The Pointer at Mzoura. Photo courtesy Almudena Alonso-Herrero
Morocco is best known for its medieval medinas and Roman cities, but the region has some interesting prehistoric remains as well. Petroglyphs dating back tens of thousands of years can be found all over the country, and archaeologists are excavating early hunting sites and Neolithic villages to piece together Morocco’s prehistory.
One curious site stands out above all others — Mzoura, Morocco’s only stone circle. It looks strikingly like those of Western Europe, as if it had been transposed from Wiltshire or Brittany.
We visited on the same day we went to visit Asilah. The site makes a good side trip from that old pirate port. A private car is needed because the stone circle stands next to the little village of Sidi-el-Yamani, which is reached only infrequently by public transport over narrow and rough roads.
Paul Meloy is the author of Dogs With Their Eyes Shut, a horror novella from PS Publishing, and the short story collection Islington Crocodiles. His short fiction has appeared in places like Black Static, Interzone, and several anthologies.
His brand new debut novel The Night Clock, set in the same world as Dogs with Their Eyes Shut, is an intriguing blend of dark fantasy, science fiction and horror. The collaborative writing team S.L. Grey says it “isn’t just a good horror novel, it’s a great one. Superbly written, full of bite, originality, and, most importantly, heart and soul.”
And still the Night Clock ticks…
Phil Trevena’s boss is an idiot, his daughter is running wild, and his patients are killing themselves. There is something terrible growing in Phil that even his years as a mental health worker can’t explain — until he meets the enigmatic Daniel, and learns of the war for the minds of humanity that rages in Dark Time, the space between reality and nightmares measured by the Night Clock.
Drawn into the conflict, Phil and Daniel encounter the Firmament Surgeons, a brave and strange band that are all that prevents the nightmarish ranks of the Autoscopes overrunning us. The enemy is fueled by a limitless hatred that could rip our reality apart. To end the war the darkness that dwells in the shadow of the Night Clock must be defeated…
The Night Clock was published by Solaris on November 10, 2015. It is 384 pages, priced at $9.99 in paperback and just $0.99 for the digital version.
Prehistoric Fantasy from the Days Before the Earth had a Moon: Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga, Part I
Pocket Books – art by Boris VallejoOrbit / Futura – Artist Unknown
In my quest to revive interest in forgotten or overlooked fantasies, it would be remiss not to discuss Jane Gaskell, specifically her Atlan Saga. The fact that my past fewposts about H Warner Munn also happen to reference Atlantis is purely coincidental, and I am by no means an expert on all things Atlantean.
I came upon Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga in the late 1980s. As a high school lad in South Africa with limited funds, the public and school libraries — as well as friends — were my main sources of fantasy material. While many folks I know seem to have been reading Heinlein and Tolkein by the time they were 10, I only started reading for pleasure as a pre-teen. Until then I actively despised it. That is not to say I didn’t enjoy a good story, just I was too lazy to read it myself. My mother desperately tried to encourage me, but I recall thinking Enid Blyton (Secret Seven etc.) was really nyaff, and the Hardy Boys were too mainstream.
Fortunately I discovered Bigglesby Captain WE Johns and my mind, at last, opened to the joys of reading. After moving through CS Forester’s Hornblower books and Alexander Kent’s Richard Bolitho series (both period sea adventure), I found myself looking for something different. I found it through friends who introduced me to Anne McCaffery’s Dragonflight and David Eddings’ Belgeriad books.
One of the factors hindering me at the time was that good material was relatively thin on the ground. I also had a juvenile dislike of second hand books, preferring to buy them new. Sure, the shops had a reasonable amount on their shelves, and there were a (very) few specialist shops with a plethora of gear to choose from, but most of it was out of my price range, or my sphere of travel. Fortunately the major chain store of the day, CNA (like a Borders I imagine) used to have an annual book sale just after Christmas where they moved loads of old warehouse stock. During one of these sales I encountered two slim volumes which, due to their awesome cover art, just had to be fantasy par excellence: The Dragon and The City, both by Jane Gaskell.
