Art of the Genre: The Art of the DM

Art of the Genre: The Art of the DM

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Me at right, Murph in middle, and my personal DM Mark to left, circa 1990 as we prepare for a Shadowrun adventure.
Me at right, Murph in middle, and my personal DM Mark to left, circa 1990 as we prepare for a Shadowrun adventure.

Yes, it’s true, I’m posting a day late on my Art of the Genre blog, but hey, when you’ve been the Gamemaster for six straight days of 14 hour gaming, I think even the great John O’Neill can cut me a little slack. I’m mean, this is my vacation after all, so I think having anything, even this odd article, to post should show how much I love my readers!

Still, it was kind of tough, amid all the chaos of gaming, to settle in on a subject for this week’s AtoG. However, the more I sat around the gaming table, the more I began to understand the Art of being a Gamemaster and how that translates into something cool.

I mean, I’ve been doing this since I was a tween… well actually before the word tween even existed. Even early on I would sit at a table, screens before me, and paint pictures with words that are vivid enough to keep my friends coming back for more. And when I say coming back for more, I mean really, truly, coming back, no matter from where, for more story spinning than I’ve the right to foist on you here.

I’ve gamed with the same group of friends since middle school, and it’s not like we all live three minutes from one another. Nope, we are now stretched from Maryland to California, but one week a year, we make a sojourn back to the Midwest to roll dice like we did when we were twelve.
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The Sword & Sorcery Anthology Now on Sale

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology Now on Sale

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sword-and-sorcery-anthologyOne of the year’s most anticipated books has arrived — a few days ahead of its official June 1 publication date.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman, is now on sale. This massive 480-page tome contains classic S&S tales from the writers who created the genre — including C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Karl Edward Wagner and Michael Moorcock — as well as modern masters such as Charles R. Saunders, Glen Cook, George R. R. Martin, Jeffrey Ford, and Caitlín R. Kiernan.

It also includes “Epistle from Lebanoi,” an original tale by Michael Shea, author of the classic Nifft the Lean, and “The Year of the Three Monarchs,” a new story by Michael Swanwick.

The early reviews have already been filled with praise, including this one from Publishers Weekly:

Hartwell and Weisman have selected some of the best short-form work in the genre… This is an unbeatable selection from classic to modern, and each story brings its A game.

With an introduction by David Drake, “Storytellers: A Guided Ramble into Sword and Sorcery Fiction” and a tantalizing assortment of stories I’m unfamiliar with — including “Gimmile’s Song” by Charles R. Saunders, “Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat” by Glen Cook, “Six from Atlantis” by Gene Wolfe, and “Path of the Dragon” by George R. R. Martin — this ones leaps right to the top of my want list.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology is published by Tachyon Publications, and priced at $15.95 for the print version and $10.95 in digital format. More complete details are here, and the complete Tables of Contents is here.

Jaym Gates Reviews Mind Storm

Jaym Gates Reviews Mind Storm

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mind-stormMind Storm
K.M. Ruiz
Thomas Dunne Books (304 pp, $24.99, Hardcover May 2011)
Reviewed by Jaym Gates

Science fiction is inundated with post-apocalyptic and dystopian settings, super-powers and corrupt governments, with varied results. Mind Storm is a nice blend of the familiar and the new, packed with action, and it introduces some pretty fun new characters. It is the first book of a series of unspecified length.

Mind Storm opens with psions Threnody and Quenton traveling to the slums of Los Angeles. It is the year 2379. Humans have stripped the Earth of nearly all resources. Crowded and afraid, nuclear war was unleashed…everywhere. By the time the war was over, most of the populated areas were dead zones, unfit for human life. The majority of the human race had been wiped out. But a small percentage of the human population finds their DNA altered, leaving them incredibly powerful and unique. They are called psions, and brainwashed and put in service to the world government as soldier-slaves.

Their power comes at a cost, burning out more of their bodies with every use. Only the fortunate make it to the age of thirty five. They are feared and hated by the humans, who regard them as dangerous vermin. Most of them are found early and pulled into the Stryker Syndicate, fitted with kill-switches controlled by the World Court. The ones who escape the Strykers are found and enslaved by the Warhounds, a rogue group of powerful psions serving a shadowy figure.

