Black Gate – Page 650 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

When It’s Time to Railroad . . .

Friday, July 15, 2016 Violette Malan Comments 0 Comment

Dracula I don’t think there’s anyone in the Fantasy and SF community that isn’t familiar with this concept (I first came across it in a Heinlein novel) but just in case: There’s a point at which all the necessary components to allow for an invention to flourish are in existence, and at that point – and not before – the invention takes off.

In other words, when it’s time to railroad, everybody railroads. It explains in part why so many inventors seem to file patents within weeks or months of each other, and why so many different people are credited with being the first one to invent something.

Look at it this way, Leonardo da Vinci is credited with the invention of numerous devices he didn’t actually build and/or wasn’t able to build, because the supporting industry, or the supporting technologies weren’t yet in existence.

I want to suggest that this happens in the arts as well. Consider the vampire, as an example. For all intents and literary purposes, the vampire was invented by Bram Stoker. A few other writers showed an interest, but not much was done with the idea until the latter half of the 20^th century, when it became time to vampire.

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Goth Chick News: Kiefer Sutherland and Hollywood Both Flatline

Thursday, July 14, 2016 Sue Granquist Comments 8 comments

Back in 1988 a then-unknown Boston screenwriter Peter Filardi had an idea for a story based on a very personal source; a close friend of his suffered a severe allergic reaction to the anesthesia after an operation and had a near-death experience.

Filardi went on to write The Craft and Salem’s Lot, but in 1990 he and director Joel Schumacher (St. Elmo’s Fire) turned that potential tragedy into the very lucrative film Flatliners.

The original Flatliners followed a group of medical students and close friends who conduct experiments with near death experiences. Each one has their heart stopped before being revived instantly, which causes them nightmarish visions, reflecting either sins they have committed or sins committed against them.

As you can imagine, their unorthodox extracurricular studies have very dark consequences, as the supernatural apparitions they experience during their “deaths” begin to follow them into the living world.

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Future Treasures: Four Roads Cross by Max Gladstone

Thursday, July 14, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Four Roads Cross is the fifth novel in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, which Ken Liu calls “Brilliant, elegant, epic, astonishing, smart, gritty,” and Django Wexler says is “garnished with skeleton kings, serpent gods, and lawyer-magicians. It’s glorious.” Here’s the description.

The great city of Alt Coulumb is in crisis. The moon goddess Seril, long thought dead, is back – and the people of Alt Coulumb aren’t happy. Protests rock the city, and Kos Everburning’s creditors attempt a hostile takeover of the fire god’s church. Tara Abernathy, the god’s in-house Craftswoman, must defend the church against the world’s fiercest necromantic firm–and against her old classmate, a rising star in the Craftwork world.

As if that weren’t enough, Cat and Raz, supporting characters from Three Parts Dead, are back too, fighting monster pirates; skeleton kings drink frozen cocktails, defying several principles of anatomy; jails, hospitals, and temples are broken into and out of; choirs of flame sing over Alt Coulumb; demons pose significant problems; a farmers’ market proves more important to world affairs than seems likely; doctors of theology strike back; Monk-Technician Abelard performs several miracles; The Rats! play Walsh’s Place; and dragons give almost-helpful counsel.

We covered all four previous novels — which, as Max explains on his blog, are ordered not by publication date, but by title:

Last First Snow
Two Serpents Rise
Three Parts Dead
Four Roads Cross
Full Fathom Five

Here they are in correct sequence.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Truck Stop Earth by Michael A. Armstrong

Thursday, July 14, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Truck Stop Earth by Michael A. Armstrong, published in deluxe trade paperback and digital formats this month by Perseid Press. Here’s Janet Morris, publisher of Perseid.

Is Truck Struck Earth a memoir? Science fiction? New Pulp? Paranormal (or paranoid) fantasy? Noir in the Shaver tradition? UFOlogy? Magical realism? Social Commentary? Black humor? We dunno. But we’re proud to bring you this tough, dangerous book that breaks every rule you thought separated true from false, good from bad, and literature from trash.

Michael A. Armstrong’s first novel was After the Zap. His short fiction has been published in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Science Fiction, Fiction Quarterly, and various anthologies, including Not of Woman Born, a Philip K. Dick award nominee, and several Heroes In Hell anthologies. His other novels include Agviq, The Hidden War, and Bridge Over Hell, part of the Perseid Press Heroes in Hell universe.

