Black Gate – Page 881 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Vintage Treasures: Grand Masters’ Choice, edited by Andre Norton

Monday, November 3, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Back in 1988, there were only eight Grand Masters of Science Fiction. The Grand Master award is given by the Science Fiction Writers of America periodically to a writer with a lifetime of meritorious achievement. Robert A. Heinlein was the first, in 1975. (As of 2014, there are now 30; Samuel Delany received his award at the SFWA Nebula Awards banquet in May this year. See the complete list of winners here.)

For Noreascon III in 1988, NESFA Press invited Andre Norton to assemble a special collection of stories, one each from all eight Grand Masters — the story each author felt was their finest. The results were packaged with an introduction by Robert Bloch, plus comments on the individual stories by Andre Norton and her co-editor Ingrid Zierhut, into Grand Masters’ Choice, a prestigious collection of SF and fantasy.

It’s interesting to see each author’s selection — and there are plenty of surprises. There’s a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novelette from Fritz Leiber, a Witch World novella by Andre Norton, a Reginald Rivers tale from L. Sprague de Camp, a Humanoids story by Jack Williamson, and four others.

Now, I probably have all of these stories in other collections. Somewhere. But I couldn’t resist this handsomely-packaged anthology, mostly because I’ve read almost none of the stories within and it was just too irresistible to have them all in one place.

The tales I’m most interested in reading are Andre Norton’s “Toads of Grimmerdale,” which originally appeared in Lin Carter’s sword & sorcery anthology Flashing Swards! 2 — and which has been recommended to me several times in the past year — and “The Autumn Land,” a novelette by one of my favorite writers, Clifford D. Simak.

Here’s the blurb from the back of the 1991 paperback edition.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Elementary is Back

Monday, November 3, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 1 comment

In September of 2012, Elementary debuted on CBS television in America. It was a modern day Sherlock Holmes series, set in New York City. It followed closely on the heels of the BBC’s Sherlock, which had aired three episode seasons in 2010 and again in 2012.

The BBC series was a clever updating of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories (at least, it was until the third season) and was full of Easter eggs to please old school Holmes fans (like me), while appealing to a new generation (including females who swoon at the sight of Benedict Cumberbatch: ‘Cumberbunnies’).

Elementary sprinkles in bits from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works, but it’s really a police procedural with a Holmes overlay. I think it’s inaccurate to say it’s based on Doyle’s stories.

Holmes is a recovering drug addict who sleeps with women. Watson is, well, a woman who starts as Holmes’s life coach. Mycroft is nothing like the original and his relationship with Sherlock has even less to do with the stories.

Irene Adler and Moriarty were completely transformed. Gregson (who was the best of a bad lot) is actually a competent policeman, which is a nice change. On the other hand, there are bits for Sherlockians, such as Holmes keeping bees on the roof and being an expert single stick fighter.

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Amazing Stories, July 1962: A Retro-Review

Sunday, November 2, 2014 Rich Horton Comments 3 comments

Back to Cele Goldsmith’s tenure at Amazing/Fantastic. This is a pretty strong issue, with, notably and perhaps surprisingly, a strong “Classic Reprint” novelet, and a strong serial opener. (The shorter fiction is less impressive.)

The cover is by Lloyd Birmingham, a semi-regular at Amazing/Fantastic throughout the ’60s, who also had one cover for Analog, one for an Ace Double, and a couple more. But he was never well-known in the field. It illustrates the serial in this issue, part one of Keith Laumer’s A Trace of Memory, competently but not particularly specially. Interiors are by Birmingham again, Leo Summers, Virgil Finlay, Dan Adkins, and Austin Briggs.

Norman Lobsenz’s editorial discusses some evidence that may or may not support the Big Bang theory. (This was a couple of years before the discovery of the 3 degree background radiation of the universe.) The lettercol, “ … or So you Say”, features a long letter by Julian Reid complaining about two recent Mark Clifton stories (“Hang Head, Vandal!” and the serial Pawn of the Black Feet), following a very long defense of his work by Clifton himself.

This response may be the last thing Clifton ever published. (He died in 1963, and I am sure he published no more stories after “Hang Head, Vandal!”) I think Clifton gets the better of the argument, pointing out for one thing that Pawn of the Black Fleet (aka When They Come From Space) is a spoof, which Reid took altogether too seriously.

S. E. Cotts’s book review column, “The Spectroscope,” covers Damon Knight anthology A Century of Science Fiction, with very high praise for the stories, but some quibbling about Knight’s categorization of different aspects of the field; and J. F. Bone’s The Lani People, which Cotts considers not very original, but quite fun. There is a very brief “Benedict Breadfruit” squib by “Grandall Barretton” (Randall Garrett) … these are decidedly sub-Feghootian to begin with and this one is worse than usual. Ben Bova (or “Ben Ben Bova” as the TOC has it) contributes an article on “The Three Requirements of Life in the Solar System,” second in a four-article series on the possibilities of alien life, this one covering possibilities for life on other planets in our system.

