Black Gate – Page 779 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Books of Tanith Lee: Companions on the Road

Saturday, July 18, 2015 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

We’re continuing with our look at the extraordinary 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who passed away on May 24th. So far we’ve covered 13 novels and three collections; today I’d like to look at the slender 1979 paperback Companions on the Road, which I think has been unjustly neglected over the last four decades.

Companions on the Road collects two novellas, Companions on the Road (1975) and The Winter Players (1976). Both were originally published as chapbooks in the UK by Macmillan, with covers by Juliet Stanwell Smith (see below). For their US release as a paperback original, they were collected into a single volume from Bantam titled Companions of the Road: Wondrous Tales of Adventure and Quest, with a wraparound cover by Lou Feck (click on the images above for bigger versions).

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Future Treasures: Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

Saturday, July 18, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

One of the nice things about hanging out with genre professionals is hearing what gets them excited. While I was at the Nebula weekend here in Chicago in June, there was a lot of excited chatter about an upcoming book from debut novelist Zen Cho, a Malaysian writer who’s published short fiction in anthologies like Bloody Fabulous, End of the Road, and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.

Now I finally have my hands on an advance copy of Sorcerer to the Crown, and I can see what all the fuss was about. It captivated me with the very first chapter. I predict this novel will launch Ms. Cho on a stellar fantasy career.

The Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, one of the most respected organizations throughout all of England, has long been tasked with maintaining magic within His Majesty’s lands. But lately, the once proper institute has fallen into disgrace, naming an altogether unsuitable gentleman — a freed slave who doesn’t even have a familiar — as their Sorcerer Royal, and allowing England’s once profuse stores of magic to slowly bleed dry. At least they haven’t stooped so low as to allow women to practice what is obviously a man’s profession…

At his wit’s end, Zacharias Wythe, Sorcerer Royal of the Unnatural Philosophers and eminently proficient magician, ventures to the border of Fairyland to discover why England’s magical stocks are drying up. But when his adventure brings him in contact with a most unusual comrade, a woman with immense power and an unfathomable gift, he sets on a path which will alter the nature of sorcery in all of Britain — and the world at large…

Sorcerer to the Crown will be published by Ace on September 1, 2015. It is 384 pages, priced at $26.95 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

See the First Trailer for The Shannara Chronicles

Saturday, July 18, 2015 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

To be perfectly honest, I’ve never really been much of a fan of Terry Brooks’ Shannara books. So when The Shannara Chronicles, a new scripted series filmed for MTV, was announced, I didn’t really pay much attention.

But the first trailer, released last week at Comic-Con, has managed to pique my interest. The show has a unique look, and the production values are top notch. And the assembled talent — including writing team Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (Spider-Man 2, Smallville), producer Jon Favreau (Iron Man, The Avengers), and cast John Rhys-Davies, Ivana Baquero and Manu Bennett — looks fantastic. Check out the 3-minute trailer above.

The Shannara Chronicles will begin broadcasting in January 2016 on MTV, and be available for binge watching on DVD and Blu-ray later in the year.

Mur Lafferty Wins 2015 Manly Wade Wellman Award

Friday, July 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Mur Lafferty has been awarded the 2015 Manly Wade Wellman Award, for her novel Ghost Train to New Orleans.

The Manly Wade Wellman Award is granted each year by the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation, for outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors. This year’s nominees also included The Sea Without a Shore by David Drake, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson, Reign of Ash by Gail Z. Martin, and Bad Wizard by James Maxey.

The winner is selected by the combined membership of four North Carolina science fiction and fantasy conventions (illogiCon, ConCarolinas, ConTemporal, and ConGregate). The award was presented on July 11 at ConGregate, in High Point, NC.

Mur Lafferty also won last year’s innaurgual award, for the first novel in the The Shambling Guides series, The Shambling Guide to New York.

Ghost Train to New Orleans (The Shambling Guides #2) was published by Orbit on March 4, 2014.

Read complete details at the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation website.

New Treasures: The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones

Friday, July 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

True, I’m a little late to the party with The String Diaries. It was originally published in hardcover last July, and came out in trade paperback in January. But I just stumbled on a copy last week, and it seems too promising not to share with you. The New York Daily News called Stephen Lloyd Jones’s debut horror novel “terrifying, and deliciously so… A sophisticated horror story that induces elemental terror,” and from what I’ve read so far, that seems accurate.

A family is hunted by a centuries-old monster: a man with a relentless obsession who can take on any identity.

The String Diaries opens with Hannah frantically driving through the night — her daughter asleep in the back, her husband bleeding out in the seat beside her. In the trunk of the car rests a cache of diaries dating back 200 years, tied and retied with strings through generations. The diaries carry the rules for survival that have been handed down from mother to daughter since the 19th century. But how can Hannah escape an enemy with the ability to look and sound like the people she loves?

Stephen Lloyd Jones’s debut novel is a sweeping thriller that extends from the present day, to Oxford in the 1970s, to Hungary at the turn of the 19th century, all tracing back to a man from an ancient royal family with a consuming passion — a boy who can change his shape, insert himself into the intimate lives of his victims, and destroy them.

If Hannah fails to end the chase now, her daughter is next in line. Only Hannah can decide how much she is willing to sacrifice to finally put a centuries-old curse to rest.

The trade paperback edition includes an 11-page preview of the sequel, Written in the Blood, released in hardcover in May. I’m not familiar with Mulholland Books, but I certainly should be — I notice they also publish Joe R. Lansdale, Dan Simmons, Lauren Beukes, and many others. The String Diaries was published by Mulholland Books on January 6, 2015. It is 420 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback, and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover design is by Keith Hayes.

