The Mandalorian: Fidelity & Innovation

The Mandalorian: Fidelity & Innovation

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I’m not a Star Wars fanboy. I’ve seen the movies, and most of the cartoon shows. Though I’m pretty spotty on The Clone Wars, which my son Sean can cite chapter and verse. I read books by Alan Dean Foster and Timothy Zahn way back when, but that’s about it.

But I like Star Wars. And I’m fairly open-minded. I thought that a few of the movies, like The Phantom Menace, weren’t that great. And The Last Jedi just about put me to sleep. But on the other hand, Solo was a fun caper/heist flick, with a Star Wars overlay: I’m in!

Star Wars Rebels was a much better animated series than The Resistance, for me. I liked all the lore they filled in. Which brings us to Jon Favreau’s terrific project, The Mandalorian. Favreau played a major role in launching the Marvel cinematic universe, and I can’t think of any better hands to be holding Star Wars at the moment.

A year ago, I raved about the first three episodes of season one, which I binge-watched with my son. I loved the rest of the season, and as I type this, we’re through episode five of season two.

SPOILER ALERT – If you’re reading this before watching the show: that’s surprising. Seems like everybody I know is watching every episode on the Friday it drops. Go catch up on Disney+, then read the rest of this. END SPOILER ALERT

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Discover How We’ll Get into Space in Stellaris: People of the Stars, edited by Les Johnson and Robert E. Hampson

Discover How We’ll Get into Space in Stellaris: People of the Stars, edited by Les Johnson and Robert E. Hampson

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Stellaris: People of the Stars (Baen, August 2020). Cover by Sam Kennedy

I complain (a lot) about the death of the mass market science fiction anthology. So when I see a new one on the shelves, it’s worth celebrating — especially when it looks as strong as Baen’s Stellaris: People of the Stars, which is obviously a tie-in to the hugely popular Stellaris computer game from Paradox.

Except it isn’t, which I discovered after I bought a copy and brought it home. It was inspired instead by a gathering of scientists and writers at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, and is a mix of fiction and non-fiction essays on space travel. Here’s a slice from by Kevin P Hallett’s review at Tangent Online.

This anthology contains ten science fiction stories themed around humanity’s quest to expand out to the stars and the many challenges they will face. With very few exceptions the stories are strong page turners. Scattered among the stories are six essays on various challenges that humanity will face, ensuring the anthology is a broad exploration of space colonization in the future….

“At the Bottom of the White” by Todd McCaffrey

Cin is a crewmember of the Valrise, a trading spaceship that is renewing contact with the abandoned colony of Arwon. The trader’s technology far exceeds Arwon’s sectarian government that starves its disaffected minorities.

Unaware of the nuances in such a charged political environment, Cin and the other members of the ship’s crew try to trade. Only to find themselves suddenly embroiled in the brutal politics of subjugation and faced with tough choices. Cin must risk going ‘down to the white’, if she’s to help the people. This was an interesting character-centric story with its fair share of intrigue and action.

Les Johnson is the author of Mission to Methone; his previous anthology was Going Interstellar (2012), edited with Jack McDevitt. Robert E. Hampson is the editor of the forthcoming The Founder Effect.

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Vintage Treasures: Saraband of Lost Time by Richard Grant

Vintage Treasures: Saraband of Lost Time by Richard Grant

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Saraband of Lost Time (Avon, March 1985). Cover by Jim Burns

Richard Grant has had a fine career as an American fantasy writer, with works such as Rumors of Spring (1986), Views from the Oldest House (1989) and the Philip K. Dick Award winner Through the Heart (1991). But his career began with his 1985 debut Saraband of Lost Time, a science fiction novel that was a Locus Award nominee for Best First Novel and received an Honorable Mention from the Philip K. Dick Award jury.

Saraband received a lot of attention at the time. In his Books column in F&SF Algis Budrys called “one of the most engaging first novels in years… a piece of cultured prose which by its nature confers importance on its cast of characters and on their activities.”

