Black Gate – Page 824 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Thrift Shop Adventures 1: Wherein I Find Fantasy Treasures in Secondhand Stores (Greyhawk Classics and More!)

Monday, April 6, 2015 Nick Ozment Comments 18 comments

“I’m gonna pop some tags / Only got twenty dollars in my pocket / I — I — I’m hunting, looking for a come-up / This is ******* awesome”
— Sir Macklemore of the Order of Thrift

When I go into town — to the nearest keep on the borderlands, say — I find it hard to pass up a quick pop-in to a thrift store. Last Friday I did my rounds in the city, hitting the trifecta: Salvation Army, Savers, and Goodwill. As with any type of hunting excursion — for instance, my single days hunting for a date at the college bars — there are highs and lows, ups and downs, mind-blowing flights of rapture and soul-crushing disappointments.

First up was Salvation Army. I always make a beeline for toys first, then books. I’ve never had much luck with toys in this particular outlet, although I did come close to a good score once: an elderly lady came up behind me at the check-out line carrying a vintage SIX FOOT LONG rubber jiggler snake! It had just been stocked on the shelf somewhere in between the time when I had looked and when I was checking out, so I’d missed it by mere minutes. It was tagged $1.99, and I immediately offered the lady ten bucks for it. She shook her head. “No, I want this. I’m thinking of putting it in my garden to keep kids out.” She actually said that.

The thought flashed through my mind “Are you crazy? That thing will be a kid magnet!” But I did not persist, just politely demurred, mentally accepting defeat. Some consolation was the fact that I had one already (they do come up on eBay occasionally, typically fetching about $20-$30).

Strike up the old Army Marching Band, though, because today was going to be a thriftastic day. Mostly thanks to a coloring book (which I’ll get to in a bit), but that wasn’t all: I was also about to unearth a tomb-full of Greyhawk.

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New Treasures: Master of Plagues by E.L. Tettensor

Monday, April 6, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

About a year ago I reported on the first novel in a promising new series: Darkwalker by E.L. Tettensor. Now the second novel featuring Police Inspector Nicolas Lenoi has arrived, Master of Plagues, and it looks as intriguing.

The Nicolas Lenoi novels are set in Kennian, part of the backwater Five Villages, which seems a lot like 19th-century England if you squint. Lenoir is tasked with investigating dark mysteries in a place where folks scoff at the supernatural. These books look like a fine mix of fantasy and mystery in a fog-shrouded Victorian(ish) landscape, with plenty of original touches to keep things interesting.

Unraveling a deadly mystery takes time — and his is running out…

Having barely escaped the clutches of the Darkwalker, Inspector Nicolas Lenoir throws himself into his work with a determination he hasn’t known in years. But his legendary skills are about to be put to the test. A horrific disease is ravaging the city — and all signs point to it having been deliberately unleashed.

With a mass murderer on the loose, a rising body count, and every hound in the city on quarantine duty, the streets of Kennian are descending into mayhem, while Lenoir and his partner, Sergeant Bran Kody, are running out of time to catch a killer and find a cure.

Only one ray of hope exists: the nomadic Adali, famed for their arcane healing skills, claim to have a cure. But dark magic comes at a price, one even the dying may be unwilling to pay. All that’s left to Lenoir is a desperate gamble. And when the ashes settle, the city of Kennian will be changed forever…

E.L. Tettensor also writes under the name Erin Lindsey. We recently covered her fantasy novel The Bloodbound. Master of Plagues was published on February 3, 2015 by Roc. It is 368 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

David Drake on E. Hoffmann Price

Monday, April 6, 2015 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

David Drake, author of The Tank Lords, The Sea Without a Shore, and dozens of other fantasy and SF novels, was also the man behind Carcosa, a small press he co-founded with Karl Edward Wagner in 1973. Carcosa published only four volumes — including Far Lands Other Days, a 590-page illustrated collection of the classic pulp fantasy of E. Hoffmann Price — but ah, what volumes they were!

Andy Duncan has started a new blog, Past and Present Futures, and he invited David to share his memories of Price. Yesterday he shared the results. Here’s a slice.

In fact [Price] spent only 30 days in the Philippines before the 15th Cav was recalled to the Mexican Border where Pancho Villa was raiding. Shortly after that they were shipped to France where they acted as mule skinners unloading freighters in Bayonne, France. He had stories about the prostitutes in all three continents.

When WW I was over, Ed was on garrison duty on the German border. The army created a service-wide scheme by which enlisted men could take an entrance exam for admission to West Point. Ed was one of the extremely few who gained admission through that test. He graduated in 1922 and was briefly a 2nd Lieutenant assigned to a Coast Artillery unit in NJ. He resigned ahead of a court martial because he had gotten to know the battalion commander’s wife rather better than the major was pleased to learn.

I’ve told the story this way to make it clear that though Ed was very smart, he was also an iconoclast who was not even slightly interested in polite society or its norms. He was acting out in the introduction [to Far Lands Other Days], but I don’t doubt he meant what he said.

Read David’s complete comments here, and visit Andy’s excellent new blog here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: What Story Should You Read First?

