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C.C. Finlay Appointed Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

C.C. Finlay Appointed Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

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Charles Coleman Finlay-smallC.C. Finlay has been named the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He replaces Gordon van Gelder, who has been editor since 1997. C.C. Finlay was the guest editor of the July/August 2014 issue, which was well received, and had been expected to edit two additional issues in 2015. Several reviewers noted that he brought a high percentage of new names to the magazine.

He is the author of the Traitor to the Crown fantasy trilogy, published by Del Rey in 2009. Under the name Charles Coleman Finlay he has published some highly regarded short fiction, including the Hugo and Nebula Award nominees “The Political Prisoner” and “The Political Officer.” We published his story “The Nursemaid’s Suitor” in Black Gate 8. In 2003 he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He addresses the announcement on his blog:

As some of you may have guessed, my guest editing gigs at F&SF were a job audition. I guess I did okay…. Officially, I take over with the March/April issue this year… March/April is at the printers so that means I’m already working on May/June. I started reading submissions for the magazine on January 1. Originally, it was going to be just for a guest editor spot in September/October, but now it is for all future issues of the magazine. So that worked out well…

Current editor Gordon Van Gelder has an inventory of stories for the magazine. After the March/April issue, these will be mixed in with the stories that I select. It will probably take a few issues to make the transition, but it won’t be sudden. Readers will still see many of the familiar writers they love. And I expect there to be new voices as well.

Gordon Van Gelder will remain publisher. We covered the January/February issue of F&SF here.

Bird People, Evil Clowns, and the Crooked One: Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

Bird People, Evil Clowns, and the Crooked One: Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

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Bone Swans CSE Cooney-smallC.S.E. Cooney reports that she has signed a contract with Mythic Delirium Press for her newest collection Bone Swans, coming this summer.

Bone Swans will contain several of her most popular novellas, including The Big Bah-Ha, which Gene Wolfe called “Deep and wise and fabulous… [it] will leave you shuddering and strangely at peace. You could found a religion on it — or it may found a religion without you.” It also includes “The Bone Swans of Amandale,” the first installment of Silver and Bone: The Pied Piper Tales, and “Life on the Sun,” originally published here at Black Gate. Here’s the complete table of contents, with links to online versions where available:

Life on the Sun
The Bone Swans of Amandale
Martyr’s Gem
How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One
The Big Bah-Ha

C.S.E. Cooney is a podcast reader for Uncanny Magazine; Amal El-Mohtar recently reviewed her short story “Witch, Beast, Saint” at Tor.com, and Mark Rigney interviewed her in late October. The two C.S.E. Cooney short stories we presented here, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” consistently rank among the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. She is a past website editor of Black Gate, and the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills.

Bone Swans will be published by Mythic Delirium Press on July 7th, 2015. Get more details on their website.

Clashing Blades, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Daring Rescues: The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, edited by Lawrence Ellsworth

Clashing Blades, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Daring Rescues: The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, edited by Lawrence Ellsworth

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The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure-smallBack in May, BG blogger Lawrence Schick (who also writes as Lawrence Ellsworth) told us about his huge upcoming anthology The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure: Classic Tales of Dashing Heroes, Dastardly Villains, and Daring Escapes. Now the book has arrived, and it looks very appetizing indeed. If you enjoy tales of adventure, this one looks like it would make a splendid late Christmas present to yourself.

The word “swashbuckler” conjures up an indelible image: a hero who’s a bit of a rogue but has his own code of honor, an adventurer with laughter on his lips and a flashing sword in his hand. This larger-than-life figure is regularly declared passé, but the swashbuckler is too appealing to ever really die. Who wouldn’t want to face deadly danger with confidence and élan? Who can deny the thrill of clashing blades, hairbreadth escapes, and daring rescues, of facing vile treachery with dauntless courage and passionate devotion?

The swashbuckler tradition was born out of legends like those of the Knights of the Round Table and of Robin Hood, revived in the early 19th century by Romantic movement authors such as Sir Walter Scott. The genre caught hold with the publication of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in 1844, and for the next century it was arguably the world’s leading form of adventure fiction.

