Black Gate – Page 938 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

April Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 3 comments

April was a good month for swords & sorcery short fiction. Between Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, nine new stories and two poems were published. (I already reviewed two from BCS last month.) Also, a new online magazine, Fantasy Scroll, appeared, promising all sorts of good things. I’ll review the first issue next month.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine #27‘s first of two stories, “Wolves,” is only the second English language story by Brazilian writer Cesar Alcazar. It continues the adventures of renegade Irish swordsman Anrath the Black Hound, whom he first introduced in “A Lonely Grave on the Hill” (HFQ #118).

One night, five brutal mercenaries find themselves together in a “desolate tavern” waiting for a mysterious employer to arrive. Alcazar’s cunning warrior and the nasty conclusion reminded me of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stories. Considering his bio says he’s translated Karl Edward Wagner, Robert E. Howard, and George R. R. Martin into Portuguese, I’m not surprised.

The only flaws in the story are some iffy word choices which I attribute to Alcazar writing in English, not his first language. For example, we’re told a man “laid” his cup on a table, though it was clear that the cup was set down on its bottom. Those few minor details aside, this is a clever story.

The second, “The Best Intentions,” is Benjamin Darnell’s first published story. It starts as a somewhat humorous tale of Aidan, student of the apothecarist Edwin, sent out for magical ingredients. It becomes a darker, violent story as things start to go wrong for the young apprentince. It’s a laudable first effort with some thrilling bits, even if its setting is overfamiliar.

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New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

The first volume of the revered Nebula Awards anthologies was released nearly half a century ago, in 1966, and it’s been an annual event ever since. I really can’t think of a single anthology series that’s lasted even half as long.

It’s no accident, either. Year after year these books, which gather Nebula Award-winning short fiction from the previous year — alongside additional nominees, excerpts from winning novels, author retrospectives and appreciations, and survey pieces — collectively form a record of the most acclaimed SF and fantasy our industry has produced for the last 49 years.

Want an example? Have a look at the Tables of Contents for the first three volumes, which contained such stories as “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny, “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw, “The Last Castle” by Jack Vance, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, “Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delany, “Behold the Man” by Michael Moorcock, and “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber.

It’s not just that those are some of the most famous SF tales ever written. It’s that the Nebula Awards — and these volumes — helped preserve and promote them and they’re likely the reason you know about these stories today.

All that begs the question: who’s in the latest volume? Who are the writers who will be remembered and acclaimed half a century from today?

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A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)

Monday, May 12, 2014 Ryan Harvey Comments 9 comments

Hey, kids: guess what comes out in theaters this Friday? Oh, wait … I have something I need to finish up here. (Sorry about the delay. It’s a boring story.)

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1996)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

Godzilla ‘98: An American Tragedy

Oh, I wish Theodore Dreiser wrote this.

All right, let’s get this mother*&!%ing thing over with as much speed as possible: Godzilla ’98 stinks like rotten Limburger. We can all agree on this. It isn’t the worst film in the Godzilla series, but that’s because it doesn’t belong in the series and has no business associated with anything with the name “Godzilla” on it. It has zero connection to any version of Godzilla, nor does it make any attempt to interpret the monster whose name it crassly exploits — which is probably the most insulting thing about this massive heap of industrial Hollywood sewage.

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“I rolled a critical hit against Yog-Sothoth!”: Revisiting AD&D Deities and Demigods (4th and Final Part)

Monday, May 12, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 16 comments

I’ve read dozens of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, some of them (“The Rats in the Walls”, “The Colour Out of Space”) multiple times. I’ve studied his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. But I never have felt compelled to categorize all the various Great Old Ones and Outer Gods and work out their relationships in the overall “mythos” — for one thing, such an undertaking seems to undermine the intent of these Lovecraftian horrors, which was to represent the awful unknown.

