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Author: John ONeill

Vintage Treasures: Worldmakers and Supermen, edited by Gardner Dozois

Vintage Treasures: Worldmakers and Supermen, edited by Gardner Dozois

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Worldmakers SF Adventures in Terraforming Supermen Tales of the Posthuman Future-small

Back in December I talked about a few of my favorite anthologies, The Good Old Stuff (1998) and The Good New Stuff (1999), which collected some of the best adventure SF from the last century, alongside Gardner Dozois’ detailed and affectionate commentary. Dozois followed up with another fine pair of anthologies focused on deep space exploration and the far future, Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons and The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future, both published in 2000. All four were released in trade paperback from St. Martin’s/Griffin, and the set is the equivalent of a Master’s level course in SF of the 20th Century.

In 2001/02, Dozois produced a final two anthologies in this format, exploring two more common themes in 20th Century SF, terraforming and advanced human evolution:

Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (459 pages, December 2001, $17.95) — cover by Chesley Bonestell
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (463 pages, January 2002, $17.95) — cover by Nick Stathopoulos

Like the first volumes, they include Dozois’ lengthy and highly informative intros to each story. Together with the first four, these books form the basis of a very solid library of 20th Century science fiction.

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Support the Return of NorthGuard, Canada’s Greatest Superhero!

Support the Return of NorthGuard, Canada’s Greatest Superhero!

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NorthGuard title Image-smallWhen I was a young comic collector living in Ottawa, one of my favorite titles was NorthGuard, the Canadian superhero created in 1984 by Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrissette and published by Matrix Comics in Montreal. When I started Black Gate 15 years later, I hired two of my heroes, Matrix artists Morrissette and the brilliant Bernie Mireault, creator of The Jam and Mackenzie Queen, as interior illustrators. So I was thrilled to hear from Bernie earlier this month that there’s an effort to return Northguard to print in a deluxe format for the first time:

I’m currently engaged in coloring the original Northguard series. Mark, Gabriel and I hope to run a Kickstarter campaign in late spring and if successful, get some 200-page color collections made… As the colorist I’m going over every nut and bolt of the material and appreciating it fully for the first time. This is a great story about a Canadian superhero that I’m proud of. Phillip might not be much at the physical combat stuff but he has lots and lots of heart. Which is the way I think about Canada.

And so in an effort to reintroduce Northguard to the public at large and create awareness of our pending attempt to solicit funding for the collection through Kickstarter or Indie gogo, etc. I’ve created a dedicated Northguard Facebook page that is designed to bring people who are unfamiliar with the work up to speed on the story and historical/political context. www.facebook.com/bem61

Matthew David Surridge profiled Bernie’s The Jam in Part II of his series My City’s Heroes, and columnist Timothy Callahan called him an artist who combined “the high Romanticism of the fantastic with the mundane life on the street” in Comic Book Resources.

If you’re at all interested in Canadian comics, or just want to keep tabs on the ongoing effort to return one of the best Canadian superheroes to print, check out Bernie’s Facebook page here. Vive Le Protecteur!

Uncanny Magazine Issue 8 Now on Sale

Uncanny Magazine Issue 8 Now on Sale

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Uncanny Magazine Issue 8-smallUncanny editors Lynn and Michael Thomas return from the Chicago TARDIS convention with an impassioned plea for increased accessibility, in their editorial in the January/February issue.

One of the reasons this convention is such a joy for us is Chicago TARDIS and its staff are very attentive to accessibility… We go to a ton of conventions for work, and, sadly, this isn’t always the case. Many excellent conventions are addressing accessibility at their events, and improving every year, which we absolutely applaud and appreciate. Others have resisted, even though it’s both the right thing to do and a US federal law thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act. After some recent conventions had some major failures with their accessibility again, we and Mary Robinette Kowal — with help from many others — felt it was necessary to create an SF/F Convention Accessibility Pledge, similar to the John Scalzi pledge about not attending conventions without harassment policies. Hundreds have signed the pledge, and it has also been covered by io9 Most importantly, we’re seeing many convention staff members joining together to share information and work to make their conventions more accessible. That’s awesome, and frankly, the point of the whole thing. Fandom is for everyone, including people with disabilities.

The January/February issue contains all–new short fiction by Maria Dahvana Headley, Nghi Vo, Christopher Barzak, Brit Mandelo, and Rose Lemberg, classic fiction by Sarah Rees Brennan, nonfiction by Chris Kluwe, Max Gladstone, Isabel Schechter and L.M. Myles, poems by Kayla Whaley, Leslie J. Anderson, and Bryan Thao Worra, interviews with Maria Dahvana Headley and Christopher Barzak, and a cover by Priscilla H. Kim. All that plus two podcasts!

All of the content became available for purchase as an eBook (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) on January 1, 2016.

