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Year: 2011

Art of the Genre: D&D Basic Boxed Sets

Art of the Genre: D&D Basic Boxed Sets

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‘Basic’, it’s a term I always took as a kind of derogatory statement regarding the type of D&D that I was first introduced to. I mean, why wouldn’t someone think that since there was an ‘Advanced’ version of D&D out there with all those wonderful hardcover books?

Everything you need is right at your fingertips!
Everything you need is right at your fingertips!

Well, that might have been the case, and eventually I would convert to those lofty hardcovers, but in my fundamental and formative years I played from a ‘box’ that provided everything I needed on my path to adventure.

I have a special love for TSR’s Basic rules and the boxes that provided them. They are kind of like a browning picture of you riding a bike before the world was more than school and what to play afterward. I’m reminded of simpler times when there weren’t multiple editions of the game, when the internet wasn’t weighted down with reference materials for feats, powers, prestige classes, and the like.

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Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Goodman Games Supplements

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Goodman Games Supplements

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fhfangfistsongWith the release of Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, there came the opportunity for independent game companies to introduce whole new lines of products that focused on expanding the gaps left in the core materials presented by Wizards of the Coast. In this review from Black Gate #14, I look at supplements from two of these product lines, published by the fine people at Goodman Games, covering various races and character classes.

Since the review was written, Wizards of the Coast has filled many of those gaps with their own materials, such as the D&D Player’s Handbook Races series, which includes the official supplements for both the Tiefling and Dragonborn races.

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— (Em Dash)

— (Em Dash)

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em-dashThis is the most complicated image ever presented on the Black Gate website.

A few days after I posted my article on the use of semicolons in fiction, I was at a writers’ group meeting and brought up the subject of the contentious punctuation mark. When I expressed my enjoyment of semicolons, one of the other writers present at the library table asked the most appropriate follow-up question:

“How do you feel about em dashes?”

Terrific query. Answer: I love ‘em. Many uses, wonderful informality, a real rhythm-maker. Great way to smash the cymbals on your drum set in the middle of a jazz riff. My major caveat about the em dash is that if overused, it draws enormous visual attention to itself that no reader can miss; the em dash is the most immediately obvious character on a page, and a slew of them is visible with a single glance. You know how annoying a long drum solo can get.

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A Review of Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede

A Review of Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede

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mairelonMairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede
Tor Books (280 pages, hardcover, May 1991)

Mairelon the Magician is a little bit mystery, a little bit comedy, but mostly a mixture of alternate history and fantasy.  It’s a light, fun sort of book; no world-altering plots or pitched battles, but a fair amount of sneaking around, spying, and working out who’s plotting what against whom.  (It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the majority of the incidental characters are plotting something.) 

I think it works better in concert with its sequel, Magician’s Ward, which adds a bit of romance to the already eclectic mix, but the first book is enjoyable on its own. 

I really have only two reservations.  First, I found the pacing of the climax to be slightly off, although this may be because I was looking at it with the wrong set of genre lenses; it may fit better into mystery than fantasy. 

The second reservation is more of a warning than a complaint: if you’re American, do not watch British shows or movies, and know you have a hard time with dialect, avoid this book — or at least hunt down a period drama to watch first, just to get into the rhythm of the language.  Otherwise the amount of thieves’ cant will make the story nearly unintelligible.

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A Round Robin of Witches: Black Gate Interviews the Creators of The Witches of Lublin

A Round Robin of Witches: Black Gate Interviews the Creators of The Witches of Lublin

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bgwitches2
Artist Ilene Winn-Lederer's "Witches" print.

I think I first heard about The Witches of Lublin on Facebook.

You know me, I’m a sucker; you put the word “witches” in the title and I’m on it. So I grabbed up my broomstick, and flew over to Ellen Kushner’s FB page where she’d posted the link about it, and I said, “This looks incredibly cool!” (Or something to that effect.) “A radio play! I love radio plays!”

And then, about five seconds later, I had a little present in my email’s Inbox.

“Because you beg so prettily,” Ellen wrote.

And there is was, the not-quite-final-draft of Witches of Lublin. I sat down and read it in a gulp.

You can read a fuller synopsis about The Witches of Lublin story here, at the super bedazzling website created for the radio play, but basically it is about a family of women klezmer musicians in Poland of the late 18th century. They’re poor, proud and trying to make their way by making music, even though it is considered immodest for females to play in public. When word of their talent spreads beyond the little ghetto where they live and reaches the Count’s ears, things start to get dangerous — and magical.

Klezmer band with women. From the Yale Strom archives.
Klezmer band with women. From the Yale Strom archives.

Co-writer Yale Strom’s research uncovered the facts that there were women klezmer musicians, and that when klezmers would play for gentile nobility, their reward could sometimes be beatings, death or even kidnappings.

This history formed the springboard for this work of fiction by Strom, Schwartz and Kushner based on Jewish women’s lives in 18th Century Europe, klezmer music and feminist history, with a healthy dose of magical realism thrown in.

You can see how I might say, in the trembling wake of reading this: “Oh, Ellen, oh pretty please, DO let me interview you about Witches for Black Gate Magazine!”

To which Ellen replied, quintessentially and in so many words, “Here, kid. I’ll do you one better.”

All of a sudden, I was interviewing the entire team of The Witches of Lublin’s creators — playwrights, composer and director — in a sort of mad merry-go-round-robin of emails. Which I now present to you for your reading pleasure.