Featuring selections by twenty hugely popular writers from the last century including Rafael Sabatini; Johnston Mcculley (creator of the Zorro character); Alexandre Dumas: Arthur Conan Doyle; and Pierce Egan (author of Robin Hood), this anthology is dedicated to the swashbuckler’s roots: historical adventures by the masters of the genre. Most of these stories have been out of print for decades; some have never before been collected in book form. All are top-notch entertainment.

The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure was published by Pegasus on December 15, 2014. It is 604 pages, priced at $24.95 in paperback or $20.08 for the digital edition.

Merry Christmas From All of Us at Black Gate

Merry Christmas From All of Us at Black Gate

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Black Gate Christmas Tree-smallThe Black Gate offices are empty, the lights are off, and the only illumination is from the tiny tree the interns put on top of the filing cabinets during the Christmas party. Another year gone. Another 780 books discussed, 112 games reviewed, 84 comics examined, and numerous issues of critical importance to the genre fiercely debated. The staff are all at home with their loved ones, sleeping the sleep of the just (and the exhausted), and the office is strangely quiet.

It’s during the few times the office is like this — and not filled with raucous debate, and the never-ending tension of the nearly-blown deadline — that I can really remember what Black Gate is all about. Sometimes, when we’re busiest, it seems that we’re just a website, just another stop on the Internet where people promote their opinions.

But if that were true, Black Gate would still just be Howard Andrew Jones and me, working away in near-total obscurity. Instead, Black Gate has become a thriving and growing collective of writers and artists who care about fantasy. We work together to promote forgotten classics and celebrate overlooked modern writers. And to help each other.

We have some of the finest writers in the industry and they work tirelessly week after week to keep you informed on a genre with hidden depths and constant surprises. It’s been an incredible year and traffic to the site has nearly doubled in just the last 12 months. The real engine of that growth has been you, the fans, who have helped spread the word, telling others about us.

So thank you once again, from the bottom of our hearts. On behalf of the vast and unruly collective that is Black Gate, I would like to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Continue being excellent — it’s what you’re good at.

More Hardboiled than the Dresden Files: The Way Into Chaos: Book One of The Great Way by Harry Connolly

More Hardboiled than the Dresden Files: The Way Into Chaos: Book One of The Great Way by Harry Connolly

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A good… Big Fat Heroic Fantasy Epic

I’m starting to think that writing a good — by good, I means delivers the tropes while meeting wider literary standards — Big Fat Heroic Fantasy Epic is like squaring a circle, reconciling Justice with Mercy, bringing World Peace… an exercise in balancing seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

You need to have the world building of Tolkien but the pacing of Ian Fleming, the escapism of C.S. Lewis but the grit and cynicism of John Steinbeck. It has to be an armchair-by-the-fire-dog-at-my-feet-on-a-winter-day read, and yet not pretend that pre-modern societies are anything but structurally unpleasant. It needs to take you on a flight of fancy, but ground you in the familiar. And, given that we live in the 21st century, despite the pre-modern setting, it’s nice to have believably empowered women helping to shape the story.

In his new book The Way Into Chaos, Book One of The Great Way, Harry Connolly has somehow managed to do this. Before I put on my writer hat, let me speak as a reader:

I approached this book with some trepidation because I was already a fan of Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces urban fantasy series (interview here).

More hardboiled than the Dresden Files, Connolly’s take on the UF genre has a delicious bleakness to it. His hero faces not just a nihilistic a-human magical world with shades of Lovecraft (…more grown up, more disquieting; you could almost call it Atheist Urban Fantasy) but also the bleaker corners of America. His mean streets and bedeviled small towns are as alienating as the magic, not leather-jacket-cool, not picket-fence cozy. His magic feels real in a maggots-under-the-skin way, and his horror elements throw into relief the things we truly care about. The plot and pacing meanwhile makes what could be an emotional battering into an adventure.

