Black Gate – Page 465 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Birthday Reviews: Robert Silverberg’s “When We Went to See the End of the World”

Monday, January 15, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Robert Silverberg was born on January 15, 1935. In 1956, he won a Hugo for being the Most Promising New Author, nearly two decades before the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award debuted. He has subsequently won two Hugo Awards for Best Novella and one for Best Novelette. Silverberg has also received two Nebula Awards for Best Short Story, two more for Best Novella, and one for Best Novel.

He has won or been nominated for numerous other awards. Silverberg was a Guest of Honor at Heicon ‘70, the 28th Worldcon, held in Heidelberg, Germany. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and named an SFWA Grand Master in 2004. Other lifetime achievement awards include the Big Heart Award, the Forry Award, the Prix Utopia, the Skylark Award, the Milford Award.

“When We Went to See the End of the World” was published in Universe 2 in 1972 by Terry Carr. The story was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award. Carr reprinted it the following year in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #2, and Isaac Asimov included it in Nebula Award Stories Eight. Lester del Rey also included it in his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Second Annual Collection. It has since been included in several collections and anthologies and has been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, and Russian.

“When We Went to See the End of the World” is set at a cocktail party which in many ways seems very much of the early seventies when the story was written. Casual sex and marijuana are routine, but the main focus of the story is Nick and Jane telling the rest of the attendees about their recent excursion to see the end of the world.

Such excursions are new, only recently having come down from a price where only millionaires could afford to go, so Nick and Jane gained social status by being the first in their neighborhood to see the end of the world, and Nick sees the opportunity to have an affair with a neighbor’s wife.

Their status, and Nick’s chances for an affair, appear to be ended when a couple of latecomers to the party indicate that they have also taken the journey to the end of the world, although the world they saw was extremely different from what Nick and Jane had experienced. Before either couple can accuse each other of lying about their experiences, another couple announces that they completed the journey and saw someone else when they were there.

The story is a reasonably light-hearted look at a common idea in science fiction and presents a reasonable explanation for the multiple experiences the party-goers who visited the end of the world had. At the same time, since all of the activity takes place in the confines of the cocktail party, it is quite possible to read “When We Went to See the End of the World” is a story about people trying to one up each other, rather than relating their actual experiences.

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Vintage Treasures: Dark Imaginings: A Collection of Gothic Fantasy edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski

Sunday, January 14, 2018 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Dark Imaginings is the first dark fantasy anthology I can remember lusting after in a bookstore. It was published in 1978, when I was 14 years old, at the lordly price of $4.95 — pretty steep in an era when a typical paperback was a buck fifty, even for a big oversized trade paperback.

In those days I would make weekly sojourns to downtown Ottawa every Saturday afternoon to hunt through the used bookstores on Bank Street for science fiction paperbacks, and I would gaze at it longingly on the bookshelf at WHSmith, or take it down and thumb through it. Joel Schick’s beautiful cover, featuring a canopy of dead, grasping trees in a twisted wood, spoke to me of dark tales whispered by strangers on Halloween. Man, I wanted this book.

And who wouldn’t? Dark Imaginings is packed with classic tales of gothic fantasy, including a Kull tale by Robert E. Howard, a Northwest Smith novelette by C. L. Moore, an Averoigne story by Clark Ashton Smith, a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale by Fritz Leiber, a Cthulhu Mythos story by H. P. Lovecraft, a novel excerpt from Poul Anderson, and ten more stories. Each is illustrated with a sparse b&w pencil sketch by James Cagle. It’s a fine volume to curl up by the window with on a blustery winter evening, as I learned when I finally bought a copy, over a decade later.

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Birthday Reviews: Arthur Byron Cover’s “A Murder”

Sunday, January 14, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Cover by O'Neil de Noux — Cover by O’Neil de Noux

Arthur Byron Cover was born on January 14, 1950. He attended the 1971 Clarion Writers Workshop and made his first sale to Harlan Ellison for inclusion in The Last Dangerous Visions. Cover’s novel, Autumn Angels was nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award. Cover was the owner of Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks, California until the store closed in 2002.

His story “A Murder” was published in the August 17, 1991 issue of Pulphouse Weekly Fiction Magazine and was purchased by Dean Wesley Smith. The story has never been reprinted.

