Black Gate – Page 990 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in November

Tuesday, December 24, 2013 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

For the second month in a row, our exclusive excerpt from Mike Allen’s dark fantasy novel The Black Fire Concerto tops our fiction charts. Those interested in more from the book can listen to our own C.S.E. Cooney read from Chapter One, in a lengthy podcast at HauntedStars.com.

Last month’s third place holder, Dave Gross’ Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos, moved on up into second place this month. You folks certainly enjoy novel excerpts.

In third place was Mark Rigney’s “The Find,” part of his perennially popular Tales of Gemen series; fourth was E.E. Knight’s “The Terror in the Vale,” his second tale of The Blue Pilgrim, following “That of the Pit.”

Rounding out the Top Five was 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.”

Also making the list were exciting stories by Joe Bonadonna, John C. Hocking, Martha Wells, Alex Kreis, David C. Smith, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Howard Andrew Jones, Aaron Bradford Starr, Jamie McEwan, Michael Shea, Peadar Ó Guilín, Janet Morris and Chris Morris, and David Evan Harris.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. For the past year we’ve 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 November:

An excerpt from The Black Fire Concerto, by Mike Allen
An excerpt from Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos, by Dave Gross
“The Find,,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney
“The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
“Draugr Stonemaker,” by Vaughn Heppner
“The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
An excerpt from Pathfinder Tales: Queen of Thorns, by Dave Gross
“Vestments of Pestilence,” by John C. Hocking
The Death of the Necromancer, a complete novel by Martha Wells
“The Renunciation of the Crimes of Gharad the Undying,” by Alex Kreis

…

Read More Read More

Skyfall: In Which a Pulp Hero Meets the 21st Century

Monday, December 23, 2013 markrigney Comments 11 comments

Let me offend as many readers as possible right at the start by stating that Daniel Craig is the best James Bond the screen has yet known. The man is equal parts chiseled granite and lithe predator; he has charm, but he withholds it whenever possible, forcing us to catch it on the sly, as if we’re at a peepshow. Nobody in movies today looks better in a suit.

Yes, Sean Connery was great, but the role of Bond requires a greater world-weariness than Connery, at least in his nineteen-sixties roles, could bring. Roger Moore brought out 007’s upper-crust prep school tastes, but he was never believably dangerous; he actually needed Q’s endless gimmicks to survive, as Craig surely does not. The various Bond inhabitors since have filled the shoes without fleshing out the man. Only Craig does justice to the flinty, ruthless public servant that Ian Fleming originally envisioned, without reducing the character to a dusty fifties history text: Cold War Tactics 101, With Style. Daniel Craig makes 007 both contemporary and relevant.

Skyfall (2013) opens with a shot of an approaching figure, out-of-focus, stalking down a dim corridor. When the figure gets close enough, the image locks on at last: it’s Bond, of course, weapon in hand, but the initial blurriness is central to the film. Skyfall presents James Bond between epochs, uncertain of his exact identity and purpose. Is he still a tool of the Cold War establishment, of traditional spy vs. spy operations, or does the world now require him to be something new? To be (as he is in the extraordinary credits sequence) reborn?

…

Read More Read More

The Weird of Oz Wraps Up Christmas Shopping

Monday, December 23, 2013 Nick Ozment Comments 0 Comment

Since geek culture has pretty much overtaken popular culture these days, any visit to the local shopping mall comes inundated with looming dragons, flashing robots and space vehicles, menacing creatures from myth and legend, superheroes of every stripe, and a certain familiar blue police callbox. Now that I have kids of my own, Christmas shopping is really interesting…

Okay, I’ll confess: my gift purchases sometimes tend to be of the “Oh man when I was that age I would’ve loved this!” variety. My wife chides me about how my daughter’s tastes are starting to slant away from superheroes and monsters and toward Barbie and Polly Pocket.

I have a son, too, but he’s still just two, so some of the coolest toys just aren’t age appropriate for him yet. My daughter, on the other hand…

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Tales From Rugosa Coven by Sarah Avery

Monday, December 23, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Unless you’ve ever been a submissions reader, I don’t think you can truly appreciate what it was like to discover Sarah Avery in the slush pile.

The story in question was “The War of the Wheat Berry Year,” a slender and deceptively simple fantasy in which The Traitor of Imlen finds she must face her old instructor on the battlefield at last. After a long day reading amateur tales about unicorns, knights slaying dragons, and teenage girls with vampire boyfriends, it was a revelation — packed with a rich and fascinating back story, subtle characterizations and, like all the best fantasy, the tantalizing sense that you were being given the briefest window into a wider tale.

I bought “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” for Black Gate 15, where it won acclaim from Keith West at Adventures Fantastic and other sites. And believe me, I kept a weather eye out for future work from Sarah.

So I was delighted when my copy of Tales From Rugosa Coven arrived last week. Rugosa Coven shows off Sarah’s talents with a collection of three linked novellas of contemporary fantasy focusing on a coven of modern witches living on the Jersey Shore. If you’re eager to find the next big name in fantasy, do yourself a favor and order a copy today.

