Black Gate – Page 1213 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Gen Con 2011: Day 1 Recap

Thursday, August 4, 2011 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 2 comments

Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!

It’s that time of the year again, when all the good little gamers gather in Indianapolis to explores the exhibitor’s booths and discover treasures, new and old. I speak, of course, of Gen Con Indianapolis, the “Best Four Days in Gaming.”

If you recall from last year’s report (see Gen Con 2010 Reflections if you don’t recall), I had a lot of fun last year, mostly because I now have a family to take and with whom I could share the experience.

They also prove useful bait for dragons. (Just kidding. No infants were harmed in the making of this blog!)

Today, however, was all about me. I trekked into Indianapolis to experience the first day of the convention on my own, basically blasting through the Exhibit Hall and trying to look at every booth to find if there was anything interesting for me to report back on.
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Breathing Life Into Dead Gods: The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis

Thursday, August 4, 2011 Brian Murphy Comments 6 comments

allegory-of-love-cover

The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils: that, we know, is what happened to our incalculable loss in the history of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining.

–C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

Tracing the roots of fantasy is a fascinating exercise. From whence did works of pure fancy spring? How far back do we go to find their source? Are its origins to be found in works like The Epic of Gilgamesh, or The Iliad and The Odyssey (for a great series of posts on the subject, look no further than Matthew David Surridge’s four part series Worlds Within Worlds ).

In his landmark study The Allegory of Love (1936), C.S. Lewis implies that fantasy’s roots lie not in the classical period, but the Medieval Age. Medieval poets infused “extinct” pagan gods with new life by employing them as allegory. Venus and Mars, Minerva and Jupiter, died and awoke again as concepts, sewing seeds that would eventually give rise to works like Phantastes or The Well at the World’s End.

Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find works of myth and fancy, Lewis claims. Ancient writers wrote stories based on the probable, or events that they believed actually happened. Or they took the marvellous as fact, writing without irony about hippogriffs and sea-monsters. Purely fantastic fiction was unknown (classical poets employed allegory, but not in this manner). Pagan gods as allegory, and the acknowledgement of myth by medieval poets, marked a cosmic shift in artistic technique, paving the paths for writers like Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton and transitioning us to works of pure fantasy. “It is difficult for the modern man of letters to value this quiet revolution as it deserves,” writes Lewis. “Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.”

Revelations and gorgeously turned bits of wisdom like these are only a few of the treasures to be found in The Allegory of Love.

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Goth Chick News: The Last Four Things

Thursday, August 4, 2011 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

The options for your summer reading list are as copious as the Speedo bathing suits which have suddenly appeared on the rooftop sun deck of the Black Gate offices, but not nearly as difficult to speak about.

A couple weeks back I told you about Robert Browne’s The Paradise Prophesy, which hit store shelves on July 21^st. This week British author Paul Hoffman brings us the second in The Left Hand of God trilogy, entitled The Last Four Things.

Hoffman’s first book set off a worldwide bidding frenzy among US publishers in 2008. The Left Hand of God (aka The Angel of Death) follows the story of Thomas Cale, a teenager imprisoned in The Sanctuary, a brutal institution that trains boys to become warriors, known as “Redeemers” in an imminent holy war.

Though the trilogy is set in an intriguingly ambiguous medieval realm with modern overtones, this isn’t entirely a fantasy world; much of it is based on Hoffman’s own experiences growing up in an extremist Catholic boarding school.

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Teaching Fantasy II: In Which I Knowingly Assign the Worst Short Story in the History of Sword and Sorcery

Wednesday, August 3, 2011 Sarah Avery Comments 13 comments

It was for his own good, honest.

My student said, “It’s time I learned to proofread. Can we do that next?”

I nearly fell off my chair. He was right, of course, but it’s not a skill students usually ask to work on. “Sure. I’ll see what kinds of exercises I can find in my files at home…”

“No exercises! No fake documents. Please, don’t ask me to proofread something whose only purpose on this earth is to be proofread.” A very reasonable objection. “How about we proofread one of your manuscripts?”

Uh oh.

