeared in other ghost story anthologies have nothing at all to do with ghosts. They may be trolls, or evil plants, vile fungi, monsters, or other creatures of that ilk. Rightly or not, I have attempted to be a bit of a narrow-minded purist about it all.” This means that there is nothing here by Arthur Machen, who specialized in ancient and malignant races lurking in the Welsh hills, while Algernon Blackwood is represented by “The Woman’s Ghost Story” instead of his masterpiece, “The Willows.”

The book contains tales by HP Lovecraft, Conrad Aiken, Rudyard Kipling, Ramsey Campbell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Donald E. Westlake, Fritz Leiber, Albert E. Cowdrey, Wilkie Collins, Manly Wade Wellman, Saki, Edith Wharton, and many others. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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