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The Art of Magic

The Art of Magic

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Growing up, Halloween was my favorite holiday. Christmas is great for the presents and Thanksgiving for the feast, but Halloween has a connection with the supernatural that always enthralled me. Ghosts, demons, undead, witches — these were (and are) my meat and mead.

When it comes to fantasy stories, magic is what calls to me. In some stories, the magic is subtle. In others, it’s loud and proud. Here are some of my favorite uses of magic in fantasy.

The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan: Jordan created one of the most detailed magical systems that I’ve ever read. The powers of the Aes Sedai are rich and varied, and they all originate from an elemental structure that feels both familiar and innovative. Especially in the early books, where the younger characters are learning how to access their power, the unfolding of this magic coincides very well with the physical exploration of Mr. Jordan’s story world. Also, it must be said that Jordan is adept at describing magical battles between wielders of massive power, something that trips up many other authors.

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Ancient Worlds: Remembering the Dead

Ancient Worlds: Remembering the Dead

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An ancient funeral. Weird thing #1: they would hire professional mourners, in case any of the deceased’s family members weren’t sufficiently upset for the required moaning, wailing, tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth.

Maybe it’s just where I live, but this seems like the perfect time of year to celebrate a holiday dedicated to spooky things. The days are short and cold, the trees are almost bare, and the nights are long and dark. And cold.

Did I mention I live in Wisconsin?

From here, it’s a slide into six months of winter and we all turn into Starks, wandering around looking darkly at the sky and muttering, “Winter is Coming.” So to us, it seems like this is the almost inevitable time to celebrate the memory of the dead. The popularity of Halloween has led many of us to see this as a natural and widespread association.

It may strike us as surprising then that this association is nowhere near universal. The origins of our Halloween are murky at best and probably syncretic, tying together British Isles traditions with Catholic veneration of the saints.

So when did the Greeks and Romans celebrate their dead?

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Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Part 2 of 4

Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Part 2 of 4

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Tales of the Wold Newton Universe-smallThis month marks the release of Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, a new anthology from Titan Books that collects, for the first time ever in one volume, Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton short fiction, as well as tales set in the mythos by other Farmerian authors.

The Wold Newton Family is a group of heroic and villainous literary figures that science fiction author Philip José Farmer postulated belonged to the same genetic family. Some of these characters are adventurers, some are detectives, some explorers and scientists, some espionage agents, and some are evil geniuses. According to Mr. Farmer, the Wold Newton Family originated when a radioactive meteor landed in Wold Newton, England, in the year 1795. The radiation caused a genetic mutation in those present, which endowed many of their descendants with extremely high intelligence and strength, as well as an exceptional capacity and drive to perform good, or, as the case may be, evil deeds. The Wold Newton Universe is the larger world in which the Wold Newton Family exists and interacts with other characters from popular literature.

To celebrate the release of the new anthology, we’ve asked the contributors to discuss their interest in Philip José Farmer’s work and to tell us something about how their stories in the book specifically fit into the Wold Newton mythos.

For today’s installment, please join us in welcoming authors Octavio Aragão and Carlos Orsi.

Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey,
Editors, Tales of the Wold Newton Universe

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Five Vampires

Five Vampires

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janosI suspect it’s not uncommon for a person to look back on the era of his earliest days and deem it the “perfect” time to have been a child; I certainly do. I regularly tell my own children how grateful I am to have been a kid in the 1970s. I say this not out of any particular love of plaid, shag carpet, or disco, but for two rather different reasons.

Firstly, ’70s were obsessed with the weird, the occult, and the apocalyptic. From The Exorcist to Soylent Green to In Search Of, there was clearly something in the air during that decade, something that had a profound effect on my youthful psyche and planted the seeds for many of my lifelong preoccupations. Secondly, the 1970s (at least as I experienced them in suburban Baltimore) was a time when contemporary television programming couldn’t keep up with demand, resulting in lots of reruns of older shows and movies being shown to plug holes in the schedule. The happy consequence of this for me was that I got to see tons of stuff made before I was born – including lots of great horror movies.

My imagination was thus founded on an unholy combination of old school horror films and Me Generation shlock – and I mean that in the best possible way. As a bookish kid with macabre sensibilities (owing perhaps to my being born two days before Halloween), the 1970s provided me with the raw materials needed to fuel my dreams and nightmares for many years to come. This is nowhere more apparent than when I look back on the various vampires I first encountered in those heady days.

