Browsed by
Category: Books

The Top 50 Black Gate Blog Posts in May

The Top 50 Black Gate Blog Posts in May

Comments 0 Comment

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. …

    Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

New Treasures: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

Comments 2 comments

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.

The Opposite of the Uncanny: Wonder and The Night Circus

The Opposite of the Uncanny: Wonder and The Night Circus

Comments 0 Comment

The Night Circus‘Magic’ is an elastic metaphor. Among its many possible uses is that of a descriptor for something that happens in performance, especially live performance: the magic of an actor possessed by a character, the magic of a given moment invested with wonder and remaining in the memory, though inevitably passing away. The magic of stage magicians isn’t in the sleight-of-hand; it’s in the effect on the audience. The related magic of the carnival — the amusement park, the theme park — is a kind of second-person secondary-world magic. You are there. You are in a conjured fantasyland. A circus, in this reading, isn’t about the stink of animals or the scutwork of putting up tents and preparing performance spaces; it’s about the feeling the show tries to inspire. It is, potentially, for some, a venue for magic — transient, susceptible to thinning, but capable of generating wonder.

Which brings me to Erin Morgenstern’s 2011 novel, The Night Circus. Set in the years leading up to and just after the start of the twentieth century, it tells the story of a kind of duel between two magicians, fought by proxy through talented pupils. Both pupils are recruited at a young age, and brought up to compete in the contest knowing nothing about the nature of the duel, not the rules, not how to win, not even who their opponent is. But this much swiftly becomes clear to them: the scene for the contention will be a fantastical circus, Le Cirque des Rêves, travelling through the great cities of the world.

We follow the story through the eyes of both contestants: Celia, the circus’s magician, and Marco, who assists the (non-wizardly) man who puts the circus together — Marco doesn’t travel with Le Cirque des Rêves, but plans tents filled with magical effects. The duel, Marco and Celia soon realise, is based around rival performances: each striving to outdo the other in creating wonder, therefore building a circus, incidentally filled with other performers and obsessed fans, dedicated to art. As the story moves easily back and forth through time, we also get several other perspectives on events, brief chapters constructing an artful, patterned plot that resolves nicely at the climax. The highly-worked plot mirrors the highly-worked nature of the book. The writing aspires to elegance, sometimes perhaps too obviously, relying too much on single-sentence paragraphs, but always displaying a striking visual imagination.

…

Read More Read More

It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

Comments 2 comments

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

Comments 25 comments

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.

…

Read More Read More

New Lamps for Old; Or, Now That I’ve Got the Sorcery, How do I Use it?

New Lamps for Old; Or, Now That I’ve Got the Sorcery, How do I Use it?

Comments 6 comments

HarryLast week I started talking about how we put the sorcery into sword and sorcery novels. People who don’t read fantasy are often mistaken about how its supernatural tropes actually work. In part, they feel that you can’t have any real tension or conflict because there’s magic and magic solves everything. You know, you just wave the magic wand and the problem goes away.* To which I say, “Tell that to the wicked Witch of the West.” Or Harry Potter. Or Gandalf.

I know that this kind of thinking is a lot less prevalent since the success of the LOTR movies, to say nothing of Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones; but it hasn’t gone away completely. And let’s not forget, strange as it may appear to us, there are still more people who haven’t seen these movies (or read the books) than there are people who have.

Before I start talking about plot devices, I would like to address something. Fantasy and SF are frequently described as “plot-driven” as opposed to “character-driven” – where the former means “not-so-good” and latter means “much-much-better.” Sure, there are some badly written books for which that kind of distinction can be made, but in any well-written book, of any genre, character drives plot. Your characters are certain kinds of people. Because they are who and what they are, they make certain kinds of decisions when faced with problems. Those decisions determine what happens next.

Yes, every writer is occasionally faced with the situation where a character simply won’t do what the writer “needs” them to do next. A good writer sits back and figures out a way to deal with that situation – a poor writer “makes” the character act in the needed way.  Hmm. Maybe it’s the writer that’s plot-driven.

…

Read More Read More

An Interview with John Joseph Adams

An Interview with John Joseph Adams

Comments 6 comments
John Joseph Adams
John Joseph Adams

Nearly every fabulous anthology you’ve read in the past ten years was edited by John Joseph Adams.*

OK, OK, that might be a little much. I’ll restate. Nearly every fabulous anthology you’ve read in the past ten years was either edited by John Joseph Adams or Ellen Datlow. Cross my black heart and bet you a Tardis, that statement’s got sturdy stems.**

Today we focus on Mr. Adams – king taste-maker of spec fic. He’s been a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award. When he isn’t busy creating anthologies and being lauded for them, the man publishes Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. Don’t forget about that podcast he does for Wired, The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dude’s busy.

Black Gate honey-badgered our way into a talk with John Joseph Adams about his process and his anthology, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. If you haven’t read it, what are you waiting for? Mad scientist stories by the likes of Austin Grossman, Seanan McGuire, David D. Levine, Carrie Vaughn, Naomi Novik, and Theodora Goss? YES, PLEASE! Seriously, the table of contents is next level, ninja. And have you eyed that COVER? It guts you with glass-tubed-screaming-creature awesome. Go buy it. We can wait.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Color Out Of Time by Michael Shea

Vintage Treasures: The Color Out Of Time by Michael Shea

Comments 13 comments

The Color out of TimeI had a hard time deciding whether a book from 1984 qualified as vintage or not.

