Support the Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume II Kickstarter!

Support the Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume II Kickstarter!

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Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume 2

In his review of Volume One of The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Fletcher Vredenburgh wrote:

Regular readers of my monthly short story roundup know how great I think Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is, ranking it the most consistent forum for the best in contemporary swords & sorcery. Some may think I’m laying it on a little thick, but The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: Volume 1, 2009-2011, a distillation of the mag’s first three years, should prove that I’m not.

It’s too late to get in on the ground floor and support the creation of Volume One — but you can help support the publishers and editors of HFQ in their noble effort to produce a second volume. I asked editor Adrian Simmons to give us the scoop, and here’s what he told me.

At Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, we swore we wouldn’t be one of those sites constantly begging you for change. But we’ve swallowed our pirde (one bite at a time, which is why it has taken so damn long) and come to you, our readers and fans, for support so we can get our best-of anthologies moving again.

If you only support Kickstarters that are clear winners, you’re in luck — as of early Monday morning, the campaign has already surpassed $700 on a $500 goal, with roughly seven weeks to go. Check it out here.

Self-published Book Review: The Seventh Colour by Will Davidson

Self-published Book Review: The Seventh Colour by Will Davidson

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Seventh_ColourI’m still running behind on book reviews, but I’ve started to receive submissions again. Please keep them coming–see the instructions here.

The Seventh Colour by Will Davidson is the tale of a society in stagnation. A thousand years ago, the elves departed, and the dwarves’ slow decline led to their eventual extinction, leaving the humans alone in the world. But magic faded with the elves, and the humans were never able to match the dwarves’ technical ingenuity, so all they had were the technology and social structures left by their departed allies. And whether they worked for the dwarves and the elves or not, human society is dying trying to cling to those things.

The story is told in multiple ways. The first, and most straightforward, is the view of Tomas, an investigator in Rivertop looking into the disappearance of a number of individuals whom his boss, Victor, believes were involved in an incident that injured Victor and killed his wife. Interspersed with Tomas’s perspective is the redacted confession of subject T187356, who recounts his harrowing encounters with highwaymen and orks and the criminal rebellion that his aunt and uncles are involved with. These converge when Tomas meets the vanished individuals, and we recognize the interrogated subject as one Alyster Trale. He and his sister, Elyssa, are currently under the protection of their parents’ friends. Far from arresting his suspects, Tomas joins them on their journey to find someplace safe for Alyster and Elyssa, and he hears them out as they travel.

Merson, Forba, Rauor, Lias, Lariad, and Pepina were all good friends at University, and like many University students, they held many long discussions about the ills of the world, and what could be done about them. They hit upon the idea that they should seek out the vanished elves, and went about learning what they could of them. Much of the novel is their account to Tomas of their quest, twenty years before this new journey he’s joined them on.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Getting to Know Your Omniscient Narrator

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Getting to Know Your Omniscient Narrator

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sky god

With the exception of “Folksy Narrators” we often think of omniscient narrators as omnipotent sky-gods who are so vast and powerful that they’re unknowable entities. But looking at them that way hides away a helpful tool in crafting and revising our fiction.

(My blog on folksy narrators is here.)

On Friday, I was leading a seminar for Myth-Ink, the Columbia College genre writing student group, on how to do public readings. They were gearing up for when they’ll be the featured readers at my Gumbo Fiction Salon reading series next week. One of the young women was practicing the first two pages of a story about dragons. Her first read-through was fairly lifeless. She didn’t have confidence in her own vocal skills, and it didn’t sound like she had confidence in the story. We had already gone over many of the basic tips, so I took another tack. I asked her some questions.

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The Great Savage Sword Re-Read: Vol 4

The Great Savage Sword Re-Read: Vol 4

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SSoC-Vol4-CvrThis series explores the Savage Sword of Conan collections from Dark Horse reprinting Marvel Comics’ premiere black-and-white fantasy mag from the 1970s. Previous installments: Volume 1 / Volume 2 / Volume 3.

In volume 4 the superb team of John Buscema (pencils) and Tony DeZuniga (inks) continues to dominate the magazine’s “Golden Age” (i.e. the late 70s). However, this volume begins with John’s talented brother Sal Buscema stepping in for issue #37, ably inked by Rudy Nebres.

It’s a good issue, but things really take off when the regular (John) Buscema/DeZuniga team returns in #38 to adapt the story “Road of Eagles” by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague DeCamp. This is a landmark issue: Conan has never looked more fierce, and his world hasn’t been this fully realized since Alfredo Alcala’s hyper-detailed inks in the mag’s early days.

I’ve read that Buscema didn’t care much for DeZuniga’s inks — but he didn’t really like anyone’s inks over his pencils except his own. That’s fairly common for the Great Pencillers of comics history — yet they were usually too busy with deadlines to do their own inks.

