Black Gate – Page 374 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Goth Chick News: Asteroid of Death Gives Halloween a Near Miss

Thursday, October 4, 2018 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

This is kind of funny, until it isn’t.

Asteroid 2015 TB145 (which reminds me of LV-426 for some reason) was discovered uncoincidentally back in 2015, and its initial appearance made a lot of people’s “reasons to avoid the outside world” lists. The rock, which looks just like a giant human skull, showed up around 300,000 miles from Earth right on Halloween. This time around it’s going to be late for the occasion, and thankfully quite a bit farther away.

The asteroid, which has a peculiar oblong shape, was captured in an image by astronomers who first noted its skull-like appearance. It didn’t take long before the rock’s heavy metal look took on a life of its own, with some nicknaming it the “death comet,” and “death asteroid.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is one of a handful of organizations that keeps tabs on objects that come within notable distance of Earth, forecasts that 2015 TB145 will come within around 24 million miles of Earth this year, and it will do so on November 11th. After that, the “asteroid of death” will take a long hiatus from Earth, not appearing near our planet again until after 2080.

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Fantasia 2018: Reflections After the Fact

Thursday, October 4, 2018 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

I saw 60 feature films or showcases of short films this year at the Fantasia International Film Festival. As is the case every year, seeing so many wild visions so close together was a powerful experience. If one film didn’t work, there’d be another one coming right after that’d be completely different. Having been slowed down by a bad cold the last few weeks, I’ve had time to think about what I took away from the Fantasia adventure this year in particular, and I keep coming back to things that struck me during the festival itself: the ability of the programmers to select films; the power of seeing the films as part of an audience and indeed part of a community; and the way those things interact.

Let me begin explaining that by thanking the Fantasia team for another excellent festival. I particularly want to thank the people who I spoke with and helped me in my coverage, including Rupert Bottenberg, Mitch Davis, Ted Geoghegan, Kaila Hier, and Steven Lee. I also want to thank a number of fellow writers who helped make the festival even more enjoyable. I’ll specifically note here Giles Edwards, Yves Gendron, Dave Harris, Agustín Leon, and Thomas O’Connor.

I mention all these people because I’ve been thinking about what makes the experience of Fantasia different from watching an equivalent number of movies in an equivalent amount of time on Netflix or blu-ray in the comfort of my own home. Some of it’s getting to see the films on a big screen, of course. But much of it also has to do with the experience of having an audience around you, and so of being able to talk about the films afterward. And, especially, it has to do with the quality of the films and their overall character — the identity of the festival, the overall feel of it that shapes the event.

Spending time at Fantasia is a very specific experience and in writing these posts I try to catch moments outside the movies themselves that strike me as characteristic of that Fantasia feel — the way a theatre may be set up for a special screening, or the way an audience reacts to key moments. Several times over the past few years I’ve mentioned that Fantasia audiences can help elevate the experience of watching a film. Enthusiastic, responsive, but not usually obtrusive, they give another dimension of life to a film. You’re watching a story as part of a crowd, part of a collective whose reaction helps shape the pacing and perception of the tale. Films being films, the director has to try to plan ahead for a crowd reaction, and I think Fantasia audiences on the whole rise to a director’s hopes. That means there’s a special value to being able to see a film alongside an audience, different from watching the same film in solitude or even (usually) at a media screening to an audience of critics. So start with that.

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Douglas Draa’s What October Brings is a Lovecraftian Celebration of Halloween

Thursday, October 4, 2018 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Halloween and Lovecraft. Two great things that belong together. And Weirdbook editor Douglas Draa is the man to make it happen.

His new anthology What October Brings is a handsome collection of original stories by Adrian Cole, Storm Constantine, Tim Curran, Cody Goodfellow, Nancy Holder, Brian M. Sammons, John Shirley, Lucy A. Snyder, Chet Williamson, Black Gate writer Darrell Schweitzer, and many others — all packaged under a gorgeous cover by Italian artist Daniele Serra.

It’s from UK publisher Celaeno Press, a new name to me, but they clearly do good work. Here’s the description.

Halloween, a time for laughing children in white bedsheets and superhero costumes. A time for chocolate candy, and pumpkins, and Trick-or-Treat.

