March/April Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

March/April Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

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The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction March April 2015-smallGordon van Gelder, who has been editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction since June 1997 when he took over from Kristine Kathryn Rusch, steps down this issue. As we announced in January, he is being replaced by C.C. Finlay, author of  “The Nursemaid’s Suitor” in Black Gate 8. In his Publisher’s Note this issue, Gordon had this to say:

AFTER eighteen years of reading submissions, my eyes need a break. I’ve hired C. C. Finlay as the new editor of F&SF, effective with this issue.

When I first started editing the magazine back in 1997, I likened the role of editor to that of managing a baseball team. That analogy still works well for me. I think I’ve had a lot of good seasons, but now it’s time to move to the back office and let someone else kick dirt on the umpire when he gets a call wrong.

You got a good sample of our new editor’s skills in our July/August issue last year, and you can see more of his taste in action in this issue. I think you’ll like what you see.

I’ll take this moment to thank all you readers and artists who have put your trust in me. I’ve done my best to bring you the best magazine I can, and I’ll continue to do so as publisher. To that end, I’m very happy to have Charlie replacing me.

Mr. Finlay begins his first issue as regular editor with a diverse range of fiction — including two Black Gate regulars, Jonathan L. Howard (author of the Kyth the Taker stories, “The Shuttered Temple” and “The Beautiful Corridor”), and Brian Dolton (“What Chains Bind Us”), both of whom I’m very pleased to see in F&SF. There’s also fiction from Bao Shu, Alice Sola Kim, Paul M. Berger, Jay O’Connell, Kat Howard, and many others.

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Future Treasures: Accretion Disk for the Ashen Stars RPG

Future Treasures: Accretion Disk for the Ashen Stars RPG

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Ashen Stars Accretion Disk-smallI’ve covered a great many role playing games here over the past few years. But I think it’s safe to say that none of them has captured my imagination the way Pelgrane Press’s Ashen Stars has.

A space opera set in a war-ravaged perimeter where civilization retains only the most tenuous hold, players take the roles of licensed mercs who make a living as as freelance law enforcement on a rough-and-tumble frontier called “the Bleed,” where humans and half a dozen alien races peacefully co-exist…. usually. The Mohilar War that very nearly destroyed the governing Combine is over, and the Combine is in no shape to govern the Bleed. Instead it is forced to depend on on loosely-authorized bands like the players to maintain peace, keep a lid on crime, and investigate odd distress signals from strange corners of space.

Pelgrane Press continues to support the game with regular PDF releases, and so far had published two thick adventure compilations in print: The Justice Trade and Dead Rock Seven, both of which were excellent. Later this year they plan to release the first rules supplement, Accretion Disk, packed with new character options, six new playable species, new options abilities (like zero-g martial arts), new weapons, and equipment, new contracts for your players, and twelve new hostile aliens.

An Accretion Disk forms around massive bodies in space. Gravity drags in random objects and debris, spinning them around and bringing them in closer and closer, faster and faster, hotter and hotter, until something explodes.

It holds true for stars and black holes – and for politics and crime, too. And let’s face it –- you’re the ones who are going to be standing in the path of that explosive release. Better get ready.

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Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

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TSR's Known World
TSR’s Known World

Last month we had a look at the Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2014, our most popular articles for all of last year.

The most popular blog posts from February include several that are guaranteed to make the Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2015, as they garnered enough traffic last month alone to rival those near the top of our 2014 list. At the top of the heap was “The Known World D&D Setting: A Secret History,” Lawrence Schick’s fascinating reminiscence of the early fantasy world he created with Tom Moldvay that became the basis for TSR’s famed Known World campaign setting.

Second on the February list was Howard Andrew Jones’ report on the Star Trek Continues Kickstarter, “Star Trek Kickstarter Warps Ahead,” which more than doubled its $100,000 goal and secured enough funding to make two more episodes of this excellent fan-made series.

Third on the list was M Harold Page’s advice for aspiring novelists, “Writing: Why You Shouldn’t Tinker With the Beginning Until You’ve Written to the End.”

The distinguished Mr. Page had a good month, also claiming the fourth spot with “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Edmond Hamilton: Who did Douglas Adams Really Read?” And rounding out the Top Five for February was Marie Bilodeau, with her look back at classic video games like Final Fantasy II and Dragon Warrior, “Seven Lessons I Learned from RPG Games of Yore.”

The complete list of Top Articles for February follows. Below that , I’ve also broken out the most popular blog categories for the month.

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New Treasures: Jazz Age Cthulhu by Jennifer Brozek, A.D. Cahill, and Orrin Grey

New Treasures: Jazz Age Cthulhu by Jennifer Brozek, A.D. Cahill, and Orrin Grey

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Jazz Age Cthulhu-smallI like these Innsmouth Free Press folks. They’ve done some impressive work recently, including Nick Mamatas’ collection The Nickronomicon, Love & Other Poisons by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and the anthology Future Lovecraft — not to mention the ongoing Innsmouth Magazine, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles, which has produced fifteen issues so far.

