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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.

The 2012 Hugo Award Nominations

The 2012 Hugo Award Nominations

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among-othersThe nominations for the 2012 Hugo Awards have been announced by Chicon 7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention. Chicon 7 will be held over Labor Day weekend right here in Chicago. The nominations are:

Best Novel

  • Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)
  • A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra)
  • Deadline by Mira Grant (Orbit)
  • Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan / Del Rey)
  • Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (Orbit)

Best Novella

  • Countdown by Mira Grant (Orbit Short Fiction)
  • “The Ice Owl” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2011)
  • “Kiss Me Twice” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, June 2011)
  • “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, September/October 2011)
  • “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” by Ken Liu (Panverse 3)
  • Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld / WSFA)

Complete list after the jump.

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John R. Fultz’s Seven Kings due in January

John R. Fultz’s Seven Kings due in January

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seven-kingsJohn R. Fultz’s second novel Seven Kings, the sequel to his breakout fantasy epic Seven Princes, will be available January, 2013.

Seven Kings, the second volume in The Books of the Shaper, will be published by Orbit in trade paperback. The cover is by Richard Anderson.

On his blog Fultz spills some additional details on the new installment:

I finished the final revisions about a month ago. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but you will see much more of Khyrei and its poisonous crimson jungles than in the first book.

Plus: More Giants…

Barnes & Noble’s inhouse magazine Explorations called Seven Princes “flawless – and timeless – epic fantasy… Seven Princes is as good as it gets.” Here on the blog Brian Murphy said:

Seven Princes is bold, brash, and big. This is a novel written with bright strokes of character and setting, bursting with world-shaking adventure, intrigue, and conflict. It reads big, and feels big, and it’s unrepentantly so.

Stay tuned — we’ll keep you posted on the latest Books of the Shaper news as word escapes from the haunted towers of Castle Fultz.

The 2011 Bram Stoker Award Winners

The 2011 Bram Stoker Award Winners

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flesh-eatersThis week the Horror Writers Association announced the winners of the 2011 Bram Stoker Awards at its annual banquet at the World Horror Convention. This year it was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and it marked the 25th Anniversary of the awards. A total of 12 awards were given in 11 categories, including one tie:

    Superior Achievement in a NOVEL
    Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney (Pinnacle Books)
    Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL
    Isis Unbound by Allyson Bird (Dark Regions Press)
    Superior Achievement in a YOUNG ADULT NOVEL (tie)
    > The Screaming Season by Nancy Holder (Razorbill)
    > Dust and Decay by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

    Superior Achievement in a GRAPHIC NOVEL
    Neonomicon by Alan Moore (Avatar Press)

    Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION
    “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” by Peter Straub (Conjunctions: 56)

    Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION
    “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” by Stephen King (The Atlantic Magazine, May 2011)

    Superior Achievement in a SCREENPLAY
    American Horror Story, episode #12: “Afterbirth” by Jessica Sharzer (20th Century Fox Television)

    Superior Achievement in a FICTION COLLECTION
    The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious Press)

    Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY
    Demons: Encounters with the Devil and his Minions, Fallen Angels and the Possessed edited by John Skipp (Black Dog and Leventhal)

    Superior Achievement in NON-FICTION
    Stephen King: A Literary Companion by Rocky Wood (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers)

    Superior Achievement in a POETRY COLLECTION
    How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend by Linda Addison (Necon Ebooks)

The HWA, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, also presented the special one-time only Vampire Novel of the Century Award to:

    I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Read complete details about this year’s awards at the Horror Writers Association website.

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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M.A.R. Barker, Nov 3 1929 – March 16, 2012

M.A.R. Barker, Nov 3 1929 – March 16, 2012

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manofgoldWhile I was at the games auction at Gary Con on Sunday, Luke Gygax solemnly paid tribute to those industry giants we lost in the last year, including Jim Roslof and Jean Wells, both early and influential TSR employees.

But I was startled when Luke added that M.A.R. Barker, the grand old man of role playing, had died last week at the age of 82.

M.A.R (Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman) Barker is not particularly well remembered today. He wasn’t especially prolific as an author, with five novels to his credit — the last three published by obscure small press publishers. But everyone who paid attention to TSR in the heady early days of role playing knew M.A.R. Barker, the creator of Empire of the Petal Throne and the fantasy world of Tékumel.

Barker created Tékumel in the decades from 1940 to 1970. Wholly unique, Tékumel was a science fantasy setting inspired by Indian, Middle Eastern, Egyptian and Meso-American mythology, a world colonized by humans and alien species some 60,000 years in the future. Perhaps most intriguing, Tékumel was largely free of Tolkien’s influence as it was well established long before the publication of The Lords of the Rings — the only major RPG setting of the 20th Century that could make that claim.

In the early 1970s Barker met one of the original Dungeons & Dragons playtesters, Mike Mornard, and was introduced to the game. It didn’t take long to realize the potential of the D&D ruleset, and he quickly adapted it for his own use and self-published Empire of the Petal Throne in 1974. One of his occasional players was D&D co-creator Dave Arneson, who called Barker his favorite Game Master — and EPT his favorite RPG.

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Return of the Barbarian Prince

Return of the Barbarian Prince

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barbarian-prince-256If you’ve spent much time on the Black Gate website you’ve probably seen Barbarian Prince get mentioned at least once.

A solo board game from the 80s designed by Arnold Hendrick, Barbarian Prince is a little like one of those old “choose your own” adventure books, except that the order of events is far more random, for they’re generated by rolling on a number of tables depending upon your location on the map and are partly affected by choices you have made and gear and allies you may have accumulated in your travels.

