Beneath Ceaseless Skies Celebrates Two Years

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Celebrates Two Years

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bcs1The relentless Beneath Ceaseless Skies published their 52nd issue last week (Sept. 23, 2010).

I continue to be amazed at this magazine. Issues appear online every two weeks like clockwork — and if you do the math, issue 52 issue marks exactly two years since they published their first, back in early October 2008. 

Each issue contains two original works of literary adventure fantasy, and the magazine’s artwork and production values remain top-notch.  Over the past two years Editor-in-Chief Scott H. Andrews and Assistant Editor Kate Marshall have earned a stellar reputation for discovering and promoting new talent, and stories published in BCS have received acclaim from Locus, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, and various Best of the Year anthologies, among many others.

If you’re a regular reader of Black Gate, many of the authors appearing in BCS will be familiar to you — including Matthew David Surridge, Renee Stern, Holly Phillips, and Richard Parks. They’ve also published Brian Dolton, Chris Willrich, Catherine Mintz, Marie Brennan, Vylar Kaftan, Yoon Ha Lee, Saladin Ahmed, and many others.

Issue 52 includes “The Guilt Child” by Margaret Ronald, and “Invitation of the Queen” by Therese Arkenberg. Over at Torque Control, there’s a spirited discussion — and plenty of praise — for Margaret Ronald’s earlier “A Serpent in the Gears” (BCS #34), set in the same world as “The Guilt Child.” Cover art this issue is by Andreas Rocha.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is completely free, but they appreciate your support, and they’re well worth it. Their latest issue is here. Drop by and check them out.

Return of the Monster…

Return of the Monster…

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NOTE: Regular readers of this blog will notice I’ve been somewhat absent of late…the reasons for this are several, mainly the fact that I’m working to finish the revisions on a new novel. But tonight I’m so excited that I just had to share this post from my personal blog with my Black Gate pals…

Cover art for the new Monster Magnet album "Mastermind", coming to planet earth on Oct. 25. The BullGod is the band's space-rock mascot.

Oh, my brothers and sisters. There comes a time when all the Rock Dreams and Psychedelic Fantasies of your life emerge and blend with a shifting reality paradigm that manifests something truly Great and Special. There is a time when the Cosmos opens its starry mouth and smiles at us, spitting glorious glowing meteors through transistorized frequencies. There comes a time when the Sonic Threshold dilates and gives birth to a continuum of swirling planetoids and the Music of the Spheres resonates like colliding asteroids to thunder in the chambers of the mind with the pulsing of rogue supernovae…and we must open our ears and let the Big Beautiful Universe spill into our consciousness on waves of Almighty Sound…

That time has come around again…the time of a brand-new album release from the gods of psychedelic space-rock, the great and powerful MONSTER MAGNET. In an age of declawed radio, corporate-manufactured psuedo-rock, and the celebration of mediocrity that is mainstream music, the MONSTER rises once more from its crucible of dead stars to light up the cosmos with a new dose of sonic fury.

The new album is called MASTERMIND. The first single is “Gods and Punks”, and the video tells a lurid tale of a down-and-out supervillain roaming the back alleys of Los Angeles trying to recapture his lost glory.

Check it out right here.

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Max Headroom Re-re-returns

Max Headroom Re-re-returns

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downloadedfile1If you don’t understand the headline, you’re probably too young to remember Max Headroom, originally a British television movie that became a short-lived series for American broadcast (1987-1988) featuring a computer generated talking head–that would be Max–who later became a music video host, a “spokesperson” for New Coke (and if you don’t know what New Coke was, you’re really too young to care about this), and later brought out of retirement in the United Kingdom to explain the switch from analog to digital TV (this, you might remember). Though, today, any 12 year old with a cheap laptop could probably program a character like Max, back in the 1980s this was beyond the technical reach and budget constraints of broadcast television; Max was played by Canadian actor Matt Frewer outfitted in a latex get-up to make him appear pixalated.

I was excited to learn that the series had recently been released for the first time on DVD: I vaguely remembered the program from its initial broadcast (because, yeah, I’m that old) and was eager to revisit something I remember as being very cool.

