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Dorgo the Dowser and Me

Dorgo the Dowser and Me

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mad_shadowsWhen John O’Neill invited me to write article about my collection of sword and sorcery stories, Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, for the Black Gate blog, I was naturally thrilled and honored. I was also somewhat uncertain.

Where do I begin? What should I say?

So I asked myself… why not first tell readers something about your book — the world of Tanyime, the kingdom of Rojahndria, the city of Valdar, and its main character — and then talk a little bit about how it all came to be? Well, here goes.

Mad Shadows is a picaresque novel — six interconnected sword and sorcery tales featuring Dorgo the Dowser, a sort of private eye set in the 14thcentury of my alternate world. It is pulp-fiction, old-school sword and sorcery with a film noir twist. That’s one of the reasons for the subtitle, The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, and the retro look of the cover.

One reason of the reasons Dorgo is known as the Dowser is because he’s a sort of private investigator, searching for clues and answers like someone searching for water with a dowsing rod. The other reason for his epithet is that he actually uses a special kind of dowsing rod in his line of work. There are all kinds of dowsing tools, and each has its own special use or “power.” I even think that dowsing rods may be the inspiration for what we call “magic wands.”

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Breathing Life Into Dead Gods: The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis

Breathing Life Into Dead Gods: The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis

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allegory-of-love-cover

The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils: that, we know, is what happened to our incalculable loss in the history of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining.

–C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

 

Tracing the roots of fantasy is a fascinating exercise. From whence did works of pure fancy spring? How far back do we go to find their source? Are its origins to be found in works like The Epic of Gilgamesh, or The Iliad and The Odyssey (for a great series of posts on the subject, look no further than Matthew David Surridge’s four part series Worlds Within Worlds ).

In his landmark study The Allegory of Love (1936), C.S. Lewis implies that fantasy’s roots lie not in the classical period, but the Medieval Age. Medieval poets infused “extinct” pagan gods with new life by employing them as allegory. Venus and Mars, Minerva and Jupiter, died and awoke again as concepts, sewing seeds that would eventually give rise to works like Phantastes or The Well at the World’s End.

Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find works of myth and fancy, Lewis claims. Ancient writers wrote stories based on the probable, or events that they believed actually happened. Or they took the marvellous as fact, writing without irony about hippogriffs and sea-monsters. Purely fantastic fiction was unknown (classical poets employed allegory, but not in this manner). Pagan gods as allegory, and the acknowledgement of myth by medieval poets, marked a cosmic shift in artistic technique, paving the paths for writers like Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton and transitioning us to works of pure fantasy. “It is difficult for the modern man of letters to value this quiet revolution as it deserves,” writes Lewis. “Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.”

Revelations and gorgeously turned bits of wisdom like these are only a few of the treasures to be found in The Allegory of Love.

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Goth Chick News: The Last Four Things

Goth Chick News: The Last Four Things

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image012The options for your summer reading list are as copious as the Speedo bathing suits which have suddenly appeared on the rooftop sun deck of the Black Gate offices, but not nearly as difficult to speak about.

A couple weeks back I told you about Robert Browne’s The Paradise Prophesy, which hit store shelves on July 21st. This week British author Paul Hoffman brings us the second in The Left Hand of God trilogy, entitled The Last Four Things.

Hoffman’s first book set off a worldwide bidding frenzy among US publishers in 2008. The Left Hand of God (aka The Angel of Death) follows the story of Thomas Cale, a teenager imprisoned in The Sanctuary, a brutal institution that trains boys to become warriors, known as “Redeemers” in an imminent holy war.

Though the trilogy is set in an intriguingly ambiguous medieval realm with modern overtones, this isn’t entirely a fantasy world; much of it is based on Hoffman’s own experiences growing up in an extremist Catholic boarding school.

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Broadly Speaking Interviews C.S.E. Cooney

Broadly Speaking Interviews C.S.E. Cooney

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cseBroadly Speaking, the podcast about the adventures of women writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, has interviewed Black Gate website editor C.S.E. Cooney.

For their July episode Broadly Speaking host Julia Rios interviewed C.S.E. Cooney, Gwynne Garfinkle, and Mary Robinette Kowal (sort of) on the ins and outs of writing humor.

