Worldbuilding in Witch King

Worldbuilding in Witch King

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Witch King by Martha Wells (Tor.com, May 30, 2023). Cover art by Cynthia Sheppard

I think people tend to talk about worldbuilding as if it’s one static process that is the same every time you do it. But I think it actually varies a lot based on the preferences of the writer and their method of work. It’s different for each writer, and for me at least it’s different for every book.

In the Ile-Rien books, I wanted to show a secondary world fantasy setting, centered around the city Vienne, that realistically aged and changed over time. Not just in politics and government and fashion, but in physical layout, with the city changing to accommodate the development of trains, automobiles, and electric light. I also used a lot of historical sources to create the material culture of the world.

In Witch King I wanted to do something a little different. I’ve done secondary worlds with a wide range of different, distinctive cultures in the Books of the Raksura series, but in Witch King I wanted to show more about the interactions between cultures.

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Goth Chick News: One from the Vaults, The Egyptologist Remains One of My Favs

Goth Chick News: One from the Vaults, The Egyptologist Remains One of My Favs

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The Egyptologist (Random House paperback edition, May 2005). Right: Canadian edition

You might assume that with stacks of books waiting patiently in every corner of GCN’s Black Gate offices, I shouldn’t have time to read something twice. And that assumption would be a correct one if I could consistently maintain a reasonable amount of self-discipline. However, I am a firm believer in the benefits of comfort food, no matter how nutritionally deficient it is, and that goes double for the mental comfort food that is a remarkable story. So yes, when I’m having a lousy week, I grab a cinnamon PopTart and one of my favorite stories off the bookshelf. The beauty of the re-read is that you can generally plow through the entire tale in roughly the same amount of time it takes to eat an entire box of PopTarts.

With that background in mind, I want to tell you about The Egyptologist. A quick peruse through the Black Gate archives confirmed my suspicion that I never wrote about this book when I first read it, probably because back then, we were still in print, and I wrote only one article per issue. First published in hardcover in 2004, I purchased The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips, to take with me on one of my dream trips; a three-week tour through Egypt in the company of Medu Hassan, a researcher from the Cairo Museum. This pre-dates e-books being a thing, as the Sony Libre wouldn’t hit the market until later that year. So back then, traveling with reading material meant packing books and this particular hardcover was a last-minute addition, added to my bag primarily due to the title and my destination, and not because I knew what I was getting into.

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Tales of Unease: Riding the Nightmare by Lisa Tuttle

Tales of Unease: Riding the Nightmare by Lisa Tuttle

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Riding the Nightmare (Valancourt Books, August 22, 2023). Cover by Vince Haig

Lisa Tuttle was born in USA, but relocated to the UK many years ago. She is a successful novelist, but especially a great short story writer, the author of numerous collections of dark fiction.

Her latest collection, forthcoming from the small but excellent imprint Valancourt Books, collects twelve previously published stories and is introduced by Neil Gaiman who, very aptly, emphasizes the Aickmanesque nature (meaning it somehow recalls the atmosphere of Robert Aickman) of some tales.

As a short fiction lover, a Lisa Tuttle fan, and a long time admirer of Aickman, my expectations for this book were high. And I was not disappointed.

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The Legacy of a Legendary Collector: Denny Lien, September 26, 1945 – April 15, 2023

The Legacy of a Legendary Collector: Denny Lien, September 26, 1945 – April 15, 2023

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A handful of items from Denny Lien’s incredible collection I was able to save from the dumpster

On Wednesday May 3, I drove 379 miles from St. Charles to Minneapolis, to help clean out the last of the legendary collection of the late Denny Lien. I’d been reliably informed that it was the final week his estate would have access to the house; the following Monday, Habitat for Humanity would take possession, and everything left would go in the dumpster.

Denny had the most incredible collection of magazines I’ve ever seen. During the scant few hours I had in the house I found virtually complete runs of Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Worlds of If, Galaxy, Fantastic, Astounding/Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Locus, Cemetery Dance, and many, many more — far more than I could ever pack and fit in the minivan I’d rented for the trip. Most were unread, in pristine condition.

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Talking Tolkien: The Architects of Modern Fantasy, Tolkien and Norton – by Ruth de Jauregui

Talking Tolkien: The Architects of Modern Fantasy, Tolkien and Norton – by Ruth de Jauregui

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Talking Tolkien is back for another installment and Ruth de Jauregui brings in another Fantasy giant, the great Andre Norton. Those DAW paperbacks are classics. Read on!

The influences of J.R.R. Tolkien and Andre Norton fill the world of speculative fiction and, while the genre existed before and after both authors, their works have forever shaped new authors and the flow of the modern fantasy novel.

Tolkien forged the modern rendition of the epic journey tale that has its roots in Beowulf and The Odyssey, pitting good against evil in the world known as Middle Earth. The master of the epic journey, the battle of good and evil, wizards, brave men and elves, sturdy dwarves, and never to be forgotten, the little hobbits, began the adventures of Middle Earth with a journey to recover the dwarves’ stolen home and treasure in The Hobbit. It was followed by his continuation, “The Road goes ever on and on…,” with the next generation of hobbits in an epic quest to save Middle Earth from its version of Satan in The Lord of the Rings.

And it all began with a hobbit in a warm and cozy hole.

