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Arak Issue 2: Sympathy for the Devil?

Arak Issue 2: Sympathy for the Devil?

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Arak_Vol_1_2See that nine-year-old boy spinning the revolving comic-book rack, seeking out the most lurid covers of monsters and aliens and skeletons in battle fatigues. He’ll rifle through his pocket for some quarters to buy the latest issue of Weird War Tales or House of Mystery or Arak, Son of Thunder.

See that forty-year-old man picking up a thirty-year-old issue of Arak, Son of Thunder, its cheap newsprint pages now yellowing, the staples loose, an older but still potent artifact promising strange adventures and magical mayhem in dreamed-of faraway lands.  This relic of boyhood — the feel of the thin paper; the primitive, splotchy look of the four-color panels; even the smell of it — brings back inchoate memories and associations of a simpler, more carefree time when his future was expanding, not shrinking, when everything was out there to be gotten, not closing in to get him.

Strange Tales 90Something as simple as a comic book can be the bridge between the boy and the man, reminding him that he is still the same being, the same conscious self who lived those years and is living these years and lived all the years in between. It is why, even though he doesn’t collect Star Wars figures, he’d love to hold again a 1978 Kenner Snaggletooth (that little guy from the Mos Eisley Cantina), because he can remember the feel of it in his hands, out in the sandbox at recess, when it was one of the most prized possessions in the world (along with Walrus and Hammerhead).

These, then, are our totems, and the old comics our sacred books.

So let’s get to the second installment of Arak, Son of Thunder, shall we?

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Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

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the-mysterious-benedict-society-0316003956-l_5462In the original 2011 edition of Fantasy Out Loud, I took a stab at reviewing the fantasy books I had read aloud to my children. Back in those halcyon days, The Hobbit was front and center.

Some eighteen months later, my boys are older and taller, but not necessarily wiser. Much to my chagrin, older son Corey, aged thirteen as of this writing, no longer wants me to read aloud to him prior to bedtime. On his own, he’s lately polished off all four of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, and is now slamming through Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which he describes as “weird.” (We’ll see what he says when he gets to the end, one of the best reveals in written English.)

But, because Corey is tackling these titles on his lonesome ownsome, this column is necessarily dedicated to eight-year-old Evan, who still can’t get enough of pre-bed daddy readings.

In the last year, fantasy titles we’ve tackled include The Warriors: Into the Wild, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Black Beauty, Summerland, Tuck Everlasting, and Magic By the Lake.

Well, all right: Black Beauty isn’t strictly fantasy, since author Anna Sewell never allows Beauty to actually speak, but for a horse to be so observant, so proscriptive, so downright brilliant?  Sounds like fantasy to me.

Here’s the rub: Evan did not like these books equally. Nor do his growing sense of taste and literary discretion always parallel, sadly, my own. At least two of the books above were volumes I would have preferred to hurl across the room, but in one case especially, despite my jaundice, Evan was enraptured.

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“A Great Place to let Your Imagination Run Wild:” Joe Bonadonna Reviews Rogues in Hell

“A Great Place to let Your Imagination Run Wild:” Joe Bonadonna Reviews Rogues in Hell

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Rogues in HellI’ve always been a fan of the shared-world universe of Thieves World. It’s sword and sorcery at its best: character-oriented, with great plots and stories. Janet Morris has been editing and writing stories for her Heroes in Hell shared-world universe for quite some time now, starting with Heroes in Hell in 1986.

The most recent volume, the twelfth, was Lawyers in Hell (2011, co-edited with Chris Morris). And now, continuing with the series, she brings us Rogues in Hell, which IMHO is the best of the lot.

I love the whole concept behind the series, the cultures, inhabitants and levels of Hell. It’s quite a cool concept, and for writers this is a great place to let your imagination run wild. And I like the use of historical, legendary, and mythic characters.

My favorite of the 22 stories that comprise this anthology is “Colony,” by Bruce Durham. It’s a solid read: well-told, with great momentum to keep things moving and fun, crackling dialog, and prose that engages all the senses. Here, General James Wolfe has recently been resurrected — and once again finds himself in Hell, aboard a Satanic ship searching for an island not unlike Skull island.

The tale is told with plenty of action and humor, and never once breaks that magic spell that keeps you inside the story.

“Which Way I Fly,” by Janet Morris, is a very complex tale, and quite hard to describe. It’s a two-fold story, with Lysicles, an Athenian general, seeking revenge against Alexander of Macedon. With Lealaps the dog, guardian hound of Zeus, Lysicles joins with Xenophon the mercenary, and their demon allies in an epic battle in Hell.

