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New Treasures: Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40K: Horus Rising on Audio CD

New Treasures: Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40K: Horus Rising on Audio CD

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horus-cdI have a 3-hour commute to my job in Champaign, Illinois, and I exhausted the excellent Dark Adventure Radio Theatre adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft’s major works months ago. What’s a bored commuter to do?

Rejoice when the latest Black Library Audio CD arrives, that’s what. I thoroughly enjoyed Nick Kyme’s Thunder From Fenris — a tale of desperate battles against a zombie plague (and worse) on a frozen planet — last year, and have been looking forward to the next release. Nothing helps the miles (and miles) of cornfields of  Illinois slip by like a fast-paced tale set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, lemme tell you.

As entertaining as it was, Fenris was only 70 minutes, and it fit on a single CD. This week’s mail brought the much more imposing Horus Rising: a 6-hour, 5 CD audio extravaganza adapting one of the central works in the Warhammer 40K canon – the tale of the epic betrayal of the immortal Emperor by his Warmaster, Horus:

It is the 31st millennium. Under the benevolent leadership of the Immortal Emperor, the Imperium of Man has stretched out across the galaxy. It is a golden age of discovery and conquest. But now, on the eve of victory, the Emperor leaves the front lines, entrusting the great crusade to his favourite son, Horus. Promoted to Warmaster, can the idealistic Horus carry out the Emperor’s grand plan, or will this promotion sow the seeds of heresy amongst his brothers? Horus Rising is the first chapter in the epic tale of the Horus Heresy, a galactic civil war that threatened to bring about the extinction of humanity.

Abridged from the best selling novel by Dan Abnett and read by award winning star of stage and screen Martyn Eliis, Horus Rising comes to life in this almost 6 hour reading.

Six hours!  Just long enough to occupy me all the way to work, and back.  Champaign, here I come!

Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

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image0041The holidays are over and according to AccuWeather, approximately 70% of the United States has snow on the ground and for a whole lot of you, this may be just a rare enough occurrence that for the moment, you’re mildly amused. But trust me when I tell you the novelty of throwing it at each other, sliding down it, or for a select group of you, writing your name in it, is going to wear off. And that’s when the cabin fever sets in.

The reality is that 70% of otherwise (fairly) stable Americans are trapped like rats with family members, classmates or co-workers for another two months at minimum. We are all now horror-movie fodder, Steven King style, holed up without sunlight and fresh air; susceptible to maddeningly repetitive sounds like the British accent on that lizard in the insurance commercials, until the only remaining coherent thought is squishing him flat in your uninsured Hummer.

Or maybe that’s just me.

The point is, you’re in need of mind-diverting entertainment until the thaw comes; before you end up being the subject of an HBO special and some Dancing With the Stars contestant is playing you… badly.

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Rich Horton Reviews The Long Look

Rich Horton Reviews The Long Look

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long-lookThe Long Look
Richard Parks
Five Star (297 pages, $25.95, September 2008)
Reviewed by Rich Horton

I am tempted to propose a new subgenre of fantasy that I might call domestic fantasy, or ordinary-people fantasy, or anyway something that suggests stories set in secondary worlds, complete with magic, and for that matter complete with kingdoms and magicians and all the other Tough Guide to Fantasyland markers (even stew!), but populated by sensible (mostly) people, fairly typical of your neighbors in general attitudes (but not anachronistically so).

I’ve noted in multiple reviews of Lawrence Watt-Evans’s novels that they seem often to take a very common sense approach to grand fantastical tropes like dragons. So his work might fit. And a novel like Sherwood Smith’s A Posse of Princesses, about a bunch of pretty basic teenagers who happen to be princes and princesses in a fantasy world, seems to fit as well. You might even argue that aspects of the great model for so much contemporary fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, have this ring* of domesticity – that is to say, the hobbits – but really it is The Lord of the Rings, with its stark good versus evil theme, and with characters like the impossibly noble Aragorn and the angel-like Gandalf and the ethereally beautiful Galadriel and the disembodied evil of Sauron, that I see my domestic fantasies as reacting against. (In a respectful way – I love The Lord of the Rings, and so, I suspect, do most of these writers.)

