Black Gate – Page 517 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Goth Chick News: What if Noah Brought More Than Animals on the Ark…?

Thursday, July 6, 2017 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

Admittedly, I’m a sucker for old-fashioned, biblical-inspired horror. There’s something about texts that old that seems to add a layer of plausibility to a story. Once, following a very odd conversation with a minister’s wife attending my college, I spent one whole summer researching obscure ancient religious texts in which you can find the inspiration for most of your nightmares.

Okay, so I didn’t get out much in those days.

But what remains is an attraction to stories like Constantine, The Seventh Sign and The Rite for their otherworldly creepiness, so when I got word of a fairly new release by Christopher Golden called Ararat, I dashed right out to get my hands on a copy.

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Star Punk Story Building in Interplanetary Hunter

Thursday, July 6, 2017 M Harold Page Comments 0 Comment

Interplanetary Hunter Barnes — I caved and bought some old Pulp.

I caved and bought some old Pulp.

I couldn’t help it. I was at Eastercon and in the dealers room, and there was Durdles Books with shelves and boxes that took me back to my early teens trawling used bookstores and charity shops for volumes with spaceships on the cover.

And since I started writing my The Eternal Dome of the Unknowable series, I’ve been exploring the roots of what I call Star Punk, the covers were cool… so I came home with some faded paperbacks of yesteryear.

One of these was Interplanetary Hunter by Arthur K Barnes.

What hooked me was the lovely Monster Manual-style insets describing the various creatures. It was actually published before roleplaying was thing in 1956 (mine is the 1972 Ace reprint), and compiled from stories that went out in magazines from 1937-1946, making it technically Golden Age.

And it tells.

It’s definitely in the category of classics you shouldn’t recommend to young people (I talked about this in my first ever BG article!). It’s a good light read, the style and lead-in may be fast and furious — pulpy goodness — but it suffers from Quaint Future and some Quaint Delivery, including excruciatingly detailed science and pseudoscience, complete with equations.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Volume 3 edited by David Afsharirad

Thursday, July 6, 2017 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

When you read as many Year’s Best volumes as I do, you come to accept a certain amount of story overlap. Yes, most of the editors do their best to coordinate with each other, but this is still a pretty small field, and with more than a half dozen Year’s Best titles every year, some repetition is to be expected. That’s one of the strengths of David Afsharirad’s Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF — he walks his own path, and in the three years he’s been doing this, I’m not sure there’s been any overlap with his fellow editors. Here’s the TOC for the newest installment, now on sale.

Preface by David Afsharirad
Introduction by David Weber
“Cadet Cruise” by David Drake (Baen.com, May 2016)
“Tethers” by William Ledbetter (Baen.com, November 2018)
“Unlinkage” by Eric Del Carlo (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2016)
“Not in Vain” by Kacey Ezell (Black Tide Rising, 2016)
“Between Nine and Eleven” by Adam Roberts (Crises and Conflicts, 2016)
“Sephine and the Leviathan” by Jack Schouten (Clarkesworld, Issue 118, July 2016)
“The Good Food” by Michael Ezell (Beyond the Stars: At Galaxy’s Edge, 2016)
“If I Could Give This Time Machine Zero Stars, I Would” by James Wesley Rogers (Unidentified Funny Objects 5, 2016)
“Wise Child” by Steve Miller and Sharon Lee (Baen.com, June 2016)
“Starhome” by Michael Z. Williamson (Baen.com, October 2016)
“The Art of Failure” by Robert Dawson (Compelling Science Fiction, Issue 1, April/May 2016)
“The Last Tank Commander” by Allen Stroud (Crises and Conflicts, 2016)
“One Giant Leap” by Jay Werkheiser (Strange Horizons, November 21 2016)
“The Immortals: Anchorage” by David Adams (Beyond the Stars: A Planet Too Far, 2016)
“Backup Man” by Paul Di Filippo (Terraform, April 7 2016)

The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Volume 3 was published by Baen on June 6, 2017. It is 336 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $8.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Greg Bobrowski. We covered the first volume here, and the second volume here. Read story samples at the Baen website.

The Digest Enthusiast #6 Now Available

Wednesday, July 5, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Digest Enthusiast 6 June 2017-back-small

There’s a lot of fascinating content in The Digest Enthusiast. I’m a guy who skims magazines, stopping to read a story when an author’s name or a piece of interior art catches my eye, and TDW sure don’t make it easy. Their June issue, the sixth, is crammed full of the kinds of pieces that you start out skimming and end up reading front to back.

