Black Gate – Page 737 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

John DeNardo’s 2015 Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Holiday Gift Guide

Saturday, December 26, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Well, Christmas is over, the gifts are (mostly) unwrapped and, barring that one uncle who always seems to be traveling on Christmas, all the presents have been exchanged. Which means it’s finally safe to look at gift-giving guides again (I don’t know about you, but all the best ones seem to pop up just as I finish my shopping.) After all, you need some suggestions on what to spend those gift certificates on, right?

Perhaps the best guide I found this year was John DeNardo’s 2015 Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Holiday Gift Guide, published in two parts over at Kirkus Reviews. What makes it so cool? It’s packed with deluxe comics, Star Trek and Stars Wars books, cool merchandise, and lots more. Here’s his suggestions for how to spend on the art lover in your life.

The go-to gift for your visually oriented loved ones is an art book. Science fiction and fantasy fans would adore Spectrum 22: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art edited by John Fleskes. Its 300 pages are jam-packed with an amazingly diverse selection of art, especially considering that they are all spectacular. It’s is a book you’ll pick up again and again. Or maybe your giftee leans toward the creepy? The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History by Stephen Jones is a visual feast aimed at lovers of horror. It contains an endlessly impressive selection of horror art since the late 19th century. Every page deserves multiple visits.

John has so many ideas, he had to split his list into two parts.

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Future Treasures: Midnight Taxi Tango by Daniel José Older

Saturday, December 26, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Daniel José Older’s first Bone Street Rumba novel, Half-Resurrection Blues, was one of the most acclaimed novels of the year, selected as one of the Best Fantasy Books of 2015 by BuzzFeed, Barnes & Noble, and other fine establishments.

The second in the series, Midnight Taxi Tango, will be released in paperback next month. If you’re a regular reader at Tor.com, you’ve probably already sampled it, as portions were originally published there as three original short stories: “Anyway: Angie,” “Kia and Gio,” and “Ginga.”

The streets of New York are hungry tonight…

Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York’s ghostlier problems. This time it’s a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn’s Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals — and is bound to take more.

The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie’s botánica, where she worked. But the closer they’ve gotten, the more she’s seeing the world from Carlos’s point of view. In fact, she’s starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that — because whatever is bringing out the dead, it’s only just getting started.

Midnight Taxi Tango will be published by Roc on January 5, 2016. It is 322 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions. Sadly, the gorgeous cover art is uncredited.

Read the first chapter at Tor.com.

The Cover and TOC for Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

Friday, December 25, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ten years ago Rich Horton, who’d already published several highly detailed survey articles in the print edition of Black Gate (including “Building the Fantasy Canon: the Classic Anthologies of Genre Fantasy” and “The Big Little SF Magazines of the 1970s”) wrote the first installment of what was to become a highly ambitious series: Rich Horton’s Virtual Best of the Year.

Rich surveyed virtually every piece of short fiction published in the genre in 2005 (an astounding 9.5+ million words), and compiled a list of the best, and we published it here at Black Gate. He repeated that feat in 2006 and 2007, and his reports on the field became more in-depth and insightful each year.

In 2006, Rich also began publishing two anthologies with Prime Books: Fantasy: The Best of the Year and Science Fiction: The Best of the Year. In 2009 those books merged into one massive volume, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, which quickly became one of the most respected and acclaimed anthology series in our industry. It has been published every year since.

Last week Prime Books released the cover of the 2016 edition (at right, click for bigger version), the eighth volume in the series, alongside the Table of Contents. This one contains fiction from C.S.E. Cooney, Kelly Link, Vonda M. McIntyre, Catherynne M. Valente, Naomi Kritzer, Seanan McGuire, Chaz Brenchley, Elizabeth Bear, Ian McDonald, Geoff Ryman, Genevieve Valentine, and many others.

Here’s the complete TOC.

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New Treasures: Time and Time Again by Ben Elton

Friday, December 25, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Time and Time Again Ben Elton-back-small

Ben Elton has written fourteen international bestsellers, including Dead Famous and Two Brothers. His latest novel is a time-travel mystery which Sir Kenneth Branagh calls “An exceptional thriller. Darkly comic, richly humane, and seriously entertaining. The final twist is spine chilling.” It was released in hardcover on Tuesday.

