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Year: 2011

King of the Nerds reviews Black Gate 14

King of the Nerds reviews Black Gate 14

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bglgMike Ferrante at the King of the Nerds blog has published a lengthy review of our latest issue:

Character driven stories with brisk pacing, often strange landscapes, and more often than not a boat load of action are what Black Gate is all about. It was a good time to jump on board with Black Gate since issue 14 (Winter 2010) is a double-stuffed issue clocking in at a massive 385 pages (in pdf), the print edition rivaling my 4th Edition Player’s Handbook in size. What’s most impressive about those 385 pages is the sheer amount of awesome fiction packed within… everything I’ve read has been fantastic in one way or another, and wonderfully unique as well.

He was especially impressed with “The Word of Azrael” by Matthew David Surridge:

By far my favorite story in this issue…  it was inspired by the snippets of biography that were featured in some of the old Conan novels.  As such “the Word of Azrael” reads sort of like a listing of deeds.  Brief highlights of a lengthy career that nonetheless serve as veritable seeds for the reader’s imagination.  Yet at the same time, in that sparse chronicle, Surridge still manages to convey a palpable weight to Isrohim Vey, a sense of gravitas and tragedy that a surround a character whom we know startlingly little about…  Fantastic stuff here and more than enough to make me damned glad I’m a Black Gate subscriber.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.16 “And Then There Were None”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.16 “And Then There Were None”

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SUPERNATURAL

This week starts out with a cute girl being picked up by a trucker, attempting to seduce him. But, fortunately, he loves Jesus and tries to save her, telling her that the void inside is searching for him. She laughs, talking about how God created him and abandoned him. Then she whispers a secret into his ear …

and he goes home and smashes in his family’s heads with a hammer.

Sam, Dean, and Bobby are on the case. Turns out there have been a series of hunters running into massive monster populations, with many hunter deaths. Dean observes that it’s a “straight kickline down I-80…. Looks to me like it’s a Sherman march monster mash.” The march seems to be heading straight to the town where a man bashed his family’s head in with a hammer.

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C.S.E. Cooney’s “The Last Sophia” at Strange Horizons

C.S.E. Cooney’s “The Last Sophia” at Strange Horizons

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claire-254Black Gate‘s website editor, the marvelously talented (and tireless) C.S.E. Cooney, has a new story up at Strange Horizons:

The gestation period for a Gentry babe is brutally short. Later, one is hard-pressed to remember any of it. As soon as ever I spew her forth into the world (this time, it is a girl; I’ve been dreaming of her), she will be taken away to be raised elsewhere, and I will not remember her face. Of my other children, I know only the names, but these I feel were all — or for the most part — in very bad taste…

I came under enemy enchantment at the soft age of fourteen. For some reason it pleased the Gentry that I should breed their changeling babes, will me nil me, and breed them I have, though I had little else to do with them. Since then, it’s been fumes and nostrums, narcotics and elixirs. I have existed in a kind of padded dream designed by the Abbot’s wizards to protect me from further Gentry meddling — although, if you look at my record, these potions hardly seem worth their weight in piss. I have now borne three Gentry babes in as many years and will any day deliver myself of a fourth.

C.S.E.’s fiction and poetry have also appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 3, Book of Dead Things, Subterranean magazine, Goblin Fruit, Ideomancer, Doorways, Mythic Delirium, and Apex, among others. Her novella The Big Bah-Ha was recently published by Drollerie Press, and her story “Braiding the Ghosts” (from Clockwork Phoenix 3) was selected for inclusion in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011.

You can read the complete text of “The Last Sophia” here.

Literature and Ideas: Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker

Literature and Ideas: Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker

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Star MakerIt’s often said that science fiction (or speculative fiction, whatever term you prefer) is a ‘literature of ideas’. I’ve never been able to agree with that statement. In part, I feel much the same way this writer does, though perhaps not as strongly; that is, to say that sf is a literature of ideas is to overlook the fact that the best mainstream literature is every bit as engaged with ideas, if not more so. Consider, say, Iris Murdoch’s use of Wittgenstein’s imagery and philosophy. Is that not writing engaged with ideas?

But I think also that there’s another difficulty with considering sf as a literature of ideas. That being: it seems to me sf very often fails to realise the promise contained in that phrase. What I mean is that ‘a literature of ideas’ would seem to imply a literature with a different structure than traditional literature; a literature with a different sense of how to shape a narrative, or how to use language. A literature actually shaped and structured by ideas, not plot or even character. I feel Murdoch goes some distance toward that sort of thing in a book like Under the Net, playing about with forms like farce and bildungsroman, and tying them together with the Wittgensteinian ideas about the representation of reality — with which, as somebody writing a basically mimetic work, she’s already engaged. What’s the science fiction equivalent of that?

It seems to me that an example of the true literature of ideas in sf is something like Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Stapledon was a novelist, but a philosopher perhaps more so; and Star Maker seems often less like a traditional narrative than an extended philosophical meditation or anthropological field report. The whole book is essentially one big infodump. But a fascinating infodump.

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Take Advantage of the Great Apex Nebula & Stoker Award Sale

Take Advantage of the Great Apex Nebula & Stoker Award Sale

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i-remember-the-futureJason Sizemore at Apex Book Company, publishers of Apex magazine and many fine Dark SF, Fantasy, and Horror books, tells us that to celebrate receiving two Nebula nominations and two Stoker nominations, Apex is having a sale on all books by authors who’ve received nominations.

