Black Gate – Page 1081 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Battlepug by Mike Norton

Tuesday, June 11, 2013 MichaelPenkas Comments 1 comment

Battlepug is a weekly web-comic that follows the adventures a big, dumb beast. And his dog. Writer/artist Mike Norton starts off the story as a fairly standard Conan-style barbarian origin piece. You know the spiel … innocent boy orphaned after his village is destroyed, forced into a life of slavery that builds both his muscles and his hunger for revenge. But there are signs along the way that remind us this won’t be the usual dreary rip-off. First of all, the terror that murders our hero’s village is pretty much the cutest thing you’ll see (until the arrival of the titular pug, anyway). Second, the Northern Elves who enslave the boy look all-too-familiar (as does their grim and merciless king). By the time the giant pug on the cover appeared in the story (which is twenty pages, or five months, along), I was already sold on the premise.

Writing a cliffhanger serial is difficult enough. Writing a cliffhanger serial where every single page is a cliffhanger, without ever seeming forced, is the work of a master storyteller. This story never gets tedious, even when it breaks for the narrator offering her own commentary (of course, it helps that the narrator is naked and covered in tattoos, and the audience is a pair of talking puppies). The strip’s been running for over two years and still continues to pull left turns with no end in sight. All the common tropes, the princess in need of rescue, the obligatory big bad, the ruthless warrior woman, are given goofy interpretations, with a few surprise cameos (like an unexpected couple who run a ferry service). As a fan of fantasy (especially sword and sorcery), it was nice to see a story that was paradoxically lampooning, while at the same time honoring, all those standard plot elements. Basically, this story works even as it’s making fun of everything else in the genre.

You can catch a new page of Battlepug every Monday at the website. It’s totally free, which means you’ve got no excuse not to check it out. But if you feel like supporting the artist (bandwidth isn’t free, people), the first bundle of pages have been collected into a traditional print collection (with volume two on its way in August). There’s also a pair of Battlepug t-shirts available (classic style or “Thunderpug”).

And if none of this has convinced you, I’ll just close my post with two words: ghost manatee.

Michael Penkas writes in a variety of genres, is the current website editor for Black Gate, maintains a blog, and has recently published a collection of his early published stories, Dead Boys (available through Amazon and Smashwords).

Pulp Heroes of 1990s Past: The Shadow on Blu-ray

Tuesday, June 11, 2013 Ryan Harvey Comments 5 comments

The Shadow (1994)
Directed by Russell Mulcahy. Starring Alec Baldwin, John Lone, Penelope Ann Miller, Peter Boyle, Ian McKellen, Jonathan Winters, Tim Curry.

The global whirlwind success of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 triggered a flurry of retro-hero movies. Eight years later, the gaudy nipple-suited failure of Batman and Robin brought an end to the cycle, and it wasn’t until the double-hit of X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) that our current comic book flood started. But we got a few interesting films during the retro-hero phase, such as Dick Tracy, the well-loved The Rocketeer … and the semi-forgotten The Shadow, which came out on Blu-ray this week to offer its mixture of elegance and error for a new audience.

A film about the pulp hero the Shadow was in development since 1982 under the auspices of producer Martin Bregman. Originally, Robert Zemeckis was slated for the director’s chair, but the film dwelled in limbo until Batman blew up the box-office. When Bregman was at last able to get the project going, Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) had replaced Zemeckis, and writer David Koepp (Jurassic Park) was on screenplay duty.

Universal Pictures had The Shadow pegged as a blockbuster in the summer of 1994: it received a heavy marketing push, with numerous merchandizing tie-ins and the announcement of an SNES video game. Universal even planned for a Shadow stunt show at their Hollywood theme park. But after a decent opening weekend, where it came in at #2 under The Lion King’s second monumental weekend and beat the awful Blown Away, The Shadow plummeted to become one of the summer’s disappointments. Plans for a franchise vanished into the darkness with the same skill as the Shadow himself.

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Law vs. Chaos replaces Good vs. Evil?

