Black Gate – Page 967 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Monthly Short Story Roundup – February

Tuesday, March 11, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 2 comments

So February’s come and gone, a bunch of new stories have been published, and some were very good. With five stories from five different authors, it’d be an exciting month if I loved all of them, but at least there were more hits than misses.

Let’s start with the February issue of Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine. It’s Issue #25 and first of the magazine’s third year of publication. That’s over fifty stories published — fifty new works of heroic fiction out there for free! Lots of writers are getting to see their first published stories — some good, some fair, some poor — out in front of eyeballs and in position to get feedback.

Even if I sound like a broken record every month (Dad, what’s a record?), I can’t urge everybody enough to check this and the other web ‘zines out and let the editors and writers know what you think. This is how the genre will continue to grow and evolve. As readers, we can do our part by supporting these magazines and these writers.

Issue #25, is equal bits weak and and strong. First, the weak: “The Wedding Gift” by Neil W. Howell. It’s a story of the moments around the arrivals at the church of a royal bride and a royal groom, told from the perspectives of several different observers. There are the war veterans now serving as guards outside the church. Then there’s the embittered mother of the bride, a disappointed and defeated queen.

They and others weigh in on the events that have led to the wedding, which is really only a plan to end a generation-long war and unite two kingdoms in peace. Into this hopeful moment comes a terror that may or may not be an accident and leads to unforeseen conclusions.

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Jon Sprunk’s Blood and Iron, Volume One of The Book of the Black Earth, on Sale Today

Tuesday, March 11, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jon Sprunk’s highly anticipated Blood and Iron, the first book in his new series, The Book of the Black Earth, finally goes on sale today. We gave you the scoop on the book last month; last week Jon peeled back the curtain on the book’s origins in a guest post at Fantastical Imaginations.

The Book of the Black Earth series is set in the same secondary world as my Shadow Saga, but in a different region far to the east of Caim’s adventures. It follows three people as they struggle for freedom in an ancient land called Akeshia, where magic is worshipped and powerful God-Kings (and –Queens) hold the power of life and death over a vast race of people.

Horace is a shipbuilder and sailor who embarks on a Great Crusade for his country, but winds up shipwrecked on the shores of his enemy. Taken captive and made a slave, he discovers a hidden talent for sorcery, and thereby comes of the attention of the local ruling queen. Alyra is a slave. As one of the queen’s handmaidens, she is lovely, intelligent, and obedient. She is also a spy in the service of a foreign government, sent to turn the greedy eyes of the Akeshians away from her homeland. Jirom is a former mercenary turned gladiator. Dragooned into the queen’s army, he joins a group of subversive slaves who crave freedom…

One of the things I really wanted to tackle in this series was an original magic system. I played around with a few concepts until I hit on one that fit my world and my story. It plays on the basic “elemental” magic (earth, air, fire, and water) with a few twists of my own.

Jon Sprunk is the author of the Shadow Saga (Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure, and Shadow’s Master) and a mentor at the Seton Hill University fiction writing program. He is a regular blogger for Black Gate. Blood and Iron was published by Pyr Books on March 11, 2014. It is 445 pages and is available in trade paperback for $18.00 ($11.00 for the digital version). Learn more at Pyr Books or read our exclusive excerpt here.

Weird of Oz on the Road: The Monsters in My Hotel Room

Tuesday, March 11, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 0 Comment

I’m posting this from a room in a Microtel Inn, my home for the next couple days.

I’m here as one of the presenters at a conference for young writers and artists. During the day, I’ll be teaching a class to grade-school students on how to make the monsters and mythical creatures in their fiction more believable. In the evening, well, I’ll mostly be here in this room, more than a hundred miles from home. I’ll be missing my wife and kids terribly, but — let’s be honest — not entirely without appreciating a temporary reprieve from the myriad demands of home. As always, I start out with inflated ideas of just how much work I’ll be able to get done without interruption or distraction. Which is my intent — I’ve brought work projects and some freelance editing to tackle.

