Black Gate – Page 625 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Modular: Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperborea — 2nd Edition!

Thursday, November 3, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 6 comments

Back in December of 2012, Black Gate head honcho John O’Neill wrote a glowing post about Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperborea (for ease of typing, we’ll go with AS&SH from here on in). AS&SH was created by Jeffrey Talanian, who co-authored Castle Zagyg with Gary Gygax (The Zagyg saga is worthy of a post in itself).

AS&SH came out of Original Dungeons & Dragons (0E), created by Gygax and Dave Arneson. That is the version that my retroclone of choice, Swords & Wizardry, is based on. Talanian cited Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft as his influences. So, we’re talking Pulp: weird pulp!

Fast forward to 2016 and Talanian has launched an already successful Kickstarter for a 2^nd Edition of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperboria. As I type this, with 22 days remaining, it is at 318% funding and is tearing through stretch goals like the Cimmerians at Venarium.

The book will be somewhere around five hundred pages and will include a 32” x “40 color map, as well as an introductory adventure. Ian Baggley’s popular art from the 1^st Edition will be supplemented with illustrations from about a dozen new artists. If you like this style of art, AS&SH is absolutely worth backing. Check out the new cover!

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Gunslingers, Shapeshifters, and Ancient Animal Gods: The Children of the Drought Trilogy by Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson

Thursday, November 3, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The border town of Sixes is quiet in the heat of the day, but at sunset wake the gunslingers and shapeshifters and ancient animal gods whose human faces never outlast the daylight. Appaloosa Elim had to enter Sixes to find his so-called partner Sil Halfwick, who disappeared inside in the hope of making a name for himself among Sixes’ notorious black-market traders.

That was the premise of One Night in Sixes, the popular debut novel by Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson. A sequel arrived in 2015, and the concluding novel in the trilogy is now scheduled to arrive in paperback in late December. Here’s all the details; links will take you to our previous coverage.

One Night in Sixes (464 pages, $7.99/$6.99 digital, July 29, 2014) — excerpt
Medicine For the Dead (480 pages, $7.99/$3.99 digital, April 9, 2015) — prologue
Dreams of the Eaten (384 pages, $8.99/$6.99 digital, December 27, 2016)

All three were published by Solaris. The covers are by Tomasz Jedruszek.

See all of our recent coverage of series fantasy here.

The Future of Iraq, According to the Country’s Science Fiction Authors

Wednesday, November 2, 2016 Sean McLachlan Comments 4 comments

1907297246 With all the grim news coming out of Iraq, it’s easy to think the country has no future. That’s wrong, of course, because being one of the oldest countries in the world, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

But what will that future look like? To answer that question, UK publisher Comma Press has released Iraq +100, an anthology of Iraqi writers imagining the future of their nation. As the blurb says:

Iraq + 100 poses a question to ten Iraqi writers: what might your country look like in the year 2103 – a century after the disastrous American- and British-led invasion, and 87 years down the line from its current, nightmarish battle for survival? How might the effects of that one intervention reach across a century of repercussions, and shape the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens, or influence its economy, culture, or politics? Might Iraq have finally escaped the cycle of invasion and violence triggered by 2003 and, if so, what would a new, free Iraq look like?

Covering a range of approaches – from science fiction, to allegory, to magic realism – these stories use the blank canvas of the future to explore the nation’s hopes and fears in equal measure. Along the way a new aesthetic for the ‘Iraqi fantastical’ begins to emerge: thus we meet time-travelling angels, technophobic dictators, talking statues, macabre museum-worlds, even hovering tiger-droids, and all the time buoyed by a dark, inventive humour that, in itself, offers hope.

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Future Treasures: The Mountain of Kept Memory by Rachel Neumeier

Wednesday, November 2, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Rachel Neumeier is the author of The City in the Lake, The Floating Islands, House of Shadows, Black Dog, and The Griffin Mage Trilogy. Earlier this year Knopf Books released her new YA novel The Keeper of the Mist.