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Catherynne M. Valente parts ways with Night Shade Books

Catherynne M. Valente parts ways with Night Shade Books

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the-habitation-of-the-blessed2Catherynne M. Valente has announced her third Prester John novel, following The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World, will not be published by Night Shade Books. In a statement on her blog last week she said:

I continue to think that Night Shade puts out wonderful books and I hope for their success. I did not take this step lightly. But their recent troubles have made our business relationship difficult, and I could not in good conscience proceed with a third book given the circumstances. Obviously I’m being a bit vague – there’s no point in airing laundry in public… What this means is that at the moment, The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are for the most part unavailable. Some copies will float around for awhile yet, but most of the e-versions are gone. I hope to fix this in the next week – I have relicensed the covers from the excellent Rebecca Guay and Night Shade has been very kind and accommodating with regards to physical copies and digital files…

As for the third and final book in the series, The Spindle of Necessity, I am committed to finding a way to make sure you get to see it. I owe you a finish. Oddly enough, Prester John is my longest series to date, and I want to bring it all to a close the way I planned to from the beginning… Given the market realities, the most likely avenue for this is a Kickstarter campaign to fund a self-published version.

At press time, both The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, in both print and Kindle versions. But if you’re interested in getting copies, you want want to move quickly.

Rio Youers’ Westlake Soul: A Review

Rio Youers’ Westlake Soul: A Review

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Westlake SoulWestlake Soul is twenty-three, a good-natured surfing champion with a loving family, loving girlfriend, and loving dog. Then a terrible fall leaves him in a vegetative state, unresponsive to the outside world — but, locked in his own mind, he’s a superintelligent superhero, astrally projecting to the moon and battling the mysterious villain named Doctor Quietus. Westlake can’t affect the outside world; can’t even twitch a finger, can only sit and be cared for by his mother and father and little sister, and the nurses they hire. But he can see what goes on around him, and react, if only internally.

Rio Youers’ novel Westlake Soul is Westlake’s account of his life and opinions, and of his fights against Doctor Quietus. Youers pulls off a tricky proposition; Westlake’s completely incapable of actually doing anything, of changing anything in his physical environment. He can only view the world, describing what he sees and how he feels. That ought to make him too passive to work as the centre of a story — and make no mistake, more than simply a narrator, Westlake is the heart of his own story, speaking as he does with the unselfconscious egocentrism of youth — but it is precisely his struggle to make a change, to accomplish even the smallest of actions, that becomes involving.

In fact, the book succeeds due to its directness of affect. Westlake Soul’s had no choice but to become thoughtul and empathic, and those qualities, along with a certain precision of diction, make his voice endearing and highly readable. The book doesn’t hesitate to tug at the heartstrings, but the writing’s effective: it feels like a kind young man’s voice. And Youers deploys that voice nicely, giving us Westlake’s observations of both his exterior and interior worlds, keeping things moving briskly.

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Battleship

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Battleship

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battleship-teaser-posterYou sunk my interest.

And so The Avengers gets another week at #1. Welcome to the Billion Dollar Club. Have a seat next to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and watch that The Dark Knight doesn’t try to steal your popcorn.

The question burning my mind as I left the theater after watching Battleship was: “Why ‘Fortunate Son’?” At the close of two hours of a rah-rah, fist pumping, pro-military glamor parade, why play one of most famous and angriest protest songs ever over a montage of alien ships getting smithereen’d? Did no one involved in the movie listen to the lyrics? “Some folks are born made to wave the flag / Oh, they’re Red, White and Blue. / And when the band plays ‘Hail to Chief’ / Oh, they point the cannon at you.” Maybe the music supervisor thought, “Oh, hell ya! People love Creedence Clearwater Revival. Let’s crank it up!” Perhaps director Peter Berg was trying to allay blame for the film, screaming “It ain’t me! It ain’t me!” Or maybe Berg filled his Navy vs. Aliens blow-em-up flick with a subversive anti-military/industrial complex message that I failed to find on my radar.

However, I will never know for certain, because there’s no way I will ever watch Battleship a second time. This is the essential Stupid Summer Movie, a Michael Bay film without Michael Bay’s obsession with disaster porn that at least gives his junk a crazy edge. If you thought the idea of adapting a strategy guessing game was a poor choice for a blockbuster movie, you were right: stick a red peg on your upper tactical screen.

Maybe the “Fortunate Sons” are the film’s heroes, who have the luck of going up against an expeditionary force of the stupidest extraterrestrials since Mac and Me. These heavily armed dreadnoughts fly twenty light years to reach Earth, but immediately smash their most crucial vessel into a satellite (they were drinking, I assume). Later, the aliens suffer defeat from the insurmountable force of senior citizens, a tourist attraction, a paraplegic, a supermodel driving a Jeep, and a tech-geek with heavy luggage.

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Files for Bankruptcy

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Files for Bankruptcy

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lord-of-the-rings-hobbit2Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, US publishers of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Animal Farm, 1984, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and numerous books by Harlan Ellison, Kage Baker, Philip K. Dick, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, James Morrow, Margaret Atwood, Diane Duane, Jane Yolen and literally hundreds of others, filed for bankruptcy protection today.

Houghton Mifflin, an educational and trade publisher in the United States, acquired Harcourt Publishing in 2007 to become Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The company has 4,000 employees around the world.

