Black Gate – Page 646 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Andrew Liptak on All the Best SF and Fantasy You Missed in August

Tuesday, August 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Over at The Verge, Andrew Liptak has posted a handy little reader’s guide titled “New Adventures: all the best science fiction and fantasy books coming out in August.” It appeared way back on August 1, but I just got around to reading it now, which really makes it All the Best SF and Fantasy I Missed in August. But whatever, it’s packed with lots of great recommended reading, and anyway September looks a lot quieter than August, so maybe I can get caught up. Here’s hoping.

Andrew seems intrigued by the steampunk adventure The Guild Conspiracy, by Brooke Johnson, the sequel to The Brass Giant (2015).

The latest installment of Brooke Johnson’s Chroniker City finds its hero Petra Wade six months after her last adventure. Tasked with building a war machine, she’s been sabotaging the project to try and stave off a coming war, and her overseers are watching her every move. It’s been a while since we’ve picked up a good steampunk adventure, and this one looks like it’s just what we need.

And also the moody Alternate History tale The Last Days of Night, by Graham Moore.

Set in 1888 at the birth of the electrical age, it follows a young lawyer named Paul Cravath who’s asked to defend industry titan George Westinghouse against a billion dollar lawsuit from inventor Thomas Edison. This novel is being adapted into a film by The Imitation Game‘s director, Morten Tyldum, which has us excited.

And the latest novella from Tor.com Publishing: The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson.

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The 2016 Mythopoeic Award Winners

Tuesday, August 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

With all my travels and such this month, I haven’t done a very good job keeping up with all the genre news. For example, I completely missed reporting on the 2016 Mythopoeic Awards, which were announced by the Mythopoeic Society at Mythcon 47 on August 7. Here they are!

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature

Castle Hangnail, Ursula Vernon (Dial)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, Grevel Lindop (Oxford University Press)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies

The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, Jamie Williamson (Palgrave Macmillan)

That’s quite a capstone for Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, which so far this year has also won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and is also a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. I was also pleased to see Jamie Williamson’s non-fiction book The Evolution of Modern Fantasy, one of the first books to seriously study Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, get some recognition as well.

Last year’s winner of the Mythopoeic Award was BG author Sarah Avery, whose Tales from Rugosa Coven won in the Adult Literartue category. Get all the details on this year’s nominees at Locus Online.

New Treasures: Bell Weather by Dennis Mahoney

Monday, August 29, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Dennis Mahoney’s previous novel was Fellow Mortals (2013), the tale of a small community struggling to recover from a fire. Bell Weather is a significant departure, an adventure fantasy set in a strange world not quite our own, where a mysterious young woman, rescued from a flooded river, is brought to an isolated settlement where dark forces terrorize the surrounding woods. Katherine Dunn (Geek Love) says, “The time is far off, the place is charming strange, and this is rollicking, jaw-clenching adventure.” And Kirkus Reviews gives it a rave, saying:

A young woman’s past catches up with her in a magic, recently colonized new world in this historical fantasy… The real strength of this novel is its stunning worldbuilding, which merges the aesthetic of the Colonial Americas with Márquez-style magical realism.

This one sounds hard to qualify… but if you enjoy historical fantasy, magic realism, or adventure fantasy, Bell Weather definitely sounds worth a shot.

Bell Weather was published by St. Martin’s Griffin on August 9, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback, or $9.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Willco (click the images above for bigger versions).

#rurallife or Can You Hear Me Now?

Monday, August 29, 2016 Julie Czerneda Comments 3 comments

This guest post by Julie Czerneda is part of the #futurespasttour, taking place from Aug 22nd to Sept 6th. Enter for a chance to win one of two sets of Julie Czerneda’s books: a mass market paperback edition of A Gulf of Time and Stars plus a hardcover edition of The Gates of Futures Past. US/Canada residents only, please. Enter here for the Rafflecopter giveaway.

At Fantasy Café earlier in this blog tour, I regaled you with the story of how we came to move to the country in the midst of my writing The Gate to Futures Past. If you haven’t read that post yet, by all means nip over and do so, because this one?

Is about what happened next.

Pretty much immediately next, in fact. While we waited for the moving truck, next. We stood inside our new, for-the-time, home, tired but triumphant, and reached for our cell phones to let the family know we’d arrived because we’d promised.

No signal.

Many houses have low-signal spots. In our previous domicile it had been, appropriately enough, beside the shelves with the Pratchetts. Walk a step away, and you were reconnected. L-Space.

Here? In short order we discovered every room and hallway, both floors, of our new house to be a dead zone. No signal at all, anywhere.

How… odd.

