Black Gate – Page 975 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Tunnel Out of Death by Jamil Nasir

Monday, January 27, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jamil Nasir wrote a number of intriguing paperbacks for Bantam Spectra over a decade ago, including The Higher Space (1996), Tower of Dreams (1999), and Distance Haze (2000) — see all three here. They were an interesting blend of science fiction of fantasy, asking Philip. K. Dick-like questions about dreams and the nature of reality (the cover tag for Distance Haze was “If dreams are doorways, where do they take us?”). And indeed, Tower of Dreams was nominated for the Philip. K. Dick Award, given annually to the best original paperback published in the US.

Nasir has been relatively quiet since 2000, publishing one new novel from Tor in 2008, The Houses of Time. But he bounced back last year with Tunnel Out of Death, a science fantasy about a private detective hired to find a literal lost soul…

Heath Ransom, former police psychic turned machine-enhanced “endovoyant” private investigator, is hired to find the consciousness of the rich and comatose Margaret Biel and return it to her body. Tracking her through the etheric world, he comes upon a strange and terrifying object that appears to be a tear in the very fabric of reality. He falls into it — and into an astonishing metaphysical shadow-play.

For Margaret is a pawn in a war between secret, ruthless government agencies and a nonhuman entity known only as “Amphibian.” Their battlefield is a multi-level reality unlike anything humankind has ever imagined. When Heath learns to move back and forth between two different versions of his life, and begins to realize that everyone around him may be a super-realistic android, that is only the beginning of a wholesale deconstruction of reality that threatens more than his sanity…

I have to admit, that’s one of the most original plot synopses I’ve read in the last year. I ordered a copy last week; my to-be-read pile is hopelessly backlogged, but if I get a chance to crack it open, I’ll report back here. Tunnel Out of Death was published May 7, 2013 by Tor Books. It is 304 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. So far, there is no paperback edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

“Beware the Man With the Stolen Soul”: Steve Ditko and Stalker

Monday, January 27, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 8 comments

Stalker #1 The first stop I made on my shopping expedition last Boxing Day was at my local neighbourhood comics store, which happens to be conveniently located two and a half blocks from my house. There, I found a deal in the back-issue bins: issues 1 to 4 of Stalker, a DC fantasy comic from the 70s. I’d vaguely heard of the title, but knew nothing about it. I thought I remembered hearing that it had good art, which I imagined perhaps meant work by somebody like Nestor Redondo or Ernie Chan. I was way off. In fact, the art was by the remarkable team of Steve Ditko and Wally Wood. As a result, it’s wonderful. And more than that: it’s truly weird fantasy art in every sense.

Ditko’s one of the most distinctive stylists in American comics. I’ve written before about his supreme accomplishment in fantasy, but Stalker’s an interesting work in its own right. Ditko creates a setting, a very specific world, and does it not by means of creating a consistent dress or coherent architectural style, but by imposing his own specific style and sense of geometric form upon the matter of the story. Wood, in turn, gives a sense of specificity and plausibility to the art, anchoring Ditko’s layouts with a sense of reality: trees, stone walls, suits of armour, all have enough subtle detail that you can feel their weight and mass. Yet at no point does he ever overwhelm Ditko’s pencils with his own style.

The writing, from a young Paul Levitz, is solid. The plot’s tight, fast-moving, and designed around good sword-and-sorcery set pieces. Still, I can’t help but see the book as primarily Ditko’s creation. He’s laid out the action with his usual flair for the expressionistic; he’s designed any number of strange variations on fantasy furnishings (castles, swords, temples, evil priests); and he’s also left certain things alone, drawing from a stock of archetypal medieval imagery so that you can’t help but focus on the weirdness of the main action. The result is not like any other fantasy art I’ve ever seen, but it feels perfectly right for the story.