But what do modern readers make of it? It has generally positive reviews at Goodreads; Tom Britz calls it “a far reaching future tale of environmental changes [that] jumped around to different characters as it tried to make sense of this future world.” And in a 4-star review, Avis Black sums up by saying,

Grant is one bizarre writer, and Saraband is his best and most (relatively speaking) accessible novel.

But Geoff Clarke found it took a second reading to really appreciate it.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Days of Technicolor Knights

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Days of Technicolor Knights

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Hang on to your hauberks! This week we’re taking a gander at veteran director Richard Thorpe’s quasi-trilogy about knights in shining armor, three films all starring Robert Taylor that set the look and feel of screen stories about medieval knights for more than a decade.

Ivanhoe

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1952
Director: Richard Thorpe
Source: Amazon streaming video

In 1814 the poet Walter Scott began publishing his popular Waverly novels of recent Scottish history, and then switched, with Ivanhoe in 1820, to the medieval era and the history of England, in the process co-inventing (along with Jane Porter) the modern genre of the historical adventure novel. Ivanhoe was a landmark in other ways as well, for its sympathetic treatment of Jews in Western societies, for establishing the character and tone of our modern version of Robin Hood, and for promoting the medieval background as a setting for adventure tales, still as popular today in the 21st century as Scott made them in the 19th. (That’s right: no Ivanhoe, no Game of Thrones.)

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A Maelstrom of Fun for Horror Adventure Fans: Deep Madness: Shattered Seas by Byron Leavitt

A Maelstrom of Fun for Horror Adventure Fans: Deep Madness: Shattered Seas by Byron Leavitt

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Cover art by Christopher Shy / Cover design by Byron Leavitt.

Shattered Seas is a toxic dose of Lovecraftian mythos, psychedelic team-exploration (reminiscent of Star Trek voyages), and survival-horror melee (mutant creatures replacing zombies). It’s a maelstrom of fun if you enjoy horror adventure, losing your mind, and drowning.

Ever want to crack open the gateway into an Otherworld with a few friends? Perhaps you are ambitious and naively want to gain dominion of cosmic powers. Will you be comfortable with mutating forces transforming you into a tentacled mass? Start the madness by searching for the mystical Sphere buried in the ocean near the submerged Kadath Mining facility. Lucas Kane, a marine biologist, is one of your tour guides. Here he observes Kadath, a mining facility with organic qualities (excerpt):

Kadath lit up below them drew his attention and caught his breath. The facility sprawled across the seabed like a sunken metropolis from another world, its illuminated structures pushing defiantly upward into the inky abyss. The station’s domes and towers seemed like the last bastions of light and reason still standing in an endless Stygian wasteland. It was hypnotic, dreamlike, and yet somehow inexplicably solid. Lucas could make out the shuttle tubes running between the three main domes, as well as to the smaller, squarer outposts and middle structures. He could even see the primary enclosed drilling site not far off from the main facility, connected to Dome Three by long, spacious tubes.

This novel was inspired by Diemension Games’ Deep Madness, a cooperative sci-fi/horror board game. The novel serves as a stand-alone book as much as it does a gateway into the game narrative. Non-gamers will enjoy it all the same since the key protagonists (Lucas Kane and Connor Durham) are freshly introduced, plus the story is a prequel to the story presented in the game. At the end of this article, there is an embedded movie overviewing the board game.

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Rogue Blades Author: An Unexpected Gift

Rogue Blades Author: An Unexpected Gift

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Howard changed my lifeThe following is an excerpt from Barbara Ingram Baum’s essay for Robert E. Howard Changed My Life, an upcoming book from the Rogue Blades Foundation.

May 25, 1995, marked a profound change in my life. Alla Ray Morris, or ‘Pat’ as we called her, passed away unexpectedly. When my husband, Jack, met with her attorneys after her funeral, he was shocked to learn she had bequeathed her rights in Robert E. Howard’s works to him, to his sister Terry, and to their mother, Zora Mae Baum Bryant, whom she had named as executrix of her estate. I could never have imagined the impact this gift would have on my life.