… a time for dark things everywhere to slink out of the shadows and into our lives, reminding those unlucky few that our charades of Halloween cannot erase the centuries of history and pain behind the facade…

What October Brings celebrates the dark traditions of the autumn rituals, of Halloween and Samhain, in homage to the uniquely fascinating fiction of HP Lovecraft. Masters of the short story offer you a “once in a lifetime” Trick-or-Treat experience…

…perhaps your last!

This is a sizable anthology packed with long stories. Over half are 18+ pages, and one, Lucy A. Snyder’s “Cosmic Cola,” is a generous 30 pages. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Birthday Reviews: Gary Couzens’s “Half-Life”

Thursday, October 4, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Gary Couzens was born on October 4, 1964.

His fiction has been collected into two volumes and he has edited four anthologies, one of which, Extended Play: The Elastic Book of Music won the 2007 British Fantasy Award. He co-edited Deep Ten with Sara Jayne Townsend and co-edited Mind Seed with David Gullen. In 2017, five of his editorials for the magazine Black Static were also nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He has collaborated with D.F. Lewis, Miriam Robertson, and Martin Owton on various short stories.

“Half-Life” was first published in the August 1996 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Couzens included the story in his first collection of short stories, Second Contact and Other Stories, in 2003.

Gary Couzens made the decision to write “Half-Life” in the second person, which is not a common choice, but in this case manages to given an immediacy to the story that would otherwise have been lacking. His unnamed protagonist (“you”) has died and his spirit is hanging around the house, spying on his wife as she moves through the days following his death, and witnessing his daughter and son come home for the funeral.

While the second person POV pulls the reader into the story, the fact of death separates the reader from the action. The death causes a dissociative sense regarding what is happening as “you” learn how you were viewed by your daughter, who couldn’t reveal that she was a lesbian to you, although she told your wife five years earlier and has brought her lover for the funeral. You also realize that you won’t see the child your son and his wife are pregnant with.

You and the reader are both left up in the air as to any purpose you have for sticking around in your old house, but it is clear that you are locked to the location, with your strongest presence in the hallway where you died. When your wife leaves the house, you realize that you aren’t tied to her and will continue to exist in your half-state for an indeterminate period of time, but will eventually disappear.

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Seventeen Years Later, Return to His Dark Materials: The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

Wednesday, October 3, 2018 Elizabeth Galewski Comments 1 comment

The venerable Philip Pullman returns to the universe of the classic His Dark Materials series after 17 years with his latest fantasy, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage. As a longtime fan of the saga, I thoroughly enjoyed this chance to return to his steampunk alternative “Brytain,” with its changeable daemons, anbaric lamps, peculiar gadgets, and peripatetic intellectuals. Opening this book felt like being wrapped in a blanket and having tea around a fire with old friends.

Surprisingly mature, well-mannered and handy eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead is a natural spy, since working at his parents’ riverside inn gives him access to all manner of travelers and their gossip. When three dangerous visitors arrive, he’s swept into a secret war against the forces of arrogant religious authority.

Joining a shadowy resistance movement, he risks his life to protect a baby who’s prophesied to change the world. At first, this means thwarting villains’ attempts to kidnap her. But then a hundred-year flood devastates the town, and he must grab her from her cradle – already floating – and ride the surging waters in his trusty canoe, La Belle Sauvage, which is the title of this first volume in the series.

The baby herself? Her name is Lyra. Yes, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage is a prequel.

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage was published in October 2017 and spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for YA Hardcover, finally slipping off at the end of January 2018. Yet I would argue that it isn’t really a YA book as conventionally understood, and that adults are its natural audience. After all, we are the ones most likely to revel in its slower pace and sly tendency to say one thing while meaning another.

Moreover, the official target audience for YA is 12 to 18, and teenagers are notorious for wanting to “read up” about people older than them. Malcolm’s age, at only eleven, would make him more naturally a “Middle Grade” hero. Yet the novel’s content is probably too subtle and sophisticated for such young readers.

