Black Gate – Page 679 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Table of Contents for Mysterion

Saturday, May 21, 2016 Donald Crankshaw Comments 1 comment

I’ve talked about the anthology my wife and I are editing and publishing before (see here and here). Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith is a professional paying speculative fiction anthology of stories which engage with Christianity. It brings together twenty writers, both newcomers and established authors, including two Nebula nominees, in stories running the gamut from science fiction, to fantasy, to horror. We avoided preachy stories, instead looking for fiction with Christian characters, themes, or cosmology that deals with them in ways that feel authentic to our experience in the faith, neither sanitizing nor vilifying.

I haven’t had anything to say in the last few months, mostly because we’ve been busy — selecting the stories, editing the stories, getting contracts signed and paying authors. We’re still busy — right now we’re looking for well-known authors and editors to blurb the anthology, and preparing advance reader copies for them, and copy editing and formatting. It’s a ton of work, but we’re finally ready to make some announcements. Namely, our table of contents.

Here are the stories that will be appearing in our anthology.

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Star Trek After All: The New Trailer for Star Trek Beyond

Saturday, May 21, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I’ve enjoyed the first two films in the Star Trek reboot, despite the fact that they’ve veered pretty far from the kind of thoughtful storytelling that made the show great. But as flashy summer blockbusters without a lot of depth go, they’re better than most — and the writers certainly captured the humor of the show, at least.

But when I saw the first trailer for the third film, Star Trek Beyond, I thought new director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) had pretty much abandoned all pretense of making a Star Trek film in favor of a two-fisted action-comedy in space. Co-screenwriter Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), who also plays Scotty, has clearly put his comedy stamp on this one. Was there anything of Star Trek left?

The second trailer, released today, is a dramatic shift in tone from the first one, and seems to confirm that yes, this is a Star Trek film after all. Have a look and see what you think. Star Trek Beyond is being produced by Skydance and Bad Robot Productions, and will arrive in theaters on July 22, 2016.

New Treasures: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Saturday, May 21, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Peter Brown is the author of The Curious Garden and My Teacher is a Monster; The Wild Robot is his first science fiction book. In a lengthy post on his website, The Wild Robot Lives!, he writes about the genesis of the book.

I wanted to tell a different kind of robot story. I wanted to tell the story of a robot who finds harmony in the last place you’d expect… What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? To answer that question, I invented a robot character named Rozzum (a subtle nod to Čapek’s play), and tried to imagine how she’d handle life in the wilderness.

Eight years later, The Wild Robot has finally arrived in hardcover from Little, Brown. Here’s the description.

Can a robot survive in the wilderness?

When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is — but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a fierce storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island’s unwelcoming animal inhabitants.

As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home — until, one day, the robot’s mysterious past comes back to haunt her.

The Wild Robot was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on April 5, 2016. It is 288 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Peter Brown.

The May Fantasy Magazine Rack

Saturday, May 21, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There’s plenty of great news for fantasy fans in May — including the successful launch of new top-tier magazine, Skelos, helmed by Jeffrey Shanks, Mark Finn, and Chris Gruber. We also wondered if Weird Tales was dead (it probably is), and started our coverage of Shock Totem — just in time for the magazine to go on hiatus. In the meantime, Rich Horton took a look at the January 1955 issue of Science Fiction Stories, containing short stories by Algis Budrys, Wallace West, and Raymond F. Jones, the author of This Island Earth.

In his April Short Fiction Round Up, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviews the latest issues of Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #51 presented its usual complement of two stories in April… Jason Ray Carney. “The Ink of the Slime Lord” gave me nearly everything I could want from a S&S story: a wicked sorceress, dire magics, a dashing pirate, and plenty of monsters…. Carney’s complete lack of restraint and deeply purple prose are a large part of what made me dig this story completely. If you’re going to be extreme, go to 11. Good fun.

