A Year of Writing Franchise Fiction

A Year of Writing Franchise Fiction

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...a chance to follow in the footsteps of my heroes Ronald Welch
…a chance to follow in the footsteps of my heroes Ronald Welch…

“Would you like to be paid to write Historical Adventure set in the Wars of the Roses?”

“Well I really wanted to write a literary novel set in the Wiemar Republic about Great War veterans coming to terms with their fractured lives, but: Yes.”

That’s roughly the Skype conversation I had a year ago, except I just made up the bit about the literary novel.

This was a chance to follow in the footsteps of my heroes Ronald Welch and Harold Lamb. It was difficult to say yes without sounding unprofessional (by swearing and whooping, e.g.).

I’m supposed to say something like: This ushered in a crazy year etc etc.

It wasn’t like that.

You just can’t write fiction day in day out if your life is Hollywood-crazy, perhaps with a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl jogging your arm. Almost all the professional writers I know have tranquil home lives and sane routines balancing work and social life.

Nor can you actually have much output if you lead a cinematic creative life, staggering to your keyboard after a booze-fueled night of carousing, then spending long hours angsting about your imagery.

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Future Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Future Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8-smallWhen we covered The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 7 (back in May, if memory serves), publisher Night Shade was having serious issues and I mentioned, “Likely this will be the last one, at least in this format.” Which I considered a real tragedy, as editor Strahan has proven to have a real talent for picking out gems from the crowded and constantly changing genre short fiction market.

Fortunately, ace publisher Solaris has stepped into the void and rescued the series and Volume 8 will appear this year on schedule. They’ve changed the distinctive cover style and format — a shame, since the first seven volumes look impressive on my shelves — but hopefully they won’t mess with too much else.

Strahan has unveiled the table of contents at his website and it looks like another very impressive volume. As usual, he culls fiction from a wide range of industry markets, including traditional print mags — F&SF, Interzone, McSweeney’s, Asimov’s, Electric Velocipede, and even Twelve Tomorrows, the special SF issues of the MIT Technology Review — and top-tier online markets like Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Eclipse Online, Subterranean, Tor.com, and Strange Horizons.

He also draws stories from the biggest anthologies of the year, like Old Mars, Dangerous Women, Rags and Bones, Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, and An Aura of Familiarity.

Authors in this volume include Ian McDonald, Robert Reed, Eleanor Arnason, Ian R Macleod, Charlie Jane Anders, James Patrick Kelly, K J Parker, Lavie Tidhar, Richard Parks, Ted Chiang, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman, Greg Egan — and, as always, a few new talents whose names you may not yet recognize, but whom you may want to keep an eye on.

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New Treasures: Snowblind by Christopher Golden

New Treasures: Snowblind by Christopher Golden

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Snowblind Chistopher Golden-smallI think I speak for the entire country when I say that this winter stinks.

Seriously. I grew up in Canada; I know cold, miserable winters. When I was five, I spent a year in northern Quebec, where it snowed in June and the winter was one constant snow storm. I remember I climbed the snowdrift by our driveway until I was able to step up onto the house, and my Dad came out and yelled at me to get off the roof. Now that’s a lot of snow.

But I can’t ever recall a winter as cold or as miserable as this one. Here in Chicago, the weathermen tell us we’re only a few inches away from a snowfall record and a few more sub-zero days away from the coldest winter on record.

The things that frighten each generation are very different. And it’s only our very best best horror writers who are so plugged into the national psyche that they know what frightens us before we know it ourselves. And after the winter of 2013-2014, I think we’ll all look back and appreciate just how brilliant Christopher Golden is and how he picked the right year to write a novel about a killer snow storm.

The small New England town of Coventry had weathered a thousand blizzards… but never one like this. Icy figures danced in the wind and gazed through children’s windows with soul-chilling eyes. People wandered into the whiteout and were never seen again. Families were torn apart, and the town would never be the same.

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Firefly, A Retrospective — Part 1

Firefly, A Retrospective — Part 1

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Firefly wallpaper-smallWhen I think of the TV show Firefly, I often compare it in my mind to the original Star Trek series. I wonder if all the Star Trek movies and spin-offs through the decades would have ever occurred if that original show had only run a single season. Yes, I think Firefly is (was) that good. And over the next few weeks, I’m going to be re-watching the episodes and sharing with you because I think this show still has a lot to teach us.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it was a “western space opera” created by Joss Whedon, which aired in 2002. The series is set five-hundred years in the future, after Earth has become uninhabitable and mankind went out to find a new star system to call home.

The western vibe comes from the planets on the frontier, which are not so civilized and fancy as the high-tech core worlds. There was a war a few years before the show begins between the system government, the Alliance, and a handful of Independent worlds who wanted autonomy. The Alliance won. The comparisons to the American Civil War are many.

The show’s cast are the crew of a transport starship called Serenity, trying to scratch out a living on the edge of space.

