Black Gate – Page 1041 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

James Enge’s Wrath-Bearing Tree Coming in August

Tuesday, July 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Woo hoo! Our Bothan spies report that the second novel in James Enge’s epic new fantasy trilogy, A Tournament of Shadows, will be released by Pyr on August 13, 2013.

Many Bothans died to bring us this information. But lordy, it was worth it.

The book continues the origin story of Morlock Ambrosius, which began in A Guile of Dragons (Pyr, August 2012). Have I ever mentioned that Morlock’s first appearance was in Black Gate 8, in James Enge’s first published work of fiction, “Turn Up This Crooked Way?” True story. Morlock was in virtually every issue of Black Gate for the next five years. Morlock and Black Gate, best buds. I could tell you some stories.

Of course, he’s a big shot now. The first Morlock novel, Blood of Ambrose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award; after that came his rapid ascent to fame and a decadent west-coast lifestyle, and he stopped taking our calls. We still get Christmas cards, with a sloppy signature forged by his agent. We treasure them.

Into the Unguarded Lands . . .

The masked powers of Fate and Chaos are killing gods in the land of Kaen, facing the Wardlands across the Narrow Sea. Vocates Aloe Oaij and Morlock Ambrosius go into the Unguarded Lands, on a mission to find the reasons for the godslaying, and to avert any threat to the lands the Graith of Guardians has sworn to protect.

After crash-landing on the hostile coast of Kaen, they will face vengeful frightened gods, a calmly murderous dragon, a demon called Andhrakhar, and a bitter old necromancer named Merlin Ambrosius.

Amid these dangers they will find that they can trust no one but themselves — and each other.

“A calmly murderous dragon.” Doesn’t that sound like a Morlock story? He’s so cool. Can’t wait.

Wrath-Bearing Tree will be published by Pyr Books on August 2013. It is 320 pages in trade paperback, priced at $18.00; $11.99 for the digital edition. Cover art by Steve Stone. See more details at the Pyr website.

New Treasures: The Thousand Names by Django Wexler

Tuesday, July 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

When I was younger, I had very specific criteria for selecting fantasy reading material. I relied exclusively on the jacket copy, blurbs, and author reputation. But after reading numerous crummy books, I decided to switch things up a bit, and only buy books with great cover art.

That worked pretty well for about a decade. By the time I was 40, I’d refined my cover selection process even further. Now I base it almost solely on color. Lush greens and gold — that’s the ticket for the best in fantasy entertainment. Take it from the voice of experience.

Based on the excited buzz around Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names, and the righteous color scheme on the cover, I expect great things. But here’s the jacket copy in case you want to decide things the old fashioned way.

Enter an epic fantasy world that echoes with the thunder of muskets and the clang of steel — but where the real battle is against a subtle and sinister magic…

Captain Marcus d’Ivoire, commander of one of the Vordanai empire’s colonial garrisons, was resigned to serving out his days in a sleepy, remote outpost. But that was before a rebellion upended his life. And once the powder smoke settled, he was left in charge of a demoralized force clinging tenuously to a small fortress at the edge of the desert.

To flee from her past, Winter Ihernglass masqueraded as a man and enlisted as a ranker in the Vordanai Colonials, hoping only to avoid notice. But when chance sees her promoted to command, she must win the hearts of her men and lead them into battle against impossible odds.

The fates of both these soldiers and all the men they lead depend on the newly arrived Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich, who has been sent by the ailing king to restore order. His military genius seems to know no bounds, and under his command, Marcus and Winter can feel the tide turning. But their allegiance will be tested as they begin to suspect that the enigmatic Janus’s ambitions extend beyond the battlefield and into the realm of the supernatural — a realm with the power to ignite a meteoric rise, reshape the known world, and change the lives of everyone in its path.

The Thousand Names was published today by Roc Books. It is 513 pages in hardcover, priced at $25.95 ($12.99 for the digital edition). It is the first novel of The Shadow Campaigns.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

Arak Issue 2: Sympathy for the Devil?

Monday, July 1, 2013 Nick Ozment Comments 3 comments

See that nine-year-old boy spinning the revolving comic-book rack, seeking out the most lurid covers of monsters and aliens and skeletons in battle fatigues. He’ll rifle through his pocket for some quarters to buy the latest issue of Weird War Tales or House of Mystery or Arak, Son of Thunder.

See that forty-year-old man picking up a thirty-year-old issue of Arak, Son of Thunder, its cheap newsprint pages now yellowing, the staples loose, an older but still potent artifact promising strange adventures and magical mayhem in dreamed-of faraway lands. This relic of boyhood — the feel of the thin paper; the primitive, splotchy look of the four-color panels; even the smell of it — brings back inchoate memories and associations of a simpler, more carefree time when his future was expanding, not shrinking, when everything was out there to be gotten, not closing in to get him.

Something as simple as a comic book can be the bridge between the boy and the man, reminding him that he is still the same being, the same conscious self who lived those years and is living these years and lived all the years in between. It is why, even though he doesn’t collect Star Wars figures, he’d love to hold again a 1978 Kenner Snaggletooth (that little guy from the Mos Eisley Cantina), because he can remember the feel of it in his hands, out in the sandbox at recess, when it was one of the most prized possessions in the world (along with Walrus and Hammerhead).