It officially filed for pre-packaged bankruptcy this morning, citing debts and liabilities of over $1 billion. The filing is part of a restructuring that it hopes will cut debt by $3.1 billion. The company issued a statement today, saying it:

will maintain normal day-to-day business operations throughout the restructuring process, and we expect no disruptions to our relationships with our customers, agents, authors, employees, business partners and suppliers. Additionally, our plan provides for our suppliers and vendors to be paid in full during and after this process and for our employees to continue receiving their usual pay and benefits.

The company said it still expects to complete the restructuring by the end of June. For additional details, see this article at Publisher’s Weekly.

Spring 2012 issue of Subterranean Magazine Now Available

Spring 2012 issue of Subterranean Magazine Now Available

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subterranean-magazine-spring-2012I admit I never know when to blog about Subterranean magazine. I really enjoy it, and I used to go to great lengths to acquire the print issues. But now that they’ve converted to an online zine they’re releasing the contents in a rolling format, a new story or article every week.

Do I announce it here when the first article goes up? Or wait until the entire magazine is posted, two months later? By the time a new issue is up, I’ve already forgotten what I did last time. So over the years I’ve finally developed a consistent system: I blog about it whenever I remember.

So here I am to tell you about the Spring 2012 issue. And it’s got a terrific line-up, nearly 70,000 words of fiction, including two big novellas from Jay Lake and Allen Steele:

  • “The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future,” by Jay Lake (24,000 words)
  • “Angel of Europa,” by Allen Steele (19,000 words)
  • “Sic Him, Hellhound, Kill Kill!” by Hal Duncan
  • “Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash,” by Caitlin R. Kiernan
  • “Here and There,” by Neal Barrett, Jr.
  • “A Holy War,” by Mike Resnick

Subterranean is edited by William Schafer, and published quarterly. The Spring 2012 issue is completely free and available here.

We last covered Subterranean magazine with their previous issue, Winter 2012.

Kickstarter Alert: New Fire, an Aztec-inspired RPG

Kickstarter Alert: New Fire, an Aztec-inspired RPG

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Kwaytlachtli of the Screaming One Warrior House
Kwaytlachtli of the Screaming One Warrior House

With 10 days left to go, I’d like to make everyone aware of the upcoming game New Fire, currently being funded through a successful but so far fairly low-key Kickstarter campaign. Most readers of the blog are probably familiar with Kickstarter through Scott Taylor’s great posts on the subject. New Fire has their game fully designed, but is seeking Kickstarter support in order to fund professional-level artwork for the product.

They’ve hit their $3,000 goal and their $6,000 stretch goal, so they’ll be releasing full-color versions of their core rulebook and are currently in the process of getting together a second stretch goal. At low levels, you can purchase a PDF copy of the book, but at higher backing levels there are hardcopy books available, as well as T-shirts, and even some design a Landmark or village for the campaign setting. (The backer goal to help design a god is, unfortunately, sold out.)

I spoke with the game’s creator, Jason Caminsky, and after the conversation was even more excited about the prospect of this game. There are three things which really make it stand out for me.

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Aqueduct Press releases The Moment of Change, an Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry

Aqueduct Press releases The Moment of Change, an Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry

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the-moment-of-change2I’ve received word this morning that contributor copies of Aqueduct Press’s The Moment of Change have started to arrive, and the book is now available for order on their website.

The Moment of Change is an anthology of feminist speculative poetry with an absolutely stellar line-up of contributors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Jo Walton, Delia Sherman, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Phyllis Gotlieb, Yoon Ha Lee, Nisi Shawl, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft, and Nicole Kornher-Stace.

It also includes two members of Team Black Gate: two poems by Amal El-Mohtar, “Pieces” and “On the Division of Labour,” and a long poem by our website editor, C.S.E. Cooney,  “The Last Crone on the Moon.” The anthology is edited by Rose Lemberg, and she’s posted the complete Table of Contents here. In her introduction she writes:

In these pages you will find works in a variety of genres — works that can be labeled mythic, fantastic, science fictional, historical, surreal, magic realist, and unclassifiable; poems by people of color and white folks; by poets based in the US, Canada, Britain, India, Spain, and the Philippines; by first- and second-generation immigrants; by the able-bodied and the disabled; by straight and queer poets who may identify as women, men, trans, and genderqueer.

I had the pleasure of listening to C.S.E. read “The Last Crone on the Moon” last year at the monthly Top Shelf Books Open Mic here in Chicago, and it is worth the price of the book alone.

Rose Lemberg and many of the contributors will be reading from The Moment of Change at Wiscon in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend. I’ll be there, and I’m looking forward to it.

The Moment of Change is 174 pages in paperback. The cover art is by  Terri Windling. It sells for $20.