Black Gate – Page 757 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tips From Paul Dale Anderson, Installment #2

Sunday, September 13, 2015 Tina Jens Comments 0 Comment

For our Pro Tip this week, we’ve got the second of what will be several installments from the prolific and generous Paul Dale Anderson, who answered all the questions on our list.

Chicagoans will have a chance to hear the Rockford native this Wednesday, when he’s the featured reader at the Gumbo Fiction Salon reading series. (Details on the event are at the end of the article.)

Paul has written across a variety of media and genres for more than twenty years and all across the spectrum of commercial fiction, including romance, westerns, science fiction, erotica, and especially horror. He’s written a huge amount of non-fiction for television, radio, newspapers, and academic journals, along with poetry and book reviews.

His latest novels are Darkness (2AM Publications, 2015), Abandoned (Eldritch Press, 2015), and Axes to Grind (Crossroad Press, 2015). He has new short stories coming out this fall at The Horror Zine magazine, Weirdbook 31, and Pulp Adventures 18.

To Outline or Not to Outline – What Works For You?

I outline only after the work is complete in manuscript. I let my characters tell their own story and each work writes itself. Then I write an outline, synopsis, elevator speech, and what I want to see as jacket copy. If I try to do that first, the story loses momentum. I put all of my creative energy into the story. Everything else is foo-foo.

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Foz Meadows Signs Two-Book Deal with Angry Robot

Sunday, September 13, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Black Gate blogger Foz Meadows has just signed a two-book deal with UK publisher Angry Robot, one of the most exciting and innovative genre publishers out there. Both books will be part of the same fantasy series. Here’s the release from Angry Robot:

An Accident of Stars, the first in the series, which is described by Foz as ‘a portal fantasy with the safeties off’, will be published in summer 2016, with a second novel to follow. You might know of Australian born, Aberdeen-based Foz through her Hugo-nominated blog, Shattersnipe, or from her many articles on The Huffington Post, Strange Horizons, Tor.com or the sadly now closed A Dribble of Ink. Foz has also written two previous books, Solace and Grief and The Key to Starveldt.

Foz Meadows: “After years of quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) obsessing over magic portals, feminism and adventuring ladies, I’m delighted to announce that Angry Robot has decided to enable me in these endeavours. An Accident of Stars is the book I desperately wanted to read, but couldn’t possibly have written, at sixteen – and, as you may have guessed, it features (among a great many other things) magic portals, feminism and adventuring ladies. I’m immensely excited to share it with you, and I look forward to collaborating in its production with our glorious Robot Overlords, who only asked in exchange a very small blood sacrifice and part ownership of my soul.”

Congratulations Foz!

You can read the complete release at the Angry Robot website, or check out Foz’s most recent blog post at Black Gate, “The Fascination of Dragons.”

The Perfect Prescription for Perdition: Doctors in Hell, edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris

Sunday, September 13, 2015 Joe Bonadonna Comments 1 comment

Doctors in Hell
Heroes in Hell, Volume 18
Edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris
Perseid Press (336 pages, $19.98 in trade paperback, $7.92 digital, June 23, 2015)
Cover: Pandemonium, John Martin (1789-1854), circa 1841, oil on canvas, from private collection. Cover design by Sonja Aghabekian

Be careful to preserve your health. It is a trick of the devil, which he employs to deceive good souls, to incite them to do more than they are able, in order that they may no longer be able to do anything.
— St. Vincent De Paul

By now, many of you no doubt know of my association with Janet Morris and Perseid Press. Maybe you’ve read the reviews of her novels that I wrote for Black Gate, including my reviews of Lawyers in Hell, Rogues in Hell, and Dreamers in Hell. In 2014 Janet and I collaborated on an article for Black Gate, in which we discussed Poets in Hell, how I came to be involved with Hell, and how she put that volume together.

Now, for 2015, Perseid Press offers you Doctors in Hell, the 18^th volume in the popular and long-running Heroes in Hell saga, created by Janet Morris back in 1986 .This year I’m going to do something similar to what Janet and I did last year: presenting a brief synopsis of each story/chapter, with the diabolical assistance of my twelve fellow Hellions — the damnedest writers in perdition, to paraphrase the text on the book’s front cover. That makes 13 of us… a nice number, don’t you think?

