Black Gate – Page 983 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Ancient Worlds: But Is It True?

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 Elizabeth Cady Comments 6 comments

Before we go any further in the discussion of the origins of fantasy and science fiction in ancient literature, I wanted to address a basic question:

Did the Greeks believe any of this was true?

When we sit down to read a work of fantasy, we are very aware of reading about a constructed space. We know we are temporarily inhabiting an imagined world, and much of our delight comes from that work of imagination. Our appreciation of any verisimilitude comes attached to that sense of creation: it is exciting to us that the work we are reading is believable even though it is pretend.

(This is, of course, what non-geeks often don’t understand about those of us of the geekly persuasion. How, they wonder, can you spend so much time arguing over the minutiae and plot holes of a story in which a basic premise is “we live in space and , even more unbelievably, do without money”? The answer is that even a pretend world needs internal consistency, and we argue because tolerances on that consistency vary. I can’t stop tearing my hair out at the messed up timeline of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, my husband thinks this is hilarious, I love him anyway.)

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A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 Ryan Harvey Comments 13 comments

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

Sayanora, Tsubaraya — and Sayanora, Golden Age of Japanese Cinema

The end of the Golden Age of Japanese Giant Monster movies coincided with the end of the most productive era for the Japanese film industry. Starting in the early 1950s, the country’s film industry experienced a meteoric rise. The major studios released a combined average of 450 movies to theaters each year. But the growth of television in the 1960s started to erode film attendance. In the late-‘60s, audience levels dropped precipitously, numerous theaters closed, and the studios faced cutbacks. Contract directors and stars were released, departments were scaled down or eliminated, and the studio responsible for the “Gamera” and “Daimajin” films, Daiei, was forced out of business entirely.

Science-fiction and monster movies had it particularly rough because of the growth of television. Popular superhero TV shows offered a cheaper alternative for young audiences to get their giant monster fix. The children who increasingly made up the viewership for Godzilla movies could now see kaiju action daily from their living rooms.

Ironically, the person most responsible for the growth of SF television was Eiji Tsubaraya, Toho Studio’s master of visual effects and one of the four “Godzilla Fathers.” Tsubaraya formed his own independent company, Tsubaraya Productions, in 1963 to create special-effects television programs. The 1966 hit show Ultra Q led to the monumental success of Ultraman the next year. Each week, Ultraman pitted its giant-sized title hero against a new monster. Clone shows sprouted everywhere, and the monsters of cinema screens started to bring in less money.

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Ol’ Standbys

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 James Maliszewski Comments 10 comments

I first encountered roleplaying games in late 1979, which means that, by year’s end, I’ll have been rolling polyhedral dice and pretending to be an elf for 35 years. The mind boggles when I ponder this, since it attests to the fact that, with a few notable exceptions, like breathing and eating, I’ve spent more time playing RPGs than I have almost any other activity in my earthly existence.

As I make my way through mid-life, I find myself thinking back to my early days of gaming often. One of the things that strikes me is how focused my friends and I were on a handful of games, which we played with incredible gusto. It must be remembered that, even back in those days, there were an incredible number of RPGs available – not as many as today, certainly, but more than even a group of tweens and teens as gung-ho for roleplaying games could play. That’s not to say we didn’t dip our toes into a lot of pools, so to speak; I’d venture to guess that, between 1979 and 1984, the period during which our mania was at its zenith, we tried many dozens of games (you find a fairly complete list of all the RPGs published, by year, between 1974 and the present here – there are a lot of them).

Despite that, we had our favorites, the ones to which we’d return again and again, after the shine had worn off the latest boxed set to appear on the hobby shop’s shelves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these games were all among the earliest ones to which we’d been introduced by the older kids and adults who acted as our “mentors” as we learned the ropes of this strange pastime. But what is surprising, I think – at least to me – is that, for the most part, these same RPGs are the ones that still hold my attention today. Granted, I’m not a neophile; I don’t instinctively seek out new games as soon as they’re released, as many of my fellow gamers do. Even so, I must confess to being a little shocked to discover that, if I look back on the gaming I’ve done over the last decade or so, it was almost entirely devoted to the same three games I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid.

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Griots: Sisters of the Spear edited by Milton J. Davis and Charles R. Saunders

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 9 comments

As I’ve written before, we are living in a S&S renaissance. A genre that was stuck in a loop of rote characters — fighting the same wizards, stealing the same temple treasures and damsels’ virtues — and virtually extinct from bookstore shelves, has come roaring back to life in the past decade. It may not command the same attention it did forty years ago, but it is rousing and alive.

