Black Gate – Page 942 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Fantasy Scroll Magazine #1

Thursday, May 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Well, here’s some exciting news. April 15th saw the release of a brand new, professionally produced digital fantasy magazine: Fantasy Scroll.

Here’s the description, from their website:

Fantasy Scroll Magazine is an online, quarterly publication featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal short-fiction. The magazine’s mission is to publish high-quality, entertaining, and thought-provoking speculative fiction. With a mixture of short stories, flash fiction, and micro-fiction, Fantasy Scroll Magazine aims to appeal to a wide audience.

Issue #1 brings you twelve short stories from authors such as Ken Liu, Seth Chambers, KJ Kabza, Alex Shvartsman, Hank Quense, and more. The magazine contains a well-balanced mix of original stories and reprints from new authors, bestsellers, and award-winning writers, plus a variety of nonfiction features, such as author and editor interviews, book reviews, and movie reviews.

The magazine is open to most sub-genres of science fiction, including hard SF, military, apocalyptic & post-apocalyptic, space opera, time travel, cyberpunk, steampunk, and humorous. Similarly for fantasy, we accept most sub-genres, including alternate world, dark fantasy, heroic, high or epic, historical, medieval, mythic, sword & sorcery, urban fantasy, and humorous. The magazine also publishes horror and paranormal short fiction.

Kindle Magazines are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when you’re not wirelessly connected.

Fantasy Scroll Magazine is edited by Iulian Ionescu, Frederick Doot, and Alexandra Zamorski. Copies are $2.99, for roughly 134 pages. I quite like the cover art, “The Dragon Rider,” by Jonathan Gragg, which speaks to me of an adventure fantasy mindset (click on the image at right for a larger version). See the complete contents of issue #1 here. Check it out.

See all of our recent New Treasures here. And thanks to John DeNardo at SF Signal for the tip!

Writing in the Flow

Thursday, May 1, 2014 Jon Sprunk Comments 2 comments

There are a lot of things I love about writing: the fame, the fortune, the hordes of screaming fans… *cough.* Pardon me as I clean up the soft drink I just snorted through my nose.

Really, writing is both a wonderful and terrible choice for a career, but one of the best parts is an experience so sweet and pure that it truly rivals the other great pleasures in life. No, it’s not the first time you sign a book for your parents.

I’m talking about The Flow.

The Flow is that magical experience when the words come as naturally as breathing, popping into your head like fireworks that seem to type themselves across your screen. When you’re in The Flow, writing seems like the easiest, most blissful vocation on the planet.

I only wish it lasted.

I don’t know about you, but when I sit down to write, it usually takes me a little time to warm up. I don’t bother with pre-game exercises; I just dive in. I read back over the previous day’s work, maybe jot down a couple notes as I try to find the narrative moment where I left off. Within half an hour, I’m typically chugging away. Then comes the make-or-break period. Somewhere toward the end of the first hour, I’ll either snag The Flow and cruise through a productive session or the magic eludes me and I have to fight to make my daily quota.

That’s the magic and wonder of The Flow. It comes and goes. But is it possible to encourage that spark to visit and maybe stick around for a while? Drawing solely from my own experience, I say yes. Er, sorta.

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Future Treasures: Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Thursday, May 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jim Butcher is something of an inspiration to modern fantasy writers.

Harry Dresden was not a hit when he first appeared, way back in the paperback original Storm Front (2000). Roc sent me a copy and I remember I couldn’t find anyone interested in reviewing it. Ditto with the next few, Fool Moon (2001) and Grave Peril (2001). Thomas Cunningham was the first to start reviewing them for us and he quickly became an unabashed fan.

Things happened fast after that. All my review copies were snapped up (except for my first edition of Summer Knight, which accidently ended up in a dollar bin at my booth at the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, where it was found by a lucky fan). I bought a complete set of the hardcover omnibus editions from the Science Fiction Book Club — and they were loaned out and never returned. I bought a second copy and it suffered the same fate.

Jim Butcher began to hit bestseller lists. I clearly remember the moment when I realized he’d crossed over to literary megastardom — it was at Dragon*Con 2010, when I glimpsed the size of the mob that showed up to get his autograph. The line wound around the room, out the door, and down several blocks.

Jim Butcher is proof positive that it’s still possible to achieve bestseller status starting with a midlist paperback series. That’s the dream of virtually every midlist fantasy writer, and for the greater part of the last decade, as publishing suffered one upheaval after another — the rise of Amazon, the collapse of Borders, and the shift to e-books, just to name a few — it was beginning to look like that dream may have suffered a hard death.

So there’s a lot of reasons to celebrate Jim Butcher’s success. But for most of us, it’s enough to know that the fifteenth volume of one of the most popular fantasy series on the market has finally arrived, breaking an 18-month drought since the last volume, Cold Days (November 2012).

