Black Gate – Page 641 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Return of Dabir and Asim

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Howard Andrew Jones sent me a letter in the very early days of Black Gate. It was articulate and delightful, and I remember it well. He welcomed the magazine to the fold, speaking enthusiastically about our focus on classic adventure fantasy. He also included a story featuring two characters of his own creation, Dabir and Asim, sleuths and adventurers who strode the crowded streets and dark ways of ninth century Arabia, facing dark sorcery and ancient evils, armed only with their wits and cold steel.

Dabir and Asim had many adventures together. I bought two of those tales for Black Gate — “Sight of Vengeance” (BG 10), and “Whispers from the Stone,” (BG 12) — and they became some of the most popular stories we ever published. Dabir and Asim appeared in two novels, The Desert of Souls and Bones of the Old Ones, one collection, The Waters of Eternity, and many other places (such as the awesome Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters anthology), before Howard turned his talents to other worthy endeavors. But you can’t keep great characters down for long, and on his blog yesterday Howard announced the return of Dabir and Asim in a brand new tale — and hinted at further adventures in the works.

For the first time this year I’ve sold a short story. I’m delighted to relay that the upcoming Skelos magazine will be carrying a never-before-published Dabir and Asim story in its second issue! You can see magazine details here and there is, briefly, still time to get in on its kickstarter.

I still fully plan to finish writing at least one more Dabir and Asim novel. If I can actually maintain the pace with this current set of drafts, I hope to find time to create a new Dabir and Asim every other year or so and market it as an e-book.

Welcome back, lads! You were missed.

Read our own coverage of the exciting launch of Skelos here, and Howard’s complete announcement on his blog.

The June Fantasy Magazine Rack

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Lots of great reading for fantasy fans in June, and the month is just getting started.

In addition to all the new magazine releases, our intrepid reviewers kept you posted on classic fiction — including the latest installment from Matthew Wuertz of his long-running re-read of Galaxy magazine from the early 50s, and our look at the first two volumes of The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1926 and 1927 Anthologies, edited by Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our May Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

As we’ve mentioned before, all of these magazines are completely dependent on fans and readers to keep them alive. Many are marginal operations for whom a handful of subscriptions may mean the difference between life and death. Why not check one or two out, and try a sample issue? There are magazines here for every budget, from completely free to $35/issue. If you find something intriguing, I hope you’ll consider taking a chance on a subscription. I think you’ll find it’s money very well spent.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1953: A Retro-Review

Tuesday, June 7, 2016 Matthew Wuertz Comments 6 comments

In the May, 1953 issue of Galaxy, Editor H. L. Gold opens with some thoughts on science fiction and the future. He writes:

Does good science fiction, then, pretend to describe the actual future? No, certainly not. Anyone who thinks so is missing the point… We’re having fun with ideas, making first this one and then that predominant just to see what might happen if.

“Wherever You May Be” by James A. Gunn — Matt Wright is heading to a hunting cabin in the Ozarks to write his thesis but has car problems. While he’s trying to get it running again, he finds a young woman named Abbie laughing at him. She ran away from home and hopes to go with Matt, but he’s not about to take in someone claiming to be 16 (she’s actually 18), so he takes her home to her father. Matt expects to find signs of abuse but finds the older man wants to be rid of his daughter — as though he’s afraid of her.

When Matt finally reaches the cabin (after getting lost a few times), he finds Abbie waiting for him. Given the late hour, he decides to let her stay. She tells him that sometimes things happen around her — objects moving as she thinks about them. Yet as he tests her abilities, she seems unable to do anything, unless she becomes upset.

Matt decides that she will be his new research paper, though she doesn’t know it. He could run all kinds of tests on her abilities. Except that it’s clear that she’s happy being with him — that she likes him. So he considers a way to enhance her powers — by breaking her heart.

I still can’t decide how I feel about this story, so I credit it with sticking with me. Abbie’s character anchors the entire story. But I just can’t stand Matt. And I don’t like the ending because I feel it cheapens Abbie’s character and pardons Matt. I think there are other ways that could have led to a similar conclusion without leaving me a bit jaded. Regardless, as I said, the story stuck with me, even with the ending (or maybe because of the ending).

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Future Treasures: Dreams of Distant Shores, by Patricia A. McKillip

Tuesday, June 7, 2016 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

A new collection by Patricia A. McKillip is a major event. In the first four decades of her very accomplished career she released a scant two short story collections: The Throme of the Erril of Sherill (1984) and Harrowing the Dragon (2005). Taychon Publications has doubled that number just in the last four years, starting with Wonders of the Invisible World (2012), and now Dreams of Distant Shores, on sale in trade paperback next week.