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Michael Bishop on Tom Hanks’ Story in The New Yorker

Sunday, November 2, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Michael Bishop, Nebula Award-winning author of No Enemy But Time, Ancient of Days, and Philip K Dick Is Dead, Alas, has posted a brief review of Tom Hanks science fiction story in The New Yorker magazine.

Yes, Tom Hanks has a story in The New Yorker. And yes, it’s science fiction. It’s titled “Alan Bean Plus Four.” Yes, the Tom Hanks who played Forrest Gump and Captain Phillips. Look, just read what Michael said.

I read it with some initial skepticism. Sure, Hanks is an Academy Award-winning actor, but can he write?

Well, yes, he can. This tale works at the level that Hanks shoots for, and the prose, pointedly colloquial and science-savvy, shows him to have a fine command of 21st-century English as well as of current cultural, social, and technological innovations. I really like it.

You can read the complete story online here. There’s even an audio version on the same page (read by Tom Hanks. How cool is that?).

Read Michael Bishop’s complete comments on his Facebook page.

See a 1942 Pulp Magazine Rack in All Its Glory

Sunday, November 2, 2014 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

The Shorpy Historic Picture Archive, a terrific photo blog which posts vintage high-definition pics from the 1850s to 1950s, has posted an absolutely gorgeous picture of a 1942 magazine rack, crammed to overflowing with pulp magazines, slicks, comics, and much more. It’s a reminder of what newsstands were like in the heyday of the pulps. Visible in the (much reduced) image above are Astounding, Planet Stories, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Future, Fantastic Adventures, and nearly a hundred others.

What’s truly unusual about this image is that it’s in color. The original image, however, is black and white — the finished product was hand colorized after nearly a year of painstaking detective work, matching the pulp images in the racks (sometimes barely visible) to actual covers. See the complete tale of the research involved here, and see the astounding high-resolution original (all 4.2 million pixels) here.

Amal El-Mohtar reviews “Witch, Beast, Saint” by C.S.E. Cooney

Saturday, November 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Erotic fiction makes me blush. You know how some people have to cover their eyes when watching horror movies? I’m like that with erotic fiction. When C.S.E. Cooney submitted short stories to Black Gate, I had to peek between my fingers to read them. We published two, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” (which Tangent Online called “bold and powerful… on a scale of 1 to 10, I rank this one as a twelve”), and I had to look the other way while editing them.

Fortuantely, there are readers braver than I. Over at Tor.com, Amal El-Mohtar has reviewed C.S.E’s new story, “Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale,” saying in part:

Absolutely no one writes fairy tales like Cooney…what Cooney does is make you feel as if you’re a citizen of fairy tale space, inhabiting the lands and experiencing the stories adjacent to those better-known: Cinderella might be a few towns over, but she doesn’t matter here. Cooney writes new fairy tales with a vigour and velocity that make me remember how I felt on first discovering The Snow Queen in a book too big for my lap…

A witch discovers a beast dying in a forest, and takes him home to keep. She can tell right away that he was once a man; she washes and revives him, feeds him, takes care of him, and they become companionable. Soon they become rather more than that; not long afterwards, the arrival of an itinerant saint troubles their romance…

It was shockingly delightful to me to see such a beautiful depiction of enthusiastic consent, kink, and polyamory in a fairy tale setting — no technical terms, no rhetoric, just the cheerful twining of compatible desires in a magical world.

C.S.E. Cooney is a past website editor of Black Gate, and the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills. “Witch, Beast, Saint” was published at Strange Horizons; read the complete story here. And read Mark’s recent interview with C.S.E. Cooney here.

New Treasures: We Are Not Good People by Jeff Somers

Saturday, November 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jeff Somers has made quite a name for himself as an SF writer. His first novel, The Electric Church (2007), launched what eventually became know as the Avery Cates series (five volumes, including the most recent, The Final Evolution in 2011.) He’s less well known as a fantasy writer. His first fantasy novel, Trickster, published by Pocket Books last year, introduced Lem and Mags, two unlikely heroes in an underground world of blood magic. But Trickster was only the first half of the tale, and now it has been re-packaged with the second half and re-released by a new publisher as We Are Not Good People.

Ethics in the world of blood magic is gray at best. Unbeknownst to most, powerful mages have orchestrated disasters — plane crashes, floods, wars — for centuries to fuel their spells with blood. Lesser practitioners, Tricksters like Lem Vonnegan, work smaller magical grifts to eke out a living using only their own gas. For refusing to bleed innocents for his spells, Lem has pretty much condemned himself and his massive, dumb sidekick, Mags, to a life of transient poverty. So when the pair finds Claire Mannice, marked with runes of deep magic and stuffed inside the trunk of a car, Lem knows the rescuing her may be noble or may be infatuation disguised as redemption. Either way, it is most definitely fatal.

