Black Gate – Page 1159 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (Part I)

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Sarah Avery Comments 1 comment

In a small infinity of alternate universes, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens isn’t just a single volume — it’s an annual Year’s Best that every library, especially every school library, collects, and that genre geeks of all ages look forward to. Alas, in our universe, Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden could only give us a 2005 volume. It’s a delightful cross-section of styles and subgenres, full of short stories that seasoned, adult readers of SF/F can sink their teeth into.

As Yolen notes in her preface, the YA market’s appetite for fantasy and science fiction novels doesn’t seem to have extended to short fiction:

[T]he book you hold in your hand now is chock-full of SF and fantasy stories Appropriate for Young Adults published last year — 2004. However, the majority of them have been gleaned from adult magazines, Web sites, collections, and anthologies. Why? Because there is very little being published in the field specifically for Young Adults. So we have taken it upon ourselves to seek out the gems for you.

The “you” Yolen and Nielsen Hayden address in their short introductions to all the stories is maybe twelve, maybe fourteen years old — at the real Golden Age of Science Fiction. Try to imagine picking this collection up the year you first realized you wanted to read every book the library had that the librarians had labeled on the spine with that little stylized rocket ship sticker.

About half of my students live in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, so this is my go-to teaching anthology. Here’s a story-by-story breakdown, how I use it, and how I don’t:

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William Patrick Maynard’s The Terror of Fu Manchu

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Joe Bonadonna Comments 0 Comment

The Terror of Fu Manchu
William Patrick Maynard
Black Coat Press (248 pp, $20.95 in paperback, $6.99 eBook, April 2009)
Reviewed by Joe Bonadonna

Usually I don’t read stories and novels based on a character created by one author and then later written by another—not if I have already read the original author’s work. Back in the day, I read all the pastiches: Conan, Red Sonja, Bran Mak Morn, Cormac, Kull, Black Vulmea… and have enjoyed many of them. I’m even friends with a few of the writers (and a collaborator with one) who were lucky enough to have been chosen to carry on with Robert E. Howard’s characters. But nowadays there are just too many new characters, too many new stories and novels to read, and time and money seem to be in limited supply the older I get.

All that being said, let me tell you a little bit about William Patrick Maynard’s wonderful novel based on Sax Rohmer’s immortal character, The Terror of Fu Manchu, which was published in 2009 in a beautiful edition by Black Coat Press. I had already heard many great things about Maynard’s novel and was familiar with his writing from the stories he published through Airship27 Productions.

So I decided to read this novel and man, I’m glad that I did. It opened up a whole new world for me, and as a fellow writer, it taught me a few things, too.

Now, I have never read any of Rohmer’s original novels, though of course I’m very familiar with Fu Manchu by way of the Boris Karloff, Warner Oland, and Christopher Lee films. So I did a little digging around and sampled enough chapters of several of Sax Rohmer’s novels in order to familiarize myself with his writing, and to see how well Maynard’s style captures the essence of his work.

Doing that also added to my enjoyment as I immersed myself in Maynard’s version of the Chinese mastermind and one of literature’s greatest villains. However, this being the 21st century and not the early part of the 20th, I thought some of Rohmer’s writing to be a bit old-fashioned and a little slower-paced than we are accustomed to in this fast-moving age of cell phones, CGI, and all things high-tech. But Maynard breathes new life and a touch of modern sensibility in his novel, while remaining faithful to Rohmer’s original vision.

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New Treasures: Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Okay, technically, this is both a Vintage Treasure and a New Treasure. It’s a brand spanking new edition of a novel that came out nearly two decades ago, in 1995.

But what a novel. The sequel to Anno Dracula, one of the most acclaimed vampire novels of the 90s — an alternate history in which Count Dracula has killed Van Helsing, married Queen Victoria, imposed a police state and launched a terrifying new era of British vampire domination — The Bloody Red Baron picks up the story a few years later, at the dawn of World War I:

It is 1918 and Graf von Dracula is commander-in-chief of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The war of the great powers in Europe is also a war between the living and the undead. Caught up in the conflict, Charles Beauregard, an old enemy of Dracula, his protégé Edwin Winthrop, and intrepid vampire reporter Kate Reed go head-to-head with the lethal vampire flying machine that is the Bloody Red Baron…

One of the most fascinating aspects of Anno Dracula was the adroit manner in which Newman drew from real and fictional historical characters for virtually his entire cast — including Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Lestrade, Allan Quatermain, Billy the Kid, Orson Welles, Oscar Wilde, Fu Manchu, The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Carmilla, Doctor Moreau, Kurt Barlow (Salem’s Lot), Carnacki, Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows), Daniel Dravot (The Man Who Would Be King), Count Orlok (Nosferatu) and even Carl Kolchak (The Night Stalker).

