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Author: John ONeill

See the Teaser Trailer for the Fantastic Four Reboot

See the Teaser Trailer for the Fantastic Four Reboot

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I’m a big fan of what Marvel has accomplished with their movie properties, but I didn’t enjoy the two Fantastic Four films. And I really wanted to — Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s FF was my favorite comic growing up, and I thrilled to the cosmic adventures of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm as they explored the Negative Zone and uncovered countless ancient mysteries (not to mention giant robots, weird alien races, and noble heralds on surf boards.)

But love of the source material only goes so far, and I don’t think the two films were well cast, or captured the true spirit of the comic. As Matthew David Surridge wisely pointed out in his lengthy look at Stan and Jack’s amazing 104-issue run, “The FF are explorers, not crime-fighters or warriors.” So I was pleased to see that — from what little I can puzzle out from the Teaser trailer released yesterday for the new reboot — the new version seems to focus on the explorer aspect of the team. This is from Marvel’s description:

Fantastic Four, a contemporary re-imagining of Marvel’s original and longest-running superhero team, centers on four young outsiders who teleport to an alternate and dangerous universe, which alters their physical form in shocking ways. Their lives irrevocably upended, the team must learn to harness their daunting new abilities and work together to save Earth from a former friend turned enemy.

And here’s peek at the trailer itself. See what you think. Worth looking forward to?

New Treasures: The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan

New Treasures: The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan

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The Dark Defiles-smallI can’t read all the fantasy books out there. I can’t even read all the really great stuff. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by a superb team of reviewers who keep me on top of things.

When Richard K. Morgan published his highly acclaimed first fantasy novel back in 2009, I totally missed it. But John C. Hocking didn’t, and in his review in Black Gate 13 he called it:

One of the most unusual, powerful, and daring sword & sorcery novels to see print for decades… The Steel Remains follows a trio of characters, each of whom played a dramatic part in humanity’s grim battle with the Scaled Folk — reptilian invaders from the sea, defeated several years past… As the three heroes are slowly drawn back together, a threat older and even more alien than the Scaled Folk moves into the world. Ringil and his friends will meet it with steel.

A sequel, The Cold Commands, followed in 2011, introducing the dark prophecy of the Illwrack Changeling, a boy raised to manhood in a ghostly between-world realm, whose return would be catastrophic for the fragile land. And late last year the final novel in what’s now being called a trilogy finally arrived. As the world teeters towards another war with the dragon folk, Ringil and his companions find the prophecy of a dark lord may be coming true very close to home.

Here’s the publisher’s description for The Dark Defiles, the closing volume of Land Fit for Heroes.

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Vintage Treasures: The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream by G.C. Edmondson

Vintage Treasures: The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream by G.C. Edmondson

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The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream 1965-small The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream 1970-small The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream-small

G.C. Edmondson was not a prolific fantasy author. He wrote barely half a dozen novels between 1965 and 1981. But at least one, The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, became an acknowledged classic, kept in print by Ace Books for nearly two decades after it first appeared in 1965.

Edmondson wrote Westerns under at least three pseudonyms. The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream was his first fantasy novel; it first appeared as part of an Ace Double (cover by Jack Gaughan, above left), paired with Stranger Than You Think, a collection of Edmondson’s short stories.

The book, the tale of a military research ship cast back in time to the Bronze Age while testing experimental submarine detection gear, was an immediate critical success. It was nominated for the Nebula Award (it lost to Frank Herbert’s Dune), and Jerry Pournelle, co-author of The Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer, called it “One of the best time travel novels I have ever read.”

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Forbes on the Books that Inspired the New Dungeons & Dragons

Forbes on the Books that Inspired the New Dungeons & Dragons

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The Name of the Wind-smallGary Gygax, creator of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, famously listed the fantasy writers and books that inspired him in Appendix N. We’ve had lengthy discussions on Appendix N, and its suitability as a jumping-off point for a fantasy collection, here on Black Gate.

Now that there’s a new version of D&D on the market, it’s not too surprising that its creators have included their own version of Appendix N. And while I consider Gygax’s Appendix N to be a terrific resource for classic fantasy fans, I was pleased (and not at all surprised) to find that the new inspiration comes chiefly from a new generation of fantasy writers.

