Black Gate – Page 523 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Future Treasures: Blackthorne, Volume Two of The Malorum Gates by Stina Leicht

Tuesday, July 25, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Stina Leicht’s first two novels were Of Blood and Honey (2011), which Sean Stiennon reviewed for us here, and And Blue Skies From Pain (2012). In 2015 she released the first novel in her new flintlock epic fantasy series, Cold Iron.

Okay, I’m not an expert on flintlock epic fantasy. In fact, I kinda thought the publisher was pulling my leg. Flintlock fantasy? Come on, you just made that up so that you’d have a section to file this under. But I did a Google search and, holy cats, it’s a legit genre and everything. Examples include Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage trilogy, D.B. Jackson’s Thieftaker Chronicles, and Django Wexler’s Shadow Campaigns series. (Check out this list for more. Use it to amaze your friends at parties!)

Blackthorne, the sequel to Cold Iron, arrives in hardcover next month from Saga Press. I have an advance copy in house and, damn. This is a big book. The first two volumes total nearly 1,400 pages. If flintlock fantasy is your thing, this book is like five pounds of Christmas. (Also, if flintlock fantasy is your thing, you’re clearly a lot more hip than I am. Don’t get excited, that ain’t much of an accomplishment.)

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July Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, July 25, 2017 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 0 Comment

As the dog days begin, my mind has been prodded back to swords & sorcery by a few things. The most important one was the the return to the fray of Charles R. Saunders, creator of the heroes Imaro and Doussouye. Just the other day, he announced the start of a new blog, Different Drumming. If you are not familiar with Saunders and his superb body of work, go at once and check out his site.

The next thing, while not exactly S&S, was that I learned the final volume of R. Scott Bakker’s Aspect Emperor series, The Unholy Consult, is about to be published. For all my issues with it, it is one of the few contemporary series that has held my interest past the first book or two.

There have also been some fun discussions among various wags over on Facebook about what a list of good introductory books to the genre would look like. I suspect it won’t be long before I’m lifted entirely from my S&S doldrums and return to reading and reviewing the stuff on a regular basis. Until then, there will still be short story roundups. Like this one.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #65 provides the publication’s usual two new stories. I like both well enough, but neither qualifies as actual S&S. The definition of “what is swords & sorcery?” has been done to death by divers hands and on numerous stages, but suffice to say there should be action and at least a touch of the dark and macabre. This issue’s two stories contain neither of those things.

“Then Will Die Your Pain,” by Tom Crowley, consists of the reflections of Konsler, an aged soldier now serving as the attendant to a knight of unclear pedigree.

Sir Garner isn’t a proper knight, just as I’m not a proper squire. There are no knights where Garner comes from, but everyone in the company calls him Sir. And of course I’m too old to be a squire. The other mercenaries say to me, “You’re gonna die out here, grandpa.” They’re probably right. I just need to finish my job first, and I’m writing this in case I don’t.

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New Treasures: Scourge by Gail Z Martin

Monday, July 24, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

According to the publicity material I have on hand, Gail Z. Martin is a bestselling writer… but that doesn’t mean I know which of her various novels have actually cracked the bestseller lists. There’s a lot of possibilities. She’s produced no less than four series in the last ten years, including seven volumes in the Chronicles of the Necromancer, four in the Ascendant Kingdoms series, three Deadly Curiosities books, and Iron and Blood, the opening book in a new steampunk series co-authored with her husband Larry N. Martin.

Her latest is Scourge, in which three brothers must find out who is controlling the abominations in a city beset by monsters. It’s the opening novel in the brand new Darkhurst series, on sale now from Solaris.

The city-state of Ravenwood is wealthy, powerful, and corrupt. Merchant Princes and Guild Masters wager fortunes to outmaneuver League rivals for the king’s favor and advantageous trading terms. Lord Mayor Ellor Machison wields assassins, blood witches, and forbidden magic to assure that his powerful patrons get what they want, no matter the cost.

Corran, Rigan, and Kell Valmonde are Guild Undertakers, left to run their family’s business when guards murdered their father and monsters killed their mother. Their grave magic enables them to help souls pass to the After and banish vengeful spirits. Rigan’s magic is unusually strong and enables him to hear the confessions of the dead, the secrets that would otherwise be taken to the grave.

When the toll exacted by monsters and brutal guards hits close to home and ghosts expose the hidden sins of powerful men, Corran, Rigan and Kell become targets in a deadly game and face a choice: obey the Guild, or fight back and risk everything.

Scourge was published by Solaris on July 11, 2017. It is 400 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 in digital format.

Microsoft Xbox One vs PS4 Pro

Monday, July 24, 2017 Matt Drought Comments 3 comments

“War, war never changes.” It’s a quote that opens the Fallout series of video games, and is often used to describe the video game console business.

The console wars, it’s been called. Since the first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, many different companies have entered this war. Each competing for games enthusiasts time and money. Each promising to be the absolute best console to experience the joy of playing, and to increase player immersion in the game.

