Black Gate – Page 854 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Ode to the Sacrificed On the Battlefield (Or Before. And After)

Friday, April 3, 2015 mariebilodeau Comments 1 comment

I started planning this post by thinking: Hey, Good Friday, awesome time for a post on sword and sorcery crucifixion. That evolved into: okay, that might be in poor taste (that’s personal growth, that right there). How about just on hero sacrifice, then? They bring us lessons by sacrificing stuff, right?

Yes, right. And the stuff (or people, whatever) they sacrifice is often forgotten by the time we’re screaming cheers and profanities during the final battle. We feel that something good has been accomplished and we forget everything that was left behind. Well, no more. Today, let us take a moment to ponder these sacrifices.

Hair
Let’s just start this with an important one, with a view to the 80s movies boom of S&S (sounds kind of Fifty Shade-ish when it’s put like that. Ha.) A mullet covered in lice is just not an easy look to pull off. Sadly much hair was sacrificed in the name of victory.

Weapons
So many weapons are cast aside. They’re special for one scene, then they get stuck in a rib cage and game over. Just abandoned like it never mattered. Let us remind the swords that yes, they did matter.

Rib Cages
On the same line, with the sword stuck in them and all. Perhaps if it had been protected by more than a bikini, the story could have ended differently .

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Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction: The Great Years, Volume II edited by Carol and Frederik Pohl

Friday, April 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I think it’s kind of cool that I can remember when and where I found Science Fiction: The Great Years, Volume II, some 36 years after I bought it.

In the spring of 1976 my friend John MacMaster introduced me to science fiction, by bringing me Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak and Piers Anthony’s Ox when I was home sick from school. I was in the seventh grade, and I felt very adult, reading grown up books instead of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators (not that there’s anything wrong with Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators — those books rule.)

I was thoroughly captivated by both novels, and afterwards began looking for anything labeled “science fiction.” One of the first items I found was Jacques Sadoul’s 2000 A.D: Illustrations From the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps, a dazzling art book containing hundreds of illustrations from American SF and fantasy pulps — showing stalwart men and women piloting spaceships into the dark reaches of space, curious aliens, sinister robots, mist-covered landscapes on far planets, and stranger things. It ignited a burning curiosity in me for all things pulp-related, and I began to haunt bookstores looking for any relics of that bygone era of pulp SF.

Shortly after we moved to Ottawa in 1976, I discovered that Canada’s capital was crowded with old bookstores, many of them hidden away in small shops on Bank Street and Sparks Street in the heart of downtown. I took the bus downtown every Saturday, returning home with bags filled with marvelous old paperbacks. It was in those crowded old shops that I first discovered Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, and countless others.

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Future Treasures: Of Noble Family by Mary Robinette Kowal

Thursday, April 2, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Of Noble Family, the fifth and final novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s popular Glamourist Histories, is due to arrive later this month.

The first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, was nominated for a Nebula Award. The previous four books in the series are:

Shades of Milk and Honey (2010)
Glamour in Glass(2012)
Without a Summer (2013)
Valour and Vanity (2014)

I had the good fortune to hear Mary read from Valour and Vanity at Capricon last year, where she talked about the effort involved in ensuring the language in these novels is appropriate for the time — including creating a Jane Austen dictionary, and making heavy use of the Oxford historical concordance, which lists words in the order in which they appeared in the English language.

Mary is also a high-profile author here in Chicago, and I first met Wesley Chu at the launch party for Without a Summer in 2013.

Here’s the description for Of Noble Family.

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Goth Chick News: Arnold Schwarzenegger (is not) the Zombie Terminator

Thursday, April 2, 2015 Sue Granquist Comments 7 comments

Arnold Schwarzenegger may be back in his cold steel Terminator role later this year, but first it looks like he’s going to get all warm and gooey.

In a new film called Maggie, Schwarzenegger plays a loving father to a teen daughter he’s doing his best to protect at the peak of a zombie apocalypse. When Maggie becomes infected, the all-consuming virus begins to transform her into an undead creature with a budding appetite for human brains. Wade stands by her and attempts to ward off the authorities who are trying to collect her for quarantine and termination. Though her condition worsens, Wade is firm in his love; although Maggie would like him to save himself from the disease that is undoing her humanity.

