Black Gate – Page 1042 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Star Trek Lives

Monday, July 15, 2013 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 8 comments

This post is for Star Trek fans.

Let me be more specific. This post isn’t for fans who were brought in by the new movies, or fans of Star Trek: the Whatever – it’s for any of you who love the original TV show.

Maybe, like me, you grew up when it was the only science fiction on television, or – it’s possible — perhaps you’re a more recent convert.

I know a lot of original Star Trek fans who’ve dreamt from time to time that they’re watching an episode they’ve never seen before. I sure have. We wanted the stories to continue and sometimes our subconscious obliges. Here’s the amazing thing: I’ve recently watched something that plays almost like one of those dreams, albeit a coherent one.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Highwater Harbor,” Part One, by Aaron Bradford Starr

Sunday, July 14, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Gallery Hunters Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh, last seen in “The Sealord’s Successor” (published here on March 3rd), “The Tea-Maker’s Task” (December 30th), and “The Daughter’s Dowry” (October 14), find themselves tasked with unraveling the secrets of a mysterious artifact… as the death toll mounts around them.

“The Cipher Key,” he said. “Is it a code? A secret writing system?”

“A means to unlock the ships themselves?” the large man asked. His words revealed his interests, and I knew him then to be a martial man of the sea, perhaps a freebooter captain.

“A mapping coordinate system,” offered Lady Armeline at the same time. “A secret route to one of the most powerful southern fortresses of the Old Kingdom.”

Gloren chuckled, sitting back and looking at the eager trio. He glanced at Yr Neh, and then at me. “It is a puzzle,” he offered. “We’ll need a second crew, if you’re thinking of recovering a ship from the Harbor. And someone you can trust to lead them.”

“I’ve got just the man,” said the Captain.

Louis West at Tangent Online called “The Sealord’s Successor” a “gripping tale of fantasy, mystery, murder and intrigue. A must read,” and “The Tea-Maker’s Task” “an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek fantasy… I wanted more.” We’re more than happy to oblige with this fourth exciting installment of the adventures of Gallery Hunter Gloren and his cat companion, Yr Neh.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Jamie McEwan, Martha Wells, 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 Highwater Harbor” is a 35,000-word novella of fantasy mystery presented in three parts, with original art by Aaron Bradford Starr. Part II will be presented next week; all three parts are offered at no cost.

Read Part I here.

Pacific Rim Loves You. Love It Back.

Sunday, July 14, 2013 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

Pacific Rim (2013)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Rob Kazinsky, Max Martini, Ron Perlman.

If you choose to see Grown Ups 2 this week instead of Pacific Rim, I will come after you. I know nothing about engineering, but I will find a way to build a titanic super robot and hunt you down. I know nothing about genetics, but I will find a way to grow a mutated giant monster and put it on your trail. And if you spent any money on any of the Transformers movies and you don’t go see Pacific Rim….

R-A-G-E!

Pacific Rim is here for you, summer movie fans and science-fiction worshippers: an original, thrilling, no-bloat SF geek explosion. Every summer has that film, the one that reminds us what fun the warm season movies are supposed to be, and makes us leave the theater walking tall as a 50-meter robot and loving life like a thirteen-year-old kid who hit the bank with a lemonade stand and can now afford that new video game.

I’ll admit a strong bias here, which is the same one that director Guillermo del Toro has: a reverence for the cinematic marvel of watching giant monsters knocking crap over. Pacific Rim is a contemporary love poem to Toho Studios and Tsubaraya Productions in the 1960s, the folks who brought the eruption of outrageous fun kaiju cinema. (Kaiju as Pacific Rim’s title cards define it means “giant monster.” I’ll be nitpicky as a fan and point out that the literal Japanese meaning is “strange beast,” with no reference to size. Daikaiju means “giant strange beast.” However, in fan speak kaiju has come to refer to the entire genre of special effects films centered on giant creatures.) Del Toro creates a whole world where giant monsters and human-piloted robotic suits can slug away at each other in awe-inspiring set-pieces stuffed with hero poses and fist-pumping victory shots. It’s so damn gorgeous and it feels so good.