Dreams of Distant Shores includes four short stories, a novella, and a short (121 page) novel, Something Rich and Strange, set in Brian Froud’s Faerielands, which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature in 1994. It also includes “Writing High Fantasy,” a 6-page essay by Patricia A. McKillip, and “Dear Pat: Afterword,” a new 6-page essay by Peter S. Beagle. See the back cover above for the complete description (click for a more legible version.)

Dreams of Distant Shores will be published by Tachyon Publications on June 14, 2016. It is 274 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Thomas Canty.

Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden by Jack Vance

Tuesday, June 7, 2016 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 6 comments

Lines from the song “Comedy Tonight” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum sprung to mind numerous times this past week while I was reading Jack Vance’s Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden (1983). While definitely not a comedy, it is by turns familiar and peculiar, convulsive and repulsive, as well as dramatic and frenetic. And sometimes, very funny. It is also one of the most inventive, strange, and bewitching books I have had the joy to read.

His first collection, the fantasy classic The Dying Earth (which you can read about in John O’Neill’s post here), helped make Vance’s early reputation as a writer of lapidarian prose, cynical wit, and above all as an inventor of incredibly original cultures, worlds, and characters. For the next three decades of his career he seemed to eschew straight fantasy, and most of his published work was science-fiction and mysteries. In 1983, though, he released a lengthy work of fantasy, Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden (L:SG). It rapidly shifts from studies of realpolitik, to fey whimsy, to dark violence that might make George R.R. Martin blush, yet it’s never jarring but completely complementary and intoxicating.

Over the following six years he added two sequels, The Green Pearl (1985), and Madouc (1989). With the latter, Vance beat out Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers, and Jonathan Carroll, among others, to win the 1990 World Fantasy Best Novel Award.

In European legend, both the lands of Lyonesse and Hy Brasil, as well as the city of Ys, sank beneath the sea. In Vance’s novel they are found among the “Elder Isles, now sunk beneath the Atlantic, [which] in olden times were located across the Cantabrian Gulf (now the Bay of Biscay) from Old Gaul.”

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The Magic of Hobbyland

Monday, June 6, 2016 markrigney Comments 7 comments

My first addiction was model trains, HO gauge engines and layouts that I was forever redesigning. Because I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the need for new boxcars and Plasticville edifices led me without fail to a mid-sized indie shop in the Graceland Shopping Center called Hobbyland.

What I didn’t know until the summer between sixth and seventh grades was that Hobbyland had also begun to carry, mixed in with the how-to guides on paper airplanes and WW II tank models, peculiar tomes that hinted at inexplicable mysteries: Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry.

To enter Hobbyland in those early years of my next addiction was to experience, in its most literal form, the marvelous. Forget about the trains, planes, and automobiles. The real heartbeat of the place turned out to be the display-rack bookshelves, gray-painted, not numerous.

You remember. You recall how those early D&D books were so peculiar, so thrown-together, more like pamphlets and broadsides than the sort of book that sat on your parents’ shelves at home. Greyhawk, etc., would have sat well with quackery advertising (phrenology, anyone?) or the meditations of theosophists or Doctor Dee.

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New Treasures: Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

Monday, June 6, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Lavie Tidhar is a fast-rising superstar. His novel Osama won the World Fantasy Award in 2012, and his “Guns & Sorcery” novella Gorel & The Pot Bellied God won the British Fantasy Award. The Violent Century, his most recent novel, was called “A masterpiece” by both the Independent and Library Journal, and his second short story collection Black Gods Kiss was nominated for the British Fantasy Award.

His latest is Central Station, a fix-up novel composed of nearly a dozen stories published in places like Analog, Interzone, and Clarkesworld, plus two new tales. NPR Books calls it “just this side of a masterpiece — short, restrained, lush — and the truest joy of it is in the way Tidhar scatters brilliant ideas like pennies on the sidewalk.” Tor.com said it is “without question the best assemblage of short stories I’ve read in recent memory,” and Starburst Magazine gives it 10 out of 10 stars, calling it “profound, incredibly moving and, quite simply, stunning.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The MX Anthologies – All the Holmes You Need

Monday, June 6, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 5 comments

David Marcum and I email each other. A lot! It is sort of a modern version of the HP Lovecraft – Robert E. Howard letter swapping. Without the gravitas. And the weirdness. And the literary importance. And the…oh, never mind. One Thursday afternoon in January of 2015, he sent me an email about a dream that he had had the previous night.

