Black Gate – Page 720 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Goth Chick News: Dashing Through the Snow to the Days of the Dead Show

Thursday, November 26, 2015 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

Granted, snow in the windy city in November is not exactly unexpected. But it is a bit surreal to be making our way to the last horror show of the year in white-out conditions.

And yet this is precisely the situation Black Gate photog Chris Z and I found ourselves facing last Saturday morning. Thankfully, the Chicago BG office is well equipped for such emergencies, though attempting to get John O out of bed before noon to requisition the keys to the company urban assault vehicle turned out to be only the first of many challenges we faced that day.

Still, we trundle into the unplowed parking lot of the venue in our jacked up Jeep Wrangler precisely at 9:45, to find roughly 500 other hard-core horror fans bent double against the howling wind, making their way through 18” of snow to pay homage to the season’s last genre-specific event.

Was it worth it?

Oh, hell yes.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Thursday, November 26, 2015 William I. Lengeman III Comments 8 comments

My peak Star Trek watching years came in the seventies. Those of us who were too young to catch the show when it first aired in the mid-sixties could gorge ourselves on seemingly endless reruns of three seasons worth of shows. It was a far cry from Netflix and calling up any episode any time but we made do.

As the seventies wound down my interest in Star Trek waned and I wasn’t really cognizant of what came along later — four more TV series and a heap of movies. I sought to rectify this in the early years of the new century, watching as many TV episodes as possible and some of the movies, but my intake of the latter was sporadic.

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Announcing the Winners of This Gulf of Time and Stars by Julie Czerneda

Thursday, November 26, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Woo hoo! We have two winners!

Last week we invited you to enter a contest to win one of two copies of Julie Czerneda’s This Gulf of Time and Stars, the opening volume in a brand new adventure SF series from one of the most popular authors in the field. To enter, all you had to do was send us an e-mail with the subject “This Gulf of Time and Stars.”

We have two versions to give away — a copy of the hardcover, and an audiobook. Our lucky winners were selected from the pool of eligible entries by the most reliable method known to modern science: D&D dice. The winner of the hardcover is:

Paul Lipps

And our audiobook winner is:

Derek A. Neve

Congratulations all! Once again, we’d like to thank DAW Books and Audible.com for providing the prizes and making the contest possible. Read Julie’s interview with Allyson Johnson, the voice of the audible.com edition of This Gulf of Time and Stars, right here at Black Gate.

This Gulf of Time and Stars was published by DAW Books on November 3, 2015. It is 464 pages, priced at $25.95 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Apex Magazine #78 Now on Sale

Thursday, November 26, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

In his editorial this month, Jason Sizemore gives us the lowdown on the issue.

This month we offer three outstanding works of science fiction to our readers. “Blood on Beacon Hill” by Russell Nichols is that rarest of things — a vampire story in our publication…. completely by coincidence is the use of the word ‘beacon’ in Day Al-Mohamed’s “The Beacon and the Coward.” Finally, we have a story by one of the genre’s rising stars, Sam J. Miller. “To Die Dancing” has a tightly bound emotional core that I think you’ll enjoy.

Gemma Files is one of the best when it comes to writing unsettling fiction. To back my assertion, we’ve included her “Signal to Noise” as this month’s reprint feature.

Rounding out the issue are interviews with author Russell Nichols and artist James Lincke, a thought-provoking essay by Ed Grabianowski titled “Cthulhu Apocalypse and the Terrifying Tradition of Horror Role-Playing Games”, and poetry by Brittany Warman, Chloe Clark, Michael Sikkema, and Julia Kingston. We have three excerpts. The first is How to Pass as Human: A Guide to Assimilation for Future Androids by Android Ø by Nic Kelman. The second is The Flux by [Ferrett] Steinmetz. And, finally, The Weight of Chains by our esteemed managing editor Lesley Conner.

Here’s the complete TOC.

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British Museum Explores Celtic Identity

Wednesday, November 25, 2015 Sean McLachlan Comments 2 comments

The Battersea Shield. Bronze, glass. Found in the River Thames at Battersea Bridge, London, England, 350-50 BC. © The Trustees of the British Museum

For many of us, the Celts are an enduring fascination. Their art, their mysterious culture, and the perception that so many of us are descended from them makes the Celts one of the most popular ancient societies. So it’s surprising that the British Museum hasn’t had a major Celtic exhibition for forty years.

That’s changed with Celts: Art and Identity, a huge collection of artifacts from across the Celtic world and many works of art from the modern Celtic Revival. The exhibition is at pains to make clear that the name ‘Celts’ doesn’t refer to a single people who can be traced through time, and it has been appropriated over the last 300 years to reflect modern identities in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere. “Celtic” is an artistic and cultural term, not a racial one.

The first thing visitors see is a quote by some guy named J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote in 1963, “To many, perhaps most people. . .’Celtic’ of any sort is. . .a magic bag into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. . .anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight.”

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Check out the First Trailer for Captain America: Civil War

Wednesday, November 25, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Civil War was one of the biggest events in Marvel Comics roughly a decade ago, pitting Spider-Man, Iron Man and a host of other heroes against a tiny contingent led by Captain America. Marvel Studios has made a major effort to replicate the crossover impact of that event in the upcoming movie, which features a bevy of guest stars… see how many you can spot in the trailer above (hint: it’s a LOT.) Captain America: Civil War will be released on May 6, 2016.