Schwarzenegger manages all this while dropping only a few manly tears and sporting a grief beard that would put Tyrion Lannister to shame; though I’ll bet you an adult beverage that sometime before the credits roll we’ll see Arnie doing what he does best, involving fire and heavy weaponry.

Freshman Henry Hobson is in the director’s chair, and Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine and Zombieland) stars as Schwarzenegger’s ill-fated daughter. Maggie is scheduled to hit theaters May 8th.

George R.R. Martin Offers a New Excerpt from The Winds of Winter

Thursday, April 2, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Back in January we reported that The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s epic Song of Ice and Fire series, will not arrive this year, as some readers had hoped.

But to soothe the pain a little, Martin has been releasing small bits from the novel at his website. This morning he offered up a brand new chapter, featuring the return of a character who’s been absent for a long time. Here’s a small sample.

Alayne loved it here. She felt alive again, for the first since her father… since Lord Eddard Stark had died.

She closed the window, gathered up the fallen papers, and stacked them on the table. One was a list of the competitors. Four-and-sixty knights had been invited to vie for places amongst Lord Robert Arryn’s new Brotherhood of Winged Knights, and four and-sixty knights had come to tilt for the right to wear falcon’s wings upon their warhelms and guard their lord.

The competitors came from all over the Vale, from the mountain valleys and the coast, from Gulltown and the Bloody Gate, even the Three Sisters. Though a few were promised, only three were wed; the eight victors would be expected to spend the next three years at Lord Robert’s side, as his own personal guard (Alayne had suggested seven, like the Kingsguard, but Sweetrobin had insisted that he must have more knights than King Tommen), so older men with wives and children had not been invited.

And they came, Alayne thought proudly. They all came.

Read the complete chapter here, and the lengthy summary of everything we know about the novel so far over at Tor.com.

Shimmer 24 Now on Sale

Thursday, April 2, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Shimmer is a slender little magazine with a big reputation.

Issue #24, covered-dated March 2015, offers four stories about endings. Here’s editor E. Catherine Tobler’s on the issue:

The world is always ending. The world is always being reborn. Small steps, planetary scale. Turning itself inside out, do-over, rewind, fast-forward this part, and pause. Pause here and take a breath and read these four stories that will change your perception of how things end, how they start, how they go ever on.

Shimmer is not generally known for its humorous content, nor happy-go-lucky stories. Shimmer stories tend to have a mood and that mood is often bleak. Beth once told me Shimmer stories were like the line from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” (or was that line only in the Jeff Buckley version?), it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah. It’s cold and broken, but there is still a sliver of light by which to see. That’s the shimmer.

Shimmer is published bi-monthly, and available in both print and your choice of DRM-free electronic formats (indeed, a wide range of formats, not just PDF and Kindle.) It has shown a talent for rooting out great fiction across a wide range of fantasy and SF, and describes itself as publishing “Speculative fiction for a miscreant world.”

Fiction this issue is by Maria Dahvana Headley, K.L. Pereira, Michael Ian Bell and Sunny Moraine. A new story is released on the magazine’s website every other Tuesday; or you can buy the complete issue in a variety of formats. The digital version also includes some nonfiction content (interviews and an editorial). Here’s the fiction TOC for March.

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See the Table of Contents for The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton

Wednesday, April 1, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Last month Prime Books announced the Table of Contents of my favorite Year’s Best book, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015.

This is the seventh volume, and it looks like another stellar line-up, with 34 stories from the leading print magazines (Asimov’s SF, Interzone, Analog, F&SF, and others), online publications (Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more) and anthologies (Fearsome Magics, Reach for Infinity, Rogues, and Solaris Rising 3, among others).

Authors include Kelly Link, Robert Reed, James Patrick Kelly, Alexander Jablokov, K. J. Parker, Ken Liu, Genevieve Valentine, Eleanor Arnason, Cory Doctorow, Peter Watts, and many, many others.

I was also very pleased to see two Black Gate contributors made the list: Saturday blogger Derek Künsken, with his Asimov’s tale “Schools of Clay,” and website editor emeritus C. S. E. Cooney, for her story “Witch, Beast, Saint: An Erotic Fairy Tale,” from Strange Horizons.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 is a fat 576 pages, and goes on sale in trade paperback from Prime Books in June.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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New Treasures: The Skull Throne by Peter V. Brett

Wednesday, April 1, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Warded Man, the first novel in Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle series, was released in March 2009. His second, The Desert Spear (March 2010), became an international bestseller, and the third, The Daylight War, followed in February 2013. Now the fourth book in the series, The Skull Throne, has been released this week.

