Black Gate – Page 676 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1926 and 1927 Anthologies, edited by Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine

Tuesday, May 31, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

While I was wandering the aisles of the Windy City Pulp and Paper Show here in Chicago last month, I came across a delightful find… the second volume of Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine’s The Best of Amazing Stories, covering 1927 (above right). I snatched it up immediately, and hunted up the first volume online (above left).

My fascination with Amazing Stories began with Isaac Asimov’s biographical anthology Before the Golden Age, in which he collected his favorite pulp SF stories. Asimov noted that Amazing had the best reputation at the time, saying “It was Amazing Stories all the way with me.” But there hasn’t been much attention paid to the early days of perhaps the greatest SF magazine, so I was very pleased to see an anthology series that attempts to collect the best of the Grand Old Lady of the pulps, year by year.

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How Does Story Happen? An Interview with Jane S. Fancher

Monday, May 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

In my report on the 2016 Nebula Awards weekend, I talked about my two-part interview with SF and fantasy writer Jane S. Fancher, author of the Groundties trilogy and the Dance of the Rings novels. (It turned into a two-part interview because the memory on my new iPhone maxed out while recording CJ Cherryh’s epic Grand Master talk, and my first attempt at an interview lasted all of three minutes. Fortunately, Jane was understanding enough to pick up our interview 24 hours later.)

The Dance of the Rings novels were some of the first review copies I ever received, back in the late 90s when we were first getting the review site SF Site off the ground, so they meant a lot to me personally, and it was a delight to finally meet Jane in person. Turns out we had a lot in common, not the least of which was fond memories of the 90s comic scene (especially WaRP Graphics, publishers of ElfQuest, where Jane got her start in the industry), and a fascination with SF publishing. She was kind enough to share her stories of breaking into the industry, the tumultuous ups and downs of starting with short-lived Warner Questar, publisher of her first three novels, and switching to DAW for her first fantasy series.

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May Issue of The Dark Now on Sale

Monday, May 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Last month we announced that Sean Wallace’s quarterly magazine of dark fantasy and horror The Dark was making some welcome changes — including switching to monthly publication, relaunching their podcast series, and starting up a Patreon account. Their last quarterly issue, May 2016, is now available, with original stories by Steve Berman and Kali Wallace, and reprints by Kaaron Warren and Angela Slatter.

The Dark is edited by Sean Wallace, with assistance by Jack Fisher. Here’s the Table of Contents.

“The Haferbräutigam” by Steve Berman
“The Body Finder” by Kaaron Warren (from Blurring the Line, 2015)
“Caroline at Dusk” by Kali Wallace
“The Jacaranda Wife” by Angela Slatter (from Dreaming Again, 2008)

You can read issues free online, or help support the magazine by buying 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 six issues sub used to be just $15, but I can’t find anything on their website (or at Amazon) about subscriptions — but you can still buy back issues.

If you enjoy the magazine you can contribute to their new Patreon account. Read the complete announcement, and sign up here. You can also support The Dark by buying their books, reviewing stories, or even just leaving comments.

Read the May issue here, and see their complete back issue catalog here. The cover for May is by Vincent Chong. We last covered The Dark with Issue 11; the next issue is due in June.

See our May Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dr. Watson for Comic Relief?

Monday, May 30, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 6 comments

For many (especially of a certain age), the image of Doctor Watson is that of a buffoon who provides little assistance and lots of laughs. And the “credit” for that perception can be laid at the feet of Nigel Bruce. Bruce appeared in fourteen popular movies opposite Basil Rathbone’s beloved Holmes, and he also played the good doctor in well over two hundred radio plays – most with Rathbone.

In the first two films, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he was a bit of a clown. But after the franchise shifted from Fox to Universal, that portrayal was understated compared to the next twelve movies he made with Rathbone. The scripts called for Bruce to play a dolt – his daughter said that the disappointed Bruce made up the term ‘Boobus Brittanicus’ to describe his un-Doyle like character.

The poem below appeared in Punch Magazine. Unfortunately, after digging through my shelves, I cannot find where I got this from (I thought that it was one of Peter Haining’s books, but that didn’t pan out). But it is from the nineteen forties, when Rathbone was the brilliant, active Holmes and Bruce provided comic relief.

I think it’s both an amusing and insightful commentary on the Bruce phenomenon:

The stately Holmes of England, how beautiful he stood
Long, long ago in Baker Street – and still in Hollywood
He keeps the ancient flair for clues, the firm incisive chin,
The deerstalker, the dressing gown, the shag, the violin.

