Books – Page 547 – Black Gate

Vintage Treasures: The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi

Friday, December 28, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

It’s a great time to be a Golden Age comics fan. If you’re interested in high-priced, archival-quality reproductions of 1950s science fiction and horror comics, there are plenty on the market.

This isn’t one of them.

The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi, in fact, is a tiny marvel of affordable comics nostalgia in a sea of overpriced hardcovers. It makes no pretense of offering complete issues, or highly collectible authors and artists, or re-colored anything. But for less than the price of a crummy SF paperback, it offers 112 full-color pages of gonzo Golden Age greatness from an assortment of impossible-to-find comics.

Opening with an 8-page introduction by Tim Pilcher, covering the history of 50s sci-fi comics in surprising detail, The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi contains five complete tales, including Explanation, Please! No. 1 Falling Frogs, and Out of the Unknown No. 1: Creature From the Crater. In between are glorious covers from Outer Space, Forbidden Worlds, Adventures Into the Unknown and others, depicting crashing alien spacecraft, stolen moons, and skyscraper-destroying dinosaurs.

There are even full-color reproductions of the classic advertisements that mesmerized me as a kid, including the “Jet” Rocket Space Ship — over six feet long, with levers that work, for only $2.98! — and the 98-cent Sensational Televiewer.

The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi was published on April 1, 2012 by Ilex Gift. It is $5.95 for 112 pages, and is one of a set of Little Books from the same publisher, all edited by Tom Pilcher. The others cover Vintage Horror, Sauciness, Crime , Combat, Terror, Romance, and Space. Collect them all!

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Beginner’s Mind in Hobbiton

Thursday, December 27, 2012 Sarah Avery Comments 8 comments

The students in Intro to Poetry read scared. They started the semester twitchy as rabbits. Poetry made them feel stupid. No, let’s be more specific: being asked to explain poetry made them anticipate humiliation. Their baggage from their high school English classes led them to expect, reasonably or not, that they had to be experts already, that they would be chastised in front of one another and punished with bad grades for not already knowing as much as their teachers did. They felt like newly licensed drivers trying to merge onto a freeway from a stop sign.

Before they could get anywhere with poetry, they had to embrace being beginners. Not to accept that they were beginners–some of them weren’t–but deliberately to become beginners. I didn’t want them to perform their expertise in my classroom. I wanted them to read with curiosity. I wanted them to encounter each poem we read together with questions like What is this? What does it do? How am I experiencing it? I urged the students to wait until they had read with beginner’s eyes, at least once through, before asking questions like What is my judgment upon this?

Reading with some approximation of the Buddhist concept of beginner’s mind is something I’ve been fairly good at since I first began teaching–it’s almost impossible to comment usefully on student writing without it–but the Intro to Poetry course forced me to model this kind of reading so assiduously that I have found it difficult ever since to read creative work, or even watch movies, in the mode of a judge in the sentencing phase of a criminal trial.

I watched Peter Jackson’s first installment of The Hobbit in an intermittent state of beginner’s mind, and my experience of it was so different from that of the film critics whose reviews I have seen since, one might think I’d seen a different film.

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Buy The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones for Just $1

Monday, December 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

the-desert-of-souls ‘Tis the season for great book deals.

Hot on the heels of the one-day $1.99 sale for the digital version of A Prince of Thorns, and the giveaway of Theo’s A Magic Broken (still available if you act fast) comes word that Head of Zeus, the British publisher of Howard Andrew Jones’ The Desert of Souls — the first installment of The Chronicles of Sand and Sword — is making the digital version of the novel available for just $1.