Forbes magazine writer David M. Ewalt, who’s written about Dungeons and Dragons before, interviewed Mike Mearls, head of R&D for Dungeons & Dragons and co-lead designer on the fifth edition rules, and designer Rodney Thompson. Here’s some excerpts:

Patrick Rothfuss ”showed that bards didn’t have to suck,” according to Mearls. Fifth edition designers knew that players would use the bard class to create characters inspired by Kvothe, the hero of Rothfuss’ novel The Name of the Wind. “We actually talked about using words of power as big element of the bard, but toned it down as too on the nose.”

Saladin Ahmed ”did a great job of capturing the concept of an adventuring party in Throne of the Crescent Moon,” says Mearls. “A lot of the stuff behind bonds, flaws, all the stuff that binds characters to the campaign, was inspired by reading Throne…”

Mearls, Thompson and the rest of D&D team are also inspired by the storytellers who wrote for previous versions of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Last week, Wizards of the Coast announced “Elemental Evil,” a new storyline in the Dungeons & Dragons product universe tied into several new products: The storyline is based, in part, on the 1985 game module The Temple of Elemental Evil, which was written by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer for the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules.

David M. Ewalt is also the author of Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It. See his complete article here.

It’s Good to be Minding the Stars with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Four, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

It’s Good to be Minding the Stars with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Four, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

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Minding the Stars The Early Jack Vance Volume 4-smallI’ve been heartily enjoying The Early Jack Vance volumes from Subterranean Press, which collect the hard-to-find early pulp SF and fantasy from one of the greatest writers of the genre, Jack Vance.

The first two, Hard Luck Diggings (2010) and Dream Castles (2012), are now sold out and out of print — and rapidly raising in price. They collected fiction from the very start of Vance’s career, the late 40s through the late 60s.

Two more volumes are now in print, with one more due in March. Minding the Stars, the fourth volume, spans the years from 1952 to 1967, collecting four long novellas and four short stories, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Future Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe, Amazing Stories, and other fine publications. Here’s the complete table of contents:

Introduction by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan
“Nopalgarth” (Originally published as The Brains of Earth, Ace Double, 1966)
“Telek” (Astounding Science Fiction, January 1952)
“Four Hundred Blackbirds” (Future Science Fiction, July 1953)
“Alfred’s Ark” (New Worlds SF, May 1965)
“Meet Miss Universe” (Fantastic Universe, March 1955)
“The World Between” (Future Science Fiction, May 1953)
“Milton Hack from Zodiac” (Amazing Stories, August 1967)
“Parapsyche” (Amazing Science Fiction Stories, August 1958)

The opening story, “Nopalgarth,” was originally published as half of an Ace Double in 1966, under the title The Brains of Earth. Vance collectors may recognize it as one of three novellas published in a slender collection from DAW in September 1980, under the title Nopalgarth (see below).

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Last Chance to Win a Copy of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones

Last Chance to Win a Copy of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones

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Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth-small2Last week, we told you that you had a chance to win one of two copies of the new paperback edition of Stephen Jones’s major horror anthology, Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, on sale this month from Titan Books.

How do you enter? Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth” and a one-sentence suggestion for the writer you’d most like to write a Lovecraftian horror story today. That’s it; that’s all that stands between you and a copy of one of the most exciting anthologies of the year. Two winners will be drawn at random from all qualifying entries and we’ll announce the winners here on the Black Gate blog. What could possibly be easier? But time is running out — the contest closes February 2.

Here’s the book blurb:

Final Shadows Gather…

The final volume in the trilogy that began with the World Fantasy Award-nominated Shadows Over Innsmouth (1994) and Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth (2005), containing stories by Ramsey Campbell, Adrian Cole, John Glasby, Brian Hodge, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Brian Lumley, Kim Newman, Reggie Oliver, Angela Slatter, Michael Marshall Smith, Simon Kurt Unsworth and Conrad Williams, along with an Innsmouth poem by H.P. Lovecraft and a “posthumous collaboration” between the author and August Derleth.

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New Treasures: For a Few Souls More by Guy Adams

New Treasures: For a Few Souls More by Guy Adams

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For a Few Souls More-smallI’ve been waiting for the conclusion of Guy Adams’s Heaven’s Gate trilogy since the first installment, The Good The Bad and the Infernal, appeared in March 2013. The second volume, Once Upon a Time in Hell, was published almost exactly a year ago. It’s a gonzo Weird Western with demons, supernatural cowboys, and steampunk Indians.

