Black Gate – Page 1239 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

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.

Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Excalibur on Blu-ray

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Ryan Harvey Comments 7 comments

Excalibur (1981)
Directed by John Boorman. Starring Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi, Paul Geoffrey, Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne.

One land! One king! 1080 lines of resolution!

Did you know that there is a re-make of Excalibur is in pre-production? Apparently, the lawyers at Legendary Pictures have forgotten that Le Morte d’Arthur and its associated characters are in the public domain and have been since the bleeding Dark Ages. No more about the re-make (for now).

The original, Once and Future Excalibur, is a crowning piece of high fantasy from the 1980s. It is also my favorite film version of the Arthurian legends. (Apologies to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Most movies about King Arthur, especially those before Excalibur upped the ante, are tatty costume dramas lacking magic, either cinematic or literal, and which feel like they were adapted from children’s editions of the story. (Apologies to Howard Pyle.) None of these movies connect to the sensations that the original telling of the legends, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, to Chrétein de Troyes, to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, create in me when I read them. A sense of dark mysticism pervades through the oldest versions of King Arthur’s myth: a mixture of paganism and early Christianity, a connection to Faerie, the eternal struggle between chaos and civilization. Excalibur, ignoring attempts to either look “realistic” or to resemble the generic expectation of a Hollywood costume drama, drives into the spiritual heart of King Arthur and emerges with something fantastic and often breathtaking.

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Weird Tales 357 Arrives

Monday, March 14, 2011 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

The office copy of Weird Tales arrived today, and it looks great. Howard Andrew Jones immediately challenged me to rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock for the right to take it home, and then had the poor grace to win the best two-out-of-three rematch. Bonehead.

Before it passed out of my grasping hands forever, I did notice that this issue has six new short stories, from N.K. Jemisin, Karen Heuler, J. Robert Lennon, Karin Tidbeck, Peter M. Ball, and Mark Meredith, and poems by Kurt Newton and Seth Lawhorn.

Matthew Kressel contributes a non-fiction piece on real-life weird tales, Geoffrey H. Goodwin interviews Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Contributing Editor Kenneth Hite reports on Lovecraft’s fascination with the town of Kingsport in “Lost in Lovecraft.”

Rounding out the issue are four pages of book reviews and an editorial by Ann VanderMeer, in which she reports on staff changes at the magazine, including the resignation of Stephen Segal, who left for an editorial position at Quirk Books. Ann has now become Editor-in-Chief, and continues to serve as fiction editor, and Mary Robinette Kowal and Paula Guran have joined the staff, as Art Director and Non-Fiction Editor, respectively.

We last reported on Weird Tales with issue 356 in November. Good to see the magazine stick to a regular quarterly schedule, just as promised.

Cover price for the issue is $6.99. It is 80 pages; the gorgeous cover is by Lee Moyer. Their website is here.

Steven Erikson finally gets a Bestseller with The Crippled God

Monday, March 14, 2011 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Justin Golenbock, publicist at Tor, tells us that Steven Erikson’s The Crippled God, the last book of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, will debut at #12 on the print bestseller list in the March 20 edition of The New York Times. It’s only the second time for Erikson — last year his previous novel barely made the list.

As Justin puts it:

Steven’s first novel, Gardens of the Moon, came out in 1999 to much fanfare…and flopped. We spent the next ten years and eight novels telling everybody and anybody who would listen that this was THE fantasy series to be reading, the best that no one knew about. The depth and breadth of its world, characters and cultures, its heartbreaking yet addictive story, and the level of pathos and philosophy embedded into every narrative layer is staggering. Erikson’s core fans knew; so many of our top-selling authors kept telling us, he’s the guy who deserves it more; yet it was on us to convince everyone else.

Then last fall, Steven’s ninth novel, Dust of Dreams, finally squeaked its way onto the NYT extended bestseller list, claiming the last spot at #35… and it was just this afternoon that we learned that the tenth and final novel in his Magnus opus will get the due he so richly deserves.

During his 2008 book tour Steven confirmed that he had signed to write six more Malazan novels; two trilogies, one of which would be a prequel to the main series, detailing the history of Anomander Rake and Mother Dark. He also plans six additional Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas, set in the same world.

Congratulations to Steven Erikson, Justin Golenboc, and Tor books on a job well done!

London Calling: The Iron Heel and the Literature of Ideas

Sunday, March 13, 2011 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

The Iron Heel Last week I discussed Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as an example of a true literature of ideas: a work structured not as a traditional narrative, with plot and character development as we know them, but instead built around the ideas that the work’s presenting, so that the book’s material is defined not by narrative but by the ideas at the core of its theme. As it happens, I recently stumbled across another example of this sort of thing.

Published in 1907, Jack London’s The Iron Heel is an imaginative account of North America sliding into a totalitarian society. London, a socialist, wrote the book as a cautionary tale about the oligarchs of his era. It’s an odd thing, mixing journalism and (what we now call) dystopic science fiction with economic hectoring. It’s slow going, particularly in the first half, but the climax is exciting adventure writing. You can see why it didn’t catch on, but it’s still worth looking at.

(You can read the book here, here, or over here, or listen to an audio version over here. I note there was recently a piece about the book on Daily Kos; you can find that here.)

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Fantasy Magazine Issue 48 Arrives — Including George R. R. Martin, Tanith Lee and Holly Black

Sunday, March 13, 2011 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

The March 2011 issue (#48) of the excellent Fantasy magazine is now online.

This issue includes original fiction from George R. R. Martin, Tanith Lee, Holly Black, and Genevieve Valentine. It is the first issue assembled by the new editor, John Joseph Adams.