Monday, April 6, 2015 Bob Byrne Comments 7 comments

FirstStory_LionsMane — One of my favorites: Frederic Dorr Steele for The Lion’s Mane

Recently a post in a Holmes Facebook group caught my eye. A woman was a fan of one of the current TV shows (I don’t recall if it was Elementary or BBC’s Sherlock), but she loved it and wanted to read the stories. She wondered where to start.

First, I think it’s a bit interesting that there are Holmes fans that have never read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. They only know the detective through television shows set in the modern day. I suppose this also happened a bit with the first Robert Downey Jr. movie, but that had a shorter shelf life. Anyhoo…

There’s a bit of a divide in the Holmes community these days between the ‘old school’ and the newer generation. One characterization is between those who study the stories and those who write speculative fan fiction that has little to no relationship with Doyle’s actual writings. To some extent, there’s always been an old guard/new fans distinction, but social media has exploded it.

While I’ve long been a fan of Holmes pastiches and enjoy most movies and films, I do look askance at all the doey-eyed swooning over Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes. And they’ll pry my calabash pipe from my cold, dead hands before I recognize merit in this Sherlock Meta stuff.

But moving off the grumpy old man ruminations, the question the woman asked was a good one. The initial responses seemed to go with the standard ‘read them in the order they were written.’ That’s logical. But I don’t think it’s the best way to go.

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Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois

Sunday, April 5, 2015 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

There are roughly ten Year’s Best volumes currently being published in the speculative fiction market, but they all bow before Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction. The Thirty-Second volume in this venerable series will be published in July.

Now, believe it or not, there were Year’s Best series before Gardner. Everett F Bleiler and T.E Dikty edited the first volume of The Best Science Fiction Stories way back in 1949 (I know, right? Who knew there was good science fiction in those days!) Judith Merril edited twelve volumes of The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy (1956-1967), while Donald Wollheim, Terry Carr, Lin Carter, Arthur Saha, Harry Harrison and Brian Aldis, and Lester del Rey all tried their hand at it for a while, with varying success. Gardner Dozois edited the Del Rey series, taking over from Lester del Rey, from 1977-81, until starting over again with The Year’s Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection in 1984 (There’s a nice summary of all this history in Scott Laz’s review of that very first volume here.)

Gardner’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction was exceptional right from the very beginning. For one thing, most prior books — even market leaders like Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year — were slender paperback originals. With his first volume Gardner delivered a massive 575-page hardcover, packed with 25 stories — including a couple of novellas, like Dan Simmons’ knockout “Carrion Comfort.”

He also began what quickly became one of the most-read columns in the entire industry: his lengthy, frank, and often highly opinionated annual summation, covering news, magazines, anthologies, movies, deaths, awards, the birth and growth of fan websites, podcasts, and much more. His first one in 1984 was a thin 17 pages, but over the decades Gardner’s comprehensive report card on the field grew to nearly 100 pages. I, for one, read them cover-to-cover.

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Self-published Book Reviews: The Severed Oath by Andrew J. Luther

Sunday, April 5, 2015 Donald Crankshaw Comments 0 Comment

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here.

The Severed Oath is the second book of The Undying Empire series by Andrew J. Luther, of which three novels are now available. However, the three work as standalone novels, so I’m only reviewing The Severed Oath here.

Leyndra is a Guild-trained Warden, a bodyguard given mystical abilities in order to protect her ward. She works for the nobleman Osho, a successful businessman for whom she has a high regard. Despite Osho’s wife’s, Tyina’s, suspicions, there is nothing romantic about their relationship—Leyndra is a professional, and her affection for Osho is, at most, sisterly.

Leyndra’s situation is contentious, but safe, until someone sends shadows to attack Osho in his sleep. Despite Leyndra’s skill and powers, she is tricked into seeing shadows where Osho stands, and it is her sword that ends his life. She is immediately branded as an Oathbreaker as the magic of the Guild marks her face, and hauled off to prison, first by the Watch, and then by the Imperial Guard. Planted evidence confirms her guilt, though she tells the true story even under torture. Even if the Emperor believed her innocent, the only ones in the city of Ythis capable of such magic are the sorcerous Five or the church of the mad god, and the Emperor does not dare confront either of them directly. So Leyndra is sentenced to be executed.

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Black Gate Nominated for a Hugo Award in a Terrible Ballot

Sunday, April 5, 2015 John ONeill Comments 127 comments

The nominees for the 2015 Hugo Awards have been announced by Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, and let’s be blunt: it’s a terrible ballot.

Here’s a brief recap: over the last few years a number of writers (primarily conservative Americans) have become increasingly convinced that the growing number of women and non-white authors winning Hugo Awards is somehow evidence that the awards have been ‘hijacked’ by a minority group of voters and social justice warriors (SJWs). Their concerns are succinctly summarized at the right-wing new site Breitbart.com.

To make a point about how the awards are influenced by what they perceive as a small group of liberal elites, a handful of authors created a slate of nominees heavily dominated by conservative writers, and asked their followers to support those slates in their entirety. The primary slates were Brad Torgersen’s Sad Puppies 3 and Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies list.