Jeffrey Ford on Scott Nicolay’s After

Wednesday, November 25, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jeffrey Ford took a chance on an unknown magazine, and sold us a story for the very first issue of Black Gate. (And a terrific story, too — a gonzo mystery set on an alien world, “Exo-Skeleton Town.” You can read the entire thing at Infinity Plus.) We’ve been pals ever since. One of the things I like about Jeff is he treats his Facebook friends to great, punchy mini-reviews of some excellent (and often hard-to-find) titles. That was the case yesterday, when he wrote the following about Scott Nicolay’s creepy horror tale After. He gave me permission to post it here. Enjoy.

if you get a chance, check out Scott Nicolay’s stand alone novella, After. About a woman who returns to her home in Seaside Heights after super storm Sandy to check on the damages. FEMA says she’s not allowed to stay but she does only to find out that some strange creature has been brought in by the storm and is lurking beneath her house.

This one’s got everything I like in a horror story — the slow burn, deep characterization so I care about the character, and the rare instance of a metaphorical resonance between the fearsome aspect of the world (the monster) and the defining condition of the character (in this case an abusive relationship). All this in a neat little book, well made (from Dim Shore Press) with a great cover and nice illustrations by Michael Bukowski.

Scott Nicolay is also the author of Do You Like to Look at Monsters? and Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed.

After was published by Dim Shores on August 4th 2015. It is 104 pages, priced at $10 in trade paperback. The cover is by Michael Bukowski. The Dim Shores website is here.

See all of our recent Reviews here.

The Great Savage Sword Re-Read: Vol. 2

Wednesday, November 25, 2015 John R. Fultz Comments 4 comments

In the first installment, I explored Volume 1 of the Savage Sword of Conan Dark Horse reprints of the classic Marvel Comics black-and-white magazine.

Volume 2 begins with Savage Sword of Conan #11 from 1976. A terrific issue written by Roy Thomas — who wrote most of the stories in the magazine its first few years — with art from John Buscema and Yong Montano. Buscema/Montano paring is an interesting one, and the results are every bit as lush and detailed as Alfredo Alcala’s inks in Volume One.

It’s too bad Montano only did this one issue of SS because he brought Buscema’s superb pencils to life as well as Alcala, yet with a decidedly different style that was no less immersive. This adaptation of Howard’s “The Abode of the Damned” isn’t your typical tale of the Cimmerian, as Conan is either off-screen or in disguise as “Shirkuh” for half the issue. It’s a brutal excursion into the violent lives of desert tribesmen, as seen through the eyes of the intrepid maiden Mellani. Seeking vengeance for her slain brother leads her right into captivity where Cimmerian-in-disguise is her only hope of surviving. Yong Montano didn’t turn into a regular Buscema inker like Alcala and later DeZuniga and Chan did, but on SS #11 he did a bang-up job creating that Buscema/Alcala level of artistic detail, while offering a fresh texture in his mastery of light and shadow.

In Savage Sword #12, reigning artistic champions John Buscema and Alfredo Alcala return to help Roy Thomas adapt Howard’s “The Slave Princess” into a Conan tale called “The Haunters of Castle Crimson.” The lush black ink work is the high standard of the magazine’s early years. Alcala’s hyper-detailed panels took Buscema’s masterful pencils to a whole new level of artistic integrity. Following their bravura performances in SS #2, 4, and 7, Buscema/Alcala bring more lighting-in-bottle greatness to these pages — and it’s their high-end work that highlights this entire second volume, beginning with SS #12.

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Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of Crowdfunding

Tuesday, November 24, 2015 Donald Crankshaw Comments 3 comments

MysterionCover — Mysterion’s Front cover

One of the risks of telling people you don’t need money is that they’ll take you at your word.

When my wife and I decided to do Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith, an anthology of speculative fiction which engages with Christianity (which I introduced to Black Gate here), one of the first things we did was talk to other small press publishers, including Chizine’s Sandra Kasturi and Black Gate’s own John O’Neill. Based on our talks with them, we figured out what it took to do an anthology, and how much it would cost, including cover art, interior layout, and the story budget. Then once we figured out the budget, we determined whether we could afford it without crowdfunding. If we were committing to this project, we wanted to make sure we could do it regardless of the results of any fundraising. The answer was that we could.

And then we decided to do some crowdfunding anyway. Not to make the anthology happen, but to make it better. We fully intend to do the anthology whether anyone gives us money or not.

“We don’t need it, but give us money anyway” turns out not to be such a great crowdfunding pitch.

So let me try a better one. Now I could go into what donors get as rewards (The ebook at half the retail price and a month early! Both ebook and paperback at less than the retail price! Free shipping almost anywhere in the world!) or what your money will do for us (More stories! Higher rates! We’ll do it again!), but what I really want to talk about is why I’m excited about this anthology, and you should be too.

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Transitioning from Short Story to Novel

Tuesday, November 24, 2015 Michael Livingston Comments 1 comment

"The Hand that Binds" art by Matt Hughes — “The Hand that Binds” art by Matt Hughes

There’s a lot of writing advice in the world. A person trying to read it all, in fact, would likely never be able to get anything written: I suspect more is written about writing in a given day than any one person could feasibly read in that same timespan.

That doesn’t mean that writing advice isn’t useful, of course, because it can be absolutely essential to a writer’s development. In my case, for instance, one of the key bits of advice I ever received as a young novelist-to-be was to try to cut my teeth on writing short stories. Doing so, it turned out, allowed me to hone my craft in smaller, more manageable chunks. It also led me to my first fiction sale: to Black Gate, which published my story “The Hand That Binds.”

Publishing short stories was an amazing experience. In composing and selling short fiction I learned far more than I could have ever imagined, and each of those “little” victories of publication were a shot in the arm of the best drug available to a writer: the confidence to know you can do it. So for me (though admittedly not for everyone), starting with short stories was vital to the development of my career.

What I want to talk about today, though, is that next move: transitioning from short stories to novels. Because although I loved (and still love) writing short fiction, I knew I wanted more. I wanted to be a novelist. What follows are the five principles and one rule that helped me make that leap.

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