Black Gate – Page 260 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

John DeNardo on the 7 Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of March

Tuesday, March 17, 2020 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

The Gobblin’ Society by James P. Blaylock-small

Covers by Vadim Sadovski, Chris Sickels/Red Nose Studio, and Jon Foster

Good friends recommend good books. And that makes John DeNardo just about the best friend we have in this business. I’ve come to rely on his regular columns for Kirkus Reviews to point me towards the best new releases each month, in articles like “Sex Robots, the Future of Racism, and Cthulhu Vacations” [Jan 21] and “The Definitive List of the Top Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2019” [Dec 2019].

He also does regular monthly round-ups of the best novels — while not neglecting short fiction, which is one of the things I like about him. For March he looks at new novels by Katie M. Flynn, K. B. Wagers, Myke Cole (Sixteenth Watch), TJ Klune, N. K. Jemisin (The City We Became), Zack Jordan, and Menna van Praag, and new short fiction and collections from Tor (including Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights, and Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson), Titan Books (including Cursed edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane), Undertow Publications, the British Library, and Black Library, not to mention James P. Blaylock, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and many others.

As always, there’s plenty of great stuff on John’s list. Here’s a few of the highlights.

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Future Treasures: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Monday, March 16, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

There is no hotter writer in the field right now than N.K. Jemisin. She’s the first writer in history to win back-to-back-to-back Hugo awards, with all three novels in her Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky). Last year she started working for DC Comics, producing the science fiction comic Far Sector with Jamal Campbell.

She has a new book coming out next week, and it looks like a winner. It’s an expanded version of her short story “The City Born Great,” originally published at Tor.com (and which you can read online right here). Set in an eldritch New York City, the story followed a supernatural talented graffiti artist, NYC’s self-dubbed “midwife,” as he tried to paint the city’s song. What’s the novel about, then? Best to let N.K. explain it. Here’s what she told EW in a recent interview.

This story is my chance to have a little monstrous fun after the weight of the Broken Earth saga, so I’m hoping readers will enjoy it, too… The city of New York comes to life — literally, as in, the city has developed sentience and an ability to act on its own. And because there’s a dangerous otherworldly tourist lurking about, trying to supernaturally gentrify the city to death, New York chooses five human champions to fight for it. Problem: they don’t know they’ve been recruited for a magical, interdimensional battle, although they figure it out pretty quickly when possessed toilet stalls attack, backyard pools turn into portals to monsterville, and traffic on the FDR becomes a literal, tentacled, killer.

Yeah, that sounds adequately funky and pretty darn great. The City We Became will be published by Orbit on March 24, 2020. It is 448 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $14.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Lauren Panepinto. It is the first novel in The Great Cities Trilogy. See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

Writing Advice: Structuring Your Story (Red Sneaker Writers)

Monday, March 16, 2020 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

I started reading William Bernhardt’s Ben Kincaid books back in the mid-nineties. I seem to recall I went on a ‘lawyer’ kick and read him, Steve Martini, and Robert K. Tannenbaum. But years later, Bernhardt made a bigger impact on me with his Red Sneaker Writers series. These slim volumes with the brightly attractive covers, are jam-packed with great writing advice. The first book I read was on Story Structure, and I think it’s still my favorite. Though every one has been both interesting to read and thought-provoking. If I ever get my act together, I’ll add “taught me a lot.”

I’ve read through a couple of them more than once, making notes ( I CANNOT highlight a physical book. I’m incapable of it). Last year, I decided to be a little more systematic and I went through EVERY title, be it Theme, Plot, Character – all of them: and I outlined the key points in each chapter. I printed them all out and have a very cool binder. Which, if I ever actually sit down and write a novel, will be of great use.

I sent one of the outlines to him, telling him that I’d like to include it in a Black Gate post, promoting the series. He kindly granted his permission. So, here we are.

I’m fortunate that many actual, real, Writers (note the capital ‘W’) with books you can buy on Amazon, or at bookstores (if you can find one that is still in business) are friends of mine. And they are FAR more qualified than I am to talk abut writing advice. I think I hold my own as a Black Gate blogger, and there are worse Sherlock Holmes short stories out there than mine (And certainly better ones!). But I’ve got two unfinished novels, which doesn’t mean squat.

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Sword-and-Sorcery and the Problem of Genre

Sunday, March 15, 2020 Brian Murphy Comments 9 comments

Cover by Tom Barber

Among the many challenges I had when I sat down to write Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery was the problem of genre itself.

