Black Gate – Page 974 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

When Is An Apocalypse Not an Apocalypse?

Friday, February 14, 2014 Violette Malan Comments 5 comments

Last week, I was talking about apocalyptic novels – both Fantasy and SF – that I have on my shelves, and once again I got some very interesting and stimulating commentary. There are quite a few recommendations in those comments – along with some great ideas – so I’d advise you to have a look.

I was a bit chagrined when one of the commenters mentioned Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969) as an example of post-apocalyptic SF. Like the other books I cited, this one is on my shelves, and as a big fan of his, I don’t know how I missed it. I’m going to talk about it, and about another of Zelazny’s novels, This Immortal (1965/66), but first, a little clarification.

One of the things we got into in the comments was exactly what we meant by “apocalypse” and “post-apocalyptic.” Now, as someone who not that long ago had a little rant about definitions, I probably should have been clearer about what I meant by those particular terms. Not that there was any name-calling or hair-pulling in last week’s comments. Just that I should have been more careful to follow my own advice.

Here’s my take on it: The existence of a precursor society is insufficient to make a story post-apocalyptic. An apocalyptic event brings about the “end of the world as we know it.” It should happen abruptly, not slowly over the course of time, as with the fall of the Roman Empire, or the disappearance of the civilization of the Caids in my own Dhulyn and Parno Novels. The new, post-apocalyptic society should be starting, effectively, from scratch. Maybe they’ve retained some “stuff” from the previous civilization, even some of the political or social ideas, but their world has changed in a way that can’t be changed back. The apocalyptic event can be natural or man-made – and I’d include magically created events in the latter category.

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The Return of Renner and Quist

Friday, February 14, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 1 comment

Samhain Publishing has just awakened Sleeping Bear, the second Renner and Quist adventure by Mark Rigney to see publication as an ebook. I discovered the series last year when the same publisher unearthed The Skates, a screwball quest involving tormented Victorian souls, a pair of magic ice skates, a ghostly hound, and dimensional time and space travel.

For the benefit of newcomers, Renner and Quist are an odd couple double act comprising a stuffy Unitarian minister and a rather crude, sometimes boorish, ex-linebacker and former private eye, who team to solve occult mysteries in Michigan. This quirky series is surprisingly literate fiction that calls to mind Douglas Adams’s delightful Dirk Gently detective series.

Rigney’s fiction is built around his characters’ faith (or their lack thereof) in the supernatural and preternatural. The series is thought-provoking as much as it is entertaining. This time out, Sleeping Bear finds Reverend Renner suffering through a crisis of faith as his attempts to minister at a local hospice have fallen on not just deaf ears, but unbelieving ones.

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Goth Chick News: Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll by Marilyn Manson – WTF?

Thursday, February 13, 2014 Sue Granquist Comments 1 comment

When I first heard about this, I thought Marilyn Manson was taking on one of my favorite computer games.

In case you don’t remember, Phantasmagoria is the 1995 interactive movie horror adventure game created by Sierra for the PC.

Made at the height of the “interactive movie” boom in the computer game industry, Phantasmagoria is notable not only for being one of the first games to use a live actor as an on-screen avatar, but also for being banned by some retailers due to its fairly graphic depiction of violence.

What I didn’t know until now is that Phantasmagoria is also a famous collection of Lewis Carroll’s poems, as well as the name for live horror shows involving projection onto smoke screens that were invented in the 18th century France.

Oh, and it’s also the title of Marilyn Manson’s first foray into film.

Yes, you read that right. Marilyn Manson, the horror rocker cum performance artist is the writer, producer, and director of this $4.2M venture that has been trying to get legs since 2005.

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A Year of Writing Franchise Fiction

Thursday, February 13, 2014 Comments 7 comments

...a chance to follow in the footsteps of my heroes Ronald Welch — …a chance to follow in the footsteps of my heroes Ronald Welch…

“Would you like to be paid to write Historical Adventure set in the Wars of the Roses?”

“Well I really wanted to write a literary novel set in the Wiemar Republic about Great War veterans coming to terms with their fractured lives, but: Yes.”

That’s roughly the Skype conversation I had a year ago, except I just made up the bit about the literary novel.

This was a chance to follow in the footsteps of my heroes Ronald Welch and Harold Lamb. It was difficult to say yes without sounding unprofessional (by swearing and whooping, e.g.).

I’m supposed to say something like: This ushered in a crazy year etc etc.

It wasn’t like that.

You just can’t write fiction day in day out if your life is Hollywood-crazy, perhaps with a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl jogging your arm. Almost all the professional writers I know have tranquil home lives and sane routines balancing work and social life.