Under cover of this semi-political movement, which added roughly 200 additional nominating ballots to last year’s total (and nearly 800 to the 2013 total), at least one of the organizers heavily seeded his slate with his own works. Vox Day’s Rapid Puppies ballot included no less than ten nominees for his Castalia House publishing company, and listed himself for both Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Editor (Long Form).

The results? As tabulated by Mike Glyer over at File 770, a total of 61 final ballot nominees from Sad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies made the final list of nominees. Only 24 nominees did not come from either list.

In short, the Hugo ballot this year was essentially dictated by two individuals who asked their followers to vote for their suggested candidates, regardless of what they actually thought was deserving.

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A Gemmel-esque Adventure in a World of Sand: Hugo Nominee Timothy C. Ward’s Scavenger: Evolution

Saturday, April 4, 2015 Comments 0 Comment

Tim Ward, along with the rest of the Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast team, just got a Hugo Nomination for best Fancast.

Like his colleagues, he’s not just a fan, he’s a writer. Just in case you were wondering, How good? here’s a quick review of his debut novel Scavenger: Evolution: (Sand Divers, Book One).

First, let’s get something out of the way — we don’t want a sad-pandas-at-the-Black-Gate-gate!

Tim and I have been friends since he interviewed me. We chat online from time to time. We beta-read each other’s material — he’s saved me from handing in a duff manuscript at least twice! — and both belong to that community of aspiring authors breaking into, or just starting to get established in, the profession.

However, part of the reason we’re friends is mutual professional respect. I like his work. Here’s why.

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A Detailed Explanation

Saturday, April 4, 2015 Matthew David Surridge Comments 133 comments

This is going to come out at some point, so I might as well say it here and now: I declined a Hugo nomination for this year’s Best Fan Writer award. I think it’s only fair to the people who voted for me to say why. Be warned, this is going to take a while. (And long-time readers of mine around these parts know that coming from me, that really means something.)

Firstly, given the nature of this post and the scrutiny that surrounds a major award, I should probably introduce myself. Hi. I’m Matthew David Surridge, a Montreal-area writer. I had a couple of longish short stories published a few years ago, one in the paper version of Black Gate and one at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’ve been fighting some minor but debilitating illnesses for a while which have kept me from writing fiction, but luckily reading and thinking about books is still within my power, and so I’ve been blogging here at Blackgate.com since 2010.

I mostly write about books I’ve recently enjoyed. In 2014, that included posts about surrealist Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, Elizabeth Hand’s Bride of Frankenstein tie-in novel Pandora’s Bride, a collection of short stories by Violet Paget AKA Vernon Lee, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the medieval tales in the Gesta Romanorum, Mary Gentle’s The Black Opera, Stella Gemmell’s The City, V.E. Schwab’s Vicious, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, Jan Morris’ wonderful Hav, Phyllis Ann Karr’s Wildraith’s Last Battle, Steven Bauer’s Satyrday, the Harlan Ellison–edited shared-world anthology Medea, Pat Murphy’s three ‘Max Merriwell’ novels (There And Back Again, Wild Angel, and Adventures in Time and Space With Max Merriwell), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s debut novel Lolly Willowes, E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvia trilogy, and Patricia A. McKillip’s The Changeling Sea. I also often write about comics, and last year I discussed the Steve Ditko/Wally Wood/Paul Levitz run of Stalker from the 1970s; the first volume of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Hugo-winning Saga; Alan Moore, Antony Johnston, and Facundo Percio’s Fashion Beast; and Sage Stossel’s Starling.

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Vengeful Specters, Vampires, and Monster Worms: Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson

Saturday, April 4, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Wordsworth’s Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural volumes (or, as we like to call them, TOMAToS) have been a virtual graduate course in British horror for me, introducing me to a host of classic Nineteenth and Twentieth Century ghost story and supernatural fiction writers. But I have to admit I was a little relieved to come across Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson, since at least I’ve heard of E.F. Benson.

Benson (July 24, 1867 – February 29, 1940) was an English archaeologist and novelist who published over 60 novels between 1883 and 1934. Today he is chiefly remembered for his ghost stories, collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), The Horror Horn (1923), Spook Stories (1928), and Old London (1937), among others.

Unlike many of the subjects of the Wordsworth collections — who’ve been sadly neglected by modern readers — Benson is still fondly remembered. His work has seen many modern collections, including the Panther edition of The Horror Horn (1974), Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991), The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson (1992), Fine Feathers and Other Stories (1994), and the five-volume The Collected Spook Stories from Ash-Tree Press (1998 – 2005), which collects all of his supernatural fiction.

H.P. Lovecraft thought highly of Benson’s work, especially “The Horror-Horn,” “The Man Who Went Too Far,” and “The Face,” calling him an important contributor to the weird short story. If you’re interested in a nice one-volume introduction to his work Night Terrors is an excellent option. It collects 54 of his best-known stories, and an introduction by David Stuart Davies, in a handsome and economical 718-page paperback.

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