Discovering Robert E. Howard: Rob Roehm – Tragic Things

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Rob Roehm – Tragic Things

REHTragic_HowardPlaqueWe’ve had over a dozen posts in our ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series here at Black Gate, but we haven’t had a single post yet about Howard himself. Oops. Rob Roehm, Featured Attendee at the 2014 REH Days and Director of Publications for the REH Foundation, fixes that hole for us. As you can see from the first paragraph, the story of Robert E. Howard’s aunts and uncles is a sad one. Take it away, Rob!


In his February 27, 1944 letter to E. Hoffmann Price, Dr. Isaac M. Howard briefly describes the state of the Howard family: “Mr. Price, the most tragic things have come to me: 2 bros., 3 sisters all dead, one sister was burned to death, one bro. killed, his body mangled beyond description by a railroad train. My wife died after a terrible lingering sickness, my only child going at the same time, leaving me alone of my father’s family.”

While fans of the doctor’s son, Robert E. Howard, are aware of the June 1936 events that deprived Dr. Howard of his immediate family, the fate of his brothers and sisters is also interesting, and is indeed full of “tragic things.”

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Future Treasures: The Miriam Black Series by Chuck Wendig

Future Treasures: The Miriam Black Series by Chuck Wendig

Blackbirds Chuck Wendig-small Mockingbird Chuck Wendig-small The Cormorant Chuck Wendig-small

[Click the images for bigger versions.]

Chuck Wendig has had an impressive career as a game designer, screenwriter, Star Wars novelist, and paperback writer. James McGlothlin reviewed his supernatural mob crime novel The Blue Blazes for us here, and Kelly Swails called Blackbirds, the first novel in his Miriam Black series, “Punch-You-in-the-Face Good.”

Now the producers of Breaking Bad are adapting Miriam Black as a TV show, creating what The Guardian calls “a sassy, hard-boiled thriller with a paranormal slant” about a young woman who can see the darkest corners of the future.

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Little Green Men, Couriers of Chaos, and Miners on Uranus: Things, edited by Ivan Howard

Little Green Men, Couriers of Chaos, and Miners on Uranus: Things, edited by Ivan Howard

Things Ivan Howard-smallThings
Edited by Ivan Howard
Belmont (157 pages, $0.50, February 1964)

Belmont Books, publisher of this anthology, apparently thrived throughout the Sixties. Early on it looks like many of their books leaned toward horror, with SF being sprinkled into the mix more as time went on. Things presents itself more as horror (the subtitle is Stories of Terror and Shock by six SCIENCE-FICTION greats) but there’s not much horror content. It’s a short volume that collects six fairly uninspired novelettes and short stories first published in SF magazines in the early Fifties.

Thumbs Up

“The Gift of the Gods,” by Raymond F. Jones

An interesting take on aliens landing on Earth, as the whole affair is somewhat derailed by bureaucracy and pettiness. It could have been a lot shorter and it was a bit preachy in spots but not bad overall.

“Little Green Man,” by Noel Loomis

I like pulp as much as the next guy and maybe a bit more — although it’s best taken in moderate doses. This one’s pretty pulpy, with the LGM of the title beseeching a mining engineer from Earth to evacuate from his home planet of Uranus. Entertaining but not particularly exceptional.

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Fantasia Diary 2015: Poison Berry in My Brain, Anima State, The Interior

Fantasia Diary 2015: Poison Berry in My Brain, Anima State, The Interior

Poison Berry in My BrainBy this point I’ve discussed all the movies I saw in theatres at the Fantasia film festival, but there remain a half-dozen more that I saw courtesy of the Fantasia screening room. I’m going to write about them over two posts, for ease of reading. And then I’ll have a coda wrapping up my Fantasia coverage with thoughts on what I saw, and the value of the festival. For now: reviews of the psychological romance comedy Poison Berry in My Brain, the metafictional satire Anima State, and the suspense movie The Interior. All of them, one way or another, directly to do with what happens inside the head.

Poison Berry in My Brain (Nounai Poison Berry) was directed by Yuichi Sato from a script by Tomoko Aizawa, based on a manga by Setona Mizushiro. The idea may sound a little familiar: Ichiko Sakurai (Yôko Maki) is a thirty-year-old woman novelist in Japan who has people living in her head. These five people are dressed in suits, and argue like a corporate board as they try to decide what Ichiko should do in any given situation. They are her emotions, her inner drives. And they get a workout as Ichiko meets and falls in love with a young artist (Yuki Furukawa), and then among the storms of that relationship sees the spark of something between her and her editor (Songha).

