Black Gate – Page 657 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Vintage Treasures: Journeys of the Catechist by Alan Dean Foster

Wednesday, April 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

I don’t think Alan Dean Foster gets the respect he deserves. He’s an enormously gifted and prolific author who’s produced some of the most ambitious and successful series on the market, including the seventeen novels in the Pip & Flinx series (which my son read and re-read, awaiting each new volume anxiously), the 13 books of the Humanx Commonwealth, beginning with Nor Crystal Tears (1982), the 8 volumes of the Spellsinger saga, and many others. (My personal favorite Alan Dean Foster novel is probably Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (1978), one of his three Star Wars novels, but don’t hold that against me.)

For those of you looking for something maybe a little less ambitious and a little more manageable, Foster has also written several fine standalone trilogies, including Icerigger, The Founding of the Commonwealth, The Damned, and The Tipping Point. Perhaps his most highly regarded fantasy trilogy is Journeys of the Catechist, comprised of three novels published between 1998-2000 by Warner Aspect, all with covers by the great Keith Parkinson.

Carnivores of Light and Darkness (344 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, June 1998)
Into the Thinking Kingdoms (376 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, April 1999)
A Triumph of Souls (406 pages, $24.96 hardcover/$6.99 paperback, March 2000)

I was surprised and pleased to find a blurb on the back of my paperback editions from Todd Richmond at SF Site, who published a review of Into the Thinking Kingdoms back in 1999. I don’t think I’ll ever really get over how cool it is to discover blurbs I published on popular SF and fantasy books.

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Book Pairings: Who Fears Death & Jeweled Fire

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 0 Comment

In May 2015, I was at the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading in New York City when Nicole Kornher-Stace and Wesley Chu were featured; they were brilliant. Read their books.

But I’m not here to talk about them.

I’m here to talk about eavesdropping.

(Well, I’m here to talk about some books I read, but I’m gonna preface it by talking about eavesdropping.)

So, at KGB last May, I happened to be sitting at a table with an Agent and an Editor.

The Editor, she says to the Agent, “I really want to read fantasy novels with strong female friendships. WHY DON’T YOU SEND ME SOME?”

And the Agent, she sighs. “I’m trying. I’m trying.”

I found this conversation:

1.) SUPER REASSURING!!! I WRITE THOSE KINDS OF BOOKS! SOMEDAY AGENTS AND EDITORS WILL LOVE ME TOO!

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Future Treasures: Daughter of Albion by Ilka Tampke

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ilka Tampke is an Australian author, and her debut novel was published in Australia last year under the title Skin, where it received a lot of attention. Now Thomas Dunne is bringing the book to American shores for the first time, with a new title: Daughter of Albion.

The tale begins in the village of Caer Cad in southwest Britain, AD 43, where a swaddled baby is found abandoned, just as the dark cloud of the Roman Empire begins to gather on the horizon. Drawing on Celtic British history, Tampke weaves a tale of Ancient Britain on the cusp of Roman invasion, the violent collision of two worlds, and a young woman torn between two men.

A baby girl is abandoned on the doorstep of the Tribequeen’s kitchen. Cookmother takes her in and names her Ailia. Without family, Ailia is an outsider in her village, forbidden from marriage and excluded from learning. Despite this, she grows up an intelligent and brave young woman, serving the Tribequeen of her township until the day when an encounter with an enigmatic man named Taliesin leads Ailia to the Mothers, the tribal ancestors, who have chosen her for another path.

Ailia’s growing awareness of her future role as the tribal protector and her relationships with the two very different men she loves will be utterly tested by the imminent threat of Emperor Claudius preparing to take the island.

Daughter of Albion: A Novel of Ancient Britain will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on April 19, 2016. It is 354 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Young Jin Lim.

March Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 0 Comment

March has come and gone and now it’s time for the short story roundup. It was a nice month for short swords & sorcery storytelling. Not a spectacular month, but a nice one.

I’ll start with Curtis Ellet’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue #50. Now in its fifth year, SSM, like most low-paying publications, is a hit-or-miss proposition for readers. Both of #50’s stories are hits.

