Black Gate – Page 772 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Dear Prudentia: What is Best in Life?

Friday, September 18, 2015 mariebilodeau Comments 7 comments

He offers you lamentations. I offer you orgies. And you vote for him. Really?

Dear Prudentia,

I know how it goes. When one asks a mighty barbarian warrior: “What is best in life?” The typical answer should be: “Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.” The first two are fine, but I must admit that the third one perturbs me. I mean, I don’t actually like hearing women cry. It makes me feel all sad, and I tear up easily, which isn’t good for troop morale. Once, I hiccupped a sob, tried to pretend it was a sneeze, and bit on my own recently sharpened sword to hide my grief. It looked pretty badass so the men were impressed and gave me wide berth, but still, I can only cut half of my face off so many times before I’m too mutilated to be understood. Plus, my tetanus shot is out of date and that’s bound to turn out badly. Please help me to enjoy the lamentations of women, as ever good conqueror should.

Grinning Anonymously

Dear Grinning,

First off, you should never let your shots expire. You just never know what you’ll encounter on that battlefield. Some people’s arrows are filthy with cow dung, did you know that? You could get terribly ill that way, which would tear your attention away from conquering.

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Future Treasures: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Friday, September 18, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I love a good caper novel. Fantasy doesn’t have enough of them. There’s Steven Brust’s Jhereg books, of course, and Scott Lynch’s marvelous Gentleman Bastard trilogy (The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves). But we could certainly use a few more. Leigh Bardugo sets out to correct that deficiency with Six of Crows, a very promising new novel featuring “a cunning leader with a plan for every occasion, nigh-impossible odds, an entertainingly combative team of skilled misfits, a twisty plot, and a nerve-wracking cliffhanger” (Publishers Weekly). It’s on sale September 29 from Henry Holt and Co.

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price — and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone…

A convict with a thirst for revenge. A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager. A runaway with a privileged past.

A spy known as the Wraith. A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums. A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes.

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction — if they don’t kill each other first.

Leigh Bardugo is the author of the popular YA novels Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, and Ruin and Rising (collectively The Grisha Trilogy). Read her story “The Too-Clever Fox” for free at Tor.com.

Six of Crows will be published by Henry Holt and Co. on September 29, 2015. It is 480 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $8.99 for the digital edition.

Persian Fire: History like Harold Lamb Used to Do It

Friday, September 18, 2015 Comments 7 comments

300 without the attack rhinos, Greece versus the known world, and — best of all — the Persian Wars from the Persian perspective. You can see how Persian Fire by Tom Holland ended up as another one of my Barter Books finds.

It’s a book that doesn’t quite live up to the promise on the dust jacket, but does deliver something else almost as spectacular. Yes, he launches us into the history of the Persian Empire and what came before it. However, a few chapters in and Athens and Sparta steal the story.

It’s not Holland’s fault.

Though he draws on archaeology to bring to life the palaces and people of Persia, just like other historians, he has but one substantial contemporary source: Herodotus, the father of History. The end result is a retelling of — to those of us who have studied Ancient History — a very familiar tale.

However, this is a tale supremely well and wisely told, pretty much as Harold Lamb would have done it. (It’s also the kind of sweeping history that the History Manifesto calls for, but which academics rarely seem to deliver (because few of them could write their way out of a paper bag).)

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Goth Chick News: You Don’t Have to Go To Hell, But You Can’t Stay Here – Ghost Sex Comes to TIFF

Thursday, September 17, 2015 Sue Granquist Comments 3 comments

You can always count on interesting offerings from the Toronto International Film Festival. Founded in 1976, “TIFF” is now one of the most prestigious events of its kind in the world, considered second only to Cannes in terms of high-profile pics, stars and market activity.

Screening close to 400 films each season, just a few of the notables which launched at TIFF include American Beauty, Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech, all of which went on to win Best Picture at the following Oscars.

So perhaps we should entertain such hopes for Lace Crater, an indy film which made its debut at TIFF on Tuesday.

Being billed as a lo-fi, horror-comedy, the trailer teases the story of an awkward young woman (Lindsay Burge) who gets a sexually transmitted disease from a ghost. That’s right: this woman has sex with a ghost and suffers the consequences.

And you thought your twenties sucked.

Lace Crater is the feature directorial debut of writer/director and local Chicago, Northwestern University grad Harrison Atkins. Here’s the official synopsis.