In James Lecky’s “But the Dreams of Men,” a man wracked by guilt over the horrible sins in his past inadvertently finds a path to redemption of sorts… Lecky does it quite well. He consistently finds the right balance between characterization, narrative, and action. If you haven’t read him before, this is an excellent place to start.

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Future Treasures: Return to the Isle of the Lost, a Descendants Novel by Melissa de la Cruz

Friday, May 20, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

This is the year of Disney. Three of the top four films (Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, and The Jungle Book) are Disney properties… not to mention the new Star Wars film scheduled for release in December. And on the small screen, the Disney Channel original film Descendants — featuring the children of Disney’s most famous villains, including Maleficent and Jafar, and Cruella de Vil — has proven to be a big hit.

Melissa de la Cruz’s The Isle of the Lost, released in hardcover by Hyperion last year, was the prequel to Descendants, and it became an international blockbuster. The novel spent thirty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list — including fifteen at the #1 spot — and has more than a million copies in print. Descendants proved to be the #1 most watched cable TV movie of 2015 (#5 of all time), and even its soundtrack soared to #1 on iTunes.

Now de la Cruz brings us a second book, Return to the Isle of the Lost, which bridges the gap between Descendants and its sequel, currently in development. Everything changes for our villainous heroes (heroic villains?) when they receive anonymous messages demanding that they return to the Isle… and when their arrival sets them on the path of a new and exciting magical adventure deep in the catacombs beneath the Isle of the Lost. Return to the Isle of the Lost will be published by Disney-Hyperion on May 24, 2016. It is 313 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover, or $12.99 for the digital version.

Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers

Friday, May 20, 2016 Violette Malan Comments 1 comment

Allingham Mind Lately I’ve been looking at SF-like inventions or discoveries that turn up in crime/mystery novels, first with John D. MacDonald‘s The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything, and then with a variation on that same invention in an SF mystery, Spider Robinson‘s Kill the Editor/Lady Slings the Booze. This put me in mind of another example of mystery meets SF in Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers (1965).

Allingham (1904-1966) is considered one of the mystery writers of the British Golden Age, along with Christie, Sayers, and their ilk, and her earlier novels certainly have a touch of that Jazz Age charm.

At first glance Albert Campion seems to be another variation on the gentleman sleuth with a friend on the force, a la Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey. The reader is given clear hints from time to time that he’s probably a younger son of a noble family, like Wimsey, but we never see Albert in family situations. He doesn’t live like a rich man, or a rich man’s son, and while it’s also pretty clear that “Albert Campion” is a pseudonym, we never learn his real name. Instead of the traditional English manservant, Albert employs Lugg, a former cat-burglar who’s lost his figure. Their relationship provides a great deal of the humour in the novels, but these books aren’t written for laughs. The characters may not take themselves very seriously, but they are serious about their work.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Paul Krueger

Thursday, May 19, 2016 Sue Granquist Comments 3 comments

Bartenders are magical.

Yes, alright – you already knew that in a metaphorical sort of way. But as we will all soon learn from native Chicago author Paul Krueger, bartenders are also very magical in a literal way.

Or at least they are here in Chi-town.

Krueger’s debut novel, Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge is about a secret society of bartenders who fight demons with alcohol-magic, which is something most of us had a feeling was probably true, but usually around 2 a.m when we start thinking to confirm our hunch, the ability to do so is pretty much beyond our reach.

No need to worry though, Krueger is about to clear it all up for us.

College grad Bailey Chen has the typical, Midwestern, twenty-something issues: no job, no parental support, and a rocky relationship with Zane, the only friend who’s around when she moves back home. But Bailey’s issues are about to get a lot less classic.

It turns out supernatural creatures are stalking the streets of Chicago, and they can be hunted only with the help of magically mixed cocktails: vodka grants super-strength, whiskey offers the power of telekinesis and tequila gives its drinker fiery blasts of elemental energy.

