BG Staff – Page 75

New Treasures: Patrice Sarath’s The Crow God’s Girl

Saturday, June 23, 2012 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Patrice Sarath has had an enviable career. Her contribution in Black Gate 4, “A Prayer for Captain LaHire,” the tale of three knights and followers of Joan of Arc who discover the horror a fourth disciple has unleashed, was one of the most acclaimed stories from our early years and was reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy 3 (2003). She edited the anthology Tales From The Secret City in 2007.

She turned to novels in 2008 with Gordath Wood, a book she describes as “hard to categorize:”

It’s fantasy but with only a touch of magic to it. It has romance, but is not a romance (a very different beast). It has a murder-kidnap mystery in it. Basically it has all of the elements of books I like to read. And although everybody has different tastes, I am betting that more than a few of you also like your books the same way I do — shaken and stirred. So if you like fantasy-mystery-romance novels, this one’s for you.

Gordath Wood was well reviewed and spawned a sequel, Red Gold Bridge, in 2009. In 2011 she published The Unexpected Miss Bennet, a Pride & Prejudice sequel which follows middle sister Mary Bennet, the most misunderstood of the Bennet sisters.

Now she’s turned to digital books with a second sequel to Gordath Wood, The Crow God’s Girl. When Lord Terrick’s youngest son is kidnapped, teenage Kate Mosland teams with a mysterious young girl named Ossen to execute a daring rescue… an action with unexpected consequences. As the kingdom stands on the brink of war and Terrick demands Kate submit to a new role, Kate finds that another daring and unexpected action may be the only way to find her true home.

The Crow God’s Girl is 326 pages and was published June 6, 2012. It is available via Amazon Kindle for $3.99.

Chicks Kick Butt

Saturday, June 16, 2012 Soyka Comments 0 Comment

I recently reviewed Chicks Kick Butt over at The SF Site. My reaction was a little less than enthusiastic, certainly less so than fellow Black Gater Alana Joli Abbott’s review. Here’s probably why:

…an anthology called Chicks Kick Butt sounded like something that would appeal to me, even if I’d never read anything by the female authors collected here, nor the editors. But, half the fun of picking up a story collection is discovering the work of people you’ve never heard of, or have heard of but never read.

In this case, however, that’s part of the problem. Some of these stories will no doubt resonate with their fan base. Not being part of them, I’m left to wonder what the fascination is. In part, that’s because I don’t get the whole vampire deal. Though I understand the charismatic kink of the guy (or girl) who drinks your blood and consumes your soul, maybe the first time someone thought of putting a cell phone in the hands of the attractive undead to use their curse for good instead of evil, or at least have highly charged sex, but still have problems just like the rest of us whose throats are unblemished, it was kind of fun. But an entire genre with multiple sub-genres of this stuff, really?

New Treasures: The Fantasy Fan

Wednesday, June 13, 2012 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Last month, I got a great e-mail from Black Gate blogger Barbara Barrett. In between her entertaining comments on The Avengers, Arthur Machen, and re-discovering comic books, was this fascinating tidbit:

I’ve started reading The Fantasy Fan — a fan’s tribute to Hornig. It’s a book containing a compilation of all the Fantasy Fan magazines… I’m only on the first zine but I’m amazed how closely the format matches that of Black Gate. Is this a *coincidence*? The first zine was published in September 1933 and it’s chilling because I keep in mind Robert E.Howard was still alive at that point… the breadth and depth of authors, articles and stories are wonderful. It’s definitely a page out of Living History.

Among fantasy collectors The Fantasy Fan is legendary. The world’s first fanzine dedicated to weird fiction, it lasted for 18 issues, from September 1933 to February 1935. Its contributors included some of the most famous names in the genre — H.P Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Bob Tucker, Julius Schwartz, Forry Ackerman, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Eando Binder, and many others — and its young editor Charles Horning so impressed Hugo Gernsback that he hired him to edit Wonder Stories in 1933, at the age of 17. While at Wonder Stories he published Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and many other famous pulp stories.

Barbara’s reference to a compilation of The Fantasy Fan was so intriguing I had to track down a copy for myself, and it finally arrived last week. Copies of the original fanzine are so rare that I’ve never even seen one, so to hold a facsimile reprint of all 18 issues in my hands was rather breathtaking. The man behind the book is Lance Thingmaker, and here’s what he says in his introduction:

These fragile gems were so unique. They were simple little fanzines, but were filled with stories, articles and comments by history’s most important weird fiction writers and fans. I felt like I was looking back in time… Since they are extremely hard to find, it seemed many others probably never had the chance to check out the world’s first weird fiction zine. I wanted to make it happen.

The end product is a top-notch piece of work. The magazines are presented in facsimile format, with painstaking restoration of the original barely legible pages, hand printed and hand-bound in hardcover by Thingmaker. The book is over 300 pages, including the complete text of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” which was being serialized when the magazine folded. It is limited to 100 copies and sold for $50. Thingmaker’s next project, due to ship later this month, is a facsimile reprint of all four issues of the ultra-rare pulp Marvel Tales.

