Black Gate – Page 696 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Grimdark Magazine 6 Now Available

Monday, January 25, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The latest issue of Grimdark, the quarterly magazine of dark fantasy, has brand new fiction from a quartet of hot new fantasy writers — including a Manifest Delusions tale by Michael R. Fletcher (set in the world of his novel Beyond Redemption), and a Vault of Heaven story by Peter Orullian (set in the world of Trial of Intentions). The issue also has fiction by T. R. Napper, and an excerpt from Mitchell Hogan’s novel Blood of Innocents.

The latest issue went on sale January 13. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

Short Stories

“At the Walls of Sinnlos” by Michael R. Fletcher
“A Fair Man” by Peter Orullian
“Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang” by T. R. Napper

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Story in Its Many Forms

Sunday, January 24, 2016 Tina Jens Comments 0 Comment

My Exploring Fantasy Genre Writing course was designed based on the idea that “story” can be told in a vast array of forms; and exploring those forms, both through observation and by wading in and taking a crack at them, enriches the way we work when we return to our preferred art form. Even if one’s painting skills are closer to a kindergartner’s finger-painting “masterpiece” than Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” the act of working with paints can help us better understand the use of color to create a desired mood.

The course is designed specifically to look at the reach of the Fantasy genre across a wide array of media and forms including fiction, fairytales, film, television, cartoons, children’s books, music (classical and otherwise), music videos, plays, radio plays, audio and video blogs, art, photography, fashion, comic books, mock journalism, poetry, games, and any other form we may stumble across.

Each week starts with an exploration of a Fantasy theme that has a large body of work built around it, such as Mermaids, Pirates, The Big Bad Wolf, Alice in Wonderland, Voodoo, Arthurian Legends, the dizzing array of Faerie creatures, The Ring of the Niebelung, and psychic detectives. After covering the basics of the theme, we read, look at, watch, and listen to various works based on or inspired by that trope.

For example, for the Pirates unit we: read issue 2 of the comic book Cursed Pirate Girl; read the short story “We Are Norsemen” (because Vikings are simply Norse pirates), recite three short poems about pirates by Shel Silverstein and laugh at his cartoon drawings; watch a short, animated historical film about Jean Lafitte, America’s most famous pirate, on YouTube; then read an essay I wrote about some little-known pirate women from around the world.

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What We Can Learn From a Time Lord: Doctor Who and a New Enlightened Perspective

Sunday, January 24, 2016 Nick Ozment Comments 0 Comment

There’s an underrated benefit to science fiction and fantasy, and it is not dissimilar from a benefit one gains by being a student of history. Since many folks consider speculative fiction and historical scholarship (or “flights of fancy” and “recorded fact”) to be the antithesis of each other, I think this benefit is worth some attention.

The benefit I here have in mind is the gaining of a healthy detached perspective. Detractors of fantasy and sci-fi will immediately object to my use of the word “healthy,” being that they regard such literature as mere escapism. And it often is that, yes. As is golf, and the Super Bowl, and birthday parties, and most fun things that we do when we aren’t engaged in utilitarian labor. But I’m thinking about a different sort of escape: escape from our own temporal status in this particular time and place and culture and society to which we were born. This is a benefit that is greatly under-appreciated, but I believe it holds real power.

The reader of science fiction, like the historian, steps out of his or her own time frame: if you’re a historian, you step back in time; if you’re a sci-fi fan, you become accustomed to stepping ahead into some speculative future. And if we cultivate that mental exercise, it gives us the unique opportunity to look at our own time from that same detached perspective.

When you do this, it can be liberating. We put so much stock in what people say. We are angered, hurt, offended, cut to the core by what we are bombarded with when we turn on the TV or log onto Twitter or get together with family over Thanksgiving dinner. But the power of these viewpoints — and the hostile ways in which they are sometimes expressed — to affect us is really only predicated on the fact that we are alive now and that these are opinions being expressed by our contemporaries.

