Black Gate – Page 521 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Unbound Worlds on 7 Great Occult Detectives

Thursday, June 22, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Simon Green Something from the Nightside-small

Matt Staggs seems to be most productive blogger over at Unbound Worlds, the house blog of Penguin Random House. He’s certainly produced most of my favorite stuff over there recently, including 4 Epic Fantasy Novels Written Before The Lord of the Rings, Have a Look at D&D Creator Gary Gygax’s FBI File, and 3 Great Novels to Read After You’ve Seen Wonder Woman.

But the piece I find myself returning to multiple times in the past two weeks is his June 5th article “7 of Urban Fantasy’s Great Occult Detectives,” in which he showcases some of the recent heroes and heroines who’ve followed in the footsteps of famous ghost hunters like Carnacki The Ghost Finder, Jules de Grandin, Aylmer Vance, John Thunstone, Titus Crow, and many others. Staggs proves this proud sub-genre is far from dead, and his proof includes series from Jim Butcher, Daniel José Older, Seanan McGuire, Laurel K. Hamilton, and others. Here’s a few of my favorites from his list.

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Delivering on the Promise of a True Open World: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Thursday, June 22, 2017 Matt Drought Comments 3 comments

The Legend of Zelda series is one of the most iconic video game series of all time. Nintendo has continually released new iterations since the launch of the original in 1986. Each new release brings with it new concepts, new art, new and interesting twists on game mechanics. Every release stands on its own; each feels like a completely new and different game.

The newest iteration of The Legend of Zelda series is subtitled Breath of the Wild. The game is commercially available on the Wii U and Switch. It opens with a familiar Legend of Zelda story: A great evil has taken over the world of Hyrule and you, Link, the legendary hero, have been resurrected to fight it. This fight however, isn’t yours alone, as you will meet many different characters who will offer assistance in battle against the great evil, Ganon.

The game begins with Link awakening in the Shrine of Resurrection, bereft of his previous memories. You have spent the previous 100 years in the Shrine of Resurrection. You are given a Sheikah Slate and clothes. Once you leave the shrine you are shown a large open world, filled with mountain peaks, rivers, fields, forests, and an imposing volcano. The camera pans over and shows you a crumbling temple, with a mysterious and mystical figure, waiting for you.

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A Fast-Paced Blend of Space Opera and Military SF: The Outriders Series by Jay Posey

Thursday, June 22, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jay Posey is an interesting guy. His work is known to millions around the world — millions of gamers, anyway. He was the Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, creator of the million-selling Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises. He branched into novels in 2013 with Three, the opening volume in what eventually became the Legends of the Duskwalker trilogy, a futuristic weird western set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland peopled by augmented humans, cyborgs, and the deadly Weir. It became the bestselling series at Angry Robot, and helped put the imprint on the map.

His newest effort is the Outriders series, featuring a crack team of nearly immortal super-soldiers in clone bodies. Bull Spec magazine called it “Military science fiction with a twisty plot and a complex political landscape… A great read for lovers of science fiction adventure!”, and SFF World labeled it “A high-paced blend of near-future space opera and military sf… good fun.” The first volume was published as a paperback original last year by Angry Robot; the highly anticipated sequel arrives next month.

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Clockwork Gunslingers, Soul-Sucking Ghosts, and Vampire Cowboys: Straight Outta Tombstone, edited by David Boop

Wednesday, June 21, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Now I know you love a good Weird Western. And you’ve probably noticed, as I have, that there’s been a dearth of them recently.

But fret not… David Boop’s anthology Straight Outta Tombstone — with brand new stories by Jim Butcher, Alan Dean Foster, Robert E. Vardeman, Phil Foglio, Michael A. Stackpole, and others — arrives next month to set things right. Here’s Boop from his Foreword.

Collected here are stories from my idols, my mentors, my peers and my friends. When I sent out invitations, I asked each author to give me their favorite and/or most famous characters in all-new stories set in the Old West. They did not disappoint.

