Black Gate – Page 1129 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Red Sonja 3

Tuesday, December 25, 2012 MichaelPenkas Comments 4 comments

You know how sometimes you’re watching the trailer to a movie and it looks really good and you suddenly realize that you’ve figured out the surprise ending of the movie just by watching the trailer? I don’t mean that you make an educated guess based on the clues in the trailer and it happens to be correct. I mean that someone actually cut a crucial scene at the end of the film into the trailer so that you’re watching the eight year-old boy change into the child-snatching goblin. And maybe you go see the movie anyway because it still could be good; but you’ve lost a little something going in, that sense of surprise, because the filmmakers spoiled their own film.

Anyway, Sortilej is a giant spider in human form. Surprise. Thanks, cover.

So, “The Games of Gita” starts with a fat, opulently-dressed Athosian being pulled in a rickshaw by a lean, rag-wearing Zotozian, whipping him on. Red Sonja stops the pair to demand that the Athosian lets his rickshaw-puller (What’s the word for that?) have a drink of water before he collapses. Because that’s compassion in the Hyborian Age: offering a glass of water to a slave being whipped to death.

So the fat guy shrugs off her concern by saying that he can easily replace the man if he dies of thirst or a severe beating. Then he asks Sonja if she’d like to accompany him to a banquet as his date. She says no. Technically, she says, “The fires of seven hells wouldn’t tempt me to sup with the likes of you.” (Someone please use this line the next time a jerk invites you to dinner.) And then she kicks his ass. Literally, the last panel of page three is her boot connecting with his ass.

The fat guy runs off and Red Sonja is then approached by a stranger named Mikal. He offers to escort her to the wealthy city of Athos. Mikal is very mysterious. Mikal wears a hood. Mikal has a goatee. Mikal is probably the devil. This bothers me just a little because his name is a Tolkienized version of mine.

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Ursula Vernon’s Digger

Monday, December 24, 2012 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

Digger The Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story was first given out in 2009. The category was a nice idea, especially given the increased prominence of comics in the media landscape, but I have to admit that up to this year, I’ve been underwhelmed by the choice of winners. Or, more precisely, winner, singular: Phil and Kaja Foglio’s webcomic Girl Genius took the award three times straight. I don’t dislike the comic, but from what I’ve read, I’d be hard-pressed to identify anything in it that makes it worth a major award ahead of any number of series — Hellboy or Mouse Guard or Wednesday Comics or RASL or All-Star Superman or you name it. After their third win, though, the Foglios announced they would decline to accept a nomination for the next year, in the interest of helping to establish the validity of the award. So the 2012 Hugo went to another title: Digger, a webcomic by Ursula Vernon. I find it’s much more interesting.

Digger is a 759-page fantasy story (free online, or available in six printed volumes) about a talking tough-as-nails wombat named Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels, who gets lost and finds herself in a strange land filled with gods, humanoid hyenas, magic, oracular snails, and mysteries. Digger wants to get home, but it looks like some unknown force has manipulated events to bring her to the temple of Ganesh where she surfaces. Who and why? That’s the central mystery that unfolds through the tale. Digger makes friends, makes enemies, and takes several harrowing journeys before all is settled.

It’s a comedy, and an effective one, but with a number of serious themes running through it. Vernon seems to have something to say, and the talent to say it well. Her storytelling’s strong, and she handles mythology deftly — both the mythology of various cultures of our world and the mythology of the story she’s creating.

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Buy The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones for Just $1

Monday, December 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

the-desert-of-souls ‘Tis the season for great book deals.

Hot on the heels of the one-day $1.99 sale for the digital version of A Prince of Thorns, and the giveaway of Theo’s A Magic Broken (still available if you act fast) comes word that Head of Zeus, the British publisher of Howard Andrew Jones’ The Desert of Souls — the first installment of The Chronicles of Sand and Sword — is making the digital version of the novel available for just $1.

