Black Gate – Page 1237 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Locus 602 Arrives

Thursday, March 17, 2011 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The latest issue of Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, has arrived at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

This issue contains interviews with Gene Wolfe and Alaya Dawn Johnson, a spotlight on Sean Wallace, a column by Cory Doctorow on “Explaining Creativity to a Martian,” short fiction reviews by Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton, the usual treasure trove of detailed book reviews by Gary K. Wolfe, Faren Miller, Paul Witcover, and many others, and a quarterly listing of US & UK Forthcoming Books through December 2011 — the most detailed and accurate catalog of forthcoming books in the industry.

As always, Locus also contains the latest news from the field. This issue includes coverage of the Nebula and Bram Stoker Award nominations, Borders’ bankruptcy, an obit of Brian Jacques, snippets and gossip on people & publishing, and much more.

The complete Table of Contents is here.

Simply put, if you want to keep up with what’s really happening in science fiction and fantasy, you need to be reading Locus.

We last covered Locus with the August 2010 issue.

This issue is 72 pages and priced at $6.95; a one-year (12-issue) subscription is $60. Their website is here, and online subscription form is here.

The Desert of Souls, a Review

Thursday, March 17, 2011 Brian Murphy Comments 7 comments

the-desert-of-souls

“We should talk more, you and I,” he said, “about storytelling.”

–Howard Andrew Jones, The Desert of Souls

The Desert of Souls is the debut novel of Black Gate magazine managing editor Howard Andrew Jones. About ¼ of the way into it, I thought aloud: You’ve got to be kidding me. A debut novel? Jones’ Arabian Nights-style adventure has the polish of a cut diamond, and the finish of a veteran author.

The Desert of Souls is a proper fantasy, albeit placed in a historical setting, so there’s magic, undead monsters, god-like snakes, and more. I haven’t encountered a djinn on the printed page since my old AD&D days, and was pleasantly flooded with memories of Oasis of the White Palm as I read. The Desert of Souls features two heroes, Dabir and Asim, who spend large part of the book in near-death situations in pursuit of the wizard Fifouz, who plots to visit an ancient curse on a modern city.

Jones has an excellent sense of pace and an affinity for a tale properly told. Not rushed, but told as a story should be told, as though novelist and the reader were drawn up around a campfire with the whole night ahead for stories. A lot happens in The Desert of Souls but it’s not told breathlessly; the pace is languid at times, quick at others in Asim’s first person narrative. It’s also unabashedly optimistic, a welcome relief in these often dark times of current fantasy offerings.

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Goth Chick News: 16th Annual Halloween & Attractions Best in Show

Thursday, March 17, 2011 Sue Granquist Comments 1 comment

Last weekend, St. Louis, MO played host to the 16th Annual Halloween & Attractions Show which was side by side with the Halloween Costume & Party Show. These events have not occurred simultaneous in several years and to have this much Halloween in one place was, well…

Let’s just say I needed to have a nice long lie down afterwards.

The HAS and the HCPS play host to vendors of every imaginable item for professional haunted attraction creators. Aisles of latex body parts, animatronic werewolves, smoke machines, scary sound effects, fake castle walls, grossly realistic masks and special effects makeup kept me engrossed for the full nine hours that the show ran on Saturday. In addition, I met several amazing artists, and a couple of horror movie directors that I’m sure you’ll recognize. But I’ll leave those as a surprise for later.

Over the coming weeks I will have the pleasure of bringing you several full-length interviews with the most intriguing people I met. But as I’ve done each year, we’ll start with a “Best in Show” list and let me say, it’s hard to stand out amidst this bloody mess. All of these items are available for purchase by the general public on the web sites indicated and represent the most innovative products for 2011.

I love this job.

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Dirty Words in Fantastic Fiction: A Writer Blogs About Process

Thursday, March 17, 2011 markrigney Comments 16 comments

All writers, whatever their stripe, accomplish the bulk of their labor through the incisive, judicious choice of words. Authors prone to world-building fantasy find themselves shackled in ways that most writers are not, limited to a surprising degree in their available terminology. Consider, if you will, the following wonderful words: renaissance, Stilton cheese, bonobo, perestroika, taco, Hollywood, dim sum, tribologist, Ecuadoran, and haiku.

