Black Gate – Page 464 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Vintage Treasures: The Snail on the Slope by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

Tuesday, February 13, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Russian science fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky are the authors of a pair of acknowledged classics, Hard to Be a God (which Zeta Moore reviewed for us here) and Roadside Picnic (1977). Their books were introduced to a broad audience in the US in the 1970s by Donald Wollheim at DAW Books. Over a dozen of their novels have been translated into English, including The Ugly Swans (1972), The Final Circle of Paradise (1976), Monday Begins on Saturday (1977), Prisoners of Power (1977), and The Time Wanderers (1987).

When I recently discovered there was a Strugatsky paperback I didn’t have, The Snail on the Slope, it was bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s always a delight to find a new object of interest. On the other hand, copies on eBay started at $30, and on Abe Books anywhere from $40 and up. (I suppose I can’t be too cranky. The vast majority of genre paperbacks from the 70s and 80s have declined in value over the past 40 years; it’s good to see the vintage paperback market has at least a few hot spots.)

But what’s the deal with the skyrocketing prices for a pair of relatively obscure Soviet-era science fiction writers? Fifteen years ago you could have had virtually any of their paperbacks for a song.

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The Courage of the Question: Tuck Everlasting

Tuesday, February 13, 2018 Thomas Parker Comments 0 Comment

If you have children at home, you know their propensity for asking questions. “Can I have some more?” “Why not?” “Are we there yet?” “Do I have to?” These questions and many others are familiar to everyone who deals with children, and they (the questions, that is) usually don’t pose much of a problem. (In my house, we have long had a standard reply to this kind of query, taken from a Ring Lardner short story: “Shut up, he explained.”)

Not all childish questions are so easily disposed of, however. The hard ones can range from the mathematical, such as “What if there was no such thing as five?” to the epistemological, like “How do you know?” The roughest ones are literally life and death: “Why did my puppy, why did my friend, why did my Grandpa have to die?” When faced with these, too often the adult impulse is to brush the child off with a pat answer that answers nothing, or better yet, to quickly change the subject.

Tough questions don’t cease to be questions, though, just because we grow too experienced, too jaded, too busy, too complacent, too disappointed, too bored — too old to be willing to ask them ourselves.

This is one of the reasons children can keep you feeling young… when they’re not making you feel ancient. It’s also why reading great children’s literature can be such a wonderful, renewing experience; such books are addressed to an audience that hasn’t yet gotten into the fatal habit of thinking that all questions have either already been answered or are unanswerable. Such books are themselves like fearless, inquisitive children; they’re willing to speak their minds, whatever the consequences. Books like this are assured of long lives…books like Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 children’s fantasy, Tuck Everlasting.

In the little town of Treegap, in the first week of August in the year 1880, ten year old Winnie Foster feels like life’s possibilities have already dried up. Her overprotective family won’t let her roam, won’t let her experience all that she wants to; her world is cruelly circumscribed by the white picket fence that keeps her safely penned in her front yard. Before the hot August days are over, though, Winnie will have an encounter that will change her life forever, and she’ll be faced with a momentous and irrevocable choice.

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The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

Tuesday, February 13, 2018 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 11 comments

Bear with me for a bit. With the death of Ursula K. Le Guin a few weeks ago, I began thinking about her Earthsea books. They were among the earliest non-Tolkien fantasy books I read. I loved them as a kid, I’ve read them three or four times since, and have fond memories of them. I’ll be looking at the first, A Wizard of Earthsea, next time. Thinking about those books got me thinking about a series I actually read even more times and have even fonder memories of: Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain.

Beginning with The Book of Three (1964), Lloyd Alexander created what has to be one of the first genre-fantasy uses of Celtic mythology (yes, Alan Garner had turned to Celtic themes in his Alderly Edge books, but those books are set in contemporary Britain, not a secondary world). Specifically, he drew on that complex and complicated compendium of Welsh tales, the Mabinogion, for inspiration and names. In this book, the four that follow, and a later collection of short stories, Alexander reworked the idiosyncratic legends into something any modern reader of fantasy would recognize immediately. Gone are the stories of women made from flowers, a human prince trading places with the god of the afterlife, and a king who is gigantic enough to wade to Ireland, and instead, a much more straightforward of a boy learning about the perils and responsibilities of heroism. Considering his intended audience was elementary school readers, it makes perfect sense to simplify, and to introduce a greater degree of coherence. I also imagine many young readers, like I was, were intrigued enough by Alexander’s books to track down the real legends.