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Future Treasures: The Book of Magic, edited by Gardner Dozois

Wednesday, October 3, 2018 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

We lost Gardner Dozois unexpectedly in May of this year. Certainly there were bigger names, but somehow Gardner always seemed to be the heart of science fiction to me. Fan, historian, gifted writer and brilliant editor — indeed, perhaps the greatest editor science fiction has ever seen — Gardner had his finger on the pulse of the field better than anyone I knew.

It was a terrible blow to lose him. But I took some consolation in the fact that his career was not over — not yet, anyway. He still had three major books in the pipeline. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection appeared in July; the final volume in what may be the greatest anthology series in genre history. And The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, a fitting cap to an amazing career, will arrive in February of next year.

But the one I’m really looking forward to is The Book of Magic, a big 576-page hardcover collecting brand new fiction from many of the top fantasy writers we have. It’s a companion book to his 2017 sword & sorcery anthology The Book of Swords, and it arrives from Bantam in two weeks. Here’s the description.

A new anthology celebrating the witches and sorcerers of epic fantasy — featuring stories by George R. R. Martin, Scott Lynch, Megan Lindholm, and many others!

Hot on the heels of Gardner Dozois’s acclaimed anthology The Book of Swords comes this companion volume devoted to magic. How could it be otherwise? For every Frodo, there is a Gandalf… and a Saruman. For every Dorothy, a Glinda… and a Wicked Witch of the West. What would Harry Potter be without Albus Dumbledore… and Severus Snape? Figures of wisdom and power, possessing arcane, often forbidden knowledge, wizards and sorcerers are shaped — or misshaped — by the potent magic they seek to wield. Yet though their abilities may be godlike, these men and women remain human — some might say all too human. Such is their curse. And their glory.

In these pages, seventeen of today’s top fantasy writers — including award-winners Elizabeth Bear, John Crowley, Kate Elliott, K. J. Parker, Tim Powers, and Liz Williams — cast wondrous spells that thrillingly evoke the mysterious, awesome, and at times downright terrifying worlds where magic reigns supreme: worlds as far away as forever, and as near as next door.

And here’s the stellar table of contents, including sixteen all new stories and a reprint novelette by George R. R. Martin.

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Birthday Reviews: Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians”

Wednesday, October 3, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Radell Faraday Nelson was born on October 3, 1931. Nelson has published under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ray Nelson, R. Faraday Nelson, and Jeffrey Lord. Nelson is also an artist.

Nelson’s novel The Prometheus Man received a special citation Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. In 2001 he was nominated for a Retro-Hugo in the Best Fan Artist category.

“Time Travel for Pedestrians” was published in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, and has been reprinted in the various versions of that anthology, but has not been published outside of that work.

While the framing device in Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians” may have been transgressive in 1972, when it was first published, the combination of rumination on masturbation and drug trips seems self-indulgent at a forty year distance.

Going beyond the framing device, as least as much as possible, the story offers numerous past life regressions for Nelson’s narrator, each one set earlier than the one before, each focusing on the conflict between the spread of Christianity and its competing belief systems, and each ending with the death of Nelson’s protagonist.

Intriguingly, the further back in time the narrator finds himself, the more receptive he is of Christianity, starting with a new age paganism, eventually becoming a priest in the Inquisition, and finally taking dictation from Mary Magdalen. While Nelson’s reflections on each of these vignettes offers different views on religion and belief, the framing mechanism intrudes, raising the question of whether the narrator is actually reliving past lives or if everything is part of the drug trip he has initiated, and which undermines Nelson’s story.

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Books and Craft: Parables for the Modern Reader

Tuesday, October 2, 2018 David B. Coe Comments 8 comments

The Earthsea Trilogy (Bantam, 1975). Covers by Pauline Ellison

Early last year, I began a column here at Black Gate that I call “Books and Craft.” The idea was to shine a light on the writing elements that contribute to the greatness of classic works in our genre. (You might care to read my previous pieces on Nicola Griffith’s Slow River, and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana .) I intended to write these on a regular basis, but life and work intervened. Today I’m happy to be back with a new “Books and Craft” post about books that have long been deeply special to me.

