Browsed by
Category: Reviews

Mindjammer Returns

Mindjammer Returns

Comments 1 comment

mindjammer1Longtime Black Gate visitors and readers might remember a time, long ago, when  I gushed about a great new FATE powered science fiction role-playing game, Mindjammer. Back then, it was an expansion for the excellent space opera setting Starblazer Adventures.

Now it’s an animal on its own, and was nominated for two Ennies (the role-playing award handed out each year at GenCon) just this year. I can see why.

I was already impressed with Mindjammer. Back in 2010 Sarah Newton did a fabulous job creating strange new societies and making the far future gameable, including the concepts of neural implants, synthetic humanoids with thanograms (deceased human personalities), sentient starships, and other impressive ideas.

…

Read More Read More

Werewolves, Haunted Castles, and Scottish Legends: Terror By Night by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Werewolves, Haunted Castles, and Scottish Legends: Terror By Night by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Comments 2 comments

Terror by Night Chetwynd-Hayes-small

Terror By Night
By R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Tandem (186 pages, $1, June 1974)

I’m reasonably familiar with the horror and SF genres, but I have to admit that the name R. Chetwynd-Hayes didn’t ring any bells. But the kind of tacky cover — and the fact that this collection dated from 1974, before the great horror boom of the Eighties kicked in — was enough for me to take this one out for a spin. Chetwynd-Hayes wrote about ten novels and many more collections during his long career, most of them in the horror genre but some leaning more toward SF.

I’d place most of the stories in this collection in the category of solid but not exceptional, with the exception of a pair of stories that stood out. I liked it well enough that I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of his books in the future. I’ve listed all of the stories but only reviewed the ones I found interesting.

…

Read More Read More

Down These Mean Streets the Obsessive Biographer Must Go

Down These Mean Streets the Obsessive Biographer Must Go

Comments 0 Comment

NOTE: The following article was first published on February 28, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

Long EmbraceChandler catLiterary biographies can sometimes prove to be a peculiar form of torture. I suppose their purpose is to see if the reader is still capable of mustering the same affection for the author’s work after reveling in every personal flaw the biographer was able to uncover. Biographies are the ultimate way of evening the score with those whose talent we will never equal. They reassure us that the gifted individuals who gained immortality through their work were certainly no better and frequently even worse human beings than those of us who admire them. Thanks to literary biographies, many view the father of sword & sorcery as a clinically depressed mama’s boy angry at the world and the father of hardboiled fiction as…well, let’s face it… there was nothing you could ever say about Hammett he didn’t already tell you about himself. This article concerns itself with Judith Freeman’s biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace.

I would not say that the book is unworthy of attention. Judith Freeman is an exceptional writer. She traces Chandler’s footsteps (even though it has been more than half a century since his death) by visiting every place he lived, worked, and vacationed and describes what she finds in a voice that Chandler fans will frequently recognize. It is a voice that is as evocative of Chandler’s work as the book’s title. The trouble is that Freeman isn’t writing a new Philip Marlowe mystery so much as transposing herself in Chandler’s shoes as a fellow author and kindred spirit. As the book unravels, she comes to share Chandler’s devotion to his wife and muse of over thirty years. The result is a bit like watching Otto Preminger’s classic film noir, Laura (1944) in that The Long Embrace shifts its focus and unfolds into a growing love story between a living person and a dead woman the narrator never met. Some readers will find the result enchanting, others will just find it creepy.

…

Read More Read More

The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

The Testament of Tall Eagle by John R. Fultz

Comments 5 comments

oie_2654127zETQGQbIIn his 1978 essay “On Thud and Blunder,” Poul Anderson pointed out that heroic fantasy was “overpast for drawing inspiration from other milieus — Oriental, Near Eastern, North and Black African, Amerindian, Polynesian.” While I’m still looking for Polynesian swords & sorcery, Black Gate alumnus John R. Fultz, has written the first full Native American novel of heroic fantasy that I’m aware of: The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015).

I must admit I’ve corresponded and debated with John several times about heroic fantasy. He’s as deeply conversant with the history of S&S as anybody I know. He brings that knowledge plus a deep love for the genre to his writing. I recommend his collection The Revelations of Zang as well as his Books of the Shaper trilogy — both are wildly inventive and fun. So I went into his new book expecting good things and I was not disappointed.

