Black Gate – Page 671 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Clarkesworld 114 Now Available

Sunday, March 20, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Clarkesworld is one of the most-reviewed genre magazines out there. So if you’re too busy to read every issue, there are plenty of places that will point you towards the stories that might appeal to you most.

Take issue #114 for example. Just about everything in the TOC looks interesting, but I only have time for one story tonight. Enter Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews, who’s done an admirable job of profiling the entire issue. Sixty seconds is all it takes to determine that the story for me is Leena Likitalo’s “The Governess with a Mechanical Womb.”

This is a rather bleak story about humans on the edge of extinction and a young woman and her sister facing it under the care of a governess, under the care of something that used to be human but… isn’t quite any longer. The story excels at building an isolated and strange atmosphere, which seems to be a theme in this month’s issue, here rendered in a post-apocalypse where aliens have come to Earth and destroyed everything for reasons unknown, then started guarding [people] from themselves. It’s an unsettling story, and one with a heavy sense of mystery… It’s tense and it’s effectively done, a story about sisters and about guardians and about control and love. It is incredibly dark, as well, and I will admit that the ending was rather difficult, a mix of love and change that left me a bit unsure what to think. But it’s a neat piece with a great weirdness to it, and it’s worth checking out.

Of course, your mileage will vary. Check out the complete review at Quick Sip Reviews here.

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Profound Enough to Hurt: Amal El-Mohtar on Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Saturday, March 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I read a lot of reviews (no, seriously. A lot. Of reviews). But, like everyone else, I have favorite reviewers — those who’ve guided me towards books I might not have selected on my own, or whose taste aligns splendidly well with (or is a heckuva lot better than) mine.

These days one of my go-to reviewers is Amal El-Mohtar, occasional Black Gate blogger and author — whose own short story “Madeleine” is a 2016 Nebula finalist for Best Short Story. Earlier this week Amal reviewed Ken Liu’s new short story collection The Paper Menagerie for NPR… and had more to say about it on her website.

I have never been so moved by a collection of short fiction. I was at times afraid to read more. Every single story struck chords in me profound enough to hurt, whether about the love and cruelty of families; the melancholy of thermodynamics; the vicious unfairness of history and the humbling grace with which people endure its weight. Stories so often take us out of ourselves; Liu’s stories went deep into my marrow, laying bare painful truths, meticulously slicing through the layers of pearl to find the grain of sand at its heart.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories was published by Saga Press on March 8, 2016. It is 464 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital version. That origami tiger on the cover was designed, folded and photographed by Quentin Trollip. We covered the complete contents here.

See all of our coverage of the best in new fantasy book here.

Vintage Treasures: The Silistra Quartet by Janet Morris

Saturday, March 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

The Golden Sword Janet Morris 1981-small

In the last few weeks I’ve touched on a few tales of modern writers who didn’t make it — or at least, fantasy series that never got off the ground, and died after one or two hardcover releases without even a paperback edition. To switch things up a bit, today I thought I’d look at one of the most successful fantasy debuts of all time, a series that became a huge international hit with its first release, launching the career of one of the most prolific fantasy writers of the late 20th Century: Janet Morris’ The Silistra Quartet.

The Silistra Quartet began with Janet’s first novel, High Couch of Silistra, which appeared in paperback from Bantam Books in 1977 with a classic cover by Boris (above left). Although it was packaged as fantasy, High Couch was really science fiction, the far-future tale of the colony planet of Silistra, still recovering from an ancient war that left the planet scarred and much of the population infertile. With a dangerously low birth-rate, it’s not long before the human colonists of Silistra develop a new social order, with a hierarchy based on fertility and sexual prowess.

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Read A.M. Dellamonica’s “The Glass Galago” at Tor.com

Saturday, March 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been catching up on some of the online fiction at Tor.com recently. They’ve published some new great fantasy by Joe Abercrombie, Matt Wallace, David Nickle, Jennifer Fallon, Melissa Marr, Delia Sherman, and many others.