The other part of this story involves Irkalla, Queen of Arali, and her son, Ninazu, who is of the winged Eshi, and is Prince of Ki-Gal. The plot revolves around the Royal House of Demons, and Erra and the Seven Sibitti, the sons of Heaven and Earth, the weapons of the gods who terrorize the dead.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part Five

Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part Five

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The Death of the Necromancer paperbackBlack Gate is very proud to present the final installment of Martha Wells’s Nebula Award-nominated novel, The Death of the Necromancer, presented complete online for the first time. In his SF Site review Wayne MacLaurin wrote:

The setting is a gaslit European continent that has familiar sounding names (Vienne, Lodun) and comes complete with steam engines and revolvers. But magic works and sorcerers walk the streets of the cities, have a great university and hold positions of power at the courts… The plot revolves around Nicholas Valiarde, a disgraced nobleman, consumed with the desire to revenge the wrongful death of his godfather. He also happens to be the greatest thief in all of Ile-Rien (a helpful talent which, I am sure you can see, would significantly help with those late night prowls around your arch-enemy’s estate)…

Valiarde’s revenge starts getting interrupted by a series of increasingly bizarre, unexplainable events. Somebody, or something, with significant magical ability begins to oppose him. More chilling is the obvious taint of necromancy — and necromancy is an art that has been outlawed for centuries…

The Death of the Necromancer is a fabulous read and earns my vote for “Most Exciting New Book of the Summer!”

Martha Wells is the author of fourteen fantasy novels, including City of Bones, The Element of Fire, The Cloud Roads, and The Serpent Sea. Her most recent novel is the YA fantasy, Emilie and the Hollow World, published by Strange Chemistry Books in April. Her previous fiction for us includes “Reflections” in Black Gate 10, “Holy Places” (BG 11), and “Houses of the Dead“ (BG 12). Her most recent article for us was “How Well Does The Cloud Roads Fit as Sword and Sorcery?,” which appeared here March 13. Her web site is www.marthawells.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mary Catelli, Michael Penkas, Vera Nazarian, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

The Death of the Necromancer was originally published in hardcover by Avon EOS in 1998. The complete, unedited text is being presented here; it began on June 2 with the first four chapters here.

Part Five includes Chapters Nineteen through Twenty-Two. It is offered at no cost.

Read Part Five of the complete novel here.

The 2013 Locus Award Winners

The 2013 Locus Award Winners

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The Apocalypse Codex Charles StrossYesterday the Locus Science Fiction Foundation announced the winners of the 2013 Locus Awards at the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle. The winners are:

FANTASY NOVEL

  • The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace)

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  • Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor)

FIRST NOVEL

  • Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

  • Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey)

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The Top 50 Black Gate Blog Posts in May

The Top 50 Black Gate Blog Posts in May

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Federation Commander Klingon BorderWe published 99 posts in the month of May. 99! If I’d known that I would have tossed off one more at the last minute, just to cross that magic 100.

But we focused on quality, not quantity (he tells himself stoically). And our top article for the month — no doubt ably assisted by the release of Star Trek Into Darkness — was a look at the Federation Commander: Klingon Border board game. Number two was also gaming-related: a peek at the Against the Odds historical gaming magazine. Third was our obituary for the talented editor and Thieve’s World author Andrew J. Offutt, followed by Violette Malan’s entirely reasonable question, “Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?” and a guest post by Milton Davis on Sword and Soul fantasy.

The Top 50 Black Gate posts in May were:

  1. New Treasures: Federation Commander: Klingon Border
  2. Explore History Through Tiny Cardboard Counters With Against the Odds Magazine
  3. Andrew J. Offutt: August 16, 1934 – April 30, 2013
  4. Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?
  5. Sword and Soul Revisited
  6. The Hunger Games and Kids: When to Say When
  7. The Kids Are Alright: The Fate of the Novel lies in the Hands of Teenagers
  8. Forrest J Ackerman and the Days of the Do-it-Yourself Anthology
  9. Vintage Treasures: Robert E Howard’s Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors
  10. Remembering Ray Harryhausen Through Ten Great Visual Effects Scenes 

     

    11. …

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New Treasures: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

New Treasures: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

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The Beautiful LandI’d never heard of Alan Averill, but I think that’s because this is a debut novel. I like debuts — they make me think I’m the first to discover an exciting new writer. I get to tell all my friends and be cool. Being cool doesn’t happen to me very often, believe me, so anything that even hints at the possibility gets a closer look.

The Beautiful Land is a tale of dimension-hopping and alternate realities. Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders called it “a great love story disguised as a thriller.” Here’s the book description.