Catch a glimpse of a New Jersey even weirder than the one you think you know, as a covenful of very modern Wiccans wrestle challenges both supernatural and mundane — and, occasionally, each other.

The personal injury attorney who chose kitchen-witchery over his family’s five-generation lineage of old school ceremonial magic would like to miss his dead parents, only now that they’re dead they won’t leave him alone. The professional fortuneteller stands out at forty paces, with her profusion of silver amulets glittering over her Goth wardrobe, but nobody has guessed her secret sorrow, especially not the covenmates who see her as their wacky comic relief. And the resident skeptic, a reluctant Pagan if ever there was one, will have to eat her words if her coven sister’s new boyfriend really does turn out to be from Atlantis.

The Jersey Shore’s half-hidden community of Witches, Druids, and latter-day Vikings must circle together against all challenges. It’s a good thing they’re as resilient as the wild rugosa roses that hold together the dunes.

Tales From Rugosa Coven was published by Dark Quest on December 21, 2013. It is 341 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback.

The Man Who Was Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Sunday, December 22, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 5 comments

Last week, in a post about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I said that certain habits of Gaiman’s plotting reminded me of G.K. Chesterton. It seemed to me that I’d referred to Chesterton fairly often in my posts here, so I did a search of the Black Gate archive. I found that I had in fact mentioned Chesterton a number of times, but that neither I nor anyone else had yet written a post for Black Gate specifically about him or any of his works. I’ve therefore put together this piece to give an overview of the man and his writing. It’s insufficient; Chesterton’s difficult to describe, more so than most writers. But one has to begin somewhere. He’s an important early fantasist, admired by figures as diverse as Gaiman, Borges, Alberto Manguel, and Slavoj Žižek. There’s even a movement to canonise Chesterton, a late convert to Catholicism, as a saint. Many of his writings are online, so you can judge him for yourself; you can find a list of texts on this page, a part of this site dedicated to Chesterton.

It’s almost traditional to say that Chesterton’s writing was defined by paradoxes. It’s not entirely accurate, I think. It’s more precise to say that in both his fiction and non-fiction he often put forward propositions structured something like: “It is frequently said that x is the case; but it is not true. In fact the very opposite is true.” From which point Chesterton would then explain, clearly, simply, and with a common-sense air, just how the opposite of everyone’s assumption was the actual state of affairs. In feeble imitation, I might put it this way: it is not true that Chesterton was a writer who delighted in paradoxes. In fact the very opposite is true. He was a writer that delighted in showing that apparent paradoxes were nothing of the sort, and were easily explained by an appeal to reality. We must not forget that Chesterton studied as an artist; and artists, perhaps more than any other sort of person, are concerned with finding the proper perspective on things.

…

Read More Read More

Warner Bros. Confirms Gilligan’s Island Re-make

Sunday, December 22, 2013 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

Multiple sources are now reporting that Warner Bros. has green-lit a feature film re-make of the famous CBS sitcom Gilligan’s Island, which ran for three seasons from 1964 to 1967.

The original show was perhaps the greatest TV staple of my childhood. On any given day of the week, at least one local station on the television dial was broadcasting Gilligan’s Island. Along with The Brady Bunch, it was the one show every one of my siblings watched.

Gilligan’s Island followed the adventures of seven castaways marooned on an island paradise after a tropical storm blows their famous “three hour cruise” out of Honolulu far off course. While hardly a fantasy the way I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched were, Gilligan’s Island was not afraid to embrace the fantastic, with episodes that included voodoo spells, futuristic jet-packs, a stone that grants three wishes, a magician’s trunk, and much more. The pilot episode featured a theme song by John Williams, and the show had several notable guest stars — including Mel Blanc, voicing everything from a frog to Gilligan’s pet duck, and a very young Kurt Russell, playing a Jungle Boy.

This isn’t the first re-make. The show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, re-cast Gilligan’s Island as the short-lived western comedy Dusty’s Trail in 1973, starring Bob Denver and Forrest Tucker as part of a group who become separated from their wagon train, with a cast of nearly identical characters. The 1982 Saturday morning cartoon Gilligan’s Planet included the voices of the entire original cast except for Ginger (Tina Louise), and followed the adventures of the castaways after they escape from the island by building a spaceship, promptly getting shipwrecked on a distant planet.

The new movie is described as a star vehicle for Josh Gad, star of the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon (and the voice of Olaf the Snowman in Disney’s Frozen). Gad will also co-write the script. No news on a release date, or whether Gad will play Gilligan.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt

Sunday, December 22, 2013 westkeith Comments 21 comments

The Blue Star
Fletcher Pratt
Ballantine Books (242 pages, May 1969, $0.95)
Cover art by Ron Walotsky

Lin Carter chose Fletcher Pratt’s novel The Blue Star to be the inaugural title in Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series. I’ve found nothing that explicitly says why this novel rather than another, but a remark in his introduction provides a clue.

Prior to this publication, The Blue Star had only been published in an omnibus edition along with Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and James Blish’s There Shall be no Darkness in 1952. This was 17 years prior to Ballantine reprinting it and two years before The Lord of the Rings was first published. Carter wrote, “I am pleased to have been instrumental in getting this remarkable novel back into print again.”

