Black Gate – Page 944 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in May

Monday, June 23, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The most-read piece of fiction on the Black Gate blog last month was our exclusive excerpt from The Alchemist’s Revenge by Peter Cakebread, the first novel from the co-author of the role playing games Airship Pirates and Clockwork & Chivalry. The first volume in the Companie of Reluctant Heroes takes place in a 17th century that didn’t quite happen, in a nation torn apart by civil war.

When an embittered mercenary agrees to escort a grieving widow to visit her husband’s grave, little does he realize the dangers they will face. This is the story of their struggle through a country divided. As they journey through tainted lands, ravaged by alchemical magic and giant clockwork war machines, they are reunited with old friends and stalked by sinister foes. The reluctant heroes band together in this tale of loss and despair, of redemption and friendship, and ultimately, of retribution and revenge!

“Stand at Dubun-Geb,” Ryan Harvey’s second tale of Ahn-Tarqa, returned to the setting of “The Sorrowless Thief,” for another heroic fantasy packed with adventure, swordplay, and weird magic. It took second place this month.

Steven H Silver’s tale of the strange astral adventures of Hoggar the Cremator, “The Cremator’s Tale,” continued its run at the top of the charts, taking third place.

Also making the list were exciting stories by Janet Morris and Chris Morris, Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Michael Shea, David Evan Harris, Aaron Bradford Starr, Joe Bonadonna, John C. Hocking, E.E. Knight, David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, Jason E. Thummel, Jon Sprunk, John R. Fultz, Dave Gross, and Harry Connolly.

If you haven’t sampled the free adventure fantasy stories offered through our Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. Here are the Top Twenty most-read stories in May.

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New Treasures: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Volume 2: 1948 – 1988: The Man Who Learned Better, by William H. Patterson

Monday, June 23, 2014 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

In 2003, I was on a panel on classic SF and fantasy with Charles N. Brown, the esteemed editor of Locus, when the conversation turned to Robert A. Heinlein (as it does).

I don’t know much about Heinlein, really. I read a small handful of his books when I was younger, but I was never really a fan. I was more an Asimov guy. Brown however, was a dedicated Heinlein reader, and when Heinlein died in 1988, Brown famously wrote that there had never really been “the Big Three SF writers,” (meaning Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.) There had only ever been Heinlein, towering over the field.

Heinlein’s first novel, For Us, The Living, written in 1939 but unpublished until 2003, would appear later that year. I had received an advance proof, but I hadn’t read it. Brown had, however, and the book was major news. The rest of us on the panel deferred to Charles as he smoothly warmed to his topic, lecturing the assembled crowd on the importance of the novel in Heinlein scholarship, and indeed, to literature itself.

“The thing to remember,” Charles said, “is that Heinlein never intended the novel to be published –”

“Yes he did,” I said.

Charles looked startled. He seemed to have forgotten that there was anyone else on the panel. He looked around, obviously annoyed at the interruption.

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Weird of Oz Travels Ahead Three Weeks in Time, Finds Himself in New House

Monday, June 23, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 2 comments

My wife and I just bought a house, so for the next couple weeks we will be moving and unpacking. Hopefully, it’s a haunted house! (But if it is, please let it be only in a benevolent way — not one of those houses where the haunt tries to turn the husband into an ax murderer or anything, or goes sucking the children into television sets. I just don’t have time for that.) The Weird of Oz — yours truly — will be taking a brief hiatus, returning with a new column on July 14.

In the meantime, I thought I’d tell you — here in my 70th post for BLACK GATE — what a pleasure it is to be a part of this team and to share, discuss, and debate with this fantastic (in all senses of the word) community. With the phenomenal growth of BG’s visitors, it is also gratifying to know that so many readers are seeing one’s output! I will continue to do my best to inform and entertain.

As for what I have in the works for future posts, I’ll be resuming my blogging of the ‘80s DC comic book Arak at some point, I promise. But there will also be book and film reviews in the mix, as well as new installments of “Collector the Barbarian”, highlighting vintage toys from our childhood that I’ve been hunting down — toys and games of the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror variety that have become collectible.

Finally, here’s a little peek into the column-writing process: these are a few “leads” I’ve typed up for potential posts, with commentary from the internal editor included…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Nero Wolfe

Monday, June 23, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 11 comments

In 1926, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned his last Holmes tale, The Adventure of the Retired Colourman. Rex Stout, a fan of those tales, would shortly create a detective who would not only evoke memories of Holmes, but who would cast his own (gargantuan) shadow: Nero Wolfe. The seventy-four stories, written over forty-one years, would be collectively known as the Corpus, akin to the Sherlockian Canon.

Nero Wolfe lives in a New York City brownstone with Archie Goodwin, Fritz Brenner, and Theodore Horstmann. This boys’ club (Wolfe makes Holmes look like a romantic) is a self-contained unit, with Wolfe and Archie solving crimes, Fritz cooking and taking care of the household chores, and Horstmann assisting Wolfe with his hobby, the cultivation of orchids in a rooftop greenhouse.