From Warden Luccio to Bubba Shackleford, they came. We get a visit from Mad Amos, and Dan Shamble shambles by. A barmaid lives up to her name “Trouble,” and a dragon named Pete wants to court the sacrificial girl, not kill her. Chance Corrigan, Hummingbird and Inazuma, Bose Roberds. Never before have these characters shared the stage like this. Cowboys and Dinosaurs. Adventurers and Aliens. Time-Traveling Bar Maids and Clockwork Gunslingers. Vampires. Zombies. They’re all in here…

Do you remember the Wild, Wild West TV series? Maybe you read Jonah Hex, the Two-Gun Kid or other cowboy comics. Did you, like me, watch old B-movies and serials such as Valley of the Gwangi and The Phantom Empire on Saturday afternoon TV? How many of you snuck to the living room once your parents were asleep to see Billy the Kid Versus Dracula during a late-night movie monster marathon on Halloween? I certainly did.

Sounds just like what the ole doc ordered.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Smugglers, Alien Vampires, and Dark Dimensions: The Best of C. L. Moore

Wednesday, June 21, 2017 James McGlothlin Comments 3 comments

The Best of C. L. Moore (1976) was the sixth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. After taking a break from the fifth installment to let J. J. Pierce edit, Lester Del Rey (1915–1993) returned to edit and give an introduction to this volume.

You may recall that Dean Ellis (1920–2009) did the cover art for the first four installments in the series with Darrell Sweet handling the fifth, though still in the style of Ellis. But the fabulous cover art of The Best of C. L. Moore was done by “The Brothers Hildebrandt” (twin brothers Greg [1939–] and Tim [1939–2006]) and represents something of a departure from the artistic precedence of Ellis and Sweet. It’s a portrait of the main character in Moore’s story, “No Woman Born.”

Catherine Lucille Moore (1911–1987) was one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of the Twentieth Century. Writing under the name C. L. Moore, she was one of the first truly successful women writers in genre fiction, gracing the early pages of Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. She was also was famously married to another well-known sci-fi writer, Henry Kuttner (1915–1958), whom she collaborated with on many stories. However, all but two of the tales in The Best of C. L. Moore were written before her time with Kuttner. As with the previous books published while the featured author was still alive, Moore has a small afterword at the end.

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June 2017 Locus Now on Sale

Wednesday, June 21, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Locus is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover. It’s packed full of news, interviews, conventions reports, color pics, enticing ads, and especially reviews of interest to me. For over 40 years it’s provided the most reliable and comprehensive coverage of the SF field on the market.

The June issue is crammed full of good stuff, including:

A lengthy interview with John Kessel (The Moon and the Other)
Winners of the Nebula and Bram Stoker Awards
Complete US and British Forthcoming Books
Review columns by Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Gary K. Wolfe, Faren Miller, Russell Letson, John Langan, Adrienne Martini, Liz Bourke, and others

One of the most interesting features for me was a spotlight on Scott H. Andrews, founding editor of the excellent Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Here’s a snippet:

I started BCS in 2008 because the F/SF short fiction field had no dedicated home for literary or character-driven secondary-world fantasy. There were lots of great literary fantasy, slipstream, and magical realism, and decades of great literary SF, but rarely were magazines publishing character-centered or stylistically bold fantasy set in invented worlds.

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Patrick Swenson on Talebones, Fairwoods Press, and the Bad Old Days of Print on Demand

Tuesday, June 20, 2017 Emily Mah Comments 0 Comment

Patrick Swenson has been a major figure in speculative fiction for decades, first as the editor of Talebones, and now as the editor in chief of Fairwood Press. Many still remember his semi-pro magazine as the market to send to if you had a story that fit nowhere, but was nevertheless amazing. He has an eye for such things.

Nowadays, getting published by Fairwoods requires more than a good agent or query letter. It is by invitation only, and to be invited, one has to be on Patrick’s radar, and to be on Patrick’s radar, one has to be excellent.

He isn’t just an editor and publisher, though. He’s a writer as well, and his career is both exciting to watch, and an excellent snapshot of modern day publishing. His first book, The Ultra-Thin Man, was published by Tor, but when they passed on the second book, The Ultra Big Sleep, he elected to publish it himself.

Patrick explained this to me while I was standing at his table during the mass signing at Mile-Hi Con. There on the table were both books, and no one who saw them would have been able to say which was self published and which was published by Tor. The quality of their covers and bindings were identical.

