Issue 42 fiction include “Splinter” by Shira Lipkin, “Sprig” by Alex Bledsoe, “Erzulie Dantor” by Tim Susman, and “The Glutton: A Goxhat Accounting Chant” by Eleanor Arnason.
Non-fiction includes “The 21st Century SF/F Professional at Conventions” by editor Lynne M. Thomas, “Behind the Convention Curtain: Programming” by Steven H. Silver, and “An Interview with Alex Bledsoe” by Maggie Slater.
The cover art is by Nicoletta Ceccolli.
Visit the magazine at www.apex-magazine.com.
Tangent Online reviews C.S.E. Cooney’s original fantasy novella “Godmother Lizard,” published at Black Gate on Sunday, November 10:
C.S.E. Cooney’s “Godmother Lizard” is a delightful fantasy tale about an orphan girl, Ro, and how she becomes a hero by saving her friends from their human-looking mother who was slowly eating them. It takes her two decades to accomplish this, but that’s part of the charm of this story. Cooney deftly uses that time to grow Ro and her friends into adults which changes them from victims to empowered.
I enjoyed the fantastical elements in Ro’s world. The essence of its magic is poignantly captured when Wyll, Jaks’ younger brother, gives Ro his living silver lizard bracelet for protection: “It wound in frantic circles around his finger, mewling all the time, until it had spiraled to rest a blunt triangular head upon his fingernail.”
The story language is rich and colorful, the growing relationship between Ro and Jaks reminiscent of chivalrous lords and ladies. The dialog has a pleasantly oblique edge to it which entranced me from the beginning. I highly recommend it.
I felt the same way when I first read it. “Godmother Lizard” is a marvelously creative fantasy set in a uniquely inventive world — one that Cooney returns to in her upcoming story “Life on the Sun.” Catch it right here as part of our upcoming line of Black Gate Original Fiction.
Read Louis West’s review in its entirety at Tangent Online, and read C.S.E. Cooney’s novella “Godmother Lizard” completely free here.
The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including Judith Berman’s sword & sorcery tale “The Poison Well,” Donald S. Crankshaw’s 50,000-word short novel A Phoenix in Darkness, Aaron Bradford Starr’s adventure tale “The Daughter’s Dowry,” the 25,000-word dark fantasy novella “The Quintessence of Absence” by Sean McLachlan, Harry Connolly’s thrilling mystery “The Whoremaster of Pald,” and Jason E. Thummel’s adventure fantasy novelette “The Duelist” is here.
Our Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones posted the news on his blog on Friday, but I thought it was worth repeating here: new British publisher Head of Zeus has picked up The Chronicles of Sword and Sand (known around these parts as the adventures of Dabir and Asim) for British publication.
The first volume, The Desert of Souls, was published here in the US on February 15, 2011, and the exciting sequel, Bones of the Old Ones, is scheduled to arrive in less than three weeks. Head of Zeus will bring both into print overseas for the first time beginning in April of 2013.
The Desert of Souls was called “An Arabian Nights adventure as written by Robert E Howard” by Dave Drake, and Bones of the Old Ones received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. In a recent feature review, SF Signal called the second volume “A damn good tale that not only pays homage to the masters, but sets its own print on the genre.”
Bones of the Old Ones is the best fantasy I’ve read in years. It’s a rollicking adventure that follows Dabir and Asim on a daring quest across the landscape of 8th Century Arabia, packed with ancient secrets, underground lairs, dread pacts, mysterious sorcery, desperate heroism, and moments of laugh-out-loud humor. The cast is much larger than The Desert of Souls, and the stakes are higher, as Dabir and Asim race against time to prevent an ancient sorcerous cabal from plunging the world into eternal winter.
Goodreads is offering signed copies of The Bones of the Old Ones — and copies of The Desert of Souls — to three lucky winners this month; visit Goodreads to enter. The winners will be announced December 19th. And now that The Desert of Souls is available in trade paperback, Amazon.com is selling the hardcover for just 10 bucks — get them while they last.
The Bones of the Old Ones will be released in North America on December 11. We first reported on it back in August.
Manvayar’s old master had been exposed as a secret necromancer… would that horrific experience give Manvayar the insight he’d need to ferret out the truth behind a rash of sorcerous killings?
Suddenly the oppression in the air condensed into cold threat, and an overpowering stink of rotting flesh rolled over him. The mare screamed and bolted past Manvayar. He spun around. A speck hung for an instant in his vision, then swelled. First it looked like a cloud of bloody pus suspended in water. Then, still growing, it congealed into a tangle of pinkish webbing and glistening limbs. Some of the limbs ended in groping hands, some bore toothy leeches’ mouths.