Archie often comments on the beauty of the orchids, which is a far cry from the thoughts of General Sternwood in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep: “Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.” Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe, I guess.

Because the characters do not age, the stories all have a comfortable familiarity about them. Also, they are set contemporary to their writing, so while in a Holmes tale, it is ‘always 1895’, the Wolfe stories feel much more like modern mysteries, even though some are over seventy-five years old.

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Sage Stossel’s Starling

Sunday, June 22, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 1 comment

Starling There’s a suspicion common in genre circles when a writer or creator from ‘the mainstream’ uses genre conventions or plot points. It’s sometimes a justified suspicion, as the writer unfamiliar with genre falls into cliché or loses control of their material through inexperience with the form. But sometimes something else happens: fresh eyes can find new truths. And every so often somebody approaching a genre by starting at square one can show why the classic genre material works in the first place — and even twist that material a bit to find new life for it going forward.

I’m prompted to this reflection by reading Sage Stossel’s graphic novel Starling, an unconventional super-hero story. Stossel readily admits that she wasn’t a super-hero fan befoe starting the book. As she says:

I happened to walk past Newbury Comics in Harvard Square, and I noticed all these superhero-related materials in the window and found myself wondering why people are so into that stuff. After all, I figured, if you really think about it, being a superhero would be kind of a logistical nightmare. And it occurred to me that there might be some humor to be mined from that.

It’s an obvious idea, and it’s not wrong — just something super-hero comics have been investigating since at least the 1960s and the early Marvel Comics. Arguably it’s something underlying a lot of early DC books, as well: the tension between two identities and trying to succeed at both without compromising either. Stossel doesn’t seem terribly aware of this background, but as it turns out, she doesn’t need to be. She’s a skilled enough storyteller that she makes her story work, with charm and humour, and say something about super-heroes and super-hero stories into the bargain. However unintentionally, Starling becomes an odd mix of classical ideals (the super-hero who is a hero, striving through the compromises of everyday life to try to do something they feel is right) and new directions.

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How I Lost My Soul and Learned to Love Hell

Sunday, June 22, 2014 Joe Bonadonna Comments 4 comments

As many readers of Black Gate no doubt know by now, I have previously reviewed the shared-universe anthologies Lawyers in Hell, Rogues in Hell, and Dreamers in Hell, all edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris.

Well, this time out, with Janet’s help, I am going to do something a little different for Poets in Hell, the 17^th volume in the highly-acclaimed, award-winning, and very successful Heroes in Hell (HIH) series, what I like to call The Eternal Infernal Saga. Let me first give you a little back story, a little history as to how I, unplanned and undreamed, found myself wandering through the circles and levels of Hell.

A couple years ago, I was asked by my friend and fellow author, Bruce Durham, if I would write a review for the then-newest volume in the Heroes in Hell series, Rogues in Hell. I said sure, I’d be happy to, even though I was in the middle of writing my second novel.

I remembered the original Baen Books Heroes in Hell series, having enjoyed a number of those, and I was familiar with Janet Morris from her work in Thieves World™ and many of her own novels. But it had been years since I read those; and I’d been so long away from the fantasy genre that I had no idea that Heroes in Hell had continued on past the 4 or 5 volumes I had read in the 1980s and early 90s.

So I read Rogues in Hell, loved every word of it, wrote my review, and then bought the previous and first volume in the new 21^st century series now published by Perseid Press, Lawyers in Hell. Now, while lost somewhere deep in the nether regions, I get contacted one fine day by none other than Janet Morris herself, who read my review, was very pleased with it, and liked the way I wrote it.

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Vintage Treasures: Master of Hawks by Linda E. Bushyager

Sunday, June 22, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Thursday’s article on Theodore Sturgeon’s The Stars Are the Styx reminded me of other Dell paperbacks we used to read, collect, and pass around enthusiastically in 1979. Perhaps the most popular was Linda E. Bushyager’s Master of Hawks.

Linda Bushyager is forgotten today. She wrote only two novels, Master of Hawks and its loose sequel, The Spellstone of Shaltus (May 1980), before vanishing, like J.D. Salinger. But she was far from forgotten among fantasy fans in the early 80s, who found her pair of novels set in the magical Eastern Kingdoms original and a lot of fun. Here’s the back cover blurb for Master of Hawks.

War of the Wizards

Backed by the power of the world’s mightiest sorcerers, the forces of the Empire marched on the Kingdom of York. But York had its own wizardry… including the telepathic gift of young Hawk, who could control every kind of bird — and more, see through their eyes.

The key to York’s survival was an alliance with the Sylvan — mysterious forest dwellers who mistrusted all humans — and to win their friendship, Hawk embarked on a quest deep into Empire territory, where only his mastery of his winged comrades could bring him through alive.

Linda E. Bushyager reappeared briefly in 2002, co-authoring the SF novel Pacifica with John Gregory Betancourt. She’s published nothing since.