Comparisons with Pixar’s Inside Out are inevitable. Or almost inevitable; in fact I haven’t seen the Pixar film, so we can dodge that bullet. I will say firstly that so far as I can gather from Wikipedia, the manga appeared just after Pixar began working on their movie — this is independent invention. Secondly, from what I understand of Inside Out, there’s a bit of a difference here: the descriptions I’ve read say that in that movie the characters who live in the main character’s head all represent a specific emotion. The board members directing Ichiko are more general. They represent tendencies. Dithering but sympathetic Chairman Yoshida (Hidetoshi Nishijima) keeps order but can’t seem to make a decision on his own; Ikeda (Yo Yoshida) is convinced that everying Ichiko does is doomed to failure and she should quit before she stops; the energetic Ishibashi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) always looks on the bright side; young gothic lolita Hatoko (Hiyori Sakurada) is impulsive and childlike — unsurprisingly, being literally a child — while old Secretary Kishi maintains Ichiko’s memories but contributes little to the discussions as he’s so often caught up in the past.

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The September Fantasy Magazine Rack

The September Fantasy Magazine Rack

Apex-Magazine-Issue-75-rack Asimovs-Science-Fiction-September-2015-rack Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies-180-rack Clarkesworld-107-rack
Fantasy-Scroll-Magazine-Issue-8-rack Lightspeed-August-2015-rack Mythic-Delirium-2.1-rack Nightmare-Magazine-August-2015-rack

Lots of great new magazines to read in September — and plenty of news to share. This month we start coverage of Mike Allen’s fine Mythic Delirium magazine, with the July-September issue (above), and Lynne and Michael Thomas take us behind the scenes to learn how the Uncanny Magazine podcast gets made. Clarkesworld mastermind Neil Clarke tell us the Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews, and Fantasy Scroll Magazine announced a massive collection of all 51 stories from their first year, Dragons, Droids and Doom, edited by Iulian Ionescu and Frederick. See our recommendations on the finest stories from last month here.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our mid-August 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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New Treasures: Stories of the Raksura: Volume Two: The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below by Martha Wells

New Treasures: Stories of the Raksura: Volume Two: The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below by Martha Wells

Stories of the Raksura Volume 2-smallMartha Wells’s Books of the Raksura trilogy — The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, and The Siren Depths — have captivated readers around the world. In Stories of the Raksura, Volume One: The Falling World & The Tale of Indigo and Cloud (details here), she returned to the world of Raksura with a pair of exciting novellas. With the second volume, Stories of the Raksura, Volume Two: The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below, now available from Night Shade Press, Moon, Jade, and other favorites from the Indigo Cloud Court return in two more powerful novellas in the same setting.

Martha Wells continues to enthusiastically ignore genre conventions in her exploration of the fascinating world of the Raksura. Her novellas and short stories contain all the elements fans have come to love from the Raksura books: courtly intrigue and politics, unfolding mysteries that reveal an increasingly strange wider world, and threats both mundane and magical.

“The Dead City” is a tale of Moon before he came to the Indigo Court. As Moon is fleeing the ruins of Saraseil, a groundling city destroyed by the Fell, he flies right into another potential disaster when a friendly caravanserai finds itself under attack by a strange force. In “The Dark Earth Below,” Moon and Jade face their biggest adventure yet; their first clutch. But even as Moon tries to prepare for impending fatherhood, members of the Kek village in the colony tree’s roots go missing, and searching for them only leads to more mysteries as the court is stalked by an unknown enemy.

Stories of Moon and the shape changers of Raksura have delighted readers for years. This world is a dangerous place full of strange mysteries, where the future can never be taken for granted and must always be fought for with wits and ingenuity, and often tooth and claw. With these two new novellas, Martha Wells shows that the world of the Raksura has many more stories to tell…

The book also includes the short stories “Trading Lesson,” “Mimesis,” and “The Almost Last Voyage of the Wind-ship Escarpment.” Stories of the Raksura: Volume Two: The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below was published by Night Shade Books on June 2, 2015. It is 232 pages, priced at $15.99 in both trade paperback and digital. The cover is by Matthew Stewart. Read an excerpt here.

The Growing Pains of Renner & Quist

The Growing Pains of Renner & Quist

BonesyCheck Out TimeSamhain Publishing has just unearthed Bonesy, their fourth Renner and Quist occult mystery from one of my very favorite authors (and a regular contributor at Black Gate) magazine, Mark Rigney.

The idea of returning from a ten-month hiatus has me a bit nervous, but longtime readers may recall my heaping praise on Rigney’s earlier titles in the series: The Skates, Sleeping Bear, and Check-Out Time. Renner and Quist are an oddball double act in the classic tradition. Renner is a persnickety Unitarian minister, while Quist is a boorish ex-linebacker. Together, this unlikely duo team to solve occult mysteries.

This latest addition to the quirky and delightful series picks up where the last episode left off with Renner and Quist dramatically changed by their experiences. This time out, Renner’s mentor, Iris Buckhalter turns up needing his help.

