Editor’s Blog – Page 104

Vintage Treasures: Swordquest, by Task Force Games

Sunday, June 3, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

It’s almost Summer, and my teenage boys will be out of high school in a matter of days. Which means I need to get serious about finding a board game to play with my son Drew.

Recently Drew and I have been playing Grail Quest, a 1980 solitaire RPG from Metagaming. But sooner or later, we’re going to find that grail, damnit, and there’s not much point to replaying those old Fantasy Trip programmed adventures once you’ve solved them.

We’ve also playing the occasional round of RoboRally and of course Barbarian Prince, but to round out his education I need to include an assortment of fantasy board games, and I prefer something we can play in 90 minutes or so. This week, I’m considering Swordquest because I found a dusty copy in the basement that hadn’t been filed away yet.

Swordquest was designed by R. Vance Buck and originally published in 1979 as Task Force Game #7, part of Task Force Games Pocket Games line. Humble in origin and slim in production values (the original price was $3.95), these little zip-locked games proved extremely popular, and many are still fondly remembered three decades later.

Altogether, they published a total of 21 Pocket Games, including some of the most popular titles of the 70s and 80s, such Star Fleet Battles, which launched an entire line of game merchandise, and Starfire, which went through five editions and was the inspiration for the line of SF novels primarily written by Steve White and David Weber. The most popular Pocket Games were re-published in a second edition in more sturdy boxes in the early 80s, including Swordquest.

The inspiration for Swordquest — as with most fantasy boardgames of the era — was clearly J.R.R. Tolkien. The races of the kingdom of Tirrane consist of elves, dwarves, and giants, and there’s also a powerful dragon and winged creatures named wrogs rather obviously inspired by Balrogs.

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New Treasures: The Sword & Sorcery Anthology

Sunday, June 3, 2012 John ONeill Comments 27 comments

We announced The Sword & Sorcery Anthology was shipping last week, but I’m glad to report that I now have it in my hot little hands.

And it looks gorgeous. It’s 480 pages in thick, oversize paperback, and sits nicely in my lap as I recline in my big green chair. Where it will remain for much of the rest of the weekend, I think.

In fact, I have two copies, courtesy of co-editor and publisher Jacob Weisman. I was going to add it to the list of titles that go out regularly to our dedicated team of freelance reviewers, but maybe I’ll just give it to the first one that asks for it. Or maybe I’ll encase it in plastic and carefully bury it in a time capsule in my back yard. Future generations with thank me (assuming they can figure out what a book is).

David Drake’s introduction notes that while two stories in this book originated in Weird Tales — the magazine that gave birth to Sword & Sorcery — three come from the legendary small press magazine Whispers, edited by Stuart David Schiff from 1973 to 1987. Drake was the assistant editor for Whispers starting with the second issue; his musings on the authors and fiction included in this volume are fascinating.

Other sources include Swords Against Darkness, Science Fantasy, Fantastic and Asimov’s SF magazines, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress anthologies, Orbit 2, and such recent books as Eclipse Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Strahan and Lou Anders 2010 anthology Swords & Dark Magic.

Two pieces — Michael Shea’s new Nift the Lean story “Epistle from Lebanoi,” and Michael Swanwick’s “The Year of the the Three Monarchs” — are original to this volume.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology was edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman. The cover is is by Jean Sebastien Rossbach. It is published by Tachyon Publications, and priced at $15.95 for the print version and $10.95 in digital format. More complete details are here, and the complete Tables of Contents is here.

This Week’s Bargain SF & Fantasy Books at Amazon.com

Saturday, June 2, 2012 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

It’s good to be the editor. For example, I pretend I do a weekly bargain books update, and no one corrects me — even though the last one was in April. Thank you for indulging me in my shared fantasy.

Let’s get down to business: Bargain Books. I’m the expert, and I’m here to share my knowledge with you. It’s what I do.

This week (ha!) the list contains books by Delia Sherman, Stephen Baxter, Sara Douglass, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen R. Donaldson, L.E. Modesitt, Jr, William Gibson, R.A. Salvatore, E.E. Knight, and many more.

The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, Delia Sherman [$7.20, was $17.99]
Land of the Dead, by Thomas Harlan [$10.40, was $25.99]
The Last Page, Anthony Huso [$4.73, was $25.99]
Hidden Empire, Orson Scott Card [$1.63, was $24.99]
Flood, Stephen Baxter [$9.98, was $24.95]
The Devil’s Diadem, Sara Douglass [$10.80, was $26.99]
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien ($1.92, was $26)
Against All Things Ending: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson [$6.40, was $16]
Scholar, L. E. Modesitt Jr. [$11.20, was $27.99]
Stephen King’s The Stand Vol. 1: Captain Trips, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Mike Perkins [$10, was $24.99]
Zero History, William Gibson [$6.40, was $16]
The Pirate King, R.A. Salvatore [$11.18, was $27.95]
Dragon Fate: Book Six of The Age of Fire, E. E. Knight [$6.40, was $16]
Songs of Love and Death, edited by Gardner Dozois & George R. R. Martin [$10.40, was $26]

All discounted between 60% and 80%. As always, quantities on these bargain books are very limited. All are eligible for free domestic shipping on orders over $25. Most of last week’s (ha!) discount titles are still available; you can see them here.