You can find a detailed breakdown of the contents of The Fantasy Fan here. My thanks again to Barbara for alerting me to this before it sold out!

Apex #37 and Interzone #240

Saturday, June 9, 2012 Soyka Comments 0 Comment

apexmag0612 June’s Apex Magazine features ”Winter Scheming” by Brit Mandelo, “In the Dark” by Ian Nichols and “Blocked by Geoff Ryman (who is interviewed by Maggie Slater), as well as Seanan McGuire’s poem, “Wounds.” Ken Wong provides the cover art. Nonfiction by Tansy Rayner Roberts and editor Lynne M. Thomas round out the issue.

Apex is published on the first Tuesday of every month. While each issue is available free on-line from the magazine’s website, it can also be downloaded to your e-reader from there for $2.99. Individual issues are also available at Amazon and Weightless.

467_large2 A version for the Nook will also be available in the near future. Twelve issue (one year) subscription can be ordered at Apex and Weightless for $19.95; Kindle subscriptions are available for $1.99 a month.

The May–June issue of Interzone has stories by Vylar Kaftan, Ray Cluley, Lavie Tidhar, Elizabeth Bourne and Tracie Welser. Cover art is ‘The Hanged Man’ by Ben Baldwin, the third of his covers commissioned for 2012.

The issue also includes all the usual suspects: “Ansible Link” by David Langford (news and obits); “Mutant Popcorn” by Nick Lowe (film reviews); “Laser Fodder” by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); along with book reviews by Jim Steel and others, and an interview with Nancy Kress.

Interzone alternates monthly publication with sister dark horror focused Black Static, published by the fine folks at TTA Press.

Yes, The New Yorker

Saturday, June 2, 2012 Soyka Comments 1 comment

This week’s issue of The New Yorker (yes, The New Yorker!) is a science fiction issue, featuring fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Diaz, among others.

Here’s the complete table of contents. Now you can have your science fiction fix and feel literary about it at the same time.

A Wiscon Reading Report: The Best in Upcoming Fantasy

Wednesday, May 30, 2012 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

Last weekend I drove to Madison, Wisconsin, for Wiscon, one of the best SF conventions in the Midwest. My travel companions were four young women, and the two-hour drive from Chicago was filled with enthusiastic discussions of My Little Pony, how to cook kale, the most satisfactory sexual positions, and who that hot-looking agent was. When I wasn’t driving I sat in the back and kept my mouth shut.

You can learn a lot about life by keeping your mouth shut. For example, I learned I definitely need to check out My Little Pony.

I learned some important stuff at Wiscon, too. Wiscon has some pretty heavy panels, with titles like Intersectionality and Feminist Community, Dogmatic Rationalism, and Performing Katniss in Print and On Screen: Gender Performativity and Deconstructing Reality TV in The Hunger Games.

No, I didn’t learn what any of those things meant. The first thing I learned at Wiscon was: Don’t volunteer to be on panels. It’s like picking my teeth with a golf club — it’s painful, and it makes me look stupid.

But the second thing I learned was: Wiscon has the best reading program on the continent. And if you’re not listening to talented authors reading their work, you’re wasting your precious hours here on Planet Earth.

So I packed my hours with as many readings as I could. At the last two Wiscons I simply followed the brilliant C.S.E. Cooney — the Queen of Wiscon, and her most gifted reader-poet — as readings seemed to spontaneously spring forth wherever she wandered. But this year she was in Ottawa giving a command performance at the most prestigious venue in the country, Canada’s National Art Centre, so we were forced to rely on our own devices. When there weren’t any readings, my driving companions and I simply created our own. In the process we were introduced to some of the hottest new writers on the fantasy scene, and several really terrific new, upcoming, or wholly undiscovered SF and fantasy novels.

Below is a list of the best of the best.

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Charlene Brusso Reviews The Cloud Roads

Sunday, May 27, 2012 Bill Ward Comments 8 comments

the-cloud-roads The Cloud Roads
Martha Wells
Night Shade Books (300 pp, $14.99, February 2011)
Reviewed by Charlene Brusso

I always look forward to reading anything by Martha Wells, because she always gives me something marvelous and new–and The Cloud Roads doesn’t disappoint.

Moon is an outsider. He’s drifted all over, living with one tribe or clan or family after another, and never met another soul like himself. Because Moon has a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. With a little concentration he can alter his body from something that appears human and “normal” to a scaly humanoid with big dragon-like wings and sharp, retractable claws. Orphaned as a child, he’s been on his own ever since, never quite fitting in, and never staying long. It’s not safe to stay, because if anyone found out what he was, what he could become, they’d be certain to think he was one of the vile, noisome Fell, creatures from nightmares who live to hunt and consume humankind.

