Black Gate – Page 1285 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

William Michael Mott’s Pulp Winds

Monday, January 17, 2011 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 1 comment

Pulp Winds
William Michael Mott
Grave Distractions Publications (190 pp. $14.99)
Reviewed by Howard Andrew Jones

A couple of years ago I had the chance to read a cracking good heroic fiction story by William Michael Mott. I knew Mott was a Robert E. Howard fan and a pulp aficionado, but what I didn’t know was that his “Temple of the Salamander” would read like a head-on collision between some of the best features of the stories of Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. “Temple of the Salamander” was set in the dying days of Earth, on a vast, last plateau crossed by an amazing road that may well be intelligent and is certainly dangerous. Traveling this road is the warrior Tulruhk, who is different from the rest of his tribe in part because of his curiosity and in part because he’s capable of compassion, so rare in his world that it makes his occasional act of mercy look like a saintly visit. Tulruhk aids a dying scholar and is rewarded with a chance for membership in an exclusive order dedicated to exploration. Tulruhk’s quest to gain that membership fuels the action in two of his chronicled adventures.

Mott’s drafted three stories of Tulruhk and the last plateau, and they’re collected in Pulp Winds, an anthology of his original work that includes heroic poetry, some atmospheric horror that hearkens back to Lovecraft and Shaver without emulating their sometimes difficult prose, and what may be the only homage I’ve ever read to one of Robert E. Howard’s fight stories. If Howard had ever written a Costigan fight story with weird elements it would have sounded an awful lot like “Fisticuffs of the Damned.” I think the biggest surprises of the collection were two heroic stories featuring Jack the Giant Killer. When Mott first mentioned these in an e-mail I was skeptical, but there’s nothing light and airy about these, and I ended up enjoying them almost as much as the adventures of Tulruhk.

Pulp Winds won’t appeal to every reader — in Mott’s work the hero gets the girl and the monsters are there for the pummeling. Which isn’t to say that they’re predictable or that there are no surprises; it’s just that Mott proudly wears his love for pulpy story elements on his sleeve. Mott wants to serve up new adventures in the style of some of the best adventure writers from the golden days of the pulps, hence the title of his collection. If you’re like me and are sometimes in the mood for some monster bashing, sword-slinging, and damsel saving, Pulp Winds delivers in spades.

The Book of Modred: An Excerpt

Monday, January 17, 2011 Matthew David Surridge Comments 2 comments

Last November, I blogged about my participation in NaNoWriMo. The following is an excerpt from what I wrote that month, for those who’d like to see how it turned out. Editing is minimal, principally for spelling. Although the story’s from the middle of the book, it should be fairly self-explanatory. It’s the story of Modred at the court of King Arthur, a young Modred who does not yet know the secret of his father’s identity, much less what’s coming for both of them in the future. As the excerpt begins, Modred’s about eighteen, possessed of a magical sword called Naught, and accompanied by his squire, who also happens to be the King’s bard, a somewhat older man named Taliesin …

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Steampunk Thoughts: The Novels of Felix Gilman

Sunday, January 16, 2011 Matthew David Surridge Comments 4 comments

I want to write about the novels of Felix Gilman, who I believe is one of the strongest new novelists in fantasy fiction today. He’s written three books, Thunderer, Gears of the City, and The Half-Made World, all of them accomplished and powerful, fusing imaginative range with a compelling style and real insight into character and voice. I’ve written about Thunderer on my own blog, and was able to interview Gilman at the 2009 Worldcon. I’d like consider now all three of his novels, and what makes them work. Before trying to describe the virtues of these books in detail, though, I think I first need to write a bit about steampunk.

I need to write about the genre because it’s a form that seems to me to be intrinsic to Gilman’s work; or, put another way, I think Gilman’s work illustrates something of what’s remarkable about steampunk. To explain that, I need to explain steampunk, and what it means to me. As it happens, I’ve seen a couple of essays lately which criticise steampunk on various grounds, so I want to consider these objections as a way of defining exactly what steampunk means, and where I think Gilman’s work fits in with it.

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Feature Excerpt: Rich Horton’s “Back to the Future: Modern Reprints of Classic Fantasy”

Sunday, January 16, 2011 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Contributing Editor and SF historian Rich Horton’s article for Black Gate 14 was on modern reprints of the best in classic fantasy and science fiction:

Orion, via their imprints Millennium and later Gollancz, took a different tack in keeping important SF in print. The SF Masterworks series, beginning in 1999, undertook to reprint the very best science fiction novels of the past century or so… a couple of story collections slipped in, including most significantly (to my mind) The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith, the complete stories of one of the oddest and most intriguing SF writers ever. Other interesting works… include what may be Jack Vance’s best singleton novel, Emphyrio; M. John Harrison’s cynical take on Space Opera, The Centauri Device; Michael Moorock’s colorful and louche science fantasy, The Dancers at the End of Time (always my personal favorite among his works); one of the most significant works from Russia: Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; and the complete “Roderick” novels by John Sladek, brilliant satire from one of the field’s best and darkest satirists.

