Search Results for: Merry Christmas

November/December Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Now on Sale

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There’s a great mix of new and established writers in the latest F&SF, including masters such as Robert Reed, Gardner Dozois, Esther M. Friesner, and Matthew Hughes, and newcomers like Lilliam Rivera, Minsoo Kang, and James Beaumon. Tangent Online‘s Bob Blough has particular praise for Esther Friesner and Robert Reed in his online review. Esther M. Friesner starts it off with a fairy tale based on Puss n’ Boots called “The Cat Bell.” This concerns a famous actor at the…

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Three Classic Books for Medieval Worldbuilders and Armchair Time Travellers

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This time next week you’ll be contemplating a pile of Amazon gift vouchers and book tokens. How do know? You’re a Black Gate reader. Your muggle relatives can’t even guess your tastes. Your geeky friends know that your wishlist is too specific to second guess. So book tokens. I won’t try to guess your tastes either! However, if you are interested in the medieval world, or medieval-style worlds, some of the following old books from my research shelf might tempt you… A…

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The Halt And The Lame

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One of the details that made Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers so unusual at the time of its filming (1973) was a level of realism previously unseen in the historical adventure movie, (think Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood). Lester showed us illness, filth, and poverty in  ways we hadn’t really seen in a movie that wasn’t about illness, filth, or poverty. Aside: Oddly enough, there’s more realism of this kind in comedy than in any other genre, as…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: “Rudolph’s Performance Review”

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Last year around this time, I posted a short, short story I wrote, “Watson’s Christmas Trick,” which was based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s own “How Watson Learned the Trick.” If you missed that, click on over for a little Holmesian holiday fun. Or click on this post from last year, which looks at a few Holmes pastiches for the season, including one of my all time favorite anthologies, Holmes for the Holidays. Though I don’t use it too often when…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes – Creation to Death and Back

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In 1882, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet “Sir”) opened up his own shop as a doctor in Southsea (England). Business was slow and his most notable triumph was marrying the sister of a patient who died of meningitis. With some spare time on his hands, Doyle wrote fiction. Somewhere around 1886, he came to the conclusion that he could write detective stories better than the ones he was reading. He would create, “a scientific detective, who solved cases on his own merits…

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“This Ghostly Little Book”

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It’s one of the most famous stories in the English-speaking world, and it is a fantasy. A Gothic fantasy of Christmas, and the meaning thereof: the story of the miser and the three spirits. It’s been retold any number of times, parodied, set in America, updated to the modern day, acted out with mice and ducks, with frogs and pigs. It’s easy to overlook how powerful the original work really is. For myself, I cannot remember how old I was…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in December

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December was the most active month the BG blog has ever seen, breaking every traffic record in our history. It’s good to have you folks hanging out with us, instead of risking your neck skiing or snowboarding or something. Exercise kills, and it especially has it in for long-time readers with weak vision and poor motor skills. If you’re just joining us, you missed some great stuff last month. Theo took on the entire SF & fantasy establishment, Rich Horton proved there’s still…

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Red Sonja 3

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You know how sometimes you’re watching the trailer to a movie and it looks really good and you suddenly realize that you’ve figured out the surprise ending of the movie just by watching the trailer? I don’t mean that you make an educated guess based on the clues in the trailer and it happens to be correct. I mean that someone actually cut a crucial scene at the end of the film into the trailer so that you’re watching the…

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A Magic Broken is Available Free Today at Amazon.com

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Merry Christmas from Amazon.com! For today only, the e-retail giant is offering Theo’s digital book A Magic Broken as a free download for Kindle readers. In his review Donald S. Crankshaw wrote: You may be familiar with Theo Beale as a blogger at Black Gate…. I was looking forward to seeing how his ideas translated into fiction. He’s given me a chance with A Magic Broken, an e-book novella equivalent to about 50 pages, written under the name Vox Day….

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The Late May Fantasy Magazine Rack

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The back half of May is filled with great print magazines, including the latest Analog, with the concluding installment of our very own Derek Künsken’s debut novel The Quantum Magician. Asimov’s SF has new novellas from two sets of collaborators, Rick Wilber & Alan Smale, and David Gerrold & Ctein, plus lots of shorter fiction. And last but not least, just before we went to press I received a copy of the June issue of The Digest Enthusiast, a handsome…

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