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The Books of David G. Hartwell: The Masterpieces of Fantasy

Sunday, January 24, 2016 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment-small

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder-small

David G. Hartwell passed away on January 20th. He was not a fiction writer, but he was nonetheless one of the most respected and influential figures in the industry. He was a senior editor at many of the genre’s most important publishers, including Pocket, Arbor House, Avon/Morrow, and Tor Books, where he edited thousands of books (yes, thousands). He edited The New York Review of Science Fiction for nearly 30 years, and was nominated for the Hugo Award 41 times.

But for me his most enduring contributions to the field will always be his delightful anthologies, of which he produced many. David had a habit of editing sprawling, ambitious books which gave readers new insights into the field. Two of his earliest, released in 1988 and 1989, and co-edited with his future wife Kathryn Cramer, were Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder.

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C.S.E. Cooney’s Novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale” Available Free Online

Sunday, January 24, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

C.S.E. Cooney’s 2015 novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale,” from her acclaimed collection Bone Swans, has been made available free online by the publisher, Mike Allen at Mythic Delirium Books. Here’s what Paul Di Filippo said about the story in his Locus Online review:

Original to this volume, “The Bone Swans of Amandale” reads as if Patricia McKillip and Laird Barron decided jointly to rework the Redwall series. In a land where, among other wonders, a Fairy Mound rises “smooth as a bullfrog,” Maurice the Rat Man must come to the aid of the last Swan Princess, Dora Rose, whom he hopelessly loves and who has seen all her kindred slain, their precious bones turned into musical instruments by the evil ogre Mayor of Amandale, Ulia Gol, whose “florid face was as putridly pink as her wig.” With the help of Nicolas the Pied Piper, suitable reparations are exacted. To say this lively tale recaps its famous model legend is also to say that the Coen Bros.’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a straight-ahead rendition of the Labors of Hercules.

Our previous coverage of Bone Swans includes:

Locus Online on C.S.E. Cooney’s Bone Swans
C.S.E. Cooney Gets a Starred Review from Publisher’s Weekly
New Treasures: Bone Swans
Bird People, Evil Clowns, and the Crooked One: Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

Read the complete story online for free here.

New Treasures: The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo

Saturday, January 23, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Science fiction can be as strange and imaginative as the best of fantasy… and that certainly seems to be the case with this slender little neo-noir thriller from French writer Serge Brussolo. While he’s published multiple bestsellers in France, this is his first novel to be translated into English. Check it out.

In The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, lucid dreamers called mediums dive into their dreams to retrieve ectoplasms — sticky blobs with curiously soothing properties that are the only form of art in the world. The more elaborate the dream, the better the ectoplasm.

David Sarella is a medium whose dream identity is a professional thief. With his beautiful accomplice Nadia, he breaks into jewelry stores and museums, lifts precious diamonds, and when he wakes, the loot turns into ectoplasms to be sold and displayed.

Only the dives require an extraordinary amount of physical effort, and as David ages, they become more difficult. His dream world — or is it the real world? — grows unstable. Any dive could be his last, forever tearing him away from Nadia and their high-octane, Bond-like adventures.

David decides to go down one final time, in the deepest, most extravagant dive ever attempted. But midway through, he begins to lose control, and the figures in the massive painting he’s trying to steal suddenly come to life… and start shooting.

The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome was translated by Edward Gauvin and published by Melville House on January 19, 2016. It is 196 pages, priced at $24.95 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Christopher King.

We All Have to Start Somewhere

Saturday, January 23, 2016 Richard Bowes Comments 1 comment

We all have to start somewhere and this is where I started: Three paperback originals from Warner/Questar. Warchild was the first (in 1986) with an EMBOSSED cover – Art by Richard Corbin. It sold okay, got on a Year’s Best list. [Click on any of the images for bigger versions.]

Feral Cell came out in 1987 – About alternate worlds and cancer which I’d had while writing Warchild – this got me some critical attention plus I got cured!

The sequel to Warchild was Goblin Market (1988) – nice enough but didn’t sell like the original (maybe because the cover wasn’t embossed).

Here are the back covers to all three books.

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Future Treasures: Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen edited by Claude Lalumiere and Mark Shainblum

Saturday, January 23, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Mark Shainblum has been a friend of mine ever since I wrote him a fan letter after reading New Triumph #1 in 1984, featuring the Canadian superhero Northguard he created with Gabriel Morrissette. And Claude Lalumiere was Black Gate‘s first comics editor, with a lengthy column in every one of our early issues. Together, the two have teamed up to edit the nineteenth volume of Tesseracts, the prestigious and long running Canadian anthology series. The theme this volume is superheroes, in all their fascinating combinations.