As we wrap up the Sneak Preview of the massive 14th issue of Black Gate we’ve posted a lengthy excerpt from Rich’s article, in which he covers titles from Baen Books, the SF and Fantasy Masterworks lines from Orion, the Science Fiction Book Club, Wildside Press, and NESFA Press.

Rich’s previous feature articles for us include “Fictional Losses: Neglected Stories From the SF Magazines,” (Black Gate 11) “The Big Little SF Magazines of the 1970s,” (BG 10) and “Building the Fantasy Canon: the Classic Anthologies of Genre Fantasy” (BG 2).

The complete “Back to the Future: Modern Reprints of Classic Fantasy” appears in Black Gate 14.

Charlene Brusso Reviews A Magic of Nightfall

Sunday, January 16, 2011 Bill Ward Comments 1 comment

A Magic of Nightfall
S.L. Farrell
DAW (656 pp, $7.99, March 2009 – March 2010 mass market edition)
Reviewed by Charlene Brusso

Fans of S.L. Farrell’s marvelous ability with character and world-building (check out the Cloudmage trilogy) will cheer at the arrival of the latest book in the Nessantico Cycle (sequel to A Magic of Twilight). Book two returns readers to the marvelous Renaissance style city of Nessantico, “the most famous, the most beautiful, the most powerful of her kind,” bustling with energy, ambition, magic (much of it unauthorized), and ever-rising intrigue. But this is a Nessantico 25 years after the events of Twilight, a shaky Nessantico and its powers-that-be set to tumble down the slippery slope that has been steadily growing steeper in the last few years.

Nessantico is the capital, both political and religious, of the Holdings, an immense and entrenched empire – immense, but half the size it used to be. To the east, rival nation-state Firenzcia is forming its own alliances with its neighbors. Likewise, the Concenzia Faith has undergone a schism. In Nessantico, the much-beloved Ana ca’Seranta still serves as the “real” Archigos, but rival Archigos Semini ca’Cellibrecca, a conservative religious hardliner, leads the faithful in Brezno in Firenzcia. Unlike Ana, Semini has no tolerance for heretics like the Numentodo, natural philosophers who’ve proven that magical ability has no link to religious faith.

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Hook ’em and Don’t Let Go

Saturday, January 15, 2011 Bradley Beaulieu Comments 4 comments

windsofkhalakovocover_sm Selling novel-length fiction is tough. Really tough. Anyone who’s been in it for any length of time can tell you how competitive it is, how quickly the rejections can stack up, how frustrating it can be to get someone to even look at your manuscript. If you’re like me, you’ve tried submitting dozens of query letters in hopes that someone will at least ask for a few pages of the work itself. I mean, that’s fair, right — to at least look at the stuff before you reject it?

Trouble is, agents and editors receive many, many more queries than they can possibly accept. It’s not uncommon to find agents receiving 75 queries or more per day. Can you imagine trying to read partials from all of them? Impossible.

This brings to light the importance of the query letter. It is your knock at the door, your two seconds to say what you want before the door is closed with you still on the outside. So let’s take a closer look at the letter, this introduction of yourself and your work. It usually has three main sections: an opening which contains a hook, a brief description of the work, and your credits. The focus of this article is that first little section, where your hook will lie.

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Short Fiction Review #33: Oxford American Future Issue

Saturday, January 15, 2011 Soyka Comments 0 Comment

Oxford American Issue 70 contemplates life in 2050 with 11 stories that share a pessimistic view of America’s future beset by natural and man-made disaster, human folly and avarice. In other words, just like it is today, only worse.

While dystopia has always been a fundamental science fictional trope (indeed, the one that has historically been most likely to gain literary credence, e.g., Brave New World and 1984), there was a time, particularly during the Golden Age of the 1930s to 1950s but still continuing on in counterpoint to the New Wave movement during the 1960s/1970s, when writers portrayed a future improved by technology, not devastated by it. Even the cyberpunks, despite their bleak industrial noir settings, arguably depicted technology as a “force for good” when their renegade heroes turn the technological tables to upend the corporate masters.