Then I realized that back in 1984, Ronald Reagan was still in his first term as president. A little checking also showed that the Nr. 1 song in September 1984 was “Missing You” by John Waite and the top film was Ghostbusters.

The final proof that 1984 can be considered vintage is that I was 23 years old back then. So, yeah, I figure that a book from 1984 qualifies as vintage.

So back in 1984, I stumbled across The Color Out of Time at one of our two bookstores in Newark, Ohio. (As added trivia, Newark is the real world counterpart of Gary Braunbeck’s haunted town of Cedar Hill, the fictitious setting for many of his stories). Anyway, this book was especially special back then, as Cthulhu Mythos-themed fiction was scarce. It wasn’t the thriving sub-genre that it is today. So when you found some you grabbed it, paid for it, and then ran like hell to get home and start reading.

Color is one of my favorite Mythos-related books, and it won’t be leaving my collection any time soon. Its rarity on the collectors market shows that those who have it aren’t in any rush to get rid of it. To me, that says a lot about the quality and re-readability of a book.

Michael Shea is one of those rare writers who don’t have a high output, but everything they do produce is of extremely high quality. I’ve been a fan since the 1970s, when I first read A Quest for Simbilis way back in junior high school.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Philippa Ballantine’s The Order of Deacons

New Treasures: Philippa Ballantine’s The Order of Deacons

Comments 1 comment

The Order of DeaconsI can’t be the only one who really enjoys these low-cost omnibus editions produced by the Science Fiction Book Club.

Omnibus editions have been a tradition for the SFBC for as long as I’ve been a member (don’t ask how long that is). One of the first books I purchased from them — and still one of my favorite SF books, period — was H. Beam Piper’s The Fuzzy Papers in the mid -1970s, containing Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens. The most recent was probably E.E. Knight’s Enter the Wolf, containing the first three novels of his terrific Vampire Earth saga: Way of the Wolf, Choice of the Cat, and Tale of the Thunderbolt.

At the same time as I purchased Enter the Wolf, I also acquired The Order of the Deacons, which collects the first three volumes of Philippa Ballantine’s A Book of the Order series. I’ve been intrigued by these books for a long time, and was impressed by the snippets I read from Geist, the opening book. Here’s the description for Geist:

Between the living and the dead is the Order of the Deacons, protectors of the Empire, guardians against possession, sentinels enlisted to ward off the malevolent haunting of the geists…

Among the most powerful of the Order is Sorcha, now thrust into partnership with the novice Deacon, Merrick Chambers. They have been dispatched to the isolated village of Ulrich to aide the Priory with a surge of violent geist activity. With them is Raed Rossin, Pretender to the throne that Sorcha is sworn to protect, and bearer of a terrible curse.

But what greets them in the strange settlement is something far more predatory and more horrifying than any mere haunting. And as she uncovers a tradition of twisted rituals passed down through the dark reaches of history, Sorcha will be forced to reconsider everything she thinks she knows.

And if she makes it out of Ulrich alive, what in Hell is she returning to?

The omnibus also includes Spectyr and the most recent volume, Wrayth. Philippa Ballantine is also the co-author, with Tee Morris, of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novels (as “Pip Ballantine”) and the Shifted World fantasy series, which began with Hunter and Fox. With luck, those will get a SFBC omnibus treatment too.

The Order of Deacons was published by SFBC in January 2013. It is 787 pages in hardcover, priced at $17.99. There is no digital edition. It is available exclusively to Science Fiction Book Club members; learn more at the SFBC website. Cover art by Karla Ortiz.

Gothic Ambiguity: Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching

Gothic Ambiguity: Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching

Comments 0 Comment

White is for WitchingI picked up Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel, 2009’s White is for Witching, knowing very little about it. I’d read that Oyeyemi was a highly-regarded young writer in ‘mainstream’ literary circles, whose work contained some speculative elements (born in 1984, her first book had been 2005’s The Icarus Girl, followed by The Opposite House in 2007; a fourth book, Mr Fox, came out in 2011). What I found in White is for Witching was an excellent horror story whose intricacy demanded careful attention. It’s sharply-written and tightly-constructed, and if its plot is not immediately clear, the book’s strong enough to encourage careful attention.

The novel moves back and forth between several perspectives, building an unusual structure out of their interplay. The prologue at first borders on nonsensical, but as the tale goes on, things become clear: this is a novel of great ambition, not afraid to possibly bite off too much. If the tone had been slightly different, the sheer flashiness and verve might have been distracting; as it is, the book modulates nicely between voices, building from a normal-seeming reality to an increasing awareness of wrongness, madness, and the supernatural.

The inventiveness of the book rests on a traditional gothic framework. There’s a family saga here and a cursed dwelling. The house, in fact, is given a voice, a personality, and may be the monster, or a monster, moving events. But one of the book’s unusual aspects is the way you’re never quite sure who is the monster, even when you’re given the point-of-view of each character. It’s a book that seems to resist any one possible reading, any reduction to one truth.

…

Read More Read More