Black Gate 14 goes to press this month. It’s a big issue — including a Morlock novella from James Enge, the sequel to “The Face in the Sea” (BG 13) from John C. Hocking, and great new adventure fantasy from Martin Owton, Matthew Surridge, Pete Butler, Michael Jasper & Jay Lake, and many others. Of course, that’s not all. Contributing Editor Rich Horton delivers another great retrospective piece, this one a detailed look at your best bets for quality reprints of Classic Fantasy,…
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224 pages, $9.95 On Sale March 31, 2009 Edited by John O’Neill Published by New Epoch Press Website Editor: Dave Munger Cover by Malcolm McClinton Spot Art by Bernie Mireault Interior Art by Kent Burles, Storn Cook, Mark Evans, Leif Jones, John Kaufmann, Malcolm McClinton, Bernie Mireault, Jim Pavelec, and Michael Vilardi Buy this issue — only $9.95 plus postage and handling! FICTION “The Beautiful Corridor” By Jonathan L. Howard Kyth had penetrated every chamber of the ancient and deadly tomb……
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The Drowned World, first edition (Berkley Medallion, August 1962). Cover by Richard Powers I’m criminally undereducated in J.G. Ballard. I came to most of my favorite science fiction writers through short fiction, and the first Ballard short stories I read (such as “The Terminal Beach”) were lush and impressively written, but also a far cry from the adventure tales I craved in SF and fantasy. But as I’ve grown older, I found I’m much more interested in Ballard. I wrote a…
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Poseidonis (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #59, July 1973). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo I’ve been collecting Clark Ashton Smith recently, and I keep coming back to the wonderful Ballantine Adult Fantasy editions edited by Lin Carter in the early 70s. It’s not nostalgia (well, maybe it’s a little nostalgia). And it’s certainly not that the stories aren’t available in other editions — Smith’s work has been annotated and collected by more than half a dozen publishers this century alone, including Night Shade,…
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Four John Crowley paperbacks published in rapid succession by Bantam: Little, Big, Beasts, Engine Summer, The Deep (October, November, December 1983, and January 1984). Covers by Yvonne Gilbert In 1981 Bantam Books published John Crowley’s masterwork Little, Big, which Matthew David Surridge calls “the best post-Tolkien novel of the fantastic.” It was an unexpected hit, receiving nominations for every major fantasy prize, including the Hugo, Balrog, BSFA, Locus, and Nebula awards, and winning both the Mythopoeic Award and the World…
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Rogues in the House In 1934, Weird Tales magazine published Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “Rogues in the House.” Bob Byrne covered the story on Black Gate as part of his “Hither Came Conan” series. Just a few years ago, in late 2018, Sword & Sorcery enthusiasts and content creators forged Rogues in the House – the Ultimate S&S Podcast (the link is a portal page to multiple listening Apps). This post spotlights it because it is more than just…
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The City of the Singing Flame (Timescape, 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill We’ve written a lot about Clark Ashton Smith at Black Gate. Like, a lot. Over two dozen articles over the last decade or so by my count, by many of our top writers, including Brian Murphy, Matthew David Surridge, Fletcher Vredenburgh, Thomas Parker, James Maliszewski, M Harold Page, Steven H Silver, John R. Fultz — and especially Ryan Harvey, who’s penned a third of our coverage all on…
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I saw more movies at Fantasia 2021 than at any previous iteration of the festival. By my count, I watched 96 short films from 25 countries and 69 features from 19 countries, with a total of 32 different countries represented in my viewing this year. The quality was there, too. I don’t have any metric to track these things, but it felt like both the number of exceptional films and the overall quality of the movies in 2021 was higher…
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When I first saw the schedule for Fantasia 2021, none of the films playing the final night of the festival struck me as something I wanted to review here. I therefore decided I’d pick one of the movies available on-demand throughout Fantasia as my personal closing film. Which then raised the question of which of those movies felt like enough of an event to mark the end of a three-week revel in the weirdness of genre cinema. And the answer…
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In the waning hours of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival I sat down to watch The Unknown Man of Shandigor (L’inconnu de Shandigor), a 1967 Swiss spy film directed by Jean-Louis Roy, who collaborated on the script with Gabriel Arout and Pierre Koralnik. The film’s got a new 4K restoration by the Cinematheque Suisse; I’d never heard of the movie, but the description was intriguing, a black-and-white mod odyssey through the weirdness of the 1960s, with nods to Dr. Strangelove…
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