Nonfiction includes author spotlights, and the articles “Three Real Historical Figures Who Embarked Upon the Hero’s Journey,” by Graeme McMillan, “Five Fantasy Worlds That You Wouldn’t Want to Visit,” by Te Jefferson & J. Corbeau, “From Story to Screen,” by LaShawn Wanak, and an interview with Steven Erikson, conducted by Andrew Bayer.

Each week in March one story and one nonfiction article is posted free online. So far they’ve posted an editorial by John Joseph Adams, and the HTML and podcast version of Genevieve Valentine’s “The Sandal-Bride.”

You can buy the complete issue at any time for just $2.99 USD, or subscribe via Weightless Books. The complete Table of Contents is here.

The cover is by Scott Grimando. David Soyka reviewed Fantasy #2 for us back in 2008.

We Live In Small Worlds

Sunday, March 13, 2011 J M McDermott Comments 1 comment

neverknew Traveling around the world in eighty days is not only quite possible, but a leisurely journey. One could, on this trip, stop to smell the roses, perhaps do a little sight-seeing on an island or two, and pursue adventure in remote locations. Really, if one were pressed for time, anyone with a passport and a few plane tickets could circumnavigate the globe in about a week or two, depending on the flight paths of the planes.

Before planes, trains, and automobiles, I wonder at the size of the world. I think of all things not as objects divorced from the shifting perspectives of humanity, singular and solid and weighty, but as objects that are shaped primarily and inextricably from the experience of the object. To me, the moon is a slip of paper always out of reach until the day an astronaut landed upon it, becoming soil and sizable stone. To me, the woods and the wild places of the world are forever out of reach, an imaginary landscape where alien life forms like bears and monkeys inhabit the world according to my television screen, where men with cyclopean-eyed tentacles of cameras and wires carry our hyperreal lens into the forested hills beyond the suburbs.

My apartment, down to its tiniest detail, is in many ways a larger space, to me, than all of the Himalayas. What I experience and what I feel, are my life, and the objects and places that are physically present in that life are the ones that are larger to me than ones in the distant horizon, imagined and mythical in its telling, but not really impactful to me in a tangible way. I live in a world that’s defined by how far I can travel in about half a day. My parents’ house is about half a day away by car and plane. My sister’s house, as well. My fiancée lives about forty minutes by car, and together we explore the landmarks and points of interest between us. This is my whole world.

The point of all this is to say that in writing a world, the experience of that world is tied not to the size and shape of stones, hills, but to the experience of them.

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Monstrous Post on Monsters II: Full Sequence

Sunday, March 13, 2011 Mike Allen Comments 15 comments

When I first crawled to the surface to whisper of monsters in your ears — before pinching off those delectable auricles with my first layer of incisors — I said I’d be back in a month with a lowdown on the greatest monsters from the pages of heroic fantasy, maybe even with a Top 10.

Sure, three of your months have passed, but why would a creature of the abyss even give a damn about human timetables? As for a Top 10 — well, to be clear, I regard your arithmetic and integers in equal contempt. In truth there are only two ways in which you matter: either when you’re sustenance (i.e. lunch) or making a complete troublesome nuisance out of yourselves with your flaming swords, silver bullet-shooting AK-47s and your brandishings of various items of religious iconography for the sake of the futile postponement of your inevitable fate (as lunch).

As evidence of the innate inferiority of your puny mortal selves, I proffer the fact that your responses to my request to name the titans in the pantheon of monsters were, as your kind says, all over the map. I hypothesized that beyond Grendel and Tolkien the monsters that populate heroic fantasy haven’t been so shiver-some, and indeed most of you extended trembling hands into other subgenres to draw out the denizens that frighten you most. (With one major exception, which I will explain in detail when I’m good and ready.)

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Preview of THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR

Saturday, March 12, 2011 John R. Fultz Comments 1 comment

the-white-luck-warrior-3 It won’t be long now…

R. Scott Bakker’s THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR hits stores on April 14, and I for one am extremely excited.

Bakker fans have been waiting for this since Feb 2009, when THE JUDGING EYE was published as the first volume of THE ASPECT-EMPEROR series. This new series is itself a sequel to Bakker’s amazing PRINCE OF NOTHING trilogy. Same world, many of the same characters, and a whole lot of epic fantasy excellence. It is a thinking man’s adventure, a cerebral approach to high fantasy, and a journey into metaphysical realms of sorcery and spirituality.

A preview of THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR has been posted right here at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist: http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2011/03/exclusive-extract-from-r-scott-bakkers.html

Bakker is one of the most original fantastists to come along in quite awhile, and his stylistic prose is amazing in its clarity, attention to detail, and sheer philosophical scope. Here’s a description of the new book:

As Anasûrimbor Kellhus and his Great Ordeal march ever farther into the perilous wastes of the Ancient North, Esmenet finds herself at war with not only the Gods, but her own family as well. Achamian, meanwhile, leads his own ragtag expedition to the legendary ruins of Sauglish, and to a truth he can scarce survive, let alone comprehend. Into this tumult walks the White-Luck Warrior, assassin and messiah both, executing a mission as old as the World’s making ….

The White-Luck Warrior is a story filled with heart-stopping action, devious treachery, grand passion and meticulous detail. It is both a classic quest tale and a high fantasy war story.

As soon as I finish Howard Jones’ THE DESERT OF SOULS, I am all over this! A new Bakker book is always cause for celebration. With these two novels and the impending release of the long-awaited A DANCE WITH DRAGONS from George R. R. Martin, this is one great year for epic fantasy…

Peace!
John