Black Gate – Page 583 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Short Fiction Spotlight: 2016

Friday, December 30, 2016 Brandon Crilly Comments 1 comment

I’m going to break form to close off 2016, to give a few recommendations from everything I read this past year. Despite the claim by a lot of people that 2016 was the worst year ever (bear in mind the years where tons of people died of the Black Plague) at the very least we weren’t hurting for great reading material. I’ll be posting my Top Ten Novels later, but today I want to focus on short fiction, which doesn’t seem to get discussed as much as I think it deserves. So here are the six short stories that I enjoyed the most in 2016 (since I couldn’t narrow it down to an even five).

“Badgirl, the Deadman, and The Wheel of Fortune” by Catherynne M. Valente, published in The Starlit Wood (Saga Press, 2016)

C.S.E. Cooney has already posted a review of this phenomenal anthology, which reexamines fairy tales in a variety of compelling ways. Valente’s story is subtle fantasy – until the very end, this could just be a story about a father and his drug dealer, told from the perspective of the father’s daughter. Because I’m a teacher with lots of experience working with troubled youth, Valente’s use of the daughter’s narration stayed with me for days after I finished — knowing that little Badgirl is in danger and doesn’t really understand what’s going on makes this story tragic not for its fantastic side, but for its realism.

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Amazon Selects the Best Books of 2016

Friday, December 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, which means it’s time to get hopping on all those Year’s Best lists I promised myself I’d cover. Wednesday we reported on Barnes & Noble’s Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog list, which means I should probably give equal time to Amazon today.

Their list pointed me towards some acclaimed fantasy that I’ve clearly overlooked, such as the first novel in Roshani Chokshi’s new Star-Touched Queen (April, St. Martin’s Griffin) series. In fact, it’s got lots of titles that B&N doesn’t mention — including a few I’ve never even heard of, like Sean Danker’s Admiral (May, Roc), the opening book in a brand new SF series (read Chapter One at Tor.com), and Lindsay Buroker’s Star Nomad (May, CreateSpace), a self-published novel about an interstellar alliance that topples before a tyrannical empire. Although Amazon’s editors did choose as their top pick Charlie Jane Anders debut novel All the Birds in the Sky (January, Tor), which has shown up on numerous Best of the Year lists so far.

In fact, I was rather surprised at the books which appear on both lists. They weren’t the big titles from major names that I might have expected. Here’s a complete list of the four novels that appear on both the B&N and Amazon lists as the best SF and fantasy novels of the year, as selected by the editorial staff of both companies.

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December 2016 Apex Magazine Now Available

Friday, December 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’m long overdue to check in on Apex. It releases its content in stages, one week at a time, which leaves me a narrow window at the end of the month to report on the magazine if I want all the content links to work. Since Lightspeed, Nightmare, and a few others do the same thing, it’s inevitable that a few magazines get dropped every month.

Well, enough of my troubles. You want to hear about all the great things in the latest issue, and rightly so. Here’s editor Jason Sizemore with his summation of the December Apex, from his editorial.

Issue 91 closes the year with some compelling and powerful original fiction by Lavie Tidhar (“Red Christmas”), K.T. Bryski (The Love It Bears Fair Maidens”), and Helen Stubbs (“Uncontainable”). These stories are different from one another in terms of subject, tone, and pacing, but they are all stories I feel will inspire some interesting conversations.

Our nonfiction offerings this month is loaded with interviews of author Helen Stubbs and cover artist Billy Nuñez, a reprint of Keffy R.M. Kehrli’s Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling essay “Tropes as Erasers,” managing editor Lesley Conner’s behind the curtains reveal of how she selects cover art, and a feature on the short film I Remember the Future based on Michael A. Burstein’s story of the same name.

Finally, our reprint this month is Burstein’s hopeful Nebula Award-nominated “I Remember the Future.” Not only does it compliment the feature on the short film in this issue, but 2016 has been a tough year for many, so I feel it is appropriate that we close it out with a little light.

Here’s the complete TOC, with links to all the free content.

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Solitaire Gaming: Hornet Leader by Dan Verssen Games

Friday, December 30, 2016 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 5 comments

Around the Jones household the winter is usually prime time for solitaire wargaming. It’s been so ever since John O’Neill and E.E. Knight got me hooked on board games again. And the last two winters the first game I pull out is DVG’s Hornet Leader.

It’s a bit of an odd fit for me, because I’m more of an ancient history guy, and Hornet Leader is all about modern(ish) planes. A lot of its setup is concerned with the differences between types of armaments, which I’ve never been remotely curious about.

Yet the game had such rave reviews from sources I respect that I finally got over the hurdle of disinterest in the subject matter, picked up a copy, and sat down to play. After some trial and error I discovered a grand game. If you like puzzles with a war or tactical theme you’re liable to find yourself captivated. And if you’re one of those who’s already interested in modern planes and the weapons they carry, you may be in heaven. (If this all sounds of interest but you’re more of a speculative fiction person, you might be curious about its expansion, which I’ll introduce at the end of the review.)

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Goth Chick News: Ralphie and His Red Rider BB Gun vs Zombies – Game Over

Thursday, December 29, 2016 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

Much like bacon, we here at Goth Chick News think everything is better with zombies. Pride and Prejudice was better. Brad Pitt was way better. And even Romeo and Juliette was a bit better, in a dead-guy-falls-for-living-girl kind of way.

But honestly, even we were skeptical that zombies could improve upon what may be the best holiday movie ever: Bob Clark’s classic A Christmas Story.

Thanks to Buzzfeed’s Jesse McLaren, those of us who have fantasized about Ralphie turning his Red Ryder against the undead have received this 30-second gift via YouTube last week.

