Black Gate – Page 449 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Unbound Worlds on Where to Start with Gothic Space Opera

Friday, March 16, 2018 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I didn’t even know one of my favorite SF sub-genres had a name. But it does, and over at Unbound Worlds Matt Staggs tells us what it is.

In a gothic space opera, pseudo-medievalism, superstition, insanity, and decay are juxtaposed with space travel: a perfect embodiment of progress, science, and rationality. The starship becomes a stand-in for the haunted mansion, and the universe at large the misty moors that surround it.

Cults, all-powerful religions, and demonic forces are commonly found in the genre, and the wear and tear of space travel — time dilation, and the assumption of death-like states of suspended animation for examples — on human relationships are often emphasized. Human life far from civilization becomes stranger, perhaps even hostile. In gothic space opera, human beings become the aliens they fear.

Gothic space opera! It’s like Dracula married Star Wars and they had a little goth space baby. Matt says gothic space opera is “Movies like Event Horizon and Sunshine, the popular wargame franchise Warhammer 40,000, and the video game Dead Space.” I like all those things, so I’m on board (I also like Alien, the ultimate haunted-space-ship movie, but maybe that’s a separate sub-sub-genre or something. I don’t question the experts.)

It was probably Warhammer 40,000, with its exciting tales of the Dark Ages of a vast galaxy-wide empire paralyzed by superstition and constant warfare, that really cemented my love of this brand new sub-genre. Matt suggests some excellent starting points for curious fans; and this is where I really paid attention. Here’s a few of the highlights.

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We Don’t Get No Respect

Friday, March 16, 2018 Violette Malan Comments 0 Comment

alatriste bar It’s often struck me that writers get more respect in other countries than they do in North America (I’m thinking specifically Europe here, since that’s the limit of my experience). When I told my (Spanish) mother as a child that I was going to be a writer when I grew up, she asked why was I wasting time talking to her, why wasn’t I getting started?

When a friend told her (Canadian) mother she wanted to be a writer, her mother told her she’d never make a living that way, and that she should go to law school. My mother recognized writing as a profession, and she further recognized that many writers do “other things” in order to live, because the writing doesn’t always pay. She always told people “my daughter is a writer” regardless of what I was doing to pay the bills.

When I tell non-writing strangers in Canada that I’m a writer, they ask me how much money I make; when I tell them I write fantasy, they either say “I don’t read that stuff” or they want to know why my books haven’t been made into a TV series. In Spain people congratulate me when they learn I’m a writer, are impressed when I say I write fantasy, and want to know if my books have been translated into Spanish.

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Birthday Reviews: P.C. Hodgell’s “Knot and the Dragon”

Friday, March 16, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 3 comments

P.C. (Patricia Christine) Hodgell was born on March 16, 1951. She has written the eight volume Chronicles of the Kencyrath, which began with God Stalk and continued most recently with The Gates of Tagmeth in 2017. God Stalk was nominated for the Mythopoeic Award as was its follow-up, Dark of the Moon.

“Knot and the Dragon” was originally published in Esther Friesner’s Chicks and Balances, the most recent addition to her long-running Chicks in Chainmail series. The story has not been reprinted.

One of the common tropes in fairy tales is the step-daughter whose father has died, leaving her with an unloving mother. Hodgell uses this set up for “Knot and the Dragon,” with Knot living with her step-mother, Marta, and her two step-sisters. Everyone in town makes it clear to Knot that she doesn’t fit in with them.

Knot’s character comes across as a mixture of a Cinderella-type mixed with Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, for Knot is constantly striving to learn more about the world in which she finds herself, lamenting the death of her father, with whom she had things in common, but also accepting her current life.

Reports of nearby dragon attacks further bring out the town’s character, with the villagers firm in their belief that since they haven’t done anything wrong, there is no reason the dragon would punish them. Naturally enough, this conviction is enough (narratively) to bring a dragon down on their village, and they decide that Knot should essentially be a sacrifice to the dragon.