But I can’t do that the whole time I’m holed up here in this room. So of course I grabbed a few books. Five, it looks like (they always seem to multiply as I pack my various and sundry bags and make my way out the door).

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To Hear the Lamentations of Their Women (at the Auction)

Monday, March 10, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Well, I survived the Spring Auction at Games Plus.

Not just survived, but triumphed. I brought home a fabulous assortment of treasures old and new, including classic titles from Task Force Games, Metagaming, Avalon Hill, FASA, and dozens of others. Overall, I carted home four boxes of games.

Not a bad haul, I happily told Alice. She wasn’t quite as happy as I was. Not only did I go a bit over budget (say, by about three boxes), but I have nowhere to put them. So much negativity and just when I finished crushing my enemies and driving them before me.

Well, I’ll worry about all that later. Right now, I’m enjoying my sweet gaming loot. In the boxes somewhere are copies of Talisman (3rd Edition), TSR’s Top Secret, several Earthdawn supplements, assorted expansions for Fantasy Flight’s Descent, Smallworld, Cutthroat Caverns, and lots more. I even found a reasonably priced copy of Earth Reborn — how lucky was that?

Always a delight to find some items on my want list. But at the moment I’m most intrigued with the surprises — the games I didn’t even know existed until they showed up on the auction block. They include a gorgeous pair of deck building games from Privateer Press, both called High Command for some reason (Hordes: High Command and Warmachine: High Command. Why? Who knows), and the oddity at left: Starship Merchants. One copy came up for auction, and that cover art spoke to me. It said, Take me home. And I said, Yes sir. Ten bucks later, it was mine. Looks like a neato game, too.

Did you know about this game? I didn’t. According to Board Game Geek, Starship Merchants was designed by Joe Huber and Thomas Lehmann, and published by Toy Vault in 2012. New copies retail for $34.99; I bought a slightly used copy in beautiful shape for 10 bucks.

When I have a few minutes, I’ll arrange some of the more interesting titles I brought home in a big pile and take some pics for posterity (like I did last year, the year before, and Spring 2012). But first, I’ll report here on the best surprises. Stay tuned.

The Novels of Michael Shea: The Extra

Monday, March 10, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

We’re continuing our look at the career of Michael Shea, who died last week, leaving behind a legacy of underappreciated novels. We started with his Sword & Sorcery classic Nifft the Lean (1983) and his dark fantasy In Yana, the Touch of Undying (1985).

Now we turn to something more recent, the first of a pair of novels that Locus Online called “dark, satirical novels about the movie industry.” The Extra arrived unexpectedly in hardcover in 2010, and when I first saw it I remember wondering if this was the same Michael Shea – it looked more like a biotech thriller than the kind of moody, cutting edge fantasy we’d come to expect from him. But, as Locus noted, there was a sharp satirical edge to this novel of a murderous, out-of-control Hollywood:

Producer Val Margolian has found the motherlode of box-office gold with his new “live-death” films whose villains are extremely sophisticated, electronically controlled mechanical monsters. To give these live-action disaster films greater realism, he employs huge casts of extras, in addition to the stars. The large number of extras is important, because very few of them will survive the shoot.

It’s all perfectly legal, with training for the extras and long, detailed contracts indemnifying the film company against liability for the extras’ injury or death. But why would anyone be crazy enough to risk his or her life to be an extra in such a potentially deadly situation?

The extras do it because if they survive they’ll be paid handsomely, and they can make even more if they destroy any of the animatronic monsters trying to stomp, chew, fry, or otherwise kill them. If they earn enough, they can move out of the Zoo — the vast slum that most of L.A. has become. They’re fighting for a chance at a reasonable life. But first, they have to survive…

The Extra was followed three years later by Attack on Sunrise, the second book in the Extra Trilogy. It was also set in a future Southern California, this time featuring a reality TV series based on the invasion of a small bankrupt town by murderous robot wasps. We’ll cover that one in our next installment.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes

Monday, March 10, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 14 comments

Me? Oh, why, thank you for asking. I’ve been into Sherlock Holmes since the early eighties. Columnist, contributor, reviewer, short story writer, screenwriter, newsletter editor, website creator: I’ve found many ways to express my Holmes geekiness.