Something that’s proving to be incredibly reinvigorating to the genre is sword & soul. Charles Saunders, coiner of the term and creator of Imaro and Dossouye, two of the best heroic fantasy characters, describes it this way:

Fantasy fiction with an African connection in either the characters or the setting…or both. The setting can be the historical Africa of the world we know, or the Africa of an alternate world, dimension or universe. But that’s not a restriction, because a sword-and-soul story can feature a black character in a non-black setting, or a non-black character in a black setting. Caveat: Tarzan of the Apes need not apply.

About six years ago Milton Davis started writing and publishing his own sword & soul fiction (though this predates the actual term). When a friend sent one of Davis’ manuscripts to Charles Saunders (which he reviewed in Black Gate), one thing led to another and soon they were collaborators in fostering the creation of more sword & soul stories. Their efforts resulted in the terrific Griots anthology in 2011. As I wrote when I reviewed it at my site last year, it is exciting to see a genre I love evolving in real time.

Two years later Davis and Saunders are back with a sequel anthology, Griots: Sisters of the Spear. One of the driving forces of sword & soul is to present characters not often seen in standard-issue S&S. As Saunders writes in the forward, with this volume he and Davis found authors with characters that:

can hold their own and then some against the barbarians and power-mad monarchs and magic-users of both genders who swings swords and cast spells in the mostly European-derived settings of modern fantasy and sword-and-sorcery.

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Vintage Treasures: They Fly at Çiron by Samuel R. Delaney

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Samuel R Delaney is justly famous as a science fiction writer. As I noted during my days as a bookseller at places like the Chicago Printer’s Row book fair (in my article “Selling Philip K. Dick“), Delaney is one of a handful of classic SF authors for whom there is still a constant demand. During that hot weekend in July in 2012 — just like at numerous SF conventions over the years — I did a brisk business selling old Samuel R. Delaney paperbacks to readers asking for him by name.

He’s less well known as a fantasy writer, even though his Nevèrÿon books — Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) and Neveryóna (1983), and the two collections Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), and The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987) — have their fans. Personally I found Tales of Nevèrÿon beautifully written, but very slow, and had no real interest in trying the next three.

But the Nevèrÿon volumes aren’t Delaney’s only fantasy. In 1993 he revised and expanded a novelette he’d written with James Sallis and published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1971, releasing it as They Fly at Çiron, and I’ve always been curious about it.

Çiron is a quiet village, troubled only by the strange black Winged Ones who inhabit the skies overhead. Until the army of Myetra arrives, led by the brutal prince Nactor, and the villagers find themselves enslaved and treated as beasts. Rahm, a village youth, escapes and form a desperate alliance with the fearsome Winged Ones, finally finding a way to resist the Myetran’s advanced weaponry.

They Fly at Çiron turned out to be Delaney’s last genre novel. Since 1993 he has focused exclusively on literary novels such as The Mad Man (1994), Dark Reflections (2007) and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012). They Fly at Çiron was published in a limited edition by Incunabula in 1993, and in hardcover by Tor in 1995. The Tor edition is 224 pages, with a handsome cover by Thomas Canty, and is readily available online.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Neal Barrett, Jr, November 3, 1929 – January 12, 2014

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Neal Barrett, Jr, author of The Karma Corps (1984), The Hereafter Gang (1991), and the four-volume Aldair series, died on Sunday.

Barrett first published story was “To Tell the Truth” in the August 1960 issue of Galaxy Magazine. He made a name for himself with his quirky, hard-to-classify short fiction, including the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist “Stairs” (Asimov’s SF, September 1988), and the Hugo and Nebula Award nominee “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” (Asimov’s SF, February 1988). His short work has been gathered in half a dozen collections, including Slightly Off Center (1992), Perpetuity Blues and Other Stories (2000), a nominee for the World Fantasy Award, and Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr. (2013). He continued writing short fiction right up to his death, with his “HERE and THERE” appearing in the Spring 2012 issue of Subterranean Magazine, and “Bloaters” in Impossible Monsters, an anthology released by Subterranean Press in July 2013

Barrett’s first novel was Stress Pattern, published by DAW in 1974. DAW published all four volumes of his Aldair series between 1976 and 1982, and his 1984 science fantasy The Karma Corps, which we covered in a Vintage Treasures piece just a few short months ago. His later books included Through Darkest America (1987), Pink Vodka Blues (1992), Dead Dog Blues (1994), Prince Of Christler-Coke (2004), and Finn, the Lizard Master series from Bantam (The Prophecy Machine, 2000, and The Treachery of Kings, 2001).

We discussed Neal Barrett’s Aldair novels — which Fletcher Vredenburgh called “a blast of strangeness and adventure. Really, [Barrett is] an author without enough attention from the average reader” — in the Comments Section of my September 10th Vintage Treasures post.