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New Treasures: The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road by Abbie Bernstein

Sunday, September 13, 2015 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Mad Max: Fury Road was a highlight of the summer for me. It was easily one of the best movies of the year, and the long-awaited return to one of the great cinematic settings of my youth, the post-apocalyptic hell of The Road Warrior. It turned both of my teenage sons into Mad Max fans. No small feat, since in general they don’t show much patience with films from the 80s.

Titan Books released a gorgeous art book to accompany the release of the film, The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road, and it’s jam-packed with behind-the-scenes photos, concept art, production stills, interviews with the cast and crew, and an insightful foreword by director George Miller. I received a copy last month, and finally had a chance to sit down with it this week. The timing is actually pretty good, as the Blu-ray was released on September 1, and we re-watched the film at home last Friday.

Below are a dozen photos and art samples from the book.

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Blowing the Doors Off the Barn: Expanding the Iron Fist Mythos

Saturday, September 12, 2015 Derek Kunsken Comments 8 comments

Marvel’s Iron Fist has not traditionally been one of those characters that attracted me. I first encountered him in a second-hand Power-Man and Iron Fist I got in my first year of collecting comics in 1981.

I didn’t get the odd-couple humor, nor the 1970s movie aesthetic that drove the creation of these heroes. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to dig a character who wore slippers. In my defense, I didn’t cotton to Karnak of the Inhumans either. So maybe it’s was the karate chops.

As a teen, I was briefly and underwhelmingly exposed to the black and white magazine-sized martial arts books Marvel published in the 1970s. The only positive sound I ever made when Iron Fist showed up on my radar was when he was drawn by John Byrne and when he briefly crossed paths with the X-Men.

That all changed for me in a 2006-2009 run of The Immortal Iron Fist written by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and Duane Swierczynski, and pencilled by Travis Foreman and David Aja. Why?

Before 2006, a few things were clear about Danny Rand, the Iron Fist. He was trained in the mystical city of K’un L’un after the deaths of his parents. He is one of a long line of successive possessors of the Chi force that he got from the Dragon of K’un L’un. His arch-enemy is the Steel Serpent, a bit of a bad apple from K’un L’un. It’s a tight superhero set-up, and to my taste, a bit tepid.

But in “The Last Iron Fist Story” (issues #1-6 of the Immortal Iron Fist), Brubaker and Fraction reveal that Danny is not the only living Iron Fist. His predecessor is still alive and kicking (sorry…); he’s been hiding in an opium haze for decades.

When the enemies of K’un L’un find him, he has to leave opium, in anticipation of something called the Tournament of the Seven Capital Cities.

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Vintage Treasures: The Durdane Trilogy by Jack Vance

Saturday, September 12, 2015 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Jack Vance was an amazingly prolific writer, and he wrote for over six decades. That’s two decades shy of Jack Williamson’s astonishing eight-decade run as an SF writer, but still pretty darned impressive. Vance made his fiction debut in the Summer 1945 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories with “The World-Thinker,” and his last short story, “Phalild’s Fate,” appeared in the ebook collection Chateau d’If and Other Stories in April 2012, a year before he died at the age of 96. No one is entirely sure how many books he produced in all that time, and estimates range from 60 to as high as 90.

Not too surprisingly, one of the marvelous things about Jack Vance is that I’m still discovering his work. I’ve never read his Durdane trilogy from the 1970s, for example — and in fact, I acquired a complete set for the first time last April at the Windy City Pulp & Paper show here in Chicago. Before I settled in to read it, I had a look back at its publishing history (doesn’t everyone do that?), and discovered just how many editions there have been over the years. Here’s a quick survey of a few of the more interesting incarnations of one of Vance’s more overlooked fantasies.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: James Reasoner on He Pointed Them North: Trail Towns in the Traditional Westerns of REH

Saturday, September 12, 2015 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

REHWesterns_Cover — Intro by James Reasoner…

After Paul Bishop’s excellent post on REH’s boxing stories turned my initial post on hard boiled private eyes into the start of a series, the next topic I knew I wanted to cover was westerns. And James Reasoner was the only person I considered to write it. Historical fiction, noir and westerns: he’s excellent in all of those areas. 1914’s Robert E. Howard Days 2014 Featured Attendee is one of the best western writers alive. Let’s hit the trail!

