Black Gate – Page 478 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

December Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, December 5, 2017 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 2 comments

December’s here, so it’s time for another roundup. When the luminous Mrs. V. asked me about what I was reading this week, it turned into a conversation about short stories, then and now. At some point I said something along the lines of short stories have always been hit-and-miss, with most stories being satisfying, some terrific, and even a big name doesn’t always knock it out of the park. In fact, anyone might hit a home run, so a magazine like Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, featuring unknown and lesser-known writers, is just as likely to contain excellent stories as any of Lin Carter’s anthologies. That’s why I persist in reviewing new short stories each month. There’s a chance each and every month that I’ll discover a story that measures up to the best of the past, and will be worthy of a place in some future anthology of great swords & sorcery tales.

That’s the sort of anticipation I have when I open up a new issue of HFQ each quarter. Adrian Simmons, David Farney, William Ledbetter, James Frederick William Rowe, and Barbara Barrett are the names on the masthead, and swords & sorcery fans should thank each one of them for consistently putting out the best new S&S and with far less attention than they deserve. I won’t say any of the latest volume, #34, is among the greats bound to last, but all three are very good. Can you really ask for more than that?

“Crazy Snake and the Demons of Ometepe,” by Eric Atkisson, brings to an end the multi-author tale begun last issue where alternate universes were at risk of domination by the Destroyer, a terrible trans-dimensional power. In “Between Sea and Flame” by Evan Dicken, Tenochtitlan fell to evil priests from the sea (not to Cortes) and the warrior Hummingbird found herself forced to back the lesser evil in order to save the word. Raphael Ordonez’s wandering ex-conquistador, Francisco Carvajal y Lopez, had to fight the Destroyer as well in “I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”

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Relive Gary Gygax’s Classic Tale of Giant Mayhem in Assault of the Giants

Monday, December 4, 2017 John ONeill Comments 13 comments

I’m pretty predictable when I shop for board games. I think I’m just trying to recreate the experience of playing Risk with my friends on lazy summer afternoons in the camping trailer in our backyard. I want to move giant armies around a board and shout “I’m attacking Kamchatka!” at the top of my lungs. The only reason I even know there’s a chunk of land on this planet called “Kamchatka” is because of Hasbro.

Anyway, in practice this means I’m drawn to pretty much any fantasy wargame with colorful components and a huge map, which looks like it could take six hours to finish. (It’s precisely because I don’t have the time to play these games any more that I lust after them so much.)

WotC’s Assault of the Giants fits the bill perfectly. It’s an ambitious game of fantasy warfare played out across a map of Faerûn, with some intriguing strategy flourishes. And best of all, it’s a game of (literally!) giant armies… how cool is that?

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Exploring the Subterranean

Monday, December 4, 2017 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I founded Black Gate in 2000, and we published the first issue at the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas in October of that year. We produced the print magazine for 11 years (the last issue, #15, was published in May 2011), and during that decade-plus I was keenly observant of other print magazines, especially new ones. A handful of new zines popped up during that period, but I think my favorite was William Schafer’s Subterranean magazine, which produced eight print issues between 2005-2011 before transitioning online.

I only managed to come across a handful of issues during the print era, but that’s okay. I keep an eye out for back issues at conventions, and occasionally snag one or two (as I did with Subterranean #2 at the 2015 Windy City Pulp & Paper convention). They’re hard to come by, but they’re generally not expensive. I have an eBay saved search that alerts me when new lots are listed, and a few months ago I got a ping about the set of three issues above.

Subterranean #4 – 2006
Subterranean #6 – January 2007
Subterranean #8 – October 2011 — the last print issue

They were in pristine, unread condition, and offered for $16 total. I was the only bidder, and took the whole set home for less than the original cover price. It’s lonely being an obsessive magazine collector, but sometimes it has its benefits.

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Simulations Publications Inc: The TSR Incursion

Monday, December 4, 2017 Bob Byrne Comments 22 comments

Around the end of 1981, brothers Kevin and Brian Blume wrested control of TSR away from founder Gary Gygax. The company would change dramatically under their leadership, until Gygax returned from his west coast exile in 1984 and (briefly) reclaimed his company. One ‘Blume Incident’ from 1982 is a pretty good example of the way they did things.

In 1958, Avalon Hill was formed, creating the modern wargaming industry, out of which role playing games grew. In 1969, James Dunnigan created Simulations Publications, Inc. — to be known as SPI — with Redmond Simenson as co-founder. He started the company to save an existing wargaming fanzine, Chris Wagner’s Strategy & Tactics, which was in a precarious financial state. Simenson was the graphic designer for the magazine and a huge part of its success. For the princely sum of $1 (yes, you read that right), SPI took on Strategy and Tactics and made it the industry’s leading newsletter, starting with the September, 1969 issue.

Strategy & Tactics would include a new wargame in every single issue from then through the current one, which is remarkable. With the popularity of the magazine, SPI also became Avalon Hill’s major competitor in the wargaming market and enjoyed great success in the seventies. Things were good. Then, as for JFK, came Dallas. Okay, not quite.

