Black Gate – Page 1131 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Brief History of Comics, Animation, and Video Games with Christy Marx

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 Emily Mah Comments 4 comments

This title is not the least bit tongue in cheek. Many of you might not think you’ve ever heard of Christy Marx.

Think again. She has had a long career developing content for a wide array of media and is rightly considered one of the most powerful and influential women in video games and comics.

Currently employed at Zynga, she began developing content for video games before the title “video game developer” even existed. Her first games were for Sierra Online, including Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail and Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood.

She’s also written scripts for animated shows including GI Joe, He-Man, and Jem and the Holograms (remember them? Christy created them.) She’s also written scripts for live-action TV shows including Babylon 5 and Twilight Zone.

But she got her start writing for comics, bringing strong women to life frame by frame with works that include The Sisterhood of Steel.

Her current series, Amethyst, will have another issue out in the next few days.

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Red Sonja 2

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 MichaelPenkas Comments 1 comment

Honestly, I’ve tried twice to summarize “The Demon in the Maze,” and I just can’t figure out how. It’s a psychedelic mess of gonzo insanity. It reads as if co-writers Roy Thomas and Clara Noto just switched off writing pages without any idea of where the story was heading or how it would end. The whole thing is plenty of fun; but at the end, I still can’t figure it out.

It starts with Sonja finally reaching Venzia (which she’s been heading towards since Marvel Feature 6). The first thing she sees when she’s in sight of its famous canal is two trading ships crashing into one another and sinking. Even though the ships are less a minute’s swim from shore on either side of the canal, none of the sailors survive the crash.

Sonja doesn’t really have time to consider this mystery before she happens upon a woman being attacked by three bandits. She easily kills the trio in less than a page, but a fourth bandit, hiding in the shadows, knocks her unconscious and drops her to an underground mirror maze. The mirrors mess with her head to the point where she first hallucinates herself as a withered old woman (rendered only a little hilarious by the fact that she’s still wearing the chain mail bikini), then watches as her arms transform into snakes that begin to strangle her. Realizing that it’s an illusion, Sonja calms down and lets her mind “go limp,” at which point a passage out of the maze opens up. She leaves the maze and walks into the plot of the story.

An old man (who is never named) lies dying on the ground and explains that the underground chamber is the prison for an evil wizard (also unnamed) who wants to rule the world. Apparently, the chamber is also the prison of a demon (once again, unnamed) who can only be freed by a human hand. But not any human hand (otherwise, his cell-mate the evil wizard would just free him). The demon can only be freed by a human of exceptionally strong will (translation: the evil wizard is a wimp). The demon created the mirror maze as a test: anyone with a will strong enough to see through its illusions would have a will strong enough to free the demon. The fact that the maze is littered with bones implies that a lot of other women have been trapped down here.

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Weird Tales Meets Planet Stories in Space Eldritch

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

I stumbled on this little beauty today while browsing the latest Kindle releases on Amazon.

The cover art by Carter Reid is spectacular, and the contents — seven original novelettes and novellas of Lovecraftian pulp space opera — look pretty darn promising too. Contributors include Huge and Nebula nominee Brad R. Torgersen, Schlock Mercenary-creator Howard Tayler, and Michael R. Collings (The Slab, The House Beyond the Hill). Here’s the complete TOC:

Foreword, by Larry Correia
“Arise Thou Niarlat From Thy Rest,” by D.J. Butler
“Space Opera,“ by Michael R. Collings
“The Menace Under Mars,” by Nathan Shumate
“Gods in Darkness,” by David J. West
“The Shadows of Titan,” by Carter Reid and Brad R. Torgersen
“The Fury in the Void,” by Robert J. Defendi
“Flight of the Runewright,” by Howard Tayler

The whole package looks professional — although the lack of an editor credit admittedly diminishes the effect somewhat. Still, I’m willing to give this one a chance.

You can sample the first thousand words of each tale at Cold Fusion Media.

Space Eldrich was published on December 14, 2012 by Cold Fusion Media. It is 248 pages in trade paperback for $13,99; and is also available as an ebook for just $5.99 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 11: John Carter of Mars

Monday, December 17, 2012 Ryan Harvey Comments 10 comments

john-carter-of-mars-canaveral So it ends here, not with a climatic epic, but with a bit of house cleaning almost fifteen years after the author’s death. The final book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s career-spanning Barsoom saga is a slender volume containing two unrelated novellas.

I’ve called this review series “Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars,” but that title is a smidgeon deceiving when discussing the two stories here. One doesn’t take place on Mars, and the other was not written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My apologies going forward.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: John Carter of Mars (1964)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1913–14), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1927), A Fighting Man of Mars (1930), Swords of Mars (1934–35), Synthetic Men of Mars (1938), Llana of Gathol (1941)

The Backstory

Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950, two years after the publication of Llana of Gathol. Two novellas from the Mars series remained orphaned, having only appeared in magazines: “The Skeleton Men of Jupiter” and “John Carter and the Giant of Mars.” It wasn’t until 1964 that Canaveral Press published them together under the deceivingly archetypal title John Carter of Mars.

