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Read “Recalled to Service” by Alter S. Reiss at Tor.com

Read “Recalled to Service” by Alter S. Reiss at Tor.com

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Recalled to Service Alter S Reiss-small

Now that I’m home from the Nebula Awards and the Windy City Pulp and Paper show (and aaalmost finished unpacking all the great loot I brought back), I can start getting caught up. I’m way behind in my reading at Tor.com for example, and they do some darn fine stuff. The Fantasy/SF tale “Recalled to Service” by Alter S. Reiss looks like a splendid place to start.

Ao Laiei does not know what happened to the great revolutionary war hero Uroie Aei since she resurrected him, but she has long intended to find out. Finally, a clue from an unlikely information source – the confusing art of dream-diving – enables her to be present for a surprising strike against an academic aligned with the revolutionary government. Laiei quickly discovers that it is not the physical target she is concerned with, but his field of study, which may unlock the secret of what mysterious deeds the elusive Uroie Aei has been up to since his disappearance. This compelling tale from writer Alter Reiss is a rich look at the world of the Shoesi and the magic that drives Ao Laiei’s unique abilities.

Alter S. Reiss is the author of the Tor.com novella Sunset Mantle. “Recalled to Service” was posted at Tor.com on February 24. It was edited by Liz Gorinsky, and illustrated by Sung Choi. It’s available here.

We last covered Tor.com with Delia Sherman’s science fiction detective story “The Great Detective.” For more free fiction, see our recent online magazine coverage.

Future Treasures: A Green and Ancient Light by Frederic S. Durbin

Future Treasures: A Green and Ancient Light by Frederic S. Durbin

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A Green and Ancient Light-smallFred Durbin is one of the most gifted fantasists at work today, and a new Durbin novel is a major event. Set in a world similar to our own, during a war that parallels World War II, A Green and Ancient Light is the tale of a boy sent to stay with his grandmother, until the crash of an enemy plane disrupts his idyllic summer and leads him to discover a riddle in the sacred grove of ruins behind his grandmother’s house.

As planes darken the sky and cities burn in the ravages of war, a boy is sent away to the safety of an idyllic fishing village far from the front, to stay with the grandmother he does not know. But their tranquility is shattered by the crash of a bullet-riddled enemy plane that brings the war — and someone else — to their doorstep. Grandmother’s mysterious friend, Mr. Girandole, who is far more than he seems, has appeared out of the night to ask Grandmother for help in doing the unthinkable.

In the forest near Grandmother’s cottage lies a long-abandoned garden of fantastic statues, a grove of monsters, where sunlight sets the leaves aglow and the movement at the corner of your eye may just be fairy magic. Hidden within is a riddle that has lain unsolved for centuries — a riddle that contains the only solution to their impossible problem. To solve it will require courage, sacrifice, and friendship with the most unlikely allies.

Fred is also the author of The Star Shard and Dragonfly. His story “World’s End” appeared in Black Gate 15. Patty Templeton interviewed Fred for us after the publication of The Star Shard, and Nick Ozment teamed with him to explore the magic of Halloween in Oz and Frederic S. Durbin Discuss Hallowe’en Monsters. We did a Cover Reveal for A Green and Ancient Light in November, including Fred’s thoughts on the art.

A Green and Ancient Light will be published by Saga Press on June 7, 2016. It is 300 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition.

A Weekend With the Greatest Talents in Science Fiction: Report on the 2016 Nebula Awards

A Weekend With the Greatest Talents in Science Fiction: Report on the 2016 Nebula Awards

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Carlos Hernandez CSE Cooney Alyx Dellamonica and Kelly Robson at the 2016 Nebula Awards banquet-small

Carlos Hernandez, CSE Cooney, Alyx Dellamonica, and Kelly Robson at the 2016 Nebula Awards banquet

I spent last weekend at the 2016 SFWA Nebula Conference in downtown Chicago. The Conference is the big annual gala for the Science Fiction Writers of America, and it culminated in the Nebula Awards ceremony Saturday night. It was a very special weekend for a lot of reasons, not least of which was the nomination for one of our own — C.S.E. Cooney, Black Gate‘s Website Editor emeritus, whose “The Bone Swans of Amandale,” from her breakout collection Bone Swans, was nominated for Best Novella of the year.

I started a new job in downtown Chicago last month, and was able to walk over to the Palmer House hotel after work on Thursday. I met up with Steven Silver, chair of the Conference (and author of the marvelous “The Cremator’s Tale,” published right here at Black Gate), and caught the last half of Mary Robinette Kowal and K. Tempest Bradford’s panel on How to Fail Gracefully, a thoughtful discussion on how to handle online criticism (hint: stay calm, learn to listen dispassionately, and avoid a kneejerk response.)