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The Great Captains by Henry Treece

The Great Captains by Henry Treece

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They were great men, yet to see them only as men, stripped of their doom-driven greatness, is to represent them on too trivial a scale. To draw them as massive heroes only would be to recreate them as inhuman cyphers.

from the preface to The Great Captains

The Great Captains (1956) is Henry Treece’s brutal and gripping version of the King Arthur story. Treece has pruned away the romantic embellishments that have obscured the old legend and returned it to the historic time and place in which it might really have happened. Excalibur isn’t buried in an anvil, but a tree stump, and Camelot isn’t a fairy tale castle, but a restored Roman town. Instead of an anachronistic quasi-medieval setting, the story unfolds during the bloody chaos of the waning days of Roman Britain decades after the last legionaries sailed for Gaul.

Britain’s darkest hours came in the Fifth Century AD, when waves of Germanic invaders swept across the English Channel. Stripped of all Roman soldiers in 407 AD, the people of Britain were forced to fend for themselves. In the end, they failed. None of the 1,000 or more prosperous Roman-style villas survived the Saxon onslaught. London, once rich and home to 60,000 people, was abandoned. Starvation and violence covered the land. Yet there were moments of hope.

In the middle of the Fifth Century AD, Ambrosius Aurelianus, a soldier of noble Roman ancestry, rallied the people and raised an army. For years, he fought off the invaders. His success spurred on the British and a generation after his death, the Saxons were routed at the Battle of Badon, securing another generation of peace for the land. According to the Historia Brittonum, written around 828 AD,

The twelfth battle was on Mount Badon in which there fell in one day 960 men from one charge by Arthur; and no one struck them down except Arthur himself.

This is the first historical mention of Arthur. The Historia goes on to document twelve great battles waged by Arthur, dux bellorum (war leader), against the Saxons and their allies. From this, all the great legends of Arthur Pendragon, Once and Future King, arise. And though many historians today have come to doubt he existed, Arthur lives on as the chivalric hero who leads the righteous against a seemingly overwhelming enemy.

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Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

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original.0I missed nearly all the seminal pop culture of my youth. When in eighth grade Andy H. asked me which I liked better, AC/DC or Pink Floyd, I honestly couldn’t answer the question. I was also much too tongue-tied to ask Andy if he’d ever heard of Doctor Who, which I’m quite sure he had not.

Anyway. One of the major events that I missed was Planet Of the Apes. True, Planet is from 1968, and I was only born in ’67, but even so, kids at my school through at least my sixth grade year sported Planet Of the Apes lunch boxes, thermoses, backpacks, and t-shirts. Planet Of the Apes (whatever it was) was cool.

My hipper-than-I friends informed me that Planet regularly played in re-runs on TV, and of course there was the short-lived spin-off series made specifically for the telly (1974). How was it that I had missed all this? Simple: I was building dams in the tributary streams of the Olentangy River, using whatever was handy: stone knives and bearskins, that sort of thing. I knew better than to explain.

Now that I’m older than Methuselah, or at least rapidly catching him up, I figured it’s time to see precisely what I’d missed.

And you know what?

If it weren’t for the execrable presence of Charlton Heston, it’s not half bad.

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The Weird of Oz Wishes You a Happily Horrifying Hallowe’en

The Weird of Oz Wishes You a Happily Horrifying Hallowe’en

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Don’t fear the Reaper. — Blue Oyster Cult

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Visitors to our house on Hallowe’en are greeted by a presence.

Oh, I’ve loved being spooked, terrified, creeped out since I was knee-high to a werewolf and not much bigger than Bigfoot’s foot.

Okay, sometimes I chickened out; it got too much for me.

I have a vague recollection of my Grandpa Yontz, who died when I was very young, taking me into one of those spookhouses somewhere along the side of the road. We got a few feet into the dark, narrow entry hall. Up ahead to our right, glowing heads hung suspended in air (recalling it decades later, and now being something of a scholar of spookhouses, I can exactly identify the effect: polystyrene mannequin heads, the kind used to display wigs, strung up on fishing line beneath an ultraviolet light). Even then, I knew they weren’t real, but that’s as far as I got. I just couldn’t bring myself to plunge further into that black unknown. I ignored my grandpa’s reassurances, pulled my hand away from his, and darted back for the entrance.