For the world’s most powerful mage, Mika Renar, has earth-shattering plans for Claire — and the old woman has noticed their interference. Hopelessly outclassed, and both intrigued by the mysterious girl and devoted to protecting the pet-like Mags, Lem engages his Trickster knack for misdirection and survival to follow the trail of ling cons that Renar and the other archmages have going.

But even if Lem and Mags win, they can still lose. Dealing with the kind of power that doesn’t heed mercy — or death — the duo is fighting for nothing less than reality itself. For magic is nothing but cons all the way down.

We last covered Jeff Somers when we linked to his Huffington Post article, Fantasy Series Better Than Harry Potter. We Are Not Good People was published by Gallery Books on October 7, 2014. It is 514 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Selling Short Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror Fiction, Part II

Saturday, November 1, 2014 Derek Kunsken Comments 3 comments

Superman004 — Don’t sell your copyright. Superman smash!!

Hey everybody. Welcome to the second of a three-post series on selling short fiction. Last time, I talked about knowing the markets and how your own writing fits into them. This week, I want to talk about sales, contracts, payments, and what rights you’re selling when you sell short fiction. This blog post is in no way a sleep-aid, despite the fact that the last sentence included the words sales, contracts, and rights.

To snap you awake, let’s assume you’re new and you’ve written something. What’s your second worry, after worrying about backing up your masterpiece of short fiction? That nobody steals your shit! You’ve heard about Siegel and Shuster. DC owns Superman. Same with Batman. They sold the copyrights.

You’ve probably heard some variant of “brilliant-but-shy-artist-shows-his-genius-to-a-Hollywood-producer-who-says-no-and-three-years-later-sees-his-magnum-opus-on-the-big-screen-with-all-the-names-changed.” I’ve felt that fear. I’ve written stuff I thought was genius. Hahahahaha. No, seriously. People are worried about losing what they created.

So, first thing: You own it. Only you can sell the rights. And the rights you sell are always described in a contract, that you can choose to either sign or not sign. So, sigh of relief. Let me explain what you are being offered by way of example.

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Sax Rohmer at Towers of London

Saturday, November 1, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 2 comments

A couple weeks ago, I finally read Mr. Towers of London, the posthumously published memoirs of Harry Alan Towers, the unflappable veteran British radio/TV/film writer-producer with well over a hundred works to his credit. It wasn’t Towers’s first stab at writing his memoirs, but this final work was notable as his most personal.

Anyone who actually knows major figures in the entertainment industry is likely aware of some of the salacious stories of debauchery, sometimes even criminal activity, that are never far from the surface. Towers’s memoirs are unique for being perhaps the most honest ever committed to print. If he pulls any punches or whitewashes any parts of his adventures, he can surely be forgiven for what he does dish out about himself and others.

That said, the most disappointing part of the book for me is that he tells the reader very little about his experiences as a writer. I would have loved to have understood more about the more private side of his profession as the book places all of the emphasis on his role as a producer. Today, he is unfairly remembered as the producer of genre films and exploitation fare. While that accounted for much of his output after 1960, he was also a respected writer-producer of family drama who frequently cast some of the biggest stars in Hollywood in his radio, TV, and film productions.

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Firefly Friday: Serenity: Those Left Behind

Friday, October 31, 2014 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 2 comments

Fan passion for more Firefly stories led to the rare (unprecedented?) move of turning a failed television series into a feature length film, in the form of 2005 film Serenity (Amazon). As an attempt to bridge the narrative gap between the end of the series and the start of the film, Joss Whedon collaborated with Dark Horse comics to produce the three-issue comic limited series Serenity: Those Left Behind (Amazon). This review is based on the original hardcover collection of the series, published in 2007. (They’ve since published a 2nd edition.)

Here are the major jumps between the end of Firefly and the beginning of Serenity, which the comic series seeks to explain:

Inara is no longer on the Serenity
Shepherd Book is no longer on the Serenity
Instead of the mysterious blue-handed agents in the series, the film introduces the operative as the key person hunting down River Tam

Serenity: Those Left Behind covers all three of these elements, and also brings back a villain from the television series who would have been recurring had it continued. I won’t ruin it by saying which one. As a hint, though, it’s someone who feels that they were wronged in their last interaction with Malcolm Reynolds, so that should narrow it down. This individual joins forces with the blue-handed operatives to move against the folks on Serenity. In addition to the mysterious recurring villain, there’s also a nice cameo by Mal’s contact Badger, who assigns them a job that doesn’t go exactly as intended. (Or at least not as intended by Mal and the crew.)

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