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Last Chance to Win a Copy of M. Harold Page’s The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets

Monday, January 27, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

On January 7th, we announced a contest to win a copy of both of M. Harold Page’s exciting Scholar Knight novels: The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets. Here’s the description for the second, Blood in the Streets:

Jack shifted both hands to his blade. With an animal roar, he executed a ‘Murder Strike’, swinging the weapon like a hammer. The crossguard caught the Lancastrian where only mail protected the nape of his neck. There was a loud crack. A shock reverberated up the blade stinging Jack’s palms.

AD1455. The Yorkists are marching on London. What happens next is History… but Jack Rose must still live through it. Jack had planned to live quietly as a country gentleman while wooing the illusive Theodora, a fiery Greek lady of mysterious origin. Unfortunately, the price of keeping his land is following his lord to war. Now Jack must stop his men from getting themselves killed, survive lethal assassination attempts, win Theodora despite her fear of losing him, and, ultimately, pick up his greatsword and plunge into the first brutal battle of the Wars of the Roses.

In this standalone sequel to The Sword is Mightier, Jack wades through brawl, skirmish and melee, his fallen foes paving his path from scholar to knight.

How do you enter to win? Simple — just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com, using as the subject the name of the first Master Strike in the German School of Fencing (we’ll even give you a clue: it’s “Zornhau”), and we’ll enter you in the drawing.

Entries must be received by Friday, January 31, 2014. One lucky winner will win both books. The winner will be contacted by e-mail and books will be delivered in digital format.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Terms and conditions subject to change. Not valid where prohibited by law. Eat your vegetables. And good luck!

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in December

Sunday, January 26, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

E.E. Knight’s sword & sorcery epic “The Terror of the Vale” vaulted to the top of our Fiction list in December — doubtless buoyed by the publication of the first story in the Blue Pilgrim sequence, “That of the Pit,” right here on December 8th. We’re proud to be able to offer both stories to our readers for the first time.

Mark Rigney’s “The Find,” part of his perennially popular Tales of Gemen series, was in second place, followed by Vaughn Heppner’s brand new Lod story, “Draugr Stonemaker,” the sequel to “The Oracle of Gog” (Black Gate 15), “The Pit Slave,” and “The Serpent of Thep.”

Novel excerpts continue to be popular with discerning readers. Our exclusive excerpt from Mike Allen’s dark fantasy novel The Black Fire Concerto claimed fourth place; fifth was our generous slice from Dave Gross’s Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos.

Also making the list were exciting stories by Joe Bonadonna, Jason E. Thummel, John C. Hocking, Janet Morris and Chris Morris, Aaron Bradford Starr, Harry Connolly, Alex Kreis, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jamie McEwan, Peadar Ó Guilín, Judith Berman, and Howard Andrew Jones.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. All through 2013, 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 December:

“The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
“The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney
“Draugr Stonemaker,” by Vaughn Heppner
An excerpt from The Black Fire Concerto, by Mike Allen
An excerpt from Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos, by Dave Gross
“The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
“That of the Pit,” by E.E. Knight
An excerpt from Pathfinder Tales: Queen of Thorns, by Dave Gross
“The Duelist,” by Jason E. Thummel
“Vestments of Pestilence,” by John C. Hocking

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Voices in Fantasy Literature, Part II

Sunday, January 26, 2014 Derek Kunsken Comments 1 comment

I sometimes give writing workshops in the Ottawa area and mentor local writers. One piece of advice that I feel comes off as a broken record is that there is *so much* good short fiction out there, for readers to taste and for writers to learn from.

Not everyone is into short fiction. My formative reading experiences were novels and comic books, two media that lend themselves to very long arcs with exploratory digressions. Only after largely failing at two novels (consuming ten years of writing time), did I finally take the old science fiction advice: work my writing career up to novels through short fiction.

Although I didn’t appreciate it then, short stories really are their own medium, with conventions and beat structures that take a lot of time to internalize. I forced myself to read a lot of short fiction, from Year’s Best collections to Hemingway and other Nobel winners. I didn’t enjoy the form for about two years, until I stumbled upon an editorial taste that worked for me, and that happened to be Escapepod, and then Podcastle.

