The Black Gate Christmas Gift List

The Black Gate Christmas Gift List

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a-guile-of-dragons[Apologies in advance for not being politically correct enough to call this the Black Gate Holiday Gift List. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, kindly ignore this post. Or use our suggestions to buy something for yourself, we won’t tell anyone.]

If you’re a Black Gate fan, we already know a lot about you. You’re almost certainly a fantasy devotee, well-read, with impeccable taste, and accustomed to the natural adoration of your peers. Pretty close, right? And you’re probably also a procrastinator who puts off Christmas shopping until the last minute, and ends up buying Wal-Mart gift certificates on December 24.

You can do better than that. In fact, we’re here to help you. Here’s a handy list of the best fantasy books, movies, games and comics of the season, with a link to a recent review, courtesy of the editors and staff of Black Gate magazine. We have gifts for every price range, from $5 to $150. Good luck, and happy shopping!

  1. A Guile of Dragons, James Enge ($17.95)
  2. The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones ($25.99)
  3. American Science Fiction: 9 Classic Novels, edited by Gary K. Wolfe ($70)
  4. Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection ($149.98)
  5. Lords of Waterdeep, Wizards of the Coast ($49.99)
  6. The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer ($39.99)
  7. Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams ($17.95)
  8. A Throne of Bones, Vox Day ($4.99)
  9. Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone ($24.99)
  10. Books To Die For, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke ($29.99)

    11. …

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First Teaser Trailer Released for Star Trek Into Darkness

First Teaser Trailer Released for Star Trek Into Darkness

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Hot on the heels of our Monday speculation surrounding the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness, comes word that Paramount has released the first teaser trailer. In terms of creating a spectacle, I think there’s a good chance they’ve succeeded admirably… there are at least three brief scenes that clearly take Star Trek places I’ve never seen before.

True, there’s an awful lot of fisticuffs for a Star Trek film. And a lot of screaming, and what looks like 23th Century kung fu. That’s weird.

But there’s also some terrifically exotic alien landscapes, a huge cast, and what looks like breath-taking urban action. Overall, I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

The clip sheds no further light on whether or not Benedict Cumberbatch is indeed playing Gary Mitchell — although he is shown in Star Fleet uniform, so that puts to bed conjecture that he’s playing Khan.

Check it out below.

Blogging Austin Briggs’ Flash Gordon, “The Menace of Mysta” / “Home”

Blogging Austin Briggs’ Flash Gordon, “The Menace of Mysta” / “Home”

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flash_gordonflash20gordon_briggs149911171“The Menace of Mysta” was the tenth installment of Austin Briggs’ daily Flash Gordon comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally published between March 27 and April 25, 1944, “The Menace of Mysta” is a very brief episode that starts off with Flash and Dale and their nameless Elvin guide crossing Lost Lake when they pass through a patch of fog and become embroiled in a spider web. A giant spider rises from the lake to attack them. Flash dispatches the creature easily enough and the trio soon comes ashore on a strange beach where they quickly find themselves among the invisible kingdom of Queen Mysta.

Mysta’s kingdom appears to function magically with visibility and seemingly inter-dimensional passage under the beautiful but mysterious Queen’s control. Dale and their Elvin guide are taken captive. Flash passes through the invisible portal into the kingdom and eventually fights his way into Mysta’s castle. Once Mysta determines that Flash poses no real threat, but is an honorable man fighting for Dale’s freedom, she pulls aside a curtain to unveil the scientific genius that allows her kingdom to operate on what seems to be magical principles. The genius is none other than Dr. Zarkov.

Readers were doubtless as flummoxed as Flash and Dale at this revelation and no sooner are they reunited with their old friend then he is bustling them off into a rocket ship on a secret mission he refuses to tell them anything about, which leads this curious and very brief penultimate adventure into the final storyline of Austin Briggs’ daily strip.

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Goth Chick News: Evil Dead is Alive and Well

Goth Chick News: Evil Dead is Alive and Well

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image002You really shouldn’t read from that book.

I mean seriously.

Put it down.

Oh well, you’re screwed.

A remake of Sam Raimi’s horror film franchise Evil Dead finally has a release date in 2013 after a couple of false starts, some casting shuffles, and a change of director that had fans screaming for the wrong reasons.

As early as 2005, it had been confirmed that a remake of Evil Dead would be made. At that point, it was to be produced by Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, but would not include any references to the original characters. It was also said that the movie would be about a group of teenagers that go to the cabin and find the book, but the similarities with the 1981 version would end there.

However, in August 2007, Bruce Campbell revealed in a radio interview that the proposed remake was “going nowhere” and “fizzled” due to extremely negative fan reaction.

The rumor mill went quiet after that, until July, 2011 when Ghost House Pictures (Sam Raimi’s production company) announced it would be producing a remake with Fede Alvarez directing and Diablo Cody refreshing the script. That’s when the legions of The Dead cried foul.