There’s too much here for me to catalog it all, but the highlights include: Editor Richard Krauss’ News Digest, 12 pages of news and gossip on Down & Out: The Magazine, Nostalgia Digest, Paperback Parade, Weirdbook, Pulp Literature, The Pulpster, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Broadswords & Blasters, and other fine publications; an interview with publisher and writer Edd Vick, Steve Carper’s fascinating piece on “the bestselling digest paperback of all time,” Bob Hope’s self-published They Got Me Covered; Richard Krauss’ survey of 60s SF mag International Science Fiction; Krauss’ review of Weirdbook #34; and Joe Wehrle Jr’s review of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse story cycle.

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The Piracy Museum in Lanzarote, Canary Islands

Wednesday, July 5, 2017 Sean McLachlan Comments 0 Comment

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Last summer I went to visit some of my in-laws and the World’s Coolest Nephew in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, and disappointed our dear editor John O’Neill by missing the Piracy Museum.

Well, I just got back from another trip to Lanzarote, and this time I made it there! The Piracy Museum is housed in the 15th century Castillo de Santa Barbara and is a delightfully cheesy tourist trap. You get cardboard cutouts of pirates, a mock up of a ship complete with a cabin boy taking a dump, televisions playing old pirate movies, and of course a big Jolly Roger. You even get a bit of history.

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Future Treasures: Moskva by Jack Grimwood

Wednesday, July 5, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jon Courtenay Grimwood has had a very impressive career. His Arabesk Trilogy, a trio of alternate history cyberpunk hard-boiled detective novels set in Alexandria, had the unusual distinction of being nominated for both the British Science Fiction and British Fantasy Awards. And we talked about his Assassini Trilogy, a tale of politics and the supernatural in 15th Century Venice, right here just last week.

His latest is a bit of a departure, but still very interesting — a thriller with political overtones set in 1980s Moscow. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne next week.

Red Square, 1985. The naked body of a young man is left outside the walls of the Kremlin, frozen solid ― like marble to the touch ― missing the little finger from his right hand.

A week later, Alex Marston, the headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter of the British Ambassador, disappears. Army Intelligence Officer Tom Fox, posted to Moscow to keep him from telling the truth to a government committee, is asked to help find her. It’s a shot at redemption.

But Russia is reluctant to give up the worst of her secrets. As Fox’s investigation sees him dragged deeper towards the dark heart of a Soviet establishment determined to protect its own, his fears for Alex’s safety grow with those of the girl’s father.

And if Fox can’t find her soon, she looks likely to become the next victim of a sadistic killer whose story is bound tight to that of his country’s terrible past…

Moskva will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on July 11, 2017. It is 358 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Blacksheep UK. See all of our recent Future Treasures here.

Literary Wonder & Adventure Show: EPISODE 5: The Strand (Full Audio Drama)

Tuesday, July 4, 2017 Michael W. Cho Comments 1 comment

I was three years old when Star Wars scorched movie screens with the force of a Death Star Superlaser. 2001: A Space Odyssey had already been out for almost a decade, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock syndicated for twice the duration of their original mission. Sci-Fi, in other words, had already conquered both the big and small screens. Radio shows had been long superseded by new technology. Yet here I am in 2017, thoroughly enjoying the Literary Wonder & Adventure Show, a retro audio show streamed to me via a wireless router, via a cell phone tower shaped like a palm tree, and ultimately from the workstation of the talented Robert Zoltan.

His latest offering, “The Strand,” is short, compressed tale, which may have gone without a single commercial break back in the old days. Nonetheless, it contains all the ingredients of compelling drama — passionate characters, a setting bursting with possibilities, high stakes, and a very clever literary device which underpins it all.

The milieu of The Strand is only quickly sketched in, but it suggests a multiverse of planets, their populations going about their workaday existences ignorant of shadowy organizations doing battle to control the fate of them all. Agents of these organizations can travel between the dimensions. Yet agent Guy, the protagonist, is preoccupied with a more personal concern: in his travels, he met and fell in love with local girl Hope, and soon thereafter, they were forced apart into different planes. Now, Guy can only speak to Hope using a jury-rigged machine via a Strand — a wispy, elusive thread of electricity or astral energy or whatnot.

