Black Gate – Page 441 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

Sunday, March 25, 2018 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

January sure was popular with readers. The most popular article at Black Gate last month was… our summary of the most popular articles at Black Gate the previous month. If that patterns hold, this will be the most popular article on the blog in March. To guarantee that, I’ve put a big picture of Godzilla at the top. You’re welcome.

Getting back to more regular fare, the second most popular post on the blog last month was Elizabeth Crowens’ epic interview with Buffy the Vampire Slayer author author Nancy Holder. Third on the list was a Vintage Treasures feature on Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane 1: Skulls in the Stars (which just proves Bob Byrne’s thesis that REH is a sure ticket into the Top Ten). Rounding out the Top Five were our look at a much more recent book, the new Looming Low anthology from Justin Steele and Sam Cowan, and my salute to a vanished book imprint, A Farewell to Roc Books.

As always, games were well represented in the Top Ten. Andrew Zimmerman Jones scored the #6 slot with his feature review of the new RPG Tales from the Loop, and M Harold Page entertained us with his report on I Love the Corps, which was good enough for #7. No Top Ten list would be complete without Ryan Harvey, and he made his appearance at #8 with the latest installment of The Complete Carpenter, this time featuring Big Trouble in Little China (1986). Wrapping things up was our look at Unbound Worlds on A Century of Sword and Planet, and the debut effort of new BG blogger David Neil Lee, with his review of Kong – Skull Island.

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Birthday Reviews: Paul Levinson’s “The Protected”

Sunday, March 25, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Paul Levinson was born on March 25, 1947.

Levinson served as President of SFWA from 1998 to 2001, originally serving as Vice President, but succeeding to the Presidency when Robert J. Sawyer resigned. He has published a series starring detective Phil D’Amato beginning with The Silk Code as well as several short stories. His other series, starting with The Plot to Kill Socrates, concerns time travel. In addition to his fiction, Levinson has published several non-fiction books.

Levinson’s novel The Silk Code won the Locus Poll for Best First Novel in 2000. His story “The Chronology Protection Case” was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Nebula Award, and won the HOMer Award. He received a second Nebula nomination for “The Copyright Notice Case,” and his third Nebula nominee, “Loose Ends,” was also nominated for the Sturgeon and the Hugo Award. His third Sturgeon nomination was for “Advantage, Bellarmine.” In 2004, Levinson’s novel The Pixel Eye was nominated for the Prometheus Award.

“The Protected” may have been published originally in Paul Levinson’s collection Bestseller: Wired, Analog, and Digital Writings in 1999. Two years later, it was definitely included in Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff’s Silicon Dreams.

Levinson tackles the rights of androids in “The Protected,” a topic which has a long history in science fiction as evidenced by many of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws stories. “The Protected” is less about the rules that govern androids, but rather the struggle between those who support androids’ rights against a group of Human firsters known as the Blood Party.

As an android who has a robotic brain inside a flesh body, Shara’s protector/lover is responsible for her security. When her creator Mark Wolfson agrees that she should be allowed to attend a conference which puts her in danger, her protector argues against it, but in the end he is forced to watch as she puts herself in danger.

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Ghosts, Pirates, and Sea-Faring Werewolves: Strange Island Stories, edited by Jonathan E. Lewis

Saturday, March 24, 2018 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

I really enjoyed Jonathan E. Lewis’ previous Star House Supernatural Classics anthology, Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales, which I talked about here. Lewis is a true connoisseur of early spooky fiction, and he’s doing the kind of work that virtually no one else is right now — compiling classic pulp (and pre-pulp) adventure and horror tales into handsome packages for a modern audience.

So I was surprised and pleased to open my mail recently and find a review copy of a brand new Lewis anthology, Strange Island Stories. (And I was just as pleased to find this quote on an inside page devoted to Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales: “Lewis has done a fine job assembling a stellar line-up of dark fantasy and horror stories featuring mummies, curses, ancient Egyptian vampires, and lots more.” — Black Gate.) In his introduction to his latest volume Jonathan explains how he’s divided the contents.