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Through Mordor to the Unreal City: A National Poetry Month Post

Through Mordor to the Unreal City: A National Poetry Month Post

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Today, for a little while, I remove my monster mask (sort of) and don my Purple Hat of Poetry.

Over at my new homepage, I’ve been sharing some of my poetry stock in honor of National Poetry Month. I started with a poem of mine called “Phase Shift,” that’s half upside down, and recently paired with an awesome space vortex illustration.

Now, because I can, I’m taking a series of poems gathered in my 2008 collection The Journey to Kailash and I’m running them, with accompanying audio readings, one a day on my new WordPress blog until the end of the month.

The Enchantress of the Black Gate, on learning I was doing this, asked me to write a blog entry on Poetry and Fantasy.

“Wow, that’s an immense topic,” I replied.

Cooney the Enchantress
Cooney the Enchantress

“Write it about your own relationship to it,” she said.

Okay, that I can do.

True statement: I discovered poetry through heroic fantasy.

I had no idea at the time, of course, what a curious path this would lead me down.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.17 “My Heart Will Go On”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.17 “My Heart Will Go On”

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SUPERNATURAL
Sam (far left) and Dean (middle) are frozen in time while the Archangel Castiel (right) begins negotiations with Fate.

After a few weeks without Supernatural, I’ve been looking forward for the show to come back. There are a lot of dangling cliffhangers this season and I’m looking forward to seeing how they come together.

This episode contains a riff on the Final Destination theme, where events are conspiring to create elaborate death scenarios. The first death involves a man triggering a Rube Goldberg-like series of events that end in being decapitated by his garage door.

It turns out that there have been a string of bizarre deaths, several of them within the same families. This draws the attention of Sam and Dean, but it’s bigger than what they find. They find a piece of gold thread at each of the death scenes, but not really any other clues. Billy’s wife, Ellen, discovers that …

Yes, that’s right, Billy’s wife, Ellen. Her daughter, Jo, is out investigating a connected series of deaths in California. Now, for the reader and viewer who’s been following the show, this may seem startling for a number of reasons. Billy’s not married, for one, and Ellen and Jo are hunters who died last season.

Anyway, Billy’s wife, Ellen, discovers that the families of all of the victims came over to the U.S. at about the same time in 1912. In fact, they came over on the same ship … called the Titanic.

See where this is going?

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An Interview with Claude Lalumière, Part One

An Interview with Claude Lalumière, Part One

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Claude LalumièreClaude Lalumière‘s involvement with fantastika has taken many forms. He’s been a retailer, an editor of anthologies, and a critic. But lately he’s become best known for his fiction. Claude’s writing is most often a surreal and precise blending of fantasy, horror, science fiction, superhero adventure, and any other genre that seems handy and to the point. His first collection, Objects of Worship, was published by ChiZine Publications two years ago; now a new set of linked short stories, The Door to Lost Pages, is about to hit shelves.

I’ve known Claude for a long time, and was happy to take the opportunity of the publication of his new book to have an e-mail conversation with him about his writing, his past, and many other things. In this first part, he discusses his language, his time as a bookseller, his two books, and his ongoing web series Lost Myths, among many other things.

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Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Nightmare World

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Nightmare World

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image0043I don’t know about you, but I never got a really clear look at horror comics as a kid, which may be why they still intrigue me to this day.

Back then, the acquisition of such contraband was generally via my older male cousins who were smart enough, even at that tender young age, to secret them inside the cover of The Archies. The comic would then be stashed between my mattress and box springs to be removed only after I had heard my parents go to bed. At this magic time, the comic would be quietly pulled out (don’t crinkle the pages too much, parents can hear that from the other side of the house) and read under a mound of stifling covers by the glow of a dimming flashlight.

The upshot of reading banned material was that I would scare myself silly and fall asleep clutching the flickering flashlight until the batteries went dead. It always seemed that the shadows cast under the covers and against the pages muted the comic book colors and make the icky stuff inside come to life.

Thus the reason horror comics were verboten.

Which, I suspect, is how I gained a lifelong addiction to horror comics and likely also the cause of ever-increasingly strong contact lenses as an adult.

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Andromeda Spaceways 50th and CSZ’s 1st

Andromeda Spaceways 50th and CSZ’s 1st

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asim50_cover_229_317-220x304In addition to having the coolest title for a genre fiction magazine,  Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has reached its 50th issue milestone.  To celebrate, the cover is a reprint of the illustration by Les Petersen for the magazine’s first issue. Stories by Debbie Cowens, Damien Walters Grintalis, Shona Husk, Barry Kirwan, Ian McHugh, Nicole R. Murphy, Dennis J. Pale, Anthony Panegyres, Mark Lee Pearson, Simon Petrie, Natasha Simonova, Robert P. Switzer and Mark D. West.  Print and PDF subscriptions and single issue purchases are available here.

Meanwhile, The Cascadia Subduction Zone (named after the earthquake corridor in the Pacific Northwest that is home base for the publication) has launched its inaugural issue. While its editorial mission is to bring more attention to women writers, and is not a genre publication per se, the women on the masthead may be familiar to genre readers.  Reviews editor Nisi Shawl is a James Triptree Jr. award winner, and features editor L. Timmel Duchamp has published short sf and is, along with arts editor Kath Wilham, a founder of Aqueduct Press.  And the first issue features a poem by Ursula K. LeGuin, as well as reviews of Karen J. Fowler, M. Rickert, and Kathe Koja.  There’s also a review of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMer.

Print and electronic editions and subscriptions are available at earth-shaking rates here.cascadia1_110x1531