Black Gate – Page 1237 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The new CONAN movie: Okay, I’m in.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 John R. Fultz Comments 12 comments

CONAN is coming. Okay, I’ve had serious doubts until now, based on the “teaser trailer” I’d seen. But this new trailer does it. I’m sold. I’m officially excited and enthused about this new CONAN movie. The Hyborian Age settings look terrific; Rose McGowan looks creepy as hell–nice touch having a female villain; the costuming and design looks superb; the creatures are well-done CGI beasties.

Is this the Arnold S. Conan from ’82? Is it the John Buscema-drawn Conan? Or the Frank Frazetta-painted Conan? No…it’s a new incarnation. Actor Jason Momoa reminds me of the Young Conan–the one Barry Windsor Smith drew in the 70s at Marvel Comics. If only he had that two-horned helmet and that three-disc necklace, he’d be a dead ringer. It’s a younger, rawer Conan, fresh from Cimmeria and the siege of Venarium. The Conan from Howard’s “Tower of the Elephant” story: a savage youth set loose in a civilization of decadent savagery.

I’m a HUGE fan of the original CONAN THE BARBARIAN film–the one directed by John Milius and co-writen by Oliver Stone. But I’m ready to jump in and experience this new take on Robert E. Howard’s most enduring character. For a guy who grew up reading Conan books, comics, and magazine–and someone who considers the original a classic–that’s saying a lot.

Of course, you can only tell so much from a trailer…but I’ve got a good feeling about this one. That said, I’m going to skip the 3D version and see the 2D instead…except for AVATAR, 3D tends to ruin most movies these days.

Judge for yourself at Yahoo:
http://movies.yahoo.com/summer-movies/conan-the-barbarian/1809953260#first

And if the movie still sucks, despite all this going for it: Crom help us all!

I reserve my final verdict until I actually see the film.

The David Gemmell Legend Award Nominees for Best Fantasy Novel of 2010

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

gemmell2

The nominations for the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2010 have been announced by the DGLA. They are:

The War of the Dwarves – Markus Heitz (Orbit)
The Alchemist in the Shadows – Pierre Pevel (Gollancz)
Towers of Midnight – Brandon Sanderson & Robert Jordan (Tor USA//Orbit)
The Black Prism – Brent Weeks (Orbit)
The Way of Kings – Brandon Sanderson (Gollancz/Tor USA)
The Desert Spear – Peter V. Brett (Voyager)

The Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel was first granted in 2009, to Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves. Last year’s winner was Empire, by Graham McNeill.

The DGLA also gives out The Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer, and The Ravenheart Award for Best Fantasy Cover Art.

The David Gemmell Legend Award is a fan-voted award administered by the DGLA. Yes, that means you can vote. The complete list of nominations is at the DGLA website. Voting is now open, so stop by and vote for your favorite!

Charlene Brusso Reviews May Earth Rise

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 Bill Ward Comments 0 Comment

mayearthrise May Earth Rise
Holly Taylor
Medallion Press (485 pages, $15.95, October 2009)
Reviewed by Charlene Brusso

Does the world need another Arthurian fantasy series? There are as many versions of the story of King Arthur as there are authors to tell it. This is the fourth novel (following Night Bird’s Reign, Crimson Fire, and Cry of Sorrow) in Taylor’s muscular epic fantasy Dreamer’s Cycle, which blends Arthurian myth with Celtic legend in a Dark Ages setting. Arthur is a High King without a kingdom, threatened by one Havgan, a Coranian warleader from across the sea (think Saxons) who’s devoted to Lytir, the One God, and feels it’s his duty to kill all the witches.

As the novel opens Arthur is plotting to rescue the Y Dawnus, the magic-wielding druids, seers, sorcerers and bards whose powers are necessary to sustain Kymru, Arthur’s empire. Taylor casts Arthur as a master strategist who first offers Havgan a chance to leave Kymru – and the Y Dawnus – or stay and die. Havgan, a determined aggressor, and overconfident to boot, refuses to leave. Arthur is surrounded by a large cast of characters – minor kings who once ruled various parts of Kymru, some displaced druids who’ve broken away from the Archdruid after he sided with Havgan, and various friends and relations.

…

Read More Read More

Art of the Genre: The Fighter

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 Scott Taylor Comments 8 comments

My stolen hero, Sir Alec Fleetwood, by Jeff Easley circa 1983

Do you ever wonder why we fight? What is it in our DNA that makes us want to pound something if the mood strikes? I suppose I’d say it’s simple human nature, because what other reason makes sense? I mean, I always hated the saying ‘boys will be boys’ and yet when my son was two I took him to a park to play and got an odd wake-up call. You see, my wife and I took every pain and precaution to be sure that he never, ever, saw or was around a gun, and yet he walked right up to two abandoned squirt guns, lifted them up like he was in a John Woo movie and started pretending to shoot stuff. Seriously, I was looking around for the release of doves and a slow motion jump from the slide to the sand-pit.

