This Page is Half Empty: The Five Horsemen of Literary Apocalypse

This Page is Half Empty: The Five Horsemen of Literary Apocalypse

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428px-durer_revelation_four_riders1Right now, as I type this — and as you read it — I’ve got a new manuscript half done. For a writer, this is sort of like me saying that at this very moment I’m not wearing anything under all of my clothing. Well, duh, most people are thinking, while trying to not involuntarily imagine me naked. For writers, the thought continues, there’s always the current project.

The process of forging the first draft is much like any other relationship between the mind and the will. Romance, for instance. There’s the initial flare of interest, the slower “getting to know you” stage, and a much longer “I know you, now” period. These are all easy to navigate, because they are exciting and interesting. They are effortless, and writers know the feeling of a Work-In-Progress crush.

But this infatuation period cannot last. While in it, there’s always the potential that your feelings are mercurial, diaphanous dream-fluff that make no sense when you try to go deeper. To your shock, you realize that perhaps your burning love isn’t the stuff of ages, but mere puppy love. Your ardor has brought you no glamour, but instead made those around you somewhat uncomfortable, hoping, for your sake, that it will all end soon without you getting hurt too badly.

Am I just a puppy-lover? you find yourself asking.

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On NPR: Howard Andrew Jones on Pulp Fiction

On NPR: Howard Andrew Jones on Pulp Fiction

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pulp-cover---planet-stories-summer-1946-lorelei-of-the-red-mists-1Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones had his turn in the national spotlight last week, with a feature article on National Public Radio’s website titled Rich Tales In Cheap Print: Three Pulp Fiction Finds.

Howard used his fifteen minutes of fame to shine a spotlight on neglected pulp masters:

The pulps have a well-earned reputation for purple prose, but there was gold among the dross.

Fine adventure stories from other genres were printed in pulps like Adventure, Weird Tales and Planet Stories, but unfortunately, many of these authors remain neglected or marginalized. Today’s readers might expect to find nothing but legions of square-jawed heroes, wilting damsels and tentacled monsters in the old magazines, but there were also skilled, inventive writers plying their trade, evoking thrills and chills without formulaic plotting.

Howard calls out three modern reprints of some of the very best fantasy from the pulp era, returned to print by publishers who have worked hard to preserve pulp fiction and present it to a modern audience:

  1. Lorelei Of The Red Mist, Leigh Brackett (Haffner Press)
  2. Who Fears The Devil, Manly Wade Wellman (Paizo Publishing)
  3. The Best Of Robert E. Howard Volume 2: Grim Lands, Robert E. Howard (Del Rey)

All these publishers deserve your support — and you deserve to read these stories. As Howard says in his final line, “Some of the tales are dark, many are brooding, but though they be decades old, each beguiles with a siren call to strange lands to witness heroic deeds.”

Read the complete article here.

A Review of The Sorcerer’s Plague

A Review of The Sorcerer’s Plague

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the-sorcerers-plague-coeThe Sorcerers’ Plague
David B. Coe
Tor (496 pages, $7.99, February 2009 (originally December 2007))
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The Sorcerer’s Plague from David B. Coe is the first book in a planned trilogy entitled The Blood of the Southlands, which takes place in a different section of a world already established in Coe’s previous series, The Winds of the Forelands. While some characters and basic information is carried over from Coe’s previous series, familiarity with these elements is not necessary to the enjoyment of The Sorcerer’s Plague.

The Southlands are divided along racial and clan lines, and much of the back-story of this book goes into describing the various divisions and antagonisms between its competing peoples. No love is lost between the Qirsi, white-haired and pale-eyed sorcerers, and the Eandi, dark-haired people incapable of magic. Between these two racial groups are the Mettai and the Y’Qatt, people that inhabit the Companion Lakes Region in which most of the book’s action takes place. These two groups blur the distinction between the races as the Y’Qatt are Qirsi who refuse, for religious reasons, to use any magic, and the Mettai are Eandi who are actually powerful magicians — only the Mettai use earth and blood magic rather than the Qirsi’s channeling of their life essence for purposes of sorcery. The competing abilities and philosophies of these groups are fertile ground for the plot.

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Art of the Genre: The DM Screen

Art of the Genre: The DM Screen

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When it comes to RPG art, there’re certainly a good number of pieces that will stick out in player’s minds for any number of reasons. Some of us remember images we based characters off of, some fell in love with representations of beautiful women, and others used specific books so much that the cover images turned into old friends.