The special pricing is available only until January 7th. On his website Howard also writes:

Head of Zeus has cooked up a pretty nifty series introduction for The Chronicles of Sand and Sword. I like it so much I wish I’d thought of it:

The Chronicles of Sand and Sword: Baghdad, AD 790. Caliph Harun al-Rashid presides over the greatest metropolis on Earth, ruler of an empire that stretches from China to Byzantium. His exploits will be recorded in Alf Layla or, as we know it, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

But The Thousand and One Nights are silent on the deeds and adventures that befell two of the Caliph’s subjects: the renowned scholar Dabir ibn Kahlil, and his shield and right hand, Asim el Abbas. For their story, we must turn to The Chronicle of Sand and Sword…

For complete details and links to sites with the discounted pricing (including Amazon.co.uk and Waterstone’s) visit the Head of Zeus website here.

A 4-Star Review of Black Gate 15

Monday, December 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

We got an early Christmas gift this year, courtesy of Goodreads, the social cataloging website dedicated to helping users find and comment on good books. With over 20 million readers each month, Goodreads is one of the most popular online destinations for dedicated readers.

All fifteen issues of Black Gate have been cataloged at Goodreads, and our latest issue has several outstanding reviews. This week, I came across a 4-star review from none other than publisher and editor Forrest Aguirre, author of Archangel Morpheus and Fossiloctopus, and co-editor of the prestigious Leviathan anthology series. Forrest writes:

My favorite piece of fiction in the volume was “The Shuttered Temple,” by Jonathan L. Howard (author of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, among others). Kyth the Taker, a brilliant and rather glib thief, is the heroine here. This was a very clever story whose strongest point is less the adventure than the philosophical underpinnings that drive Kyth and Tonsett, her foil. Witty, funny, and thought provoking, I found this the best of this excellent volume.

I have to admit, though, that a piece of non-fiction overshadowed all the fiction in the volume. “Art Evolution,” by Scott Taylor, is an epic article that touched a soft spot in my heart and made me wax nostalgic for role-playing days of old. This was as thoroughly-researched an article on the subject of fantasy-art in role-playing as I’ve ever seen. Of course, I’m hard pressed to think of other articles that have even endeavored such an undertaking. From Jeff Dee to Matthew D. Wilson, Taylor traces the history of art in role-playing. It’s an incredible journey that is worth the price of the issue alone.

Copies are still available for only $18.95 each (or as part of a heavily discounted back issue bundle) at our online store. Also available in PDF for $8.95, and for the Kindle — with enhanced content and color art and images — at Amazon.com for just $9.95!

You can read the complete review at Goodreads here. The complete BG 15 table of contents is here.

A Magic Broken is Available Free Today at Amazon.com

Monday, December 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Merry Christmas from Amazon.com! For today only, the e-retail giant is offering Theo’s digital book A Magic Broken as a free download for Kindle readers.

In his review Donald S. Crankshaw wrote:

You may be familiar with Theo Beale as a blogger at Black Gate…. I was looking forward to seeing how his ideas translated into fiction. He’s given me a chance with A Magic Broken, an e-book novella equivalent to about 50 pages, written under the name Vox Day. It is connected to Theo’s novel, A Throne of Bones, but as I haven’t read the novel yet, I can’t say exactly how…

When I first discovered fantasy in the eighties, it seemed that elves and dwarves were staples of the genre — if it was fantasy, it had at least these two demi-human races. In the last twenty years, fantasy has moved away from that, but I must admit that I have a soft spot for them, especially dwarves. So I was happy to see the dwarf, Lodi, as one of the heroes of this story… The story follows Lodi and the human spy, Nicolas, as they go after the same prize — a kidnapped elven woman — for very different reasons…

One character who came across very well was the city of Malkan itself, where the story took place. Malkan is an independent city, built by dwarves, but mainly occupied by humans. The humans acknowledge no outside lord but money, and the merchants control the city more than the nobility, whom they raise and overthrow at will. As we see Nicolas and Lodi deal with slavers, prostitutes, and powerful merchants, we start to see life in the city at ground level. It’s a city where life is cheap, even for the powerful, and where secrets are plentiful. It’s the sort of city that’s teeming with stories, and it’s almost a shame that the characters are in such a hurry to leave.

Download A Magic Broken free here. But hurry — the offer is only good today.

Black Gate Online Fiction: Seven Kings by John R. Fultz

Sunday, December 23, 2012 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive first look at Seven Kings, the latest volume in the Books of the Shaper series from John R. Fultz, the acclaimed author of several of the most popular tales in Black Gate magazine, including “The Vintages of Dream” in BG 15, and the novel Seven Princes.

