Black Gate – Page 731 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Warring Supercomputers, Deep Space, and Cold Equations: 5 Tales from Tomorrow

Monday, November 9, 2015 William I. Lengeman III Comments 0 Comment

5 Tales from Tomorrow
Edited by T. E. Dikty
Crest Books (176 pages, $0.35, December 1957)
Cover by Richard Powers

T.E. Dikty edited a bunch of SF anthologies, mostly throughout the Fifties and many in collaboration with Everett F. Bleiler. Aside from Clifford Simak and perhaps one-hit wonder Tom Godwin, the names in this volume are not quite the SF A-list, but the results are mostly not bad.

“Push-Button Passion,” by Albert Compton Friborg

As I was reading this story I couldn’t help wondering if Friborg was the pseudonym for a better known author – Kurt Vonnegut. It has that whimsical, satirical feel that one tends to associate with Vonnegut. Turns out that it is indeed a pseudonym, but for an academic named Bud Foote, whose SF output was limited to this and one other short story, also published in the Fifties.

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Cemetery Dance 73 Now on Sale

Monday, November 9, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There aren’t a lot of print horror magazines left, so I’m grateful we still have Cemetery Dance. It was founded by Richard Chizmar in 1988, while he was still in college, and it is still edited by him today. Cemetery Dance Publications began to publish books in 1992, and quickly outgrew the magazine, but CD Publications has continued to publish approximately two issues a year of the magazine for the past 27 years.

Issue #73 is cover-dated December 2015, and is currently for sale on the CD website (although the issue is listed as forthcoming.) It has new fiction from Gerard Houarner, Keith Minnion, Michael Wehunt, Nik Houser, and Amanda C. Davis. Here’s the complete contents.

Fiction

“A Devil Inside” by Gerard Houarner
“Down There” by Keith Minnion
“The Inconsolable” by Michael Wehunt
“Citizen Flame” by Nik Houser
“Voices Without Voices, Words With No Words” by Amanda C. Davis

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Of Necromancers & Frog Gods – Part One (The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes)

Monday, November 9, 2015 Bob Byrne Comments 11 comments

NECROMANCER GAMES

OGL and D20

When Wizards of the Coast rolled out the Open Game License for 3^rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, a plethora of third party companies would produce products, leaving players with a seemingly unlimited number of options available for purchase. A few were great, more were terrible and most were in between.

That period was known as the d20 boom, which inevitably led to a d20 bust and is explained in depth in Shannon Appelcline’s tremendous, four-volume RPG history, Designers and Dragons. If you have any interest in role playing history, you will love those books (they are broken up into decades: The Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and Two Thousands).

Along the way, many new and existing companies entered the official Dungeons and Dragons world. One of the most popular and successful was Necromancer Games, founded by Clark Peterson and Bill Webb. Under a different name, Necromancer’s offspring is a major player in the RPG scene today.

The Open Gaming License (OGL) made the 3^rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons mechanics permanently “open use” and the basis of a System Reference Document (SRD). The OGL was accompanied by the d20 license, which verified that third party products were compatible with 3^rd Edition.

The OGL and d20 licenses had distinguishing characteristics and somebody more versed than I in the intricacies should write a post on that whole shebang. Suffice to say here, companies began rolling out d20 products from day one.

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New Treasures: Our Lady of the Ice by Cassandra Rose Clarke

Monday, November 9, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Cassandra Rose Clarke is the author of The Wizard’s Promise and The Assassin’s Curse series. Her first novel for adults, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Her latest novel, Our Lady of the Ice, is one of the most intriguing titles to cross my desk this season — featuring a female PI, ruthless gangsters, and robots agitating for independence in an Argentinian colony in Antarctica.

In Argentine Antarctica, Eliana Gomez is the only female PI in Hope City — a domed colony dependent on electricity (and maintenance robots) for heat, light, and survival in the icy deserts of the continent. At the center is an old amusement park — now home only to the androids once programmed to entertain — but Hope City’s days as a tourist destination are long over. Now the City produces atomic power for the mainland while local factions agitate for independence and a local mobster, Ignacio Cabrera, runs a brisk black-market trade in illegally imported food.

Eliana doesn’t care about politics. She doesn’t even care — much — that her boyfriend, Diego, works as muscle for Cabrera. She just wants to save enough money to escape Hope City. But when an aristocrat hires Eliana to protect an explosive personal secret, Eliana finds herself caught up in the political tensions threatening to tear Hope City apart. In the clash of backstabbing politicians, violent freedom fighters, a gangster who will stop at nothing to protect his interests, and a newly sentient robot underclass intent on a very different independence, Eliana finds her job coming into deadly conflict with Diego’s, just as the electricity that keeps Hope City from freezing begins to fail…

From the inner workings of the mob to the story of a revolution to the amazing settings, this story has got it all. Ultimately, however, Our Lady of the Ice questions what it means to be human, what it means to be free, and whether we’re ever able to transcend our pasts and our programming to find true independence.

Our Lady of the Ice was published by Saga Press on October 27, 2015. It is 421 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital edition.

2015 World Fantasy Award Winners Announced

Sunday, November 8, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Unlike last year, I was unable to attend the World Fantasy Convention, but from all reports it was just as exciting and rewarding as ever. They presented the World Fantasy Awards right on time at the end of the convention, and I’m happy to be able to share the winners with you.

For the last several years the coveted Life Achievement Award has been given to two recipients, and this year the judges continued that tradition, presenting the award to both Ramsey Campbell and Sheri S. Tepper for their outstanding service to the fantasy field.

