Black Gate – Page 704 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Tale of Two Covers: The Last Page by Anthony Huso

Sunday, March 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

The Last Page Anthony Huso paperback-small

I bought the hardcover edition of Anthony Huso’s debut novel The Last Page after reading Matthew David Surridge’s review in Black Gate 12.

The Last Page is a high fantasy steampunk novel, and a love story. We follow the sexually charged relationship between the improbably named Caliph Howl, heir to the throne of the northern country of Stonehold, and a witch named Sena. The two of them meet at university, go their own ways, and then come together again after Caliph has become king and Sena has acquired a vastly powerful magical tome… what really makes the first book work is its language. The prose is strong, quick and dense in the best ways. The diction, the word choice, is inventive; the imagery is both original and concise. At its best, Huso’s language recalls Wolfe or Vance…

The last time I was in a bookstore I did a double take when I saw the trade paperback edition, which has been given a dramatically different cover. The hardcover edition (above left) was packaged as an urban fantasy, with a beautiful woman with glowing eyes on the cover. The paperback (at right) has been completely redesigned as a fantasy adventure novel, showing a huge fleet of airships massing over a sprawling fantasy landscape. If you’re not paying attention, it’d be pretty easy to mistake it for a completely different book.

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Superhero TV: Arrow

Saturday, March 12, 2016 Derek Kunsken Comments 3 comments

ga0 — The Arrow. I’ve been told by the ladies that he is easy on the eyes.

Over the last several weeks, a Canadian cadre of Black Gate‘s bloggers have formed an Alpha Flight of super-bloggers to right the wrongs of the world, especially where such wrongs take the form of you not knowing about every superhero TV show we can talk about.

This is going to be my last post in this huge comic event, and to cap off my contribution, I wanted to dig into the CW’s Arrow which has been running since 2012 and is into its fourth season. It has the same producers as The Flash and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (also running on CW) and CBS’ Supergirl, and they occupy the same universe (multiverse in the case of Supergirl).

Green Arrow is not a new DC property, dating back to 1941. Green Arrow was a Robin Hood-themed character cast in the same mold as Batman, so much so that he also started as a millionaire, had a kid sidekick, and an Arrow Car and an Arrow-Plane.

In fact, there wasn’t much to separate him from Batman for much of his early years, which begs the question of, if you’re looking for Batman, why not just buy a Batman comic?

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Future Treasures: Harmony House by Nic Sheff

Saturday, March 12, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The YA dystopian trend doesn’t seem like it will run out of energy too soon. My eyes glaze over these days when I see them at the bookstore.

There’s plenty of original and interesting YA work being produced that don’t involve nightmare dsytopian scenarios, however. Nic Sheff, author of the bestselling memoir Tweak, an account of his teen years as a crystal meth addict, and its follow up We All Fall Down: Living with Addiction, brings us Harmony House, a YA horror novel. It arrives in hardcover from HarperTeen later this month.

Something’s not right in Beach Haven.

Jen Noonan’s father thinks a move to Harmony House is the key to salvation, but to everyone who has lived there before, it is a portal to pure horror.

After her alcoholic mother’s death, Jen’s father cracked. He dragged Jen to a dilapidated old manor on the shore of New Jersey to start their new lives—but Jen can tell that the place has an unhappy history. She can feel it the same way she can feel her anger flowing out of her, affecting the world in strange ways she can’t explain.

But Harmony House is more than just a creepy old estate. It’s got a chilling past — and the more Jen discovers its secrets, the more the house awakens. Visions of a strange boy who lived in the house long ago follow Jen wherever she goes, and her father’s already-fragile sanity disintegrates before her eyes. As the forces in the house join together to terrorize Jen, she must find a way to escape the past she didn’t know was haunting her — and the mysterious and terrible power she didn’t realize she had.

Harmony House will be published by HarperTeen on March 22, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

Bombs and Gorgeous Automatons: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

Saturday, March 12, 2016 Damien Moore Comments 0 Comment

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street-back-small

Imagine living in 1800s London and working near Scotland Yard as a telegraphist. Now, imagine how the foundations of your uneventful life are upended when a stranger saves you from a catastrophic bombing. And get this: they knew it would happen.

Thus begins The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley. When Thaniel Steepleton, the disillusioned telegraphist, befriends Keita Mori, a masterful watchmaker, their lives begin to weave around the clock. Cursed with the ability to see the future, Mori struggles to live in the present whilst preventing bad things from happening to Thaniel. In the meantime, bad things unfortunately happen to Mori, considering he ranks as the premier suspect in the bombing. Later on, a brilliant physicist named Grace enters their lives and attempts to rid Mori of his ability to foretell the future.

Along with this gripping tale, we learn about Mori’s aristocratic past in a war-torn Japan. We also learn the reason why he needed to start his life anew in London. Matsumoto, a man from his past, also journeys to London and weaves in and out of Grace’s life, hoping to find a place of permanence. The two subplots strengthen the plot in their center.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

Saturday, March 12, 2016 William I. Lengeman III Comments 5 comments

Where’s Spock? Why, he’s right there in the director’s chair, of course. For the third cinematic voyage of the Starship Enterprise, Leonard Nimoy took on a dual role as actor and director, though the former role was somewhat minimal. Which set a pattern for numerous other Star Trek cast members. According to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, 15 cast members eventually sat in the big chair, although only Nimoy, Shatner and Jonathan Frakes directed movies.

