John ONeill – Page 478

Tachyon Announces Contents of The Sword & Sorcery Anthology

Thursday, January 5, 2012 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Our friend Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Publications has announced the contents of his long-awaited new book, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology.

The 432-page trade paperback will contain classic tales of S&S from Robert E. Howard, George R.R. Martin, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Karl Edward Wagner, Poul Anderson, David Drake, and others — including an original tale from Nift the Lean author Michael Shea:

Terrifying barbarians, cunning mages, and daring heroes run rampant through these exceptional classics of the exciting sword & sorcery genre. From Robert E. Howard to Jane Yolen, this fast-paced anthology is a chronological gathering of influential, inventive, and entertaining fantasy adventure stories. In “Tower of the Elephant,” Conan takes up jewel thievery but, as is his wont, proves far better with his sword. “The Flamer Bringers” finds anti-hero Elric infiltrating a band of bloodthirsty mercenaries and outwitting a powerful sorcerer. “Become a Warrior” is the unexpected tale of a child who loses all she holds dear, only to gain unforeseen power and unlikely revenge. Further entries come from early sword & sorcery legends such as Jack Vance and Catherine Louise (who wrote as C. L.) Moore, the next wave of talents including Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, and modern trendsetters like Karl Edward Wagner and David Drake. An original story from Michael Shea rounds out this essential anthology, which will particularly appeal to fans of action-oriented fantasy titles such as The Lord of the Rings and the Song of Fire and Ice series.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology is edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman. It will be released on June 1, 2012 by Tachyon Publications, and priced at $15.95. Read complete details here.

Zahir Magazine Ceases Publication

Wednesday, January 4, 2012 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Sheryl Tempchin’s highly respected genre magazine Zahir has ceased publication with the 28th issue, October 2011.

Zahir has been published quarterly since Summer 2003. The magazine managed 20 print issues, before switching to electronic format with the January, 2010 issue.

Over the last eight years Zahir has published short stories by Sharon E. Woods, Sonya Taaffe, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Mark Rich, Francesca Forrest, and many others. The consistently excellent cover art was by Godfrey Blow, Phil Volk, Leslie Shiels, and many other noted artists.

The eight electronic issues have since been assembled into annual print anthologies gathering the complete contents of four issues every year — generous 300+ page-collections available through Amazon.com and Createspace.

Editor Tempchin published the following letter on the magazine’s website:

It is with regret that I must announce we will no longer be publishing new quarterly issues of Zahir. We will continue to have a web presence here, where the online issues from the past two years are available for you to read in the archives. We will also continue to offer our two print anthologies for sale, as well [as] the print issues from 2003 through 2009. If new things develop, we will keep you posted here.

Read the complete letter here, and visit the archives to read the online issues, or snap up print copies of back issues while they’re still available.

John R. Fultz’s Seven Princes on Sale Today

Tuesday, January 3, 2012 John ONeill Comments 17 comments

Here at the rooftop headquarters of Black Gate, overlooking the majestic Chicago skyline, we’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time: the day the first volume of John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper series finally hits bookstores.

Seven Princes is John’s first novel. He’s had three highly acclaimed short stories appear in Black Gate — including “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine” (BG 12), “Return of the Quill” (BG 13), and “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15), — and has published short fiction in Weird Tales, Space & Time, Lightspeed, and the anthologies Way of the Wizard and Cthulhu’s Reign. Here’s the cover blurb:

It is an Age of Legends. Under the watchful eye of the Giants, the kingdoms of Men rose to power. Now, the Giant-King has slain the last of the Serpents and ushered in an era of untold peace and prosperity. Where a fire-blackened desert once stood, golden cities flourish in verdant fields.

It is an Age of Heroes. But the realms of Man face a new threat — an ancient sorcerer slaughters the rightful King of Yaskatha before the unbelieving eyes of his son, young Prince D’zan. With the Giant-King lost to a mysterious doom, it seems that no one has the power to stop the coming storm.

It is an Age of War. The fugitive Prince seeks allies across the realms of Men and Giants to liberate his father’s stolen kingdom. Six foreign Princes are tied to his fate. Only one thing is certain: War is coming.

