News – Page 30 – Black Gate

Robin Hobb on What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy

Wednesday, February 5, 2014 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Over at SF Signal, Andrea Johnson has put together one of the more interesting round-robin interviews I’ve read in a some time. As part of their Mind Meld series, she asked eight well known fantasy authors — including Martha Wells, Melanie Rawn, Sam Sykes, and Robin Hobb — to answer the question “What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy?”

Many of the answers are both fascinating and insightful. Martha critiques the current trend towards multiple viewpoint characters (“A perfectly valid style, but… when it’s done wrong, it’s tedious”), Marc Alpin comments on the necessity to switch gears between books (“Some readers, especially those who wanted more of book one, freak out and think they’ve been cheated”), and Patrick Tomlinson discusses inevitable book bloat (“The longer an author writes inside a world, the longer the books tend to become.”) But it was Megan Lindholm, aka Robin Hobb, who I thought had the most salient comment, pointing out that the rise of independent publishers has also unleashed a host of amateur marketeers, whose newbie mistakes have left us with countless books that are misrepresenting themselves on the shelves:

I’m going to commit heresy here. I think that old time publishers are actually better at targeting the audience and showing readers the books they want than our current climate of ‘Everyone quick, promote a book you like’ is. Authors see their own books differently from how their publishers see them, and some of the author promotions I’ve seen led me to expect one sort of book and then [they] delivered another… I think that some (not all) of the people who are hired to create the book trailers don’t really know much about marketing… They make terrific trailers, and I get so excited to read the book, I buy it, and then think, ‘Well, this is a pretty good book, but it’s not at all what I thought it was going to be…’

To find a book that you really want to read, I recommend going to a bookstore (a big building sometimes made out of brick and mortar where they sell books made out of paper), and talk to the book seller (a person who knows all about what she or he is selling)… If you do not have a bookseller who can do this, then I am very sorry for you. Try your librarian.

Read the complete article here.

Sony Shuts Down Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and Three Other MMOs

Sunday, January 26, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Sony Online Entertainment announced on Friday that it is cleaning house by shutting down four underperforming online games: the long-running Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the free-to-play Free Realms, the Star Wars game Clone Wars Adventures, and the dungeon crawler Wizardry Online.

Vanguard is the most well-known of the lot. Despite high expectations — it was created by key developers of the popular EverQuest — it had a disastrous launch in January 2007, winning Gamespy‘s “Biggest Disappointment” award (and winning “Least Fun”, “Most Desolate,” and “Lamest Launch” in the 2007 MMOWTF Awards). The launch destroyed developer Sigil Games, who reportedly gathered all 150 employees in the parking lot on May 14, 2007, where Director Andy Platter told them, “You’re all fired.” Vanguard was acquired that month by SOE, who have nurtured it for the past seven years. It will shut down on July 31.

The family-friendly Free Realms, developed in-house by SOE and released on April 29, 2009, was generally well reviewed, but never really found an audience. It will shut down permanently on March 31, 2014. The free-to-play Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures launched on September 15, 2010, but has recently been hemorrhaging players; it will shut down on March 31 as well.

I wasn’t even aware there was a Wizardry Online until I read heard Sony was shutting it down. Based on SirTech’s RPG classic, the free-to-play title was developed in Japan by Gamepot and released in the US and the EU less than a year ago, on January 30, 2013. Like the original game, death was permanent — highly unusual these days — and players weren’t thrilled by the old-school graphics, and it never really caught on outside Japan. It will shut down on July 31. Of all the games on the list, I’m most intrigued by this one (see the YouTube First Look produced by MMOHuts last year to see why) and may try it out before it’s gone.

Sony says it is shutting down these games “to refocus resources in other areas,” including PlanetSide 2, Magic: The Gathering – Tactics and DC Universe Online.

C.S.E. Cooney’s “Martyr’s Gem” Acquired for Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014

Monday, January 20, 2014 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

We were very pleased and proud to hear reports this morning that editor Rich Horton has acquired C.S.E. Cooney’s novella “Martyr’s Gem” for his annual collection, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014.