The exhilaration of pure hatred rushed through Manvayar. The necromancer was here! He narrowed his attention to the width of a sword blade, reached to the roots of his soul and ripped out a piece of his own substance, which he formed into Nariyo words of command and hurled at the creature. The words sank into its flesh. It thrashed but kept swelling outward until it was twice as high as a man and its limbs writhed toward the manor windows.
A man was screaming. Inside the stables, horses whinnied and crashed against their stalls. The stench of putrefaction choked him.
Manvayar took a few steps forward. His sword was already in his hand.
“The Poison Well” originally appeared in Black Gate 7, and was widely acclaimed. Patrick Samphire at Tangent Online wrote:
Mage and warrior Manvayar fled his former master when he discovered his master was a secret necromancer. Now he is assisting the death priest, Seppan, in a search for a necromancer whose creations have killed two men. Their hunt leads them to an unwelcoming manor house where the deaths occurred… Berman is an excellent writer. She smoothly juggles the various elements of the story — the secret of the poison well, the hidden necromancer, the hostile family of the lord of the manor, and Manvayar’s past… Manvayar is haunted by vivid dreams of his former master, yet his master has no part to play in this story… the reader is left wondering whether “The Poison Well” is the first part of a series. I certainly hope so; this was a fascinating and well-written piece that deserves its place opening the issue.
“The Poison Well” is a complete 14,000-word novelette of adventure fantasy offered at no cost. As Patrick astutely surmised, it was the first in a thrilling series; the second installment, “Awakening,” which explores the back-story of Manvayar’s former master, appeared in Black Gate 10 and was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2007. We will present “Awakening” in its entirely next week.
You can see the complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction here.
Baghdad celebrated its 1,250th birthday this year. It’s been through a lot since it was founded by the Caliph al-Mansour in 762 AD, seeing more than its fair share of invaders come and go. Nowadays, Baghdad shows little of its former glory. It’s a dusty place of crumbling concrete buildings, blast walls, and traffic jams. Look harder, though, and you’ll find some of Baghdad’s former glory still shining through.
Some 20 years ago, shortly after I graduated from the University of Illinois, I bought my first home computer. It was an Amiga 2000, essentially the same as the entry-level Amiga 500 but with a hard drive. The hobby computing industry — which is now dead — was booming in the early 90s, and there were thousands of fun things the dedicated hobbyist could do with a decent home computer. Video editing, BASIC programming, ray trace imaging, indexing Chicken Cacciatore recipes… and if you were cutting edge enough to buy a modem, you could even log into BITNET and post on those electronic bulletin boards everyone was talking about. Crazy.
All of that was very interesting. But I shelled out my $1,500 bucks for one reason, and one reason only: to play games. And that’s exactly what I did.
I played the role playing games I’d been aching to try out in my last year of grad school, while feverishly finishing my Ph.D. thesis: Pool of Radiance, Bard’s Tale, Dragon Wars, many others. I played late into the night, before dragging my weary butt into work at Amoco Oil the next morning. It was an exhausting and emotionally draining lifestyle but, let’s face it, those dungeons weren’t going to clean themselves out. Countless terrified townspeople in tiny electronic villages were counting on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down.
About a year after I bought my Amiga, in March 1992, Electronic Arts published one of the most acclaimed role playing games ever made for that platform: Black Crypt, the first release from Raven Software, future makers of the popular Hexen, Soldier of Fortune, Quake 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warware 3. Inspired by the legendary game Dungeon Master, another famous Amiga title, Black Crypt was nothing less than a vast trap-filled dungeon crammed with monsters, secret passages, hidden switches, and magical loot. The graphics were gorgeous, and the wonderful sound effects — the distant clanking of trapdoors, odd footsteps, and telltale sounds of the teleporters — immersed players like never before, and made you want to play with the sound cranked up and the lights turned down low.
I played the first few levels and was mesmerized. Then, in November 1992, I got married and moved to Belgium, leaving my beloved Amiga behind. I thought about the game many times in the intervening years, as I returned to the States, got a job at a tiny software company, worked on Internet Explorer 1.0, and was at ground zero of the Internet revolution that transformed the entire country. Some time during those turbulent years, my Amiga was moved to the basement, where it quietly sits today, collecting dust.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been on a quest to find and complete Black Crypt. It’s a quest filled with exactly the kind of twists and turns you’d expect for a man determined to find a long-lost crypt, spoken of only in half-forgotten legend. While critics raved, Black Crypt was released when the Amiga was already in decline, and was never successful enough to be ported to any other platform. It vanished quickly, both from store shelves and collective memory. As I search for the right magical tools that will allow me to open the crypt, I’m well aware that it’s not going to be easy.
But that’s okay. After twenty years, one of the things I’ve learned is that true joy isn’t always in the destination. It’s in the journey.