SEVEN PRINCES. Some will seek glory. Some will seek vengeance. All will be legends.

For those lucky enough to be in San Francisco this Saturday, John will be doing his first signing at Borderlands Books. Bring your copy of Seven Princes and meet one of the rising stars of fantasy.

Read John’s interview with Seven Princes cover artist Richard Anderson right here at Black Gate.

Tangent Online reviews Black Gate 15

Monday, January 2, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Review site Tangent Online published an extensive and extremely complementary piece on our latest issue on New Year’s Day. Author Kevin R. Tipple writes:

The Spring 2011 issue of this massive 384 page magazine delivers in a big way. Beyond the numerous review features on books, dvds, games, letters, and editorial, and other interesting columns and features, the focus is clearly on quality fiction. Complex tales with richly drawn characters of depth engaged in an adventure of some type in a detailed and complex fantasy setting is what you will find in this issue. The stories fully lived up to the subtitle and exceeded my wildest expectations…

Each and every single story in Black Gate #15 is a good one… From the distinctive cover art that pays homage to the concept of the “Special Warrior Woman Issue” to the abundance of reviews, numerous features, and other interesting content, this is a quality magazine. Fiction is what drives the issue in all aspects. Living up wonderfully to their subtitle of “Adventures In Fantasy Literature,” Black Gate 15 delivers consistently across the board with the twenty-one stories… I must say the price for what you get is incredibly reasonable and well worth it…

The fiction is tremendously varied in terms of characters, settings, and writing styles. What is constant in each story is that every one is strong and well written. The folks involved at all levels deserve your support as they have produced an incredibly good product.

Buy this issue for only $18.95, or as part of bundle of back issues — any two for just $25 plus shipping — at our online store. Also available in PDF format for only $8.95!

Or buy the Kindle version — with enhanced content and color art and images — at Amazon.com for just $9.95!

You can find the complete review here, and the complete BG 15 table of contents here.

Glenn Lord, Nov 17 1931 – Dec 31, 2011

Sunday, January 1, 2012 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Glenn Lord, the Father of Robert E. Howard fandom, died yesterday.

Lord was born in 1931 in Louisiana. He first discovered the work of Robert E. Howard through his first Arkham House collection, Skull-Face and Others (1946). This began a life-long interest in Howard’s work, and in 1965 he became the literary agent for Howard’s heirs. The same year he purchased Robert E. Howard’s famous literary trunk, filled with tens of thousands of pages of unpublished stories, poems, and story fragments, from pulp writer E. Hoffmann Price.

The trunk, and Lord’s private collection of unpublished Howard fiction, provided a seemingly endless trove of new material for decades, published in places such as Fantastic Stories, Zane Grey Western Magazine, The Howard Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, numerous anthologies, and in his own magazine, The Howard Collector. In 1977 he worked with Karl Edward Wagner to release three seminal Conan books through Berkley, The Hour of the Dragon, Red Nails, and The People of the Black Circle, the first Conan collections to present the unaltered text of Howard’s stories from Weird Tales.

Lord received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1978, and was the Editor Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, Texas in 2006. He received The Cimmerian‘s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

Read a personal remembrance from Black Gate blogger Barbara Barrett, who attended a birthday party for Glenn Lord at the Monument Inn in LaPorte, TX in November, after the jump.

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The Desert of Souls is One of the Best Fantasy Novels of 2011

Tuesday, December 27, 2011 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

the-desert-of-souls Howard Andrew Jones’ first novel The Desert of Souls has been named one of the best fantasy novels of the year by Barnes & Noble.

Paul Goat Allen, a full-time genre book reviewer who’s reviewed thousands of titles over the past 20 years, posted his choices for the Best Fantasy Releases of 2011 at Explorations, the highly respected Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy Blog. In addition to Desert of Souls (#4), the list also includes Prince of Thorns by Black Gate blogger and author Mark Lawrence (at #5), and our good friend James L. Sutter’s first novel, Death’s Heretic (#3).