Personal taste aside, Roy Thomas obviously realized the greatness of the Buscema/DeZuniga pairing. He made sure this team worked together as often as possible: 7 out of these 12 issues feature John Buscema pencils with DeZuniga inks. Roy even tapped DeZuniga to ink two more great issues penciled by Sal Buscema (i.e. #39 and #44).

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A Tale of Magical Apocalypse: The Ley Trilogy by Joshua Palmatier

A Tale of Magical Apocalypse: The Ley Trilogy by Joshua Palmatier

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Shattering the Ley-small Threading the Needle-small Reaping the Aurora-small

Joshua Palmatier’s Ley Trilogy is one of the more original fantasy series out there. Set in Erenthrall, a vast city of light and magic fueled by a ley line network, the series follows a sprawling cast of rebels, traders, assassins, guardsmen, and magic wielders through a series of shattering events that bring apocalyptic change to their world, including quakes, magical distortions, and creatures beyond nightmare. The first novel is available in paperback from DAW, and the second in hardcover; the final volume arrives this August.

Shattering the Ley (484 pages, $25.95 in hardcover/$9.99 paperback/$7.99 digital, July 1, 2014)
Threading the Needle (453 pages, $27 in hardcover/$13.99 digital, July 5, 2016)
Reaping the Aurora (464 pages, $26 in hardcover, August 1, 2017)

All three covers are by Stephan Martiniere. Here’s the description for the opening volume.

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Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

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The Quantum Magician - Cover 2, May 2017
Cover art! By Justin Adams

Black Gate readers were very supportive when I reported the start of my 2-year experiment as a more present parent and as a full-time writer in June of 2015. I am happy to announce some of the fruits of that experiment 23 months into this leave from work.

First of all, my son is now 12 years old and is a wonderful human being. He cares about others, listens more, has more self-possession and seems successful enough socially that girls keep calling him. I can of course, only take half the credit for that, but even if the only thing I accomplished in the last 23 months was my contribution to raising a responsible person, I would have called it a very successful sabbatical.

However, while he was at school, I went to the library to write or edit, and some good things have come of that too.

Last night, at 7:30pm, 6 May, while I was reading at Ad Astra, Toronto’s premier fan convention, a very dedicated but surely sleepy-eyed gentleman in Oxford was posting the press release announcing my first novel! The world English rights to the The Quantum Magician sold to Solaris Books in the UK in November, via my excellent agent Kim-Mei Kirtland, but the news has been under embargo for the last six months while cover art was being developed by the extremely talented Justin Adams.

The Quantum Magician is an sf heist story, basically Ocean’s Eleven meets Guardians of the Galaxy. I took many of the elements of hard sf and aliens that are found in my short fiction pieces “The Way of the Needle,” “Persephone Descending,” “Pollen From a Future Harvest,” “Schools of Clay” and “Flight From the Ages” and found something I’m really excited about: stealing things.

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Skelos 2 Now Available

Skelos 2 Now Available

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Skelos 2-small Skelos 2-back-small

When we folded the print version of Black Gate, I took some solace in the fact that there would be new magazines that came along eventually and picked up the banner of weird fiction and adventure fantasy. And you know what? I was right. In particular, I’ve been very encouraged by the ongoing success of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the recent launches of the excellent Occult Detective Quarterly and the promising Cirsova.

But the magazine that I think Black Gate readers will be most excited about is Skelos, edited by the triumvirate of Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, and Jeffrey Shanks. In its first two issues, it’s published new fiction by Keith Taylor, Scott Oden, Arianne “Tex” Thompson, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Milton Davis, Robert M. Price, Adrian Cole, and others — including a brand new Dabir & Asim tale from Howard Andrew Jones in the second issue!

The magazine is gorgeously illustrated by professional artists, with full-page art accompanying many of the stories and even the poetry. And the magazine feels substantial in your hands. Issue #2, cover-dated Winter 2017, is 200+ pages in heavy pulp-sized format. It’s the kind of thing you can sink into your chair with for hours, as it transports you to worlds dark and mysterious.

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Pellucidar Break: The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Pellucidar Break: The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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monster-men-original-dust-jacketI’ve reached the halfway point on my retrospective of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels — and if I’ve learned one thing from having done two other complete ERB retrospectives (aside from never get in a flying vehicle with Carson Napier), it’s that I should take a break before plunging forward into the second half. Or maybe plunging down into the second half. Once a Burroughs series enters the late 1930s, the drop off in quality can get frightfully steep.

So before going Back to the Stone Age, I’m rewinding to the salad days of ERB’s career and exploring a lesser-known work: a take on Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau filtered through the pulp jungle adventure; a book of great promises and great frustrations.