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Another Reason to Love Netflix “Watch Instantly”: Vampire Circus

Another Reason to Love Netflix “Watch Instantly”: Vampire Circus

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vampire-circus1Vampire Circus (1972)
Directed by Robert Young. Starring Adrienne Corri, Laurence Payne, Anthony Higgins, Thorley Walters, John Moulder-Brown, Lalla Ward, Robin Sachs, Lynne Frederick, Richard Owens, David Prowse, Robert Tayman.

It seems that any time I log into Netflix to manipulate my queue to get physical DVDs, I discover more treasures that I can watch with only a click of the mouse button. Sometimes films unavailable on DVD—or any home video format—for many years. Such as Vampire Circus. (It is available on Blu-Ray, but I don’t have that option.)

Vampire Circus is one of the small treasures of 1970s Hammer Horror, and unfortunately few people on this side of the pond have had the opportunity to see it; the movie has remained incredibly elusive in the U.S. When it was released theatrically in the States, the U.S. distributor de-sanguinized it to a PG rating. Netflix has oddly maintained the PG rating on their page for the film, even though the version they have is uncut and contains the copious amount blood and bare breasts that were the marks of Hammer in its latter days.

Hammer Film Productions knew they were losing the youth audience as the decade started. Their dominance in the Anglo-horror cycle through the late 1950s and the first half of the ‘60s weakened as more graphic and contemporary movies edged in on them, making the Gothic Victorian trappings seem quaint. Hammer also lost a number of its best stars, directors, and technical people, and quality slipped as the ‘70s started. After the excellent Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Dracula series never recovered, and the attempt to reboot the Frankenstein series with The Horror of Frankenstein (on my short list for the worst horror movie the studio ever put out) was a disaster.

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Howard Andrew Jones Reviews Traveller RPG Supplements

Howard Andrew Jones Reviews Traveller RPG Supplements

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Spinward Marches_cover.indd

The Traveller RPG was originally released in 1977 as a game system in which players could explore generic space adventure games. (One of the game’s creators, Marc Miller, claims the idea came from wanting to do Dungeons & Dragons in space.)

If you like playing games set in space – whether space opera, hard SF, planetary romance, or space cowboys (you know who you are)  – you might want to check out Traveller‘s flexible system to help supplement your gameplay. You can find out more from their current publisher, Mongoose Publishing, or go to the source of all (questionable) knowledge, Wikipedia.

Today, we’re presenting three reviews from the pages of Black Gate which focus on Traveller materials. Two are of new supplements from Mongoose and the third review is for a CD-ROM containing many supplements and modules from earlier editions of the game.

Enjoy!

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Solitaire Gaming

Solitaire Gaming

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island-of-lost-spells
Another great adventure from Dark City Games.

I blame the whole thing on John O’Neill.

A few years back I asked him about the solo Dark City Games adventures that Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Todd McCaulty had reviewed so favorably for Black Gate. John happens to have a larger game collection than most game stores, so I’d come to the right person.

Solo games were great fun, John told me. “Here’s an extra copy of an old game you’ve never heard of that’s really cool. Go play it.”

That was Barbarian Prince. And yeah, it was pretty nifty (you can try it out yourself with a free download here, along with its sister solitaire product, Star Smuggler).

I started playing and enjoying the products created by Dark City Games, which the rest of the staff and I have continued to review for the magazine.

barbarian-prince3But what are these solitaire games like?

The most obvious analogy is to say that solitaire games are a little like computer adventure games played with paper, with dice and cards taking the place of a computer game’s invisible randomization of results.

My first thought was something along the lines of “how quaint,” but it turns out that while the play experiences are similar, the flavors are slightly different, even if playing them stimulates similar centers of the brain.

It’s like switching off orange pop to try some root beer, or vice versa. You may not drink one or the other exclusively, but they both sure are sweet on a hot day.

zulus-on-the-ramparts
"You mean your only plan is to stand behind a few feet of mealie bags and wait for the attack?"

While playing a solitaire game you may not see any computer graphics, but your imagination will paint some images for you.

And there’s the tactile pleasure of manipulating the counters and looking over the game board and flipping through the booklet and rolling the dice.

Solitaire in no way means that you will get the same game play each time, and to my surprise I’ve discovered that a well designed solo board game has better replay value than many computer games.

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Shrek Forever After

Shrek Forever After

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shrek_4_poster_08-535x800Last week, I discussed my favorite fantasy films of 2010 and realized that, surprisingly, they were overwhelmed by young adult films, and even animated ones. And this isn’t just because I have two young kids, it’s because they’re actually making some of the best films out there for young adults.