In her latest, a prince and a princess must work together to save their kingdom from outside invaders… and dangers within. It’s available in hardcover next week from Saga Press.

Long ago the Kieba, last goddess in the world, raised up her mountain in the drylands of Carastind. Ever since then she has dwelled and protected the world from unending plagues and danger…

Gulien Madalin, heir to the throne of Carastind, finds himself more interested in ancient history than the tedious business of government and watching his father rule. But Gulien suspects that his father has offended the Kieba so seriously that she has withdrawn her protection from the kingdom. Worse, he fears that Carastind’s enemies suspect this as well.

Then he learns that he is right. And invasion is imminent.

Meanwhile Gulien’s sister Oressa has focused on what’s important: avoiding the attention of her royal father while keeping track of all the secrets at court. But when she overhears news about the threatened invasion, she’s shocked to discover what her father plans to give away in order to buy peace.

But Carastind’s enemies will not agree to peace at any price. They intend to not only conquer the kingdom, but also cast down the Kieba and steal her power. Now, Gulien and Oressa must decide where their most important loyalties lie, and what price they are willing to pay to protect the Kieba, their home, and the world.

The Mountain of Kept Memory will be published by Saga Press on November 8, 2016. It is 431 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Marc Simonetti.

An Open Letter To George R. R. Martin and the Producers of Game Of Thrones

Tuesday, November 1, 2016 markrigney Comments 9 comments

Dear George & Co.,

I was wrong.

Back in 2011, when the first season of Game Of Thrones aired, I watched up until the episode where Ned Stark gets speared in the leg during a street fight. (His opponent? That bastion of modesty and ethics, Jaime Lannister). And then I gave up. I stopped watching despite the fact that the storytelling was excellent, the acting superb, the locations first-rate, the camera and tech work all but faultless. I gave up because I was tired of seeing the female characters on the show abused, one after the next. I began to suspect the worst of both you and the show runners.

Call me a pig-headed liberal progressive if you must, but I’d like to see the arts, both commercial and fine, be aspirational, which I realize is a very millennial sort of term, but I like it. I’m with Gene Roddenberry: I want at least some of our creative output to showcase what we could be as a society, not merely depict what we are (i.e., barbarous and brutal). Of course the particular world of A Song Of Ice and Fire and Game Of Thrones demands its share of brutality, but it became my position, following those early episodes, that the show was reveling in the violence rather than merely depicting what was necessary to develop the story. It was my considered opinion that I was once more in the throes of a TV show where female agency was, at best, a limp afterthought.

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New Treasures: The Girl with Ghost Eyes by M. H. Boroson

Tuesday, November 1, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Publishers Weekly called The Girl with Ghost Eyes “A brilliant tale of monsters, magic, and kung fu in the San Francisco Chinatown of 1898.” In her review of the hardcover edition, published by Talos in November of last year, Sarah Avery wrote:

We’re connoisseurs of kickass combat scenes, eldritch lore, and victories won at terrible, unpredictable price. We want our heroes unabashedly heroic and morally complicated at the same time. Add a decade or more of research on the author’s part, distilled to the most concentrated and carefully placed drops, and a well-timed sense of humor, and you’ve got the recipe for the perfect Black Gate book…

Li-lin’s family has protected the world of the living from the spirit world for generations. Most Daoist priests and priestesses take it on faith that their rituals work — they can’t literally see the spirit world and the efficacy of their magic. Li-lin can, though. She has yin eyes, ghost eyes, a visionary ability that appalls her father and would disgust her trusting neighbors if they knew…

Devoted daughter, faithful widow, compassionate protector of Chinatown, Li-lin must conceal her rarest talent, lest she shame everyone she loves. Long practice at concealment, combined with the necessity of bending rules and stories if she’s to be effective in a world where even a warrior priestess is expected to show deference to men and elders no matter what, has prepared her almost too well for the mystery she must solve.

Someone wants her father dead. That someone wants it enough to lay trap after trap for her family. Bad magic is on its way, of the kind only the Maoshan can stop.

Li-Lin and her ghost eyes save Chinatown, don’t you doubt it.

