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The Stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax Mark a Milestone

The Stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax Mark a Milestone

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mst3kHuluWhen you watch a film synched up to RiffTrax, do you still picture the silhouettes of wisecracking ‘bots Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot in the little Satellite-of-Love screening room of your mind?

And if not a smidgen of that question made sense to you, this post probably is one you can skip (unless you’re a completist, and have thus far read every Black Gate post to date. In which case, we should probably know who you are. Has anyone read every single BG blog all the way back to day one?).

This report goes out to fellow Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) fans out there in the blogosphere. On July 9 of this year, on special assignment from BG’s Midwestern outpost in Minnesota, I attended a live screening of the RiffTrax presentation of Sharknado 2: The Next One. Two fan-buddies who share my adoration of Michael J. Nelson and his crew accompanied me on this outing (readers here will be familiar with one of those friends: none other than sometime BG scribe Gabe Dybing). In a bona fide movie theater we would share with other diehard fans an experience usually relegated to our laptops and living room televisions.

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The Worst AD&D Spell Of All Time

The Worst AD&D Spell Of All Time

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Arcana UnearthedSo there we stood, surrounded. Demons in all directions, converging fast – and we’re not talking garden variety patsies. Even for our major league party, the future looked bleak, bloody, and painful. On the plus side, we had our pizza in place, our dice at the ready. Beers and sodas hovered with popped caps and bated breath, anticipating action.

“Initiative!” cried the DM.

We each rolled. One of the demons, which just happened to moonlight as a spell-caster, moved first — and what did that pipsqueak no-good blackguard cheat of a demon cast our way?

Chain Lightning.

At fifteenth level.

Two hours later, with the pizza cold and stiff, the beers stale and the sodas flat, we finally finished adjudicating the effects of that single spell. We were in shock, and grumbling to beat the band. The DM, equally weary and perplexed, said, “Okay. Still first round. Who gets to take the next action?”

That I no longer recall, but this I know: we won the battle, and the demons lost. So did Chain Lightning. We made a solemn pledge that very day to never again allow that spell to eclipse the glory of our triumphant campaigning. Banned it was, all but ripped from the pages of the rulebook. And good riddance, too.

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Enter the Grimdark Magazine Battle-off Competition

Enter the Grimdark Magazine Battle-off Competition

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Grimdark Magazine Battle-off Competition

Grimdark Magazine is getting some great notices among fans of heroic fantasy — including from our own Fletcher Vredenburgh, who said in his review of the first three issues, “From a swords & sorcery perspective, the biggest — and potentially most interesting — new publication out there is Grimdark Magazine.” Grimdark editor-in-chief Adrian Collins contacted us this morning to let us know of a new contest sponsored by the magazine, open to heroic fantasy writers of all kinds. Here’s the deets:

We’re running a competition over at Grimdark Magazine that may interest some of Black Gate‘s followers — both readers and writers. It’s a battle-off, where self and small published authors enter a 1K word excerpt featuring a battle scene, the readers then vote on a top 7 and a panel of judges then decide on the top 3 to win awards.

It will run for a couple of months between mid August and the end of October… There are some pretty awesome prizes up for grabs, including a Kindle HD, signed hardcovers, plenty of paperbacks and ebooks, editing services and cover art services.

This is one of the most unusual writing contests I’ve heard of, and I highly approve. So sharpen your pens, all you aspiring adventure fantasy writers. This is your chance to show that you have the chops to deserve wider attention — and maybe win something that could help your new novel really stand out. Get the complete details here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: By Crom – Are Conan Pastiches Official?

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: By Crom – Are Conan Pastiches Official?

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ConaPas_Ace2Today’s post is actually about Robert E. Howard’s Conan, but (in a stunning surprise) it’s got some Sherlock Holmes at the foundation. No, Conan never met the great detective…

Hopefully you’ve been checking in on our summer series, Discovering Robert E. Howard. There are plenty more posts coming, so stay tuned. While I very much like Howard and his works, I came late to his stories and I’m certainly no expert.

There is one area I’ve found…curious, which relates to the “official” status that seems to be accorded to the authorized pastiches written since Howard’s death. It’s quite different in the Holmes world.

