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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in January

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in January

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Medieval Fantasy-smallWe dove into the politics of fantasy in January, with articles from M Harold Page (“Why Medieval Fantasy is not Inherently Conservative,”) and Derek Kunsken (“Is Fantasy Inherently not Political?”) — both of which cracked the Top Five for the month.

We didn’t steer clear of controversy on the rest of the chart, either. Nick Ozment dissected the latest Peter Jackson pic, with a little help from friends Frederic S. Durbin and Gabe Dybing, in “Inkjetlings Round eTable: Jackson’s Desolation of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.”

Rounding out the Top Five for the month were our look at the economics of labeling the film 47 Ronin an early flop, and Joe Bonadonna’s detailed review of The Sacred Band by Janet Morris and Chris Morris.

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in January were:

  1. Why Medieval Fantasy is not Inherently Conservative
  2. Inkjetlings Round eTable: Jackson’s Desolation of The Hobbit
  3. Universal Labels 47 Ronin a Flop less than 24 hours After Release
  4. Heroic Fantasy with the Sharp Edge of Reality: A Review of The Sacred Band
  5. Is Fantasy Inherently not Political?
  6. Observations: The Fellowship of the Ring movie
  7. The Weapons of Fantasy
  8. Observations: The Two Towers movie
  9. You Can’t Go Home Again
  10. A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka

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The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in January

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in January

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AppleMarkMark Rigney’s “The Find,” part of his perennially popular Tales of Gemen series, hit the top of the fiction charts this month. “The Find” is actually Part II of the series, which began with “The Trade,” which Tangent Online called a “Marvelous tale. Can’t wait for the next part.”

Next on the list was E.E. Knight’s sword & sorcery epic “The Terror of the Vale,” the second in the Blue Pilgrim sequence, following “That of the Pit.” Third was Martha Wells’ complete novel, the Nebula nominee The Death of the Necromancer. Making its debut on the list was Sword Sisters by Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, the exciting new sword & sorcery novel from our friends at Rogue Blades Entertainment. It’s great to see RBE publishing novels again — and you can check it out right here.

Rounding out the Top Five was Joe Bonadonna’s fast-paced adventure “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum.” Also making the list were exciting stories by Dave Gross, Mike Allen, Vaughn Heppner, Jamie McEwan, Aaron Bradford Starr, Janet Morris and Chris Morris, Jason E. Thummel, David C. Smith, Ryan Harvey, Michael Shea, Harry Connolly, John C. Hocking, and Alex Kreis.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. All last year we presented an original short story or novella from the best writers in the industry every week, all completely free. Here are the Top Twenty most-read stories in January:

  1. “The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney
  2. “The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
  3.  The Death of the Necromancer, a complete novel by Martha Wells
  4. An excerpt from Sword Sisters, by Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe
  5. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
  6. An excerpt from Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos, by Dave Gross
  7. An excerpt from The Black Fire Concerto, by Mike Allen
  8. “Draugr Stonemaker,” by Vaughn Heppner
  9. “Falling Castles,” by Jamie McEwan
  10. “The Sealord’s Successor,” by Aaron Bradford Starr

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Art of the Genre: Behind the Curtain at Black Gate L.A.

Art of the Genre: Behind the Curtain at Black Gate L.A.

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Sue somehow still looks pale even in the SoCal sun...
Sue somehow still looks pale even in the SoCal sun…

First off, thanks to all the readers who read and posted about last week’s Art of the Genre article ‘The Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years’ and if you haven’t taken a look, I hope you do right here! Oh, and remember, it isn’t who is the ‘best,’ but who was the most impactful.

Second, and putting into practice a bit of the Wizard’s First Rule, I thought I’d dip into the email ‘bag’ and pull back the curtain on a part of my life here in L.A. You see, there are often questions sent to me concerning Black Gate L.A. offices, like possible internships with us, and many times just inquiries as to ‘who are you?’ My current favorite of these is artist Jeff Easley’s request to ‘Post pictures of Kandi!’ which I got last week. Well, since I had a moment today between a lunch at the Red Lobster with John Scalzi [hey, he’s from Ohio and I’m from Indiana, so to us that is still an awesome and upscale establishment, so sue us!] and my two hour commute into downtown for floor seats at a Lakers game with Bill Simmons, I decided I’d introduce all my readers, and those of Black Gate in general, to our working version of ‘The Office’ here in LaLa Land.