Within a year or two, a real horror visited us: my grandpa was snatched away in a traffic accident on a narrow road coming back from a camping trip on the Mogollon Rim. In the face of reality, pretend horrors aren’t so scary after all, and I never again turned away from a spookhouse or a scary movie.

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Try a Free Cold and Dark Adventure

Try a Free Cold and Dark Adventure

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Cold and Dark-smallLast week, I talked about a promising new RPG of science fiction horror, Cold and Dark, from Chronicle City Games.

I say promising because any time an RPG includes stats for alien beasts that scuttle around remote asteroids, deadly secrets from ancient star-faring civilizations, and the threat of genocide through an infectious madness, you know you’re in for some great gaming.

Shortly after the post went live, I heard from Angus Abranson at Chronicle City:

The article on Cold & Dark is great, thanks. The only thing I’ll add is that (yesterday) we posted up a free 65-page Quickplay for the game which also includes an adventure so people can ‘try before they buy.’

You can download the Quickplay via our webstore here.

Woo-hoo! What makes a great game even better? Free stuff! Thanks, Chronicle City. You’re all right.

It’s our duty to pass this news along to you, naturally. Because we look out for you. Especially in regards to great games and free swag.

Now you have no excuse not to check out Cold & Dark. I expect a steady stream of reader reports on epic gaming sessions. Especially ones in which you neglected to bring along sufficient ordinance and your team ran out of ammo somewhere in a dark corridor far, far below the surface. Those are my favorite.

Good hunting, people.

Black Gate Online Fiction: Dark Muse by David C. Smith

Black Gate Online Fiction: Dark Muse by David C. Smith

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Dark Muse-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Dark Muse, the new noir thriller from David C. Smith.

Jack Mathis, a bright young book editor in Chicago, has found the next great American writer. Yet this anonymous genius is inspired to create in the darkest way imaginable: he picks his victims carefully, murders them gruesomely, then gives them new life in the best stories Jack has ever read.

The writer knows all about Jack. All about his wife. Knows everything. He has more stories in mind, too. Jack wants them. What is he willing to do to get them?

David C. Smith is the author of twenty-two novels, primarily in the sword-and-sorcery, horror, and suspense genres, including The Witch of the Indies (1977), Oron (1978), The Sorcerer’s Shadow (1978), and The West is Dying (1983).

David is the co-author, with Joe Bonnadonna, of Waters of Darkness, also available from Damnation Books. Read a free excerpt here.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by David Evan Harris, Janet Morris and Chris Morris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Peadar Ó Guilín, Vaughn Heppner, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others, is here.

Dark Muse was published by Damnation Books on December 1, 2012. It is 206 pages and currently available in trade paperback for $17.99, and $5.95 for the digital version.

Read a complete sample chapter of Dark Muse here.

Publishing and the Luck of Timing

Publishing and the Luck of Timing

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Thermopyale Last Stand of the 300-smallAlthough publishers don’t like to admit it, there is a large amount of luck involved in the sales of most books. No one really knows when (or even how) a book is going to catch fire in the public imagination and charge to the top of the bestsellers list. Publishers can help. They can advertise; they can push to get the book on the shelves, but they can’t make the public buy it.

In many ways, Osprey Publishing relies less on luck than most publishers. Since most of our books are based around long-running series that have an established following and fan base, we can generally predict, with some degree of accuracy, how well a given book will do. That said, sometimes we are surprised. Personally, I’m still baffled as to why Warships of the Anglo-Dutch Wars 1652-74 has sold so well. And sometimes, we are just lucky…

A few years ago, we published Thermopyale: Last Stand of the 300 right about the same time the movie 300 came out. Sales for the book went off the charts. Not too long after, we released Zombies: A Hunter’s Guide right about the time The Walking Dead first hit television screens. Another instant hit.

This leads to the obvious question: Why don’t we time our books to come out at the same time as big budget movies or television shows? Oh, we’ve tried. And we’ve been burned. In the book trade, it is necessary to announce your book at least a year before publication if you want it seriously considered for placement in the stores. Now, movie releases are usually announced even sooner than that, but they often don’t stick to their release dates.

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