Black Gate – Page 888 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

Sunday, January 4, 2015 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Black Gate blogger Bud Webster gets the cover of the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction with his novelette “Farewell Blues,” a ghost story set in the swamps of Louisiana in 1937. In her review of the issue, Colleen Chen at Tangent Online had this to say:

The narrator, trumpet player Juney Walker, talks about a cornet player named Jake, who was so good he could play to wake the dead. Turns out this is literally true. One hot summer, he and Jake were playing music nights in a small swamp town in Louisiana, and strange dead things start emerging from the swamp in response to the music. It turns out that Jake isn’t quite from this realm, and the music he plays is bridging the place where he is to the place he’s from. Something is calling him home, and if he doesn’t go, the uncontrolled pieces from that beyond place will seep into here and wreak their eerie havoc… This is an atmospheric and Cajun-flavored ghost story.

Good to see Bud get the spotlight. He’s a terrific writer and was a regular columnist and poetry editor for the print version of Black Gate.

He’s also written a dozen blog posts for us, most recently “Selling Your Books Ain’t as Easy as it Looks,” and “Talk to Any Squids Lately? In Space, I Mean?” His most recent books are his guide to SF & fantasy bookselling, The Joy of Booking, and his collection of columns on genre writers, Past Masters: and Other Bookish Natterings.

There are other enticing stories in the issue, from Eleanor Arnason, Matthew Hughes, Dale Bailey, Naomi Kritzer, Albert E. Cowdrey, and others. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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A Great Collision of Awards Lists

Sunday, January 4, 2015 Derek Kunsken Comments 0 Comment

1993 — The Hugo Award: Most ancient of sf/f awards, armed with a point suitable for hunting prey.

OK, despite the title, there are no explosions or car crashes in this post.

However, as a Canadian, a SFWA member, an Asimov and Analog author and an audio listener, my thoughts on awards season can get a bit jumbled. Someday, I’ll make a nerd-pleasing Venn diagram about it…

The scifi/fantasy/horror field is in constant motion and there are a ton of brilliant writers out there. The Nebula and Hugo and Aurora nominees for the past few years, as well as the Year’s Best collections and the Locus Recommended Lists, give anyone a great place to start discovering the genre(s).

I feel a responsibility to the process, like I feel a responsibility to vote in elections. Here are the award areas I get involved in:

I nominate for both the Hugos and the Nebulas, often using the recommended lists as the bases for my reading; those lists are stored in the ultra-secret passages on the SFWA boards, guarded by three-headed dogs and passwords that have to have a number and a symbol in them. Members of SFWA can nominate and vote for the Nebulas. Anybody who is attending Worldcon or attended the last Worldcon can vote in the Hugos, as can people who have supporting memberships (which seem steep to me at $50, but it is what it is).

As I’m primarily an audio consumer, to round out my short fiction reading, I also listen to as much of Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies as I can.

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The Anti-Tolkien: Michael Moorcock in The New Yorker

Saturday, January 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 16 comments

I was surprised and pleased to see a lengthy feature on Michael Moorcock in that bastion of American literature, The New Yorker.

Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, wrote the piece, which was published online on December 31, 2014. It’s a well-informed article which celebrates Moorcock’s substantial contribution to fantasy, but doesn’t gloss over his years as a young muckraking editor at the helm of the New Wave:

It was fifty years ago this year that Moorcock, then twenty-four years old, was offered the editorial helm of the British magazine New Worlds… Moorcock and his peers had become tired of the dominant science-fiction landscape: vast fields of time travel, machismo, and spaceships, as well as the beefcake heroes of the fantasy subgenre “Sword and Sorcery.” The Golden Age of Science Fiction, held aloft by authors like Frederik Pohl, John W. Campbell, and Robert Heinlein had, by the nineteen-sixties, sputtered out into a recycling of the same ideas. Within the pages of New Worlds, Moorcock created a literary revolution, one that would have science-fiction fans calling for his head.

The focus of the piece, titled “The Anti-Tolkien,” is on Moorcock’s criticism of the “troublesome infantilism inherent in Tolkien’s work,” and his response to it in his own work.

Read the complete article online here.

Bird People, Evil Clowns, and the Crooked One: Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

Saturday, January 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

C.S.E. Cooney reports that she has signed a contract with Mythic Delirium Press for her newest collection Bone Swans, coming this summer.

