Black Gate – Page 749 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Q26 Now Available

Saturday, December 5, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly made a big splash this month with the arrival of the long-awaited anthology of their first few years, The Best Of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume 1.

But while that’s been grabbing the headlines, don’t forget that HFQ is one of the most reliable regular sources of new adventure fantasy, and that they just released their 26th quarterly issue. This one contains short stories by Robert Zoltan, Jon Byrne, and J.R. Restrick, and poetry by Mary Soon Lee, Eliza Victoria, and Ann Keith. Here’s the complete fiction TOC:

“The Voice of the Green Flame,” by J.R. Restrick. In a besieged city a king must make horrid decisions and plume ancient horrors. This story is S&S/Weird Fiction at its finest!

“Beggar’s Belief,” by Jon Byrne. Life among the dregs of society is not easy by any stretch, but there are those who master the difficulties and eke out their living. Among the dangers they face, one rises high above the rest — hope.

“The Blue Lamp,” by Robert Zoltan. Adventure fiction in the classic style, Zoltan’s tale will take you from the mundane and into a world of magic and mystery not seen since the glory days of the pulps.

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Kull and the Quest for Identity

Friday, December 4, 2015 William Patrick Maynard Comments 3 comments

NOTE: The following article was first published on April 18, 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.

Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” is a remarkable advancement upon “Exile of Atlantis” and the “Am-ra of the Ta’an” fragments. Howard’s first published story of what will later be known as the Pre-Cataclysmic Age leaves behind the derivative world of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches to mine new territory in terms of character and setting as well as genre.

Kull, the barbarian who has recently seized the crown and now must struggle to keep it, marks a significant break from both Howard and the fantasy genre’s past while continuing to build upon the age-old theme of the outsider as noble savage. Howard was hardly the first young man who felt a sense of kinship with such characters. It is not hard to imagine the aspiring young writer, alienated in Cross Plains, pouring his feelings into the exiled Atlantean who remains an outcast even after rising to the throne of Valusia.

The story opens with Kull making a proper royal entrance. Unsurprisingly, the barbarian king’s empathy rests not with Valusia’s finest archers and trumpeters, but with the mercenaries paid to act as foot soldiers – men who show the king little respect, but who demonstrate integrity for all their brash honesty. This sets the stage for the introduction of Brule, the noble Pict destined to become Kull’s loyal companion. While Brule enters the series as a figure of suspicion, Kull soon modifies his opinion of the man’s character. Brule, like Kull, is a man of integrity.

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Vintage Treasures: Rudy Gutierrez Does Nalo Hopkinson

Friday, December 4, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

About fifteen years ago, I received an unsolicited fantasy story from a young author in Canada. I rejected it, and the author didn’t take the rejection well. She wrote me a pretty grumpy letter.

You sometimes get grumpy letters when you reject stories. Usually the best thing to do is ignore them. But I didn’t in this case, because the author had a point. It was an excellent story, and she knew it. The author’s name was Nalo Hopkinson, and I had rejected her story because of its frankly adult tone and content.

Well, she took me to task for that. Black Gate was brand new at the time, and Nalo challenged me for rejecting a story purely on the grounds of sexual content. She found it cowardly, and I didn’t blame her. That’s no way to build a reputation for a new magazine, she said. In my response, I told her I would have loved to publish her story — but not in Black Gate, which we had worked very hard to make suitable for readers 12 and up. I thought there was a clear market niche for a family-friendly fantasy magazine, and had set out to create one. Her story was very strong, but no so strong that I was willing to go back on the promises I’d made to our investors, distributors and advertisers. Nalo got that immediately, wrote me a warm and thoughtful response, and we hit it off. I’ve followed her career with great interest ever since — and what a stellar career it’s been.

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A Rose By Any Other Name?

Friday, December 4, 2015 Violette Malan Comments 4 comments

It was back when I was teaching a course on satire that I understood for the first time the true importance of characters’ names, and the titles of books. It’s more obvious, perhaps, in a satirical work than in any other, but names – whether of people or novels – are vitally important.

It behooves us as writers to pay them great attention.

To illustrate what I mean, let me show you an example from a satirical work that’s also considered SF, Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange. What’s the significance of the title? We all know what an orange is, don’t we? A type of citrus fruit that grows in semi-tropical areas, which can be eaten, or made into juice, or marmalade or some other specimen of usefulness.

