Black Gate – Page 965 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

SFWA Announces the 2013 Nebula Award Nominations

Tuesday, February 25, 2014 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

Happy day! The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) announced the nominees for the 2013 Nebula Awards today.

So many novels! Last year, there were only six nominated; this year there are eight. Yowsah. Does that mean there were 33% more awesome novels published this year? Probably. That’s the most logical explanation.

Remember to vote! These awards count on your input to pick the winner. Ha-ha — except they don’t, of course. Only active members of SFWA can vote. Which they do, when they’re not loudly denying there’s harassment of women writers or spending all their time actually harassing women writers. Let’s hope the spectacle of the awards puts all the recent ugliness behind us — at least until the inevitable next blow up.

This year’s nominees are:

Novel

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (Morrow)
Fire with Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
Hild, Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit)
The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island)
A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (Harper)

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Ancient Worlds: Argonauts Assemble!

Tuesday, February 25, 2014 Elizabeth Cady Comments 3 comments

"Ok, we've got a tank, two clerics, a bard, a couple of light fighters... did anyone roll a mage?" "No worries, we're picking her up in Colchis." — “Ok, we’ve got a tank, two clerics, a bard, a couple of light fighters… did anyone roll a mage?”
“No worries, we’re picking her up in Colchis.”

So you’ve been given an impossible task by a king, primarily for the purpose of getting rid of you. What do you do first?

Well, to be honest, I would move to a new kingdom, but that’s why I’m not a Greek hero.

Jason, on the other hand, set out to assemble a team of the greatest heroes Greece had to offer. Not all of these are memorable: if you’ve heard of Phlias of Araethyrea, for example, you’re a bigger mythology geek than I am.

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For Want of a Dragon… The Dragon Lord by David Drake

Tuesday, February 25, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 5 comments

One of the greatest incentives to start blogging about S&S was that it would force me to read more.

For the three or four years before I started my blog, I was reading only a dozen or so books a year, instead of the fifty to sixty I had in the past. If I wanted to have something to write about, I would actually have to read. That part’s worked out very well for me.

Coupled with that was the hope of getting to all those books I’d bought and been meaning to read for years — even decades in a few cases. I would leave used book stores with shopping bags full of books, heady with plans to read them all some day. A lot of the S&S books I hoped to blog about had been in those bags.

One was The Dragon Lord, David Drake’s tale of an Irish adventurer in the days of King Arthur. Last week, after ten or fifteen years, I pulled it from its dusty purgatory on the bookshelf.

According to the ISFDB, Drake has written seventy novels and over a dozen collections of stories. I’ve read my share of his fiction over the years, including the early Hammer’s Slammers stories and the horror collection From the Heart of Darkness. A few years ago, I read and reviewed his stories about Vettius, a legate in the late Roman Empire. While I thoroughly enjoyed those stories, I had no plans to read Drake again any time soon.

For me to choose to read a David Drake book at this point means that something hooked me. It’s nothing against Drake, but at my age I’ve got stacks of other books picked out. I need a reason to pick out a back row book. In the case of The Dragon Lord, the impetus was a picture from Wayne Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy.

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Blogging Arak 14: Arak Has a Fling with Fate (Literally)

Tuesday, February 25, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 2 comments

Satyricus is offstage sleeping for most of this issue, so we don’t get any comic-relief banter between that randy old goat and Arak. That’s as it should be, though, because this episode delivers a private and transformative event in Arak’s life. This is the issue where Arak comes into his own as a character. (Also, he scores — with one of the Fates, no less! ––which would have been awkward with a satyr on hand.)

Up until now, Arak has been a confused man lacking in self-identity. His tribe was wiped out when he was a boy. He was raised into adulthood by Vikings. Now he wanders in a land where everyone calls him a heathen “red devil.” As he interacts with more “civilized” people, he often displays a stronger innate core of morality and honor than those around him — ironically, and despite his Viking past. He is intelligent, resourceful, but quick to anger when he has been wronged or when he sees someone else wronged (the latter point making him more of a traditional hero than many of his anti-hero barbarian counterparts in fiction).

He is a man who is searching, on an existential quest about the very nature of the universe and his place in it. You see, he assumes his people’s god He-No died with his people, but he was always told he was the son of He-No — the son of Thunder. He has learned in his journeys that there are other thunder gods: Thor, Zeus, Jupiter, and the Christian deity who is said to be the god and maker of everything. Are all these thunder gods but names for one god, he wonders — and, if so, is he somehow a son to all of them? This haunting question has been further compounded by earlier events: his defeat of the sea serpent (back in issue 1) by stabbing it with a heavy metal cross that was subsequently struck by lightning. (Was it the god of the cross or his own father of the thunder who intervened?) Finding his own face carved next to that of Hercules, a Greek hero of old, atop Mount Olympus, only to witness the stone faces cleaved in two by a bolt of lightning. And now, he has discovered a tapestry portraying his life up until now, hung deep in the caves that honeycomb Mount Athos.