Outside we went, phones held high — a little giddy, truth be told, to be doing our own LARP of Mulder and Scully. Were we not, when said and done, in the middle of no-one-knew-where? (Literally. No one else knew exactly where we were, hence the promise to call. Not even a mailing address. More on that later.)

We followed our rising little bars as ardently as if chasing a Pokémon. Up the hill. Finally!

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Vincent Starrett on the Great Detective

Monday, August 29, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 6 comments

Otto Penzler is a larger than life name in the mystery field. He is the man behind New York City’s ‘Mysterious Bookstore’ as well as the Mysterious Press (Nero Wolfe’s current imprint!). He’s a true mystery maven. You can read about his recent The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories here. From 1993 through 1995, under the Otto Penzler Books imprint, he reissued nine hard-to-find works of Sherlockiana.

The Otto Penzler Sherlock Holmes Library consists of the following books, originally published between 1906 and 1967:

221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes — Vincent Starrett
Baker Street By-Ways — James Edward Holroyd
Baker Street Studies — Ed. By H.W. Bell
Holmes & Watson — S.C. Roberts
My Dear Holmes — Gavin Brend
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes — Vincent Starrett
Holmes & Company — John Kendrick Bangs
Seventeen Steps to 221B — Ed. By James Edward Holroyd
Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction? — T.S. Blakeney

Bear in mind, every bit of anything you ever wanted to know wasn’t available on the internet back when Penzler republished these books. Heck, the Baker Street Journal wasn’t even available as a collection on CD yet. This collection of Sherlockiana was uncommon for the time. Some entries are better than others, but they are all an affectionate part of my Sherlockian bookshelf (except, maybe for Bangs’ book).

Read on for reviews of the two Vincent Starrett entries in the series. You may remember reading his outstanding introduction to the first Solar Pons collection.

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Future Treasures: Women of Futures Past, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Sunday, August 28, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Baen is one of the few publishers still producing quality paperback anthologies — and indeed, they’ve had some excellent ones in the past few years. They look to continue that tradition next month with Women of Futures Past, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which contains 11 classic tales by Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore, C.J. Cherryh, Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress, James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, Connie Willis, Zenna Henderson, Anne McCaffrey, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Andre Norton.

As usual, Baen offers some free content online, including Rusch’s introduction, and the first two stories. Here’s the complete Table of Contents, with links to the online content.

Introduction: Invisible Women by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“The Indelible Kind“ by Zenna Henderson (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1968)
“The Smallest Dragonboy“ by Anne McCaffrey (Science Fiction Tales, 1973)
“Out of All Them Bright Stars” by Nancy Kress (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March, 1985)
“Angel” by Pat Cadigan (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1987)
“Cassandra” by C.J. Cherryh (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1978)
“Shambleau” by C.L. Moore (Weird Tales, November, 1933)
“The Last Days of Shandakor” by Leigh Brackett (Startling Stories, April 1952)
“All Cats Are Gray” by Andre Norton (Fantastic Universe, August/September 1953)
“Aftermaths” by Lois McMaster Bujold (Far Frontiers: The Paperback Magazine of Science Fiction and Speculative Fact, Volume V, Spring 1986)
“The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” by James Tiptree, Jr. (Galaxy, March 1969)
“Sur” by Ursula K. Le Guin (The New Yorker, February 1, 1982)
“Fire Watch” by Connie Willis (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 15, 1982)

And here’s the complete description.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July

Sunday, August 28, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Black Gate had 1.26 million page views last month, very nearly a record. Much of that bump in traffic was due to a series of very popular posts. Derek Kunsken has long been one of our most popular bloggers — his interview with Christopher Golden was our third most popular article in October, and last month his piece on Rebirth: DC’s corrective reboot was #5. But he thoroughly dominated the charts in July, claiming both the #2 slot, with his look back at Marvel’s Star-Lord, and the top spot, with his examination of the soaked-in misogyny of Piers Anthony’s famed Xanth series. Remember to leave room for the rest of us, Derek!

Bob Byrne was #3 on the list, with the second half of his two-part history of Necromancer and Frog God Games. Nick Ozment had our second most popular comic article in July, claiming the fourth spot on the list with his retrospective of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Rounding out the Top Five was our look at Chaosium’s classic Runequest campaign Borderlands.

Also in the Top Ten were Adrian Simmons’ belated review of Hudson Hawk, M Harold Page’s review of The Trojan War: A New History, some comments on James Wallace Harris’ popular post “Who Still Reads 1950s Science Fiction?”, Bob Byrne’s examination of a century of John D. MacDonald, and our look at the 2016 David Gemmell Award Nominees.

