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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 7.2 “Hello Cruel World”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 7.2 “Hello Cruel World”

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Dean tries to help Sam deal with his hallucinations.
Dean tries to help Sam deal with his hallucinations.

Following the season 7 premiere, Castiel is taken over by the leviathans that he sucked out of Purgatory. This episode begins with a weakened Castiel-turned-leviathan leaving Dean and Bobby with a promise to deal with them later. He heads out into a lake and dissolves into black cloud of water that erupts out flowing in all directions … right into the local water supply, which allows the leviathans to begin taking over unsuspecting residents.

The vessel of Castiel appears to have not made it through the process, leading me to believe that Misha Collins (the actor who played Castiel) is gone from the show, at least for the foreseeable future. Dean certainly laments him, as he finds his trademark trenchcoat floating in the lake.

Sam is having some problems of his own, of course, as he’s having visions of Lucifer, who’s telling him that he never actually escaped from the cage where he trapped Lucifer and Michael (back at the end of season 5). Instead, Lucifer claims to have been inspiring this delusional post-apocalyptic “escape” as a way of torturing Sam. Dean claims that Lucifer isn’t real, but then that’s also what Lucifer says about Dean, so it’s hardly a compelling argument.

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Goth Chick News: The Doctor Will See You Now… So Run!

Goth Chick News: The Doctor Will See You Now… So Run!

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image003Considering what I get up to in my free time, one would not immediately peg me as squeamish. Rodents? No problem. Dead bodies? Nope! I dissected one in college. I’ve even gone so far as to occasionally baby-sit children who are not yet potty trained and not even flinched.

At least not much anyway.

But even those of us that can claim a stoutness of heart in nearly every situation, the operative word there is “nearly;” because everyone has something that makes their skin crawl.

Now this skeeviness is not to be confused with fear. Fear is saved for terrifying things like clowns. I’m talking about that one thing, rational or not, that makes your stomach roll over and all the blood run out of your face until someone asks you if you need to have a lie down.

For me, this is hospitals.

Before you jump in and try to tell me I’ve got a doctor phobia, I don’t. I’ve never been admitted to a hospital or been seriously ill.

However, I did work in a hospital and the results of this adventure are that even passing someone in the mall wearing a little too much white can make me throw up in my mouth a little.

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Alyx Among the Dandelions: Exploring Joanna Russ and Ray Bradbury

Alyx Among the Dandelions: Exploring Joanna Russ and Ray Bradbury

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My copy looked like this. A far cry from John's vintage original.
My copy looked like this. A far cry from John's vintage original.

I think our book club should have a name. It’s that cool. It consists of our Mighty Robot Overlord John O’Neill, awesomely chill Chicago author Geoff Hyatt, our own Dread Patty Templeton and myself. Four people make for a nicely balanced book club, in my opinion.

Now, we may not meet in the most consistent fashion ever (our two meetings had a wee gap of four months between them), but we do read SPIFFY BOOKS. Or at least… discussable ones.

I mean, we started out with The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, which was written up by Mr. Hyatt back in May. Then we decided to get our claws into some Joanna Russ and vintage Bradbury. Next we’re going to do Fritz Leiber’s Swords against Death and China Mieville’s Iron Council.

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Art of the Genre: A Gaming Family Tree

Art of the Genre: A Gaming Family Tree

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Sir Fleetwood: Basic Edition Fighter, Level 30, Art by Jeff Easley
Sir Fleetwood: Basic Edition Fighter, Level 30, Art by Jeff Easley

I began my journey here at Black Gate telling everyone that I was a gamer, a lifer as I put it, and that’s something I just can’t seem to shake. It all began when I was in junior high school, very early eighties, and with that damnable Red Box… but that isn’t to say that there weren’t thousands of others who did the same things I did concerning the D&D hobby in their school years.

What makes me different is that I still play today, but again, I’m not alone in that either as sites like Dragonsfoot help link like-minded, and yes ‘old’, gamers into an online world where they can still discuss the trials and tribulations of gaming life.

[Note: True story, I was on Dragonsfoot last week and someone asked a question about the module B3 Palace of the Silver Princess. I answered the question and added a bit about the nasty trick in the room in question. Bam! I get jumped all over for not posting a spoiler alert on my answer… for a thirty-year old D&D module! We old gamers take our hobby seriously I guess.]

