I’ve seen a lot of exciting news from David C. Smith recently. If you’ve been following the Black Gate Online Fiction series (see the latest here), you know that his recent collaboration with Joe Bonadonna, Waters of Darkness, has been near the top of our monthly traffic charts since we published an excerpt back in March. And just a few months ago, our website editor, Michael Penkas, reviewed his much-loved Red Sonja novels, co-written with Richard L. Tierney in the early…
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Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Waters of Darkness, the supernatural pirate dark fantasy novel by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna. The Witch’s shot smashed its prow with a sudden chaos of flame and smoke, blood and cinders. Lengths of oar blew into the air and fell slowly like matchwood to the sea. Sailors and pieces of sailors littered the waves with a red stain. Kate’s ruffians howled, and the crews of the…
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We’re very pleased to note the March 1 release date of a new novel by two Black Gate contributors, David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, which they describe as “the best supernatural pirate dark fantasy… EVER.” We asked Dave about the book’s genesis, and here’s what he told us: This story is based on a ms. I wrote in 1978 that was to be a sequel to The Witch of the Indies, my first published novel, based on Robert E….
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Thursday I had the pleasure of attending a reading by the distinguished David C. Smith here in Chicago. Dave’s accomplishments in the field of modern sword & sorcery are legendary. With Richard L. Tierney, he published the Bran Mak Morn novel, For the Witch of the Mists (1978), and six volumes in the Red Sonja series from 1981 to 1983. He wrote one other novel based on the works of Robert E. Howard: The Witch of the Indies (1977), featuring…
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By Jill Elaine Hughes Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. David C. Smith, now a professional scientific manuscript editor living near Chicago, published nearly twenty novels of pulp fantasy in the 1970s and early 1980s, including several volumes in the acclaimed Red Sonja series. Smith’s novels — now mostly out of print but still widely available on the secondhand book market — represent a bygone era in science fiction/adventure fantasy writing and publishing. With the recent mainstream…
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I’d been planning to reprint some excerpts from an interview I conducted with David Smith last year, then realized we had another interview with David Smith in the Black Gate web queue… and then I bumped into David Smith at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback convention! Below you’ll find some excerpts from my interview with David related to the writing of fantasy adventure fiction, most particularly sword-and-sorcery. For the complete interview, visit here. And for the more recent interview,…
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During the fantasy boom of the 1970s and ’80s, the work of a young Chicagoan named David C. Smith consistently kept Sword-and-Sorcery readers enthralled with tales that heralded back to the pulp S&S adventures of old. Now after many years away from the field, he sits down with Black Gate to discuss that storied publishing age and his career as one of the genre’s shining lights. READ THE ARTICLE
Moderan, by David R. Bunch (Avon, May 1971). Cover by Norman Adams The week between Christmas and New Year’s may be my favorite time of the year. Nobody’s working. Life slows down. Everybody’s eating cheese. And I can finally kick back and tackle the reading projects I’ve wanted to get to all year. At the top of my list is a Moderan, a classic science fiction collection that reviewers at Black Gate have referenced countless times in the past few…
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Farewell, Earth’s Bliss (Ace Books, 1971), Synthajoy (Berkley Books, September 1979), and Ascendancies (Ace, January 1985). Covers by Reginald Lloyd, Richard Powers, and Barclay Shaw I learned this week that David Guy Compton died on November 10. He was born on August 19, 1930, in London, the child of two actors. He lived to the age of 93. He wrote SF as “D. G. Compton,” mysteries as “Guy Compton,” romance novels as “Frances Lynch,” and also radio plays, some non-fiction…
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Rarely a day goes by that I’m not listening for at least a few minutes to a radio play or an audiobook. They have become weaved into the fabric of my life. David Ian of Unchained Productions recounts a live performance of The Hobbit at a Middle Earth Convention. This is SO neat! Read on. “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” the narrator Cindy McGean begins at the microphone. Flanking her on stage is a phalanx of microphone…
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