The Skull Throne of Krasia stands empty.

Built from the skulls of fallen generals and demon princes, it is a seat of honor and ancient, powerful magic, keeping the demon corelings at bay. From atop the throne, Ahmann Jardir was meant to conquer the known world, forging its isolated peoples into a unified army to rise up and end the demon war once and for all.

But Arlen Bales, the Warded Man, stood against this course, challenging Jardir to a duel he could not in honor refuse. Rather than risk defeat, Arlen cast them both from a precipice, leaving the world without a savior, and opening a struggle for succession that threatens to tear the Free Cities of Thesa apart.

In the south, Inevera, Jardir’s first wife, must find a way to keep their sons from killing one another and plunging their people into civil war as they strive for glory enough to make a claim on the throne. In the north, Leesha Paper and Rojer Inn struggle to forge an alliance between the duchies of Angiers and Miln against the Krasians before it is too late. Caught in the crossfire is the duchy of Lakton — rich and unprotected, ripe for conquest.

All the while, the corelings have been growing stronger, and without Arlen and Jardir there may be none strong enough to stop them. Only Renna Bales may know more about the fate of the missing men, but she, too, has disappeared…

The fifth (and final?) book in the series, The Core, does not yet have a release date. The Skull Throne was published by Del Rey on March 31, 2015. It is 704 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. Read the first chapter here.

Amazon.com Returns to 1999 for April Fool’s Day

Wednesday, April 1, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Amazon.com has turned back the clock to 1999 for April Fool’s Day.

The world’s largest online retailer has re-formatted its main page to precisely mirror the look and feel it had on April 1, 1999. It’s not just a snapshot of the page from sixteen years ago — it has replaced everything on the page, including the links on its top Books, Music and Videos, with April Fools-themed products.

The Amazon 100 Hot Books, for example, is topped by these three titles:

April Fool’s Day, Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew, by Carolyn Keene
The Practical Joker’s Handbook, by Tim Nyberg
April Foolishness, by Teresa Bateman

All the titles are real. None of the links function, however (clicking anywhere on the page will dump you back to the 2015 version of the Amazon home page).

As someone who used to shop regularly at Amazon in 1999, this page really takes me back. I love the prominent link to “VHS Top Sellers” in the bottom right. All of Amazon’s regular services — such as your cart, wish list, and the search functions — operate normally. It’s just the main page that’s been pranked.

Visit the Amazon home page here.

Presumably, Amazon’s home page will return to normal by the end of the day. Click on the image at right for a screen capture of the full page.

Epic Musket Fights and Vampire-Like Magic: Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Wednesday, April 1, 2015 Comments 0 Comment

Guns of Dawn — This book is a supremely good read. That it’s also also thoughtful, wise and clever, is a bonus, like a good honest curry that however leaves an exquisite aftertaste.

(This weekend, I’ll be doing my thing at Conpulsion, Edinburgh’s truly excellent gaming convention. If you’re there, drop by and say hello.)

Guns of the Dawn
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor UK (700 pages, February 12, 2015, £16.99 in hardcover, £7.99 digital)

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Guns of the Dawn is…

Imagine Pride and Prejudice meets Sharpe, or if some of the female characters of the Cherry Orchard got conscripted into All Quiet on the Western Front, or was it Red Badge of Courage or Catch 22?

With Magic.

In a nutshell, two vaguely 1800s nations go to war. As attrition grinds down her side’s army to the point where they are conscripting women, upper class Emily decides not to draft dodge and goes to war, in a red coat, with a musket, ultimately in a swamp. And somewhere in there, there is an emotionally complex romance, coming of age, a mediation on truth and propaganda, and a hint of… but that would be a spoiler.

Actually, the whole X meets Y thing breaks down very quickly. “Oh this is the French Revolutionary War..? or is it the American Revolution? Or…”

Tchaikovsky is obviously well-read, has life experience, understands war and organisations, and people, and if there are parallels with classic literary works and moments of Military History, it’s because they in turn reflect truths about life and people. Though, as I read on, I got the sense that he was quietly enjoying playing with reader expectations. Just sometimes, you think, “Oh I know how this goes. This is a Rorke’s Drift sequence…” and then it’s not.

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