Black Gate – Page 1252 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Review of Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede

Monday, April 18, 2011 Isabel Pelech Comments 0 Comment

Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede
Tor Books (280 pages, hardcover, May 1991)

Mairelon the Magician is a little bit mystery, a little bit comedy, but mostly a mixture of alternate history and fantasy. It’s a light, fun sort of book; no world-altering plots or pitched battles, but a fair amount of sneaking around, spying, and working out who’s plotting what against whom. (It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the majority of the incidental characters are plotting something.)

I think it works better in concert with its sequel, Magician’s Ward, which adds a bit of romance to the already eclectic mix, but the first book is enjoyable on its own.

I really have only two reservations. First, I found the pacing of the climax to be slightly off, although this may be because I was looking at it with the wrong set of genre lenses; it may fit better into mystery than fantasy.

The second reservation is more of a warning than a complaint: if you’re American, do not watch British shows or movies, and know you have a hard time with dialect, avoid this book — or at least hunt down a period drama to watch first, just to get into the rhythm of the language. Otherwise the amount of thieves’ cant will make the story nearly unintelligible.

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A Round Robin of Witches: Black Gate Interviews the Creators of The Witches of Lublin

Monday, April 18, 2011 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 4 comments

bgwitches2 — Artist Ilene Winn-Lederer's "Witches" print.

I think I first heard about The Witches of Lublin on Facebook.

You know me, I’m a sucker; you put the word “witches” in the title and I’m on it. So I grabbed up my broomstick, and flew over to Ellen Kushner’s FB page where she’d posted the link about it, and I said, “This looks incredibly cool!” (Or something to that effect.) “A radio play! I love radio plays!”

And then, about five seconds later, I had a little present in my email’s Inbox.

“Because you beg so prettily,” Ellen wrote.

And there is was, the not-quite-final-draft of Witches of Lublin. I sat down and read it in a gulp.

You can read a fuller synopsis about The Witches of Lublin story here, at the super bedazzling website created for the radio play, but basically it is about a family of women klezmer musicians in Poland of the late 18th century. They’re poor, proud and trying to make their way by making music, even though it is considered immodest for females to play in public. When word of their talent spreads beyond the little ghetto where they live and reaches the Count’s ears, things start to get dangerous — and magical.

Klezmer band with women. From the Yale Strom archives.

Co-writer Yale Strom’s research uncovered the facts that there were women klezmer musicians, and that when klezmers would play for gentile nobility, their reward could sometimes be beatings, death or even kidnappings.

This history formed the springboard for this work of fiction by Strom, Schwartz and Kushner based on Jewish women’s lives in 18th Century Europe, klezmer music and feminist history, with a healthy dose of magical realism thrown in.

You can see how I might say, in the trembling wake of reading this: “Oh, Ellen, oh pretty please, DO let me interview you about Witches for Black Gate Magazine!”

To which Ellen replied, quintessentially and in so many words, “Here, kid. I’ll do you one better.”

All of a sudden, I was interviewing the entire team of The Witches of Lublin’s creators — playwrights, composer and director — in a sort of mad merry-go-round-robin of emails. Which I now present to you for your reading pleasure.

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Through Mordor to the Unreal City: A National Poetry Month Post

Monday, April 18, 2011 Mike Allen Comments 3 comments

Today, for a little while, I remove my monster mask (sort of) and don my Purple Hat of Poetry.

Over at my new homepage, I’ve been sharing some of my poetry stock in honor of National Poetry Month. I started with a poem of mine called “Phase Shift,” that’s half upside down, and recently paired with an awesome space vortex illustration.

Now, because I can, I’m taking a series of poems gathered in my 2008 collection The Journey to Kailash and I’m running them, with accompanying audio readings, one a day on my new WordPress blog until the end of the month.

The Enchantress of the Black Gate, on learning I was doing this, asked me to write a blog entry on Poetry and Fantasy.

“Wow, that’s an immense topic,” I replied.

“Write it about your own relationship to it,” she said.

Okay, that I can do.

True statement: I discovered poetry through heroic fantasy.

I had no idea at the time, of course, what a curious path this would lead me down.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.17 “My Heart Will Go On”

Monday, April 18, 2011 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 0 Comment

After a few weeks without Supernatural, I’ve been looking forward for the show to come back. There are a lot of dangling cliffhangers this season and I’m looking forward to seeing how they come together.

