Black Gate – Page 724 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

World Fantasy 2015: It’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of Convention Reports

Thursday, November 19, 2015 Sarah Avery Comments 7 comments

The Saratoga Hilton, site of the 2015 World Fantasy Convention

Ask a literary agent how writers should pursue representation, and they almost always say, “Go to any convention, and we’ll all be in the hotel bar.”

In years past, I’ve tried agent/author speed dating at the Nebulas weekend, pitch sessions with agents at writing conferences, commenting on agents’ manuscript-wish-list blog posts — all the in-person variations but the bar, because the bar is not my natural habitat. Then again, in years past, I didn’t have an award in my pocket. Lots of people may be ambivalent about awards, but agents like them. This year I figured I might be out of my element, but I would no longer have that aura of desperation that surrounds unpublished novelists with no specific prospects. I finally had something an agent might want.

So I set my sights on the World Fantasy Convention, a con known for a base of attendees consisting almost entirely of professionals in the field. I love a good panel, I love a good reading, I love a good casual schmooze, but I had a mission. One that was certain to throw me into a wide variety of interactions that would range from the awkward to the absurd, with perhaps a little sweet spot of productivity in the middle.

When John O’Neill asked me to write a con report, I told him I had none of the kinds of impressions people record in them. What I had instead was my misadventures in agent hunting. John was laughing already, and urged me to post it.

If you want to know about the World Fantasy Awards and their banquet, memorable quotes from notable figures, the controversy over the toothless harassment policy, I’m not your girl. Not this time, anyway.

But you can time-travel back to the start of my most recent unfinished agent hunt and watch me indulge my hubris.

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New Treasures: Dead Ringers by Christopher Golden

Thursday, November 19, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Christopher Golden is one of the most popular horror writers on the market; Stephen King called his 2014 novel Snowblind “deeply scary.” His latest is a new twist of the legend of doppelgangers, and follows five people confronted with doubles. It’s available in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press.

When Tess Devlin runs into her ex-husband Nick on a Boston sidewalk, she’s furious at him for pretending he doesn’t know her. She calls his cell to have it out with him, only to discover that he’s in New Hampshire with his current girlfriend. But if Nick’s in New Hampshire… who did she encounter on the street?

Frank Lindbergh’s dreams have fallen apart. He wanted to get out of the grim neighborhood where he’d grown up and out of the shadow of his alcoholic father. Now both his parents are dead and he’s back in his childhood home, drinking too much himself. As he sets in motion his plans for the future, he’s assaulted by an intruder in his living room… an intruder who could be his twin.

In an elegant hotel, Tess will find mystery and terror in her own reflection. Outside a famed mansion on Beacon Hill, people are infected with a diabolical malice… while on the streets, an eyeless man, dressed in rags, searches for a woman who wears Tess’s face.

Dead Ringers was published by St. Martin’s Press on November 3, 2015. It is 310 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Ervin Serrano. See all our latest New Treasures here.

Asilah: Visiting an Old Pirate Haven in Morocco

Wednesday, November 18, 2015 Sean McLachlan Comments 1 comment

Part of the defenses put up by the Portuguese in Asilah during their brief occupation in the 15th century.

Last week I wrote about how I spent a month living in Tangier working on my next novel. Luckily my family came down with me for part of the time, and since it was my son’s first trip out of Western Europe I wanted him to enjoy himself and open his eyes a little. So what do you show a ten-year-old in Morocco? Well, besides the Casbah and the medina market, what better than an old pirate port?

Asilah stands on Morocco’s Atlantic coast and like many of the country’s ports started out as a Phoenician trading center about 3500 years ago. It’s most famous as the last base of the famed Barbary pirates, who started being a menace in the early Middle Ages. Their heyday was from the 15th to 19th century, when they terrorized shipping in the Western Mediterranean and the Strait of Gibraltar. Several European interventions, including the United States’ first overseas adventure, failed to stop them. The rampant piracy was one the excuses the French and Spanish used to establish colonies throughout North Africa.

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The Series Series: Why Do We Do This To Ourselves? I Can Explain!

Wednesday, November 18, 2015 Sarah Avery Comments 33 comments

What’s up with the Big Fat Fantasy books? Books that crest a thousand pages, books that fell forests, books that travel in savage packs of series. We wait three years, five years, ten years for the next volume. Meanwhile, the scope of what the author must remind readers about between installments expands (a storytelling problem anatomized over here by Edward Carmien). We click over to the fan-run online encyclopedia to remind ourselves who the characters are, both because it’s been so long since the last volume, and because the cast size is just that large.