The first episode, or pilot, came in two parts. Titled “Serenity,” it actually didn’t air until the very end of the season. Because this episode sets up so much of the story world and the relationships of its primary characters, I find this criminal. I’ve heard that Fox didn’t think this episode was suitable to open the series, and for that they should be flogged in public. I always insist on watching the episodes in the order they were originally intended. So here goes.

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Ares Magazine Kickstarter Succeeds!

Ares Magazine Kickstarter Succeeds!

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Ares Magazine Issue 1-smallRecently, I wrote about the Rebirth of Ares Magazine. Earlier this month, they wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising $26,185, or 105% of their goal.

Now, they’re moving forward to deliver their premiere issue in May.  The issue will contain the complete two-player game War of the Worlds, designed by Bill Banks, and a nice mix of intriguing articles, including:

  • Asimov’s Last Gasp – A discussion on Robotics and Ethics
  • The Queen’s Guard – High Fantasy in the land of Hadera
  • BattleChrome – Mechs, Techs, and Wrecks
  • Sarita’s Gambit – Star Fury Fiction

along with three short stories, interviews, ads, and other content.

Ares is inspired by the classic Ares Magazine, published by SPI between 1980 and 1984. It included a complete SF or fantasy game in every issue, including Greg Costikyan’s classic Barbarian Kings and Citadel of Blood; The High Crusade, based on Poul Anderson’s 1960 novel of interstellar conquest on horseback; The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora; Nightmare House; The Omega War; and nearly a dozen others.

The issue will be 80 pages in full-size (8.5″ x 11″) format; future bi-monthly issues are already in the works. Keep up on the latest news on their website.

Congratulations, Ares!

Art of the Genre: The Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years

Art of the Genre: The Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years

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Artist Cynthia Sheppard from Lamentations doesn't make the list but who does?
Artist Cynthia Sheppard from Lamentations doesn’t make the list but who does?

The office here at Black Gate L.A. has never been quiet, it just isn’t who we are. But with the addition of new blogger James Maliszewski to the mix, it is downright loud. This change was made all the more punctuated today by the fact that our southern California drought was broken with a series of showers. As I didn’t want to get damp, I was forced to close the windows to my corner office, which usually provide some calming background noise from the crashing waves and calling gulls on Redondo Beach. Now closed in, and facing a deadline, I had to fight against the sound of a debate between Maliszewski and Ryan Harvey on who would best portray adventuring party characters in a film version of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Honestly, I would have cast our resilient secretary, Kandi, for the lead as she often times dyes her hair red when the mood strikes, but these two ‘A list’ diehards had no interest in my two cents. Therefore, I read over an email once more from our intrepid editor, John O’Neill, which I’d received the Friday before.

Taylor, I’m not paying you six figures to get a tan, so write me some numbers-generating copy!

Nice… Always the charmer that one.

Nonetheless, I flipped on my computer with my sexy desktop background of our very own Sue Granquist lounging around in her ‘Goth Chick’ black, white, and buckled finery and then bumped over to Microsoft Word. What to write? Well, how about a ‘Top 10’, since those seem to always create a buzz and get people to click down after the break.

Considering the Lamentations of the Flame Princess argument, and the just-passed 40th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, I decided on the ‘Top 10 RPG Artists of All-Time.” Yep, I think I’m qualified to take that one on, but just to discourage my own favoritism, I decided on a way to judge the list outside my own nostalgic mind. Now sure, the below rules have some level of interpretation on my end, but I do believe they hold water for overall impact on the industry.

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Monthly Short Story Roundup – January

Monthly Short Story Roundup – January

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oie_113212RNKI9Hm5Well, it’s that time again, and here I am with another batch of new heroic fantasy and S&S short fiction reviews.

Nothing outside of Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly caught my eye this past month and the stories they offered are the usual mixed bag, varying in quality from mid-range to very good. In a perfect world, some of these writers could make a living just writing short stories.

I love short stories. Growing up, a large part of my genre reading was made up of anthologies from brilliant editors like Lin Carter and Terry Carr. Their short (by contemporary standards) volumes introduced me to dozens of great authors, established and new.

oie_114255fABYaSsMIn Lin Carter’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2, for example, the authors ranged from Tanith Lee and Fritz Leiber to Caradoc Cador and Paul Spenser. If one story stunk, there was a very good chance the next one wouldn’t. It was a rare anthology that had nothing to offer.

I’m not saying anything new when I say a ten- or fifteen-page story can be as powerful as a novel. I’d recommend Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” to anyone doubting that. As for excitement, how many five pound books can match the urgency and ferocity of Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”? Sure, there are times I enjoy being swept up in a six- or seven-hundred page book, but I’d mostly rather read twenty or thirty good individual tales. When the rare new heroic fiction story collection comes along, like Strahan and Anders’ Swords & Dark Magic or Davis and Saunders’ Griots, I don’t hesitate to toss it in my Amazon cart.

And that’s why I love the various magazines (and the work their editors do each issue). Just counting Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Swords and Sorcery Magazine, I’m guaranteed at least six new stories a month. In the months Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is published, that’s an additional four or more.