Child of a Hidden Sea, the first novel in A. M. Dellamonica’s trilogy The Hidden Sea Tales, was published in hardcover last June, and we covered it and its sequel, A Daughter of No Nation, in November. But that doesn’t mean I’ve had time to read it… and I probably won’t for many months. So I was delighted to see her 6,900-word story “The Glass Galago” available free at Tor.com. See? There are ways to keep tabs on all the hot new fantasy authors, if you look hard enough.

A.M. Dellamonica is at it again! The thrilling adventures of Gale Feliachild and Captain Parrish continue in a series of prequel stories that offers to take us deeper into the fascinating world of Stormwrack.

When Gale and the crew of the Nightjar are called back to the fleet to handle an issue involving a law regulating new patents and a missing magical inscription, they soon find themselves embroiled in a plot that is could potentially pit island against island. Now, they must discover the mystery of the glass galago before time runs out for both it and the fleet.

“The Glass Galago” was posted at Tor.com on Jan 26, and tagged as “Epic Fantasy.” It was edited by Stacy Hill, and illustrated by Richard Anderson. It’s available here.

We last covered Tor.com with Jennifer Fallon’s “First Kill.” For more free fiction, see all of our online magazine coverage here.

Jack Binder and the Early Chicago SF Fan Club

Saturday, March 19, 2016 Doug Ellis Comments 1 comment

Back in the mid-1930’s, one of the most active science fiction fan clubs was the Chicago Science Fiction Club, which had among its members such fans as Jack Darrow (among fandom’s most prolific writers of letters of comment to the SF pulps), Earl and Otto Binder (the Eando Binder writing team), Jack Binder (their brother, an artist), Walter Dennis and Paul McDermott (both of who had started the Science Correspondence Club in 1929 and later published The Comet, edited by Ray Palmer and arguably the first SF fanzine), William Dellenback, Allen Kline (brother of author Otis Adelbert Kline) and Howard Funk. The Chicago Club had formed as the Chicago Chapter of the Science Fiction League, the nationwide fan organization created and promoted by Wonder Stories. The Chicago Chapter’s activities were prominent in the pages of Wonder Stories, and in Sam Moskowitz’ words, it was “the outstanding chapter of the time.”

From November 1935 to the Spring of 1937, the Club published a fanzine called The 14 Leaflet. The Spring 1937 issue is available online as a pdf in the fanzine section of fanac.org. The copy that’s online, however, is missing the first interior page of the issue. Following the cover (by William Dellenback; I acquired his original preliminary for it back in 2001 when I bought material from Jack Darrow’s estate) but before page 1, many copies of the issue had another page inserted, which contained 19 very small photos (all taken by Dellenback) of various club members. The photos were all glued to a plain sheet of white paper, with numbers identifying them, with the code, revealing the identities of the folks in the photos, on page 2. However, the copy scanned online was apparently missing this photo page. On page 11 of the issue, the editors noted that 50 copies were being printed with the photo page (most going to the members) and 25 copies were being printed without the photo page.

I’ve looked for the Spring 1937 issue of The 14 Leaflet for many years, but had not had any success finding it. I wanted to see those photos!

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The Mid-March Magazine Rack

Friday, March 18, 2016 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

I think you could read a healthy diet of exclusively short fiction every day, and not come even close to staying on top of all the great new fantasy stories published every month.

But don’t panic — Black Gate is here to help. And we’re happy to report that March has been shaping up terrifically for short fiction fans. Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace — editors of Clarkesworld — have packaged up all of the fiction from last year in Clarkesworld: Year Eight, now available in trade paperback. In his February Short Story Roundup, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed the latest sword & sorcery tales from F&SF and Swords and Sorcery Magazine. For our vintage magazine readers, Rich Horton took a look at two issues of Analog from either side of the Campbell divide, and Matthew Wuertz reviewed the April 1941 of Unknown, with stories by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Theodore Sturgeon, P. Schuyler Miller, and Robert Heinlein. And we reported on the news that the entire run of IF Magazine, one of the great 20th Century science fiction magazines, is now freely available online at the Internet Archive.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our early March Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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Future Treasures: The Human Chord/The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood

