Black Gate – Page 1309 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Review of The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz

Monday, October 4, 2010 Isabel Pelech Comments 2 comments

witches-karres-a I decided to review The Witches of Karres mostly because I remember seeing some sequels, written by different authors, as James H. Schmitz died in 1981.

I’m not surprised; The Witches of Karres feels like it should have been a series all along. The setting seems designed for multiple adventures. The book itself is less a space opera than a space operetta — it never takes itself too seriously — but it’s still distinctly an adventure story, not a straight-up comedy.

Captain Pausert is a decent and friendly man, perhaps a touch too in love with his notion of himself as a square-jawed space adventurer. For instance, we find out quite early in the book that he faked a log entry about a desperate fight against pirates when he actually just spent a few hours blowing up asteroids — partly to test his ship’s guns, partly for the fun of it.

Still, he can’t resist helping someone in trouble, especially when that someone is an apparently helpless teenage slave girl. Despite the anti-slavery laws of his native planet, he’s quickly maneuvered into buying her, then her two younger sisters.

Pausert may be a bit bumbling at this point in the story, but he’s not quite stupid; he notices that the slave-owners are extremely eager to sell, and that there’s something slightly off about the three girls.

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Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

Monday, October 4, 2010 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 4 comments

A growing number of Black Gate authors have moved on to book deals, and some were published novelists before they appeared in the magazine.

Two of us, James Enge and myself, landed book deals featuring recurring characters that had appeared in Black Gate short stories.

They were the Dabir & Asim stories for me (“Whispers from the Stone” and “Sight of Vengeance“) and the Morlock tales for James (six appearances in BG so far, starting with “Turn Up This Crooked Way” and “Payment Deferred,” and most recently the novella “Destroyer” in Black Gate 14).

Back before James got nominated for the World Fantasy Award in the Best Novel category (for his first novel, no less! — that’s Blood of Ambrose, if you don’t have a copy yet) the two of us got talking one day about the connections between magazine sales and book deals.

We decided to turn the thing into a public back-and-forth discussion about writing serial fantasy characters, starting with a look at the idea that short story successes lead naturally to selling books.

I’ve captured and condensed that conversation here for your enjoyment.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.2 “Two and a Half Men”

Monday, October 4, 2010 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 6 comments

Since having children, I’ve found that anything hinting at children in danger is a lot more emotional than it was before. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would have probably had no real impact on me a few years back, but watching it now those last few minutes, where Button is aging younger and younger, undergoing dementia as his toddler body gets smaller and smaller, forgetting even how to walk … it still haunts my dreams. (I probably should have put a spoiler space there, but if you haven’t seen it by now, you probably aren’t going to.)

Dean and a cute little kid. Grab the tissues, this is going to get ugly.

So the promos for this week’s episode tell me that it’s going to be a rough one, emotionally. There’s a baby and, from what I can tell, he is either a monster or eaten by one … or possibly both.

The first moments of the episode, as is often the case, are action packed. Camera zooms in on a family photo which is then smacked by a blood soaked hand and falls to the ground. A woman runs through the house, clutching her baby in bloody arms. She hides in the bedroom. The phone gives a busy signal. Someone’s forcing the door open, so she hides under the bed with a baby. There is absolutely no way that this plan will work, and to her credit you get the idea that she knows it, but this is a horror series after all and it’s not like she had a lot of options.

Holy crap, Dad’s bloody corpse is under the bed with them!

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Art of the Genre: The real ‘L’ word

Monday, October 4, 2010 Scott Taylor Comments 0 Comment

chainmail_3rd_edition I’m an old TSR module fan, and as such I’ve always been intrigued by how the concept of such media came into existence. For the most part they fall in series, kind of like writers follow Tolkien with the concept of connected books and characters in a trilogy. It makes perfect sense, especially if you’re trying to create an extended campaign with a gaming group that meets on a regular basis. Series modules facilitate that, and recently I had the opportunity to chat with one of the original designers of a TSR foundation adventure path, the L Series ‘Lendore Isles.’

The author, Lenard ‘Len’ Lakofka is probably so ‘old school’ he’s beyond the term. His inclusion into the realm of RPGs predates the genre entirely, as he was a member of the International Federation of Wargaming. This institution came about in the sixties before the creation of Gygax’s Chainmail and was the original organizer of the first Lake Geneva Convention, i.e. GenCon in 1968.

At that first convention, people were playing Avalon Hill board games and Diplomacy during the Saturday only gathering, but that first year a chosen few were invited by Gygax to try Chainmail on the following Sunday after the convention was over. Lakofka was one of these founding fathers of the game.

From those humble beginnings, Chainmail would evolve into Dungeons & Dragons and Lakofka would continue to play the game with verve for the next forty years.

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War, Peace, and Fantasy

Sunday, October 3, 2010 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

War and Peace In one of my first posts here, I mentioned that I was hoping to figure out what it is, exactly, that I like about fantasy fiction; what it is I get from fantasy that I get nowhere else.

