The Death of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

The Death of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

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woman-between2On June 24, Science Fiction author and critic F. Gwynplaine “Froggy” MacIntyre posted a short note in the Community News section of Jeffry Dwight’s SFF.Net, an online community of genre readers and pros. The apparently-casual note was titled, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” the famous last words of Titus Oates, the English explorer who committed suicide during an Antarctic expedition by stepping out into a blizzard.

Most readers didn’t catch the inference. One astute reader who did called 911, and Froggy was taken into custody, dragged out of his apartment by six police officers while yelling, “I want to die and I’m going to take everyone in the building down with me,” according to a neighbor.

Froggy was released a few hours later. He returned to his home, posted a bitter rant titled “One idiot ruins everything,” and lit a fire in his cluttered apartment that killed him and took a dozen fire trucks and 60 firefighters over an hour to extinguish, according to “Froggy’s Last Story“, the lengthy New York Times article that appeared Friday. The article quotes Black Gate‘s Darrell Schweitzer, Andrew Porter and Bud Webster.

Although he produced only a handful of books, including the novel The Woman Between the Worlds and the anthology MacIntyre’s Improbable Bestiary, Froggy’s short fiction appeared in many outlets, including Analog, Weird Tales, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories. He was also a respected critic, writing books reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for many years. More biographical details are in his Wikipedia entry.

Many of us in the SF & Fantasy community knew Froggy, but few of us knew him as well as we thought he did. His online bio (now taken down) stated his parents had given him up at an advanced age, sending him to an orphan labor camp in Australia, contacting him years later only to ask him to donate a kidney to his twin brother.  In the New York Times article, Darrell describes Froggy’s public persona as “basically a character he invented.” Froggy zealously guarded his privacy, and many of the tales he told were seemingly designed to obscure his origins as much as possible.

Whatever the case, Froggy was a talented writer and fan who was with us too briefly. Rest in peace, Froggy.

Locus Reviews Black Gate 14

Locus Reviews Black Gate 14

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locus-595aThe August issue of Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, contains a review of our latest issue by Contributing Editor Rich Horton.

Black Gate‘s Winter issue is positively huge… and it delivers excellent value. There are three novellas, all entertaining. My favorite was Robert J. Howe’s “The Natural History of Calamity,” which is basically urban fantasy, but with quite a clever central idea. Debbie Colavito is a private detective with a difference: she detects what’s wrong with someone’s “karmic flow” and restores the balance. In this story she takes a case for a nice young man whose equally nice girlfriend has just dumped him. Was it something he did wrong, some bad karma? Or is it something to do with her new boyfriend, a nasty piece of work who, by coincidence, has some history with Debbie? The central idea is pretty intriguing and could, I think, support a series. Nicely done, with some well-handled twists.

Rich also enjoyed “Devil on the Wind” and “The Word of Azrael”:

“Devil on the Wind,” by Michael Jasper & Jay Lake concerns a group of magicians whose power arises from their own suicides (and revivals). One such witch is sent to a nearby Prince to enforce the rule of these magicians. But she learns that her allies have plans that don’t include her… Even better is Matthew [David] Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael.” It concerns Isrohim Vey, who sees the Angel of Death on a battlefield and as a result is spared — more a curse than a blessing — to search again for the Angel. His search almost takes the form of a catalog of sword & sorcery tropes, his many adventures told briefly but with style and an ironic edge. Surridge both celebrates and winks at the genre. It’s very entertaining, clever, and even thought-provoking.

The online counterpart to Locus magazine is the excellent Locus Online, edited by Mark R. Kelly.

Of Policed Identities and Public Urination: A Review of The City & The City

Of Policed Identities and Public Urination: A Review of The City & The City

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city2The City and the City is a murder mystery. That is the first thing. Miéville makes it perfectly clear: the book explicitly follows the rhythms of this genre, the steps as strictly defined as the rules of a sonnet: the death, the jaded, world-weary but still tender-hearted investigator, the discovery that the victim was not quite what she seemed, the additional deaths, the dead ends and red herrings, the gathering momentum, the Explanation between murderer and detective, slotting all the puzzle pieces together in front of all the characters assembled, the wry denouement.

And the fact that an almost superciliously correct mystery can blend so perfectly with the surreality of a fantasy of superimposed cities is due to the fact that, as Miéville says in the Random House Reader’s Circle interview at the end of the book, the crime novel is “at its best, a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle. All the best noir – or at least I should say the stuff I like most – reads oneirically. Chandler and Kafka seem to me to have a lot more shared terrain then Chandler and a true-crime book.”

Spoilers below the cut. Don’t read them. It just tied for the 2010 Best Novel Hugo – just go read the book!

