As the dog days begin, my mind has been prodded back to swords & sorcery by a few things. The most important one was the the return to the fray of Charles R. Saunders, creator of the heroes Imaro and Doussouye. Just the other day, he announced the start of a new blog, Different Drumming. If you are not familiar with Saunders and his superb body of work, go at once and check out his site. The next thing, while not exactly S&S,…
“I am going to tell a story,” the griot says. “Ya-ngani!” the crowd responds, meaning “Right!” “It may be a lie.” “Ya-ngani.” “But not everything in it is false.” “Ya-ngani.” The griot begins his tale. from “Amma” by Charles R. Saunders For those unfortunates unacquainted with Charles R. Saunders and the tales he’s woven, you can read plenty about them here at…
The air has turned crisp, the sun is dipping below the horizon earlier each evening, and the supermarket candy section seems to have grown exponentially. Halloween is just around the corner and, like many of you, my mind has turned to haunts and frights. Horror is one of the primary elements dividing swords & sorcery from epic fantasy. To quote the Horror Writers Association’s site, horror fiction is that which “elicits an emotional reaction that includes some aspect of fear…
It turns out there were lots and lots of really good horror and science fiction short stories published this summer. Not as much swords & sorcery as I would have liked, but a bunch of good stories nonetheless. This week I’m going to give you a glance at roundup regular, Grimdark Magazine. I’m also going to take a look at two mags new to the roundup: the recently revived Weirdbook (read about the relaunch here), and newcomer Red Sun Magazine. You can read…
Matthew David Surridge is Black Gate‘s most successful blogger, both in terms of critical and popular success (his post “A Detailed Explanation,” on why he declined a Hugo nomination last year, is the most popular article in our history). He’s also one of our most prolific, with 270 articles to his credit, and he’s had more reprinted than anyone else on our staff. Of course, that’s mostly due to last year’s Reading Strange Matters, which collected 24 of his posts, chiefly…
I have been a fan of Milton J. Davis’ saga of Changa Diop ever since I read the first volume, Changa’s Safari, back in 2010. All three volumes are published by MVmedia, LLC. They are: Changa’s Safari: A Sword and Soul Epic (2010) Changa’s Safari, Volume Two (2012) Changa’s Safari, Volume Three (2014) [Click on any of the images in this article for bigger versions.] It’s no secret that Davis has been influenced by the father of the Sword and…
Over at book site Book Riot, Troy L. Wiggins has posted an excellent list of fantasy books that venture outside the ordinary. Fantasy recommendation lists are characterized by their safety. Curious newcomers to the genre, having enjoyed their sample of escapist literature, request more stories, more worlds to lose themselves in. More often than not, though, the recommendations that they receive are the same few critically acclaimed authors… My belief is that Fantasy literature is the perfect lens for readers…
Three weeks ago we invited Black Gate readers to win a copy of the new Lovecraft-inspired anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, by suggesting who should be writing Lovecraftian horror today. To make it challenging, all entries had to be a single sentence. We received a near-record number of entries for this contest, too many to print here. But I’ve selected 20 of the more interesting, and reproduced them below. Two winners were randomly drawn from a list of all qualified entries, and those…
Boy, we sure covered a wide range of topics in November. They included a look at the tragic death of British SF author John Brunner, the triumphant return of one of the fathers of modern Sword & Sorcery, a high-resolution snapshot of a 1942 pulp magazine rack, bulletins from the World Fantasy Convention, and a detailed report from inside the prehistoric painted caves of Somaliland. And that’s just a sample of the Top Ten most popular articles. The #1 article…
After DAW killed the fourth Imaro novel, for nearly twenty years Charles R. Saunders’s published swords & sorcery output was limited to only a few short stories. Since 2006, starting with the reprinting of Imaro, new books from him have been appearing at a furious rate. In addition to new novels starring his established S&S characters, Imaro and Dossouye, he introduced a new pulp hero, Damballa. Abengoni: First Calling (A:FC) is the first book in Charles R. Saunders’s foray into epic…