The story that would eventually become The Monster Men is an ambitious thematic and character experiment that explodes with the exuberance of early Edgar Rice Burroughs. It’s also a misfire where generic pulp elements and a terrible ending undermines the potential for one of its author’s most intriguing works. The ebullience of youthful ERB bursts through, but the control and follow-through with complex ideas seem to have been left to the concurrent Tarzan, Mars, and Pellucidar series.

Burroughs wrote the novel in April 1913 during a feverish period between The Cave Girl and The Warlord of Mars. He may have devised the idea in late 1912 as a short story. But he soon discovered the short story wasn’t his medium and expanded the idea into a full-length book titled “Number Thirteen.” It appeared as “A Man without a Soul” in the November 1913 issue of All Story. For its first book publication in 1929, the name was changed to The Monster Men, by far the weakest of the trio of titles, but the one we’re stuck with. “The Man without a Soul” had been used as the title for the U.K. book publication of The Mucker, which probably accounts for the change. The title coincidence between these two books, however, isn’t exactly a coincidence, something I’ll examine later.

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Future Treasures: The Empire’s Ghost by Isabelle Steiger

Future Treasures: The Empire’s Ghost by Isabelle Steiger

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The Empire's Ghost-smallIsabelle Steiger is something of a mystery, to me at least. She came out of nowhere… no previous novels, no short stories that I can find, zip. Not even a website.

Is Steiger a pseudonym, maybe? Who knows. All I know is that she’s produced the opening novel of a brand new fantasy series that’s getting a lot of attention — no small achievement. The Empire’s Ghost arrives in hardcover in ten days.

The empire of Elesthene once spanned a continent, but its rise heralded the death of magic. It tore itself apart from within, leaving behind a patchwork of kingdoms struggling to rebuild.

But when a new dictator, the ambitious and enigmatic Imperator Elgar, seizes power in the old capital and seeks to recreate the lost empire anew, the other kingdoms have little hope of stopping him. Prince Kelken of Reglay finds himself at odds with his father at his country’s darkest hour; the marquise of Esthrades is unmatched in politics and strategy, but she sits at a staggering military disadvantage. And Issamira, the most powerful of the free countries, has shut itself off from the conflict, thrown into confusion by the disappearance of its crown prince and the ensuing struggle for succession.

Everything seems aligned in Elgar’s favor, but when he presses a band of insignificant but skilled alley-dwellers into his service for a mission of greatest secrecy, they find an unexpected opportunity to alter the balance of power in the war. Through their actions and those of the remaining royals, they may uncover not just a way to defeat Elgar, but also a deeper truth about their world’s lost history.

The Empire’s Ghost will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on May 16, 2017. It is 419 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Young Jin Lim,

Worldbuilding a “Star Punk” Future #2: Post-Certainty Society in Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s Peace

Worldbuilding a “Star Punk” Future #2: Post-Certainty Society in Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s Peace

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Vatta Cold Welcome
…could be a superior Traveller campaign

Go on a Traveller RPG forum and ask for book recommendations, and somebody will suggest Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series — a series that has just spawned a rather good sequel, Vatta’s Peace.

The Vatta books are, of course, a really good read. They’re gritty and realistic — it helps that Moon’s ex-military. They’re also fast-paced and well-written, they have vivid characters you enjoy hanging out with, and a strong female protagonist (or two). The same can be said of her other big SF series, affectionately known among my friends as “Scary Horse Aunts In Space” (*) but it’s the Vatta books that come up because they feel a lot like Traveller, meaning they fit my definition of Star Punk:

Set in [a] spacefaring civilization… where… technology has somehow failed to eliminate the human element, where you still need a human to pull the trigger or pilot the scout ship, and where nanotechnology, 3D-printing and vertical farms have neither eliminated trade, nor ushered in a crime-free post scarcity society. They all involve individuals or companions — adventurers, traders, investigators, contractors — pursuing goals of only local significance. (*)

Except for not being an ensemble piece, the series really could be a superior Traveller campaign! It even kicks off with Ky operating as a free trader having left Naval Academy due to a scandal — did somebody fail her survival roll during character generation? It expands to encompass family corporations, commercial espionage, romance, family drama, conspiracy, politics, atrocity, piracy and ultimately set-piece space battles.

However, it rarely loses sight of the business of space travel. Our intrepid hero must deal with crew, repairs, finance, quirky local custom, in addition to the issues around using a civilian ship in armed conflict against pirates and other enemies… this is like a story from the 1970s, but with a tighter plot, modern diversity and values, and much better writing.

The setting — the worldbuilding — is also very Traveller-like in that the technology is limited in such a manner as to create a near-future-but in spaaace feel. Moon achieves this mostly by deploying the third of the options identified in the my last article: she turns the technology against itself.

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