Cover’s “A Murder” is a metafictional and psychological exploration of a brutal murder. He tries to get into the head of both the victim, Stephanie, and the murderer, Bill Prisman. Stephanie is an avid reader of horror novels and stories and when she finds herself being attacked, she is very much aware that it was a complete surprise. There was none of the forewarning or sense of foreboding that she would have expected there to have been in the novels and stories she has read. Prisman’s mind is dark. He has just been released from prison and has a sense of entitlement towards women that he can only fulfill by raping and murdering them.

Cover brings the two of them together and then backs away from the horrible crime be invoking the point of view of the omniscient author. Rather than describing Prisman’s attack, he discusses an alternative to the horror he has set up. This tangent is presented in almost clinical terms and serves to show that certain ideas about criminal behavior, notably reformation, are impractical.

Prisman is the poster child for recidivism, something both he and the law enforcement community know, but their hands are tied by a society and culture which believe that people can change when placed in an environment which actually serves to reinforce their worst tendencies. Once this detour is complete, Cover allows his story to continue to its inexorable ending.

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The January Fantasy Magazine Rack

Saturday, January 13, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Only two print magazines in the first half of the month, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and pulp reprint mag High Adventure. Online zines definitely seem to be where the action is. The first magazines of 2018 feature fiction from Tobias S. Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Tamara Vardomskaya, Sunny Moraine, Terence Faherty, Osahon Ize-iyamu, Erin Roberts, Bo Balder, Bao Shu, Arkady Martine, Marissa Lingen, Sunny Moraine, Vivian Shaw, R.K. Kalaw, and many others. Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in early January (links will bring you to magazine websites).

Beneath Ceaseless Skies — the January 4 issue — #242! — has fiction from Tamara Vardomskaya and Hannah Strom-Martin, plus a reprint by A.B. Treadwell
Clarkesworld — new stories from Tobias S. Buckell, Osahon Ize-iyamu, Erin Roberts, Bo Balder, and Bao Shu, plus reprints from James Tiptree Jr. and Michael Swanwick
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine — the January/February double issue follows their winter tradition of seasonal suspense and Sherlockian detection, with a new entry in Terence Faherty’s series from the lost manuscripts of Dr. John Watson, “The Noble Bachelor”
Nightmare — original fiction from Lori Selke and Vincent Michael Zito, plus reprints by Halli Villegas and Lynda E. Rucker
GrimDark Magazine — Alex Marshall is back with his second Crimson Empire novella *Beasts of the Burnished Chain,* plus a story from Anna Smith-Spark, and interviews with Steven Erikson and Erik Scott de Bie
The Dark — brand new dark fantasy and horror from Lindiwe Rooney and Bill Kte’pi, plus reprints from Eric Schaller and Carrie Laben
High Adventure — three classic tales of air adventure: “War Game” by George Bruce, “O’leary’s Last Supper” by Arthur Guy Empey, and “The Kansas Comet” by William E. Barrett
Uncanny — issue #20 contains all-new short fiction by Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Arkady Martine, Marissa Lingen, Sunny Moraine, Vivian Shaw, and R.K. Kalaw, plus a reprint by Vandana Singh

Click any of the thumbnail images above for bigger images. Our Late December Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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War Eternal: Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Saturday, January 13, 2018 Ryan Harvey Comments 6 comments

In 1940, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his final new adventure setting, the extrasolar planet Poloda. For the first time in a career that had ignited pulp science fiction back in 1912, Burroughs pushed beyond the solar system to the region of pure speculation. But what he discovered four hundred and fifty thousand light-years from Earth wasn’t an E. E. Smith space opera, or even an old-fashioned romp on a weird planet of monsters and savage humanoid tribes. Against the grain of its romanticized title, the incomplete short novel Beyond the Farthest Star isn’t an escapist tale, but a bleak meditation on a world mired in unending warfare. The title makes you anticipate Star Wars. Instead you find just Wars.

This is a stark work. It offers no illusions. There’s a dash of humor and some winking satire, but the overwhelming sensation of Beyond the Farthest Star is resignation to carnage. There are no valiant heroes on Poloda who become beacons for others to follow. There are only stalwart soldiers who fall in line to fight the fight, whatever it may be, and die in numbers tabulated by the hundreds of thousands.