Yet many of us love such books. In my case — and maybe yours, too — not just a few odd specimens of the type, but the type itself.

Thomas Parker laid out all the objections that can be leveled against the sprawl of our genre’s most popular novels, not as an outsider but precisely as an insider shocked at what has become normal to him. (Embrace the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole and just go with it — the main point’s still sincere.)

Someone please tell me. Why? Why do we do this to ourselves, we devotees of science fiction, horror, and (especially) fantasy? What did we do to deserve this? What crime did we commit in some previous existence that we now have to expiate with such bitter tears? Judge, I deserve to know! I demand answers!

If readers are asking themselves that question in that way, even in jest, you can bet the authors are, too, often with a greater level of frustration.

I have to marshal all my hubris to say this in public, but guys, I think I might have the answer. Seriously, not just an answer, but maybe the central answer.

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Kickstarting the Mindjammer Universe: A Far Future Transhuman Utopia?

Wednesday, November 18, 2015 Sarah Newton Comments 2 comments

Yesterday Mindjammer Press launched a Kickstarter for my far future transhuman science-fiction roleplaying game and fiction setting Mindjammer, to fund a series of RPG supplements and fiction for the game, including sourcebooks, adventures, and even a version for the Traveller rules. It made its initial funding goal this morning in a little less than 24 hours, and John very kindly invited me to Black Gate to speak about the Kickstarter and the Mindjammer setting.

You may know something about Mindjammer already — John O’Neill and Howard Andrew Jones have both written about it before, and I’ve blogged about it here too. It’s set in Earth’s far, far future — approximately 17,000AD — during the Expansionary Era, when a formerly stagnant civilization on Old Earth has reinvented itself as a “New Commonality of Humankind” following the discovery of “planing” — faster-than-light travel. Now, two centuries on, the Commonality is journeying to the stars, rediscovering lost colonies settled from Old Earth by slower-than-light generation and stasis ships millennia before. Cultural conflict is everywhere, between this vibrant, optimistic, yet overwhelmingly strong interstellar civilization, and the disunited, often highly divergent lost colony cultures which are facing “integration” at the Commonality’s hands.

The Commonality considers itself the brightest and greatest civilization of humankind. The Mindscape, a vast interstellar shared consciousness and data storage medium to which all Commonality citizens are linked by neural implant, gifts its citizens with technological telepathy and the awesome powers of technopsi. It also lets them upload their memories, and download the memories of other people — even dead people. Artificial life forms with synthetic personalities based on the memory engrams of dead heroes abound: even the starships are sentient beings, the eponymous “Mindjammers”, faster-than-light vessels which travel between the stars, updating the Mindscape and knitting transhumanity’s interstellar civilization together.

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Future Treasures: Vendetta, a Deadly Curiosities Novel by Gail Z. Martin

Wednesday, November 18, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Gail Z. Martin has a fine reputation among sword & sorcery fans, and I’ve followed her career with keen interest. She’s produced no less than three series in the last eight years: the four-volume Chronicles of the Necromancer, the two-volume Fallen Kings Cycle, and the Ascendant Kingdoms trilogy. She’s also the author of Iron and Blood, the opening book in a new steampunk series co-authored with her husband Larry N. Martin.

But I missed Deadly Curiosities, the first novel in her urban fantasy series set in Charlotte, North Carolina, when it came out last year. Which is a pity, because I think this might be her most appealing one yet. Following the proprietors of an antique shop whose owners track down and eliminate deadly artifacts, Deadly Curiosities revealed “a realistic underworld” (Publishers Weekly) and included “pirates and smugglers whose deaths are tied to the evil threatening the city… Martin is clearly in her element” (Fiction Vortex).

In the new volume Vendetta, on sale next month, Martin ratchets up the tension as Cassidy and Teag find themselves squaring off against an unknown enemy with strong magic, powerful resources… and a very long memory.

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Monstress: An Interview with Marjorie Liu

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 Derek Kunsken Comments 0 Comment

On November 4th, Image launched a new comic series called Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. Liu is already well known as a New York Times Bestselling novelist, and from her work on Marvel titles such as Wolverine, X-23, Dark Wolverine, and Astonishing X-Men. I had a chance to interview Marjorie about Monstress.