Takahiro O’Leary has a very special job… working for the Axon Corporation as an explorer of parallel timelines — as many and as varied as anyone could imagine. A great gig — until information he brought back gave Axon the means to maximize profits by changing the past, present, and future of this world.

If Axon succeeds, Tak will lose Samira Moheb, the woman he has loved since high school — because her future will cease to exist. A veteran of the Iraq War suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Samira can barely function in her everyday life, much less deal with Tak’s ravings of multiple realities. The only way to save her is for Tak to use the time travel device he “borrowed” to transport them both to an alternate timeline.

But what neither Tak nor Axon knows is that the actual inventor of the device is searching for a timeline called the Beautiful Land — and he intends to destroy every other possible present and future to find it.

The switch is thrown, and reality begins to warp — horribly. And Tak realizes that to save Sam, he must save the entire world…

The Beautiful Land was published by Ace Books on June 4. It is 362 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback ($9.99 for the digital edition).

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

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Strange Chemistry — publishers of such marvelous titles as Martha Wells’s Emilie and the Hollow World, Blackwood by Gwenda Bond, Pantomime by Laura Lam, Christian Schoon’s Zenn Scarlett, and many others — have produced a montage displaying all of their book covers.

Strange Chemistry is known for their gorgeous cover designs, and this montage of eighteen captures all of them. Sort of makes you want to collect them all, doesn’t it? Click on the image for a full size version.

Strange Chemistry Book Button2

We’re supporters of Strange Chemistry and so we’re reproducing it here with pride. Steal this smaller button for your own blog, and check out all of their books at the Strange Chemistry website.

Sterling E. Lanier and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Sterling E. Lanier and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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Hiero-s JourneyTor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode have been reading Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N, the list of fantasy and SF titles in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. This time Tim Callahan tackles Sterling E. Lanier, author of Hiero’s Journey.

It’s a terrific article, but I note that the editors chose Darrell K. Sweet’s cover for the 1983 Del Rey edition to accompany it, featuring our hero next to his mutant giant moose, chatting amiably with a bear. Dudes. (Or Dames, I dunno.) That’s waaay too sedate a cover for Lanier’s classic. The Vincent di Fate cover for the 1974 Bantam paperback (at right) is the one you want. (Click for a much bigger version, showing that toothy dino in all his glory).

It’s… an incredibly enjoyable book. Lanier may not be even close to as famous as Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, or Roger Zelazny or some of the others from Gygax’s list, but Hiero’s Journey constantly surprised me with its inventiveness and slow built toward a satirical climax. It also moves with a pace appropriate to a story about a guy riding a giant moose and unleashing the occasional psychic fury on mutated howler monkeys and other nefarious creatures….

It’s also a book that seems to have informed one of the weirder seemingly-slapped on aspects of Dungeons & Dragons — I’m speaking about psionics, which seemed out of place in the original AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide — and almost the entirety of the later Gamma World game setting. Gygax isn’t credited with designing Gamma World, but James Ward’s original rulebook for Gamma World cites Hiero’s Journey as an influence, and with that game’s post-nuclear-holocaust setting and mutated animals and cities with names like primitive spellings of our own, it’s like playing scenes straight out of Lanier’s novel…

What Hiero and his companions find, as they explore and escape capture from the new breed of machine-friendly beings who don’t seem to recall what trouble technology hath wrought, is a deep and treacherous dungeon. This part is almost pure D&D adventuring, with roving monsters (mutated beasts) and foul threats from below.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s President Fu Manchu, Part One

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s President Fu Manchu, Part One

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President NewspaperPresident DoubledaySax Rohmer’s The Invisible President was originally serialized in Collier’s from February 29 to May 16, 1936. It was published in book form later that year by Cassell in the UK and Doubleday in the US under the title President Fu Manchu. The novel is the first in the series to fictionalize real events with characters based on familiar figures in the US in the 1930s such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. More than one critic has noted that the story may have influenced the classic Cold War conspiracy thriller The Manchurian Candidate.

The novel gets underway with Sir Denis Nayland Smith on special assignment with the FBI in a reworking of the Parson Dan episode from the very first Fu Manchu novel over twenty years before. Rohmer is much more comfortable with his second effort at a third person narrative for the series.

The early chapters do an admirable job of introducing Smith and his opposite number, FBI Agent Mark Hepburn, into the life of the highly controversial radio talk show host, Abbot Patrick Donegal. The celebrated Catholic priest had his manuscript on the foreign power threatening the USA stolen from his studio at the Tower of the Holy Thorn during his most recent broadcast. Abbot Donegal can recall nothing of the theft or even the contents of the manuscript he prepared.

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