Black Gate – Page 1131 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Sherwood Smith’s The Spy Princess

Wednesday, August 8, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

If you’re not reading Sherwood Smith, you’re missing out on one of the most gifted and versatile fantasy authors at work today.

Sherwood’d first novel, Wren to the Rescue (1990), kicked off the popular 6-volume Wren fantasy series, including Wren’s Quest (1993), Wren’s War (1995) and A Posse of Princesses (2008). I first took notice of her with the Court and Crown Duet, published as two YA novels, Crown Duel and Court Duel, in 1997/98.

Sherwood effortlessly transitioned to adult fantasy with the major novel Inda (2006), the first installment in an ambitious fantasy quartet which continued with The Fox (2007), King’s Shield (2008), and Treason’s Shore (2009). To science fiction fans Sherwood is the author of the beloved Exordium series, co-written with Dave Trowbridge, which began with The Phoenix in Flight (1993), as well as two novels in Andre Norton’s Solar Queen universe (co-written with Andre Norton), and two books in Norton’s Time Traders universe.

With The Spy Princess Sherwood offers up a treat for the numerous fans of her YA books: the tale of four intrepid children who are the only thing that stand between a city and destruction.

When twelve-year-old Lady Lilah decides to disguise herself and sneak out of the palace one night, she has more of an adventure than she expected — for she learns very quickly that the country is on the edge of revolution. When she sneaks back in, she learns something even more surprising: her older brother Peitar is one of the forces behind it all. The revolution happens before all of his plans are in place, and brings unexpected chaos and violence. Lilah and her friends, leaving their old lives behind, are determined to help however they can. But what can four kids do? Become spies, of course!

The Spy Princess is 400 pages in hardcover from Viking Juvenile. The hardcover is $17.99, and the digital version is $10.99. It was published on August 2.

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Total Recall (2012)

Tuesday, August 7, 2012 Ryan Harvey Comments 6 comments

totalrecall2012poster In a charming case of movie irony, the new Total Recall has already been mostly forgotten, even though it only came out on Friday. The Dark Knight Rises, in its third week, handily crushed the Len Wiseman-directed remake. I’m writing this on Tuesday, and it already feels as if the movie was never even released: it was a dream implant that never took, and the original memory of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven-Arnold Schwarzenegger Summer blockbuster has already taken back all the cerebral space. Nonetheless, I’ll still perform this brain autopsy on Total Recall ’12 to see why no one bothered to show up except for people writing reviews.

If you were to pick the right approach to remaking 1990’s Total Recall — aside from simply not remaking it all — you would want to try it “straight,” focusing in on the everyman aspect of a protagonist in a cyberpunk future who discovers that his whole life is a false memory implant, and in truth he’s a dangerous double (possibly triple) agent. It is, after all, a nifty SF-noir concept, delivered courtesy of the Philip K. Dick short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” and refashioned into a feature film concept by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who also created the original screenplay for Alien.

And this re-make of Total Recall does that: it plays the movie as a straightforward science-fiction adventure film done in the current style. But… it was handed to Len Wisemen to direct. And he turned out the same film he always turns out: broadly competent but utterly dull, slick, superficial, and ultimately disposable. Producer Neil Moritz, responsible for the “Fast and Furious” franchise, should probably shoulder a good part of the blame as well, because the by-the-numbers execution here is what he does best unless he gets a director who clicks with the material.

Despite publicity hand-waving about “going back to the literary source,” this certainly isn’t a remake like the Coen Brothers’ True Grit. Len Wisemen’s Total Recall does a beat-for-beat copy of the plot of the 1990 film with a few background substitutions and a number of bizarre moments of meaningless karaoke imitations (the three-breasted prostitute, the “two weeks” lady at the security station, ripping out an implanted tracking device), but with all the fun drained from it and slathered over with the same polished SF glean seen on movies since the early 2000s. Fans of the original will find themselves bored to the point of wishing the whole thing was a memory implant gone wrong — a schizoid embolism! — and viewers who have never seen the original will yawn over watching the same old junk they’ve slogged through for years… only with even more lens flares!