Answers to some of these questions will be given in the pages of this issue…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in January

Tuesday, February 25, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

We dove into the politics of fantasy in January, with articles from M Harold Page (“Why Medieval Fantasy is not Inherently Conservative,”) and Derek Kunsken (“Is Fantasy Inherently not Political?”) — both of which cracked the Top Five for the month.

We didn’t steer clear of controversy on the rest of the chart, either. Nick Ozment dissected the latest Peter Jackson pic, with a little help from friends Frederic S. Durbin and Gabe Dybing, in “Inkjetlings Round eTable: Jackson’s Desolation of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.”

Rounding out the Top Five for the month were our look at the economics of labeling the film 47 Ronin an early flop, and Joe Bonadonna’s detailed review of The Sacred Band by Janet Morris and Chris Morris.

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in January were:

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NBC’s Heroes to Return in 2015

Monday, February 24, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

I enjoyed the first season of NBC’s superhero drama Heroes — quite a bit, actually. It was smart and fun, and had a genuinely original take on the ensemble superhero idea. It didn’t hurt that it had a very talented and diverse cast, either, including Hayden Panettiere, Ali Larter, Masi Oka, George Takei, and Zachary Quinto as the sinister supervillian Sylar. Now, I haven’t seen Seasons 2 through 4. I understand the cast expanded a bit — adding Kristen Bell, Zeljko Ivanek, and Malcolm McDowell, among others — and, as usual, the show received a lot of fan criticism for losing its way. Fans. They love you, until they don’t.

Regardless, I was surprised and pleased to read on the CNN website this morning that NBC is bringing back Heroes next year:

NBC helped kickstart the superhero TV trend in 2006 with Heroes, an X-Men-ish action-drama about a group of people with superhuman powers. Now the network is bringing back the show for a 13-episode event series to air in 2015. Original series creator Tim Kring is on board to run the show. Titled Heroes Reborn, the project is billed as a stand-alone story; the characters have not yet been announced.

The announcement has already generated buzz and backlash in the fan press. NBC has also announced they will introduce the new characters and storylines in a digital series before the mini-series airs. Until then, enjoy the 20-second teaser promo that ran during Olympics coverage.

New Treasures: A Turn of Light by Julie E. Czerneda

Monday, February 24, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I managed to miss A Turn of Light when it was released in trade paperback last March. A pity, as I’ve tried to keep up on the novels of Julie E. Czerneda ever since her first, A Thousand Words for Stranger, landed at my door back in 1997. The fact that she’s a fellow Canadian just adds an extra layer of awesome.

In the 17 years since her debut, Julie has published no less than four highly regarded science fiction trilogies: Trade Pact, Stratification, Species Imperative, and Web Shifters. But with her latest, she turns to epic fantasy for the first time and I’m keenly interested in seeing where she’ll take the genre.

The pastoral valley of Marrowdell is home to a small pioneer settlement of refugees, lush fields of grain, enigmatic house toads — and Jenn Nalynn, the miller’s daughter. Life here is full of laughter and peace, as well as hard work, and no one bothers overmuch about the outside world. Except Jenn Nalynn. Jenn longs to travel, to seek what’s missing in her life. Not that she’s sure what that is, but since this summer began, she’s felt a strange and powerful yearning. She’s certain she’ll find what she needs, if only she can leave the valley.

But she must not. Jenn is turn-born and cursed, born by the light of two worlds and bound to both. For the valley is more than it seems. Long ago, a cataclysm of misused power pinned Marrowdell to the Verge, a place of wild magic, home to dragons and even stranger creatures. Should Jenn step beyond Marrowdell, she will pull the worlds asunder. To prevent this, powers from the Verge have sent a guard to watch over her, a disgraced dragon Jenn knows as Wisp, her invisible playmate. Wisp’s duty is to keep Jenn in Marrowdell. By love, if he can. By her death, if he must.

But time is running out. What Jenn unknowingly feels is the rise of the Verge’s magic within her, a magic that will threaten her and those she loves. Worse, this summer will end with a Great Turn, and strangers seeking power at any cost have come to Marrowdell to try to force an opening into the Verge, to the ruin of all.

A Turn of Light, the first in the Night’s Edge series, will be published by DAW on March 4th. It is 822 pages, priced at $8.99 for the paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. The second volume, A Play of Shadow, is scheduled to be released in November. Check out her website for fresh updates.

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in January

Sunday, February 23, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Mark Rigney’s “The Find,” part of his perennially popular Tales of Gemen series, hit the top of the fiction charts this month. “The Find” is actually Part II of the series, which began with “The Trade,” which Tangent Online called a “Marvelous tale. Can’t wait for the next part.”

