Black Gate – Page 842 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Clarkesworld 101 Now on Sale

Thursday, February 5, 2015 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Issue 101 of Clarkesworld contains fiction from Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Greg Van Eekhout, Nicola Griffith, and others. Non-fiction includes “What in the World Do They Want, Anyway? The Myth of the Friendly Alien” by Mark Cole, “Another Word: YA is the New Black” by Dawn Metalf, interviews with Locus editor Liza Groen Trombi and Chinese author Tang Fei, and an editorial, “The Next Hundred,” by Neil Clarke.

This issue’s podcast is “The Last Surviving Gondola Widow,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, read by Kate Baker.

Why should you pay attention to Clarkesworld? It’s a three-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, and stories from the magazine have been nominated (and won) countless awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Stoker Awards. In 2013 Clarkesworld 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.

We last covered Clarkesworld with Issue 100. If you prefer print, I highly recommend Clarkesworld: Year Six edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace — an inexpensive and a great way to introduce yourself to Clarkesworld. Every purchase helps support the magazine… definitely worth considering if you’re a fan of short fiction.

Clarkesworld 101 was published by Wyrm Publishing. The contents are available for free online; individual issues can be purchased for $3.99, and monthly subscriptions are $2.99/month. A 6-month sub is $17.94, and the annual price is $35.88. Learn more and order individual issues at the magazine’s website.

This issue’s cover, “Lady and the Ship,” is by Atilgan Asikuzun. See the complete issue here.

See all of our recent magazine coverage here.

Vintage Treasures: Starshine by Theodore Sturgeon

Thursday, February 5, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid-small

Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid 2-small

Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid 3-small

For this installment of Vintage Treasures, we’re going to set the Wayback Machine for that far distant era of American publishing, when it wasn’t at all unusual for a midlist science fiction writer to publish a paperback collection clocking in at a slender 174 pages… and have it go through nearly a dozen printings in as many years. Ah, for the days when the American public had a greater appetite for short stories!

Starshine was Sturgeon’s thirteenth collection (thirteen short story collections! It boggles the mind). It included three novelettes and three short stories, spanning just over two decades of his career: 1940 to 1961. I’ve captured the covers of all the paperback editions in this article — if you’re an old-timer like me, maybe one of them will jog your memory.

The first edition of Starshine was the December 1966 Pyramid paperback (above left, cover by Jack Gaughan.) It was back in print less than two years later, in March 1969, with a new cover by Gaughan again (above middle). Why it needed a new cover, I dunno – I much prefer the original one.

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El Burgo de Osma: A Medieval Walled City in Spain

Wednesday, February 4, 2015 Sean McLachlan Comments 1 comment

Vista_de_El_Burgo_de_Osma_desde_el_castillo_de_Osma_(cropped) — El Burgo de Osma. Photo courtesy Daniel Muñoz.

Central Spain is filled with castles and walled cities. Until the end of the Reconquista in 1492, the peninsula saw a series of wars between Muslims and Christians, or between Christian rulers who sometimes called on the Muslims for help. Central Spain is especially rich in medieval fortifications because for many years it was the frontier between the two cultures. One of the best preserved medieval cities in Soria is El Burgo de Osma.

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Ancient Worlds: Callisto and Arcus

Wednesday, February 4, 2015 Elizabeth Cady Comments 2 comments

Normal_callistomounted — The name of the character Callisto on Xena: Warrior Princess was taken from this myth; like most things on the show the name is the only thing the two characters hve in common.

The problem with gods isn’t just that they’re terrible parents, or that they’re bad luck to be around. Greco-Roman gods were bad news because, well, they were people. Which sounds nice and relatable until you think about some of the people you know.

They’re intense, passionate beings who are untempered by immortality. Which means they feel everything we feel – love, joy, anger, jealousy – but with the powers of a god to back them up.