I have chosen to divide Strange Island Stories into four distinct sections. The first, GHOSTS AND SHAPE SHIFTERS, includes classic ghost stories, tales of lycanthropy and werewolves, and supernatural tales set on islands… The second section, BIZARRE CREATURES AND FANTASTIC REALMS, includes short stories in which bizarre animal and plant life play an important role… The third section, HUMAN HORRORS, as its title indicates, includes works that are not necessarily “weird” but are nonetheless horrific and deeply strange. Readers might find these stories, all of which evoke a sense of foreboding dread, to be deeply chilling. Among the stories included in this section is George G. Toudouze’s lighthouse story “Three Skeleton Key,” a story that was adapted three times into a chillingly effective radio show. The fourth and final section of Strange Island Stories includes an original work of short fiction I have written entitled “An Adriatic Awakening.”

The anthology includes stories by M.P. Shiel, John Buchan, George MacDonald, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Conan Doyle, Francis Stevens, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. P. Lovecraft, Henry S. Whitehead, Jack London and nine others.

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Walk a Mile in My Paws: The Valley of Creation by Edmond Hamilton

Saturday, March 24, 2018 Ryan Harvey Comments 1 comment

What I’ve learned from my still inadequate reading of pulp science-fiction legend Edmond Hamilton is his mastery of pushing his stories in expected directions but in unexpected ways. I’ve developed enough of a sense of how Hamilton viewed his characters and his attitude toward humanity that I can anticipate the direction he’ll flip a tale in the middle — but I’ll never anticipate how he’ll do it. Almost every time, he exceeds expectations by taking the most daring path, both for his narrative and his prose.

The 1948 novel The Valley of Creation follows a theme the author explored in his cliché-battering short story “A Conquest of Two Worlds” (Wonder Stories, 1932), where a human turns against the colonial tyranny of his own race to side with oppressed aliens. Hamilton often used a cynical, bleak approach in his short fiction, turning to a lighter adventure mode for his novels. The Valley of Creation falls into this pattern. It challenges readers with a protagonist who discovers he’s on the wrong side of a conflict — the side of racial supremacists — and switches allegiance. But it’s done as a science-fantasy adventure with the zip expected of the pulps and a heavy dose of A. Merritt’s “Lost World of Super Science!” explorations.

The Valley of Creation was published in Startling Stories for the July 1948 issue, sharing a table of contents with stories from Jack Vance and Henry Kuttner. Lancer published the paperback version in 1964, a time when the paperback market was mining for the gold spread throughout the pulp era that might otherwise have flaked away with the rough paper. Hamilton did revisions for the ‘64 version, updating the timeline so its protagonist, mercenary Eric Nelson, is a veteran of the Korean War.

At the opening of the novel, Nelson is in the position of many characters from noir movies and books of the late ‘40 and ‘50s: a disaffected military man who’s seen too much and has now lost his way. Nelson and his four mercenary partners are stranded in Central Asia at the end of their tether after their Chinese warlord employer is killed. They then receive a strange offer from a man named Shan Kar — he’ll pay them in platinum if they come to his valley of L’Lan and fight “the enemy of his people.”

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Birthday Reviews: Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Clock That Went Backwards”

Saturday, March 24, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Edward Page Mitchell was born on March 24, 1852 and died on January 22, 1927. Mitchell wrote early science fiction stories for the New York Sun in the 1880s, including stories of invisibility, time travel, computers, and teleportation, predating the works of H.G. Wells. From 1897 to 1926 he served as editor for the Sun. While he was the Sun’s editor in 1897, the newspaper published Francis Pharcellus Church’s famous essay “Yes Virginia.”

“The Clock that Went Backward” first appeared anonymously in the Sun on September 18, 1881. Because it didn’t include Mitchell’s byline, for many years the story was ignored and not reprinted until Sam Moskowitz included it in The Crystal Man: Stories by Edward Page Mitchell, a collection of Mitchell’s science fiction published in 1973.

Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh included it in Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fictio of the 19^th Century and it also appeared in Edel Brosnan’s The SF Collection and Peter Haining’s Timescapes: Stories of Time Travel. More recent reprints include in Chad Arment’s About Time, The Tachypomp and Other Stories, a collection of Mitchell’s science fiction, The Wordsworth Collection of Science Fiction, the audio anthology Short Science Fiction Collection 50, and Swords and Steam Short Stories, edited by Laura Bulbeck.

It is also available on Project Gutenberg. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer included the story in The Time Traveler’s Almanac, noting that it may be the first published time travel story, predating both “The Chronic Argonauts” and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The story has also been translated into Romanian.

Harry and the narrator are cousins who have spent considerable time with their Aunt, Gertrude. The most notable thing about Gertrude, beside her antiquity, is a stopped clock that she owns, which was made in 1572 in the city of Leyden in the Netherlands, where the family came from before immigrating to the United States. Following Gertrude’s death, when she willed the clock to Harry, the two travel to Leyden, with the clock, to attend university.

Naturally enough, with the guidance of one of their professors who could have been a distant ancestor, they use the clock to travel back to 1574 and the Siege of Leyden, where Harry rescues the daughter of Mayor Pieter Adriaanszoon Van der Werf and Professor van Stopp takes a key role in lifting the siege. The narrator returns to his native time, alone, and possibly the descendent of his cousin Harry.

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In 500 Words or Less: Robots vs Fairies, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe

Friday, March 23, 2018 Brandon Crilly Comments 1 comment

Robots vs Fairies
Edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe
Saga Press (384 pages, $16.99 paperback, $7.99 eBook, January 2018)

When I asked Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, the editors of Robots vs Fairies, on Twitter if I absolutely had to decide between Team Fairy and Team Robot, I was hoping they’d let me off the hook. Here’s what Dominik told me instead:

Apparently, I have no choice. It doesn’t help that Team Fairy and Team Robot both offer up truly remarkable stories. I mean, take one look at the table of contents and you’ll see that this is a stacked deck of established legends and talented up-and-comers. That said, I have heeded the instructions of my overlords and picked a side.

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New Treasures: Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi

Friday, March 23, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Tochi Onyebuchi lives in Connecticut. His first short story was published in 2011; since then he’s appeared in Asimov’s SF, Ideomancer, and a number of small press anthologies.

Beasts Made of Night is his debut novel, and I’ve heard a lot about it over the last few months. VOYA called it “Unforgettable,” and Caitlyn Paxson at NPR says it’s “The beginning of a great saga… Tochi Onyebuchi conjures up a busy market city inspired by his Nigerian heritage and populates it with a group of outcast kids who shoulder the sins of the rich and powerful.” And Buzzfeed called it a “compelling Nigerian-influenced fantasy has a wonderfully unique premise and lush, brilliant worldbuilding.” Here’s the description.

Black Panther meets Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch in Beasts Made of Night, the first book in an epic fantasy duology.

In the walled city of Kos, corrupt mages can magically call forth sin from a sinner in the form of sin-beasts — lethal creatures spawned from feelings of guilt. Taj is the most talented of the aki, young sin-eaters indentured by the mages to slay the sin-beasts. But Taj’s livelihood comes at a terrible cost. When he kills a sin-beast, a tattoo of the beast appears on his skin while the guilt of committing the sin appears on his mind. Most aki are driven mad by the process, but Taj is cocky and desperate to provide for his family.

When Taj is called to eat a sin of a member of the royal family, he’s suddenly thrust into the center of a dark conspiracy to destroy Kos. Now Taj must fight to save the princess that he loves — and his own life.

Debut author Tochi Onyebuchi delivers an unforgettable series opener that powerfully explores the true meaning of justice and guilt. Packed with dark magic and thrilling action, Beasts Made of Night is a gritty Nigerian-influenced fantasy perfect for fans of Paolo Bacigalupi and Nnedi Okorafor.

Beasts Made of Night was published by Razorbill on October 31, 2017. It is 304 pages, priced at $17.99 in trade paperback and $10.99 for the digital edition. Read a lengthy excerpt at NPR.

Birthday Reviews: Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Part of Us That Loves”

Friday, March 23, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Kim Stanley Robinson was born on March 23, 1952.