Rather than do as she was instructed, Knot seeks out the witch who lives nearby ever since she was forced from her home by the dragon. Although the witch’s first inclination is to flee with her son, who was accidentally turned into a pig during her last encounter with the dragon, the witch agrees to offer (dubious) help to Knot.

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Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast: Clark Ashton Smith, Poet of The Fantastic

Friday, March 16, 2018 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I’ve started listening to podcasts during my morning commute on the train and, let me tell you, I am an instant fan. I can’t explain what took me so long to discover them, but I am a convert. I’ve really been enjoying Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe’s Coode Street Podcast, and am just getting into Welcome to Night Vale. But the best podcast I listened to this month was Episode 9 of the Literary Wonder & Adventure Show from our old friends Robert Zoltan and Dream Tower Media. This month’s topic is Clark Ashton Smith, Poet of The Fantastic, and the special guest is our very own Saturday blogger Ryan Harvey.

Ryan practically introduced me to CAS with his epic four-part examination of The Fantasy Cycles of Clark Ashton Smith, starting with The Averoigne Chronicles. He brings both a deep knowledge and genuine passion to the topic, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Here’s a clip from around the 7-minute mark.

The first of [Smith’s] weird short stories that he sold to a magazine was 1926, a story called “The Abominations of Yondo,” which he sold to a local magazine called The Overland Monthly. And H.P. Lovecraft, who was his pen pal at the time, and for the rest of Lovecraft’s life, encouraged Smith to sell his stories to Weird Tales. And he got into Weird Tales, and for a period of about five years he, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, were also all pen pals, and were the major focus of the magazine. And Smith sold a lot of stories at this time, and then in 1934-35, right about the same time both Lovecraft and Howard stopped writing – although for very different reasons – Smith just no longer needed to support his parents (his mother died in ‘35 and his father died in ‘37) and he just lost interest in writing prose.

Ryan is a terrific resource for anyone who wants to understand the mystery and appeal of the great pulp fantasists of the early 20th Century, and host Robert Zoltan has edited their conversation into a fascinating 1-hour package. Check the whole thing out here, and see our coverage of previous episodes of the Literary Wonder & Adventure Show here

Future Treasures: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Thursday, March 15, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Justina Ireland is author of the YA novels Promise of Shadows and Devil’s Pass. Her latest, Dread Nation, is an audacious fantasy set in a post-Reconstruction America battling a plague of zombies risen from Civil War battlefields, and it’s getting a heck of a lot of pre-release buzz for a zombie book. Booklist calls it “Brilliant and gut-wrenching,” and Publishers Weekly praised its “Abundant action, thoughtful worldbuilding, and a brave, smart, and skillfully drawn cast… [with] a nail-biting conclusion.”

Bustle has a great interview with Ireland in which she says, “Sure, you have well-to-do white women fighting, but it didn’t seem realistic. It would’ve been black women fighting in the streets.” That led her to the intriguing idea of a school for black and Native girls who train to fight the swarms of undead. Dread Nation arrives in hardcover next month.

Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania — derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever.

In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead.

But there are also opportunities — and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It’s a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.

But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose.

But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies.

And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.

Dread Nation will be published by Balzer + Bray on April 3, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by David Curtis.

Revenge of the Literary Living Dead: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Thursday, March 15, 2018 Thomas Parker Comments 0 Comment

Science fiction, horror fiction, fantasy fiction, mystery fiction — for most of their history, ghetto fiction, in that such stories and the writers who produced them were decidedly “second class” citizens of the literary world and so were kept confined to areas where no respectable reader (much less critic) would want to venture, primarily pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks with the kinds of covers that you would never want your girlfriend’s mother — or your mother, for that matter — to see.

But oh, how things have changed. While you’ll search the library shelves in vain for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vampire novel or Norman Mailer’s alien invasion epic (which of course could never exist outside the realm of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — style mashups, a tide that mercifully seems to have receded), a more recent breed of “literary” writers have produced books that not so long ago would have been beyond the pale for anyone but the most hopeless genre hack — in the eyes of the mainstream critical establishment, anyway.