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New Treasures: Obsidian & Blood by Aliette de Bodard

New Treasures: Obsidian & Blood by Aliette de Bodard

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obsidian-blood-smallAs a reader over 40, I have a certain responsibility to gripe about modern fantasy. To point out how things were better in my day, complain how “kids today” just don’t appreciate good writing, and dismiss current trends as crass commercialism. It’s a thankless job, but it’s been handed down to me by countless generations of grumpy old readers, and I take it seriously.

It ain’t easy, either. For one thing, I have to ignore a lot of really excellent work by Jeff VanderMeer, Neil Gaiman, Howard Andrew Jones, James Enge, John Fultz, and dozens of others, just to have any kind of credibility at all. And when a trend comes along that I really like, I have to shut the hell up about it. And trust me when I tell you, it’s hard for me to shut the hell up about anything.

For example: when I was a kid, fantasy novels went out of print all the time. If you missed ’em, too bad for you — that was the price you paid for not getting hip to the best writers fast enough. You had to sit around and listen to all your friends talk about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, nodding along and gritting your teeth. (At least, that’s what I imagine it would have been like, if I’d had friends).

Not any more. These days when a popular paperback dies, it just returns months later in a new, improved format, like Gandalf the White. Or the Priceline Negotiator.

Case in point: Aliette de Bodard’s Acatl novels. The first, Servant of the Underworld, published in paperback by Angry Robot in October 2010, was a fascinating murder mystery set in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, where the end of the world is kept at bay only by the magic of human sacrifice.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Some Dubious Ideas and Some Good That Came of Them

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Some Dubious Ideas and Some Good That Came of Them

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When I learned my first child would be a boy, one of my first stops was the library, where I checked out a huge stack of books about boys: how they think, how they learn, how they’re socialized, with all the attendant parental and teacherly how-tos and cautionary tales. I was wary of essentialism, but willing to consider the possibility that the big recent developments in neuroscience might have something new to tell me. Since my son would not be born yet for some months, I tried out the most promising of the books’ insights on my students. Childhood in a masculine mode–any version of a masculine mode–is a foreign country to me. I wanted what I always want when I’m about to fly off to terra incognita. I wanted a map, a phrasebook, and a Rick Steves guide to the notable sights. That and a good highlighter pen will get me through as much touristing as I’ve ever been able to afford.

Only it turned out I wasn’t a tourist, or even a long-term expatriate. I was a character in a portal fantasy, the kind this essay on io9 praises, in which people cross through the portal from each world into the other, and nobody’s normality is stable. As it turned out, I had lived my entire life as a character in that portal fantasy without knowing it. None of my maps or phrasebooks could be relied upon.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 10: Llana of Gathol

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 10: Llana of Gathol

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llana-of-gathol-1st-edBack on Mars, and closing in on its finale, after my short sabbatical… What can I say? It seems Synthetic Men of Mars will suck out the desire to keep trudging forward from even the most dedicated ERB enthusiast.

Llana of Gathol is the first of the two story collections that close out the published Barsoom epic: it contains four novellas chronologically linked together to produce an episodic novel… one that hopefully improves upon the failed previous book.

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: Llana of Gathol (1941)

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)

The Backstory

I discussed at length ERB’s decision to write novellas he could later gather into episodic novels in my review of Escape on Venus, one of the three collections he wrote simultaneously, rotating through settings. Escape on Venus was a massive bust, but part of the reason for its failure is that Venus is a minor location in ERB’s canon. The Earth’s core fared better with Savage Pellucidar. And what of Mars, so far Burroughs’s most consistent setting for quality? Could changing writing methods rescue readers from the mistakes that made Synthetic Men of Mars a glaring black mark on the series? …

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Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 7 (plus Conan the Barbarian 66, 67, and 68)

Marvel Feature: Red Sonja 7 (plus Conan the Barbarian 66, 67, and 68)

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marvel-feature-7-coverSo the next issue blurb at the end of Marvel Feature 6 was just a bit misleading. After you went back to the comic shop (or newsstand or drug store or wherever people went in 1976 to get comics), paid your thirty cents for Conan the Barbarian 66, and got the issue back home, you would discover that it wasn’t a continuation of the story from Marvel Feature 6 at all. No, “Daggers and Death-Gods!” instead told the story of Conan and Belit docking in Massantia to trade some “honest loot, freely plundered.” After some tense negotiating, they are told of a missing page from the Book of Skelos being kept in the Temple of a Thousand Gods. There’s a hefty reward being offered by an unknown client (who works through a middleman) to anyone who can steal the page from the temple. Conan and Belit make their way through the temple and, after nearly killing eachother, thanks to a caretaker’s spell, they find the page … and Red Sonja. So issue 66 actually tells a story parallel to the one we just finished, with the promise that the next part will, for real this time, be told in issue 67.