Next on the list was E.E. Knight’s sword & sorcery epic “The Terror of the Vale,” the second in the Blue Pilgrim sequence, following “That of the Pit.” Third was Martha Wells’ complete novel, the Nebula nominee The Death of the Necromancer. Making its debut on the list was Sword Sisters by Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, the exciting new sword & sorcery novel from our friends at Rogue Blades Entertainment. It’s great to see RBE publishing novels again — and you can check it out right here.

Rounding out the Top Five was Joe Bonadonna’s fast-paced adventure “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum.” Also making the list were exciting stories by Dave Gross, Mike Allen, Vaughn Heppner, Jamie McEwan, Aaron Bradford Starr, Janet Morris and Chris Morris, Jason E. Thummel, David C. Smith, Ryan Harvey, Michael Shea, Harry Connolly, John C. Hocking, and Alex Kreis.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. All last year we presented an original short story or novella from the best writers in the industry every week, all completely free. Here are the Top Twenty most-read stories in January:

“The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney
“The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
The Death of the Necromancer, a complete novel by Martha Wells
An excerpt from Sword Sisters, by Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe
“The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
An excerpt from Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos, by Dave Gross
An excerpt from The Black Fire Concerto, by Mike Allen
“Draugr Stonemaker,” by Vaughn Heppner
“Falling Castles,” by Jamie McEwan
“The Sealord’s Successor,” by Aaron Bradford Starr

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Leigh Brackett, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Sunday, February 23, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

And so we come to the end of our extended journey through Gygax’s Appendix N, at the hands of our intrepid guides Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode at Tor.com.

We haven’t always agreed with the opinions of Messieurs Callahan and Knode. But that’s okay. More than okay, really… what’s the point of following along with a literary survey if we don’t get to pound the table occasionally and shout “You lunkheads!” Really, the primary pleasure we old-timers get these days is disagreeing with self-proclaimed experts. Loudly, and at length.

But overall I think Callahan and Knode, the Lewis and Clark of Appendix N, have done a fine job. They’ve surveyed every entry in Gary Gygax’s original list of authors who influenced Dungeons and Dragons, just as they promised when they set out nine months ago. Along the way, they’ve shared their opinions — sometimes as informed experts, sometimes as newbies coming to the work of the masters for the first time.

And at every stop, they’ve been honest with us on whether or not the books spoke to them as modern readers. I don’t think we can ask for anything more than that.

I’m going to miss following along with Tim and Mordicai. Whether I agreed with them or not — nodding along with “Yup, yer darn tootin’,” or banging my head on the table and cursing every reader born after 1990 — they were always entertaining, enlightening, and frequently very funny.

But we still have two last articles to examine: Mordicai’s appreciation of the grand old lady of science fantasy, Leigh Brackett, and Mordicai and Tim’s wrap-up of the entire series, their salute to J.R.R. Tolkien. Let’s see if these last two pieces bring more nodding, or table-banging.

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Vintage Treasures: The Trouble With Tycho by Clifford D. Simak / Bring Back Yesterday by A. Bertram Chandler

Sunday, February 23, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

While we’re on the topic of my favorite Ace Doubles (trust me, we were), I should say a thing or two about Clifford D. Simak’s The Trouble With Tycho. Simak is not well remembered today. None of his 28 novels are in print (unless you count low-end Kindle or POD editions from specialty publishers), and he had something of a rep as a SF midlister for much of his career. But he remains one of my all-time favorite SF writers. He won three Hugos: for his 1963 novel Way Station, for the short story “Grotto of the Dancing Deer” (1980), and his 1959 masterpiece “The Big Front Yard,” perhaps the most perfect SF story ever written. He also won a Nebula (for “Grotto”).

Simak penned many fine SF adventure-mysteries. One of the first I came across was The Trouble With Tycho, the tale of a haunted crater on the moon and the desperate space miners who try to plumb its secrets. It was part of a 1961 Ace Double, with a cover by John Schoenherr and paired with A. Bertram Chandler’s Bring Back Yesterday. Here’s the blurb from the first page.

No Second Chance on the Moon

Prospecting on the Moon was pretty grim and un-rewarding. With no water, no oxygen, and almost no valuable ores, it was one helluva place to try and get rich quick. Only most of the would-be prospectors didn’t find this out until after they’d gotten there.

And Chris Jackson was no exception. He’d gotten the syndicate back home to put up the money for a moon rig and the passage out, and now he had to make good their faith in him. Had to make it on the Moon, even if it meant going into Tycho!

For Tycho was the one place on Luna where there were positive riches to be found — in salvage. The remains of three expeditions that had disappeared in Tycho would be perfectly preserved in that airless atmosphere, and the man who could get to them — and get out again alive — would have his fortune made.

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