Black Gate – Page 1107 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Blood’s Pride by Evie Manieri

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’m still reading the books I picked up over the weekend — including Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, and Karen Heuler’s fascinating collection The Inner City. Heck, I haven’t even finished the digital version of The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination I bought weeks ago. I suck.

Fortunately, sucking as a reader isn’t a crime (yet). And besides, it’s hard to stay focused when so many delicious new titles cross my desk every day. Titles like Evie Manieri’s intriguing first novel Blood’s Pride, which promises a tale of vengeance, conquest & rebellion, and long-buried secrets.

Rising from their sea-torn ships like vengeful, pale phantoms, the Norlanders laid waste to the Shadar under cover of darkness. They forced the once-peaceful fisher folk into slavery and forged an alliance with their former trading partners, the desert-dwelling Nomas tribe, cutting off any hope of salvation.

Now, two decades after the invasion, a rebellion gathers strength in the dark corridors of the city. A small faction of Shadari have hired the Mongrel, an infamous mercenary, to aid their fledgling uprising — but with her own shadowy ties to the region, she is a frighteningly volatile ally. Has she really come to lead a revolution, or for a more sinister purpose all her own?

The eye-catching cover art is by Kekai Kotaki — click on the image for a bigger version. Evie Manieri is a graduate of Wesleyan University with a double major in medieval history and theater — a promising mix for a career as a fantasy novelist. She lives in New York. According to her website bio this is the first novel in the Shattered Kingdoms trilogy; the next installment, Fortune’s Blight, is due out in the Fall.

Blood’s Pride was published on February 19, 2013 by Tor Books. It is 516 pages in hardcover, priced at $24.99.

Red Sonja 15

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 MichaelPenkas Comments 0 Comment

I know I’ve gone on about this before, but cover spoilers can ruin an otherwise great story. Seriously, click the cover to Red Sonja 15 and tell me if you can guess the secret of the three dead kings. Honestly, even the title (The Tomb of Three Dead Kings!) practically gives it away.

So it is a little surprising when we open to page one and find … a mummy. Just some guy wrapped in cloth strips, surrounded by a circle of swords in the snow. Sonja stops at the sight of him and is about to take a closer look when she sees three men dressed like kings (spoiler, they are) riding in the distance. So what’s an adventurer to do? Investigate the mummy or the three kings riding together in the dark?

Sonja opts for neither. Instead, she heads in the opposite direction to a sleepy little town where she finds a warm inn to relax in.

Of course, Red Sonja’s idea of relaxing includes beating everyone at dice until her satchel is full of coins and everyone at the inn is mad at her. She gets invited into the backroom by three of the losers, only to get attacked. Even though she’s expecting it, one of them gets a lucky shot and Sonja’s quickly stripped of her sword and purse, then thrown out in the snow.

Even with her cloak, that bikini isn’t helping much in the snow. And, honestly, why would she still be wearing a bikini in the dead of winter? In fact, a metal bikini would get even colder than a regular cloth one. Even her horse is wearing a blanket.

Fortunately, Red Sonja always keeps an emergency coin in her boot, so she has enough to cover a crappy inn on the other side of town. Before she goes, she manages to steal a sword by holding a passerby at knife-point. Near as I can tell, this is just one of the shlubs she beat at dice a few hours earlier. He’s not one of the guys who attacked her and he didn’t even try to hold out on what he owed. He just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and now Sonja has a new sword.

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Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

Warner Archive has so far received all the attention in my recent veer into the world of the manufacture-on-demand DVD, a dazzling universe where the big studios serve the niche movie lovers with titles that would otherwise only surface in North America on bootlegs swiped off Japanese laserdiscs. (Yeah, you own a couple of those.) Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, The Bermuda Depths, and The Last Dinosaur all come from Warner Brothers’ MOD division. But two other studios have their own extensive MOD programs: MGM Limited Edition Collection and Universal Vault. It’s through MGM that we get the strange 1977 combo of Western and monster movie called The White Buffalo.

