Black Gate – Page 507 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Haunted Worlds by Jeffrey Thomas

Tuesday, August 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Haunted Worlds Jeffrey Thomas-back-small

Jeffrey Thomas is best known for nearly a dozen novels, collections, and shared world anthologies set in the city of Punktown, a crime-ridden metropolis on the colony world Oasis, a city of aliens, mutations, private detectives, and sentient machines. His Punktown novels include Deadstock (2007) and Blue War (2008), and his most recent collection was Ghosts of Punktown, published by Dark Regions Press in 2016. Punktown is also the setting for the last publication from Miskatonic River Press, a Kickstarter-funded setting book for Call of Cthulhu that is very late but still appears to be (fingers crossed) in the pipeline (the latest updates from May and July seem upbeat).

Thomas’ recent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, World War Cthulhu, The Children of Old Leech, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Weird Fiction Review, and many other fine places. His latest book, Haunted Worlds, collects some of his most recent fiction, including the Lovecraftian tale “The Temple of Ugghiutu,” two stories set in Punktown, and several previously unpublished stories. The foreword is by Ian Rogers.

Haunted Worlds was published by Hippocampus Press on August 1, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $20 in trade paperback. There is no digital edition. The cover art and frontispiece are by Kim Bo Yung. Get complete details and order copies at the Hippocampus website.

A Gathering of Ravens by Scott Oden

Tuesday, August 15, 2017 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 3 comments

To you, I am orcneas. To the Dane, I am skraelingr. The blasted Irish would name me fomorach,” Grimnir said, then smote his breast with one black-nailed fist. “But I am kaunr! Do you understand now?”

Grimnir from A Gathering of Ravens

You know me: I’m the guy who reads mostly old swords & sorcery novels and short stories. Aside from a few by Milton Davis and P.C. Hodgell, I haven’t read many new S&S novels. My experience with contemporary fantasy novels has been mostly… disappointing.

I’m also a guy who is on record as disliking the utilization of orcs in modern fantasy. In the works of their creator, J.R.R. Tolkien, orcs are perversions of elves created by Middle-earth’s satan figure, Melkor. In modern fantasy they’ve become little more than woefully misunderstood warriors — basically fantasy Klingons. So, when Scott Oden sent me a copy of his latest book, A Gathering of Ravens (2017), and I learned its protagonist was an orc, my hopes weren’t high. Well, Oden’s novel knocked the heck out of any prejudices I had. New or old, this book kicks ass, and is one of the best swords & sorcery novels I’ve read in a while.

Grimnir, the last of his race, lives on the Danish island of Sjaelland, dreaming of revenge against Bjarki Half-Dane, the man who killed his brother, Hrungnir. His desire to cleave his enemy with his trusty seax (a old Germanic sword), leads him from Denmark to England, and finally to the field of Clontarf, in Ireland.

Etain is a young woman, disguised as a man, bound for Roskilde to evangelize the Danes. After a bloody run-in with Grimnir, she finds herself bound to him and forced to act as his guide across the British Isles in search of his prey. With no recourse but to stay by his side, she follows him into the mystic heart of Yggdrasil, the world tree, traveling through time and space. The mismatched pair, devout Christian woman and resoundingly pagan monster, face off against numerous supernatural and mundane foes before reaching the book’s rousing conclusion on a field outside of Dubhlinn. Their story lets up only a few times, but those calmer passages serve to allow magical creatures or armies the time to marshall their forces for the next burst of violence.

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Call for Backers! Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastic Stories in a Sustainable World Campaign on Kickstarter, in Conjunction with a Video Interview with Sarena Ulibarri, Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press

Monday, August 14, 2017 Emily Mah Comments 0 Comment

The Kickstarter campaign for Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastic Stories in a Sustainable World is now live!

What is this, you ask? Well, let me explain the history. Solarpunk is an emerging subgenre that focuses on sustainable energy, and many believe the rest of the world has a head start on the solarpunk movement. This anthology, being funded by the Kickstarter, was originally published in Brazil, in Portuguese, and is known internationally as one of the earliest examples of solarpunk. World Weaver Press wants to bring it to the northern hemisphere and the English language.

