I’m planning a more lengthy post on the role of religion and spirituality in fantasy (expanding on some things I hinted at in my last post, which involved orc samurai), but the last couple weeks have been so crammed with lounging on beaches, jujitsu, and job hunting that I haven’t had the opportunity to give it the work it deserves. So, instead, I present:
Long ago, in the days of parachute pants and phones with cords, I became addicted to Milton Bradley’s Gamemaster Series of board games. Games such as Axis and Allies, Conquest Empire, Broadsides & Boarding Parties, and Fortress America taking up large blocks of time on Saturday’s all through junior high and high school.
Little did I know the intrigue of big business hijinks going on behind the scenes where my absolute favorite board games were concerned. In 1984 the venerable and one-hundred and twenty year-old Milton Bradley Company was bought out by the gaming giant Hasbro. This moved the GMS [Gamemaster Series] games under a new banner, and when Hasbro acquired the publishing name of Avalon Hill in 1998, the GMS began being published there.
Funny side note: My first ever official interview with a game company came in 1997 with Avalon Hill when it was still independent and located in the industrial district of Baltimore. It was a surreal experience, going on an interview at Applebees and having to answer questions like ‘who was your most powerful role-playing character?’ and ‘tell me about your best gaming moment?’ Yeah, I didn’t get the job, but it was still pretty cool.
The new Black Static cover features Ben Baldwin‘s illustration for Ramsey Campbell’s “Recently Used”: here’s the opening paragraph:
Tunstall thought he hadn’t slept when the phone rang. He clutched it and sat up on the bed, which felt too bare and wide by half. On the bedside table the photograph of him with Gwyneth in the sunlit mountains far away was waiting to be seen once more, and beyond it the curtains framed a solitary feeble midnight star. He rubbed his aching eyes to help them focus on the mobile as he thumbed the keypad. “Hello?” he said before he’d finished lifting the phone to his face.
Other fiction includes “Dermot” by Simon Bestwick, “A Summer’s Day” by K. Harding Stalter, “Still Life” by Simon McCaffery and “How the Sixties Ended” by Tim Lees. Non-fiction columns by Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler, Mike O’Driscoll and reviews by Tony Lee and Peter Tennant.
In related news, Mercurio D. Rivera’s “Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us” from Black Static # 18 is up for the 2011 World Fantasy Short Story Award. Here’s the download.
You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static. Also, the publishers are reintroducing lifetime subscriptions. What you’re buying, in essence, is a 10-year subscription at the current rate. If you think you’re going to live for at least another decade, and you think Black Static will also be around for as long, this could be a bargain for whatever time you and the magazine have after that. If that weren’t enough, you can also opt for joint lifetime sub that gets you sister publication Interzone for a slightly reduced rate. Sign your life away here.
The 2011 Challenge! Stealth Writing Competition from Rogue Blades Entertainment officially ends on October 1 — which means there’s only four weeks left to enter.
Last’s year’s contest, the Challenge! Discovery 2010, had ten winners, including Henrik Ramsager, Nicholas Ozment, Frederic S. Durbin, Gabe Dybing, and Keith J. Taylor. The winning entries from the 2010 contest will be collected in the Challenge! Discovery anthology, to be published by Rogue Blades Entertainment.
The 2011 Challenge! writing competitions tasks writers to submit an original work of short fiction using a piece of art and a one-word theme for inspiration. The theme this year is Stealth and this year’s art, by Storn Cool, is at right.
More details are at the Rogue Blades website:
Using the awesome cover art provided by Storn Cook and this year’s title Stealth, capture your muse over the next 15 days and embark upon grand adventure! … Get your heroic adventure in any genre to RBE between June 15th and September 15th, 2011, and see if you have what it takes to deliver a winning tale! Speculative fiction is NOT required for Challenge! themes, so readers could find Historical Swashbucklers, Sword & Sorcery/Planet, Soul & Sandal, Western, Mystery, Dark Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror and even Romance — ALL the flavors of HEROIC FICTION so long as they are mighty and mysterious tales of action and adventure.