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Bad Habits

Monday, December 17, 2012 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

Little, Big I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about how I read what I read, and how I enjoy it. Or, what’s in it that I enjoy. It seems to me that much of the pleasure in my reading comes about from bad habits. Which is to say, habits that I can’t help but think ought to be bad, but which nevertheless feel central to the act of reading. Maybe that feeling’s an illusion; maybe it’s the secret why bad habits become habits. At any rate, I thought I’d be self-indulgent this week and throw out what I’ve come up with, as I’d love to hear if any of it resonates with anyone else’s experience of reading.

My first bad habit is a tendency to make a preliminary judgement about a book after only a page or two. Maybe even less. That’s a judgement that can, and often does, change as I read on. But it still feels like I’m having a response — equal parts emotional, imaginative, and rational — based on incomplete information. Of course one has the right to a first impression, and of course it’s worth keeping an eye on whether the book you’re reading is repaying the time you put into it. But the reaction I have is something broader than that; it’s a kind of synecdochic sense of the book that derives from reading a small part of it. And it can be not just misleading, but horribly misguided.

A book like The Lord of the Rings grows as it goes on; it grew as it was written, and its shape as a story tends to reflect the way its characters go on journeys to unexpected places. A book like Little, Big (which I think is the best post-Tolkien novel of the fantastic I’ve read) keeps building thematically and narratively as it goes on, and makes that act of building into a structural principle of the novel: the fact that the story gets bigger the further in you go relates directly to one of the major themes of the book. So in both cases, you can’t really judge the book from the opening pages, and in both cases it may be a while before you really get a sense of what’s going on. In both cases that distance, that development, how the registers change over the course of the story, is key to the whole experience.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1950: A Retro-Review

Monday, December 17, 2012 Matthew Wuertz Comments 6 comments

I’m slowly making my way through my collection of Galaxy Science Fiction, continuing with the second issue, dated November 1950.

“Honeymoon in Hell” by Fredric Brown: In the futuristic year of 1962, due to some unknown cause, all of Earth’s babies are born as females. With their own ideas running out, the U.S. government turns to Junior – the largest cybernetic computer in the nation. The computer hypothesizes there could be something local to the planet causing the issue.

It suggests testing the theory by sending married couples to the moon – to see if conception in a different environment would produce males. The government chooses Ray Carmody, a former rocket pilot who was one of the few people ever to land on the moon.

To Carmody’s dismay, the U.S. teams up with Russia for the first of multiple missions, and he is married remotely to Anna Borisovna, also a rocket pilot. They land separately in Hell Crater and begin assembling a shelter, but their work is interrupted by unexpected arrivals.

This is a story that gives away its age with numerous details, but it moves along really well. It’s an interesting idea, and I liked how the plot unfolded.

“Forgotten Missionary” by Isaac Asimov: Humans land on Saybrook’s Planet, taking caution to establish a barrier between themselves and the indigenous species. Because they must. The previous explorers, under Saybrook’s guidance, found that the planet was like a single organism, and it wanted to add new species to its body. Given the opportunity, the planet’s organisms could impregnate other species, which would later birth scions with green patches of fur where their eyes should be.

When the barrier fails for a brief moment, one of the planet’s organisms sneaks aboard, disguising itself as part of the ship. Its mission is to wait until it encounters the humans’ home world before affecting all other specimens of life – otherwise, the humans would simply destroy themselves as their first explorers had.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying”

Sunday, December 16, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

gharad-small1 We’re slowly capturing all the online fiction we’ve published here over the past 12 years as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction series. This week we present the complete text of Alex Kreis’s “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying,” one of the shortest tales to ever appear in Black Gate.

I am very sorry about seizing the throne of Falland and establishing a dictatorship based on terror and intimidation. As ruler of Falland, I enforced a number of highly unfair and immoral policies for which I now feel very badly, including putting all orphans raised by any forms of wildlife to death, and ordering the execution of all wandering bards (although I must say in my defense that that decision was not entirely unpopular).

Alex Kreis is a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop and a member of BRAWL, the Boston SF/F writing critique group. He lives with his wife and two children in Massachusetts. “The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying” was his first fiction sale.

You can see the complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Donald S. Crankshaw, Aaron Bradford Starr, Sean McLachlan, Harry Connolly, and Jason E. Thummel, here.

“The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying” originally appeared in Black Gate 14. It is a complete 960-word short story of satirical fantasy offered at no cost. Art by Bernie Mireault.