The Girl with Ghost Eyes was published in hardcover by Talos on November 3, 2015. It was reprinted in paperback by Talos on October 11, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $7.99, or $7.59 for the digital version.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Another Term: Bound in Blood by P.C. Hodgell

Tuesday, November 1, 2016 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 0 Comment

With Bound in Blood (2010), P.C. Hodgell continues to blow me away with her talent for telling tales. It’s the fifth book in the Kencyrath series, and the second one about our heroine Jame’s time at military school, the randon academy at Tentir. It’s not the most compelling novel so far. In fact, it’s more of a collection of stuff that happens to Jame or stuff she does. That the book manages to hold a reader from cover to cover proves just how good Hodgell is.

First, the mandatory recap:

Thirty thousand years ago, Perimal Darkling began to devour the series of parallel universes called the Chain of Creation. To fight against it, the Three-Faced God forged three separate races into one: feline-like Arrin-Ken to serve as judges; heavily-muscled Kendar to serve as soldiers and craftsmen; fine-featured humanoid Highborn to rule them. For 27,000 years, the Kencyrath fought a losing battle; one universe after another falling to the darkness. Three thousand years ago, the High Lord Gerridon, fearful of death, betrayed his people to Perimal Darkling in exchange for immortality. Fleeing yet again, the Kencyrath landed on the world of Rathilien. Since then, they haven’t heard from their god, and Perimal Darkling has seemed satisfied to lurk at the edges of their new home. Monotheists trapped on an alien world with many gods, the Kencyrath have had to struggle to make a life on Rathilien.

Now, the power of the Three-Faced God seems to be reappearing. The Kencyrath believe that only the Tyr-ridan, three Highborn reflecting the three aspects of their god — destroyer, preserver, and creator — will be able to defeat Perimal Darkling. Jame, raised in the heart of Perimal Darkling, is fated to be the Regonereth, That-Which-Destroys.

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October 2016 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

Monday, October 31, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jeremiah Tolbert has had a pretty impressive short fiction career — in the last few years he’s been published in Asimov’s SF, Giganotosaurus, Interzone, the sword & sorcery Cthulhu anthology Swords Vs Cthulhu, and other fine places. Some of you will also remember his very fine story in Black Gate 15, “Groob’s Stupid Grubs.” His latest tale for Lightspeed is “The Cavern of the Screaming Eye,” a futuristic role-playing tale which he describes thusly:

The first in the Dungeonspace sequence of stories, “Cavern” involves the story of a boy struggling with the legacy of his dead brother, a great d-space crawler lost to one of the most deadly dungeon anomalies the City has ever seen – The Black Hole.

His mother will kill him if he takes up d-space adventuring – she can’t bear to lose another son to the high-risk world of dungeon crawling. But an addiction to the thrill of adventure might just be in his blood, and now he find himself embroiled in the new kid’s dungeoneering schemes. Will they survive… the Cavern of the Screaming Eyes?

Here’s Charles Payseur’s summary from Quick Sip Reviews.

This story imagines a future fantasy world where young people can enter into d-space, a sort of dungeon-crawling game, only one where the stakes are life and death. The main character, Ivan, has recently lost his brother to the game, a brother who was a hero to many but a terror to Ivan. His home life a mess, Ivan is surprised when a new kid at his school offers friendship and, more than that, an opportunity to get involved in dungeon delving… This also feels like the start or something larger, because the story introduces many things that don’t exactly pay off. But it does create the sense of a larger world and a larger mystery which Ivan is just discovering, that will undoubtedly have huge implications for him, his family, and his new friends. It’s an entertaining piece and light but with a lifting optimism and fun that makes it a pleasant read and a fine story!

Read Charles’ complete review of the October issue here.

This month editor John Joseph Adams offers us original fantasy by Jeremiah Tolbert and Kat Howard, and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard and Will Kaufman, plus original science fiction by Stephen S. Power and Mary Anne Mohanraj, along with SF reprints by Karen Joy Fowler and Fran Wilde.