These, then, are our totems, and the old comics our sacred books.

So let’s get to the second installment of Arak, Son of Thunder, shall we?

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Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

Monday, July 1, 2013 markrigney Comments 8 comments

In the original 2011 edition of Fantasy Out Loud, I took a stab at reviewing the fantasy books I had read aloud to my children. Back in those halcyon days, The Hobbit was front and center.

Some eighteen months later, my boys are older and taller, but not necessarily wiser. Much to my chagrin, older son Corey, aged thirteen as of this writing, no longer wants me to read aloud to him prior to bedtime. On his own, he’s lately polished off all four of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, and is now slamming through Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which he describes as “weird.” (We’ll see what he says when he gets to the end, one of the best reveals in written English.)

But, because Corey is tackling these titles on his lonesome ownsome, this column is necessarily dedicated to eight-year-old Evan, who still can’t get enough of pre-bed daddy readings.

In the last year, fantasy titles we’ve tackled include The Warriors: Into the Wild, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Black Beauty, Summerland, Tuck Everlasting, and Magic By the Lake.

Well, all right: Black Beauty isn’t strictly fantasy, since author Anna Sewell never allows Beauty to actually speak, but for a horse to be so observant, so proscriptive, so downright brilliant? Sounds like fantasy to me.

Here’s the rub: Evan did not like these books equally. Nor do his growing sense of taste and literary discretion always parallel, sadly, my own. At least two of the books above were volumes I would have preferred to hurl across the room, but in one case especially, despite my jaundice, Evan was enraptured.

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“A Great Place to let Your Imagination Run Wild:” Joe Bonadonna Reviews Rogues in Hell

Monday, July 1, 2013 Joe Bonadonna Comments 5 comments

I’ve always been a fan of the shared-world universe of Thieves World. It’s sword and sorcery at its best: character-oriented, with great plots and stories. Janet Morris has been editing and writing stories for her Heroes in Hell shared-world universe for quite some time now, starting with Heroes in Hell in 1986.

The most recent volume, the twelfth, was Lawyers in Hell (2011, co-edited with Chris Morris). And now, continuing with the series, she brings us Rogues in Hell, which IMHO is the best of the lot.

I love the whole concept behind the series, the cultures, inhabitants and levels of Hell. It’s quite a cool concept, and for writers this is a great place to let your imagination run wild. And I like the use of historical, legendary, and mythic characters.

My favorite of the 22 stories that comprise this anthology is “Colony,” by Bruce Durham. It’s a solid read: well-told, with great momentum to keep things moving and fun, crackling dialog, and prose that engages all the senses. Here, General James Wolfe has recently been resurrected — and once again finds himself in Hell, aboard a Satanic ship searching for an island not unlike Skull island.

The tale is told with plenty of action and humor, and never once breaks that magic spell that keeps you inside the story.

“Which Way I Fly,” by Janet Morris, is a very complex tale, and quite hard to describe. It’s a two-fold story, with Lysicles, an Athenian general, seeking revenge against Alexander of Macedon. With Lealaps the dog, guardian hound of Zeus, Lysicles joins with Xenophon the mercenary, and their demon allies in an epic battle in Hell.

The other part of this story involves Irkalla, Queen of Arali, and her son, Ninazu, who is of the winged Eshi, and is Prince of Ki-Gal. The plot revolves around the Royal House of Demons, and Erra and the Seven Sibitti, the sons of Heaven and Earth, the weapons of the gods who terrorize the dead.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part Five

Sunday, June 30, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Black Gate is very proud to present the final installment of Martha Wells’s Nebula Award-nominated novel, The Death of the Necromancer, presented complete online for the first time. In his SF Site review Wayne MacLaurin wrote:

The setting is a gaslit European continent that has familiar sounding names (Vienne, Lodun) and comes complete with steam engines and revolvers. But magic works and sorcerers walk the streets of the cities, have a great university and hold positions of power at the courts… The plot revolves around Nicholas Valiarde, a disgraced nobleman, consumed with the desire to revenge the wrongful death of his godfather. He also happens to be the greatest thief in all of Ile-Rien (a helpful talent which, I am sure you can see, would significantly help with those late night prowls around your arch-enemy’s estate)…

Valiarde’s revenge starts getting interrupted by a series of increasingly bizarre, unexplainable events. Somebody, or something, with significant magical ability begins to oppose him. More chilling is the obvious taint of necromancy — and necromancy is an art that has been outlawed for centuries…

The Death of the Necromancer is a fabulous read and earns my vote for “Most Exciting New Book of the Summer!”