This is most apparent in the stories of Zeus (Jupiter in Ovid’s works) and his many…. Well, some older editors call them “loves”. Some others call them “conquests”, which is a little better. For the most part, they’re victims, either of Zeus when he kidnaps them or his wife when she finds out about them.

One such victim whose story Ovid tells is Callisto. She was a sworn virgin, a friend of Diana who wandered with her in the wilderness. She spent all her time with her fellow virgins, hunting, fishing, and generally avoiding men and the role usually allotted to young women in the ancient world. Until Jupiter saw her and raped her. As if that weren’t bad enough, when she was discovered to be pregnant, Diana threw her out of her company.

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New Treasures: The Emerald Spire Superdungeon

Wednesday, February 4, 2015 John ONeill Comments 13 comments

I’ve been playing AD&D with my kids and their friend Will a few days a month (yes, that’s first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It’s the only version I know how to play. Plus, used copies of the rules are still cheap.)

As I mentioned in my 2013 article, I’ve been gradually running them through Gygax’s classic adventure modules, and setting them on the Outdoor Survival map, just as Gygax used to do. Right now we’re in the middle of G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, which is just as much fun as I remember it.

I mention this because they’ll soon be done with Gygax’s Against the Giants adventure modules, and I’ve been on the hunt for another epic adventure to involve them in. These days it’s superdungeons that get all the good press, and I can understand why. Nothing gets players excited like a truly epic adventure they can sink their teeth into.

I’ve been extremely impressed with the Pathfinder adventures I’ve purchased in the past — including the massive 420-page Rise of the Runelords, a gargantuan hardcover collection of the first six Adventure Path modules — so when I heard Paizo was releasing a standalone supermodule, I thought it would be worth checking out.

The Emerald Spire Superdungeon (yes, Superdungeon is part of the actual title — how cool is that?) was released last summer, and it’s as ambitious and as gigantic as I could have hoped. The dungeon spans a whopping 16 levels, designed by superstars like Ed Greenwood, Frank Mentzer, Michael Stackpole, Lisa Stevens, Sean K. Reynolds, and many others.

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Don’t Panic! It’s Nice to Know Douglas Adams Read Beyond Page 10!

Tuesday, February 3, 2015 Comments 7 comments

HHguide — Douglas Adams lived at a dark time…

So, Douglas Adams claimed: “I’ve started most science fiction books but only got to about page 10, I’m afraid, usually.”

Yet Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not only squarely Space Opera, it’s also part of the Space Opera tradition. Without the 10-page statement we’d just assume Douglas Adams had read the likes of Edmond Hamilton and, given the resonances, it’s fairly obvious that he did at some point and perhaps forgot about it (read first entry in this series for details).

Does this matter?

Adams probably wasn’t dissembling. Memory is untrustworthy.

However, if he was dissembling — if you reread the statement, he hedges a little (“most…. usually”) — then he had every right to.

Douglas Adams lived at a dark time when the cultural establishment, and thus those who looked to it for guidance, had a patronising attitude to popular entertainment in general and SF in particular. My old High School English teacher — who in all other ways was fantastic — actually had a poster on the wall explaining that real literature was about character and… literary stuff… and thus Science Fiction wasn’t literature.

SF was skin to put over magical realism or fairy tales, or just “a bit of fun” (chortle). Meanwhile anything that was SF&F but had forced itself into mainstream educated culture was treated as “not really genre”. Tolkien was treated as a sort of modern fabulist, not a Fantasy writer. Writers like Vonnegut were “literary” and “satirical”. Books like 1984 were “political allegories” or something else clever… and so on.

The logic was that SF&F was rubbish, so anything good could not be SF&F. Small wonder then if Douglas Adams wasn’t rushing to flaunt his imaginative roots.

But, was he actually laughing at us?

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The Future of Fantasy: February New Releases

Tuesday, February 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

February is packed with a stellar line up of fantasy releases. If you’ve got a ski trip or high school reunion coming up, we recommend you cancel. If you seclude yourself in your room immediately, you may just have enough time to read a small fraction of the great books coming you way.