Jack’s father had passed away in 1971, and several years later his mother married Elliott Bryant, a kind, loving widower who embraced his new family as Zora Mae had two adult children, a daughter-in-law, and three young grandchildren. Elliott’s parents and younger brother were deceased, but he maintained a close relationship with his aunt, Alla Ray Kuykendall (‘Auntie K’) and her daughter, Alla Ray Morris (‘Pat’), who lived in the nearby town of Ranger, Texas. Whenever we gathered at the house in Cross Plains for holidays, Auntie K and Pat were always included, and over the years they became family to all of us as well. So even after Elliott died suddenly in 1982, the relationship continued, and every week Jack’s mother drove to Ranger to play bridge with the Kuykendalls and their friends. I believe she and Pat became even closer after Auntie K passed away. Nevertheless, we were stunned when Pat suddenly died and we learned she had included us in her will — it was totally unexpected.

We knew nothing about Robert E. Howard or his works. However, we recalled Zora Mae, Elliott, Auntie K, and Pat had attended the showing of the film Conan the Barbarian, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the Paramount Theatre in Abilene, but Jack and I had never seen the film or read any of Howard’s works or talked about Howard or discussed the Kuykendalls’ ownership at family gatherings. I faintly remembered comments about Howard Days, but we had never discussed those events, nor had we attended. Interestingly, though, Jack’s mother kept a Conan calendar on her kitchen wall — which I know now was a Ken Kelly scene from “People of the Black Circle.” (You would have to know Jack’s mother to appreciate how completely out of character it was for her to have a heroic fantasy calendar on her wall. Zora Mae was very much a traditionalist and was very particular about her home and its accessories.)

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A Tale That Calls to Mind Classic SF Sagas: The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton

A Tale That Calls to Mind Classic SF Sagas: The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton

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The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton (Del Rey, 2018-2020). Covers by Anna Kochman

You know, I remember when Peter F. Hamilton was known for hardboiled science fiction like the Greg Mandel series (Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, and The Nano Flower, 1993-95). His breakout work was the massive 1.2 million-word The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God, 1996-99) which turned him into the 21st Century’s poster child for Space Opera. Since then he’s become one of the top selling modern SF writers, with a series of NYT bestselling space opera trilogies, including the Commonwealth Saga, the Void Trilogy, and the Chronicle of the Fallers.

This month sees the release of The Saints of Salvation, the third novel in The Salvation Sequence. Here’s a slice from Paul Di Filippo’s rave review at Locus Online.

Peter Hamilton just keeps getting better and better with each book, more assured and more craftsmanly adroit, and more inventive. And to his credit, he wants to stretch and try different things, not just repeat himself. His newest – the first in a fresh cycle – is, to my eye, rather different than any of his previous books. I detect a distinct Neal Stephenson vibe layered atop his own signature Hard SF moves…

What’s the year 2204 like? Pretty amazing and different…  what could upset this arcadian applecart? The discovery of an unknown alien ship on a distant planet – a ship filled with semi-butchered yet still living humans. Immediately the Connexion Corp mounts a top-secret mission to Nkya. Helmed by an employee named Feriton, the posse consists of several deadly security experts, masters of dirty tricks and brute survivalism… Hamilton gives us a tale – or at least the maximally effective start of a tale – that calls to mind such classic sagas as Greg Benford’s Galactic Center series and Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee cycle… It’s a bravura performance from start to finish….

The flashback sequences are remarkable, heart-stopping mini-thrillers, kind of police procedurals-cum-spy-capers. Hamilton should really be tasked with doing the script for the next Mission: Impossible film… In short, Hamilton is juggling chainsaws while simultaneously doing needlepoint over a shark tank. It’s a virtuoso treat, and I for one can hardly wait for Salvation Lost.

Lucky for you, you don’t have to wait. Salvation Lost was published last year. Here’s the complete deets on all three volumes, all released by Del Rey.

Salvation (576 pages, $30 hardcover/$9.99 paperback and digital, September 4, 2018) – cover by Anna Kochman
Salvation Lost (512 pages, $32 hardcover/$9.99 paperback and digital, October 29, 2019) – cover by Anna Kochman
The Saints of Salvation (528 pages, $30 hardcover/$14.99 digital, November 17, 2020) – cover by Anna Kochman

See all our recent coverage of the best new Space Opera trilogies (and other high quality series) here.