Consistently listening to several stories a week gave me such a broad view of the kinds of writing out there and what I liked and how the different forms connected to each other and what rules each played in, or broke, as the case may be. So, I’m a late convert to short fiction and I feel the missionary need at times to show people just how much range and quality is out there. I picked three stories I wanted to recommend to the world.

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Sony Shuts Down Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and Three Other MMOs

Sunday, January 26, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Sony Online Entertainment announced on Friday that it is cleaning house by shutting down four underperforming online games: the long-running Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the free-to-play Free Realms, the Star Wars game Clone Wars Adventures, and the dungeon crawler Wizardry Online.

Vanguard is the most well-known of the lot. Despite high expectations — it was created by key developers of the popular EverQuest — it had a disastrous launch in January 2007, winning Gamespy‘s “Biggest Disappointment” award (and winning “Least Fun”, “Most Desolate,” and “Lamest Launch” in the 2007 MMOWTF Awards). The launch destroyed developer Sigil Games, who reportedly gathered all 150 employees in the parking lot on May 14, 2007, where Director Andy Platter told them, “You’re all fired.” Vanguard was acquired that month by SOE, who have nurtured it for the past seven years. It will shut down on July 31.

The family-friendly Free Realms, developed in-house by SOE and released on April 29, 2009, was generally well reviewed, but never really found an audience. It will shut down permanently on March 31, 2014. The free-to-play Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures launched on September 15, 2010, but has recently been hemorrhaging players; it will shut down on March 31 as well.

I wasn’t even aware there was a Wizardry Online until I read heard Sony was shutting it down. Based on SirTech’s RPG classic, the free-to-play title was developed in Japan by Gamepot and released in the US and the EU less than a year ago, on January 30, 2013. Like the original game, death was permanent — highly unusual these days — and players weren’t thrilled by the old-school graphics, and it never really caught on outside Japan. It will shut down on July 31. Of all the games on the list, I’m most intrigued by this one (see the YouTube First Look produced by MMOHuts last year to see why) and may try it out before it’s gone.

Sony says it is shutting down these games “to refocus resources in other areas,” including PlanetSide 2, Magic: The Gathering – Tactics and DC Universe Online.

Magic, and Miracles: An Interview with Bruce McAllister

Saturday, January 25, 2014 Garrett Calcaterra Comments 1 comment

Bruce McAllister lives in idyllic old town Orange, California. Outside his 1914 craftsman-style home, wild parrots squawk as they fly overhead from sweet gum tree to palm tree to an aged church bell tower in the distance. Inside, the home is neat and sparsely furnished. The only semblance of clutter is in McAllister’s writing office, where the desk is smattered with a few sheets of loose-leaf paper, and where along the sidewall, piled on top of a fold-out table and in plastic bins beneath it, he keeps his cobble collection. These fossil-riddled rocks are from the Santiago Creek riverbed where he routinely walks with his dog Madge. Like the seashell collection he had as a boy — and which plays a prominent role in his newest novel, The Village Sang to the Sea: a Memoir of Magic — these cobbles are a reminder of the wonder in the world around us, “rationale mysticism,” as he calls it.

Similar to Brad Latimer, the protagonist in The Village Sang to the Sea, McAllister grew up in a military family and lived in Italy for a time. Like Brad, his hunchback teacher caught him writing a story one day and, rather than punish him, the teacher encouraged him.

When he was sixteen, McAllister became nettled with another teacher, this one back in the United States, who was overemphasizing the importance of symbolism in literature. In an act of annoyed defiance, McAllister wrote a now famous letter, which he sent to 150 authors, including the likes of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Fritz Leiber, wherein he asked their thoughts on symbolism in their work and whether it was ever purposeful. To his surprise, the vast majority of the authors wrote back. “It was a miracle they responded,” he says.

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Vintage Treasures: Gaslight Tales of Terror, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Saturday, January 25, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I don’t know much about British ghost story writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes. According to his entry at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, he produced ten novels and two dozen short story collections between 1959 and 2001, the year he died. That’s a heck of a lot of ghost stories.