Master of Hawks was published in July 1979 by Dell Publishing Co. It is 256 pages, originally priced at $1.95. The cover is by Maelo Cintron. It remained out of print for nearly 30 years, before being reprinted by Fantastic Books in trade paperback in April 2010. There is no digital edition.

The Series Series: Traitor’s Blade by Sebastien de Castell

Saturday, June 21, 2014 Sarah Avery Comments 6 comments

Well, this breaks the streak.

After months of reviews that boiled down to not-my-book-but-maybe-yours or notably-flawed-but-with-some virtues or promising-but-published-a-draft-too-early, I looked at my box of review copies and saw months more of the same ahead of me. So I wrote John O’Neill and asked if any new books had come in that I might be able to love without reservation.

Not only did I love this book, I trusted it. Somehow, de Castell managed in his debut novel to win my trust so completely and quickly that he could tell nearly half of his story in flashback, often for a chapter at a stretch, and never once did he throw me out of the waking dream of fiction to wonder whether he could pull it off. As much as I like watching authorial tightrope-walking acts in general, I like best of all to watch one without worrying that the author might fall.

Falcio Val Mond’s coat is in tatters, along with his reputation, his soul, his country, and the order of warrior-magistrates he led to bring the king’s justice to the people of Tristia. He’s still First Cantor of the Greatcoats — for all the good that does him, with his king long since dead and the dukes of Tristia’s provinces plotting to exterminate or co-opt the surviving Greatcoats and install a new puppet monarch.

What Falcio has left to work with is formidable, though. He is still chief badass of an elite band of badasses, with two of his lifelong companions still by his side. Kest and Brasti are different enough from Falcio and from each other for the three of them to thread their misadventures with a high-stakes debate about how to survive and be of service as bringers of law in a lawless time when they are constantly outnumbered, defamed, despised, and impoverished. How do you help people who hate you, and is it ever conscionable to give up?

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Star Trek 3 Confirmed

Saturday, June 21, 2014 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Paramount Pictures confirmed on Wednesday that the third film in the J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek reboot has been green-lit for a 2016 release.

I haven’t been the biggest fan of the new films. Sure, they are highly watchable blockbuster action pics — fast moving, splendidly acted, and with terrific effects. But to me they haven’t captured the spirit of the original show and the creators seem kinda oblivious to this fact, turning characters I’ve loved for 40 years into action-film superheroes, with Spock getting into prolonged fistfights with superhuman opponents and Kirk ascending confidently into the Captain’s chair of the Enterprise in his early 20s, less than 24 hours out of the academy. It’s been more like watching The Expendables filmed on a Star Trek set (which actually sounds sorta cool, now that I say it out loud.)

But that’s okay. The films have been popular and have kept the franchise in the public eye. And they’re by no means bad films — they’re just not the Star Trek I wanted. So I was pleased to hear that there would be a third. Especially since the ending of Star Trek Into Darkness strongly implied the next one would be closer in spirit to the original version, with the crew finally beginning their five-year mission of exploration.

We don’t know a lot about the new movie yet. We know it will be directed by Roberto Orci, screenwriter and producer of Star Trek Into Darkness, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and the Sleepy Hollow TV show, in his directorial debut. In a recent interview, Orci stated that he wants the film to be more original, and to stay in the classic Trek world, which at least sounds good. His co-writer J.D. Payne also dropped a few clues about the plot.

Star Trek 3 (no idea if that’s the final title) will be written by Patrick McKay, Roberto Orci, and John D. Payne, and produced by J.J. Abrams and David Ellison. It is scheduled for a 2016 release, just in time for the show’s 50th anniversary. (Thanks to Tor.com for the tip.)

Future Treasures: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two edited by Gordon Van Gelder

Saturday, June 21, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

One of my favorite anthologies of the last half decade (and considering how many I’ve purchased, that’s saying a lot) was The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume One edited by Gordon Van Gelder. Considering it was an absolutely gorgeous 470-page package sampling five decades of the finest fantasy magazine in the genre, how could it not be?

So I was delighted to hear that Gordon and his publisher, Tachyon Publications, are hard at work on a second volume. It will be released next month, and is nearly as large as the first. Here’s the description:

A mutant baby goes on a rampage through Central Park. An immigrant reveals secrets in the folds of a perfect gift. Lucky Cats extend their virtual paws to salute a generous revolution. The Internet invades a third-world village.

The premier speculative-fiction magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction continues to discover and showcase many of the most inventive authors writing in any genre. Now drawing even more deeply upon F&SF’s impressive history, this extraordinary companion anthology expands upon sixty-five years’ worth of top-notch storytelling. The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two is a star-studded tribute to the continuing vision of F&SF.

This volume collects classic short fiction from Alfred Bester, Stephen King, Zenna Henderson, Robert Sheckley, Robert A. Heinlein, Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, R. A. Lafferty, Lucius Shepard, Gene Wolfe, and many others. It even includes two of my all-time favorite stories: Harlan Ellison’s “Jeffty Is Five,” and “The Aliens Who Knew, I mean, Everything” by George Alec Effinger.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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