Black Gate – Page 497 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Superheroes, a Wise-Cracking Demon, and Warrior Dinosaurs: To Hell and Back by Matthew Hughes

Monday, September 18, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Costume Not Included Matthew Hughes-small

I consider Canadian author Matthew Hughes to be one of the most gifted short stories writers at work today. Much of his output — including his two book Gullible’s Travels series, his 2004 novel Black Brillion, and his Tales of Henghis Hapthorn (Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira) — is set in his Archonate Universe, which is profoundly influenced by Jack Vance. John DeNardo says “His Archonate universe is a wonderfully compelling far future that mixes fantasy and science fiction.”

But Hughes is also responsible for a quirky superhero trilogy published as paperback originals by Angry Robot between 2011 and 2013, back before the publisher had the reach and acclaim it enjoys today. As a result, the series didn’t get the exposure I think it deserved… a shame, since I think the topic is quite timely, and Hughes’ comic gifts make him almost uniquely suited for the material. If you’re a fan of superheroes, To Hell and Back is a series that deserves your attention.

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New Treasures: The Raft by Fred Strydom

Monday, September 18, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Fred Strydom’s debut novel The Raft was published in hardcover last year, and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog called it “One of the sharpest premises in 2016… a must-read.” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said “Strydom’s debut subverts postapocalyptic fiction… [it] reinvigorates the genre with a suspenseful concept and intimately realized characters. A sucker punch of a novel.”

I never saw the hardcover, but the trade paperback reprint from Talos caught my eye at the bookstore last week. Have a look.

“The day every person on earth lost his and her memory was not a day at all. In people’s minds there was no actual event . . . and thus it could be followed by no period of shock or mourning. There could be no catharsis. Everyone was simply reset to zero.”

On Day Zero, the collapse of civilization was as instantaneous as it was inevitable. A mysterious and oppressive movement rose to power in the aftermath, forcing people into isolated communes run like regimes. Kayle Jenner finds himself trapped on a remote beach and all that remains of his life before is the vague and haunting vision of his son.

Kayle finally escapes, only to find a broken world being put back together in strange ways. As more memories from his past life begin returning, the people he meets wandering the face of a scorched earth — some reluctant allies, others dangerous enemies — begin to paint a terrifying picture. In his relentless search for his son, Kayle will discover more than just his lost past. He will discover the truth behind Day Zero — a truth that makes both fools and gods of men.

The Raft was published in hardcover by Talos Press on May 3, 2016, and reprinted in trade paperback on May 16, 2017. It is 432 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $25.99 for the digital edition. Read a brief excerpt at Books Live.

Robert E. Howard Wrote a Police Procedural? With Conan?? Crom!!!

Monday, September 18, 2017 Bob Byrne Comments 26 comments

Reportedly, Ernest Hemingway bet Howard Hawks that the director couldn’t make a good movie out of his worst book. Hawks took the bet and we ended up with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (it’s not Bogie’s best, but I vote Hawks the winner of the bet). Suppose I told you I could show you that one of what’s commonly considered among the worst Conan stories isn’t really that bad – and that it’s a pre-genre police procedural? Ready to take on the challenge?

In 2015, Black Gate‘s Discovering Robert E. Howard series showcased the breadth and diversity of REH’s writings. Boxing stories, westerns, science fiction, Solomon Kane, El Borak: Howard was an immensely talented author who wrote in a variety of genres. My first entry in the series was about Steve Harrison, Howard’s take on the hardboiled private eye with a weird menace twist. As you can read in that essay, Howard didn’t care for the genre and he abandoned it almost as quickly as he entered it. Today, I’m going to look at his lone police procedural. Yep – Robert E. Howard wrote a police procedural before the term was even in use. And it features Conan!

The general consensus is that Howard hit the mark with his fourth Conan story, “The Tower of the Elephant,” published in March of 1933. His first was “The Phoenix on the Sword,” which appeared in Weird Tales in December of 1932 and was a rewrite of an unpublished Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule.” Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, rejected the second, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” which to me, reads more like a chapter in a longer work than a self-contained story.