I sat down with Sarena Ulibarri, the editor in chief of World Weaver Press, for an interview that explores who she is, what World Weaver Press publishes, and a brief history of solarpunk and this anthology.

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I’ll Slip by the Dragon and… CLANK!

Monday, August 14, 2017 Jeff Stehman Comments 0 Comment

Clank! is a deck-building, dungeon-delving, push-your-luck board game designed by Paul Dennen at Dire Wolf Digital. It’s also the most fun “throw caution to the wind” board game I’ve played in a long time.

Players are thieves heading into a dungeon, challenged to see who can come back with the most loot. Bonus points if you walk out instead of getting carried, but you won’t be allowed to walk out unless you have an artifact. (And if you’re too deep in the dungeon when you tip over, the locals won’t carry you out.)

The players each start with identical decks of ten cards. A player shuffles their deck and draws five. These provide movement points to delve deeper and skill points to buy additional cards to add to their deck. There are also stumble cards that force them to add their cubes to the Clank! pile. At the end of a player’s turn, the cards they played and any newly acquired cards are discarded. Once they’ve played through all their cards, the discard pile is shuffled, and those new cards enter play.

Thus the players are building up their decks in the hopes that their draw of five cards will give them an increasing number skill points to buy better and better cards, and also to start bringing combat points and gold into their hand on a turn. (Yes, there are shops in the dungeon.)

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 33 Now Available

Sunday, August 13, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

While I was strolling through the streets of my hometown of St. Charles, a mysterious traveler in black slipped me a tightly bound scroll. “Keep if safe,” he whispered. “And honor the pact of knowledge.” When I got home, I found it contained a copy of the latest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, plus a tasty-looking recipe for Canadian date squares. Looks like it’s my lucky week.

The latest issue of HFQ includes stories by Evan Dicken, Raphael Ordoñez, and Jason Carney, plus poetry from Andrew Crabtree, Kendall Evans, and Michael Tilbury. Here’s the complete TOC, with fiction links.

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The 2017 Hugo Award Winners

Sunday, August 13, 2017 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

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Words Are My Matter Writings About Life and Books Ursula K. Le Guin-small

The winners of the 2017 Hugo Awards were announced on Friday at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, Finland. I wish I had been there! But since I wasn’t, let’s just get this over with. Here’s the complete list of winners. Congratulations, all you cool people. In Helsinki, eating pickled herring. I don’t want to hear about it.

Best Novel

The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Best Novella

Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)

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Haruo Nakajima (1929–2017): The Man Who Was Godzilla

Saturday, August 12, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 1 comment

While I was debating on Tuesday whether to focus on writing about the Blu-ray release of Shin Godzilla or completing the next John Carpenter series installment, The Thing, the news hit of the death of one of the last surviving participants of the 1954 Godzilla, Haruo Nakajima, from pneumonia at age eighty-eight. It was a painful blow: that Nakajima was still out there and alive was a reassurance to any Godzilla fan, because he actually was Godzilla — the first performer inside the monster costume, back in the original Godzilla, and the one who stayed with the part the longest, playing the monster until near the close of the original Showa Era. He suited up as Godzilla in twelve films from 1954 to 1972, a record that’s unlikely ever to be beat now that even Japanese Godzilla films have switched to using CGI rather than the old fashioned suits.

We talk about how Japanese giant monster (kaiju) films are done with “man-in-a-suit” special effects, but we often don’t understand what that implies. Since we’re once again deep in the “Does Andy Serkis deserves an Oscar nomination for a performance-capture role?” debate that comes after the release of each of the new Planet of the Apes films, it’s appropriate to remember the great performances from the suitmation actors who long preceded CGI-assisted characters.

And among suitmation performers, Nakajima was one of the finest. He infused Godzilla with a personality that emerged stronger and stronger during the period he was inside the costume. Godzilla, arms stretched forward in an attack pose, daring another giant monster to charge with the slight turn of the head — that’s down to Haruo Nakajima. He influenced the way Godzilla is acted as much as Boris Karloff influenced the Frankenstein Monster.