Read the complete story here.

Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars

Sunday, December 16, 2012 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

Back in October, I featured the Robert E. Howard collection Solomon Kane: The Hills of the Dead, the second of two Bantam paperbacks published in the late 70s. The first was Skulls in the Stars, released in 1978.

The Solomon Kane tales are some of my best-loved Howard fiction. “The Skull in the Stars” was one of the first Robert E. Howard tales I ever read, and for many years it was my favorite of his short stories.

He was the Puritan, who flinched not from the gates of Hell. Tall, gaunt, hollowed-eyed in his opposition to the forces of darkness, he defied the devil himself. Kane, cold, steely-nerved duelist, snatched his long rapier from its sheath and thrust it into the heart of evil. Ghoulish laughter follows him. Foul horror haunts his way. Kane, a man whose blood quickens with adventure. Kane, a man more dangerous than a famished wolf.

These slender paperbacks both have fold-out cover art (click on the image at right for the full version). The art is uncredited for this volume, but some sources claim it is Jeff Jones, and the style seems right to me. While the contents aren’t pure Howard (both books contain fragments completed by Ramsey Campbell), it’s a pleasure to see both the poetry and Cambell’s introductions. Here’s the complete TOC:

“The World of Solomon Kane” by J. Ramsey Campbell
“Skulls in the Stars”
“The Right Hand of Doom”
“Red Shadows”
“Rattle of Bones”
“The Castle of the Devil” (Completed by Ramsey Campbell)
“The Moon of Skulls”
“The One Black Stain” (poem)
“Blades of the Brotherhood”

Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars was published in paperback by Bantam Books in December, 1978. It is 178 pages, with a cover price of $1.95.

New Treasures: American Gothic Tales

Sunday, December 16, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I’ve had my eye on this collection for a while, but it was Matthew David Surridge’s fascinating four-part series on Joyce Carol Oates’s Gothic Quintet that finally nudged me over the edge. I ordered it last week, and have been enjoying it ever since.

To be honest, while I was prepared for a survey of American horror, my brief perusal of the contents before I laid down my money led me to believe it was slanted towards modern writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, and Stephen King. And while they’re all represented, the book doesn’t neglect the classics either.

They’re all here: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Herman Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids,” Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Ambrose Bierce’s “That Damned Thing,” and many more.

How does it manage that? By being nicely huge: the trade paperback is 546 pages.

Something else I appreciate is the nice selection from modern authors who aren’t usually represented in horror anthologies: Paul Bowles’s “Allal,” Robert Coover’s “In Bed One Night,” E. L. Doctorow’s “The Waterworks,” Don DeLillo’s “Human Moments in World War III,” Raymond Carver’s “Little Things,” Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Temple,” and Steven Millhauser’s classic “In the Penny Arcade.”

And if that’s not enough for you, there’s also a varied selection from horror writers more associated with the genre, including Thomas Ligotti, Nancy Etchemendy, Bruce McAllister, Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg, Katherine Dunn, John Crowley, and Lisa Tuttle.

It’s not perfect — where are Fritz Leiber, Frank Belknap Long, Hugh Cave, or Dan Simmons? — but it’s damn close. American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, was published in trade paperback by Plume in December, 1996. It is $21 for 546 pages; there is no digital edition.

Saturday Round Up: Talk to the Hand

Saturday, December 15, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Last Saturday, I posted the Black Gate Christmas Gift List, crammed with gift-giving ideas for the discerning fantasy fan. For the last week, I’ve been receiving additional suggestions from readers.

By far my favorite comes from Todd Ruthman, who pointed me to the Bluetooth Handset Gloves offered by ThinkGeek, shown at left. For only $69.99 you can talk to your loved ones just by extending your thumb and pinky. Described as “warm and comfortable capacitive-touch gloves with a Bluetooth headset built in,” they seem ideal for impressing friends and passers-by. I love this gift idea more than I can say. If the right-handed glove comes with a wall-climbing feature, two of my childhood dreams will have totally come true.

George Dew at Dark City Games points out that DCG products make great stocking stuffers, and that unscientific studies (conducted by watching episodes of The Big Bang Theory) show that the amount of time that families spend playing board games is inversely proportional to the chances of children getting involved in drugs, alcohol “and anything else bad.” I’m a believer. You can find Dark City’s splendid catalog here.

Finally, a few readers complained because the number two item on the list, Howard Andrew Jones’s The Bones of the Old Ones, was not yet on sale. Our tireless team of minions have reported that it is now, in fact, on shelves all across the country. In other BotOO news, the esteemed Mr. Jones tells us that a major studio has optioned The Chronicles of Sword and Sand (AKA the Dabir and Asim novels), and the hunt is currently on for a screenwriter.