Monday, June 10, 2013 James McGlothlin Comments 10 comments

Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders dedicate their sword and sorcery anthology Swords and Dark Magic to Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock as “the great literary swordsmen who made it possible.” Creating one of the most memorable characters in the genre — the “anti-hero” of Elric of Melniboné — would be enough to earn Moorcock this acknowledgment. But Strahan and Anders suggest that:

It might be his alteration of the battle of Good versus Evil into that of Law versus Chaos (with disastrous consequences implied if either side ultimately triumphed over the other) that made the most significant contribution to fantasy literature (p. xv).

For those who may be unfamiliar with this distinction, Moorcock’s fantasy universe (or multi-verse) is populated, and seemingly controlled to some extent, by the Lords of Law and the Lords of Chaos. These god-like beings seemingly have mysterious and unfathomable intentions.

But they often appear to desire to exert their Lawful or Chaotic control over mortals and their worlds. As Strahan and Anders note, results are calamitous for any such world and its inhabitants when the scale tips too far towards either Law or Chaos.

No doubt this “alteration” has been significant. Outside the realm of fantasy literature, Moorcock’s Law versus Chaos contrast is most notably seen in the early Dungeons and Dragons rules. Its famous notion of alignment spawned a whole cosmological picture upon which this historically important game was built. (See Appendix 1 “The Known Planes of Existence” in Deities and Demigods.)

Nevertheless, I disagree with Strahan and Anders’s wording of this LC contrast. They seem to suggest — and they are not the first to do so — that Moorcock’s LC is a replacement of the traditional Good versus Evil dynamic within his famous sword and sorcery tales.

I want to suggest that it is rather an added facet. I’ll look at just one of Moorcock’s famous Elric stories to make this case.

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Iain M. Banks, February 16, 1954 – June 9, 2013

Monday, June 10, 2013 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Iain M. Banks, the Scottish novelist who — almost uniquely — created parallel careers as both a bestselling literary author and a top science fiction author, died yesterday at the age of 59, two months after announcing he had terminal gall bladder cancer.

Iain Banks burst onto the literary scene in 1984 with his first novel, The Wasp Factory. It was both a critical and commercial success, listed in 1997 as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century, and it allowed Banks to become a full-time writer.

I heard a great deal about The Wasp Factory when it was first published, but it was his first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas (1987) that really brought him to my attention. It was the first volume of his popular The Culture series, a sequence of ten books set in a far future civilization run by intelligent machines. Consider Phlebas and the volumes that immediately followed — The Player of Games, The State of the Art, and Use of Weapons — were much read and discussed among my small circle of friends in Ottawa.

Banks published science fiction as “Iain M. Banks,” and literary fiction as “Iain Banks.” All told, he wrote a total of 26 novels; his most recent were The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (Oct 9, 2012) and Stonemouth by Iain Banks, published one day later on Oct 10, 2012.

He won the British Science Fiction Association Award twice, in 1994 for Feersum Endjinn and 1996 for Excession. He was nominated for the Hugo Award in 2005 for The Algebraist.

His last novel, The Quarry by Iain Banks, is scheduled for publication later this month, on June 20.

Oz Reviews The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg

Monday, June 10, 2013 Nick Ozment Comments 0 Comment

This novel came out in 1972 under the Signet Science Fiction imprint, which is quite misleading. There is nary a hint of sci-fi in its pages. Rather, The Book of Skulls is a deeply compelling psychological study, a book full of mystery and existential dread.

The story is told by four narrators: Eli, Ned, Oliver, and Timothy, Harvard college students who are the book’s protagonists. Each of the forty-two chapters is prefaced by the name of one of the four, the narrator of that chapter, so we are constantly shifting among the four minds. We get four strongly delineated perspectives as the story unfolds through their cross-country road trip to their ultimate goal: an ancient mystery cult in the Arizona desert that may possess the secret to physical immortality.

