What I Learned From A New Hope

What I Learned From A New Hope

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Star Wars A New Hope-smallI was seven years old when the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, hit the theaters. That was a magical summer in my childhood, a time when the future was gigantic bubble of fun and optimism that seemed to be moving closer to me day by day.

Years later, when I started penning my own stories, I flailed about like most fledgling writers, not really sure what I was doing. Eventually, I got my act together, but it wasn’t until later as I looked back on what worked, and what didn’t, that I started to realize that the most important lessons about storytelling were the ones I unwittingly learned at the movie theater, watching heroes battle an evil empire in a galaxy far, far away.

Motivation

It’s vital for characters to have deep and compelling motivations, so when I think of this topic, I always go back to the basics. Luke, our main hero, begins the movie yearning to get off his desert homeworld and find adventure among the stars. That seems simple, and it is, but it’s also a motivation that so many people share. Who among us didn’t yearn for personal freedom when we were growing up, the chance to get away from our ordinary lives and do something exciting?

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The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks Wins the 2013 David Gemmell Legend Award

The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks Wins the 2013 David Gemmell Legend Award

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The Blinding Knife-smallBrent Weeks’s The Blinding Knife, the second volume of The Lightbringer Saga, has won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2012.

The David Gemmell Legend Award is a fan-voted award administered by the DGLA. This is the fifth year for the Legend Award; it was first granted in 2009 to Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves; in 2010 to Graham McNeill’s Empire: The Legend of Sigmar, in 2011 the winner was Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, and last year The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss received the honors.

The nominees for the 2013 award also included The Red Country by Joe Abercrombie, Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff, King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence, and The Gathering of the Lost by Helen Lowe.

The Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Debut was awarded to Malice by John Gwynne.

The Ravensheart Award for best Fantasy Book Jacket Artist went to Didier Graffet & Dave Senior for the cover of The Red Country by Joe Abercrombie.

Our man-on-the-scene, roving reporter Harold M. Page, will report in with complete details on the ceremonies right here on Thursday.

Complete details are available at the DGLA website.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Insanity in Pictures

Insanity in Pictures

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culbard-coverThough I can’t be completely certain, I think the first time I encountered the name of H.P. Lovecraft was sometime during the course of 1980, not long after I’d discovered Dungeons & Dragons. The thin blue rulebook contained inside the Basic Set included a single reference to “Cthulhu” as a deity alongside Crom and Zeus (two names I already knew). Back in those days, hobby shops were ground zero for the burgeoning roleplaying hobby. Bearded wargamers, nerdy college kids, heavy metal-loving teens, and fantasy fans of all sorts rubbed shoulders in these peculiar little stores, swapping stories of their characters and campaigns, as well as holding forth on a variety of topics. To a young person such as myself, hobby shops were amazing places filled with amazing people, whose company I sought out as often as I could.

There was a strange camaraderie among the hobby shops’ patrons – or so it seemed to me anyway. We were all a little strange by the standards of the time, taking interest in things that were still many years from mainstream recognition, let alone acceptance. Consequently, the usual distinctions of age didn’t matter much and I regularly found myself chatting with people years older than myself about gaming and fantasy and science fiction. I can’t begin to convey what a big deal this was to me. I was a shy, bookish sort and didn’t make friends easily, yet here I was gabbing with teenagers and university students as if we were old comrades.

That’s when I heard someone mention Cthulhu again and, callow youth that I was, asked just who (or what) Cthulhu was. Little did I know that that innocent question would lead to a lifelong interest in the life and works of H.P. Lovecraft.

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An Addendum on Tie-In Fiction

An Addendum on Tie-In Fiction

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I wanted to add a couple comments to John’s brief post about tie-ins. Much of the commentary revolved around Alan Dean Foster. He’s a favorite of mine and influenced my writing and career. He and King were the only two authors I took with me to college, and those battered collections are still on my shelves. I’ve corresponded with him over the years, but the only personal contact was when my wife and I shared a pizza with him at Archon (Stephanie did most of the talking, I was hopelessly tongue-tied at sharing pizza grease with a guy who wrote so many books I read to bits). I though I’d expand a little on him as well.

First, to get the curmudgeonly “back in my day” village elder/idiot stuff out of the way . . .

alien-alan-dean-fosterSome of the younger readers of Black Gate might have a hard time imagining how starved we were back then for more of our favorite SF movie worlds. These days, well before a major movie or game comes out, there is almost always a web presence filled with “Would You Like To Know More?” media goodness. But even for a big 20th Century Fox production like Alien, we didn’t have anything beyond a few brief TV spots, reviews, and the same press packet that went to every major paper in the country. If we wanted to know more about the movie’s world, rather than how Sigourney Weaver got along with the cat on-set, all we had to cling to were the tie-ins.