I guess at our very core there’s a fighter in all of us. It’s probably the reason why Jon Schindehette over at ArtOrder was so surprised with the response to his art request for an ultimate fighter art composition. People just plain like human fighters, and the numbers involved in the impetus of the competition hold to that fact.

Certainly, the groundwork for many a gamer starts with the fighter. He’s essentially the ‘easy one’, the character class you give the new player because all you have to do is swing a weapon and hope the dice are lucky. There are no magic spells to learn, no prayer lists, holy symbols, or thieves tools. It’s just put on some armor, grab a sword, and go, and you know, I really love that!

So, when I started my rather epic quest in the realms of RPGs, just like discussed in my discourse on Basic D&D’s Red Box, I of course played a fighter. As a matter of fact, I was so obviously unoriginal, I stole Frank Mentzer’s Sir Fleetwood name example right along wth Jeff Easley’s image for the fighter I wanted to play and went from there.

…

Read More Read More

May/June Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine Now on Sale

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

The May/June double issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction goes on sale today.

Editor Gordon van Gelder tells us:

It’s pretty rare for us to have a family reunion in F&SF, but this issue has a piece about reuniting with one of our founding editors. (Our next issue will actually have a story starring another one of our editors.) There’s a lot of music in this issue, several strange forms of life, and a talking dog. Another can’t miss issue, in other words.

This issue features the novella “Rampion” by Alexandra Duncan, and two novelets: “Black Mountain” by Albert E. Cowdrey, and “Music Makers” by Kate Wilhelm, plus short stories by Chet Williamson, Steven Popkes, Don Webb, Carter Scholz, Scott Bradfield, S. L. Gilbow, Ken Liu, and two (!) by Robert Reed.

The Special Feature this issue is “Jesse Francis McComas: The Traveller Returns” by Maria E. Alonzo. The issue also contains an editorial by Gordon Van Gelder, book columns by Charles de Lint and Chris Moriarty, “Plumage From Pegasus: Building a Readership” by Paul Di Filippo, a film column by Kathi Maio, and a Curiosities column by the late F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre.

F&SF is published six times a year; issues are a generous 258 pages. It is the longest-running professional fantasy magazine in the country, and has been published continuously since 1949. It is a great way to sample some of the fast-rising new names in fantasy.

The cover price is $7.50; one year-subscriptions are a bargain at $34.97, and include the giant October/November anniversary issue. You can order subscriptions and browse their blog at www.sfsite.com/fsf/.

The cover this issue is by Tomislav Tikulin. We covered the March/April issue here.

Welcome to Bordertown: Part the Third of a Brobdingnagian Review

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 7 comments

Don’t you believe for a nanosecond that the reason I didn’t finish up this Welcome to Bordertown blog was because I didn’t finish the book. Not for the flicker of a fly’s eye!

The trouble is, as soon as I finished it, I had to go and read the other Bordertown books: Will Shetterley’s Elsewhere and NeverNever, followed by Emma Bull’s Finder. I even started The Essential Bordertown, and it is bliss! Bliss, I tell you! I even had a Long Lankin dream.

Don’t know what a Long Lankin is? Boy oh boy. Dark magic, that. Am I gonna tell you all about it? NO! You must read these books for your own sweet selves!

But now that I’m mostly done with my huge Bordertown stack o’ goodies and am calming down some, I figured I should probably wrap up this, for lack of a better word, “review,” the first two parts of which can be read here and here, for those of you whose patience stretches even unto eternity.

…

Read More Read More

How I Spoiled My Own Bad Guys with Unexpected Success

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

el_greco_view_of_toledo . . . not that I mind, really.

I’m getting prepared to go on vacation in my own hometown, staying in a hotel a mere five miles from my current apartment. That’s what you get when you win a free trip to Hollywood . . . and you live in Century City (a.k.a. “Beverly Hills Adjacent”).

I am getting good mileage out of that joke, believe me. For this year’s Writers of the Future and Illustrators of the Future workshop and award ceremony, people are being flown into Los Angeles from as far away as Perth in Western Australia and Johannesburg in South Africa. As for me: a right turn, a left, another right, another left. With good traffic, sixteen minutes, or so declares the Lords of MapQuest. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten to Hollywood in under sixteen minutes, but I tend to travel there during peak hours.

But what’s this post really about, since I imagine most of you do not dial into the Black Gate frequency to hear my driving reports?