Stand aside Daryl Dixon, because Dead Eye Ralphie makes this look good…

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Future Treasures: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

Thursday, December 29, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

One of the many nice things about Christmas is how it re-introduces me to fairy tales. Maybe it’s being surrounded by a blanket of snow, or not having to trudge to work every day, or the constant squeal of kids in the house… or just the magic of the season. Whatever it is, I’m more open to fairy tales this time of year, including the kind that come between hard covers.

The Bear and the Nightingale is the debut novel by Katherine Arden, with more than a hint of a Russian fairy tale setting. Naomi Novik calls it “A beautiful deep-winter story, full of magic and monsters,” and Booklist says it’s “Utterly bewitching… peopled with vivid, dynamic characters, particularly clever, brave Vasya, who outsmarts men and demons alike to save her family.” It arrives in hardcover next month from Del Rey.

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn’t mind — she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.

After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa’s new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.

And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa’s stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.

As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed — this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse’s most frightening tales.

The Bear and the Nightingale will be published by Del Rey on January 10, 2017. It is 336 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

The Library of America Publishes Elmore Leonard — Again

Thursday, December 29, 2016 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

Elmore Leonard Four Novels of the 1970s-small

Elmore Leonard Four Novels of the 1980s-small

Back in January I dashed off a brief New Treasures article titled The Library of America Publishes Elmore Leonard, in which I highlighted the first two volumes of The Library of America’s omnibus editions of Leonard, Four Novels of the 1970s and Four Novels of he 1980s.

Despite the fact that Leonard never wrote a single SF or fantasy novel (and we’re very much a fantasy blog), it became one of the most popular New Treasures articles I’ve ever written — and in fact, it still outperforms half of the New Treasures articles I write every month. Elmore Leonard is a popular writer in any genre.

So I could hardly ignore the third and final volume in the set, Elmore Leonard: Four Later Novels. Like the others it contains four full novels (Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Out of Sight, and Tishomingo Blues, published between 1990-2002). Here’s the description, which does a find job of summarizing each of Leonard’s freewheeling plots in a single sentence.

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The Very Opposite of a First Contact Novel: On Whetsday by Mark Sumner

Thursday, December 29, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Mark Sumner produced some of the most acclaimed fiction ever published in Black Gate. The Internet Review of Science Fiction called his story “Leather Doll” (from BG 7) “Absolutely riveting…. A masterpiece of contemporary science fiction,” and Tangent Online called his serialized novel The Naturalist (in BG 10, 11, and 13) “Absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable… it recalls the “lost world” tales of H. Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle… Fraught with danger and excitement, and full of the mystery and color of a grand adventure.”

His newest book is On Whetsday, a far-future tale of a planet where the last remaining humans live in peaceful co-existence with an enigmatic alien race. Sharon Shinn calls it “The very opposite of a first contact novel… but just as exciting.” It was originally serialized at Daily Kos, where Mark has been a writer for several years. Here’s the enticing first paragraph.

On Whetsday, Denny danced at the spaceport. It was a good place to dance, if you didn’t mind the heat that boiled off the acres of asphalt or the noise of the rising shuttles. You could meet a dozen races in single morning: lithe little skynx, scarlet klickiks, and sluggish chugs with their curtains of eyes brushing the ground. Most of the passing visitors had never seen a human, and fewer still understood what Denny was doing. Dancing was a rare thing among the races of the galaxy. But they understood enough to toss shiny credit chips or small bits of scrip into the box by his feet. They understood begging. Begging was universal.

You can read the complete first chapter at Daily Kos here.

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Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Selects the Best Novels of 2016

Wednesday, December 28, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

It’s the end of the year, the time when companies, magazines, and bloggers flood the airwaves with Year’s Best lists. Why do they bother? Because we love them! Lists, lists, lists. They’re the best.

One of my favorite genre sites, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, is out with their annual Editor’s Picks for the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2016, including Cixin Liu’s Death’s End, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, and a debut novel, Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer.

Palmer’s long-in-coming debut crafts a distinctly unique vision of a future world — a 25th century where technology has created abundance, where religion is outlawed but personal spirituality is encouraged, where criminals are sentenced to wander the world making themselves useful. It’s an imagined outcome rooted in threads visible all around us even today. The story involves an unlikely meeting between a convict serving a family named Mycroft Canner; a “sensayer,” or spiritual guide, named Carlyle Foster; and Bridger, a young boy who seems to possess the power to make his every wish come true — a power that could completely destabilize a world that is the very definition of stability. With lush prose that recreates the feel of a period novel, this is one of the year’s most striking debuts. Read our review..

The list also includes several novels we’ve recently covered at Black Gate. Here’s a partial list.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Alan Baxter’s Crow Shine and Sarah Remy’s The Bone Cave

Wednesday, December 28, 2016 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

This week’s Tale of Two Covers looks at two very similar covers, released a month apart late this year. (Click the images above for bigger versions.)

The first is Crow Shine, published by the Australian independent publisher Ticonderoga Publications on November 11, 2016. Crow Shine is the debut horror collection from Australian dark fantasy writer Alan Baxter, and it gathers stories from F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Postscripts, and multiple anthologies. You can read more about it at the Ticonderoga website, but unfortunately it doesn’t identity the cover artist.

The second is The Bone Cave, published in paperback yesterday by Harper Voyager Impulse. It’s the third volume in Sarah Remy’s Bone Magic series, following Stonehill Downs (2014) and Across the Long Sea (2015). See all the details at the publisher’s website here. Like Crow Shine, the cover artist is uncredited.

While both books clearly make use of the same base image, there are also interesting design differences. Note the lamp affixed to the rock in the cover on the left (missing on the right), and the skull at the base of the rock on the right. They’ve also gone with different color schemes — Crow Shine is a pale white, almost green, and The Bone Cave has colored the entire background red.

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