We’re used to Edgar Rice Burroughs as a master of sweeping adventure in worlds where fighting means hope. It’s a shock to see him sitting glumly among the ruins of hope, waiting for the next wave of barbarians. Looking at Poloda from the perspective of the twenty-first century is to see a prophetic futurist emerging in Old Man Burroughs. The story the Old Man tells is not much fun. But it’s enthralling — and there’s nothing else like it in the ERB canon, even among the strange evolutions his work took during his last decade.

As with Savage Pellucidar and its sister books set on Mars and Venus, the Poloda novellas were planned to form a connected sequence for later hardcover publication. Part I, “Beyond the Farthest Star,” was written in October 1940 over twelve days, and Part II, “Tangor Returns,” was finished in December in five days. “Beyond the Farthest Star” appeared in the January 1942 issue of Blue Book, but Burroughs never submitted Part II for publication, probably because he scrapped the series after starting work as a war correspondent. “Tangor Returns” wasn’t discovered until thirteen years after Burroughs’s death. It was published along with “Beyond the Farthest Star” in the 1964 Canaveral Press omnibus Tales from Three Planets. Ace Books later released a paperback of the unfinished Poloda saga as Beyond the Farthest Star, with the first novella retitled “Adventure on Poloda.”

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Birthday Reviews: Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Maze of Maal Dweb”

Saturday, January 13, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 4 comments

Cover of Double Shadow, artist unknown. — Cover of *Double Shadow*, artist unknown.

Clark Ashton Smith was born on January 13, 1893 and died on August 14, 1961. Along with H.P. Lovecraft, he was one of the major authors at Weird Tales, writing stories which were similar to the dark fantasies Lovecraft wrote.

Smith maintained a correspondence with Lovecraft for the last 15 years of Lovecraft’s life. While Lovecraft wrote about Cthulhu, Smith wrote about the far future Zothique. Smith was named the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award winner in 2015.

“The Maze of Maal Dweb” first appeared in a limited edition chapbook, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, published by Smith in 1933. A the time the story was called “The Maze of the Enchanter.” It received its first general publication, and under its better known title, in the October 1938 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright.

Smith included it in his 1944 collection Lost Worlds and it has frequently been reprinted since, including translations into Dutch, German, French, and Italian. Maal Dweb also appeared in Smith’s story “The Flower-Women.”

“The Maze of Maal Dweb” has Tiglari working his way through a swamp to retrieve his beloved, Athlé, from the titular lord of the solar system. Despite Maal Dweb’s palace being impregnable, Tiglari has somehow managed to acquire knowledge of the dangers that lie within, so he can arm himself appropriately for his quest.

Similarly unexamined is how Maal Dweb, a recluse who is never seen by anyone except the women he orders sent to him, can successfully rule his vast domains. Similarly, the palace is seemingly unpopulated except by the petrified forms of Maal Dweb’s previous victims. Rather than a living home in which to live, Maal Dweb sits like bait in his trap, waiting for doomed adventurers to come to him.

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Future Treasures: The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley

Friday, January 12, 2018 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I don’t know about you lot, but I like my dystopian horror filled with cosmic weirdness, strange fungi, and terrifying tales told around post-apocalyptic campfires.

Okay, that’s fairly specific. I blame the pre-release copy for Aliya Whiteley’s novella The Beauty, which has admittedly sparked my imagination. The Beauty was originally published in the UK in 2014 by Unsung Stories, where it was promptly nominated for the Shirley Jackson and Saboteur awards, and chosen by Adam Nevill as one of his favorite horror tales. He calls it “A story of cosmic fecundity and fungal weirdness that I couldn’t put down.” Kirkus Reviews labeled it “gut-wrenching… renders a world that exists somewhere between post-apocalyptic and fable-esque… unforgettably grotesque.” It arrives in trade paperback next week from Titan Books.

Somewhere away from the cities and towns, in the Valley of the Rocks, a society of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their history recounted by Nate, the storyteller. Requested most often by the group is the tale of the death of all women.

They are the last generation.

One evening, Nate brings back new secrets from the woods; peculiar mushrooms are growing from the ground where the women’s bodies lie buried. These are the first signs of a strange and insidious presence unlike anything ever known before…

Discover the Beauty.

The Beauty will be published by Titan Books on January 16, 2018. It is 288 pages, priced at $12.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version.

See all our coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy, SF and horror here.

