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William Michael Mott’s Pulp Winds

William Michael Mott’s Pulp Winds

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Pulp Winds
William Michael Mott
Grave Distractions Publications (190 pp. $14.99)
Reviewed by Howard Andrew Jones

A couple of years ago I had the chance to read a cracking good heroic fiction story by William Michael Mott. I knew Mott was a Robert E. Howard fan and a pulp aficionado, but what I didn’t know was that his “Temple of the Salamander” would read like a head-on collision between some of the best features of the stories of Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. “Temple of the Salamander” was set in the dying days of Earth, on a vast, last plateau crossed by an amazing road that may well be intelligent and is certainly dangerous. Traveling this road is the warrior Tulruhk, who is different from the rest of his tribe in part because of his curiosity and in part because he’s capable of compassion, so rare in his world that it makes his occasional act of mercy look like a saintly visit. Tulruhk aids a dying scholar and is rewarded with a chance for membership in an exclusive order dedicated to exploration. Tulruhk’s quest to gain that membership fuels the action in two of his chronicled adventures.

Mott’s drafted three stories of Tulruhk and the last plateau, and they’re collected in Pulp Winds, an anthology of his original work that includes heroic poetry, some atmospheric horror that hearkens back to Lovecraft and Shaver without emulating their sometimes difficult prose, and what may be the only homage I’ve ever read to one of Robert E. Howard’s  fight stories. If Howard had ever written a Costigan fight story with weird elements it would have sounded an awful lot like “Fisticuffs of the Damned.” I think the biggest surprises of the collection were two heroic stories featuring Jack the Giant Killer. When Mott first mentioned these  in an e-mail I was skeptical, but there’s nothing light and airy about these, and I ended up enjoying them almost as much as the adventures of Tulruhk.

Pulp Winds won’t appeal to every reader — in Mott’s work the hero gets the girl and the monsters are there for the pummeling. Which isn’t to say that they’re predictable or that there are no surprises; it’s just that Mott proudly wears his love for pulpy story elements on his sleeve. Mott wants to serve up new adventures in the style of some of the best adventure writers from the golden days of the pulps, hence the title of his collection. If you’re like me and are sometimes in the mood for some monster bashing, sword-slinging, and damsel saving, Pulp Winds delivers in spades.

Feature Excerpt: Rich Horton’s “Back to the Future: Modern Reprints of Classic Fantasy”

Feature Excerpt: Rich Horton’s “Back to the Future: Modern Reprints of Classic Fantasy”

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centaurideviceContributing Editor and SF historian Rich Horton’s article for Black Gate 14 was on modern reprints of the best in classic fantasy and science fiction:

Orion, via their imprints Millennium and later Gollancz, took a different tack in keeping important SF in print. The SF Masterworks series, beginning in 1999, undertook to reprint the very best science fiction novels of the past century or so… a couple of story collections slipped in, including most significantly (to my mind) The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith, the complete stories of one of the oddest and most intriguing SF writers ever. Other interesting works… include what may be Jack Vance’s best singleton novel, Emphyrio; M. John Harrison’s cynical take on Space Opera, The Centauri Device; Michael Moorock’s colorful and louche science fantasy, The Dancers at the End of Time (always my personal favorite among his works); one of the most significant works from Russia: Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; and the complete “Roderick” novels by John Sladek, brilliant satire from one of the field’s best and darkest satirists.

As we wrap up the Sneak Preview of the massive 14th issue of Black Gate we’ve posted a lengthy excerpt from Rich’s article, in which he covers titles from Baen Books, the SF and Fantasy Masterworks lines from Orion, the Science Fiction Book Club, Wildside Press, and NESFA Press.

Rich’s previous feature articles for us include “Fictional Losses: Neglected Stories From the SF Magazines,” (Black Gate 11) “The Big Little SF Magazines of the 1970s,” (BG 10) and  “Building the Fantasy Canon: the Classic Anthologies of Genre Fantasy” (BG 2).