The winners were selected by a panel of judges. This year’s winners of the World Fantasy Awards are:

Novel

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Random House)

Novella

We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)

Short Fiction

Do You Like to Look at Monsters?, Scott Nicolay (chapbook, Fedogan & Bremer)

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: 1st Person and Tight Limited 3rd – A Closely Related Duo

Sunday, November 8, 2015 Tina Jens Comments 0 Comment

This is Part 4 in the Choosing Your Narrative POV Series.

We’re continuing our examination of eight POV approaches commonly used in Fantasy. This week you’ll find our second and third POV forms – First Person and Tight Limited 3rd – are so similar they’re virtually identical twins. Think of the I vs. He or She pronouns as names: the equivalent to dubbing twins Mary and Carrie.

1st Person

This uses the I/Me/My pronouns. This can be a very powerful and intimate point of view.

But it can come across as self-indulgent and can slow the pacing of the story. It is more difficult than it first looks to do it successfully, though it’s not nearly as difficult as 2nd Person.

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The November Fantasy Magazine Rack

Sunday, November 8, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Lots of magazine news in early November. The huge Kickstarter-funded Queers Destroy Horror! special issue of Nightmare shipped, and small press magazine Crossed Genres announced that it will close with the December issue. In reviews, Learned Foote took a look at Emil Ostrovski’s “Tragic Business” in the October Lightspeed, and Richard Horton examined the January 1962 issue of Fantastic, with fiction by Randall Garrett and Erle Stanley Gardner, in his latest retro-review.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our mid-October Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

As we’ve mentioned before, all of these magazines are completely dependent on fans and readers to keep them alive. Many are marginal operations for whom a handful of subscriptions may mean the difference between life and death. Why not check one or two out, and try a sample issue? There are magazines here for every budget, from completely free to $12.95/issue. If you find something intriguing, I hope you’ll consider taking a chance on a subscription. I think you’ll find it’s money very well spent.

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Vintage Treasures: The Joyous Invasions by Theodore Sturgeon

Sunday, November 8, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I’ve been gradually surveying the many collections of Theodore Sturgeon, one of the finest — some would say the finest — short story writers the field has ever seen. They’re easy to obtain, and very inexpensive, although the vast majority have been out of print for over three decades.

Well, most of them are easy to obtain. There are a few exceptions, and one of them is The Joyous Invasions, a collection of three novellas that appeared only in the UK. I’ve been trying to find a copy since I first discovered it existed earlier this year, and I finally succeeded last week. Here’s the description.

Alien Incursions

A tiny parasitic being whose task is to prepare humanity for an extra-terrestrial takeover. Its method: to make all dreams come true…

The ultimate sick TV show of the future — where the attractions are children struck down by a mysterious disease from outer space…

An alien field-expedition to Earth, which bases itself in a cheap boarding house — with weird and very unexpected results…

Here, together in one volume, are three stunning novellas by one of the giants of modern Science Fiction

The Joyous Invasion contains two of Sturgeon’s most famous stories, and one I’d never heard of.

“To Marry Medusa” (Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1958)
“The Comedian’s Children” (Venture Science Fiction Magazine, May 1958)
“The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1955)

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John DeNardo’s Five Reasons to Read Short Speculative Fiction Anthologies

Saturday, November 7, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I love short fiction. It’s how I was introduced to science fiction and fantasy, reading The Hugo Winners and The Early Asimov in the trailer in our back yard when I was twelve. I highlight a lot of anthologies and collections here on the blog, new and old (as you may have noticed).

John DeNardo, founder of the great SF Signal, shares my obsession with short genre fiction, and at the Kirkus Reviews site he uses a meditation on short stories as a crafty way to review Gardner Dozois’ 32nd volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, in his article “5 Reasons to Read Short Speculative Fiction Anthologies.” Take, for example, Reason #4: Short Fiction Is Fun.

People read fiction for fun, and where else can you experience so many fun stories than in a speculative fiction anthology that offers cool new worlds and ideas around which to tell them?

Few stories are as page-turning as “The Regular” by Ken Liu, set in a near-future Boston where a cybernetically enhanced investigator goes looking for a deadly serial killer. “West to East” by Jay Lake is as superb an adventure story as you’re ever likely to read. It involves a pair of space travelers stranded on an alien planet with a harsh atmosphere and having no way to return home. If you could encapsulate everything that is weird and wonderful about 1950s Sci-Fi B-movies, it’d probably look like “Passage of Earth” by Michael Swanwick, the story of an alien invasion as seen from the perspective of a medical examiner and his ex-wife. Then there’s the fast-moving “Red Light, and Rain” by Gareth L. Powell, a gripping action story about two time-traveling enhanced humans who wage a battle on the streets of present-day Amsterdam.

Read John’s complete article here, and see our coverage of The Year’s Best Science Fiction (including the complete TOC) here.

Future Treasures: Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente

Saturday, November 7, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

With all the fuss around Catherynne M. Valente’s new novel Radiance, I almost missed the fact that Cat’s 2013 award-winning novella, Six-Gun Snow White, was being brought back into print by Saga Press.

Six-Gun Snow White is a delightful reimagination of one of the best-known fairy tales of all time, featuring Snow White as a gunslinger in the mythical Wild West. It was nominated for every major award our field has to offer — including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards — and it won the Locus Award for Best Novella of the year, for the limited edition from Subterranean Press. Now Saga is reprinting the book as an attractive trade paperback, with cover and interior art by Charlie Bowater.

Forget the dark, enchanted forest. Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are more likely to find coyotes as the seven dwarves. Insert into this scene a plain-spoken, appealing narrator who relates the history of our heroine’s parents — a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. Although her mother’s life ended as hers began, so begins a remarkable tale: equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, this is an utterly enchanting story… at once familiar and entirely new.

Six-Gun Snow White will be published by Saga Press on November 10. It is 154 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $14.99 in trade paperback. The cover and interior illustrations are by Charlie Bowater.