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Category: Editor’s Blog

The blog posts of Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones and Editor John O’Neill

50% Off Sale at Night Shade Books

50% Off Sale at Night Shade Books

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cloud-roadsNight Shade Books, one of the leading small press publishers, is having a 50% off sale. That’s 50% off every book in their catalog, including all existing stock and forthcoming titles.

However the sale only lasts until next Thursday, April 26th, so act fast.

Night Shade publishes some of the most acclaimed authors in the business, including Martha Wells, Manly Wade Wellman, Greg Egan, Glen Cook, David Drake, Paolo Bacigalupi, Kage Baker, Jay Lake, Iain M. Banks, Elizabeth Bear, Charles Saunders, Lucius Shepard, and many more.

Night Shade has also earned a fine reputation for discovering and promoting many of the hottest rising stars in SF and fantasy. Just in the last few years they’ve published Rob Ziegler’s Seed, Cat Valente’s The Habitation of the Blessed, Bradley P. Beaulieu’s The Winds of Khalakovo, J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another, Kameron Hurley God’s War, Jon Armstrong’s Philip K. Dick Award nominee Yarn, and the Hugo Award-winning The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, just to name a few.

Looking for recommendations? Here at Black Gate we’ve recently discussed several excellent Night Shade titles, including:

as well as one or two I’m doubtlessly forgetting.

I also highly recommend all four volumes of Jonathan Strahan Eclipse series, perhaps the best original anthology line currently on the market, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s nifty pirate anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails, and Charles Saunders’ legendary sword & sorcery novel Imaro.

To get 50% off you need to purchase at least four titles — which won’t be a problem, considering the rich selection you have to choose from.  Get all the details on the sale here, and start shopping their catalog here.

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

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

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zotI don’t know about these weekly Amazon.com reports. I mean, they’re supposed to be public service announcements that steer you towards cool savings on the latest releases.

Instead, they’re fueling my online shopping obsession. I spend hours every afternoon trolling for bargains, and I call it “research.”

Well, not your problem I suppose. You get to benefit from my compulsive behavior, and I get to fill my house with more books and games in the shrinkwrap. Everyone wins.

Terrific bargains this week include the definitive collection of one of the best comics ever made, Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991, as well as a nice assortment of Marvel Essentials and Marvel Masterworks (The Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America).

Discounted fantasy and SF novels include Charles Stross’ Rule 34, the first installment in Richard Kadrey’s popular Sandman Slim series, Orson Scott Card’s latest Ender novel Ender in Exile, and Jonathan Lethem’s first novel Gun, with Occasional Music.

It’s a big list this week — thirty titles, 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.

Let’s get to the comics first.

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Doug Draa looks at Frank Belknap Long

Doug Draa looks at Frank Belknap Long

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rim-of-the-unknown2Doug Draa has kicked off a new blog dedicated to the golden age of Horror Anthology Paperbacks. His first subject is the much-overlooked pulp master Frank Belknap Long:

I’ve enjoyed Mr. Long’s stories since the middle 70s when I first read “The Space Eaters” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1. He was a correspondent of Lovecraft’s and wrote several stories incorporating HPL’s Cthulhu Mythos. His attempts at Mythos writing were successful enough that his “Hounds of Tindalos” are more or less accepted as canon.

His stories are pure pulp and crazy enough to stand above the normal horror fare of the 30s and 40s. I find “The Space Eaters” to be one of the very best non-HPL penned Mythos tales ever. It tells of an invasion from beyond (actually from outside and between) in such a cold hearted and nonchalant manner without any of HPL’s typical histrionics that it is truly unsettling without ever being “over the top”. Hats off to the man! But as far as craziness goes, how can you not love such titles as “The Flame Midget,” “The Man with a Thousand Legs” or “The Horror from the Hills”?

Indeed. Frank Belknap Long published a host of stories in the pulps and several fine collections, including The Early Long, Odd Science Fiction, The Hounds of Tindalos, The Rim of the Unknown and Night Fear.