I used to run a Holmes On Screen website, which I dropped just before the first Robert Downey, Jr. movie: how’s that for timing? Swing by www.SolarPons.com to see my (not one, but) two free, online newsletters inspired by the world’s first private consulting detective.

If you have a pulse, you may have noticed that Sherlock Holmes is rather popular these days. In the mid-eighties, the British TV series starring Jeremy Brett had revived interest in the detective. That interest waned as Brett’s health deteriorated and the series quality fell off towards the end. A few made-for-television movies, including ones starring Matthew Frewer (that Max Headroom guy), Richard Roxburgh and Rupert Everett, didn’t generate much excitement. Sherlock Holmes and the Vengeance of Dracula, once the hottest script in Hollywood, lost its luster and became a dead property. Sherlock Holmes was as viable as Martin Hewitt.* “Who,” you say? Exactly.

Then, on Christmas Day, 2009, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes opened and grossed over a half a billion dollars worldwide. A sequel did even better here and abroad. Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat, deciding to expand beyond Doctor Who, grabbed Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, put them in modern day London and helped make Sherlock Holmes even more popular than during the stories’ initial run with their simply titled Sherlock.

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Future Treasures: Mary Robinette Kowal and Blake Hausladen Read from Upcoming Books at Capricon

Monday, March 10, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Mary Robinette Kowal reads from Valour and Vanity at Capricon 2014 — Mary Robinette Kowal reads from **Valour and Vanity** at Capricon 2014

There are lots of reasons to attend conventions. To meet your favorite authors, to network with fellow writers and editors, to browse in the Dealer’s Room (yeah!), to check out the Art Show, to attend entertaining panels.

But the thing I find most delightful these days is author readings. There’s something about hearing beloved characters brought to life right in front of you by the author herself that’s truly magical. In just the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to attend readings by Peter S. Beagle, Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Patty Templeton, C.S.E. Cooney, Martha Wells, Fredric Durbin, and Steven Erikson, among many others.

It’s also a great way to discover new writers. I make it a priority to attend as many readings as I can by writers I’m not familiar with. And let me tell you, that’s really paid off — I’ve discovered some of my favorite new writers because I had an empty 30 minute slot between the Firefly panel and the midnight showing of Destroy All Monsters. Over the decades, that’s included people like Charles Saunders, N. K. Jemisin, Mark Sumner, Bradley Beaulieu, Alex Bledsoe, and — believe it or not — George R.R. Martin.

Take my advice: if you find yourself in a place where professional storytellers are willing to stand before you and entertain you, take advantage of it. You won’t be sorry. You can attend that anime panel next year.

A few weeks ago, I was at Capricon 34 in Wheeling, Illinois, with a few other Black Gate staffers, including Patty Templeton and Steven Silver. We didn’t have a booth — we haven’t bothered with one since the print version of the magazine died in 2011 — and I’m still getting used to being able to wander without being tied to the Dealer’s Room. I didn’t get to attend everything I wanted to — I missed Wesley Chu’s Saturday morning reading because I was mailing back issue orders at the post office — but I did catch some terrific panels. And, not too surprisingly, the most delightful and entertaining events at the convention were three readings, from Hugo-Award Winning author Mary Robinette Kowal, Strange Horizons editor Mary Anne Mohanraj, and self-published writer Blake Hausladen.

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Why Amazon Lists Books For Over $20 Million

Sunday, March 9, 2014 John ONeill Comments 15 comments

If you’ve been buying used and rare books online for any period of time, I’m certain you’ve run into strange pricing anomalies. I’m not just talking about George R.R. Martin’s paperback collection Sandkings listed for $2,000 at Amazon, or Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said for $7,700 (although there’s plenty anomalous about those prices, as anyone with a copy will tell you.)

