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Art of the Genre: When Great Art is actually Bad Art

Art of the Genre: When Great Art is actually Bad Art

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Amazing isn't it? Is originality dead, or is someone in Hollywood smarter than we give them credit?
Amazing isn't it? Is originality dead, or is someone in Hollywood smarter than we give them credit for?

I had a question proposed to me in my Saturday blog here on Black Gate concerning the multiple covers of Howard Andrew Jones’s The Desert of Souls. I’ll repost the question here.

I see a lot of photo-manipulation covers and hybrid photo/3D/digital painted covers, and I feel that a lot of them actually look pretty cheap and nasty. If I was Howard Andrew Jones, for example, I would be very happy with the first The Desert of Souls cover (100% digitally painted, stirring, full of life and movement, etc) and very unhappy with the second cover (a mish-mash of photo elements and, I don’t know? 3D elements? What’s going on with those faces? It almost looks like a romance novel cover.) What do you think about this trend?

I’m going to break this down into two different answers. The first will deal with The Desert of Souls, and the second on the current state of science fiction/fantasy covers in general.

The question immediately reminded me of Hollywood and their great marketing machine. In 1990 Paramount Studios released Hunt for the Red October. The movie cost roughly $30 million to make and grossed $200 million worldwide, which is to say it was an enormous success. The movie poster featured a shadowy submarine, Sean Connery’s face, all in black and red, and the title in white lettering.

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Strange Horizons April 16, 2012

Strange Horizons April 16, 2012

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This past week’s issue of Strange Horizons features a story by Andrea Kneeland. “Beneath Impossible Circumstances”:

Analise wants to have a baby. A real baby. I tell her that if we had a baby together, it would be a real baby. It would be a real baby and it would have parts from both of us, and it would be a real person made from both of our genes, and that I want parts of myself in a child just as much as she wants parts of herself in a child. When I tell her these things, she turns on the faucet or runs the vacuum or opens the refrigerator door wide and sticks her head in like she’s looking for something so she can pretend not to hear me and I can pretend not to see how damp and salted her reddening cheeks are, and on days like these, when I tell her things like these, the bed sheets between us stay cool and dry and I remind myself of the virtue of silence and I bite my lip to draw blood so that in the morning, when I move my mouth, the pain will remind me not to say a thing.

Other features include poetry by Virginia M, Mohlere, commentary by Adam Roberts on the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke shortlist and a review of Lev Grossman’s The Magician King by Bill Mingin.

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Clarkesworld #67

Clarkesworld #67

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cw_67_300The April  issue of Clarkesworld is currently online. Featured fiction: “Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill, “Draftyhouse” by Erik Amundsen and “The Womb Factory” by Gary Kloster.  Non fiction by Brian Francis Slattery, Jeremy L.C. Jones and Danile Baker.  The cover art is by Steve Goad.

All of this is available online for free; there’s even an audio podcast version of the Crosshill story read by Kate Baker. However, nothing is really free. The magazine is supported by “Clarkesworld Citizens” who donate $10 or more. There’s also a Kindle edition.

We last covered Clarkesworld with issue #66.

Rich Horton and Sean Wallace explore War and Space

Rich Horton and Sean Wallace explore War and Space

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warandspace1Rich Horton has been a Contributing Editor for Black Gate since…. you know, I’m not even sure I remember. When we were in Kindergarten, maybe.  Or possibly since that drunken weekend when we assembled Goth Chick in our old laboratory. Good times, good times.

There was a day when I thought Rich and I would conquer science fiction together. We were two freelance journalists telling it like it is. When Tor started printing books with ink made in Singapore sweat shops, we blew the lid off the whole thing. Sleep didn’t matter, friendships didn’t matter. Only the truth mattered. And hot babes. Babes were on us like… like… well, not really. But anyway, we were unstoppable. The world was ours for the taking. At least, that part of the world that didn’t include women.

Then Rich met Sean Wallace, and Sean offered him something I never could: an actual wage. Rich dropped me like a hot potato for a career as one of the hottest anthologists in the field, and never looked back. Last time I saw him he was driving a Lamborghini Diablo and talking to J.K. Rowling on his cell.

I confronted Sean on the front steps of the Prime Books skyscraper in ’06. I was in a snarling rage, and threatened his life. He punched me in the nose and made me cry.  Then he bought me a hot chocolate and a bus ticket back to Chicago, and that was that.

That was nearly a dozen acclaimed anthologies ago, including three volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, my favorite of the annual survey anthologies. Now Rich and Sean have teamed up for War and Space: Recent Combat, a reprint anthology collecting some of the best tales of space warfare from the last few decades, including “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359” by Ken MacLeod, “Art of War” by Nancy Kress, and “The Political Officer” by Charles Coleman Finlay. This isn’t your typical military SF collection however, as Sean makes clear in a question to a reader in the comments section of his blog:

Will you still like it even if it’s not, well, in the vein of Baen military sf? I have to admit that we went a bit broader with this, and while we love it a lot, I just hope people aren’t expecting something a bit more militaristic?

Coming from a guy with a mean right hook, that sounds great to me.  War and Space will be released on May 2 by Prime Books. It is $15.95 for 384 pages in trade paperback.