There are sixty official Sherlock Holmes tales. Period. Fifty-six short stories and four novels (more novellas, really), all penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and published during his lifetime. There are two Holmes short-shorts, “How Watson Learned the Trick” and “The Field Bazaar” and there is no disputing that they were written by Doyle. But they are not included (by anyone, I believe) in the official count.

You, oh enlightened one, know that the Doyle Estate tried to include a sixty-first story, found among ACD’s papers by a researcher, but it turned out to have been written by Arthur Whitaker.

To quote myself, from my first Solar Pons post here at Black Gate:

Parodies are stories that poke fun at Holmes. But the more serious Holmes tales, those that attempt to portray Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective to varying levels, are called pastiches. Just about the earliest ‘serious’ attempt at a Holmes copy was by Vincent Starrett, who wrote “The Adventure of the Unique Hamlet” in 1920.

Doyle’s son Adrian, sitting at his father’s very desk, produced The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (half of the stories were co-written with John Dickson Carr, who would quit mid-project).

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro Tip From Lawrence Watt-Evans

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro Tip From Lawrence Watt-Evans

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Lawrence Watt-Evans-smallAffectionately known as LWE (pronounced Louie) by many of his friends and fans, Lawrence Watt-Evans is the second author in our series of Pro Tips — wit and wisdom from professionals across the Spec Fic field. (You can find our first one, from Laura Anne Gilman, here.)

LWE is the author of more than four dozen novels and short story collections and more than a hundred short stories, in addition to comic books, poems, and more than 150 non-fiction articles. He works mostly in the fantasy genre, but has numerous science fiction and horror publications, too. He sold his first novel at the age of twenty-four, and has been a full-time writer ever since.

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started writing/ publishing?

I wish I had known that the publishing business is always changing. Always. Publishers come and go, genres rise and fall, formats change. When I broke in, mass-market paperbacks sold on newsstands were where the money was, fantasy was a poor stepchild of science fiction, and there were a dozen or so major fiction publishers and no one else mattered.

Then national chain bookstores blossomed, the old paperback distribution system collapsed, fantasy surpassed SF in sales, horror boomed and then busted… and that was before the internet, Amazon, ebooks, print-on-demand, self-publishing, etc. I learned more about publishing history and discovered that the system I had thought had dominated forever only came into its own in the 1950s.

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Weirdbook Returns in October…

Weirdbook Returns in October…

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WB31
Front Cover of Weirdbook #31
Back Cover
Back Cover of Weirdbook #31

“It’s alive! Alive!!!!!”

Weirdbook is coming back to life. New editor Doug Draa has done an immense job of resurrecting Paul Ganley’s classic weird fantasy mag.

Weirdbook #31 will be the first issue since 1997, and it’s slated for an October release from its new publisher Wildside Press.

On the left is a look at the front cover by Dusan Kostic. Click for a bigger version.

The back cover (right) will be a piece by the great Stephen E. Fabian, who did all the covers for the original WB run.

This issue is sort of a bridge between the magazine’s past and its future.

Here’s a look at the Table of Contents for Weirdbook #31.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Wally Conger on “Rogues in the House”

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Wally Conger on “Rogues in the House”

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BG_RoguesComicOne of the cool things about being an active member in the Sherlock Holmes community is that I run across a broad spectrum of people with other common interests outside of the world’s first private consulting detective. Wally Conger and I have had back and forth conversations on versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and other topics.

We may not agree on season three of Sherlock, but we do both enjoy reading Conan. So, I asked him to review “Rogues in the House,” which I knew he had just read. He was kind enough to do just that…

By the time Robert E. Howard launched into writing “Rogues in the House” in January 1933, he already had 10 Conan tales under his belt. He was very comfortable with the character.

In fact, upon publication of the story in the January 1934 issue of Weird Tales, Howard wrote to fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith:

Glad you liked ‘Rogues in the House.’ That was one of those yarns which seemed to write itself. I didn’t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it in just as it was written. I had a splitting sick headache, too, when I wrote the first half, but that didn’t seem to affect my work any.

