Black Gate

The new Black Static cover features Ben Baldwin‘s illustration for Ramsey Campbell’s “Recently Used”: here’s the opening paragraph:

Tunstall thought he hadn’t slept when the phone rang. He clutched it and sat up on the bed, which felt too bare and wide by half. On the bedside table the photograph of him with Gwyneth in the sunlit mountains far away was waiting to be seen once more, and beyond it the curtains framed a solitary feeble midnight star. He rubbed his aching eyes to help them focus on the mobile as he thumbed the keypad. “Hello?” he said before he’d finished lifting the phone to his face.

Other fiction includes “Dermot” by Simon Bestwick, “A Summer’s Day” by K. Harding Stalter, “Still Life” by Simon McCaffery and “How the Sixties Ended” by Tim Lees.  Non-fiction columns by Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler, Mike O’Driscoll and reviews by Tony Lee and Peter Tennant.

In related news, Mercurio D. Rivera’s “Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us” from Black Static # 18 is up for the 2011 World Fantasy Short Story Award. Here’s the download.

You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static. Also, the publishers are reintroducing lifetime subscriptions. What you’re buying, in essence, is a 10-year subscription at the current rate.  If you think you’re going to live for at least another decade, and you think Black Static will also be around for as long, this could be a bargain for whatever time you and the magazine have after that. If that weren’t enough, you can also opt for joint lifetime sub that gets you sister publication Interzone for a slightly reduced rate.  Sign your life away here.

“There was a man, Magnus’s son,
Ragni his name. In Reykjavik
Stands his office, six stories,
Far from the harbor in the fat past.
Birds nest there, now abandoned.
The sea washes along Vesturgata,
As they called it.

In those days
Ragni’s son, a rich man,
Also a scholar, skilled in law,
Thomas his name, took his wife
From famished Boston, far away.
Brave were her people, black-skinned,
Strong with spear, with shield courageous,
Long ago.”

I was flicking through my Flist, and what should I see but Francesca Forrest talking about solar superstorms and poetry and Ragnarok? If you know Francesca even a little, this would not surprise you.

And yet I was astonished.

Following her link to Tor.com, I beheld this magnificent poem by writer Paul Park. It went live in April. Why it has taken me this long to pay attention to it, I’ll never know; it’s a mystery, as Geoffrey Rush says in Shakespeare in Love.

I wish I’d written it. Never could’ve, but there you have it.  I’m snake-hearted and sick with envy. My eyeballs are melting a little. I may still be trembling. What a rush!

Lovers of Nordic sagas, flock over to Tor.com. Strew your comments like jeweled offerings.

And then, go on and read Francesca’s great review of it at Versification, a new site for speculative poetry reviews. Francesca has provided a map, so that you can track the hero’s movements. And links as well, to things like Hallgrimskirkja.

It’s very exciting. I wonder else Mr. Park has done…

We last covered Tor.com with their interview of our Managing Editor, Howard Andrew Jones.