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Author: John ONeill

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 31 Now Available

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 31 Now Available

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 31-small

From far-distant nether dimensions of imagination, editorial overlords have transmitted another fabulous issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly to our mundane plane of existence. Teams of blind scribes in the Himalayas, listening intently to the vibrations of the snow butterflies of Nepal, have transcribed the text with eager hands. And once again, the world owes them a great debt. (And maybe a case of beer. From a mico-brewery, not the cheap stuff.)

The latest issue includes stories by Dennis Mombauer, Aidan Doyle, Raphael Ordoñez, and HFQ editor James Rowe. Here’s the complete TOC, with fiction links.

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New Treasures: Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

New Treasures: Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

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Universal Harvester

It’s great to be plugged into the industry, so I can hear what editors and publicists think are going to be the big books each season. And it’s incredibly helpful to be involved with a network of bloggers and reviewers who give me their take on the same thing.

But nothing beats hearing from readers — and what I’m hearing from readers is that John Darnielle’s modern horror novel Universal Harvester is the book that’s currently keeping them up at night. It’s available now in hardcover Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state ― the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.

But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets ― an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store ― she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.”

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SFWA Announces the 2016 Nebula Award Nominations

SFWA Announces the 2016 Nebula Award Nominations

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The-Obelisk-Gate-smallerThe Nebulas are here! The Nebulas are here!

Ahem. Excuse me if I get a little giddy. The Nebula Award is one of the most prestigious awards in our field. I was asked to present the award for Best Novelette at the 2015 Nebulas in Chicago, and last year the Awards were even more exciting, as several Black Gate bloggers and authors — including Amal El-Mohtar, Lawrence M. Schoen, and our website editor C.S.E. Cooney — were nominated for major awards.

So it’s always exciting when the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) announces the nominees — and this year is no exception. This year’s nominees are (links will take you to our previous coverage):

Novel

All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
Borderline, Mishell Baker (Saga)
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
Ninefox Gambit,Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
Everfair, Nisi Shawl (Tor)

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Mouth of the Dragon by Tom Barczak

Black Gate Online Fiction: Mouth of the Dragon by Tom Barczak

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Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Mouth of the Dragon: Prophecy of the Evarun by Thomas Barczak, published in deluxe trade paperback and digital formats this month by Perseid Press. Thomas Barczak’s short fiction has appeared in the award-winning Heroes in Hell anthologies edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris; his previous novels include the epic fantasy novel Veil of the Dragon, and the Kindle serial Awakening Evarun.

Chaelus watched them fall, one by one, like cordwood; five Servian knights brought down to the bristling snow.

Crimson feathers stuck out against the pallor. Even from a half a league away he could see them, like the blood they let. The red fletching of the Khaalish. But Chaelus didn’t need the whisper of the Giver to drift through him to know it was a ruse. It wasn’t the Khaalish. It was something far worse.

It was the Hunters.

Idyliss bowed her head without his command and flew across the snow-covered plain.

They were still too far away for him to save them.

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Future Treasures: The Vorrh Book II – The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

Future Treasures: The Vorrh Book II – The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

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The Vorrh and The Erstwhile-small

Early last year, Matthew David Surridge reviewed the Vintage trade paperback edition of The Vorrh here at Black Gate, calling it:

A powerful, fascinating book that defied easy categorization; epic fantasy or epic horror, magic realism or magic surrealism, it seemed bigger and stranger than whatever one might think to call it. Set mostly in Africa and mostly in the years after World War I, it deals with a forest called the Vorrh, where reality and time and logic become confused. A hunter tries to cross the forest, another man tries to stop him, yet another man tries to stop the second. Meanwhile, in a colonial German city that exists inside the forest, a young cyclops is educated by peculiar automata…

Vintage has announced the impending arrival of the sequel, The Erstwhile, which will be released in trade paperback next month.

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Get Reacquainted with the Gentlemen Bastards in Scotty Lynch’s The Bastards and the Knives

Get Reacquainted with the Gentlemen Bastards in Scotty Lynch’s The Bastards and the Knives

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The Lies of Locke Lamora-small Red Seas Under Red Skies-small The Republic of Thieves-small The Bastards and the Knives-small

I hear nothing but good things — really, nothing but great things — about Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. The opening novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and placed second in the Locus poll for First Novel, and became a bestseller in paperback. The Republic of Thieves placed third in the 2014 Locus poll for Best Fantasy Novel.

The series so far is composed of:

The Lies of Locke Lamora (June 2006)
Red Seas Under Red Skies (June 2007)
The Republic of Thieves (October 2013)

Next month Gollancz releases The Bastards and the Knives, an omnibus collection of two prequel novellas in the series, “The Mad Baron’s Mechanical Attic” and “The Choir of Knives.” Both are previously unpublished.

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Vintage Treasures: The Novels of Lawrence Watt-Evans

Vintage Treasures: The Novels of Lawrence Watt-Evans

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My introduction to Lawrence Watt-Evans was his brilliant short story “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” which originally appeared in the July 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and which I read in his 1992 collection Crosstime Traffic. It won the Hugo Award for best story of the year. And while the overall tone of the tale is downbeat, even melancholic, it is hands-down one of the most optimistic and life-affirming short stories I’ve read in any genre. Check it out if you haven’t had the pleasure already — it appears in a bunch of different anthologies, including The New Hugo Winners, Volume II (1992), The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of the 20th Century (1998), and a 2013 Escape Pod podcast.

