SF Site reviews Black Gate 14

SF Site reviews Black Gate 14

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bglgAuthor Sherwood Smith, who has reviewed virtually every issue of Black Gate, shares her thoughts on our latest issue in a feature review at SF Site:

This issue of Black Gate, clocking in at 384 pages, is more book than magazine…. A few stories are outstanding, and most of the rest are solid entertainment. Add in generous page count on reviews, and the issue is a strong one. Readers tempted to start subscribing ought to consider beginning with this issue, as the prices are going to go up. (Though so is the page count.)

She admits to being pleasantly surprised by “The Word of Azrael” by Matthew David Surridge:

When I read that this tale was “initially inspired by the old Conan paperbacks which preceded each story with a snippet of Conan’s bio,” I groaned…. Was I wrong! Within two pages, Surridge’s deft, ironic voice had disarmed me.  We begin on a battlefield where seven kings and their armies died. The warrior Isrohim Vey wakens alone, except for the Angel of Death… What follows seems to be a series of iceberg-tip stories, that is, the climactic moments of what could have been longer tales. Increasingly intriguing tales. The reader begins to perceive patterns weaving them together into a tapestry of solid gold.

She highlights several additional pieces, including “On a Pale Horse” by Sylvia Volk:

Salsabil regards her father’s mare as her sister, as they share the same name. This isn’t a problem until she takes her sister grazing, and discovers a single-horned stallion following them…. Drought brings the raiding Mutair down on Salsabil’s people. Though they do their best to fight back, they are being driven out of their own lands, many of them killed, but meanwhile the mysterious horned pale horse follows them… A lovely story with a flavor of Arabian Nights.

And “La Señora de Oro” by R L Roth:

A few years ago, my spouse inherited some letters written by one of his ancestors who was a silver miner just after the gold rush. Roth’s epistolary story, which takes place between March and September 1850, is an eerie match in tone and (early on) in details as Tom writes to his wife Annie, telling her about his search for the gold that is supposed to save his family from want. The story is fantasy-horror, the fantastic element serving as a metaphor for what happened to far too many gold rush miners… Hats off to Roth for a disturbingly well-wrought tale, pitch-perfect for the period.

The complete review is here.

Goth Chick News: I Went To See an Acupuncturist and When I Got Home My Voodoo Doll Was Dead

Goth Chick News: I Went To See an Acupuncturist and When I Got Home My Voodoo Doll Was Dead

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voodoo1I have a friend who collects Star Wars paraphernalia. He travels around the country a few times a year attending mammoth SciFi conventions and comic trade shows, in the frenzied remainder of the hunting and gathering instinct that evolution allowed us to keep. The dedicated room in his house where this amazing assortment of merchandise is displayed has its own security system, in place at the request of the insurance company that covers it with a policy of biblical proportion. His Facebook page is a plethora of friends and fans who admire his every acquisition, seeking to purchase or swap rare treasures with their original packaging intact.

By contrast, I collect Voodoo dolls, for which the conventions are largely unpublicized and which no one seems interesting in trading.

The idea of creating and then affecting an inanimate representation of a living thing is thousands of years old. The Egyptians buried their dead kings with dozens of tiny statues of servants which would come to life to serve their masters in the next world, and ancient Romans crafted small likeness of friends and enemies to use in prayers to their many deities. In China, small dolls were artfully sculpted and honored as family ancestors.

In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a civilization that did not have some sort of similar lore. The act of creation is infused with irresistible mystic qualities; once we make it, we can nurture it or destroy it. That is our god-like choice.

So you can clearly see why this is way more fun than collecting Star Wars figures.

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Original Fiction: “THE WEIRD OF IRONSPELL” by John R. Fultz

Original Fiction: “THE WEIRD OF IRONSPELL” by John R. Fultz

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ironspell-6
http://sheikman.blogspot.com

“The Weird of Ironspell” by John R. Fultz

Illustrations by Alex Sheikman 

6. The Tomb of Azazar

 

The crypt lay on an uncharted isle off the wild coast of southern Mydrithia.

A triple-sailed war galleon dropped anchor in the narrow cove, but only five men came to shore. If there had been any living sentinels watching from the jungle depths, they would have counted only two of the group as human men. The other three were strangelings: two tall Amurions bearing longbows and a gaudily garbed gnome. They stood on the wet sands and surveyed the wilderness that smothered the slopes of a dormant volcano. There was no sign of civilization old or new in this ancient haunt of green shadows.

Ironspell ran a hand through his shaggy black beard and stared into the jungle, looking for invisible signs. Tumnal pulled the rowboat inland and hid it between two jutting boulders.

This desolate chunk of earth bore the stink of long-buried sorcery, of that Ironspell was sure. But it was a reek that had fooled him before.

“Are you sure this is the place?” asked the gnome, dusting sand off his vermillion robes with a gnarled hand. “Looks nothing more than a place for a good shipwreck.”

