Black Gate – Page 900 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1952: A Retro-Review

Sunday, September 7, 2014 Matthew Wuertz Comments 7 comments

The February, 1952 issue of Galaxy included a pair of articles along with its fiction offering. I covered Robert A. Heinlein’s predictions from an article titled “Where To?” in a previous post. The other, by L. Sprague de Camp, reflects on science fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assessing the failed predictions within older stories.

It seems odd to showcase an article about how science fiction authors failed to predict the future and then follow it up with a science fiction author predicting the future. But I digress…

“Double Standard” by Alfred Coppel — The protagonist is bent on space travel, even if he isn’t suitable for colonial breeding. With forged documents and the illegal work by a plasti-cosmetician, he’s ready to board a ship to anywhere.

This is a quirky tale with a predictable ending. But it’s short enough that it works.

“Conditionally Human” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. — Norris and his wife run a district pound, not for average dogs and cats, but for genetically modified creatures. Some are intelligent versions of dogs and cats while yet another breed, called neutroids, closely resemble humans. The neutroids only grow to specific, chosen ages between one and ten and remain at that level of development. They are suitable pets for C-class couples — people who have been deemed as having a defective heredity and thus are forbidden from having children of their own.

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What Would it Look Like to Pull a Watchmen on Planetary Romance? Part III

Saturday, September 6, 2014 Derek Kunsken Comments 1 comment

When we last left our intrepid blogger (me) two weeks ago and four weeks ago, he was blogging (very roughly) about the superhero genre, pre- and post-Watchmen, and the kind of light that Alan Moore’s Watchmen shone onto superhero comics, as well as the core elements of the planetary romance form. I was setting up this conversation about what a Watchmen-like treatment of planetary romance would look like, both the pretty parts and the ugly ones.

This is a fun exercise and it’s quite possible that I’m way off in what I construct next, so if I am, please offer up your ideas, views, suggestions. Debate is good!

And, I’ve been ending on a cliffhanger, like any good pulp. So now, here’s Part III, What a Watchmen Treatment of Planetary Romance Might Look Like….

We’ll need a hero, a youngish white male paragon to travel to another world, because that’s the core of the form. And let’s have the aliens of this world be as close to humans as possible in physique and psychology, otherwise other assumptions become much harder to play with.

While Carson traveled to Venus, Carter to Barsoom, and Rogers to the future by themselves, we may need companions for the hero, like Flash Gordon did. And for later grist for the dramatic mill, it will probably serve us that one is a strong, well-characterized, complex woman, preferably from another political viewpoint or culture.

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Future Treasures: The Baen Big Book of Monsters, edited by Hank Davis

Saturday, September 6, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Monsters!! And lots of ’em.

That’s all you need to know. Big monster book comin’. A Halloween-themed monster anthology, with a tantalizing a mix of classic reprints and original stories, all featuring REALLY BIG MONSTERS. Contributors include names that will be very familiar to Black Gate readers, such as Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, William Hope Hodgson, Murray Leinster, James H. Schmitz, Arthur C. Clarke, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, David Drake, and many more.

It even includes the pulp classic “The Monster-God of Mamurth” by Edmond Hamilton. And Harlan Ellison told us that story sucked when we wanted to reprint it. What does he know?

I approve of this Hank Davis fellow. His last anthology for Baen was the awesome In Space No One Can Hear You Scream, released last Halloween. This man is doing God’s work. Next time you run into him tell him he is blessed, and we’ll be rubbing elbows with the saints in the line to buy his book.

Here’s the book description, and the complete Table of Contents.

SIZE MATTERS

From the dragons of legend to Jack the Giant Killer’s colleague to King Kong and Godzilla, people have found the idea of giant creatures both scary and fascinating. Why so many should find accounts of a critter big enough to gulp down a puny human like an insignificantly small hor d’oeuvre or step on said human and leave a grease spot might be explained by the psychologists, but such yarns are undeniable fun.

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Self-Publishing Checklist: The Random No One Tells You

Friday, September 5, 2014 Patty Templeton Comments 8 comments

OH MY GAWD! You fancy glitterquill! You wrote a book.

So did I. It took forever. Mostly because I was an undisciplined mess who worked multiple jobs for the majority of the book’s birthing, but HEY! It got done. And… it appears… you’ve done the same. Which is rad. Take a moment to celebrate yourself. I don’t care how you get yer good times (sex, napping, whiskey, dancing, WHATEVER!), but you need to celebrate. For example, I read for a week straight and C.S.E. Cooney got me a sweet potato pie. Which no one else ate. It was ALL MINE. For breakfast. For dinner. There was no guilt ONLY WIN AT LIFE!