The complete “Back to the Future: Modern Reprints of Classic Fantasy” appears in Black Gate 14.

Charlene Brusso Reviews A Magic of Nightfall

Charlene Brusso Reviews A Magic of Nightfall

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magic-of-nightfallA Magic of Nightfall
S.L. Farrell
DAW (656 pp, $7.99, March 2009 – March 2010 mass market edition)
Reviewed by Charlene Brusso

Fans of S.L. Farrell’s marvelous ability with character and world-building (check out the Cloudmage trilogy) will cheer at the arrival of the latest book in the Nessantico Cycle (sequel to A Magic of Twilight). Book two returns readers to the marvelous Renaissance style city of Nessantico, “the most famous, the most beautiful, the most powerful of her kind,” bustling with energy, ambition, magic (much of it unauthorized), and ever-rising intrigue. But this is a Nessantico 25 years after the events of Twilight, a shaky Nessantico and its powers-that-be set to tumble down the slippery slope that has been steadily growing steeper in the last few years.

Nessantico is the capital, both political and religious, of the Holdings, an immense and entrenched empire – immense, but half the size it used to be. To the east, rival nation-state Firenzcia is forming its own alliances with its neighbors. Likewise, the Concenzia Faith has undergone a schism. In Nessantico, the much-beloved Ana ca’Seranta still serves as the “real” Archigos, but rival Archigos Semini ca’Cellibrecca, a conservative religious hardliner, leads the faithful in Brezno in Firenzcia. Unlike Ana, Semini has no tolerance for heretics like the Numentodo, natural philosophers who’ve proven that magical ability has no link to religious faith.

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Short Fiction Review #33: Oxford American Future Issue

Short Fiction Review #33: Oxford American Future Issue

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oxford-americanOxford American Issue 70 contemplates life in 2050 with 11 stories that share a pessimistic view of America’s future beset by natural and man-made disaster, human folly and avarice.  In other words, just like it is today, only worse.

While dystopia has always been a fundamental science fictional trope (indeed, the one that has historically been most likely to gain literary credence, e.g., Brave New World and 1984), there was a time, particularly during the Golden Age of the 1930s to 1950s but still continuing on in counterpoint to the New Wave movement during the 1960s/1970s, when writers portrayed a future improved by technology, not devastated by it. Even the cyberpunks, despite their bleak industrial noir settings, arguably depicted technology as a “force for good” when their renegade heroes turn the technological tables to upend the corporate masters.

Part of the bleakness here might be because Oxford American terms itself  “The Southern Magazine of Good Writing,” and the American South certainly has a collective consciousness of disasters dating back to the Civil War, but most recently with Katrina and the BP oil spill in the Gulf.  “The Vicinity of the Sick” by M.O. Walsh depicts a Louisiana where people have to wear bio-hazard suits to go in the water; a woman dying of cancer is driven by her reluctant husband to a restricted biohazard in hope of escaping the soul-sapping hazards of technological illusions that pervade “normal” existence in Connie May Fowler’s “Do Not Enter the Memory”; and a strange pair from opposite socio-economic backgrounds try to survive (and discover some basic bond of humanity) in the Bayou following ecological and technological collapse in “Maroon” by Susan Straight.  Along the same lines, in a non-fction piece, Kevin Brockmeier lists his “Ten Great Novels of the Apocolypse.”

In addition to ecological disaster, the stories share to varying degrees the usual suspects for end-of-the-world scenarios: the amoral corporate focus on the bottom-line and self-interest, the numbness of media and advertising that leads to unhealthful lifestyles, medical advances that keep people biologically alive in bodies long past expected mileage.

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New Treasures: Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40K: Horus Rising on Audio CD

New Treasures: Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40K: Horus Rising on Audio CD

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horus-cdI have a 3-hour commute to my job in Champaign, Illinois, and I exhausted the excellent Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s major works months ago. What’s a bored commuter to do?