“The God in the Bowl” was probably written in early 1932 and was Howard’s third Conan story. Wright rejected this one as well and it did not see print in any form until an edited version by L. Sprague de Camp was published in 1952’s Space Science Fiction, Volume 1, Number 2 (the story has nothing to do with either space or science fiction…). De Camp did less chopping on this one than most of his Conan edits, but fans could finally read Howard’s original text in Donald Grant’s The Tower of the Elephant in 1975.

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Two Films on Netflix: Enter the Void and Kagemusha

Sunday, September 17, 2017 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

On September 7, for various reasons, I decided to treat myself to two movies on Netflix I’ve wanted to see for ages but had never found the time to watch. The first was Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void. It’s about a drug addict who gets shot and has an extended dream/out-of-body experience. There are tons of digital effects, shots spliced together, weird angles, cameras gliding through walls, tricky lighting, all kinds of stuff.

And it’s … all less involving than it should be. Because it’s an out-of-body experience shown from a first-person perspective, we don’t really get to see much of the actors’ faces, only the tops of their heads. The story’s non-linear, but a lot of scenes aren’t needed. Dialogue’s improvised, and feels it. Overall, I thought it was an example of talent without genius or taste; good ideas, some breathtaking moments, and largely uninvolving.

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What to Read after The Handmaid’s Tale: Brave New Girl by Rachel Vincent

Sunday, September 17, 2017 Elizabeth Galewski Comments 0 Comment

What should you read after Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? Rachel Vincent’s Brave New Girl.

First-person narration in the present tense plunges readers into the surreal world of Dahlia 16. Raised in a training facility with 4,999 identical sisters, Dahlia doesn’t realize she’s a clone. All she knows is that she should be like her identicals, happily and unquestioningly serving her home city without distinction.

At least, that’s what she’s supposed to do. Dahlia figures she must be defective since she takes pride in being at the top of her class, and arrogance isn’t permissible in a laborer. Worse, she’s started breaking the rules. Stuck in a broken elevator with Trigger 17, a handsome teenage soldier, she actually talks to him. And now she can’t stop thinking about him…

Clearly there’s something wrong with her. If the authorities discover her secret, they’ll liquidate the genome, slaying the entire cohort of 5,000 girls. Meanwhile, Trigger 17 makes himself even more difficult to forget by leaving her forbidden gifts. He must be flawed, himself, to behave so recklessly.

If you’re hearing echoes of Aldous Huxley in Vincent’s title, it’s for good reason. Brave New Girl is a high-concept YA dystopia. Although it features clones with bar codes tattooed on their wrists and renegade geneticists, file it under speculative rather than science fiction. (On GoodReads, the author herself describes the genre as “sci-fi lite.”) Most of the reading pleasure comes from figuring out how this world works right along with the protagonist, whose learning curve drives the story. A paragon of “show, don’t tell,” the narrative is filtered through Dahlia’s perspective. This generates moments of cognitive dissonance when the reader understands what’s going on better than Dahlia herself and vice versa. If you’re a hard-core sci fi reader who prefers fictional worlds to make sense right from the beginning, then this novel will likely frustrate you. Even after the volume has finished, many explanatory details remain missing, held in reserve for future books.

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Good Old-fashioned Military Science Fiction: The Icarus Corps by Zachary Brown

Saturday, September 16, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I love omnibus editions. It’s not just their convenience, the joy of having an entire trilogy packed into one hefty volume. I think it’s just as much the celebratory aspect. It’s like, Holy crap, we made it. The series is finished. Forget we charged you for the first two; look, here’s the whole damn thing in one volume. You’re welcome.

In the case of The Icarus Corps, the trade paperback containing a complete military science fiction trilogy by Zachary Brown, that’s actually more or less accurate, as the third book, Jupiter Rising, was never even published in paperback. If you enjoyed the first two, and don’t have an e-reader, this is your only option.

Still, it ain’t a bad option, all things considered. I bought the first book, The Darkside War, and I was still delighted to stumble on the omnibus edition of all three novels at Barnes & Noble last week, and I snapped it up immediately.