In the third and final volume, For a Few Souls More, Heaven has fallen to Earth, joining the Union as the 43rd state… and the President sets out for the legendary town of Wormwood, the traveling community which appears once every hundred years for a single day.

The uprising in Heaven is at an end and Paradise has fallen, becoming the forty-third state of America. Now angels and demons must learn to get along with humans.

The rest of the world is in uproar. How can America claim the afterlife as its own? It’s certainly going to try as the President sets out for the town of Wormwood for talks with its governor, the man they call Lucifer.

Hell has problems of its own. There’s a new evangelist walking its roads, trying to bring the penitent to paradise, and a new power is rising. Can anyone stand up to the Godkiller?

For a Few Souls More was published on December 30, 2014 by Solaris. It is 316 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jake Murray.

The Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2014

The Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2014

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Premium 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook-small2014 was a pretty good year for Black Gate. Our readership nearly doubled, and we published a record number of articles. I was going to do an exact count of all the posts we made in 2014 so I’d sound a little more together here, but I lost count after 1,200.

But trust me. It was a lot.

At the end of every month last year, I compiled a brief report itemizing our Top 50 articles for the month (here’s the list for December, for example). Mostly because the lists were fun and popular. But also because I couldn’t believe Scott Taylor’s Art of the Genre pieces kept beating my Vintage Treasures posts, month after month. Seriously, how does that happen?

Anyway, those of us who obsess over traffic stats every month (chiefly me and Scott) noticed a few surprises when we tabulated the results for all of 2014. Several of the overall most popular articles of last year rarely made the Top 20 every month. But they had steady traffic month after month, and those numbers added up. I guess it’s true what they say about slow and steady winning the race. That Aesop guy knew what he was talking about.

Below we’ve tabulated the 80 most popular articles on the Black Gate website for all of 2014 — starting with Andrew Zimmerman Jones’ report on the hit Dungeons and Dragons reprint series, “My Youth Was Delivered Yesterday: AD&D 2nd Edition Re-Released,” originally posted in 2013. It was read 26,380 times last year, making it our most read blog post in 2014, and one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published.

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Black Static #43 Now on Sale

Black Static #43 Now on Sale

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Black Static 43-smallBlack Static is a British magazine of dark fantasy and horror, edited by Andy Cox. It used to be called The 3rd Alternative, until it was acquired by TTA Press, the publishers of Interzone and Crimewave, and was relaunched as Black Static in 2007.

I reported on the first issues of Black Static I purchased, issues 40 and 41, back in October. I enjoyed both, and thought the magazine was deserving of regular coverage here at Black Gate. (Besides, we Black publications need to stick together.)

The November–December issue contains short stories by Ralph Robert Moore, Usman T. Malik, Simon Bestwick, Annie Neugebauer, Andrew Hook, and Aliya Whiteley. The cover, for Ralph Robert Moore’s ‘Drown Town,’ is by Ben Baldwin; interior illustrations are by Ben Baldwin, Tara Bush and Dave Senecal.

The magazine’s regular columns include Coffinmaker’s Blues by Stephen Volk and Blood Pudding by Lynda E. Rucker (comment); Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); and Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews). This month Tennant’s column includes a lengthy interview with James Cooper.

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Future Treasures: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill

Future Treasures: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015-smallThe Mariner Books Best American series is one of the more successful anthology series on the market. Their titles include Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and Best American Sports Writing.

This year for the first time they’re adding an SF and fantasy volume, with John Joseph Adams as series editor. The editors are still selecting for the inaugural volume; the submission guidelines are here.

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor — a leading writer in the field — then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.

Now, with Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, series editor John Joseph Adams will curate a new anthology series that will demonstrate what science fiction and fantasy literature is capable of — that will demonstrate that science fiction and fantasy is more than just retreads of Star Trek and Star Wars, that it is the genre of Flowers for Algernon and Fahrenheit 451, of The Man in the High Castle, The Book of the New Sun, and A Canticle for Leibowitz, that it is the genre of Wild Seed and The Left Hand of Darkness, and of Little, Big and The Sparrow and Dhalgren.

Fans of the genres know that the finest science fiction and fantasy is on par with the finest works of literature in any genre, and the goal of this anthology series is to prove it. The 2015 volume will collect the best material published in 2014, selected by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Joe Hill.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 will be published by Mariner Books on October 6, 2015. It is 320 pages, priced at $14.95 for both the print and digital editions.