The special pricing is available only until January 7th. On his website Howard also writes:

Head of Zeus has cooked up a pretty nifty series introduction for The Chronicles of Sand and Sword. I like it so much I wish I’d thought of it:

The Chronicles of Sand and Sword: Baghdad, AD 790. Caliph Harun al-Rashid presides over the greatest metropolis on Earth, ruler of an empire that stretches from China to Byzantium. His exploits will be recorded in Alf Layla or, as we know it, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

But The Thousand and One Nights are silent on the deeds and adventures that befell two of the Caliph’s subjects: the renowned scholar Dabir ibn Kahlil, and his shield and right hand, Asim el Abbas. For their story, we must turn to The Chronicle of Sand and Sword…

For complete details and links to sites with the discounted pricing (including Amazon.co.uk and Waterstone’s) visit the Head of Zeus website here.

A Magic Broken is Available Free Today at Amazon.com

Monday, December 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Merry Christmas from Amazon.com! For today only, the e-retail giant is offering Theo’s digital book A Magic Broken as a free download for Kindle readers.

In his review Donald S. Crankshaw wrote:

You may be familiar with Theo Beale as a blogger at Black Gate…. I was looking forward to seeing how his ideas translated into fiction. He’s given me a chance with A Magic Broken, an e-book novella equivalent to about 50 pages, written under the name Vox Day. It is connected to Theo’s novel, A Throne of Bones, but as I haven’t read the novel yet, I can’t say exactly how…

When I first discovered fantasy in the eighties, it seemed that elves and dwarves were staples of the genre — if it was fantasy, it had at least these two demi-human races. In the last twenty years, fantasy has moved away from that, but I must admit that I have a soft spot for them, especially dwarves. So I was happy to see the dwarf, Lodi, as one of the heroes of this story… The story follows Lodi and the human spy, Nicolas, as they go after the same prize — a kidnapped elven woman — for very different reasons…

One character who came across very well was the city of Malkan itself, where the story took place. Malkan is an independent city, built by dwarves, but mainly occupied by humans. The humans acknowledge no outside lord but money, and the merchants control the city more than the nobility, whom they raise and overthrow at will. As we see Nicolas and Lodi deal with slavers, prostitutes, and powerful merchants, we start to see life in the city at ground level. It’s a city where life is cheap, even for the powerful, and where secrets are plentiful. It’s the sort of city that’s teeming with stories, and it’s almost a shame that the characters are in such a hurry to leave.

Download A Magic Broken free here. But hurry — the offer is only good today.

New Treasures: David C. Smith’s The Fall of the First World

Sunday, December 23, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Thursday I had the pleasure of attending a reading by the distinguished David C. Smith here in Chicago.

Dave’s accomplishments in the field of modern sword & sorcery are legendary. With Richard L. Tierney, he published the Bran Mak Morn novel, For the Witch of the Mists (1978), and six volumes in the Red Sonja series from 1981 to 1983. He wrote one other novel based on the works of Robert E. Howard: The Witch of the Indies (1977), featuring the pirate Black Terence Vulmea.

On his own, Dave produced the highly-regarded story cycle set on the imaginary island-continent Attluma, beginning with Oron (1978) and The Sorcerer’s Shadow (1978). All told, the Tales of Attluma include five novels and eighteen short stories and novelettes written between 1971–1984. In total, Dave has written twenty-one novels in a career spanning over three decades and still going strong — including the occult thriller Call of Shadows, released by Airship 27 in March of this year.

Dave entertained the audience with tales of the heady days of his early career, when young writers named Karl Edward Wagner, David Drake, Richard L. Tierney, and Charles R. Saunders were breathing new life into sword & sorcery — and when he shared an agent with Wagner, Frank Herbert, and an up-and-coming young horror writer named Stephen King.

But the highlight of the reading was the excerpt from The West is Dying, the first volume in The Fall of the First World, a fantasy trilogy originally published in paperback by Pinnacle Books in 1983. Unavailable for nearly thirty years, these exciting volumes are finally being returned to print by Borgo Press. A fantasy version of War and Peace, the saga follows the conflict between two great empires, bringing together legendary historical characters and Western myths including the tale of Helen of Troy. As a king offers his beautiful daughter as a prize, another pursues only endless war… and so the First World begins to collapse.

