Black Gate – Page 670 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox

Tuesday, March 22, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The prolific Janet Fox, who wrote dozens of fantasy and SF stories between 1970-1995, as well as the Scorpio series (under the name Alex McDonough), was best known in later years as editor and publisher of the weird fiction journal Scavenger’s Newsletter. She died in 2009, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw a brand new novel with her byline arrive last week.

Turns out this isn’t the same Janet Fox. This Janet Fox lives in the UK, and is the author of Sirens, Forgiven, and Faithful. The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle is her fourth novel, a spooky tale of ghosts, ruined castles, and nazis. That’s all I need to know. I’m in.

“Keep calm and carry on.”

That’s what Katherine Bateson’s father told her, and that’s what she’s trying to do: when her father goes off to the war, when her mother sends Kat and her brother and sister away from London to escape the incessant bombing, even when the children arrive at Rookskill Castle, an ancient, crumbling manor on the misty Scottish highlands.

But it’s hard to keep calm in the strange castle that seems haunted by ghosts or worse. What’s making those terrifying screeches and groans at night? Why do the castle’s walls seem to have a mind of their own? And why do people seem to mysteriously appear and disappear?

Kat believes she knows the answer: Lady Eleanor, who rules Rookskill Castle, is harboring a Nazi spy. But when her classmates begin to vanish, one by one, Kat must uncover the truth about what the castle actually harbors — and who Lady Eleanor really is — before it’s too late.

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle was published by Viking Books for Young Readers on March 15, 2016. It is 400 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

Fantasy Scroll Magazine 11 Now Available

Tuesday, March 22, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The eleventh issue of the online-only Fantasy Scroll Magazine, cover dated February 2016, is now available. In his editorial editor Frederick Doot gives us a sneak peek of the contents. Here’s a snippet:

We start 2016 with the heartfelt and enchanting “Sundark and Winterling” by Suzanne J. Willis featuring one of the most extraordinary homes you could imagine. The story hits all the right notes. We then move on to Paul Magnan’s “Red Cup,” a unique story that takes an inside look of trials and tribulations of a flower; no, it’s not all roses for our hero Red Cup. Next we are swept into a chaotic world with Stephen Walter Simpson’s “The Water Moon” following the fascinating life, and secret to some, of the lead character, Ivan.

We welcome another contribution by J.W. Alden, this time a flash fiction gem, “Battle Lines” which hits us early and hard, as the best science fiction flash stories can do. How can you settle the hostilities and egos and a decision between rival guildsman? “Talking with Honored Guests” by Alexander Monteagudo may provide one fiery way how.

Fantasy Scroll Magazine was long overdue for a pet alien love story, and we found a beaut with Ian Creasey’s “How I Lost Eleven Stone And Found Love,” a much more endearing story than the title suggests. We are happy that “The Great Excuse” by Jacob Michael King has found a home here at FSM; I won’t give much away, but I will say that Lovecraft would be proud. “The Velna Valsis” by Henry Szabranski is short, but sometimes a short jab to the gut is all you need to make your point, and this one hits the reader hard.

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Vintage Treasures: Three Apocalyptic Anthologies

Tuesday, March 22, 2016 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

Back in January I bought a nice lot of 42 vintage science fiction paperbacks on eBay. Most were from the 70s and 80s, and most were in pretty good shape. Enough to keep me busy for a month, taking them out of the box one by one and cooing over them.

Most of you are probably too young to remember that far back, when the Cold War was at its height and the specter of nuclear war loomed over everything. In November 1981 Gallup found that 53% of American adults expected a nuclear war within a decade, and after Nicholas Meyer’s apocalyptic TV film The Day After and NBC’s tense mock-documentary Special Bulletin, about terrorists who detonate a nuclear weapon, both aired in the spring of 1983, some polls showed that number rocket briefly above 70%. 70%! These days we can’t even get that many to agree that the President of the United States is Christian.

