One of sword & sorcery’s primary inspirations is historical adventure, like that of writers Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. That noble genre continues today in Tim Willocks’ insanely violent The Religion: Vol 1 of the Tannhauser Trilogy (2006), for one, set in the cauldron of the Great Siege of Malta. Into it, Willocks introduces the rogue Mattias Tannhauser, son of a Saxon blacksmith from Transylvania. At the age of 12, Mattias’ mother and sister are killed by Ottoman militia and he is taken…
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This is one section of a serialized novel presented by Black Gate magazine. It is offered at no cost and appears with the permission of Mark Rigney, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2016 by Mark Rigney. This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or current events is purely coincidental. This is Chapter Fifteen. To read Chapter Fourteen, click…
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Remember swords & sorcery? You know, the wild, adventurous storytelling that brought most of us here together at Black Gate. I’ve put it on the back burner for the last couple of months, choosing instead to delve into epic high fantasy. But a few weeks ago I got a message from sword & soul impresario/writer/publisher Milton Davis, who wanted to know if I’d be interested in reading the new Changa collection, Before the Safari, pre-publication. Is Conan’s hair square-cut? Does Ningauble have seven…
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After the past several months of Socratic dialogue/pie fight/drunken Hell’s Angels motorcycle-chain melee (in other words, after dozens of articles and hundreds – thousands? – of comments on the Hugo debacle, for you late arrivers), we here at Black Gate have firmly answered the nonmusical question, “What are awards good for?” In a nutshell, we have established that awards can help writers find a wider audience, they can provide a bit of financial leverage for those who win them, and…
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In his editorial this month, John Joseph Adams takes a few minutes to highlight a few of his accomplishments in the past month. It’s an impressive list. In case you missed the news last month, we won another Hugo!… Lightspeed took home the rocket for Best Semiprozine, but also, just as exciting, there were two other Lightspeed Hugo victories: Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s story from Lightspeed, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” won the Hugo for Best Novelette, and one of…
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This is one section of a serialized novel presented by Black Gate magazine. It is offered at no cost and appears with the permission of Mark Rigney, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2015 by Mark Rigney. This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or current events is purely coincidental. Chapter One Once, it was said,…
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One of the interesting things about going back to the beginning of any tradition is seeing how things might have gone. Seeing, that is, possibilities unexplored and roads not taken. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of what, in retrospect, is an earlier stage of evolution. Sometimes there’s a sense of a missed chance. And then sometimes you can see why things went the way they did. I’ve written here before about my fascination with underexplored elements in 80s fantasy. In…
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Of all the mysteries and temptations packed inside that wondrous cardboard sarcophagus known as the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, none was more hypnotic than that lumpy, ill-made set of five polyhedron dice. Six-sided diced I knew, of course, but twelve? Eight? To say nothing of that canary-yellow four-sider. How did one even use it? What seemed perfectly obvious by the age of thirteen was a serious stumper at twelve. And then there was the twenty-sider, a multi-faceted orb the color…
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Nathan Ballingrud’s short stories have been making the rounds for a while, with some of the most prestigious names in contemporary weird fiction and horror sounding his praises. Jeff VanderMeer calls Ballingrud “One of my favorite short fiction writers” and Laird Barron claims that Ballingrud’s debut horror collection “deserves a place of honor in the canon of the dark fantastic.” Thus I’ve had my eye on Ballingrud’s collection, North American Lake Monsters, since last summer when it first came out….
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Call of Cthulhu remains one of my favorite role playing games, despite the fact that I haven’t played it in… woof. Let’s say nearly 25 years. Part of it, I think, is simple fondness for the source material, H.P. Lovecraft’s marvelously rich and creepy Cthulhu Mythos. But just as much stems from an appreciation for the enormously inventive adventures and supplemental material published for the game over the years, since it first debuted in a handsome box set from Chaosium…
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