Weird Tales Closes to Submissions

Friday, June 1, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Holy cats! That was fast. The editors of Weird Tales magazine have announced it is closing to submissions on Tuesday, June 5th.

Now, Black Gate magazine is in no position to throw stones about being closed to submissions. We’ve been closed since roughly the Napoleonic era. But still… didn’t Weird Tales just announce it was open?

Let me check. Yup, it did.

[If you’re too lazy to click on that link, you can just scroll down the page to the announcement four days ago.]

All right, we’re done being snarky. And we will note that the magazine is only closing to fiction submissions — artists and disheveled arcane researchers, your contributions are still valued. [Okay. We’ve still got a little snark left.] Here’s the official announcement:

Heads up that at noon eastern time on Tuesday June 5th we will be closing for fiction submissions. We will still be looking at art and nonfiction proposals.

There’s still time to finish your submission and get it in the mail by Monday morning. Stock up on coffee, turn off the phone, and channel Clark Aston Smith. Fame and Fortune await you.

But act fast.

A Wiscon Reading Report: The Best in Upcoming Fantasy

Wednesday, May 30, 2012 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

Last weekend I drove to Madison, Wisconsin, for Wiscon, one of the best SF conventions in the Midwest. My travel companions were four young women, and the two-hour drive from Chicago was filled with enthusiastic discussions of My Little Pony, how to cook kale, the most satisfactory sexual positions, and who that hot-looking agent was. When I wasn’t driving I sat in the back and kept my mouth shut.

You can learn a lot about life by keeping your mouth shut. For example, I learned I definitely need to check out My Little Pony.

I learned some important stuff at Wiscon, too. Wiscon has some pretty heavy panels, with titles like Intersectionality and Feminist Community, Dogmatic Rationalism, and Performing Katniss in Print and On Screen: Gender Performativity and Deconstructing Reality TV in The Hunger Games.

No, I didn’t learn what any of those things meant. The first thing I learned at Wiscon was: Don’t volunteer to be on panels. It’s like picking my teeth with a golf club — it’s painful, and it makes me look stupid.

But the second thing I learned was: Wiscon has the best reading program on the continent. And if you’re not listening to talented authors reading their work, you’re wasting your precious hours here on Planet Earth.

So I packed my hours with as many readings as I could. At the last two Wiscons I simply followed the brilliant C.S.E. Cooney — the Queen of Wiscon, and her most gifted reader-poet — as readings seemed to spontaneously spring forth wherever she wandered. But this year she was in Ottawa giving a command performance at the most prestigious venue in the country, Canada’s National Art Centre, so we were forced to rely on our own devices. When there weren’t any readings, my driving companions and I simply created our own. In the process we were introduced to some of the hottest new writers on the fantasy scene, and several really terrific new, upcoming, or wholly undiscovered SF and fantasy novels.

Below is a list of the best of the best.

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Gary Gygax’s Hall of Many Panes

Friday, May 25, 2012 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Whew. What a week. I bought a collection of 240 new SF & fantasy paperbacks on Monday, and trying to squeeze them into already-crowded bookshelves in my library is taking some determination. Tomorrow morning I’m throwing some clothes in a bag for a trip to Madison with Patty Templeton and Katie Redding for Wiscon, one of the best conventions in the Midwest.

But tonight, I relaxed and dusted off some of the goodies waiting patiently for my attention. The most intriguing one in the pile is Gary Gygax’s Hall of Many Panes, a boxed mega-adventure from Troll Lord Games, which I purchased on eBay back in March.

Panes was released in 2005, so don’t get too excited if you haven’t heard of it. It’s not a recently-discovered manuscript by the creator of D&D, or anything like that. It was originally written for Gygax’s latter day RPG Lejendary Adventures, but has also been statted for d20 systems, which makes it usable with virtually any of the popular retro-clones on the market like OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord.

Gygax was a master of the mega-adventure, and I’m not sure why he didn’t write more of them, especially at the end of his career when he was experiencing a resurgence.

But then again, I wonder at the fact that the ones he did write — like Necropolis and the massive Castle Zagyg — weren’t more popular, and perhaps that helps explain it.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about Hall of Many Panes. Troll Lord has done a great job assembling a package clearly modeled after the classic TSR boxed sets: inside are three sizable books (76, 96, and 102 pages) and a pamphlet of maps and gaming handouts. The books are a little light on art, but sturdy and highly readable.

