Need Some Cthulhu?

Need Some Cthulhu?

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AP_Sanity1Way back in 2003, The Shackled City began appearing in the pages of Dungeon magazine. Spread over twelve installments, it let characters adventure in a connected storyline from first to twentieth level and really, it was the first incarnation of the modern Adventure Path. Paizo followed this up with two others, Age of Worms and Savage Tide. A post about the real evolution of the Adventure Path, going back to the ‘Giants’ modules from TSR, would be a pretty interesting read. But that’s not this post.

Paizo lost Dungeon when Wizards of the Coast brought it back in-house. As we all know, Paizo went from developing 3.5 materials to the massively successful Pathfinder RPG. And at the heart of Pathfinder has been the Adventure Path: a six module, linked storyline, written by multiple authors, covering levels 1 to 20. Rise of the Runelords kicked things off in 2007-2008 (I highly recommend the Anniversary Edition ) and later this month, Paizo’s nineteenth Adventure Path comes out.

That’s 114 modules of adventuring. Wow. They range all over the Pathfinder world of Golarion and really showcase what a fantastic campaign world it is. I put it up there with the Forgotten Realms as my favorite (I’m not a big Greyhawk guy, myself).

Bet you wondered if I was ever gonna pay off the post’s title, didn’t you? Well, I am. Here’s a description of Strange Aeons:

In a distant land polluted by an alien menace from beyond the stars, a great cancer grows within the earth. As its tendrils reach out through the dreams of those who learn and study its existence, a sinister cult grows more active in preparing the way for a devastation that will destroy more than the minds of would-be heroes. Can the adventures reclaim lost memories in time to stop the advance of a cataclysmic contagion that could threaten all of Golarion? Can they resist the mind-shattering truths revealed by the Yellow Sign, and the monstrous force it symbolizes? The Strange Aeons Adventure Path pits the heroes against the cosmic horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, with new monsters, mind-shattering terrors, and explorations far beyond the known lands of Golarion.

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August Issue of The Dark Now on Sale

August Issue of The Dark Now on Sale

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The Dark August 2016-smallIt’s a little ironic that The Dark finally makes a long-anticipated leap from quarterly to monthly publication in May… and then I promptly miss the next two issues. It doesn’t really help that the magazine is published every month if I only make time to read it once a quarter. (Of course, I’m still reading fiction at Tor.com from back in April, so I suppose everything’s relative.) Let’s just cut our losses and jump back in with the August issue, mm’kay?

The Dark is edited by Sean Wallace, with assistance by Jack Fisher. Here’s the Table of Contents for issue #15, cover-dated August 2015.

“Floodwater” by Kristi DeMeester
“Wheatfield with Crows” by Steve Rasnic Tem (from Dark World: Ghost Stories, 2013)
“Some Pictures of Monsters” by Rhonda Eikamp
“Hairwork” by Gemma Files (from She Walks in Shadows, 2015)

You can read issues free online, or help support the magazine by buying the ebook editions, available for the Kindle and Nook in Mobi and ePub format. Issues are around 50 pages, and priced at $2.99 through Amazon, B&N.com, Apple, Kobo, and other fine outlets — or subscribe for just $1.99 per issue.

If you enjoy the magazine you can contribute to their new Patreon account. Read the complete announcement, and sign up here. You can also support The Dark by buying their books, reviewing stories, or even just leaving comments.

Read the August issue here, catch up on their June or July issues, or see their complete back issue catalog here. The August cover is by Tomislav Tikulin. We last covered The Dark with the May issue.

See our August Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

Future Treasures: The Call by Peadar O’Guilin

Future Treasures: The Call by Peadar O’Guilin

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The Call Peadar O'Guilin-small The Call Peadar O'Guilin-back-small

Peadar O’Guilin was one of the most popular and prolific contributors to the print version of Black Gate. His first story for us was “The Mourning Trees” (BG 5), followed by “Where Beauty Lies in Wait” (BG 11) and “The Evil Eater” (BG 13), which Serial Distractions called “a lovely little bit of Lovecraftian horror that still haunts me to this day.” A fourth story, “The Dowry,” appeared as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction catalog.

Check out the podcast version of “The Evil Eater” on Pseudopod, or download Where Beauty Lies In Wait, a free e-book collecting a dozen of Peadar’s short stories, including his Black Gate tales, here.

Peadar’s first novel, The Inferior, was published to terrific reviews in 2008; it was followed by the next two novels in The Bone World Trilogy, The Deserter (2012) and The Volunteer (2013). His last book was Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories, which Sarah Avery called “old-school weird fiction, Clark Ashton Smith style.”

Peadar’s newest novel is easily one of the most anticipated novels of the year here at Black Gate‘s rooftop headquarters. A unique blend of fantasy, horror, and folkore from one of the top writers in the field, The Call is this fall’s must-read fantasy epic.