The common element? You guessed it. Not one of the words in that list is likely to have a place in the literature we lovingly call fantasy fiction.

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Howard Andrew Jones on How Captain Kirk Led Me to Historical Fiction

Thursday, March 17, 2011 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Man, that Howard Andrew Jones is, like, everywhere.

Today he’s at Tor.com, writing about how James T. Kirk led him on a many-year mission to explore strange new worlds of historical fiction:

I’d read that Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry had modeled Captain Kirk after some guy named Horatio Hornblower. I didn’t think I’d like history stories, but I sure liked Star Trek, so I decided to take a chance. Once I rode my bicycle to the library and saw how many books about Hornblower there were, I figured I’d be enjoying a whole lot of sailing age Star Trek fiction for a long time to come.

Of course, it didn’t turn out quite like that. Hornblower wasn’t exactly like Kirk, and his exploits weren’t that much like those of the Enterprise, but they were cracking good adventures. Thanks to my own curiosity but mostly to the prose of the talented C.S. Forester, my tastes had suddenly, and accidentally, broadened beyond science fiction… I no longer thought of historical fiction as a strange, untouchable world, and as I grew older I tried more and more of it, sometimes because a period interested me and sometimes just because I liked a cover or a title. That’s how I found the work of Cecilia Holland, and it’s why I wasn’t afraid to try out a book by Harold Lamb titled The Curved Saber after I was spellbound by Lamb’s biography of Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general…

The complete article is here, and you can learn the mind-boggling details about Howard Andrew Jones month at Black Gate here.

Bradley Beaulieu’s The Winds of Khalakovo Released This Week

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

windsofkhalakovocover_sm Black Gate blogger Bradley Beaulieu’s first novel The Winds of Khalakovo was published by Night Shade Books on Monday. I asked him to tell us a little bit about it, and his influences:

Thanks for having me on Black Gate. It’s great to be able to talk to some of the fans of the magazine, because unlike other places where I often feel like a relative newcomer — a welcome guest, so to speak — here I feel at home. I feel like I’m among friends, like we’re all part of an extended family: those who love adventure – and epic-based fantasy. So I was excited about the chance to share the news about my debut novel, The Winds of Khalakovo, just released by Night Shade Books.

The Winds of Khalakovo is a story about Nikandr, the Prince of a Grand Duchy modeled loosely after Muscovite Russia. The Nine Duchies of Anuskaya have been beset by a decade-long blight, by a wasting disease that strikes commoner and royal alike, and by the Maharraht, a rebellious splinter group that wants nothing more than the destruction of the Grand Duchy and her people. While searching for a way to heal the islands, Prince Nikandr stumbles across a boy, a boy who has the power to break worlds, and he finds that the Maharraht are bent on using this boy to achieve their goals. But the boy also has the power to heal, and it falls to Prince Nikandr to unlock his secrets before the Maharraht can use him to lay waste to his home of Khalakovo.

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Art of the Genre: The Cat Lord

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 Scott Taylor Comments 6 comments

Harry Quinn shows us the serious Cat Lord

What is the Cat Lord? Well, to me it’s something my friend Mark told me about when he was reading Gord of Greyhawk back in high school, a magical character with awesome power. Having owned three cats in my lifetime, I’d say he has to be an interesting fellow, a rather profound god of feline things. This of course isn’t to be confused with Bast, the Egyptian goddess of cats, but something more D&D based.

I’d picked up D&D 1st Edition’s Monster Manual II at some point, and certainly the Cat Lord appeared in there, two great pictures of him done by Larry Elmore and Harry Quinn helping to flesh out this mysterious demi-god.

He seems an interesting enough fellow, all cats digging him, and if you ever play a campaign based on the planes, particularly Planescape, I’d suggest throwing him in. I mean, why not, he’s the perfect neutral foil to either a good or evil party who could lead the characters on a wild quest of whimsy. It doesn’t even have to be based in his home plane of The Beastlands, just throw him in anywhere, having him show up in a tavern with a girl on each arm, or maybe on a fence playing with a mouse.