I did know he was a prolific and important anthologist. He took over The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories from editor Robert Aickman with number nine in 1973, bringing the series to 20 volumes before it ended in 1984, and he edited six volumes of the Armada Monster Book between 1975 and 1981. He also produced five standalone horror anthologies with Fontana, including Cornish Tales of Terror (1970), Scottish Tales of Terror (1972), Welsh Tales of Terror (1973), and Tales of Terror from Outer Space (1975).

The last in the series was Gaslight Tales of Terror (1976), a marvelous mix of original and classic spooky tales. Here’s R., from his introduction:

Here are fourteen Gaslight Tales of Terror, including one or two oil lamps and a few guttering candles. With one exception all the stories have either a Victorian or Edwardian background… But although — if newspaper reports are to be believed — ghosts and other horrors have not been exorcised by the advent of space travel and colour television, one feels they were more at home during the reign of Queen Victoria. And I do mean at home: in pea-souper fogs, on gloomy streets where the lamp-lighter with his long pole trudged wearily from post to post, and a potential Jack the Ripper lurked in dark alleyways.

Eight tales are original to this volume, including contributions from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Roger Malisson, Dorothy K. Haynes, Rosemary Timperley, and a vampire tale from Chetwynd-Hayes himself.

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The Series Series: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

Friday, January 24, 2014 Sarah Avery Comments 0 Comment

Read this book. Just read it. Ignore the reviews that call Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling, or call the series that opens with The Bone Season the next Hunger Games. Most importantly, ignore the jacket copy, which spoils a big reveal that is best appreciated in a state of shocked astonishment alongside the protagonist’s own. For that matter, I give you leave to ignore everything about this review I am writing right now except the first sentence, which I am not abashed about reiterating: Read this book.

You’re still here? Okay, that’s cool, too.

If all the comparisons in the mainstream reviews are off the mark — and the ones I find bandied about online all are — then what is The Bone Season?

It’s the book you would get if Philip K. Dick decided to write about the wild Victorian occult scene that flourished under Madame Blavatsky, blossomed again in the time of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, lingering until it faded with its evenstar, Dion Fortune. That is, if Philip K. Dick decided to take all that supernatural grandiosity, and steampunk adaptations of Victoriana, and turn them on their heads by transposing them into a dystopian near-future historical moment that feels intermittently like hard SF with its what-ifs scrambled.

It’s Minority Report meets Oliver Twist in the secret séance parlor of Martha Wells’s The Death of the Necromancer. Sez me. But the readers of Cosmopolitan don’t speak geek, so instead Cosmo conjures the ghost of J.K. Rowling, because hey, the blasted ruins of Oxford being repurposed as a prison camp for deliberately starved clairvoyants is a setting so reminiscent of Hogwarts. Oh, well. I’m sure someday I’ll write a review that far off the mark, too. (But not this day.)

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New Treasures: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler

Friday, January 24, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Last week I wrote a brief piece on Otto Penzler’s marvelous The Big Book of Adventure Stories, and I’ve been having so much fun with it that I decided to look at some of his other door-stopper genre anthologies. So here we are this week with The Vampire Archives, one of the best collections of vampire stories I’ve ever encountered.

What makes it so great? It’s over 1,000 pages of the finest vampire fiction ever written, old and new, in a beautiful and inexpensive package. This is the only volume you need to bring yourself up to speed on vampire lit of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries — no small claim.

It includes the classics you’d expect, like John Keats’ 1820 poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” by Fritz Leiber — as well as many that you might not, like Ambrose Bierce’s 1891 tale “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” an excerpt from Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour,” “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Lovely Lady” by D. H. Lawrence, and even a Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” by Arthur Conan Doyle.

There’s a generous selection of fiction from the pulps, including “Stragella” by Hugh B. Cave, “Revelations in Black” by Carl Jacobi, “When It Was Moonlight” by Manly Wade Wellman, and Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne tale “The End of the Story.”

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