Black Gate – Page 558 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Where The Road meets Mad Max: Peter Newman’s The Vagrant Trilogy

Sunday, March 12, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

In his SF Signal review Nick Sharps called Peter Newman’s The Vagrant “Dark Dystopian Fantasy at Its Very Best,” saying:

The premise of The Vagrant is simple enough. Accompanied by a baby and a goat, a nameless mute must cross demon-infested wastelands to deliver a magical sword to the Shining City, last bastion of hope. The mute is hunted by multiple factions and it is difficult to distinguish friend from foe in the ruins of a world tainted by evil… Beneath the grit and grime of The Vagrant there is no shortage of beauty. It’s part fantasy and part science fiction. There are demons and knights but the demons enhance their followers with necrotech and the knights ride floating castles and caterpillar tanks. All of the shiny technology of the past has fallen to rust and disuse in the wake of the demonic incursion. The taint of the demons brings mutation and famine. The Vagrant has a sort of The Road meets Mad Max meets The Children of Men vibe…

It wouldn’t feel appropriate to classify The Vagrant as grimdark fantasy. The elements of the subgenre are all present: the setting is dystopian, life is harsh and brief, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are few and far between. Newman’s demons and the change they affect on the world and its inhabitants remind me of the forces of Chaos from Warhammer 40,000 — the very property that inspired the term grimdark. The Vagrant is bleak, depressive, and violent and yet… The Vagrant surpassed all my expectations.

The sequel, The Malice, finally arrived in trade paperback from Harper Voyager this week, and the third and final book, The Seven, is scheduled to appear in October.

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Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast Presents: J.R.R. Tolkien, Master of Modern Mythology: A Conversation with Author Scott Oden

Saturday, March 11, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I really enjoyed the last audio show from Dream Tower Media, a lively conversation with Black Gate blogger Ryan Harvey on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his enduring works. So I was very pleased to see Robert Zoltan and his co-host Edgar the Raven return last month with a brand new episode of their Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast, a conversation with author Scott Oden (Memnon, The Lion of Cairo) that delves deep into the history and writing of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Once again, calling this a podcast doesn’t do it justice, as it’s really a professionally-produced radio show set in the dimension-hopping Dream Tower (with a talking raven). It opens with a trip to Middle Earth, a visit from a lost Nazgûl, and mis-dialing Sauron on a palantir. But the show eventually settles into a fascinating discussion on the life and work of Tolkien, with some lengthy asides to delve into Robert’s theories on the origins of the creative drive (and the evils of world-building).

Scott makes a terrific subject, sharing his story of hammering out three chapters of a Conan novel before turning to history as a source. And his tale of how writing — producing his first novel, Men of Bronze, with a razor-blade sitting next to him — literally saved his life, is riveting stuff. His new novel, A Gathering of Ravens, is coming from Thomas Dunne Books in June.

Check out J.R.R. Tolkien, Master of Modern Mythology: A Conversation with Author Scott Oden, and all the episodes of the Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast, here.

Future Treasures: The Return by Joseph Helmreich

Saturday, March 11, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Here’s a fun little science fiction mystery thriller about a scientist who returns after a very public alien abduction… or does he? What does it mean when the man at the center of an unexplained celestial event denies it ever happened?

The Return is a the first novel from Joseph Helmreich, a script reader for the Weinstein Company and an alternative folk singer. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne next week.

During a live television broadcast on the night of a lunar eclipse, renowned astrophysicist Andrew Leland is suddenly lifted into the sky by a giant spacecraft and taken away for all to see. Six years later, he turns up, wandering in a South American desert, denying ever having been abducted and disappearing from the public eye.

Meanwhile, he inspires legions of cultish devotees, including a young physics graduate student named Shawn Ferris who is obsessed with finding out what really happened to him. When Shawn finally tracks Leland down, he discovers that he’s been on the run for years, continuously hunted by a secret organization that has pursued him across multiple continents, determined to force him into revealing what he knows.

Shawn soon joins Leland on the run. Though Leland is at first reluctant to reveal anything, Shawn will soon learn the truth about his abduction, the real reason for his return, and will find himself caught up in a global conspiracy that puts more than just one planet in danger.

Equal parts science-fiction and globe-hopping thriller, Joseph Helmreich’s The Return will appeal to fans of both, and to anyone who has ever wondered… what’s out there?

The Return will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on March 14, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by David Curtis.

A Jaunt Through Clark Ashton Smith’s Collected Fantasies—Vol. 1: The End of the Story

Saturday, March 11, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 8 comments

I’ve read the complete works of Clark Ashton Smith. And I’ve been known to write at length about them, or to chat with journalists on the topic. There’s nothing unusual about this, since Smith ranks among my favorite five or so authors of all time.

But only recently did I decide to undertake reading his fantasy stories in the original order he wrote them. I can thank Night Shade Books’ five volume series, The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, for making this an easier task than it would’ve been only a few years ago. When the series started to appear in 2007, the hardcover volumes went out of print rapidly. Even a hardcore fan like myself couldn’t justify a purchase of one of the high-priced used copies.

