The Top 12 Black Gate Fiction Posts in March

The Top 12 Black Gate Fiction Posts in March

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bones-of-the-old-onesNovel excerpts were the top draw last month, as Howard Andrew Jones held the top spot for a third month in a row with tantalizing slice of sword-and-sorcery goodness from The Bones of the Old Ones, followed closely by The Waters of Darkness, the new supernatural pirate novel from from David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna. And Vaughn Heppner’s novel Star Soldier was not much further down the list.

Still, short fiction proved plenty popular, with stories by Aaron Bradford Starr, Joe Bonadonna, David Evan Harris, Judith Berman, E.E. Knight, Gregory Bierly, John R. Fultz, Harry Connolly and Vaughn Heppner filling out the Top 12.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. Every week, we present an original short story or novella from the best writers in the industry, all completely free.

Here are the Top Twelve most read stories in March, for your enjoyment:

  1. An excerpt from The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones
  2. An excerpt from The Waters of Darkness, by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna
  3. “The Sealord’s Successor,” by Aaron Bradford Starr
  4. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
  5. “Seeker of Fortune,” by David Evan Harris
  6. “The Poison Well,” by Judith Berman
  7. “The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
  8. “A Princess of Jadh,” by Gregory Bierly
  9. “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” by John R. Fultz
  10. “The Whoremaster of Pald,” by Harry Connolly
  11. An excerpt from Star Soldier,” by Vaughn Heppner
  12. “The Pit Slave,” by Vaughn Heppner

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Ryan Harvey, Steven H Silver, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Emily Mah, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here. The most popular Black Gate fiction from February is here.

We’ve got plenty more fiction in the coming months, so stay tuned!

Read Last Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary in Speculative Fiction 2012

Read Last Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary in Speculative Fiction 2012

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Speculative Fiction 2012It’s no surprise that some of the best and most insightful writing in 2012 took place on blogs.

Blogging — with its immediacy and ease of public access — has attracted some of the most gifted writers we have, and fantasy and SF readers are increasingly turning to the blogs and writers they trust for news and opinion. For the latest evidence, look no further than Speculative Fiction 2012, a new collection of the very best online reviews, essays, and commentary from Jurassic London press.

Speculative Fiction 2012 gathers over fifty of the best articles published last year, from the top tier of bloggers and authors in science fiction and fantasy. The contributor list includes some of the most acclaimed writers in the field, folks like Christopher Priest, N. K. Jemisin, Joe Abercrombie, Daniel Abraham, Elizabeth Bear, Myke Cole, Kate Elliott, Niall Alexander, Rose Lemberg, Kameron Hurley, Adam Roberts, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Sam Sykes, and Lavie Tidhar.

I’m very pleased to say that it also includes one of our own: Matthew David Surridge, whose February 2012 Black Gate article “Tolkien and Attila” is in the Table of Contents. Here’s what Matthew tells us:

This is out now, and has one of my Black Gate articles in it — to paraphrase the Amazon blurb, a look at what Tolkien learned from Attila the Hun. Happy to have a piece of mine in a very strong line-up! And worth noting: proceeds from the sale of the book go to a charity promoting international literacy and education.

You can read the announcement, including the complete list of contributors, here, and Matthew’s original article is here.

Speculative Fiction 2012 was edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin, with a foreword by Mur Lafferty. It published on April 23, 2013 by Jurassic London. It is 380 pages in paperback, priced at $11.99. There is no digital edition.

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

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people-of-the-black-circleI may have more books by Robert E. Howard in my collection than any other writer.

I’m not certain, as I haven’t counted, and if you allow anthologies then he’ll be beaten out handily by folks like Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. But the venerable Mr. Howard occupies more than two shelves in my library, which is astounding for someone who died at the age of thirty.

I came to Howard early. The first story I read by REH was “Pigeons from Hell,” which Charles Saunders mentioned in a speech he gave to the Ottawa Science Fiction Society in 1981, the year his groundbreaking Imaro was released. “Horror doesn’t usually scare me,” he told us. “‘Pigeons From Hell’ scared me.”

I think the second REH tale I read was the Solomon Kane tale “Skulls in the Stars,” which I enjoyed even more. (I wrote about the two Bantam Solomon Kane collections, Skulls in the Stars and The Hills of the Dead, last year.)

But I wasn’t a Conan fan. Most of it was prejudice — in those days, all those novels with barbarians on the cover were considered the lowest form of fantasy, and I generally snubbed them. Oddly, I don’t think I even associated Conan with Robert E. Howard.

I surreptitiously tried a Conan book in my early teens, a collection of tales mostly by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, if I remember correctly. Didn’t impress me. That was all I needed to confirm that I was better than this stuff and return to reading books of quality, like Perry Rhodan and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.