Dragging the body into the undergrowth, he exchanged his footwear as he had planned. The new boots were tight yet warm on his aching feet. He lifted the bronze helmet with its welded mask from the dead man’s head and placed it on his own. Let one of their own demon faces be the last thing they see as they die. He took what else he could from the body (a few more bits of dried food) and rolled it into a stagnant pool. A viper glided through the black water and wrapped itself around the corpse. Tong caught a glimpse of himself in the surface of the water. A pale broad-chested devil with a leering face of black death, twin horns growing from his temples. His mouth was a fanged grin and his eyes were invisible behind narrow slits. He grinned beneath the mask and walked back to the trail, the bloody sabre in one hand, his knife in the other.

He stalked after them in resolute calm, ready to face the triumph of his death.

Barnes & Noble’s in-house magazine Explorations called Fultz’s first novel “flawless – and timeless – epic fantasy… Seven Princes is as good as it gets.” On his blog, Fultz shared additional details on the new installment:

I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but you will see much more of Khyrei and its poisonous crimson jungles than in the first book. Plus: More Giants…

Seven Kings will be published by Orbit on January 15, 2013. It is 496 pages in trade paperback available for $15.99 ($9.99 ePub and PDF). Learn more at the Orbit website.

Read the first chapter of Seven Kings here.

New Treasures: David C. Smith’s The Fall of the First World

Sunday, December 23, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Thursday I had the pleasure of attending a reading by the distinguished David C. Smith here in Chicago.

Dave’s accomplishments in the field of modern sword & sorcery are legendary. With Richard L. Tierney, he published the Bran Mak Morn novel, For the Witch of the Mists (1978), and six volumes in the Red Sonja series from 1981 to 1983. He wrote one other novel based on the works of Robert E. Howard: The Witch of the Indies (1977), featuring the pirate Black Terence Vulmea.

On his own, Dave produced the highly-regarded story cycle set on the imaginary island-continent Attluma, beginning with Oron (1978) and The Sorcerer’s Shadow (1978). All told, the Tales of Attluma include five novels and eighteen short stories and novelettes written between 1971–1984. In total, Dave has written twenty-one novels in a career spanning over three decades and still going strong — including the occult thriller Call of Shadows, released by Airship 27 in March of this year.

Dave entertained the audience with tales of the heady days of his early career, when young writers named Karl Edward Wagner, David Drake, Richard L. Tierney, and Charles R. Saunders were breathing new life into sword & sorcery — and when he shared an agent with Wagner, Frank Herbert, and an up-and-coming young horror writer named Stephen King.

But the highlight of the reading was the excerpt from The West is Dying, the first volume in The Fall of the First World, a fantasy trilogy originally published in paperback by Pinnacle Books in 1983. Unavailable for nearly thirty years, these exciting volumes are finally being returned to print by Borgo Press. A fantasy version of War and Peace, the saga follows the conflict between two great empires, bringing together legendary historical characters and Western myths including the tale of Helen of Troy. As a king offers his beautiful daughter as a prize, another pursues only endless war… and so the First World begins to collapse.

The West is Dying was published by Borgo Press on November 29, 2012. It is 422 pages in trade paperback priced at $19.99. The cover art is by Dusan Kostic. It is available directly from Borgo Press or through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.

2012 SFWA Grand Master Awarded to Gene Wolfe

Saturday, December 22, 2012 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America has named Gene Wolfe the 2012 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.

The Grand Master Award is given not for a particular work but for “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.” It is given only to living writers.

Previous recipients include Fritz Leiber, Clifford D. Simak, A. E. van Vogt, Jack Vance, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Michael Moorcock.

Wolfe’s publications include The Book of the New Sun, Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Soldier of the Mist, The Book of the Long Sun, and The Wizard Knight. His recent works include Pirate Freedom (2007), An Evil Guest (2008), The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009), The Sorcerer’s House (2010), and Home Fires (2011). He has won two Nebulas, five World Fantasy Awards, six Locus Awards, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007.

Read C.S.E. Cooney’s lengthy interview with Gene, conducted over breakfast in November 2010, here.