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Lackington’s Issue 7 Now on Sale

Thursday, September 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Black Gate blogger Derek Kunsken was the first to alert me to the birth of new online market Lackington’s last June. The Ottawa-based magazine is edited by Ranylt Richildis and appears four times a year; it publishes art and speculative fiction between 1,500 – 5,000 words in length. It has produced seven issues, like clockwork, which had me counting on my fingers… have there really been that many quarters since last June?

Anyway, it’s high time I started paying attention to this fine magazine, adding it to our regular magazine coverage, and answering some of your questions. Questions like, “Who the heck is Lackington?” That riddle is answered on their Donate page:

Once upon a time, a British bookseller named James Lackington made books affordable for nearly everyone. It was the late eighteenth century, literacy was on the rise, but books were still a luxury item for many Londoners. Lackington changed that by popularizing the cheap “remainder” and making a tidy profit for himself, in the bargain.

We’ll never make a profit at Lackington’s Magazine. Our principles, in fact, have us in a bind. We want to keep content accessible to everyone, the way Lackington did. But we also want to pay contributors, because we believe creative labour must be compensated. To do so, we rely on donations to buy stories and art. Help keep this project afloat, support creators, and ensure we remain open to anyone with an internet connection.

Lackington invented remaindered books? Seriously, that guy is totally my hero.

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Sarah, William Morris, and Me

Thursday, September 17, 2015 Thomas Parker Comments 7 comments

Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up, you whippersnappers, and see Old Fogy’s Carnival of Cantankerous Complaints. Present your tickets and take your seats for yet another unsolicited argument justifying my personal preference for bound paper books over electronic texts. Keep your arms and hands inside the diatribe at all times. (Go away kid, you bother me.) Ready?

A while back I decided I wanted to read William Morris’s 1877 book-length epic poem, Sigurd the Volsung, a violent Victorianizing of old Norse myth. After discovering that the paperback copy I ordered from Amazon was heavily abridged (grrrr!) I located an old used copy online — an American edition published in Boston by Roberts Brothers in 1891. (Morris was a popular author, and editions of his works that are this old are not at all scarce; I think it cost me ten or fifteen dollars.)

When the book arrived, I carefully took it out of the shipping package (books of this vintage are wonderfully heavy) and opened the dark green cover to look through it. I immediately saw, on the very first blank page, a name and a date neatly written in pencil:

Sarah Anderson Bates 1892

I’m not specifically a collector of signed editions, though I have acquired quite a few over the years (mostly from science fiction writers), among them books signed by Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Harlan Ellison, Peter Beagle, Fritz Leiber, and Cormac McCarthy — some pretty heavy hitters.

The signature I value most is Sarah Anderson Bates. Why? Partially for the surprise of having it at all, but mostly because she is someone I know nothing about, who was — just like me — an ordinary person who had a book she valued, and who, by writing her name in it, became a kind of time traveler, sending a signal to me, a person who probably wasn’t even born until long after she was gone.

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New Treasures: Awaiting Strange Gods by Darrell Schweitzer

Thursday, September 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I was proud to publish two very fine stories by Darrell Schweitzer in the print version of Black Gate: the frontier horror story “A Dark Miracle” (BG 3) and the Thomas the Rhymer tale “Into the Gathering Dark” (BG 15). So I’m very pleased indeed to see a brand new collection from Mr. Schweitzer, Awaiting Strange Gods: Weird and Lovecraftian Fictions, which collects 22 tales in a very handsome package. In addition to a new introduction by S.T. Joshi, the book also contains three interior illustrations by cover artist Tim Kirk.

I’m especially delighted by Awaiting Strange Gods because it also marks the continued resurgence of Fedogan & Bremer, the Minneapolis-based weird fiction publisher that produced over two dozen fabulous volumes in the 80s and 90s, including Colossus by Donald Wandrei, Stephen Jones’ Shadows Over Innsmouth and Dark Detectives, and Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner. It’s marvelous to see them active again.

Darrell Schweitzer, for 19 years co-editor of Weird Tales, is a familiar name in Dark Fantasy and fringe SF stories. But his forays into Weird/Lovecraftian got underway long after he had established his literary voice. These are very personal stories, notable for character development as opposed to HPL’s cutouts against a cosmic background. 22 tales ranging from straight Mythos to Historical, and from Pennsylvania to Asia Minor. We think these tales are a treat, and you will too!

John R. Fultz produced a marvelously detailed survey of Schweitzer’s weird fantasy, coupled with an interview, in “The Sorcery of Storytelling: The Imaginary Worlds of Darrell Schweitzer,” published at Black Gate ‘way back in 2006. Read it here.