Many of the genres we know, and love, and live in — mystery, horror, historical fiction — are old, in a relative sense, culturally ubiquitous, and therefore intensely familiar. We’ve enjoyed them for so long that we typically don’t bother to question who set them down, or when, or why. Their conventions are widely accepted. Everyone knows what fantasy is for example, and can conjure up a reasonably accurate description without expending too much effort — elves, dragons, heroes, princesses, magic, set in other worlds beyond our own. Boom, done.

But if you start poking under the hood you will find that genres are full of contradictions, exceptions, uncertain beginnings, and open-ended futures. They don’t coalesce until after art has been created, often decades later. They’re birthed through a weird alchemical process that includes inspired initial breakthroughs, the production of further works by successive artists, derivative and pastiche work, fan/reader discussion, and eventually, critical consensus. Or something close.

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Uncanny X-Men Part 8, Issues 59-66: The Savage Land and the End of the Silver Age X-Men

Saturday, March 14, 2020 Derek Kunsken Comments 2 comments

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This is a gigantic milestone! This is the 8th episode in my reread of the X-Men run. It covers from #59, the height of the Roy Thomas-Neal Adams run, to #66, the end of original X-Men stories, which hit the stands on March 10th, 1970. The end of the X-Men’s ongoing stories coincides with the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of the Bronze.

The Silver Age X-Men, as a distinctly 1960s phenomenon reached their peak with some of the Arnold Drake stories with some interesting experimentation under Steranko’s art. The arrival of Neal Adams feels much more like it belongs in the Bronze Age. Both the art and the story complexity (under Roy Thomas) feels like it’s breaking creative ground that the best of the 1970s will follow.

The merry mutants’ uneven momentum had carried them for 7 years, but even a spectacular finish couldn’t save the series from its failure to come into focus. We’re going to talk today about that end.

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An Intelligent Medical-Thriller about a Worldwide Plague: Contagion (2011)

Saturday, March 14, 2020 Mark R. Kelly Comments 0 Comment

The 2011 film Contagion is being remembered in light of current events. I remember it well — especially the part about not touching your face! Here’s what I wrote about it on my blog, back then.

Brief plug for the movie Contagion, an intelligent medical-thriller about a plague [that] quickly breaks out worldwide, killing a quarter of those infected. I was impressed by the Slate dialogue between Arthur Allen and Carl Zimmer, and advance articles that described the lengths director Steven Soderbergh went to instill scientific authenticity. The film tends towards a documentary style rather than a overtly dramatic end-of-the-world thriller style; I appreciated the focus on the *process* of analyzing the infection – to an extent it reminded me of The Andromeda Strain, with a similar focus on scientists as heroes (!). I was affected by the dramatic structure which begins the film with “Day 2″ and ends the film with “Day 1″, revealing — to the audience but not to the characters — the ultimate source of the contagion. And the music by Cliff Martinez is my kind of film music (though apparently not yet available on CD).

Links:

www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778
www.slate.com/id/2303319/entry/2303322
www.markrkelly.com/Views/?p=718

Space Renegades, Leviathan Ships, and Planet-Eating Monsters: The Honors Trilogy by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre

Friday, March 13, 2020 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Covers by Jeff Huang

I think a lot of the classic SF I read in the 70s and 80s would be characterized as YA today. Certainly the novels of Clifford D. Simak, Roger Zelazny and Anne McCaffrey still speak to a modern audience, and would probably do well in the YA section of the bookstore.

Or maybe not. Every new generation finds writers who speak its language, and sets aside the treasured writers of older generations. And that’s the way it should be. It’s good to pass along our love of Simak, Zelazny, McCaffrey and others to young readers… but it’s a good idea to take the time to see what the heck they’re reading as well.

What are they reading? Lots of stuff. The YA section of my local Barnes & Noble is crammed full of new releases every week, and a great many of them are science fiction. And more than a few look pretty interesting, too. The Honors trilogy by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre piqued my interest recently… probably because I saw the one-sentence summary for Honor Lost (“Quick-thinking Leviathan pilot Zara Cole must stop a planet-eating monster or lose everyone she loves in the finale of this acclaimed trilogy”), and let’s face it, planet-eating monsters are my weakness.

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New Treasures: The Boatman’s Daughter by Andy Davidson

Friday, March 13, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy lately, and I’m in the mood for something different. With impeccable timing, along comes Andy Davidson’s The Boatman’s Daughter, a supernatural thriller about a young woman facing down ancient forces in the depths of the bayou. It features the silhouette of a swampman with a plant growing out of his head on the cover, and that qualifies as sufficiently different in my book.

