Black Gate – Page 954 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Ancient Worlds: Shots in the Dark

Tuesday, March 25, 2014 Elizabeth Cady Comments 2 comments

Previously on Ancient Worlds: We’ve been discussing Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, which tells the story of Jason and the Argonauts, well known from many a late night creature feature.

After Heracles convinces his fellow Argonauts that the encircling Lemnian peril is too perilous, they sail on and the Argo makes its way through the Hellespont. There they find an island populated by “Earth-born monsters” with six arms each.

This is a recurring theme in Greek myth. Not just monsters, of course, although the Greeks love a good monster. (AND WHO DOESN’T?) The most terrifying and most anthropomorphic tend to be Earth-born, that is, creatures that spring up out of the earth.

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I Invoke the Voidal! Oblivion Hand by Adrian Cole

Tuesday, March 25, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 4 comments

Stripped of all his memories for some great transgression against the Dark Gods, the mysterious one called the Voidal, or Fatecaster, endlessly traverses the dimensions of the omniverse. Always he brings vengeance via his Oblivion Hand, an additional punishment of the Dark Gods. And furthermore, any who aid or befriend him are made to suffer.

Oblivion Hand (Wildside Press 2001) is a fix-up of eight early stories by Adrian Cole about his dark wanderer, the Voidal. Cole’s amnesiac protagonist was introduced in a chapbook titled “The Coming of the Voidal” (in this book reworked and retitled “Well Met in Hell.”) Five more tales appeared in a variety of small magazines and anthologies between 1977 and 1980, including Fantasy Crossroads and the Gerald Page-edited Heroic Fantasy. Two more, “The Lair of the Spydron” and “Urge and Demiurge,” were scheduled to be in Phantasy Digest and Weird Adventures respectively, but both magazines shut down before the stories could be published. They appear for the first time in Oblivion Hand.

In a review I did of the first two stories, “Well Met in Hell” and “The Lair of the Spydron,” I was harsh and almost disdainful. Still, there was something about them that I remember liking. Reading Lin Carter’s Kellory the Warlock last week (and whoever thought a writer most people agree was generally mediocre could attract so many comments a quarter of a century after his death?), elements of it reminded me of Cole’s book. Both authors were intent on creating a setting that wasn’t just another watered down mimeograph of Middle-earth; they wanted something stranger. Carter succeeded, but Cole did immeasurably better.

Cole’s omniverse is an endless collection of interesting settings: universe-sized dimensions; monster-infested pocket worlds; a realm filled not with planets but islands that float in space. Countless arrays of gods rule over these various worlds. Terrible beings like the Spydron create and work their will on hidden places they carve out for themselves. Powerful sorcerers raise themselves up above the gods in other worlds.

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New Treasures: The Last Wild by Piers Torday

Tuesday, March 25, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I don’t know much about this Piers Torday fellow. Not that there’s all that much to know — The Last Wild is his first novel, he lives in London, and is hard at work on additional adventures featuring Kester and Polly. Admit it — that’s all you need to know, too.

The Times has compared The Last Wild to Roald Dahl’s classic James and the Giant Peach – a pretty rousing endorsement. It looks like a quick, exciting, Middle-Grade read, and I think I’ll settle down with it later in the week. That is if my kids don’t steal it first.

In a world where animals no longer exist, twelve-year-old Kester Jaynes sometimes feels like he hardly exists either. Locked away in a home for troubled children, he’s told there’s something wrong with him. So when he meets a flock of talking pigeons and a bossy cockroach, Kester thinks he’s finally gone crazy. But the animals have something to say. And they need him. The pigeons fly Kester to a wild place where the last creatures in the land have survived. A wise stag needs Kester’s help, and together they must embark on a great journey, joined along the way by an overenthusiastic wolf cub, a military-trained cockroach, a mouse with a ritual for everything, and a stubborn girl named Polly. The animals saved Kester Jaynes. But can Kester save the animals?

The Last Wild was published on March 18, 2014 by Viking. It is 322 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in February

Tuesday, March 25, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Mark Rigney’s “The Find,” part of his perennially popular Tales of Gemen series, maintained the top spot last month, holding off a stiff challenge from Jon Sprunk’s hit novel Blood and Iron.

“The Find” is actually Part II of the series. It began with “The Trade,” which Tangent Online called a “Marvelous tale.” Read all three tales in their entirety right here.

Jon Sprunk’s Blood and Iron, Book One of The Book of the Black Earth, was released this month by Pyr Books and we offered an exclusive pre-release excerpt of this brand new sword & sorcery epic in February.

Next on the list was Joe Bonadonna’s fast-paced adventure “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” followed by E.E. Knight’s sword & sorcery epic “The Terror of the Vale,” the second in the Blue Pilgrim sequence, and sequel to “That of the Pit.”

Fifth and sixth were our excerpt from Sword Sisters, the new novel from Tara Cardinal and Black Gate blogger Alex Bledsoe, and “The Sealord’s Successor,” by Aaron Bradford Starr, a new tale of Gallery Hunters Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh, last seen in “The Tea-Maker’s Task” and “The Daughter’s Dowry.” Next was Martha Wells’s complete novel, the Nebula nominee The Death of the Necromancer.

