New Treasures: Leviathan’s Blood by Ben Peek

New Treasures: Leviathan’s Blood by Ben Peek

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Leviathan's Blood-small

Over at his blog, The Urban Sprawl Project, Ben Peek celebrates the release of Leviathan’s Blood, the sequel to 2014’s The Godless.

You should buy it. You should review it. You should tell your friends about it. Perhaps even your enemies.

I’m pretty happy with it, myself. It’s the middle of the trilogy, the Empire of the Children Trilogy, and there are things in this book that I am absurdly pleased with. There is a set of scenes here that I worked towards from the moment I settled on the narrative structure of the book. (It is, for those of you who have not heard me say it before, a structure that echoes the 12/13 episode structure that TV shows have adopted in the last decade. One of my favourite shows of this was Deadwood, and I remember, way back when I began work on The Godless, how interesting it would be for a fantasy book to echo that.) It’s strange to have a moment laid out in a book beyond the first while you’re writing it, but frankly, the whole series is laid out in that fashion, which will hopefully make for an interesting rereading for people. But anyhow, I am absurdly pleased with this.

Any novel with a structure inspired by Deadwood is okay in my book.

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A Tale of Two Covers: Ellen Kushner on Basilisk

A Tale of Two Covers: Ellen Kushner on Basilisk

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Basilisk Ellen Kushner-small Basilisk Ellen Kushner 1984-small

August 1980

May 1984

Last month I was delighted to find a brand new copy of Ellen Kushner’s first anthology Basilisk on eBay for the criminally low price of $1.50 — less than cover price! The copy I found was the original 1980 edition (above left), with the gorgeous Rowena cover. In fact, it wasn’t until I started researching it that I discovered it was re-issued in 1984, with a brand new cover by Stephen Hickman (above right).

Well, here was a curious mystery. Why would Ace Books, no newbie to fantasy publishing, replace such a colorful and effective cover? Nothing against Hickman’s cover — which, in fact, I think is tremendously effective — but it’s hard to compete with a life-and-death knife fight between a beautiful desert princess and a buck-naked green guy. And let’s face it, if you have to have a topless princess and a naked green guy on your cover, Rowena is the artist to put them there.

Maybe 1980 was a little too early to introduce naked green butt to mass market? Maybe Basilisk was intended as the first in a series, and when that didn’t happen, Ace thought Hickman’s cover more suited to a one-off anthology? Obviously, there’s a story here. And the person to tell that story is Ellen Kushner. I reached out to her last week with a few questions, and was very pleased to get a lengthy (and very entertaining!) response. Rather than edit it to fit a shorter article, I decided to reproduce the entire thing here. Ladies and gentlemen, the marvelous Ellen Kushner.

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Goth Chick News: Doctor Sleep Gets the Hollywood Treatment

Goth Chick News: Doctor Sleep Gets the Hollywood Treatment

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Doctor Sleep-smallThey say for good or bad, you never forget your first love; and so it went with me and Stephen King.

I fell deeply in love with him in those heady, early days of Carrie, Salem’s Lot and Firestarter when thankfully I was advised by an older and wiser high school friend, to “read King in order.” But by the time I arrived at The Stand and Gerald’s Game I had begun to spend more and more time with other authors, as King started to feel… well… a little predictable. And ultimately, I never even cracked The Dark Tower books (though I have heard they are quite good) because by that time my literary horror affections were firmly turned elsewhere.

Ah well… I was young.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Doctor Sleep when it was released in October, 2013. I mean, King to me was “back then”; was I really proposing to give him another chance?

Ultimately, I was moved by the warm memories I had of The Shining, in spite of being in the heretical subset who think Kubrick’s interpretation is every bit as good a movie as the source material. Doctor Sleep was, after all, King’s hotly-anticipated sequel.

Well as you probably know, there I was the minute I closed the back cover of the novel, literally gushing about King all over you in Goth Chick News. Doctor Sleep was not only fantastic, but may well rank in my top 10 favorite reads ever. And that’s saying quite a lot.

All that old magic came flooding back.