Nor can you actually have much output if you lead a cinematic creative life, staggering to your keyboard after a booze-fueled night of carousing, then spending long hours angsting about your imagery.

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Future Treasures: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Thursday, February 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

When we covered The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 7 (back in May, if memory serves), publisher Night Shade was having serious issues and I mentioned, “Likely this will be the last one, at least in this format.” Which I considered a real tragedy, as editor Strahan has proven to have a real talent for picking out gems from the crowded and constantly changing genre short fiction market.

Fortunately, ace publisher Solaris has stepped into the void and rescued the series and Volume 8 will appear this year on schedule. They’ve changed the distinctive cover style and format — a shame, since the first seven volumes look impressive on my shelves — but hopefully they won’t mess with too much else.

Strahan has unveiled the table of contents at his website and it looks like another very impressive volume. As usual, he culls fiction from a wide range of industry markets, including traditional print mags — F&SF, Interzone, McSweeney’s, Asimov’s, Electric Velocipede, and even Twelve Tomorrows, the special SF issues of the MIT Technology Review — and top-tier online markets like Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Eclipse Online, Subterranean, Tor.com, and Strange Horizons.

He also draws stories from the biggest anthologies of the year, like Old Mars, Dangerous Women, Rags and Bones, Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, and An Aura of Familiarity.

Authors in this volume include Ian McDonald, Robert Reed, Eleanor Arnason, Ian R Macleod, Charlie Jane Anders, James Patrick Kelly, K J Parker, Lavie Tidhar, Richard Parks, Ted Chiang, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman, Greg Egan — and, as always, a few new talents whose names you may not yet recognize, but whom you may want to keep an eye on.

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New Treasures: Snowblind by Christopher Golden

Thursday, February 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I think I speak for the entire country when I say that this winter stinks.

Seriously. I grew up in Canada; I know cold, miserable winters. When I was five, I spent a year in northern Quebec, where it snowed in June and the winter was one constant snow storm. I remember I climbed the snowdrift by our driveway until I was able to step up onto the house, and my Dad came out and yelled at me to get off the roof. Now that’s a lot of snow.

But I can’t ever recall a winter as cold or as miserable as this one. Here in Chicago, the weathermen tell us we’re only a few inches away from a snowfall record and a few more sub-zero days away from the coldest winter on record.

The things that frighten each generation are very different. And it’s only our very best best horror writers who are so plugged into the national psyche that they know what frightens us before we know it ourselves. And after the winter of 2013-2014, I think we’ll all look back and appreciate just how brilliant Christopher Golden is and how he picked the right year to write a novel about a killer snow storm.

The small New England town of Coventry had weathered a thousand blizzards… but never one like this. Icy figures danced in the wind and gazed through children’s windows with soul-chilling eyes. People wandered into the whiteout and were never seen again. Families were torn apart, and the town would never be the same.

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Firefly, A Retrospective — Part 1

Wednesday, February 12, 2014 Jon Sprunk Comments 22 comments

When I think of the TV show Firefly, I often compare it in my mind to the original Star Trek series. I wonder if all the Star Trek movies and spin-offs through the decades would have ever occurred if that original show had only run a single season. Yes, I think Firefly is (was) that good. And over the next few weeks, I’m going to be re-watching the episodes and sharing with you because I think this show still has a lot to teach us.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it was a “western space opera” created by Joss Whedon, which aired in 2002. The series is set five-hundred years in the future, after Earth has become uninhabitable and mankind went out to find a new star system to call home.

The western vibe comes from the planets on the frontier, which are not so civilized and fancy as the high-tech core worlds. There was a war a few years before the show begins between the system government, the Alliance, and a handful of Independent worlds who wanted autonomy. The Alliance won. The comparisons to the American Civil War are many.

The show’s cast are the crew of a transport starship called Serenity, trying to scratch out a living on the edge of space.

The first episode, or pilot, came in two parts. Titled “Serenity,” it actually didn’t air until the very end of the season. Because this episode sets up so much of the story world and the relationships of its primary characters, I find this criminal. I’ve heard that Fox didn’t think this episode was suitable to open the series, and for that they should be flogged in public. I always insist on watching the episodes in the order they were originally intended. So here goes.

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Ares Magazine Kickstarter Succeeds!

Wednesday, February 12, 2014 Matthew Wuertz Comments 1 comment

Recently, I wrote about the Rebirth of Ares Magazine. Earlier this month, they wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising $26,185, or 105% of their goal.