Actually though, Tolkien’s works began much earlier. He was writing poetry and the beginnings of his epic work as early as 1910, and perhaps even earlier as his first published poem, “The Battle of the Eastern Field,” was printed in the King Edward’s School Chronicle in March 1911. At age 19, he was already on the long road leading to Middle Earth after being orphaned, his romance with his future wife forbidden by his guardian, and failing and then winning a scholarship to Oxford.

As Tolkien himself said in the introduction to The Fellowship of the Ring: “…to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends was dead…”

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Gen Con Writers’ Symposium Aug 3-6, 2023: Special Guests and Program Release

Gen Con Writers’ Symposium Aug 3-6, 2023: Special Guests and Program Release

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Gen Con is the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America. In 2019, they welcomed over 65,000 unique visitors and offered over 19,000 events. By its nature, Gen Con attracts a large number of attendees who enjoy speculative fiction.

Gen Con 2023 will be held August 3-6 in Indianapolis, Indiana

The Gen Con Writers’ Symposium (GCWS) is a semi-independent event hosted by Gen Con and intended for both new and experienced writers of speculative fiction. All registration is handled through the Gen Con website. 

Over the past 28 years, the Writers’ Symposium has grown from a small set of panels over a day or two to one of the largest convention-hosted writing tracks in North America, offering hundreds of hours of programming from authors, editors, agents, and publishers to nearly 3000 unique visitors per year on average.  

We’re proud to announce that the Scalzi Family Foundation will be this year’s Gen Con Writers’ Symposium Legendary Sponsor! This sponsorship will enable the symposium to support more writers to attend, creating a more representative and inclusive event.

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Vintage Treasures: The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

Vintage Treasures: The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

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The Drowned World, first edition (Berkley Medallion, August 1962). Cover by Richard Powers

I’m criminally undereducated in J.G. Ballard. I came to most of my favorite science fiction writers through short fiction, and the first Ballard short stories I read (such as “The Terminal Beach”) were lush and impressively written, but also a far cry from the adventure tales I craved in SF and fantasy.

But as I’ve grown older, I found I’m much more interested in Ballard. I wrote a Vintage Treasures piece on The Crystal World last November, and tracked down his monumental Complete Short Stories, Volumes One & Two in 2019. But the roots of my interest trace back (as they often do) to an article at Black Gate. In this case, Thomas Parker’s terrific piece A Prophet Without Honor: J.G. Ballard, published here in 2015.

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Skullduggery in the Imperium: The Deep Man by Michael Mersault

Skullduggery in the Imperium: The Deep Man by Michael Mersault

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The Deep Man and The Silent Hand (Baen Books,
January 4, 2022, and October 3, 2023). Covers by Kurt Miller, unknown

I was at Barnes & Noble on Saturday, browsing the science fiction section, when an honest-to-god novelty caught my eye. A brand new mass market paperback! I thought they were virtually extinct, wiped out in the industry-wide shift to trade paperbacks and digital formats. It was titled The Deep Man, the debut novel by newcomer Michael Mersault, and was a reprint of a trade paperback released in January of last year.

It sounded pretty good, too. Something about “It Takes a Warrior to Relight the Galaxy!,” plus some breathless back cover copy about a Galactic Imperium, Myriad Worlds, mysterious nonhumans, mighty clans, an Honor Code, a hero in command of an outmoded, underequipped frigate, spies and assassins, and uncovering a “chilling plot to extinguish humanity’s light from the galaxy.”

Slow down there, deep dude. You had me at “It Takes a Warrior.” Am I the only one who misses paperbacks that fit in one hand? Time to kick the cats out of my big green chair, and read about relighting the galaxy! With humanity’s light, plain old laser fire, or whatever. Honestly, I’m not picky.

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Goth Chick News: This Is Seriously Incredible (and Kind of Disturbing)

Goth Chick News: This Is Seriously Incredible (and Kind of Disturbing)

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@danruse

I am very much a newbie to the world of artificial intelligence (AI), but I’m finding it infinitely fascinating. Like most people, I started with ChatGPT and then started playing around with Bard and other competitors. The possibilities are mind-bending and frightening in nearly equal measure, but I have started incorporating it into my work life, albeit slowly. I even tried asking ChatGPT to write a GCN article, but thankfully you’d notice the difference between it and me, or at least until AI gets a better sense of humor.

The latest thing I’ve been digging into is AI interpreting images. For instance, there is an AI tool called Midjourney which creates images from text prompts. For a basic plan of $96 per year, you purchase time on Midjourney’s powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to interpret and process your text prompts. In response to your prompts (i.e. “New York in the summer”), Midjourney creates four graphic interpretations of what it thinks you asked it for. You can then zero in on the image closest to your liking, and perfect/enhance it further.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Zatoichi at Large

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Zatoichi at Large

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Zatoichi and the Chess Expert (Japan, 1965)

Looking over my notes for the forthcoming Cinema of Swords collection (to be published by Applause Books on June 15th), I realized that there were several five-star entries in the Zatoichi series, absolute gems, that I’d never covered here at Black Gate. Worse, I hadn’t devoted an article to the blind swordsman in almost two years, and there might be newer readers who hadn’t been introduced to Shintaro Katsu and his samurai-era yakuza outlaw hero.

Well, we can’t have that. Herewith are three top-notch features from the Zatoichi series — try any one of them, and then just see if you can stop yourself from watching the rest.

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