Black Gate – Page 1083 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Modern Space Opera With a Classic Feel

Wednesday, February 27, 2013 BryanThomasSchmidt Comments 0 Comment

“I think it’s pretty cool that crowdfunding allows all the elements of this anthology to come together — a magazine with a history in the space opera community, pro authors who are enjoying a chance to pursue a unique project, and a small press getting a chance to grow alongside a rising editor working with his love of space opera.” – Camille Gooderham-Campbell, Every Day Publishing

I imagine many Black Gate readers came to their love of science fiction and fantasy much like me. I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when Star Wars was revolutionary, and Star Trek:TOS reruns were bread and butter fare alongside Space: 1999, and Dr. Who. My first speculative fiction novels were mostly tie-ins and Orwell books assigned for school, but soon I discovered Tolkien and Alan Dean Foster and then Robert Silverberg and whole new worlds opened for me. And the stories that most got me excited were the space operas. I loved James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations and then Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, which led to Asimov and exploration of some Lensman and other pulp stories.

It’s no surprise then that my first novel series, The Saga Of Davi Rhii, was inspired by just such work. When the first book, The Worker Prince, got honorable mention from Barnes & Noble Book Club’s reviewer Paul Goat Allen on his Year’s Best Science Fiction Releases of 2011, I was excited to know that an audience for the sort of space opera I loved still existed.

So much of the science fiction and fantasy I was seeing was nihilistic, featuring protagonists that were not only damaged, but not even very heroic. The stories themselves were not hopeful, but depressing. I see so much nihilism in the culture around me that I like my speculative fiction to be an escape. Not that I can’t tolerate a few exceptions at times, but yeah, I’ll admit, I like when the good guys win, and I like to know who the good guys are.

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Final Ballot for the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards Announced

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

The Horror Writers Association has announced the Final Ballot for the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards. This is the 26th annual ballot; the HWA has been giving out Stoker Awards since 1987.

The award, a miniature haunted house designed by Harlan Ellison and sculptor Steven Kirk, is the coolest trophy in the genre. Just check it out at right. The little door even opens! If anybody has one of these and they want to unload it, I’m here to help. Seriously. I’m your guy.

Ten more are going to be awarded at the Bram Stoker Awards Banquet in New Orleans on June 15. Let’s get to the nominees.

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A NOVEL

Ethridge, Benjamin Kane – Bottled Abyss (Redrum Horror)

Everson, John – NightWhere (Samhain Publishing)

Kiernan, Caitlin R. – The Drowning Girl (Roc)

Little, Bentley – The Haunted (Signet)

McKinney, Joe – Inheritance (Evil Jester Press)

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN A FIRST NOVEL

Boccacino, Michael – Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling (William Morrow)

Coates, Deborah – Wide Open (Tor Books)

Day, Charles – The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief (Noble YA Publishers LLC)

Dudar, Peter – A Requiem for Dead Flies (Nightscape Press)

Gropp, Richard – Bad Glass (Ballantine/Del Rey)

Soares, L.L. – Life Rage (Nightscape Press)

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Tanith Lee’s Secret Books of Paradys

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 14 comments

The Secret Books of Paradys I & II Women in Horror Month continues, and bearing that in mind I’d like to say a few words about Tanith Lee and the Secret Books of Paradys. Lee’s a prolific writer, and I haven’t read much else of her work — only the novel Heart-Beast besides the four volumes of the Paradys sequence — but after reading only the first Paradys collection, I started buying her work when I found it. Even a relatively small sample of her prose created a remarkable impression.

In some ways, as one reads through the whole series, it’s difficult to know how to take the books. They’re horrific, but also at times absurdly parodic or comic; which is to say grotesque. They’re oneiric, in that not only do supernatural events happen, but characters often act or change without obvious reason, and the fictive city of Paradys itself seems to accrue layers of meaning and complexity like a recurring landscape in a lucid dream. Above all, the books are weird with the weirdness of nightmare; though written with incredible technical skill, it’s difficult to articulate a single overall theme to the books, though multiple meanings suggest themselves.

Paradys is a city in northern France, originally a Roman settlement based around the exoploitation of soon-played-out silver mines. It developed over time into a major city, with a cathedral and taverns and damned poets and all the appurtenances of decadent gothic romance. The various stories of Paradys take place in different eras of the city’s life, told from different perspectives, using different styles. They’re linked by certain patterns of imagery — notably the ambiguous symbol of the moon — and a concentration on colour: each book, or long story, has a certain colour which defines it, and all colour-references within that story will refer either to white, black, or that specific hue. I can only imagine how difficult that technique is, but it’s incredibly effective at building distinct and distinctive atmospheres.

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Red Sonja 12

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 MichaelPenkas Comments 0 Comment

Where were we? Red Sonja and the polygamist exile prince Suumaro were trying to break free of a prison palace, which was built on top of a tree by Suumaro’s sorceress mother Apah Alah shortly after her husband left her. They’d met a horned centaur who used a glass-blowing pipe to create leather eggs that hatched into thumb-sized peacocks that grew to thousands of times their original size in a matter of minutes. The centaur died. The giant peacocks died. Sonja went blind for a while. And after she got her sight back, she was approached by a demon who wanted her to steal something called the Emblem. The demon’s name is Kthonn and he offers both Sonja and Suumaro great wealth if they retrieve this issue’s mystic doodad. That’s page one.

