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Worldcon Wrap-up

Worldcon Wrap-up

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black-gate-booth
The Black Gate booth. From left to right: John O’Neill, Howard Andrew Jones, James Enge, and part of Donald Crankshaw’s head. Also, the back of Peadar Ó Guilín. Click for bigger version.

I was almost to Chicago last Thursday when I realized I’d gotten so wrapped up in the audio book of The Name of the Wind that I’d missed my turn. Fortunately, I found another way to Interstate 90 and the Hyatt Regency. And when I finally reached the dealer’s room, I was able to lodge a personal complaint with Patrick Rothfuss himself for writing so well that I got distracted.

It wasn’t long ago that I’d arrive at a convention and be surrounded by strangers or literary luminaries I was too nervous to approach. When I turn up these days, there are still a lot of strangers, but there are plenty of familiar faces as well. Before I’d even checked in, I bumped into Tom Doyle, and shortly after registering my complaint with Patrick Rothfuss, I was welcomed by Arin Komins and Rich Warren  to their used books booth, Starfarer’s Dispatch.

Rich showed me a rare Harold Lamb book, then, as I noticed it contained an insert about Lamb I had no knowledge of, he handed me a CD with scans of the material. That was incredibly kind of him. I then signed a complete set of the Harold Lamb books I’d edited and personalized Arin’s copy of The Desert of Souls, which she had liked so much that I gifted her with an ARC of The Bones of the Old Ones.

Purely by chance, I kept down the aisle to the left and came instantly to the Black Gate booth where John O’Neill, (now with beard) occupied a booth surrounded by old but well-cared for paperbacks and stacks of Black Gate magazines. The booth remained a gathering spot for friends, acquaintances, and staff members throughout the convention, which is why the talented Peadar Ó Guilín and Donald Crankshaw were manning the booth with O’Neill. I’d never had the chance to meet Peadar before, but his gentle humor put me immediately at ease. We chatted for a while and then James Enge wandered up with his brother Patrick. While the Mighty Enge was settling into the room we shared, I retrieved a box of The Desert of Souls hardbacks to sell at the Black Gate booth. (We sold ’em all before the end of the convention!)

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2012 Hugo Award Winners Announced

2012 Hugo Award Winners Announced

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Lynne and Michael Thomas show us the 2012 Hugo Award for SF Squeecast.
Lynne and Michael Thomas show off the 2012 Hugo Award for SF Squeecast.

If it’s seemed a little quiet here on the Black Gate blog for the past five days, it’s because many of our staff and bloggers — including John O’Neill, Howard Andrew Jones, Rich Horton, Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Joe Bonadonna, and David C. Smith — have been at Chicon 7, the World Science Fiction Convention here in Chicago, over the Labor Day weekend.

It was a 5-day party and convention, culminating in the Hugo Awards ceremony Sunday night. We’ll have more complete con reports right here in the next few days, but for now here’s the big news: The 2012 Hugo Award winners. Congratulations to all!

BEST NOVEL

  • Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

BEST NOVELLA

  • ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist,’’ Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2011)

BEST NOVELETTE

  • ‘‘Six Months, Three Days,’’ Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011)

BEST SHORT STORY

  • ‘‘The Paper Menagerie,’’ Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)

BEST RELATED WORK

  • The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition, John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls & Graham Sleight, eds. (Gollancz)

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The Top 30 Black Gate Posts in July

The Top 30 Black Gate Posts in July

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best-of-robert-e-howard-grim-lands2Summer months are for sports, gardening, and getting together in the back yard with close friends. But apparently nobody told you people, because you spent the entire month on the computer, reading Black Gate blog posts.

July 2012 was one of the best months we’ve ever had, with solid traffic growth and nearly 70 new articles from writers such as Howard Andrew Jones, Joe Bonadonna, Patty Templeton, Patrice Sarath, D.B. Jackson, and many others. Here are the Top 30 most popular articles and links for the month.

And while I’m instructing you, don’t forget to go outside once in a while, maybe get a little sunshine. It’s good for you.

  1. New Treasures
  2. Under the hood with robert-e-howard
  3. Musing on villainy
  4. Six-sought-adventure-a-half-dozen-swords-and-sorcery short stories
  5. Art-of-the-genre-the-art-of-calvin-and-hobbes
  6. Confessions-of-a-guilty-reviewer
  7. How-I-met-your-cimmerian-and-other-barbarian-swordsmen
  8. Self-sabotage-is-easier-than-writing
  9. Black-Gate-goes-to-the-summer-movies-the-amazing-spider-man
  10. Vintage-treasures-henry-kuttners-the-graveyard-rats
  11. Leigh-brackett-american-writer
  12. Clockwork-angels-iii-hope-is-what-remains-to-be-seen
  13. Genre-prejudice
  14. Edgar-rice-burroughs-mars-part-6-the-master-mind-of Mars
  15. Art-of-the-genre-the-art-of-an-inspired-fake

    16. …

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It Came From GenCon 2012: Young Kid Edition

It Came From GenCon 2012: Young Kid Edition

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Magician's Kitchen
In Magician's Kitchen, players try to get the potions in the correct cauldron, then to light the fireplace. Beware the tripping stones!

