John C. Hocking’s “The Face in the Sea” nominated for Harper’s Pen Award
The Sorcerer’s Guild announced this week that John C. Hocking’s “The Face in the Sea” (from Black Gate 13) has been nominated for the Harper’s Pen Award (formerly the Ham-Sized Fist Award).
The Harper’s Pen Award honors the best Heroic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery short fiction. The award is sponsored by The Sorcerer’s Guild. The stated goal of the award is “to encourage authors to continue to explore heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery fiction, as well as to reward those who continue to publish it.”
The Finalists for 2009 are:
- “Slow Stampede” by Sara Genge (Asimov’s Science Fiction)
- “Where Virtue Lives” by Saladin Ahmed (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
- “The Face in the Sea” by John C. Hocking (Black Gate 13)
- “Tomb of the Amazon Queen” by Michael Ehart (Dark Worlds 3)
- “Bright Wings in the Ebony Hall” by Dale Carothers (Electric Spec)
- “The Last of His Kind” by Bill Ward (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly)
- “Serpents Beneath the Ice” by Carl Walmsley (Rage of the Behemoth)
- “The Dark Blessing” by James Lecky (Silver Blade)
Special shout out to Black Gate Contributing Editor Bill Ward, for his nomination for “The Last of His Kind.”
There’s some fine publications on that list. If you like heroic fantasy, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to try a few of the links above and, if you like what you see, support one of our sister magazines. Me, I’m going off to read some more Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
Congratulations to all the finalists! The winner will be announced next week.
There’s nothing like being faced with your own weirdness.
Most pulp writers of the 1930s were itching to break into the hardcover book market. Since reprints of pulp stories in book form were rare at the time, these writers did not expect that their work for the newsstands would survive past an issue’s sell-date. They felt comfortable re-working and expanding on them to create novels. Raymond Chandler famously called his process of novelizing his already published work as “cannibalizing.” He welded together different short stories, often keeping large sections of text intact with only slight alterations. Other authors took ideas that they liked, or else felt they could do more justice to in the novel format, and enlarged them into books without text carry-over. Robert E. Howard used “The Scarlet Citadel” as a guide for The Hour of the Dragon. And Cornell Woolrich turned many of his short stories into novels. “Face Work” became The Black Angel. “Call Me Patrice” became I Married a Dead Man. “The Street of Jungle Death” became Black Alibi. And “Speak to Me of Death” became Woolrich’s most depressing novel (which is really saying something), Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
The sarcophagus was empty, the mummy was on the loose, and Corporate expected her to deal with it. Seemed like a lot to ask, especially for minimum wage.
I freely cop to having the sort of geeky sense of humor that is immediately triggered by someone coming up with the perfect movie quote for any given situation. For that matter, the level of hilarity is proportionately magnified by the obscurity of the quote, how quickly I was able to identify it, and any subtle, “insider” references the quote might invoke.
On April 2nd, “Titans Will Clash!” Which is perhaps the worst tag-line I’ve seen since “The Story That Won’t Go Away” for JFK. I wonder why the tag-line on director Louis Lettier’s previous film wasn’t “This Summer, The Hulk Is Incredible!”