But Watson, Doctor Watson! How altered, how betrayed
The fleet of foot, the warrior once, the faster than Lestrade!
What imbecile production, what madness for the moon
Has screened my glorious Watson as well nigh a buffoon?

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Vintage Treasures: Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance

Monday, May 30, 2016 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Jack Vance was one of the most prolific fantasists of the 20th Century at both long and short lengths, producing some 55 novels and dozens of short stories. Underwood-Miller published no less than 60 hardcover volumes of his work during his lifetime, chiefly collections, and Subterranean Press produced some eleven volumes of his short stories and novellas, starting with the massive Jack Vance Treasury in 2007, and including The Early Jack Vance, a thoroughly delightful five-volume set that ended with Grand Crusades.

All those marvelous hardcover volumes were aimed at the collectors market, however, and sadly Vance had precious little fantasy short fiction reprinted in paperback. In fact, he had relatively few mass market collections at all. Ace gave us a handful of science fiction collections, including The Worlds of Jack Vance (1973), Galactic Effectuator (1981) and The Augmented Agent and Other Stories (1988); DAW published Dust of Far Suns (1981) and The Narrow Land (1982); and Pocket just one: The Best of Jack Vance (1976).

But what Vance lacked in quantity, he made up in quality. His 1979 collection Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance, one of the very few collections that focuses on his fantasy work, gathers some of his very finest work, including the title story and the brilliant “The Moon Moth.” It appeared in hardcover from Underwood Miller in 1979, and was reprinted in paperback by Tor in 1988.

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After the Twilight: Walt Simonson’s Ragnarök

Sunday, May 29, 2016 Matthew David Surridge Comments 5 comments

Ragnarök: Last God Standing Walt Simonson’s published eight issues so far of his ongoing comics series Ragnarök, along with a trade paperback collecting issues 1 through 6. Simonson, a veteran master of the comics form, is joined for the book by colorist Laura Martin and letterer John Workman. Edited by Scott Dunbier, Ragnarök’s published through IDW, and Chris Mowry’s credited with “production” on the first seven issues while Neil Uyetake gets the production credit on the eighth. What is Ragnarök beyond that? A fast-paced, adventurous saga. A grim playing-about with Norse myth. A super-hero high fantasy that nods to the past while telling a new and distinctive tale. And: a comic as exuberant as it is well-crafted.

The Viking legends say that at the end of time the heroic gods battle the assembled forces of evil, lose, and the fire giant Surtur destroys the world. Simonson’s imagined a story that takes place after the great final battle, but before the burning of the earth. In Ragnarök years have passed since the defeat of the gods. Then a mysterious figure hires a family of black elf assassins to kill a dead god. Things go wrong, and that god, a very familiar god who wields an unstoppable warhammer, instead awakens. Alone in a world ruled by his enemies, the zombie-like god that once was Thor seeks divine vengeance.

Difficult, in talking about this book, not to talk about Simonson’s stunning work in the 1980s on Marvel Comics’ version of Thor, one of the greatest post–Jack Kirby runs on any book in Marvel’s history. After having drawn some issues of the book a few years previously, he took over as both writer and artist with issue 337 and began a long-ranging story that finally ended in issue 382 (he’d given up art duties a bit more than a year before). Simonson brought a new awareness of myth to the book, and a striking design sense grounded in Norse culture as interpreted through a Kirbyesque lens. He also brought a powerful grasp of comics craft and storytelling technique.

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Monsters, Super-Science, and Devastating Family Secrets: Aurora West by Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin

Sunday, May 29, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

When I started my new job last month, I began taking the train into the city every day for the first time. St. Charles to Chicago, an hour each way. That’s a long time to be staring at all those suburbs going by. So I did two things immediately: I upgraded to a new iPhone 6s, which allowed me to keep up with all my blogs on the go (especially Politico, Tor.com, and MSNBC), and I started catching up on graphic novels.

For my first month on the job (at least until Alice got me a subscription to The New York Times as a birthday present last week), I read almost exclusively comics and graphic novels on the train, digging into the huge stack I’d accumulated over the past eighteen months. I read Original Sin, a cosmic mystery featuring Marvel’s greatest heroes as they attempted to solve the murder of The Watcher. I enjoyed Rick Remender’s gonzo dimension-hopping adventure Black Science, and the 2016 Hugo nominee Invisible Republic, a really superior far-future political thriller, and lots more.