When Robert E. Howard was growing up in Cross Plains in the 1920s, it was entirely possible that some of the older men in town might have gone on cattle drives in their youth, as the great trails from Texas to the railheads in Kansas opened up after the Civil War and changed the focus of the Lone Star State’s economy. Whether a young Bob Howard ever listened to these old cowboys spin yarns about those days, we don’t know, but he certainly might have.

J. Marvin Hunter’s classic book Trail Drivers of Texas appeared in 1927, and this volume might well have caught Howard’s interest, too, although we have no record of him ever reading it.

What we do know, however, is that Howard wrote several Western stories in which the trail towns which served as destination points for those great herds of Longhorns play an important part, beginning with “Gunman’s Debt”, which went unpublished during Howard’s lifetime but is one of his best Westerns. It’s set in the small Kansas settlement of San Juan, and although Howard tells us that the rails and the trail herds haven’t reached it yet, it’s clear that they’re on the way. San Juan is new and raw and more than a little squalid:

Three saloons, one of which included a dance hall and another a gambling dive, stables, a jail, a store or so, a double row of unpainted board houses, a livery stable, corrals, that made up the village men now called San Juan.

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Future Treasures: Loosed upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction edited by John Joseph Adams

Friday, September 11, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

There have been few aspects of our planet’s future as hotly debated as climate change. And regardless of your opinion on the matter, you have to admit: it’s a fascinating topic, and one ideally suited for exploration in fiction. Editor John Joseph Adams, who just took home his second Hugo award for Lightspeed magazine, has assembled a stellar line-up of writers — including Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Tobias S. Buckell, Alan Dean Foster, Margaret Atwood, Seanan McGuire, and Jean-Louis Trudel — with a massive, 565-page anthology that looks at our changing planet through the unique lens of science fiction.

This is the definitive collection of climate fiction from John Joseph Adams, the acclaimed editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and Wastelands. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle, and hope.

Join the bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future.

This is a collection that will challenge readers to look at the world they live in as if for the first time.

See the complete table of contents here.

Loosed upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction will be published by Saga Press on September 15, 2015. It is 565 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition.

Sahib: Colonial Military Life in India or on Mars

Friday, September 11, 2015 Comments 6 comments

If you are in the Northumbrian town of Alnwick, chasing Hogwarts or visiting the Hotspur School of Defence, stop by Barter Books — it’s like that library in Name of the Rose, except all the books are for sale and the coffee’s better. Imagine a Victorian station turned into a used book store and you’re there.

It’s where I get random stuff, or regret not buying it. For example, there was this 1930s book on WWI air warfare in Bulgaria but it was too pricy, and now I wish I’d splashed out anyway…

“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger,
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.” (CS Lewis)

In the past, I returned to Edinburgh laden with Leigh Brackett books. This time, among my finds was a copy of Sahib: The British Soldier in India by Richard Holmes.

It’s a book you can read as history, especially if you are British, but also as context for Steampunk and Space Opera.

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August Issue of Swords and Sorcery Magazine Now Available

Friday, September 11, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Issue 43 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, cover-dated August 2015, is now available.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine is edited by Curtis Ellett. Each issue contains two short stories, and is available free online. This issue includes new fiction from Connor Perry and Sandra Unerman.

“Stragglers in the Cold,” by Connor Perry, is the tale of a skin changer faced with the choice of dying of starvation in the snow or breaking the rules of his kind and taking another person’s body. Perry is new to Swords & Sorcery but not to fantasy. His work can be seen on-line in his web serial, Monsters of Nottingham.

“Thorncandle House,” by Sandra Unerman, is the story of a man coming home against his will to a house that wants him more than he wants it. Unerman’s work has not previously appeared in Swords & Sorcery but she has been a fantasy writer for many years. She has recently published stories in Frostfire Worlds and in the Worms anthology from Knightwatch Press. She lives in London and is a member of the Clockhouse Writers’ Group.

Read the current issue here. We last covered Swords and Sorcery Magazine with Issue #42.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine is edited by Curtis Ellett, and is available free online. Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed issue #42 in his July Short Story Roundup.

Our September Fantasy Magazine Rack is here, and all of our recent magazine coverage here.