Browsed by
Category: News

The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer

The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer

When I was a young blogger, I swore I wouldn’t write predictable headlines like “The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer!” Now I’m a middle-aged blogger with deadline pressures and nothing is as satisfying and as reassuring as a predictable headline. Thank you for your indulgence.

Do you watch Sherlock? Of course you do. The BBC One crime drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, which places Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective and his trusted companion Watson in contemporary London and is one of the best things on television. It’s one of the very few shows on television my entire family watches together (the other was Firefly). Famously conceived by Doctor Who writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat while they were commuting back and forth from Cardiff by train, Sherlock has had only two brief seasons so far, in 2010 and 2012, with one episode each season being written by Gatiss, Moffat, and Stephen Thompson.

The worst thing about Sherlock has been that there’s so very little of it, with only three 90-minute episodes per season, and a long drought between seasons. First time I watched Season One on Blu-ray, in fact, I kept checking the box to make sure I hadn’t missed a disk.

Season Two ended — naturally — on a killer cliffhanger, with Sherlock faking his suicide while Watson looked on. American fans in particular have been waiting impatiently for Season Three, which is slowly wrapping production in the UK. Two of the three episodes have been completed and on August 2 the brief Season Three teaser below was finally released by the BBC. No air date has been given, so for now it’s all we have. Enjoy.

Tabletop Gaming On The Rise

Tabletop Gaming On The Rise

Tabletop RPGs-smallThere’s an interesting article in the Times Free Press this week that examines the growing evidence that tabletop role playing is experiencing a significant resurgence.

Written by Casey Phillips, the article, “After 40 years, popularity of tabletop gaming rises despite high-tech competition,” mixes industry stats with anecdotal evidence gathered from the Chattanooga area.

D&D and other role-playing games increasingly are becoming a mainstream activity. In a 2000 survey, Wizards of the Coast — the current owners of the D&D universe of products — estimated that 5.5 million people in the U.S. regularly play tabletop roleplaying games…

With the recent growth of nerd culture through blockbuster comic book films and the growth of the video game industry, role-playing has been embraced more positively by pop culture, serving as a plot device in TV shows such as Futurama, Freaks and Geeks, Community and The Big Bang Theory

In a 2004 essay about his introduction to D&D as a seventh grader, talk show host Stephen Colbert writes, “I… was instantly hooked. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my school work.” In 2011, he also issued an on-air shout-out to “any half-elf thieves who are joining us tonight.”

I’m not sure I believe that 5.5 million people stat from Wizards of the Coast — unless maybe they define “regularly plays tabletop roleplaying games” as “daydreamed about being Legolas one time.” But I definitely concur that D&D has become tightly identified with the rise of nerd culture, and that has played a very real part in popularizing it and other role playing games. I witnessed that first hand, when my daughter asked to play after her friends watched the “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” episode of Community.

Read the complete article here.

Summer 2013 Subterranean Magazine now Available

Summer 2013 Subterranean Magazine now Available

Subterranean Magazine Summer 2013-smallThe Summer installment of online dark fantasy magazine Subterranean is a special K. J. Parker issue, with two short stories by the pseudonymous author of The Folding Knife and The Engineer trilogy, “The Sun And I” and “Illuminated,” and an article, “Rich Men’s Skins; A Social History of Armour.”

I wonder if the editors have any inside info on who the mysterious K.J. Parker really is? Those Subterranean guys are pretty connected; it’s their job to be in the know on industry secrets and stuff. They’ve published Parker plenty times before — most recently with “Let Maps to Others” (Summer 2012), “The Life and Sad Times of the Western Sword” (Fall 2011), and the World Fantasy Award-winning novella, “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong” (Winter 2011).

After a lengthy association like that, you’d think they’d have shelled out a couple bucks for a private eye, and maybe have some fuzzy photos and a database of incriminating leads by now. Like the fact that K.J. Parker and John R. Fultz have never been seen in the same room together. Hmmmm.

If Lee Moyer’s cover looks familiar, it should — it was first used as the cover for Weird Tales 357 (see it here). No crime in re-using great art I guess, but you’d think they’d have chosen something less recent. That issue of WT came out just two years ago! Maybe they’re on a budget. Private eyes aren’t cheap.

They didn’t skimp on the contents though — as usual, this issue is packed with great fiction from some of the top names in the industry, including Joe R. Lansdale, Catherynne M. Valente, and Kat Howard.

Read More Read More

The Doom That Came to Kickstarter

The Doom That Came to Kickstarter

The Doom That Came to Atlantic City-smallReports are coming in that Erik Chevalier, the man behind one of the most high-profile Kickstarter game successes of 2012, The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, has admitted that he will never produce the game.