Derek Kunsken: I read Monstress, and I have to say I was absolutely floored by how beautiful it is. I’ve seen Sana Takeda’s work with you on X-23, but it seems like all the stops were pulled out here. Not only that, the setting is original and the theme of inhumanity reminds me of Scott Snyder’s Wytches.

Marjorie Liu: You’re so kind. I’ve also been floored by Sana’s work on this book. I had a vision, I knew what I wanted Monstress to look like — but Sana took those ideas and just made them explode on the page. Her character designs, too, totally altered the story. I had one idea of what the book was going to be about — and then I saw what the monster looked like — and everything changed in that moment. For the better.

The revelations in the world of Monstress feel both fast and slow, drinking from the firehose, but piling up the questions on the side. Maika seems to be neither fully human nor Arcanic. Can you talk about Maika as an outcast character?

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Vintage Treasures: The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

We haven’t discussed Thomas Burnett Swann much here at Black Gate (a quick search pops up only one previous title, his 1972 paperback Wolfwinter). He is largely forgotten today.

His second novel, The Weirwoods, was serialized in two parts in Science Fantasy in 1965. It appeared in paperback from Ace Books in 1967 with a cover by Gray Morrow (above left, click for bigger version). The back cover of that edition is in the middle. It is a very slender novel, just 125 pages, with an original cover price of 50 cents. At right is the October 1977 Ace reprint, with a cover by Stephen Hickman.

Swann published some 16 novels, which together constitute a secret history of the magical races of classical mythology, starting in ancient Egypt in roughly 2500 BC, and the inexorable decline of magic in the face of the growth of Christianity and other world religions. The Weirwoods is set in the world of the Etruscans, the pre-Roman civilization that dominated Italy from 800 to 500 B.C., and tells the tale of nobleman Lars Velcha, whose city Sutrium sits beside the mysterious Weirwoods, home to witches, centaurs, fauns, water sprites, and far stranger things. When Velcha captures the weir-man Vel and makes him a slave, he triggers a war that brings disaster to his city.

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Clarkesworld 110 Now on Sale

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Mark Cole’s nonfiction article “You Wouldn’t Be Reading This If It Weren’t For Buck Rogers,” in the latest issue of Clarkesworld, is a fond look back at one of the most important characters in the history of science fiction, and the famous comic strip he spawned.

Buck got his start in a singularly dull novelette by Philip Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 AD,” in the August 1928 Amazing Stories (its cover looks so much like the classic images of Buck that no one notices it illustrates E.E. “Doc” Smith’s story, Skylark of Space).

By now everyone knows the story: Rogers gets trapped in a mine filled with a mysterious radioactive gas and wakes up almost five hundred years later. But then it bogs down in endless descriptions of future technology, future history, and future language. Even the “exciting” action is told in a detached tone, more suitable for a history text than a pulp adventure.

Yet, within a year, it became one of the most popular comic strips ever.

Issue #110 of Clarkesworld has seven stories — five new, and two reprints — from Naomi Kritzer, Nin Harris, Sara Saab, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Xia Jia, Tim Sullivan, and Ellen Kushner & Ysabeau S. Wilce.

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October Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 1 comment

Just because I’ve taken a turn toward epic high fantasy in my reading of late doesn’t mean I’ve forsaken swords & sorcery. In fact, here’s my latest look at short stories from a trio of magazines you can read for free every single issue.

I’m starting this month off with Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’ve written here before about my love-hate relationship with the magazine. Too often it just doesn’t print stories I’m interested in. Even when it does, its editors definitely have more literary taste than the pulpish flavor I prefer in my heroic fantasy. Issue #185 is a reminder of why I still look forward to BCS’s arrival every two weeks. Topped by a gorgeous painting by Feliks Grzesiczek that could easily pass for the locale of a Hammer film, the issue bills itself as “fantastically monstrous…for Halloween.” And it is.

“Demons Enough” by Ian McHugh is a little like Underworld (if Underworld wasn’t awful), set a little to the left of Beowulf’s Geatland. In other words, you get a shapeshifter throwing down with vampires, and folks named Thorfinn and Freydis trying to kill the lot of them. When the component elements of a story have been played with by an untold host of other writers over the years, the author has a lot of work to bring something original to the mix. That happens here with McHugh’s vampires, or leeches as they’re called. Cloaked by night and magic, they take on a more human form. In the sunlight, stripped of most of their power, their true selpulchral nature is revealed. Gloomy atmosphere, gut-squishing violence, and apprehension are delivered with a more than adequate degree of skill.

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