It’s the first of June 1914 and Hugh Stanton, ex-soldier and celebrated adventurer is quite literally the loneliest man on earth. No one he has ever known or loved has been born yet. Perhaps now they never will be.

Stanton knows that a great and terrible war is coming. A collective suicidal madness that will destroy European civilization and bring misery to millions in the century to come. He knows this because, for him, that century is already history.

Somehow he must change that history. He must prevent the war. A war that will begin with a single bullet. But can a single bullet truly corrupt an entire century? And, if so, could another single bullet save it?

Time and Time Again was published by Thomas Dunne Books on December 22, 2015. It is 387 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital format. The cover was designed by Mulcahey & Claire Ward/TW. Click on the images above for bigger versions.

Merry Christmas From All of Us at Black Gate

Friday, December 25, 2015 John ONeill Comments 15 comments

I woke up this morning the same way I have on Christmas morning for the last 18 years: to the excited screams of children telling Alice and me to get out of bad, Santa has come. Ten years ago, I thought I had only a few more years of this. Turns out teenagers love to shout on Christmas morning even more than toddlers.

Well, at least it got me up early. After all the presents were unwrapped, and we’d all snacked on Alice’s delicious Christmas quiche, I dropped by the Black Gate offices to pick up some review titles. It’s when the office is virtually deserted like this — lit only by the glow from the tiny tree the interns put on top of the filing cabinets — that I’m reminded of the early days, when BG was launched with all the hope and optimism in the world back in 2000.

We’ve grown tremendously since then. The print version is gone, but our staff, and our readership, has grown tremendously. Fifteen years ago Black Gate was a humble magazine with a tiny circulation. Now we’re a sprawling international collective of writers and artists working together to promote forgotten classics, celebrate overlooked modern writers, and promote each other.

2015 was a momentous year for us. We received our first Hugo Award nomination, and surpassed a million page views/month for the first time in our history. Over the years Black Gate has helped launch the careers of a great many talented writers, and that hasn’t changed since we switched to an online venue. Drop by if you’re interested in discovering some of the very best new and classic fantasy. I guarantee you, we’ll point you towards something that will delight you.

The engine of our growth has been you, the fans, who’ve enthusiastically spread the word about us. So thank you once again, from the bottom of our hearts. On behalf of the vast and unruly collective that is Black Gate, I would like to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Continue being excellent — it’s what you’re good at.

Hubert Rogers’ Astounding Covers — And His Fascinating Correspondence with Robert A. Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp

Thursday, December 24, 2015 Doug Ellis Comments 11 comments

At IlluxCon this past October, one of our major purchases was a pulp painting by artist Hubert Rogers. Rogers was Astounding Science Fiction’s primary cover artist from late 1939 to early 1952, with a break from 1943 through 1946 due to World War II (which he spent in Canada painting war posters and other paintings related to the war). We’d made arrangements over the summer to buy it from a friend of ours, who had owned it for many years, and he drove it up to IlluxCon with him so we could complete the deal.

This one appeared on the cover for Astounding, April 1941, and illustrated “The Stolen Dormouse” by L. Sprague de Camp. Shortly after its publication, De Camp wrote to Rogers, asking if he could acquire the painting, which he did.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read The Hour of the Dragon

Thursday, December 24, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward continue their re-read of The Bloody Crown of Conan by Robert E. Howard, the second of three omnibus volumes collecting the complete tales of Conan, with the full-fledged novel The Hour of the Dragon. It was originally published in five parts in Weird Tales, from December 1935 to April 1936.