But Philip Roth’s foray into alternate history, The Plot Against America, Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic nightmare, The Road, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Dhameresque cannibal-killer fest, Zombie, to name only a few books, demonstrate that a new day has dawned.

To more and more writers today, the old genre labels mean less and less; they’re going to write what they want in the way that they want, and artificial boundaries be damned. Such a one is Colson Whitehead, the author of four well-received mainstream novels published between 1999 and 2009, which established his reputation as a writer to watch. His most recent novel, 2016’s The Underground Railroad, fulfilled his promise by winning several major awards including the 2016 National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize.

But between his first four novels and The Underground Railroad, Whitehead produced 2011’s Zone One, which was somewhat out of the literary mainstream (as it was once defined), being a full blown they’re-coming-for-your-brains zombie novel.

Sometime after an incurable disease has turned most of the world’s population into an army of flesh-eating living dead, Mark Spitz (an ironic title referring to the character’s inability to swim — we never find out his actual name) spends his days in Manhattan, working as a member of a civilian “sweeper team,” going from building to building, putting down the stray zombies that remain after a major clearance by the marines. He’s not exactly crazy about the work, but it’s a job, at least, and in a living-dead devastated economy, any job is a good job.

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Birthday Reviews: Rosel George Brown’s “David’s Daddy”

Thursday, March 15, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Fantastic Science Fiction Stories June 1960

Fantastic Science Fiction Stories June 1960-contents 2-small

Cover by Burt Shonberg

Rosel George Brown was born on March 15, 1926 and died on November 26, 1967. She participated in the Milford Writers Workshop and in 1959 was nominated for a Hugo for Best New Author (losing to No Award; Brian W. Aldiss and Kit Reed were also nominated that year!)

Brown wrote the novel Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue and a sequel that was published posthumously. She also collaborated with Keith Laumer on Earthblood. Many of her short stories were collected in A Handful of Time.

“David’s Daddy” was originally published in Fantastic Science Fiction Stories in the June 1960 issued, edited by Cele Goldsmith. Judith Merril included the story in The 6^th Annual of the Year’s Best SF and Ellen Datlow reprinted it in Sci Fiction on July 2, 2003.

In many ways “David’s Daddy” is a sadly prescient story. It is set in an elementary school where Lillian is a new teacher, learning the ropes from Miss Fremen, who has been there for twenty years. In the process of sharing tips, Miss Fremen also mentions that one of her students, Jerome, seems to have a strange sort of mental telepathy.

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Vintage Treasures: Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance

Wednesday, March 14, 2018 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Here’s a Jack Vance novel I haven’t read: Maske: Thaery, a science fiction adventure first published in hardcover in 1976. The Wikipedia entry does a fine job of summarizing how the book fits into Vance’s catalog, I thought.

Maske: Thaery is a science fiction novel by American writer Jack Vance, set in his Gaean Reach milieu… Maske: Thaery marks the beginning of the period when Vance’s novels were published exclusively straight to paperback, whereas prior to this the majority had first appeared in science fiction magazines, the last such examples being Durdane trilogy, serialised in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1971 to 1973, The Gray Prince, serialised in Amazing Science Fiction in 1974, and Marune: Alastor 933, also serialised in Amazing Science Fiction in 1974. The twofold title of Maske: Thaery, with its separating colon, would suggest that it was originally intended to be part of a serial, similar to the Alastor novels (Trullion: Alastor 2262, Marune: Alastor 933, and Wyst: Alastor 1716), although no further volumes were written… Maske: Thaery continues Vance’s interest in richly textured, strongly xenological settings, in which an outsider protagonist comes into conflict with a bewilderingly complex social hierarchy, other examples being Emphyrio (1969) and the Durdane trilogy.

Maske: Thaery placed 12th on the annual Locus Award list for Best SF Novel in 1976. After Jack Vance’s death in 2013, I read the following tribute/review at Speculation…, which called the book “one of his best.”