Ironspell spat upon the brown sand. “It’s here. Somewhere…”

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Looking Back on the first Sword and Sorceress

Looking Back on the first Sword and Sorceress

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sword-and-sorceress-iSword and Sorceress I

Edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley (DAW, 1984)

The late author and editor Marion Zimmer Bradley probably could not have dared to guess in 1984 that her anthology series, Sword and Sorceress, would turn into a yearly and best-selling institution of fantasy short stories that would extend past her death. That the first volume in the series bears a Roman numeral shows that she did believe the anthology would see at least two volumes; that it now reaches into the mid-twenties (with the twenty-fifth due this year) shows just how much sword-and-sorcery has embraced inclusiveness during the last three decades. Strong female heroines are now a key part of the genre, completing what C. L. Moore started with her amazing — especially for the time — Jirel of Joiry stories of the 1930s. Bradley invokes Moore a few times in her introduction, and the book is dedicated to both Moore and Jirel.

Over a quarter of a century after publication, the first Sword and Sorceress holds up quite well, while still showing some of the growing pains of sword-and-sorcery in the 1980s. Reading through it makes it clear that the sword-and-sorcery revival still had a distance to go in 1984. About three quarters of the stories Sword and Sorceress I are good-to-excellent, but like all anthologies it has rough patches, some shaky editorial picks, and a few pieces that don’t hit at all. As the series had just started, Bradley did not have a large pool of submissions to pick from. Later volumes would improve the mix as the number of works submitted increased, but this is the start, and therefore worth reading for its historical importance, saggy spots and all.

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Welcome to the Digital Age, Before the Golden Age

Welcome to the Digital Age, Before the Golden Age

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btga2One of my favorite books — among a host of many favorites, of course, many many favorites, collected over decades of careful reading in a wide variety of genres, it’s hard to choose, depends on the time of day, naturally, and what we’re talking about, whether you want to include non-fiction, and it’s difficult to judge pleasure reading against, you know, literature like The Sound and the Fury, which was great until the part where I quit reading and pretty much gave up. That Quentin character though, man, what a dick.  Anyway. Where was I.

Aww, screw it.  My favorite book of all time, bar none, is Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age.

Why is it so great?  Dude, it’s totally undiluted science fiction awesomeness. Asimov collected the early pulp stories that first hooked him on science fiction, from magazines such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories of Super Science, and Science Wonder Stories, in a 900-page omnibus that captured the heart and soul of early American SF.

Published between 1931 and 1938 — the year that John W. Campbell took over Astounding and ushered in what’s now generally referred to as the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” — the stories in Before the Golden Age feature brain stealers from Mars, two-fisted scientists battling monster hoards, amateur time travel  (“Kiss 1935 good-bye!”), shrink rays, civilizations in grains of sand, humans in rags taking on entrenched alien conquerors, killer robots, giant brain monsters,  and much more.

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Thinking of Heroes

Thinking of Heroes

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butch_o_hare-280I’ve been pondering the need for heroes in fiction again this week, and I thought it a good time to revisit a post I’d made on the Black Gate Livejournal page a few years ago. I imagine a lot of you haven’t read it; if you have, I apologize for the repeat.

During the school year my little girl brings home reading practice sheets every week. Each day we’re to time her reading the fluency sheet for a minute, three times, the idea being that it will improve her reading. She does get better at reading each time through, naturally, but she also gets pretty bored – I suppose I would, too, if I had to read the same thing over and over three times a day. But she’s also bored because the stories as a whole haven’t been very interesting. Except for one.

She brought home the story of Butch O’Hare. I’d never given much thought to whom O’Hare airport was named after. I suppose I assumed it was named after a politician. None of these fluency stories can be read completely in a minute—she was only about a third of the way through when the minute timer dinged. My son, her older brother, was so interested that he looked up from his own homework and said “actually, that’s pretty interesting.” I agreed, and asked her to keep reading, and she was intrigued enough herself that she kept going without complaint.

Stories about heroes fascinate my family, and, I believe, humanity as a whole. I think that we’ve become so cynical that we sneer a little when we hear stories of heroics and imagine that it can’t really be true, or we wonder if the hero secretly beats his wife. We are programmed to think that we REALLY need to read stories of ordinary people or cowardly people or despicable people and that stories of heroes are for children. We’re savvy enough now not to believe everything we hear or read, because, God knows, we’ve been fooled plenty of times.

But we still need heroes. And Butch O’Hare was one.

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Apex Magazine re-opens to Submissions

Apex Magazine re-opens to Submissions

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apexmagApex publisher Jason Sizemore has announced that the magazine has re-opened to submissions.

This is great news for fans, since the magazine announced last May that it was temporarily suspending publication. It began as print edition Apex Digest in 2005, swtiching names to Apex Magazine when it became online-only in 2008. It resumed online publication in June 2009 and has published monthly since. 

Note that Apex has new Submission Guidelines. The pay rate is five cents a word, and the new fiction editor is Catherynne M. Valente. The magazine has added Dark Fantasy to their list of interests (originally focused on science fiction and horror), and their Guidelines are worth the read:

What we want is sheer, unvarnished awesomeness. We want the stories it scared you to write. We want stories full of marrow and passion, stories that are twisted, strange, and beautiful. We want science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mash-ups of all three—the dark, weird stuff down at the bottom of your little literary heart. This magazine is not a publication credit, it is a place to put your secret places and dreams on display. Just so long as they have a dark speculative fiction element—we aren’t here for the quotidian.