Alas, as Tom Wolfe used to say, you can’t go home again.

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Blogging Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON, Part Four: “Caverns of Mongo”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON, Part Four: “Caverns of Mongo”

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caverns-mongo

 “Caverns of Mongo” was the fourth installment of Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between March 3 and April 14, 1935, “Caverns of Mongo” picked up the storyline where the third installment, “Tournaments of Mongo” left off with Emperor Ming having made Flash a royal King of Mongo and awarded him and Dale the savage uncharted cave kingdom of Kira to rule.caverns_mongo_book1

Flash and Dale are accompanied on their journey by Captain Khan and a squad of loyal Hawkmen who were ordered by Vultan to aid them. The kingdom of Kira is wonderfully prehistoric peopled with Neanderthal-like cliff-men, winged dactyl-bats, carnivorous plants, and a man-eating sauropod. This may be standard lost world fare, but with the introduction of the cannibalistic lizard-men as the true villain of the piece, there is no mistaking the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

While Jules Verne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had popularized the concept of lost prehistoric lands that survived to the modern age, it was Burroughs who perfected the mixture of lost world and pseudo-science in both his Caspak and Pellucidar series. The latter in particular are the strongest influence on Alex Raymond here with the lizard-men portrayed as not only the more advanced culture, but a decidedly evil one. The scene where Flash (rendered unconscious in the lizard-men’s ambush) is taken to their lair and prepared as the tribe’s meal is particularly chilling.

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C.S.E. Cooney’s The Big Bah-Ha Available October 2010

C.S.E. Cooney’s The Big Bah-Ha Available October 2010

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claire-254Our own C.S.E. Cooney has sent us some good news about her latest fiction extravagana:

The Big Bah-Ha is a novella by yours truly, coming out at Drollerie Press in October 2010!!! It is a post-apocalyptic katabasis story, complete with kiddie gangs, slingshot battles, strange clowns, Tall Ones, and one very dead (very brave) child protagonist.

No, I didn’t know what a “katabasis story” was either.  Thank God for Wikipedia, which tells me “Katabasis is a descent of some type. Katabasis may be a moving downhill, a sinking of winds, a military retreat, or a trip to the underworld.” Oooh, now I get it.

The Big Ba-Ha is a macabre post-apocalyptic fairy tale, a rollicking fantasy of a band of near-feral children who brave a plague-ridden landscape on a desperate quest. To rescue one of their own, they will ally with the monstrous and enigmatic Flabberghast — who arrived only after the world ended and eats the bones of the dead — and penetrate the mystery of Chuckle City, home to ravenous packs of balloon aminals, murderous Gacy boys, and the elusive Gray Harlequin. The Big Ba-Ha — it’s The Goonies meets The Road Warrior, perfectly suited for both ordinary children and gifted adults, and one of the most original fantasies I’ve read in a long time.

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Heavy metal fantasy: Blind Guardian back in the fray with At the Edge of Time

Heavy metal fantasy: Blind Guardian back in the fray with At the Edge of Time

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blind-guardian-live-frontTo the gods of the north, I pray
And raise my cup for the fallen ones
Then I cry
In Valhalla they’ll sing

–“Valkyries,” Blind Guardian

As a life-long heavy metal fan who also loves fantasy literature, it was only a matter of time before I got to the subject of Blind Guardian. About all you need to know about this wonderful, semi-obscure German metal band is that they wrote an entire album about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (Nightfall in Middle Earth).

Need I say more? I mean, look at the picture I’ve embedded — that’s a Blind Guardian album cover, and it looks like it could have been plucked off the cover of a Robert Jordan novel.

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Goth Chick News: Satan Took the Elevator, But I Took the Stairs

Goth Chick News: Satan Took the Elevator, But I Took the Stairs

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image0043“For the love of God, not another one!”

I was in the midst of exchanging text messages with my regular movie-date crowd, trying to decide what we were going to see. At the top of my list was a new release called Devil which to its apparent detriment, had M. Night Shyamalan’s name attached to it.