Moon isn’t Fell. Hes’ not sure what he is. And Moon doesn’t want to be alone. That’s just how things are.

Then he meets another shapeshifter: Stone, someone like himself. From Stone, Moon learns about the Raksura, who shift between groundling and dragonish shapes and live in courts run by Queens. There’s a long list of hierarchical rules to learn, but Moon is welcome to come back with Stone to Indigo Cloud Court and become one of its warriors. More than welcome, in fact.

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Clarkesworld #68 plus PKD and Gnosticism

Saturday, May 26, 2012 Soyka Comments 2 comments

cw_68_300 The May issue of Clarkesworld is currently online. Featured fiction: “Prayer” by Robert Reed, “Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop” by Suzanne Church and “All the Things the Moon is Not” by Alexander Lumans. There are also audio versions of all three stories, read by Kate Baker. Non fiction by Aletha Kontis, Jeremy L.C. Jones and Elizabeth Bear. The cover art is by Jessada Suthi.

All of this is available online for free. However, nothing is really free. The magazine is supported by “Clarkesworld Citizens” who donate $10 or more. There’s also a Kindle edition.

One personal reaction to Bear’s very funny essay, “Another Word: Dear Speculative Fiction, I’m Glad We Had This Talk”: I agree that Lenny Bruce didn’t get funnier when he got angrier (his drug problems certainly didn’t help), but I found George Carlin to be more interesting the angrier he got. Maybe he wasn’t quite as funny, but his anger certainly resonated with me. Sometimes having your “face pressed down into a trough of human misery until the bubbles stop” is necessary to remind people that life is not a television sitcom. At least the ones who haven’t already drowned.

Someone else who got less interesting when he started taking himself too seriously (and, once again, the drugs didn’t help) was Philip K. Dick. Simon Critchley examines Dick’s metaphysical worldview as expressed in Exegeiss, a posthumously published series of philosophical 133948681 ramblings. While I tend to think all this stuff really is the result of a bad acid trip, Critchley as a professor of philosophy for the most part keeps a straight face. Some of you may laugh out loud not only at the source material, but the attempt at exegesis.

We last covered Clarkesworld with issue #67.

Aqueduct Press releases The Moment of Change, an Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry

Monday, May 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I’ve received word this morning that contributor copies of Aqueduct Press’s The Moment of Change have started to arrive, and the book is now available for order on their website.

The Moment of Change is an anthology of feminist speculative poetry with an absolutely stellar line-up of contributors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Jo Walton, Delia Sherman, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Phyllis Gotlieb, Yoon Ha Lee, Nisi Shawl, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft, and Nicole Kornher-Stace.

It also includes two members of Team Black Gate: two poems by Amal El-Mohtar, “Pieces” and “On the Division of Labour,” and a long poem by our website editor, C.S.E. Cooney, “The Last Crone on the Moon.” The anthology is edited by Rose Lemberg, and she’s posted the complete Table of Contents here. In her introduction she writes:

In these pages you will find works in a variety of genres — works that can be labeled mythic, fantastic, science fictional, historical, surreal, magic realist, and unclassifiable; poems by people of color and white folks; by poets based in the US, Canada, Britain, India, Spain, and the Philippines; by first- and second-generation immigrants; by the able-bodied and the disabled; by straight and queer poets who may identify as women, men, trans, and genderqueer.

I had the pleasure of listening to C.S.E. read “The Last Crone on the Moon” last year at the monthly Top Shelf Books Open Mic here in Chicago, and it is worth the price of the book alone.

Rose Lemberg and many of the contributors will be reading from The Moment of Change at Wiscon in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend. I’ll be there, and I’m looking forward to it.

The Moment of Change is 174 pages in paperback. The cover art is by Terri Windling. It sells for $20.

William Patrick Maynard’s The Terror of Fu Manchu

Thursday, May 17, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

We’re a talented group here at Black Gate. Every time I drop a pencil someone on staff publishes a book. Last week I spilled a pencil case, and Scott Taylor announced a nine-volume fantasy series.

I was especially pleased to get my hands on the first novel by Friday blogger William Patrick Maynard, The Terror of Fu Manchu, published in 2009 by Black Coat Press. Bill was authorized to continue Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers and the second volume, The Destiny of Fu Manchu has just appeared, also from Black Coat Press.

I met Bill for the first time at the Windy City Pulp and Paper show two weeks ago here in Chicago, and found him to be an intelligent and entertaining conversationalist. I was fortunate to have the chance to ask him about his novels, and I was treated to an enthusiastic and fascinating lecture on the Boxer Rebellion, the psychology of Yellow Peril novels, and the uniquely global evil of Fu Manchu.

It was one of those moments when you wish you had a recorder. After listening to Bill I was more intrigued than ever to read his novels, and I wished I had a way to share his infectious enthusiasm with our readers.

Eventually I asked Bill to recreate what he told me as best he could in an e-mail message, to post here.

He graciously complied, and here’s what he sent me.

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