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The Strange and Happy Life of The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

Wednesday, July 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Berkley 1967-small

Astounding Tales of Space and Time Berkley 1967-small

The lifecycle of a modern anthology ain’t that complicated. It comes out in hardcover or trade paperback from a small press, stays in print for 5-6 years or so — or until the small press suffers a horrible death, whichever comes first — and then vanishes, popping up thereafter only on eBay and at SF conventions, like a Star Trek action figure.

It didn’t always used to be this way. Used to be that anthologies would appear originally in hardcover, just like real books, and then get reprinted in paperback (also, just like real books). And sometimes those paperbacks would get multiple editions over the decades. (No, I’m not joking. And yes, I know we’re talking about anthologies.)

But go back father than that, to the beginnings of American publishing itself — scholars of this dark and mysterious period are conflicted about actual dates, but in general we’re talking about the 1940s and 50s — and we enter a time when paperbacks had a fixed upper page limit. So how did these primitive cave-dwelling publishers reprint popular volumes, like for example John Campbell’s 600-page beast The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (Simon & Schuster, 1952), when the typical paperback of the era contained barely 100 pages?

No easy task, but our intrepid publishing forefathers found a way. They broke the book up into two volumes and, because giving them similar names would have been just too easy, gave the paperback editions completely different titles. Thus the groundbreaking hardcover edition of The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology spawned two paperbacks: The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology and Astounding Tales of Space and Time, both of which remained in print in various editions for years, confusing collectors like yours truly for decades. Let’s have a closer look, because I ended up buying all seven of the damn things before I figured out they were all the same book, and they might as well be useful for something.

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The Son of the Return of Ravenloft Again

Wednesday, July 13, 2016 Jackson Kuhl Comments 0 Comment

Over at Dragon+, Wizards of the Coast has published James Wyatt’s Plane Shift: Innistrad, a free pdf that introduces Dungeons & Dragons to Magic: The Gathering’s world of Gothic horror:

The starting point for this document was The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Innistrad. Consider that book to be a useful resource in creating your Innistrad campaign, but not strictly necessary. An abundance of lore about Innistrad can be found on the Magic web-site. This document is designed to help you turn the book’s adventure hooks and story seeds into a resource for your campaign with a minimum of changes to the fifth edition D&D rules.

It’s hard to determine where the snake’s head begins and its tail ends here: Innistrad was MtG’s version of D&D’s Ravenloft, which itself has gone through umpteen editions, the most recent being WotC’s Curse of Strahd hardback; and Plane Shift: Innistrad contains suggestions for moving the action of Curse of Strahd from Barovia to Innistrad.

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Teaching History through Wargaming: Strategy & Tactics #280: Soldiers 1918

Wednesday, July 13, 2016 Sean McLachlan Comments 4 comments

I’ve been a history buff all my life, and this interest led me to a career as an archaeologist before becoming a writer specializing in history and historical fiction. Thus it’s not surprising that I want my ten-year-old son to have a firm grounding of history, even though he takes more after his astronomer mother and will almost certainly go into one of the STEM fields.

One of my main interests is World War One, so when I visited Belgium a couple of years ago for the centenary I brought him back some Belgian comics on the conflict. Now we’re watching the excellent Channel Four series The First World War. I’m also vocally hoping he’ll read my Trench Raiders series, so far with no luck! I’ve been pushing this particular era of history because we live in Madrid. Since Spain wisely stayed out of the war, I don’t think the Spanish educational system will teach him as much about WWI as I think he should know.

So why not add a little extra knowledge through wargaming? He’s been expressing an interest in it lately since his favorite comics shop has some wargaming tables, so I invested in issue #280 of Strategy & Tactics, a classic wargaming magazine that’s older than I am. This issue comes with the game Soldiers 1918: Decision in the Trenches, which one BoardGameGeek labeled as “medium light” in difficulty.

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Clarkesworld 118 Now Available

Wednesday, July 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Clarkesworld #118 has five new stories by Mike Buckley, Eric Schwitzgebel, John Chu, Jack Schouten, and A Que, and two reprints by Linda Nagata and Mary Rosenblum.