You remember him, right? He’s the director who once told us amazing stories such as The Sixth Sense and Signs, but of late has attempted to force feed us unpalatable drivel like The Happening and The Last Air Bender.

M. Night is an amazing teller of tales. Were we all sitting around a campfire while he scared the crap out of us with masterful plot twists, I would never want to go home.

But apparently when he’s handed an all star cast and a multi-million dollar studio budget, what might have been an unforgettable fable makes me want to slit my wrists, at least lately.

If only M. Night would stick to the story-telling and leave the movie making to someone else…

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Letters to Black Gate: Vampire Earth, Pete Butler and Gary Gygax

Letters to Black Gate: Vampire Earth, Pete Butler and Gary Gygax

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tale-of-the-thunderbolt2Jesse Moya tells us how she discovered Black Gate:

I recently started The Vampire Earth books by E. E. Knight.  On the cover of Tale of the Thunderbolt (Book 3), there is a brief descriptive quote about Knight, and Black Gate is listed as the source.
So I thought I would check out what Black Gate was all about. Unlike my younger days, I no longer have as much time to read, so I thought if your site did reviews I might learn about authors/series that I might otherwise never discover.
Noticed you were a magazine so I decided to see what kind of stories you published. I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten in the (bad) habit of sticking to the authors I know (on the basis that I don’t want to “waste my time”), so I’m trying to expand.
In the last couple of years, I’ve caught back up to current music thanks to my oldest girl and her iTunes downloads. Now I just need help getting to know who good new authors may be, and I hope your magazine helps me.

Thanks, Jesse. Glad to see such as healthy attitude towards trying new writers (and magazines). I wish we saw it more often.

And wow — that’s the first time we’ve ever won a customer from a cover blurb.

Hear that, Reviews Editor Bill Ward?  I want cover blurbs on every fantasy novel in North America. Get on it.

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Art Evolution 3: Jeff Dee

Art Evolution 3: Jeff Dee

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t1-254

In the first installment of this series, I explained my plan to collect ten of the greatest fantasy role-playing artists for a shared project to illustrate a single character in their best known style. For that one I chose Earthdawn and Shadowrun artist Jeff Laubenstein.

And now the Art Evolution blog series continues into Week 3, after last week’s contribution from Exalted artist Eric Vedder.

OK, so two down and I had an ‘Exalted Lyssa‘. As pleasing as that was, I still needed more ammunition before I started blind solicitations.

In another stroke of ‘luck’ I was already a horrible failure as a writer. As such, I’d spent time marketing a wretched book I’d written in 2006 that I’d worked with Jeff Dee on some illustrations for.

To me, Dee was a must for the article, all of his work at TSR a kind of Holy Grail of RP art.

My imagination still wonders if the zombie on the cover of T1: The Village of Hommlet has grappled or bit the unfortunate warrior pictured there.

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Interzone #229 Arrives

Interzone #229 Arrives

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interzone229And by arrives, I mean I finally found a local bookstore — Barnes & Noble, in Champaign, Illinois — that carries it at a reasonable price ($7.50 US).

I like Interzone. This British science fiction magazine has had a long and illustrious history, and has published some terrific work. They’ve also had some really great covers, especially in the last few years. (Okay this issue, with the Lego Road Warriors look, maybe isn’t the best example.) If I could find a domestic distributor, I’d subscribe in a heartbeat.

Still, it’s worth the hunt every two months. The full-color interiors and top-notch design give the zine a distinct look and real appeal. My favorite features are frequently the non-fiction — including Nick Lowe’s Mutant Popcorn film column, Tony Lee’s Laser Fodder DVD articles, David Langford SF gossip column Ansible Link, and especially the book reviews, which provide an often tantalizing look at British SF and fantasy titles. 

Fiction this issue is by Jim Hawkins, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Toby Litt, Antony Mann, and Paul Evanby. There’s also an interview with Finch author Jeff VanderMeer, and an editorial.

Interzone is published by TTA Press, and edited by Andy Cox and Andy Hedgecock.  Their website is here.