However, as of 2016, all five of The Collected Fantasies are now available in inexpensive trade paperbacks that can be purchased through online retailers with a few clicks. The texts for these volumes have been meticulously prepared (no simple feat considering the revisions and alternate versions published in the past) and offered in the chronological order of composition.

I’m taking a stroll through these editions to read the stories as they were imagined and committed to paper. Instead of regaling you with further long essays, I’m going to take on the role of sightseer, bringing back notes and a slideshow presentation about the best — and the rest — of each volume.

By the way, if you are new to Clark Ashton Smith, the Night Shade editions aren’t the best way to start out. They’re aimed at the collector and long-time connoisseur. I recommend the Penguin Classics collection The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies as a better Smith introduction. If you like the heady journey, there’s much more to explore in the dark fathoms below…

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In 500 Words or Less: Angels of Our Better Beasts by Jerome Stueart

Friday, March 10, 2017 Brandon Crilly Comments 2 comments

Angels of Our Better Beasts
By Jerome Stueart
ChiZine Publications (300 pages, $16.99 paperback/$9.99 digital, December 2016)

As part of my Short Fiction Spotlight for 2016, I discussed the collection Angels of Our Better Beasts by author Jerome Stueart – specifically his short story “Why the Poets Were Banned from the City,” which focuses on the emotional turmoil of a father who has lost his daughter, and blames the writers who have been exiled for the safety of everyone else in the big city. As I mentioned previously, it’s an emotionally charged story that balances a great premise with a realistic, human situation – which is arguably what every SF writer should strive for.

Stueart’s entire collection is like that: fabulous ideas and even more fabulous characters. I got my first taste of this at World Fantasy 2016, hearing Stueart read from “Lemmings in the Third Year,” where a scientist transported to a world of intelligent animals tries to teach the Scientific Method to a group of lemmings. It’s a hilarious story, as the lemmings have grown accustomed to one of their group being regularly eaten by a neighboring owl, and the scientist’s exasperation reminded me of some days in the classroom where people just aren’t getting it.

And while a lot of the stories in Better Beasts are funny – like “Bondsmen,” where the previous incarnations of 007 try to desperately help the current holder of their legacy – there are an equal number of poignant and heartfelt stories. “Brazos,” for example, focuses on a farmer negotiating for his daughter’s hand with a god, maintaining the tension throughout the entire story as this simple human throws down with an entity who could smite him with a single gesture.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak

Friday, March 10, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak, published by Pyr Books in trade paperback on March 14. Richard A. Knaak is the New York Times bestselling author of some three dozen novels, including The Sin War trilogy for Diablo and the Legend of Huma for Dragonlance.

A chill wind rose up. I tightened the collar of my overcoat and looked around. Diocles’s presence had left me with no more desire to be here. Besides, I had an appointment farther on the North Side — a young couple called the Nilssons who continually heard footsteps on the upper floor of the old house they rented. They thought it was the ghost of the first owner, who’d hung herself after her husband perished in the Great Fire.

I knew better. It wasn’t a ghost. If they’d seen my ad, seen the offerings of Nick Medea, investigator and debunker of the supernatural, then they had a far worse problem than ghosts. They had one of the Wyld lurking around their home.

There was plenty of time to reach my clients, since the appointment was set — for more than theatrical reasons — at midnight. It wasn’t hard to convince anyone who needed my services that I needed to come at the witching hour. They’d be desperate for any help at this point, no doubt having exhausted the usual charlatans.

“There was a visitor to Saint Michael’s this evening,” Diocles muttered.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mark Rigney, John Fultz, Jon Sprunk, Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner, Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

We covered the first volume in the series, Black City Saint, here, and Richard’s newest Pathfinder Tales novel, Reaper’s Eye, here. Richard’s last article for Black Gate was “Tommy Guns, Prohibition, and…. Magic?”

Black City Demon will published March 14, 2017 by Pyr Books. It is 363 pages, priced at $17.50 in trade paperback and $2.99 for the digital edition.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Black City Demon here.

New Treasures: The Facefaker’s Game by Chandler J. Birch

Friday, March 10, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I stumbled on Chandler J. Birch’s debut fantasy novel in the New Arrivals section at Barnes & Noble last month. The description on the back immediately made me think of a fantasy version of Charles Dickens… a clever and resourceful pickpocket in the employ of the greedy Mr. Ragged plies his trade in a monster-infested slum, until the day he crosses Ragged once too often and is forced to flee. Soon enough he falls in with a crew of talented rogues planning an ambitious heist, led by the brilliant and mysterious Candlestick Jack.

I’m not the only one to make the comparison to Dickens. Brent Weeks says, “It takes a special writer to blend Dickens, Sanderson, and Lynch — and yet make it totally his own. Chandler Birch succeeds beautifully. A wonderful debut!” I was hoping to point you to an online excerpt so you could try it out, but so far I’ve been unable to track one down. If that changes, I’ll let you know!

