Black Gate – Page 1090 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

May/June Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine now on Sale

Saturday, May 11, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Gordon van Gelder’s Fantasy & Science Fiction is perhaps the magazine I most look forward to. He’s built a fine stable of regular authors, including Robert Reed, Dale Bailey, Ken Liu, Naomi Kritzer, and especially the prolific Albert E. Cowdrey, who’s had a story in every issue since Sept/Oct 2011.

But that doesn’t mean the magazine is predictable, and the May/June issue is even less predictable than usual. Here’s Michelle Ristuccia at Tangent Online:

F&SF isn’t a themed magazine, but if it was, this issue’s theme would be sex told in first person. Most of the stories mention infatuation or sex, and a few are explicit, bordering on erotica. Some of the writers are so good that they could win over all but the most prudish – and of those that didn’t wow me, most are still high quality writing. This issue is definitely worth the cost…

“Changes” by Rand B. Lee is an intriguing post-apocalyptic SF tale complete with chaotic time travel and talking monster dogs, told in third-person over the shoulder of Whitsun… When a pack of mutant dogs alerts him to the poisonous nature of a pocket of ominous mist, Whitsun feels that he must investigate… I love the idea of reality constantly destabilizing around the characters and I appreciated the mix of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that results.

The cover story is “Wormwood is Also a Star” by Andy Stewart. Here’s Michelle again:

“Wormwood is Also a Star” takes us to the heart of two mysteries set in the Ukraine in 1992. The macro mystery concerns the Angel’s Tear, a magical forcefield of unconfirmed origin that sprang up to protect part of the Ukraine from the fallout of Chernobyl. The more personal mystery is that of the death of reporter Mitka’s sister 20 years earlier, which is still shrouded in political secrecy… Andy Stewart put an incredible amount of work into this story and pulls it all off well, including the scenes involving borderline erotica and backstory reveals occurring simultaneously… I dare you not to be smitten.

The issue also contains fiction from Joe Haldeman, Paul Di Filippo, Ted White, Bruce McAllister, Dale Bailey — and yes, Albert E. Cowdrey.

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Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

Saturday, May 11, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 1 comment

Published in 1998, Nalo Hopkinson’s debut novel was Brown Girl in the Ring, the first winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. It went on to be shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree Junior Award, to win the Locus Award in the First Novel category, and to help Hopkinson (who had already published several short stories) win the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She’s gone on to write five more novels, along with two collections of short stories, as well as editing and co-editing several anthologies.

Born in Jamaica, Hopkinson has lived in Toronto since 1977, and a near-future version of that city is the background to Brown Girl in the Ring. In this dystopian imagining, the core of the city’s been abandoned by all levels of government. A young mother named Ti-Jeanne lives in the community that’s sprung up; she’s the granddaughter of one of the community’s leaders, Gros-Jeanne, a healer with apparently magical powers — and Ti-Jeanne herself has begun to see strange visions. When elements of the Ontario government reach out to a local boss, asking him to supply a human heart for an emergency organ transplant, both Jeannes become involved in the resulting violence.

The novel deserves the acclaim it got. On one level, it’s a strong adventure story with a fast-moving plot. But the book’s also notable for its language — specifically the dialogue, largely written in a Caribbean English. And for the story’s use of both science fiction and fantastic elements; as it works through a powerful family tragedy, played out in a dark future through the invocation of spirits and gods, it convincingly evokes the mythic.

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New Treasures: Cyclades

Saturday, May 11, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I saw the original release of Clash of the Titans, starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith, on opening night in 1981. As just about anyone who’s seen it can tell you, it’s not a very good movie, with a painfully flat performance by Harry Hamlin as Perseus and clumsy attempts to add kid appeal with a nonsensical robot owl.

In the middle of a tale involving Pegasus, three blind witches, Medusa, and the Kraken, Hollywood feels the need to add a robot owl. I mean, come on.

But it didn’t matter. I loved it with a wild passion, and it ignited an intense interest in Ancient Greece in me.

I read everything I could get my hands on, from Homer to Aeschylus, Euripides to Aristophanes. I visited the library and asked to see maps of ancient Athens, circa 500 B.C. And I scrapped our ongoing D&D campaign, set in a generic medieval landscape, and told my bemused players we’d be starting over in Athens, at the height of the Bronze Age.

I discovered the history of the Cyclades, the tight knot of islands off the coast of Greece, that I learned had been packed with tiny civilizations and numerous isolated cultures over the centuries. It was a perfect setting for a fantasy game: a maze of islands thick with myth and mystery, a stone’s throw from the great city states that birthed modern civilization. The D&D campaign that began there carried on for over a decade, and was easily the most successful and rewarding one I’ve ever played.

But I always wondered why I didn’t see the setting used more often. So you can imagine how I felt when the fantasy board game Cyclades was released in 2009. I bought a copy last month, and so far I’ve been very pleased with it.

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Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?