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New Treasures: The Passenger by F.R. Tallis

New Treasures: The Passenger by F.R. Tallis

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The Passenger F R Tallis-smallF. R. Tallis is the author of The Sleep Room (2013), The Forbidden (2014), and The Voices (2014). He’s been nominated for the Edgar award, the New London Writer’s Award, and the Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger Award. His latest supernatural thriller takes readers under the wartime seas of the stormy North Atlantic in 1942, to a German U-boat with an unnatural passenger… what’s better than the creepy mixture of Nazis and ghosts? I know what I’ll be curling up with this weekend.

1941. A German submarine, U-471, patrols the stormy inhospitable waters of the North Atlantic. It is commanded by Siegfried Lorenz, a maverick SS officer who does not believe in the war he is bound by duty and honor to fight in.

U-471 receives a triple-encoded message with instructions to collect two prisoners from a vessel located off the Icelandic coast and transport them to the base at Brest ― and a British submarine commander, Sutherland, and a Norwegian academic, Professor Bjornar Grimstad, are taken on board. Contact between the prisoners and Lorenz has been forbidden, and it transpires that this special mission has been ordered by an unknown source, high up in the SS. It is rumored that Grimstad is working on a secret weapon that could change the course of the war…

Then, Sutherland goes rogue, and a series of shocking, brutal events occur. In the aftermath, disturbing things start happening on the boat. It seems that a lethal, supernatural force is stalking the crew, wrestling with Lorenz for control. A thousand feet under the dark, icy waves, it doesn’t matter how loud you scream…

The Passenger was published by Pegasus on February 1, 2016. It is 371 pages, priced at $25.95 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version.

Marooned Spacemen, Forgotten Planets, and Alien Dragons: Rich Horton on Rocannon’s World/The Kar-Chee Reign

Marooned Spacemen, Forgotten Planets, and Alien Dragons: Rich Horton on Rocannon’s World/The Kar-Chee Reign

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Rocannon's World-small The Kar-Chee Reign-small

The Ace Doubles were a fairly low-paying market by most measures, and they didn’t always attract top authors. But they did publish early books by many writers who would go on to become top authors. Such is the case with the pairing of Rocannon’s World, the first novel by the great Ursula K. LeGuin, and The Kar-Chee Reign, an early novel by SF master Avram Davidson.

Rich Horton examined both novels as part of his ongoing series of Ace Double reviews at his blog Strange at Ecbatan. Here’s what he said, in part:

Seeing that Ursula K. Le Guin’s first novel was an Ace Double came as a mild surprise to me, some time back when I encountered this pairing. Since then I’ve realized that that wasn’t really that rare, for example, Samuel R. Delany also had early novels published as Ace Doubles, as did many other great writers…

Rocannon’s World is a curious novel. It is a “Hainish” novel, thus fitting into Le Guin’s main “future history,” but it doesn’t seem wholly consistent with novels like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. What it mainly is is a fantasy novel with SF trappings. Except for the prose, which is excellent as one might expect from Le Guin, it feels strikingly pulpish. The plot and feel would not have been out of place in an early 50s issue of Planet Stories…

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The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Early Horror Paperbacks

The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Early Horror Paperbacks

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The Screaming Skull and Other Great American Ghost Stories-small Bodies of the Dead and Other Great American Ghost Stories

We lost David Hartwell on January 20th. This is our third article in a series that looks back at one of the most important editors in our industry.

When I think of David Hartwell, I think chiefly of his forte — the massive retrospective anthologies like Foundations of Fear and The Science Fiction Century that gave deep insight into the changing nature of our field. But David also produced a small number of mass market paperback anthologies, especially early in his career. The two I want to look at today are The Screaming Skull and Other Great American Ghost Stories (1994) and Bodies of the Dead and Other Great American Ghost Stories (1995), both published by Tor.

Mass market anthologies like this really don’t exist today, chiefly because modern audiences weren’t raised on short stories the way I was. But I’m very glad they did when I was a young reader haunting bookstore shelves in the 80s and 90s. Cheap enough to be a quick impulse buy, they were a great way to get introduced to a wide variety of authors — and a lot of fun to read, I might add.

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Future Treasures: The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Future Treasures: The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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The Tiger and the Wolf-smallAdrian Tchaikovsky is a British fantasy writer whose claim to fame is the ambitious 10-volume series Shadows of the Apt, published in the US by Pyr, which began with Empire in Black and Gold (2008). In his Black Gate review “Epic Musket Fights and Vampire-Like Magic,” M Harold Page called his 2015 novel Guns of the Dawn “a supremely good read with a satisfying ending.”

His newest novel, The Tiger and the Wolf, kicks off a brand new series, about a young girl coming of age in a dangerous world of shapeshifters on the brink of war. It will be published in the UK next week. No word on a US release date, but Amazon UK will ship the book to the US.