We all know what a clockwork is. A mechanism designed and built by humans to run other items or machines, initially clocks (hence the name), but subsequently a variety of other things. On a large scale, they could run factories, on a small scale, toys. We still find people who would say a “wind-up” or “clockwork” toy, particularly a “clockwork man.”

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The Other Sax Rohmer

Friday, December 4, 2015 William Patrick Maynard Comments 2 comments

I recently penned an article examining the possibility that four privately-printed titles by The Theosophical Society of London might have been the work of a young Sax Rohmer since he and the author of the four theosophical works were both born in the UK as Arthur Henry Ward in 1883. Rohmer shared a lifelong interest in theosophy and occasionally wrote non-fiction pieces on the topic and other occult interests. The current article is concerned with a second mystery writer with the name Sax Rohmer or, more correctly stated, Elizabeth Sax Rohmer.

Credited on the back of her lone novel as the daughter of Sax Rohmer, Elizabeth was in fact his wife. Born Rose Elizabeth Knox into a family of Music Hall entertainers, her brother Teddy was one of The Crazy Gang whose influence in British comedy ranged from The Goon Show to Monty Python. While never as prolific as her husband, Elizabeth penned at least two short stories, “Spikey” and ” ‘arker” under the name Lisbeth Knox in 1924 and 1932, respectively. Under the name Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, she scripted a number of radio and television scripts with her husband. Sadly, no copies of the programs survive and her short fiction remains obscure.

Elizabeth Sax Rohmer’s lone novel, Bianca in Black was published in 1958. At the time, her husband was battling poor health and involved in a protracted court case over his literary rights. Strapped for cash, Elizabeth went to work on a novel herself for Thomas Bouregy’s Mystery House imprint in the US and for Ryerson Press in Canada. A paperback edition by Airmont would follow four years later. Elizabeth acknowledged that her husband helped her with the story and writing of the book. While it is clearly his wife’s work primarily, Sax Rohmer’s hand is evident in certain aspects. The story itself has some slight echoes of his 1954 mystery, The Moon is Red.

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Goth Chick News: Stop Your Grinnin’ and Drop Your Linen – This is the Holiday Gift You’ve Been Searching For

Thursday, December 3, 2015 Sue Granquist Comments 2 comments

Some years ago, a previous profession put me in gruesomely close proximity to the outcomes of even “minor” motorcycle accidents. And though I’ve since moved on to focusing on movie corpses, this is likely due to the fact that the real things are just so…well… icky.

Therefore, though I’d never tell anyone else what they should do, I for one do not saddle up my sexy little blood-red 250 without donning every bit of safety gear first. And believe it or not, this makes me terminally uncool in Illinois where we have no mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists.

You know that cute little wave we bikers are supposed to give one another to acknowledge our mutual bad-assed-ness?

Nope, me either – because unhelmeted riders do not consider me in my helmet and Kevlar in 90 degree Chicago heat to be anything close to bad-assed.

That is – until now.

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Future Treasures: The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez

Thursday, December 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

When you publish a lot of book reviews, you get used to hearing manufactured publicity from publishers… half-hearted quotes from their other writers, and glib comparisons to best sellers. Which makes it so refreshing when you encounter true buzz building around a wonderful new book — chatter on social media, unsolicited endorsements from other writers, and excited discussions among friends. That’s what I’m seeing with Carlos Hernandez’s first book, a quirky and compelling collection of science fiction stories that’s rapidly building a tidal wave of admiration and anticipation in advance of its release next month.

Curious about all the commotion, I reached out to Carlos to see if I could get him to say a few words about his book, and he was generous enough to send me the comments below. Enjoy.

The title of my collection, The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, is so esoteric and personal that it might leave a body wondering how it could serve anyone as a guide to anything. But I’ve picked up travel guides to places I am unlikely ever to visit just for the utter delight of reading them, grateful for the maps, the region-specific vocabulary, the window into human experience there aren’t world enough and time for me to get first-hand. The ones I relish most are deeply introspective, well-mannered, street-smart, generous. They understand the transformative power of small acts, of minute observation, of language. And they are, despite everything they have seen in their travels, deeply in love with humanity.

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Taming the Massive Beast of Pathfinder: An Interview with F. Wesley Schneider

Thursday, December 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

F. Wesley Schneider has had a fascinating career. He was the former assistant editor of Dragon magazine, and co-authored Complete Scoundrel for Dungeons & Dragons. He is the co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and over the last seven years has produced dozens of Pathfinder adventures and accessories, including Hell Unleashed, Artifacts and Legends, Varisia, and Rule of Fear.