The award will be presented at the 48th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend in San Jose, CA, May 16-19, 2013. Read the complete announcement at SFWA.org.

Prince of Thorns Available for $1.99 at Amazon.com

Saturday, December 22, 2012 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

For today only, Amazon.com is offering the Kindle version of Prince of Thorns, the opening volume of Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Empire trilogy, for just $1.99.

In a Black Gate blog post shortly before publication, Mark Lawrence wrote:

The book I’ve written, Prince of Thorns, has layers, rather like an onion (or an ogre). I hope it can be enjoyed as a violent swords and sorcery romp. Get your teeth into it though and there’s more there – it’s as much about our prince as it is about what he does. This is a damaged person and although the story is told in his words without a hint of excuse, there are lessons to be learned between the lines. It wasn’t until tonight though, desperately scratching at the subject in the effort to come up with something to say in this blog post I was invited to supply, that I discovered another layer, deeper still…

In Prince of Thorns the main character has suffered a personal disaster. It’s not the ‘evil threatens the village’ of classic fantasy. It’s not injured pride or a looming darkness in the east. He’s been screwed over, a tsunami has rolled through his life and left devastation. And the book is in large part his reaction to that. It’s about where he takes his anger and where it takes him.

It’s only through the lens of half a decade and more that I see I was writing out… not a version of my own experience, but a mapping of the emotions.

If you’re the kind of reader who has to think long and hard before parting with $1.99, by all means check out the generous excerpt we presented here last October.

The sequel, King of Thorns, was released in August 2012, and the final volume, Emperor of Thorns, is scheduled for August 2013. We have several of Mark Lawrence’s short stories in inventory, and the first, “Bulletproof,” will appear as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction line early next year.

Prince of Thorns was published by Ace in August 2011. The 336-page hardcover edition is still in print, priced at $24.95. You can buy the Kindle version here.

Thanks to Awsnyde for the tip!

Vintage Treasures: The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Friday, December 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

William Hope Hodgson is almost unique among his contemporaries: his most famous novels, The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, have been continuously in print for the better part of the last hundred years. H.P. Lovecraft described The Night Land, first published in 1912, as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”

But Hodgson wrote many other highly-respected works of horror and dark fantasy, and here his publication history is a little more spotty. Perhaps chief among them are the tales of Carnacki The Ghost Finder, a supernatural detective who came up against horrors that would have made Van Helsing blanche. I’m pleased to say that the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural have not let us down, and in 2006 they brought the complete collection back in print in a handsome and inexpensive edition.

“‘I saw something terrible rising up through the middle of the ‘defence’. It rose with a steady movement. I saw it pale and huge through the whirling funnel of cloud – a monstrous pallid snout rising out of that unknowable abyss. It rose higher and higher. Through a thinning of the cloud I saw one small eye… a pig’s eye with a sort of vile understanding shining at the back of it.”

Thomas Carnacki is a ghost finder, an Edwardian psychic detective, investigating a wide range of terrifying hauntings presented in the nine stories in this complete collection… Encountering such spine-chilling phenomena as ‘The Whistling Room’, the life-threatening dangers of the phantom steed in ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ and the demons from the outside world in ‘The Hog’, Carnacki is constantly challenged by spiritual forces beyond our knowledge. To complicate matters, he encounters human skullduggery also. Armed with a camera, his Electric Pentacle and various ancient tomes on magic, Carnacki faces the various dangers his supernatural investigations present with great courage.

Josh Reynolds explored the career of Carnacki The Ghost Finder in greater detail as part of The Nightmare Men series last year.

We’ve covered ten volumes in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural series so far:

The Crimson Blind and Other Stories by H.D. Everett
Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster
The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson
The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey
The Power of Darkness — Tales of Terror, by Edith Nesbit
Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance, The Ghost-Seer
The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths edited by Mark Valentine
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead
Sherlock Holmes: The Game’s Afoot, edited by David Stuart Davies
The Casebook of Sexton Blake, edited by David Stuart Davies

There’s plenty more to come, so stay tuned.

The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson was published in 2006 by Wordsworth Editions. It is 191 pages in paperback priced at $6.99. There is no digital edition.