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Lawrence Schick on “Dash and Daring Never Go Out of Style”

Lawrence Schick on “Dash and Daring Never Go Out of Style”

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Outlaw Angus Donald-smallLawrence Schick has posted an intriguing article on modern swashbucklers over at The Huffington Post.

I am a connoisseur of old swashbuckling stories, the kind of historical adventure tales that were arguably the western world’s most popular form of fiction in the hundred years from the publication of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in 1820 to Johnston McCulley’s first Zorro novel in 1919… and I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to go back to the 19th century to find a thrilling swashbuckler. A strong story boldly told never truly goes out of fashion, and there are some excellent novelists working today whose stories hearken back to the old swashbucklers, but whose writing is thoroughly modern.

He points to several recent titles, including William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage books, and a sparkling new translation of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. He also enthusiastically recommends the Outlaw Chronicles by British author Angus Donald:

The titular outlaw in the series is none other than Robin Hood, the original swashbuckler himself… The books in this series are fast-paced, the characters are memorable and well-drawn, and the dialogue is crisp and modern. But Donald’s Robin Hood isn’t Scott’s merry and chivalrous rogue, he’s a much more dangerous man: he’s a charismatic but ruthless renegade knight with a grudge against the aristocracy, and the author’s portrayal of the hard life of a band of medieval outlaws rings true…

The author has done his homework, and his depiction of the bloody work of combat in the 12th century is in equal parts thrilling and horrific. This is solid historical adventure that doesn’t shy away from the nasty realities of life in the Late Middle Ages: Donald tells it as it was.

Lawrence Schick’s most recent post for us was Compiling The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. Read the complete article at The Huffington Post.

C. S. E. Cooney Joins Uncanny Magazine as a Podcast Reader

C. S. E. Cooney Joins Uncanny Magazine as a Podcast Reader

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C. S. E. Cooney has hair like Medusa seriously it's amazing-smallThe brand new fantasy magazine Uncanny — which we discussed excitedly last month when its first issue went on sale — has shown uncanny good sense by hiring our very own C.S.E. Cooney as a podcast reader. Here’s a bit cribbed from the press release:

Uncanny Magazine is thrilled to announce that the marvelous C.S.E. Cooney has agreed to join us as the second reader on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast! Ms. Cooney is a Rhode Island writer and actor… She loves to read aloud to anyone who will sit still long enough to listen. Some of her narration work can be found on Podcastle and Tales to Terrify. With her fellow artists in the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, C. S. E. Cooney appears at conventions and other venues, singing from their growing collection of Distant Star Ballads, dramatizing fiction, and performing such story-poems as “The Sea King’s Second Bride,” for which she won the Rhysling Award in 2011.

Ms. Cooney will make her debut as an Uncanny Magazine Podcast reader in Episode 3 this January.

So much exciting C.S.E. Cooney news! Just last month, we reported on Amal El-Mohtar’s review of her short story “Witch, Beast, Saint,” and our roving reporter Mark Rigney interviewed her in late October. The two C.S.E. Cooney short stories we published here at Black Gate, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” consistently rank among the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. Her most recent blog post for us was Book Pairings: Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells and Royal Airs, published last Sunday. She is a past website editor of Black Gate, and the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills.

In other C.S.E. Cooney news, today is her birthday. Happy Birthday, Claire!!

Support the Six by Six Kickstarter, Containing the Complete Cineth Stories by Martha Wells

Support the Six by Six Kickstarter, Containing the Complete Cineth Stories by Martha Wells

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Six by Six-smallLong time readers will remember Martha Wells’s Cineth stories, “Holy Places,” “Houses of the Dead,” and “Reflections,” which first appeared in Black Gate 10, 11, and 12. They were some of the most popular stories we every published, and they helped put Black Gate on the map.

