Black Gate – Page 1038 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Goth Chick News: Stoker’s Manuscript by Royce Prouty

Thursday, July 11, 2013 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

Tell me a good story and I’ll follow you anywhere.

This is what I mean at least, when I say “willing suspension of disbelief.” It doesn’t imply your narrative has to be perfect, with every “T” crossed and every “I” dotted. Instead it implies that close is good enough, if you tell me a tale sufficiently riveting to distract me from the details you might have missed.

Case in point: World War Z the movie.

I recently read a review that outlined three major flaws in the plot; specifically, things the audience would need to get over in order to enjoy the movie. Having read the book, I was prepared to not get over any of it, and suffer through the potential cinematic bastardization just so I could tell you not to.

Instead, twenty minutes in I was utterly willing to forget why anyone would be the least bit interested in Gerry’s (Brad Pitt) survival considering he was neither a scientist nor a doctor, and was at best a disenfranchised United Nations worker of some kind. I just let it all go while watching a horde of manic zombies crawl over each other by the thousands to scale an insanely high wall and eat the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Just tell me a good story and I’m right there with you…

And that is why I feel particularly abused when a good story stretches my disbelief to the breaking point, utterly diverting me from the tale and making it impossible for me not to say, “Huh…?”

Which brings us (finally) to Royce Prouty’s freshman outing, Stoker’s Manuscript.

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Alan Snow’s Worse Things Happen at Sea Released This Week

Thursday, July 11, 2013 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Alan Snow’s first novel, Here Be Monsters, was the last book I read to my kids, some time in 2007. I used to read out loud to them every night — back when they all went to bed at the same time. These days, I can’t even get them in one room at the same time. Teenagers.

I think I first became interested because of the artwork. Snow is the artist behind what may be the finest kid’s book ever created, Don’t Climb Out of the Window Tonight, and I can’t tell you how many times I read that thing out loud. Over and over (and over). I think I still have it memorized. Don’t climb out of the window tonight, because Frankenstein’s gang is in the bushes. Man, that book is a surreal masterpiece.

Anyway, I think my kids really enjoyed Here Be Monters too. I know I sure did. Box trolls, cabbageheads, secret subterranean tunnels inhabited by races of underlings, catapults made of knickers, a mad inventor, and a hero who flies over the city at night using only a pair of wings and a box with a crank. It all came together to form a madcap adventure involving illegal cheese hunts, pirates, and the rats who run the Nautical Laundry. Seriously, he had me at “box trolls,” that other stuff was just gravy. As a splendid bonus, Snow’s delightful drawings of his bizarre and wonderful characters appeared on virtually every page, and added enormously to the book.

I enjoyed it so much that I really hoped there would be sequels. Shortly after it appeared, Amazon started referring to Here Be Monsters as The Ratbridge Chronicles, Book 1, which made me think, hey, I dunno, maybe.

In point of fact, additional volumes did appear: Worse Things Happen At Sea (Oct 2010) and Thar She Blows (coming in December 2013). Sadly, they only appeared in the UK, because everyone there reads Charles Dickens and watches Doctor Who, and hence are trained from birth to recognize awesome when they see it. But earlier this year, stop-motion studio Laika, creators of Coraline and ParaNorman, announced plans to film Here Be Monsters as their next feature (now titled The Boxtrolls) and suddenly American publishing realized it better get on the stick.

And so Worse Things Happen at Sea was published here on Tuesday, and I can finally order it without heinous overseas shipping charges. Which I will do. But first I think I’ll dig up that battered copy of Don’t Climb Out of the Window Tonight and read it one more time. Because gobins are in the bushes, and they mean business.

Worse Things Happen at Sea was published July 9, 2013 by Atheneum Books. It is 352 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover, and $9.99 for the digital edition.

Apple Found Guilty of Ebook Price Fixing

Thursday, July 11, 2013 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Apple’s long-running legal battle to prove that it did not mastermind a conspiracy to price-fix digital books ended yesterday with a guilty verdict.