Sonja stabs him on page two. Basically, she knows he’s going to betray her, so why not cut out a lot of useless effort and kill him now? Her logic is sound, but her blade has no effect on the demon. So instead she agrees to find the Emblem. Apparently, among other things, the Emblem has the power to free them all from the prison palace.

Suumaro uses his magic to get a general fix on the talisman’s location. Turns out it’s in yet another tower of the increasingly large prison complex. So the two of them go off in search of the thing and, as soon as they’re out of earshot, Kthonn reveals that (spoiler) he’s planning to sacrifice them as soon as they return with the Emblem. Who’s he going to sacrifice them to? We’re never told. An even bigger demon, probably.

So, Sonja, Suumaro, and Kthonn all know this is a bad deal. But everyone’s going along with it anyway, presumably because seventeen pages aren’t going to fill themselves. And when they reach the (unguarded) chamber where the Emblem is kept, they find four items on a table: a wand, a sword, a coin, and a cup.

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The Real Argo: The Lord of Light Film and the Lost Jack Kirby Sketches

Monday, February 25, 2013 John ONeill Comments 16 comments

I was pleased to see Ben Affleck’s Argo win the Academy Award for Best Picture last night. It was the best film I saw last year, although I admit I didn’t see all the nominees.

But I was a little annoyed during parts — especially scenes which included dialog from the fake movie, Argo. It’s clear that Affleck (and his characters) have little respect for science fiction, as the script and its source material are portrayed as utterly terrible sci-fi at its pretentious worst.

Which was particuarly annoying because the source material in question — the script used by real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez, the man portrayed by Affleck — is based on my all-time favorite SF novel, Roger Zelazny’s brilliant Lord of Light. The man who wrote the original Wired article that inspired Argo, Joshua Bearman, explains it this way:

Argo was the name Tony gave to a script that was in turnaround and sitting in a pile at [makeup artist John] Chambers’ house. That script was called Lord of Light and had been adapted from a successful Roger Zelazny science-fantasy novel of the same name. A small-time self-starting dreamer… named Barry Geller had optioned Zelazny’s book himself and raised money to get the project started. He hired Jack Kirby to do concept art and Chambers to make the alien masks. But the whole project fell apart…

It was hard to see the script for Lord of Light merciliessly skewered for laughs in Argo. Still, something good has come out of it all. As a result of the recent spotlight on the film, Jack Kirby’s original sketches — thought lost for years — have come to light.

BuzzFeed has reproduced eleven of the sketches in an article by Richard Rushfield. If you’re a Kirby fan, or a fan of Zelazny’s SF masterpiece, they are well worth a look. Check them out here.

Who is the Daughter of Fu Manchu?

Monday, February 25, 2013 Joe Bonadonna Comments 1 comment

The Destiny of Fu Manchu
By William Patrick Maynard
Black Coat Press (264 pages, $20.95 in trade paperback, April 2012)
A review by Joe Bonadonna

So who is the daughter of the infamous, the mysterious, the brilliant Fu Manchu? Is it the exquisite Koreani? The exotic Fah lo Suee? The lovely Helga Graumann? Who or what is the destiny of Fu Manchu? And who is “Khunum-Khufu,” and why is he in control of the Si-Fan?

The clues are there, the disguises are many, and the deception is all part of the fun in William Patrick Maynard’s sequel to his wonderful, The Terror of Fu Manchu.

I’ve become a fan of Maynard’s Fu Manchu. More importantly, I’m a fan of William Patrick Maynard. (His short story, “Tulsa Blackie’s Last Dive,” is one of the highlights of The Ruby Files, published by Airship27 Productions.) Now, in The Destiny of Fu Manchu, Bill picks up the story years after the events of his first novel, and this time he ups the ante in a tale that is far more complex and insidious than the good doctor’s previous adventure. I’ll do my best to give you a rundown without, hopefully, spoiling any of the fun.

The story opens with a prologue written by good old Petrie himself, the hero/narrator of the aforementioned The Terror of Fu Manchu. This time, however, Petrie has been abducted by Khunum-Khufu and a new faction of the Si-Fan, which plays back to the theft of the Seal of Solomon and the events related in the previous novel.

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A Touch of Evil: Colonial Gothic Horror Board Gaming At Its Finest

Monday, February 25, 2013 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 3 comments

The quiet colonial hamlet of Shadowbrook is cursed by evil and you are one of the small group of people who can investigate the growing danger, discover the evil’s source, and then collect together a group of Town Elders to destroy it!

That is the premise of Flying Frog Productions’ board game A Touch of Evil (Amazon). You move through the village, exploring various locations and getting clues and equipment. Your currency in the game are Investigation points, which you can spend to learn the secrets behind the Town Elders, or to buy new equipment from the town’s blacksmith. Each round, you uncover new mysteries … many of which result in a confrontation with the foul minions of the main villain tormenting the village and bringing it more under the sway of darkness.