Not too surprisingly, a lot of science fiction from the era was preoccupied with tales of the apocalypse. The Cold War is long over, but those paperback treasures, with their morbidly imaginative visions of the end of the world and beyond, are still with us. You can find plenty of great anthologies with that theme very cheaply if you look (the ones I haven’t hoarded in my basement, anyway.) Today I want to look at three that I pulled out of my newly acquired collection: Robert Sheckley’s After the Fall (1980), H. Bruce Franklin’s Countdown to Midnight (1984), and Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions 1.

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The IX: Exordium of Tears by Andrew P. Weston

Tuesday, March 22, 2016 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 4 comments

From his home in the Aegean, author Andrew P. Weston has sent out another blast of science fiction action (yeah, I don’t read only fantasy) with his new book The IX: Exordium of Tears, recounting the further adventures of the famous Legio IX Hispana. The preceding volume, The IX, was released last year and reviewed at Black Gate by me here.

To recap: the Roman IX Legion, their Celtic adversaries, US cavalry troopers, their American Indian foes, and a squad of British special forces operators were torn from their respective times just as they were about to be killed in battle, and teleported to the planet Arden. There, under the guidance of the planet-controlling AI “the Architect”, they were set to fight against the Horde, an endless force of energy-eating beings who had worked their way through the billions of inhabitants of the many worlds of the spacefaring Ardenese civilization. The Architect’s plan for surival is to store the genetic templates of the surviving Ardenese and revive them in the future, while using the warlike humans to destroy the Horde. In league with the survivors of previous groups of teleported humans from other timelines, guided by the super computer, and armed with such fun toys as mini-singularity bombs, the newcomers do just that. The books show their old school sci-fi roots in this bit of Campbellian human chauvinism. They also bring to mind stories by Gordon Dickson and Jerry Pournelle, a strong mark in their favor.

In the year between their victory and the start of the new book, many of the Ardenese are restored to life. Together, they and the humans are striving to restore the planet Arden to its pre-Horde state, but peace is fleeting.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Thirteen

Monday, March 21, 2016 markrigney Comments 0 Comment

Linked below, you’ll find the thirteenth installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue. Urnua lives to see the secrets of the armory unveiled, Mother Coal instigates a disturbing extrication, and Maer escapes the Middle Isle. Chapter Fourteen will follow in two weeks’ time, so stay tuned –– and for those who fear I’m writing a doorstop, be reassured. This will be Book One of a pair (but no, not an ongoing, endless cycle), and the Great Divide between the two will be reached in Chapter Fifteen.

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 thirteenth and latest installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

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Future Treasures: The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks

Monday, March 21, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Faith Erin Hicks has had a pretty enviable career in comics, as a writer for Lumberjanes, Buffy: The High School Years and The Last of Us: American Dreams, and as an artist for Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, and Brain Camp. On her own she’s created Friends with Boys, Zombies Calling!, and the Eisner-Award winning The Adventures of Superhero Girl.

Her latest, The Nameless City, has the look and feel of epic fantasy. Built on an ancient mountain pass, cut through sheer rock by some long-lost technology, the Nameless City has been conquered so many times that its long-suffering inhabitants — a melting pot of an unknown number of previous civilizations — can’t even agree on what to call it. Thirteen year-old Kaidu, the privileged son of a tribal leader, comes to the city to meet his father, a general with the ruling Dao army, for the first time. General Andren is a kind man, but too busy to spend more than a few minutes a day with a son he’s never known.

Disappointed and lonely, Kaidu sneaks out of the protective enclave of the Palace each day to wander the city. There he meets Rat, a starving street urchin who steals his most precious possession: the ancient knife his father gave to him when they first met. Lost and humiliated, Kaidu chases Rat through the streets and across the rooftops of the city until he tackles Rat, retrieving his precious knife.

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The Refusal To Sprawl: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Monday, March 21, 2016 markrigney Comments 1 comment

To peruse the book jacket of Station Eleven, one would think that this novel has a traditional main character (Kirsten). This, like the utterly misleading picture on the front –– the yellow tents and curving wall never crop up, so far as I can tell –– is a lie.