Ursula K. Le Guin died earlier this year after a stellar career of nearly sixty years. She was a master of speculative fiction, one of the most decorated writers ever to grace our genre. She was perhaps best known for her science fiction novels set in the Hainish Universe, but personally, I am most fond of her fantasy, specifically the first three of her Earthsea novels: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. (In fact, my newest series, The Islevale Cycle, is set in a world of islands and seas that I meant as an homage to Earthsea and Le Guin.)

These three early Earthsea novels, often referred to as The Earthsea Trilogy, were published as children’s books. They were written, though, with a spare sophistication and elegance that appealed to a broad audience and brought them critical and commercial success. Earthsea is a world of myth, rich culture, and social complexity. By creating a network of islands and archipelagos, Le Guin ensured that her land would be home to a variety of traditions, customs, and people. And in making Ged, the hero of the series, dark-skinned, she brought a non-traditional protagonist to a genre that had, until that time, been overwhelmingly white.

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Birthday Reviews: Edward Wellen’s “Barbarossa”

Tuesday, October 2, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Since I realize I jumped the gun and moved Walter Jon Williams’s birthday up a couple of weeks with my Birthday Review published earlier today, here is someone who was actually born on October 2.

Edward Wellen was born on October 2, 1919 and died on January 15, 2011.

Most of Wellen’s publications were short stories and he was more active in the mystery field than in science fiction, although he began publishing in the genre in 1952 with the non-fact article “Origins of Galactic Slang” in Galaxy. In 1971 he published his only science fiction novel.

“Barbarossa” was initially published in the June 1973 issue of Vertex: The Magazine of Science Fiction, edited by Donald J. Pfell. It was reprinted in the anthology Fantastic World War II in 1990, edited by Frank McSherry, Jr.

Wellen briefly explores the fate of a Nazi U-boat commander who refused to surrender to the Allies when Admiral Doenitz gave the order following Hitler’s death at the end of World War II. Using every trick he could think of, Helmut Niemans managed to escape the Allies, jettisoning enough flotsam from the ship that it was believed to be lost. Instead, he spent the next twenty-odd years as a pirate, picking up crew as he could to replace the Germans who died, tried to escape, or mutiny.

Less a story than a vignette showing how Niemens manages to continue adding to his crew, with a flashback to explain his history, Wellen fails to show how the ship manages to remain functional, although ever-decreasingly, through the years. He also doesn’t discuss how Niemens is able to avoid any sort of detection. Instead, the Commander is shown as a sad Captain Nemo, awaiting the revival of the Nazi ideology while he crews his boat with a rag-tag collection of slaves who don’t believe in his vision. Wellen also ignores the fourteen crewmen who were aboard the boat during World War II, and doesn’t clarify where their loyalties lie — whether to Niemens, the Reich, or simply remaining alive in their tight and smelly quarters.

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Autumn Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, October 2, 2018 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 2 comments

It’s been more than a piece, heck, even more than a while, since I’ve done one of these. I’m glad to be back because there’s been some really good short fiction published in the last couple of months. I’m not going to get to everything, but I am going to get to the best — Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 37 and Tales From the Magician’s Skull No. 2.

HFQ 37 has four stories and three poems. The continued use of evocative black and white art makes it my favorite looking ezine out there, but it’s the high quality of the stories that matters.

P. Djeli Clark kicks off the issue with the more-than-a-little grim “The Paladin of Golota.” Teffe is a young boy in the decaying town of Am Amara. He survives by robbing the corpses of the stream of warriors who have come to his town to fight the demon worms that infest the surrounding lands. Contrary to his fellow street kids, Teffe draws a line at cutting the throats of the wounded, instead waiting until they die on their own. This slight sense of honor leads him into a conversation with the fighter, Zahrea. She knew coming to Am Amara meant her death was likely, but came anyway.

“You’d die just to become a hero?” he asked.

She sat back and closed her eyes before saying: “Heroes give the world hope. They fill our tales and stories. There is a reason we do not make gods our heroes, but instead mortals who became more.”

Clark is a writer whose work I’ve admired very much in the past and this is my favorite story of the month. The story is grim, but unlike so many such stories, Clark not only provides a moment of grace in the darkness, but its entirety is built around that moment.

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