Awaiting Strange Gods: Weird and Lovecraftian Fictions was published by Fedogan & Bremer on September 15, 2015. It is 292 pages, priced at $39.95 in hardcover, and $125 for the deluxe limited edition, with a signature page and fitted slipcase. The cover art is by Tim Kirk. There is no digital edition.

When Big Game Hunting was Glamorous: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

Wednesday, September 16, 2015 Sean McLachlan Comments 8 comments

The recent scandal over the killing of Cecil the Lion has once again brought big game hunting into the spotlight, with various websites outing rich hunters who go to Africa to blow away lions, giraffes, and other animals.

Here in Spain, we had an even bigger scandal back in 2012 when, at the height of this country’s financial crisis, King Juan Carlos went to Botswana and killed an elephant. He later apologized but this, plus rumors of extramarital affairs and numerous incidents of being apparently drunk in public, forced him to abdicate two years later.

There was a time when scandals like this would have never happened, when kings and commoners could empty their guns into beautiful animals free from the fear of criticism. Many wrote memoirs of going on safari, creating a genre that has all but died out today.

One of the classics of the genre is The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson and originally published in 1907. Patterson worked as the chief engineer building the Mombasa to Uganda railway in 1898. Managing a huge crew of Africans, Pathans, and Sikhs in adverse conditions to build a railroad through poorly mapped territory would have been hard enough, but soon lions started coming into the workmen’s camp at night and carrying off his workers.

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Vintage Treasures: Hell’s Gate by Dean R. Koontz

Wednesday, September 16, 2015 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

One of the great things about collecting old paperbacks is that it’s an inexpensive hobby. Almost criminally inexpensive. Want a good condition copy of the first edition of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, one of the rarest and most sought-after genre paperbacks? Copies at Amazon.com start at around 10 bucks… about the price of a brand new paperback. I bought a mint-condition, unread copy on eBay for a lofty $20 a few years back.

But there are exceptions. And some of the most interesting exceptions are the early paperbacks of Dean R. Koontz.

Koontz was (and is) a terrifically prolific writer, publishing as many as eight books a year. His first novel, Star Quest (cover here), was published as an Ace Double in 1968, and over the next few years he wrote more than a dozen other SF novels, under his own name and many pseudonyms, including Leigh Nichols, David Axton, and many others. His first bestsellers were Demon Seed (1973), The Key to Midnight (1979, as by Leigh Nichols) and his breakout novel Whispers (1980). With the money he made as a bestselling writer, Koontz famously bought up the rights to most of his early work and, with rare exceptions, has not allowed it to be reprinted.

Which brings us to Hell’s Gate, his fifth novel, published under his own name as a paperback original by Lancer in 1970. It is 190 pages, originally priced at $0.75, with a gorgeous cover by the great Kelly Freas (click the above images for bigger versions). The rights now rest with Koontz and, like much of his early work, it has never been reprinted. There is no digital edition. If you want a copy, you’ll have to turn to the collector’s market, and copies in good condition can be pretty expensive. Prices at Amazon.com currently range from around $15-35, and at eBay range from $7.50 to $100. If you’re interested, be prepared to shop around.

Tanith Airborne: Warhammer 40k: Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Guns of Tanith

Wednesday, September 16, 2015 Sean Stiennon Comments 1 comment

The Guns of Tanith
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 5 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (315 pages, $6.95, May 2002)
Cover by Adrian Smith

The Guns of Tanith opens with another first for the Ghosts: A training sequence. After redeeming himself for the disaster on Hagia, Gaunt and the men of the Tanith First-and-Only are being deployed to Phantine. Phantine’s industrial history spans so many millennia that most of the planet is covered by smog toxic enough to make human life impossible. The remaining Phantine cities are perched on mountains whose elevations rise above the poisonous clouds. So naturally, when the time comes to liberate Phantine settlements from the occupying forces of Chaos, ground assaults aren’t an option. Thus, en route to Phantine, we find the Ghosts in training for an aerial drop assault, supported by Phantine’s elite aerial corps.

The training sequence reintroduces us to some familiar faces: Twitchy sniper Larkin, soft-hearted giant “Try-Again” Bragg, scout leader Mkoll, and the rest of the crew, along with some relatively new arrivals, particularly Commissar Viktor Hark, who joined the Ghosts in the previous volume to supplement Gaunt’s split role as both Commissar (a kind of propaganda officer) and Colonel of the Ghosts. Hark, as neither Tanith nor Vervunhive, is in a position to be a little harsher, a little more detached, and perhaps a little more objective in his disciple than Gaunt can ever be. He’s a fair man, and fits well with the Tanith, but is more at ease with the brutal reality of a commissar’s duty to enforce iron disciple.

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