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Early Peek at 2000AD Prog #2050: A Jumping-On Issue

Saturday, September 16, 2017 Derek Kunsken Comments 7 comments

2000AD is a weekly anthology book, typically with 4 stories running at a time, with some at the middle while others are ending, which makes it hard to find a meaty run to review. Several times a year, 2000AD publishes issues (pronounced progs if you’re speaking with a British accent) for new people to jump on — where every story is beginning.

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Prog #2050 is such an issue and will be hitting newsstand (and the internet as a digital issue) on September 25th, so I thought I’d get into it. This was a large-sized issue (48 pages) and contained 7 new stories that you don’t have to know much at all about the world of 2000AD to start reading.

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The Complete Carpenter: Christine (1983)

Saturday, September 16, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 6 comments

It’s a Stephen King September, thanks to the monstrous success last week of It: highest grossing September opening ever, highest grossing horror movie opening ever, and only a Deadpool away from highest grossing R-rated opening ever. (Our own Sue Granquist’s take.) A perfect time to fast-track the next movie in my John Carpenter career retrospective, also a Stephen King adaptation.

And in some unfortunate tragic timing, Harry Dean Stanton died the day before I posted this. Stanton was one of the great character actors of the last sixty years, a continual presence in movies from the moment I first started watching them, and appeared memorably in two John Carpenter films, Escape from New York and today’s subject, Christine. Stanton lived a long, full life (he was 91) but will still be immensely missed. Few people could steal a scene like he could.

*Sniffle* Anyway, back to our regular program.

In the wake of the financial failure of The Thing, John Carpenter needed a studio project to keep busy, and took up producer Richard Kobritz’s offer to direct Christine, based on a Stephen King novel that was still in galleys. (The book was published in April and the movie premiered in December.) Carpenter originally intended to direct another King adaptation, Firestarter, which Universal offered to him. But after the box-office crash of The Thing, Universal cut the budget for Firestarter in half, and Carpenter opted out. When he ended up at Columbia with Christine, the screenwriter of the early drafts of Firestarter, Bill Phillips, went with him to handle the scripting chores.

The film was a mild success, grossing twice its $10 million budget. Like most of Carpenter’s movies from this period, Christine has maintained a steady profile ever since. Along with Carrie, The Shining, and The Dead Zone, it’s part of a group of early Stephen King movies from major directors.

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What do George Lucas, Michael Jackson, and Harry Houdini Have in Common? It Combines Reading and Obsession

Friday, September 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

I’ve recently discovered the website Literary Hub. Their recent articles include 7 Writers Who Were Also Editors, Fake News and the Rise of Fascism in the 20s, and their entirely cool Most Talked About Books feature (which this week includes John Le Carre and N.K. Jemison).

But my favorite article in their archives is Emily Temple’s piece on 10 Famous Book Hoarders, which includes photos of the libraries of George Lucas, Ernest Hemingway, William Randolph Hearst, Thomas Jefferson, and fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld (300,000 volumes!)

I’m a fairly compulsive book collector myself, though not on the scale of famous genre collectors like David Hartwell, Bob Weinberg, and Frank Robinson. My house doesn’t look anything like the pictures in Temple’s article (it looks more like this). Still, it’s good to see evidence of well adjusted individuals with the same peculiar obsession as myself. Check out the complete article here.

Zombies Need Brains Needs You

Friday, September 15, 2017 Violette Malan Comments 0 Comment

ZNB Razors Those who know me, or who have read some of my previous posts on the subject, know that I’m a big fan of anthologies, particularly those featuring original stories. For my general remarks on the subject, you can look here. I’ve mentioned that the anthology is a wonderful thing for readers, who can encounter authors new to them, sample the work of people they’re not familiar with, and, in the case of the themed anthology, explore an idea that interests them.

The original anthology can also be a god-send for writers – in part because it’s an easy way for new readers to learn about us, and find out whether they like our style. But it’s also the all-important entry-level step for a lot of new and previously unpublished authors, particularly when the anthology, like the ones Zombies Need Brains publish, is recognized as a qualifying market by SFWA.

But even established writers benefit from anthologies. You get to explore an area or a theme that interests you, but that you don’t have a novel-length idea for. You get to write a short adventure for established characters – again, something cool that just isn’t novel-length. You can re-visit complex imaginary worlds, and sometimes, you can give new characters or worlds a test run before you run the larger version.

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