The West is Dying was published by Borgo Press on November 29, 2012. It is 422 pages in trade paperback priced at $19.99. The cover art is by Dusan Kostic. It is available directly from Borgo Press or through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.

Prince of Thorns Available for $1.99 at Amazon.com

Saturday, December 22, 2012 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

For today only, Amazon.com is offering the Kindle version of Prince of Thorns, the opening volume of Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Empire trilogy, for just $1.99.

In a Black Gate blog post shortly before publication, Mark Lawrence wrote:

The book I’ve written, Prince of Thorns, has layers, rather like an onion (or an ogre). I hope it can be enjoyed as a violent swords and sorcery romp. Get your teeth into it though and there’s more there – it’s as much about our prince as it is about what he does. This is a damaged person and although the story is told in his words without a hint of excuse, there are lessons to be learned between the lines. It wasn’t until tonight though, desperately scratching at the subject in the effort to come up with something to say in this blog post I was invited to supply, that I discovered another layer, deeper still…

In Prince of Thorns the main character has suffered a personal disaster. It’s not the ‘evil threatens the village’ of classic fantasy. It’s not injured pride or a looming darkness in the east. He’s been screwed over, a tsunami has rolled through his life and left devastation. And the book is in large part his reaction to that. It’s about where he takes his anger and where it takes him.

It’s only through the lens of half a decade and more that I see I was writing out… not a version of my own experience, but a mapping of the emotions.

If you’re the kind of reader who has to think long and hard before parting with $1.99, by all means check out the generous excerpt we presented here last October.

The sequel, King of Thorns, was released in August 2012, and the final volume, Emperor of Thorns, is scheduled for August 2013. We have several of Mark Lawrence’s short stories in inventory, and the first, “Bulletproof,” will appear as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction line early next year.

Prince of Thorns was published by Ace in August 2011. The 336-page hardcover edition is still in print, priced at $24.95. You can buy the Kindle version here.

Thanks to Awsnyde for the tip!

Vintage Treasures: The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Friday, December 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

William Hope Hodgson is almost unique among his contemporaries: his most famous novels, The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, have been continuously in print for the better part of the last hundred years. H.P. Lovecraft described The Night Land, first published in 1912, as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”

But Hodgson wrote many other highly-respected works of horror and dark fantasy, and here his publication history is a little more spotty. Perhaps chief among them are the tales of Carnacki The Ghost Finder, a supernatural detective who came up against horrors that would have made Van Helsing blanche. I’m pleased to say that the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural have not let us down, and in 2006 they brought the complete collection back in print in a handsome and inexpensive edition.

“‘I saw something terrible rising up through the middle of the ‘defence’. It rose with a steady movement. I saw it pale and huge through the whirling funnel of cloud – a monstrous pallid snout rising out of that unknowable abyss. It rose higher and higher. Through a thinning of the cloud I saw one small eye… a pig’s eye with a sort of vile understanding shining at the back of it.”

Thomas Carnacki is a ghost finder, an Edwardian psychic detective, investigating a wide range of terrifying hauntings presented in the nine stories in this complete collection… Encountering such spine-chilling phenomena as ‘The Whistling Room’, the life-threatening dangers of the phantom steed in ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ and the demons from the outside world in ‘The Hog’, Carnacki is constantly challenged by spiritual forces beyond our knowledge. To complicate matters, he encounters human skullduggery also. Armed with a camera, his Electric Pentacle and various ancient tomes on magic, Carnacki faces the various dangers his supernatural investigations present with great courage.

Josh Reynolds explored the career of Carnacki The Ghost Finder in greater detail as part of The Nightmare Men series last year.

We’ve covered ten volumes in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural series so far:

The Crimson Blind and Other Stories by H.D. Everett
Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster
The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson
The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey
The Power of Darkness — Tales of Terror, by Edith Nesbit
Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance, The Ghost-Seer
The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths edited by Mark Valentine
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead
Sherlock Holmes: The Game’s Afoot, edited by David Stuart Davies
The Casebook of Sexton Blake, edited by David Stuart Davies

There’s plenty more to come, so stay tuned.