Rejoice when the latest Black Library Audio CD arrives, that’s what. I thoroughly enjoyed Nick Kyme’s Thunder From Fenris — a tale of desperate battles against a zombie plague (and worse) on a frozen planet — last year, and have been looking forward to the next release. Nothing helps the miles (and miles) of cornfields of  Illinois slip by like a fast-paced tale set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, lemme tell you.

As entertaining as it was, Fenris was only 70 minutes, and it fit on a single CD. This week’s mail brought the much more imposing Horus Rising: a 6-hour, 5 CD audio extravaganza adapting one of the central works in the Warhammer 40K canon – the tale of the epic betrayal of the immortal Emperor by his Warmaster, Horus:

It is the 31st millennium. Under the benevolent leadership of the Immortal Emperor, the Imperium of Man has stretched out across the galaxy. It is a golden age of discovery and conquest. But now, on the eve of victory, the Emperor leaves the front lines, entrusting the great crusade to his favourite son, Horus. Promoted to Warmaster, can the idealistic Horus carry out the Emperor’s grand plan, or will this promotion sow the seeds of heresy amongst his brothers? Horus Rising is the first chapter in the epic tale of the Horus Heresy, a galactic civil war that threatened to bring about the extinction of humanity.

Abridged from the best selling novel by Dan Abnett and read by award winning star of stage and screen Martyn Eliis, Horus Rising comes to life in this almost 6 hour reading.

Six hours!  Just long enough to occupy me all the way to work, and back.  Champaign, here I come!

Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

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image0041The holidays are over and according to AccuWeather, approximately 70% of the United States has snow on the ground and for a whole lot of you, this may be just a rare enough occurrence that for the moment, you’re mildly amused. But trust me when I tell you the novelty of throwing it at each other, sliding down it, or for a select group of you, writing your name in it, is going to wear off. And that’s when the cabin fever sets in.

The reality is that 70% of otherwise (fairly) stable Americans are trapped like rats with family members, classmates or co-workers for another two months at minimum. We are all now horror-movie fodder, Steven King style, holed up without sunlight and fresh air; susceptible to maddeningly repetitive sounds like the British accent on that lizard in the insurance commercials, until the only remaining coherent thought is squishing him flat in your uninsured Hummer.

Or maybe that’s just me.

The point is, you’re in need of mind-diverting entertainment until the thaw comes; before you end up being the subject of an HBO special and some Dancing With the Stars contestant is playing you… badly.

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Rich Horton Reviews The Long Look

Rich Horton Reviews The Long Look

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long-lookThe Long Look
Richard Parks
Five Star (297 pages, $25.95, September 2008)
Reviewed by Rich Horton

I am tempted to propose a new subgenre of fantasy that I might call domestic fantasy, or ordinary-people fantasy, or anyway something that suggests stories set in secondary worlds, complete with magic, and for that matter complete with kingdoms and magicians and all the other Tough Guide to Fantasyland markers (even stew!), but populated by sensible (mostly) people, fairly typical of your neighbors in general attitudes (but not anachronistically so).

I’ve noted in multiple reviews of Lawrence Watt-Evans’s novels that they seem often to take a very common sense approach to grand fantastical tropes like dragons. So his work might fit. And a novel like Sherwood Smith’s A Posse of Princesses, about a bunch of pretty basic teenagers who happen to be princes and princesses in a fantasy world, seems to fit as well. You might even argue that aspects of the great model for so much contemporary fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, have this ring* of domesticity – that is to say, the hobbits – but really it is The Lord of the Rings, with its stark good versus evil theme, and with characters like the impossibly noble Aragorn and the angel-like Gandalf and the ethereally beautiful Galadriel and the disembodied evil of Sauron, that I see my domestic fantasies as reacting against. (In a respectful way – I love The Lord of the Rings, and so, I suspect, do most of these writers.)

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Another Reason to Love Netflix “Watch Instantly”: Vampire Circus

Another Reason to Love Netflix “Watch Instantly”: Vampire Circus

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vampire-circus1Vampire Circus (1972)
Directed by Robert Young. Starring Adrienne Corri, Laurence Payne, Anthony Higgins, Thorley Walters, John Moulder-Brown, Lalla Ward, Robin Sachs, Lynne Frederick, Richard Owens, David Prowse, Robert Tayman.