For the purposes of keeping readers’ interest, I’m starting with our resident part-timer, ‘Goth Chick’ Sue Granquist. She spends half her time here in L.A. working with the horror genre movie industry and the other half in Chicago around the Midwest convention circuit — and bringing our editor John O’Neill coffee. She and I have a strange relationship, and I swear if she wasn’t so damn Goth and I wasn’t so damn married, there would have been an illicit office affair years ago, but as it is we just have fun insulting each other as much as possible.

I took this picture about a month ago, while we were having lunch on the veranda outside the office on the ‘beach side’. Chick, as I affectionately call her, although hating the sun most days, had decided to join me for lunch and afterward sat on the railing with her back to the Pacific. I had a nice vantage point and told her, ‘Chick, I bet I could take a photo of you from here and then Photoshop the railing out of it to make you look like you were suspended in the clear blue SoCal sky.’ ‘Art,’ she said using her nickname for me, ‘I bet you a bag of black licorice jelly beans you can’t.’

Well, as you can see, I got those damnable jelly beans and they sit on my desk to feed to gulls swirling in the sea breeze out my window when I’m felling particularly peevish.

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The Adventure Continues: the Return of Renner and Quist

The Adventure Continues: the Return of Renner and Quist

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Sleeping Bear coverWhen I first dreamed up my odd-couple pair of Renner & Quist, one of the many goals I had in mind was to write their stories specifically and consciously as adventures. This was not perhaps the most sensible decision, given a literary market polarized between nominally realistic “grown-up” fare and the highly fantastical tomes aimed at teens. (I shall not deign to even mention Romance; call me biased, go ahead. I can take it.) Nor did my conception of Renner & Quist allow for them to don armor, wield swords, or inhabit some far-flung or alternate world. No, these two, Reverend Renner being a Unitarian Universalist minister and Dale Quist a former P.I. and ex-linebacker, required a contemporary setting; to emplace them elsewhere would be to guarantee that any stories woven around them would be untruthful.

This is not to say that I’m against high fantasy; quite the opposite. I’m here, aren’t I? For further proof, take a gander at my Black Gate trilogy concerning Gemen the Antiques Dealer.

But not all ideas trend that direction and with Renner & Quist, I knew I had nearer waters to chart. Now that their second novella, Sleeping Bear, is out in the world, and with their first proper novel, Check-Out Time, very much in the production pipeline, it seems high time to explore what remains, in the 21st century, of that cracking good term, “adventure.”

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

Black Gate Online Fiction: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

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Blood and Iron Jon Sprunk-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk — a new novel of heroic fantasy that reads like a sword-and-sorcery version of Spartacus.

It starts with a shipwreck following a magical storm at sea. Horace, a soldier from the west, had joined the Great Crusade against the heathens of Akeshia after the deaths of his wife and son from plague. When he washes ashore, he finds himself at the mercy of the very people he was sent to kill, who speak a language and have a culture and customs he doesn’t even begin to understand.

Not long after, Horace is pressed into service as a house slave. But this doesn’t last. The Akeshians discover that Horace was a latent sorcerer, and he is catapulted from the chains of a slave to the halls of power in the queen’s court. Together with Jirom, an ex-mercenary and gladiator, and Alyra, a spy in the court, he will seek a path to free himself and the empire’s caste of slaves from a system where every man and woman must pay the price of blood or iron. Before the end, Horace will have paid dearly in both.

Jon Sprunk is the author of the Shadow Saga (Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure, and Shadow’s Master) and a mentor at the Seton Hill University fiction writing program. He is a regular blogger for Black Gate.