He’s currently the editor-in-chief at Paizo, and in that capacity has overseen the entire line of Pathfinder Tales, including novels by Howard Andrew Jones, Tim Pratt, Dave Gross, and many others. His first novel, Bloodbound, was released this week, and we had the chance to chat with him about this exciting change in his career.

You’ve been writing and designing game supplements and adventures for over a decade. What’s it like to get behind the wheel of a novel instead? How are the challenges similar, and how are they different?

Honestly, after spending so much time working on roleplaying games, writing a novel felt sort of self-indulgent. Working on Bloodbound was far more like the act of playing a roleplaying game than writing an RPG adventure actually is.

For anyone not familiar with roleplaying game adventures, they’re essentially giant outlines that allow a Game Master to tell a particular story without having to do much preparation. An RPG adventure provides the script for a story, descriptions of the settings, and game rules for all the various threats.

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New Treasures: The Best Of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Volume 1

Thursday, December 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I’ve been very pleased to watch Heroic Fantasy Quarterly‘s reputation grow by leaps and bounds over the past few years, to the point where it is openly acknowledged as one of the premier sources of adventure fantasy. Howard Andrew Jones calls their output “Stirring, polished adventure fiction [that] needs to be seen by more readers,” and Fletcher Vredenburgh proclaims it “My favorite fantasy magazine… Always true to the traditions of heroic fiction, they yet manage to publish tales that push the genre in new directions.” So I was excited to see a thick anthology of their best work arrive last month — and very honored when I was asked to write the introduction. Here’s a sample.

At its very best, Sword & Sorcery showcases the kind of worldbuilding that twists your head around. It’s the floating pocket dimensions of Adrian Cole’s The Voidal. The savage landscapes of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age. The twisted streets of unmappable Lankhmar, the doomed Atlantis of Kull, the shadow dimensions of Chronicles of Amber…

The setting of a Sword & Sorcery tale is fundamentally very different from the setting of Heroic Fantasy. Heroic Fantasy is castles and keeps and barbarian provinces. It’s wind-swept vistas and dark dungeons, elven forests and cloud kingdoms and subterranean cities and the dangerous borders of Mordor. If you’re going to vacation in the lands of Heroic Fantasy, you’ll need an experienced guide. Because one wrong turn and suddenly you’re an orc hostage.

You needn’t trouble with a guide in the world of Sword & Sorcery. Because S&S… man, S&S will kill you.

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an ezine dedicated to short works of heroic fantasy. It is edited by Adrian Simmons, David Farney, William Ledbetter, and James Frederick William Rowe, and published four times a year. Issues are are completely free. We last covered HFQ with issue #25. The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: Volume 1, 2009-2011 was compiled by the editors of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and published on November 27, 2015. It is 226 pages, priced at $9.99 in paperback and $4.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Justin Sweet. See the complete Table of Contents here.

Gregory Frost’s Tain Returns

Wednesday, December 2, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Two months ago, in early October, I wrote a brief article about the Cú Chulainn novels of Gregory Frost, both published by Ace and both now long out of print. Several readers commented on how much they’d enjoyed them, and Eugene R. said “Frost… uses a dry, understated wit that really underlines the heroic and tragic parts of the original legends.” On November 20th author Gregory Frost dropped by to say:

Just wanted to alert any of you who are interested that Táin and Remscela are back in the world as ebooks, currently exclusively through Book View Cafe. Táin was just this week re-released, and Remscela will be out in December.

On his blog, Frost goes into considerably greater detail on the origin of the books:

Many years ago, with Terri Windling as my editor, I penned two novels spun from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge – the epic fantasy tales of the demigod Setanta, better known as Cú Chulainn. The project became something of an obsession… It was picked up in the late 1990s in a small-press edition that put both novels into one volume called Crimson Spear, and in that form Time-Warner’s early (and ultimately premature) venture into ebook publishing put it out.

Both of those combined editions had a plethora of typos and other minor issues. So I’m delighted to have the rights back to these books. And as of today, the first one, Táin, is again available in ebook format for Nook and Kindle exclusively through Book View Cafe. The sequel, Remscela, will be out in early December, also exclusively from Book View Cafe.

Táin is currently available for $5.99; I note Frost’s debut novel Lyrec is also available for $4.99. Check ’em out here!