Black Gate – Page 858 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Vintage Treasures: The Year’s Best Fantasy, First Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Thursday, January 8, 2015 John ONeill Comments 18 comments

Some 27 years ago, the first volume of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s long-running Year’s Best Fantasy series appeared.

Created in conscious imitation of Gardner Dozois’s even longer-running Year’s Best Science Fiction (also published by St. Martin’s), Datlow and Windling’s Year’s Best Fantasy became the most prestigious and long-lived fantasy annual the genre has yet seen. Renamed The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror beginning with the third book in 1990, it lasted an impressive 21 years, publishing its final volume in 2009.

The series accumulated numerous accolades and award nominations over the decades, and became the acknowledged yearbook for the field. Just as Dozois did with his sprawling summations, Datlow and Windling summarized the year’s news, events, and gossip in lengthy and highly readable intros. If you were a new writer, publication, or small press, it was a major career milestone just to be name-checked.

I remember how excited I was to finally get my hands on a copy in the fall of 1988. I took it to the common room of my graduate dorm in Urbana, Illinois, and curled up in a comfy chair, where I read for hours while the first winter snow accumulated outside. I read this first volume cover to cover, in the process getting introduced to dozens of writers like Delia Sherman, Michael McDowell, David J. Schow, Susan Palwick, and many others. The book was the equivalent of a graduate course in modern fantasy.

In fact, there was just one problem. I didn’t like most of the stories.

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The Royal Armory of Madrid

Wednesday, January 7, 2015 Sean McLachlan Comments 1 comment

This sumptuous armor and barding was a gift from Carlos Manuel, Duke of Savoy, to Philip III. It was made in Milan in the 1580s.

Europe is rich in collections of early arms and armor. Most major cities and many smaller towns have their local armories. Generally these collections span a broad range of time, but La Real Armería, the Royal Armory, in the Royal Palace in Madrid, is unusual in that most of the collection dates to the lives of Charles V (1500-1558) and Philip II (1527-1598). This makes it perhaps the best collection of high quality sixteenth-century arms and armor in the world.

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New Treasures: The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter by Rod Duncan

Wednesday, January 7, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Rod Duncan is a mystery writer with three novels to his credit: Backlash, Breakbeat, and Burnout. His first fantasy novel, The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter, is advertised as the first book in The Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series.

Duncan brings his talent for mystery to the shadowy streets of a fantasy metropolis, where Elizabeth Barnabus maintains a dangerous secret identity as she earns a living as a private detective. Graham Joyce called The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter “A magic box pulsing with energy. Compulsive reading from the get-go… [a] blend of steampunk alternative history wrapped in the enigma of a chase.”

Elizabeth Barnabus lives a double life – as herself and as her brother, the private detective. She is trying to solve the mystery of a disappearing aristocrat and a hoard of arcane machines. In her way stand the rogues, freaks and self-proclaimed alchemists of a travelling circus.

But when she comes up against an agent of the all-powerful Patent Office, her life and the course of history will begin to change. And not necessarily for the better…

The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter was published by Angry Robot on August 26, 2014. It is 384 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Will Staehle.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Top Black Gate 50 Posts in December

Wednesday, January 7, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Marie Bilodeau, our newest blogger, didn’t waste any time making a name for herself. Her first post, “Nine (mostly) Distinct (almost) Positive Traits of Chainmail Bikinis,” shot right to the top of the traffic charts for the month of December, and stayed there. Welcome aboard, Marie! I think you’re going to fit right in.

Sticking with the theme of fashionable armor, Dungeons and Dragons turned out to be a popular topic last month as well — and fantasy gaming in general, from Call of Cthulhu to the new Dragon Age game.

Mark Rigney examined early fantasy miniatures in our #3 post for the month, “AD&D Figurines: Youth In a Box?” And James Maliszewski proved that it’s not just readers who are frequently overwhelmed with choices, with his post “The Coolest RPGs I’ve Never Played,” fifth for the month.

Connor Gormley took a hard look at the overused trappings of much of modern fantasy in his article “Dwarves, Dragons, Wizards and Elves: Thinking About the Standard Fantasy Setting,” which clocked in at #2.

Also on the Top Five was Adrian Simmons, with another look at subtle storytelling of J.R.R. Tolkien, “Frodo Baggins, Lady Galadriel, and the Games of the Mighty,” a follow up to his popular article “Fools in the Hotzone: Saruman as the Bold but Incompetent Firefighter.”

Moving on to the Top Ten, we have M Harold Page’s latest review, “More Hardboiled than The Dresden Files: The Way Into Chaos: Book One of The Great Way by Harry Connolly.” Harry’s been a perennial favorite with our readers since we published his very first story, “The Whoremaster of Pald,” back in issue #2.