The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, created by Eberron designer Keith Baker and artist Lee Moyer, was a Monopoly-style game with a distinct Cthulhu flair. Described as “A light hearted Lovecraftian game of urban destruction,” the game invited players to take the roles of Great Old Ones in a race to be the first to destroy the world. The Kickstarter campaign launched May 7, 2012 with a $35,000 goal; by the time it closed on June 6, 2012 it had raised an astounding $122,874.

However, over the past 13 months, Chevalier has been releasing increasingly bleak progress reports, culminating in this post Tuesday:

This is not an easy update to write. The short version: The project is over, the game is canceled…

From the beginning the intention was to launch a new board game company with the Kickstarted funds, with The Doom that Came to Atlantic City as only our first of hopefully many projects… Since then rifts have formed and every error compounded the growing frustration, causing only more issues. After paying to form the company, for the miniature statues, moving back to Portland, getting software licenses and hiring artists to do things like rule book design and art conforming the money was approaching a point of no return. We had to print at that point or never. Unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards…

Predictably, the feedback from backers has been scathing.

Read More Read More

Support the Spellbound and Spindles Kickstarter

Support the Spellbound and Spindles Kickstarter

Spellbound and Spindles

“Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life.”
— Johann Christoph Friederich v. Schiller

There is a tendency, I think, to not take fairy tales seriously. A hundred years of relegating them to the nursery has hidden their power: to educate, to entertain, to challenge and change us. And yet, the magic of “Once upon a time …” remains. Televisions shows and movies borrow from them. Comic books and stories are filled with sleeping princesses, talking animals, spells to be broken and kingdoms to be saved.

Fairy tales endure not in spite of their plasticity, but because of it. The story of Cinderella is found all over the world, in hundreds of different versions. Details vary depending upon the culture that tells the tale. Despite the alterations, though, the story is recognizable time and again.

And it is this malleability that I am counting on in my project, Spellbound and Spindles. To give a brief introduction and history, Spellbound is a children’s fantasy magazine published by my company, Eggplant Literary Productions. In each issue we publish fiction, poetry and art, all fantasy related. One of our priorities is putting out a publication that reflects our global readership. We actively solicit submissions that are diverse in their settings and characters.

It is with that goal in mind, coupled with my belief in the power of fairy tales, that I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Spellbound & Spindles. The plan is to publish a special edition of Spellbound, as well as a companion adult anthology, of fairy tales retold to include POC, LGBT, and disabled characters. The anthologies will be produced in both e-book and limited edition hardcover.

We — myself, and the staff at Eggplant — view this as an opportunity to build upon what we’ve already done and to push the field of children’s and fairy tale literature into a more inclusive direction. As the mother of a biracial child, it is a project that is close to my heart. If the idea intrigues you, please check out the campaign and back us.

The Name of the Wind Optioned as a TV Drama by Fox

The Name of the Wind Optioned as a TV Drama by Fox

The Name of the Wind-smallThe Internet is abuzz with word that Patrick Rothfuss’s epic fantasy series, The Kingkiller Chronicles, has been optioned as a TV series by 20th Century Fox Television and New Regency Productions.

Dateline first broke the news on Thursday. Details are fairly thin, but it looks like Eric Heisserer (screenwriter for Final Destination 5 and the 2011 The Thing remake, and director of the upcoming Hours) will adapt the series, and serve as executive producer.

The Kingkiller Chronicles is one of the most popular fantasy series of the past decade. The first volume, The Name of the Wind, was published by DAW in April 2007; the sequel The Wise Man’s Fear appeared in March 2011. Both hit No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list. A third volume, The Doors of Stone, is due next year.

Following the runaway success of HBO’s Game of Thrones — even my Dad watches the show, and he scorned fantasy for decades — it’s not surprising that the bigger networks have started to snap up other popular properties suitable for big-scale small screen adaptation.

A much bigger question is whether or not Fox and New Regency can achieve something approaching the quality and ambition of Game of Thrones. Rothfuss has tens of thousands of dedicated fans who will be watching developments closely.

We’ll report news (not to mention unsubstantiated gossip and innuendo) here as soon as we hear it.

Get Five Years of Fiction from Tor.com — For Free!

Get Five Years of Fiction from Tor.com — For Free!

Tor The StoriesTo celebrate their fifth anniversary, Tor.com is releasing an anthology crammed with all the original fiction they’ve published since their launch.

It’s a hugely impressive list — over 150 short stories. Authors include Charles Stross, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Steven Gould, Elizabeth Bear, Terry Bisson, Jay Lake, Brandon Sanderson, Jeff VanderMeer, Jo Walton, Ken Scholes, Rachel Swirsky, Harry Turtledove, Michael Bishop and Steven Utley, and Kij Johnson. And that’s just in the first twelve months!