Here’s C.S.E. on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

The thing is, I love Jane Austen… I found it delightful to have Elizabeth Bennet wanting to cut off people’s heads when they threatened her honor. I liked the whole thing between samurais and ninjas. I liked that the Bennet sisters fought back-to-back at the Netherfield ball… I do think that there is something exquisitely funny in having girls in dresses with swords. It speaks to my inner She-ra, Princess of Power.

C.S.E. Cooney is the author of Jack o’ the Hills and The Big Bah-Ha. Her poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride” won the Rhysling award for long form poetry. Gwynne Garfinkle’s short stories and poems have appeared in The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 4, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Teens Talk Growing Up, and No Body’s Perfect. Mary Robinette Kowal won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008, her latest fantasy novel is Shades of Milk and Honey.

The complete podcast is roughly 39 minutes; you can find it here. And you can find C.S.E. Cooney’s behind-the-scenes article on the interview (including how she managed to channel Mary Robinette Kowal) right here at Black Gate.

A Beautiful Trilogy – Uglies Film Announced

A Beautiful Trilogy – Uglies Film Announced

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ugliesScott Westerfeld has posted on his blog a press release announcing upcoming film adaptations of his popular Uglies trilogy, set in a post-apocalyptic future where everyone, at age 16, is made “pretty” through an intense surgical procedure. When everyone is Pretty, the idea is, everyone is equal and happy, so there’s no reason for discord.

Why the Books Rock

Uglies is a powerful book which features some of the best of science fiction. It has action, but also deep thematic elements. It has social context, without being preachy. It has deeply realized characters and very human conflicts between them. It is a rich world that grows more complex with each book.

And, of course, being a modern young adult series, it also features a love triangle. (A couple of them, actually.)

The story of the first book, Uglies, starts with the main character, Tally Youngblood, who is nearing 16 (and her surgery) with anxious anticipation. One great thing about this book is Tally, because she’s not your typical hero. She’s fairly selfish and certainly short-sighted. It often doesn’t occur to her, especially in the first book, that she should take into account much beyond her own immediate wants and desires … which makes her a perfect teenage protagonist.

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Win a Limited Edition Copy of Rage of the Behemoth from Rogue Blades Entertainment

Win a Limited Edition Copy of Rage of the Behemoth from Rogue Blades Entertainment

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rotbJason M Waltz, publisher of Rogue Blades Entertainment, is giving away a free copy of the limited edition of Rage of the Behemoth to one lucky winner this week.

Described as “Almost 150,000 words of monstrous mayhem recording the ferocious battles that rage between gargantuan creatures of myth and legend, and the warriors and wizards who wage war against, beside, and astride them,” Rage of the Behemoth gathers 21 splendid tales of pure adventure fantasy under one cover, including contributions from Bill Ward, Andrew Offutt & Richard K. Lyon, Lois Tilton, Mary Rosenblum, Sean T. M. Stiennon, Brian Ruckley, Bruce Durham, Jason Thummel, C.L. Werner, and many more.

How do you win? Easy!

Just comment on any of the three posts this week at Rogue Blades Entertainment’s Home of Heroics , and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a copy. The Home of Heroics is the Grand Central Station for heroic fiction on the Web, and previous writers have included Martha Wells, E.E. Knight, David C. Smith, Charles Saunders, Bill Ward, and many others.

Comments must be made between Monday, July 25, and Friday July 29. Complete details on the contest are here.

Learn more about Rage of the Behemoth here.

You won’t find many contests this easy — or this much fun. Check out Home of Heroics today. You can thank us later.

Mark Lawrence on Prince of Thorns

Mark Lawrence on Prince of Thorns

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prince-of-thornsThat fantasy story you love, the one where the farm boy gets the sword and kills that monster so the bad overlord is cast down and the princess is freed… I didn’t write that one. Those stories, wrapped up in more sophisticated prose with a twist and turn and an OMG, are great. They’re the strength and the curse of the genre. I didn’t write one. I wrote an ugly awkward thing that has seriously made someone blog ‘I got that horrible feeling in my tummy and could not read any more.’ Prince of Thorns is an ungentle book.