In the bleak northern crown of the world, war is coming

Maniye’s father is the Wolf clan’s chieftain, but she’s an outcast. Her mother was queen of the Tiger and these tribes have been enemies for generations. Maniye also hides a deadly secret. All can shift into their clan’s animal form, but Maniye can take on tiger and wolf shapes. She refuses to disown half her soul, so escapes, rescuing a prisoner of the Wolf clan in the process. The killer Broken Axe is set on their trail, to drag them back for retribution.

Maniye’s father plots to rule the north and controlling his daughter is crucial to his schemes. However, other tribes also prepare for strife. Strangers from the far south appear too, seeking allies in their own conflict. It’s a season for omens as priests foresee danger, and a darkness falling across the land. Some say a great war is coming, overshadowing even Wolf ambitions. A time of testing and broken laws is near, but what spark will set the world ablaze?

The Tiger and the Wolf will be published in the UK by Tor-Macmillan on February 11. It is 590 pages, priced at £18 in hardcover and £11.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Neil Lang.

Announcing the Winner of an Autographed Copy of Brandon Sanderson’s The Bands of Mourning

Announcing the Winner of an Autographed Copy of Brandon Sanderson’s The Bands of Mourning

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The Bands of Mourning-smallBrandon Sanderson’s The Bands of Mourning, the latest novel in the Mistborn series, was published last week by Tor Books. To celebrate, Tor graciously made one autographed copy available to Black Gate, and we offered it to our readers in a contest.

All you had to do to enter was send us an e-mail with a one-sentence summary of why you’d like to read it. We were inundated with entries, and today we selected one winner at random, using the most reliable method of random number generation known to modern science — D&D dice.

As you can imagine, Black Gate readers were pretty creative in their responses. Here’s Andrew Meyer:

I think the evolution of the metallurgy magic mechanic into a industrial setting is fantastic.

Anna Raj took a romantic approach, with a run-on sentence:

My newly fiance is an avid Brandon Sanders reader, who cheats on me with mini dates of his books; going to the bathroom with the book tightly gripped inside his arms, going for midday coffee to the local bookstore sitting in the corner with another of his books and reading it over and over again as to where the pages are barely on the spine; I probably would be a part of ‘the band of the mourning’ when he comes across this book, but I love to see his smile.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “The Black Stranger”

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “The Black Stranger”

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The Conquering Sword of Conan-smallHoward Andrew Jones and Bill Ward are wrapping up their re-read of The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard, the third and final omnibus volume collecting the complete tales of Conan, with what Howard calls “my most pleasant surprise so far during the re-read,” the story “The Black Stranger.” It was never published during Robert E. Howard’s lifetime, appearing for the first time in Karl Edward Wagner’s anthology Echoes of Valor in 1987. Here’s Bill:

Like “Beyond the Black River” which precedes it, “The Black Stranger” is a tale set in the Pictish wilderness of Hyboria that sees a vulnerable outpost of civilization overrun by the wild men of the wood. But this time around the threat of the Picts — still an Amerindian analog — serve as more of a backdrop to the infighting and machinations of pirate captains, an exiled nobleman, and a cagey Conan. Again REH draws on the American frontier for inspiration, but it isn’t the dominant theme of the piece, which also manages to end on a far more up tempo note despite the carnage. Wild battles, double-crossing, pirate treasure, and a mysterious demonic stranger are all skillfully woven together into a complex but nonetheless fast-paced adventure that stands solidly alongside the better Conan stories.

Read the complete exchange here.

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Weird Fiction Review #6 Now on Sale

Weird Fiction Review #6 Now on Sale

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Weird Fiction Review 6-smallWeird Fiction Review #6 has a very clever cover. It’s an homage to Sgt. Pepper, of course, but it’s also more than that.

Click on the image at right for a bigger version to see what I mean. Jammed into that group photo are 69 “Giants of Weird Fiction.” How many can you recognize? Sure, you can pick out Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King. But can you spot Karl Edward Wagner? Forrest J. Ackerman? Salvadore Dali? Neil Gaiman? How about Gene Simmons?

Weird Fiction Review is an annual magazine edited by S.T. Joshi, and devoted to weird and supernatural fiction. This sixth issue contains original stories and essays by Laird Barron, Jonathan Thomas, Mollie Burleson, James Goho, Jason V Brock, and Michael Aronovitz; a lengthy interview with Clive Barker and a new interview with T.E.D. Klein; a 24-page full-color gallery of art by Christopher Conn Askew, an essay on Robert E. Howard-inspired art in the comics; a heavily illustrated essay on the artwork of L.B. Cole, and much more. It is priced at $35.

Here’s what Nick Ozment said about the last issue:

On the high $35 cover price: you can typically find the new(er) issues for substantially less than that. If you pre-order issue 5 on Amazon, they have it discounted to $26.60. And you can find copies of issue 4 for around $18. Not so for the first three issues: the cheapest issue 3 on Amazon will set you back $999.11!

Sounds like a sound investment to me.

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