Bone Swans will contain several of her most popular novellas, including The Big Bah-Ha, which Gene Wolfe called “Deep and wise and fabulous… [it] will leave you shuddering and strangely at peace. You could found a religion on it — or it may found a religion without you.” It also includes “The Bone Swans of Amandale,” the first installment of Silver and Bone: The Pied Piper Tales, and “Life on the Sun,” originally published here at Black Gate. Here’s the complete table of contents, with links to online versions where available:

Life on the Sun
The Bone Swans of Amandale
Martyr’s Gem
How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One
The Big Bah-Ha

C.S.E. Cooney is a podcast reader for Uncanny Magazine; Amal El-Mohtar recently reviewed her short story “Witch, Beast, Saint” at Tor.com, and Mark Rigney interviewed her in late October. The two C.S.E. Cooney short stories we presented here, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” consistently rank among the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. She 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.

Bone Swans will be published by Mythic Delirium Press on July 7th, 2015. Get more details on their website.

New Treasures: Moth and Spark by Anne Leonard

Saturday, January 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Anne Leonard’s debut novel, published earlier this week, is a romantic fantasy being compared to A Discovery of Witches. It also has dragons in it. Most romances could be improved by adding dragons, I think.

A prince with a quest, a beautiful commoner with mysterious powers, and dragons who demand to be freed — at any cost

Prince Corin has been chosen to free the dragons from their bondage to the power Mycenean Empire, but dragons aren’t big on directions. They have given him some of their power, but none of their knowledge. No one, not the dragons nor their riders, is even sure what keeps the dragons in the Empire’s control. Tam, sensible daughter of a well-respected doctor, had no idea before she arrived in Caithenor that she is a Seer, gifted with visions. When the two run into each other (quite literally) in the library, sparks fly and Corin impulsively asks Tam to dinner. But it’s not all happily ever after. Never mind that the prince isn’t allowed to marry a commoner: war is coming. Torn between his quest to free the dragons and his duty to his country, Tam and Corin must both figure out how to master their powers in order to save Caithen. With a little help from a village of secret wizards and rogue dragonrider, they just might pull it off.

Moth and Spark was published by Penguin Books on December 30, 2014. It is 384 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Vintage Treasures: Bow Down to Nul by Brian W. Aldiss / The Dark Destroyers by Manly Wade Wellman

Saturday, January 3, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

We’re back to our survey of Ace Doubles, this time with a volume from 1960 containing lesser-known novels from two of science fiction’s brightest stars: Bow Down to Nul by Brian W. Aldiss and The Dark Destroyers by Manly Wade Wellman. Ace Doubles didn’t always have a clear connecting theme, but they did in this case, as both novels feature the struggle against brutal aliens who have conquered Earth.

Bow Down to Nul is a Galactic Empire novel, a fairly common theme in early pulp SF, made popular by writers like Asimov and Van Vogt. The empire in this case is a huge stellar realm controlled by the Nuls, an ancient race of giant three-limbed creatures. Earth is a backwater colony world, ruled by a Nul tyrant. The human resistance is disorganized, but aided by a Nul signatory attempting to bring to light abuses on Earth.

As Aldiss noted in his Note From The Author, the set-up strongly parallels the complex colonial relationships he witnessed first hand while serving in India and Indonesia in the forties.

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Art of the Genre: Kickstarter from Opening to Close

Saturday, January 3, 2015 Scott Taylor Comments 1 comment

Sarah Avery asked me recently if she could pick my brain on Kickstarters, and although once I replied she never took me up on the offer, I still enjoy talking about certain details of campaigns. Today, as I face the final leg of my current and 9^th Kickstarter for AotG, I’m going to talk a bit about the ebb and flow of a campaign.

All Kickstarters share at least two universal facts: that you will have your greatest pledges at the campaign’s opening and closing, as well as a dead zone in the middle where pledges are hard to come by.

Today, The Folio is in its final 24 hours, a time period that is nearly as important as the first 24 hours after launch. It is the ‘now or never’ moment for backers, especially those you’ve managed to reach through the campaign but they hedged with the old ‘I’ll get back to it closer to the end.’ This thought process is two-fold, the first being that backers tend to have a better understanding of what they can spend closer to the date in which money will be withdrawn from their accounts, and second, that they often like to see what kind of success (and stretch goals) a project achieves before they jump in.

For me, The Folio is fully funded, which is the good news, and for those backers of the project, we are all pushing for that first stretch goal that will help create a second module in The Folio series. Thus, the final 24 hours become paramount to seeing just how ‘good’ the project really did over the course of its life.