In 2004 I got my first ever check for writing fiction, a princely $31 for ‘Song of the Mind-born,’ a story that Black Gate had turned down. Between 2003 and 2006 Black Gate turned down about five of my short stories. John O’Neill writes the best rejections of any magazine editor I’ve ever encountered, and believe me if we lived pre-email I would have enough rejections to reconstitute a sizeable tree.

Reading an O’Neill rejection you know that the man has read your submission from top to bottom and put some thought into letting you know why he’s not going to pay you for it. He lets you walk away with dignity and hope.

This was the last O’Neill rejection I got:

It is with great pain that I am forced to reject you yet again. I really liked this story and read to the end, even though I was sure after the first few paragraphs that it wouldn’t be a fit for Black Gate. It was very nicely done, and hit me on an emotional level. It works at all levels, I think — except it’s not a fit for Black Gate. Please put some of your excellent talent to use on an adventure story with some unique world building, and ship it my way.

I took John’s advice and the next three submissions were all accepted. ‘Bulletproof,’ accepted in 2006, will appear in Black Gate 16, perhaps Spring 2012? And that’s another thing I love about Black Gate (apart from the fact you can actually buy it off the shelves of real shops) – the optimism, the way they put the season on each issue as if the year wasn’t enough to uniquely identify it!

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Ruminations on Ice and Fire

Ruminations on Ice and Fire

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A Dance With DragonsI recently had the chance to review George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons for my hometown newspaper, The Montreal Gazette. Looking at both the new volume and the previous four installments in his Song of Ice and Fire series, I found myself wondering what it is that makes the books work so well both with critics and a mass audience.

A Dance With Dragons reached the top of the best-seller lists in its first week of release, and had the highest first-day sales of any fiction book this year. The initial wave of reviews were widely positive, with glowing praise from Jeff VanderMeer and Lev Grossman among others (I liked it, too). There have been some dissenting opinions, though, one example of which is Theo’s post from earlier today. Oddly, it seems many of the people most disenchanted with the book have been (some) long-standing fans.

Perhaps it’s not so odd. It’s been six years since the last book in the series came out, and another five years since the book before that. Because of the way Martin structured these books, that means fans have been waiting to read about some of their favourite characters for eleven years. That’s quite a while; longer than the gap between the cancellation of the original Star Trek TV series and the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for example. Expectations had to have been running high. But this only brings me back to what I was wondering before: why have people been waiting so fervently for the book?

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Among Others

Among Others

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among-others1It’s hot, I just downloaded Lion (which is the only cool thing happening in these parts) and I’ve managed to avoid any car crashes. Unlike other folks here, since I don’t have much going on, here’s my review of Jo Walton’s Among Others.

Could do worse things than turn the AC up high and read this one.

Borders Begins Liquidation

Borders Begins Liquidation

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borders-lockedBorders, one of the largest bookstore chains in the United States, has began the process of closing its doors.

Going-out-of-Business sales started today at all Borders, Borders Express, and Waldenbooks locations, with up to 40% off most items. The store has announced that gift cards will be honored during the liquidation, Borders Rewards Plus discounts are good through August 5th, and Borders Bucks will be accepted until July 31.

CEO Mike Edwards sent this e-mail to all Borders Rewards members yesterday, saying in part:

We had worked very hard toward a different outcome. The fact is that Borders has been facing headwinds for quite some time, including a rapidly changing book industry, the eReader revolution, and a turbulent economy. We put up a great fight, but regrettably, in the end, we weren’t able to overcome these external forces.

Going out of business sales begin in stores Friday, July 22. I encourage you to take advantage of this one-time opportunity to find exceptional discounts on your favorite books…

When I moved to my current home in St. Charles, IL in 1997, it was a town filled with many bookstores. The arrival of Borders and then Barnes & Noble gradually killed virtually every one of them.

But I consoled myself with the fact that Borders was, in fact, a superb book store. Clean, well organized, and marvelously well stocked, it was a terrific place to browse and find books. And now it is gone, leaving my town with one small bookstore: Town House Books, the sole survivor of the coming of Borders over a decade ago. One town over, there’s also a B&N superstore — another marvelous place for book lovers.  Until it too goes bankrupt, as many investors are now predicting.

It is the end of the bookstore?  I hope not, but time will tell.  And until then, I’ll be shopping at Town House books.