My first experience with The White Buffalo, aside from seeing ads on local television stations when it ran during “Charles Bronson Tough Guy Week,” was on an awful first-generation VHS tape I watched during college as part of an independent study of the 1970s Western. The movie was drab and a cruel disappointment considering how exciting the plot description sounded: “Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse team up to hunt down a giant, possibly supernatural, white buffalo on a rampage.” How could such a crunchy high-concept result in such a bland film?

Blame “VHS goggles,” which turned the movie’s photography into mulch. The difference in The White Buffalo experience between VHS and DVD is substantial. Although the MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD is rough compared to today’s Blu-rays, it is about as good as the picture could look in standard definition without undergoing hefty restoration. The movie isn’t a lost classic, but it wins in the realm of atmosphere: eerie and bleak. The artifice of the limited budget, which puts most of the nighttime and snowbound scenes against the Buffalo on obvious interior sets, contributes to the dream-like atmosphere. That may be an accident of filming, but it’s a positive creative accident. The White Buffalo never succeeds as an action thriller, but it remains a fascinating piece of odd Western cinema of the 1970s, a decade filled with plenty of oddness for the grand ol’ American genre. The current popularity of the Weird Western and steampunk subgenres gives the movie a freshness that moves it beyond being only a “Manifest Destiny” take on Jaws.

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Releasing This Week: Warhammer 40K: Relic From Fantasy Flight Games

Monday, March 18, 2013 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Game Designers Workshop and Fantasy Flight — the folks behind the superb Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy role playing games — have teamed up once again to release Relic, an intriguing new board game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Based on the streamlined (and well-honed) mechanics of the Talisman fantasy games, Relic allows two to four players to assume the role of powerful Imperial heroes, and bravely venture forth to protect the Antian Sector. By completing card-based missions and defeating dangerous enemies of the Imperium — including Nurgling Swarms, Fallen Inquisitors, Ork Vulcha squads, and even a Tyranid Hive-ship — characters compete to gain rewards and experience, increasing their chances to advance and ultimately be the first to defeat the evil that lies beyond the Warp rift. See all the details in the compact video run-through below.

Relic was published today, Mar 18, 2013, by Fantasy Flight, under license from Games Workshop. The game contains a game board, 10 plastic character pieces and character sheets, mysterious attribute and life dials, more than 300 cards, tokens, 4 six-sided dice, and a handsome rulebook. It retails for $59.95.

Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey

Monday, March 18, 2013 markrigney Comments 3 comments

Loincloths: love ’em or hate ’em, it’s a fact that Tarzan and Conan weren’t the only musclebound men to model the style. For proof, we need look no farther than The Naked Prey (1966).

But first, let’s time-warp back to 1980. Required reading in my junior high meant immersion in Richard Connell’s short, “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which humans are both predator and prey. It’s an old idea, but rarely presented quite as starkly as in this story, wherein a big game hunter in the Colonial tradition seeks one final thrill before hanging up his boots. As in a few Dame Agatha novels and a great many summer camp slashers, the hunter’s weekend guests become his targets.

What we teen readers were supposed to glean from “The Most Dangerous Game,” I have no idea, and I might well have forgotten the entire piece had it not been for my stumbling onto The Naked Prey a few years later. Watching this celluloid take on man hunting man transported me sharply back to the Connell story and even, if my failing memory serves, prompted me to re-read it.

In The Naked Prey, Cornel Wilde’s wily explorer-hero is actually credited as “Man.” If he has another name, we never learn it. He doesn’t really need one, although a nickname might be helpful. If I were his parent, I’d call him Determination Personified.

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Fantastic, January 1965: A Retro-Review

Monday, March 18, 2013 Rich Horton Comments 7 comments

Now an issue of Fantastic from very late in Cele Goldsmith Lalli’s tenure. I’ll note first that the subtitle of the magazine is “Stories of Imagination.” What this means, it appears, is that Fantasy is allowed, but not required.