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Will Mars Needs Moms be one of the Biggest Box Office Bombs in History?

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

The New York Times is reporting that Mars Needs Moms, which opened on Friday, “is on track to become one of the biggest box-office flops ever.”

In the movie business, sometimes a flop is just a flop. Then there are misses so disastrous that they send signals to broad swaths of Hollywood. Mars Needs Moms is shaping up as the second type.

Walt Disney Studios spent an estimated $175 million to make and market Mars Needs Moms, which sold $6.9 million in tickets at North American theaters in its opening weekend. That grim result puts the 3-D animated adventure on track to become one of the biggest box-office bombs in movie history, on par with such washouts as The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Cutthroat Island and The Alamo.

Much of the blame for the film’s poor reception is being placed on high ticket prices, especially for Imax. While it costs between $8 and $9 to seat a child for a typical movie, ticket prices for 3-D screenings average around $13 — and $15.50 for the Imax version.

The film is based on the 2007 book Mars Needs Moms! by Berkeley Breathed, creator of Bloom County. It follows the adventures Milo, of a 9-year-old boy (voiced by Robot Chicken creator Seth Green) whose mother (Joan Cusack) is abducted by Martians.

The NYT predicts the impact on Disney “will be severe.” Disney has already closed down ImageMovers Digital, Robert Zemeckis’ animation division. Zemeckis, the Oscar-winning director who helmed Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, and The Polar Express, was a producer for Mars Needs Moms. His last film using the same motion-capture animation style, A Christmas Carol (2009) was also a disappointment for Disney, and now the studio has canceled his next planned feature, a 3D remake of Yellow Submarine.

I thought the trailer looked good, and Breathed’s book was terrific. My kids want to see Mars Needs Moms, so I guess I’ll discover firsthand if the film is enjoyable… but the odds aren’t promising.

First Teaser Trailer for Conan the Barbarian

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 John ONeill Comments 49 comments

The first trailer for the new 3D remake of Conan the Barbarian has been unleashed this week by Lionsgate.

The trailer is quite brief (one minute), and doesn’t show much beyond a lot of smoke, a few poorly nutritioned villains, a beautiful woman, and some goofy dialog on how to achieve contentment through slaying. That part reminded me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but with more swords and a better soundtrack.

The brief film description reads:

The tale of Conan the Cimmerian and his adventures across the continent of Hyboria on a quest to avenge the murder of his father and the slaughter of his village.

I don’t remember anything about his father in the original version. But as Howard Andrew Jones is constantly telling me, I probably need to read more Robert E. Howard.

The finished film will be released on August 11, 2011. It is directed by Marcus Nispel and stars Jason Momoa (Stargate: Atlantis) as Conan.

The film also stars Ron Perlman, Stephen Lang, and Rose McGowan, who’s preparing her own take on a Robert E. Howard character in the upcoming Red Sonja, also scheduled for release this year.

Howard Andrew Jones’ Plague of Shadows Now on Sale

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

Howard Andrew Jones’ second novel in two months officially goes on sale today:

The race is on to free Lord Stelan from the grip of a wasting curse, and only his old elven mercenary companion Elyana has the wisdom — and swordcraft — to solve the mystery of his tormentor and free her old friend before three days have passed and the illness takes its course. When the villain turns out to be another of their former companions, the elf sets out with a team of adventurers across the Revolution-wracked nation of Galt and the treacherous Five Kings Mountains to discover the key to Stelan’s salvation in a lost valley warped by weird magical energies and inhabited by terrible nightmare beasts. From Black Gate magazine’s managing editor Howard Andrew Jones comes a fantastic new adventure of swords and sorcery, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows is the third novel in the new line of Pathfinder Tales from Paizo. They are standalone tales set in the world of Golarion, home of the succesful Pathfinder role playing game; Plague of Shadows follows Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross and Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham.

You can order copies directly from Piazo, either individually or as part of their Pathfinder Tales subscription.