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Mysterion 2 Update: Kickstarter vs. Patreon

Friday, August 11, 2017 Donald Crankshaw Comments 0 Comment

We’re nearing the end of our Kickstarter for Mysterion 2, the second volume of our anthology of Christian-themed speculative fiction. With only a week left, we’re still a ways from our funding goal. Since Kickstarter is all or nothing, if we do not make our goal, we do not receive any money, and Mysterion 2 will not happen.

While that would be unfortunate — we believe that Mysterion is a unique market, paying professional rates for speculative fiction with Christian characters, themes, or cosmology — we decided to use Kickstarter for exactly this reason.

For the first volume, we used Patreon. Patreon’s normal campaign is as a monthly subscription, but it can also be set so that the patron pays for every post you mark as a paid post. You can put up multiple paid posts per month, or you can put up none. This allowed us not to charge our patrons anything until we delivered an anthology. We felt this was necessary since we were first time anthologists. My wife and I had no idea whether we would receive enough good stories to make a worthwhile anthology. Even if we did, did we have what it took to select the best stories, edit them, format them, put the book together in an attractive package, and deliver an actual book that we would be proud of? We thought we could, but given that we didn’t actually know, we decided not to take anyone’s money until we had the book ready.

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In 500 Words or Less: Nova by Margaret Fortune

Friday, August 11, 2017 Brandon Crilly Comments 0 Comment

Nova
By Margaret Fortune
DAW (320 pages, $24.99 hardcover, $7.99 paperback, June 2015)

My first time at the Nebulas weekend in May, I was given this massive bag of complimentary books (apparently this is standard, but hey, I’m new) – so many books, in fact, that my friend Derek Künsken and I were detained by Canadian Border Services on our way back to Ottawa. It’s taken me time to go through the bag and see what appeals to me, but I’ve finally been able to start reading them so I can review a few here.

I started with Nova, the first novel in the Spectre War series by Margaret Fortune. The back cover description piqued my interest: a former prisoner of war is returned home, except that she’s not actually a former prisoner of war – she’s a genetically-engineered bomb that’s supposed to explode in thirty-six hours.

The first few chapters lived up to my expectations, as the character Lia mentally prepares to “go Nova” and destroy a massive space station operated by her designers’ enemies. That in and of itself is a neat concept, especially when things obviously go wrong (if they didn’t, this would be a short story) and Lia faces the fact that she’s going to be around for a lot longer than she expected.

Unfortunately, after about 100 pages of Nova … I just got really bored. Every encounter sees Lia struggling to understand emotions she was never meant to feel, and connect with people who knew the person she’s designed to imitate. That sort of slow character development can be really effective, but in this case it got old really quick as Lia’s reactions became too repetitive.

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New Treasures: Graphic Classics Volume 26: Vampire Classics

Friday, August 11, 2017 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

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Graphic Classics Volume 26 Vampire Classics

I’ve been a huge fan of Tom Pomplun’s Graphic Classics comic anthologies for years, ever since I received a copy of the first one, Volume 1: Edgar Allan Poe, in 2001 (back when they were Rosebud Graphic Classics, a spin-off of Rosebud magazine). Some of my favorites are Volume 4: H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 14: Gothic Classics, and Volume 23: Halloween Classics (back cover here). But I hadn’t seen a new release in over three years, ever since Volume 25: Canine Feline Classics back in 2014. So imagine my surprise when I accidentally stumbled on a copy of Graphic Classics Volume 26: Vampire Classics, which snuck into bookstores on June 28. Here’s the description.

Vampire Classics features a unique adaptation of the 1922 silent film, Nosferatu. Plus a horror-western by “Conan” creator Robert E. Howard and Ray Bradbury’s “The Man Upstairs.” With “The Strange Orchid” by H.G. Wells, “Olalla” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and a short story by famed horror writer and co-editor Mort Castle.

Our previous coverage of Graphic Classics includes:

Graphic Classics Half-Price Sale
It’s Halloween Already with Graphic Classic’s Halloween Classics
Get Graphic Classics Volume 23: Halloween Classics for only $10 in October

Graphic Classics Volume 26: Vampire Classics was published by Eureka Productions on June 28, 2017. It is 144 pages, priced at $19.95. See all our recent Comics coverage here.