Jazz Age Cthulhu is a handsome paperback containing three brand new novelettes inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, set against the background of the Roaring Twenties, by Jennifer Brozek, A.D. Cahill, and Orrin Grey.

Journey to Kansas City, the “Paris of the Plains,” a city of glamor and sin where cults, secret societies and music intermingle. Visit Assam, India, where a British dilettante wakes up one morning covered in bruises and welts, with a dead man in her bed and no memory of what happened in the last 24 hours. Her only clue is a trashed invitation to the exclusive Black Ram Club. Relax on the resort island of Pomptinia, an Italian enclave of wealthy socialites, expats and intellectuals. But beware — the sea conceals dark secrets.

We last covered Innsmouth Free Press with their anthology Sword & Mythos, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. We covered Jennifer Brozek’s collection Apocalypse Girl Dreaming back in October, and her heroic fantasy anthology Shattered Shields, co-edited with Bryan Thomas Schmidt, in September.

Jazz Age Cthulhu was published by Innsmouth Free Press on December 15, 2014. It is 146 pages, priced at $10 for the trade paperback and just $3.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

Uncanny Magazine Issue 3 Now on Sale

Uncanny Magazine Issue 3 Now on Sale

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Uncanny Magazine 3-smallThe third issue of Uncanny Magazine is now on sale, with a cover that caused me to do a bit of a double take. I’m not entirely sure if it depicts a plucky adventuress assisting a monster in distress, a strange sexual romp in a pastoral field, or something else entirely. The artist is Carrie Ann Baade, and the title of the work (Unspeakable #2) doesn’t help. Click on the image at left for a bigger version, and make up your own mind.

Whatever the case, the new issue has a stellar line up, with all-new short fiction by Sofia Samatar, Rosamund Hodge, Emily Devenport, a classic reprint by Ellen Klages, and more. Here’s the complete fiction contents:

“The Lamps Thereof Are Fire and Flames,” by Rosamund Hodge
“Translatio Corporis,” by Kat Howard
‘Ivory Darts, Golden Arrows,” by Maria Dahvana Headley
“Those,” by Sofia Samatar
“When the Circus Lights Down,” by Sarah Pinsker
“Dr. Polingyouma’s Machine,” by Emily Devenport
“In the House of the Seven Librarians,” by Ellen Klages
“You Are Two Point Three Meters from Your Destination,” by Fran Wilde

Nonfiction this issues is by Ytasha L. Womack, Stephanie Zvan, Amal El–Mohtar, and L.M. Myles. There are also poems by Jennifer Crow, M Sereno, and our very own C.S.E. Cooney, and interviews with Sofia Samatar, C.S.E. Cooney, and Ellen Klages.

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Great Pathfinder Discounts at Paizo’s GM Day Sale

Great Pathfinder Discounts at Paizo’s GM Day Sale

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Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign
Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign

Game Masters are getting a lot of appreciation these days. According to Wizards of the Coast, all of February was Dungeon Master Appreciation Month, a fact that they celebrated with a hilarious series of videos of a “Dungeon Master Support Group.” These are clearly intended to promote the recent 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, but I’m a sucker for a brilliant viral promotional campaign. If you you’ve ever played a tabletop RPG, definitely check them out.

That being said, I’m not sure that the work we do as as Dungeon Masters (or Game Masters) quite warrants a full month. Turns out that we also have a day, which seems a bit more proportional!

March 4 was the “official” GM day, to celebrate Gamemasters everywhere. Some digging shows that this sacred gaming holiday dates back to 2002, when it was proposed on the EN World forums.

Paizo LLC, the makers of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, are celebrating the event by having a massive GM’s Day sale that runs through March 10. It’s a great time to buy the Core Rulebook, Bestiaries, GameMastery Guide, and other books to begin playing Pathfinder, but for those who already play Pathfinder RPG, here’s my tip of the top 5 books may not yet have but definitely want.

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Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

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The Buried Giant-small2Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled), is one of the most acclaimed novelists in the English language. His newest novel, The Buried Giant, is already generating intense interest — and debate — among fantasy fans. Witness two very different reactions… the first, from Neil Gaiman, writing in The New York Times:

This is a novel about an elderly couple going from one village to the next, set in a semi-historical England of the sixth or perhaps seventh century… Saxons and Britons live side by side in a post-Arthurian twilight, in a mythical time of ogres, sprites and dragons — most of all the dragon Querig, who dominates the second half of the book…

The narrative tone is dreamlike and measured. There are adventures, sword fights, betrayals, armies, cunning stratagems and monsters killed, but these things are told distantly, without the book’s pulse ever beating faster… Enemies are slain, but the deaths are never triumphant. A culmination of a planned trap for a troop of soldiers, worthy of a whodunit, is described in retrospect, once we already know what must have happened… this is, at its heart, a book about two people who are now past all adventure.