GenCon is fun for gamers of all ages, but now that I have young children, I always have a special place in my heart for games that I can play with one or both of them. Given that my oldest is currently 7, though, this puts some pretty massive restrictions on what I can actually play. It has to be age-appropriate in both content level and rule complexity.

This year saw a number of games that caught my fancy in this regard. The charming Magician’s Kitchen, the enchanting Dixit, and, last but certainly not least, the upcoming game Mice and Mystics, which is available now for online pre-order with a significant discount.

Magician’s Kitchen

This is a fun little game where you’re playing a magician’s apprentice who is running around, trying to get potions in the cauldrons and then starting a fire. The trick to this game is that there are hidden magnets that cause your piece to drop the potions. For a more detailed description of Magician’s Kitchen, I recommend my review over at the About.com Physics site, where I even proposed some ideas about how you could use this fantasy game to teach some cool scientific ideas to the young ones.

Magician’s Kitchen is designed for up to 4 players, aged 5 to 15. My youngest son (age 2) really gets enjoyment out of making the apprentices drop their potions. The game is available from Amazon.com and other retailers nationwide, with a retail cost of $29.99.

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The Bones of the Old Ones Inches Closer to December Publication Date

The Bones of the Old Ones Inches Closer to December Publication Date

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bones-of-the-old-onesThis week the most exciting item to arrive at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters, bar none, was the Advance Reading Copy of Howard Andrew Jones’s The Bones of the Old Ones, the sequel to his breakout fantasy novel, The Desert of Souls.

I read The Bones of the Old Ones the instant I could get my hands on it, and it was everything I hoped it would be. A rollicking adventure that follows our heroes Dabir and Asim in a daring quest across the landscape of 8th Century Arabia, Bones is 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:

Combining the masterful fantasy of Robert E . Howard with the high-speed action of Bernard Cornwell, Howard Andrew Jones breathes new life into the glittering tradition of sword-and-sorcery with the latest tale of Dabir and Asim’s adventures. As a snowfall blankets 8th century Mosul, a Persian noblewoman arrives at the home of the scholar Dabir and his friend the swordsman Captain Asim. Najya has escaped from a dangerous cabal that has ensorcelled her to track down ancient magical tools of tremendous power, the bones of the old ones.

To stop the cabal and save Najya, Dabir and Asim venture into the worst winter in human memory, hunted by a shape-changing assassin. The stalwart Asim is drawn irresistibly toward the beautiful Persian even as Dabir realizes she may be far more dangerous a threat than anyone who pursues them, for her enchantment worsens with the winter. As their opposition grows, Dabir and Asim have no choice but to ally with their deadliest enemy, the treacherous Greek necromancer, Lydia. But even if they can trust one another long enough to escape their foes, it may be too late for Najya, whose soul is bound up with a vengeful spirit intent on sheathing the world in ice for a thousand years…

The Bones of the Old Ones will be released in hardcover and eBook by Thomas Dunne Books on December 11. It is 307 pages of non-stop action for $24.99 ($12.99 digital), and gets my highest recommendation. Place your advance order now.

Steamgothic

Steamgothic

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steamgothicSteampunk is a literary subgenre that has also sprouted a lifestyle that encompasses fashion, music, and art based loosely on a philosophy of hands-on, do-it-yourselfness in an age of touchscreen virtual experience. To my knowledge, Sean McMullen’s “Steamgothic” is the first steampunk story that is also about the sensibility of the steampunk community. The narrator is an expert restorer of steam engines whose day job is to customize ultralight aircraft motors. He’s approached by a couple who have possession of an 1852 Aeronaute, a steam-powered aircraft which, had it actually flown, would predate the Wright Brothers by a half-century. He’s invited to participate in a restoration with the intent of proving this possibility. The initiative becomes the subject of a reality TV show called The Aeronauteers, and plenty of drama ensues, much of it more human than mechanically-related, with hidden motivations gradually revealed beyond postulating how if the Aeronaute had actually flown, would history have changed?

Recommended reading, even if you have only a slight interest in how the cogs actually turn. You can find it in the current Interzone.

William Patrick Maynard’s The Terror of Fu Manchu

William Patrick Maynard’s The Terror of Fu Manchu

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the-terror-of-fu-manchu2The Terror of Fu Manchu
William Patrick Maynard
Black Coat Press (248 pp, $20.95 in paperback, $6.99 eBook, April 2009)
Reviewed by Joe Bonadonna

Usually I don’t read stories and novels based on a character created by one author and then later written by another—not if I have already read the original author’s work. Back in the day, I read all the pastiches: Conan, Red Sonja, Bran Mak Morn, Cormac, Kull, Black Vulmea… and have enjoyed many of them. I’m even friends with a few of the writers (and a collaborator with one) who were lucky enough to have been chosen to carry on with Robert E. Howard’s characters. But nowadays there are just too many new characters, too many new stories and novels to read, and time and money seem to be in limited supply the older I get.