It seems that any time I log into Netflix to manipulate my queue to get physical DVDs, I discover more treasures that I can watch with only a click of the mouse button. Sometimes films unavailable on DVD—or any home video format—for many years. Such as Vampire Circus. (It is available on Blu-Ray, but I don’t have that option.)

Vampire Circus is one of the small treasures of 1970s Hammer Horror, and unfortunately few people on this side of the pond have had the opportunity to see it; the movie has remained incredibly elusive in the U.S. When it was released theatrically in the States, the U.S. distributor de-sanguinized it to a PG rating. Netflix has oddly maintained the PG rating on their page for the film, even though the version they have is uncut and contains the copious amount blood and bare breasts that were the marks of Hammer in its latter days.

Hammer Film Productions knew they were losing the youth audience as the decade started. Their dominance in the Anglo-horror cycle through the late 1950s and the first half of the ‘60s weakened as more graphic and contemporary movies edged in on them, making the Gothic Victorian trappings seem quaint. Hammer also lost a number of its best stars, directors, and technical people, and quality slipped as the ‘70s started. After the excellent Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Dracula series never recovered, and the attempt to reboot the Frankenstein series with The Horror of Frankenstein (on my short list for the worst horror movie the studio ever put out) was a disaster.

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Howard Andrew Jones Reviews Traveller RPG Supplements

Howard Andrew Jones Reviews Traveller RPG Supplements

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Spinward Marches_cover.indd

The Traveller RPG was originally released in 1977 as a game system in which players could explore generic space adventure games. (One of the game’s creators, Marc Miller, claims the idea came from wanting to do Dungeons & Dragons in space.)

If you like playing games set in space – whether space opera, hard SF, planetary romance, or space cowboys (you know who you are)  – you might want to check out Traveller‘s flexible system to help supplement your gameplay. You can find out more from their current publisher, Mongoose Publishing, or go to the source of all (questionable) knowledge, Wikipedia.

Today, we’re presenting three reviews from the pages of Black Gate which focus on Traveller materials. Two are of new supplements from Mongoose and the third review is for a CD-ROM containing many supplements and modules from earlier editions of the game.

Enjoy!

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Solitaire Gaming

Solitaire Gaming

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island-of-lost-spells
Another great adventure from Dark City Games.

I blame the whole thing on John O’Neill.

A few years back I asked him about the solo Dark City Games adventures that Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Todd McCaulty had reviewed so favorably for Black Gate. John happens to have a larger game collection than most game stores, so I’d come to the right person.

Solo games were great fun, John told me. “Here’s an extra copy of an old game you’ve never heard of that’s really cool. Go play it.”

That was Barbarian Prince. And yeah, it was pretty nifty (you can try it out yourself with a free download here, along with its sister solitaire product, Star Smuggler).

I started playing and enjoying the products created by Dark City Games, which the rest of the staff and I have continued to review for the magazine.

barbarian-prince3But what are these solitaire games like?

The most obvious analogy is to say that solitaire games are a little like computer adventure games played with paper, with dice and cards taking the place of a computer game’s invisible randomization of results.

My first thought was something along the lines of “how quaint,” but it turns out that while the play experiences are similar, the flavors are slightly different, even if playing them stimulates similar centers of the brain.

It’s like switching off orange pop to try some root beer, or vice versa. You may not drink one or the other exclusively, but they both sure are sweet on a hot day.

zulus-on-the-ramparts
"You mean your only plan is to stand behind a few feet of mealie bags and wait for the attack?"

While playing a solitaire game you may not see any computer graphics, but your imagination will paint some images for you.

And there’s the tactile pleasure of manipulating the counters and looking over the game board and flipping through the booklet and rolling the dice.

Solitaire in no way means that you will get the same game play each time, and to my surprise I’ve discovered that a well designed solo board game has better replay value than many computer games.

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