Station Eleven is akin in many ways to A Song Of Ice And Fire in that it positions a dozen main characters and asks us to follow them all, sometimes for moments, sometimes for chapters, in what amounts to a kind of prose chorale. The effort is largely successful, but it also suggests a grander canvas, one that Mandel, who surely thinks of herself as a writer of literary work, has no intention of pursuing.

Contrast with Mr. Martin: when he sets his dozen, then fifty, characters in motion, he follows every one, rabbit hole after rabbit hole. This is not to say that either approach is more valid than the other, but it’s telling; the one method begets only a single book, the other a series or even a cycle.

Once again, I find myself puzzled by the (apparently necessary) differences between genre and literary publishing tropes. I honestly don’t think Mandel even considered expanding her storylines, or following her characters farther afield. Expansion and long-form digressions are all but expected in fantasy and science fiction, and the short novel (say, Flowers For Algernon) is a rare bird these days, and getting rarer.

But in nominally literary work? One book, and you’re out. Covers closed, shelve the title. Move along, people. Nothing more to see here.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: More Playing Sherlock Holmes – 221B Baker Street

Monday, March 21, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 4 comments

Last week, I looked at the reissued Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (SHCD), originally released in 1981. That game was undoubtedly influenced by 221B Baker Street: The Master Detective Game (221B), which had come out a few years earlier in 1975.

In 221B, two to six players take on the role of Sherlock Holmes, though there’s a reference in the rulebook to being “Watsons.” It makes no difference, but I’m gonna go with being the world’s first private consulting detective, myself.

The game comes with 20 Case cards, generic, colored plastic player pieces, Scotland Yard and Skeleton Key “cards,” a solution checklist pad and a slim booklet with all the rules, clues and case solutions.

Unlike SHCD, which included a map, 221B uses a board. Players start and finish at 221B Baker Street, moving to various locations on the board, such as the Apothecary, Hotel, Museum, Tobacconist, etc. Each location is assigned a number in each case. When the player moves to the location, they look up the corresponding number in the clue section of the rulebook. The clue, such as “Earl Longworth has constant headaches” is recorded on the solution checklist – kept secret from other players.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: When the Form Is the Story

Sunday, March 20, 2016 Tina Jens Comments 1 comment

(This article is a follow up to my blog post “Story In Its Many Forms“)

In a previous blog (linked above), I talked about my Exploring Fantasy Genre Writing class and how they’re required to try their hands at forms beyond the basic short story: including poetry, blues songs, plays or radio plays, comic books, and mock journalism (any of the print or broadcast forms). For other weeks, they can choose yet a different form, but they can’t work in the exact same form twice.

They adapt to some forms fairly easily, because they see the parallels and similarities to the form they’re most comfortable with. And though different parallels and similarities exist between any two forms, they just can’t see them sometimes.

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New Treasures: The Grimm Future, edited by Erin Underwood

Sunday, March 20, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

NESFA Press is one of my favorite small publishers. They’ve done some of the most essential collections of the past few decades, including From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, the massive six-volume Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, the two-volume Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, the magnificent Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell, Transfinite: The Essential A. E. Van Vogt, and dozens more. They’ve been relatively quiet recently (except for releasing a new volume in The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson every year or so, which admittedly is enough to keep anyone busy), and I admit that I was growing concerned that the once tireless NESFA machine was perhaps not as tireless as most of us thought.

So I was very pleased to see the release of The Grimm Future last month, an anthology collecting reimagined Grimm fairy tales by Garth Nix, Max Gladstone, Carlos Hernandez, Jeffrey Ford, Peadar Ó Guillín, John Langan, Seanan McGuire, and many others.

Blending fresh new science fiction with a futuristic dash of magic, The Grimm Future is a unique anthology of reimagined Grimm fairy tales from some of today’s most exciting authors — along with the original stories that inspired them. The Grimm Future examines our humanity and what that term might come to mean through the eyes of future generations as society advances into an age when technology consumes nearly every aspect of our lives or has ultimately changed life as we know it. How might these timeless stories evolve? Given the relentless onrush of technology, there is even greater need for fairy tales and Grimm magic in our future. Read on!

All the stories are new.

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