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J.K. Rowling Outed as the Author of The Cuckoo’s Calling

Sunday, July 14, 2013 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

There’s been a huge surge of interest in Robert Galbraith’s debut crime novel The Cuckoo’s Calling today.

That’s because “Robert Galbraith” was revealed late yesterday as Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

The book’s publisher has been touting the book as a “classic crime novel in the tradition of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.” Up until yesterday, it had sold around 1,500 copies in hardback. But in the hours since its author was revealed, it has hit the bestseller list. Amazon is currently out of stock and listing it as shipping in 10 to 14 days (Barnes & Noble still has it in stock online). If you want a first edition hardcover, you better move fast.

The Sunday Times has reported that Rowling has completed a second novel featuring the same detective, Cormoran Strike. It is due next year. Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, was published last year.

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you’ve never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you’ve never seen them under an investigation like this.

The Cuckoo’s Calling was published April 30 by Mulholland Books. It is 464 pages, priced at $26 for the hardcover (if you can find one). You’ll have better luck with the digital edition, priced at $12.99.

Check Out the How To Train Your Dragon 2 Teaser Trailer

Sunday, July 14, 2013 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I love it when a really great film sneaks up on me. It doesn’t happen very often any more — as Editor-in-Chief of the BG website, it’s more or less my job to stay on top of the latest in fantasy entertainment — but when it does, it’s a real delight.

My favorite film of 2010, and one of my all-time favorite animated films, period, snuck up on me. My kids came boiling up out of the basement, begging me to come watch it with them on DVD. So I did. They were aquiver with excitement as they watched it again — for what turned out to be the fourth time — trying to stay quiet and not spoil the surprises for me.

The film was How To Train Your Dragon, and it was everything they said it would be: funny, surprising, original, and absolutely riveting. See Andrew Zimmerman Jones BG review here, in which he calls it “Hands down, of the fantasy films I’ve seen this year, my favorite.”

And now the sequel has snuck up on me. Or at least the teaser trailer has — I had no idea the movie was in production. But I’m delighted to hear it, and anxiously awaiting the finished product. Canadian writer/director Dean DeBlois, who also directed the first film, calls this one “the epic second act of a much larger story.” Here’s a look at the trailer posted two days ago on YouTube, where it already has over 1.6 million views.

How To Train Your Dragon 2 was produced by DreamWorks Animation and directed by Dean DeBlois. The voice cast includes Gerard Butler, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, and Craig Ferguson. It is scheduled for release in June 2014.

Virgil Burnett’s Towers at the Edge of a World

Saturday, July 13, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 4 comments

Towers at the Edge of a World One of the distinct pleasures of book fairs and used book sales is finding an intriguing book you’ve never heard of. A greater and related pleasure comes when that book turns out to be quite good. Then, in reaction to that, there’s a melancholy that sets in from the fact that a worthwhile book is largely unknown. I’d like to think I can take the edge off that last sense by writing about some of these books here. So, given all that, a few words about Virgil Burnett’s Towers at the Edge of a World:

First published in 1980 by St. Martin’s Press and republished in 1983 by The Porcupine’s Quill with illustrations by the author, it’s a collection of 15 short stories and an introduction, all set in an imaginary French town in times ranging from the Dark Ages through to the near-present. It’s tied together by imagery and theme more than plot, both as a whole and in the individual stories. There’s little dialogue or drama, though more as the book goes on — it could be seen to be replicating the (supposed) historical development of a sense of character.