In this, we were very lucky to have a guy like Foster writing the tie-in. In most of his books, he filled in plot holes he spotted with a little business somewhere or other (like why putting the crew of the Nostromo in a single, relatively safe location and turning the rest of the ship into a vacuum wasn’t an option). He also liked to add some flavor to the movie universe, the Alien tie-in memorably begins with a description of the business of recording dreams for entertainment. Since he was usually working from a script, his tie-in also served as a form of “additional scenes” for those days before the advent of DVDs with bonus features. It was from Foster that I first experienced Ripley finding Dallas in the alien’s cocoon, with Brett turning into a facehugger egg next to him. It’s also the only place, even today I believe, where you can get the full scene of the crew getting lucky for a change and Parker almost blasting the damn thing out of an airlock. No need to tell you who sabotages that, I’m sure.

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October Short Story Round-up

October Short Story Round-up

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Another month, another batch of new short stories for your reading enjoyment. First there’s the usual complement of two stories from the October issue of Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine. Then, between Beneath Ceaseless Skies #131 and #132, there are an additional seven stories. I was hoping the Autumn Heroic Fantasy Quarterly would hit the ether before I had to get this done, but no such luck.

oie_44528E6erIABHSwords and Sorcery Magazine is straightforward. See that title? That’s pretty much what you get and I consider that a good thing. That I’m writing this while listening to Manowar’s Battle Hymns is absolutely appropriate.

Swords and Sorcery opens with James Lecky’s “Forged in Heaven, Tempered in Hell“. The story is told alternately from the perspectives of Halvari, High Priest of Baal-Rethok, and Kharchadour the God-Slayer as they face one another across the battlefield. The priest is the chief servant of the last of the demonic idiot gods and the God-Slayer is the man who’s killed all of Baal-Rethok’s co-deities.

The priest’s narrative consists mostly of begging his master to destroy the approaching warrior, while the God-Slayer’s recounts his origins. There’s nothing strikingly original about the plot, but what makes this story work is the bloody determination of Kharchadour. Also, I’m a big fan of the standalone short story that doesn’t feel like it’s missing a real beginning or ending, of which this is a great example.

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt is the author of S&S’s second story, “Right of Ultissima.” Lady Alina of Marovia is introduced smashing open the door to the Loremaster Tolek’s lab with her sword. For twenty years, she has sought vengeance for her father’s death. Before she can act, Tolek calls for the Rite of Ultissima, the privilege of speaking a last few words before death. What he says forces her to reconsider her entire life. Uitvlugt refers to his writing as haiku fiction: short and impactful. At under 1,800 words, it is pretty short. Its impact, mostly derived from some not surprising psychological insights, and unfortunately not the trappings of magic and swords, is only moderate.

So last month I was excited that Beneath Ceaseless Skies seemed to be back on the heroic fiction train. Well, that train derailed.  Issue #131, the double-sized fifth anniversary issue, has five stories — one to commemorate each year of its existence — and not a single one can be even marginally considered heroic fiction. I almost don’t care that two of them are really good.

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New Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Stalking the Beast by Howard Andrew Jones

New Treasures: Pathfinder Tales: Stalking the Beast by Howard Andrew Jones

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Pathfinder Tales Stalking the Beast-smallIt’s funny. I talked to Howard nearly every day while he was writing this book, and heard the blow-by-blow as he devised the plot and fleshed out the characters, recognized the growing excitement in his voice as the novel came together and he contributed his own unique talents and fine narrative gifts to the collaborative bit of gaming genius that is Pathfinder. It almost felt like reading the book would be superfluous.

And then I read the description below and realized hearing all the behind-the-scenes details meant absolutely nothing. It’s like saying you know how a gourmet dish will turn out because you’ve seen all the ingredients. I may have watched Howard lay all the pieces out on his writing table, but the true magic comes in how they all fit together. I’m excited to find out and I know I’ll be delighted.

When a mysterious monster carves a path of destruction across the southern River Kingdoms, desperate townsfolk look to the famed elven ranger Elyana and her half-orc companion Drelm for salvation. For Drelm, however, the mission is about more than simple justice — it’s about protecting the frontier town he’s adopted as his home, and the woman he plans to marry.

Together with the gunslinging bounty hunter Lisette and several equally deadly allies, the heroes must set off into the wilderness, hunting a terrifying beast that will test their abilities — and their friendships — to the breaking point and beyond. But could it be that there’s more to the murders than a simple rampaging beast?

From critically acclaimed author Howard Andrew Jones comes a new adventure of love, betrayal, and unnatural creatures, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Interested? Paizo has promised us enough free copies for a giveaway. Stay tuned for details and you could win your own copy.

Pathfinder Tales: Stalking the Beast was published this week by Paizo. It is 400 pages, priced at $8.99 in paperback. No word on the digital edition yet. Howard’s previous Pathfinder book was Plague of Shadows, released in 2011. His most recent novel was The Bones of the Old Ones.

Weird of Oz: Hallowe’en Postmortem

Weird of Oz: Hallowe’en Postmortem

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more ghost storiesHallowe’en always passes, for me, with a waft of melancholy, like a chilly breeze blowing down the last few clinging maple leaves.

