Now Shipping: Black Gate 14
Black Gate 14 is now shipping. Foreign and domestic subscriber copies went in the mail last week.
At 384 pages, Black Gate 14 is the largest issue in our history. Be sure you’re in a sturdy chair while reading.
It includes an 8-page Knights of the Dinner Table strip, nearly 25 full pages of art, and over 150,000 words of fiction – including a Morlock novella from James Enge, a new tale of Brand the Viking from John C. Hocking, and fiction from Michael Jasper & Jay Lake, Pete Butler, Robert J. Howe, Diana Sherman, Martin Owton, Mike Shultz, and many others.
Rich Horton returns with another detailed look at the rich history of the fantasy genre, this time focusing on publishers striving to keep the best of the past in print in “Back To The Future: Modern Reprints of Classic Fantasy.” And of course we include our regular review columns, calling out the finest new fantasy games and books, assembled and edited by Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward.
The complete Black Gate 14 preview is here.
The gorgeous wraparound cover is by Bruce Pennington, who also did the cover to Black Gate 12.
The issue is available for just $15.95, plus $2.50 shipping – or, until we come to our senses, you can include it as part of a 4-issue subscription for the criminally low price of $29.95. Our order page is here.
We’re hard at work converting the issue to PDF format, and will make a downloadable version of the issue available in early April for just $4.95 (only $2.95 for existing subscribers).
Over at 
Occasionally a bit of book-to-film news seems to come out of nowhere and create some genuine surprise. So, amidst reports of this-or-that being remade, rebooted, retread, reimagined, or reduxed (what is it this week? Lord of the Ring Tones? Aliens vs. Predator vs. Chucky vs. Tony Montana? T.J. Hooker on Mars?) it seems there is actually an original, never done before, not part of a hot franchise redo, SF book adaptation slated for television. Gordon R. Dickson’s Childe Cycle, better known by the name of the first book in the series, Dorsai!, is being made into a live action series by MDR productions (
I wanted to point all of you to the fine series of articles over on 
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).
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.
