Black Gate – Page 569 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

B&N Blog on 96 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in 2017

Thursday, February 2, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog has gradually become one of my favorite places on the web. It’s well written, entertaining, and has a lot of content — virtually all of it focused on books. What’s not to love?

It’s not afraid of tackling big projects either. While lesser blogs may give you a peek at 10 upcoming releases and then head down to the pub, the hard-working crew at the B&N Sci-Fi Blog labor late into the night to compile a monster list of nearly 100 of the best genre books coming your way. How do they do it? Here’s Joel Cunningham with the scoop.

We asked sci-fi and fantasy editors from all the major publishing houses to share with us the books they are most excited to release into the wild in 2017. Let us just say, these editors are very excited — so excited, the list quickly ballooned to nearly 100 books. That’s 100 books that we’re really excited about too, even if the knowledge that we can’t possibly hope to read every one of them makes us lament, again, our pesky mortality.

Grab a fresh cup of coffee or your beverage of choice, and settle in. This is a big one.

Yeah, Joel’s right about that. It took a lot of work with compile this list, and I guarantee you that you’ll find something that will catch your interest. Here’s a handful of titles that I found especially intriguing.

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The Arian Baptistry in Ravenna, Italy

Wednesday, February 1, 2017 Sean McLachlan Comments 4 comments

Ceiling of the Arian Baptistry

Last week I blogged about the fantastic Basilica of San Vitale, in Ravenna, Italy. That’s only one of several fine examples of Late Antique art in the city and only one of eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites there.

Another is the Arian Baptistry, built by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great at the end of the 5th century. Theodoric was an Arian Christian, following a creed that believed that Christ was distinct from, and subordinate to, God the Father. This is because Christ did not always exist but was created by God the Father. More orthodox Christians at the time believed that Christ was both human and divine but was one and equal to God the Father. Theodoric had both types of Christians in his kingdom and to avoid trouble, kept them in separate neighborhoods with separate houses of worship

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Another Magazine Gone: Fantastic Stories of the Imagination Packs it In

Wednesday, February 1, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There’s a healthy number of genre magazines on the market in 2017… but that doesn’t mean that all (or even most) of them are healthy. The vast majority of independent and small press magazines operate on paper-thin margins, which means that even minor setbacks can put the whole enterprise at risk.

We lost one of the highest-paying short fiction markets in the industry last month, as publisher Warren Lapine announced on January 18th that a combination of financial difficulties and personal setbacks had conspired to doom Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. In his Message From the Publisher he writes:

It’s with deep regret that I announce the closing of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. The January issue will be our final regular issue and the People of Color Take Over issue will be our final issue. I’m really proud of the body of work that we produced at Fantastic. There are a number of reasons that now is the time for me to close the webzine. According to my projection, it’ll take more than five years for Fantastic to become self sustaining, and I simply don’t feel that that is a reasonable time frame.

I had planned to stick it out another year, but my personal life has made that much more difficult. Last month my daughter’s house burned down and she and her family are staying with us while we try to sort everything out with an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay; and this month my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer… For those of you who are owed portions of an electronic subscription. Your subscription will be filled with electronic copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Cascadia Subduction Zone. That means you’ll be getting two magazines for every one we owe you.

Fantastic Stories of the Imagination was founded in August 2014, and published 17 issues over the past two and a half years. It took its name from the fondly-remembered digest Fantastic Stories, published from 1952-1980 by Ziff-Davis, and continued the original’s numbering scheme. The modern version was a free webzine that published two new stories every issue, plus reprints, reviews and commentary. It was edited by Warren Lapine and published by Wilder Publications, and available free online, and in a variety of digital formats for $2.99.

We last covered Fantastic Stories of the Imagination with the September-October 2015 issue. The final issue will be the Kickstarter-funded People Of Color Take Over Fantastic Stories, inspired by the hugely-successful People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction special issues of Lightspeed and Nightmare. The last regular issue contains new fiction by Wendy Nikel and Tamoha Sengupta; check it out here.

Steven Brust’s Five Roger Zelazny Books that Changed His Life

Wednesday, February 1, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Over at Tor.com, Steven Brust (The Incrementalists, the Vlad Taltos novels) talks about what may be my favorite fantasy novel, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967).

You always get asked, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?” And, of course, there’s no answer, or a thousand answers that are all equally valid. But I usually say, “In high school, when I read Zelazny’s Lord of Light.”