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Ancient Worlds: Apollo and Daphne

Tuesday, January 6, 2015 Elizabeth Cady Comments 2 comments

Waterhouse's Apollo and Daphne — Waterhouse’s Apollo and Daphne

The title for Ovid’s Metamorphoses comes from the fact that every story he tells contains one. A metamorphosis, that is. While Homer begins his epics with Anger (in the Iliad and the Odyssey), Ovid begins In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora… “I’m of a mind to tell you about bodies changed into new forms…” Sometimes those changes are incidental to the story, but at the beginning, Ovid is interested in the big changes. The great, cosmic ones. He begins by telling about the first change, from yawning chaos into the slowly increasing order of Creation. He tells of the first four ages of mankind, the Roman version of the Great Flood myth, and of Apollo’s conquest of the great Python.

That last should be a good story, but he speeds past it: Earth Angry, Giant Dragon-Snake thing, God with bow, boom. Festival commemorating mighty victory. Next!

He then tells the story of Apollo and Daphne. The first thing you need to know is this:

Apollo has no game. None. Zero. He is That Guy. He is always That Guy, and the one time he manages to get a boyfriend, said boyfriend ends up instantly dead because Apollo is The Worst.

We have our theories on why that may be, but that comes later. For now, just know this: if Apollo is interested in someone, girl or boy, it will end badly for her or him. And probably for the world at large.

So when he comes into Olympus fresh from killing a dragon and makes fun of Cupid for being a baby archer… well, let’s just say that disturbance in the force that you feel is two-thousand years’ worth of readers cringing and then smacking their faces with their palms. Cupid, after all, enjoys making gods fall in love with really embarrassing people.

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Start Off the New Year With Strange Tales

Tuesday, January 6, 2015 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Santa was good to me this year. Lots of great paperbacks, some Warhammer 40K audio dramas, two graphic novels… and a copy of Strange Tales #6, cover dated October 1932 (the Wildside reprint edition, of course.)

Nothing like getting a famous pulp magazine for Christmas. This one contains a novella by Victor Rousseau and short stories by Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Hugh B. Cave, Sewell Peaslee Wright, and Henry S. Whitehead, among others. I even know who Henry S. Whitehead is, thanks to my recent post on the Wordsworth edition of Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead (and yes, I felt smug when I spotted him on the TOC). There’s even an essay on True Tales of the Weird by Robert W. Sneddon. The reprint includes all of the interior artwork by Amos Sewell and Rafael Desoto. Here’s the complete table of contents:

“The Hunters from Beyond” by Clark Ashton Smith
“The Curse of Amen-Ra” by Victor Rousseau
“Sea-Tiger” by Henry S. Whitehead
“The Dead Walk Softly” by Sewell Peaslee Wright
“Bal Macabre” by Gustav Meyrink
“Strange Tales and True,” essay by Robert W. Sneddon
“The Infernal Shadow” by Hugh B. Cave
“The Artist of Tao” by Arthur Styron
“In the Lair of the Space Monsters” by Frank Belknap Long
The Cauldron (Letters)

We covered several of Wildside’s pulp reprints in December. Strange Tales #6 is about 148 pages, priced at $14.95. Wildside’s has replicas of issues 4, 6, and 7 for sale as pulp reprints here.

How It All Began

Tuesday, January 6, 2015 Jeff Stehman Comments 1 comment

I discovered D&D when I was 12 years old. Typical, but that’s where typical ended. No friend/sibling/ cousin/teacher sat me down at a table with those early paperback rulebooks and oddly shaped dice. I didn’t get to see the rules or the dice. Come to think of it, there wasn’t a table.

I’d moved the year before, and a distant friend was visiting. Our families spent an afternoon together roaming a museum, and he and I were alone for part of that time. He spent about an hour telling me about this great new game he was playing, exploring a dark dungeon with his friends, facing all manner of evil. I remember only one fragment of his story: Their dwarven cleric had been slain. They had left the body behind, but were planning to go back for the dwarf’s warhammer, as they’d run into a bunch of skeletons and thought a smashing weapon might prove useful.

How many 12-year-old lovers of adventure fantasy could pass that up? Certainly not me, but I didn’t know where to acquire this wondrous game, and I had no one to play it with (nor would I for another 5 years). What to do?

Fortunately, I had picked up the notion of making board games from an older brother, so I plopped down on the floor and got to work. From my friend I’d heard about dungeon rooms and treasures and monsters and secret doors. I’d heard about wizards and magical weapons and healing potions. I’d heard about hit points and hit dice and armor class. And I knew they were all rolled into one game.