However, most projects are made or fail in the first 24 hours after launch. It is in these first hours that the true barometer of just how many backers you have is seen. Most folks like to see at least 50% of your backing come in the first 24 hours, which can be a daunting sum. For The Folio, I hit 25% in the first day, and added another 5% on day two, so the road was much longer and harder than many successful projects you see out there. That said, 30% in two days is still a great way to begin and I had confidence that with those numbers we’d survive the lull, which we did.

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Clarkesworld 100 Now on Sale

Friday, January 2, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The award-winning Clarkesworld magazine published its 100th issue this month — a landmark by any measure. Very few SF and fantasy magazines have made it to 100 issues, and this is something that deserves to be celebrated.

This bigger-than-average issue contains fiction from Naomi Kritzer, Kij Johnson, Catherynne M. Valente, Jay Lake, Damien Broderick, Karl Schroeder, and others. The four non-fiction pieces are “Song for a City-Universe: Lucius Shepard’s Abandoned Vermillion,” by Jason Heller, “Exploring the Frontier: A Conversation with Xia Jia,” by Ken Liu, “#PurpleSF” by Cat Rambo, and an editorial by Neil Clarke: “On the Road to One Hundred.”

This issue’s podcast is “Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” by Aliette fde Bodard, read by Kate Baker.

Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, & Sean Wallace won the World Fantasy Award in the Special Award Non-Professional category for Clarkesworld in November (see our complete report here).

We last covered Clarkesworld with Issue 97 and the anthology Clarkesworld: Year Six edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace. The anthologies are inexpensive and a great way to introduce yourself to Clarkesworld. Every purchase helps support the magazine… definitely worth considering if you’re at all a fan of short fiction.

Clarkesworld 100 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 is by Julie Dillon. See the complete issue here.

See all of our recent magazine coverage here.

Revising and Editing II: The Nitty Gritty

Friday, January 2, 2015 Violette Malan Comments 7 comments

I had occasion to read the first 3 chapters of a friend’s manuscript the other day. This is his first completed manuscript, and he wanted a second pair of eyes on what he was sending out to agents. I started off my critique by saying: “There’s good news. All your sentences are sentences, and all the words you use mean what you think they mean.”

Obviously, my friend wasn’t immediately gratified by this response,* at least, not until I explained how very often this isn’t the case. I had another friend (please note the past tense) who, when I suggested a word he used didn’t mean what he thought it meant, told me loftily that he knew that, but he was just trying it out to see if it would fit. He had, he explained, dashed it all down when he was drunk.

Which brings us to a piece of advice attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Write drunk. Edit Sober. Please note the order. Given Hemingway’s reputation, the assumption has always been that his advice was to be taken literally, but I’m not so sure. I know that people have achieved marvels while drinking/drunk, but I don’t think these were cases of cause and effect. Alcohol or its cultural equivalent can smooth the path of genius (at least for a while), but it doesn’t create the genius in the first place.

I choose to believe that what Hemingway meant was, write while inspired, edit with a clear head. All kinds of things might inspire you to write, and I often find that when the juices are flowing (creativity’s, not the bottle’s) I’m not even so much as aware of the passage of time, let alone the exact nature of every sentence and punctuation point.

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The Early Novels of Jack Vance: Grand Crusades: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Five, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

Thursday, January 1, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Subterranean Press is now accepting pre-orders on the fifth volume of their landmark series The Early Jack Vance.

New titles in the series are released every March. I covered Volume Two, Dream Castles, after I unexpectedly found a copy in the Dealer’s Room at Capricon 33 in 2013, and I reported on Volume Three, Magic Highways, last March.

Volume Five is by far the largest so far (at 472 pages); I was also surprised to see that it contains only five stories, all short novels, most published in pulp magazines between 1950 and 1954.

The Rapparee (Startling Stories, November 1950)
Crusade to Maxus (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1951)
Gold and Iron (Space Stories, December 1952)
The Houses of Iszm (Startling Stories, Spring 1954)
Space Opera (Pyramid Books, 1965)

This volume also contains a new introduction by the editors.

The first four books in The Early Jack Vance were a treasure trove for collectors, as they contained Vance stories that have been out of print for decades — and many that have never been reprinted. In contrast, this volume contains four short novels that have appeared in a handful of paperback editions over the decades (and under multiple titles), and one that has never been reprinted. This is first time they’ve been collected under one cover and the first time any have been in print for at least 30 years. I’ve selected a dozen covers from earlier printings below.

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