The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson was published in 2006 by Wordsworth Editions. It is 191 pages in paperback priced at $6.99. There is no digital edition.

A Brief History of Comics, Animation, and Video Games with Christy Marx

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 Emily Mah Comments 4 comments

This title is not the least bit tongue in cheek. Many of you might not think you’ve ever heard of Christy Marx.

Think again. She has had a long career developing content for a wide array of media and is rightly considered one of the most powerful and influential women in video games and comics.

Currently employed at Zynga, she began developing content for video games before the title “video game developer” even existed. Her first games were for Sierra Online, including Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail and Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood.

She’s also written scripts for animated shows including GI Joe, He-Man, and Jem and the Holograms (remember them? Christy created them.) She’s also written scripts for live-action TV shows including Babylon 5 and Twilight Zone.

But she got her start writing for comics, bringing strong women to life frame by frame with works that include The Sisterhood of Steel.

Her current series, Amethyst, will have another issue out in the next few days.

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Weird Tales Meets Planet Stories in Space Eldritch

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

I stumbled on this little beauty today while browsing the latest Kindle releases on Amazon.

The cover art by Carter Reid is spectacular, and the contents — seven original novelettes and novellas of Lovecraftian pulp space opera — look pretty darn promising too. Contributors include Huge and Nebula nominee Brad R. Torgersen, Schlock Mercenary-creator Howard Tayler, and Michael R. Collings (The Slab, The House Beyond the Hill). Here’s the complete TOC:

Foreword, by Larry Correia
“Arise Thou Niarlat From Thy Rest,” by D.J. Butler
“Space Opera,“ by Michael R. Collings
“The Menace Under Mars,” by Nathan Shumate
“Gods in Darkness,” by David J. West
“The Shadows of Titan,” by Carter Reid and Brad R. Torgersen
“The Fury in the Void,” by Robert J. Defendi
“Flight of the Runewright,” by Howard Tayler

The whole package looks professional — although the lack of an editor credit admittedly diminishes the effect somewhat. Still, I’m willing to give this one a chance.

You can sample the first thousand words of each tale at Cold Fusion Media.

Space Eldrich was published on December 14, 2012 by Cold Fusion Media. It is 248 pages in trade paperback for $13,99; and is also available as an ebook for just $5.99 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars

Sunday, December 16, 2012 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

Back in October, I featured the Robert E. Howard collection Solomon Kane: The Hills of the Dead, the second of two Bantam paperbacks published in the late 70s. The first was Skulls in the Stars, released in 1978.

The Solomon Kane tales are some of my best-loved Howard fiction. “The Skull in the Stars” was one of the first Robert E. Howard tales I ever read, and for many years it was my favorite of his short stories.

He was the Puritan, who flinched not from the gates of Hell. Tall, gaunt, hollowed-eyed in his opposition to the forces of darkness, he defied the devil himself. Kane, cold, steely-nerved duelist, snatched his long rapier from its sheath and thrust it into the heart of evil. Ghoulish laughter follows him. Foul horror haunts his way. Kane, a man whose blood quickens with adventure. Kane, a man more dangerous than a famished wolf.

These slender paperbacks both have fold-out cover art (click on the image at right for the full version). The art is uncredited for this volume, but some sources claim it is Jeff Jones, and the style seems right to me. While the contents aren’t pure Howard (both books contain fragments completed by Ramsey Campbell), it’s a pleasure to see both the poetry and Cambell’s introductions. Here’s the complete TOC:

“The World of Solomon Kane” by J. Ramsey Campbell
“Skulls in the Stars”
“The Right Hand of Doom”
“Red Shadows”
“Rattle of Bones”
“The Castle of the Devil” (Completed by Ramsey Campbell)
“The Moon of Skulls”
“The One Black Stain” (poem)
“Blades of the Brotherhood”

Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars was published in paperback by Bantam Books in December, 1978. It is 178 pages, with a cover price of $1.95.

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