Friday, May 10, 2013 Violette Malan Comments 14 comments

My mother was Spanish and my father was Polish, so there was a little north vs. south going on in my home all the time as I was growing up. My mum would encourage us to watch Zorro and El Cid, my dad was all for Taras Bulba and whoever else Yul Brynner was portraying that week on late night TV. When my mother would make remarks about the superiority of the Mediterranean culture, my father would remind her that the Spanish culture, at least, came mostly from the Moors, and that Rome fell, crushed beneath the heels of the – you guessed it – northern barbarians.

Aside to the historically educated: Yes, I know that isn’t exactly what happened. Otherwise, why did it take Gibbon seven volumes to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? I’m not talking history here, I’m talking popular (mis)conceptions.

Last week I took a look at the rise of the hero in popular culture – by which I meant not just among our genre-respecting selves, but with all those other people. This week I’d like to take a look at where heroes come from – or where we expect them to come from.

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The Unexpected Delights of Renner and Quist

Friday, May 10, 2013 William Patrick Maynard Comments 3 comments

This review wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m up in the Albian wastes in Alberta for my day job and the review that was scheduled to run this week fell through. John O’Neill came to my rescue with a short ebook just published by Samhain Publishing. The book is called The Skates and it is part of the series of Renner and Quist adventures written by Mark Rigney.

I’ll be honest up front in stating I had not heard of the publisher, author, or series before this time, although I’ve since realized Mr. Rigney is a fellow Black Gate blogger with several short stories to his credit already published by the online magazine. My main relief was that John allowed me to get a review done without missing a week and the ebook was short enough to read through in barely an hour.

Then I read the damn thing and my perception changed instantly.

I curse simply because I envy Rigney for his talents. This wasn’t a fun, enjoyable read so much as it was a story I instantly loved. I’m sure the folks at Samhain Publishing are nice people, but why hasn’t Rigney’s fiction been noticed by editors at major publishing houses? Yes, it is that good. I’m fairly familiar with the New Pulp world and Rigney can write circles around most of us as he seamlessly blurs the lines between genres and switches voice from one first person narrator to the other.

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Goth Chick News Meets The Resurrectionist

Thursday, May 9, 2013 Sue Granquist Comments 2 comments

“If they knew what horrible things were available to them they would take comfort in their own suffering.”
-Dr. Spencer Black

I have been sitting here for long moments and I am still not sure where to start telling you about this.

It is art and science and masterful storytelling packaged and tied with a blood splattered ribbon. It is at once indescribably beautiful and nightmarishly horrifying. It is my latest obsession and my signed copy caused me to remove everything else from my coffee table to ensure no other object would detract from it.

It is The Resurrectionist, by EB Hudspeth.

Hudspeth is one of the people I couldn’t wait to introduce you to, whom I met at this year’s C2E2 event in Chicago. When Nicole at Quirk Books got in touch, she described EB (he said we could all call him Eric) as “author, artist and creator of ‘Frankenstein meets Gray’s Anatomy.'”

Couple this with Quirk’s charter of publishing only 25 strikingly unconventional books every year, and this amounted to an opportunity there was no way I was going to miss.

Eric Hudspeth came in out of the rain (literally) to sit down and talk about The Resurrectionist during his visit to Chicago – the 1893 version of which figures prominently in his tale.

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New Treasures: A Matter of Blood by Sarah Pinborough

Thursday, May 9, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

You can’t judge a book by its cover.

But you know what you can judge by the cover? The cover. And since that’s an important part of a book, I guess you can make a successful partial judgment just by holding a book at arms length for a few seconds. Admit it — you do it all the time, I’m just giving you some air cover here.

Come to think of it, it’s a pity you can’t judge books by their covers. Because, man, that would save me a lot of reviewing time that I could put to good use playing Mass Effect.

Until that happy day, we’re stuck doing things the old fashioned way, with hours of bleary-eyed reading late into the night. Unless you’re like me, of course, picking through the weekly new arrivals until you find a cover that makes you say, “Whoa. That looks cool. I should tell people about it.”

Which brings us nicely to Sarah Pinborough’s new novel A Matter of Blood, the first volume of The Forgotten Gods trilogy. Which, if you haven’t guessed, has a great cover, with an upside-down London skyline and a cracked overlay that looks like reptilian skin.

And the book description sounds pretty intriguing too.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Battles, Reluctance, and Service to the Sea of Stories

Thursday, May 9, 2013 Sarah Avery Comments 5 comments

We’ve come to the last installment of my review of Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros. It’s a peculiar book, different in several ways I have talked about before from other books on writerly craft. It’s specialized by both genre and cluster of techniques, and each chapter shows a noted author using examples from his or her own work to demonstrate how to use a particular technique well (or, in the case of early drafts, badly, followed by advice on revision). Although the book is, by design, most useful for the newcomer to writing fantasy, it has something to offer more seasoned writers, and it’s of great value to teachers of writing who specialize in, or are at least willing to engage with, genre fiction.