You see, until then, I had never known you could do that. I never knew you could make someone feel all those different things at the same time, with all of that intensity, just by how you used 26 characters and a few punctuation marks. What was it? Well, everything: Sam and Yama were the most compelling characters I’d come across; it was the first time I’d ever stopped reading to just admire a sentence; it gave me the feeling (which proved correct) that there were layers I wouldn’t get without a few rereadings; and, above all, it was when I became of what could be done with voice — how much could be done with just the way the author addressed the reader. I remember putting that book down and thinking, “If I could make someone feel like this, how cool would that be?” Then I started reading it again. And then I went and grabbed everything else of his I could find.

Steven uses this as a springboard to discuss Five Roger Zelazny Books that Changed My Life by Being Awesome, including the spiritual successor to Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969), which includes the brilliant “Madrak’s Possibly Proper Death Litany, or the “agnostic’s prayer” as it has come to be called.” Read the entire article here.

A Shaper of Myths: The Best of Cordwainer Smith

Tuesday, January 31, 2017 James McGlothlin Comments 3 comments

He and I stared at each other. Was this what culture was? Were we now men? Did freedom always include the freedom to mistrust, to fear, to hate?
— Cordwainer Smith, “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” p. 300

Such are the questions set in the context of Cordwainer Smith’s utopian, futuristic society where people are seeking to go back to being “human” again. But this is only one small time slice and representation of Smith’s massive mythos in The Best of Cordwainer Smith (1975). This volume was the fifth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series, and the first to be edited by someone other than Lester Del Rey (1915–1993). John J. Pierce (1941–) edits this volume and provides a very fine introduction. Pierce is a science fiction critic and was once a very outspoken pundit against the 1960s New Wave in science fiction.

Whereas the cover art of the first four volumes was done by the late Dean Ellis (1920–2009), the cover for this book was by the late Darrell Sweet (1934–2011). Sweet’s artwork here is very reminiscent of Ellis’ work on the Classic Science Fiction Series. This is interesting, seeing how Sweet’s later artwork is very different from Ellis. (See this Black Gate memorial post to Sweet for later examples of his work.) It seems Sweet was attempting to keep with the aesthetic feel that Ellis had already established.

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January 2017 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

Tuesday, January 31, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The January 2017 issue of Nightmare is now available, with original fiction from Cadwell Turnbull and Carrie Vaughn, and reprints by Lilliam Rivera and Ashok Banker. Here’s Kevin P Hallett’s thoughts from Tangent Online:

“Loneliness is in Your Blood” by Cadwell Turnbull

This short dark horror describes a female vampire who makes herself invisible while she hunts for human blood. The vampire thinks she is immortal, living among the American slaves. But after hundreds of years, she finds herself growing old. As she ages, she is compelled to suck a young couple dry of their blood, an act that induces her own pregnancy and the birth of a new girl vampire…

“Redcap” by Carrie Vaughn

This horror short introduces us to Violet, the youngest of three sisters charged with minding the sheep. Her elder sisters warn her each day of the dangers outside the home, and that they will all starve if any sheep are lost. One day, as she prepares to herd the sheep from the pasture, she finds a lamb missing. Violet is torn between her sister’s warnings about the dangers and their cautions about starving if any sheep are lost.

She decides to search for the lost sheep. Drawn to its bleating, she climbs the haunted hill where the demon, Redcap, traps her… The story had a nice pace to it and the plot was engaging, pulling the reader forward…

Read his complete review here. The complete contests of the issue are listed below.

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The Pastel City by M. John Harrison

Tuesday, January 31, 2017 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 16 comments

M. John Harrison, like Joan Vinge or J.G. Ballard, hails from my terra incognita of the universe of sci-fi/fantasy authors. Over the years I’ve read praises of his fiction but have never read a word of it. Searching my shelves for something to review this week, I saw a copy of the Bantam omnibus of his novels and stories of Viriconium, a city in the twilight days of Earth. I have no memory of how, when, or where it came into my possession, but there it was. So I figured it was about time to investigate its unknown literary landscapes.

Harrison came to my attention from a pair of essays he wrote on the creation of fantasy. The first, “What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium,” is an attack on the effort to codify and specifiy the nature of fantasy. It opens with this bold statement:

The great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric. They were books, which means that the one thing they actually weren’t was countries with people in them.