“The Altar of the Toad” by Davide Mana is a simple and solid story with just enough characterization, world building, and action to serve as a perfect example of the minimum of what I want from the genre. I don’t need every S&S story to be a staggeringly brilliant literary achievement, only for it to take me away from the blacktop and the sounds of honking horns for a little while.

Aculeo, an ex-legionary, and Amunet, an Egyptian sorceress, make a tremendous mistake when they respond to a plea for help from a blind woman:

“I prayed for delivery,” she said, her head tilted to one side. A strand of stringy hair had come loose from her coif, and brushed her wrinkled cheek as she spoke. “I prayed for warriors, to deliver my daughter from the mouth of the Toad.”

In this genre that sort of request is bound to bring trouble. It does, and with more than a hint of Lovecraft Mythos terrors. Even though there are plenty of intimations that “Altar” is part of a larger narrative, it stands perfectly well on its own, something I prize highly. Mana has self-published several other stories of Aculeo and Amunet and I am very curious how they stack up against this one.

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Small-Scale Epic Childhood: Memories of Playing at the Cabin on the Mogollon Rim

Monday, April 11, 2016 Nick Ozment Comments 5 comments

Some of my fondest memories are days spent at my Nan and Grandad’s cabin in Heber, Arizona, up on the Mogollon Rim nestled in the largest ponderosa pine forest on the continent. Surrounded by that fantastic landscape, it was easy to let one’s imagination run as free as the Mogollon Monster…

The Woodpile

The “woodpile” behind my Nan and Grandad’s cabin was mostly dirt, left over from when part of the lot was first cleared to make way for the trailer (the cabin was a large trailer home, actually, with a deck built on). The wood came from the pine trees that had been cut down, their trunks buried under the heaping dirt mound, giving the woodpile its foundation and shape.

It wasn’t so big, really, but to my cousins and me it was our own private mountain fortress. How many times did we flop down on it for cover as Injuns shot arrows at us, and then return fire over its crest with our wood-knot guns? Or, other times, the wood-knots were machine guns and we were out there fighting Nazis.

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Clarkesworld 115 Now Available

Monday, April 11, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Tangent Online is, as usual, more on top of things than I am. Their review of the latest issue of Clarkesworld magazine was posted yesterday, before I’d even had a chance to look at this month’s cover. Reviewer Jason McGregor does a fine job of writing intriguing summaries for each story (a subtle art, and I know that from experience.) Here’s his summary of “Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Avery is a woman with something in her past which leads her to a strange and rootless life, so she is able to go on a journey at a moment’s notice when an employer calls her with a strange job. Alien artifacts have appeared all over North America (why just North America?) and humans who may be abductees eventually appear from them. Avery is to drive one of these, and an alien, to St. Louis. Along the way, she reflects on her life (ultimately revealing the great tragedy of her life, which the reader suspected in a general way), her strange companions, the nature of consciousness, and makes a decision with enormous consequences.

Read his complete review here.

Clarkesworld #115 has four new stories by Carolyn Ives Gilman, Chen Qiufan, Gregory Feeley, and Sara Saab, and two reprints by Garth Nix and Elizabeth Hand.

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New Treasures: Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales, Compiled by Stefan Dziemianowicz

Monday, April 11, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Fall River Press is Barnes & Noble’s discount hardcover publisher. If you’ve ever visited a B&N superstore, you’ve likely seen dozens of their books piled near the check-out aisles. They specialize in low-cost editions of authors in the public domain, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, and many others. They’re notable chiefly because their books are a great value, and also because you can’t find them on Amazon.com.

Stefan Dziemianowicz has edited more than 50 horror, mystery, and SF anthologies, many for Fall River — including The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: A Collection of Victorian Detective Tales, and Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror. His latest is Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales, a nearly 700-page compilation of stories by Lovecraft, M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Jules Verne, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, and 95 others.

Ghosts! They come in all shapes and sizes, all genders and species, and they have manifold reasons for manifesting — or, as is sometimes the case, not manifesting. For more than two centuries ghosts have haunted the imaginations of writers around the world, who have chronicled their exploits with a vividness and zeal that is just a little bit incongruous for entities whose relative lack of material substance leads many among us to question their existence.

