Black Gate – Page 652 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Sample Three New Pathfinder Tales Soundclips from Macmillan Audio!

Wednesday, June 1, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Pathfinder Tales Beyond the Pool of Stars audio-small

Two weeks ago we shared three Pathfinder Tales soundclip samples from Macmillan Audio with you, from the audiobook versions of Pirate’s Prophecy by Chris A. Jackson, Dave Gross’ Lord of Runes, and Liar’s Island by Tim Pratt. They were extremely well received, so we’re back by popular demand with three more — including a sample from Beyond the Pool of Stars, by our very own Howard Andrew Jones!

Hellknight by Liane Merciel
Bloodbound by F. Wesley Schneider
Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones

[Links will take you to our previous coverage of each book.]

Each clip is about ten minutes long. So sit back, close your eyes, and let professional readers Ilyana Kadushin and Steve West whisk you away to a world of magic and adventure!

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Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, edited by Rich Horton

Wednesday, June 1, 2016 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

We are well and truly into the Year’s Best season now, that delightful part of the year when the annual best-of-the-year anthologies start flying thick and fast. This year this season kicked off with Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten, and next week Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1 follows close on its heels. And that’s just the beginning — over the next two months we’ll see Year’s Best books from Gardner Dozois, Paula Guran (two!), Ellen Datlow, Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams, and many others. If you’re a short story lover like me, it’s a veritable embarrassment of riches.

If you can only afford to buy one, for my money Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 is the one to get. Rich’s taste is exemplary, and he ranges far and wide to hunt down the very best short fiction of the year. The eighth volume goes on sale next week, and includes C. S. E. Cooney’s novella The Two Paupers and Naomi Kritzer’s Hugo and Nebula nominee “Cat Pictures, Please,” plus several other Nebula nominees — including Tamsyn Muir’s novelette “The Deepwater Bride,” Brooke Bolander’s “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead,” and “Today I Am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker — and 25 more stories.

I do find that, year after year, Rich’s taste tends to align best with mine. But with several newcomers on the scene, I’m curious to see if Rich remains at the top of the heap. Giving him particular competition last year were the Strahan and Paula Guran volumes, especially The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas (and this year’s looks especially good).

Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 will be published by Prime Books on June 7, 2016. It is 576 pages, priced at $19.95 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. See the complete table of contents here.

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May 2016 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

Tuesday, May 31, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The contents of the May issue of online magazine Nightmare are now fully available at the magazine’s wesbite. This issue contains original short stories from Adam-Troy Castro and Lisa Goldstein, and reprints from Joe Hill and Sarah Langan.

Original Stories

“The Old Horror Writer” by Adam-Troy Castro
He’s harder to find than most. I have the basis for comparison because I’ve gotten to all of them sooner or later, from the big names to the obscurities. There are some who give up so thoroughly, and disappear so completely, that it’s as if they never existed at all. This guy’s far from the worst. He’s an old man now, twenty years removed from his last novel and ten from his last short story; he’s no longer a member of HWA or SFWA, and the agency that used to handle his interests now has him in their estate file.

“Sawing” by Lisa Goldstein
Clarissa watched from the wings as the Great Bertoldi sawed a woman in half. Down went the saw through the coffin-like box, then up, then down again. A cigarette burned at the side of his mouth, on the edge of his smile. The saw broke through the box. He put it down and slid metal plates between the two halves, then rolled the sections apart. The woman’s head poked out from the end of one of the sections, feet from the other.

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Coming Out

Tuesday, May 31, 2016 Kelly Robson Comments 2 comments

We often talk about coming out as a process that has a beginning and an end. You come out to your family, friends and once everyone knows, that’s it. You’re done.

It’s not true though. We keep coming out throughout our lives, to every casual acquaintance. That means that in the past month I got to come out to a whole whack of new people at the Nebulas, including the Tor admin and sales people we sat with at the banquet table. Alyx and I also got to come out to the staff at the new coffee shop up the street, and the new condo concierge.

In June, I get to come out to the new hire in Accounting (he looks like a nice guy) and my new dental hygienist (assuming he or she is chatty — they usually are). Probably a few other people too.

It’s always a risk. An increasingly small risk — nothing compared to what it was in 1989 — but a risk nonetheless.

Kelly Robson’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and at Tor.com. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” was nominated for a Nebula Award this year. She lives in Toronto.

Pathfinder Goes to the Stars (and Other Announcements)

Tuesday, May 31, 2016 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 4 comments

The dividing line between fantasy and science fiction can be difficult to define. I’ve been on convention panels on the subject a few times, at both ConFusion in Detroit and Windycon in Chicago, and have been in the audience of even more of them, but never once have I seen a group of people fully agree on where that diving line is, or even that such a definition exists. The genre is so fluid, including settings with science so fantastic and magical systems so dogmatic that the dividing line seems impossible to lay out. Many of us are fans of both and always have been, though perhaps we appreciate science fiction and fantasy for different reasons, regardless of how we define them.

This weekend, at PaizoCon, the creators of the Pathfinder RPG announced that they would be happily dancing along this boundary with the new Starfinder RPG. With the Starfinder RPG Core Rulebook slated for an August 2017 release date, it looks like this will create whole spacefaring options set in the distant future of the Pathfinder setting, as described in the announcement blog post:

Starfinder is set in Golarion’s solar system, but far in a possible future—one in which the gods have mysteriously spirited Golarion away to an unknown location, and refuse to answer questions about it. In its place, the cultures of that world have evolved and spread throughout the solar system, especially to a vast space platform called Absalom Station. Gifted access to a hyperspace dimension by an ascended AI deity, the residents of the system suddenly find themselves with the ability to travel faster than light, and the race is on to explore and colonize potentially millions of worlds. But there are horrors out there in the darkness…

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New Treasures: The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1926 and 1927 Anthologies, edited by Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine

Tuesday, May 31, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

While I was wandering the aisles of the Windy City Pulp and Paper Show here in Chicago last month, I came across a delightful find… the second volume of Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine’s The Best of Amazing Stories, covering 1927 (above right). I snatched it up immediately, and hunted up the first volume online (above left).