Fultz’s novel is a wonderful throwback to the golden days of swords & sorcery of the 1970s. In only 324 pages, Testament recounts the adventures of Tall Eagle, a young man of a Great Plains Indian tribe in the days just before the introduction of horses to his people. It’s possessed of a straightforward narrative that’s as lean and fierce as a wolf. Instead of the Clark Ashton Smith-like prose of his previous books, much of Testament reads like a brutally realistic historical saga of 17th century Plains Indian life… until the monsters show up. And they do, in great, slimy droves.

…

Read More Read More

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Wrath of Fu Manchu, Part Two

Comments 2 comments

Tom Stacey Wrathdaw_fu_manchuWhen Rohmer scholar, Dr. Robert E. Briney compiled a posthumous hardcover collection of the author’s rare and previously uncollected short fiction in the early 1970s, he included three short stories that were first published in This Week magazine in between Rohmer’s last two Fu Manchu novels. The stories were subsequently reprinted in sequence in Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine between January and March 1966 where the latter two stories were retitled. The hardcover collection, The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other New Stories was first published in the U.K. in 1973 by Tom Stacey. A U.S. mass market paperback edition from DAW Books followed in 1976. The collection was subsequently reprinted in 2001 as part of Allison & Busby’s Fu Manchu Omnibus – Volume 5. Titan Books will reprint the original collection as a trade paperback in March 2016.

“The Eyes of Fu Manchu” was serialized in two installments in This Week magazine on October 6 and 13, 1957. It first appeared in book form when Dr. Briney added it to the 1970 Ace paperback collection, The Secret of Holm Peel and Other Strange Stories. The story opens with Sir Denis Nayland Smith attending a lecture at the Sorbonne by an American scientist, Dr. Gregory Allen. Dr. Allen is a specialist in the possible chemical means of halting or even reversing the effects of aging. Sir Denis correctly believes Dr. Allen’s research will draw him to the attention of Dr. Fu Manchu. He makes plans to attend Dr. Allen’s upcoming lecture at King’s College in London with Dr. Petrie who is flying in from Cairo.

Rohmer mines one of his own life’s episodes when he encountered and began an extramarital affair with a young bohemian woman while on a voyage to Madeira. Here, Gregory Allen meets a young bohemian woman named Mignon while crossing the English Channel. Mignon is an artist and, upon learning Gregory abandoned his study of art for science, she makes some pointed remarks about his abandoning the bohemian life of freedom and truth for one of compromised values as part of the Establishment. Her words seem to sting Dr. Allen as much as her beauty and youth charm him just as Rohmer, the former bohemian turned established bestselling author and husband must have felt when he began his own affair with a younger free spirit on his voyage to Portugal years before.

…

Read More Read More

Short Speculative Fiction: “Summer at Grandma’s House” by Hao Jingfang

Short Speculative Fiction: “Summer at Grandma’s House” by Hao Jingfang

Comments 0 Comment
https://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Clarkesworld-October-2015-small.jpg

Lately I’ve felt like using this column to cover fewer pieces of fiction, but more in depth. So for the time being I’ll write about one story per column, picking my favorites from a given magazine.

In this month’s Clarkesworld, I very much enjoyed the short story “Summer at Grandma’s House” by Hao Jingfang, originally published in 2007, and translated into English by Carmen Yiling Yan.You can read it for free right now at Clarkesworld.

Briefly, what it’s about: a young man drifting aimlessly through life who visits his grandmother for the summer. This place is not what you’d expect: “The coffeepot is a penholder, the penholder is a lighter, the lighter is a flashlight, the flashlight is a jam container.” The story has to do with what he learns about the meaning of life in this house. From here on in, we delve into spoilers, so click on (either to the story or the rest of the column).

…

Read More Read More

The Blood of Martyrs: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Sabbat Martyr

The Blood of Martyrs: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Sabbat Martyr

Comments 0 Comment

Sabbat Martyr-smallI mentioned last time that, out of the Gaunt’s Ghosts series thus far, I found Straight Silver the closest thing to a weak link. I have to give credit where credit is due, though: any novel that sets up a book like Sabbat Martyr is a novel I’m glad to have found.

The Ghosts novels seem to be roughly divisible into broad arcs. The first three books, retrospectively collected as The Founding, where an introduction to the broad cast of characters and a training ground for Abnett to find his groove as an author of military science fiction. The second arc, The Saint, began with Honor Guard, and finds its completion and climax in Sabbat Martyr. Sabbat Martyr picks up on the spiritual themes of Honor Guard, as well as key subplots from Guns of Tanith and Straight Silver, and loops them all together into a book that is easily the best Ghosts novel so far, and stands among the best books of its type I’ve read.