Yay!! Drinks are on us!¹

“Martyr’s Gem” was originally published in Ann Leckie’s online magazine GigaNotoSaurus in May of last year. Giganotosaurus publishes one longish fantasy or science fiction story every month, including the Nebula nominees “All the Flavors” by Ken Liu, and “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers” by Katherine Sparrow. If you can’t wait for the book, you can read the complete “Martyr’s Gem” here.

There’s a marvelous animated excerpt narrated by Ms. Cooney, “The Epic of Shursta Sharkbait,” here. Sara Norja at Such Wanderings pretty much summed up our feelings when she said:

It’s a gorgeously written story with characters that jumped off the screen and will linger in my mind for a good while, I suspect. The island culture she’s created is fascinating and vibrant. Sharks and gemstones! Bantering, loving sibling relationships! A society where men and women are pretty equal! An interesting oral storytelling culture and stories-within-stories! I love pretty much everything about this novella. Go forth and be immersed!

It’s fairly unusual for a 19,000-word novella to make it into a Year’s Best volume, so this is something to celebrate. Rich Horton’s volumes are our favorite Year’s Best anthologies out there; the 2014 edition is due in May. We covered the 2013 edition here.

We published C.S.E. Cooney’s novella “Godmother Lizard,” which Tangent Online called “a delightful fantasy… [it] entranced me from the beginning,” and the sequel “Life on the Sun” — which Tangent called “bold and powerful… this one captured a piece of my soul. Brilliant.”

1. Must be of legal drinking age. Must realize we’re joking. Offer not valid outside the continental U.S.A. Or anywhere that serves alcohol.

Neal Barrett, Jr, November 3, 1929 – January 12, 2014

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Neal Barrett, Jr, author of The Karma Corps (1984), The Hereafter Gang (1991), and the four-volume Aldair series, died on Sunday.

Barrett first published story was “To Tell the Truth” in the August 1960 issue of Galaxy Magazine. He made a name for himself with his quirky, hard-to-classify short fiction, including the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist “Stairs” (Asimov’s SF, September 1988), and the Hugo and Nebula Award nominee “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” (Asimov’s SF, February 1988). His short work has been gathered in half a dozen collections, including Slightly Off Center (1992), Perpetuity Blues and Other Stories (2000), a nominee for the World Fantasy Award, and Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr. (2013). He continued writing short fiction right up to his death, with his “HERE and THERE” appearing in the Spring 2012 issue of Subterranean Magazine, and “Bloaters” in Impossible Monsters, an anthology released by Subterranean Press in July 2013

Barrett’s first novel was Stress Pattern, published by DAW in 1974. DAW published all four volumes of his Aldair series between 1976 and 1982, and his 1984 science fantasy The Karma Corps, which we covered in a Vintage Treasures piece just a few short months ago. His later books included Through Darkest America (1987), Pink Vodka Blues (1992), Dead Dog Blues (1994), Prince Of Christler-Coke (2004), and Finn, the Lizard Master series from Bantam (The Prophecy Machine, 2000, and The Treachery of Kings, 2001).

We discussed Neal Barrett’s Aldair novels — which Fletcher Vredenburgh called “a blast of strangeness and adventure. Really, [Barrett is] an author without enough attention from the average reader” — in the Comments Section of my September 10th Vintage Treasures post.

Neal Barrett was born in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma City. He was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2010. He died January 12, 2014, at the age of 84.

Winter 2014 Subterranean Magazine now Available

Monday, January 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

How does Subterranean magazine get such gorgeous covers, issue after issue? Editor Bill Schafer must keep a host of talented artists chained up in the basement. I wish I’d thought of that.

