Editor’s Blog – Page 113

Read Jeffrey Ford’s complete “Exo-Skeleton Town” from Black Gate 1

Sunday, October 23, 2011 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Jeffrey Ford’s short story “Exo-Skeleton Town” grabbed a lot of critical attention when it appeared in our first issue in Spring, 2001. Antony Mann, in issue 2 of The Fix: The Review of Short Fiction said:

‘Exo-Skeleton Town’ by Jeffrey Ford… is crazy stuff, man, witty and entertaining.

And Mark R. Kelly, in the September 2001 issues of Locus, said:

Jeffrey Ford’s “Exo-Skeleton Town” is a ribald, scatological tale set on a dark planet populated by alien bugs whose medium of exchange is their own excrement in the form of dung balls. Humans have arrived in force, having learned 1) of the bugs passionate interest in old back & white movies; and 2) of the dung balls’ fantastic aphrodisiac powers. But wait, there’s more… lots of wacky fun. There are some thematic ironies that knit together the story’s various parts… it’s definitely alive.

Recommended Story of the Month: Jeffrey Ford, “Exo-Skeleton Town.”

Now editor Marty Halpern has selected the story for his upcoming anthology Alien Contact, saying:

If you’re not already a fan of the old, classic Hollywood movies — and the actors and actresses that made these films such classics — then you certainly will be after you’ve read “Exo-Skeleton Town.” This is probably the quirkiest story in the anthology. And it remains one of the more unique story concepts I’ve ever read. In fact, even though I’m the editor, I’m almost tempted to ask Jeff: “Where the hell did this idea come from?”…

So, for your reading pleasure, here is “Exo-Skeleton Town,” which won the 2006 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, the French national speculative fiction award.

You can enjoy the complete story, one of the most unusual and imaginative pieces we’ve ever published, at Marty’s blog, More Red Ink. And you can see the complete Table of Contents for Black Gate 1 — still available in our store for just $18.95 — here.

Sale at Rogue Blades Entertainment

Thursday, October 20, 2011 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Rogue Blades Entertainment, publisher of top-notch heroic fantasy, is having a one-of-a-kind online sale.

Here’s RBE publisher-mastermind Jason Waltz to ‘splain the details:

RBE has to clear the shelves! Rogue Blades presents its first 2-for-$15 sale. Purchase any 2 of these RBE titles for $15.00 plus shipping!

Rage of the Behemoth, limited editions
Mythic Memories
Demons: A Clash of Steel
Sages & Swords

Simple! Now’s your chance to catch up on some of the best in new short fantasy, including fiction by Tanith Lee, Howard Andrew Jones, Joseph A. McCullough V, Sean T.M. Stiennon, Bill Ward, Elaine Isaak, C.L. Werner, and many others, and all at a great price.

Rage of the Behemoth is one of the best fantasy anthologies I’ve read in the past few years. Contributors include Andrew Offutt & Richard K. Lyon, Lois Tilton, Mary Rosenblum, Sean T. M. Stiennon, Brian Ruckley, Bruce Durham, Jason Thummel, and many more. Read more about it, including Theo’s great review, here.

Demons is an anthology “devoted to the devilish fiends who seek to wreak havoc among mankind upon the mortal plane.” Contributors include Bill Ward, Brian Dolton, Steve Goble, Elaine Isaak, C.L. Werner, Laura J. Underwood, and many others. You can read more in our news article here.

At $15 for two titles, these books won’t last long. Check out this terrific sale today.

ChiZine Publications’ eBooks Now Available on iTunes Store

Sunday, October 16, 2011 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

ChiZine Publications, one of the best of the genre small press, has announced all of its titles are now available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod through Apple’s iTunes Store.

This is pretty cool, because I just bought an iPad to experiment with electronic versions of Black Gate, and I’ve been trying to find some good books to read. ChiZine Publications already has their titles — including The Door to Lost Pages by Claude Lalumière, and Isles of the Forsaken by Carolyn Ives Gilman — available for the Amazon Kindle, Kobo reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and other e-formats.

But the iPad is where most of the action is, at least in terms of sales (nearly 4 million per month, and growing rapidly), and iPhone sales are even higher. ChiZine co-Publisher Sandra Kasturi said this about their commitment to electronic readers:

You can really see the change from a year ago. Get on the bus or subway and you’ll find half the people are reading off a device rather than a physical book. We take pride in our physical books and ebooks. We want to reach both readers and for them to have great experiences because of the writing and the visual impact.

Makes sense to me. ChiZine’s eBooks can be purchased and downloaded via iTunes by searching for the author name or title, and the publisher promises to have direct links on their website in a few days. Other electronic formats are available today.