In April of last year, the US Department of Justice filed suit against Apple and the largest book publishers in the United States: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster. All the publishers settled, and only Apple chose to fight the battle in court. Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote sided with the DOJ, saying that Apple played a “central role” in the conspiracy and that Apple and the publishers conspired to eliminate price competition in the emerging digital books market.

The legal battle and the discovery phase leading up to it, have been very much in the public eye. One of the most fascinating aspects (at least for people like me, whose eyes glaze over at 80-page legal documents) was the publication of behind-the scenes e-mails between Steve Jobs and publishers as they hammered out the details of the scheme. The Atlantic reprinted several of Jobs’s e-mails from January 2010, including an exchange with James Murdoch at News Corp, negotiating on behalf of HarperCollins:

Jobs wasn’t willing to compromise. He sent this reply to Murdoch the same day, arguing that Amazon’s pricing wasn’t sustainable and would train people to think that ebooks were cheap. Jobs also reminded Murdoch of Apple’s vast reach–“over 120 million customers with credit cards on file.” You need us more than we need you, he seemed to be saying.

Hatred of Amazon’s discounted ebook pricing strategy seemed to be the engine of the entire conspiracy and Judge Cote made specific mention of it in her ruling:

Before Apple even met with the first Publisher Defendant in mid-December 2009, it knew that the “Big Six” of United States publishing… wanted to raise e-book prices, in particular above the $9.99 prevailing price charge by Amazon for many e-book versions of New York Times bestselling books and other newly released hardcover books. Apple also knew that Publisher Defendants were already acting collectively to place pressure on Amazon to abandon its pricing strategy… The Publishers conveyed to Apple their abhorrence of Amazon’s pricing, and Apple assured the Publishers it was willing to work with them to raise those prices.

Apple contends that it has done nothing wrong, and plans to appeal the verdict.

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Mist-Torn Witches

Wednesday, July 10, 2013 Sean Stiennon Comments 0 Comment

The Mist-Torn Witches
by Barb Hendee
Roc (336 pages, mass market first edition May 7, 2013, $7.99)

The Mist-Torn Witches isn’t exactly the novel I wanted, but it fits into a category of novel I’d like to see more of. It’s modest in the best senses of the word: Focused on a handful of characters, limited to a single setting (a prince’s castle), and with a tightly focused plot, centered around a magically-enhanced murder investigation. It also manages to be relatively light in pacing and tone, something I’d like to see more of in a market seemingly saturated with the gruesome, grim, and gut-splattered.

Orphaned sisters Celine and Amelie are a likable pair. Celine was trained my her mother as an apothecary, but makes most of her income by pretending to have inherited her mother’s powers as a seer and distributing invented fortunes, while Amelie is an armed-and-dangerous tomboy who serves as the duo’s muscle. They’re forced to flee their rural home when Celine, for the first time, has a truly prophetic vision. Unfortunately for her, that vision is of local ruler Sub-Prince Damek murdering his betrothed after the wedding, which drives Celine to warn the girl away from marrying him. Celine and Amelie are forced to seek refuge with Damek’s younger brother, Anton, and his brave guard captain, Jaromir.

Anton is a just ruler, and his people are happy, but not all is well within the walls of his castle. Young women are being murdered under mysterious circumstances, their bodies turning up as withered husks. Anton offers the sisters a deal: Use Celine’s newfound powers of true prophecy to find the killer and they’ll be rewarded with an apothecary shop inside his walls. Fail, and they’ll be turned out to make their way alone, vulnerable to the wrath of Sub-Prince Damek.

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D.B. Jackson Interviews Ethan Kaille, Thieftaker

Wednesday, July 10, 2013 D.B. Jackson Comments 3 comments

Today I have the pleasure of publishing an interview I’ve had with Ethan Kaille, one of Boston’s leading thieftakers.