Over the course of a year, that’s a lot more stories than even Lin Carter edited together in the same amount of time. Which makes me a very happy fan.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran

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The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2013-smallYou don’t have time to keep up on all the great work produced in the fantasy and horror fields, year after year.

You may think you do. But trust me, you don’t. There are fantastic new novelists emerging all the time — folks like Laird Barron, Theodora Goss, Genevieve Valentine, and Ekaterina Sedia — and new masters of the short story, like Karen Tidbeck, Ken Liu, Rachel Swirsky, Mike Carey, and many others. How are you going to keep up?

Believe it or not, that’s not a rhetorical question. I have the answer right here: Paula Guran’s indispensable annual collection The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. It’s like a cheat sheet covering all the exciting new — and established — writers in the genre. Read it every year, and I guarantee you’ll be talking intelligently about the latest literary trends in dark fantasy at your next party. (You’re on your own picking out what to wear, though. Just remember: no white after Labor Day.)

Paula Guran doesn’t provide the lengthy annual summary typical of some Year’s Best collections. Instead she gives the space over to fiction — over 500 pages of the best short stories of 2013, culled from magazines like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Postscripts, Cemetery Dance, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Subterranean, Lightspeed, Apex, and Shimmer, and anthologies like The Book of Cthulhu 2, Hex Appeal, Shotguns v Cthulhu, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, Black Wings II, and many others.

This is the fourth volume of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, but the first one I’ve gotten around to. In our defense, we’ve at least covered several of Paula’s other recent anthologies, including Season of Wonder and Weird Detectives.

Here’s the book description.

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Delivering What the Title Promises: Saga

Delivering What the Title Promises: Saga

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Saga #1A few months ago, the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story was given to Saga, Volume 1, the first trade paperback collection of the ongoing Saga comic book. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, with art by Fiona Staples (and lettering and design by the Fonografiks studio), the book deserved the win. It’s the first chapter in a promising story and manages to establish a simple and powerful basic situation for the main characters, while also creating a complex world, backstory, and array of subplots. If it sometimes seems overbroad, too accessible and glib, it also has a deep and original sense of history to its setting, and a design sense that makes that setting live.

It begins with a birth, a battle, and an attempt to escape war. In a galaxy (presumably) not our own, there is a planet named Landfall, where a species of winged humanoids have developed high technology; orbiting Landfall is the moon Wreath, where magic-using horned humanoids live. Moon and planet have always been at war, but have reached the point where they can’t battle directly in their home solar system without risking their own destruction. So the war’s fought on countless fronts throughout the galaxy, with alien species everywhere forced to choose sides. One front is the planet called Cleave, where the fighting’s especially vicious; there, a woman from Landfall, Alana, has fallen in love with Marko, a former warrior from Wreath. They’ve run away from the war and the book begins with the birth of their daughter — and their discovery by agents of both sides.

The story moves quickly. Factions enlist various agents to track down the young family. And these agents have stories of their own. The book cuts quickly between plot strands, narrated by the newborn daughter speaking from some unspecified point in the future. There are ghosts, robots, pleasure planets, bounty hunters, mass battles, and all the familiar genre furnishings. There are also less familiar things, born from the mash-up of genres. Forests of rocketships. An interspecies romance novel. And a grumpy-looking lynx who can detect lies. It’s an inventive, fast-moving story about parenthood and art that never overstrains its central metaphors.

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Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Dave Truesdale and Others Sign Petition Calling for Changes to SFWA

Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, Dave Truesdale and Others Sign Petition Calling for Changes to SFWA

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SFWA Bulletin 200Word of a new controversy inside the hallowed walls of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) is hardly news — the organization is known for regular rows. Less than a year ago, in fact, we reported that SFWA Bulletin Editor Jean Rabe resigned amidst a controversy over a series of sexist and rather tasteless articles. As a consequence, the membership of SFWA demanded additional oversight of the Bulletin and the new President, Steven Gould, promised the organization’s officers would take a more active role in overseeing production.

Now Tangent Online editor Dave Truesdale (a non-member of SFWA) has circulated a petition taking issue with the planned oversight, citing fears of censorship and excess political correctness. I think. It’s 12 pages long and seriously rambly, and frankly lost me when it started quoting Charlton Heston as “an early civil rights activist” (you can read the original doc here).

Predictably, the petition has struck a chord on both sides of the issue. It has already been signed by Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Barry N. Malzberg, Mike Resnick, Nancy Kress, Gene Wolfe, Jack Dann, Norman Spinrad, and Sheila Finch. Meanwhile, several folks have been speaking up loudly against it — most entertainingly Natalie Luhrs:

It’s full of appeals to the sanctity of the First Amendment – which, as a private organization, SFWA doesn’t need to abide by – and a whacking great heap of sexism and racism, too. I don’t understand why some people are constantly conflating their desire to say anything they want, wherever they want, with private organizations’ right to moderate spaces that they own.

For those who want a slightly more balanced and objective viewpoint (and why would you want that?), I recommend C.C. Finlay’s concise summary of the issue, Editing is not Censorship, posted on Facebook here (with comments) and on his blog here (comments disabled).