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Disturbing Monsters, Tragic Undead, and Gorgeous Worldbuilding: Sorting Out The Old Kingdom by Garth Nix

Tuesday, July 4, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Australian writer Garth Nix became a New York Times bestselling author with The Old Kingdom series, which began in 1995 with Sabriel. He’s had a very significant career quite apart from these novels, with his popular Seventh Tower books (6 volumes), The Keys to the Kingdom (7 books), Shade’s Children (1997 — that’s the publication year, not the number of volumes), and many others.

But The Old Kingdom remains perhaps his most popular series, and it’s appeared in multiple editions. At various times it’s also been called The Abhorsen Trilogy, The Old Kingdom Chronicles, and The Abhorsen Chronicles. He’s returned to it many times over the years… often enough, in fact, that it’s hard to figure out just how many books there are, and how they all fit together.

Hard for me, anyway. So the task I set for myself today was to get the whole series sorted, including all the various prequels, sequels, collections, omnibus volumes, and the like. Here we go.

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Amazing Stories November 1969: A Retro-Review

Tuesday, July 4, 2017 Adrian Simmons Comments 2 comments

This is Part 1 of a Decadal Review of vintage science fiction magazines published in November 1969. The articles are:

Amazing Stories, November 1969
Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1969
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1969
Worlds of If, November 1969
Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, November 1969

Almost every year I go to a small sci-fi conference in Lawrence Kansas called The Campbell Conference. The people who run the Campbell Conference have a lot of sci-fi magazines and books; boxes and boxes of them. In fact, they have them out in the common area and sell them for like a dollar apiece. I was there last year and pulled out, completely at random, an Amazing Stories from November 1969 — which is remarkable because that was the year and month I was born.

And it occurred to me that, truth be told, I actually haven’t read all that much science-fiction. I read a Larry Niven short story collection in high school, and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1 off and on in early college. The majority of my science fiction reading has been novels; I didn’t really return to the short-form until the early 2000’s — and mostly because that’s when I first started going to the Campbell Conference!

When I saw that ’69 Amazing I was struck with the idea that I’d raid those boxes, gather the magazines from November ’69, read ‘em, and review ‘em. Then, because a decade is a nice number, I figured that I’d add ’79, ’89, and ’99, possibly (depending on how this all goes over) I may do ’09. Yes, a Quatro-Decadal Review!

I’m going to delve fairly deep into these works, so if you’ve got an issue with spoilers for 47 year old stories, you have fair warning! Also, I’m gonna end the reviews with my thoughts on the general ‘vibe’ of the magazine.

And away we go!

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Vintage Treasures: The Hormone Jungle by Robert Reed

Monday, July 3, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

The Hormone Jungle Robert Reed-back-small

Robert Reed is one of the most acclaimed and prolific writers at work in SF today. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction in 1987, and won the Hugo Award for his 2006 novella “A Billion Eyes.” He’s sold some 200 short stories to numerous markets, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Interzone, Albedo One, Postscripts, F&SF, and Daily Science Fiction, and published over a dozen novels, including Down the Bright Way (1991), An Exaltation of Larks (1995), and Marrow (2000).

But back in 1988 he was a young writer with just one novel under his belt, The Leeshore (1987). His second, The Hormone Jungle, was published in hardcover that year by Donald Fine, and reprinted in paperback a year later by Popular Library with a cover by Luis Royo. Unlike the sophisticated space opera for which Reed is known today, The Hormone Jungle was packaged as a straight-ahead adventure story tailor made for a film treatment staring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Set “on an Earth overrun by a trillion species,” it featured a square-jawed “professional hero,” a beautiful lady android in distress, and a noir edge. That didn’t help it find a market, however… it pretty much vanished without a trace, and has never been reprinted. Copies aren’t hard to find, but it nonetheless took me a while to acquire one. I finally found one on eBay recently for $4.99 (including shipping).

Our previous coverage of Robert Reed includes:

Is Robert Reed the New Century’s Most Compelling SF Voice?
New Treasures: The Greatship

The Hormone Jungle was published by Questar/Popular Library in June 1989. It is 300 pages, priced at $4.50 in paperback. The cover is by Luis Royo. Read more at Reed’s website, and see all our recent Vintage Treasures here.