Black Gate – Page 1289 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Review of Daemon World (Warhammer 40,000)

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 Bill Ward Comments 0 Comment

Daemon World
Ben Counter
BL Publishing (414 pp, $7.99, 2009 (originally published in 2003))
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The world of Warhammer 40,000 takes ‘dark’ to a whole new level, with a constellation of warring races in various shades of gray (for example, the ‘good guys’ of the Imperium have no qualms about eradicating entire planets within their own empire), a bleak, medieval gothic aesthetic oozing with fanaticism, intolerance, and cruelty, and an essentially hopeless outlook for humankind.

Indeed, the series tagline, “In the grim darkness of the future there is only war,” gets at the heart of the 40k setting, though it misses somewhat the undercurrent of black humor and parody that have been present in this universe since its inception. But the enormously popular world of the 41st millennium is more than just a space opera version of Warhammer Fantasy – despite its space elves and orks, Warhammer 40,000 is a unique and appealing setting that has been steadily accruing a history and a body of lore for over twenty years, all of which makes it much more complex and interesting than it may appear at first blush. It is a richly detailed, dark fantasy of the future that synthesizes everything from Paradise Lost to Star Wars, H.R. Geiger to H.P. Lovecraft, Dune to Starship Troopers.

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Art Evolution 19: RK Post

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 Scott Taylor Comments 3 comments

Art evolves, one generation of role-players leading into the next and each attaches it’s best memories to the artists that defined their games of choice. This ongoing series continues, but if you’ve missed previous entries they can be found here.

With the help of Wizards of the Coast I had my ‘Caldwell Lyssa’, and the weeks for the project were growing short. These final days became the most trying for me as artists started to hedge, deadlines were missed, and suddenly I faced the possibility that I might not get twenty artists when I was assured only months before that I’d have twenty-five.

Still, with every prick of a thorny dropout, there were those who provided a silver lining. Out there among the countless catalogues of incredible gaming work there were some artists who simply smiled and said ‘when do you need it’.

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Goblin Fruit: Winter 2011

Tuesday, January 18, 2011 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 0 Comment

Do you remember Amal El-Mohtar? Poet, writer, Black Gate blogger?

Well! As I may have mentioned once or twice, she and Jessica P. Wick (who turns back into a mermaid when you spray her with a hose) co-edit a ‘zine called Goblin Fruit, which publishes “poetry of the fantastical.”

And… THE WINTER ISSUE IS LIVE!!! It’s ALIVE, I tell you! With (O my leaping lords of the great down under), soul-salivating art by Melbourne’s Omi Fam!

If we go by the art alone, this issue would be like a wolf pelt stuffed with sentient diamonds, or a lantern carved from a human skull. But I know the names of some of the poets (Rose Lemberg of Stone Telling, Leah Bobet of Ideomancer, Mari Ness of the Oz Blog at Tor.com, Loreen Heneghan, Christopher W. Clark, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Michelle Muenzler, and Neile Graham), therefore the possibilities for this issue are as endless as a winter’s night.

Go check it out! If you dare.

We last covered Goblin Fruit in our three-part review of the magazine.

Howard Andrew Jones Reviews HeroScape

Tuesday, January 18, 2011 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 0 Comment

In 2004, I made my first trip to GenCon and was overwhelmed by the experience. I don’t remember much about the specific tables I visited, but I do remember coming across this new game, HeroScape, which applied a modular style to tactical war gaming – not just in the building of the army (which was usually modular in some sense), but in the design of the playing surface and terrain.

Just as Howard describes himself below, I was also the sort of person who always chose storytelling games over wargames. I had bought some Warhammer units, but had spent so much time painting them that I’d never actually gotten around to playing the game … and even if I had, the lack of terrain would have annoyed me.

With HeroScape, all of these elements came packaged together in a master set, and you could expand on the experience easily enough with various expansion packs. Six years later, Howard describes his experience with the current incarnation of the game.

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“And the Score at the Text Break Is…” My Favorite Soundtracks for Writing

Tuesday, January 18, 2011 Ryan Harvey Comments 11 comments

jerry-goldsmith-conducts I always write with music playing. That’s not much of an admission. A few writers prefer to work in silence, but most that I have talked to say that they need to have music in the background while they work at their keyboards or notebooks. Some writers like to listen with headphones on as an extra seal against the rest of the world, but I only do that if I’m working in a public environment. Otherwise, I let my massively stuffed iPod play through the huge speakers in my apartment to surround me with music as I work.

Just as every writer has a different method of writing, so does every writer have difference musical preferences for underscoring his or her work. But “underscore” is the key word, since I have discovered that film music is perhaps the number one choice for music to write by. One reason for this is that film scores usually lack lyrics (at least in English; Latin chanting is a standby, Ave Satani!) that can distract from the author’s own words. Film music, regardless of its style, also inherently has a dramatic feel that parallels how writers often think.

The situation is a bit different for me. I do listen to film scores while writing, but that’s because film music is my favorite form of music. I have listened to film scores more than any other type of music since high school, when I turned into an avid collector of soundtrack albums. My collection is now somewhere in the thousands, and ranges in obscurity from John Williams’s Star Wars scores to films nobody remembers except film score collectors (The Cassandra Crossing). The chronological scope of my collection is just as wide, from silent movie scores to films released a few weeks ago. Film music is one of my deep passions.

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Cloning Mammoths — Will Neanderthals be Next? (We hope so)

Monday, January 17, 2011 John ONeill Comments 16 comments

CNN is reporting that a team of Japanese, Russian and American scientists are attempting to clone a mammoth, an extinct beast from the ice age. Apparently, they’ve achieved recent breakthroughs by combining the genetic code of an elephant with the DNA of a shag carpet. The researchers hope to produce their little cloned bundle of joy within six years, which is just about as long as it took my wife Alice and I to produce a baby (if you count the three years it took to convince her to go out with me).

Mammoths are big. Big big big. Hence, the name “mammoth.” The word comes from the Russian mamont, meaning “humongous,” or something like that. Probably. Anyway, Wikipedia reports the largest known species reached heights of 16 feet at the shoulder, and may have exceeded 12 tons. That’s four times as much as my Uncle Phil’s Hummer. Wherever they’re doing the cloning, I hope it has vaulted ceilings. And maybe a fenced yard, so the little tyke can go outside to do his business.

Incredibly, Wikipedia also reports an 11-foot long mammoth tusk was discovered north of Lincoln, Illinois in 2005, about three hours from where I live. Can you get enough DNA to clone something from a tusk? [Hey Alice — road trip!!]

Contrary to everything I learned in eighth grade, mammoths are not dinosaurs. They’re giant gorilla elephants. They’re also mammals, like that other famous extinct not-a-dinosaur, the saber-tooth tiger. Scientists have chosen to clone the mammoth first, rather than the saber-tooth tiger or the Tyrannosaurus Rex, because they’re unimaginative losers.

As every well-read science fiction fan knows, cloning mammoths is just the first step on the slippery slope towards cloning people, cloning cats, Clone Wars, and the inevitable zombie apocalypse. I hope that in the interim, we get around to cloning Neanderthals. Because let’s face it — that’s what cloning is for.

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.