He wrote nearly 30 novels, including Space Station 1 (1957), Mission to a Distant Star, Mars is My Destination (1962), The Horror from the Hills (1963), Monster From Out of Time (1970), and Survival World (1971).

I don’t see a lot of blogs devoted to vintage horror anthologies, but if all the entries are as informative as this one, I’ll be a regular visitor.

You can find Doug’s blog, Uncle Doug’s Bunker of Horror, here.

New Treasures: The Library of America’s A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes

New Treasures: The Library of America’s A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes

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a-princess-of-marsSo yeah, I saw John Carter. And I liked it. Liked it enough that I went twice, actually. Been a while since I did that.

Still looks like it’s going to be the biggest box office bomb of the year, but these things happen. Doesn’t mean it’s not a good movie. And let’s face it — it’s helped introduce a whole new generation to the classic science fantasy of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

And not just all those young punks playing video games who don’t read books anymore.  I’m talking about a great many supposedly well-read science fiction and fantasy readers who never bothered to give ERB the time of day.

People like, y’know, me. For instance.

Sure, I’m fairly well read in SF and fantasy. And I have a (nearly) complete set of Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books in paperback, picked up here and there at garage sales because I liked the covers. But Burroughs just never really appealed to me in my youth, and I never bothered to read them.

I loved the colorful action-adventure of the great pulp serials, but the mid-1930s was about as far back as I went.  Give me Asimov, van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, Charles Tanner, H.P. Lovecraft. But if you appeared before they did — if your name was H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example — then you were just old.

Well, it’s never to late to correct past mistakes. Especially when The Library of America is making it easy with two beautiful keepsake volumes celebrating the centenary of Burroughs’ most famous creations: Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars.

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Rich Horton and Sean Wallace explore War and Space

Rich Horton and Sean Wallace explore War and Space

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warandspace1Rich Horton has been a Contributing Editor for Black Gate since…. you know, I’m not even sure I remember. When we were in Kindergarten, maybe.  Or possibly since that drunken weekend when we assembled Goth Chick in our old laboratory. Good times, good times.

There was a day when I thought Rich and I would conquer science fiction together. We were two freelance journalists telling it like it is. When Tor started printing books with ink made in Singapore sweat shops, we blew the lid off the whole thing. Sleep didn’t matter, friendships didn’t matter. Only the truth mattered. And hot babes. Babes were on us like… like… well, not really. But anyway, we were unstoppable. The world was ours for the taking. At least, that part of the world that didn’t include women.

Then Rich met Sean Wallace, and Sean offered him something I never could: an actual wage. Rich dropped me like a hot potato for a career as one of the hottest anthologists in the field, and never looked back. Last time I saw him he was driving a Lamborghini Diablo and talking to J.K. Rowling on his cell.

I confronted Sean on the front steps of the Prime Books skyscraper in ’06. I was in a snarling rage, and threatened his life. He punched me in the nose and made me cry.  Then he bought me a hot chocolate and a bus ticket back to Chicago, and that was that.

That was nearly a dozen acclaimed anthologies ago, including three volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, my favorite of the annual survey anthologies. Now Rich and Sean have teamed up for War and Space: Recent Combat, a reprint anthology collecting some of the best tales of space warfare from the last few decades, including “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359” by Ken MacLeod, “Art of War” by Nancy Kress, and “The Political Officer” by Charles Coleman Finlay. This isn’t your typical military SF collection however, as Sean makes clear in a question to a reader in the comments section of his blog:

Will you still like it even if it’s not, well, in the vein of Baen military sf? I have to admit that we went a bit broader with this, and while we love it a lot, I just hope people aren’t expecting something a bit more militaristic?

Coming from a guy with a mean right hook, that sounds great to me.  War and Space will be released on May 2 by Prime Books. It is $15.95 for 384 pages in trade paperback.

New Treasures: Alaya Johnson’s Wicked City

New Treasures: Alaya Johnson’s Wicked City

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wicked-cityYeah, pretty much the last thing I expected to distract me this week was yet another urban fantasy featuring a kick-butt female protagonist and a city overrun by vampires.