Paul Kearney’s piece on large-scale battle scenes is just what I hoped it would be. You know all the familiar gripes about fantasy warfare that fails the suspension-of-disbelief test: the army never seems to eat or excrete, never needs to get paid, charges its horses directly into walls of seasoned enemy pikemen, and so on. “So You Want to Fight a War” addresses all those mundane things an author must get right if the fantasy elements of her story are to feel real to the reader, and then Kearney pushes past the gripes into solutions that any conscientious author can learn to implement. It’s that last bit that I found truly refreshing — many discussions of military verisimilitude get bogged down in griping. Kearney assumes throughout that it’s possible for his reader to get this stuff right, with enough good models, research, and practice.

As in Brandon Sanderson’s chapter on “Writing Cinematic Fight Scenes,” the reader is urged to map the combatants’ positions in space. Of course, with at least two armies’ worth of combatants, what one does with the map is a little more complicated this time around:

Keep the map beside you as you write, and as the narrative progresses and the lines move and break and reform, annotate your map. By the end of the battle it should be covered in scrawls, but you will still see the sense within it. It should also have a scale, so that if you want one character to see another across that deadly space, you can gauge whether it’s possible or not. Battlefields can be large places, miles wide. Our ten thousand men, standing in four ranks shoulder to shoulder, will form a line over a mile and a half long, and that’s close-packed heavy infantry such as Greek spearmen or Roman legionaries. If your troops are wild-eyed Celtic types who like a lot of space to swing their swords, it will be even longer.

Okay, that’s a little daunting, but Kearney also offers things like a breakdown of pre-gunpowder tactics into a set of relationships that he likens, persuasively, to rock-paper-scissors. If you can remember how that kindergarten game works, you can avoid some of the biggest beginner blunders in the genre.

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Michaele Jordan Reviews After Death

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 Bill Ward Comments 1 comment

After Death. . .
An Anthology of Dark and Speculative Fiction Stories Examining What May Occur After We Die
Edited by Eric J. Guignard
Dark Moon Books, an imprint of Stony Meadow Publishing, Largo FL (292 pp, $15.95, trade paperback, April 2013)
Reviewed by Michaele Jordan

As you can guess from the title, Eric J. Guignard has assembled an assortment of viewpoints about the afterlife. These thirty-four stories (illustrated by Audra Phillips) cover a surprising range, especially since the viewpoint most professed by science fiction fans is the least represented. Please do not interpret that remark as a criticism. There’s not a lot of story to tell in a story about nothing happening. Yet even the perception of the afterlife as nothingness is included with ‘The Last Moments Before Bed,’ in which Steve Rasnic Tem confronts the dreadful hole remaining after a loved one is gone.

These stories run the gamut from blissful to black; John Palisano’s ‘Forever’ anticipates a joyful reunion, while Kelly Dunn’s ‘Marvel at the Face of Forever’ is one of the darkest horror stories this reviewer has ever seen. Several authors contrast the Christian afterworld with the pagan, as in the Christian displacement of the Greek afterlife in Jonathan Shipley’s ‘Like a Bat out of Hell,’ or Valhalla’s continued rowdy intrusion into the Catholic middle ages as told by Christine Morgan in ‘A Feast of Meat and Mead.’

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Sean T. M. Stiennon Reviews Child of Fire

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 Sean Stiennon Comments 3 comments

Child of Fire
Harry Connolly
Del Rey (357 pages, mass market first edition September 2009, $7.99)

When we first meet Ray Lily, he’s in unpleasant circumstances. He’s less than 48 hours out of prison, driving a junker van through a Seattle rainstorm, and serving as chauffer to a boss who a.) is a powerful sorcerer, b.) wants to see him dead at the first possible opportunity, and c.) is paying him a wage of zero dollars per hour. Ten minutes after we meet him, he’s watched a boy die in front of his parents by exploding into sorcerous flame and melting into a swarm of silver worms. And then he’s watched the boy’s parents immediately forget they ever had a son, and drive away only vaguely confused.

It only goes downhill from there.

Child of Fire is a dark book. Sometimes shockingly, disturbingly dark, as is apparent right from the opening. That said, it’s also hugely entertaining, with noir-styled prose, a likeable narrator, and one of the most imaginative and horrifying monstrous adversaries I’ve ever encountered in fiction of any medium.

Our hero, Ray Lily, narrates the book in first person, and he bears comparison to hardboiled heroes like Philip Marlowe and Archie Goodwin, as well as the fantasy genre’s own Harry Dresden. He’s not quite as, well, heroic as Harry, though. He’s a criminal, recently out of a prison sentence that came at the tail end of a car-jacking career in L.A. county, and he still has a tendency to sort everyone he meets into two categories: victim and dominant.

But mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his childhood friend have pulled him into the shadowy world of the Twenty Palaces, a league of sorcerers formed to protect the secrets of magic from outsiders and to hunt down the supernatural entities known only as “predators.” These are hungry creatures from an extra-dimensional world called the Empty Spaces, who exist in a constant state of hunger. When summoned to our world, they can offer terrible power in return for a chance to sate that hunger on humans.

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