Part of the bleakness here might be because Oxford American terms itself “The Southern Magazine of Good Writing,” and the American South certainly has a collective consciousness of disasters dating back to the Civil War, but most recently with Katrina and the BP oil spill in the Gulf. “The Vicinity of the Sick” by M.O. Walsh depicts a Louisiana where people have to wear bio-hazard suits to go in the water; a woman dying of cancer is driven by her reluctant husband to a restricted biohazard in hope of escaping the soul-sapping hazards of technological illusions that pervade “normal” existence in Connie May Fowler’s “Do Not Enter the Memory”; and a strange pair from opposite socio-economic backgrounds try to survive (and discover some basic bond of humanity) in the Bayou following ecological and technological collapse in “Maroon” by Susan Straight. Along the same lines, in a non-fction piece, Kevin Brockmeier lists his “Ten Great Novels of the Apocolypse.”

In addition to ecological disaster, the stories share to varying degrees the usual suspects for end-of-the-world scenarios: the amoral corporate focus on the bottom-line and self-interest, the numbness of media and advertising that leads to unhealthful lifestyles, medical advances that keep people biologically alive in bodies long past expected mileage.

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New Treasures: Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40K: Horus Rising on Audio CD

Friday, January 14, 2011 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

I have a 3-hour commute to my job in Champaign, Illinois, and I exhausted the excellent Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s major works months ago. What’s a bored commuter to do?

Rejoice when the latest Black Library Audio CD arrives, that’s what. I thoroughly enjoyed Nick Kyme’s Thunder From Fenris — a tale of desperate battles against a zombie plague (and worse) on a frozen planet — last year, and have been looking forward to the next release. Nothing helps the miles (and miles) of cornfields of Illinois slip by like a fast-paced tale set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, lemme tell you.

As entertaining as it was, Fenris was only 70 minutes, and it fit on a single CD. This week’s mail brought the much more imposing Horus Rising: a 6-hour, 5 CD audio extravaganza adapting one of the central works in the Warhammer 40K canon – the tale of the epic betrayal of the immortal Emperor by his Warmaster, Horus:

It is the 31st millennium. Under the benevolent leadership of the Immortal Emperor, the Imperium of Man has stretched out across the galaxy. It is a golden age of discovery and conquest. But now, on the eve of victory, the Emperor leaves the front lines, entrusting the great crusade to his favourite son, Horus. Promoted to Warmaster, can the idealistic Horus carry out the Emperor’s grand plan, or will this promotion sow the seeds of heresy amongst his brothers? Horus Rising is the first chapter in the epic tale of the Horus Heresy, a galactic civil war that threatened to bring about the extinction of humanity.

Abridged from the best selling novel by Dan Abnett and read by award winning star of stage and screen Martyn Eliis, Horus Rising comes to life in this almost 6 hour reading.

Six hours! Just long enough to occupy me all the way to work, and back. Champaign, here I come!

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Two: “The Cry of the Nighthawk”

Friday, January 14, 2011 William Patrick Maynard Comments 0 Comment

“The Cry of the Nighthawk“ was the second installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story made its debut in Collier’s on December 26, 1914 and was later edited to comprise Chapters 4-6 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in 1916 in the UK by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Rohmer’s tale bears definite similarities to his first Fu-Manchu story, “The Zayat Kiss” (1912) in that the story opens with Dr. Petrie at work in his principal vocation caring for a patient called Forsyth who has turned up at his residence late that evening with a badly infected hand. Petrie, in true pulp fashion, fails to recognize that Forsyth is the spitting image of Nayland Smith with a moustache.
Finished with his patient, Petrie goes to his study to find Smith with the lights out staring frantically outside just as he had at the opening of “The Zayat Kiss.” Petrie joins him and they watch poor Forsyth walk to his doom under the elms. They hasten outside after hearing the cry of a nighthawk and retrieve Forsyth’s dead body with its mutilated face. Only then does Petrie realize that Forsyth is Smith’s doppelganger and the duo then deduce that the poor man shared the fate intended for Smith.

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Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

Thursday, January 13, 2011 Sue Granquist Comments 3 comments

The holidays are over and according to AccuWeather, approximately 70% of the United States has snow on the ground and for a whole lot of you, this may be just a rare enough occurrence that for the moment, you’re mildly amused. But trust me when I tell you the novelty of throwing it at each other, sliding down it, or for a select group of you, writing your name in it, is going to wear off. And that’s when the cabin fever sets in.

The reality is that 70% of otherwise (fairly) stable Americans are trapped like rats with family members, classmates or co-workers for another two months at minimum. We are all now horror-movie fodder, Steven King style, holed up without sunlight and fresh air; susceptible to maddeningly repetitive sounds like the British accent on that lizard in the insurance commercials, until the only remaining coherent thought is squishing him flat in your uninsured Hummer.

Or maybe that’s just me.

The point is, you’re in need of mind-diverting entertainment until the thaw comes; before you end up being the subject of an HBO special and some Dancing With the Stars contestant is playing you… badly.

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