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Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch Announce Fiction River

Tuesday, August 7, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Pulphouse publishers Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn have announced a new genre market, Fiction River:

Fiction River will be a bimonthly anthology series starting in April next year. Each anthology will be theme-focused and cross-genre containing all original fiction written by some of the top writers in fiction, including big names and names you might have never heard of.

Each anthology will be published in an electronic edition, a trade paper edition, and a very limited and numbered and signed hardback edition. (Signed by all authors and editors.) Readers will be able to buy each anthology individually or subscribe to the anthology series like a magazine.

As many of you know, Kris and I, in 1987, started Pulphouse Publishing with Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine. We published those anthologies every three months. Fiction River will be like Pulphouse and Orbit and Universe and other major original fiction anthology series of the past. It will focus on top quality short fiction of all types, in a themed-anthology format.

Pulphouse was one of the most respected fantasy and science fiction markets of the 80s and 90s. They published twelve thick issues of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine from 1988 through 1993, and 19 issues of a weekly fiction magazine, also called Pulphouse (which was never quite weekly). They were nominated for a Hugo three times, and won the World Fantasy Award in 1989. After closing down Pulphouse Kristine Kathryn Rusch was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for six years (1991 to 1997), and Dean Wesley Smith edited the anthology series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

To fund the project Smith and Rusch announced a Kickstarter project. By August 7, with 20 days still to go, they have surpassed their original $6,000 goal, with nearly $9,300 pledged.

You can read more about Fiction River here.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve

Tuesday, August 7, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I continue to find marvelous treasures in the four boxes I purchased from the Martin H. Greenberg collection.

Take, for example, Universe 3, the 1973 original anthology edited by Terry Carr. I haggled with Doug Ellis until he sold me both Universe 3 and 4 for 51 cents (all the change I had left in my pocket), mostly because of the mysterious and cool notes I found scrawled on the Table of Contents, presumably by Martin H. Greenberg himself.

But it was in Carr’s introduction that I found the real treasure this time, a quote I’ve heard time and time again since I started reading science fiction and fantasy in my early teens:

When aficionados of this field get together, that’s a standard topic of discussion. When was science fiction’s golden age? Some say the early forties, when John W. Campbell and a host of new writers like Heinlein, Sturgeon and van Vogt were transforming the entire field; others point to the early fifties, to [editors] H.L. Gold and Anthony Boucher and to such writers as Damon Knight, Alfred Bester and Ray Bradbury. Some will lay claims for the late sixties, when the new wave passed and names like Ballard, Disch and Aldiss came forward.

There are still people around, too, who’ll tell you about 1929 and David H. Keller, E.E. Smith and Ray Cummings.

The clue in most cases is when the person talking first began to read science fiction. When it was all new, all of it was exciting. Years ago a friend of mine, Pete Graham, tersely answered the question “When was the golden age of science fiction?” by saying “Twelve.” He didn’t have to explain further; we knew what he meant.

I was surprised and pleased to discover the origins of that famous phrase (although, by the time it reached me, it had morphed into “The golden age of science fiction is fourteen.”)

Either way, there’s fundamental truth in Pete Graham’s observation. Between the ages of 12 and 14 I devoured countless volumes of fantasy and science fiction, including a great many reprints from the pulp era. For me, the Golden Age of Science Fiction lies between 1932 and 1942, when everything was new in the genre, and authors sought, above all, to deliver a sense of wonder to their readers.

There’s a great deal more to recommend Universe 3 besides Carr’s famous introduction, by the way. It contains fiction by Edward Bryant, George Alec Effinger, Edgar Pangborn, Robert Silverberg, Gordon Eklund, pulp writer Ross Rocklynne — and Gene Wolfe’s famous tale “The Death of Doctor Island.” If you can find a copy, I highly recommend it.

Just don’t expect to pay 51 cents for it. Leave that to the experts.

Goblin Secrets, A Review

Monday, August 6, 2012 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 5 comments

bggobsec Goblin Secrets
William Alexander
Margaret K. McElderry Books (240 pages, $16.99, Hardcover 2012)
Reviewed by C.S.E. Cooney

After reading this article about the decay of criticism in online book culture and the rise of the “cult of admiration,” I’m feeling a little furtive, a little tender, when I first sit down to write about things I like. Ashamed of, I dunno, “enthusing.”