At this year’s E3 video game conference, Microsoft unveiled its newest video game console in its war with Sony. It’s a mid-cycle update to the Xbox One called the Xbox One X, positioned to compete with Sony’s mid-cycle update to its PS4, the PS4 Pro.

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No Slimy Monsters, No Princesses: The Bantam Spectra Omnibus Robert Silverberg

Sunday, July 23, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Robert Silverberg The Masks of Time Born With the Dead Dying Inside-small

Robert Silverberg Three Novels The World Inside Thorns Downward to the Earth-small

Robert Silverberg practically introduced me to science fiction. His novel Collision Course was one of the first SF novels I ever read, and he’s one of the first authors I collected. Like a lot of Campbell-era SF, Collision Course is about humans thrusting out into space in an aggressive age of empire-building, and our first encounter with an equally aggressive alien race with the same dreams. The copy I read was the 1977 Ace edition with a cover (by an uncredited artist) that casually gave away the ending.

Ace Books, run by Jim Baen and publisher Tom Doherty, was Silverberg’s paperback publisher in the US for many years. By the 80s, however, Silverberg had been lured over to the Bantam Spectra line under Lou Aronica. Bantam pulled out all the stops for Silverberg, reprinting much of his vast backlist with gorgeous new artwork by Welsh artist Jim Burns. My collection includes over a dozen Bantam Silverberg’s, including his Majipoor novels, Gilgamesh the King (1984), To Open the Sky (1984), and many others,

But it was only a few months ago that I discovered that Bantam produced two omnibus Silverberg collections in 1988. It was purely by luck, as I was hunting down a copy of Downward to the Earth, and instead found a seller offering something called Three Novels: The World Inside, Thorns, Downward to the Earth for just $3. I quickly searched around and found there was a least one earlier volume, collecting The Masks of Time, Born With the Dead, and Dying Inside. I expect they had very low circulation, because I’ve never seen them before.

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July 2017 Clarkesworld Now Available

Sunday, July 23, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

In his editorial this issue, Neil Clarke reflects on the heart attack that nearly killed him five years ago.

When the universe calls, you have no choice but to listen. Five years ago this month, it sent me a message in the form of a near-fatal heart attack. It was the sort of thing that not only caught me off guard, but my family, friends, and doctors as well. As I lay there in the critical care unit, the weight of what happened hit me hard, providing an odd sort of clarity and a revised outlook on life. I had some choices to make, a lot of alone time before visitors to think about it.

Over the years, I’ve blogged and editorialized many of the details of that time, but today is about celebrating an anniversary and pushing forward. Not only did I survive, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons. It was a crappy way to get the message, but I’m very glad I did. At the end of the first year, I took back the anniversary by returning to Readercon — the scene of the crime — and successfully ending the Kickstarter campaign for Upgraded, my first anthology.

Five years later, I have a year’s best series and several more anthologies, watched Clarkesworld turn ten, and made it to my fiftieth birthday. Earlier this year and thanks to my wife’s return to the workforce, I was able to quit the day job and have the time to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time editor. Technically, I am full-time now, but the goal was always to be making a full-time income — with healthcare covered — and I’m still working towards that.

Speaking as someone who still believes SF magazines are the heart of the field, I’m enormously grateful Neil is still with us.

The July Clarkesworld contains original fiction from Zhang Ran, Rich Larson, Robert Reed, Bo Balder, and Nicole Kornher-Stace, plus reprints by Joe Haldeman and Lavie Tidhar. The cover, “Genetics Lab,” is by Eddie Mendoza.

Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp, writes that her tale is “the first short story I’ve written in approximately forever. It’s also the first tie-in story I’ve written in the Archivist Wasp world. More of those to come.”

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Super-Intelligent Cats, Shape-Shifting Aliens, and Mysterious Footprints in the Snow: Rich Horton on 9 Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy

Saturday, July 22, 2017 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Earlier this week I wrote a brief Vintage Treasures piece about Raymond J. Healy’s groundbreaking anthology New Tales of Space and Time. Groundbreaking because it virtually invented the original science fiction anthology, way back in 1951. I was inspired to write that article by Rich Horton’s review of Healy’s follow-up, 9 Tales of Space and Time, at his blog Strange at Ecbatan. Here’s Rich.

Raymond J. Healy (1907-1997) is primarily remembered within the SF field for his role as co-editor (with J. Francis McComas, one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) of the absolutely seminal 1946 anthology Adventures in Time and Space, with was the first introduction in book form to short SF for many post-War readers. It was reprinted numerous times, including a Modern Library edition in 1957.

Healy edited three other SF anthologies, one more reprint book with McComas, the much shorter and less good More Adventures in Time and Space (1955); and two original anthologies on his own: New Tales of Space and Time (1951) and the book at hand, 9 Tales of Space and Time (1954)… Both books are very good, and both seem to have been quite significant at the time, but I don’t think they are much remembered. The first book had two major stories, Kris Neville’s “Bettyann” and Anthony Boucher’s “The Quest for Saint Aquin,” as well as contributions from the likes of Asimov and Bradbury. The second book has no story as good as those, but it is still quite interesting.