In short, I read some pretty fine stuff. But the crème-de-la-crème was a two-volume story featuring Aurora West, a compelling heroine who was completely new to me: The Rise of Aurora West and The Fall of the House of West. Aurora accompanies her father Haggard West, greatest hero of the beleaguered city of Arcopolis, as he races across rooftops, investigates the mysterious origins of the strange plague of monsters bedeviling his city, and solves bizarre crimes. But in the process Aurora stumbles on clues relating to a long-forgotten crime, and begins an investigation of her own… one that leads to a series of revelations that challenge everything she knows, and threatens the very future of Arcopolis.

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Future Treasures: The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds

Sunday, May 29, 2016 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Arthur C Clarke A Meeting With Medusa-small

Arthur C Clarke The Medusa Chronicles-small

Arthur C. Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1971, and 45 years later is still considered one of the great classics of SF. It introduced us to Howard Falcon, who suffered a terrible accident while exploring the hostile skies of Jupiter — an accident that nearly destroyed his helium-filled airship, and both turned him into the world’s first cyborg, his badly damaged body largely replaced with machines, and made him essentially immortal. When Falcon returns to Jupiter in a more advanced ship, he makes contact with giant jellyfish-like creatures he names “Medusae.” The Medusae may be intelligent, and Falcon’s experience with them changes him even more dramatically than his previous accident. Now Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds have written a novel-length sequel to Clarke’s classic tale, following Falcon’s further adventures to the limits of our solar system… and beyond.

Inspired by Clarke’s novella, The Medusa Chronicles continues the story of Howard Falcon, perhaps humanity’s greatest ambassador and explorer, and the centuries of his adventures among our solar system, the rise of artificial intelligence, and our expansion on to other planets, written with the permission from Clarke’s estate by two of our greatest science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds.

The Medusa Chronicles is an awe-inspiring work by two modern masters of science fiction who have taken the vision of one the field’s greatest writers and expanded upon it, combining cutting-edge science, philosophy, and technology into a transcendent work of fiction that offers a plausible future for our solar system through the eyes of one of its great fictional heroes.

The Medusa Chronicles will be published by Saga Press on June 7, 2016. It is 412 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Getty Images.

Notes From the Underground, Part II: Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, Tremors 4: The Legend Begins and Tremors 5: Bloodlines

Sunday, May 29, 2016 William I. Lengeman III Comments 1 comment

Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001)
Directed by Brent Maddock

Burt Gummer: Is your head up your ass for the warmth?

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the movie Tremors to almost anyone. I think there’s plenty to like in it, even for the casual viewer, unless they have a strong aversion to horror/monster movies. Tremors 2: Aftershocks was a decent sequel but I’d recommend it only to more serious horror fans and Tremors cultists. Which is even more true for Tremors 3: Back to Perfection.

As the title suggests, the action moves from the remote corner of Mexico featured in the second movie to the small desert town of Perfection, Nevada, the setting for Tremors. The town sign now lists a population of five, down from the 14 of the first movie.

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New Treasures: The Murdstone Trilogy by Mal Peet

Saturday, May 28, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

How hard can it be to write a fantasy trilogy? That’s a topic that came up more than once at the Nebula Awards this month. You know what also came up? A copy of Mel Peet’s The Murdstone Trilogy, which deals with that very question. I was fortunate enough to get one of the few copies that showed up on the free book table at the Nebula weekend, and I was very glad I did. It proved to be the prize acquisition of the weekend.

Written by Carnegie Medalist Mal Peet, it’s a black comedy about an impoverished literary writer who makes a pact with the devil to write a sword-and-sorcery trilogy. It was sold as an adult novel in the UK, but is being marketed as YA here in the US. The Wall Street Journal calls it “A deliriously freewheeling send-up of the publishing industry and the current sword-and-sorcery craze,” and Publishers Weekly says it’s “enormous fun, especially for those familiar with the literary conventions it skewers.”

Award-winning YA author Philip Murdstone is in trouble. Flat broke. His star has waned. No one wants his novels about sensitive teenage boys. So his ruthless agent, Minerva Cinch, convinces him that his only hope is to write a sword-and-sorcery blockbuster. High Fantasy, specifically, or, to be more precise, Phantasy with a p-h. Unfortunately, Philip — allergic to the faintest trace of anything Tolkien — is utterly unsuited to the task.

In Philip’s darkest, whiskey-fueled hour, a dwarfish stranger comes to his rescue. But the deal Philip makes with Pocket Wellfair turns out to have Faustian consequences. The Murdstone Trilogy is a richly dark comedy described by one U.K. reviewer as “totally insane in the best way possible.”

The Murdstone Trilogy was published by Candlewick Press on September 22, 2015. It is 314 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Greg Clarke.