There’s a brief page at the beginning of each book, excerpted from a later Imperial history of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, that briefly gives us a big picture of how the overall war is going. Usually, these don’t have much direct relevance to the plot, and are mostly there for flavor. The one for Sabbat Martyr, though, informs us that the Crusade is overstretched, bogged down in an assault on the key fortress world Morlond, and vulnerable to counter-attacks along its flanks. Urlock Gaur, Chaos Archon, is engaged at the front, but his lieutenants are circling like sharks to exploit weakness in the Imperial position.

In short, the Crusade needs a miracle.

…

Read More Read More

September Short Story Roundup

September Short Story Roundup

Comments 3 comments

oie_2021448ETqDlkzrHere we are again, friends, with a passel of new heroic fantasy tales to extol. And September was a splendid month for new stories. In fact, one is in contention for my favorite of the year so far…

…and I’ll start with that particular story: “Poor Bright Folk” by James Lecky in the latest issue of Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine, #44. Elathan is a bard of the Aos Si (more commonly called the Sidhe, or fey folk) traveling through the once brightly-colored land of Orialla. On entering a forest glade he meets a woman whose very appearance unnerves him:

Her hair hung in a long braid almost as far as her knees, deep lines marked her cheeks and forehead, yet she stood straight as a staff, her movements fluid and easy. Her clothing – a straight dress and a short cape – were a patchwork of various colours and materials, some smooth and strong, others coarse and faded.

The sight of her disturbed me in a way I could not give voice to and I wished for nothing more than to be away from this place and this strange woman.

Her name is Mual and when she asks him to play for her at her home he finds himself saying yes in words that seem to come from outside himself.

In Mual’s castle Elathan discovers she is working a vampiric sort of magic over her servants and now him. To escape her clutches and free his fellow captives the bard must use his wit and wiles. Lecky didn’t try, thankfully, to emulate some sort of old-timey style with his prose, yet “Poor Bright Folk” has the feel and resonance of the best fairy tales from out of the deeps of time.

…

Read More Read More

Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

Sam Spade and the Pursuit of Empty Dreams

Comments 17 comments

NOTE: The following article was first published on February 21, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

First FalconFalcon pbkMuch of what has been written about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon focuses on the novel as groundbreaking in its realistic portrayal of detective work. More in-depth literary studies tend to focus on the significance of Hammett’s shift in protagonist from the incorruptible and nameless Continental Op of his earlier work to the jaded self-portrait of the author as Sam Spade. In my view, this transition is primarily noteworthy in that Hammett’s protagonist changed from an idealized conception of the man he might have become had he remained a Pinkerton Operative (the Continental Op is based on Hammett’s boss during his stint with the Pinkerton Agency) to a more self-reflective portrayal of a man mired in moral conflict. Hammett’s own moral crisis would color his fiction from this point until he resolved his dilemma and settled into a life alternating his celebrity status with reclusiveness – a life whose one constant was Hammett’s complete lack of creative output for his remaining 27 years.

Many have speculated why Hammett’s creativity dried up when he and his muse and mistress Lillian Hellman had settled comfortably into something approaching unwedded bliss as the Nick and Nora Charles of the real world. My own opinion has been that once freed of the conflict of whether or not to walk a path of integrity or give in to the encroaching corruption that constantly assailed his world, Hammett had nothing further to draw upon for inspiration. Resolution was tantamount to becoming a spent force and Hammett was finished as a writer. The fact that he realized this dilemma was inescapable lies at the heart of both The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in their pursuit of empty dreams incapable of satisfying the characters whose lust is so great they are willing to die for or kill in their futile quests.

…

Read More Read More

Invading Aliens and Self-Aware Submarines: The Human Zero, Edited by Sam Moskowitz & Roger Elwood

Invading Aliens and Self-Aware Submarines: The Human Zero, Edited by Sam Moskowitz & Roger Elwood

Comments 5 comments

The Human Zero-small

The Human Zero and Other Science Fiction Masterpieces
Edited by Sam Moskowitz & Roger Elwood
Tower Books (224 pages, $0.60, 1967)
Cover artist unknown

Most of the names in The Human Zero are well-known SF writers, with a few notable exceptions. Perhaps Chad Oliver is well-known to more avid SF fans than I, but I didn’t recognize the name. Then there’s the odd man out here — Erle Stanley Gardner. Who wrote a great deal of fiction in his day but is best known for introducing the character Perry Mason to the world.

Not much to see in this collection of eight stories, at least by my reckoning. Two of the stories managed an Okay rating and the rest of them didn’t cut it.

…

Read More Read More