Superheroes! Supervillains! Superpowered antiheroes! Mad scientists!

Adventurers into the unknown. Detectives of the dark night. Costumed crimefighters. Steampunk armored avengers. Brave and bold supergroups. Crusading aliens in a strange land. Secret histories. Pulp action.

Tesseracts Nineteen features all of these permutations of the superhero genre and many others besides! Featuring stories by: Patrick T. Goddard, D.K. Latta, Alex C. Renwick, Mary Pletsch & Dylan Blacquiere, Geoff Hart, Marcelle Dube, Kevin Cockle, John Bell, Evelyn Deshane, A.C. Wise, Jennifer Rahn, Bevan Thoma, Bernard E. Mireault, Sacha A. Howells, Kim Goldberg, Luke Murphy, Corey Redekop, Brent Nichols, Jason Sharp, Arun Jiwa, Chadwick Ginther, Leigh Wallace, David Perlmutter, P.E. Bolivar, Michael Matheson.

The Tesseracts anthology series is Canada’s longest running anthology. It was first edited by the late Judith Merril in 1985, and has published more than 529 original Canadian speculative fiction (Science fiction, fantasy and horror) stories and poems by 315 Canadian authors, editors, translators and special guests. Some of Canada’s best known writers have been published within the pages of these volumes ― including Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Robert J. Sawyer, and Spider Robinson (to name a few).

Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen will be published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing on April 15, 2016. It is 200 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback. But the digital version will be available next week, and is priced at only $5.99. The cover is by Jason Loo.

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Barbara Barrett – Painting With Words: The Poetry of REH

Friday, January 22, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

Black Gate‘s ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series had ranged far and wide across the writings of REH. But we had not yet tackled his poetry. Consider it tackled! Barbara Barrett, who put together the extensively detailed The Wordbook: An Index Guide to the Poetry of Robert E. Howard, is the planet’s resident expert on the poetry of REH. And the author of Conan was quite a poet. Read on!

By the time I discovered Howard’s poetry, Solomon Kane, King Kull, Conan and El Borak were familiar characters. I didn’t think Howard’s writing could get any better than the poetic prose in those stories. At least, until I picked up a copy of Shadow Kingdoms: The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard and read these lines from his poem “The Ride of Falume.”

A league behind the western wind, a mile beyond the moon,

Where the dim seas roar on an unknown shore and the drifting stars lie strewn

I was transported to a place straight out of a Hubble star-strewn space photo where I sat on some unknown seashore, gazing at a moon larger than I had ever seen, and listening to the roaring waves crash against sand and rock. I could see it all clearly.

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Tracking Down Frank Kelly Freas’ Planet Stories Cover for “The Ambassadors of Flesh”

Friday, January 22, 2016 Doug Ellis Comments 6 comments

A little while ago, I posted one of our two big IlluxCon purchases — a Hubert Rogers Astounding cover that we had arranged to buy over the summer from a friend, and the deal was completed at IlluxCon. This is the other major piece we picked up there, also from the same friend (click for a bigger version).

It’s by the great Frank Kelly Freas, and is the cover for the Summer 1954 issue of Planet Stories. It illustrates “The Ambassadors of Flesh” by Poul Anderson, which was the third of his Dominic Flandry stories. Needless to say, Flandry saves the day, and the girl.

Like all of the original Planet Stories covers I’ve seen, the block where the magazine’s logo went was just painted as a solid color. My friend had the logo scanned and printed onto mylar, which is laid in on top of the painting as it’s framed, so the logo is actually not on the artwork. Freas won the first of his ten Best Artist Hugos in 1955, about a year after this painting was published.

On a side note, artist Herman Vestal, a Fiction House regular, contributed a double-page spread which ran as the interior illustration for this story. Several years ago at Windy City, I managed to pick up the left half of that illo (still looking for the right half!), which has Flandry in a good action scene. I’ll post that down the road.