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Art of the Genre: Cosplay

Wednesday, August 3, 2011 Scott Taylor Comments 3 comments

There are two incredible things in this picture, and they aren't the outfits

I live in L.A., Tinseltown, Hollywood, the City of Dreams, and you’d think that being here would overwhelm me with fantasy, but in reality it’s never that way. Sure, now and then you’re someplace ordinary and run into a ‘star’, but seeing the reality of that always seems a letdown as well.

I think that’s why having an office next to Ryan Harvey is so special, because he’s even more a Peter Pan than I am, and his creative vision is always spilling out into the reception area. Kandline, or Kandy as I call her, helps too, her ‘I’m going to make it’ and goth-prep style always bringing a smile to my face when I roll in late from a long line at Starbucks.

Still, I live a pretty mundane life if you don’t include trips on the BG Zeppelin. I have a wife, a son, and bills to pay just like most folk in the world, but there are those moments in time when even I dream about what could have been if time worked a bit differently.

What do I mean? Well, I’m talking about those crazy kids today and their ‘Cosplay’. You see, I’m a Halloween junky, like last year I dressed up in full costume each Friday of October to pick up my son from pre-school. That being said, however, I end my persona-swaps after All Hallows’ Eve, but if life were different, if I were younger, and if Cosplay had existed in 1990 I’m pretty sure my life would have been drastically different.

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Cowboys & Aliens: Aliens, Go Home

Tuesday, August 2, 2011 Ryan Harvey Comments 5 comments

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
Directed by John Favreau. Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olvia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine, Clancy Brown, Paul Dano.

Thunderation, aliens. We was havin’ ourselves a fine little Western show here in this town of Absolution. Then you come riding in, a-blastin’ and burnin’ everything like it was a Saturday night after the cowpokes got paid and the whiskey gone dry. You turned our durned movie into about as interesting a place as a salt flat. Hell, we had almost made this Ford fella entertaining again, and it ain’t been since the War of the Southern Rebellion that folks enjoyed anything that city slicker’s done.

So thanks fer nuttin’, alien varmints. Ain’t you got plenty a’ other moving pictures this year that you’re blowing your cannons in? Now stay on yer side of the barb-wire fence, and if we catch you branding one of our cattle again with those laser doohickies, we’re pulling leather on you and leavin’ you for the buzzards and worms who ain’t particular about what their chow is.

The “Weird Western” genre has found its niche along with other subsets of steampunk in literature and comics — but it has never caught fire on the big screen. Wild Wild West and Jonah Hex were failures, and deservedly so. There are also far earlier examples, like 1971’s Zachariah, a rock musical Western based on Siddhartha with music by Country Joe and the Fish and Elvin Jones, and starring Don Johnson. That sounds fun, right? Sorry, it isn’t. Cowboys & Aliens, from Iron Man director John Favreau and based on the Platinum Studios graphic novel, fares better in the quality department, but it is still an inert bore that fails to merge its two genres into anything entertaining. Mostly, it’s a slog.

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Steve Ditko and The Start of Something Strange

Sunday, July 31, 2011 Matthew David Surridge Comments 2 comments

Origin Splash One of my favourite Marvel Comics characters, certainly my favourite of all their big names, is Doctor Strange. Like most established Marvel characters, he’s been handled a lot of different ways over the course of time. I’d like to look back, and look closely, at one of the early tales that defined him most clearly — specifically, his origin story.

Doctor Strange first appeared in Strange Tales 110, in which he investigates a man’s recurring bad dreams and battles an old enemy, Nightmare, master of the Dream Dimension. Strange is a kind of occult detective, a figure in the tradition of Martin Hessselius or John Silence (or, more closely, Mandrake or Zatara). Unlike them, though, he’s more magician than detective. Although we meet him here for the first time, he’s clearly an experienced wizard — “Never again shall you thwart me!” claims Nightmare. We don’t discover in this five-page story how Strange came to have his powerful magical amulet, or who his mysterious mentor is.

The next month’s story gives us a bit more background, introducing another archenemy who has a history with the good doctor — Baron Mordo, a former student of Strange’s mentor and master. We get a sense of Strange’s power, too, as he has a battle of astral forms with Mordo. The next two issues didn’t have a Doctor Strange story, then issue 114 presented another battle with Mordo. It was with the next story, in issue 115, that we finally learned who this man of mystery really was.