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Catherynne M. Valente parts ways with Night Shade Books

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Catherynne M. Valente has announced her third Prester John novel, following The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World, will not be published by Night Shade Books. In a statement on her blog last week she said:

I continue to think that Night Shade puts out wonderful books and I hope for their success. I did not take this step lightly. But their recent troubles have made our business relationship difficult, and I could not in good conscience proceed with a third book given the circumstances. Obviously I’m being a bit vague – there’s no point in airing laundry in public… What this means is that at the moment, The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are for the most part unavailable. Some copies will float around for awhile yet, but most of the e-versions are gone. I hope to fix this in the next week – I have relicensed the covers from the excellent Rebecca Guay and Night Shade has been very kind and accommodating with regards to physical copies and digital files…

As for the third and final book in the series, The Spindle of Necessity, I am committed to finding a way to make sure you get to see it. I owe you a finish. Oddly enough, Prester John is my longest series to date, and I want to bring it all to a close the way I planned to from the beginning… Given the market realities, the most likely avenue for this is a Kickstarter campaign to fund a self-published version.

At press time, both The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, in both print and Kindle versions. But if you’re interested in getting copies, you want want to move quickly.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Files for Bankruptcy

Monday, May 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US publishers of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Animal Farm, 1984, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and numerous books by Harlan Ellison, Kage Baker, Philip K. Dick, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, James Morrow, Margaret Atwood, Diane Duane, Jane Yolen and literally hundreds of others, filed for bankruptcy protection today.

Houghton Mifflin, an educational and trade publisher in the United States, acquired Harcourt Publishing in 2007 to become Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The company has 4,000 employees around the world.

It officially filed for pre-packaged bankruptcy this morning, citing debts and liabilities of over $1 billion. The filing is part of a restructuring that it hopes will cut debt by $3.1 billion. The company issued a statement today, saying it:

will maintain normal day-to-day business operations throughout the restructuring process, and we expect no disruptions to our relationships with our customers, agents, authors, employees, business partners and suppliers. Additionally, our plan provides for our suppliers and vendors to be paid in full during and after this process and for our employees to continue receiving their usual pay and benefits.

The company said it still expects to complete the restructuring by the end of June. For additional details, see this article at Publisher’s Weekly.

New Treasures: Shadow Blizzard by Alexey Pehov

Sunday, May 20, 2012 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I tend to avoid fantasy trilogies until the third book is published, for the same reason that I don’t date musicians under 30. Because I’m married. Duh.

Man, that didn’t make any sense. I blame these stupid cold medications. My head feels four feet in diameter, and my thoughts seem to take… longer… to travel from one side to the other. I wish Alice were here to make me soup and send me to bed, but on Friday she left to take our son Tim to music camp in… um… I forget. Some state that has music camps.

You know what I need? A really good fantasy I can curl up with until I feel better. And now that Shadow Prowler, the third book in Alexey Pehov’s epic The Chronicles of Siala, has arrived I can do just that. Shadow Prowler is the sequel to Shadow Prowler and Shadow Chaser. Here’s what Matthew David Surridge said about the first volume in Black Gate 15:

Pehov has written a fantasy trilogy, with elves and orcs and dwarves and wizards and a quest… this first book, at least, feels fundamentally like a game of Dungeons and Dragons. The story is even structured around the exploration of an ancient burial ground, Hrad Spein, the Palaces of Bone, filled with traps, magic, and the undead… there is an enjoyable buzz of plot going on in the book. In fact, once you get over the echoes of Tolkien, in the form of the ancient artifact, the quest story, the elves and dwarves and the setting, you notice that the actual structure of the book is closer to Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat: a thief tells the story of how he is captured by the good guys, and made to work for them.

Ancient burial grounds, traps, magic, the undead, and a reluctant thief. Yup, that could get me through this cold. Here’s the plot summary for the third volume, just for comparison:

Shadow Harold’s quest is almost at an end: he and his companions have fought long and hard to make their way to the tomb Hrad Spein, in search of the magic horn that is their only hope to defeating The Nameless One. The journey was perilous, and many in their company did not survive. Together, however, they have come further than anyone else ever has — but their struggle isn’t over just yet…

Wow. Three books, and they’re still in the same dungeon? Holy cats, that does sound like an epic game of D&D. If that’s not enough to sell you, here’s the cool book trailer.

Shadow Blizzard is 462 pages in hardcover. It was published on April 24th by Tor, and has a $26.99 cover price. It was translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield.

2011 Nebula Award Winners Announced

Sunday, May 20, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I turned 48 today. Not a bad accomplishment, considering that when I started reading science fiction in 1974, I didn’t even know people got that old. And ever since I started reading novels on my iPad and Kindle, I’ve decided I’m officially living in the future. SF used to prep me for the future, but whatever the next 48 years have in store, I ain’t ready.

Fortunately some things don’t change. People fall in love, tax bills come due, and great writing still wins awards. Case in point: the 2011 Nebula Awards, given out last night in a ceremony at the Nebula Awards Weekend in Arlington, Virginia.

Novel

Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Novella

“The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov, 2011)

Novelette

‘‘What We Found’’, Geoff Ryman (F&SF Sept-Oct, 2011)

Short Story

“The Paper Menagerie”, Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife”

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)

You can find the complete list of nominees at Locus Online.

Octavia Butler and John Clute received the Solstice Award, and Black Gate blogger Bud Webster received the SFWA Service Award, for his tireless work with the Estate Project to track literary estates for deceased members of the science fiction community. Congratulations, Bud!

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