The top two books in the list were The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss and Farlander by Col Buchanan. Allen writes:

The sheer amount of noteworthy fantasy debuts in 2011 was remarkable. Besides Buchanan and Sutter’s stellar first novels, this year gave us The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones, Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns, Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey, Courtney Schafer’s The Whitefire Crossing, Paula Brandon’s The Traitor’s Daughter, The Emperor’s Knife by Mazarkis Williams, Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick, Michael J. Sullivan’s Theft of Swords, and Teresa Frohock’s Miserere.

You can read an exclusive excerpt from Prince of Thorns, Brian Murphy’s recent review of The Desert of Souls, and Andrew Zimmerman Jones’ review of Death’s Heretic, all right here at Black Gate. Don’t tell us we don’t point you to the best fantasy.

Congratulations to Howard, Mark and James!

Got an eReader for Christmas? Try some $0.99 Titles from Harper Voyager

Monday, December 26, 2011 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I bought my first e-readers two months back — a Kindle Fire and an iPad — in preparation for converting Black Gate to digital format (a project that bore its first fruit with BG 15, now available in its full digital glory, complete with enhanced content and cool color images. Woo hoo!)

Mostly I’ve been using them to review dozens of different iterations of BG 14 & 15, as John Woolley and I constantly tweaked and improved the digital versions. But I’m gradually getting used to them, and despite having a library of thousands of print volumes, I can see how digital readers could easily become my preferred medium for leisure reading. They are light, compact, and perfect for the kind of quick web surfing needed to check on that curious fact or two that comes up during reading. Plus, they’re capable of surviving a gentle plummet from about three feet when I doze off in my chair, just like real books.

I told myself I’d finally use one to read a novel over the Christmas break, and see if I found them as compelling for lengthier work. But I haven’t made the time to pick a book; and besides, most of ones I want to read I’ve already purchased in print, and I wasn’t wild about shelling out another seven to eight bucks just to get a digital version.

But that was before I got an e-mail from Harper Voyager yesterday, with a list of digital fantasy titles specially priced at $0.99 to $1.99 — including a handful that were on my reading list this month, like David Chandler’s Den of Thieves and Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. The books are available for Kindle, Nook, iBookstore, and Google eBookstore, and titles include:

Den of Thieves by David Chandler ($0.99)
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey ($0.99)
Nightwalker by Jocelynn Drake ($0.99)
White Tiger by Kylie Chan ($0.99)
Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine & Tee Morris ($0.99)
The Scent of Shadows by Vicki Pettersson ($0.99)
Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison ($1.99)
Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb ($1.99)
Rides a Dread Legion by Raymond E. Feist ($1.99)
The Heir of Night by Helen Lowe ($1.99)
Earth Strike: Star Carrier One by Ian Douglas ($1.99)

For 99 cents, I don’t mind buying a digital version of a novel I already have in print, and I bought four (the Chandler, Kadrey, plus The Scent of Shadows and The Heir of Night).

The complete list of titles is here, or you can just do a search for each of the above digital titles at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, or Google eBookstore. The website doesn’t say how long the pricing will last however, so if you’re interested, I would act now.

Black Gate 15 Now Available for Kindle

Tuesday, December 20, 2011 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Our latest issue, Black Gate 15, is now available for the Amazon Kindle for just $9.95. That’s roughly half the cost of the print version.

The Kindle version comes with new content, color art, hundreds of striking color images, and every word of the print version.

Originally published at $18.95 in May 2011, the massive Black Gate 15 is 384 print pages of the best in modern adventure fantasy, with 22 new stories, 23 pages of art, and a generous excerpt from The Desert of Souls, the blockbuster new novel by Howard Andrew Jones featuring the intrepid explorers Dabir and Asim in 8th Century Arabia.

The theme of the issue is Warrior Women, and behind Donato Giancola’s striking cover eight authors contribute delightful tales of female warriors, wizards, weather witches, thieves, and other brave women as they face deadly tombs, sinister gods, unquiet ghosts, and much more. Frederic S. Durbin takes us to a far land where two dueling gods pit their champions against each other in a deadly race to the World’s End. Brian Dolton offers us a tale of Ancient China, a beautiful occult investigator, and a very peculiar haunting. And Jonathan L. Howard returns to our pages with “The Shuttered Temple,” the sequel to “The Beautiful Corridor” from Black Gate 13, in which the resourceful thief Kyth must penetrate the secrets of a mysterious and very lethal temple. Plus other tales of female fighters from Maria V. Snyder, Sarah Avery, Paula R. Stiles, Emily Mah, and S. Hutson Blount.