Martha Wells is the author of fourteen fantasy novels, including City of Bones, The Element of Fire, The Cloud Roads, and The Serpent Sea. Her most recent novel is the YA fantasy, Emilie and the Hollow World, published by Strange Chemistry Books in April. Her previous fiction for us includes “Reflections” in Black Gate 10, “Holy Places” (BG 11), and “Houses of the Dead“ (BG 12). Her most recent article for us was “How Well Does The Cloud Roads Fit as Sword and Sorcery?,” which appeared here March 13. Her web site is www.marthawells.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mary Catelli, Michael Penkas, Vera Nazarian, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

The Death of the Necromancer was originally published in hardcover by Avon EOS in 1998. The complete, unedited text is being presented here; it began on June 2 with the first four chapters here.

Part Five includes Chapters Nineteen through Twenty-Two. It is offered at no cost.

Read Part Five of the complete novel here.

Masks and Talismans: Kurt Busiek’s Astro City

Sunday, June 30, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 7 comments

Astro City #1 A couple Wednesdays ago, I did something I haven’t done in ages. I went down to my local comic store on new-comic day (which is Wednesdays) and bought a new super-hero comic off the rack. Not a Marvel or DC book, though — not really, though it was published by DC’s Vertigo imprint. This was the return of a series first published in 1995, under the Image Comics banner. The title’s moved around a fair bit since, and frequently been on hiatus from regular publication. But it’s back now, and hopefully for a long time to come. It’s Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, and I want to talk about what it is and why I’m going to be buying it going forward.

In this comic, Astro City’s a metropolis located somewhere in the continental United States; it’s a hub for super-heroic activity, and has been for decades. Mad science, high sorcery, aliens: all of that. Men and women in strange costumes. Wild sprawling battles. Secret societies and crime rings. Everything you expect from super-hero stories — but not told the way you expect it. Because alongside all that imaginative chaos, there’s a city. Filled with millions of human beings. Astro City tells us their stories, as well. It’s an anthology book, alternating single issues and longer arcs, displaying incredible dramatic and emotional range for a genre often considered to have distinct formal limitations.

Writer and creator Kurt Busiek summed it up as “about being human among the superhuman,” which is true and also only part of it; superhumans are often the main characters of the stories, but Astro City as a place gives them a kind of context, a human connection, human meaning to the fantasy of their powers. Astro City uses the super-hero form as a way to talk about human beings, and vice-versa. It is, from one point of view, a struggle with the super-hero traditions of the past, an examination of genre conventions, a turning of those conventions to new ends. First appearing not so long after the ‘deconstruction’ of super-heroes exemplified by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, Astro City was at one time considered as part of a wave of ‘reconstructionist’ titles; but it was always more than that. It was, and is, a comment on super-heroes — working with perhaps the most meta-fictional of all genres, a form that endlessly reinvents its own past, Busiek pastiches and re-imagines the whole history of hero comics, creating a kind of ocean of story out of which he can draw seemingly endless incidents and anecdotes.

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The 2013 Locus Award Winners

Sunday, June 30, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday the Locus Science Fiction Foundation announced the winners of the 2013 Locus Awards at the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle. The winners are:

FANTASY NOVEL

The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace)

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor)

FIRST NOVEL

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey)

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The Top 50 Black Gate Blog Posts in May

Sunday, June 30, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

We published 99 posts in the month of May. 99! If I’d known that I would have tossed off one more at the last minute, just to cross that magic 100.

But we focused on quality, not quantity (he tells himself stoically). And our top article for the month — no doubt ably assisted by the release of Star Trek Into Darkness — was a look at the Federation Commander: Klingon Border board game. Number two was also gaming-related: a peek at the Against the Odds historical gaming magazine. Third was our obituary for the talented editor and Thieve’s World author Andrew J. Offutt, followed by Violette Malan’s entirely reasonable question, “Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?” and a guest post by Milton Davis on Sword and Soul fantasy.

The Top 50 Black Gate posts in May were:

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New Treasures: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

Saturday, June 29, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I’d never heard of Alan Averill, but I think that’s because this is a debut novel. I like debuts — they make me think I’m the first to discover an exciting new writer. I get to tell all my friends and be cool. Being cool doesn’t happen to me very often, believe me, so anything that even hints at the possibility gets a closer look.

The Beautiful Land is a tale of dimension-hopping and alternate realities. Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders called it “a great love story disguised as a thriller.” Here’s the book description.

Takahiro O’Leary has a very special job… working for the Axon Corporation as an explorer of parallel timelines — as many and as varied as anyone could imagine. A great gig — until information he brought back gave Axon the means to maximize profits by changing the past, present, and future of this world.

If Axon succeeds, Tak will lose Samira Moheb, the woman he has loved since high school — because her future will cease to exist. A veteran of the Iraq War suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Samira can barely function in her everyday life, much less deal with Tak’s ravings of multiple realities. The only way to save her is for Tak to use the time travel device he “borrowed” to transport them both to an alternate timeline.

But what neither Tak nor Axon knows is that the actual inventor of the device is searching for a timeline called the Beautiful Land — and he intends to destroy every other possible present and future to find it.

The switch is thrown, and reality begins to warp — horribly. And Tak realizes that to save Sam, he must save the entire world…

The Beautiful Land was published by Ace Books on June 4. It is 362 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback ($9.99 for the digital edition).

See all of our recent New Treasures here.