Born in Kansas in 1928, Burnett passed away last year. As well as being an author, teacher, and acquaintance of Stein and Joyce, he was an artist and art historian whose work included cover illustrations for Penguin (I’ve included examples of his art that I’ve found online alongside this article). From 1974 to his death, he lived in Stratford, Ontario, where he taught Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. In addition to Towers, he wrote Skiamachia: A Fantasy (1982), A Comedy of Eros (1984), a collection of short stories called Farewell Tour (1986), and Scarbo Edge: A Romaunt (2008). He co-wrote two mystery novels with Bruce Barber under the name Bevan Underhill, The Bloody Man (1993) and The Running Girl (1994), and with Barber co-edited the 2004 anthology, Habaneras, which he published through his own Pasdeloup Press. In 2010, he published an essay on drawing, Object and Emblem. In 2003, a translation of his play Leonora was published in French; I can’t find a record of an English publication.

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Challenging the Classics: Questioning the Immutable Hallmarks of Genre

Saturday, July 13, 2013 Foz Meadows Comments 8 comments

Every once in a while, usually in the midst of conversations about the history of SFF or arguments about its greatest works and writers, I’ll guiltily remember how few of the Classics I’ve read, and make rash promises to remedy the situation.

I know Orson Scott Card is a raving homophobe, I’ll think to myself, but I really should read Ender’s Game. In a fit of mad optimism, I’ll add various works by Isaac Asimov and William Gibson to my Amazon wishlist, only to delete them the next time I’ve got money to spend, because I just can’t muster up the interest. Friends have lent me copies of Jack Vance, Vernor Vinge, and Gene Wolfe, and each time, despite my best intentions, the books are left to molder by the bedside in favor of something by Catherynne M. Valente or Nnedi Okorafor.

It’s not like I have any moral objection to books by straight white male writers – after all, I’ve been compulsively reading and rereading both Discworld and A Song of Ice and Fire for over a decade, I’m an absolute sucker for China Mieville and Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World will forever be one of my all-time favorite novels (and that’s just for starters).

But with the genre developing in so many different directions at once, it feels needlessly regressive to pry myself away from the latest book by Elizabeth Bear or N. K. Jemisin and instead try to read, out of duty rather than passion, some decades-old novel that’s already been analysed, reviewed, and criticised ad nauseum.

Which doesn’t make them bad novels, or mean that there’s anything wrong with loving, critiquing, discovering and talking about them now. They’re just not for me, is all, and most of the time, I can live with that. But then I’ll read yet another article complaining about newcomers to SFF reinventing the wheel for lack of familiarity with the Classics, or hear someone bemoaning the fact that fantasy Isn’t What It Used To Be, and part of me starts to doubt my own credentials. Can I really call myself a fan of science fiction if I’ve never read Dune? If I let slip that I never made it past book one of The Wheel of Time, are the Geek Police going to come along and revoke my right to talk about epic fantasy on the Internet?

If I’ve never read the Classics, then how did I get into SFF in the first place?

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New Treasures: Lonely Souls edited by Gordon van Gelder

Saturday, July 13, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I love novellas, and I think they’re the perfect length for SF and fantasy. Long enough to really explore characters and setting, short enough to demand ruthless pacing — and to read in one sitting. I bought as many as I could fit for Black Gate (a few more than I could fit, truthfully), and writers were always grateful. Time and again I was told that the novella was a hard sell these days… only a handful of markets would take them.

One editor who does regularly feature novellas is Gordon van Gelder, for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Even though each issue is a massive 256 pages, however, he’s still limited in how many he can fit. So I was pleased to see the recent appearance of Lonely Souls, an anthology of four novellas just published by Gordon’s Spilogale press.

Many science fiction writers view the novella as the optimal length-short enough to be read in one sitting, but long enough to build a world. And what better world can we build and examine, than the landscape of our lonely souls? Gordon Van Gelder has brought together a set of four novellas that dig deeper into the recesses of our beings.

In “Goliath of Gath,” Jan Lars Jensen offers us a look at figure of legend not usually considered: Goliath. One of the last of his people, the giants, in a changing social and political landscape. A pacifist manipulated into death with the promise of peace. A man whose story is rarely examined in favor of David, the plucky hero of the Bible.

