Yesterday I drove up to Lake Geneva, the birthplace of Dungeons and Dragons, for Gary Con IV, the annual gathering in honor of Gary Gygax, the father of role-playing games. I really enjoy Gary Con. In both locale and tone it’s very much what I imagine the earliest GenCon gaming conventions — which took place in Lake Geneva over thirty years ago — were like. Just like the early GenCons it’s small and very friendly, with a focus on vintage gaming and first…
September-October 2023 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Shutterstock, Tomislav Tikulin, and Marianne Plumridge There’s plenty of great stuff in this month’s print magazines, including a new Diving Universe novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, an homage to the 1958 classic The Blob by Eric Choi, a chilling story of the Dead Letter Office by David Erik Nelson, the gruesome secret of the alien Deviltree by…
“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun) And A (Black) Gat in the Hand turns 100 today. With help from some friends, this column has managed to offer a hundred essays on the fascinating world of Pulp. April 8, 1949 was the…
Rainbringer: The Symphonic Heavy Metal of Weird Fiction Edward M. Erdelac has been writing entertaining weird fiction for over a decade. He pushes boundaries. One of his first spotlights on Black Gate was in 2014 regarding his Merkabah Rider (concerning the 19th-century Hasidic Jewish mystic turned gunslinger). Erdelac also wrote an entry in Tales of Cthulhu Invictus mentioned in my recent 2022 review of Richard L. Tierney’s Simon of Gitta tales (this connection resonates since both Tierney and Erdelac extended…
The Warrior and the Sorceress (Argentina/USA, 1984) Barbarians don’t get no respect. The fantasy films released in the wake of the unexpected worldwide success of Star Wars (1977) were all over the map, varying widely in approach and quality, but the barbarian lookalikes that followed the first Conan movie (1982) stuck to a formula, in quality plunging straight to the bottom of the barrel and mostly staying there as the barrel bumped along the cheapie exploitation circuit for the next…
Legend (Universal, 1985) The fantasy film boom of the Eighties mostly drew upon pulp sword and sorcery tales, but some harked back farther to earlier traditions of myth, fables, and fairy tales, often because the filmmakers had a more vividly enchanted look in mind. Whether hit or miss, these movies and their typically rich visuals provided a welcome diversion from the then-prevailing norm of mounted barbarians thundering across windswept steppes.
Ran (1985) History, bloody history. In this series we usually concern ourselves with the adventures of heroes, singly or in small groups, in quests or endeavors to right wrongs or win personal rewards on a medium or small scale. But sometimes our sword-wielders’ exploits are set against the backdrop of full-scale warfare, imminent or ongoing, and the sheer quantity of blood spilled in wartime adds serious stakes and grave overtones to even the most spirited adventures. We all enjoy light-hearted…
Lin Carter is above all else good company. He’s looking back one generation to what is now our genre’s Heroic Age, a wild and woolly era of unbounded creativity separated from us by a gulf of a century — I am reminded of when, as a teenager, I bought a drink for an elderly jazz musician, who in turn told me about going out on the town with Fats Waller, and the perils of playing for Jelly Roll Morton.
My guest this month is Peter McLean, a successful short story writer and contemporary fantasy novelist who has cast his authorially eye on more traditional fantasy, with his War for the Rose Throne, series, the first two volumes of which (Priest of Bones and Priest of Lies) are now available, and currently in development for television by Heyday Productions. For those who may not have read them (and if that’s you, go do that now, we’ll wait) here is the…
Ah, Horror in the time of Covid! It seems almost superfluous, like a feather boa on an ostrich. However, we the authors of A Sinister Quartet (Mythic Delirium 2020), have pranced fancily forward on that ostrich! Ostriches piled on ostriches! Feather boas galore! Which feather boas, I might add, sport an unnerving number of teeth and eyeballs. (Editor and author Mike Allen likes to say of our book: “It’s the fun horror, the kind you consume for imaginative shocks and chills, not the kind that…