The beginning of everything great in a gamer's life
The beginning of everything great in a gamer's life

Still, I believe that there is one particular set of RPG images that wedge themselves heavily in the mind of ALL gamers, and those are found on the reverse side of DM Screens. I don’t care what generation or edition of the game you’ve played, as a player you’ve spent countless hours staring at the art on those screens.

Truly, even if you’re not an ‘art guy,’ you’ve managed to study details in the images on those screens you’d never have noticed otherwise. The characters depicted are memories burned into your subconscious like a kind of Pavlovian conditioning, even a glance at those images giving rise to the urge to game no matter how many years you’ve been away from the table.

I started playing D&D Basic, which of course had no screens, but when I met my oldest gaming friend, Mark, I was introduced to a DM’s screen for the first time and the rest is history.

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Vincent N. Darlage reviews Age of Cthulhu: Death in Luxor

Vincent N. Darlage reviews Age of Cthulhu: Death in Luxor

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gmg7001coverlargeIf you’re in the mood for some good horror encounters with the dark forces of the Great Old Ones, then the new Age of Cthulhu line from Goodman Games may be of interest.  Vincent Darlage reviewed the first installment in this set of game modules. (Links to other Cthulhu resources at the bottom of this post.)

Age of Cthulhu: Death in Luxor

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games (48 pp. Softcover, $12.99)
Reviewed by Vincent N. Darlage

This time, intrepid investigators are on the hunt for things man was not meant to know in Egypt, rather than Arkham or Dunwich – a nice change, so far as I’m concerned. A Lovecraftian horror is locked beneath Luxor in Egypt, and is unleashed, bringing with it a new era of darkness that will blast all of mankind, unless the intrepid player characters can stop it. The adventure is heavily focused on investigation, not on combat, which was nice to see.

The finding of the clues and the free-form nature worked well for me; Luxor doesn’t seem to railroad the players much, if at all. I especially liked the investigation summary on page four. The summary goes through each scene and lays out in a few sentences what is revealed and where it leads. For a free-form adventure, this is essential as it details which scenes have which clues. More adventures need to do things like this. …

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Adventures Fantastic Salutes Bud Webster and Tom Reamy

Adventures Fantastic Salutes Bud Webster and Tom Reamy

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san-diego-lightfoot1We’re receiving reports as Black Gate 15 arrives in mailboxes around the globe. We’ll update you here as we collect feedback and reviews on the issue and its contents.

One of the first to check in was Keith West at Adventures Fantastic, who has written an open letter to Bud Webster in response to Bud’s column on Tom Reamy, the acclaimed fan and short story writer who died in 1977:

Dear Bud,

I wanted to let you know how much I appreciated your profiling Tom Reamy in your inaugural installment of “Who?!” in the new issue of Black Gate. I’ve enjoyed your “Past Masters” columns for years. You have a tendency to profile most of my favorite writers from my teenage years. I assume you know which ones to pick because you have exemplary taste. I was especially pleased that you chose Tom Reamy. He is an author who is sadly neglected, and I wish someone would bring him back into print in an archival edition…

Somewhere, and I don’t recall where, I found a hardcover of San Diego Lightfoot Sue. At the time I was (and still am) an aspiring writer with a fondness for short fiction… In his Afterward, Howard Waldrop writes about the gas station the Reamys operated on the highway between Breckenridge and Woodson. As soon as I read about it, I knew exactly the gas station Howard was talking about. It sat in a curve in the road just inside the county line.

The gas station is gone now, but the house is still standing. That’s it in the photo on the right. I’d read on the Black Gate blog that you were going to write about Tom and I took the picture when I was visiting my parents in Breckenridge last Christmas.

Job well done, Keith. A nice piece of investigative reporting. Thanks for the touching tribute of your own. Hope you enjoy the rest of the issue as much as Bud’s column.

You can see Keith’s complete letter (and photos) here.

A Review of City of Bones by Martha Wells

A Review of City of Bones by Martha Wells

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city-of-bonesCity of Bones by Martha Wells
Tor Books (383 pages, hardcover, June 1995)

It’s always fun to find a fantasy book that isn’t based on medieval Europe. City of Bones, by Martha Wells, is advertised as a story which draws on the Arabian Nights, and it does not have genies and magic lamps, but certainly brave thieves and dangerous deserts. It also contains a little bit of steampunk and a post-apocalyptic element.