Lawrence’s most significant contribution to the genre, however, has been his novels — and he’s written a lot of them. His first, The Lure of the Basilisk, appeared in 1980; since then he’s produced five novels in The Lords of Dûs series (which Bob Byrne wrote about here), The Worlds of Shadow trilogy, The Obsidian Chronicles trilogy, thirteen novels set in the world of Ethshar (originally developed as a role-playing game setting), beginning with The Misenchanted Sword (1985), The Annals of the Chosen trilogy, The Fall of the Sorcerers series, and many others. Under his Nathan Archer pseudonym he’s produced a pair of Star Trek novels, Spider-Man: Goblin Moon (1999), two Predator novels, and much more.

I tend to like my SF and fantasy dark and gritty, and Lawrence’s work — especially his early novels — had a reputation for being light hearted and fun. So for much of his career I tended to ignore his work, which I’ve recently come to realize was a significant oversight. So when I found the lot of vintage Lawrence Watt-Evans novels above for sale on eBay for just $7.95 (shipping included), I found it irresistible. It arrived last week.

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The February Fantasy Magazine Rack

The February Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Apex-Magazine-January-2017-rack The Audient Void-rack The-Magazine-of-Fantasy-Science-Fiction-January-February-2017-rack Occult-Detective-Quarterly-1-rack
Sword and Sorcery Magazine January 2017-rack Fantastic-Stories-of-the-Imaginations-January-February-2017-rack Nightmare-Magazine-January-2017-rack Space-and-Time-magazine-127-rack

A lot of exciting changes in the magazine industry this month. Let’s start with the bad news: Warren Lapine’s Fantastic Stories of the Imagination closed up shop. The Good News? We added two brand new magazines to our tracking list: Obadiah Baird’s sharply designed The Audient Void, and the stellar first issue of Occult Detective Quarterly, edited by Sam Gafford and John Linwood Grant.

Fans of vintage magazines had lots of fun material to choose from this month. Rich Horton looked at the June and July 1962 issues of Fantastic, and Nick Ozment riffs off Knights of the Dinner Table from 2008, asking the burning question “Who Would Win? John McClane and James Bond versus a Tribe of D&D Goblins.” In addition to all that, Tangent Online announced their highly-anticipated 2016 Recommended Reading List, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed a trio of magazines in his January Short Story Roundup, and Michael Penkas started a brand new magazine review column for us, kicking off with reviews of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the January issue of Nightmare, and the most recent issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our late January Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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New Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Through The Gate in the Sea by Howard Andrew Jones

New Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Through The Gate in the Sea by Howard Andrew Jones

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Pathfinder Tales Through The Gate in the Sea-smallHoward Andrew Jones’ fourth Pathfinder Tales novel, Through the Gate in the Sea, will be released in trade paperback by Tor Books next week. I made the long journey to his wind-swept writing tower to get the skinny for Black Gate readers. Here’s what he told me, in tiny script written on yak hide, lowered down on a long rope.

I love the lizardman. Everyone’s favorite lizardman Jekka is a point-of-view character this time. And there’s a pirate captain, Ensara. He’s not as bad as he thinks he is, but he’s not as good as you’d like him to be. He gets caught in the middle of things, and he has to choose between helping Mirian and Jekka, and staying with his crew. He’s down on his luck, and gets hired by a sorceress to hunt down Mirian and get these magical artifacts. I really enjoyed writing Ensara’s chapters.

It’s got a little bit of a hard boiled tone. While I was writing it, I was reading a lot of Chandler and Ricard Stark and Wade Miller. It’s got the usual journeying through weird places. If I’m reading a fantasy novel, give me interesting people in interesting places! There’s a chance to find an lost city through a magical portal in the middle of the ocean, and if they do, Jekka and his people will have a place to live.

But the devil-worshiping empire of Cheliax hasn’t forgotten its defeat at Mirian’s hands. On the other side of the portal are all these powerful artifacts. And an ancient, undead child-king wants the one that’s kept the lost lizardfolk city safe for centuries.

Whatever, man. You had me at Lizardman POV character. Through The Gate in the Sea will be published by Tor Books on February 21, 2017. It is 352 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

GDW Co-Founder and Game Designer Loren Wiseman Has Died

GDW Co-Founder and Game Designer Loren Wiseman Has Died

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Just a few of the classic SF games pubished by GDW

I heard from my friend Jolly Blackburn that gaming pioneer Loren Wiseman died yesterday.

Wiseman was a name well known to old-time gamers. With Frank Chadwick, Rich Banner, and Marc Miller, he co-founded legendary publisher Game Designers’ Workshop in 1973. GDW published some of the greatest SF and fantasy boardgames and RPGs ever made, including Traveller, Twlight 2000, Space 1889, Gary Gygax’s Dangerous Journeys, Imperium, Fifth Frontier War, Mayday, Azhanti High Lightning, Dark Nebula, and countless others (Wayne’s Books has a nice summary of the Traveller Universe board games, and there’s a compete list of GDW’s gaming output at Wikipedia).

Many tributes have been pouring it on Facebook and other places — including one from Jolly, who credits Wiseman with giving him his start in the gaming industry. In addition to his lengthy list of credits as a game designer and publisher, Wiseman was also editor of the Journal of the Travellers Aid Society and Challenge magazines. After GDW closed in 1995 he joined Steve Jackson Games, where he became the Traveller Line Editor. He received the Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Adventure (for Twilight: 2000 Going Home) and was inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame in 2003.

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