The novel tells the story of Rodvard Bergelin, who is a clerk in the genealogical offices of the Empire in the capital city of Netznegon. Not given an actual name, the Empire is in decay. Ruled by a Queen whose only heir has been exiled, political intrigue abounds. Rodvard is a member of a revolutionary group known as the Sons of the New Day. They have Bolshevik overtones, but when they eventually gain power, things resemble the French Revolution.

The other protagonist is a young woman who is a witch, Lalette Asterhax. In Pratt’s world, magic is real, but only witches can use it. The only exception is through a gem known as a Blue Star. Not all witches have one, but Lalette does. The power to be a witch is hereditary, passed from mother to daughter. A witch gains her powers when she loses her virginity.

The Sons of the New Day order Rodvard to seduce Lalette. Neither is really interested in the other. Rodvard is taken with a voluptuous young noblewoman who has started hanging around his office. Lalette, on the other hand, is being pursued by an old nobleman, Count Cleudi. In order to get away from him and out from under her mother’s thumb, Lalette reluctantly yields to Rodvard’s advances.

…

Read More Read More

Chuck Norris Schools Jean-Claude Van Damme in Epic Holiday Video

Sunday, December 22, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ah, the 80s’. When action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme ruled the box office.

Thirty years later, most film stars of the era have largely retired. Except for occasional appearances in The Expendables franchise — and, if you’re Jean-Claude Van Damme, a history-making advertisement for Volvo.

The action stars of the 80s may be older, but they’re no less competitive… as Delov Digital makes clear in a hilarious remake of Van Damme’s Volvo ad, starring the untoppable Chuck Norris.

Watch the complete 70-second video here.

In other news for 80s action fans, the teaser trailer for The Expendables 3 — with an expanded cast that includes Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, and Arnold Schwarzenegger — was released yesterday. Enjoy.

The End of Electric Velocipede

Saturday, December 21, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

We are very sad to report that Electric Velocipede, one of the finest small press magazines in the genre, has published its final issue. Editor and publisher John Klima addresses the reasons for his decision in his editorial, A Remembrance of the Future:

This was not an easy decision.. Finishing this final issue is my way of closing things out mostly on my terms.

There is outstanding money owed me that just isn’t coming. That means money meant for Electric Velocipede’s future needs to be used on the present; we’re unable to make new issues when we still have to pay for old issues. There are limited options for electronic subscriptions; and the largest and most popular, Amazon, stopped taking new magazines right around the time I ran an Electric Velocipede Kickstarter based around the plan of having Amazon subscriptions for future revenue.

I have outstanding debt from running Electric Velocipede — and since the magazine can’t even support itself, it doesn’t make sense to keep it going and continue to spend money without earning any.

Electric Velocipede was one of the most acclaimed independent genre magazines on the market. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times, and won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. We reported on the successful Kickstarter, which raised over $7,500 to fund the magazine, in happier times last September.

Electric Velocipede 27, the final issue, contains short fiction from Daniel Ausema, Helena Bell, Geoffrey W. Cole, and many others. The cover is by Thom Davidsohn. Copies are available for your Nook or your Kindle for just $1.99.See complete details here.

We last reported on Electric Velocipede with issue 25.

New Treasures: Hidden Things by Doyce Testerman

Saturday, December 21, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There are plenty of ways to select a new novel to read. Cover art, of course. Recommendation from friends. Plot description. Here, let’s try an experiment. I’ll tell you some things about Hidden Things by Doyce Testerman, and you tell me when you want to read it. Here’s the description:

Watch out for the hidden things… That’s the last thing Calliope Jenkins’s best friend says to her before ending a two a.m. phone call from Iowa, where he’s working a case she knows little about. Seven hours later, she gets a visit from the police. Josh has been found dead, and foul play is suspected. Calliope is stunned. Especially since Josh left a message on her phone an hour after his body was found.

Spurred by grief and suspicion, Calli heads to Iowa herself, accompanied by a stranger who claims to know something about what happened to Josh and who can — maybe — help her get him back. But the road home is not quite the straight shot she imagined…

Okay, I’m intrigued. And the cover is okay. Still, I don’t know about you, but I’m not sold yet. Let’s look at some of the blurbs. Here’s The Blue Blazes author Chuck Wendig:

Testerman tells a story of a secret world that is sad, sweet, funny, and more than a little twisted. This world of wizened wizard-men and demon clowns will lure you into the shadows, and once you meet the characters who live in those dark, strange places, you’ll never want to leave…

Hmm. Wizard-men and demon clowns? Definitely getting closer. But for me, it was this quote from Maureen Johnson that sealed the deal:

Hidden Things reveals the America I want to believe in — dragons on highways, trolls in the hills, motels that lead to new dimensions. I’ll never look at a rest stop the same way again.

Yup, that did it. Dragons, trolls, and motels to new dimensions? I ordered my copy last month. Hidden Things was published by Harper Voyager in August 2012. It is 327 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $10.99 for the digital edition. See all of our recent New Treasures here.