August Derleth was among the first to go about classifying Lovecraft’s monsters in any systematic way, which tended to morph the work from pure horror into something more like metaphysical science fiction. Some fans have also criticized Derleth for using a Judeo-Christian framework for his classification, creating a dualistic good-versus-evil overlay that would be anathema to Lovecraft’s own worldview. The dissonance of this theme with the source texts threatened to jettison the original intent: conveying the cosmic terror of the mystery of existence and our precarious place in it.

Plugging Lovecraft’s cast of cosmic creeps into a Dungeons & Dragons pantheon and assigning stats to them (hit points, armor class, etc.) — as the 1980 first edition of Deities and Demigods did — seems vulnerable to this criticism to the utmost degree. Here are these totally foreign, otherworldly entities — and here’s how you defeat them! But it’s human nature. We love stats. We have to classify, categorize, label, and collate. It’s an inevitable progression that tends to water down the capacity of classic monsters to frighten (we’ve worked out how you destroy a vampire — stake to the heart, full exposure to sunlight — or put down a werewolf — silver bullet — or stop a zombie — head shot — so exhaustively that we have to come up with new variations and altogether new monsters to keep readers on the edge of their armchairs).

Still, I gotta admit it’s kinda fun to see what the game designers thought Cthulhu’s class levels should be, or how many hit points might be possessed by Nyarlathotep. If you’re going to introduce these beings into the hack ‘n slash realm of D&D, it’s bound to happen.

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“All Folk Cherished Their Legends”: Phyllis Ann Karr’s Wildraith’s Last Battle

Monday, May 12, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 2 comments

Wildraith's Last Battle A little while ago, I wrote here about Phyllis Ann Karr’s 1986 novel At Amberleaf Fair. I thought it was well-written and inventive, quietly doing highly distinctive things with the fantasy genre without drawing attention to its own originality. I recently read another book by Karr, 1982’s Wildwraith’s Last Battle, and found it was different from Amberleaf Fair while also sharing many of its virtues: tight prose, clever plotting, a strong sense of character, and a tremendously well-constructed setting. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s well worth discussing here.

Set in the southern hemisphere of an unknown world, a group of iron-age nations have begun a complex three-sided war. Meanwhile, for reasons unrelated to the war, one woman loses everything and curses the god, Wildrava, that she believes is responsible. The result is that the god incarnates as a (more-or-less) human female named Wildraith and tries to seek out the woman who cursed her — but the woman, Ylsa, is finding her own way among the shifting sides of the ongoing war. Despite herself, Wildraith finds herself becoming a key player in the war as she strives to find Ylsa and break the curse.

The book is, to use recently-developed terminology, both grim and dark. Violence, including sexual violence and torture, is an element of the story’s reality and occasionally described in detail. There’s nothing ostentatious in the novel’s depiction of violence, though, nothing exploitative or false. It’s a part of the tone and world and feels earned without forcing the whole book into depressive bleakness. Ultimately, what makes the novel remarkable is its ability to fuse matter-of-fact description of day-to-day activities with the experience of war and also a distinctively fantastic sense of wonder: a feeling of the numinous that comes from gods involving themselves in the affairs of mortals.

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The Fantasy of Lucius Shepard: A Handbook of American Prayer

Monday, May 12, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Lucius Shepard died on March 18 and, to commemorate his profound contributions to fantasy, we are surveying his books here. Today, we continue with a short novel with a fascinating premise: A Handbook of American Prayer.

Wardlin Stuart is in prison for manslaughter when he begins to write letters to God. He soon finds that his prayers are answered — all of them. Wardlin seems to have accidently stumbled on the correct way to supplicate God… or, at least, a god. But when he publishes his prayers, he sets himself up for a confrontation with a powerful fundamentalist minister. And in the meantime, God appears to have arrived on Earth…