Robinson won the Hugo Award for his novels Green Mars and Blue Mars. He won the Nebula for Red Mars, the first novel in the series, as well as for 2312 and for his novella “The Blind Geometer.” Red Mars also won a British SF Association Award, the Ignotus Award, and the Seiun Award. Green Mars won the Ignotus Award, the Italia Award while Blue Mars won the Prix Ozone. He won a World Fantasy Award for the novella “Black Air” and his novel Pacific Edge received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

“The Part of Us That Loves” was originally published in Full Spectrum 2, edited by Lous Aronica, Shawna McCarthy, Amy Stout, and Pat LoBrutto in 1989. Robinson included the story in his 1991 collection Remaking History and that same year it was translated into French.

The city of Zion, Illinois was founded in 1901 as a religious community. Although it has become a more traditional community over the years, Robinson uses its religious background as an effective setting for “The Part of Us That Loves.” The tale feels like two completely separate stories, though the first half provides the means of understanding the second.

The first half focuses on Naomi and Tom, two teenagers in the community band preparing for a concert in honor of two residents who are both celebrating their one hundredth birthday. The two are interested in each other, although they aren’t sure how to pursue that interest.

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Goth Chick News: My Vacation to Hell

Thursday, March 22, 2018 Sue Granquist Comments 6 comments

This was just too good not to tell you about.

Back in 2012, I had the pleasure of vacationing in Turkey for several weeks. During that trip I fell in love with Istanbul, Turkish coffee and meat on sticks dipped in yogurt. I also thought the coolest story from that trip would be how our tour guide agreed to drive us within 200 miles of the border with Iran and Iraq so I could crawl under the jeep and take pictures of “war zone” checkpoint with a 500mm zoom lens. Apparently, the military is a bit twitchy about being photographed.

But no, the coolest thing I did on that trip, I didn’t even know I did until last week.

One of our stops was in the modern city of Pamukkale, in the region of Anatolia, from which we ventured into the countryside to the ruins of Hierapolis. To me the remains of this Greco-Roman city were especially magical because they have not been converted into a tourist attraction with paved parking and a gift shop selling stuff made in Taiwan. Instead this site is still very much under excavation by universities and preservationists from across the globe and in many places, we waded through waist-high weeds to get the best vantage points. It truly felt like we were discovering a lost city.

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Mage: The Hero Denied #7

Thursday, March 22, 2018 MichaelPenkas Comments 1 comment

As promised, one Mage review is delivered right on the heels of the other one. Starting off, Kevin is still on the trail of the Questing Beast. He can see the Beast’s footprints thanks to some magic eye-drops that he got from a magic pot dealer last issue. When he finally catches up with it, he sees the Questing Beast communicating with a little devil-child (he calls it an “imp”). The imp and the Beast dash off just as the eye drops wear out, leaving Kevin nauseous and vomiting in a public waste bin.

Meanwhile, Magda is trying to shrug off the advances of the school superintendent, only to find out too late that he’s an incubus in disguise. It’s interesting that the succubi dress in little more than nylon body stockings, while the incubi seem to prefer tailored suits. Whatever draws the eye, I guess. Unfortunately, he recognizes her as Kevin’s wife (no idea how) and reports to the Umbra Sprite that he’s captured her.

By the time Kevin wakes up the next morning, his wife and daughter have been kidnapped. He arrives just in time to see his son lured onto a school bus with dozens of redcaps. While various monsters come and go throughout all three volumes of this series, the redcaps have been around since near the beginning and seem to be the go-to beasties when a villain just needs a nasty little army to do a quick and dirty job.

The issue ends with a green ogre destroying Kevin’s house.

So, in this issue, Kevin’s wife and children are kidnapped by the Umbra Sprite and his house is destroyed. Kirby’s dead and Joe’s made it clear that he won’t be helping on any further adventures. Kevin still has no idea about the third Mage’s identity. He has no home, no allies, and no idea what to do next. If he could put his ego aside, he would go to Magda’s two witch sisters (last seen in volume two) and ask for their help. But I’ve got a feeling that he’s going to try handling things alone.

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