Short stories featured this issue are:

“Helio Music” by Mike Buckley
“Fish Dance” by Eric Schwitzgebel
“The Sentry Branch Predictor Spec: A Fairy Tale” by John Chu
“Sephine and the Leviathan” by Jack Schouten
“Against the Stream” by A Que
“Nahiku West” by Linda Nagata (from Analog Science Fiction, October 2012)
“Lion Walk” by Mary Rosenblum (from Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2009)

The non-fiction is:

Paradise Lost: A History of Fantasy and the Otherworld by Christopher Mahon
Talkative Creatures and a Mesozoic Cocktail: A Conversation with Michael Swanwick by Chris Urie
Another Word: Burning Bridges by Peter Watts
Editor’s Desk: What is it with Readercon? by Neil Clarke

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Belated Movie Review #7: Towards a Unified Theory of Hudson Hawk

Tuesday, July 12, 2016 Adrian Simmons Comments 13 comments

So there’s this network, Comet TV, that shows old sci-fi shows and movies and such. As I live in a media cave without cable or Netflix I sometimes catch said old movies there. A couple of weeks ago I caught the 1991 Bruce Willis vehicle Hudson Hawk — a movie both loved and reviled! An action/comedy that is, in most senses, the final word on action comedies.

Most people absolutely HATE this movie. Especially snobs whose jobs depend on them hating movies. Can I provide examples? Oh yes:

Terry Cliffored, writing for the Chicago Tribune notes:

Boring and banal, overwrought and undercooked, Hudson Hawk is beyond bad.

Kenneth Truan scribbling gloomily for the L.A. Times had this to say:

The saddest thing about Hudson Hawk is that director Lehmann and co-screenwriter Waters were previously responsible for the clever, audacious “Heathers,” a film that represented all that is most promising about American film, while this one represents all that is most moribund and retrograde. Perhaps they both earned enough money here so that they won’t be tempted to indulge themselves in similar big-budget fiascoes. Here’s hoping.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t include Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers trying to be cool by bemoaning it thusly:

A movie this unspeakably awful can make an audience a little crazy. You want to throw things, yell at the actors, beg them to stop.

You know what? Screw them! There are some movies that are simply beyond the grasp of tiny minds — and this is one of those movies, if not the king of such movies.

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New Treasures: In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus, edited by Stephen Jones

Tuesday, July 12, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Mary W. Shelley’s gothic horror masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was published in 1818, shortly after the author turned 20. As we approach the 200th anniversary of one of the greatest horror novels in history, we can expect to see plenty of tribute volumes. But for my money, the only one you need is Stephen Jones’ massive In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus, a 712-page tome which collects pulp stories from Astounding and Weird Tales, modern riffs on the legend of Frankenstein, and three complete novels.

Frankenstein… His very name conjures up images of plundered graves, secret laboratories, electrical experiments, and reviving the dead. Within these pages, the maddest doctor of them all and his demented disciples once again delve into the Secrets of Life, as science fiction meets horror when the world’s most famous creature lives again.

Here are collected together for the first time twenty-four electrifying tales of cursed creation that are guaranteed to spark your interest — with classics from the pulp magazines by Robert Bloch and Manly Wade Wellman, modern masterpieces from Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Karl Edward Wagner, David J. Schow, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and new contributions from Graham Masterson, Basil Copper, John Brunner, Guy N. Smith, Kim Newman, Paul J. McAuley, Roberta Lannes, Michael Marshall Smith, Daniel Fox, Adrian Cole, Nancy Kilpatrick, Brian Mooney and Lisa Morton. Plus, you’re sure to get a charge from three complete novels: The Hound of Frankenstein by Peter Tremayne, The Dead End by David Case, and Mary W. Shelley’s original masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

As an electrical storm rages overhead, the generators are charged up, and beneath the sheet a cold form awaits its miraculous rebirth. Now it’s time to throw that switch and discover all that Man Was Never Meant to Know.

In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus is a revised an updated edition of The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Carroll & Graf, 1994), and if you have that volume, you probably don’t need this one. This new hardcover edition adds a new Foreword by Neil Gaiman and one new story, Stephen Volk’s “Celebrity Frankenstein,” from Postscripts 28/29 (2012), bringing the total to 24 stories. Diabolique Magazine calls the new edition “a stunning array of stories;” check out their complete review here. In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus was published by Pegasus Books on July 5, 2016. It is 712 pages, priced at $27.95 in hardcover and $26.23 for the digital edition.