In my defense, the city is Prohibition-era Manhattan and our protagonist Zephyr Hollis, newly arrived from the ranches of Montana, isn’t a vampire hunter but a socially conscious teacher who’s not above mingling with men — and the Others, otherworldly creatures that include vampires — in discreet speakeasies. The quirky setting and fine attention to detail intrigued me, but it was the engaging narrator that kept me reading. The novel is Wicked City by Alaya Johnson, and it was this jacket copy that first hooked me:

It’s summer in the city and most vampires are drunk on the blood-based intoxicant Faust. The mayor has tied his political fortunes to legalizing the brew, but Zephyr Hollis has dedicated herself to the cause of Faust prohibition — at least when she isn’t knocking back sidecars in speakeasies.

But the game changes when dozens of vampires end up in the city morgue after drinking Faust. Are they succumbing to natural causes, or have they been deliberately poisoned? When an anonymous tip convinces the police of her guilt, Zephyr has to save her reputation, her freedom and possibly her life. Someone is after her blood — and this time it isn’t a vampire.

In a New York City populated by flappers and vampires, debutantes and djinn, it’s best to watch your back. You never know what’s lurking in the shadows.

It’s too early to tell if the novel is going to live up to its early promise, but so far indications are good. Wicked City goes on sale today; it is available in hardcover from Thomas Dunne Books, at $25.99 for 306 pages.

New Treasures: Warhammer 40K: A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns on Unabridged Audio

New Treasures: Warhammer 40K: A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns on Unabridged Audio

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prospero-plus11When I drove my son Tim to Blue Lake Fine Arts camp in Michigan last summer, during the five hour drive we listened to Steve Lyons’ The Madness Within and Sandy Mitchell’s Dead in the Water, both 65-minute audiobooks in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

And boy, they were great. Both were extremely polished, with professional readers and solid production values, including subtle sound effects and rousing music.

Best of all they were terrific stories — especially the Ciaphas Cain tale Dead in the Water. Commissar Cain is a rogue with no interest in heroics of any kind, but an enviable talent for getting out of sticky situations. When he’s posted to Archipelaga, a feral ocean world slowly being pacified by the Imperium, he soon finds himself investigating the mystery of a missing squad, and facing a dangerous and unknown enemy.

Cain’s an engaging and frequently very funny protagonist, and the story was the perfect length. After that I was on the hunt for more audiobooks from Black Library.

Last week my wishes were granted. In fact, they were exceeded in spectacular fashion: with the arrival of unabridged audio adaptations of two seminal works in The Horus Heresy cannon:  A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns, both New York Times bestsellers.

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

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

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extreme-fantasyThis week sees some great bargains on fantasy, dark fantasy and horror from Carroll & Graf, including several of their splendid Mammoth Book Of... anthologies such as Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, and a fine collection from Stephen Jones covering Dracula, Wolf Men, Monsters, and more. These are sizable trade paperbacks, 500 pages or more, and they assemble a wide assortment of excellent short fantasy.

For those looking for something a little edgier, or at least more in tune with modern publishing, I’ve also included The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance, volumes 1 and 2, and The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance 2, all edited by Trisha Telep. You’re welcome.

Lou Anders’ terrific superhero anthology Masked is now available for just six measly bucks. Two installments of Barb Hendee’s urban Vampire Memories series are also on the list, as is the first novel by Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker, Dracula The Un-Dead, the direct sequel to Dracula (read William Patrick Maynard’s review here).

Jeffrey Ford, author of the weird and wild story “Exo-Skeleton Town” in Black Gate 1 (read the complete text here), has a great selection of novels available available at steep discounts this week, including The Drowned Life, The Girl in the Glass, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, and The Shadow Year.

Finally, don’t overlook two of the finest titles on this week’s list: Margo Lanagan’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel Tender Morsels, and the latest collection by the marvelous Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters.

As always, quantities on these bargain books are very limited. All these titles are eligible for free shipping on orders over $25.