But back to the point, I salute anyone who can continue a hobby for thirty years. Like most things started in youth most people will simply grow out of such simple passions. For me, however, a deep love of history and art kept me involved in gaming, along with a good deal of chance.

To tell this story, I’m going to provide a history, but for the art side of things I’ve gone to great lengths to recruit all the friends I’ve made in this industry the past two years as a visual guide. To me there is a symbiosis involved, and one cannot truly appreciate the tale without the visual additions, because any good fantasy tale deserves some wondrous illustration.

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14 Questions for S.M. Stirling

14 Questions for S.M. Stirling

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_dsc2558_2I’ve known S.M. Stirling, or Steve as his friends call him, for ten years now. He and I were in the same writers group in New Mexico, called Critical Mass, and I believe I’ve read exactly eight-five kajillion of his words. A rigorous editor and rewriter of his own work, he’d often dwarf the rest of our submissions for the month. It’s been my privilege to watch from this vantage point as he climbs the sales charts, from a well respected niche writer to now a New York Times bestselling one.

Unfortunately, my move from New Mexico to London ended my time in Critical Mass, but not the friendships or the contact, thanks to the miracles of modern technology. Steve’s career continues to move from strength to strength as he fleshes out his Emberverse series. Set in a future in which some of the laws of physics have taken a vacation, humanity must live without electricity, gunpowder, or even steam power. Any attempt to harness these old technologies falls flat. Magic and mythical visions, however, gain strength with each passing year. To me, this a brilliant fantasy premise that makes use of the science fiction conceit, “it could happen someday”. The characters learn to make castles out of concrete and swords out of scrap metal. SCA members find their fluency in Tolkein Elvish and armor making skills useful in a way they never imagined. Wicca becomes a mainstream religion, and a history professor who once worshipped the despots of old becomes one. Whether you’ve actually made your own chain mail, or merely think that’s a cool idea, you should give his books a try.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 5: “The Wizard of Venus”

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 5: “The Wizard of Venus”

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wizard-of-venus-roy-krenkel-frontpieceThe Venus series ends not with a novel, but a novella. Consequently, this will be the shortest entry in my survey of Burroughs’s last series, but I have appended a wrap-up with my final thoughts on the Venus books as a whole.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933), Carson of Venus (1938), Escape on Venus (1941).

Today’s Installment: “The Wizard of Venus” (1964)

The Backstory

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s experiment of writing the previous Venus book as four linked novellas succeeded — commercially, at least — so he forged ahead with a new story in 1941 to start a second quartet. But no magazine purchased “The Wizard of Venus.” ERB moved on to the second story, which he started on 2 December 1941 in his home in Hawaii.

You can see where this is headed.

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Dream a Dream: The Chronicles of Everness by John C. Wright

Dream a Dream: The Chronicles of Everness by John C. Wright

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everness1The Last Guardian of Everness
Tor (336 pages, Sept 2004, $25.95)
Mists of Everness
Tor (352 pages, Feb 2005, $25.95)
By John C. Wright

The Everness of the title is simply a house, a sprawling mansion built on the northern Maine coast.  Everness is a memory palace made real, a house whose features and layout are identical in both the waking and dream worlds, and one of the few gateways where dreams can cross over into manifest reality.  It is a conduit for all the normal dreams that come to humans in their sleep, but it is also a border to be defended.  The run-down seawall of the manifest world is a towering battlement in the Dreaming.

John C. Wright’s Chronicles of  Everness is an epic in two moderately sized volumes dealing with an assault upon our world (the waking world) and a horde of unspeakable evils from our nightmares.  Literally.  The world of the fantastic exists, but only in a vast dream-world composed of a vast population of gods, demons, monsters, fairies, selkies, angels, and supernatural princes.

It’s a difficult pair of books to encapsulate in any reasonable number of words, simply because of the sheer number of ideas, fantastic settings, plot threads, and scenarios Wright manages to stuff between his covers.  On the most basic level, they’re a tale of good versus evil, but that battle is fought in locations ranging from a suburban living room to the towers of an undersea Hell.  The books bite off a lot, and manage to chew through most of it with style.