Howard: Robert E. Howard was at the top of his game when he wrote it. For decades there was nothing with which to compare this novel on an apple to apple basis because it was so far ahead of what anyone else had done…

Bill: The novel… was the result of a solicitation from a British publisher for a full-length pulp adventure from REH… After an abortive stab at the planetary romance novel Almuric, left unfinished by REH and possibly later completed by his agent, Otis Aldebert Kline, REH turned again to the Cimmerian and his Hyborian landscapes. And it is to King Conan, whom we have not seen since “The Scarlet Citadel,” that REH returns to for his epic… King Conan is betrayed and captured by conspirators aided by a powerful wizard, and his throne usurped by an Aquilonian nobleman… the quick set-up of Conan’s betrayal and capture on the battlefield in “Citadel” becomes the far more memorable and exciting chapter in Dragon that sees Conan, about to lead his forces in battle, paralyzed by sorcery and his place on the field taken by another…

Next up, Bill and Howard dive into the third Rel Rey Conan collection, The Conquering Sword of Conan. Stay tuned.

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Vintage Treasures: Explorers and The Furthest Horizon, edited by Gardner Dozois

Thursday, December 24, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Last week I talked about two of my favorite anthologies by one of the most acclaimed editors in the field: The Good Old Stuff (1998) and The Good New Stuff (1999) (collected into one massive 982-page volume as The Good Stuff by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1999), both edited by Gardner Dozois. Those books collected some of the best adventure SF from the last century, alongside Dozois’ detailed and affectionate commentary on each author. The result was the equivalent of a Master’s level course in Adventure SF of the 20th Century, and its most proficient writers.

A year later, Dozois did the same thing with another pair of anthologies, this time focused on two similarly fascinating branches of science fiction: tales of deep space exploration, and tales of the far future. Like the first two volumes, they were both released in trade paperback from St. Martin’s/Griffin, and they are both excellent:

Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons (495 pages, April 2000, $17.95)
The Furthest Horizon: SF Adventures to the Far Future (492 pages, May 2000, $17.95)

Both had covers by famous SF artist Chesley Bonestell. Like the first volumes, they include Dozois’ lengthy and highly informative intros to each story. These volumes perfectly compliment the first two, forming the basis for a solid library of modern science fiction.

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 188 Now Available

Thursday, December 24, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The December 10th issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, issue #188, arrives with a brand new cover, “Huashan Temple” by Xiao Ran, a concept artist from Shanghai, China. Click on the image at right to see a bigger version.

Issue #188 has short fiction from Nick Scorza and John Wheeler, and a reprint (from issue #120) by Laura E. Price.

“Eyes Beyond the Fire” by Nick Scorza
When no eyes were on her, Lys frayed a rope with her knife — choosing one which would not harm the sails but would send an iron pulley tumbling into the sea. When Tamlen angrily ordered a replacement brought from the cargo hold, Lys was first to volunteer and on her way before anyone could deny her.

“The Rest Will Blur Together” by John Wheeler
I am Melika. And that is all, now. My grandfather — I believe he was my grandfather — said that our memories make us who we are. I hope that he was wrong, for if he spoke the truth, then I am no one.

From the Archives:
“The Drowned Man” by Laura E. Price
The drowned man brushed past Corwyn in his hurry to get away from her sister.

Nick Scorza has been published in magazines such as Something Wicked, Hobart, and Dogwood. John Wheeler is a graduate of the Alpha Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop for Young Writers; this looks like his first sale.

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Down These Mean Streets a Pastiche Writer Goes

Wednesday, December 23, 2015 William Patrick Maynard Comments 5 comments

NOTE: The following article was first published on April 12, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

Pulp fans are united by an uncommon passion for literary authors and their creations. We read and re-read these seminal works time and again savoring each thrill as if discovering it anew. We read one another’s thoughts on these works in the hope of gaining a greater appreciation of the material or, at the very least, finding some justification for why they affect us so deeply. We dread to consider awakening to a world where there are no new tales of these characters to discover.

A small number of us set out on the precipitous path of making that dream a reality by adding to the existing canon of our favorite characters. Many of those who do so choose to work in the relative safety of fan fiction, content in the knowledge that none will judge their efforts too harshly. Fan fiction, however, is a double-edged sword for while it allows us to work free from criticism, we do so in the knowledge that none will treat our work as a legitimate continuation and that, at the end of the day, is what we all strive to achieve.

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