Black Gate – Page 654 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Future Treasures: The People in the Castle by Joan Aiken

Thursday, April 21, 2016 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

My introduction to Joan Aiken was her marvelous novel The Cuckoo Tree, which I had pressed on me by my friend Alex Lambert more than 30 years ago. That led me to Black Hearts in Battersea, Midnight is a Place, and The Whispering Mountain.

Small Beer Press, which has brought us many delightful volumes over the years, will be publishing a collection of Joan Aiken’s “Selected Strange Stories” next week, and I’m looking forward to it. Kirkus Reviews calls it:

A welcome anthology of fantasy stories by a 20th-century master. The author of the beloved classic gothic for children The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Aiken (1924-2004) also wrote hundreds of works of popular fiction that spanned the genres, from fantasy to horror to historical fiction, including several Jane Austen sequels. Naturally the tone of her books and short stories varies with their content, but its main notes include sophisticated, spritely satire and the darker moods of literary fairy tales. Fans of Wolves will recognize the honorable orphans and cruel guardians who populate these tales. Typically the wicked meet with fitting fates and the innocent triumph, though for Aiken, a good death counts as a happy ending. She plays with the contrast between the eldritch and modern culture and technology: ghosts and dead kings out of legend who contact the living by telephone, a doctor who writes prescriptions for fairies, a fairy princess who’s fond of Westerns.

The People in the Castle will be published by Small Beer Press on April 26, 2016. It is 256 pages, priced at $24 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover, “The Castle in the Air” (1939) is by Joan Aikman. Kelly Link provides an introduction, and you can read a complete sample story, “The Cold Flame,” at Tor.com.

Here Come the Replicants! – Blade Runner 2 Moved Up

Thursday, April 21, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 6 comments

The long awaited sequel from Ridley Scott, starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright and Dave Bautista (yes, the former wrestler), was originally slated for January of 2018. That’s not exactly prime release time. Or a sign that the studio has confidence in the film. Instead, it’s been moved up to the weekend of October 6, 2017, which would put it in the Oscar discussion. If it is any good, of course.

Feelings about the sequel are certainly mixed. Though I think folks should remember that Blade Runner was not a hit upon release and had fared so poorly in test screenings that the film was recut before general distribution. However, it has grown to cult status. It’s one of my favorites and certainly a classic of scifi noir.

The script continues the story from the first film, which was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Which is well worth a read.

K.W. Jeter wrote two official sequel novels, which I’m happy to say, have nothing to do with the film. The first was readable: the second was terrible.

If you enjoyed Blade Runner, there’s a superb book on the making of the film, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.

I remain hopeful about this film. And Vangelis is 73 years old. Will he be doing the soundtrack? It was a big part of the original.

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The Dark Magazine Becomes Monthly, Launches Patreon Account

Thursday, April 21, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

There are big changes afoot for Sean Wallace’s The Dark Magazine, one of the finest dark fantasy magazines on the market — including switching from quarterly to monthly, relaunch their podcast series, and much more. Here’s the complete scoop from the magazine’s new Patreon page:

For almost three years, The Dark Magazine has brought readers a quality selection of original dark fantasy and horror from both new and established authors. Published by Prime Books and edited by Sean Wallace, the magazine has also received critical reception and recognition in the field with recent stories reprinted in year’s best anthologies and several listed on the Locus Recommended Reading List.

And now it is time for the next step in our evolution:

* adding more original fiction to every monthly issue
* adding podcasts, all done by an awesome team of narrators
* increasing the pay rate to our authors, up to the SFWA qualifying rate
* adding a monthly print edition, to be available worldwide

Read the complete announcement, and sign up to support the magazine here.

The Dark is a monthly magazine edited by Sean Wallace, with assistance from Jack Fisher. You can read issues free online, or help support the magazine by subscribing to 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 one-year sub (12 issues) is just $23.99 – subscribe today.

We last covered The Dark with Issue 11. See our Mid-April Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

Cuenca: A Clifftop Medieval Town in Spain

Wednesday, April 20, 2016 Sean McLachlan Comments 2 comments

One of the famous “hanging houses” of Cuenca

An hour’s train ride from Madrid is a small medieval town that’s often overlooked by international visitors. Cuenca has been an important town since the 8th century and has heaps of historic sights as well as natural beauty.

Located in rough hills and on a spur between the deep valleys of the Júcar and Huécar rivers, it’s a naturally defensible position and was fortified by the conquering Moors in 714. There is little remaining from the Islamic era because after it was conquered in 1177 by King Alfonso VIII, the city was extensively remodeled by him and several later monarchs.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Wednesday, April 20, 2016 William I. Lengeman III Comments 6 comments

I’m not always the most attentive or detail oriented movie watcher. So, as I came to the end of The Voyage Home, the fourth of the original cast Star Trek movies, I realized that I still didn’t know exactly what was going on with those whales.

After movie three — The Search For Spock — the crew of the late starship Enterprise (watch the aforementioned for more details on that) are laying over on Vulcan, getting their commandeered Klingon ship up to speed when Earth finds itself menaced by a Big Dumb Object of some sort. It demands that it be paid a tribute of whales – or something like that — or it will wipe out the Earth in dramatic fashion. Our heroes enact that time honored SF convention of slingshotting around the sun to go several centuries back in time (with keen precision, I must note) and pick up a few whales, which they spirit off in a hastily built whale tank in the Klingon ship.