All that began to change with The People of the Black Circle, a Christmas gift from my brother Michael.

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Some Thoughts on Grimus

Some Thoughts on Grimus

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GrimusBrian Aldiss has told a story (and I have no reason to doubt it) in which he, Arthur C. Clarke, and Kingsley Amis were the jury for a 1975 Sunday Times science fiction award. One of the books they were strongly considering for first prize was a novel called Grimus, by a 25-year-old first-time writer who worked in advertising. But as they deliberated, the publisher pulled the book from the competition, evidently because said publisher didn’t want the book given the label of ‘science fiction.’ Odd to think of the impact on the writer’s career: “Had it won,” Aldiss has been quoted as observing, “he would have been labelled a science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again.” As it happened, Salman Rushdie’s second novel, 1981’s equally-fantastic Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize (as well as both the 25th anniversary and the 40th anniversary “Booker of Bookers” prize, which pitted all the books that had won the prize up to those points against each other); he’s gone on to have a distinguished and controversial career, though one famously marked by the outrage his writing provoked in certain quarters.

Reading Grimus, I find that, whatever his publisher might have wanted, it’s easiest to define it as that subset of fantasy called science fiction. At times, and perhaps by the end of the book, that’s even the best way in which to read it. But the novel’s so strange and supple it moves quickly and effortlessly from one genre to another, one narrative approach to the next. It reinvents its form as it goes, incorporating what came before while opening up new ways for its tale to proceed. You can see why a jury of writers would look at it as a potential prize-winner; it’s remarkable, and if I found it only sporadically involving on a human level, its fluidity of prose and image still made it work — there’s a pleasure in storytelling, here, and in the plasticity of story, in story that refuses to be bounded by any descriptor and so spills out to embrace all genres.

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Intrigue and Dinosaur Beasts: Tangent Online on “The Sorrowless Thief”

Intrigue and Dinosaur Beasts: Tangent Online on “The Sorrowless Thief”

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Ryan Harvey-smallJohn Sulyok at Tangent Online reviews Ryan Harvey’s sword & sorcery tale, published here on April 7:

The narrator, a beggar nearly given up on life, spends what little money he has in dream-smoke-filled drug dens, indulging in the illusions brought on by the smoke of the mokkah flower. What wanders in one night is no illusion, it is the thief Dyzan Ludd. He seems immune from the smoke, and immune from what has brought so many into the den: the Sorrow. These facts stir the narrator. He and Dyzan find themselves in conversation about Dyzan’s upcoming plan to rob a caravan coming from the north. It is a fool’s errand, but Dyzan doesn’t listen to reason…

Ryan Harvey’s “The Sorrowless Thief” exists as part of a larger science-fantasy series. The world of Dyzan includes few guns and many (magically) tamed dinosaur beasts… These surrounding details thicken the setting and the plot, adding a lot of intrigue to the events herein…

Ryan Harvey won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2011 for his story, “An Acolyte of Black Spires,” part of the science-fantasy series on the continent of Ahn-Tarqa, which is also the setting for “The Sorrowless Thief,” his ebook novelette “Farewell to Tyrn,” and upcoming novel Turn over the Moon. He writes a regular weekly column at Black Gate. Read John’s complete review here.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Steven H Silver, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Emily Mah, David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, Aaron Bradford Starr, C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, E.E. Knight, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“The Sorrowless Thief” is a complete 7,000-word sword-and-sorcery tale. It is offered at no cost. Read the complete story here.

Pass the Salt, Please

Pass the Salt, Please

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DinnerAccording to some people, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food. That’s right, I’m one of those people who start planning lunch while we’re still sitting at the breakfast table. But, see, there’s a reason for that: something might need to come out of the freezer, or come in from the garden.

I also have a good grasp on where my food comes from. As a child, one of my aunts kept chickens in her patio, and we kids used to flush rabbits for my uncle and his friends to kill with sling shots – real slings, by the way, not catapults.

Now that I live in the country, I buy meat and cheese from the people who produce them – my neighbours. I also have a very large garden where I grow my own produce, and as it happens, there’s not a lot about freezing, canning, and preserving that I don’t know.

One thing’s for sure: it takes up a lot of time. And in a pre-industrial age – the time period that most of us use for our secondary world fantasies – it took up almost all of the time. So why don’t we see more of it in our books? Well, it’s just that, for most of us, how to get dinner, where dinner comes from, how to pay for it, grow it, etc. isn’t the story we want to tell – nor the story our readers want to read.

But as I’ve suggested already (and no doubt will again), this is information we need to know. Not doing this right – or not doing it or at all –  is the mark of an amateur. Sometimes, in our modern technological world, we’re so far removed from how the food gets produced, that we can easily make serious mistakes – or worse, overlook significant motivation – by not understanding where food comes from, and how it was produced in a pre-industrial age.

