Black Gate – Page 304 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Taste of Uncanny

Monday, July 29, 2019 Caroline M. Yoachim Comments 0 Comment

We here at Uncanny Magazine are in the middle of the Uncanny Magazine Year Six: Raise the Roof, Raise the Rates! Kickstarter, and what better time to have a snack break and take a look at the roles food plays in fiction?

Fictional food is powerful. It evokes senses beyond sight, resonates with our personal and cultural experiences, and can be comforting… or viscerally off-putting. I have drooled over the lemon cakes from Game of Thrones, and — like so many people — been deeply disappointed by the reality of Turkish Delight.

And now without further ado, here is a tasting menu of the ways Uncanny stories have made use of food!

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The Games of Origins Game Fair

Monday, July 29, 2019 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 0 Comment

My first science fiction convention was 2001’s Eeriecon III, in Niagara Falls, NY. This was a literary convention, where almost all of my time was spent lapping up the wisdom of authors and scientists, discussing worldbuilding, sociology, magical systems, story structure and narrative, and all manner of other things of interest to writers, both old pros and aspiring novices.

These days, I make less of those literary conventions, and have migrated more into gaming conventions with the family. Less intellectual stimulation, perhaps, but it’s a much more active environment, with more to do. And though the intellectual discussions are perhaps not as rigorous (rule lawyering aside), there is no shortage of mental stimulation … let alone sensory stimulation … at these gaming conventions.

The most recent of these gaming conventions I attended was the mid-June Origins Game Fair, in Columbus, OH. This was my second year making that convention, and I’ve got to say that I somewhat prefer it to the more overwhelming GenCon. There is a bit less spectacle, a bit less overt consumption (you can, for example, actually walk through the exhibit room without colliding into people … usually), and more of an emphasis on just playing fun games.

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What I’ve Been Reading Lately: July 2019

Monday, July 29, 2019 Bob Byrne Comments 7 comments

So, Hither Came Conan wrapped up last week. I mean, it’s really done this time. And A (Black) Gat in the Hand starts up next month, so I’ve got a couple weeks to fill with some meanderings. More aimless than my normal meanderings.

I’m wrapping up the most brutal month-long period of my work year, and I’ve been lining up hernia surgery in a couple weeks. So, I’ve been reading (and listening to audiobooks when I can) a ton for stress relief. I figure I’d talk about some of that reading for today’s column.

CLIVE CUSSLER

I’ve been reading Cussler for decades – from way back before he pieced off the writing of all his books. I used to grab each Dirk Pitt book when it came out. With the possible exception of Robert Ludlum, no one has ever been a ‘stay up late, page turning’ author for me, more than Cussler has.

Cussler’s adventure tales frequently involve water and sea exploits. Two of his heroes, Dirk Pitt and Kurt Austin, work for NUMA – the National Underwater Marine Agency. It’s a fantasy organization for Cussler, with unlimited funds and governmental support, to reclaim treasure, stop terrorists, Bond-like villains – anything. And The Oregon Files are about a fantasy crew on a super high-tech ship that does similar world-shaking missions for the CIA. Cussler books are exciting and fun.

My love of the Pitt books waned quickly with the introduction of his kids, Dirk (really – the SAME name?) and Summer. The shark was jumped in Valhalla Rising. I didn’t care for Trojan Odyssey, and when Cussler’s own son, Dirk became co-author, on Black Wind, I gave up on the series. There is far too much to read – including better books from the Cussler world, to read a ‘meh’ series. I have read 18 of the 25 Pitt books, and just re-read The Mediterranean Caper, while listening to the unabridged Black Wind. I have no desire to move forward on the seven books I haven’t read yet. I’m much more likely to re-read something.

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Ditmar Award for Best Fanzine: SF Commentary

Sunday, July 28, 2019 Rich Horton Comments 1 comment

The Ditmar Awards, for achievement in Australian Science Fiction (including Fandom), have been presented annually since 1969. In most years some variety of a Best Fanzine Award has been given.