Eli, we learn, came across The Book of Skulls during one of his forays into the rare and uncatalogued manuscripts section of the university library. Translating it, he discovered the bizarre claim of the Brotherhood of Skulls, that they can forestall death. Further translation revealed that to become an initiate into their secrets of immortality, four candidates must come, a four-sided Receptacle. But part of the demand of the initiation is that two of the four must die: “The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O Nobly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live.”

Eli has talked his three roommates into going with him in search of the cult over spring break, and each has his own motives for going along, which are gradually revealed as we get into their heads.

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Art of the Genre: The Top 10 Role-Playing Games of All-Time

Monday, June 10, 2013 Scott Taylor Comments 13 comments

In my continuing series of ‘Top 10s’, I’m very happy to be doing a subject that incorporates two things I would simply have a hard time living without: fantasy gaming art and the games themselves. So, considering I’m currently in the middle of running a Kickstarter that not only is looking to produce an absolute load of original fantasy fiction, but also an RPG and art book, what better time to compose a list of The Top Ten Role-Playing Games of All Time.

Now, I suppose I should mention that I’ve been playing RPGs since I was 10, and without revealing just how old I am, it must be understood there is a measurable amount of time involved there. Certainly, I’m not the foremost expert on role-playing games, but I’m going to put myself in the upper 10% of gamers and that should give me enough perspective to comprise this list.

Having established that I can’t help but say that going back in time, weighing the impact, reach, and longevity of so many games was an absolute thrill, and so many memories came flooding back with each one. I was also surprised at how many I’d played (all of them), even if just once during a random gaming session in some long forgotten era of my life.

These games, you see, are like time capsules of memory, and when they come up in conversation with gamers, I think every one of those in the discussion is ripped back through time to the point where they sat at a table, rolled dice, and laughed with friends most likely long out of their lives. Only games that take place on a table-top make such an intimate miracle happen, their power unmistakable and their reach deeper than most non-gamers would ever understand.

So, without further ado, let’s get into the meat of this list and find out just what games made it in, which ones were snubbed, and how many people can disagree with my choices!

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

Sunday, June 9, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Black Gate is very proud to present Part Two of Martha Wells’s Nebula Award-nominated novel, The Death of the Necromancer, presented complete online for the first time.

Nicholas Valiarde is a man of several parts, or roles. One is that of disenfranchised nobleman, bent on revenge for the execution of his godfather, Edouard Viller, who was falsely accused of the capital offense of necromancy by the scheming Count Montesq. Another is that of the master thief Donatien, legendary criminal of Ile-Rien. These two roles collide when Nicholas encounters ghouls and a sorcerer known as Doctor Octave in the cellars of a duchess’s house while carrying out a robbery.

Sinister forces are at work in Ile-Rien. Citizens have gone missing, corpses have turned up vivisected, bones have washed up in the sewer gates. All the evidence points to a necromancer at work, very probably someone with access to the books of the infamous Constant Macob, believed dead for over 200 years. As he investigates, Nicholas and his misfit friends uncover a plot that leads them into a series of escalating confrontations with the evil creations of Macob, as the necromancer schemes to gather enough power to return to life…

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 will be presented here over the next four weeks, beginning last week with the first four chapters here.

Part Two includes Chapters Five through Eight. It is offered at no cost.

Read Part Two of the complete novel here.

The Unfulfilled Superhero: Philip Wylie’s Gladiator

Sunday, June 9, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 1 comment

Growing up reading superhero comic books, it was almost inevitable that I’d hear about Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator. It was said to be the inspiration behind Superman, the original story about an ultra-powerful strong man who set about trying to right wrongs. Growing older, I heard more: that Jerry Siegel, Superman’s co-creator, had reviewed the book for a fanzine; that he’d swiped dialogue from the book for use in his comics; that Wylie had threatened to sue. These claims were, in fact, not true. It is accurate to say that elements of the novel (now in the public domain and freely available online) can be seen in Superman. It’s also true (as Claude Lalumiére observed to me when he sold me his copy of the book) that the novel seems to have had as much or more inspiration on the character of Spider-Man. But as I see it, the book really stands in opposition to the super-hero genre as it later developed; it’s a kind of deconstructing of the genre before the genre had been really created. Unfortunately, I can’t say I find much else to recommend the novel. Still, it’s worth looking at as a curiosity, to see what survived in later works and what was changed — and how those changes transformed the central idea.