Clarkesworld 106 Now on Sale

Friday, July 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

In his editorial this issue, Editor-in-Chief Neil Clarke recalls the birth of the magazine at Readercon:

Our ninth anniversary will occur in October, but the magazine was born at Readercon. At the Friday night Meet the Pros(e) party, Sean Wallace and I got into a long discussion about online magazines spurred on by SciFiction’s recent closure. [SciFiction was the Sci Fi channel’s online magazine and its demise was a huge blow to the perceived credibility of the medium.] That night, we spent hours trying to figure out why so many online magazines had failed and what it would take to make one succeed. Sleep-deprived and a bit too overconfident, we came up with a business model we thought would work. By the end of the weekend, it was a done deal: I was launching a magazine. Nine years later, that wild little experiment is turning into what I hope will become my career. Not bad for something I stumbled into with no prior experience.

Over the past nine years, Clarkesworld has become one of the most important magazines in the field, a three-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. In 2013 it received more Hugo nominations for short fiction than all the leading print magazines (Asimov’s, Analog, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) combined, and last November the magazine was awarded a World Fantasy Award.

Issue #106 of Clarkesworld has seven stories — five new, and two reprints — from Sam J. Miller, Kay Chronister, Natalia Theodoridou, Pan Haitian, Yoon Ha Lee, Keith Brooke, and Adam Roberts.

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Is That Your Sword, Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Friday, July 17, 2015 Violette Malan Comments 26 comments

I love sword-fights. By which I mean I love them in movies and on TV. Not so much in books. Mostly in books they take too long, and illustrate more how much research the writer has done and not so much the moving ahead of the story. And that’s how swords and sword fighting came to mind when I started thinking about what real life things do and don’t happen in fiction, or in movies or TV. If you’d like to see what I’ve already said about this, look here, and here.

So, in the spirit of what does and doesn’t happen in real life vs TV or movies – or even books – just what happens with people’s swords when they aren’t using them to kill someone? And what about other weapons? As I’ve suggested before, this type of thing is fairly easily handled in books. More easily than, say, why characters never (ie. hardly ever) go to the bathroom. In books, when they’re not using them, characters simply sheath their swords, or hang them from their harnesses, or hang them up by the belt on a hook. Or put them down on a table. As the reader, your eyes are directed elsewhere, and you rarely give it another thought.

Sure, sometimes a writer will have a character clean their sword, or other weapons. But there are reasons for this. One, it gives the characters something to do with their hands while dialogue is taking place. Two, how the cleaning gets done tells the reader something about the character’s personality.

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A Wild Ride Through a Cold Hell: A Review of J.P. Wilder’s Schade of Night

Friday, July 17, 2015 Joe Bonadonna Comments 1 comment

Schade of Night
J.P Wilder
iUniverse (350 pages, $20.95 in trade paperback, $3.99 in digital format, December 19, 2014)

Don’t let the lovely young lady and her smile gracing the cover of J.P. Wilder’s wonderful Schade of Night fool you: Schade Lee does little smiling in this dark, action-packed, modern-day fantasy that reads like a paramilitary thriller graced with supernatural overtones.

Schade has some issues, for sure. But she’s one tough, no-nonsense private detective, who can be as stubborn as a mule, as fearless and reckless as a teenager, and often lets her heart rule her head. She’s a disgraced, ex-FBI agent turned investigator who has been hired to find a young girl named Kylie Berson, who’s been kidnapped by one especially sick and twisted serial killer — a real dangerous foe who often leaves cryptic messages for Schade, usually carved into the flesh of his victims. Kylie may already be dead, but Schade refuses to believe that, to accept that, and has vowed not to lose another victim to this crazed maniac.

The story takes place in and around Flagstaff, Arizona, during a dark and cold season of snow and harsh weather. Schade she sets out to save Kylie, no matter what it takes, no matter what it costs. To complicate matters, Schade has been having dreams and visions… visions of places that are real, and she glimpses disturbing images of things that have or will happen in these places.

Add to that a feeling, a sense of some of mysterious power building inside her, her trusty SIG automatic that is some kind of “foci” that can suck the souls out of those she shoots and kills, and then absorb those souls into her own, and you have a young woman with more on her plate than she may be able to handle. She certainly has no idea why these things are happening to her, or how. But when she does find out, well… you can just imagine how she takes the news. Like I said, she’s stubborn.

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Goth Chick News: Checking In at the Hotel Transylvania

Thursday, July 16, 2015 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

If only this place really existed, I would never again suffer a Black Gate company road trip, trapped in a zeppelin with a load of less-than-hygienic fan boys, but instead would be enjoying my suite in the goth girl’s equivalent of the Four Seasons.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, my all-time favorite animated film Hotel Transylvania will be coming to the small screen, courtesy of Canadian company Nelvana Enterprises.

Debuting in early 2017 (venue pending), the series will focus on Mavis, the daughter of Dracula, expanding on her teenage years and her friends at the world-famous monster five-star resort.

News of the TV adaptation comes ahead of the sequel Hotel Transylvania 2 hitting theaters this fall, on September 25.

And speaking of the sequel…

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The July Fantasy Magazine Rack

Thursday, July 16, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There’s a few new faces in the July magazine rack, including Faerie Magazine, a quarterly print magazine “that celebrates everything magical and extraordinary.” Since they don’t have regular issues, we also haven’t done justice to Tor.com, one of the best online magazines in the industry, but this month we highlighted Black Gate author Michael Livingston’s story “At the End of Babel,” which appeared there on July 1.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our late-June 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 $7.50/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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