The top twelves stories, as determined by the judges, will be awarded a print copy of the anthology, and the top three will also be awarded a cash prize, and written critiques from the judges. Judges this year are artist Storn Cook, author and writing instructor Mary Rosenblum (Horizons & Water Rites), and me, Black Gate editor John O’Neill.
The contest entry fee is only $10, and a minimum number of participants is required. The official Challenge! submission guidelines are here, and the complete details of the Challenge! Stealth contest are here. Stories must be between 3,000 and 9,000 words.
What more do you need to know? Start writing!! We expect great things from you on October 1.
Although it first filed paperwork in mid April of this year, the news that Samsung was suing Apple (the iPhone guys, not the Beatles label) was rendered strange by one of their arguments. It seems that Samsung was contesting the viability of Apple’s patents for the iPhone and iPad, because a nearly identical device had been seen used on the U.S. space mission Discovery One, way back in 1968.
Yes, that Discovery One. You know, the mission to Jupiter where the HAL-9000 AI had a series of unforeseen technical difficulties and eliminated the human crew, thus putting the U.S. space program on hold until mid 1969, when America renounced its Jovian ambitions and settled for landing on the moon.
Samsung used, in its initial defense of the argument, this clip from a documentary on Discovery One, clearly showing members of the ill-fated crew using an iPad-a-like to stream video feeds while somewhere past Mars orbit. This, Samsung assured the press and the courts, is clear evidence that Apple didn’t invent anything, and that the idea –the actual execution, even– of the iPad had been around long before Apple even existed. So, all of Apple’s patents had to be seen for the shams that they were. Steve Jobs was, in effect, cribbing ideas from doomed U.S. space missions, and profiting from the misfortunes of historical figures.
“The Beast Men of Mongo” was the tenth installment of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between April 25 and August 8, 1937, “The Beast Men of Mongo” picks up the storyline where the ninth installment, “The Tusk Men of Mongo” left off with Flash and Dale led by Captain Truno to Prince Barin’s kingdom. Truno explains that it is necessary for them to live in treetop homes because of the many dangers of the forest. They ride a vine-propelled elevator to an amazing network of highways that link the trees four hundred feet above ground to Prince Barin’s stunning snow-white castle.
Barin and Aura give Flash and Dale a royal welcome. Alex Raymond’s artwork is gorgeous in these panels. Aura still carries a torch for Flash and greets him with a passionate kiss that leaves Dale fuming. That night as Flash gazes out the window he spies an intruder entering Aura’s chamber via the balcony. Flash heroically swings down on a vine and surprises the intruder. The man surrenders Aura’s jewels and claims he was reduced to thieving because of his sickly wife. Flash takes pity on him and lets him go free. Aura emerges from her bed chamber and discovers Flash who returns her jewels and claims the thief escaped. Leaving Aura’s room, Flash is met by Dale who is suspicious when Flash claims he chased a thief away. The adult themes in this storyline (though tame by modern standards) were quite sophisticated for their day. Don Moore’s dialogue lets Raymond’s artwork tell the story for him. This was always true of their partnership, but the point is driven home even more when Raymond turns up the heat of sexual tension between Flash and Aura.
For those who put entertainment first, heroic fantasy offers it in its purest form.
— L. Sprague de Camp, The Fantastic Swordsmen
Although many of its foundational writers had already sailed into the west, swords and sorcery reached a Weird peak in the 1960s. In 1961 Fritz Leiber coined the term “swords and sorcery” in the journal Ancalagon. The Swordsmen and Sorcerer’s Guild of America (can I get a membership, please?) began the first of its secretive meetings. And the Lancer published, L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter-edited Conan series with its splendid Frank Frazetta covers was everywhere. These were heady times for the genre. Although the mass-produced works of the era can still be readily found and enjoyed today, I can only imagine when books like The Swords of Lankhmar could be found in drugstore wire spinner racks and the like.