Neal Barrett was born in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma City. He was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2010. He died January 12, 2014, at the age of 84.

New Year’s Resolutions of Oz

Monday, January 13, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 2 comments

After about ten months of uninterrupted weekly posts, I’m taking a bit of a breather this week. Today, instead of new content, I’ll take inventory and look ahead to what I hope to deliver Black Gate readers in 2014. Perhaps I can couch it in a “New Year’s Resolutions” list — most of us allow for a bit of leeway on those overly optimistic proclamations, anyway…

1. Lose about twenty pounds, preferably at a blackjack table in Derbyshire.

2. Cut back on tobacco consumption, especially my wife’s.

3. Drink more alcohol. (It fell way off in 2013. Obviously I need to get to more conventions.)

And blah blah blah. Okay, let’s get to the stuff that someone else reading this might actually be curious about…

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The Science Fiction and Fantasy of Mick Farren

Monday, January 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

First time I heard of Mick Farren was when I opened a box of review copies from Tor in 1996 to find his novel The Time of Feasting, a dark fantasy concerning a hidden colony of vampires living underground in New York City. I flipped to the bio, where I read that Mick was the writer and singer for the punk band The Deviants, and that he also had several solo hits.

This was pretty cool. Here was a successful rock musician making a mid-career transition to dark fantasy writer. This just re-affirmed what I already knew: there were plenty of glamorous professions out there, but nothing as awesome as being a fantasy novelist.

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Art of the Genre: Artistic Melancholia for the Ruins of the Cyber World

Monday, January 13, 2014 Scott Taylor Comments 4 comments

Biking the Grasslands before the fall... — Biking the Grasslands before the fall…

Not to go all ‘Goth Chick’ on you, but have you ever walked in a graveyard? If your answer is no, I’d put money says that you have but you just didn’t realize it. You see, the internet is really a reflection of our own world, with vibrant and glowing real-estate all along the information super highway. Now if you consider each dedicated website as a ‘town’ along this course, what happens when the site goes dormant? I would like to hypothesize that it, and all the ‘people’ [information] in it dies as well. Sure, you can still visit, and perhaps even find out some cool history there, but in truth you are simply walking over the graves of the dead.

Take a site like Grognardia for example, RIP December 11^th 2012, or Permission Magazine RIP February 2011, or Stephen Fabian.com RIP June 6^th 2010. They still exist, can still be read, but have ceased functioning for all intents and purpose and are now just ghosts in the machine.

Now you might be asking, ‘so what does this morbid topic have to do with Art of the Genre?’ Well, perhaps nothing, but then again, perhaps everything. Each website, no matter how basic, had to have a design, and that design, like a testament to some ancient civilization, is left behind in a kind of ruin that can be viewed by anyone who stumbles off the beaten path into a lost world, but I think I digress, so first let me go back. Seeing these always seems to bring me back to my post here on November 15^th, 2012. In it I spoke about the Art of Disappearing MMORPGs, and for some reason I feel the need to speak on the subject a bit more and I apologize if I reiterate some of the topics of that post but I’m in stream of consciousness right now so humor me.

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Winter 2014 Subterranean Magazine now Available

Monday, January 13, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

How does Subterranean magazine get such gorgeous covers, issue after issue? Editor Bill Schafer must keep a host of talented artists chained up in the basement. I wish I’d thought of that.

The Winter Issue isn’t just a pretty face — it’s got personality, too. Have a look at the spectacular table of contents:

“The Scrivener” by Eleanor Arnason
“Bit Players” by Greg Egan
“The Prelate’s Commission” by Jeffrey Ford
“Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story” by Karen Joy Fowler
“Hayfever” by Frances Hardinge
“Caligo Lane” by Ellen Klages
“I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There” by K J Parker
“Pilgrims of the Round World” by Bruce Sterling

We published Jeffrey Ford’s “Exo-Skeleton Town” back in Black Gate 1. It won the 2006 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, the French national speculative fiction award, and has been reprinted many times — including in the anthology Alien Contact, where editor Marty Halpern said:

This is probably the quirkiest story in the anthology. And it remains one of the more unique story concepts I’ve ever read. In fact, even though I’m the editor, I’m almost tempted to ask Jeff: “Where the hell did this idea come from?”…

You can read the complete story here. We published Ellen Klages wonderful fantasy “A Taste of Summer” in Black Gate 3; she has since been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and World Fantasy Awards for her short fiction.

Subterranean is edited by William Schafer and published quarterly. The Winter 2014 issue is completely free and available here; see their complete back issue catalog here. We last covered Subterranean magazine with their previous issue, Fall 2013.