What else is in BG 15? Harry Connolly returns after too long an absence with “Eating Venom,” in which a desperate soldier faces a basilisk’s poison — and the treachery it brings. John C. Hocking begins a terrific new series with “A River Through Darkness & Light,” featuring a dedicated Archivist who leads a small band into a deadly desert tomb; John Fultz shares the twisted fate of a thief who dares fantastic dangers to steal rare spirits indeed in “The Vintages of Dream,” and Vaughn Heppner kicks off an exciting new sword & sorcery series as a young warrior flees the spawn of a terrible god through the streets of an ancient city in “The Oracle of Gog.” Plus fiction from Darrell Schweitzer, Jamie McEwan, Michael Livingston, Chris Willrich, Fraser Ronald, Derek Künsken, Jeremiah Tolbert, Nye Joell Hardy, and Rosamund Hodge!

Buy the complete issue for the Kindle at Amazon.com, or buy the print version at our online store. The complete table of contents is here.

R.I.P. Euan Harvey

Friday, December 9, 2011 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

In the decade or so I’ve been editing Black Gate magazine, I’ve been blessed to cross paths with a wide variety of talented writers, artists, and creators.

One of the most talented was Euan Harvey, a terrific short story writer whose career was just beginning to take off. His work appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Aoife’s Kiss, and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. I bought a story from Euan, “Kamaratunga’s Masterpiece,” and it is scheduled to appear next year in Black Gate.

In August 2009 Euan was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. He lived and taught in South East Asia for thirteen years, but that year he returned to the United Kingdom, where he lived just outside London with his wife and family.

Today his family posted the following announcement on his Facebook page:

To all of Euan’s friends who have been reading this. I am sorry to tell you all that his melanoma grew so fast that on Tuesday his state deteriorated and we were warned he might not have long. His brother and sister, cousin and parents were… all with him yesterday, and last night Alex and Fon stayed with him. He could hear but not talk. At 5.45 this morning [Friday 9th] his breathing changed, and he died very peacefully.

BG Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones, who discovered and first introduced me to Euan while he was editing Flashing Swords magazine, said this about him:

Euan Harvey was a fine man and father, and an excellent writer. He gave me great novel feedback, and I have enjoyed his stories for years. I was proud to call him friend. I am stunned and saddened by this news.

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The New York Review of Science Fiction drops Print Version

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

One of the best critical magazines for fans of science fiction and fantasy is The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kevin J. Maroney. It has been published monthly since 1988, and it’s been nominated for a Hugo Award virtually every year. Famous for its in-depth reviews, serious tone, and critical excellence, NYRSF also has deep ties to the fan community, with plenty of news and interesting commentary on both fiction and the folks who create it.

I’ve been a subscriber for roughly a decade and I find that while NYRSF is rarely a quick read, I can always count on it to point me towards the best in modern SF & fantasy, as well as bringing plenty of neglected classics to my attention. I rarely get a third of the way through an issue before rising from my big green chair to go dig through my library for some obscure 1970s paperback or pulp story they’ve referenced. The staff writers have excellent taste and very long memories, and they know their stuff. NYRSF: it’s entertaining, and it’s good for you.

For the past few years the editors have been bemoaning the bleak outlook for the genre’s print fiction magazines. And on December 4, NYRSF became part of the news: they announced they would switch to a PDF-only format with the August 2012 issue:

We will continue to publish print issues through the end of the current volume in July 2012. It does not appear that we will continue in print past then but will switch to PDFs of entire issues. These may be emailed to subscribers, or we may decide not to have subscribers and just make each issue available online, either for a nominal charge or for free. We will almost certainly also offer a print-on-demand option as well…

We have offered a PDF subscription to overseas and non-US subscribers for the last couple of years, but we are now, this minute, offering this option to all subscribers. If it is time for you to renew your subscription, we want you to know that you can switch immediately to all-electronic for the reduced price of $3.00/issue.

Read the complete announcement here.

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Author: John ONeill