In that strange time of tie-dye and Tolkien, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the pages of paperback books, Pyramid Books published four swords and sorcery anthologies. Edited by fantasy/science fiction author L. Sprague de Camp, the series began with Swords and Sorcery (1963) and concluded with 1970’s Warlocks and Warriors.
“There was a man, Magnus’s son,
Ragni his name. In Reykjavik
Stands his office, six stories,
Far from the harbor in the fat past.
Birds nest there, now abandoned.
The sea washes along Vesturgata,
As they called it.In those days
Ragni’s son, a rich man,
Also a scholar, skilled in law,
Thomas his name, took his wife
From famished Boston, far away.
Brave were her people, black-skinned,
Strong with spear, with shield courageous,
Long ago.”
I was flicking through my Flist, and what should I see but Francesca Forrest talking about solar superstorms and poetry and Ragnarok? If you know Francesca even a little, this would not surprise you.
And yet I was astonished.
Following her link to Tor.com, I beheld this magnificent poem by writer Paul Park. It went live in April. Why it has taken me this long to pay attention to it, I’ll never know; it’s a mystery, as Geoffrey Rush says in Shakespeare in Love.
I wish I’d written it. Never could’ve, but there you have it. I’m snake-hearted and sick with envy. My eyeballs are melting a little. I may still be trembling. What a rush!
Lovers of Nordic sagas, flock over to Tor.com. Strew your comments like jeweled offerings.
And then, go on and read Francesca’s great review of it at Versification, a new site for speculative poetry reviews. Francesca has provided a map, so that you can track the hero’s movements. And links as well, to things like Hallgrimskirkja.
It’s very exciting. I wonder else Mr. Park has done…
We last covered Tor.com with their interview of our Managing Editor, Howard Andrew Jones.
It’s only September 1st but the bales of hay and plastic skeletons have already lined the shelves of the local craft stores for over a month. Though I dutifully grouse about Christmas music echoing through the malls in mid-October, Halloween accoutrements in July simply means that for a few short months of the year, my home décor is in trendy step with the retail market.
And though I won’t amp up the props that send the neighbor kids screaming back down the sidewalk until the official start of the “the Season” on October 1st, the appearance of jumbo bags of assorted candies and plastic Iron Man costumes at Target means I’m well within my rights to break out the black food coloring and a few bottles of Vampire Wine.
Which I will drink while sinking my fake pointy teeth into some awesome, pre-season offerings.
Believe it or not, I learned it’s been ten years since Bitten, the first novel in Kelley Armstrong’s New York Times bestselling Otherworld series. In that time hundreds of thousands of you have ravenously devoured the adventures of Armstrong’s witches, demons, and werewolves.
In her latest outing, Spell Bound, Armstrong pulls out all the stops, bringing all of her supernatural characters together in what is clearly the first battle of an Otherworld war; and I can’t wait to dig in.
William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki outlived his creator with a tenacity that Hodgson, a bantam rooster of a man, would have appreciated. Thomas Carnacki, resident of 472 Cheyne Walk, London, first appeared in a series of five stories (“Gateway of the Monster”, “The House Among the Laurels”, “The Whistling Room”, “The Horse of the Invisible”, and “The Searcher of the End House”) in The Idler Magazine in the January through April, as well as June, issues of 1910. But despite Hodgson’s death in World War I, Carnacki carried on in a further four stories (“The Thing Invisible”, “The Hog”, “The Haunted Jarvee” and “The Find”) retrieved from Hodgson’s papers by his wife. All nine stories are available in a variety of printed, electronic and audio forms.
But that wasn’t the end. Carnacki’s career was further chronicled by other writers, including A. F. Kidd, Andrew Cartmel, Barbara Hambly, Alberto Lopez Aroca, Kim Newman, Willie Meikle and Alan Moore. He battled evil alongside the Second Doctor and Sherlock Holmes, as well as Mina Murray’s League. He appeared on television, played ably by Donald Pleasance. He’s even inspired a concept album! But in each of his incarnations, Carnacki combined ancient sorceries and Edwardian science to face the squealing, swine-faced threats of the Outer Void.