Many of last week’s discounts are still available; you can see them here.

Knights of the Dinner Table: The Java Joint Strips

Knights of the Dinner Table: The Java Joint Strips

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java-jointYears ago, before I started Black Gate magazine, I worked with David Kenzer in the Commerce Drive offices of Motorola here in Chicago. Dave is the founder of Kenzer & Company, publishers of the award-winning Hackmaster role playing game and Jolly Blackburn’s brilliant Knights of the Dinner Table comic.

KenzerCo was the first investor in Black Gate, and without Dave’s early advice and guidance I never could have gotten off the ground. But perhaps the most important contribution he made to our success was his offer to include an original Knights of the Dinner Table strip in every issue. It was an incredible gesture of faith in my fledgling enterprise, and it helped bring my new magazine to the attention of thousands of gaming fans. Brian Jelke at KenzerCo wrote a proposal for a strip centered around a coffee shop, Steve Johansson signed on to do the art, and The Java Joint was born. It has appeared in virtually every issue of Black Gate, and in July of last year KenzerCo packaged up all the stories — together with a brand new 8-page strip — in Knights of the Dinner Table: The Java Joint Strips, published in print and PDF format.

I’ve written about my days with Dave at Commerce Drive, the multi-million dollar software deals and creative projects we did together, a few times now, including in  “How To Succeed in Business,” my editorial for Black Gate 11, and in my portion of the Tribute to Gary Gygax here on the blog in 2008. In my introduction to this new collection I tell the full story of our adventures together for the first time.

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Vintage Treasures: The Bantam Giant Novels of Lawrence Schoonover

Vintage Treasures: The Bantam Giant Novels of Lawrence Schoonover

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golden-exile3Who the heck is Lawrence Schoonover?

I had no idea. At least until I found myself in an unexpected bidding war for a beautiful collection of Bantam Giant paperbacks on eBay, including two by Mr Schoonover: The Golden Exile and The Burnished Blade (cover here).

Don’t know much more about him. I’m sure a trip to Wikipedia would tell me lots about Schoonover but, really, his covers tell me pretty much everything I need. Apparently he wrote big fat adventure novels featuring dudes with swords, exotic settings, and women who had little use for clothing. I’m a fan.

And it certainly doesn’t hurt that his novels were published as Bantam Giants.

There’s just something about the Bantam Giants that really brings out the collector in me. If you’re any kind of paperback aficionado, you know what I’m talking about.

The first Bantam Giants appeared in 1951, during the tenure of the legendary Ian Ballantine. I don’t believe they were numbered separately from Bantam’s usual sequencing, which makes cataloging them somewhat problematic, but their ranks included James Michener, Emile Zola, Harold Robbins, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Wilder, C. S. Forester and many, many more.

Some of the best literature of the 20th Century appeared in paperback as Bantam Giants, such as Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

They also included a superb assortment of classic adventure novels from Rafael Sabatini, Thomas R. Costain, John Masters, John Dickson Carr, and even some dude named Lawrence Schoonover.

If you're the one who outbid me for this eBay lot, you should be ashamed of yourself.
If you're the one who outbid me for this eBay lot, you should be ashamed of yourself.

There was also a smattering of science fiction and fantasy, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s classic anthology The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories, John Collier’s Fancies and Goodnights, and novels by Bradbury and Jerry Sohl.

I think a large part of the appeal of Bantam Giants is their sheer size. They promise a lot of reading for your 35 cents. And dang, they look good don’t they? Just check out that beautiful eBay lot at left (click for bigger version.)

‘Course, I’d know a lot more about Schoonover if I’d just managed to win that damn auction. Since I didn’t, I was forced to hunt down virtually every single title in the set individually on eBay. I finally managed to complete that daunting task late last week. It’s okay, I’m sure the kids didn’t really need that college fund.

And before you ask which I’m going to read first, I think that should be fairly obvious. I’m curious about all of them, but before anything else I have to find out just what the Great Folly of that young lady in the bottom right is.

Even though I think I have a pretty good idea.