Then Eric Carl Wolf brings us to a grassy, cowboy-country, beef-herding planet as barren as the Old West in “Demands of Ghosts,” where we meet a former assassin seeking anonymity and redemption.

In “One Day at the Zoo” by Rand B. Lee a young girl with special powers is “saved” from being experimented on by the closest person to her, her mother, who seeks instead to destroy her.

In a strange, violent, debauched future, an assassin confronts a new technology that enables immortality, destroying the value of death, and he begins a quest for oblivion, so goes “Final Kill” by Chris DeVito.

Spilogale also publishes digital versions of Fourth Planet from the Sun (covered here) and F&SF. We covered the July/August issue of F&SF here.

Lonely Souls is currently available in electronic format. It is 267 pages, priced at $5.99. There is currently no print edition. Learn more here. Check it out and support great short fiction at a great price!

James Frenkel Leaves Tor

Friday, July 12, 2013 John ONeill Comments 17 comments

Long-time editor James Frenkel has left Tor Books.

Frenkel was one of the most accomplished editors at Tor — indeed, in the entire industry. I first came across his name in the mid-80s, when he was publisher of Bluejay books, a science fiction imprint that produced trade paperback editions of K.W. Jeter, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Connie Willis, and many others. Among many other accomplishments, Bluejay Books first began publishing Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies.

Frenkel joined Tor after the collapse of Bluejay in the late 80s, where he edited some of the biggest names in the industry, including Vernor Vinge, Joan D. Vinge, Frederik Pohl, Andre Norton, Dan Simmons, Jack Williamson, Timothy Zahn, Greg Bear, and many others.

Frenkel’s departure from Tor comes following accusations of sexual harassment, stemming from an incident at Wiscon reported by Elise Matthesen:

Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different house joined the conversation briefly and decided to do the thing that I reported. A minute or two after he left, one of the hosts came over to check on me… So I reported it to the convention. Somewhere in there they asked, “Shall we use your name?” I thought for a millisecond and said, “Oh, hell yes.”

While Matthesen did not immediately identify the editor in question, he was famously ID’d by Mary Robinette Kowal in her June 18 blog post “Why am I afraid to name the editor?” Yesterday Tor senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden made the announcement via Twitter that James Frenkel was no longer associated with Tor Books.

Frenkel currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Joan D. Vinge. He has not yet made any public announcement regarding the issue.

You’ve Got Crime in My Fantasy Novel. You’ve Got Fantasy . . .

Friday, July 12, 2013 Violette Malan Comments 5 comments

So, I decided to write a serial-killer book. All my friends were.

Perhaps I should explain. A lot of my friends are crime and mystery writers, and with them, after a few glasses of wine, the talk always seems to turn to serial-killer books. Who’s writing one. Who wants to. Who’s never gonna, no matter what. How publishers always push for one. It’s like serial killers are the new black.

Inevitably someone turns to me and says “Well, you don’t have to worry, Violette. It’s not like you could write a serial-killer fantasy novel.” Well, as you can imagine, I regarded those as fighting words – and now you know the origin of my novel, Path of the Sun.

Of course, that friend was echoing the John W. Campbell opinion on science-fiction mysteries that I mentioned a few weeks ago. According to Campbell, it couldn’t be done. Here in the community, experience has shown us that Campbell was wrong. But the attitude among non-fantasy or SF readers is still pretty much the same as his.

The trick, as most of you know, is to solve the crime – sometimes after figuring out how to commit the crime – within the parameters of our created worlds. Sometimes, we can even create crimes our pure-mystery-loving friends have never even thought of. Any common thief can steal money, the Fantasy or SF thief can steal your soul. Or a few hours of time out of your life. Or, perhaps, the best time of your life.

But let me get back to my serial killer.

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