Our most recent Vintage Bits articles were Sword of Aragon, Lordlings of Yore, and Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception.
A young woman makes a dangerous journey across a fantastic desert landscape in a desperate attempt to save her childhood friend:
He heaped down beside me on the sharps of his knees and stared into the murky slime of the pool. “Do you have another lace?”
I felt him there beside me, all along my right side, every thin bone of him. Whenever he twitched, I expected him to rattle like verdy branches. I untied my other sandal and handed over the lace.
“I’m Ro,” I told him.
“Jaks.” He nodded at me. “Your parents are dead?”
“Pretty much dead, yeah,” I agreed. “Buried down in Paupers’ Grave on the corner of B’ihbrid and Nilzi. I live with Great Aunt Irlingard who hates me.”
“I live with my father and sisters,” he said, “in my Mother’s house.”
After a pause, he added, “My Mother is eating my father. Very slowly.”
C.S.E. Cooney’s fiction has been reprinted in Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011 and 2012 editions). Her poems and short stories have appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 3, Apex, Subterranean, Strange Horizons, Podcastle, Pseudopod, Ideomancer, Goblin Fruit, and Mythic Delirium. Her collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes was released by Papaveria Press in May, and her fairytale-with-teeth novella, Jack o’ the Hills, was published by Papaveria in January. She was the recipient of the Rhysling Award in 2011 for “The Sea King’s Second Bride.”
You can see the complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Donald S. Crankshaw, Aaron Bradford Starr, Sean McLachlan, Harry Connolly, and Jason E. Thummel, here.
“Godmother Lizard” is a complete 16,000-word novella of weird fantasy offered at no cost.
Well, as Rabbie Burns would say, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
I had all these wonderful, these glorious, these SUPREME plans to fly from Rhode Island to Chicago on Monday, October 29th, 2012 and spend a few days there among folks I hadn’t seen since I moved last November.
But a little storm named Sandy had other ideas. Oh, I won’t go into the details. They’re not gory enough; besides, it would sound like I’m complaining.
And really, I spent a very pleasant Monday in my attic apartment — which trembled — looking out the windows at sideways trees, contemplating putting on my ruby slippers in case the house fell on me, writing romantic letters by candlelight and reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Enchanted Glass. So that was all right.
But fly to Chicago? See family? Spend Halloween among friends, with soup and bonfire and creepy literature? Drive in caravan to Toronto(ish area) where the World Fantasy Convention was located?
CAPTAIN, IT’S A NO-GO. Halloween has been canceled, repeat, Halloween has been canceled.
However, my story does not end with the storm. No, it is just beginning.
Disclosure: I was provided a free copy of this novella for review.
You may be familiar with Theo Beale as a blogger at Black Gate. Some of his posts have been controversial, but whether you agree or not, they make for interesting reading. So I was looking forward to seeing how his ideas translated into fiction. He’s given me a chance with A Magic Broken, an e-book novella equivalent to about 50 pages, written under the name Vox Day. It is connected to Theo’s novel, A Throne of Bones, but as I haven’t read the novel yet, I can’t say exactly how they’re connected.
There will be minor spoilers in this review, but I’ll try not to give away the ending.
I was interested to see that the world Theo created had the “traditional” fantasy races of dwarves and elves, along with humans. When I first discovered fantasy in the eighties, it seemed that elves and dwarves were staples of the genre — if it was fantasy, it had at least these two demi-human races. In the last twenty years, fantasy has moved away from that, but I must admit that I have a soft spot for them, especially dwarves. So I was happy to see the dwarf, Lodi, as one of the heroes of this story.
The story follows Lodi and the human spy, Nicolas, as they go after the same prize — a kidnapped elven woman — for very different reasons. A great love of elves is not the motivation for either. The dwarves, in particular, have a grudge against elves for a betrayal that is never fully explained in the story. But elves pay a bounty for any of their own who are returned to them, and Lodi is looking for funds. That’s one reason why he’s taken on the task of freeing some dwarven slaves, on behalf of the father of one of them. The reader’s given the impression that Lodi at least feels some compassion for his fellow dwarves. Going after the elf is purely mercenary.
They told us you can’t fill up the Internet, but in September, we thought we’d give it a shot. And so Scott Taylor wrote about his lifetime love of giant robots, Mark Rigney examined the genre ghetto, and Bradley Beaulieu told us about his surprise date with Amber Benson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Pat Rothfuss, and Terry Brooks.
Howard Andrew Jones commented on the World Science Fiction convention and Death and the Book Deal, Sarah Avery told us how to use our proud geek heritage to survive The Scarlet Letter, and Jason Thummel invited you to Self-Publishing 101. And that’s just the top seven articles.
Here the complete list of the Top 40 September blog entries at Black Gate according to you, our readers.