All that being said, let me tell you a little bit about William Patrick Maynard’s wonderful novel based on Sax Rohmer’s immortal character, The Terror of Fu Manchu, which was published in 2009 in a beautiful edition by Black Coat Press. I had already heard many great things about Maynard’s novel and was familiar with his writing from the stories he published through Airship27 Productions.

So I decided to read this novel and man, I’m glad that I did. It opened up a whole new world for me, and as a fellow writer, it taught me a few things, too.

Now, I have never read any of Rohmer’s original novels, though of course I’m very familiar with Fu Manchu by way of the Boris Karloff, Warner Oland, and Christopher Lee films. So I did a little digging around and sampled enough chapters of several of Sax Rohmer’s novels in order to familiarize myself with his writing, and to see how well Maynard’s style captures the essence of his work.

Doing that also added to my enjoyment as I immersed myself in Maynard’s version of the Chinese mastermind and one of literature’s greatest villains. However, this being the 21st century and not the early part of the 20th, I thought some of Rohmer’s writing to be a bit old-fashioned and a little slower-paced than we are accustomed to in this fast-moving age of cell phones, CGI, and all things high-tech. But Maynard breathes new life and a touch of modern sensibility in his novel, while remaining faithful to Rohmer’s original vision.

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Writing Business: Web Design

Writing Business: Web Design

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Image created by jameson9101322.
Image created by jameson9101322.

The other day, I shared a tactic I often use to keep myself on task when writing, the McCoy test. In honor of my favorite Star Fleet surgeon, I ask myself if I’m a writer, or a blank, the blank being whatever I’m doing instead of writing (sorting laundry, eating spinach, performing one-handed push-ups, bear wrasslin’). If I have to ask myself that question during my scheduled writing time, then I put down the spinach fork or the bear and get to work.

Well, I haven’t written or revised any of my fiction now for the last week. That admittedly drives me a little crazy, but I’m still a writer because part of the business of writing is business. It took me a long time to finally admit that a writer is a small business owner with a product. I discovered that I have to make the promotion of my work a central part of my job if I’m going to be able to afford spinach and bear wrasslin’ lessons.

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Michael Penkas Promoted to Black Gate Website Editor

Michael Penkas Promoted to Black Gate Website Editor

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michael-penkasWe are very pleased to announce that, effective August 15, Michael Penkas has been promoted to Black Gate Website editor.

Michael Penkas moved to Chicago in 2004 and since then has performed at various open mic events. He previously worked as a copy editor and general assistant for the long-running Twilight Tales book/reading series. His short stories have been published in Midnight Echo, One Buck Horror, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, and Shock Totem, among others.

Michael sold his first short story to Black Gate in 2011. His first blog post for us was a review of Brendan Detzner’s short story collection Scarce Resources in November of 2011; in the last few months he’s reviewed Matt Wagner’s Mage: The Hero Discovered, Ted Naifeh’s Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, and Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, among others.

Michael takes over from C.S.E. (Claire) Cooney, who was promoted to website editor in January of 2011. Claire’s relocation to Rhode Island — and the growing success of her recent books, including How to Flirt in Faerieland & Other Wild Rhymes — has left her less time for other activities. Claire brought enormous energy and drive to the role, and she attracted many new bloggers to our small community. She will be much missed, although she promises to continue to blog for us when time permits.

Michael Penkas has been working hard behind the scenes for the past few months as Assistant Website Editor, bringing a new level of professionalism to the blog. We are pleased and very proud to have him officially take over the reins as our new Website Editor.

For a complete list of the folks responsible for Black Gate, visit our Staff Page.

James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons Arrives

James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons Arrives

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a-guile-of-dragonsThe official on-sale date isn’t until August 24, but I’ve now received multiple reports that James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons has arrived in stores. It’s also available for purchase online. We can’t postpone the party any longer.

James Enge’s first published story “Turn Up This Crooked Way” — the tale that introduced Morlock the Maker to the world — was in Black Gate 8. Morlock appeared in virtually every issue of Black Gate for the next five years; his last appearance was the novella “Destroyer” in BG 14.

James’ first Morlock novel, Blood of Ambrose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010. It was followed by This Crooked Way, which collected a dozen short stories, including all six published in Black Gate, and The Wolf Age. A Guile of Dragons is the fourth in the series, and the first new Morlock book in almost two years. As we reported back in February, it is Morlock’s origin story:

Before history began, the dwarves of Thrymhaiam fought against the dragons as the Longest War raged in the deep roads beneath the Northhold. Now the dragons have returned, allied with the dead kings of Cor and backed by the masked gods of Fate and Chaos.

The dwarves are cut off from the Graith of Guardians in the south. Their defenders are taken prisoner or corrupted by dragonspells. The weight of guarding the Northhold now rests on the crooked shoulders of a traitor’s son, Morlock syr Theorn (also called Ambrosius).

But his wounded mind has learned a dark secret in the hidden ways under the mountains. Regin and Fafnir were brothers, and the Longest War can never be over…

The gorgeous cover is by Steve Stone. Click on the image at right to see the complete wrap-around image in HD.

A Guile of Dragons is 320 pages in trade paperback, published by Pyr Books. It is $17.95, and has an official on-sale date of August 24. But if you find it for sale and whisk it home before then, we won’t tell anyone.