For him, any effort to delineate geographical boundaries and the like in a work of fantasy undermines what really lies at its heart. He describes his own tales like this:

“Viriconium” is a theory about the power-structures culture is designed to hide; an allegory of language, how it can only fail; the statement of a philosophical (not to say ethological) despair. At the same time it is an unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which all the values we yearn for most have been swept precisely so that we will try to put them back again (and, in that attempt, look at them afresh).

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Old Dark House Double Feature VI: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) and Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967)

Monday, January 30, 2017 William I. Lengeman III Comments 7 comments

This time around, two old dark house flicks that are separated by about a year. A classic of the genre and one’s that’s a bit of a dud.

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
Universal Pictures (1966)
Directed by Alan Rafkin
Written by Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum
Starring Don Knotts, Joan Staley, Liam Redmond, Sandra Gould, Dick Sargent and Skip Homeier

Your opinion about The Ghost and Mr. Chicken will probably depend on how you feel about Don Knotts, someone who made a career of playing variations on the same character — a jittery, keyed up guy who often tried to cover up his bumbling with bluster.

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Future Treasures: Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones

Monday, January 30, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Remember the 80s fantasy classic Labyrinth? Of course you do. Directed by the brilliant Jim Henson and introducing a 15-year-old Jennifer Connelly, the film revolved around the efforts of Sarah to rescue her brother Toby from the clutches of the Goblin King (played with marvelous panache by David Bowie).

Labyrinth is chiefly remembered today for its terrific puppetry and Brian Froud’s ace conceptual designs. But the story it tells is a very old one, one which recurs often in fairy tales. Debut author S. Jae-Jones brings us a fresh new retelling in her novel Wintersong, coming in hardcover next month from Thomas Dunne. Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen) says, “This was Labyrinth by way of Angela Carter. Deliciously romantic, with a nuanced Goblin King and a strong heroine, this story was rife with fairy tales, music, and enchantment.”

The last night of the year. Now the days of winter begin and the Goblin King rides abroad, searching for his bride…

All her life, Liesl has heard tales of the beautiful, dangerous Goblin King. They’ve enraptured her mind, her spirit, and inspired her musical compositions. Now eighteen and helping to run her family’s inn, Liesl can’t help but feel that her musical dreams and childhood fantasies are slipping away.

But when her own sister is taken by the Goblin King, Liesl has no choice but to journey to the Underground to save her. Drawn to the strange, captivating world she finds ― and the mysterious man who rules it ― she soon faces an impossible decision. And with time and the old laws working against her, Liesl must discover who she truly is before her fate is sealed.

Rich with music and magic, S. Jae-Jones’s Wintersong will sweep you away into a world you won’t soon forget.

Wintersong will be published by Thomas Dunne Book on February 7, 2017. It is 448 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition. Read a massive 44-page excerpt (in PDF format) at the Macmillan website.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Not Impressed With “The Mazarin Stone”

Monday, January 30, 2017 Bob Byrne Comments 4 comments

Current writers of Sherlock Holmes stories (such stories are known as ‘pastiches’) are held to the standard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s originals. And rightfully so. But that’s not to say that all sixty of Doyle’s tales featuring his famous detective are of the same quality. Followers of the great detective debate the merits of various stories. I myself am less than thrilled with “The Dying Detective,” since Holmes doesn’t do much of anything in it. He’s less mobile than Nero Wolfe in that one.

But I can’t think of too many fellow Sherlockians (and I don’t mean followers of the BBC television show) who are enamored with “The Mazarin Stone.” I definitely am not and consider it one of the weakest in the entire Canon. Of course, if you haven’t read it, you probably should do so before continuing. You’re back? Good.

The Play’s the Thing

Jack Tracy’s The Published Apocrypha contains the full text of the play The Crown Diamond, as well as an informative essay. “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” and The Crown Diamond are pretty much the same story and share much dialogue, differing only in a few minor details.

One of those details worth noting is that Colonel Sebastian Moran is the villain in play, whereas it is Count Negreto Sylvius in the story. Using Moran makes sense, since playgoers likely would know the character, based on his feature role in “The Empty House.” Both men like air guns and are big game hunters, so the real difference is negligible.

Dennis Neilson Terry starred as Holmes in the stage production of The Crown Diamond. It’s nowhere near as good as Doyle’s play, The Speckled Band, which I wrote about in this post.

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