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Short Fiction Roundup: And the winners are…

Short Fiction Roundup: And the winners are…

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The 2010 Hugo Award winners for various short fiction categories:6a00d8341ce22f53ef0105365ac432970c-200wi1

Best Novella: “Palimpsest” by Charles Stross (Wireless)

Best Novellette: “The Island” by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)

Best Short Story: “Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)

And the best semiprozine goes to an online pub: Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan, the current issue of which features stories by Robert Reed and Stephen Gaskell.

Dragon*Con Report Part 2

Dragon*Con Report Part 2

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dragonconlogoI said a few words about Dragon*Con itself in Part 1 of my con report.  In this one, I’d like to share our experiences at the largest science fiction and fantasy convention in North America.

After a long  journey,  Black Gate publisher John O’Neill and I reached  Atlanta late Thursday afternoon. Reviews Editor Bill Ward acted as our elite scout, and was not only waiting with con badges, but had scoped out the route we’d need to follow to unload our boxes and boxes of Black Gate magazines and vintage science fiction paperbacks. While John and I have been corresponding with Bill Ward for several years, we’d never before met him in person, and it was a pleasure to be able to do so. Bill proved to be just as indispensable, organized, and articulate as he is online, and possessed a dry, quick wit as well.

Jason Waltz, owner of Rogue Blades Entertainment, shared a quarter of the booth with us, and although he and his friend John Whitman had driven down from Milwaukee and we had driven down from Illinois and Indiana, we somehow arrived within a few minutes of each other without coordination. I doubt it would have worked out as well if we’d actually planned it. Between the five of us we managed to get all the Black Gate gear and RBE gear unloaded within an hour. Unpacking it and putting it on display took a bit longer, and required additional time the following morning.

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English Gothic: Britain Goes to the Movies

English Gothic: Britain Goes to the Movies

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english-gothic2Jonathan Rigby’s ENGLISH GOTHIC (2000) is an excellent survey of British horror and science fiction films. Misleadingly subtitled A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA; the book focuses instead on the 20 year period from THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) through TO THE DEVIL, A DAUGHTER (1976) when British production companies like Hammer, Amicus, and Tigon consistently outperformed the Hollywood majors in producing the finest and most influential genre films.

Part of the book’s strength is not just Rigby’s detailed and chronological survey of nearly every genre film to come from the British Isles during these two decades, but the fact that he captures the social and economic factors that helped shape the pictures and, more importantly, the public’s reception to them.

The rise of the horror genre in film started with the German Expressionist classics of the silent era and the contemporary Lon Chaney and John Barrymore efforts in the States. The genre solidified with the phenomenal impact of Universal’s horror franchises of the 1930s and 1940s.

The interesting thing here is that the majority of these films remained unscreened or else limited to adult-only audiences in the UK where censorship was extremely puritanical in the first half of the last century.

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Sword & Sorcery is Alive and Well at Pyr

Sword & Sorcery is Alive and Well at Pyr

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shadows-sonWell, I’m back from Dragon*Con, and my head is still spinning. It would take me weeks to jot down even a partial record of all the events we attended and the great people we met (not to mention the jaw-dropping costumes I was constantly gawking at) — so I think I’ll leave that to Howard, who’s already posted Part I of a splendid con report.

Instead, I’m going to hit the highlights.  The best event we attended at the convention, bar none, was the Pyr Books, a New Voice in Publishing panel, hosted by publisher Lou Anders and attended by Pyr authors Clay & Susan Griffith, Erin Hoffman, Andrew Mayer, Ari Marmell, Mike Resnick, Jon Sprunk, Sam Sykes, and the amazingly cool James Enge.

Why was it so great? Lou highlighted the terrific titles Pyr will be publishing over the next six months in a fast-paced and entertaining slide show, and each of the authors chimed in at appropriate moments to tell us a little more about their books. It was a great way to get introduced to an entire line in under an hour.

And what a line. I haven’t been this intrigued by so many books from a single publisher in a long time.

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Goth Chick News: Would You Like Some Wine With That Cheese?

Goth Chick News: Would You Like Some Wine With That Cheese?

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image006Before this, I was already obsessed with my Wii gaming system. On evenings following particularly stressful bouts at my “day job,” I can generally be found playing House of the Dead 3 on two-person mode; armed with the pistol in one hand and the machine gun in the other. Nothing says “stress relief” like laying waste Rambo-style to a seemingly endless parade of the undead.

Needless to say, everyone knows better than to ring my cell phone during “killing dead things” time, which is a lot like “story time” if I had kids, only different.

