King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

King Arthur Revisited: Donald Barthelme’s The King

Comments 0 Comment

41EQ75FAXGLThe legend of King Arthur has become one of literature’s greatest footballs, and it gets punted hither and yon with often quite careless abandon. Legions of celluloid spinoffs litter the vaults of Netflix, and on the printed page, one can select from heavyweights like Mallory, White, or Steinbeck to enjoy your Age of Chivalry fix.

Flying well under the radar is one of the twentieth century’s best known metafictional writers, Donald Barthelme. His story collections, including City Lights and Sixty Stories, are classics of the form, endlessly inventive, cartwheeling-freewheeling-Catherine wheeling lunacies that manage nonetheless to pack a surprising emotional punch.

Most of Barthelme’s output centered on short fiction, but every so often he ventured into the realm of the novel, as with his knowing, nudge-nudge/wink-wink Snow White and his unjustly forgotten Arthurian outing, The King.

Released by Harper & Row in 1990 and featuring the evocative, jutting illustrations of Barry Moser, The King is an anachronistic treat from start to finish, and hilarious besides.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy

New Treasures: Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy

Comments 18 comments

Fearsome Journeys The New Solaris Book of FantasyI have to admit I’ve been a bit frustrated with Ian Whates’s recent anthologies from Solaris: Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (2011), and the brand new Solaris Rising 2 (March 2013).

Oh, they’re fine anthologies. Whates is establishing himself as an editor with a keen eye for talent, and he’s attracted some terrific names.

But that’s a lot of science fiction. Nothing wrong with science fiction but… what about fantasy? Come on Solaris — where’s the love?

Apparently, it was in the mail. Last month it arrived in the form of Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy, edited by uber-editor Jonathan Strahan.

Fearsome Journeys is the first volume in a new series of fantasy anthologies featuring all-original fiction. Authors in the first volume include Ellen Klages, Trudi Canavan, Elizabeth Bear, Daniel Abraham, Kate Elliott, Saladin Ahmed, Glen Cook, Scott Lynch, Ellen Kushner & Ysabeau Wilce, Jeffrey Ford, Robert Redick and KJ Parker.

That’s a damned impressive line-up. All is forgiven, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy was edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by Solaris on May 28, 2013. It is 416 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. Find out more at the Solaris website.

See all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Falling Castles” by Jamie McEwan

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Falling Castles” by Jamie McEwan

Comments 2 comments

uprising-2771The intrepid Prince Tanek, hero of “An Uprising of One” from Black Gate 15, returns in a tale of a daring castle raid — with chilling consequences.

Tanek could hear voices coming from the watchtower above as one by one his companions pulled themselves through the chilly water and lined up against the wall beside him. Romy was distracting the single watchman on the northwest tower. King Luzak had left only a skeleton guard behind, wishing to include all available force in his invasion.

When they had all hurriedly dressed, Tanek, dagger in hand, slipped through the unlocked postern gate and led the others through the cramped stone passage beyond. He was relieved to find the gate on the far side of the thick wall unlocked as well.

“Rojek,” whispered Tanek, his hand on the gate.

“My lord,” Rojek answered from close behind.

“Just the two of us,” said Tanek. “Follow me out, to our left, and up the tower stairs. Remember; we must stay below the parapet as much as possible.” Glancing down at the sword that Rojek had insisted on wearing Tanek added, “And remember, quiet!”

Jamie’s “An Uprising of One” made the Tangent Online Recommended Reading List 2011. In his feature review of BG 15 Kevin R. Tipple wrote:

King Erskine of Malpass, a tyrant known as “Erskin the Extractor” for reasons that become clear in the story, must be stopped and stopped now. He has a weakness and Tanek has figured it out. A key part of Tanek’s plan requires him to scale the tallest tower at Erskine’s castle at Courbe. Despite how dangerous it is, breaking into the castle by climbing the tower might be the easiest party of the plan…

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

“Falling Castles” is a complete 11,000-word tale of adventure fantasy offered at no cost. Art from “An Uprising of One” by Jim and Ruth Keegan.

Read the complete story here.

Self-published Book Reviews: Some Thoughts After Half a Year

Self-published Book Reviews: Some Thoughts After Half a Year

Comments 0 Comment
Tiger Lily cover
The first book I reviewed.

Back in November of last year, I offered to review self-published books for the Black Gate blog. As I said when I started:

Nowadays, it’s really easy to self-publish a book. However, it’s very, very hard to stand out in the crowd. For every author who breaks through, there are hundreds out there who do not. While many of these self-published books are deservedly unknown, I believe that there are self-published books out there that deserve more attention than they’re receiving, and I’d like to help them get it. So I’m offering to review one self-published fantasy book each month. Considering that there are hundreds or thousands published every day, I’m sure that this won’t even scratch the surface. So in order to help me find out which books I should be reviewing, and to give you the best opportunity to sell yourself, I’m going to set up a submission system.