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The Women of Andre Norton’s Witch World

The Women of Andre Norton’s Witch World

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Witch World 1I don’t think there is any one today who doesn’t know that Andre Norton was really Alice Mary Norton, which makes her portrayal of female characters more interesting than it would be otherwise. Much of her fiction was written prior to the politicization of the feminist movement (or at least widespread public awareness of it) so it isn’t surprising that in many respects her characters reflect the traditional, male-centric, social attitudes that we would expect from that time period.

In particular we see the presentation and acceptance of women as “other” in the feminist sense, which is, stated simply, the idea that women are seen and defined not as entities and persons in their own right, but as “not men.”

The protagonist of Witch World is clearly the male human Simon Tregarth, who is transported from our plane of existence to that of the main setting of the book and its sequels and follow-ups. It’s primary world fantasy in that respect, and Simon is the “stranger in a strange land” through whom we learn about the new world.

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Enter: The Midnight Guardian

Enter: The Midnight Guardian

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51FJ8Q35TMLDarkman_film_posterJohn C. Bruening makes a smashing debut as a novelist with a hardboiled pulp yarn that is so good, it immediately makes you set the author to one side with a handful of other standouts currently working in the New Pulp field.

The Midnight Guardian: Hour of Darkness frequently put me in mind of Sam Raimi’s underrated 1990 film, Darkman in that it is likewise evocative of The Shadow and Doc Savage and is set in a world familiar to readers of Dashiell Hammett and those who love old Warner Bros. gangster pictures of the 1930s (and Universal horrors and serials of the same decade). While much of The Midnight Guardian is the work of an author well-versed in the vocabulary and mythology of the pop culture of the last century, it is also the creative construct of a first-rate storyteller who has denied himself and his audience for far too long.

Pulp means a lot of things to different people. For purists, it is exclusively the fiction (adventure, crime, thriller, western, romance, war, humor) published in pulp magazines (not slicks) in the 1920s through the 1950s. For others, pulp fiction is any fast-paced, action-packed story with stock characters and situations set in a world decidedly less sophisticated, but much more visceral  than our own.

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A Scare You Straight Post-Apocalyptic Nightmare: B.C. Bell’s Bipolar Express

A Scare You Straight Post-Apocalyptic Nightmare: B.C. Bell’s Bipolar Express

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Bipolar Express-smallI’m a big fan of B. Chris Bell’s film-noirish, pulp fiction stories, and his wonderful novel, Tales of the Bagman Volume 1, The Bagman Vs The World’s Fair, and Tales of the Bagman, Volume 3, all published by Airship27 Productions (and previously reviewed by me here at Black Gate.) So I jumped at the first chance I had to read his excellent, and very hard to pigeon-hole, Bipolar Express. Now, when I say it’s hard to pigeon-hole, I mean it. You can’t slap a label on this one, folks. But I will say this — it’s an important novel: serious, with that element of scary realism, gallows humor and touch of madness that will keep you laughing while the story shakes you up.

This is a novel of truths and wisdom that casts an observant eye on a certain segment of society many of us don’t like to think about: alcoholics, drug addicts, rehab centers and asylums. Bipolar Express has much in common with The Man with the Golden Arm, The Lost Weekend, and Trainspotting, with a macabre touch of Philip K. Dick to add a whole other level to the novel. It’s a “scare you straight,” post-apocalyptic story with a science fiction element that I won’t spoil for you: is what’s happening to the characters reality? Or is it all a shared hallucination? This would make one hell of a freaking movie! It’s also quite a wild ride. I’m not even sure how to tell you about it. So first I’m going to tell what Chris says about it, and then I’m just going wing it from there.

A misdiagnosed mentally ill man spends thirty days in a mental institution. Four years later he finds himself rescued from his own destructive impulses by his fellow patients, who inform him that the magnetic poles have begun to shift, just as they have every 250,000 years. Regardless of the truth, now he’s trying to survive the worst winter in Chicago history along with his mentally ill friends, a man with no fingers, and a cannibal dog. And, if the cold, starvation and illness don’t kill him, there’s a gang roving the city that will. Along the way he’ll discover magnetism affects the behavior of birds, elephants, ants, even humans. And then there are those ‘radioactive’ rays in the sky… this is a novel about failure, redemption, and the end of a world.

Okay, now it’s my turn. And whether or not you think I’m writing in any sort of logical order is your problem.

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Off to Worldcon

Off to Worldcon

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MidAmeriCon II-small

By the time the Black Gate supercomputer posts this article, I’ll be on a plane to Kansas City, heading to MidAmeriCon II, the 74th World Science Fiction Convention.