I don’t recall if I watched The Search for Spock prior to this rewatch project. But I actually watched it twice within a month or two to make up for it. Why? Well, because it didn’t really stick the first time around. Which is to say that about the best I can do to critique this movie is to damn it with faint praise. It’s like one of the many Star Trek TV episodes that’s not bad but that doesn’t have anything special to recommend it. I think the word serviceable sums it up best.

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New Treasures: The Last Girl by Joe Hart

Friday, March 11, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Joe Hart is the author of several horror and thriller novels, including The River Is Dark, Lineage, and Widow Town. His latest is the opening novel in a new post-apocalyptic series in which a mysterious worldwide epidemic dramatically reduces the number of females born, from 50% of births to less than 1 percent. Twenty-five years after the first infection, there’s still no cure, and there are fewer than a thousand woman on the face of the Earth.

The Last Girl tells the tale of Zoey, and a few other surviving women, kept in a research compound desperately searching for the cause of the epidemic. It’s not a life Zoey wants… and when she makes a bid for freedom, she takes the future of mankind into her hands.

The second volume in The Dominion Trilogy, The Final Trade, is scheduled to be released on September 13, 2016. The Last Girl was published by Thomas & Mercer on March 1, 2016. It is 371 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $5.99 for the digital price. The cover was designed by M.S. Corley. Click the images above for bigger versions.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 194 Now Available

Friday, March 11, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Beneath Ceaseless Skies has changed up its cover art again. I quite like the new art, “Research Lab” by Sung Choi (see the full piece here), which covers their third Science Fantasy Special Issue.

The March 3rd BCS is a special double-issue featuring a bonus story, a bonus podcast, and a science-fantasy episode of the BCS Audio Vault podcast. It contains original short fiction by Yoon Ha Lee, Cat Rambo, Anaea Lay, and an Audio Vault reprint by Yoon Ha Lee.

“Foxfire, Foxfire” by Yoon Ha Lee
Even in human-shape, I had an excellent sense of smell. I had no difficulty tracking the pilot. She lay on her side in the lee of a chunk of rubble, apparently asleep. The remains of a Brick Ration’s wrapper had been tossed to the side. She had downed all of it, which impressed me. But then, I’d heard that piloting was hungry work.

“Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest” by Cat Rambo
Today her sleeves are sewn with opals and moonstones and within their glimmer here and there on the left sleeve, glitters another precious stone, set in no particular order, random as the stars. Her skirt and bodice are aluminum fish-scales, armored though she expects no fight. Her only weapon is her own considerable wit.

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A Pearl Among Emeralds: The Alhambra Palace

Friday, March 11, 2016 Violette Malan Comments 1 comment

Alhambra tower According to at least one source, Granada’s Alhambra Palace is the most visited tourist attraction in Spain. I’m sure the people in Barcelona would argue that their Sagrada Familia actually holds that honour, but the fact is that people have been going to visit the Alhambra since it became a Moorish royal palace in 1333. Or at least since Washington Irving wrote his Tales of the Alhambra in 1840.

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Goth Chick News: Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Aliens with Ripley’s Underwear and a Xenomorph Cookie Jar

Thursday, March 10, 2016 Sue Granquist Comments 1 comment

If you can get your brain around this fact, it has been nearly 30 years since the release of James Cameron’s iconic horror / scifi movie Aliens.

The film has been the subject of a lot of web-chatter of late, not simply because of its pending milestone birthday, but also due to the on-again-off-again sequel project by Neill Blomkamp that would have reunited Ripley and Newt, but which is now permanently and possibly terminally on hold.

But hardcore Aliens fans are still holding out hope. Speaking with Icons of Fright in November, Michael Biehn (Corporal Hicks) confirmed that Blomkamp’s film would have wiped the Alien third and fourth films out of continuity, while showing confidence that the project wasn’t entirely dead. According to him, 20th Century Fox would be downright foolish to not pursue this project once Ridley Scott is done with Alien: Covenant:

The basic idea is acting like Alien 3 and 4 never existed. I know Ridley Scott is doing his movie first and is going to be the executive producer on this one, so I’m really looking forward to that. I know that Ridley’s focus is on [Alien: Covenant] and I’m sure that he and Fox both don’t want that and Neill’s movie to come out right next to each other, because they’re kind of two different worlds, with Aliens taking place thousands of years later, which is how they explained it all to me, but at the same time, they want to give them a similar feel. I know they’re putting the brakes on Neill’s movie just for a little while, but I really think that it would be embarrassing to Ridley and Fox and Sigourney [Weaver] if they just didn’t make the movie.

So while we all wait to see what happens, let’s get a jump on the Aliens birthday celebrations with a couple of early gifts.

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Take a Classic Science Fiction Tour With IF Magazine

Thursday, March 10, 2016 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

The entire run of IF Magazine, one of the great 20th Century science fiction magazines, is now freely available online at the Internet Archive.

IF, originally titled If Worlds of Science Fiction and later Worlds of If, was a monthly magazine that began publishing in 1952. It was published continuously for 22 years, until it was merged with Galaxy in 1974. During its run it published some of the most acclaimed SF of the 20th Century, including “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star,” James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, Jack Williamson and Fredrick Pohl’s The Reefs of Space, and much, much more.

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