She has developed an obsession with a brass rubbing of a strangely sexless 16th Century human skeleton she calls “Bonesy.” Her unhealthy obsession seems to have triggered premonitions of her death and she wants Renner, with his obvious occult abilities, to become Bonesy’s caretaker.

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The Great Serialization Experiment: Don’t Kill Your Reader – Eat a Cookie Instead

The Great Serialization Experiment: Don’t Kill Your Reader – Eat a Cookie Instead

Write on your own tombstone. Is there anything the Internet won't do? What a world we live in, people. What a world.
Write on your own tombstone. Is there anything the Internet won’t do? What a world we live in, people. What a world.

Remember, Kids: A Dead Reader Is A Non-Purchasing Reader

Here we are, last post of this series. Thanks for sticking around! Check out the first two parts if you haven’t yet: The Lay of the Land and Attack on Multiple Fronts.

The Mad Science

Ah, the eternal question: To plot ahead, or to write by the seat of your pants? I like to strike a healthy balance between planning and OMG WHY DID I THINK THAT CAPTURING MY NEIGHBOR’S PETUNIA GARDEN WOULD BE SIMPLE AND WHY DIDN’T I STUDY THEIR SQUIRREL DEFENSE GRID MORE THOROUGHLY FIRST??? I seriously still wonder about that one, as do my scars. I enjoy a combo of planning and flying by the seat of my squirrel-shredded pants is what I’m saying, in case that was a bit much on the cap locks.

This is what I did for Nigh, but I already had two published trilogies by the time I wrote it, so I had some idea of how I draft best (hint: very caffeinated). I didn’t have book 5 written when book 1 came out, but I had my plan. A thin little plan full of hunger and pain, but a plan nonetheless. I focused on arcs (skeleton) and promises (muscles and organs), and then tacked on the skin as I wrote.

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Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 22: Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends, Assassination, and Attack on Titan: Part 1

Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 22: Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends, Assassination, and Attack on Titan: Part 1

Rurouni KenshinTuesday, August 4, was my last day at the Fantasia Festival. It was the official closing day of Fantasia; they’d added a few screenings on Wednesday, but nothing that looked compelling to me. I have some more films to write about after this, thanks to the festival’s screening room. But since I’ll be writing here about the last three movies I saw in a theatre at the 2015 Fantasia Festival, in this post I want to make a point of acknowledging the crowds.

All three movies I saw that Tuesday played in the big Hall Theatre, to packed houses. All of them were more-or-less designed to be big crowd-pleasers, though in different ways. In two cases, they succeeded admirably, even spectacularly. And the third case failed utterly. Given the kinds of movies these were, the audience reactions are worth noting; especially in the case of these audiences. Fantasia crowds are the best I’ve ever found, wildly enthusiastic when a good movie pays off, but critical and even mocking when a bad one implodes. So I’m happy to use their responses in discussing these three movies.

The first film I saw that Tuesday was a late addition to the Fantasia line-up. Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends was the third film in a series, a live-action adaptation of a popular manga that had already been adapted into several anime. Assassination was a Korean movie set during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s, a mix of intrigue and action. Then came the festival’s official closing movie, the first film in the live-action adaptation of Attack on Titan.

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Cixin Liu the Superstar: How Taking a Risk on a Chinese Author Paid Off Big For Tor

Cixin Liu the Superstar: How Taking a Risk on a Chinese Author Paid Off Big For Tor

The Three-Body Problem-smallOne of the great things about science fiction conventions is getting to rub shoulders with your heroes.

Some years ago I received an advance proof of an upcoming fantasy from Bantam Spectra, just before heading to Archon in St. Louis. I threw it in my luggage, and brought it to the author’s reading. There were only seven people in the audience, so afterwards I got to have a nice chat with the author, and he graciously signed my book for me. The writer was George R.R. Martin, and the book was A Game of Thrones.

In fact, writers who will draw huge crowds in public can often be vastly more approachable at small conventions. Perhaps this is because seeing Neil Gaiman at your local library is a big deal, but hanging out with him at the bar at World Fantasy is just a lot more casual.

Of course, there are rare exceptions. There are a few writers treated like superstars, even among fellow professionals. I saw it happen when Stephen King came to my home town of Ottawa for the World Fantasy Convention in 1984, and autograph lines spontaneously formed whenever he sat down. I got in line an hour early just so I could be in the front row during his reading from The Talisman (and ended up giving up my seat anyway, just so Tabitha King wouldn’t have to stand in the back.)

And I saw it happen again in June of this year, when the hottest new writer in science fiction, Cixin Liu, author of the Three-Body trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End), arrived in Chicago for the Nebula Awards weekend.

Mr. Liu was in making his first trip to the United States as a published author to be on hand for the presentation of the awards. His first novel in English, The Three-Body Problem, published by Tor in November of last year, was up for Best Novel.

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