I mean, look at that word. “Enthuse.” It’s just soggy with connotation. To enthuse is to be ridiculous, unsophisticated, bumptious even — and don’t I wish my brains to be a whirl of razorblades, that my words might be bright like blood on snow?

That said, alas, I can never sufficiently motivate myself to write about things I dislike. The energy it takes to be snarky! And then, to be cleverly snarky! Things I perceive as stupid sap me of that energy. In fact, stupid things fade so fast from my mind, it’s almost like a magical amnesia, like I was wand-bopped by some Fairy of Forgetting on my Naming Day and doomed to be as unlike Addison DeWitt as a self-styled critic may be.

This forgetting may be a kind of criticism in itself, but it’s not the public, in your face(book), post-to-the-Zeitgeist kind. It is personal. It is not at all useful to society in the ways certain negative reviews can be. (For the interested, author James Enge listed a few services negative reviews may provide, in a recent blog:

Negative reviews provide a public health service: some books, or elements in some books, constitute hazards that the public has a right to be warned about… [They also can be] useful autopsies of failure. Sometimes you can figure out how fiction works by examining a fiction that doesn’t work.

The point of all this — the POINT, my friends and fellow readers — is… that I, um, loved Goblin Secrets, by William Alexander.

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New Treasures: Clockwork and Cthulhu

Monday, August 6, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I don’t know much about this little artifact; but the moment I laid eyes on it, I knew I had to blog about it. It combines two of my favorite things: Cthulhu and Clocks.

Okay, not really. Would you believe Cthulhu and role-playing games? How about Cthulhu and giant clockwork war machines that lumber across the land?

Clockwork and Cthulhu is a supplement for the 17th century alternate historical fantasy world Clockwork & Chivalry, one of the most innovative settings ever produced for RuneQuest 2. And yes, I realize that if you don’t play RPGs, that sentence will not parse no matter how hard you mess with it. Just go with it.

England has descended into civil war. The earth is tainted by alchemical magick. Giant clockwork war machines lumber across the land. In the remote countryside, witches terrorise entire villages, while in the hallowed halls of great universities, natural philosophers uncover the secrets of nature.

War, plague and religious division make people’s lives a constant misery. But even greater threats exist. Witches whisper of the old gods. Royalist alchemists pore over John Dee’s forbidden translation of the Necronomicon, dreaming of powers that will allow them to win the war. Parliamentarian engineers consult with creatures from beyond the crystal spheres and build blasphemous mechanisms, unholy monuments to their alien overlords. Vast inter-dimensional beings seek entry into the world, while their human servants, corrupted, crazed and enslaved, follow the eldritch agendas of their hidden masters.

Clockwork & Cthulhu brings the horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the 17th century alternate historical fantasy world of Clockwork & Chivalry.

You have to admit that sounds cool. Don’t you wish you played role-playing games now?

Clockwork and Cthulhu was written and designed by Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton, authors of Clockwork & Chivalry. It is 156 pages, and sells for $29.99. It is published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment; you can find more information here.

Escape to the Jungle

Monday, August 6, 2012 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 8 comments

I’d planned a post about the business of writing today, but when we returned home from a family reunion and I learned about another massacre of innocents by another angry man with a gun, I just couldn’t muster the energy to talk seriously about the trials and tribulations of being a writer. Those trials and tribulations pale before what anyone in the assault was facing.

I couldn’t find much more to add to what I’d already said the last time this happened… what, two weeks ago? My God, people. Surely we can do better than this, somehow.

As a result, today I’m keeping things very light. In graduate school, one of my guilty pleasures was reading some pretty mindless escapist adventure. From the middle to the end of semesters, things could get more than a little hectic, what with all the projects and research papers, and it was nice to be able to just pick up a story and be entertained for a while by my old friend Ki-Gor.

Some years back, at Pulpcon, I missed the chance to become acquainted with the works of the gifted Ben Haas, about a decade before his writing finally hooked me. I didn’t discuss Haas here because most of his best work is western, but I took a long post live on my own site. At the same convention, though, I was wandering around the dealer room with writer John C. Hocking and sword-and-sorcery scholar Morgan Holmes. I stopped to chuckle at a ridiculous-looking pulp cover on display at one of the booths. Jungle Stories was emblazoned upon the masthead. Below, a beautiful and clearly evil dark-haired woman loomed over a bronzed jungle-man bound to an altar. Morgan said, “That’s actually a pretty good story.”