Maybe they always have and I just didn’t notice, because I was part of the demographic they were aiming at. But as I approach the age where I’m constitutionally-permitted to run for President, it’s clear that these movies are being made without my thirtysomething self as the intended target … yet somehow they’re resonating very well with me, in ways that the films which are being made for adults don’t seem to.

One film which didn’t make the list was Shrek Forever After, and that was for a simple reason: I hadn’t seen it.

Well, I took care of that late last week … and it certainly needs to be added. I swear, between Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon, Dreamworks might actually give Pixar a run for their money at the Academy Awards this year. (Although, once again, I must rant: Would it kill Dreamworks to include a digital copy of the film?)

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Jackson Kuhl Reviews The Birthing House

Jackson Kuhl Reviews The Birthing House

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birthing-house-tpbThe Birthing House
Christopher Ransom
St. Martin’s Press (320 pp, $14.99, August 2009 – August 2010 paperback edition)
Reviewed by Jackson Kuhl

Conrad Harrison is driving through rural Wisconsin when, on a whim, he buys a nineteenth-century house with insurance money received after the death of his estranged father. The building was, Conrad learns, The Birthing House – a hospice where expectant women could deliver their babies. Conrad returns to Los Angeles to pack up his things, his dogs, his wife — the house for him a chance to save his troubled marriage and begin over after a series of career failures. But upon moving to the house, Conrad becomes aware of a lurking presence within and soon discovers…

Well, he doesn’t discover much. His wife departs to attend job training and remains offstage for much of the book, leaving Conrad home alone to be harassed by apparitions and occurrences. There is never a sense of menace; the previous owner lived there some twenty years and while aware of the weirdness, is indifferent to it. That fact by itself results in a haunting minus any mystery or apprehension.

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“Jirel, Ma Joie!” (In Which I Encounter My First C.L. Moore)

“Jirel, Ma Joie!” (In Which I Encounter My First C.L. Moore)

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jirel21Due to an unfortunate (or perhaps I should say, “fortuitous”) comment I let slip in an email, Howard Andrew Jones discovered I had no idea who C.L. Moore was.

My comment was something to the effect of, “C.L. Moore? What did he write?”

I met Howard in person once, about a billion years ago at World Fantasy in Saratoga Springs. I retain no clear picture of him in my head, except from images I’ve gleaned off of his Facebook profile page, but from his quick reply, I could so clearly see the bare patches on his skull where he had just torn out huge clumps of hair in rage and frustration.

But he was quite polite about it all.

In his email, he linked me right to Ryan Harvey’s thorough and passionate overview of Herself, Catherine Lucille Moore, Mighty Sorceress of the Pen, Queen Mother of the First Female Sword-Swinging Spit-Fire Protagonist in Fantasy and Science Fiction. This article I happily read, promising myself I would devour some C.L. Moore books the first chance I got!

And then I promptly forgot all about it.

But Howard Andrew Jones and John O’Neill, undaunted by my insouciance, both earnestly strove to further my education in this, our beloved genre. By hook, crook and conspiracy, they contrived to smuggle me a copy (through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered) of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry for my birthday.

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Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers, and Fans

Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers, and Fans

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speculateSpeculate! is a podcast for writers, readers, and fans, run by Gregory A. Wilson and Bradley P. Beaulieu, two writers of speculative fiction. Speculate! will be sharing podcasts of several different types, including:

  • Fiction Reviews – discussions of novels or short fiction.
  • Author Interviews – interviews or roundtables with some of the great and new voices in speculative fiction.
  • Writing Technique – nuts and bolts discussions of writing technique that stem from the works we’ve reviewed.
  • Artist Interviews – just to shake things up, we thought we’d include some interviews with various artists in the speculative fiction arena.

In general, though we may not always stick to this formula, we’ll be discussing a particular set of short stories or a novel, then we’ll interview the author(s) in the following episode, and will finish up with a show where we get into the more nitty gritty details of writing technique. This allows us to dig deeper into the fiction we’re discussing, and it hopefully allows you, the listener, to be both entertained and informed. We’re always looking for suggestions for improvement, though, so if you have any thoughts on new topics or even authors we might interview, please feel free to discuss in our posts or send us an email through the contact page.

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