The complete list of Top Articles for July follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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Last Chance to Get a Free Copy of Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith

Sunday, August 28, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Two weeks ago we told you that Enigmatic Mirror Press was offering free review copies of the new anthology Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith in digital format to Black Gate readers, in return for honest reviews (e.g., at Amazon, Goodreads, etc.) There’s still time to get in on the offer, but you have to act fast.

What is Mysterion? It’s a groundbreaking anthology of Christian fantasy, edited by Black Gate author Donald Crankshaw (“A Phoenix in Darkness“) and his wife Kristin Janz. It will be released this week, and contains original fiction from Beth Cato, Pauline J. Alama, Stephen Case, David Tallerman, and many others. Here’s the description:

The Christian faith is filled with mystery, from the Trinity and the Incarnation to the smaller mysteries found in some of the strange and unexplained passages of the Bible: Behemoth and Leviathan, nephilim and seraphim, heroes and giants and more. There is no reason for fiction engaging with Christianity to be more tidy and theologically precise than the faith itself.

Here you will find challenging fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories that wrestle with tough questions and refuse to provide easy answers or censored depictions of a broken world, characters whose deeds are as obscene as their words and people who meet bad ends — sometimes deserved and sometimes not. But there are also hope, grace, and redemption, though even they can burn like fire.

Join us as we rediscover the mysteries of the Christian faith.

If you’re willing to read the book and provide a review, just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “Mysterion,” and we’ll forward it along to the publisher. But we must receive your request before the publication date.

Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith will be published by Enigmatic Mirror Press on August 31, 2016. It is 324 pages, priced at $9.99 in digital format. See the complete Table of Contents here.

When Men Were Men and Aliens Were Green and Up to No Good: The Pulp Tales of Robert Silverberg

Sunday, August 28, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

In the Beginning Tales from the Pulp Era Robert Silverberg-small

Early Days More Tales from the Pulp Era Robert Silverberg-small

Robert Silverberg’s career as a science fiction writer spans over six decades. His first short story, “Gorgon Planet,” appeared in the February 1954 issue of Nebula Science Fiction, when he was 19 years old, and his first novel, Revolt on Alpha C, was published in 1955. He won a Hugo in 1956 for “Best New Writer,” and for the next few years — until the market for SF magazines collapsed in 1959 — he was extraordinarily prolific, routinely publishing five stories a month, and producing roughly a million words a year.

He published over 80 stories in 1958 alone, in magazines like Imaginative Tales, Fantastic, Amazing Stories, Imagination, and many others. His story “Re-Conditioned Human” appeared in the February 1959 issue of Super-Science Fiction (see the cover below left), and he had two novelettes in the April issue (below right): “Vampires from Outer Space” (under the name Richard F. Watson) and “Mournful Monster” (as Don Malcolm).

Those magazines are almost impossible to find now (unless you’re Rich Horton, of course), but Subterranean Press has done a favor for Silverberg fans — and pulp fans — everywhere by assembling two handsome volumes of his early work. In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era was published in hardcover in February 2006, and Early Days: More Tales from the Pulp Era will arrive on August 31, 2016.

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Black Static #53 Now on Sale

Saturday, August 27, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

British horror magazine Black Static #53, cover-dated July-August, is now available. Over at Dread Central, Gareth Jones has penned a rave review of the entire issue. Here’s a snippet:

One of the best stories to appear in Black Static in recent months (and that’s saying something!), Priya Sharma’s “Inheritance or The Ruby Tear” kicks off Black Static’s 53rd issue in formidable style. Part gothic romance, part Bone Tomahawk-esque rescue/revenge story, “Inheritance” follows the sorrows of Lord William Mansell, a wealthy aristocrat whose wife and daughter appear lost to the sea when their wagon falls from the cliff edge and is dashed upon the rocks… a thoroughly absorbing novelette that deftly blends elegant tension, mystery, frenetic violence and stark horror…

Harmony Neal’s “Dare” sees a group of teenage girls sitting around playing Truth or Dare whilst drinking vodka mixers. As expected for a genre work, things quickly get dark – the girls’ own unique demons sending them down a path of unified expression that sees “keeping up appearances” extend to collective disfigurement.

“The Rim of the World” by Kristi DeMeester paints an increasing sense of foreboding as it progresses, telling the story of couple Laurel and Jacob as they return to the ramshackle home of Laurel’s deceased grandmother. Laurel’s reminiscing reminds Jacob of the horrific run-up to his own sister’s death, tied in with a mysterious sand pile located not far from where the couple now lay. Atmosphere is the name of the game in this entry, DeMeester painting the sense of unseen, esoteric horrors lurking in the shadows, just waiting for the right moment to make themselves known…

Read the complete review here.

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