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How to Worldbuild a Good Sandbox: Four Rules from the Warhammer 40K Universe

How to Worldbuild a Good Sandbox: Four Rules from the Warhammer 40K Universe

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Honour Guard Dan Abnett-small
Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K universe is one of the best sandboxes around.

I’m working on a sandbox Space Opera setting.

Sandbox is the tricky part; a “sandbox” is a storyworld that lets you tell (or experience — if you are a gamer) all sorts of different kinds of story. Essentially, I’m building my Discworld.

Oh, you say, just make it big with lots of different kinds of settings plus spare blank spots on the map.

Yes, that gives you lots of flexibility (though less than you’d think). However, the stories won’t be — sorry, I can’t think of a better word — branded.

I mean, the asteroid miners over here and the fight against the dark lord over there, don’t need to belong in the same universe and the reader (or player) won’t really feel as if they are revisiting the same place.

So a good sandbox is one that maximises the possible range of branded stories.

Spend time with a 12-year-old tabletop gamer and you quickly realize that — in this light — Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K universe is one of the best sandboxes around. You can could dump just about any Space Opera SF story into it, and it would still feel like 40K. To do Firefly, just plug in Orcs, Inquisitors and Space Marines and Imperial Guards. To do Starship Troopers tell a story about the Imperial Guard. To do Star Trek, just follow a Tau captain on their five year mission.

Less so in the Star Wars universe.

Firefly Wars would need a local civil war as backstory, since the cleanup after the prequels feels like it would involve more mass graves. Your Alliance could be the Empire, but the Empire doesn’t really feel as if it would do dark secrets — why bother hiding them? — or have secret super soldier programs– it has Stormtroopers and Sith anyway. Starship Troopers could be about the latter-day Stormtroopers, but the moral ambiguity would be lost. Star Trek…? No, not without taking a ship to a different galaxy and then it would not feel like Star Wars. It would lose its brand.

So the 40K ‘verse is a far better sandbox than the Star Wars one.  How can this be? It appears to follow four basic rules…

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Future Treasures: Street Magicks, edited by Paula Guran

Future Treasures: Street Magicks, edited by Paula Guran

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Street Magicks-small Street Magicks back-small

Paula Guran is one of the most accomplished editors in the business. She’s done some of the best anthologies of the past few years, including my favorite book from 2015, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas — not to mention Weird Detectives, New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, Warrior Women, and many others.

Her newest is Street Magicks, a collection of the finest recent urban fantasy, and it looks right up there with her best. It includes stories by Charles de Lint, Scott Lynch, Ellen Klages, Delia Sherman, Neil Gaiman, Nisi Shawl, Jim Butcher, Jeffrey Ford, Nnedi Okorafor, and many others. It will be available in trade paperback this month from Prime Books. Check out that great cover by Scott Grimando (click for bigger version.)

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Meeting Your Heroes

Meeting Your Heroes

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Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee

There is a saying that you should never meet your heroes. The golden god may have feet of clay, and all that. I don’t agree.

Now, I adore my wife. Let me make that plain up front, so there are no misunderstandings. But there is another woman in my life – my goddess of writing, Tanith Lee.

Tanith Lee is the reason I’m a writer today. She inspired me in a way that nothing and no one else did or could. I’ve always hoped that if I worked hard enough and long enough I might one day be a tenth as good a writer as she was. I don’t know that I am, but I’m working on it. Drake is nothing like a Tanith Lee book, but I like to think that at the heart of it there is a little of her voice.

Tanith passed away last year and it my greatest professional regret that I never got to meet her and just tell her “thank you.” But then how many people get to meet their deity?

This Easter weekend though I did get to meet her husband, John Kaiine.

John is an absolutely lovely man and a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. We were at EasterCon in Manchester, UK, and John was there to speak on a panel held in tribute to Tanith. Hosted by Storm Constantine, the panel consisted of John and the Night’s Nieces – Kari Sperring, Sarah Singleton, Freda Warrington and Liz Williams, all writers who Tanith had inspired and mentored. John and the others spoke beautifully about Tanith and her work. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room by the end of the hour.