Dunnigan’s Dallas: The Television Roleplaying Game, was a licensed product, intended to cash in on the massively successful show. My first thought is to wonder how many Dallas fans wanted to play an RPG — apparently not many. It was a disaster. Simonsen commented that they produced “80,000 copies and that was 79,999 too many.”

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Self-published Book Review: Dark Healer by Harry Leighton

Monday, December 4, 2017 Donald Crankshaw Comments 2 comments

There won’t be a review next month, due to the holidays, and most likely the month after that, since I’ll be reading for Mysterion, which will be opening to submissions in January. However, I’ll be happy to accept new book review submissions to review once I’m back.

Dark Healer by Harry Leighton is one of those novels about which I felt conflicted afterward. I really enjoyed the story, and thought it worked well at drawing me in and keeping me reading. But there were significant weaknesses in the prose that interfered with my enjoyment. I’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about the story.

Marlen, the titular Dark Healer, is a skilled surgeon and also a mage, mixing magic with the common healing arts in order to make his patients better. Better being the key word here—he can improve eyesight, enable quicker healing, make them stronger, even add extra arms. He’s a regular medieval Mengele, but way more successful. When bounty hunters Jonas and Alia begin tracking him, it’s because he’s begun buying people at illegal slave auctions, specifically the sick and disabled. Some he makes well so that they can serve him, others he uses as spare parts.

Jonas has a history with Marlen. At one point, they were friends, but they had a falling out right at the beginning of Marlen’s turn to a darker path. Now, living with regret for his own actions during that desperate time, Jonas is determined to make things right by hunting Marlen down. His apprentice Alia doesn’t have a personal stake, but she’s utterly devoted to her mentor and father-figure, Jonas.

Daeholf, Trimas, and Zedek are on the run. Trimas is an exiled ex-General, Daeholf a former military scout and saboteur who had a falling out with his commanders, and Zedek is an elf, hated and feared everywhere in the Empire. Their goal is to keep their heads down and survive. But when they find that Daeholf’s cousin has gone missing, and discovered a farm where the farmers are the harvest, they are also set on the trail of the healer Marlen.

When the two groups team up to take down Marlen, they find themselves embroiled in an incipient civil war, and at its core, the monsters Marlen’s created.

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Witches, Privateers, and Enchanted Blades: Tales of the Thieftaker by D. B. Jackson

Sunday, December 3, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

“Night of Two Moons,” the most popular story in Black Gate 4, was my introduction to the work of David B. Coe. Over the past two decades he’s produced eight novels in the same setting, the Forelands Universe (five in the Winds of the Forelands series, plus the Blood of the Southlands trilogy), and I’ve followed them avidly. His prior work included the LonTobyn Chronicle trilogy; more recently he’s turned his attention to contemporary fantasy with the Case Files of Justis Fearsson (Spell Blind, His Father’s Eyes, and Shadow’s Blade), featuring a magic-using private detective who faces off against dark sorcerers in Phoenix, Arizona. Starting in 2015 David became a semi-regular blogger for us; the most recent article in his Books and Craft series was World Building and the Importance of Setting.

In addition to that prodigious output, under the name ‘D. B. Jackson’ David’s also written four novels in the popular Thieftaker Chronicles, a historical urban fantasy series set in pre-Revolutionary Boston. The books have been widely acclaimed, and Kirkus Reviews calls them “Splendid… with [a] contemporary gumshoe-noir tone… An unusual series of great promise.” I’m very excited to see the next release, Tales of the Thieftaker, is a collection of new and previously published short stories — featuring a pre-dawn fire in colonial Boston, a young witch who harbors a terrible secret, a magick-laden blade, and the true story of the bloody mutiny aboard the privateering ship Ruby Blade.

Tales of the Thieftaker will be published by Lore Seekers Press on December 18, 2017. It is 275 pages, priced at $17.95 in trade paperback and $4.99 for he digital edition. The cover is by Chris McGrath. Read David’s interview (as D.B. Jackson) with his main character Ethan Kaille, the Thieftaker, in a funny and very insightful post here at Black Gate.

Vintage Treasures: The American Fantasy Tradition edited by Brian M. Thomsen

Sunday, December 3, 2017 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Brian Thomsen’s first anthology was Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows & Weefolk: A Collection of Tales of Heroes Short in Stature, a 1991 Questar paperback co-edited with Baird Searles. He followed that with more than a dozen more over the next 20 years — including The Reel Stuff (1998), Oceans of Magic (2001), and Masters of Fantasy (2004) — most co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg. He was the Senior Editor of SF and Fantasy at Warner Books and then Director of Books and Periodicals at TSR, where he wrote several Forgotten Realms novels, including Once Around the Realms (1995) and The Mage in the Iron Mask (1996).

He eventually became a Consulting Editor at Tor, where he produced in my opinion the most significant book of his career, and indeed one of the most important fantasy anthologies of the 90s: The American Fantasy Tradition, a massive 600-page hardcover surveying two centuries of American fantasy, containing stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Edith Wharton, Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Charles Beaumont, Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, Shirley Jackson, Avram Davidson, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Karl Edward Wagner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, and many others.