Friday, March 18, 2016 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

The Human Chord The Centaur Algernon Blackwood-small

The Human Chord The Centaur Algernon Blackwood-back-small

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve not read much Algernon Blackwood. But I’ve been educated on his substantial contributions to the American horror genre by my fellow Black Gate writers, especially Ryan Harvey and Bill Lengeman. In his 2009 post “The Incredible Adventures of Algernon Blackwood,” Ryan wrote:

Of all the practitioners of the classic “weird tale”… none entrances me more than Algernon Blackwood. Looking at the stable of the foundational authors of horror — luminaries like Poe, James, le Fanu, Machen, Lovecraft — it is Blackwood who has the strongest effect on me. Of all his lofty company, he is the one who seems to achieve the most numinous “weird” of all.

Blackwood is often referred to as a “ghost story” writer… But true ghosts rarely appear in his fiction. Blackwood liked to dance around the edge of easy classification, and as his work advanced through the 1900s and into the teens, it got even harder to pinpoint. Blackwood’s interest in spiritualism, his love of nature, and his pantheism started to overtake his more standard forays in supernatural terror. His writing turned more toward transcendentalism and away from plot. The most important precursor to this development is his 1911 novel The Centaur, which critic S. T. Joshi describes as Blackwood’s “spiritual autobiography.”

And in his 2015 review of Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, Bill Lengeman clearly agreed.

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Beat the British and Save New France: Empires in America 2nd Edition

Friday, March 18, 2016 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 1 comment

The second edition of a solitaire board game about the French and Indian War sits only a few feet away from me, and it’s all I can do to keep writing this review. I’d much rather be finishing the game, the seventh I’ve played this week since I received it Monday. You see, Wolfe is marching on Ticonderoga and Monro is heading for a fort I built in the Green Mountains. I’ve whittled both of their armies down, though, so the biggest threat is General Anherst, aided by the Royal Navy as he advances along the St. Lawrence Seaway.

I love this game. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise, seeing as how I really enjoyed the original edition. I wrote about Empires in America in some detail back in 2012 right here at Black Gate. Since then, the manufacturer Victory Point Games has made a number of production advances. (You may have seen my excited post about the quality of Nemo’s War in January.) Cards are made from professional card stock, and the counters — wow, the counters may be cardboard, but they were cut with a laser, and with their brown finish they look and even feel a little like they’re wooden.

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Alone at the Edge of the World: The Witch

Friday, March 18, 2016 Thomas Parker Comments 5 comments

Have you ever considered the possibilities that would open up if certain common modern inventions had appeared much earlier than they actually did? (If you haven’t, humor me for the next few minutes and pretend that you have.)

Imagine, for example, that some starch-collared, black-hatted pre or proto-Edison had invented motion pictures some three hundred years before that technology really did arrive. What sort of films would have resulted? What kind of movies would have been made, for instance, by the dour puritans of New England?

Somehow, I don’t think that particular group would have been big on romantic comedies or caper pictures, and their 50 Shades of Grey would have been a sober documentary on the winter landscape of Massachusetts instead of… well, you know. Scary movies, on the other hand — they might well have gone in for those, and if you had gotten the corn shucking and butter churning done early some Saturday night in 1660, and had hopped on the family mule to trot into town to the Salem Cinema 6 to see a horror movie, you might have seen something very like The Witch.

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Goth Chick News: Tim Burton May (or May Not) Have Confirmed Beetlejuice 2 Is (or Is Not) a Go

Thursday, March 17, 2016 Sue Granquist Comments 6 comments

Yes, we’re confused too, in a giddy-with-anticipation kind of way. So let me explain.

March 30^th marks 28 years since the viewing public was first introduced to “the ghost with the most” and it’s been nearly as many years that talk of a sequel has been swirling.

To begin, let’s draw a door into the 90’s for a little background.

Beetlejuice was actually where we were first introduced to the wildly imaginative, dark humor of Tim Burton, whose name has since become synonymous with “strange and unusual” films.

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