Now that I’ve been doing these reviews for half a year, I thought that now would be a good time to look back and think about my approach. That and I was slow selecting a book to review last month.

When I first hung up a shingle offering to do reviews for Black Gate, I had a quite a few review requests, and it was a challenge just doing the minimum due diligence on them all. My technique consisted of reading the blurb, and if I thought that sounded interesting, reading the writing sample I requested. If I thought it was promising from that point, I’d mark it as a possibility. However, I didn’t request a copy of the book until I’d gone through all the requests, which gave me a chance to ask for the book I thought looked most promising.

…

Read More Read More

Jo Walton’s Eight Books From the Last Decade that Made Me Excited About Fantasy

Jo Walton’s Eight Books From the Last Decade that Made Me Excited About Fantasy

Comments 3 comments

chrysantheOver at Tor.com, Hugo Award-winning author Jo Walton celebrates the eight fantasy novels that most excited her about the genre in the last decade.

Her list includes Yves Meynard’s Chrysanthe, which we last discussed here. Here’s what she said:

Yves Meynard’s Chrysanthe is in the tradition of Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny, and beyond that of Dunsany and Mirrlees. It also has modern sensibilities, and because Meynard is from a different culture — he’s an award-winning novelist in French — it’s distinctly different from most of what we see on the shelves labelled as fantasy. This is a quest through shadows that leads to unexpected places. So much fantasy uses magic in a logical way — I’ve called it “realist magicism.” Of everything I’ve mentioned here, only this and A Stranger in Olondria are doing anything that isn’t that. I like it to make sense, but I also like the incredible flowering of the imagination you get in things like Chrysanthe.

Jo’s list also includes Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet, Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series, Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, Steven Brust’s Dzur, and two others I’ll leave as a surprise.

Check out the complete list here.

Cosmic Horror Skills at Novel Length: A Review of Laird Barron’s The Croning

Cosmic Horror Skills at Novel Length: A Review of Laird Barron’s The Croning

Comments 12 comments

The Croning-smallAs regular readers of Black Gate are fully aware, the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons has had a huge influence upon post-1970s fantasy writers and fans. A case in point, Tor.com is currently delivering a series of posts exploring Gary Gygax’s (the original creator of Dungeons and Dragons) suggested readings in Appendix N of the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide (the first two are here and here). The authors in this list are the usual suspects in fantasy literature: Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, etc. But one author that Gygax includes, that may be a surprise to some, is the horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft.

However, veteran fantasy and other genre fans will likely see no incongruence here. For example, as a 13-year old intently reading the original Dungeons and Dragons book Deities and Demigods, I found the Cthulhu mythos section, based on Lovecraft’s horror fiction, to be just as inspiring for fantasy role-playing as the Greek and Norse mythos sections. I believe many others will agree that Lovecraftian horror has been a part of the sundry smorgasbord of fantasy for some time.

As veteran genre fans also well know, Lovecraft has spawned a cadre of authors who can be clearly identified as “Lovecraftian.” Such authors, in my opinion, fall into two broad and general groups. One group imitates Lovecraft by using the same sorts of tropes that he did: forbidden eldritch books, gibbous moons, tentacled monsters, mad cultists, etc. The second group writes more in the mood of Lovecraft, giving a general sense of nihilistic dread, sometimes called “cosmic horror.” I personally favor the latter group though there are some fine examples of the first.

Laird Barron is a fairly new horror writer who fits the squarely into the latter Lovecraftian group. His short story collections The Imago Sequence and Occultation are both often heralded as must-haves for horror fans, receiving the 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson awards, respectively. Barron’s stories range from eerie to the utterly terrifying, presenting a universe that gives small peeks into entities and realities that are at best indifferent to Earth and humanity’s fragile existence and sanity.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Katya’s World by Jonathan L. Howard

New Treasures: Katya’s World by Jonathan L. Howard

Comments 3 comments

Katyas World-smallThose of you with sharp eyes last week noticed that, buried among the many intriguing titles in the Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage we published on June 29, were the latest novels from Black Gate author Jonathan L. Howard.

Jonathan is a terrifically talented fantasy author. We published two of his stories featuring Kyth the Taker, the brilliant thief whose commissions inevitably involve her in sorcerous intrigue: “The Shuttered Temple” in Black Gate 15 and “The Beautiful Corridor” (BG 13.)