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All Eyes on Mars as Curiosity Prepares to Land

Sunday, August 5, 2012 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

As I type this, the one-ton Curiosity, the largest rover ever sent to another planet, is nearing an historic landing on Mars. It is scheduled to land at 1:31 a.m. Eastern Standard Time tomorrow morning, in slightly more than two hours.

Curiosity is already famous for several reasons. The $2.6 billion atomic-powered robot carries perhaps the most sophisticated mobile lab ever built — including 17 cameras, a laser, instruments that can analyze soil and rock samples, and a telecommunications system that can beam the results hundreds of millions of miles back to Earth.

It’s also famous for a series of videos depicting the “Seven Minutes of Terror,” the almost impossibly complex landing sequence — involving the world’s largest supersonic parachute, a sky crane, and no less than 76 precisely timed explosive charges — that will decelerate the rover from 13,000 miles an hour to zero in just seven minutes, delicately depositing it on the Martian surface. At 1,986 pounds, Curiosity is much too large for any previously-designed landing sequence to work.

I cannot do justice to the amazing scheme JPL has cooked up to slow the rover. I leave that to William Shatner, who narrates a 4-minute summary of the planned landing here. No, he’s not kidding. It really is that crazy.

I am very, very excited about this landing tonight. But like the entire staff of NASA, and much of the rest of the world, I’m also very concerned about all the things that could go wrong. I will spend much of the next two hours with my fingers crossed. CNN will be broadcasting live coverage of the landing, starting at 11:30 p.m. Eastern tonight.

I’m rooting for you Curiosity. Make it down in one piece, buddy.

Update: NASA reports that the SUV-sized Curiosity touched down safely on Mars, transmitting black and white images back to Earth. Higher resolution color images are expected later in the week. Way to go, Curiosity!

Vintage Treasures: The Prince of Morning Bells by Nancy Kress

Sunday, August 5, 2012 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

I first discovered Nancy Kress through her brilliant SF short stories, like the Hugo- and Nebula-Award winning “Beggars in Spain.” But she has an impressive fantasy resume as well, including her early novels, The Golden Grove (1984) and The White Pipes (1985) — which we cover here.

The Prince of Morning Bells (1981) was her first novel, and I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of it. Until I found a copy in Martin Harry Greenberg’s vast paperback collection.

Only yesterday, when marvels and mystery blessed the Universe…

Lovely Princess Kirila rejected royal traditions to seek wisdom and truth at the Tents of Omnium at the Heart of the World. With her protector and savior, the enchanted purple dog, Chessie, she reaches the kingdom of the Quirks — but their rational society cannot help in her hazardous quest. Nor can the people of Ruor, whose mystic religion threatens to enslave her. It is only at the Castle of Reyndak that a handsome young prince succeeds in interrupting her journey…

But years later, Kirila will again take up her quest with faithful Chessie, to reach the fabled tents, and discover the amazing secret at the heart of every woman’s world.

You’ve got to hand it to any book summary that includes the words “enchanted purple dog.” That’s some serious book blurbing chutzpah right there.

The original Timescape paperback is pretty hard to find (and no, you can’t have mine.) But we live in the era of digital books, and if you’ve got an e-reader, then The Prince of Morning Bells can be all yours for just $5.99 in a revised edition with a new afterword by the author.

The Prince of Morning Bells is 236 pages. It was originally published by Pocket Books, as part of their Timescape line, and released in a revised edition in trade paperback by FoxAcre Press in 2000 (still in print). It is currently available in digital format for the Nook and Kindle.

The Top 30 Black Gate Posts in June

Saturday, August 4, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

June was a terrific month for the Black Gate blog. Traffic has been steadily increasing for the past two years, and in June we reached a total of 2,300 blog posts. The top article for the month was “Selling Philip K Dick” from June 11, and the most popular link on the website was to the collected “New Treasures” columns.

The complete list of the Top 30 blog posts in June at Black Gate follows.

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