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Galaxy’s Edge 19 Now Available

Galaxy’s Edge 19 Now Available

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Galaxy's Edge 19-smallMike Resnick’s Galaxy’s Edge magazine has been published since March 2013; it’s a bimonthly that has both print and digital editions. Truth be told, I thought it was a straight-up science fiction magazine, and didn’t pay much attention until recently. I finally took a closer look this month, and it seems like Galaxy’s Edge could be of interest to fantasy fans after all. The latest issue, #19, is cover-dated March 2016; Mike’s editorial includes a reprint of the last of his F&SF columns from the 90s, which celebrates forgotten treasures. Here’s a taste.

Readers of this column know that the late C. L. Moore is one of my favorite writers. Her Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories are classics of their type, and she was also able to produce truly brilliant works of art such as “Vintage Season.”

I’d like to tell you about one of her less well-known books. It’s called Judgment Night, and it’s sort of a transition between her early days as a Weird Tales fantasy specialist and her later career, in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, as a creator of highly-polished, fast-paced science fiction.

Every pulp writer referred to “pleasure planets” — but only Catherine Moore created one that was worthy of the title: “Cyrille, where beauty and terror were blended for the delectation of those who loved nightmares.” It’s the world where much of Judgment Night takes place.

And, in an era when girls in science fiction stories were just lumpy boys, fit only for holding the equivalent of the hero’s horse, Moore created yet another powerful, competent woman, fully the equal of Jirel — the memorable Juille, who rebels against a rebellion.

The March issue of Galaxy’s Edge includes new fiction by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Larry Hodges, Steve Pantazis, Dantzel Cherry, Ian Whates, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Sunil Patel, and Kary English & Robert B Finegold, plus reprints from Robert Silverberg, Janis Ian, David Drake, and Jean Rabe. It also includes Part Two of Leigh Brackett’s 1955 SF novel The Long Tomorrow.

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New Treasures: Those Below, Book II of The Empty Throne by Daniel Polansky

New Treasures: Those Below, Book II of The Empty Throne by Daniel Polansky

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Those Above Daniel Polansky-small Those Below Daniel Polansky-small

Daniel Polansky’s first novel, Low Town, was followed by two sequels, Tomorrow the Killing (2012) and She Who Waits (2013). His recent entry in Tor.com‘s line of novellas, The Builders, is a dark anthropomorphic fantasy featuring a company of warriors keeping a low profile after being on the losing end of a grueling war. In our recent contest, in which we invited readers to summarize their favorite novella in one sentence, it was hands-down the most popular choice, with entries like these:

The Builders by Daniel Polansky is Beatrix Potter as directed by Sam Peckinpah — Greg Hersom
The Builders by Daniel Polansky: Redwall meets The Wild Bunch, and it all goes to hell — Rich Miller
The Builders is the best critter tale ever: Winnie the Pooh this ain’t! — Lee Hunter

His 2015 novel Those Above, the opening entry in The Empty Throne, was called “Machiavellian clockwork glory” by Mark Lawrence. The second and final novel in the series, Those Below, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK last month.

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Brederode: A 14th Century Castle in the Netherlands

Brederode: A 14th Century Castle in the Netherlands

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In the North Holland province of the Netherlands stands the atmospheric ruin of Brederode Castle, a battered survivor of a violent past.

Unlike the more popular Dutch castle Muiderslot, which I’ve also written about here on Black Gate, Brederode is mostly ruins but still makes a rewarding day trip from Amsterdam.

Brederode started as a bailey and square keep built in 1282 by Willem van Brederode to guard an important coastal road. In 1300 the original fortification was rebuilt with a large keep with three square and one round tower at the corners. A moat surrounded the entire structure. In 1351, it was the scene of fighting in the so-called Hook and Cod Wars. This was a struggle over the rights to the title of the Count of Holland. The “Cod” faction was mainly made up of city merchants and was called this by their enemies in the landed nobility because a cod will continue to greedily eat and grow as long as there’s food to consume. The traditional nobility called themselves the “Hooks” because, of course, that’s what you use to catch a cod. The Brederode family was part of the Hook faction but this proved to be a bad decision because a Cod force besieged the castle in 1351 and destroyed it.

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