Like Rich, I consider Healy’s first book, Adventures in Time and Space, to be enormously important, perhaps the most important SF anthology of the Twentieth Century.

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Godzilla, So-So Solo-Act: The Return of Godzilla (Godzilla 1985)

Saturday, July 22, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 2 comments

The most recent Japanese Godzilla film, 2016’s Shin Godzilla (aka Godzilla: Resurgence), is about to stomp into North America on Blu-ray. Shin Godzilla received an extremely limited one-week run in U.S. theaters in October 2016 — the theater where I watched it ran it once each on Saturday and Sunday morning — so this home video release is the first opportunity most people in Region A will have to see it. (I’ve reached a point where I no longer consider the world in terms of nations but of Blu-ray region coding. “What part of the world are you from?” “Region A.”)

As prep for examining Shin Godzilla, I’m warping back to 1984 and the film in the series with which it has the most in common, i.e. the last time Godzilla went solo, with no other monster in sight: The Return of Godzilla. The home video timing works out well, since The Return of Godzilla only recently had its own digital video debut in North America on a Blu-ray from Kraken Releasing. In fact, the film hasn’t been available here on home video in any format since the late 1990s.

It’s also the first time the original version of the film has been legally available in the United States. When The Return of Godzilla first reached American theaters, it was as a grotesque Dr. Pepper-fueled mutant hybrid called Godzilla 1985. This Americanized version has been heavily slagged for decades for good reasons, but the original isn’t a hidden gem like the Japanese version of King Kong vs. Godzilla. Don’t expect a kaiju epiphany on your first viewing of The Return of Godzilla.

The Reboot of Godzilla

Known in Japan simply as Gojira, The Return of Godzilla was a reboot of the series long before that term for franchise reimagination became popular. It ignited the “Heisei” series of Godzilla films that lasted until 1996 and brought the legendary monster to a second height of fame and quality. Which is strange, since The Return of Godzilla doesn’t look as if it could ignite anything bigger than a tealight candle.

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Apex Magazine on the Best Short Fiction Reviews

Friday, July 21, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

In his editorial in last month’s Apex Magazine, Jason Sizemore salutes some of the best short fiction reviewers out there.

There are some reviewers that stand head and shoulders above the rest, and I want to direct our readers to them.

Charles Payseur (Quick Sip Reviews) writes entertaining and smart reviews. His pairing of alcoholic drinks with his favorite stories of the month is amusing. If a reviewer can have “heart,” then Charles has it.

Maria Haskins is incredibly well-read and she takes the time to write a list of her favorite stories along with capsule reviews on her blog. She’s a great advocate for short fiction and short fiction publications.

A.C. Wise contributes a monthly review column to the Apex Magazine website titled “Words for Thought” with some of the smartest analysis you’ll find.

Paula Guran regularly reviews work outside her comfort zone and adds much needed life and variety to the short fiction reviews in Locus Magazine.

There are others (though not as many as there should be). If you have a favorite reviewer let me know!

To that list I would add the hard-working team at Tangent Online, the Hugo-nominated Rocket Stack Rank, the excellent short fiction reviews by Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton in Locus… and of course our very own Fletcher Vredenburgh, Adrian Simmons, and Michael Penkas.

The June issue of Apex also contains brand new fiction by Aimee Ogden, Pip Coen, K.A. Teryna (trans. by Alex Shvartsman), and Tobias S. Buckell, plus an excerpt from Mary Turzillo’s new novel Mars Girls, and a reprint by Maureen McHugh. The cover art is by Irina Kovalova. Read the complete issue for free here. We last covered Apex with the May issue.

Read To Me

Friday, July 21, 2017 Violette Malan Comments 6 comments

Illuminated page In case I haven’t mentioned it before, my brother owns the last independent bookstore in Kingston, Ontario. Which goes to explain why it’s was only this week that I bought a Kindle. For the first time in my life, I’m reading in a different way.

Reading, and its broader form story-telling, has been around as long as history, and it’s been changing and evolving all along, with new ideas and new technologies.

Some think the first stories were told by shepherds sitting around on hillsides watching sheep. As exciting as sheepherding can sometimes get (wolves anyone?) there’s considerably more leisure time in this occupation than there is in farming, or fishing. The shepherds would come down from the hillside and tell their stories to the people in the village, and the marketplace storyteller was born. Or so reasons this particular school of thought.

What happened to the marketplace storyteller? Well, memorizing all of Homer et al (in case there were requests) and learning how to recite them in an entertaining way is really hard work. Then you have to come up with your own, original stories, or really, you’re nobody. You have to put literally years into learning all you need to know, and then you have to sit somewhere telling stories and hoping that people will pay you for it. If you’re very good, someone may become your patron and keep you on retainer to tell stories for them and their guests.

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