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Cynthia Ward Reviews Lost Things

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Bill Ward Comments 1 comment

lostthingsweb Lost Things: Book I of the Order of the Air
Melissa Scott & Jo Graham
Crossroad Press (350 pp, $17.99, Paperback, $4.99, eBook, 2012)
Reviewed by Cynthia Ward

I first encountered Melissa Scott’s fiction in her second novel, The Roads of Heaven (1988), which is the first book of the Silence Leigh trilogy. I ended up reading all three novels, intrigued by their smart blending of familiar science fiction and fantasy elements (magic, interstellar travel, a gender-inequitable future) with a strong female lead, sharp prose, excellent characterizations, exceptional world-building, a quick pace, and an insightful exploration of gender roles. Despite a major lack of reading time, I made sure to read all subsequent Scott novels I saw, including her occasional collaborations with her partner, the writer/editor Lisa A. Barnett.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, I stopped seeing new novels from Scott. I would puzzle over the sudden disappearance of a favorite author until, years later, I would learn that Scott’s partner of 27 years had passed away after a long struggle with cancer. I hoped that Scott would eventually return to writing, while understanding why she might not.

Well, Melissa Scott has returned. And she’s done so in less a whirlwind of activity than a tornado. She’s released a pair of new collaborative novels set in the Stargate Atlantis universe, and a new solo novella set in the Elizabethan-esque world of Astreiant, which she created with her late partner. Their previous Astreiant titles are being reissued, along with several of Scott’s other backlist titles. And she recently released another new novel, set in the shared world of the Orphic Crisis Logistical Taskforce series, and written in collaboration with Jo Graham, an author previously unknown to me. It is this last work, Lost Things: Book I of the Order of the Air, which concerns us here.

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Vintage Treasures: The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner

Tuesday, August 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

I have fun with these Vintage Treasure pieces. For one thing, they’re a great excuse to shine some light on interesting items that cross my path.

Take Henry Kuttner’s paperback collection, The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner. Published in 1987, nearly 20 years after his death, it’s unusual in several respects. For one thing, it includes only novellas. And all originated from a single source: the long-dead pulp magazine Startling Stories.

I think this is a neat idea. The best writers of the pulp era — and Kuttner certainly qualifies — have seen most of their short fiction studiously reprinted. In fact, we’ve covered four generous collections of Kuttner’s pulp fiction just in the last few years: the weird-menace collection Terror in the House, the first volume in The Early Kuttner series; Thunder in the Void, gathering his early space operas; Detour to Otherness, the massive retrospective of his collaborative work with C.L. Moore; and none other than the distinguished James Enge reviewed his Gallagher stories for us, collected in Robots Have No Tails.

But short novels, 40,000-word epics printed in a single pulp issue, rarely (if ever) get reprinted. They’re too long for most collections, and generally too short for a standalone novel, so most of them have slipped through the pages of history. The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner rescues three such wonders and puts them under one cover.

But that’s not even the most interesting thing about The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner. Since all three novels appeared in a single source, this isn’t just a collection of Kuttner’s work. It’s an anthology that celebrates Startling Stories. Just as most collections give us insight into the recurring themes in an author’s work, this book offers us a generous sampling of the kind of fiction that appeared in that grand old pulp.

The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner collects The Portal in the Picture (originally published in 1949), Valley of the Flame (1946), and The Dark World (1946). It’s one of the most intriguing collections I’ve come across in the past year. At press time, there are 23 used copies available on Amazon.com, ranging in price from $2.25 to $9.99.

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Expendables 2

Tuesday, August 21, 2012 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

001_expendables2_poster Two years ago I walked out of a theater showing The Expendables, shaking my head in mild bewilderment. I don’t just have a high tolerance for ‘80s action cheese; I actively embrace it. I was nearly as excited about the release on Blu-ray last week of Death Wish 3 as I was about Jaws’s simultaneous hi-def debut. (Well, not really, but that’s my way of drawing your attention to what an over-the-top great/stupid movie we have in Death Wish 3.) But 2010’s The Expendables pushed none of my buttons. It was dull, the action flat, and Stallone seemed to think audiences would care about the tangled romantic lives of his and Jason Statham’s characters (at the expense of the rest of the cast). Stallone also seemed ignorant of the premise’s goofy appeal and played too much of it straight. The film ended up wasting most of the names on the marquee and couldn’t live up to its modest goals. It was also badly tarted-up with occasional post-production blood to get an R rating after it was shot for PG-13. It was a misfire for what looked like a simple shot.

Yet it made enough money for them to take a second shot, and when I left the theater after seeing Expendables 2, I felt they hit the target. I won’t go so far as to say “they got it right,” because “right” isn’t something a movie like The Expendables 2 would even know how to define, but the folks aboard this go-round sure “got it better.” It’s the best dumb fun movie of the summer for fans of the old-school testosterone action pics.

Here’s all you need to know about what kind of movie the filmmakers on Expendables 2 have put together: During the finale and within the space of thirty seconds, there are three lines quoting The Terminator, a line from Die Hard, and a reference to Rambo. Chuck Norris strides onto the screen through a haze of combat dust to the whistling strains of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Stallone grunts “Rest in pieces!” after he and company shred some fools with a rain of bullets. Dolph Lundgren plays the brains of the team. And Jean-Claude Van Damme is the villain.