Gaiman’s review of the novel is largely positive, although he admits his “inability to fall in love with it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, in contrast, has harshly criticized the book — and especially the author’s clear disdain for fantasy.

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Vintage Treasures: Horrors in Hiding edited by Sam Moskowitz with Alden H. Norton

Vintage Treasures: Horrors in Hiding edited by Sam Moskowitz with Alden H. Norton

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Horrors in Hiding-smallHorrors in Hiding is the second in the trilogy of anthologies Sam Moskowitz edited for Berkely in the early 70s, and the only one we haven’t covered. The first was Horrors Unknown (1971), and the last (and the final anthology Moskowitz ever produced) was Horrors Unseen (1974).

It’s also the only one co-edited with Alden H. Norton, a noted anthologist in his own right, who co-edited four books with Moskowitz, including The Space Magicians and Ghostly By Gaslight (both in 1971).

I like Vincent Di Fate’s cover, which is moody and very striking. Although it’s awfully purple, and a little puzzling if you stare at it too long. (Is that dude eating a rock?)

The blurb on the back is short and to the point:

WARNING: Lock your doors before unleashing Horrors In Hiding. Ten grim and gruesome tales of the macabre guaranteed to chill your blood and shatter your nerves.

I count only nine stories, but let’s not be picky. They are grim and gruesome, and that’s what matters.

Moskowitz was a die-hard pulp fan, and half the stories within — those by Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, August Derleth and Ray Bradbury — are culled from pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Strange Stories. The rest — by Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, John Kendrick Bangs and Nathaniel P. Babcock — are much older.

As usual, Sam wrote fascinating and detailed introductions — author appreciations, really — for each story, and his love and knowledge of the field shine through. Sometimes I think Moskowitz produced these anthologies just so he’d have an excuse to talk about his favorite writers.

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Weirdbook Relaunches

Weirdbook Relaunches

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Weirdbook 22-smallW. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook, one of the all-time great weird fiction magazines, will be relaunched this year by David A. Riley and Black Gate blogger Douglas Draa‎.

Weirdbook, a large-sized magazine with excellent production values, produced thirty annual issues between 1968 and 1997, publishing fiction by Stephen King, Joseph Payne Brennan, H. Warner Munn, Robert E. Howard, Tim Powers, Darrell Schweitzer, Basil Wells, Charles R. Saunders, Michael Bishop, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Ramsey Campbell, Delia Sherman, and countless others. The magazine was also famous for its gorgeous interior artwork by Gene Day, Victoria Poyser, J. K. Potter, Allen Koszowski, Stephen E. Fabian, and many others.

Douglas Draa, a prolific blogger and the former Online Editor for Weird Tales, is the Managing Editor and Fiction editor; Riley has signed on as Senior Editor and Publisher. When I asked Doug for additional details he shared this with us:

We’ll closely, but not slavishly, follow the original format. Content wise we hope to have a strong mix of weird, horror, weird-sf, dark fantasy, swords & sorcery, and everything in between. The accent will be on strong story telling that the reader will enjoy. The eclectic mix of style and sub-genres that the original was famous will be our “leitfaden.” Paul is on board as Editor Emeritus with “kill-switch” powers to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Our goal is to bring the reader high quality genre fiction original in the Weirdbook tradition. The key word will be entertainment. Critics be damned.

On a personal note, W. Paul Ganley and Weirdbook were a big influence on me, and a major inspiration for Black Gate. I was consciously following in Paul’s footsteps when I launched BG 15 years ago, and I’m very excited to see his magazine return. For more details, see Doug’s announcement here, and the magazines’s new website here.

Tips For Homemakers: Preparing Your Garden of Victory!

Tips For Homemakers: Preparing Your Garden of Victory!

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No blog post is complete without a war time propaganda poster.
You too could look this morally superior as you plant your garden.

Are you in charge of a Barbarian horde? Did your family lay siege to a neighboring kingdom over the winter? Do you enjoy feasting on the thawed entrails of your enemy (remember to cook the meat well, first! Who knows where your enemy has been!)

Well, my heroic homemakers, spring will soon be in the air. The ground will thaw and so will the bodies of your enemies.  Birds will sing and battle cries will echo. Grass will sprout and warrior tummies will demand feeding.

The time to plan your Garden of Victory is now!  Here are some easy to follow tips and tricks to make it even easier than before, all while using existing resources.

Burn, Burn, Burn!

First, you MUST BURN THE WINTER SCARS FROM YOUR LAND! (I’m told this isn’t really a planting thing, but trust me, it’ll look cool.) Make sure your land is covered with combustible materials, like oil, dry hay or failed batches of barbarian moonshine.

TIP: Make sure you don’t set the fire too close to your home. If you didn’t destroy all neighboring tribes during the winter, add some coloring agents to keep the smoke interesting. You don’t want to start being predictable. Remember: predictable neighbors are invadable neighbors.

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