I had a notion that Fantastic at this time was a Fantasy magazine, but that’s not the case yet. (It was, pretty much, by the time I was subscribing, during Ted White’s era in the mid-70s.) It should be noted, however, that from September 1959 to September 1960 the subtitle was “Science Fiction Stories” – so certainly “Stories of Imagination” implies a more wide range of stories.

I suppose that in 1965, Fantasy was not yet a self-supporting category – Tolkien’s books were just about then exploding in popularity, and I guess it was with those that a separate category was born. Indeed, the “standard history” places the origin of Fantasy as a truly separate category in the mid-60s, pushed not only by Tolkien, but the success of Lancer’s Conan reprints – in a sense, the deal was sealed with Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series in the late 60s, and things were confirmed with Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara and then Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series in the mid-to-late ’70s.

The cover is by Ed Emshwiller, illustrating John Jakes’s short story “The Girl in the Gem” (who for once doesn’t look like his wife Carol). Interiors are by Emsh and Schelling. Besides house ads, there are full page ads for the Rosicruans, and for the Consumer Service Company (purveyors, it seems, of flashlights and such). Also, there are spot ads for C.A.R.E., Hollywood Music Productions (looking for songwriters), and for G. P. Putnams (advertising Farnham’s Freehold)).

The editorial, signed as usual by Norman Lobsenz, discusses the character of Brak the Barbarian (hero of the Jakes cover story), comparing him to Conan and Fafhrd, to Brak’s advantage. (I can hardly agree.)

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Weird of Oz Revisits Fighting Fantasy

Sunday, March 17, 2013 Nick Ozment Comments 13 comments

Rogue Blades Entertainment continues to put out fine new projects — though, I lament, with far less frequency than in days of yore.

Also in those days of yore (about two years ago, to be precise), for a brief, shining, halcyon period of time (a few months, to be precise), RBE hosted a website that ran regular blogs under the banner “Home of Heroics.” It was my good fortune to be invited into HoH’s stable of bloggers, and I made a couple contributions before that heroism-vaunting home vanished like the fabled city of Xanadu. I only got in two or three posts, mind you, because I was on a monthly rotation rather than the weekly slot I enjoy here on Black Gate.

One of those posts that I wanted eventually to follow up on was an account of my experience revisiting Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. My report touched off similar nostalgic reminiscences from several readers.

Since, as far as I can tell, the material that ran on HoH is no longer accessible, I’d like to use this St. Patrick’s Day edition of Weird of Oz to resurrect that post here — with an eye to reviewing other single-player gamebooks down the road.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “Seeker of Fortune” by David Evan Harris

Sunday, March 17, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

John Sherman has a gift… a gift that’s brought him to the attention of the wrong people. Getting out will take a lot of luck — and some very quick thinking.

John had never tamped anyone into the black before. He had seen Ronnie do it, twice. The first had been a young guy on a motorcycle, maybe nineteen or twenty. Veronica had tucked her long black hair behind her ears, then focused on the target. The kid had looked right at them, a puzzled look on his face, sweat suddenly pooling on his forehead, and then something had come out of the bed of a pickup heading the other way, something small and sharp that struck the kid squarely in his left eye.

For a second it seemed he would keep the bike from toppling, even as his hand flew to his face. Then he lost it, not even laying the bike down, a skid morphing into a tumble, and John thought or imagined he could hear his neck snap when he hit the pavement. Veronica, utterly calm, had looked at John, who was open mouthed and shaking.

“So now you’ve seen,” she’d said, and they had never spoken of it again.

David Evan Harris’s first fiction sale, “The Mudslinger,” was published in Black Gate 11. It was one of the most acclaimed stories in the issue, and Grasping For the Wind said, “Harris has the makings of an epic fantasy… I look forward to more.” He is a lawyer in California.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Aaron Bradford Starr, 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.