But… okay. So you have this thing. It is a manuscript. It is in a Word doc. You want to self-publish it. What the hell happens now? A LOT. Dear GEEZUS, a lot. Are you sure you want to do this? Yes? Okay. Well, here is a list – NOT ALL INCLUSIVE – but a starter guide to the pile of stink you stuck your foot into.

1. Firm Out Your Expectations

What do you want from your self-publishing experience?
Do you want to be a bestseller? (Um… good luck.)
Are you shooting to be a midlist author?
Maybe you are a passionate amateur who is publishing for friends and family?

Whatever you are, know it and embrace it. My suggestion… keep your heart and drive high and your expectations low.

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New Treasures: The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett

Friday, September 5, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Yes, I’m late to the party with The Company Man. Yes, it came out three years ago. And yes, here I am trying to pull a fast one and sneak it in as a “New Treasure.” Work with me here; it’s been a long week.

Basically, I decided it’s time to pay attention to this Robert Jackson Bennett fellow. He made a considerable splash with his debut novel, Mr. Shivers (2010), and since then he’s put out a book a year: The Company Man (2011), The Troupe (2012), and American Elsewhere (2013). His latest, City of Stairs, which Tor.com described this morning as “an atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city,” goes on sale next week. The Company Man looks like a very dark alternate history that combines gumshoe pulp fiction with a steampunk setting. I bought a copy last week, and it shot immediately to the top of my TBR pile.

The year is 1919.

The McNaughton Corporation is the pinnacle of American industry. They built the guns that won the Great War before it even began. They built the airships that tie the world together. And, above all, they built Evesden – a shining metropolis, the best that the world has to offer.

But something is rotten at the heart of the city. Deep underground, a trolley car pulls into a station with eleven dead bodies inside. Four minutes before, the victims were seen boarding at the previous station. Eleven men butchered by hand in the blink of an eye. All are dead. And all are union.

Now, one man, Cyril Hayes, must fix this. There is a dark secret behind the inventions of McNaughton and with a war brewing between the executives and the workers, the truth must be discovered before the whole city burns. Caught between the union and the company, between the police and the victims, Hayes must uncover the mystery before it kills him.

Others have clearly caught on to Robert Jackson Bennett long before me — he’s been awarded an Edgar, the Shirley Jackson, and the Philip K. Dick Citation of Excellence. The Company Man was published in April 2011 by Orbit Books. It is 466 pages, priced at $13.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version.

What Did That Say? Or, When is a Subtitle not a Subtitle?

Friday, September 5, 2014 Violette Malan Comments 5 comments

Lately I’ve had some experiences with subtitles that worry me a little. Here’s my problem: just what is it that’s being subtitled, and is there any way for us to know whether we’re missing something?

Usually when I’m watching a movie with subtitles, it’s in a language I have some grip on, like French or Italian. The subtitles are there to help me when the dialogue is too fast, or perhaps too colloquial, for me to follow it directly (though that in itself might be one of the problems, as we’ll see in a minute). There’s only one thing I watch where I don’t have any real clue on the language, and that’s Japanese anime.

The thing is, I’ve always been a big fan of subtitles over dubbing. I prefer to hear the actors’ own voices – I know how important voice can be, and I figure actors are cast for that as much as for any other quality. Tone is also something it’s virtually impossible to translate. But now, having seen some of the stuff I’ve seen, I’m not so sure I wouldn’t be better off watching a dubbed version.

The only dubbed films or TV shows I regularly watch are dubbed in Spanish, and I do that so my ear doesn’t lose its facility with the language through long periods of disuse. I never use the English subtitles, first, because the whole point is for me to concentrate and follow the Spanish; and second, because, as a reader, my eye is always drawn first to the written word, and I’d be wasting my practice time reading the subtitles instead of listening. Though, I might cheat a bit by watching a movie or an episode first in English, so I can concentrate on the vocabulary rather than on the plot.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer… In the Beginning, Part Three

Friday, September 5, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 0 Comment

“The M’Villin” was first published in Pearson’s Magazine in December 1906. Rohmer was still writing stories under the modified version of his real name, A. Sarsfield Ward. The story represented a quantum leap forward in the quality of Rohmer’s fiction and shows the influence of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbucklers.