I wish to thunder I could write with equal ease all the time. Ordinarily I revise even my Conan yarns once or twice, and the other stuff I hammer out by main strength.

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Hugh Hancock and Why Geeks Love Lovecraftian Magic

Hugh Hancock and Why Geeks Love Lovecraftian Magic

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Carcosa
If you like the short film, you might enjoy his — NSFW– Carcosa Lovecraftian web comic.

How come geeks like Lovecraftian magic so much?

Writing on Charles Stross’s blog, Hugh Hancock, Machinima guru turned live-action filmmaker and web comic — um — maker(?) who — disclaimer! — has been a mate since he threw me through a pile of chairs, thus curing the suspected RSI in my shoulder — thinks it’s because Lovecraft pings the things that horrify geeks:

What if too much knowledge really was bad?

What if there were no life hack to divert the apocalypse?

What if the Inquisition were right?!!?

Obviously he’s onto something. It is all pretty horrifying and creates a wonderful double bind; we readers simultaneously want the protagonist to satisfy our curiosity, and at the same time want them to flee the horrid fate that will result.

However, I think there’s more than Horror at work.

Before I go on to explain why, go and watch his short Lovecraftian film HOWTO Demon Summoning so we have a common reference point (and because it’s funny and horrific, and makes surprising use of CGI given Hugh is an indy filmmaker).

 

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Ancient Worlds: Greek Comedy and the Surprising Origins of SFF

Ancient Worlds: Greek Comedy and the Surprising Origins of SFF

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3304_-_Athens_-_Stoà_of_Attalus_Museum_-_Theatre_mask_-_Photo_by_Giovanni_Dall'Orto,_Nov_9_2009Laughter is one of the defining traits of higher primates, ourselves included. While I’m pretty sure my dog can grin, I have yet to hear him giggle. His attempts at humor are pretty weak, too. But for those of us in the opposable thumbs club, humor is a near-universal. What makes someone laugh may vary from culture to culture and across time, but our love of laughter is a constant.

This was as true of the Ancient Athenians as it is of us. Our word, comedy, is in fact a Greek word that contains the ideas of partying or festival-going and poetry. And the Greeks loved comedy. Today I want to talk specifically about Old Comedy, which you probably know (if you know it at all) from the works of Aristophanes.

Aristophanes would have gotten along well with Jon Stewart. Old Comedy was highly topical: it was deeply political, satirical, and fond of poking fun at the powerful. It made use of mythological themes and characters, but unlike our surviving tragedies usually took place in a relatively modern, if highly fanciful, setting. The plots were absolutely ludicrous, and the jokes made pointed reference to contemporary politics. So much so that, should you choose to read any old comedy (and you should: it’s worth the effort), I’m going to break with my usual custom and suggest you get a highly annotated, solid, scholarly edition to do so. In most genres, I advise people to go with readability. But with Aristophanes, you’ll need the footnote that explains that a certain individual was famous for his blowjobs rather than his active performance for anal sex if you want to get the joke in the backyard scene of Ecclesiazusae.

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Looking at The Dukes of Hazzard as a Fantasy Story

Looking at The Dukes of Hazzard as a Fantasy Story

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Dukeseps13132yuI’m not a cranky old man, but I generally consider most stuff shown on network TV after my 15th birthday to be not worth the effort to press the buttons on the remote… or worth the effort to get cable.

But I had a lot of really good experiences with TV before I turned 15. The choices were pretty limited, but the more I talk to my 10 year old, the more I realize there were oases of TV magic in my youth.

Battlestar Galactica in 1978. Buck Rogers in 1980. M.A.S.H. for my entire youth. Knight Rider. Starblazers. Battle of the Planets. Most Saturday morning cartoons. Manimal… hahaha. Just kidding. That was cancelled for good reason.

Wanting my son to have some magic oases too, I found myself unqualified to offer him anything other than what I had when I was young. And recently I was musing about our Friday nights, and what I might have been doing 30 years earlier, and I realized that for a good five years, I’d watched The Dukes of Hazzard every Friday at my grandmother’s house. I decided to try to relive some of my childhood while offering something new to my son’s.

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