Lee Kelly, author of City of Savages, has a new novel of magical realism headed our way. A Criminal Magic has one of the most intriguing premises I’ve read in a while. It’s a tale of magic, high stakes and intrigue set against the backdrop of a very different Roaring Twenties… when Prohibition made magic illegal. It arrives from Saga Press in February.
Magic is powerful, dangerous and addictive — and after passage of the 18th Amendment, it is finally illegal.
It’s 1926 in Washington, DC, and while Anti-Sorcery activists have achieved the Prohibition of sorcery, the city’s magic underworld is booming. Sorcerers cast illusions to aid mobsters’ crime sprees. Smugglers funnel magic contraband in from overseas. Gangs have established secret performance venues where patrons can lose themselves in magic, and take a mind-bending, intoxicating elixir known as the sorcerer’s shine.
Joan Kendrick, a young sorcerer from Norfolk County, Virginia accepts an offer to work for DC’s most notorious crime syndicate, the Shaw Gang, when her family’s home is repossessed. Alex Danfrey, a first-year Federal Prohibition Unit trainee with a complicated past and talents of his own, becomes tapped to go undercover and infiltrate the Shaws.
Through different paths, Joan and Alex tread deep into the violent, dangerous world of criminal magic — and when their paths cross at the Shaws’ performance venue, despite their orders, and despite themselves, Joan and Alex become enchanted with one another. But when gang alliances begin to shift, the two sorcerers are forced to question their ultimate allegiances and motivations. And soon, Joan and Alex find themselves pitted against each other in a treacherous, heady game of cat-and-mouse.
A Criminal Magic will be published by Saga Press on February 2, 2016. It is 432 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital edition.
Yesterday a Wizard Entered New York With a Case: The First Trailer for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
This appears to be the week for trailers. Perhaps the Friday before a new Star Wars film is a fertile time to announce new fantasy films? Whatever the case, hot on the heels of yesterday’s trailer for Star Trek Beyond, we have the first trailer for Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, the long-anticipated cinematic return to the world of Harry Potter.
Set in New York in the 1920s, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them follows the adventures of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) the famed magizoologist, as he mingles with New York City’s secret community of witches and wizards while compiling notes for his soon-to-be-famous book, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, the textbook Harry Potter and his friends still use 70 years later at Hogwarts.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is based on the slender 42-page book of the same name by J. K. Rowling, first published in 2001. It is directed by David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter films, from a screenplay by Rowling. It stars Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol, Samantha Morton, Colin Farrell, Jon Voight and Ron Perlman, and is scheduled to be released in November 2016.
How to Get From Worldbuilding (or Research) to Story
How do you get from the cool world you just built — or researched — to an actual story?… Let’s imagine a knight on a revenge quest.
Worldbuilding is a thing.
People build Fantasy worlds for fun.
They’ve pretty much always done it, either collectively — like the storytellers who built Greek mythology and or theologians who created the medieval vision of Hell — or individually, like the quirky medieval mapmakers and of course Tolkien, and every modern GM who spends more time creating their world than playing in it, and every wannabe Fantasy author who loses themselves in the act of creation.
For a fictional world to live, however, somebody has to tramp its surface.
We need a Homer to dump Odysseus on the Island of the Cyclops, Dante to have Virgil lead him through the Circles of Hell, and “John Mandeville” — whoever he really was — to take us to the Land of Prester John. Meanwhile, Tolkien must stop building and start writing, the GM has to assemble their players, and the modern wannabe Fantasy author has to…
Ah. That’s the thing.
Once upon a time, you could just take your hero from A to B to C, picking up plot tokens or even just getting closer to the goal while having quirky adventures on the way. We now expect a little more from our authors.
How do you get from the cool world you just built — or researched — to an actual story?
It’s been a lot of fun getting deep into epic high fantasy over the past few months, and I hope you’ve been enjoying it as well, but it’s good to remember what got me started writing at Black Gate in the first place: swords & sorcery. So without further ado, here’s the November short story roundup.
Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine Issue 46 hit the virtual stands with its usual pair of stories, one by Brynn McNab and another by Black Gate‘s own Nicholas Ozment. As John O’Neill wrote last week, Ellet is planning on putting together an anthology of the best of his magazine’s first four years. Coupled with Heroic Fantasy Quarterly‘s “best of” anthology, it’s a good time for short fiction readers.
McNab’s story, “The Gargoyle and the Nun,” is a somewhat formless story of Merek and Arabella, a soldier transformed by a witch into a gargoyle and the woman he loves. The story, in which true love conquers all, feels very much like a fairytale and has some good moments. It suffers in the end, though, from being only three short scenes featuring characters without much character.
“Last Stand at Wellworm’s Pass” is a perfect dose of old school storytelling from Ozment. “Tamalin, one of the most feared and powerful mages in all of Rilsthorn” is on the run from a pack of assassins on the dark streets of Ment City. Cornered, he is rescued by a cloaked man named Kor. His deliverer offers to help the wizard escape through the maze of tunnels that run beneath the city and on to ultimate freedom by way of a place called Wellworm’s Pass. It’s a quick-paced story that, while it doesn’t offer anything startlingly new, is delivered with all the brio and skill needed to create a successful S&S tale. Any S&S story that can stuff in werewolves, demons, and djinns is alright by me.
Neil Clarke’s editorial this issue includes some discussion of his long-term goals, a glimpse at his introduction to the upcoming Best Science Fiction of the Year, and the news that he’s also accepted a position as an interim editor of the SFWA Bulletin.
How do we shift the discussion of short fiction magazines from the goals of just merely surviving to growing into a thriving market? Yes, as the magazine editor, I have a vested interest in that path to financial success, but a good chunk of the buzz in my head was been triggered by the introduction I plan to write for The Best Science Fiction of the Year. I’ve been asked to include a state-of-the-market report in my introduction and plan to take the from-ten-thousand-feet view rather than perform a market-by-market analysis. Suffice it to say, no one has the answers, but there’s no shortage of ideas. I’m still trying to digest it all…
Oh, did I mention that I’ve also accepted the post as interim editor of the SFWA Bulletin and signed contracts for two more anthologies? Yeah, I’m a glutton for punishment, but pushing my limits seems necessary if I want to reach the point where I can quit the day job. (Yes, a day job on top of all that.)
Issue #111 of Clarkesworld has four new stories by Liu Cixin, Tamsyn Muir, Seth Dickinson, and Cassandra Khaw, and two reprints by Sean McMullen and Walter Jon Williams.
Linked below, you’ll find the sixth installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue. In this latest batch of adventures and misadventures, Karai meets Vashear, we tour the Sindarin market (where disaster awaits), and Maer bargains for the lives of Doss and Cullen with –– well, I’d better keep that a secret until you get there, eh? Chapter Seven will follow in two weeks’ time, by hook or by crook.
A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles, I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture.
Bear in mind that this is a true serial. I haven’t written to the end; I couldn’t publish all at once even if I wished to do so. I do have the overall arc of the piece ever more firmly in mind, but as to how exactly I’ll write navigate the roads from here to there? I predict it’ll be one complication at a time –– minimum. I do promise this: I’ll dole out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously. Welcome to adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.
Tell your friends. Sharing and linking are the highest of compliments. Off we go –– and if you’re just discovering this portal, may I suggest you begin at the beginning?
Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.
Read the sixth and latest installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.
Now that J.J. Abrams, who directed the last two Star Trek movies, is off doing Star Wars, Paramount Pictures has brought in Justin Lin, the director of Fast & Furious, to helm the latest installment. This one sees the crew — at long last — starting their five-year mission to explore the frontier, which certainly piques my interest.
I’ve come to accept that this new generation of Star Trek is far removed from the cerebral TV show I remember. Abrams and his Fringe writing partners Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have instead turned the property into an action-movie franchise, with fist fights, explosions, and a pounding rock soundtrack. On the other hand, the script this time was co-authored by Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty and who previously wrote Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End, so that a least promises a fresh perspective. Have a look at the first trailer, just released this morning, and let me know what you think.
Star Trek Beyond is being produced by Skydance and Bad Robot Productions, and will arrive in theaters on July 22, 2016.