I found myself thinking about that question a fair bit over the past couple of weeks. I was reading a 1500-page novel about a world-shaking clash of armies, a prose epic whose subjects ranged from the politics of high society to battles shaped by cavalry charges, and which presented a struggle against a would-be world conqueror viewed by some as divinely gifted and by others as a Satanic force of utter chaos.

It wasn’t a fantasy, though. It was War and Peace.

I found myself fascinated by how much Tolstoy’s great novel (Tolstoy claimed the book wasn’t a novel, in a formal sense, but the term fits better than any other) looks like an epic fantasy — even while feeling like nothing of the sort. Why is that? Why is something that seems so close to fantasy in form so different in actuality?

Obviously it’s a different kind of book. Obviously Tolstoy was aiming at something — many things — quite different from an epic fantasist. But what sort of things? How do they determine the feel of the novel?

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New Treasures: The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle

Sunday, October 3, 2010 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

This book has been sitting on my desk since I bought it from Jacob Weisman, publisher of Tachyon Publications, at Wiscon. My desk isn’t all that big, so every time my to-do list topples over, or I tell the kids to get rid of the copies of Titan Quest and, I dunno, maybe get some homework done for a change, there it is.

The problem with these anthologies is that they’re my weakness. They suck me in. I can resist the novels because, you know, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment. But the anthologies… they’re just harmless diversions, right? And when I sit down to finally get that Goth Chick post formatted for Sue, or clear out a few hundred ageing e-mail from the Black Gate in-box… well, one quick story first can’t hurt. And when the kids find me in the big green chair it’s two hundred pages later.

So, maybe I peeked at this one a bit. Probably when I should’ve been answering that e-mail you sent me in August. But you’d understand if you had a copy of The Secret History of Fantasy in your hot little hands like I do.

Peter Beagle, who’s been conducting something of a one-man revolution in short fantasy over the last decade himself, has compiled a terrific collection of modern fantasy — the oldest stories here, Robert Holdstock’s “Mythago Wood” and Stephen King’s “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” are from 1981 and 1984, respectively. The book includes some of the most acclaimed fantasy tales in the intervening decades, including Steven Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum,” Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire,” Neil Gaiman’s “Snow, Glass, Apples,” Jeffrey Ford’s “The Empire of Ice Cream,” and stories from Michael Swanwick, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen F. McHugh, Gregory Maguire, T.C. Boyle, and more.

There’s also an intro from Beagle, as well as two long essays, “The Critics, The Monsters, and the Fantasists,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre,” by David G. Hartwell. Taken together, it’s an impressive package. And a highly distracting one — take my word for it.

Mortals, Meet the Dark and Twisty: A Review of Goblin Fruit, Part III

Sunday, October 3, 2010 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 4 comments

header2 Hallo again, Ye Faithful Paladins of the Black Gate!

So nice to hobnob with you here, with every mother’s child of you looking so ruddy and so spry. Ah. I notice that since last we met you’ve invested in cold iron and a few sprigs of rowanberries. Protective charms. Hedge-witchery. Well done! I mean, it probably won’t protect you from the wrath of the mighty Goblin Hordes in the long run, but nice try anyway! You’re learning.

So, look. In Part I and Part II of this here saga, I introduced y’all to the myth, mischief and magic that is Goblin Fruit Magazine. In my final homage to the Goblin Queens, editrices Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick, I feel it worth mentioning their literary endeavors independent of Goblin Fruit, both prose and poetry, which may be found in such places as Strange Horizons (Amal’s “And Their Lips Rang with the Sun, for example, and Jess’s “How Wizards Duel”), Mythic Delirium, and Cabinet des Fées.

That’s just the beginning of their genre-spanning conquest, of course, but this is the 21st Century. Our friend “Google” will take you the rest of the way.

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Scheherazade’s Bequest 11 now Online

Saturday, October 2, 2010 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

So I’ve discovered this cool thing called Scheherezade’s Bequest. It happened while reading C.S.E’s LiveJournal, when I should have been working. Right next to a pic of a young woman kissing a horse is this entirely C.S.E-like comment:

OH, SEE!!! Scheherezade’s Bequest 11 is up at www.cabinetdesfees.com! And cucumberseed‘s story is there, and shvetufae‘s got a thing in it, and I wish I weren’t at work, so I could REEEEEAAAAAAD IT!!!

To conceal my curiosity about the horse (not to mention my obvious guilt at having less self-control than she during work hours), I asked C.S.E. to explain Scheherezade’s Bequest to me.

Because she knows everybody (and I mean everybody), C.S.E. passed my request along to co-editor Erzebet YellowBoy, who kindly explained that Scheherezade’s Bequest is the online component of the altogether splendid Fairy Tale Journal Cabinet des Fées, which explores the fairy tale in fiction and fact.

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies Celebrates Two Years

Saturday, October 2, 2010 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The 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…

Saturday, October 2, 2010 John R. Fultz Comments 5 comments

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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