The Winter Issue isn’t just a pretty face — it’s got personality, too. Have a look at the spectacular table of contents:

“The Scrivener” by Eleanor Arnason
“Bit Players” by Greg Egan
“The Prelate’s Commission” by Jeffrey Ford
“Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story” by Karen Joy Fowler
“Hayfever” by Frances Hardinge
“Caligo Lane” by Ellen Klages
“I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There” by K J Parker
“Pilgrims of the Round World” by Bruce Sterling

We published Jeffrey Ford’s “Exo-Skeleton Town” back in Black Gate 1. It won the 2006 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, the French national speculative fiction award, and has been reprinted many times — including in the anthology Alien Contact, where editor Marty Halpern said:

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?”…

You can read the complete story here. We published Ellen Klages wonderful fantasy “A Taste of Summer” in Black Gate 3; she has since been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and World Fantasy Awards for her short fiction.

Subterranean is edited by William Schafer and published quarterly. The Winter 2014 issue is completely free and available here; see their complete back issue catalog here. We last covered Subterranean magazine with their previous issue, Fall 2013.

Universal Labels 47 Ronin a Flop less than 24 Hours After Release

Sunday, January 5, 2014 John ONeill Comments 16 comments

Universal Pictures announced it would take a writedown on its $175 million fantasy epic 47 Ronin on December 26th, the day after the film entered wide release on Christmas Day.

While it’s routine for studios to write off projected losses for underperforming films, it’s highly unusual for one to announce that such a major project is a bomb so early in the film’s run, virtually killing what little hope it had to defy expectations and turn things around.

My teenage sons, oblivious to wider industry news, saw the trailer — packed with gorgeous fantasy landscapes; pirates; dark dungeons; and life-and-death swordfights against samurai, monsters, and flying dragons — and were sold immediately.

For myself, I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but I was astounded that Universal had dismissed the film so cavalierly, and my curmudgeonly nature immediately made me assume they were idiots. So we caught a matinee showing yesterday, in a nearly empty theater.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. Rinko Kikuchi does a marvelous job as the (literally) scenery-chewing, shape-shifting witch and veteran actor Hiroyuki Sanada (most recently seen in The Wolverine and the TV shows Lost and Revenge) carries the film as the leader of the legendary band of 47 disgraced samurai who avenges the death of their noble lord, against the direct orders of the Shogun.

Even Keanu Reeves delivers an entirely serviceable performance as Kai, the half-breed who leads the weaponless ronin into a demon-infested forest and wins them some cool samurai ordnance. The marketing has portrayed Reeves as the lead, but it’s really Sanada who has the most screen time.

The tale of the original 47 ronin, whose 18th century graves still stand today at Sengaku-ji in Japan, is perhaps the most famous example of bushidō, the samurai code of honor, in Japanese history, and is considered by some the country’s “national legend.”

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Read Isaac Asimov’s Predictions for 2014… from 1964

Friday, January 3, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Several sites around the Internet are making a big deal of Isaac Asimov’s predictions for 2014, originally written as an Op Ed piece for The New York Times fifty years ago.

Inspired by his visit to the New York World’s Fair of 1964, Asimov’s original piece wasn’t a science fiction story, but simply his predictions for what the World’s Fair of 2014 would be like.

Alexis Kleinman’s article at The Huffington Post is titled “Isaac Asimov’s Predictions For 2014 From 50 Years Ago Are Eerily Accurate,” and carefully categorizes the Good Doctor’s predictions as Correct (“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence”), Close, But Not Exact (“World population will be 6,500,000,000”), and Incorrect (“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords”).

Dylan Love at Business Insider takes a similar angle, with his post “In 1964, The Brilliant Isaac Asimov Wrote Some Predictions For 2014 — Wait Until You See How Right He Was.” Love grades Asimov much higher than HuffPo, noting that several predictions (“Men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better,” which clearly forecasts World of Warcraft, and “Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with ‘robot-brains,'” an obvious reference to Google’s self-driving cars) just need the right interpretation to be true.

Rebecca J. Rosen at The Atlantic takes Asimov to task for predicting an insufficiently grim future (“But he couldn’t have known the consequences of the development he predicted —- a planet whose climate is badly destabilized, whose inhabitants face mass extinctions in the years ahead”), and David Wogan at Scientific American clearly enjoyed the article, though he points out Asimov entirely missed the boat in at least one regard (“What we know as the internet is missing in these predictions, which is how we are all able to read this article and his thoughts decades later.”)