“Seeker of Fortune” is a complete 7,300-word short story of contemporary fantasy. It is offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

The Land the Ravens Found and Naomi Mitchison

Sunday, March 17, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 1 comment

The Land the Ravens Found One of the joys you get to have as a reader is the discovery of a new writer, or a new old writer, with a back catalogue of work out there waiting for you. A little while ago, my girlfriend Grace and I were at a book fair when Grace came across a children’s novel called The Land the Ravens Found. First published in 1955, the copy she’d found was a fourth edition, from 1966, suggesting there’d been some demand for the book over the years. It was a story of Viking times and the founding of a settlement in Iceland, written by a woman named Naomi Mitchison. Neither of us had heard of her, but after reading the book, Grace was impressed enough to recommend it to me; after reading it myself, and learning a bit about Mitchison online, I thought it’d be worth writing a little here on both book and author.

The short novel tells the story of Aud the Deep-Minded, a historical figure who was the head of a Viking household in Caithness, and who led her household to Iceland late in the ninth century. The book begins in Caithness, with a scene from the perspective of Aud’s grandson, Anlaf, but the point-of-view shifts easily throughout the book, giving a kind of communal portrait of Aud and her family and her family’s thralls, describing their relationships and daily lives. The drama seems almost secondary to the precise, detailed depictions of ninth-century life, but oddly the book becomes all the more involving because of it, as life moves on, through marriages and deaths and quarrels which oddly remain in the background, yet still shape everything that goes on.

Mitchison was born Naomi Haldane in 1897. She died in 1999, at the age of 101, after what seems to have been one hell of a life. It’s not just that she wrote over ninety books in her life, from science fiction to autobiography. She was an anti-fascist who helped get left-wing refugees out of Nazi Austria, an activist for women’s rights and open access to birth control, a polyamorist, and, after a period living in Africa in the 1960s, an honorary mother (‘Mmarona’) and advisor to a Botswanan leader.

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New Treasures: The Inner City by Karen Heuler

Sunday, March 17, 2013 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

I’ve started ordering more from Barnes & Noble’s online store. Not that I’ve been unhappy with Amazon, but I wanted to try out the competition, and so far I’ve been pleased with the service.

The first book I ordered was the seventh volume of the collected Atomic Robo, Flying She-Devils of the Pacific. At some point while browsing their online store, they recommended an odd little volume to me: Karen Heuler’s The Inner City, a collection of fantasy short stories. I’ve never heard of Karen Heuler. But I’m very familiar with ChiZine, the eclectic Canadian publisher, and raved at length about their marvelous back catalog a while back. So I took a chance and ordered The Inner City — what the heck, it was the perfect price to get my order up to $25, and get free shipping.

What are you hiding down deep in your inner city?

Anything is possible: people breed dogs with humans to create a servant class; beneath one great city lies another city, running it surreptitiously; an employee finds that her hair has been stolen by someone intent on getting her job; strange fish fall from trees and birds talk too much; a boy tries to figure out what he can get when the Rapture leaves good stuff behind. Everything is familiar; everything is different. Behind it all, is there some strange kind of design or merely just the chance to adapt? In Heuler’s stories, characters cope with the strange without thinking it’s strange, sometimes invested in what’s going on, sometimes trapped by it, but always finding their own way in.

Surprisingly, so far I’ve been more taken with The Inner City than Atomic Robo — and believe me, that doesn’t happen very often. Typical of ChiZine, the book design and packing are gorgeous. There’s even a 10-page catalog in the back that reminds me of the checklists in the endpapers of Ace paperbacks that fascinated me as a young teen. The stories in this collection were originally published in places like Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, Albedo One, Moon Milk Review, and other excellent publications — a good sign.

The Inner City was published February 13, 2013. It is 212 pages, priced at $16.95 ($9.99 for the digital edition). ChiZine has a generous sneak-peek here — including the complete 10-page catalog. Check it out!