No way you can even keep up with them all without help, however. No worries — that’s what we’re here for. Sit back and relax, and we’ll fill you in on the top new releases in fantasy scheduled for February.

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Sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird to be Published After 55 Years

Tuesday, February 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

This is the kind of story you want to fact check several times to make sure it’s not a hoax. But it appears to be legitimate.

AP is reporting that a long-lost novel by Harper Lee, written in the 1950s and believed lost, has been rediscovered and will be published in a 2-million print run by Harper (the publisher, not the writer) on July 14. It is a loose sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most popular novels in the English language. The 88-year old author released a statement through her publisher today:

In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman… It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became To Kill a Mockingbird) from the point of view of the young Scout.

I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn’t realized it (the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.

Go Set a Watchman is 304 pages, and will be published as it was written over 50 years ago. It will be Lee’s second novel, and her first new release since To Kill a Mockingbird.

Read the complete AP article here.

What Price Immortality? In Yana, the Touch of Undying by Michael Shea

Tuesday, February 3, 2015 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 4 comments

As I was rushing to get out of the house the other morning I remembered that I had to pick a book to read and review for this week. Nothing in the front row of my swords & sorcery shelves caught my eye so I started going through the books stacked in the back and still, nothing called out to me (that was short enough to read in just a couple of days). Finally I snagged the late Michael Shea’s In Yana, the Touch of Undying (1985). I saw the print was big, so even though it’s just over three hundred pages I knew it would be a quick read. I can’t believe that such lame criteria led me to this dynamite book.

Last year John O’Neill wrote that a friend had told him this book would change his life, though I didn’t remember that when I took up In Yana last Thursday. What I knew, from the back cover, was that the book featured a student named Bramt Hex searching for the secret of immortality in a world filled with ogres, ghosts, vampires, and lots of magic. From reading Shea’s very good Nifft the Lean, I expected a similar work of Vancian fantasy — dark, bizarre imagery laced with humor.

For the first chapter or two, In Yana appears to be just that. At 28, Bramt Hex has been a student for much of his life. He’s fat, worried about failing his final examination, and coming to dread what he assumes will be a life of day-in day-out dreariness in academia. When a wealthy dowager, the Widow Poon, enters the inn where he’s dining, Bramt allows a wave of romantic dreaming to sweep over him.

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Dual Structures in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories and Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland

Tuesday, February 3, 2015 Gabe Dybing Comments 11 comments

Recently I completed my reading of all of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. After I had put down the second or fourth collection (this depends on how you approach the editions from White Wolf, which collected the books doubly in single volumes, and these are the publications with which I began my survey), I made some faintly denigrating comment on Goodreads (if I remember it correctly), something about the quality of these stories being like flies caught in amber. This was a metaphor for Leiber’s soupy, languid, highly embellished prose style.

But a year or so later, as I got to the end of The Knight and Knave of Swords and then the termination of Swords and Ice Magic, I found that I had really begun enjoying these stories. I had even begun to admire the writing style. So I bought, without question, Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland out of interest to see who possibly could be so foolish as to try to meet Leiber on his own brilliant terms.

Before I get to a review of Leiber and then, specifically, to Bailey, I want to detail the kind of place I come from. As I become a regular contributor to Black Gate, I realize that there are quite a number of books that I really should have read while I was growing up. Now, I’ve read a lot of fantasy. That will be apparent. But sometimes I pick up a new volume, open the cover, begin reading, and ask myself, “Why didn’t I read this twenty-five years ago?” One of the answers might be because of my intense snobbishness, a youthful shortcoming that I slightly touched on last entry. Another reason is because, at the beginning of eleventh grade, I artificially arrested the sheer volume of my high fantasy reading by consciously “growing up” and turning my back on the genre in preference for established “literary” pursuits. But also, as I cast my memory back through the years, I’m coming to believe that I didn’t read a lot of these works then because a lot of these weren’t all that visible.

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