Well, we’ve already invested sixty cents into this story, so we might as well invest another thirty to find out where it ends. Issue 67 opens with four pages of re-caps to the stories we read in Marvel Feature 6 and Conan the Barbarian 66. After the recaps, Sonja and Belit have exactly one panel of dialogue before Belit draws her sword and tries to kill her. Red Sonja called her a serving wench and that was all it took because, as Belit is fond of reminding us, she’s actually the daughter of the death-goddess Derketa (Belit believes this because Belit is crazy). The fight lasts for three panels before Belit concedes that Red Sonja is a better swordswoman and throws her sword aside. But she hasn’t conceded the fight, only changed weapons. Apparently, Belit (like all crazy girlfriends) carries a knife. At this point, Red Sonja probably realizes that Conan has enough problems with his delusional knife-wielding girlfriend, so she opts instead to grab the page, slice through the torch that lights the chamber, then flee under cover of darkness. Because Red Sonja only has crazy delusions of grandeur after watching her entire family murdered. For Belit, it’s a lifestyle.

The rest of the issue is Conan promising Belit that he’ll track down Sonja and the page, then getting sidetracked when he discovers an old friend has been imprisoned for murdering one of the town guard (which he’s done so many times, you’d think he’d be surprised to find that some people actually get arrested for it). After killing a half-man/half-tiger (honestly, no one’s even surprised by this sort of thing any more), he frees his friend and discovers that he was locked in the cell next to the man who originally stole the page (small world, Roy Thomas, awfully small world). He meets back up with Belit and they take in this new bit of information just as Red Sonja races past them on horseback. We’re told that the story will be continued in Marvel Feature 7.

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Zenna Henderson’s The Anything Box

Zenna Henderson’s The Anything Box

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The Anything BoxAs so often happens, I was at a book fair the other week when, again as so often happens, I stumbled on a book by a writer I’d heard of at some point and about whose work I was vaguely curious. In this case, the writer was Zenna Henderson and the book was a collection of sf and fantasy short stories called The Anything Box. Which, upon reading, I found to be quite intriguing.

Henderson was born in 1917 and died in 1983. Most writing I’ve found about her online (including her homepage, her SF Encyclopedia entry, and this excellent appreciation by Bud Webster) mention some or all of the following things: that she was a Mormon, that she taught Japanese-Americans in an internment camp during World War Two, and that she was one of the few women writing sf in the 1950s under an obviously female first name. Her work has influenced Orson Scott Card, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Connie Willis.

Henderson seems to be best known for her stories about the People, refugee aliens trying to make lives for themselves on Earth. None of those pieces are in The Anything Box. These stories stand alone; most, but not all, focus on teachers, children, and domestic life. Their technique is mainly simple and direct: straight-ahead narrative prose, eschewing tricks of chronology or unreliable narrators. “Things” uses alien vocabulary extensively, and “Turn the Page” borders on a Bradbury-like expressionistic lyricism, but on the whole the book is good solid 50s commercial prose. Which does some unexpected things.

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Star Trek Into Darkness Poster Fuels Gary Mitchell Speculation

Star Trek Into Darkness Poster Fuels Gary Mitchell Speculation

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star-trek-into-darkness-smallJust to review, Black Gate is a website with a laser-like focus on the best in new and neglected fantasy. If you want science fiction, there’s plenty of other places for that. Except maybe for Star Trek, because that has William Shatner and we’re big fans.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’d like to point you to the just-released poster for the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness, featuring a trenchcoat-clad badass standing on a mound of rubble that used to be Federation stuff, starting at other Federation stuff he could also knock over. Just to drive home the point, his profile forms part of a crumbling Federation emblem (click the image at right for a bigger version).

That’s one cool poster. It’s also done absolutely nothing to dampen ongoing speculation that the villain this time is none other than Gary Mitchell, Kirk’s friend and helmsman who became all glow-eyed and megalomanical after slamming into the edge of the galaxy at warp 3 in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Neither has the film’s official description:

When the crew of the Enterprise is called back home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis. With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.

As our heroes are propelled into an epic chess game of life and death, love will be challenged, friendships will be torn apart, and sacrifices must be made for the only family Kirk has left: his crew.

For the record, I think this is a great choice. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was the second pilot and one of the show’s earliest episodes, and frankly one of its best. And if the poster and teaser description are any indication, the action this time won’t take place on a remote planetoid covered in giant styrofoam rocks, but a populated center where the stakes are a lot higher and the explosions a lot bigger. Finally, as reported some time ago, Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch has been cast as the film’s villain, and I think he’d make a magnificent Gary Mitchell, both as a jovial lieutenant commander and as an all-powerful psychic loonie.

Star Trek Into Darkness is directed by J. J. Abrams, and written by Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof and Roberto Orci. It is the twelfth feature-length Star Trek film and the sequel to 2009’s Star Trek. It is set for release on May 17, 2013.