The Top Five Books I Read in 2017

Friday, January 12, 2018 Brandon Crilly Comments 4 comments

Ghost-Talkers-Mary-Robinette-Kowal-smaller

Another year has passed, dear readers, which means that I’m mandated to assess the books I read in 2017 and declare my favorites. Of course, this mandate is self-imposed, and the difficulty of figuring out which books to pick this year is also self-inflicted. I’ve learned how to put down a book after 50 pages if I don’t enjoy it and move on, which means that the books I finished this year are all ones that I enjoyed on some level. I know, woe is me. But cut me some slack, because instead of a cop-out top ten list like last time, this year I forced myself to cut down my selections and present you with a Top Five. Note that these aren’t necessarily all books released in 2017; I just happened to read them in the last year.

Last year, I made an offhand comment that if I was forced under pain of death to absolutely pick a #1 title for 2016, I’d have chosen An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet. I’ve decided that for each of these annual posts (presuming I’m still around here in a year’s time) I’m going to nominate one book as my top pick for the year, and then list the rest in alphabetical order. Any ranking beyond #1 is going to be arbitrary anyway, since each of these novels is amazing in different ways.

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Birthday Reviews: Jack London’s “A Thousand Deaths”

Friday, January 12, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Jack London was born on January 12, 1876 and died on November 22, 1916. Best known as an adventure author for his novels The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf, he also wrote novels which would be considered proto-science fiction, perhaps most notably Before Adam. Active in socialist causes, many of his works supported the rights of workers, including his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, which has appeared as a preliminary nominee on the Prometheus Hall of Fame ballot twice.

“A Thousand Deaths” was purchased by Herman Umbstaetter and published in the May 1899 issue of Black Cat. The magazine reprinted the story in 1917 and it has been published in several science fiction collections over the years, including a reprint in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1967 when Ed Ferman was the editor. It has been reprinted in various London collections and science fiction anthologies over the years.

“A Thousand Deaths” is the story of a man who has been disowned by his wealthy parents and forced to make his own way in the world. He has found a niche for himself as a merchant marine, but when the story opens, he is drowning in San Francisco Bay, having decided rather precipitously to leave the ship he had been working on. He passes out in the water and when he awakens, he finds himself revived on a pleasure yacht which happens to belong to his father, who does not recognize him.

His father is interested in finding a way to stave off death and has, in fact, brought the narrator back to life. Without revealing his identity to his father, the two agree that the narrator will allow his father to kill him in various ways and bring him back to life to test his various hypotheses. The father is depicted as a monster, reminiscent of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo or H.G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau. His two assistants, whose only notable characteristic is that they are black, unfortunately, allow the casual racism of the period in which the story was written to shine through.

The narrator eventually tires of the experimentation, especially when he realizes that his father is doing much more to him than his father has told him. He effects an escape after managing an unlikely scientific breakthrough that allows him to follow in his father’s monstrous footsteps.

The story was clearly written at a time when it was believed that science would eventually be able to solve all of life’s (and death’s) problems, and while it doesn’t have a Frankensteinian “There-were-things-man-was-not-meant-to-know” lesson to it, London definitely makes the implication that technological advances needed to be tempered by man’s humanity.

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Goth Chick News: Alien Roller Coast Goals (or What I Will Be Doing the First Time Chicago Is Snowed In)

Thursday, January 11, 2018 Sue Granquist Comments 3 comments

Contrary to what you may have heard from my fellow Black Gate staffers, I really was pretty good last year. I give Santa a lot of credit for ignoring the fake news which came out of our Chicago office about me hanging little bat skulls on the company tree and spray-painting all the candy canes black. Instead he decided to grant my two biggest wishes: for an HTC Vive virtual reality headset and the latest release of Planet Coaster to go with it.

Anyone who knows me knows I am absolutely mad for roller coasters and the game Planet Coaster by Frontier is, in my opinion, the quintessential environment for building the most extreme coasters and then watching with sadistic glee while your guests line up to ride it and promptly get sick afterwards. However, with the addition of the Vive VR, you can now personally line up to ride it and then get sick afterwards.

In other words, it rocks utterly.

Having spent more hours than I can to count immersed in Planet Coaster since its first release in 2016, I consider myself pretty adept at creating fanciful yet heart stopping coasters in the virtual world. But today, I must bow to the guru, the sensei, the ultimate Jedi Master of Planet Coaster, super-fan Hin Nya.

Nya has utilized Planet Coaster to create Aliens: The Ride, a 15-minute experience that takes you on a virtual trip through the scariest theme park attraction (n)ever made.

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