Also making the list were exciting stories by Dave Gross, Jamie McEwan, Janet Morris and Chris Morris, Mike Allen, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, Jason E. Thummel, David C. Smith, Michael Shea, and John C. Hocking. 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 February.

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Take Dungeon Delving to the High Seas in Descent: The Sea of Blood

Monday, March 24, 2014 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Okay, that title doesn’t make any sense. Dungeon delving… on the ocean. You know what that sounds like? Drowning, that’s what it sounds like.

But let’s move on. I’m still processing the four boxes of loot I brought back from the Spring Games Plus Auction and, like a determined CSI agent at a crime scene, putting clues together to determine how I ended up with a copy of Descent: The Sea of Blood.

Let’s say a few words about the basic game, Fantasy Flight’s Descent: Journeys in The Dark, because it came up for auction and … man. Everybody wanted it. Seriously, it was like feeding time at the crazy cat lady house. There were two copies of the long out-of-print first edition and they were way out of my price range. The first, a jumbled box containing the game and all the expansions, sold for $92, and the second, an unpunched set of the first edition only, sold for $130. (If you’re in the market, Amazon still has new copies from a handful of vendors, starting at $289.)

So what’s Descent all about, then? To be honest, I’m a little vague on the specifics, ’cause my copies are still in the shrinkwrap, but I do know it’s one of the most popular of the dungeon-delving board games, which simulate the loot-and-scoot dynamic of Dungeons and Dragons in a more contained setting. (Other examples include Super Dungeon Explore, Castle Ravenloft, Legend of Drizzt, Claustrophobia, Warhammer Quest, DungeonQuest, Tomb, Cutthroat Caverns, and many others. And yes, my copies of those are shrinkwrapped too, so don’t bother asking.)

Descent was originally released in 2007 and designed by Kevin Wilson. It pits an overlord against up to four hero players, who cooperate to complete a range of exciting objectives, like clobbering a sea-monster, or beating down a dragon (going strictly by the box cover art, which is generally a good indicator). For extra collectability — like it needed it — the game shares a setting with Fantasy Flight’s other popular titles, Runewars, Rune Age, and Runebound.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Short-Lived Holmes

Monday, March 24, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 17 comments

Netflix’s House of Cards redefined what can be achieved by a web series. Everything about it, from casting to story to visuals, screams “quality.” The fact that it was intended to run for only a single season yet has already been renewed for a third testifies to the success that the show has had. It’s tough to maintain viewership when there’s almost nobody to root for, but they’ve done it.

But I wonder how many people realize that it is a remake of a 1990 British miniseries (apparently lust for power transcends decades. And centuries…)? Ian Richardson plays the Kevin Spacey role. Francis Urquhart has a disarming smile that makes him seem more warm than Spacey’s Frank Underwood. Don’t be fooled!

The original House of Cards has a few Holmes ties. Female lead Susannah Harker appeared opposite Charlton Heston in the TV version of Crucifer of Blood, a modified version of The Sign of the Four.

She was also the client in Jeremy Brett’s version of The Adventure of the Dying Detective. Also, Colin Jeavons was Brett’s Inspector Lestrade. But it is Richardson’s brief tenure as Sherlock Holmes that we will look at now.

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Why We Keep Weaving These Webs

Monday, March 24, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 14 comments

My buddy Gabe and I, when we first met almost two decades ago, we knew — man, we knew our stuff was better (or was going to be better) than just about anything out there. It was the haughty arrogance of youth and ego, plus the fact that we just hadn’t read nearly as much of what was out there as we have now.

Consider, too, the impressions we’d formed in our teen years of what was most prevalent in the various popular-media streams: the (much smaller) fantasy book aisle was dominated by Terry Brooks and many lesser Tolkien imitators churning out derivative high-fantasy formula. Comics were still stuck in stunted-development adolescence, just on the cusp of the revolution when writers like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman would kick that medium in its juvenile ass. Films were mostly sci-fi knockoffs of Star Wars or B-grade fantasy with special-effects budgets so meager they wouldn’t fund a single episode of a typical SyFy TV show. And television animated fantasy didn’t aspire much beyond Hanna-Barbera cartoons and He-Man.

In short, based on that narrow and selective assessment, any cocksure young tale-weaver could survey that crop and think, “I can do better than that.” But we weren’t the only Gen Xers who nursed such thoughts. Many others could also do better, and they have.

With our generation, speculative fiction has entered into what seems a golden age, borne out in all those mediums — books, comics, film, television (and add another medium that was just emerging from its nascent stages when we entered the fray: video games). Individuals with tastes and perceptions kindred to our own are drawing on the best of the past like never before, fusing with modern sensibilities what they mine from those rich veins to create some of the finest work the genre has ever seen.