Goth Chick News Guest Review: Revisiting My Bloody Valentine

Goth Chick News Guest Review: Revisiting My Bloody Valentine

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With “the season” officially over for 2020, the stores seem to have given Thanksgiving a miss and moved directly to reminding us it’s time to make this the most expensive Christmas ever. I therefore determined it was a fair cop to give the whole thing a pass and move directly on to Valentine’s Day. And it seemed only right to invite Goth Chick News guest writer Scott E to comment on his favorite film, while I slacked off in a carb-coma.

Take it away Scott.

The 2009 Lionsgate sequel to the 1981 classic horror film, My Bloody Valentine, was cleverly written by Todd Farmer and Zane Smith, and directed by Patrick Lussier. Jensen Ackles, Tom Adkins, Kerr Smith, Betsy Rue, Jamie King, Megan Boone and Kevin Tighe round out the talented cast. This film is one of my favorites because the flow of the scenes pulled me in from the get go, and the special effects were creative and gorier than expected. Jensen Ackles (Supernatural) plays the son of original slasher Richard John Walters (24) who returns to his hometown on the tenth anniversary of the Valentine’s night massacre that claimed the lives of 22 people.

If you’re unfamiliar with the original 1981 storyline it, like the 2009 version, takes place in a mining town, enabling several of the most terrifying scenes to be darkly claustrophobic. Apparently Lionsgate wasn’t all that keen on a sequel , but Lussier convinced the executives the 3D effects would pay off at the box office. Studio legend has it that Lionsgate brass viewed a rough cut of the 3D version and screamed like little girls, ensuring the studio’s full backing.

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Black Gate is Moving!

Black Gate is Moving!

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Black Gate is moving!

If you’ve had trouble leaving a comment recently, or logging into the site to create an article (or for any reason), that’s the likely reason. For the last 20 years we were hosted at Toybox in Ottawa, run with tireless efficiency by Roy Hopper, but Roy has decided to wind down the business. Effective yesterday afternoon, we migrated the entire site to a brand new hosting service in Florida.

This wasn’t exactly an easy process (not according to the exhausted late-night calls we got from Support at our new service provider, anyway). It involved moving over 211,000 files, uncounted gigs of images, sound files (who uploaded sound files?), and strange databases apparently created by DAW Books in the 1970s. Our offices look like a Marvel Studios sound stage after a wrap party.

All of this is a prelude to begging your indulgence for the next few days. Simultaneous with the migration, we upgraded our WordPress install, moved our email servers, and shed several old databases and obsolete plug-ins. Like Bones stepping off a transporter pad, we’re padding ourselves down to make sure all our parts arrived intact. Things are sure to be a little off-kilter for at least the next few days — and maybe a little later than usual. (And if you’re a BG contributor frustrated with the new setup, don’t hesitate to get in touch to ask for help.)

With luck, the whole team will be back to normal next month. In the meantime, enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday (for our US readers), and for international visitors, enjoy the coming slate of holidays SF and fantasy books.

And thanks in advance for your patience with us!

Writing Advice: Get Spiteful

Writing Advice: Get Spiteful

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What a stunning walk this would be. Image by Tim Hill from Pixabay

Good afternoon, Readers!

I have a hot take:

Spite is as good a reason for creating as any.

Wait. Hear me out. Let me explain.

This past week, I was hit with two important rejections. They hit harder than rejections normally do. I’ve been at the writing game a long, long time. I’m used to rejections. Sure, I really wanted to succeed this time, but I always really want to succeed. Normally rejections just make me sad for a little bit. I drink a bit of whiskey – alright, a little bit more than a bit of whiskey – and I pick myself up and try again. This time… this time I went through the whole gamut of stages of grief. Except for denial. I’ve had too many rejections for denial to ever come up. It’s totally believable that it would happen.

Also, bargaining didn’t happen. What was I going to do? Whinge at them until their minds changed? Psht.

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