First, it’s to explain why I might not have a post up next Tuesday, which is the start of the workshop week for winners of the Writers of the Future Contest. Second, it’s to shamelessly plug the upcoming Writers of the Future Vol. 27, in which I’ll be making my professional fiction-writing debut with my story “An Acolyte of Black Spires.” The anthology’s unveiling will be on Sunday, May 15, but the book won’t be on sale at bookstores and online outlets until the next month. None of the contributors have even seen the cover yet, nor have we seen the illustrations for our individual stories. (There’s apparently a special procedure for that.) The ceremony on the 15th at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel will stream live through the Writers of the Future website, in case anybody cares to see what I look like in a tux. Also, I have a few people on the Black Gate team I plan to mention in my speech. So, John, Howard, and Bill . . . you might want to tune in. Just saying.

But what I really want to talk about is the bizarre nature of “short story order.” When I first set out to write short stories in a series, I knew I would not have much control over the order in which they appeared. I’ve read enough on pulp history to understand how that works. However, 1) I never expected to sell any of these stories; and 2) I would never have imagined that this particular one would be the first in the series to appear.

…

Read More Read More

Gene Wolfe’s 80th Birthday Blog

Monday, May 2, 2011 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 0 Comment

Gene Wolfe, April 2011, Top Shelf Books Open Mic

Hey, lookit!

Isn’t this a neat idea?

If you click through the link, you read:

“As some of you may be aware, Saturday 7 May will be the esteemed Mr. Gene Wolfe’s 8oth birthday. This blog has been created for friends, fans and admirers to express their good wishes to him and will be presented for his perusal before the end of his birthday. Please feel free to forward this to anyone that you think might be interested. And if you don’t know who Gene Wolfe is, it’s well past time you found out!”

Go put your two cents in! I sure did!

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.19 “Mommy Dearest”

Monday, May 2, 2011 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 1 comment

Sam and Dean have a chat with Eve, who decides to take the form of their dead mother.

Eve’s up to no good in the town of Grant’s Pass, Oregon, by being unusually charming to a college student (named, as we shortly learn, Edward Bright). She runs her hand across his cheek, which cannot be a good thing. He wonders away from the bar she enters. Eve kisses another boy, then walks through and begins touching people. The whole place goes insane with a monstrous, vampiric feeding frenzy, as she sits and calmly watches.

Dean is making bullets filled with Phoenix ashes, but isn’t sure it’s going to work. The ashes certainly aren’t burning him. In fact, it’s all a bit of an exercise in futility without a location, so they summon Cas to try to get a bead on Eve. He has no information, but Sam has the idea of trying to track down an empathic monster to see if they can get Eve’s location from one of them.

Castiel is able to track down a cult favorite: Amber Benson, from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer fame. (For those who weren’t avid Buffy fans, Benson played Tara, the lesbian love interest of Willow. Her season 6 death at the hands of a misogynistic nerd nearly triggered the destruction of the world at Willow’s hands. Tara also had the best song in the classic “Once More, With Feeling” musical episode of Buffy, also from Season 6. If you have not seen it, Season 6 of Buffy is some of the best television ever made.)

Fortunately for fanboys like me, Benson also played the non-killing vampire Lenore, who was introduced briefly in Season 2 of Supernatural.

…

Read More Read More

Teaching Fantasy Part 1: Rewards, Backfires, Escapes

Monday, May 2, 2011 Sarah Avery Comments 13 comments

bgolympian “What do you do when nobody’s making you do anything?”

His parents are making him meet with me for tutoring in the first place, so why should the kid trust me? I look like any other English teacher to him. No matter what he does when he’s free, he assumes I’ll disapprove. He’ll answer with embarrassment, and be surprised when nothing bad happens.

“And what do you read when nobody’s making you read anything?”

Most of my students, boys and girls both, answer, “Fantasy.” They say that with embarrassment, too, because English teachers are famous for their aversion to fantasy.

Yet when you read around in books about teaching teenagers, or teaching writing, or the intersection of gender and learning, it’s common to find the authors lamenting that fantasy is not just a boy genre (as the reviewer Ginia Bellafante notoriously called it), but the boy genre, the only one their male students read voluntarily. Why does the education community fall into this error? Is it that the girls are able to conceal their preferences better, or that they’re able to stomach the tedious mainstream books they’re assigned better? Or maybe it’s that the kinds of fantasy novels girls prefer are less vexing to their teachers? I don’t know.

I will concede that the boys I tutor tend to be more shut down as learners, and more shut down about literacy, than my female students are. Some education writers have explored this widely observed disparity eloquently and imagined fantasy literature as one of a range of remedies for it. In Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices, Ralph Fletcher implores his English teacher readers, whom he assumes will be mostly female and uniformly hostile to genre fiction, to allow their students to read and write fantasy at school. He takes particular pains to advocate for fantasy stories that incorporate violence.

…

Read More Read More