Good to see Asimov getting so much attention two decades after his death. You can read his original article here.

Sherlock Holmes Tiptoes into the Public Domain

Tuesday, December 31, 2013 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

An American judge has ruled that Sherlock Holmes is in the Public Domain.

Say what? If you’re like me, you’ve had some trouble wrapping your head around the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective wasn’t already in the public domain. His first appearance, in the short novel A Study in Scarlet, was in 1887, and he appeared in a total of four novels and 56 short stories between then and 1927. To my mind that’s the pre-pulp era, roughly contemporary with the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Let’s review. If most of Robert E. Howard Conan tales, published between 1932 -1936, are in the public domain — and in fact, virtually all literary works published before January 1, 1923 are no longer covered by United States copyright law — what’s the deal with Sherlock Holmes?

Well. Near as I understand it, the Conan Doyle Estate bases their claim on the fact that the last Holmes story was published in 1927, and the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Irene Adler, etc. were not truly completed until then. The Estate has challenged any production that tried to make use of the characters — and indeed, popular TV series like the BBC’s Sherlock, and CBS’s Elementary, have paid a license.

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Announcing the Winner of the Autographed Set of John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper Trilogy

Sunday, December 29, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Two weeks ago we told you about the arrival of Seven Sorcerers, the third and highly-anticipated final volume in John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper trilogy. The trilogy opened with Seven Princes (January 2012), and Seven Kings (January 2013). To celebrate the publication of the concluding book, we announced a contest to win a complete autographed set of all three, compliments of Orbit Books and John R. Fultz.

It’s too late to enter the contest now, but it’s not too late to discover Fultz’s unique heroic fiction, which Barnes & Noble calls “flawless epic fantasy.” You can try some of John’s exciting stories right here at Black Gate, including “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” which appeared as part of the Black Gate Online Fiction line, or the three stories that appeared in our print version: “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine”(BG 12); “Return of the Quill” (BG 13); and “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15). And you can read more about John’s philosophy of fantasy in his recent article, “One Man’s Trash…”

We received a record number of entries, which just shows the high level of excitement among our readers for everything written by John. All the entries were recorded on a spreadsheet, and the winner selected using the office percentile dice.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the autographed set of John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper trilogy is Massimiliano Izzo. Congratulations, Massimiliano! We’ll be touch to let you know how you can claim your books.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and to John R. Fultz and Orbit Books for sponsoring the contest. Seven Sorcerers was published on December 10th by Orbit Books. It is 448 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Look for it in bookstores everywhere.

The End of Electric Velocipede

Saturday, December 21, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

We are very sad to report that Electric Velocipede, one of the finest small press magazines in the genre, has published its final issue. Editor and publisher John Klima addresses the reasons for his decision in his editorial, A Remembrance of the Future:

This was not an easy decision.. Finishing this final issue is my way of closing things out mostly on my terms.

There is outstanding money owed me that just isn’t coming. That means money meant for Electric Velocipede’s future needs to be used on the present; we’re unable to make new issues when we still have to pay for old issues. There are limited options for electronic subscriptions; and the largest and most popular, Amazon, stopped taking new magazines right around the time I ran an Electric Velocipede Kickstarter based around the plan of having Amazon subscriptions for future revenue.

I have outstanding debt from running Electric Velocipede — and since the magazine can’t even support itself, it doesn’t make sense to keep it going and continue to spend money without earning any.

Electric Velocipede was one of the most acclaimed independent genre magazines on the market. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times, and won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. We reported on the successful Kickstarter, which raised over $7,500 to fund the magazine, in happier times last September.

Electric Velocipede 27, the final issue, contains short fiction from Daniel Ausema, Helena Bell, Geoffrey W. Cole, and many others. The cover is by Thom Davidsohn. Copies are available for your Nook or your Kindle for just $1.99.See complete details here.

We last reported on Electric Velocipede with issue 25.

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