Andy Davidson is the author of In the Valley of the Sun, which was a finalist for the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. His second novel is getting even more attention… Kirkus Reviews says, “The remote Arkansas bayou is a swirling kaleidoscope of murder, greed, and dark, ancient magic… A stunning supernatural Southern Gothic.”

I like the sound of that. Here’s the publisher’s description.

Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm.

But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda’s peculiar and precarious life. And when the preacher makes an unthinkable demand, it sets Miranda on a desperate, dangerous path, forcing her to consider what she is willing to sacrifice to keep her loved ones safe.

With the heady mythmaking of Neil Gaiman and the heartrending pacing of Joe Hill, Andy Davidson spins a thrilling tale of love and duty, of loss and discovery. The Boatman’s Daughter is a gorgeous, horrifying novel, a journey into the dark corners of human nature, drawing our worst fears and temptations out into the light.

The Boatman’s Daughter was published by FSG Originals on February 11, 2020. It is 416 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Goth Chick News: Watching Pet Sematary in a Pet Cemetery Is the Distraction We All Need

Thursday, March 12, 2020 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

With the zombie apocalypse bearing down on us in the form of this year’s flu season, Big Cheese John O has given up and ordered the Black Gate staff to work from home. I mean, there was really no point in Clorox wipes when this office is full of boys who haven’t dusted anything since we moved in. Trying to disinfect surfaces simply resulted in swirls of little antiseptic-smelling puddles everywhere. Weeks ago, I had fully abandoned the office’s unisex bathroom as a bad bet and started dropping in at the far more hygienic bus station down the street. And since no bakery would deliver individually-wrapped donuts, the only safe alternative to keep Black Gate running was to separate everyone. Of course, there’s no telling what leaving the staff unsupervised will do to the quality of the writing, but time will tell.

So, though hunkering down for some serious binge-watching seems fairly attractive at the moment, there are still some extremely good reasons to go out, besides having the outside world pretty much to yourself.

Namely, a company called On Set Cinema.

The concept is a simple one. Kenny Caperton, owner of The Myers House NC, which is a life-size replica of the infamous Michael Myers house from John Carpenter’s Halloween, came up with the idea to show movies in their actual filming locations. Though he screens content from all genres, his focus is horror films.

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“Authenticity” in Sword & Sorcery Fiction

Thursday, March 12, 2020 Gabe Dybing Comments 9 comments

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

These days, in intersection with my Conan gaming (I enjoy both Monolith’s board game and Modiphius’s roleplaying game), I have been reading a lot of two things: weird fiction from the turn of last century into, maybe, the 1940s; and sword & sorcery — anything that, on its cover, features a muscled male wielding medieval weaponry — predominantly from the ‘70s or ‘80s. (This latter does the double duty of encouraging me to work out.)

As is to be expected, these works offer various levels of quality. Early-last-century weird fiction is in a class of its own, and, though writers of that era freely borrowed tropes, themes and elements from each other (they very much appear to have been in conversation, literally or otherwise), the form of the weird tale is not as calcified as that of sword & sorcery appears to be by the ‘80s. Even within this latter’s straitjacket, however, I have encountered some standouts, including John Dalmas’s The Orc Wars (beginning with The Yngling, 1971), Gordon Dickson’s and Roland Green’s Jamie the Red (an unofficial Thieves’ World novel, 1984), and John Maddox Robert’s The King of the Wood (1983). Why I like these is for the reasons that one would like any work of fiction, of course, but with one addition: they present a sense of verisimilitude. I should add here, for anyone who might not be privy to how sword & sorcery is supposed to be subdivided from its parent genre of fantasy, that sword & sorcery is supposed to be more “realistic.” The world presented in such tales is premodern. Life is hard. The cultures do not have our present technology (nor magic — magic, in this subgenre, if not “low,” is rare and mysterious and terrifying and usually very, very “wrong”) with which to ease the drudgery of existence. In other words, the characters in such stories live in the way that folks in the Middle Ages lived, possibly in the way that many of our grandparents or great-grandparents lived, if they were homesteading somewhere.

This is why I no longer write sword & sorcery. I am a city boy. I am modern. I have no idea what “real life” is like. And yet I somehow have enough of one to know — intuitively or otherwise — when a writer knows even less than I do. To catalog the many errors of some of our most famous current fantasy writers is outside of the scope of these observations, but I’ll point to the occasion that spurred me finally to write on this topic here.

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