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We All Live in Lovecraft Country

Monday, October 31, 2016 Jackson Kuhl Comments 4 comments

lovecraftcountry Lovecraft Country
by Matt Ruff
Harper (384 pages, $26.99 hardback, $7.99 digital, February 2016)

Pam Noles grew up the daughter of a mother who was very active in the NAACP and a father who, because of his color, had to sue their city after being turned down eight times for a firefighting job. Noles also grew up loving all things science fiction — books and B movies — even though nobody on those book covers or in those movies resembled her family.

On Saturday nights Noles watched schlocky movies hosted by an Elvira knockoff called The Ghoul, backed by a cast of weirdos (every big market had something similar — in Philly we had Saturday Night Dead, hosted by Stella “The Maneater From Manayunk”). During breaks in the movie they performed skits.

Usually it would be just me in the basement sprawled on the floor surrounded by snacks, Legos and books to read during the commercials. If he was off shift, sometimes Dad would come down and join me in his leather recliner by the stairs. Every once in a while Mom called down from the kitchen Are you letting her watch those weird things? And we’d lie in unison, No. If she came down to check for herself, Dad would get in trouble.

Dad had his own names for the movies.

What’s this? ‘Escape to a White Planet?’

It’s called ‘When Worlds Collide.’ I’m sure I sounded indignant.

‘Mars Kills the White People.’ I love this one.

Daaaaad. It says it right there. ‘War of the Worlds’. I know I sighed heavily, but was careful to turn back to the tv before rolling my eyes.

Once he asked me which was more real, the movie or the skits between. I didn’t get it, and told him that they were both stories, so they were both fake. He didn’t bring it up again until a skit came on. I can’t remember if it was a ‘Soulman’ skit or one of the caveman gags (the cavemen were multicultural — basic white, Polish, Italian, and black). But I remember Dad saying, how come you never see anybody like that in the stories you like? And I remember answering, maybe they didn’t have black people back then. He said there’s always been black people. I said but black people can’t be wizards and space people and they can’t fight evil, so they can’t be in the story. When he didn’t say anything back I turned around. He was in full recline mode in his chair and he was very still, looking at me. He didn’t say anything else.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes for Halloween

Monday, October 31, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 8 comments

I don’t really do horror. Now, I am a huge Robert R. McCammon fan and of F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack. Of course, I’ve read a fair amount of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stuff (man, that creeps me out). And bits here and there from Robert E. Howard, Les Daniels, Anne Rice and a few others. But overall, I don’t really enjoy the genre, so it’s not an area I have a lot of experience with.

However, I have come across several examples of Holmes in the genre. And it being Halloween, let’s take a quick look at few titles that involve horror or the supernatural. Those two things aren’t always the same, you know.

The Unopened Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (John Taylor) There was a time when Holmes pastiches were relatively uncommon and, pre-Amazon, you grabbed what you could when you saw them on the shelves. I still remember being excited to buy books from Richard Boyer, L.B. Greenwood and Frank Thomas. Another was a short story collection by John Sherwood, a writer for the BBC. “The Wandering Corpse,” “The Battersea Worm,” “The Paddington Witch,” “The Phantom Organ,” “The Devil’s Tunnel” and “The Horror of Hanging Wood” are all supernatural-tinged stories. The last one remains a favorite of mine and something I wish I’d thought up. Taylor wrote four more Holmes adventures, which were read aloud by Benedict Cumberbatch. I’ve not heard them, but every couple of years, around this time, I read a few stories from his book.

Gaslight Anthologies (edited by J.R. Campbell & Charles Prepolec) In 2008, Canadians Campbell and Prepolec put out Gaslight Grimoire, a collection of eleven creepy Holmes tales. It was followed by thirteen more in Gaslight Grotesque, and finished up with another dozen in Gaslight Arcanum. That’s 36 stories of horror and weirdness. You can certainly tell what you’re getting from the covers of the last two books. If you’re a Holmes fan and really like the horror genre, these three anthologies are just what you’re looking for.

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