In addition to being one of the earliest glosses on Celtic themes, The Book of Three is one of the first times Tolkien’s dark lord trope seeped into the genre. Instead of being a fairly benign lord of the afterlife as he is in the Mabinogion, Arawn is reconfigured as a mostly standard issue dark lord. The original’s mythic paradise, Annwn, is reconstructed here as a dread realm. Rereading The Book of Three for the first time in at least ten years, I was quite happy that I still enjoyed it, but seeing it with older eyes exposed gears and wires I hadn’t paid a mind to before.

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Birthday Reviews: Maureen F. McHugh’s “Ancestor Money”

Tuesday, February 13, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Maureen F. McHugh was born on February 13, 1959. She published her first story, “All in a Day’s Work,” in Twilight Zone using the pseudonym Michael Galloglach, the only story published using that name.

McHugh won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1993 for her debut novel China Mountain Zhang, which also won the Locus Poll for Best First Novel and the Lambda Award. In 1999, it also received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. She won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1996 for “The Lincoln Train,” which also won that year’s Locus Poll. Her collection After the Apocalypse: Stories received the Shirley Jackson Award.

“Ancestor Money” was first published in the October 1, 2003 issue of Sci Fiction, edited by Ellen Datlow. It appeared in the following year’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Edition and was included in McHugh’s collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories. Diane Severson read the story for PodCastle PC036 in 2008 and it was against reprinted in Peter S. Beagle’s anthology The Secret History of Fantasy. Its most recent appearance was in Paula Guran’s Ghosts: Recent Hauntings. McHugh received a Nebula nomination for “Ancestor Voices.”

In “Ancestor Money,” Rachel Ball died at the age of 35 and has been existing in the afterlife for seven decades, content in her secluded world, occasionally seeing the spirit of her husband’s uncle, Speed, until Speed delivers a letter to her. The letter, which informs her that her granddaughter, Amelia Shaugnessy, has made an offering in Rachel’s memory and she can claim it by visiting a temple in Hong Kong, pulls Rachel from her idyllic afterlife.

Rachel travels from the Heaven she knows to the strange Heaven of San-qing, the afterlife for Hong Kong. Along the way, she has a constant sense of unease as she is pulled further and further from her natural place and understanding of the world. McHugh describes Rachel’s journey, which involves a mundane seeming airplane, with a sense of unease that mirrors what Rachel is experiencing as she leaves her heavenly version of Kentucky.

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Tell Me A Story: Levar Burton Reads

Monday, February 12, 2018 Elizabeth Cady Comments 3 comments

Admit it. You are singing this song in your head right now. And possibly craving fruit loops.

I’m a child of the 80s. And 90s. I’m technically a member of a little sliver generation in between Gen X and the Millennials, and even that depends on who wrote the chart you’re looking at. But the point is, Levar Burton was a pivotal figure in my childhood. First through “Reading Rainbow”, the long running and highly acclaimed literacy program for children on PBS, and then via “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. I still remember the first season of Reading Rainbow: it premiered in 1983, and I was an avid watcher. When “The Next Generation” premiered four years later, I was just at an age to appreciate it. So when I heard that Burton was launching a new podcast series for adults via Stitcher, I was quick to subscribe.

It has been an outstanding addition to my podcast feed.

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Incendiary Conspiracy Theory Suggests Possible Collusion Between She-Ra: Princess of Power and Hordak

Monday, February 12, 2018 Nick Ozment Comments 2 comments

The 1985 cartoon She-Ra: Princess of Power was a spin-off of He Man and the Masters of the Universe aimed at young girls. It ran for 2 seasons, 93 episodes, and was canceled in 1986. Both series were produced by Filmation in conjunction with toymaker Mattel.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN OFFSCREEN CONVERSATION FROM A SECRET RECORDING OF SOME OF THE SUPPORTING CAST.

This is a partial transcript of video obtained from the memory files of one of Hordak’s captured Hover Robot spies. It has never been declassified or released on Etheria or Eternia, and we are publishing the audio transcript here at Black Gate at great personal risk, like the brave souls in the movie The Post. You’re welcome, people of planet Earth!

FLUTTERINA: “Well, since we’re dishing gossip, lemme tell you guys — totally off the record — lemme tell you what bothers me about this whole She-Ra charade. I saw her lift a whole lake once.”

LOO-KEE: “Huh?”

FLUTTERINA: “A whole lake. With the bedrock beneath it — like a bowl, ‘cuz you can’t just lift a body of water — and toss it like a mile through the air. A lake. That puts her at what power level? Like a hundred He-Mans? So why doesn’t she just stamp out The Horde?”

KOWL: [flaps his ear-wings and hovers excitedly] “Yeah! Every time she ‘defeats’ Hordak, she just lets him slip away. Sometimes she sees him off with a shake of her finger and a ‘Don’t you ever get up to this sort of mischief again’!”