On top of all this, Patrick also runs the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat twice a year. This retreat is where:

Writers gather at a location of minimized outside interference or influence, ready to spend an intensive four or five days on their own work, with others involved in the same who were present for support and interactive development of written creative work as art, craft, and science. Balanced against this is a schedule of events aimed at supporting this process, with the number of retreat guests and attendees kept to a limit.

Held in a resort village on the Olympia Penninsula, it’s an opportunity unlike any other to give an added boost to one’s writing career.

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New Treasures: A God in the Shed by J-F. Dubeau

Tuesday, June 20, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

J-F. Dubeau is a Montreal writer who burst on the scene last year with The Life Engineered, which was nominated for the Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. His follow-up is very different indeed — a contemporary horror novel set in small town Quebec, where a dark spirit has held sway for centuries. Fangoria says “Move over True Detective. A rich, gothic story of murder and mystery, A God in The Shed is quite possibly one of the most enthralling novels I’ve read in the last ten years.”

The village of Saint-Ferdinand has all the trappings of a quiet life: farmhouses stretching from one main street, a small police precinct, a few diners and cafés, and a grocery store. Though if an out-of-towner stopped in, they would notice one unusual thing ― a cemetery far too large and much too full for such a small town, lined with the victims of the Saint-Ferdinand Killer, who has eluded police for nearly two decades. It’s not until after Inspector Stephen Crowley finally catches the killer that the town discovers even darker forces are at play.

When a dark spirit reveals itself to Venus McKenzie, one of Saint-Ferdinand’s teenage residents, she learns that this creature’s power has a long history with her town ― and that the serial murders merely scratch the surface of a past burdened by evil secrets.

I love the movie-like credits on the back, which include the editor and cover designer. I wish more publishers followed suit. A God in the Shed was published by Inkshares on June 13, 2017. It is 428 pages, priced at $15.99 for the trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by M.S. Corley.

Half Past Human by T.J. Bass

Tuesday, June 20, 2017 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 6 comments

‘Civilization is too high a price to pay for survival’

Moon from Half Past Human

I don’t know what made me buy Half Past Human (1971) by T.J. Bass fifteen years ago. It was one of those books I had always seen on the used book store shelves, but nothing about the cover (the basis on which I tended to buy unknown books back then) made me go “Gotta buy it.” Something on the back cover, though, must have caught my attention that day, because I plunked my money down on the counter of Red Bank, NJ’s (sadly, long gone) Book Pit. I started reading it on the ride home, and before I knew it I was a third of the way done. A week later I made a circuit of used book stores to get my hands on the sequel, The Godwhale (1974).

Initially published by Ballantine, Gollancz released the duology in 2014 as part of its Masterworks collection. If you’re a sci-fi reader of a certain age, or a student of the genre, you’ll recognize most of the books in the collection, definitely most of the authors. But with only two books published nearly fifty years ago, I wonder how many know Bass’s name today. Which is a shame.

The fear of overpopulation was immense in the late sixties. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb promised that if population growth was not brought under control, humanity faced oblivion. Regular famines, overcrowded cities, a polluted environment, and dwindling natural resources seemed to be our future. Science fiction was examining the problem with books like Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966) (the basis for the Charlton Heston sci-fi noir Soylent Green) and John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar (1968). This fear set the stage for Bass’s vision of Earth crushed by the weight of three trillion people.

In this, the third millennium, Earth was avocado and peaceful. Avocado, because all land photosynthesized; and peaceful, because mankind was evolving into the four-toed Nebish — the complacent hive citizen.

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When Fantasy and Theology Collide: Some Thoughts on Satan

Monday, June 19, 2017 Nick Ozment Comments 17 comments

I recently met a woman whose father-in-law had been a federal prison guard at a medical prison that held the “Blind Sheikh” back around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel-Rahman) was an associate of Osama bin Laden and the planner behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — one of the early “masterminds” of Al Qaeda. In other words, a real life counterpart to the nastiest, most nefarious villains in our fictional thriller novels and cinema fare.

She told me that her dad-in-law spoke to the Sheikh a couple times, as could be expected: casual banter will occasionally happen between guards and the imprisoned criminals they are guarding. She said the Sheikh seemed friendly enough to her father-in-law, but she added, “The Sheikh told him that we worship three gods. That was a big issue he had with us, that we worship three gods. So much of it was cultural misunderstanding.”

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