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The Attenuated Hero: Vicious by V.E. Schwab

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

Vicious V.E. Schwab had written a number of YA novels when, in 2013, Tor published her book Vicious. Billed by some as a super-hero story, it had elements of that genre while also, to some extent, questioning its assumptions. Reading it, I found that the book seemed interested in questions of morality, heroism, and villainy, but that the super-hero aspects were so attenuated I doubt it would have occurred to me to consider it as a super-hero story without the claims of the book jacket. Its handling of ideas of heroism felt like a reiteration of themes comics (Marvel, DC, and independent) have been interrogating relentlessly (if not neurotically) for at least thirty years. In some ways, it’s best to simply ignore the ‘super-hero’ tag. If you do, you’re left with a well-paced and sharply-structured novel. And on its own terms, it’s an enjoyable tale.

The book alternates between present-day scenes and flashbacks, and a large part of the success of the novel rests in the fact that Schwab successfully pulls off this technical trick without blunting her momentum. Ten years ago, Victor Vale and Eli Cardale (later Eli Ever) are brilliant pre-med students who discover that near-death experiences can, under certain circumstances, grant survivors strange powers. They experiment, things go wrong, and while they both get powers, they end up as enemies. Now, in the present, Victor’s gotten out of prison, recruited some assistants, and is seeking out Eli — who himself has been up to some surprising things in the previous years, having come to hate the extraordinary people (or EOs) gifted with powers.

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io9 Looks at the Megadungeon

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Over at io9, Ed Grabianowski has posted a thoughtful survey of that underappreciated RPG stable, the megadungeon.

He covers many of the essentials — including The Temple of Elemental Evil, Undermountain, and Castle Greyhawk — and throws in a few clever suggestions I hadn’t thought of (such as the Death Star and Minecraft.) He here is on the modern classic Blackreach:

Blackreach is a signature location in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. It’s semi-abandoned underground city filled with eerily beautiful glowing mushrooms, strange ruins, rare plants and other oddities. The first time you delve into Blackreach, you can’t help but be a bit awestruck. The silence down there is intense, creating a tension and wonder I’ve rarely experienced in video games. Blackreach itself is massive, but to get to it you actually have to work your way down through another dungeon, a Dwemer ruin. And Blackreach is actually connected to three of these dungeons, so there’s no doubt it’s worthy of the “mega” appellation.

As thorough as he is, there’s plenty left over for folks in the comments section to add, including the epic Rappan Athuk, Dragon Mountain, Judges Guild’s early classic Tegel Manor, Arduin Dungeon, Ultima Underworld, and many others.

I’m disappointed that so far no one has mentioned a few of my favorites, including Monte Cook’s massive (and now extremely hard to find) Ptolus, Gygax’s Castle Zagyg modules, AEG’s ridiculously oversized World’s Largest Dungeon, and Goodman Games’ massive Castle Whiterock. Ah well. Who would have thought the market would be crowded with megadungeons?

You can read Ed’s complete io9 article here.

Writers – Don’t Start at the Start…

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 6 comments

Chapter 25 of Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun and Profit (which should be on EVERY writer’s bookshelf) is titled, ‘First Things Second.’ As he succinctly summarizes (nice but unneeded alliteration there), “Don’t begin at the beginning.”

It’s a popular screenwriting maxim to enter the scene as late as you can. In other words, don’t begin at the beginning. I seem to recall William Goldman espousing this.

Block tells of being advised to switch the first two chapters of a detective novel he had written. Basically, this put the reader in the thick of the action from the outset, with some explanation following. Tension can be created at the outset and carried forward by not beginning at the beginning.

Sitting here at the keyboard, I can’t think offhand of a Sherlock Holmes or Solar Pons story that uses this technique. There’s a reason we’ve all got the image of Holmes and Watson sitting in their rooms at 221B Baker Street when a client or Inspector Lestrade comes to visit and we’re off on a case.

As I read this chapter, I thought of Will Thomas’s Barker and Llewlyn books (love them, but what’s with the two “L”s at the beginning of that name?). Barker has more than a passing resemblance to Sherlock Holmes (I suspect that Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal owes a debt to these books) and Llewellyn is his Watson (or Boswell). Mind you, they are excellent books and not simply Holmes copies.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in March

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

You Black Gate peeps sure are a reliable bunch. You love vintage fantasy paperbacks, 80s horror movies, and gaming news, and with a noble passion. But you know what you really crave? Tales of People Behaving Badly, that’s what. Figures.

And thus we find that the #1 article on the Black Gate blog last month was our report on John Campbell’s ugly KickStarter implosion, a sad tale of comics, hubris, and book-burning. (It was my favorite, too. I’m not throwing stones.)