Win one of two Advance Reading Copies of Blood and Iron! Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “Blood and Iron,” and we’ll enter you in the drawing. Entries must be received by Friday, February 28, 2014. No purchase necessary. Terms and conditions subject to change. Not valid where prohibited by law.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner,  Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

Blood and Iron, Book One of The Book of the Black Earth, will be published by Pyr Books on March 11, 2014. It is 445 pages and will be available in trade paperback for $18.00 ($11.00 for the digital version). Learn more at Pyr Books.

Read a complete sample chapter of Blood and Iron here.

The Series Series: Marshal Versus the Assassins by M. Harold Page

The Series Series: Marshal Versus the Assassins by M. Harold Page

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Marshall Versus the Assassins-smallOf the many excellences in Marshal Versus the Assassins, M. Harold Page’s story of a real historical crusader trying to avert a crusade, the most remarkable is Page’s rendering of physical combat. There are so many reasons this stand-alone adventure in the Foreworld Saga could be subtitled Don’t Try This at Home.

Since you’re here reading Black Gate, odds are you’re a fight scene connoisseur. You’ll have read some classic set-pieces, and some classic blunders. You may even have read this post, which discusses the biggest pitfall most writers face when they set out to learn how to write a fight scene: the counterintuitive way a blow-by-blow approach to even the most exciting events can turn tedious. Writers who overcome that problem generally do it by intertwining the physical blow-by-blow fight choreography with the things fiction can render and film can’t — most of them aspects of the viewpoint character’s inner life.

What Page does more and better than any other fantasy writer I know is intertwine the viewpoint character’s complete sensory experience during combat. As a practitioner and historian of Europe’s lost martial arts traditions, Page knows in muscle memory how each weapon his crusader characters use feels in the hand, in the heft, and in the mailed body it strikes. All of us who write fantasy that includes fight scenes try to convey this kind of sensory vividness and immediacy. The difference in results between a writer who’s relying on research or imagination and a writer who has dedicated years to mastering the things his characters have mastered is immediately apparent.

I was about to say the difference was apparent on the page, but for much of the time I spent reading the fight scenes, I wasn’t really paying attention to the existence of a page. It would be more accurate to say the difference is apparent in the reader’s mirror neurons.

I love reading a book that I couldn’t have written, one that displays writerly chops totally different from mine. Of course, the thing Page makes look easy that I struggle with as a writer is not the only virtue of this book.

For instance, there’s the delightful blank spot in history that Page imagines his way into.

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Announcing the Winner of M. Harold Page’s The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets

Announcing the Winner of M. Harold Page’s The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets

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The Sword is Mightier-smallLast month announced a contest to win both novels in M. Harold Page’s exciting Scholar Knight series: The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets, compliments of Paradox Interactive and M. Harold Page.

It’s too late to enter the contest now, but it’s not too late to discover Mr. Page’s unique brand of heroic fantasy. Visit his blog here or stop by Black Gate every Thursday to read his regular column.

His recent articles for us have included So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?,  Understanding Tolkien: Why His Landscapes Work, Why Evil Overlords Need to be Competent, and Why Medieval Fantasy is Not Inherently Conservative (or Inherently Anything Political).

We received so many entries for this contest, we had to abandon our usual tracking and selection process. We gave up on spreadsheets to track the entries — but at least our D&D dice didn’t fail us when it came time to determine a winner.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of both volumes in M. Harold Page’s Scholar Knight series is Jackie Stevens of Aylesbury. Congratulations, Jackie! We’ll be touch to let you know how you can claim your books.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and to M. Harold Page and Paradox Interactive for sponsoring the contest. The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets were published on September 25 and December 12, 2013, respectively. They are available in digital format for $4.99 each.

Gygax Magazine #3 Now Available

Gygax Magazine #3 Now Available

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Gygax Magazine 3-smallWhen the last game shop in town went out of business six years ago, I lost the ability to easily browse the latest new releases, and keep up with what’s going on in the industry. Sure, Games Plus in Mount Prospect– one of the finest game shops on the planet — is still in business and thriving, but it’s a good hour away, and I don’t get there more than two or three times a year (although I never miss their semi-annual auction).