It never plays the same way twice, and a lot of us find it glorious fun — although it is difficult to win. John O’Neill is a huge fan of the game, and he got me interested some years back when he gave me an extra copy he had lying around.

When I heard rumors of an unofficial redesign over at BoardGameGeek, I dropped by to take a look and was incredibly impressed. Someone — Todd Sanders, as it turns out — had gotten permission to create a new game board, pieces, and redesign the layout of the rule and event books.

The result was brilliant, beautiful, and a completely professional product.

It’s available, free, for anyone who wants to download the files and create their own version of the game (the original version of Barbarian Prince is also available for free download, courtesy of Reaper Miniatures and Dwarfstar Games).

I contacted Todd to learn more about his redesign and what had inspired it, and discovered he was responsible for a number of stunning games of his own creation.

We talked last week about game design, Print and Play games, and, naturally, Barbarian Prince. Larger versions of the lovely game boards can be seen by clicking on their pictures.

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Art of the Genre: The Pillaging of Kickstarter?

Art of the Genre: The Pillaging of Kickstarter?

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The Good of Kickstarter... The Order of the Stick
The Good of Kickstarter... The Order of the Stick

The pillaging of Kickstarter… Dramatic huh? Well, it might not exactly be the case, but I’ve seen a couple shocking trends happening out in the world of Kickstarter that disturbed me enough to talk about it here in my regular Kickstarter postings.

You see, Kickstarter at its very base level is about money, and that’s not a bad thing because it takes money to make cool things happen. Kickstarter, as a platform, helps thousands of independent minded artists, writers, musicians, inventors, and all other manner of creative people connect with fans to create projects that they love. How can that be wrong? Well, it’s not, but unfortunately corporations have now discovered the power of Kickstarter, and what was once a grass roots movement is quickly changing into a large scale money grab.

To illustrate this, I’m going to take you all through a couple of examples that I’ve seen in the past few months. First off I’m going to start with this little ‘Honest Man’s Kickstarter’ that introduced me to Kickstarters in the first place, the initial art recreation project by former TSR artist Jeff Dee. Dee, a forward thinking guy, was understandably put out that TSR threw away all his original art from his work on Dungeons & Dragons from 1979-1981. Who could blame him, right? So he goes to Kickstarter and asks folks to help him recreate those original pieces of art, as well as add some new ones if pledging was high enough. Jeff asked for $2,500 to do this and received funding to the tune of $5,750, which is a great thing to see for a guy who struggles with bills as much as anyone else in America today.

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Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

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deserterIf you’re a long-time Black Gate reader you know the name Peadar Ó Guilín.

His first story for us was “The Mourning Trees” (Black Gate 5), followed by “Where Beauty Lies in Wait” (BG 11) and “The Evil Eater” (BG 13), which Shedrick Pittman-Hassett of Serial Distractions called “a lovely little bit of Lovecraftian horror that still haunts me to this day.”

Peadar’s first novel The Inferior was published to terrific reviews in 2008. School Library Journal called it

[An] epic story of survival, betrayal, and community… intriguing at every turn, The Inferior will hold readers from page to page, chapter to chapter, to the very end.

After nearly four years the sequel has finally arrived, and it promises to be everything we’ve waited for. Here’s the book description:

The humans are weak and vulnerable. Soon the beasts that share their stone-age world will kill and eat them. To save his tribe, Stopmouth must make his way to the Roof, the mysterious hi-tech world above the surface. But the Roof has its own problems. The nano technology that controls everything from the environment to the human body is collapsing. A virus has already destroyed the Upstairs, sending millions of refugees to seek shelter below. And now a rebellion against the Commission, organized by the fanatical Religious, is about to break.

Hunted by the Commission’s Elite Agents through the overcrowded, decaying city of the future, Stopmouth must succeed in a hunt of his own: to find the secret power hidden in the Roof’s computerized brain, and return to his people before it is too late.

The Deserter is on available today in hardcover, and in digital format for the Kindle and Nook. It is 448 pages, and published by David Fickling Books.

To promote it, Peadar has released Where Beauty Lies In Wait, a free e-book collecting a dozen of his short stories, including all three from Black Gate. It’s available in Kindle, ePub and PDF versions, and you can get it here.

Is John Carter a Flop?

Is John Carter a Flop?

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john-carterI’ve been enjoying Ryan Harvey’s enthusiastic review of the new Disney film John Carter, although I wasn’t able to make it to the local metroplex to see it myself this weekend. Apprently, I wasn’t the only one.

Entertainment Weekly, in assessing the weekend box office take, calls the film “one of the most high profile box office misfires in years.”

Carter really needed to open to $50 million at a bare minimum. Other films that reportedly cost around $250 million include Spider-Man 3, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Avatar, and those four movies debuted to an average of $99 million. John Carter, on the other hand, collected an estimated $30.6 million this weekend… a dismal showing for such a costly project.

Today’s New York Times, in an article titled Ishtar Lands on Mars, estimates the film’s total cost at closer to $350 million:

John Carter, which cost an estimated $350 million to make and market… took in about $30.6 million at the North American box office… That result is so poor that analysts estimate that Disney will be forced to take a quarterly write-down of $100 million to $165 million. The amount will depend on ticket sales overseas, where John Carter took in about $71 million over the weekend, a better total than Disney had feared…

Because of its enormous cost and the way ticket sales are split with theaters, analysts say the film needs to take in more than $600 million globally to break even. The only silver lining for Disney may be a dubious one: last March the studio’s Mars Needs Moms flopped so badly that it also required a write-down, making year-on-year performance comparisons less brutal.

Although the numbers look grim, $71 million overseas is nothing to sneeze at. With a combined weekend take over over $100 million, it may be too early to label John Carter a clear bomb. We’ll see what the future holds… and I still plan to see it this week.