Dumas remained a surprising influence on the author who still turned out the odd swashbuckler as late as the 1950s. It should also be noted that the character of Lola Dumas in President Fu Manchu (1936) is said to be a descendant of the famous author, while The Crime Magnet stories Rohmer penned in the 1930s and 1940s feature Major de Treville, a character whose surname suggests he is a descendant of the commander of the Musketeers from Dumas’s D’artagnan Romances.

Colonel Fergus M’Villin may be oddly named, but he makes for a fascinating character. An expert swordsman and fencing master, he is also a bit of a cad. The story of how he comes to avenge the honor of the man he previously slew in an earlier duel maintains the breezy good humor and spirit of adventure that colors The Three Musketeers in its earlier chapters. Rohmer thought well enough of the character to have penned a sequel, “The Ebony Casket,” but it was never published. The manuscript survived up until the year 2000, when it was junked in Tokyo by a family who did not imagine its worth to collectors.

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Goth Chick News: Chicago Comic Con 2014 – Hold Onto Your Spandex… (Part 2)

Thursday, September 4, 2014 Sue Granquist Comments 1 comment

Last week and prior to the end-of-summer bacchanalia that is Labor Day weekend, we got half way through telling you all about the adventures kilt-clad Black Gate photog Chris Z and I had at the largest Wizard World Comic Con Chicago has ever hosted.

On the hottest weekend of the summer, with temperatures climbing into the three digits, we arrived at one of the city’s biggest convention centers and waded into a sea of vendors, artists, and cosplayers clad in unbreathing fabric which, in some cases, was stretched to the breaking point.

After agreeing it was about time to ask “The Boss” John O’ for hazard pay, we set about scoping the con’s coolest people and products to tell you about.

So here is part two; and let me say, we’re pretty excited…

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How Eilean Donan Castle Nearly Shrugged off the Age of Gunpowder (Then Got Blown up Anyway)

Thursday, September 4, 2014 Comments 4 comments

AD 1719, the wild West Coast of Scotland, where nobody seems to realise that the Viking Age is over, and three government frigates close in on Eilean Donan Castle.

How’s this going to go?

Eilean Donan Castle — which was once famously defended by just two men, one a good archer — has a Spanish garrison of 46 soldiers. They’re here to guard a depot for munitions shipped in to support yet another Jacobite uprising.

Jacobite means “supporters of James,” in this case James Stuart, son of the deposed King James II Stewart, last of king of the Scottish dynasty deposed in favor of a Hanoverian-as-in-German one. Most Scots then and now don’t get too romantic about the Stuarts. Once they became kings of the United Kingdom, the Stuarts didn’t do much for their former countrymen, and once deposed, they mostly got them killed.

And it’s not that the Spanish government particularly likes the Stuarts. It’s just that Spain is on the other side from the British in something called the War of the Quadruple Alliance, so stirring up trouble is part of the game.

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Kirby McCauley, September 11, 1941 — August 30, 2014

Thursday, September 4, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

In late fall 2000, Dave Truesdale convinced me to reprint Edmond Hamilton’s first published story, the creepy pulp tale “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” from the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Harlan Ellison told us “it’s an awful story,” but what does he know? It has ancient lost cities, valiant explorers, horrible curses, and seriously spooky giant spiders. I loved it.

So I dutifully tracked down the rights, and discovered they were controlled by the Pimlico Agency in New York. In short order, I found myself on the phone with a guy named Kirby McCauley, negotiating the right to reprint the story in the second issue of Black Gate for $200.

Now, I’d certainly heard of Kirby McCauley. He was Stephen King’s first agent, and King had famously related some of the guidance McCauley gave him early in his career. More interesting to me, McCauley was also an accomplished editor. His Dark Forces was easily the most acclaimed horror anthology of the 1980s (it included Stephen King’s The Mist, among many other notable stories.) So in between our business dealings, I mentioned to Kirby that I was a fan. He was very gracious and surprisingly easy to deal with.

For a good many years, Kirby McCauley was one of the most successful agents in the industry, with a client list that made his peers green with envy. George R.R. Martin said “Kirby revolutionized agenting in SF and fantasy and horror,” and that was no exaggeration. However, McCauley’s career suffered a significant downturn in the late 90s, and he lost most — but not all — of his biggest clients.

Kirby McCauley passed away last weekend, and his death has largely been ignored by the industry. But today, I found a lengthy appreciation written by his client and friend George R.R. Martin. It’s definitely worth the read, both as a remembrance of a man who made a big difference in the industry and as a wonderful snapshot of what publishing was like in the 70s and 80s.

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