Great Ghost Stories pays tribute to the long literary legacy of the ghost story by gathering together in one volume 101 of the best short ghost stories of all time. Here you will find ghosts of virtually every stripe and semblance: ghosts who seek revenge against the living, ghosts who dutifully keep appointments made while their hosts were still alive, ghosts who appear to convince skeptics of their existence, and even ghosts who don’t know that they’re ghosts. Some of the ghosts depicted here are helpful, while others are horrifyingly malevolent. Some have a disconcerting physicality — for example, the phantom limb whose owner claims committed the murder that he’s accused of. Others are so insubstantial — among them the lingering influence of a suicide that imbues a boarding house room — that their power over the living seems completely out of proportion.

The stories collected in this volume show the great variety of ghostly experience as conceived by some of the greatest weird fiction writers of all time. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to enjoy these stories–but you dismiss their power to terrify you at your own peril.

Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales was published by Fall River Press on March 18, 2016. It is 689 pages, priced at $7.98 in hardcover — less than the price of a paperback! The jacket was created by The Book Designers. It’s available at your local B&N store, and online at B&N.com.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: John Cleese as Holmes – Take One

Monday, April 11, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 5 comments

John Cleese is best known, of course, as the sardonic Q opposite Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in Die Another Day. Though not as well remembered, he also played a key role in the British comedy troupe, Monty Python.

I’m kidding!

On January 18, 1973, the final episode of Python’s third season aired. It was Cleese’s last episode with the group, which would continue on for one more season. That very same same day, Cleese’s next project aired – Comedy Playhouse Presents: Elementary, My Dear Watson. It was produced by Barry Took, who had brought the Python members together.

I’m going to tackle the Achilles heel (really, it’s more like the entire torso) of this show, the plot: or rather, the lack of one. It’s barely a story. Try to stick with me, and no, I’m not leaving things out: it really goes like this…

The show opens in a room full of dead lawyers, slumped over their desks, each with a knife in the back. Some would say that’s a pretty good start, but let’s stay focused. Thus the show’s subtitle, The Strange Case of the Dead Solicitors. A policeman and a secretary exchange what are intended to be witty comments, which immediately brings the lame laugh track to the viewer’s attention. This is not the most robust laugh track you’ll come across.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on “Head-Hopper”

Sunday, April 10, 2016 Tina Jens Comments 0 Comment

This is part 8 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, does a brilliant job with our next POV style:

Head-Hopper

If you’ve not read her novel, I urge you to do so. I also urge you to read it aloud, even if you’re sitting outside at a café, which I did a few summers ago. The book is graced with many long, complex sentences that loop and flow, and sometimes change point of view from one clause to the next. Reading it out loud helps the brain make sense of the phrases and clauses in a way that eyes-only reading can’t manage as well. When done well, as Ms. Woolf did, it is a brilliant writing stratagem. But it works best in stories where there is very little physical plot. The conflict comes mainly from the contrast of how different characters perceive the same moment, and in the shifting emotions of characters.

Which means, generally, it is not a good point of view choice for action-packed genre stories.

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Vintage Treasures: The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

Sunday, April 10, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Today’s Vintage Treasure is The Demon Breed, a 1979 Ace paperback by James H. Schmitz, which I bought the year it came out. Over the next few decades Schmitz would become one of my favorite SF short story writers, with delightful tales such as “The Second Night of Summer” (which I read in Gardner Dozois’s terrific anthology The Good Old Stuff), “Grandpa,” the Nebula nominee “Balanced Ecology,” and many others.

But in 1979 I was a fifteen year-old teenager, haunting the W.H. Smith on Sparks Street in Ottawa every Saturday, and I’d never heard of James H. Schmitz. But I knew what a bikini was. And Bob Adragna’s eye-catching cover, featuring special field agent Nile Etland and her otter companion crossing the floating atoll on the ocean world of Nandy-Cline as two sinister Parahuan observe from behind, spoke to my very soul. On the back of the book Andre Norton said something about a “detailed alien background” and “could not put it down,” but who paid attention to that? That cover told me everything I needed to know in two seconds. Bikinis, blasters, and bug-eyed monsters? Sold.

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