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Future Treasures: The Sculptor by Scott McCloud

Tuesday, January 6, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Scott McCloud is one of my all-time favorite comic creators.

I’ve been reading comics for 45 years, so it’s not easy to pick favorites. When pressed, I say Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Spider-man by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Dave Sim’s Cerebus, Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez… and Scott McCloud’s masterpiece, Zot!

Zot! is a pretty simple story. It’s about a boy with a rocket pack and a blaster, living in a futuristic version of the 1960s, who accidentally stumbles into our dark, gritty, and sometimes bleak world. It’s a kid’s comic, for sure, and a superb one, filled with a lot of action, great characters, fabulous villains, and laugh-out-loud humor. I’ve read thousands of comics since I set down the last issue of Zot! in 1990, many of them excellent, but I can’t recall a single one with the same joyous sense of fun and madcap love of the medium. Just ask everyone who sent in letters (pre-Internet!) to vote on which character should get a pie in the face in issue #27.

McCloud had substantial success with his groundbreaking books on the comic medium, Understanding Comics (1994) and Reinventing Comics (2000). But his fans have been waiting over a decade for him to return to comics as a storyteller, and the long wait is finally over. His first work of adult fiction, The Sculptor is a complete, self-contained graphic novel of love, loss… and a deal with Death.

David Smith is giving his life for his art — literally. Thanks to a deal with Death, the young sculptor gets his childhood wish: to sculpt anything he can imagine with his bare hands. But now that he only has 200 days to live, deciding what to create is harder than he thought, and discovering the love of his life at the 11th hour isn’t making it any easier!

The Sculptor will be published by First Second on February 3, 2015. It is 490 pages, priced at $29.99 in hardcover. No digital edition has been announced.

A Look At The Year Gone By – 2014

Tuesday, January 6, 2015 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 5 comments

By my count, I published forty-two articles here at Black Gate during 2014. I reviewed thirty-two novels and over forty short stories.

While most of the books were older ones [e.g. The Eternal Champion (1962) and Year of the Unicorn (1965)], I did manage to sneak a few newer ones into the mix, as you’ll read below. The short stories, all from presently publishing magazines, reinforced my belief that there’s a continuing renaissance in swords & sorcery. There are talented authors toiling away despite the lack of commerical interest. I hope I convinced other S&S fans to investigate these books and stories and learn for yourselves how much good heroic fantasy is out there waiting for you.

As I’ve written in the past, one of my initial reasons for blogging about S&S was to get myself to read many of the books I had missed or neglected over the years. I managed to accomplish a lot of that this year.

Two-thirds of the books I read were brand new to me. Among the older ones were Darrell Schweitzer’s strange and intoxicating Echoes of the Goddess and Adrian Cole’s phantasmagorical Oblivion Hand. I’m very happy I finally read Keith Taylor’s great Celtic S&S book, Bard, as well as Teresa Edgerton’s The Queen’s Necklace. The best contemporary books I read were the densely constructed The Constant Tower by Carole McDonnell, and sword & soul founder Charles R. Saunder’s brand new Abengoni: First Calling.

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Beyond Ever After: Into the Woods

Monday, January 5, 2015 Thomas Parker Comments 3 comments

Whenever I walk into my local chain bookstore, I am immediately attracted to a display near the entrance which bears the enticing banner, “Former Bestsellers.”

Here reside the Grishams, the Clancys, and the Kings of last year and the year before, pushed off the pedestal of the New and the Now by the never-ceasing flood that issues from the mouth of modern publishing. It is a great place to grab a good read, cheap.

It is, alas, the fate of even the most successful book to eventually become a “former.” A quick consultation of the New York Times bestseller list reveals that the number one hardcover fiction book of this first week of 2015 is Gray Mountain by John Grisham. It is, I am sure, an efficient and effective novel, but if we could leap forward two or three hundred years and conduct a cyborg-on-the-street interview, what is the likelihood that any of our subjects would be able to name the characters or recount the plot of Gray Mountain?

Of course I’m being unfair to Grisham, a writer who is a straightforward, popular entertainer of the moment with no aspirations to membership in the Pantheon. Might we do better asking our 24th century citizen about A Farewell to Arms, or Lolita, or Portnoy’s Complaint? Yes? Umm… no, I think.

What could we ask about with any chance of success — never mind centuries from now, but even today? (Outside the halls of the English Department, I fear that the great works of Hemingway, Nabokov, and Roth wouldn’t fare any better than Forever Amber — and if you’ve never heard of that one, that’s my point, and if you have… oh, just sit down and be quiet!) Here’s a guess — Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumplestilskin, Hansel and Gretel, stories that were already old when Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first collected them two hundred years ago.

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