How much more of a review do you need after that? The Expendables 2 is utterly silly, and everybody seems aware of it and rides the wave of ludicrous puns and over-the-top action with bloody smiles. Between making the two films, someone must have gotten the memo that the whole concept is actually a gag.

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Weird Tales Pulls Novel Excerpt Following Fan Uproar

Tuesday, August 21, 2012 John ONeill Comments 40 comments

It’s been an interesting day for Weird Tales, the oldest genre magazine on the market.

It began with the abrupt resignation of Ann VanderMeer as a senior contributing editor, “due to major artistic and philosophical differences with the existing editors.” As reported here last year, VanderMeer was replaced as editor by Marvin Kaye as the magazine transitioned to new Publisher Nth Dimension Media, run by John Harlacher. While Ann commented that her resignation “has been in the works for several months, ever since I was removed as the editor-in-chief,” it was apparently hastened by Kaye’s decision to publish an excerpt from Victoria Foyt’s novel, Saving the Pearls: Revealing Eden. The “Pearls” in the title refer to whites, who find themselves a persecuted minority after an ecological disaster. In praising the book, Kaye wrote:

Weird Tales seldom prints SF, but this story is a compelling view of a world that didn’t listen to the warnings of ecologists, and a world that has developed a reverse racism: blacks dominating and detesting not just whites, but latinos and albinos, the few that still survive of the latter are hunted down and slaughtered.

[Kaye’s post, and the comments it generated, have since been removed from the WT site; a Google webcache of the page is here.]

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Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft

Monday, August 20, 2012 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

122 years ago today, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the father of modern horror, was born in Providence, Rhode Island.

Here at Black Gate we’ve celebrated Lovecraft’s works in numerous ways over the years. In 2010, John R. Fultz interviewed the authors behind the landmark anthology Cthulhu’s Reign in “Cthulhu Has Risen…”, perhaps the single most popular blog post we’ve ever published, and last year he examined a brand new magazine celebrating Cthulhu’s creator, Lovecraft eZine. Matthew David Surridge took a detailed look at the master’s prose style in H.P. Lovecraft: The Style Adjectival, and Bill Ward told us about the silent movie version of The Call of Cthulhu.

We’ve covered numerous games, books, and audio adaptations, from Andrew Zimmerman Jones’s 2011 article on Age of Cthulhu: Death in Luxor to my review of Dark Adventure Radio Theatre’s superb audio play The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In the last week alone we told you about Ross E. Lockhart’s excellent anthology The Book of Cthulhu and the new RPG setting Clockwork and Cthulhu from Cakebread & Walton.

But there’s always more. So today, in honor of H.P. Lovecraft’s 122nd birthday, we’d like to present to you The Call of Cthulhu (For Beginning Readers), a faithful retelling of the classic horror tale… in the style of Dr. Seuss.

Created by artist Richard John Ivankovic, The Call of Cthulhu (For Beginning Readers) is a full-color illustrated version of the perhaps Lovercraft’s most famous story, originally published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. The complete version can be browsed online here.

We think H.P. Lovecraft would have enjoyed it.

Writing Business: Web Design

Monday, August 20, 2012 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 3 comments

The other day, I shared a tactic I often use to keep myself on task when writing, the McCoy test. In honor of my favorite Star Fleet surgeon, I ask myself if I’m a writer, or a blank, the blank being whatever I’m doing instead of writing (sorting laundry, eating spinach, performing one-handed push-ups, bear wrasslin’). If I have to ask myself that question during my scheduled writing time, then I put down the spinach fork or the bear and get to work.

Well, I haven’t written or revised any of my fiction now for the last week. That admittedly drives me a little crazy, but I’m still a writer because part of the business of writing is business. It took me a long time to finally admit that a writer is a small business owner with a product. I discovered that I have to make the promotion of my work a central part of my job if I’m going to be able to afford spinach and bear wrasslin’ lessons.

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The English Civil War with Clockwork War Machines: an Introduction to Clockwork & Chivalry

Sunday, August 19, 2012 Peter Cakebread Comments 5 comments

Hi Folks,

I’m Peter Cakebread. Along with my friend and co-writer, Ken Walton, I run a small company, Cakebread & Walton.

With a company name like that, it has been suggested that we could have been undertakers, or perhaps owned a quaint little coffee house, or even been nineteenth century grave robbers – “There are no Peelers out tonight, Mr Walton, so pass me the shovel, if you would be so kind.” Instead, we write tabletop RPGs (Role Playing Games), and fiction, although we are always looking to diversify, so keep the suggestions coming!

To date, our games are mostly published by Cubicle 7 (who also publish The One Ring and Doctor Who RPGs, alongside a host of other titles).

This time, I thought I’d chat about Clockwork & Chivalry, our clockpunk RPG set in an alternate Seventeenth Century.

Clockwork & Chivalry is a RPG set in the time of the English Civil War. The English Civil War was fought between the Royalists (the Cavaliers) and Parliament (the Roundheads). We haven’t veered away from most of the real history, it’s simply too interesting, but we have added a couple of rather big twists – in our setting the Royalists use magick, and the Parliamentarians have giant clockwork war machines.

But, Woah! Go back! Where did this idea come from?

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