This episode contains a riff on the Final Destination theme, where events are conspiring to create elaborate death scenarios. The first death involves a man triggering a Rube Goldberg-like series of events that end in being decapitated by his garage door.

It turns out that there have been a string of bizarre deaths, several of them within the same families. This draws the attention of Sam and Dean, but it’s bigger than what they find. They find a piece of gold thread at each of the death scenes, but not really any other clues. Billy’s wife, Ellen, discovers that …

Yes, that’s right, Billy’s wife, Ellen. Her daughter, Jo, is out investigating a connected series of deaths in California. Now, for the reader and viewer who’s been following the show, this may seem startling for a number of reasons. Billy’s not married, for one, and Ellen and Jo are hunters who died last season.

Anyway, Billy’s wife, Ellen, discovers that the families of all of the victims came over to the U.S. at about the same time in 1912. In fact, they came over on the same ship … called the Titanic.

See where this is going?

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An Interview with Claude Lalumière, Part One

Sunday, April 17, 2011 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

Claude Lalumière‘s involvement with fantastika has taken many forms. He’s been a retailer, an editor of anthologies, and a critic. But lately he’s become best known for his fiction. Claude’s writing is most often a surreal and precise blending of fantasy, horror, science fiction, superhero adventure, and any other genre that seems handy and to the point. His first collection, Objects of Worship, was published by ChiZine Publications two years ago; now a new set of linked short stories, The Door to Lost Pages, is about to hit shelves.

I’ve known Claude for a long time, and was happy to take the opportunity of the publication of his new book to have an e-mail conversation with him about his writing, his past, and many other things. In this first part, he discusses his language, his time as a bookseller, his two books, and his ongoing web series Lost Myths, among many other things.

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Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Nightmare World

Sunday, April 17, 2011 Sue Granquist Comments 5 comments

I don’t know about you, but I never got a really clear look at horror comics as a kid, which may be why they still intrigue me to this day.

Back then, the acquisition of such contraband was generally via my older male cousins who were smart enough, even at that tender young age, to secret them inside the cover of The Archies. The comic would then be stashed between my mattress and box springs to be removed only after I had heard my parents go to bed. At this magic time, the comic would be quietly pulled out (don’t crinkle the pages too much, parents can hear that from the other side of the house) and read under a mound of stifling covers by the glow of a dimming flashlight.

The upshot of reading banned material was that I would scare myself silly and fall asleep clutching the flickering flashlight until the batteries went dead. It always seemed that the shadows cast under the covers and against the pages muted the comic book colors and make the icky stuff inside come to life.

Thus the reason horror comics were verboten.

Which, I suspect, is how I gained a lifelong addiction to horror comics and likely also the cause of ever-increasingly strong contact lenses as an adult.

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Andromeda Spaceways 50th and CSZ’s 1st

Saturday, April 16, 2011 Soyka Comments 1 comment

asim50_cover_229_317-220x304 In addition to having the coolest title for a genre fiction magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has reached its 50th issue milestone. To celebrate, the cover is a reprint of the illustration by Les Petersen for the magazine’s first issue. Stories by Debbie Cowens, Damien Walters Grintalis, Shona Husk, Barry Kirwan, Ian McHugh, Nicole R. Murphy, Dennis J. Pale, Anthony Panegyres, Mark Lee Pearson, Simon Petrie, Natasha Simonova, Robert P. Switzer and Mark D. West. Print and PDF subscriptions and single issue purchases are available here.

Meanwhile, The Cascadia Subduction Zone (named after the earthquake corridor in the Pacific Northwest that is home base for the publication) has launched its inaugural issue. While its editorial mission is to bring more attention to women writers, and is not a genre publication per se, the women on the masthead may be familiar to genre readers. Reviews editor Nisi Shawl is a James Triptree Jr. award winner, and features editor L. Timmel Duchamp has published short sf and is, along with arts editor Kath Wilham, a founder of Aqueduct Press. And the first issue features a poem by Ursula K. LeGuin, as well as reviews of Karen J. Fowler, M. Rickert, and Kathe Koja. There’s also a review of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMer.

Print and electronic editions and subscriptions are available at earth-shaking rates here. cascadia1_110x1531

Welcome to Bordertown: What Would Eilonwy Do?

Friday, April 15, 2011 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 10 comments

gnomes This morning on my walk to work, I spotted a man crossing a lawn. His arms were very full. Of garden gnomes.