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Modular: My Favorite “Do It Yourself” Products for Roleplaying Games

Wednesday, March 14, 2018 Gabe Dybing Comments 15 comments

Those who know me a little more than as an infrequent contributor to Black Gate Magazine might be aware that I once aspired to be a writer of fantasy stories and novels, even publishing (for a short time but longer than average life expectancy) a small press magazine with co-editor and lifelong friend Nick Ozment. A few years into my forties, however, roleplaying games have utterly subsumed my creative life. I’m currently gamemastering four games: my home game, the very first roleplaying game I ever ran in my young life, Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP); another MERP game, this one using full Rolemaster rules (2nd edition), via play-by-post (PbP) in a G+ community; and two Modiphius Conan 2d20 games, one via PbP in a G+ community and one (same format) in a Facebook group. This last one is being conducted with Bob Byrne and Martin and Xander Page and is the subject of a new Modular series helmed by Mr. Byrne. In preparing my observations on Modiphius’s licensed Conan property, I have been thinking deeply about various… I suppose I shall call them “styles” of play. Using what I consider two fairly representative rules sets of what I mean by play “styles,” I have done a pretty extensive breakdown here. I expect I also shall have occasion to write about different styles of play in the midst of my experience with the 2d20 playtest. Right now, though, I want to talk about what can be termed the OSR (Old School Revival) — perhaps more accurately referred to as DIY (Do It Yourself) — resources that I most appreciate and are the most often used in my MERP games. Specifically, these resources help me come up with content and develop my fantasy world.

There are a number of “adventure generators” — perhaps more accurately described as “idea machines” — out there. I’m sure all of them are fantastic. You can download one for free from Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea at its website Hyperborea.tv. Nearly all of the products and producers that I’m going to mention in this article offer one. Even Conan 2d20 has one, though the focus of that generator, due to the nature of play that Conan encourages, is a bit different, and I expect I will analyze this at length when I get to that portion of the official playtest series. These “adventure generators” almost certainly are evolved from the “story creators” that Ozment once told me that the early pulp writers used, sometimes flicking spinners rather than throwing dice. Hey, modern GMs are under almost the same kind of pressure as those pulp writers were, though instead of needing to churn out words for pennies to put meat on the table they need to come up with an idea quick, tonight, before the players come over expecting to be wowed and entertained. Pre-made modules can do the same thing, of course, but they have to be studied first, details have to be remembered, and sometimes they just don’t work with the ongoing campaign in the way that a few randomly generated elements can result in truly inspired serendipity. All of the products I’m about to profile I own and use in PDF.

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Birthday Reviews: Tad Williams’s “Go Ask Elric”

Wednesday, March 14, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 7 comments

Elric Tales of the White Wolf-back-small

Cover by Brom

Tad Williams was born on March 14, 1957. He published the Memory, Sorry & Thorn fantasy series beginning in 1988 and followed up with the Otherland series in 1996 and Shadowmarch in 2004. Williams has also published a handful of stand alone novels, including Tailchaser’s Song and Caliban’s Hour. He collaborated with Nina Kiriki Hoffman on Child of an Ancient City.

Williams was a nominee for the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award in 1986 and the next year Tailchaser’s Song was a nominee for the William L. Crawford Award. Two of his novels have been nominated for Germany’s Phantastik Preis.

“Go Ask Elric” was published in 1994 in Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, a Michael Moorcock Festschrift which allowed other authors to play with Moorcock’s settings, characters, and themes. The story was translated into French for inclusion in an abridged version of the anthology as a whole. Williams later included it in his collection Rite: Short Work, which also included an essay Williams wrote as an introduction to Moorcock’s novel Gloriana.

Williams manages a successful homage to Michael Moorcock in “Go Ask Elric,” pulling in elements from Moorcock’s stories “Elric at the End of Time” as well as “the Vanishing Tower” and “Sailing to the Future.” Rather than focusing on Elric, William’s main character is Pogo Chapman, a young kid who worships Jimi Hendrix in the mid-1970s. During an acid trip, Pogo is sucked into the multiverse where he meets up with an imprisoned Elric and helps him escape. As Moorcock did in “Elric at the End of Time,” Williams switches between Elric’s point of view and Pogo’s, allowing the reader to see just how much Elric misreads the situations he is in.

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