Short fiction from Tor.com has won virtually every major award in SFF. Want examples? “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Jan 2010) won the Nebula and Charlie Jane Anders’s novelette “Six Months, Three Days” (June 2011) won the Hugo. There are numerous Nebula nominees among the collected stories as well, including “The Finite Canvas” by Brit Mandelo (Dec 2012), “Swift, Brutal Retaliation” by Meghan McCarron (Jan 2012), and two novelettes by Rachel Swirsky: “Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia” (Aug 2012) and “A Memory of Wind” (Nov 2009).

There’s no shortage of Hugo nominees in this lot either, including John Scalzi’s “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue” (April 2011), “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Nov 2010), “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky (Mar 2009), and “Overtime” by Charles Stross (Dec 2009).

In short, this is one of the most impressive and monumental anthologies to come along in years. And Tor.com is giving it away absolutely free. We’re not worthy, but we won’t let that stop us.

You can see the complete list of fiction Tor.com has published in the last five year at their Original Fiction index. And just to prove that they’re not resting on their laurels, they’ve announced five new stories will be published tomorrow, by Carrie Vaughn, Nancy Kress, Lavie Tidhar, Ben Burgis, and Tina Connolly.

Fiction for Tor.com is acquired and edited by Liz Szabla, Ann VanderMeer, Susan Dobinick, Ellen Datlow, Noa Wheeler, George R. R. Martin, Paul Stevens, Calista Brill, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Brendan Deneen, Janine O’Malley, and a talented community of Tor editors and their pals.

Get the free book here.

Weird Tales 361 Now on Sale

Weird Tales 361 Now on Sale

Weird Tales 361-smallThe latest issue of the world’s oldest — and arguably greatest — fantasy magazine is now on sale.

Weird Tales #361 is the special demented Fairy Tale issue, with fiction by Peter S. Beagle, Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, Morgan Llywelyn, and many others.

There’s also articles from Darrell Schweitzer (“Ninety Years of Weird Tales“), an interview with J. David Spurlock on the artwork of Margaret Brundage, and “An Inside Look at Weird Tales,” a step-by-step look at the evolving cover concept for this issue, by editor John Harlacher and artist Jeff Wong.

It’s always a delight to see a new issue of Weird Tales, especially one as jam-packed as this. This fat issue contains no less than 19 stories and four poems, alongside several feature interviews, book reviews, and copious interior art.

The PDF review copy we received is beautifully laid out and easy to navigate and read. This is the second issue produced by Nth Dimension Media, under new editor Marvin Kaye.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents:

Read More Read More

J.K. Rowling Outed as the Author of The Cuckoo’s Calling

J.K. Rowling Outed as the Author of The Cuckoo’s Calling

The Cuckoos CallingThere’s been a huge surge of interest in Robert Galbraith’s debut crime novel The Cuckoo’s Calling today.

That’s because “Robert Galbraith” was revealed late yesterday as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

The book’s publisher has been touting the book as a “classic crime novel in the tradition of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.” Up until yesterday, it had sold around 1,500 copies in hardback. But in the hours since its author was revealed, it has hit the bestseller list. Amazon is currently out of stock and listing it as shipping in 10 to 14 days (Barnes & Noble still has it in stock online). If you want a first edition hardcover, you better move fast.

The Sunday Times has reported that Rowling has completed a second novel featuring the same detective, Cormoran Strike. It is due next year. Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, was published last year.

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this.

The Cuckoo’s Calling was published April 30 by Mulholland Books. It is 464 pages, priced at $26 for the hardcover (if you can find one). You’ll have better luck with the digital edition, priced at $12.99.

Check Out the How To Train Your Dragon 2 Teaser Trailer

Check Out the How To Train Your Dragon 2 Teaser Trailer

I love it when a really great film sneaks up on me. It doesn’t happen very often any more — as Editor-in-Chief of the BG website, it’s more or less my job to stay on top of the latest in fantasy entertainment — but when it does, it’s a real delight.

My favorite film of 2010, and one of my all-time favorite animated films, period, snuck up on me. My kids came boiling up out of the basement, begging me to come watch it with them on DVD. So I did. They were aquiver with excitement as they watched it again — for what turned out to be the fourth time — trying to stay quiet and not spoil the surprises for me.

The film was How To Train Your Dragon, and it was everything they said it would be: funny, surprising, original, and absolutely riveting. See Andrew Zimmerman Jones BG review here, in which he calls it “Hands down, of the fantasy films I’ve seen this year, my favorite.”

And now the sequel has snuck up on me. Or at least the teaser trailer has — I had no idea the movie was in production. But I’m delighted to hear it, and anxiously awaiting the finished product. Canadian writer/director Dean DeBlois, who also directed the first film, calls this one “the epic second act of a much larger story.” Here’s a look at the trailer posted two days ago on YouTube, where it already has over 1.6 million views.

How To Train Your Dragon 2 was produced by DreamWorks Animation and directed by Dean DeBlois. The voice cast includes Gerard Butler, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, and Craig Ferguson. It is scheduled for release in June 2014.