A man walks into a bar. A dispute ensues, and the bartender kills him. He’s sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. In prison, the convict, Wardlin Stuart, writes prayers addressed to no god in particular. Inexplicably, his prayers — whether it’s a request for a girlfriend or a special favor for a fellow inmate — are answered, be it in days or weeks. When his collection of supplications, A Handbook of American Prayer, is published by a New York press, Stuart emerges a celebrity author. Settling into a new life in Arizona, he encounters a fundamentalist minister. The two are destined for a confrontation. In the interim, it seems that the god to whom Stuart has been praying has manifested himself on the earth. In this short novel about America’s conflicting love triangle — celebrity, spirituality, and money — Shepard negotiates the thin line between the real and the surreal, expounding upon violence and redemption along the way. This story of an unlikely American messiah shows why The Wall Street Journal has compared Shepard, an award-winning author, to Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and Ward Just.

We previously discussed Shepard’s acclaimed collection The Dragon Griaule and his vampire novel, The Golden.

A Handbook of American Prayer was published by Thunder’s Mouth Press on September 14, 2004. It is 272 pages in hardcover. A trade paperback edition was published simultaneously. Both are out of print; there is no digital edition.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Eille Norwood: the Silent Detective

Monday, May 12, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 4 comments

Norwood_Doyel — Norwood and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Stoll Pictures Annual Dinner

This may shock you, but there were on-screen Sherlock Holmes before Benedict Cumberbatch! And for you old-time fans, even before Robert Downey Jr. Really! The first great movie Holmes comes from the silent film era. And he shared a last name with another actor who would give arguably the greatest portrayal of the world’s first private consulting detective.

William Gillette had come to personify Sherlock Holmes through repeated performances of his stage play in the U.S. and Europe. His 1916 film version certainly helped as well, but was not a critical part of his success. Anthony Edward Brett would become the first great movie Holmes, though he would achieve it as Eille Norwood.

Born in 1861, Norwood was primarily a stage actor in England when he landed the role that would make him famous throughout the U.K..

In 1921, a British film company named Stoll decided to film a series of shorts based on Doyle’s stories. For the next two years, they would produce forty-five of the twenty-minute films, along with two longer ones. Doyle’s short stories fit the twenty-minute length quite well and Stoll wasn’t forced to add inauthentic filler to them.

The first fifteen, chosen randomly from among Doyle’s stories, were called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That same year, the first version of what would be the most famous film title in the Canon was made, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Maurice Elvey directed all sixteen films. That same year, Elvey made a romantic drama called The Fruitful Vine. The lead was played by a young man named Basil Rathbone. How about that?

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Future Treasures: Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence

Sunday, May 11, 2014 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

In The Broken Empire trilogy (Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, and Emperor of Thorns), Mark Lawrence told the tale of Jorg Ancrath’s devastating rise to power. In a blog post for us shortly before Prince of Thorns was released, Mark Lawrence explained some of the genesis of the series:

The book I’ve written, Prince of Thorns, has layers, rather like an onion (or an ogre). I hope it can be enjoyed as a violent swords and sorcery romp. Get your teeth into it though and there’s more there – it’s as much about our prince as it is about what he does. This is a damaged person and although the story is told in his words without a hint of excuse, there are lessons to be learned between the lines. It wasn’t until tonight though, desperately scratching at the subject in the effort to come up with something to say in this blog post I was invited to supply, that I discovered another layer, deeper still…

In Prince of Thorns the main character has suffered a personal disaster. It’s not the ‘evil threatens the village’ of classic fantasy. It’s not injured pride or a looming darkness in the east. He’s been screwed over, a tsunami has rolled through his life and left devastation. And the book is in large part his reaction to that… It’s only through the lens of half a decade and more that I see I was writing out… not a version of my own experience, but a mapping of the emotions.

We published the first chapter of Prince of Thorns, with a brand new introduction by Mark, online here.

The numerous fans of The Broken Empire trilogy will be thrilled to hear that Mark Lawrence returns to the Broken Empire with his next book, coming June 3. Prince of Fools tells the tale of The Red Queen’s grandson, Prince Jalan Kendeth, a man tenth in line for the throne, who nonetheless finds life quickly becoming very complicated indeed…

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Vintage Treasures: Six Worlds Yonder / The Space Willies by Eric Frank Russell

Sunday, May 11, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

We’re back with our continued look at some of the most interesting Ace Doubles.