Apex Magazine #35

Apex Magazine #35

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apexmag0412_mediumThis month’s Apex Magazine is a special international themed issue, featuring ”Love is a Parasite Meme” by Lavie Tidhar  (who is interviewed by Stephanie Jacob) and  ”The Second Card of the Major Arcana” by Thoraiya Dyer; the classic reprint is “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”  by Rochita Loenen-Ruuize.

Raul Cruz provides the cover art. Nonfiction by Charles Tan and editor Lynne M. Thomas round out the issue.

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. 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.


Interzone #239

Interzone #239

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443_largeThe March-April issue of Interzone features new stories by Chris Beckett (”The Gates of Eden”), Steve rasnic Tem (”Twember”), Jon Wallace (”Lips and Teeth”), Suzanne Palmer (Tangerine, Nectarine, Clementine, Apocolypse”), Matthew Cook (“Railriders”) and Nigel Brown (“One-Way Ticket”); cover artwork by Ben BaldwinJacob Boyd (“Bound in Place”); “Ansible Link” genre news and miscellanea by David Langford; “Mutant Popcorn” film reviews by Nick Lowe; “Laser Fodder” DVD/Blu-Ray reviews by Tony Lee; book reviews by Jim Steel and other contributors.

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

Clarkesworld Issue #66

Clarkesworld Issue #66

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cw_66_300The March  issue of Clarkesworld is currently online. Featured fiction: “Sunlight Society” by Margaret Ronald, “The Bells of Subsidence” by Michale John Grist and “From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit” by Gary Kloster.  Non fiction by E.C. Ambrose, Jeremy L.C. Jones and Neil Clarke.  The cover art is by Sergio Diaz.

All of this is available online for free; there’s even an audio podcast version of all three stories read by Kate Baker. However, nothing is really free. The magazine is supported by “Clarkesworld Citizens” who donate $10 or more.

We last covered Clarkesworld with issue #64.

Rolling Cities and Ship Building: A Talk with Frederic S. Durbin

Rolling Cities and Ship Building: A Talk with Frederic S. Durbin

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Philippe de Champaigne's Vanitas Still Life with Skull
Philippe de Champaigne's Vanitas Still Life with Skull

In a Frederic S. Durbin story, you’re as likely to get a chattering, boxed skull secreted away on an enormous mobile city as you are to get an ominous underground world directly beneath a funeral parlor. Durbin writes dark stories with a light touch. His detailed settings come close to becoming characters themselves. Though his audience is mainly a younger crowd, his fantasy novels can be enjoyed by all. All, meaning me. I like his books. You should too. Don’t even get me started on his short stories. I might squeal all over you.

Durbin was born in Illinois, taught English and creative writing in Japan for twenty years and now resides in Pittsburgh, PA. His most recent novel, The Star Shard, was released in February.

Black Gate had a sit down and discovered the secrets of Frederic S. Durbin’s soul. Ish. OK. That’s a lie. More so we booktalked, but if you ask him nicely on his GoodReads or blog, “Mr. Durbin, what secret(s) does your soul hold?”… he might tell you. And if he does, report it back to the big BG so we get the scoop first. In the meantime, here’s Black Gate’s talk with Frederic S. Durbin.

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Lords of Waterdeep: D&D’s Newest Board Game Is a Hit

Lords of Waterdeep: D&D’s Newest Board Game Is a Hit

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lordswaterdeepLords of Waterdeep (Amazon)
Wizards of the Coast ($49.99, March 2012)
2-5 players
Ages 12+
Approximate Play Time: 1 hour

Note: As I write this, Saturday March 17, there’s a 37% discount on the game’s pre-order over at Amazon.

Let’s get this out of the way: Of all of the fantasy board games I’ve ever forced my wife to play for review purposes (or any other purpose for that matter), this is by far her favorite. In her words, “I felt completely engaged throughout the whole game. Usually there’s some strategy here and there, but I had to plan out each and every move in this game.”

So, it’s a keeper!

With that spoiler out of the way, on to the review…

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A Time Capsule from 1983

A Time Capsule from 1983

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space-gamer-66Last month I wrote a lengthy blog post about Sword & Sorcery, a lavish fantasy board game published by SPI over three decades ago. In the comments section the topic soon turned, as it often does with us old-time gamers, to TSR’s purchase of the bankrupt remnants of SPI in 1983. Christian Lindke, a long-time reader, had some particularly astute observations:

While it is easy to blame TSR for what they did to SPI — and they deserve a lot of blame — one should keep two things in mind. First, when they purchased SPI it was in dire financial straights and would likely not have survived. Second, they had hoped to keep SPI’s staff, but those staff members refused to work for TSR — for varied reasons — and left to form the Victory Games studio over at Avalon Hill… A massive resurgence of publishing of SPI games happened under Lorraine Williams. We would never have seen the SPI monster TSR World War II game, or Wellington’s Victory, Sniper (including BugHunters), let alone the 3rd edition of DragonQuest…

There is an excellent issue of Fire and Movement, printed by Steve Jackson Games, that goes over the purchase of SPI.

I asked Christian if he could track the issue down, and he did more than that. He wrote an extensive and excellent blog post on the topic, and in a good bit of investigative reporting he tracks down a series of articles in Steve Jackson’s Space Gamer magazine that reveal more extensive details.

But it was this bombshell at the bottom of Christian’s article that I personally found much more startling.
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