Things got a little more wholesome (sort of) with our #2 article, M. Harold Page’s “What’s the Point of Steampunk?” (You remember. The one with the line, “WHAT WAS THAT, SIR? I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY ZEPPELIN ENGINES.”)

Moving on, we find that Derek Kunsken’s interview with comic wunderkind’s Mirror Comics was the third most-read post for the month, followed by Bob Byrne’s opening post in his popular new blog series, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes. Rounding out the Top Five was Fletcher Vredenburgh’s look at a forgotten Lin Carter novel, Kellory the Warlock (forgotten by everyone but Black Gate readers, apparently).

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in March were:

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Something Unspeakable Has Come Home: 1972’s Deathdream Revisited

Tuesday, April 29, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 5 comments

One of the most enduring tales in all horror literature is W.W. Jacobs’s classic 1902 shocker, “The Monkey’s Paw,” in which a father acquires a magic talisman (the paw) from a soldier home from service in India. The paw supposedly grants three wishes — wishes that of course come at a price. Not really believing that it will work, the father wishes for two hundred pounds to pay off his house. The next day, his son is killed (“caught in the machinery”) at the factory where he works and in compensation, the company presents the family with…two hundred pounds.

Some days later, after her boy has been buried, the grief-blinded mother realizes that they’ve only used one wish, and compels the appalled father to use the paw to wish their son alive again. A short time later, they hear a soft knocking at the door, knocking that quickly grows into a deafening fusillade as whatever it is that waits outside the bolted door furiously tries to gain entry. While the ecstatic mother fumbles with the bolt, the terrified father, imagining the mangled horror outside, uses the paw for one last wish. When the door finally swings open, there is nothing there — “The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.”

This powerful tale has been adapted many times over the decades, for stage and radio, for television and movies, and for comics, and it has additionally inspired many stories and films that are not direct adaptations; of these Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Semetary may be the most well known. Another example, not nearly as well known as it deserves, is the 1972 low-budget horror film, Deathdream.

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A World Mottled With Decay: The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

Tuesday, April 29, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 6 comments

For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for the knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind a only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home.
— from “Meryphillia”

The late Brian McNaughton’s 1997 collection The Throne of Bones is a book I want to on one hand praise and with the other hold it away from myself with a pair of iron tongs. It contains some of the best writing I have ever read in fantasy; by turns tense, dark, grimly funny, and occasionally majestic. And it’s set in a vivid world, parts of which will haunt me for a long time.

On the other hand, many of the characters are by far the most despicable I’ve ever met and their actions among the vilest put to paper. Lots of the characters’ actions are motivated by sexual appetites that are many things — mostly disturbing — but never even remotely erotic. So if this review leaves you curious about McNaughton’s work, be warned: while it’s not sadistic or very frightening, it is strong stuff.

The Throne of Bones contains nine short stories and the novella, “Throne of Bones” itself composed of six intricately intertwined stories. They are set within and on the edges of an old empire slipping into decay: crumbling cities, clashing religious sects, and feuding noble clans. The rich and powerful lead lives of luxury, while the poor live in squalor. Between them a small middle class live in dual fear of the nobility and of falling into poverty.

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OMG! Immortal Immodesty (Deities and Demigods, Part 3)

Tuesday, April 29, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 12 comments

Whoops! The Goddess of Pain has had a wardrobe malfunction! — Whoops! The Maiden of Pain has had a wardrobe malfunction!

In my ongoing exploration of TSR’s first edition Deities and Demigods (1980), I must now confront the mammary in the room.

Did you ever notice there’s a fair amount of nudity in those first generation ADD books? I’m just, um, wondering if you guys did. I mean, I didn’t. I just noticed. Someone pointed it out to me — yeah! That’s the ticket! When I was twelve years old, I was much too pious to have had any impure thoughts toward Loviatar, aka Goddess of Hurt aka “Maiden of Pain.”

Okay, I may have noticed in passing that there was less modesty in those ‘70s and early ‘80s realms of fantasy, whereas with second edition on there is nary a nipple to be noticed. The cleaning up happened before the Wizards of the Coast buy-out and seems to track pretty closely with the culture in general (note many PG movies from the same era — say, the original Clash of the Titans — that couldn’t be shown on basic cable these days without heavy editing to assure that preteens aren’t sullied by viewing bare human breasts and buttocks, which they have never seen because who ever heard of the Internet?).

The interior illustrations are gorgeous. This is old-school RPG, so it’s all black-and-white line art by the likes of Erol Otus, David S. LaForce, Jim Roslof, and David C. Sutherland III.

To undress, er, address the tempestuous topic of topless deities in the temples, I must confess that, as an adolescent, I did appreciate the fact that goddesses by and large disdained mortal-kind’s prudery when it came to attire. It’s stunning, really, how many goddesses not only do not cover up their breastesses, but wear outfits that positively accentuate them.

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