The Facefaker’s Game was published by Simon & Schuster/ Simon451 on November 1, 2016. It is 444 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $4.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Tal Goretsky. Click the images above for bigger versions.

Goth Chick News: A LARPing We Will Go…

Thursday, March 9, 2017 Sue Granquist Comments 6 comments

The conversation in the office at my day job was, for once, interesting this week. I overheard several of the engineers discussing LARPs, meaning Live Action Role Play, an activity with which I only have a nodding familiarity. The topic occasionally comes up at the various Cons we cover each year, in the context that cosplayers are sometimes also LARPers.

As there was no way I was going to blow my Black Gate cover by jumping in the middle of the engineers’ discussion, I decided to do a bit of investigation on this topic. I became curious to know how popular LARPs actually were, what type of scenarios are explored and who were the people engaged in the activity?

First, to begin as they say, at the beginning…

LARP is described as one-part improvisational theater, one-part reenactment and one-part role playing game. As you may have guessed, it owes its structure origin to Dungeons and Dragons. Like D&D, a game master or GM (vs a dungeon master) determines the rules and the setting of the game, and may also influence events or act as a referee during play. Unlike D&D where players build and describe their characters through a narrative, LARP players take on the physical role of their player character (PC) and act out the storyline in a real environment.

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March/April 2017 Asimov’s Science Fiction Now on Sale

Thursday, March 9, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The March/April 2017 Asimov’s Science Fiction is the magazine’s 40th Anniversary issue. I can still remember buying the second issue off the racks in Ottawa back in 1977. I vividly remember Isaac’s editorial, which cheerfully encouraged young readers to write science fiction, and how much it inspired me to try my hand at it myself.

I borrowed my parent’s typewriter, banged out a story, and mailed it in a few weeks later, dreams of being an SF writer in my head. I’m sure Asimov’s then editor, George Scithers, was cursing Asimov as he worked through the crush of submissions. I still have his personal rejection letter, which gently critiqued my plot, characters, and spelling. When I met George at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, I was finally able to thank him for his kindness to me a quarter-century earlier.

The double-sized March/April issue of Asimov’s is packed with intriguing stuff, including brand new fiction by Damien Broderick, Will McIntosh, Bill Johnson & Gregory Frost, Ian R. MacLeod, Suzanne Palmer, Sarah Pinsker, Dale Bailey, Rich Larson, Terry Bisson, and others. Here’s Sheila’s full description from the website:

March/April 2017 is our official fortieth anniversary! The exciting cover story is by Asimov’s Readers’ Award-winner Suzanne Palmer. In her tense new tale, a human-created artificial intelligence — left grieving and lonely on a distant planet — may annihilate an alien lifeform over a terrible misunderstanding. Don’t miss “Number Thirty-Nine Skink”!

Alan Smale flies us to another universe for an alternate view of “Kitty Hawk”; Ian MacLeod reveals the brutal “Wisdom of the Group”; We’ve come to expect that Damien Broderick will play with a myriad of motifs in his tales and certainly delivers in “Tao Zero”; Terry Bisson offers a wry explanation for why “We Regret the Error”; We find some twisted love in Rich Larson’s “Cupido”; while Will McIntosh provides us with another story of love gone wrong in “Soulmates.com”; “A Singular Event in the Fourth Dimension” is a charming Asimov’s debut for new writer Andrea M. Pawley; Sarah Pinsker will break your heart with “The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going”; Ian Creasey lets us know that it will only get worse “After the Atrocity”; with “The Invasion of the Saucer-Men” Dale Bailey treats us to another of his works inspired by fifties SF movie titles; Gregory Norman Bossert lets us know who’s a “Goner”; and we’ll learn why “Three Can Keep a Secret” from a mysterious con artist in Bill Johnson & Gregory Frost’s new novelette.

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Dead Gods, Buried Histories, and a Protean City: Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Divine Cities Trilogy

Thursday, March 9, 2017 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I love it when the final book in a terrific trilogy finally arrives. (Wait a minute… are you sure it’s a trilogy? How can you tell? Sure, they all look like trilogies, until that pesky fourth book shows up. Better start over.) I love it when the third book in a terrific series finally arrives, and wraps things up satisfactorily… at least until the fourth book appears, maybe.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs (2014), the opening novel in The Divine Cities, was nominated for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and GoodReads Choice Award, and came in second for the Locus Award. But what got my attention was BG writer Peadar Ó Guilín calling it “The best fantasy I’ve read so far this year. Great stuff,” and a reviewer at Tor.com who described it as “an atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city.” Volume II, City of Blades, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim, and that built up anticipation for the third volume nicely.

City of Miracles is now scheduled to arrive in trade paperback from Broadway Books in early May. On his blog Bennett calls it “the final installment of The Divine Cities series, starring everyone’s favorite Dreyling murder machine, Sigrud. It’s readable as a standalone, just like the other books, but it’s highly recommended that you read the previous ones first.” Final installment. Uh huh. Let’s see how long that promise that holds up when this thing is optioned as the next big Netflix series.

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