I haven’t been to WorldCon since 2012, when it was held right here in Chicago. That time Black Gate had a big booth in the dealer’s room — staffed by a crack team of BG writers, including Howard Andrew Jones, James Enge, Rich Horton, Donald Crankshaw, Jason Waltz, and Peadar Ó Guilín — selling what would turn out to be our last issue. (Howard has a detailed report with plenty of pics, here.) With the end of the print issue, there’s no point to a booth, so this time it’s just me flying solo. I was too lazy and preoccupied to fill out the programming form, so I’m not even on any panels. If you spot a white-bearded guy shuffling through the dealer’s room asking about copies of Perry Rhodan, it’s probably me.

But if you’re a Black Gate reader attending the con, I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment below, and I hope to run into you in person. I will post periodic reports from the convention over the next few days, including some selfies with fans. See you there!

Dark Lords Through History: Waller Newell’s Tyrants

Dark Lords Through History: Waller Newell’s Tyrants

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Tyrants
Dark Lords Through History (And Why They Did It)

Remember the Sword of Damocles?

Damocles flatters King Dionysus; “Lord! How fortunate and god-favored you are to be so powerful!”

The king — really a tyrant — says, “Sure. Let’s change places for a day.”

So, Damocles has a right old time feasting and carousing, right up until the moment Dionysus points out the sharp sword hung over his head, suspended by just one fraying thread…

Eek!

The take home is, WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT TO BE A TYRANT, YOU IDIOT? EVERYBODY WILL TRY TO KILL YOU.

And that’s one of the questions that Professor Waller R. Newell sets out to answer in his Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror (the which I talked his publisher into sending me as a nice follow up to Holland’s book on the Caesars.).

By “tyrant”, he means a ruler with personal power unconstrained by law or custom.

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Fantasia 2016, Day 4: Questioning Genre (Beware the Slenderman, In a Valley of Violence, and The Unseen)

Fantasia 2016, Day 4: Questioning Genre (Beware the Slenderman, In a Valley of Violence, and The Unseen)

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Beware the SlendermanSunday, July 17, began early for me. I went down to the Hall Theatre to watch Parasyte: Part 2 (I’ve written about it here, along with Part 1), then took care of some personal errands before returning to the Hall to watch a documentary called Beware the Slenderman, about a case of attempted murder and its apparent inspiration in internet stories about a shadowy monster. After that I planned to watch In a Valley of Violence, a Western starring Ethan Hawke, John Travolta, and Karen Gillan. Then I’d go across the street to see the world premiere of a Canadian film called The Unseen, which promised a new take on the idea of the invisible man.

Beware the Slenderman, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, is an examination of a crime that took place in small town in Wisconsin on May 31, 2014. Two twelve-year-old girls took a mutual friend out to a nearby forest and stabbed her fourteen times before leaving her to die. The girls believed they were acting in the service of a terrifying creature called the Slender Man. Brodsky’s film examines the causes of the crime, presenting the background of the stories of the Slender Man before analysing the family life and mental health of the two girls, and then following the girls for a time through the justice system.

Doubts about the film immediately arise. There are elements of mystery in its structure — why did these children do this thing? — that really does it no favours. The film ends up focussing on the girls’ mental states, so the mystery aspect ultimately feels superficial at best and exploitative at worst. It’s hard as well not to notice that there’s no involvement from the victim or her family. One might wonder if the film also exploits fears about the neurodivergent. The narrative it settles on, the explanation of what led to the killing, involves undiagnosed mental conditions on the part of the two girls. This is a plausible analysis, to say the least, but what’s the film doing by presenting it? What is the point of telling this story?

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New Treasures: The Greatship by Robert Reed

New Treasures: The Greatship by Robert Reed

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The Greatship-small The Greatship-back-small

I’ve been hearing about Robert Reed’s Greatship stories for a very long time. The tales of a vast spaceship relic that is larger than worlds, and which contains thousands of alien species, the Greatship stories appeared first in F&SF and Asimov’s Science Fiction in the mid-90s, and were frequently reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies.

By the last decade Reed was producing ambitious novellas in his Greatship universe, and they were appearing primarily in anthologies — especially the novella-friendly anthologies from the Science Fiction Book Club — such as “Camouflage” (in Down These Dark Spaceways, May 2005), “Rococo” (Forbidden Planets, May 2006), “The Man with the Golden Balloon” (Galactic Empires, February 2008), and “Alone” (Godlike Machines, September 2010). There was also at least one standalone chapbook, Mere, from Golden Gryphon Press, and three novels: Marrow (2000), The Well of Stars (2005), and A Memory of Sky (2014).

Three years ago, Argo-Navis press produced the first collection, The Greatship, which gathered a dozen short stories and novellas written over the past 20 years (including Mere and all four novellas mentioned above), along with additional connecting material and an introduction. At $31.99 in trade paperback it’s a bit pricey, but it’s well worth it to have so much great material in one place.

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