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 199 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 199 Now Available

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 199-smallAs it nears its landmark 200th issues, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has kicked off a subscription drive aimed at enabling the magazine to publish novellas for the first time (yeah!) The details are on the website, but here’s the basics.

BCS ebook subscriptions, available exclusively at WeightlessBooks.com, are only $15.99 for a full year/26 issues. (That’s less than 30 cents a story!) Subscribers can get issues delivered directly to their Kindle or smart phone, and they get new issues early, a week before the website. Forthcoming authors in BCS include Marie Brennan, Gregory Norman Bossert (whose first BCS story “The Telling” won the World Fantasy Award), Mishell Baker, KJ Kabza, Stephanie Burgis, Tony Pi, Catherynne M. Valente, Kameron Hurley, A.M. Dellamonica, Claude Lalumière, and more.

From now until June 3, if you buy a BCS ebook subscription or renew your existing subscription (you can renew at any time), you can help unlock our drive goals. Since BCS #1 in 2008 – 200 issues, 419 stories! – over a third of our fiction has been novelette-length or longer. Longer stories work great for awe-inspiring fantasy worlds, like you’ll find in every issue of BCS. Our word-count limit for submissions, 10,000 words, has always been among the longest if not the longest of pro-rate online magazines. With your help, we’d like to make it even longer!

  • At 25 new/renewing subscribers, BCS will raise our submissions word-count limit to 11,000 words.
  • At 50 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise our word-count limit to 12,000 words.
  • At 100 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 13,000 words.
  • At 200 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 15,000 words!

Every subscription makes a difference in helping us pay our authors, for their great stories of all lengths.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is one of the top markets for adventure fantasy, and I’d be thrilled to see it start buying longer stories. At only $15.99 for a full year, it’s a terrific bargain. I bought my first subscription today, and I challenge Black Gate readers to follow my example. Let’s see if we can add 10 new subscriptions to the total.

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Star Trek After All: The New Trailer for Star Trek Beyond

Star Trek After All: The New Trailer for Star Trek Beyond

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I’ve enjoyed the first two films in the Star Trek reboot, despite the fact that they’ve veered pretty far from the kind of thoughtful storytelling that made the show great. But as flashy summer blockbusters without a lot of depth go, they’re better than most — and the writers certainly captured the humor of the show, at least.

But when I saw the first trailer for the third film, Star Trek Beyond, I thought new director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) had pretty much abandoned all pretense of making a Star Trek film in favor of a two-fisted action-comedy in space. Co-screenwriter Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), who also plays Scotty, has clearly put his comedy stamp on this one. Was there anything of Star Trek left?

The second trailer, released today, is a dramatic shift in tone from the first one, and seems to confirm that yes, this is a Star Trek film after all. Have a look and see what you think. Star Trek Beyond is being produced by Skydance and Bad Robot Productions, and will arrive in theaters on July 22, 2016.

New Treasures: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

New Treasures: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

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The Wild Robot Peter Brown-smallPeter Brown is the author of The Curious Garden and My Teacher is a Monster; The Wild Robot is his first science fiction book. In a lengthy post on his website, The Wild Robot Lives!, he writes about the genesis of the book.

I wanted to tell a different kind of robot story. I wanted to tell the story of a robot who finds harmony in the last place you’d expect… What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? To answer that question, I invented a robot character named Rozzum (a subtle nod to Čapek’s play), and tried to imagine how she’d handle life in the wilderness.

Eight years later, The Wild Robot has finally arrived in hardcover from Little, Brown. Here’s the description.

Can a robot survive in the wilderness?

When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is — but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a fierce storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island’s unwelcoming animal inhabitants.

As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home — until, one day, the robot’s mysterious past comes back to haunt her.

The Wild Robot was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on April 5, 2016. It is 288 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Peter Brown.

The May Fantasy Magazine Rack

The May Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Apex-Magazine-April-2016-rack Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies-198-rack Clarkesworld-116-rack Shock-Totem-10-rack
Fantasy-Scroll-Magazine-Issue-12-rack The SFWA Bulletin 208-rack Swords and Sorcery magazine April 2016-rack Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Q28-rack

There’s plenty of great news for fantasy fans in May — including the successful launch of new top-tier magazine, Skelos, helmed by Jeffrey Shanks, Mark Finn, and Chris Gruber. We also wondered if Weird Tales was dead (it probably is), and started our coverage of Shock Totem — just in time for the magazine to go on hiatus. In the meantime, Rich Horton took a look at the January 1955 issue of Science Fiction Stories, containing short stories by Algis Budrys, Wallace West, and Raymond F. Jones, the author of This Island Earth.