Jonathan’s first novels were the popular Johannes Cabel books: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (2010), Johannes Cabal the Detective (2010), and the upcoming Fear Institute. But one series doesn’t appear to be enough for Jonathan. Here’s the 411 on the first book of The Russalka Chronicles:

The distant and unloved colony world of Russalka has no land, only the raging sea. No clear skies, only the endless storm clouds. Beneath the waves, the people live in pressurised environments and take what they need from the boundless ocean. It is a hard life, but it is theirs and they fought a war against Earth to protect it. But wars leave wounds that never quite heal, and secrets that never quite lie silent.

Katya Kuriakova doesn’t care much about ancient history like that, though. She is making her first submarine voyage as crew; the first nice, simple journey of what she expects to be a nice, simple career.

There is nothing nice and simple about the deep black waters of Russalka, however; soon she will encounter pirates and war criminals, see death and tragedy at first hand, and realise that her world’s future lies on the narrowest of knife edges. For in the crushing depths lies a sleeping monster, an abomination of unknown origin, and when it wakes, it will seek out and kill every single person on the planet.

The second title in the series, Katya’s War, is due in October.

Katya’s World was published by Strange Chemistry on November 13, 2012. It is 320 pages in paperback, priced at $9.99 ($6.99 for the digital edition). Learn more at the Strange Chemistry website, and read Jonathan’s thoughts on writing the Johannes Cabel books right here at Black Gate.

EN World Announces the 9 Most Anticipated RPGs of 2013

EN World Announces the 9 Most Anticipated RPGs of 2013

Comments 3 comments

The folks at role-playing game news and reviews site EN World have published the results of their survey on the Top 9 Most Anticipated RPGs of 2013.

The survey was conducted on EN World, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Only full tabletop roleplaying games — not adventures, settings, or other supplements — with a 2013 release date made it to the list. The results were published on June 27 and summarized in the nifty YouTube video below.

Some of the impending RPG releases for the year include Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition from Chaosium, Robin D. Laws’s Iron Age drama Hillfolk (Pelgrane Press), Shadowrun 5th Edition (Catalyst Game Lab), the highly anticipated Star Wars: Edge of the Empire from Fantasy Flight, Monte Cook’s Kickstarter phenomenon Numenera, the new Firefly RPG from Margaret Weis Productions, and the massive 13th Age by D&D designers Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo. That’s enough hints; now here’s the video with all nine winners.

You Think You’ve Got Problems? Where’d I Put That Wand . . .

You Think You’ve Got Problems? Where’d I Put That Wand . . .

Comments 0 Comment

BuffyWhen dealing with sorcery, often the precise source or methodology of the magic is part of the premise of the novel itself – it’s what makes this place or that different from the world we live in. But the real function of any plot device – including magic – is to complicate the lives of your characters. Adding conflict and tension to otherwise humdrum lives is what writers do. It’s our job, and sorcery is one of the tools that fantasy writers have at our disposal.

At the same time we’re using magic to solve problems, like technology does, we’re using magic to create problems. Like technology does.

Just think about what the presence of magic does to that old stand-by, the coming-of-age novel. Being a teenager isn’t bad enough? Coming to terms with the world as it really is, and what your part in that world might be – that’s not hard enough on you? Let’s make you a wizard as well. It’s no coincidence that authors often have magical abilities appear at puberty. And yes, that’s using magic as a metaphor.

We don’t think of her as a wizard, but other than Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is probably the best known specially-empowered teenager. Creator Joss Whedon makes the metaphor fairly obvious, as Buffy suffers through her normal-world coming-of-age simultaneously with her other-world coming-of-age.  Like Harry Potter, Buffy has to learn about herself and her relationship to the world as well as her powers – and that with those powers comes responsibility.

…

Read More Read More

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s President Fu Manchu, Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s President Fu Manchu, Part Two

Comments 3 comments

Invisible PresidentPresident Cassell 50sSax Rohmer’s The Invisible President was originally serialized in Collier’s from February 29 to May 16, 1936. It was published in book form later that year by Cassell in the UK and Doubleday in the US under the title President Fu Manchu. The novel is the first in the series to fictionalize real events with characters based on familiar figures in the US in the 1930s such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. More than one critic has noted the story may have influenced the classic Cold War conspiracy thriller, The Manchurian Candidate.

The hotel where Sir Denis Nayland Smith and his FBI counterpart, Mark Hepburn, are staying is thrown into a panic over the unexpected arrival of James Richet, Abbot Donegal’s secretary, who is wanted by the authorities as a member of the Si-Fan. Richet arrives by taxi outside the hotel before collapsing. His corpse is discovered inexplicably covered with mysterious red spots.

When first introduced, Richet came under suspicion for no better reason than Smith detecting Eurasian blood in his background. Strangely, Smith’s valet Fey is also Eurasian and while other characters sometimes express doubts concerning Fey’s loyalty, Sir Denis never questions it. One wishes that Rohmer would have given Smith a more concrete reason to suspect Richet other than racial profiling.

…

Read More Read More