Last time we discussed Eric Frank Russell’s first Ace release, his 1954 novel Sentinels of Space (with a brief aside to look at his 1958 paperback collection from Berkley, Men, Martians, and Machines.) So I thought it apropos to examine his first Ace Double pair: Six Worlds Yonder / The Space Willies, published in 1958.

Six Worlds Yonder is a rather uniquely themed collection: stories of first landings on far planets, all published in Astounding between 1955 and 1957. Here’s the book description:

THE PLANET MAPPERS

One thing’s certain about the exploration of outer space — there’s not going to be two worlds alike! In this new collection of interstellar explorers, the fertile and original mind of Eric Frank Russell presents a half-dozen of the more extraordinary possibilities.

There’s the world where everything moves at a pace so different from ours that it would take a couple of lifetimes to establish communication. There’s the planet of immortals, with all that that really signifies. There’s the puzzling problem of keeping important messages secret when surrounded by truculent aliens. And there’s more…

Every story is different, every world is unique, and every adventure is science-fiction at its best.

Russell’s stories were frequently more whimsical than most others depicting the grim business of interstellar exploration in 1950s SF digests. I think perhaps Bud Webster described Russell’s style best in his book Past Masters, in his appreciation of the stories in Men, Martians and Machines.

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A Ride Along with the Thought Police: John C. Wright, Foz Meadows, and Rachel Aaron

Sunday, May 11, 2014 John ONeill Comments 67 comments

There’s been a lively and far-ranging debate that’s arisen out of the 2014 Hugo nominations, recent turmoil inside SFWA, and even the lingering controversy over WisCon withdrawing Elizabeth Moon’s Guest of Honor invitation back in 2010. It began earlier this week with author John C. Wright drawing the threads of these (and other) issues together to illuminate a broad conspiracy to silence conservative writers, in his article Heinlein, Hugos, and Hogwash:

The lamps of the intellect were put out one by one, first in society at large, then in literature, then in our little corner called science fiction. What we have now instead is a smothering fog of caution, of silence, of an unwillingness to speak for fear of offending the perpetually hypersensitive. Science fiction is under the control of the thought police…

When Larry Correia was nominated for a Hugo Award, the gossips reacted with astonishing venom, vocal enough to be mentioned in the Washington Post and USA Today. He was accused of the typical menu of thought crimes. You know the selection: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, insensitivity, fascism… The lunatic Left planned and struggled for years, decades, to achieve their cultural influence. Let us imitate their perseverance, and retake our lost home one mind, one institution, at a time. Start by praying.

Black Gate blogger Foz Meadows posted a thoughtful (and frequently very funny) response, “Silence Is Not Synonymous With Uproar: A Response To John C. Wright,” in which she ably disputes John C. Wright’s complaints point by point. Here’s an example:

You cannot state, as your opening premise, that SFF fandom is being handicapped by silence and an unwillingness to speak out, and then support that premise by stating the exact polar opposite: that there has, in your own words, been vocal uproar. Doubtless, what Wright meant to imply is that the persons against whom the uproar is directed are being silenced by it – that he, and others like him, such as Larry Correia and Theodore Beale, are now suffering under the burden of enforced quietude. But given that all three men are still writing publicly and vocally, not just about the issues Wright raises, but about any number of other topics, the idea that their output is being curtailed by their own “unwillingness to speak for fear of offending” is patently false.

In her post “The Loudest Sound in the World is a Bigot Screaming That he’s Being Silenced,” Rachel Aaron, author of the The Legend of Eli Monpress and, under the name Rachel Bach, the military SF series Fortune’s Pawn, presents the radical idea that having readers react strongly to your ideas isn’t the same thing as being a victim of “thought police” — it’s something called criticism, a vital part of a free society.

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