SF Commentary, edited by Bruce Gillespie, won the 1973 Ditmar Award for Best Australian Fanzine. Overall, Gillespie has won 16 Ditmars, for Best Australian Fanzine, Best Fanzine Editor, and Best Fan Writer. He has also won 3 Atheling Award for Best Criticism. (The Atheling Awards are part of the Ditmars, I believe, so in reality Gillespie has won 19 Ditmars.) SF Commentary first won the Ditmar Award in 1972, and most recently just last year, in 2018.

SF Commentary began publication in 1969. 99 issues have appeared to date, with the latest having just been posted at efanzines.com. It appeared very regularly through 1981, was revived from 1989 through 1993, again between 2000 and 2004, and one or two issues per year have appeared since 2011, these latest primarily in electronic form. In the early years John Foyster and Barry Gillam occasionally shared editorial duties with Gillespie, but since 1975 Bruce has been sole proprietor.

I have been reading issues of SF Commentary in this latest (post 2011) series regularly, and I have corresponded regularly with Bruce Gillespie in various fora since for the past 15 years. Bruce is intensely interested in SF and in its literary ambitions, and his magazine has long reflected that. SF Commentary issues are huge, and stuffed with long critical articles and reviews.

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New Treasures: The Big Book of Classic Fantasy edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Sunday, July 28, 2019 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

The Big Book of Classic Fantasy-back-small

One of my favorite anthologies of the past few years — perhaps my absolute favorite — is The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It’s a companion book of sorts to their 2012 Tor volume The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, a monumental 1152 page collection of weird fantasy from roughly the last century.

But I don’t file it with that book, or the Vandermeer’s other fine anthologies. Instead, I give it a place of honor on the shelf with my other Vintage Big Books, which include Otto Penzler’s The Big Book of Adventure Stories, The Big Book of Ghost Stories, and The Vampire Archives. Which is why I was so excited to see the VanderMeer’s add another book to that illustrious set this month: The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, a thoroughly impressive tome that unearths the fascinating origins of modern fantasy.

Kirkus Reviews calls The Big Book of Classic Fantasy a “quintessential anthology destined to become the standard by which future fantasy classic anthologies are measured… a must-have.” It contains rarely-seen tales from Asian, Eastern European, Scandinavian, and Native American traditions, including brand-new translation of fourteen stories never before printed in English. Contributors include the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, E. Nesbit, Christina Rossetti, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, L. Frank Baum, H. G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Edith Wharton, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, Hermann Hesse, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, A. Merritt, E. R. Eddison, John Collier, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith, and many, many others.

Here’s the impressive Table of Contents.

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Pervert and Unnatural: Two Books from Image Comics Exploring Sex

Saturday, July 27, 2019 Derek Kunsken Comments 0 Comment

** Explicit Sexual Language and Stuff (Obviously!) If you’d prefer something less sexual, check out my interview with Plaid Klaus of Image Comics’ Void Trip right here **

I often dive into the first issues and first trades at Image to taste test new series, new voices, new art styles, new genres. I also find it interesting to look at pairs of series as foils to one another.

It isn’t that one series is created in response to another, or that they’re even in the same genre, although often the are; it’s sometimes cool to read across themes.

Recently, I read The Pervert and Unnatural from Image. I was intrigued by what the series were saying about sex and sexuality, not only individually, but when taken as a pair of works.

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Vintage Treasures: The Perfect Lover by Christopher Priest

Saturday, July 27, 2019 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The Perfect Lover Christopher Priest-small

The Perfect Lover Christopher Priest-back-small

Cover by Walter Bachinsky

Christopher Priest is one of the most celebrated modern British science fiction authors. He won a World Fantasy Award for his 1995 novel The Prestige (filmed under the same name in 2006 by Christopher Nolan, with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale), the British Science Fiction Award award for Best Novel no less than four times (for Inverted World, The Extremes, The Separation, and The Islanders), and he’s been nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Non-Fiction Book (that last one for his epic expose on Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions, The Book on the Edge of Forever).