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Vintage Treasures: Inter Ice Age 4 by Kōbō Abe

Wednesday, April 20, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The recent success of foreign SF writers in translation in the US — including Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Hex), among others — seems like a modern phenomenon. But truthfully, our genre has been open to talented writers from around the world for decades. As far back as the days of Jules Verne, Americans have been warmly receptive to foreign SF writers, and over the decades that’s included authors like Stanislaw Lem (Solaris), Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities), Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths), Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic), Pierre Boulle (The Planet of the Apes) and Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher).

Japanese writer Kōbō Abe (the pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe, who died in 1993) isn’t as well remembered here as some others, but he had a considerable impact in Japan. In 1951 he received Japan’s most important literary award, the Akutagawa, for his novel The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma, and in 1960 his novel The Woman in the Dunes won the Yomiuri Prize. His 1959 novel Inter Ice Age 4 imagines a world slowly being submerged by melting polar ice, and the desperate race to genetically modify children so they can survive the coming underwater age — and the strange prophetic computer that attempts to guide mankind into a very uncertain future.

Inter Ice Age 4 was written in 1959, and published in paperback in the US by Berkely in March 1972. It is 223 pages, priced at 95 cents. The cover is by Richard Powers. I acquired the unread copy above for about 60 cents last month, as part of a collection of 42 vintage SF paperbacks on eBay I bought for $27. Click the images for bigger versions.

Kelly Link Collection Get in Trouble is a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Kelly Link’s sixth collection, Get In Trouble, was listed as one of two finalists for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday by the Pulitzer Prize Board, including the award for fiction, “for distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”

The winner was Viet Thanh Nguyen, for his novel The Sympathizer. The Board also recognized two finalists, the novel Maud’s Line by Margaret Verble, and Kelly Link’s short story collection Get in Trouble. In their commendation on the website, the Board described Get in Trouble like this:

A collection of short stories in which a writer with a fertile and often fabulist imagination explores inner lies and odd corners of reality.

Get in Trouble was published in hardcover by Random House February 3, 2015, and reprinted in paperback on February 9, 2016. It is 368 pages, priced at $16 for the trade paperback, and $11.99 for the digital version.

New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ron Rash is the author of Serena, a New York Times bestseller which was made into a Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper film with the same title in 2014. He’s also the author of The Cove and Above the Waterfall, and is a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize.

I was tipped off to his short story collection Something Rich and Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. Although the stories within are not genre fiction, there’s plenty here to reward readers of weird fiction. Entertainment Weekly said “This anthology of Rash’s earthy, often eerie short stories is like a forest you can get lost in for hours, small but affecting tales of poverty, addiction, pride, love, and despair threaded with life-altering acts of violence.” And NPR said “Rich and strange are two words that aptly apply to this book. I have two other words to continue with: Simply beautiful… some of the stories are so searing, it’s as if someone has taken a stick from a blazing fire and pressed it into your hand.”

Something Rich and Strange was published by Ecco on August 11, 2015. It is 448 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback, and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Jamie Heiden. Click the covers above for bigger versions.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197 Now Available

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Issue #197 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies features a sword & sorcery tale by Tony Pi and a fanciful animal fantasy by Kelly Stewart, two podcasts by Tony Pi, and a reprint by Tina Connolly. Nicky Magas at Tangent Online liked the Stewart, and had mixed feelings on the Pi:

Ao has a fairly unique ability in Tony Pi’s “The Sweetest Skill.” Although he appears to be naught but a candy maker, Ao’s family has a long symbiotic history with the zodiac spirit animals that grant him the ability to form magical constructs out of simple materials. But absolute loyalty to the spirits is required for such power, and the penalty for disobedience can be awful, as Ao well knows. So when the spirit of King Tiger shows up one night with a request to rescue a divine tigress in need, Ao is more than a little wary. On the other hand, he owes a debt of gratitude to the injured spirit and all debts must be paid, even if that means going up against the sorcery of the Ten Crows gang… “The Sweetest Skill” is a neatly packaged sword and sorcery story set in a broader narrative world. The characters, the setting, and the plot are all decently constructed, but lack a stylistic charm to be truly eye-popping…

Aril knows that you ought never invite Rabbits into the garden, in Kelly Stewart’s “Rabbit Grass.” There’s no getting rid of them or fixing the damage they do if you’re silly enough not to heed that bit of advice. All the same, there’s something about the little Rabbit Picket that Aril can’t ignore. And conversation never hurt anyone, did it?… But Picket won’t stop going on about the non-existent Rabbit Grass, and when he shows up at her window one night looking desperate and worried, Aril won’t rest until she’s aided her unlikely companion, even if it means venturing into the Rabbit warrens herself. Part Peter Rabbit and part Alice in Wonderland, “Rabbit Grass” is… a lovely pastoral fantasy.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Fifteen (The End!)

Monday, April 18, 2016 markrigney Comments 0 Comment

Linked below, you’ll find the final installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue. Yes, you heard a’right. This, me hearties, do be the closing section. For now. This will be Book One of a pair (but no, not an ongoing, endless cycle), and you have reached the Continental Divide between the two.

As part of the work of laboring on to the end, I’ve also gone back to the beginning with an eye toward cleaning up typos, improving the prose as needed, and catching the odd mistake. Let’s face it, serialization (at speed) is an invitation to inconsistency. More on that another day, but for now, suffice it to say that the manuscript as a whole is now a good deal neater and cleaner.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles (or perhaps my unexpectedly popular D&D-related post, “Youth In a Box,”) I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. Oh, and if you’re only now discovering this portal, may I suggest you begin at the beginning? The Spur awaits…

Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

Read the fifteenth and final installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

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