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Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness

Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness

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waters darknessfrazetta pirate-smallWaters of Darkness is the new novel from David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, published by Damnation Books. Longtime readers of my column will recognize Bonadonna as the author of the well-received sword & sorcery title, Mad Shadows and the recent space fantasy, Three Against the Stars. David C. Smith will be familiar to Robert E. Howard fans for his series of Red Sonja novels in the 1980s.

The shade of Robert E. Howard lingers over every page of Waters of Darkness, the first collaboration by these two talented authors to see print.

The principal characters, Crimson Kate O’Toole and Bloody Red Buchanan, would have fit in nicely had this 17th Century swashbuckler first seen print in the pages of Weird Tales in the 1930s. A quest for fabled treasure sets these two buccaneers sailing for the Isle of Shadow in the far distant Eastern Seas.

They find themselves combating an evil priest of Dagon and the sorcerer in his thrall along the way and most of the crew of the Raven pays the cost for their having crossed paths.

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Goth Chick News: Walpurgisnacht, or Those Germans Know How to Party

Goth Chick News: Walpurgisnacht, or Those Germans Know How to Party

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redrum2As you may (or may not) have noticed, there was no Goth Chick News last week. This was due to my need to spend a little quality time outside of the office with my blender and a bottle of Red Rum.

No I’m not making that up – Red Rum is for real and it’s my fav and so much for those of you who thought this was all an act and I really spend my vacations in Branson, Missouri drinking ginger ale.

Beyond just sitting around soaking up sun and exploring the many different uses for a quality bottle of spirits, I was also deeply engaged in researching an interesting phenomenon that I only just discovered. The impetus was a Black Gate chat with a charming German fellow, who shared it with me just before sliding out of his lounge chair and out onto the deck… where he was promptly collected and hustled away before completing his tale, prompting me to order up another Red Rum and research this intriguing bit of info.

Apparently, the Germans celebrate their version of Halloween on April 30th and unlike the American version, the German take is decidedly “adult” and the “candy” involved is largely a euphemism.

The Walpurgisnacht festival takes its name from Walpurga of Devon, England, an abbess from the 700’s who was canonized as the patron saint of rabies – yes rabies.

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New Treasures: Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna

New Treasures: Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna

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Dangerous Waters Juliet E McKennaI’m such a sucker for paperbacks. Seriously, put a rogue with a sword and a ship on the cover, and I’ve got that thing to the cash register faster than you can say, “Paper or plastic?”

I think it’s partly because I find paperbacks very inexpensive. That wasn’t always the case. When I  made my weekly pilgrimage to downtown Ottawa bookstores in my teens, clutching ten bucks of hard-earned babysitting money, that was barely enough to get 2-3 paperbacks — if I was selective.

I agonized over each choice. Keith Laumer’s The Time Bender, or Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Death? Edgar Pangborn’s West of the Sun, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth? These are the life choices that kept me up at night.

Today things are easier. For one thing, paperback prices haven’t budged in over 15 years. I paid $7.99 for a paperback copy of Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog in 1998, and I paid $7.99 for the copy of Juliet E. McKenna’s Dangerous Waters I bought last week.

That’s an incredibly long period for anything to be stable in publishing — look at how paperback prices quadrupled in the 15 years between 1965 (around a buck) and 1980 (around 4-5 bucks).

Paperback prices won’t stay this way for long. But while they do, I’m enjoying them. $7.99 (minus my 10% Barnes & Noble member discount) is still an impulse buy for me. Which means I can pick up a book based on nothing more than a cool cover, and take it home guilt free.

I have no idea what it says on the back of Dangerous Waters, but I think I’ll read it now and find out.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: More on Writing Fantasy Heroes

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: More on Writing Fantasy Heroes

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Writing Fantasy HeroesLast week I began a review of Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros, Jason M. Waltz’s collection of essays on craft. Most of the authors seem to assume the reader is a newcomer to fiction writing, but some of the advice is sufficiently specialized that many veteran writers will also find it useful. It’s also a pleasure to see the authors pull back the curtain on their own work, walking the reader through passages, sometimes in early draft, that illustrate the particular technique or concern of each chapter.

Picking up where we left off last week, we find Ian C. Esslemont coming up with something genuinely new to say about the old adage, “Show, don’t tell.” For the benefit of newer writers, he goes over the familiar territory: why to avoid infodumps, how to recognize them in one’s own drafts, ways to replace them with opportunities for dramatic action, classic blunders like “As you know, Bob” dialogue. Stick with Esslemont to the end, though, despite the groanworthy title of “Taking a Stab at Sword and Sorcery,” and he complicates the choice between showing information and telling it with a third possibility I’ve seen handled in other ways, but never right in a discussion of “Show, don’t tell.”

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