We profiled ChiZine Publications back in December of last year.

Dark City Games Oracle’s Breath Now Available for iPhone

Thursday, October 13, 2011 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

We’re big fans of Dark City Games’ terrific line of solitaire fantasy games. We’ve wasted many hours with these little wonders on the Black Gate rooftop headquarters, when we should have been plotting the overthrow of the entire publishing world.

Instead, we searched for the buried archives of long-dead sorcerers on The Island of Lost Spells, stood alongside Roman Legionnaires at the border between Gaul and Germania in Wolves on the Rhine, and plumbed the depths of an ancient ruin for a powerful relic in The Oracle’s Breath. There are publishing barons in Manhattan who owe their Perrier to Dark City Games, and that’s a fact.

Subscribers may even remember that we published a complete solo adventure from Dark City Games in issue 12 of Black Gate: “Orcs of the High Mountains,” by Jerry Meyer, Jr. Don’t tell me we don’t share the love.

Now comes word that Questland Games has made one of Dark City’s best adventures available for the iPhone: Oracle’s Breath.

Yes, now you can journey to a rich world of fantasy while everyone else in the staff meeting thinks you’re checking stock prices.

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New Treasures: Dungeons & Dragons The Shadowfell

Monday, October 10, 2011 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Regardless of where your gaming loyalties lie these days — 3rd Edition, 4th Edition, Original Edition, Pathfinder, or Other — you have to admit that Wizards of the Coast has produced a top-notch line of adventure supplements to support D&D over the past few years.

They’ve put some of the best writers in the business — including Ari Marmell, Bruce R. Cordell, Mike Mearls, Bill Slavicsek, Richard Baker, and many others — to work crafting attractive and superbly produced game books that keep me opening my wallet month after month.

Yet, as an old-school gamer who cut his teeth on the golden age of role-playing adventures, one thing I still miss is those beautiful box sets TSR produced in the 80s and 90s.

You know the ones I’m talking about. The Ruins of Undermountain, Dragon Mountain, Menzoberranzan, City by the Silt Sea, and dozens of others.

These weren’t just outsized adventure modules. They were complete campaigns, packed with gorgeous color maps, thick adventure guides, character sheets, new monsters, and other mysterious goodies.

When you held one in the game store, you felt the promise of weeks of adventure vibrating in your hands. Or maybe it was just the crushing weight of the box, making your wrists weak. Whatever. Your hands trembled, and you knew that had to be good.

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Take a Journey to Strange Worlds

Friday, October 7, 2011 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Strange Worlds, a new anthology of Sword & Planet stories edited and illustrated by Jeff Doten, is now available. And it sure looks like an attractive package.

Containing all original fiction from Charles A. Gramlich, Ken St. Andre, Paul R. McNamee, Charles R. Rutledge, and others, Strange Worlds is fully illustrated with both full-color and black & white art accompanying each tale. Here’s the copy from the back cover:

New worlds and new adventures.

A sword and blaster at your side, the wind in your hair and the ringed moons rising overhead…

Sword and Planet is where it all started, the original space adventures on exotic and perilous worlds. Strange Worlds is the first collection of ALL NEW Sword and Planet adventures in a very long time. Eight stories and one comic, each story with both black and full color illustrations. This is space adventure at it’s (sic) rawest down in the dirt form, so strap on your gear and let’s get going.

Other than the obvious typo, it sounds good to me. According to contributor Paul R. McNamee, editor Doten provided nine color plates and commissioned nine authors to craft a sword-&-planet tale using one of them as inspiration. Doten also added some black & white interiors based on the resulting stories.

Strange Worlds is available from Space Puppet Press for $27 plus $3.75 U.S. shipping. Order today from strangeworldsanthology.com.

Bill Ward’s four-part story “The Box” begins at Pathfinder Tales

Tuesday, October 4, 2011 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Black Gate Reviews Editor Bill Ward is a multi-talented gent.

Not only is he one of the most energetic editors in the field, with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Who’s Who in modern fantasy, but he’s also a very talented writer in his own right.

And Paizo Publishing has given him an opportunity to show off some of that talent by commissioning him to write a story for their Pathfinder Tales Web Fiction line — a weekly presentation of multi-part adventures featuring the exploits of daring denizens of the Pathfinder world.

Bill’s 4-part story is entitled “The Box,” and here’s what he tells us about it:

When a supposedly easy theft goes bad, Kostin Dalackz finds himself caught up in a deadly criminal conspiracy centered on a mysterious, magically locked box. Enlisting the aid of a diverse group of adventurers and rogues, Kostin strikes out to settle accounts — and re-acquire the twice-stolen property. ‘The Box’ is a journey through the seedy underbelly of the city of Magnimar, part of the Pathfinder world setting of Golarion.