The latest issue of Apex includes original fiction from Paul Jessup and Jerry Gordon, a reprint from Catheryyne M. Valente, Audio Fiction from Jerry Gordon, and a Dark Faith roundtable interview with Gary A. Braunbeck, Jay Lake, Nick Mamatas, and Catherynne M. Valente.

The complete magazine is also available in a downloadable, pay-what-you-want edition through Smashwords, and in a Kindle edition (for 99 cents).

Apex Book Company also recently published Dark Faith, reviewed right here at the Black Gate blog by David Soyka.

Paizo Announces Pathfinder Tales

Paizo Announces Pathfinder Tales

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winter-witchPaizo, publisher of the Pathfinder role playing game, has announced a new fiction line called Pathfinder Tales.

It’s a move that has a certain inevitability. When TSR announced a line of novels to support Dungeons and Dragons — beginning with the Dragonlance novels of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman in 1984 — it was an instant hit, and helped catapult TSR to new success as the fourth largest publisher in the country.

For a brief time in the early 90s, TSR’s novels far surpassed their game products in sales. At some point virtually every major adventure game publisher — including White Wolf (Vampire the Masquerade), Game Designer’s Workshop (Traveller), FASA (Battletech, Shadowrun), and Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon) — has experimented with a fiction line, with varying success.

Now that Pathfinder has grown to be the system of choice for many gamers, something similar was clearly in the cards. This from the official announcement:

Pathfinder Tales novels are standalone adventures written by some of fantasy’s bestselling authors…  journey through Golarion as you never have before, through the eyes of canny warriors and flippant scoundrels, and see firsthand why the Pathfinder world has twice earned the prestigious ENnie Award for Best Campaign Setting.

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Short Fiction Review # 28: Dark Faith

Short Fiction Review # 28: Dark Faith

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dark_faith_frontcvra_medium1

[Hell] doesn’t exist, no more so than the entities that are called Satan and the Devil.  They’re all…storybook constructs…Know this: there is no such thing as a ‘cosmic evil.’ Evil is a human matter, fashioned by ignorance, brutality, addiction, emotional trauma—the list is endless. The cosmos doesn’t feel anything, it is just a space, it doesn’t care about either good or evil, it is simply, like Heaven, indifferent.

“For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer” by Gary A. Braunbeck

p. 275, 285

That pretty much sums up my personal view of a universe indifferent to ongoing human folly.  That said, I’m fascinated by the notion of faith and its ethical implications, so a short story collection entitled Dark Faith co-edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon naturally got my attention. People rely on faith to provide an orderly framework to their lives, to infuse meaning to their existence. What these  stories (as well as several poems) share is a consideration of what happens when the assumptions that underpin faith unravel. For the most part, the results are not good

The opening story, “Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland, considers the afterlife of those who made the horrific choice to jump from the Twin Towers rather than remain in a burning buidling about to collapse. The whole subgenre of 9/11 fiction is tricky, given  our collective memory of something so frighteningly incomprehensible that’s been trivialized over time with the endlessly surreal replaying loop of the imploding skyscrapers, but Pelland’s take here is vividly disturbing in suggesting that memorializing the dead can make matters worse.

Poets and sages like to say that there is clarity in certain death. That a calm resignation settles over the nearly deceased, and they embrace the inevitability of the end of life with dignity and grace.

But there was no clarity for her, no calmness, no life flashing before her eyes in a montage of joy and regrets.  There was just pure animal terror, screams torn from her throat as she plummeted toward the ground in the longest ten seconds of her life.

And then there was an explosion of pain.

p.2

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Realms of Fantasy on Realms of Fantasy

Realms of Fantasy on Realms of Fantasy

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realms-december-2008Following some of the recent discussion on the future of the magazine, including the Wednesday report here on the Black Gate blog that publisher Warren Lapine had written to warn subscribers that it might be shut down, Realms of Fantasy editor Douglas Cohen has weighed in with a State of the Union piece on the Realms website.

Creatively speaking, RoF’s future is looking bright and there is a lot to be excited about. Financially speaking… It’s fair to say we’re currently navigating some choppy waters. Behind the scenes, there has been some sacrifice involved in RoF reaching this point…. If we can get through this rough patch the magazine could be secure and stable for a very long time.

There’s been plenty of debate on both the announcement and just how fans should respond in other quarters as well, including a discussion kicked off by Nick Mamatas on how the magazine might have gotten the message out without appearing quite so doomed, some comments from long-time RoF (and Black Gate) author Richard Parks, a news story at Examiner.com, an exchange with editor Douglas Cohen at The Dreaded Sword, and of course ongoing discussion right here at Black Gate.

It’s tempting to treat this as just a news story and remain objective, but I’m not going to do that. Regardless of how you feel about how the message got out, Realms of Fantasy is a terrific magazine, one of the few professional fantasy publications that will publish and promote new writers, and it deserves your support. 

You can buy a subscription here for just $19.99 for a full year.