All three stories feature her characters Giliead and Ilias. “Holy Places” was reprinted in Lightspeed magazine, but the others have never been reprinted — although I’m often asked when they might be available in a more permanent edition. So I was very pleased to hear the following news from Martha this week:

I’m involved in a kickstarter this month… It’s short story collections by six different authors (me, Tina Connolly, Brenda Cooper, Stephen Gaskell, Bradley P. Beaulieu, and Will McIntosh) with reprints and some stories original to the collection. The new short story I’ll have in it is a Nicholas and Reynard story set before The Death of the Necromancer, called “Night at the Opera,” so I thought some Black Gate readers might be interested.

We serialized Martha’s complete novel The Death of the Necromancer here.

We frequently hear about publishing Kickstarter projects, but this one looks very special indeed. Six by Six brings together six terrific fantasy and SF authors, each of whom contributes six stories, for 36 stories in all — including all three Giliead and Ilias tales from Black Gate magazine.

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Fantasy Keeps You Young

Fantasy Keeps You Young

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John O'Neill at Capricon 2014 (photo by Patty Templeton)
John O’Neill at Capricon 2014 (photo by Patty Templeton)

Some years before I started Black Gate magazine, I was editing a science fiction fan site called SF Site. It’s still going strong today, managed by my old partners Rodger Turner and Neil Walsh in Ottawa. It was nominated for a Hugo award in 2002, and a World Fantasy Award in 2006; in 2002, it won the Locus Award for best webzine.

Anyway, before all that fame and glory, I was still struggling to get the damn site off the ground. That meant a lot of hard work, writing and posting articles that nobody read, late into the night. Around 1997 or so, I hit on an idea to give my site a higher profile: offering free hosting to the major SF and fantasy magazines, none of which had websites at the time. This worked splendidly, and over the next few years, Rodger and I launched sites for Analog, F&SF, SF Chronicle, and many others (meaning that I made a lot of phone calls, and Rodger did all the actual work.)

In 1998, shortly after we launched the Asimov’s SF site, I wrote A Brief History of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, to celebrate the magazine coming on board. I wrote about finding the second issue in 1977, the summer I discovered SF magazines. In my first draft, I said something about Asimov looking elderly and distinguished on the cover.

I ran the draft past Sheila Williams, then Executive Editor of Asimov’s, and received a very cranky note in return. She strongly objected to my wording, saying “Isaac was barely fifty when that photo was taken — hardly elderly!” I puzzled over that for a long, long time. What did she mean, exactly? It didn’t make any sense. Finally, I had an epiphany. Sheila was probably really old, too. She might even be approaching 50 herself! And as everyone knew, old people shouted at everybody, and didn’t make much sense. I tweaked my wording enough to pacify her and we published the article.

I’ve thought about that exchange a few times since I turned 50, just a few months ago.

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The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in October

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in October

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The Black Fire Concerto-smallMike Allen continues to dominate the top of our charts for a second month, with the exclusive excerpt from his first novel The Black Fire Concerto. Mike’s breakout collection Unseaming was released on October 1st from Antimatter Press. Check it out here.

Surging back into second place are Janet Morris and Chris Morris, with an excerpt from their heroic fantasy novel The Sacred Band. They also claimed the #3 slot with “Seven Against Hell,” an exclusive sample from their new anthology, Poets in Hell.

Knocked out of the #2 slot was “The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen by Mark Rigney, which settled at #4 this month. “The Keystone,” Part III of the series, also made the list. Check out Mark’s first novel, the popular Check-Out Time, released on October 7 from Samhain Publishing.

Rounding out the Top Five was Ryan Harvey’s sword & sorcery story “The Sorrowless Thief,” a tale of intrigue and dinosaur beasts, part of his popular science-fantasy set series on the continent of Ahn-Tarqa.

Also making the list were exciting stories by Joe Bonadonna, John C. Hocking, David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, Judith Berman, Michael Shea, C.S.E. Cooney, Aaron Bradford Starr, Jason E. Thummel, Steven H Silver, Martha Wells, Sean McLachlan, Harry Connolly, Howard Andrew Jones, and John R. Fultz.

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