Leaf 1: R.I.P. Hallowe’en 2013

This October was a busy one for me. Five days out of seven, I was hosting a ghost tour, accompanied on many of those nights by a bona fide “paranormal investigator.” The thirty or so guests we conducted into the shadows each night had quite a time and I must admit — note that I characterize myself as an “open-minded skeptic” — I may have had a paranormal experience or two myself. After having been “Haunted Master of Ceremonies” for these tours the past three years, dozens of evenings, that was a first. Maybe I’ll write about it sometime, somewhere. I have to process it a bit more first, try to debunk it and exhaust alternate explanations.

You might say I have a little Scully and a little Mulder in my head. Not that I have split personality disorder or anything, but when something happens, these two sides of my mind — the rational, scientific side and the childlike-wonder side who “wants to believe” — begin laying out their competing narratives to explain the event. Which side wins out? Both. Neither. This world is a mysterious place and no one’s gotten to the bottom of it. I certainly won’t.

I’ll just keep celebrating the mystery and fastidiously trying to avoid ever getting bored by it. Boredom is the end; it’s death; it’s deciding you don’t really care what’s going on. Whenever that starts to happen (and it does, friends, as you creep along toward gray hair and creaky bones), I retreat to the proverbial “black gate,” to the wellsprings of fantasy, to the towers of science fiction, to the tombstones of horror. Visiting imagined worlds reminds the disenchanted traveler how endlessly bizarre and fascinating and surprising is this world in which we live.

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Science Fiction From China

Science Fiction From China

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Science Fiction From ChinaThis summer, Tor Books announced that it would release Liu Cixin’s science fiction series, The Three-Body Trilogy, in an English translation by Ken Liu. The series has sold 400,000 copies in Chinese, and helped inspire a renaissance of science fiction in China. As of yet I haven’t seen a publication date for the first volume, The Three-Body Problem, but Tor states that it will be the first genre science fiction novel from mainland China to be published in English.

But having Chinese sf translated into English is not without precedent. In 1989, Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy edited a book called Science Fiction From China. It presented eight stories, along with a bibliography of Chinese science fiction, an overview by Wu of the history of sf in China, and a foreword by Frederik Pohl. As you might expect, it’s an interesting volume.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, as anthologies usually are. None of the stories seemed to me to be really bad, though, and the good ones were often quite good. Overall, I found that the pacing and development of both good and bad stories reminded me of pre-Gernsbackian and especially pre-Campbellian scientific romances — of science fiction stories from before the tradition of ‘science fiction’ had been identified, and especially before that tradition had been largely taken over by the pulps.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Fredric Brown

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Fredric Brown

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The Best of Fredric Brown-smallWelcome to the 13th installment of my ongoing examination of one of the most influential book series of my youth, Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line. This time, we’re looking at the 1977 release, The Best of Fredric Brown, edited by Robert Bloch (who had his own entry in the series eleven months after this one, which I discussed back in July.)

The Classics of Science Fiction line was my introduction to many of the major SF and fantasy writers of the 20th Century (well, that and The Hugo Winners, which first introduced me to Poul Anderson, Walter C. Miller, Arthur C. Clarke, and others, and of course the various volumes of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame).

All that education didn’t teach me much about Fredric Brown, however. A week ago, I probably could have named only one Fredric Brown short story from memory, “Arena” — which, admittedly, I dearly loved. I first read it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, where it was selected as one of the finest short stories ever written, but even before that, I knew it as the Star Trek episode of the same name.

You probably think of it as, “Isn’t that the one where Kirk throws styrofoam rocks at the Gorn?”

Yes. Yes it is. And even though it has been much-parodied (including a brilliant video game commercial starring an 80-year old William Shatner and an aged Gorn in a re-match), it’s still one of the finest episodes of the original series.

So before I sat down to assemble my notes for this article, I took my paperback copy of The Best of Fredric Brown with me on a business trip, to a banking show in Las Vegas, and used the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the author. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting all that much. Not every installment in the Classics of Science Fiction could be a winner.

My mistake.

The Best of Fredric Brown is one of the best short story collections I’ve read in years. Brown is frequently compared to O. Henry for his gift for twist endings and the comparison is apt. Even when you’re on the alert, Brown manages to constantly surprise and delight you in a way that very few authors — in the genre or out — can pull off.

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2013 World Fantasy Award Winners Announced

2013 World Fantasy Award Winners Announced

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alif-the-unseenYou’d think that, since I’m unable to attend World Fantasy this year, they’d keep the convention low key. I mean, no sense rubbing it in, right?

No such luck. I hear there was just as much excitement, just as many panels, and just as many fabulous parties as always. It’s like they don’t care.

They even gave out just as many awards as usual. Well, even if I couldn’t attend, at least I can read the same award-winning fantasy as everyone else. See, that’s what’s great about awards — they’re fair to everybody.

This year’s winners of the World Fantasy Awards are:

Novel:

Novella:

  • “Let Maps to Others,” K.J. Parker (Subterranean, Summer 2012)

Short Story:

  • “The Telling,” Gregory Norman Bossert (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nov 29, 2012)

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