The American Fantasy Tradition is one of the finest survey anthologies of Western fantasy ever assembled, and it would serve as a splendid textbook for any introductory course to modern fantasy. It stands with David Hartwell’s The Dark Descent, Gardner Dozois’s Modern Classics of Fantasy, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s The Weird as one of the essential texts of the fantasy canon.

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Remembering Frank M. Robinson’s Legendary Pulp Collection

Saturday, December 2, 2017 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

William F. Nolan pointing at the Hammett Black Mask

Frank M. Robinson lived an incredible life. He was drafted into the navy in World War II, wrote his first novel The Power in 1956, and saw three of his books transformed into major motion pictures, including The Power (1968), The Towering Inferno (1974), and The Fifth Missile (1986). His other novels include Blow-Out! (1987, with Thomas N. Scortia) and The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991). He wrote the Playboy Advisor column from 1969 to 1973, and played himself in the 2008 film Milk, as one of Harvey Milk’s political inner circle.

But for science fiction and fantasy collectors, Frank is chiefly known for an entirely different reason: he had one of the most valuable and complete pulp collections ever assembled. His collection was legendary for the incredible condition of most of the magazines, including some of the rarest pulps in existence. Last week Jason V. Brock posted several unseen photos of Frank’s collection on Facebook, and was kind enough to offer us high-resolution versions we could share with Black Gate readers.

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New Treasures: What the Hell Did I Just Read by David Wong

Saturday, December 2, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

What the Hell Did I Just Read-back-small

Jason Pargin is the Executive Editor of the comedy site Cracked.com. Under the name David Wong he’s published three novels, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (2016) and the bestselling series John Dies at the End (2009) and This Book Is Full of Spiders (2012). Connor Gormley called the first John Dies novel “Ghostbusters With More Swearing and Fewer Crappy Sequels” in his 2014 Black Gate review; the book became a feature film starring Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown in 2012. What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror is the third installment, it was released in hardcover last month. If you’re looking for a novel of cosmic horror and black humor, this is your ticket.

It’s the story “They” don’t want you to read. Though, to be fair, “They” are probably right about this one. To quote the Bible, “Learning the truth can be like loosening a necktie, only to realize it was the only thing keeping your head attached.” No, don’t put the book back on the shelf — it is now your duty to purchase it to prevent others from reading it. Yes, it works with e-books, too, I don’t have time to explain how.

While investigating a fairly straightforward case of a shape-shifting interdimensional child predator, Dave, John and Amy realized there might actually be something weird going on. Together, they navigate a diabolically convoluted maze of illusions, lies, and their own incompetence in an attempt to uncover a terrible truth they — like you — would be better off not knowing.

Your first impulse will be to think that a story this gruesome — and, to be frank, stupid — cannot possibly be true. That is precisely the reaction “They” are hoping for.

What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror was published by St. Martin’s Press on October 3, 2017. It is 373 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

The Complete Carpenter: Starman (1984)

Saturday, December 2, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 2 comments

It’s taken me exactly a year to go from Dark Star to Starman in my survey of John Carpenter’s career. At this rate, I’ll be at Escape From L.A. by this time in 2018. The timing works out on this one, however. There’s no “winter holiday” Carpenter movie — no, The Thing doesn’t count, that’s a “winter” movie — but Starman is as cheerful and uplifting a science-fiction tale as Carpenter has ever turned out, so it feels right for December.

Starman has quite the long history behind it. The script was in development at Columbia back in 1980 and went through a round-robin of writers. Columbia had the opportunity to do the Spielberg project that would eventually turn into E.T., but turned it down in favor of Starman — a decision the studio would come to regret when E.T. became the highest-grossing movie in history during the Summer of 1982 (when it squashed a certain other alien visitor movie).

The mega success of E.T. caused director John Badham to abandon Starman because he thought it was too similar to Spielberg’s movie. (Badham went on to direct WarGames, so that worked out.) Many other directors were on the film at one time or another — Adrian Lynne, Mark Rydell, Tony Scott, Peter Hyams — but John Carpenter had the pitch that stood out: film it as a love story/road movie in the classic Hollywood vein. Like It Happened One Night, but with an alien. Carpenter wanted to show he had the directing chops to tackle a different type of material. He was also still wounded over the poor reception of The Thing and wanted to deliver a hit for a big studio.

And thus we have a John Carpenter film for the whole family! Which is odd enough on its own.

The Story

Advanced extraterrestrials discover space probe Voyager II and choose to answer humanity’s invitation to “come and see us sometime,” as inscribed on the probe’s audio-visual disc. An alien observation ship heads to Earth, but the U.S. Air Force knocks it from its planned course so it crashes in rural Wisconsin. The disembodied alien aboard takes on the human shape of Scott Hayden (Jeff Bridges), the recently deceased husband of lonely Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen), by using DNA from a lock of Scott’s hair.

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