One of the things I miss the most is the magazine section. Nothing makes you feel your hobby is vibrant and alive quite like a healthy ecosystem of periodicals. I really enjoyed standing in front of the magazine rack and pulling out the latest issue of Knights of the Dinner Table, Kobold Quarterly, the excellent KnockSpell, Games Workshop’s  White Dwarf, or Troll Lord’s The Crusader.

The loss of so many local game shops has really hurt gaming magazines — we lost Kobold Quarterly in 2012 and Mythmere has announced the future of Knockspell is in doubt. That’s one of the reasons I was so delighted to hear about the launch of the very promising Gygax Magazine last year.

I reviewed the first issue last March and I was very impressed. Issue #2 was released in time for Gen Con, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting the third issue for some time… and wondering how I was going to find a copy.

My wait finally ended last week, compliments of a Priority Mail package from our San Diego correspondent and ace blogger Scott Taylor — who late last year was hired as the new Art Director for the magazine. Inside was a beautiful copy of Gygax Magazine #3, the first issue with his name on the masthead.

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New Treasures: Castaway on Temurlone by David Wesley Hill

New Treasures: Castaway on Temurlone by David Wesley Hill

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Castaway on Temurlone-smallDavid Wesley Hill was known simply as David W. Hill when I bought his weird western “Far From Laredo” for Black Gate 4. Man, that was a great story. Gunslinger Charles Duke is summoned from 19th Century Texas by poor villagers to deal with three very different — and very deadly — demons. Strange seduction attempts, a forest of trees that used to be men, and a frog-demon blocking a bridge all challenge Duke on his journey… not to mention a reward that turns out very differently than expected.

Duke returned in “The Good Sheriff” in Black Gate 13, one of the strangest and most original tales I’ve ever published. Duke is hired as sheriff of a strange frontier town peopled by dogmen and demons… and a powerful sorcerer who knows how to send him home. But first he must confront a fallen god in an epic shootout in the middle of town.

I wish I could have published a great many more Charles Duke stories, but David turned his attention to novels — including the acclaimed At Drake’s Command, which Awesome Indies called “A godsend to readers.” But I admit I was most intrigued by his first novel, Castaway on Temurlone, featuring as it does space pirates, beautiful clones, and cannibal innkeepers.

It is indeed a Universe of Miracles! But not for young Pimsol Anderts, idle and jobless on a depressed, waterlogged world, until he signs aboard the interstellar freighter Miraculous Abernathy. Indentured to the aristocratic Wirthy family — and bewitched by beautiful Mirable Wirthy, the latest clone of the long-dead matriarch Imogene Wirthy — Pim’s adventure has barely begun when pirates attack, forcing him to flee the ship with Mirable in tow.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in December

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in December

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Herlock-smallThe top article on the Black Gate blog last month was Elwin Cotman’s detailed look back at the Space Opera of famed Anime creator Leiji Matsumoto.

Second on the list was Jon Sprunk’s survey of the Worst Fantasy Films of All Time, followed by our tribute to the 80s science fiction & fantasy of Bluejay Books.

Fourth was the 12th installment in our ongoing series tracking the latest in Appendix N scholarship: “H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D. Closing out the list is M. Harold Page’s thoughtful response to the question, “So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?”

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in December were:

  1. Futuristic Myth: The Space Opera of Leiji Matsumoto
  2. The Worst Fantasy Films of All Time
  3. A Fond look back at Bluejay Books
  4. H.P. Lovecraft, A Merritt, and Appendix N; Advanced Readings in D&D
  5. So What’s Wrong with (some) Modern Fantasy?
  6. Seductive Sorceress Queens, Decadent Civilizations and Moon-lit Brawls: Bloodstone
  7. The Cartoon Revolution will no Longer be Televised
  8. Experience the Joy of the Pulps with The Incredible Pulps
  9. The Problem with Wonder Woman
  10. A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)

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