The victory at the end comes from purchasing a Lair card (the price of which changes as evil gains control over Shadowbrook), gathering together a group of Town Elders, and going to confront the villain. However, the Town Elders all have secrets, and if you’re not careful, those secrets could cause them to turn on you, increasing the villain’s power during the confrontation. If you fail to defeat the villain, it escapes and play continues until another player is able to trigger a confrontation. This process continues until someone succeeds at actually defeating the villain.

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Heroic Fiction Quarterly 15

Monday, February 25, 2013 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 5 comments

One of an editor’s greatest pleasures is coming upon a fine story, so Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and William Ledbetter must have felt pretty delighted when they came upon the most recent batch of fiction they’ve published in Heroic Fiction Quarterly.

I’m sad to say that I’m more familiar with Heroic Fiction Quarterly e-zine in theory rather than in practice. I’ve heard good things about it for some time and I’ve read a few tales now and then, but it’s been years since I sat down for a visit. I’ve tried two of the stories in the most recent issue, “Dusts of War” by Ben Godby and “Kingdom of Graves” by David Charlton and was tremendously impressed. This is stirring, polished adventure fiction and needs to be seen by more readers. I’m looking forward to finding out what the rest of the issue holds. I’m looking forward to seeing what PREVIOUS issues hold.

Just prior to joining the Black Gate staff, I was managing the Flashing Swords e-zine. I selected and edited the tales for the first six issues. It was a small market with a small budget, and as might be expected, some of what I pulled from the submissions pile were diamonds in the rough, work from promising amateurs. It was sort of a “market with training wheels”: a place where burgeoning writers could hone their craft and start their careers. But a lot of the stories proved very fine indeed, better than such a small market had any right to be, and I can recall my frustration that more attention wasn’t being paid to them, as well as the frustration when the wrong sort of attention was paid — a reviewer tearing apart a first-time writer’s first published story with the same claws that would be used on a veteran writer in a pro market, or a fine writer’s work being dismissed by something as foolish as the old saw “first person stories have no tension because you know the narrator will survive.”

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum” by Joe Bonadonna

Sunday, February 24, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

We first posted Joe Bonadonna’s sword and sorcery novelette “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum” in December 2011, and it has proven to be one of our most popular online stories. We’re proud to re-present it here as part of the new Black Gate Online Fiction library.

Long before the legendary cities of Cush and Erusabad were destroyed by war, the graveyard was old. No one knew how old the graveyard truly was, for the carvings on its headstones and markers had been long worn away by the hands of time, wind, and weather. The cemetery crouched with its dead in a hidden vale in the dark heart of Khanya-Toth, land of shadows, black magic, and creatures of the night.

A tall, slim woman sat on the opposite side of the fire, close to the entrance to her bamboo hut. She wore a black robe, her face partially hidden within its hood.

“You’ve come a long way from Valdar to see me,” she said. Her name was Zomandra Chuvai, and she was a witch, one of the Kha Jitah. She lived alone in that ancient graveyard, with only ghosts and memories to keep her company.

“We’re the Blunker boys,” Ollo said. He was all skin and bone, with a sickly yellow pallor.

“I’m well aware of who you are,” Zomandra said. “Shall we talk business?”

“The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum” is part of Joe’s first published swords and sorcery collection, Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser. Read more about Mad Shadows in “Dorgo the Dowser and Me,” posted on the Black Gate website here.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, E.E. Knight, Jason E. Thummel, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum” is a complete 15,000-word novelette of weird fantasy offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

The Weird of Oz Locates Scooby-Doo

Sunday, February 24, 2013 Nick Ozment Comments 3 comments

“Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you?” is a question I’ve heard asked — or, rather, sung — ever since I was a child. For most of my life, I didn’t care where the hell he was. But things have changed.

Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Inc. gang have been unmasking criminal hoaxers longer than I’ve been around, having debuted three years before I was born. They belong to that collective mob of pop-culture figures that have just always been there and are still going strong performing their antics for new generations…Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse and his club, the Muppets, the Peanuts Gang, Tom and Jerry. Others from my childhood have fallen by the wayside — Heckle and Jeckle, Woody Woodpecker — waiting to be re-launched or else forever consigned to the Old Toons Retirement Home.

As a boy, I followed all of them at one time or another. This was largely determined by which programs the networks happened to be running during the hours just before or just after school (and, of course, that golden block of children’s programming: Saturday morning). It may be almost unfathomable to some of my younger readers, but there was a time not all that long ago when a latchkey kid getting home from school only had three or four channels to choose from, perhaps only one of which would be playing cartoons — two channels if you were lucky, in which case you might actually have a choice between, say, Care Bears or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (and you can guess which one I chose). For us, the idea of six or seven channels playing cartoons 24/7 would seem about as far off as some of the far-out gadgetry on Star Trek.

Scooby-Doo is one of the franchises that has had real staying power, obviously. Unlike, say, The Flintstones, the live-action movies did not kill the franchise, which has gone through numerous new incarnations of TV series as well as dozens of made-for-TV or direct-to-video animated films.

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