But in the mid-70s he was still a young SF writer trying to make a name for himself, building on the Campbell nomination for his second novel Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) and the BSFA win and Hugo nomination for his third, The Inverted World (1974). His fifth novel, A Dream of Wessex, is the one I want to talk about today. It was a very early take on virtual reality — published a full 30 years before the first Oculus Rift prototype.

A Dream of Wessex is the tale of a group of volunteers who create a utopian consensus VR world where they’re unable to remember their past lives. It appeared in the UK in 1977, and was published in the US by Dell under the name The Perfect Lover. Here’s an excerpt from the Kirkus Review of the novel in December of 1977.

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Janice Bogstad and Jeanne Gomoll

Saturday, July 27, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

The Fan Activity Achievement Award (FAAN) were presented from 1976 through 1980 to recognize achievement by those who write, edit, and illustrate fanzines. The awards were revived in 1994 and have presented every years since, with the exception of 1996. The Best Fan Editor Award was only presented during the initial run of the award from 1977 to 1980. It was won in each of the first two years by Rob Johnson. Janice Bogstad and Jeanne Gomoll won the FAAN Award for Best Editor in both 1979 and 1980 for their editorial work on the fanzine Janus. They were also nominated in both those years (as well as 1978) for the Hugo Award.

Janice Bogstad began editing the fanzine Janus in 1975. She was joined in editorial duties by Jeanne Gomoll with issue 2 and the two co-edited the zine from 1975 through 1980, producing a total of 18 issues of the fanzine. The zine was nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo three times, in 1978, 1979, and 1980. When Bogstad and Gomoll decided to stop editing the zine, the editorial duties to Diane Martin, who continued publishing another 8 issues between 1981 and 1990 under the auspices of SF³, although name of the fanzine was changed to Aurora. Following the publication of Janus, Bogstad began publishing the zine New Moon in 1981.

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Transformed: A Primer on Minister Faust

Friday, July 26, 2019 ZZ Claybourne Comments 4 comments

The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Narmer’s Palette, February 2013)

In a career that has seen the author tackle fan boy culture (both the good and the bad of it), superhero deconstruction, immigration & enculturation, and gritty space opera that fixes what George Lucas tried to do with the Wars prequels, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (since re-released as The Coyote Kings, Book 1: Space-age Bachelor Pad, as the author is currently working on the hugely-anticipated book 2) began author Minister Faust’s cult journey, and he’s blazed new indie trails ever since. Are you a fan of smart and subversive? Faust is one of the best in the business. One line into Kings and I was hooked.

In advance, shut up. I know epilogues go at the end. My point here, which should have been obvious in my opinion, is that I am telling you some of the end of this story so as to get you to comprehend the mindset under which I am currently operating and during which I am escaping.

Here’s a writer who manages to pack more imagination and mega-wattage of writing into a single page than most writers get out of an entire series, turning every book he writes into a full-body experience. Also? Humor. Faust is funny as hell. Even in what I consider to be his masterpiece, The Alchemists of Kush, a book that can shatter and rebuild you if you let it, he’s fully aware that the broken and confused laugh on the darkest of days. Maybe especially then.

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Goth Chick News: Hanging with the Paranormal Cirque

Thursday, July 25, 2019 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

I love it when ‘scary’ engulfs something one would normally not associate with the haunt industry. I’ve been to a haunted flea market, played haunted mini golf, and even been onboard a haunted cruise. And though the circus, or at least carnivals, have their own creepy vibe, spectacles like Cirque du Soleil have generally remained wholesome, light-hearted, family entertainment. Okay, there is that Zumanity show which brought a blush even to my pallid cheeks, but it exists only in Las Vegas, making it less unexpected.

But last weekend I attended my first ever, ‘over 18’ haunted circus event, complete with zombies, vampires and clowns. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Paranormal Cirque.

This honest-to-goodness traveling circus takes place under a ginormous black and red (what looks like) latex tent, kicking off your experience with a vaguely S&M vibe. The outer vestibule is like a mini haunted house populated by “freaks” who jump at you, scream at you, thrust chainsaws at you and generally prod you down the connecting hallway into the main tent with elevated seating on three sides of a center stage (ring?).

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