Our hero Khat is a relic dealer, which is to say, a shady and unlicensed archeologist-for-profit. It seems that long ago, the world was wetter and cooler and more hospitable, and artifacts from that time have great value — not to mention, very occasionally, magic powers. Now, most of the world is covered by a rocky desert called the Waste. Khat is a krisman, a hardy marsupial humanoid who is well-adapted to the Waste, but reviled in most cities. Charisat, where he lives, may be one of the richest trading cities in the world, but it’s a cruel and hierarchical place.

Khat and most of the people he knows are noncitizens, and they take it for granted that they have very few rights. They aren’t even permitted to use “real” money, just tokens that serve the same purpose. Khat and his associates are very careful never to speak of buying artifacts; they barter for them. Even using the word “buying” could bring the Trade Inspectors down on them, and if the Trade Inspectors take them away, they won’t be coming back.

This tension between the powerful and the powerless is one of the driving forces of the story. When Khat is hired by a Patrician to help explore a nearby ruin, he takes it as read that he’ll probably be betrayed. It only becomes worse when he realizes that the Patrician is actually a Warder, a law enforcer who uses sanity-destroying magic. Khat becomes more and more involved in events, but he never entirely trusts any of his companions, even fellow relic dealer Sagai, his long-time partner. His paranoia is at least partly justified.

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The Meta-Reality of Fandom

The Meta-Reality of Fandom

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Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!
Did I say I was an unapologetic geek? My wife, Amber, offered our son to a dragon at GenCon!

I’m an unapologetic geek. I don’t just watch genre shows and read genre books, I immerse myself in them. The ones that stay with me, that I actually decide to devote myself to, linger with me, becoming part of the fabric of my internal world, the thought processes that help me deal with the mundane levels of reality. I analyze these cultural components, trying to pick them apart to figure out why the events unfolded the way they did and, more importantly, what I can learn from it. (For an example, consider how I found an excuse to talk about Thor on my Physics blog, using the film as a lesson in how to be a good scientist.)

Black Gate is also dedicated toward this sort of exploration, publishing not just fantasy fiction but also thoughtful commentary on the genre, in both the magazine and also on this blog. (At this point, I feel the need to point out Aaron Starr’s recent excellent post “The Gods Never Urinate,” which is an exceptional case of this.) Even on our Twitter feed, @BlackGateDotCom, we try to share as much of this sort of material as we can.

But let’s really think about what’s going on here. The genre of science fiction and fantasy, more than any other, reflect upon the fundamental nature of reality. They can do this literally, metaphorically, or (when at its best) in complex combinations of the two. So you have reality, and then you have the genre literature which is reflecting upon that reality.

And the truly motivated fans don’t just read the literature. Remember, the word “fan” comes from “fanatic.” If you don’t obsess at least a little bit, you aren’t a fan, you’re just someone who likes the show or the book. Fans go a step further, and we reflect upon the genre. We reflect in our own minds, and through the written word, both online and in print, in podcasts and vidcasts, and in person at gaming stores, comic shops, bookstores, conventions … or, let’s be honest, any time more than two of us are in contact with each other. The depth of the analysis can vary widely, of course, but that reflection on the genre is the defining trait of fandom.

Fandom is the process of reflecting upon the reflection of reality. …

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The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part Two

The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part Two

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The Two TowersThis is the second of three posts prompted by a recent re-reading of The Lord of the Rings. As I said in the first post, I went back to the book with the general idea of approaching it as one would a medieval saga, rather than a contemporary novel, and seeing what struck me as a result. I wrote in that post about what it seemed to suggest to me about Tolkien’s sense of character, and next week I intend to write about his use of irony — or, if you prefer, an anti-irony that shows how good can emerge out of apparent evil.

But this week I want to consider the aspect of the work which is perhaps the least saga-like thing in it, and something which has been criticised even by readers who have generally liked the book. And that is Tolkien’s depiction of landscape, and his approach to the natural world. Specifically, his tendency to describe his settings in detail.

I should say firstly that I am not one of the readers who dislikes the detail of the book. I generally prefer long books; I think the tendency to brevity is natural for stage and film dramas, but I’m not convinced it’s either natural or desirable in prose narratives like the novel or the romance. That is, the short story obviously has to be brief, and you can get certain effects from stories of certain lengths. But when you’re talking about a novel-length work, I think there are many approaches one can take; and I think that sometimes the best books are made out of digressions and an author exploring obsessions at the risk of apparent narrative shapelessness.

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