You know, gnomes? With the blue coats and the red hats? The Rien Poortvliet kind?

“Morning!” I said.

“Morning,” he said. “I got a delivery. Gnome delivery.”

After we’d passed each other, and I’d spent a good while grinning, I thought to myself, “I know why that just happened. That happened because I started reading Welcome to Bordertown on the train today.”

(Hey! Heads up! If you follow the above link to the Bordertown website, then click through the fancy links there to Amazon to purchase any of the new books on that page, then Terri Windling’s Endicott Studio gets a small kick-back from Amazon.com. And all of that money is donated to a shelter for homeless kids. More info here.)

Now, I’m only half a story in — the first one. But half a story in means I’ve already read the two introductions, by Terri Windling and Holly Black respectively, and also the “Bordertown Basics” which is sort of like a mix of the Not for Tourists Guide to Chicago, and Wolfe and Gaiman’s wicked little chapbook, A Walking Tour of the Shambles. It includes a weekly advisory about gang movement, monster sightings, pickpockets and missing gargoyles.

This bit made me chortle:

“The Mock Avenue street association would like to apologize to everyone for fixing the church tower clock last week, which caused widespread confusion. It has now been restored to its usual wrong time.”

But let me back up a little. Reading the introductions, I started to get a strange feeling. Gene Wolfe described a poem once as giving him “that fairy tale feeling.” He may have been quoting someone famous, like Dunsany or something. He does that. This was like that feeling, but it was also another feeling mixed in. …

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Nat’l Poetry Month… In GOBLINLAND!!!

Friday, April 15, 2011 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 0 Comment

What? Another issue of Goblin Fruit is LIVE??? Aw, heck! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?

Okay, okay. All kidding aside. Yes – the Spring 2011 Issue is out!

And you know what? It’s special.

And you know why? Because I’m in this one it’s Goblin Fruit’s FIFTH ANNIVERSARY!!!

Hurray! Yippee! Three cheers!

They’re doing all sorts of cool things here. Wick and El-Mohtar have their usual, hilarious Note from the Editors, they have a PRIZE DRAWING, and their featured poet, Catherynne M. Valente has put up Act I of a four-act colossus, A Silver Splendour, a Flame, which she says will be, if she does it right, her “Cantos.”

Cat blogged about it yesterday:

This is a Persephone poem. It is a very long Persephone poem. It, in fact, will not complete for one year. The “acts” will come out on the solstices and equinoxes for the next year, as is appropriate for Our Girl. It is a sprawling thing, with much experimentation and madness. It is Persephone as a Vaudeville show. It is difficult and it is thorny and it is, I hope, beautiful. I hope you like it. I hope you’ll all read it, whatever you think about poetry, and Persephone, and girls scribbling verse. Give it a chance.

I started reading it yesterday, thinking just to peek — it is, after all, quite long — and then I fell in. Into a pool of my own slobber. I mean, I can’t even, AAAUUGGGHH!

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Fright: The Forgotten Dracula Comic

Friday, April 15, 2011 William Patrick Maynard Comments 3 comments

Most comic fans are aware that while the Marvel Age of Comics may have begun with the 1961 publication of the first issue of The Fantastic Four, the imprint actually began in 1939 when Timely Comics published the first issue of Marvel Comics with the Golden Age Human Torch on the cover. In the 1950’s, Timely Comics became Atlas Comics who continued to publish Cold War adventures of Timely’s Golden Age favorites as well as horror anthology titles and westerns. Far fewer comic fans recall that Atlas Comics was briefly revived in the mid-seventies as a rival to Marvel under the auspices of estranged family members of Marvel’s publisher and editor-in-chief. They stole Marvel talent and did their best to give the industry giant a real run for its money.

At the time, Marvel had taken advantage of the loosening of the Comics Code Authority and produced the award-winning horror title, The Tomb of Dracula. The dark look and tone of the book combined with the consistently strong scripting by Marv Wolfman and stunning art work by Gene Colan (inked by Tom Palmer) made the 70-issue run of the original series one of the biggest artistic and commercial success stories of the decade. While Marvel has never quite managed to bottle lightning with the title a second time, revivals are frequent while sales of reprints remain strong nearly forty years after the fact. While the book was busy collecting industry awards for the exceptional talent of its creators and the level of maturity they brought to the title, the newly-revived Atlas Comics prepared their answer in the form of the first and (as it turned out) only issue of Fright featuring The Son of Dracula in the spring of 1975.

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