Welcome, Mr. Kaille, to my humble office, and thank you for taking time to speak with Black Gate. Please begin by introducing yourself to our readers. Who is Ethan Kaille?

I am no one of consequence, really. I work in Boston as a thieftaker — for a negotiated fee, I recover property that has been stolen, and return it to its rightful owner.

Surely there is more to your life than thieftaking. What did you do before you began to work in your current profession?

[Long pause.] I don’t usually like to speak of it, but if you must know, I was a prisoner. Years ago, as a young, foolish man, I took part in a mutiny aboard a ship called the Ruby Blade. When the mutiny failed, I was placed in the brig, and eventually was tried and convicted. The Admiralty Court spared my life, but sentenced me to fourteen years at labor on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean.

And before all of that, I was a sailor in the British navy, just like my father before me, and his father before him. I enlisted during the War of the Austrian Succession and fought at Toulon as a crewman aboard the HMS Stirling Castle.

When was the first time that you became aware of your powers as a conjurer?

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013 Edition

Wednesday, July 10, 2013 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Well, look at that. My favorite Year’s Best anthology has arrived — and earlier than I expected.

This is the fifth volume of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. Rich did a handful of volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s Best SF before combining them into one fat mega-volume starting in 2009. I much prefer these generously-sized tomes. They rest nicely in my lap, and pin me to my reading chair.

This year, Rich selects thirty-three short stories and novelettes from a wide range of magazines — Analog, Asimov’s SF, Interzone,, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Eclipse Online, Electric Velocipede, Tin House, and others — as well as anthologies, including The Future is Japanese, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and Robots: The New A.I.

His contributors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Linda Nagata, Jay Lake, Kelly Link, Robert Charles Wilson , Genevieve Valentine, Elizabeth Bear, Aliette de Bodard, Robert Reed, Christopher Rowe, Naomi Kritzer, Michael Blumlein, Catherynne M. Valente, Lavie Tidhar, and many others.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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July/August Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

Tuesday, July 9, 2013 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Pretty sedate cover on the latest F&SF. Especially when you consider recent covers have featured deadly sea creatures, dragons, and floating eyeballs. But hey – magical cats are a time-honored tradition in American fantasy, so who am I to judge?

Colleen Chen at Tangent Online finds lots to like about this issue’s cover story, “The Color of Sand” by KJ Kabza, magical cats and all:

I always have high expectations when reading F&SF, but I found this issue particularly delightful. Much of it read like a selection of folk and fairy tales, complete with talking animals and legendary folk, interspersed with a couple of science fiction stories and a dash of horror for variety.

“The Color of Sand” by KJ Kabza is a whimsical tale of a five-year-old boy named Catch who lives on the edge of the dunes with his mother and his only neighbor, a talking sandcat named Bone. Catch and his mother, who pick up mysterious colorful pebble-like objects on the beach to trade and sell, discover one day that the objects, called refulgium, are magic. Catch swallows a red one and becomes a giant. Guided by Bone, he and his mother embark on a journey along the coast to the perilous Final Atoll to seek a black refulgium that will return him to normal size.

This story was such a pleasure to read. It’s smart and funny enough to appeal to adults but would also enrapture children of any age.

The issue also contains fiction by Eleanor Arnason, Tim Sullivan, Adam Rakunas, Chen Qiufan, Harry R. Campion, and many others. In a startling development, there is no contribution from Albert E. Cowdrey this issue – for the first time in two years.

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Professor Jameson’s Space Adventures, or Zoromes Make the Happiest Cyborgs

Tuesday, July 9, 2013 Douglas Draa Comments 5 comments

I first ran across Neil R. Jones’s Prof. Jameson stories in junior high while reading Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age — which, by the way, is one of my favorite anthologies.

Neil R. Jones’s first Prof. Jameson adventure appeared in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. In this first story, “The Jameson Satellite,” Mr. Jones gives us all the background information that we’ll ever need to follow this wonderful over-the-top space adventures of Professor Jameson and his Machine Men colleagues, the Zoromes!