FLUTTERINA: “It is kind of demented, isn’t it? Like she just likes toying with him, dragging out a cruel game for her own perverse pleasure.”

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Time Travel to the Most Dramatic Incidents in History: Invictus by Ryan Graudin

Monday, February 12, 2018 Elizabeth Galewski Comments 0 Comment

Farway McCarthy’s mother is one of the most famous time travelers ever to record the past. Since she disappeared when he was a child, never returning from an expedition to ancient Egypt, his only hope of finding her again is by following in her footsteps and becoming a field agent for the Corps of Central Time Travelers himself. He’s his class’s valedictorian going into the final exam, so this dream lies within his grasp. There’s just one more simulation to ace.

But then the unthinkable happens. He fails.

Somebody must have rigged the simulation. He didn’t get nearly close enough to the actress playing Marie Antoinette for her to notice him. Plus, she had the gall to wink at him in that knowing way as the hologram of Versailles vanished around him and the warehouse reappeared. He’d been set up.

Far pleads his case to the Headmaster to no avail. Just like that, he’s expelled from the Academy instead of graduating. If someone from the past could guess you’re a visitor from the future, you’ve got no business being a Recorder. Such carelessness could undermine the whole fabric of time.

Far leaves his exam knowing he’ll never get the chance to time travel. Trapped in the present, he’ll never find his mother. He’ll never even get the chance to look.

“Subject Seven has been successfully redirected,” an anonymous memo informs the reader as Far faces his bleak new future.

That’s when a mysterious handwritten note invites Far to meet with a black-market trader. The Corps of Central Time Travelers aren’t the only ones who own time machines, it turns out. Far can captain one (the Invictus) by accepting the trader’s extortionate terms, which, of course, he does.

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New Treasures: Cry Your Way Home by Damien Angelica Walters

Monday, February 12, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Damien Angelica Walters is the author of the novels Ink (2012) and Paper Tigers (2016), and the 2015 collection Sing Me Your Scars. She was an Associate Editor of John Klima’s excellent Electric Velocipede magazine, and her short fiction has been published in Black Static, Apex Magazine, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, Autumn Cthulhu, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, Eternal Frankenstein, Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. Her short fiction has been nominated multiple times for a Bram Stoker Award – including just last month.

Her second collection, Cry Your Way Home, arrived from Apex Publications earlier this month. It contains 17 tales of horror wrapped up in a handsome trade paperback with a gorgeous cover by Marcela Bolívar. Check it out — or if you like, try some of Damien’s online fiction in recent venues like Nightmare, The Dark, and Apex Magazine.

Cry Your Way Home was published by Apex Publications on January 2, 2018. It is 240 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback, and $4.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Marcela Bolívar. See the complete table of contents here.

Birthday Reviews: Terry Bisson’s “Scout’s Honor”

Monday, February 12, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Cover by John Picacio

Terry Bisson was born on February 12, 1942. In addition to writing his only original novels and short stories, including Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and The Pickup Artist, Bisson has written several media tie-in novels and completed Walter Miller, Jr.’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman.

He has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice, for “Bears Discover Fire” and for “macs.” Both stories also won the Locus Poll. “Bears Discover Fire” also received the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. “macs” received the Grand Prix l’Imaginaire and the Xatafi-Cyberdark Awards for translations. In 1993, Bisson received the Phoenix Award from DeepSouthCon.

“Scout’s Honor” was first purchased by Ellen Datlow for the online ‘zine Sci Fiction, where it appeared in the January 28, 2004 issue. It was reprinted the next year in both the Hartwell/Cramer and the Dozois Year’s Best anthologies. Bisson included the story in his collection Greetings and the story was translated into Italian in 2008. It was short-listed for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

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Unbound Worlds on the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of February 2018

Sunday, February 11, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I used to take pride in keeping tabs on the releases from all the major publishers. Nowadays I’m happy if I can putter over to the bookstore once a month. What brought on this tide of sloth? The fact that so many others do it vastly better than I do.

Take Matt Staggs at Unbound Worlds for example. His recent article on the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of February 2018 includes no less than 33 titles, from Myke Cole, R.A. Salvatore, Laura Bickle, Jon Sprunk, W. Michael Gear, Jo Walton, Kelly Barnhill, William C. Dietz, John Kessel, Karin Tidbeck, Gini Koch, and many others. That’s more than a book a day! If you need more guidance than that in a short month like February, God help you.

Here’s a few of the highlights from Matt’s list, starting with the debut novel from Jasmine Gower, set in an alternative Chicago during Prohibition where magic, not alcohol, is the banned substance.

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