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The Nightmare Men: “The Ghost-Seer”

The Nightmare Men: “The Ghost-Seer”

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9781840225396Aylmer Vance, agent of the enigmatic Ghost Circle, made his first appearance on the nightmare stage in 1914. The creation of husband-and-wife writing team Alice and Claude Askew, Vance appeared in eight consecutive issues of The Weekly Tale-Teller between July and August. The stories-“The Invader”, “The Stranger”, “Lady Green-Sleeves”, “The Fire Unquenchable”, “The Vampire”, “The Boy of Blackstock”, “The Indissoluble Bond” and “The Fear”-ranged from grotesque to gentle, and are, by and large, of a slower pace than those featuring Vance’s contemporaries, such as Carnacki. Only one of the stories has been regularly anthologized (“The Vampire”), with the rest languishing in obscurity until the release of recent collections by Ash-Tree Press and Wordsworth Editions respectively.

Like John Silence, Vance inhabits an England of soft spiritual influence, where elementals, ancient memories and ghostly manifestations cling to the unseen corners and visit just long enough to inject the mundane with a booster shot of the strange. Unlike Carnacki’s Outer Monstrosities and Malign Visitors, the apparitions that Vance faces are utterly human in their aspect, if not their motivation. Death is no barrier to the desires of the flesh or the dreams of the determined, and it is when these elements intrude on the hard-won peace of the Edwardian mind that the Ghost-Seer must intervene.

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Interzone #236 September-October 2011

Interzone #236 September-October 2011

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374The new Interzone features contains stories by Jason Sanford (“The Ever-Dreaming Verdict of Plagues”), Mercurio D. Rivera (“Tethered”), Jon Ingold (“The Fall of the City of Silver”), Fiona Moore (“The Metaphor”) and Stephen Kotowych (“A Time for Raven”); art by Richard Wagner, Ben Baldwin, Jim Burns and Martin Hanford. There’s also the regular columns, Ansible Link by David Langford, Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe,  and Laser Fodder by Tony Lee; book reviews including an interview with Lavie Tidhar conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller.

You can also download issue 230 for free, containing stories by Aliette de Bodard, Nina Allan, Lavie Tidhar , Patrick Samphire and Tim Lees.

In other news, Locus reports that the Amazing Stories trademark has been acquired, possibly for use as the title for an online magazine. This would be how many times the dead magazine has been resurrected? Although this time, a true resurrection, as it wouldn’t have a physical paper form.

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Fourteen – “Power Men of Mongo”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Fourteen – “Power Men of Mongo”

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flashgordonpowermenofmongopower-men1“Power Men of Mongo” was the fourteenth installment of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally published between April 14, 1940 and January 12, 1941, “Power Men of Mongo” picks up the storyline where the thirteenth installment, “The Ice Kingdom of Mongo” left off with Flash, Zarkov and Katon speeding by rocket-engine to Mingo City in a desperate attempt to rescue Dale. The rocket-engine is hijacked by Logun and the remnants of the Freemen who happily rejoin the battle to overthrow the Emperor of Mongo. They succeed in infiltrating the city, but one of the Freemen, Pital betrays Flash for the reward promised by Ming. The Emperor sets a trap to capture Flash and the Freemen when they meet in a warehouse at night. Dale starts a chemical fire in the warehouse to warn Flash of the danger. Ming leaves her to burn. Unable to remove her from the blazing warehouse, Flash settles for putting out the fire and then making a daring escape.

Flash successfully infiltrates Ming’s royal guard and very nearly succeeds in rescuing Dale, but Ming outmaneuvers him. Hunted by the police, Flash is rescued by Katon who leads him to the underground electrical works where the Power Men of Mongo are employed. Ergon, head of the Lodge of the Power Men has already befriended Zarkov and is eager to have the Power Men join the rebellion against Ming. The Power Men cause a blackout in the palace during which Flash and Zarkov (disguised as Power Men) eventually succeed in rescuing Dale. It is interesting to note that Flash’s Power Man outfit makes him look suspiciously like DC’s superhero, The Flash. Zarkov is given more of a chance to show his heroism. A turning point comes when Flash finds many of his former Freemen working in Ming’s munitions factory. Flash orchestrates a workers’ revolt and has the men turn on their foremen and seize control of the factory.

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