But obsession went a step further to borderline mania when Netflix introduced their “instant download” option using gaming systems like the Wii and Xbox. With a bit of simple programming, a wireless modem and a $2 monthly subscription, you can choose from an impressive menu of movie options, downloading with the lightening speed I can only dream about for my laptop internet connection; such as a two hour movie in under 15 seconds.

Add this to my wet bar and bathroom, and frankly I see no compelling reason to ever come out of the basement.

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Dragon*Con Report Part 1

Dragon*Con Report Part 1

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John O'Neill mingling with celebrities.

Those of you who’ve never attended a convention, let alone Dragon*Con, might wonder what the purpose of one is, and what they are like. I used to wonder what all the fuss was over myself, so I thought I’d provide a quick primer for the uninitiated. Attending a fantasy or science fiction convention is an excellent opportunity to mingle with other people who enjoy the same things you do, to interact with the creators of the kinds of work you love, and to meet with the people who edit and publish that work. Sometimes it’s a chance to obtain reproductions of that work, or images from it, or objects based on props from said work. Conventions are also a fabulous chance to network with peers and publishers who might or might not know your own work, although I never advise cornering an editor for twenty minutes of unbroken narrative to pitch any novel, especially one that you haven’t written yet.

But as to what a convention is like, they’re all different. World Fantasy Con, which Black Gate will be attending in force near the end of October, tends to be somewhat intimate, and fairly sober – at least during the day. Dragon*Con, well… I think Lou Anders of Pyr described it quite well in a post earlier today when he said it was like Mardi Gras on Middle-Earth. There are so many different lines of programming that Dragon*Con requires five immense hotels to provide space for them all, and so many attendees that they can’t fit into even those – there are at least five overflow hotels in addition to those with events. There seem to have been something in the area of 68,000 people attending this year. You could field a whole lot of Roman legions with all of those people, though you probably wouldn’t want to.

When I say “Lines of Programming” I mean different kinds of panels and events. There are so many special guests and panels to attend you can go to Dragon*Con with ten of your friends and each have entirely different, and interesting, experiences. If you want, you can go to nothing but writing panels and learn publishing secrets. You can go to media panels where movie, TV, or comic stars discuss what it was/is like working on their show. You can go to the art show and peruse the graphic arts, or maybe buy some, or go on the gaming track, or see a huge selection of independent films. There were two halls of exhibitors and one dealer room and even though I toured through all three I’m sure I didn’t see every product. Strolling through all of it are folk in costume. Some of those costumes are simple affairs, or store bought. Some are hand-crafted works of exquisite art. Some of them will sear your mind in wonder, although not always the good kind.

Into this we of Black Gate wandered, and I’ll provide a detailed account of what we saw and who we met before the end of the week.

The Weird of Cornell Woolrich: “Kiss of the Cobra”

The Weird of Cornell Woolrich: “Kiss of the Cobra”

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lair_of_the_white_wormNo, this isn’t a review of the Ken Russell film The Lair of the White Worm. The poster just fits so well with Cornell Woolrich’s 1935 story “Kiss of the Cobra” that I had to use it. You would almost think Russell was adapting Woolrich, not Bram Stoker.

My three previous installments exploring the fantasy and horror tales of suspense author Cornell Woolrich have all looked at classic works from his typewriter: “Jane Brown’s Body,” “Dark Melody of Madness,” and “Speak to Me of Death.” However, Woolrich was a prolific pulpster, and sometimes he pounded out sub-par work because the hotel room bill had to be paid. Any Woolrich fan can whip out a list of the writer’s suspense stories that simply made him or her cringe—and not positively. I’m as hardcore a Woolrich aficionado as you will likely find, and even I have to admit that some of his lesser stories are dreadful. His exploration of vampires, one of his potentially intriguing side trips into the supernatural, “Vampire’s Honeymoon” (later revised and retitled “My Lips Destroy” so Woolrich could sell it as a “new” piece), is the single most clichéd work about vampires I’ve ever read. Only the staking of a vampire using a broken hockey stick makes it remotely interesting. I can’t imagine Woolrich spent more than two hours cranking it out and then sending it off. It’s an indication of the power of Cornell Woolrich’s name on the front of pulp magazines of the time that it sold on its first try.

But some of Woolrich’s mid-level work deserves attention, and “Kiss of the Cobra” falls solidly into his opus of “weird stories.” It examines the concept of “foreign other” with fantasy displays that hint at black magic, contains richly sensual prose, and has a liminal sense of a were-creature. The suspense and hard-boiled crime aspects are also well executed, even if the mesh of the two sides isn’t that smooth. Much greater work was to come, but with all its flaws (such as the standard pulp era’s Euro-centric view of India and a protagonist given to generic wise-crack dialogue) the story remains worth visiting for horror and suspense enthusiasts.

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