And they’ve infiltrated all levels of the creative business. When I watch old He-Man and She-Ra reruns with my kids, I get the impression that those writers were just lazily phoning it in for a paycheck and couldn’t give a damn about the words they were putting to paper or the stories they were slapping together. Contrast that with the short-lived He-Man relaunch (2002-2004). It wasn’t a stand-out show by any means, but it was heads above virtually anything that cynically aired in the early ‘80s to sell us toys from Mattel and Kenner and Hasbro. Yeah, that particular corner of the market still exists to sell toys — to our kids and grandkids now — but the people who are creating the product were kids like Gabe and me, who thought, “Man, if I could have a job writing that show, I would make it so cool.” And they do have those jobs, and they are.

So where does that leave us, web-weavers in a surfeit of webs?

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New Treasures: Cthulhu Britannica: Shadows Over Scotland by Stuart Boon

Sunday, March 23, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Call of Cthulhu remains one of my favorite role playing games, despite the fact that I haven’t played it in… woof. Let’s say nearly 25 years.

Part of it, I think, is simple fondness for the source material, H.P. Lovecraft’s marvelously rich and creepy Cthulhu Mythos. But just as much stems from an appreciation for the enormously inventive adventures and supplemental material published for the game over the years, since it first debuted in a handsome box set from Chaosium in 1981.

Sure, I’d love to play CoC again. But until I find the time (and a group to play with), I’m quite content to read the best new releases. Because Call of Cthulhu continues to draw fabulously talented creators and artists and, unlike most RPGs, its adventures are highly readable all on their own.

Take the new Cthulhu Britannica line from Cubicle Seven, for example, which transplants Lovecraft’s horrors to the green and pleasant land of England. So far, there have been four volumes: the Cthulhu Britannica core book by Mike Mason (2009); Avalon: The Somerset Sourcebook by Paul Wade-Williams (2010); Folklore by Stuart Boon, James Desborough, and Gareth Hanrahan (December 2012); and the first hardcover volume, Stuart Boon’s Shadows over Scotland.

(That’s not even including the crazy-ambitious, Kickstarter-funded Cthulhu Britannica: London Boxed Set by Dominic McDowall, which rivals the legendary boxed set Horror on the Orient Express. The London Boxed Set raised £90,412 on a £15,000 goal and will include three books, four large full-color maps, and numerous handouts. The Kickstarter closed on December 12 and the set is scheduled for delivery in August.)

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Vintage Treasures: Rogers’ Rangers by John Silbersack

Sunday, March 23, 2014 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

If you know the name John Silbersack, it’s likely for his many significant accomplishments as a publisher and literary agent.

Silbersack has founded no less than six different imprints, including ROC Books at Penguin, Warner Aspect, and Harper Prism. Over a decade ago, he walked away from publishing and decided to become an agent, partnering with Trident Media Group, where he now reps some of the biggest names in the industry, including Barb & J.C. Hendee, Guy Gavriel Kay, E. E. Knight, William F. Nolan, David Schow, Paul Park, and the Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert estates.

But back in the early 80s, this publishing Renaissance man also tried his hand at writing and editing. With Victoria Schochet, he edited the first four volumes of The Berkley Showcase (1980 – 1982), an anthology of science fiction and fantasy that presented original work from Berkley authors. It lasted five volumes and published a fabulous range of fiction from Orson Scott Card, R A Lafferty, Pat Cadigan, John Kessel, Howard Waldrop, Connie Willis, Thomas M Disch, Marge Piercy, Eric Van Lustbader, and many others.

All very interesting. But what we want to talk about today is Silbersack’s sole novel: Rogers’ Rangers, a sequel to the original Buck Rogers novel, published by Ace Books in 1983, which I found in a collection of SF books from the 1980s I acquired two months ago.

Back in 1979, Glen A. Larson, the producer behind the original incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, launched a new SF TV show for Universal: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, starring Gil Gerard and Erin Gray (and the voice of Mel Blanc as Twiki, Buck’s robot companion.) The series was a hit, and I vividly remember seeing the pilot episode in theaters, shortly before the TV version launched.

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Politics and Fantasy Make Strange Bedfellows

Sunday, March 23, 2014 Derek Kunsken Comments 7 comments

In January, both M. Harold Page and I wrote posts about politics in fantasy literature. While we came at the topic from different points, I think we narrowed in on the same conclusion. I quote from Page’s post:

Of all the genres, Fantasy must be the worst possible channel for the politically minded author. They simply can’t be heard over that clash of steel and the roar of dragons…

Really enjoyed and appreciated his post. And I do take his point – escapism is great fun and entertaining. But ultimately escape and make believe can only go so far, and at other times and places we will have other needs, other reasons to want to read. Something that touches us inside.

The reason I’m coming back to this topic, perhaps more convinced than I was before of this serious liability in fantasy, is that I’ve just read Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction. I’d mentioned the anthology in my post as something I was looking forward to reading.

Now that I have, maybe I’m having one of those stumbling-upon-a-watch-in-the-heath moments, because, for the life of me, I can’t see how fantasy could have done even a fraction of what this anthology seems to have accomplished effortlessly. A few examples will make this clear.

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