My fascination with Amazing Stories began with Isaac Asimov’s biographical anthology Before the Golden Age, in which he collected his favorite pulp SF stories. Asimov noted that Amazing had the best reputation at the time, saying “It was Amazing Stories all the way with me.” But there hasn’t been much attention paid to the early days of perhaps the greatest SF magazine, so I was very pleased to see an anthology series that attempts to collect the best of the Grand Old Lady of the pulps, year by year.

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How Does Story Happen? An Interview with Jane S. Fancher

Monday, May 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

In my report on the 2016 Nebula Awards weekend, I talked about my two-part interview with SF and fantasy writer Jane S. Fancher, author of the Groundties trilogy and the Dance of the Rings novels. (It turned into a two-part interview because the memory on my new iPhone maxed out while recording CJ Cherryh’s epic Grand Master talk, and my first attempt at an interview lasted all of three minutes. Fortunately, Jane was understanding enough to pick up our interview 24 hours later.)

The Dance of the Rings novels were some of the first review copies I ever received, back in the late 90s when we were first getting the review site SF Site off the ground, so they meant a lot to me personally, and it was a delight to finally meet Jane in person. Turns out we had a lot in common, not the least of which was fond memories of the 90s comic scene (especially WaRP Graphics, publishers of ElfQuest, where Jane got her start in the industry), and a fascination with SF publishing. She was kind enough to share her stories of breaking into the industry, the tumultuous ups and downs of starting with short-lived Warner Questar, publisher of her first three novels, and switching to DAW for her first fantasy series.

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May Issue of The Dark Now on Sale

Monday, May 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Last month we announced that Sean Wallace’s quarterly magazine of dark fantasy and horror The Dark was making some welcome changes — including switching to monthly publication, relaunching their podcast series, and starting up a Patreon account. Their last quarterly issue, May 2016, is now available, with original stories by Steve Berman and Kali Wallace, and reprints by Kaaron Warren and Angela Slatter.

The Dark is edited by Sean Wallace, with assistance by Jack Fisher. Here’s the Table of Contents.

“The Haferbräutigam” by Steve Berman
“The Body Finder” by Kaaron Warren (from Blurring the Line, 2015)
“Caroline at Dusk” by Kali Wallace
“The Jacaranda Wife” by Angela Slatter (from Dreaming Again, 2008)

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. A six issues sub used to be just $15, but I can’t find anything on their website (or at Amazon) about subscriptions — but you can still buy back issues.

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 May issue here, and see their complete back issue catalog here. The cover for May is by Vincent Chong. We last covered The Dark with Issue 11; the next issue is due in June.

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

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dr. Watson for Comic Relief?

Monday, May 30, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 3 comments

For many (especially of a certain age), the image of Doctor Watson is that of a buffoon who provides little assistance and lots of laughs. And the “credit” for that perception can be laid at the feet of Nigel Bruce. Bruce appeared in fourteen popular movies opposite Basil Rathbone’s beloved Holmes, and he also played the good doctor in well over two hundred radio plays – most with Rathbone.

In the first two films, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he was a bit of a clown. But after the franchise shifted from Fox to Universal, that portrayal was understated compared to the next twelve movies he made with Rathbone. The scripts called for Bruce to play a dolt – his daughter said that the disappointed Bruce made up the term ‘Boobus Brittanicus’ to describe his un-Doyle like character.

The poem below appeared in Punch Magazine. Unfortunately, after digging through my shelves, I cannot find where I got this from (I thought that it was one of Peter Haining’s books, but that didn’t pan out). But it is from the nineteen forties, when Rathbone was the brilliant, active Holmes and Bruce provided comic relief.

I think it’s both an amusing and insightful commentary on the Bruce phenomenon:

The stately Holmes of England, how beautiful he stood
Long, long ago in Baker Street – and still in Hollywood
He keeps the ancient flair for clues, the firm incisive chin,
The deerstalker, the dressing gown, the shag, the violin.

But Watson, Doctor Watson! How altered, how betrayed
The fleet of foot, the warrior once, the faster than Lestrade!
What imbecile production, what madness for the moon
Has screened my glorious Watson as well nigh a buffoon?

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Vintage Treasures: Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance

Monday, May 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Jack Vance was one of the most prolific fantasists of the 20th Century at both long and short lengths, producing some 55 novels and dozens of short stories. Underwood-Miller published no less than 60 hardcover volumes of his work during his lifetime, chiefly collections, and Subterranean Press produced some eleven volumes of his short stories and novellas, starting with the massive Jack Vance Treasury in 2007, and including The Early Jack Vance, a thoroughly delightful five-volume set that ended with Grand Crusades.

All those marvelous hardcover volumes were aimed at the collectors market, however, and sadly Vance had precious little fantasy short fiction reprinted in paperback. In fact, he had relatively few mass market collections at all. Ace gave us a handful of science fiction collections, including The Worlds of Jack Vance (1973), Galactic Effectuator (1981) and The Augmented Agent and Other Stories (1988); DAW published Dust of Far Suns (1981) and The Narrow Land (1982); and Pocket just one: The Best of Jack Vance (1976).

But what Vance lacked in quantity, he made up in quality. His 1979 collection Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance, one of the very few collections that focuses on his fantasy work, gathers some of his very finest work, including the title story and the brilliant “The Moon Moth.” It appeared in hardcover from Underwood Miller in 1979, and was reprinted in paperback by Tor in 1988.

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