The dream (and the email) was about putting together a multi-author anthology of traditional Sherlock Holmes stories. As David typed, “There would be no weird Alternate Universe or present-day stuff, no Holmes-is-the-Ripper, nothing where Watson is at Holmes’s funeral or vice-versa. Etc. Essentially nothing that shockingly contradicts what is in the Canon.”

Earlier that morning, he had emailed Steve Emecz, his publisher at MX Books, about the idea. From that dream was born the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. Except more authors signed on and it grew to two books: then to three. Then came another volume in 2016. And a fifth, containing only Christmas stories, and a sixth, are on their way! In fact, I should be finishing my Christmas tale right now, not writing this post.

The four volumes have contained ten introductions/forewords/essays, five poems and over eighty new stories. That’s EIGHTY Holmes short stories (including a couple of plays) making their first book appearances in this series. I read Holmes stories at a pretty heavy pace and I’m still working my way through these volumes.

The first three books came out as a trilogy, split into time periods (1881-1889, 1890-1895 and 1896-1929). Volume IV followed as the ‘2016 Annual’ and it is expected that there will be at least one new collection yearly into the foreseeable future.

And every single author participating has donated their royalties to the restoration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former home, Undershaw, which, when completed, will be a part of Stepping Stones, a school for children with learning disabilities. As my sister Carolyn is severely mentally retarded, I can appreciate the generosity of every one of my fellow authors. Actions like this matter.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Taught You: A Look at How Peter Straub Crafts His Opening Chapters

Sunday, June 5, 2016 Tina Jens Comments 3 comments

Taking advantage of the fact that I’m not teaching this summer, I decided instead to take a course in the Fiction Program at Columbia College: Censorship and Writing. The course explores many kinds of censorship, not just the book-banning, burning, remove it from the library kinds. It includes self-censorship, social censorship, and censorship in the news, among others. Last week, one of our assignments was to write an essay about something we had learned about writing from reading another author. I chose to look at how Peter Straub crafts a rich and complex opening chapter, looking especially close at the beginning of his novel The Hellfire Club. With my blog deadline looming, I decided it would be equally appropriate to share it with you.

Lessons from Peter Straub’s Fiction

Peter Straub is an international best-seller of dark fantasy, horror, thriller, and mystery works. But he’s also a damned-fine writer, which is probably why he isn’t as big a household-known name as Stephen King, but also why his writing is more revered and studied.

From Straub I learned that commercial genre fiction can blend literary techniques, lyricism, and narrative grace with fantasy and horror tropes and mystery and thriller structure to produce work that is pleasing, popular, and thoughtful.

He is also a master of what I call the Story Promise, which is literally the promises made to the reader in the first few graphs, the first few pages, about what to expect from the story.

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Self-published Book Review: The Chained Adept by Karen Myers

Sunday, June 5, 2016 Donald Crankshaw Comments 0 Comment

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see this post for instructions to submit. I’ve received very few submissions recently, and I’d like to get more.

This month, we look at The Chained Adept by Karen Myers.

Penrys has worked at the Collegium—a college of wizards—for the past three years, but she’s not from there. No one knows where she’s from. She has enough magical knowledge and power to frighten the wizards of the Collegium, but she has no memories prior to being found lying naked in the snow and no clues as to her origins aside from the chain she wears around her neck and her furred ears, neither of which anyone has seen before. The Collegium gave her the title of adept and access to their library, but her research taught her less about herself than about the use and creation of magical devices. When one of those devices flings her halfway around the world, she only discovers more questions.

Penrys finds herself in an army camp under magical attack. After helping to defeat the attack, she is put under the watchful care of the wizard Zandaril, who is from the nomadic horse-herders of Zannib. His nation is renowned for its mind-wizards, but even he is in awe of what Penrys can do with her mind-magic. It goes far beyond telepathy to learning skills and language from those nearby and detecting people and even animals at incredible distances. It’s more than enough to make the Kigali army suspicious. The Kigali have no wizards, which explains why they turned to the allied nation of Zannib for magical assistance for their expeditionary force. They’re investigating rumors of an invasion in the Neshilik region.

Penrys soon makes herself useful, uncovering a plot to sabotage the camp, and thereby earns enough trust to be sent on a scouting mission with Zandaril to find out what they can about the Rasesni invaders’ wizards. They soon discover that the Rasesni are not so much invading as fleeing, and that what they’re fleeing has much to do with Penrys’s forgotten past.

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