In his April Short Fiction Round Up, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviews the latest issues of Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #51  presented its usual complement of two stories in April… Jason Ray Carney. “The Ink of the Slime Lord” gave me nearly everything I could want from a S&S story: a wicked sorceress, dire magics, a dashing pirate, and plenty of monsters…. Carney’s complete lack of restraint and deeply purple prose are a large part of what made me dig this story completely. If you’re going to be extreme, go to 11. Good fun.

In James Lecky’s “But the Dreams of Men,” a man wracked by guilt over the horrible sins in his past inadvertently finds a path to redemption of sorts… Lecky does it quite well.  He consistently finds the right balance between characterization, narrative, and action. If you haven’t read him before, this is an excellent place to start.

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Future Treasures: Return to the Isle of the Lost, a Descendants Novel by Melissa de la Cruz

Future Treasures: Return to the Isle of the Lost, a Descendants Novel by Melissa de la Cruz

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The Isle of the Lost-small Return to the Isle of the Lost

This is the year of Disney. Three of the top four films (Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, and The Jungle Book) are Disney properties… not to mention the new Star Wars film scheduled for release in December. And on the small screen, the Disney Channel original film Descendants — featuring the children of Disney’s most famous villains, including Maleficent and Jafar, and Cruella de Vil — has proven to be a big hit.

Melissa de la Cruz’s The Isle of the Lost, released in hardcover by Hyperion last year, was the prequel to Descendants, and it became an international blockbuster. The novel spent thirty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list — including fifteen at the #1 spot — and has more than a million copies in print. Descendants proved to be the #1 most watched cable TV movie of 2015 (#5 of all time), and even its soundtrack soared to #1 on iTunes.

Now de la Cruz brings us a second book, Return to the Isle of the Lost, which bridges the gap between Descendants and its sequel, currently in development. Everything changes for our villainous heroes (heroic villains?) when they receive anonymous messages demanding that they return to the Isle… and when their arrival sets them on the path of a new and exciting magical adventure deep in the catacombs beneath the Isle of the Lost. Return to the Isle of the Lost will be published by Disney-Hyperion on May 24, 2016. It is 313 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover, or $12.99 for the digital version.

Announcing the 2015 Bram Stoker Award Winners

Announcing the 2015 Bram Stoker Award Winners

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A-Head-Full-of-Ghosts-smallerBack in February, Goth Chick announced “Your Dark and Stormy Night Reading List” — the nominees for the The Horror Writers Association’s 2015 Stoker Awards for superior literary achievement in horror, in a variety of categories. The Bram Stoker Awards were instituted in 1987 and the eleven award categories are: Novel, First Novel, Short Fiction, Long Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction Collection, Poetry Collection, Anthology, Screenplay, Graphic Novel, and Non-Fiction.

That’s a lot of great horror reading. Now, the Bram Stoker awards are traditionally given out at the World Horror Convention, but this year changed things up a little. The 2015 honors were awarded on May 14, 2016 at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, during the first annual StokerCon — which sounds like it was a blast.

Congratulations to all the winners! And for all you readers, we suggest you start loading up your Amazon wish list immediately.

For Superior Achievement in a Novel

For Superior Achievement in a First Novel

  • Mr. Suicide, Nicole Cushing (Word Horde)

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Shock Totem #10 Now Available

Shock Totem #10 Now Available

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Shock Totem 10-smallWay back in March of last year, when I announced we were expanding our magazine coverage at Black Gate — and was bold enough to list the 16 magazines we’d be covering regularly — there was an immediate outcry that we were being too limited. And the very first magazine that readers requested we add to our list was the American small press horror ‘zine Shock Totem (thanks, Wild Ape!).

After a year of sustained effort, we’ve built up our coverage to the point where we report on 41 magazines regularly, or at least semi-regularly (41! I had no idea there were 41 fantasy magazines on the market when I started this crazy project). But Shock Totem still isn’t one of them. Time to correct that! Today, I’m here to tell you about the tenth issue of the magazine of “Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted,” which shipped in March.

But first, I should share this unfortunate announcement from K. Allen Wood, posted on January 1 of last year:

The next issue of Shock Totem, number ten, will be our last issue for a while. The reasons for this are many, but the biggest reason is simple: kids… As of right now, the goal is to take a complete break from publishing the magazine in 2015 and reopen for submissions on January 1, 2016, with a new issue scheduled for July 2016…

In the next few weeks we will begin accepting novel and novella submissions… we’re not going away, not completely; we’re just scaling back for a time so I can be a father.

As the father of three, I can certainly understand that. It took over a year for issue 10 to materialize, but with regard to the novellas Allen was as good as his word. In August of last year Shock Totem Publications announced they were open for novel and novella submissions, and on January 31 they rolled out this very impressive publishing schedule for the year.

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