Within the first few pages, we learn that Professor Jameson of the 20th century had a horrible revulsion against being buried and subsequently becoming worm food after his death. So, to ease his mind, he arranged to have his body placed in a hermetically sealed rocket after his death and then launched into orbit around the Earth.

Following me so far? Good. So now we skip ahead 40,000,000 years to find the Professor’s orbiting Tupperware bowl still circling a now-dead Earth, which is itself orbiting a dying Sun which has cooled off and become a Red Giant (we now figure that this’ll actually take somewhere around 5 billion years to happen). So far so good? Good!

We then meet a group of intergalactic explorers who are at this very moment investigating our dying solar system. Their sensors pick up a metallic object orbiting the Earth.

Now of course the reader knows immediately what the object actually is. When they finally approach Earth and discover Prof. Challenger’s coffin-ship, they take it aboard their own greatly larger ship.

It turns out that the Zoromes aren’t your run-of-the-mill extra-terrestrial explorers. Nope, they are actually cyborgs! The Zoromes wanted dearly to explore the galaxy, but knew their mortal bodies wouldn’t survive a journey that might entail thousands of years, so they traded flesh and bone for metal and circuitry. Makes sense to me.

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Mask of the Macabre by David Haynes

Tuesday, July 9, 2013 MichaelPenkas Comments 0 Comment

Looking for some new horror, but sick of zombie apocalypses, vampire/werewolf boyfriends, philosophic serial killers, and all those ghost children? Something fresh? Or something that pulls from an older tradition? David Haynes’s Mask of the Macabre is available for ninety-nine cents.

This ebook is broken down into four interconnected stories set in 1860s England. The style borrows more from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than Saw or The Walking Dead. The first story in the series, “Mask of the Macabre,” concerns a decadent patron of a decadent theatre whose life is touched unexpectedly by a string of mutilations that predates the Ripper murders by a quarter century. The second story, “Doctor Harvey,” delves into the background of a psychiatrist who has no business judging the sanity of others. “Memento Mori” concerns an early photographer who specializes in capturing the images of the recently deceased, whose latest commission is even grislier than mere corpses. Finally, “A New Costume” wraps up the series, explaining some mysteries of how the three previous stories are inter-connected, as well as leaving hints to future horrors that await those who continue with the series.

This is the first in a series of e-novelettes by David Haynes. If you want to learn more about the author, check out his website.

Michael Penkas has been writing for years. His first collection of stories, Dead Boys, is available through Amazon and Smashwords.

Check Out the Humble ebook Bundle: Pay What You Want for 6 Great Books

Monday, July 8, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I had a look at the Humble ebook Bundle today, and was very impressed.

I’ve heard rumblings about this Humble thing for a while, but to be honest I never looked into it. They sold video game and music bundles, or something, on a “pay-what-you-want” basis, raising over $13.5 million for charity. That’s cool. You go, humble peeps.

But now they’re offering four great SF and fantasy titles, at a price you set yourself, for the next nine days. Suddenly I’m at lot more interested. The titles are:

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson
Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold

Yes, you get to decide what price you’re willing to pay for this awesome book bundle. Even if it’s only 1 cent, you cheap bastard. The titles are DRM-free, and available in multiple formats for most e-readers, including Kindle and iPad. You even get to choose where your money goes, allocating a portion (or all) of your payment the Electric Frontier Foundation, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, or Child’s Play Charity.

This is the second book promotion these Humble geniuses have strung together. As of press time, over 35,000 bundles have been sold, which is pretty darned amazing. The site tracks the average donation amount ($9.55 last time I checked), which lets you know just how cheap you really are — and also makes it possible to offer a special premium of two additional titles for those willing to pay more that. Those titles are:

The Last Unicorn: Deluxe Edition by Peter Beagle
Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton

Yeah, that’s six great titles for less than ten bucks. That’s a steal. Check it out here.