No, I’m talking about the instances where prices for books inexplicably spiral out of control, as UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen noted on his blog:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly … Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping)… the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random – suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

Intrigued, Eisen began to track the prices.

I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

On the day we discovered the million dollar prices, the copy offered by bordeebook was 1.270589 times the price of the copy offered by profnath. And now the bordeebook copy was 1.270589 times profnath again. So clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price…

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Self-published Book Review: The Tragic Empire by Wil Radcliffe

Sunday, March 9, 2014 Donald Crankshaw Comments 0 Comment

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here.

Back when I reviewed the first Noggle Stones book, The Goblin’s Apprentice, I knew there was a sequel. Of course I could only review one book at a time and I figured I should start at the beginning. Though I really enjoyed the first volume, I didn’t want to review books in the same series two months in a row, so I couldn’t cover the second book right away. Now that it’s been a year, enough time has passed for me to take on the sequel.

The Tragic Empire takes place a few months after the events of the first book. Martin Manchester is settling in as the king of Willow Prairie, establishing alliances with the nearby realms of dwarves, ogres, and other folk. The goblin Bugbear serves as Manchester’s diplomat while pursuing his own investigations, with a particular interest in discovering what force was behind the Shadow Smith, the villainous mastermind of The Goblin’s Apprentice. To that end, he’s allowed himself to be thrown into an Áes Dána prison, in hopes of finding access to their archives, which contain works dating back to the Coranieid Empire. After a tricky escape and some fancy diplomacy, it seems that Bugbear may get what he wants, until the US Army attacks the Áes Dána.

Which answers one of the lingering questions of the first book. We saw what happened to the town of Willow Prairie when our world of 1899 merged with a world of ogres, goblins, and dwarves, but there was no indication of what happened to the rest of the world until now. Surely someone in Washington noticed all these strange people appearing from nowhere and decided to do something about it. War against the invaders would be an obvious option.

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New Treasures: Jalizar, City of Thieves by Umberto Pignatelli

Saturday, March 8, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

About a month ago, I wrote an enthusiastic review of Haven — The Free City, a complete fantasy city designed and published by now-defunct Gamelords way back in 1984. One of the things I mentioned is that detailed, usable, interesting city settings are relatively rare.

I thought I’d test that theory by hunting around for a more modern urban setting and taking it for a spin. Sure enough, they were a little sparse — a lot harder to find than another megadungeon, for sure. But there were a few. And the first to catch my eye was Jalizar, City of Thieves, a Savage Worlds setting very different from the player sanctuary of Haven. Jalizar promises danger and intrigue in spades, inviting players to don the cloak of thieves waging a righteous battle for profit and glory against a corrupt establishment.

Jalizar, City of Thieves, the Rotten Flower of the North, is revealed to your eyes in this book!

In its pages, you’ll learn the seedy ways of the Thieves’ Guild. You’ll smuggle goods into the city, fooling the Copper Helms, the corrupt city watch of Jalizar, vie for power with the Merchant Houses or, if you are really bold, venture into the dark Sewers of Jalizar where an age-old evil lurks undisturbed.

Twenty new Edges, new trappings and tweaks for the arcane backgrounds, an additional list of gear, and much more await you in this book! So sharpen your dagger, put on your black cloak, and step outside into the dark alleys of the City of Thieves!!

That’s a lot of exclamation points. Also, I’m not familiar with Savage Worlds and I don’t know what the heck “Twenty new Edges” means. Still, I like what I see. My copy arrived this week, and first impressions are excellent. The book is beautifully designed and the interior artwork is plentiful and top-notch. We’ll see if it holds up to a closer reading.

Jalizar, City of Thieves was written by Umberto Pignatelli and published by Gramel on October 1, 2013. It is a Sword and Sorcery Savage Worlds sourcebook for Beasts & Barbarians, whatever that means (but it sounds good). It is 199 pages, priced at $24.99 in paperback. It’s also available as a watermarked PDF at RPGNow for $10.54 (or $7.36, if you buy before March 16).