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Announcing the 2015 Bram Stoker Award Winners

Thursday, May 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Back in February, Goth Chick announced “Your Dark and Stormy Night Reading List” — the nominees for the The Horror Writers Association’s 2015 Stoker Awards for superior literary achievement in horror, in a variety of categories. The Bram Stoker Awards were instituted in 1987 and the eleven award categories are: Novel, First Novel, Short Fiction, Long Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction Collection, Poetry Collection, Anthology, Screenplay, Graphic Novel, and Non-Fiction.

That’s a lot of great horror reading. Now, the Bram Stoker awards are traditionally given out at the World Horror Convention, but this year changed things up a little. The 2015 honors were awarded on May 14, 2016 at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, during the first annual StokerCon — which sounds like it was a blast.

Congratulations to all the winners! And for all you readers, we suggest you start loading up your Amazon wish list immediately.

For Superior Achievement in a Novel

A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay (Morrow)

For Superior Achievement in a First Novel

Mr. Suicide, Nicole Cushing (Word Horde)

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Shock Totem #10 Now Available

Thursday, May 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Way back in March of last year, when I announced we were expanding our magazine coverage at Black Gate — and was bold enough to list the 16 magazines we’d be covering regularly — there was an immediate outcry that we were being too limited. And the very first magazine that readers requested we add to our list was the American small press horror ‘zine Shock Totem (thanks, Wild Ape!).

After a year of sustained effort, we’ve built up our coverage to the point where we report on 41 magazines regularly, or at least semi-regularly (41! I had no idea there were 41 fantasy magazines on the market when I started this crazy project). But Shock Totem still isn’t one of them. Time to correct that! Today, I’m here to tell you about the tenth issue of the magazine of “Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted,” which shipped in March.

But first, I should share this unfortunate announcement from K. Allen Wood, posted on January 1 of last year:

The next issue of Shock Totem, number ten, will be our last issue for a while. The reasons for this are many, but the biggest reason is simple: kids… As of right now, the goal is to take a complete break from publishing the magazine in 2015 and reopen for submissions on January 1, 2016, with a new issue scheduled for July 2016…

In the next few weeks we will begin accepting novel and novella submissions… we’re not going away, not completely; we’re just scaling back for a time so I can be a father.

As the father of three, I can certainly understand that. It took over a year for issue 10 to materialize, but with regard to the novellas Allen was as good as his word. In August of last year Shock Totem Publications announced they were open for novel and novella submissions, and on January 31 they rolled out this very impressive publishing schedule for the year.

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Cast Your Spell on a Medieval Town in The Village Crone

Wednesday, May 18, 2016 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

I’m something of a collector (this may not come as a surprise). I collect vintage paperbacks, pulps, science fiction digests, comics, and lots of other paper ephemera.

But chiefly what I collect is games. Goodness, I have a lot of games. I hoard them in the basement. I drive to games auctions (like the marvelous Games Plus auction in Mount Prospect, IL), I track down obscure Amiga games on eBay, and I compulsively hunt every solitaire role playing game ever made.

I’m almost given up buying modern fantasy board games, though. Not that they’re not any good — far from it! — but even an obsessive like me has his limits. We’re living in a Golden Age of Board Games, and it’s a huge challenge keeping tabs on even a fraction of all the interesting games being released every month.

You know what I can do, though? I can try some of the games Amazon.com has deeply discounted every month. I’m not sure what the story is with these games — were they discontinued? Replaced with a newer edition? Did they flop? — but hey, I don’t actually care all that much. They’re super cheap, they look cool, and I’m ready to buy. Take my money.

I’ve been buying 1-2 every week for the past month or so, and some of them look pretty darn good. Like Fireside Games’ The Village Crone, an accessible Euro-style game with modular boards in which 1-6 players harvest spell ingredients, give their familiars secret tasks, casts spells, turn villagers into frogs, and compete for the power and authority that comes with being named Village crone.

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