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Broadly Speaking Interviews C.S.E. Cooney

Sunday, July 31, 2011 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Broadly Speaking, the podcast about the adventures of women writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, has interviewed Black Gate website editor C.S.E. Cooney.

For their July episode Broadly Speaking host Julia Rios interviewed C.S.E. Cooney, Gwynne Garfinkle, and Mary Robinette Kowal (sort of) on the ins and outs of writing humor.

Here’s C.S.E. on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

The thing is, I love Jane Austen… I found it delightful to have Elizabeth Bennet wanting to cut off people’s heads when they threatened her honor. I liked the whole thing between samurais and ninjas. I liked that the Bennet sisters fought back-to-back at the Netherfield ball… I do think that there is something exquisitely funny in having girls in dresses with swords. It speaks to my inner She-ra, Princess of Power.

C.S.E. Cooney is the author of Jack o’ the Hills and The Big Bah-Ha. Her poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride” won the Rhysling award for long form poetry. Gwynne Garfinkle’s short stories and poems have appeared in The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume 4, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Teens Talk Growing Up, and No Body’s Perfect. Mary Robinette Kowal won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008, her latest fantasy novel is Shades of Milk and Honey.

The complete podcast is roughly 39 minutes; you can find it here. And you can find C.S.E. Cooney’s behind-the-scenes article on the interview (including how she managed to channel Mary Robinette Kowal) right here at Black Gate.

Register Your Interest, Copyright for Paper and E-Books

Saturday, July 30, 2011 Emily Mah Comments 2 comments

Copyright is a term well known to any author, or artist of any kind, for that matter, but I’ve often been surprised at how many misconceptions there are about this area of law. Now, here I must insert my usual disclaimer. Even though I am a lawyer, I am inactive in the bar at the moment and thus do not keep on top of every development in statutes and case law. I write this as a general guide, a place for you to get started, but if you have any concerns regarding your copyrights, I always recommend you hire a lawyer who is currently practicing law. That said, let’s discuss copyrights and some basics about how they work.

There are two current developments in the publishing industry that have inspired me to write this post.

1) The rise of the indie author, meaning an author who publishes without using a publisher or agent.

2) The unprecedented growth in e-publishing.

But first a little background.

What Is Copyright?

Copyright is the right you have to exploit your artistic work for commercial gain and exclude others from doing so without a license. It attaches to your work the moment it is “fixed in a tangible medium”. In other words, once you write it down, record it on a CD, or save it to your hard drive, you own the copyright in your work. The term “tangible medium” is dated, because we can’t really touch computer files on a hard drive – or, at least, we shouldn’t try it – but computers and their data storage devices have been around long enough that they are included in this definition. I’ve surprised many people by saying this, though it is nevertheless the truth. All you need to do to own the copyright in your work is create said work.

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Black Gate Interviews Dave Gross, Part Two

Saturday, July 30, 2011 Bill Ward Comments 3 comments

the-hobbit-tolkien-ballantine Last week in part one of our interview Black Gate sat down with Forgotten Realms and Pathfinder author Dave Gross to talk about writing, gaming, and his latest Pathfinder novel, Master of Devils. This week Dave tells us more about his early influences and his transition from gamer to game fiction writer.

Chicken or egg time: what came first for you — gaming or storytelling?

Definitely storytelling. I was learning to read around the time I was learning to walk.

My first geekdom was ghost and horror stories, collections of which I’d order every time the Scholastic Books flyer came around our grade school. I can’t remember when I was first writing stories, but I’m sure it was in homeroom with a half pint of milk nearby. Later I burned through all the SF at our city library, and one day my cousin Francis handed me a copy of The Hobbit, and fantasy became my favorite. After burning through the Tolkien trilogy I devoured everything I could find by R.E. Howard and his clan. It was around that time that a classmate and his elder brother introduced me to D&D. They taught me the game from the original saddle-stitched books. Once the boxed game came out, I began DMing. Which, of course, is its own sort of storytelling.

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