Pathfinder Tales Web Fiction are completely free adventure tales that provide a taste of the thrills in Pathfinder Tales novels. Past contributors to their growing online library include Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Ed Greenwood, Elaine Cunningham, Robin D. Laws, Erik Mona, Monte Cook, and many others.

Part I of “The Box” appeared on Wednesday, Sept 28; Part II is scheduled to be posted tomorrow. The tale awaits you here.

Eat Flaming Laser Death: An Evening of RoboRally

Sunday, October 2, 2011 John ONeill Comments 15 comments

These are good times for board gamers.

After the death of Avalon Hill as an independent game publisher (its remnants were purchased by Hasbro in 1998), it sure seemed like the era of the board game was over. SPI, FASA, Task Force Games, GDW, Yaquinto, West End Games, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Mayfair Games, TSR, and finally Avalon Hill… the leading lights of board game design in the 20th Century had all perished by the end of the 90s. It looked like those of us who loved to move cardboard counters around abstract hex grids were relegated to paying ridiculous prices for out-of-print copies on eBay.

But that was before Fantasy Flight proved there was still life in board games yet, with a stellar line up of beautifully produced — and profitable — titles. Mayfair Games returned from the dead, phoenix-like, with the English language rights to the blockbuster Settlers of Catan. Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR and built on their rich tradition with D&D-inspired board games like The Conquest of Nerath (read Scott Taylor’s terrific review here). And, surprise of surprises, Hasbro has kept the Avalon Hill name alive, putting out high quality games like Battle Cry and Axis and Allies.

So on a Sunday night when I’ve managed to pull Tim and Drew, my two teenage sons, away from Gears of War 3 and sit them down at the gaming table, I find I actually have a choice of intriguing modern games to offer them. Should we go for complex and fascinating, like Axis and Allies? Colorful and fun, like Descent: Journeys in the Dark? Quick and light, like Cheapass Games’ Kill Doctor Lucky?

Rhetorical question, of course. When one of the choices involves lasers, killer robots, and blowing each other up in a frenetic race for mechanized glory, the answer is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It was RoboRally in a landslide.

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Tangent Online reviews Matthew David Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael”

Friday, September 30, 2011 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Reviewer Nader Elhefnawy at Tangent Online offers a detailed review of the latest volume of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011, including Matthew David Surridge’s story from Black Gate 14, “The Word of Azrael.”

In Matthew David Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael” (which first appeared in the Winter issue of Black Gate magazine, an excerpt of which can be read on the magazine’s web site), warrior Isrohim Vey encounters the Angel of Death on the battlefield. Having seen the Angel’s smile once, he spends the rest of his life pursuing another glimpse of it – a colorful, wide-ranging, action- and adventure-filled epic journey in the tradition of Conan the Cimmerian and Elric of Melnibone. The resulting piece is one of the strongest heroic fantasies I have seen in years.

Fine praise indeed, for a terrific story that’s been one of the most acclaimed pieces we’ve published in recent years.

You can read the excerpt from “The Word of Azrael” here, and the complete Black Gate 14 Table of Contents is here.

And you can read more about Rich’s excellent The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011 here.

Sara Douglass, June 2, 1957 — Sept 27, 2011

Thursday, September 29, 2011 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Sara Warneke, the Australian fantasy author who wrote under the name Sara Douglass, died of ovarian cancer on September 27, 2011, at the age of 54.

Sara wrote a total of 19 novels, beginning with the first book of what became The Axis Trilogy, BattleAxe, in 1995.

All told she wrote five major fantasy series: The Axis Trilogy, The Wayfarer Redemption, The Crucible, The Troy Game, and Darkglass Mountain.

Outside of Australia, The Axis Trilogy and The Wayfarer Redemption were combined into a single six-book series, called simply Wayfarer Redemption.

Sara also wrote Beyond the Hanging Wall (1996), Threshold (1997), The Devil’s Diadem (2011), and the non-fiction The Betrayal of Arthur. The Hall of Lost Footsteps, a collection of short stories, is due from Ticonderoga Publications this year.

Sara was born in Penola, South Australia, and attended Annesley College in Wayville. She became a registered nurse, and eventually completed her Ph.D. in early modern English History. She was a lecturer in medieval history at La Trobe University in Bendigo, where she completed her first novel, BattleAxe, in 1995.

Her Wikipedia entry, with a complete listing and links for her novels, is here.

She lived in Tasmania, and was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008. She underwent successful treatment that year, but the cancer returned in 2010.

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