Now, they’re moving forward to deliver their premiere issue in May. The issue will contain the complete two-player game War of the Worlds, designed by Bill Banks, and a nice mix of intriguing articles, including:

Asimov’s Last Gasp – A discussion on Robotics and Ethics
The Queen’s Guard – High Fantasy in the land of Hadera
BattleChrome – Mechs, Techs, and Wrecks
Sarita’s Gambit – Star Fury Fiction

along with three short stories, interviews, ads, and other content.

Ares is inspired by the classic Ares Magazine, published by SPI between 1980 and 1984. It included a complete SF or fantasy game in every issue, including Greg Costikyan’s classic Barbarian Kings and Citadel of Blood; The High Crusade, based on Poul Anderson’s 1960 novel of interstellar conquest on horseback; The Wreck of the B.S.M. Pandora; Nightmare House; The Omega War; and nearly a dozen others.

The issue will be 80 pages in full-size (8.5″ x 11″) format; future bi-monthly issues are already in the works. Keep up on the latest news on their website.

Congratulations, Ares!

Art of the Genre: The Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years

Wednesday, February 12, 2014 Scott Taylor Comments 32 comments

Artist Cynthia Sheppard from Lamentations doesn't make the list but who does? — Artist Cynthia Sheppard from Lamentations doesn’t make the list but who does?

The office here at Black Gate L.A. has never been quiet, it just isn’t who we are. But with the addition of new blogger James Maliszewski to the mix, it is downright loud. This change was made all the more punctuated today by the fact that our southern California drought was broken with a series of showers. As I didn’t want to get damp, I was forced to close the windows to my corner office, which usually provide some calming background noise from the crashing waves and calling gulls on Redondo Beach. Now closed in, and facing a deadline, I had to fight against the sound of a debate between Maliszewski and Ryan Harvey on who would best portray adventuring party characters in a film version of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Honestly, I would have cast our resilient secretary, Kandi, for the lead as she often times dyes her hair red when the mood strikes, but these two ‘A list’ diehards had no interest in my two cents. Therefore, I read over an email once more from our intrepid editor, John O’Neill, which I’d received the Friday before.

Taylor, I’m not paying you six figures to get a tan, so write me some numbers-generating copy!

Nice… Always the charmer that one.

Nonetheless, I flipped on my computer with my sexy desktop background of our very own Sue Granquist lounging around in her ‘Goth Chick’ black, white, and buckled finery and then bumped over to Microsoft Word. What to write? Well, how about a ‘Top 10’, since those seem to always create a buzz and get people to click down after the break.

Considering the Lamentations of the Flame Princess argument, and the just-passed 40th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, I decided on the ‘Top 10 RPG Artists of All-Time.” Yep, I think I’m qualified to take that one on, but just to discourage my own favoritism, I decided on a way to judge the list outside my own nostalgic mind. Now sure, the below rules have some level of interpretation on my end, but I do believe they hold water for overall impact on the industry.

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Monthly Short Story Roundup – January

Tuesday, February 11, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 4 comments

Well, it’s that time again, and here I am with another batch of new heroic fantasy and S&S short fiction reviews.

Nothing outside of Swords and Sorcery Magazine and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly caught my eye this past month and the stories they offered are the usual mixed bag, varying in quality from mid-range to very good. In a perfect world, some of these writers could make a living just writing short stories.

I love short stories. Growing up, a large part of my genre reading was made up of anthologies from brilliant editors like Lin Carter and Terry Carr. Their short (by contemporary standards) volumes introduced me to dozens of great authors, established and new.

In Lin Carter’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2, for example, the authors ranged from Tanith Lee and Fritz Leiber to Caradoc Cador and Paul Spenser. If one story stunk, there was a very good chance the next one wouldn’t. It was a rare anthology that had nothing to offer.

I’m not saying anything new when I say a ten- or fifteen-page story can be as powerful as a novel. I’d recommend Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” to anyone doubting that. As for excitement, how many five pound books can match the urgency and ferocity of Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”? Sure, there are times I enjoy being swept up in a six- or seven-hundred page book, but I’d mostly rather read twenty or thirty good individual tales. When the rare new heroic fiction story collection comes along, like Strahan and Anders’ Swords & Dark Magic or Davis and Saunders’ Griots, I don’t hesitate to toss it in my Amazon cart.

And that’s why I love the various magazines (and the work their editors do each issue). Just counting Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Swords and Sorcery Magazine, I’m guaranteed at least six new stories a month. In the months Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is published, that’s an additional four or more.

Over the course of a year, that’s a lot more stories than even Lin Carter edited together in the same amount of time. Which makes me a very happy fan.

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