Gladiator opens in rural Colorado, with a man named Abednego Danner, a biology professor at a small college. Danner develops a serum that, administered in utero, can make a living creature tremendously fast, strong, and tough. When his wife falls pregnant, he administers the serum to his unborn child, who turns out to be a son named Hugo. The book follows Hugo though his life, as he develops his tremendous strength, goes to college and becomes a football star, struggles to make money, goes off to fight in the First World War, tries to find his purpose, fails to end political corruption, and finally comes to an odd anticlimactic end struck by lightning on a peak in South America while doubting God.

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Vintage Treasures: The Radio Beasts by Ralph Milne Farley

Sunday, June 9, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Last month I wrote a brief piece on Ralph Milne Farley’s pulp novel An Earth Man on Venus, originally published as The Radio Man in Argosy magazine in 1924.

As part of the research I dug a little into Farley, and discovered his real identity was Roger Sherman Hoar, state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts.

I also discovered he produced seven (!) sequels over the next three decades: The Radio Beasts (1925), The Radio Planet (1926), The Radio Flyers (1929), The Radio Menace (1930), The Radio Gun-Runners (1930), The Radio War (1932) and The Radio Minds of Mars (1955).

That’s a lot of radio action.

A lot of things have changed since the 1920s. But one aspect of pop culture remains consistent: when a property has seven sequels, someone somewhere made a lot of money.

We can safely assume that by the time The Radio Minds of Mars (great title) appeared in 1955, America had had its fill of radio adventure. But in the intervening years, the Radio novels were a hot property.

The Radio Beasts affirms that. It had multiple editions, beginning with its 1925 four-part serialization in Argosy All-Story Weekly. It was reprinted (in one installment) in Fantastic Novels Magazine in January 1941 — with a Frank R. Paul cover, no less.

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Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet, Part V: The Accursed

Saturday, June 8, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 5 comments

The Accursed Last October, I looked at the four books of Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet that had been published up to that point. I wrote about them in publication order, starting with Bellefleur, from 1980, a novel I thought truly brilliant. I had a slightly more ambiguous reaction to 1982’s A Bloodsmoor Romance, which might have been a function of my being less familiar with the books that had inspired it. At any rate, I was considerably more impressed with 1984’s Mysteries of Winterthurn and thought 1998’s My Heart Laid Bare a successful conclusion to the sequence. If ‘conclusion’ is the appropriate word. Earlier this spring, Oates’ fifth gothic was published, as though the sequence was returning to unlife after being laid to rest.

In fact, Oates wrote all five books in the early 80s, but only published three at the time. My Heart Laid Bare, the fourth, was published a decade and a half later. Now, a decade and a half after that, The Accursed has finally been published. It was the third book written, and so can be viewed as either a belated conclusion to the sequence or else as a kind of keystone to the gothic arch of the whole series. I tend to prefer the latter. My Heart Laid Bare seemed to move away from the Gothic toward a more purely ironic, though not wholly mimetic, form of storytelling. The Accursed is in keeping with the earlier books of the series, not without irony itself, but also filled with the sublime and seemingly supernatural. I found it clarified and extended themes and imagery of all five books, resonating and completing the overall sequence.

Given the structural complexity of each individual book, the way they build themselves up almost as jigsaw puzzles, and particularly given Oates’ choice in The Accursed to withhold the final puzzle-piece of plot until the final chapter, there’s something appropriate about the publication order of the books. The Accursed may after all be best read as the final book of the five. As such, it’s a bravura conclusion, every bit as dense with meaning and as extravagantly well-written as its predecessors. And as intricate, every image linking to each other and to the core themes of the book. But it also comes to seem that the five books replicate as a whole their individual structures: the themes build, and the plot follows.

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