The discount is 40% off print and digital versions of the following books:

Dark Faith, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry L. Gordon — $11.97 (Buy Here)
To Each Their Darkness, Gary Braunbeck — $11.37 (Buy Here)
Taste of Tenderloin, Gene O’Neill — $8.37 (Buy Here)
Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales, Fran Friel — $9.57 (Buy Here)
I Remember the Future, Michael A. Burstein — $13.17 (Buy Here)
Unwelcome Bodies, Jennifer Pelland — $8.97 (Buy Here)
Aegri Somnia, edited by Jason Sizemore and Gill Ainsworth — $8.97 (Buy Here)

Issue 18 of Apex Magazine, containing Amal El-Mohtar’s Nebula-nominated story “The Green Book” is also 40% off. You can read the complete story here.

The special pricing ends March 14. Take advantage of a great sale to sample the work of some of the finest new writers in the genre!

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Hollywood Goes Grimm

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Hollywood Goes Grimm

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image0023Anyone who has ever read Grimm’s fairy tales knows that they are not the stuff that Disney has made of them. Shorter on happy endings than you may think ,and often fraught with enough violence to garner an “R” rating, it’s a wonder it’s taken Hollywood this long to discover them and mark them for a darker, CGI-laden treatment.

Being a huge fan of Grimm’s fairy tales, as any self-respecting goth chick would be, I’m following several interesting offerings en route to the big screen in the coming months.

Red Riding Hood, set for release in theaters this weekend (and called Little Red Cap in the Brothers Grimm tale) puts a werewolf spin on the original tale of young girl-meets-carnivorous-canine-who-consumes-her-relatives.

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Tangent Selects Six Black Gate Stories for its Best of 2010

Tangent Selects Six Black Gate Stories for its Best of 2010

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hangmans-bigTangent Online has published its annual Recommended Readling List, this year including six stories from our most recent issue, Black Gate 14:

“The Hangman’s Daughter” by Chris Braak
“Devil on the Wind” by Michael Jasper and Jay Lake
“Red Hell” by Renee Stern
“La Señora de Oro” by R. L. Roth
“Destroyer” by James Enge
“The Natural History of Calamity” by Robert J. Howe

Congratulations to all!

Tangent Online is managed by Steve Fahnestalk, and published by Dave Truesdale. The complete Recommended Readling List is here.

Art by John Kauffman for “The Hangman’s Daughter.”

Charles R. Saunders Reviews A Desert of Souls

Charles R. Saunders Reviews A Desert of Souls

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desertofsoulsCharles R. Saunders, author of the legendary Imaro books, has weighed in on Howard Andrew Jones’s first novel:

What, then, is so special about The Desert of Souls? Well, just about everything.

Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East during the initial bloom of Islam’s ascendance, Howard brings to life the storied past of places such as Baghdad, Basra, Mosul… To this tapestry of history, Howard adds several threads of sorcery…

The protagonists and the patron become involved in a fatal encounter in a local bazaar. Events swiftly escalate into a maelstrom of murder, theft, escape, pursuit, magic, mayhem, romance, rejection and redemption, The characters — and the reader — whirl along in a breakneck journey through a Middle East that is ancient, yet well beyond the cusp of irreversible change…

Yet for all this homage to the past, Howard also breaks new ground with this novel, which places him firmly among the ranks of such new-wave sword-and-sorcery writers as Joe Abercrombie, James Enge and Steven Erikson, to name just a few. Remember Howard Andrew Jonses’ name. You will be hearing — and reading — more from him.

Charles’ review joins the recent rave coverage from BookPage, Bush League Critic, and SF Revu.

You can read Charles’ complete review here.

These Just In…

These Just In…

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feb-2011-cover-web2 The first Realms of Fantasy resurrected under new publishers, Damnation Books, for February 2011 features the fiction of Desirina Bokovich, Richard Parks, Mark Rigney, Pauline J. Alms and Scott William Carter.  The last has a story entitled “The Time of His Life” which is described as:

It’s so difficult to find time for yourself amid the demands of family and work.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just carve some out?  Maybe, maybe not.

Realms of Fantasy tends to favor a wee bit too much of fairy land for my tastes  (an unfair criticism, since that is, after all, a large part of its niche), but this sounded different and intriguing enough to get my immediate attention. Who after, all, hasn’t fantasized about having some private place to get away from it all?

In this case, the narrator discovers a room in which he can spend as much time as he wants on creative pursuits, but only minutes have gone by when he returns to the real life of kids and bitchy wife and work.  A Twilight Zone kind of tale that’s ultimately about resisting the allures of temptation and self-gratification.  The wife’s transformation from bitch to loving partner isn’t quite believable, though perhaps Williams is suggesting this has less to do with the wife’s actual attitude than the husband’s perception. And he does get right the marital tension between two equally tired (but for different reasons) partners with young children.  

black-static-291However, I have to wonder what the editors do here at this magazine.  Okay, maybe you can make an argument that intense cold could actually scorch, though I tend to associate it with extreme heat. But racing minds, chills going up a spine, the mere mention of a shudder should send off alarm bells to break out the red pencils and clean up clumsy phrasing that mars an otherwise decent story.

Horror magazine Black Static for February-March 2011 has new tales from V. H. Leslie, Ray Cluley, Maura McHugh, Ed Grabianowski and James Cooper.  In the “first lines that hook you into the story” department, here’s the opening to McHugh’s “Water”:

“The pot lids hopped and fizzed when Mark’s mother laid the wooden spoon down calmly, opened the back door of the kitchen, disappeared into the overgrown garden, and drowned herself in the river that flowed past their house.”

True horror lies not in the stuff of sexy vampires or ghost stories or chainsaw massacres, but within the mundane context of ordinary existence.

R.A. Lafferty Literary Estate For Sale

R.A. Lafferty Literary Estate For Sale

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past-masterSteven Silver at SF Site is reporting that the estate of R.A. Lafferty, including rights to his 29 novels and 225 short stories, is currently being auctioned off.

The source for the news appears to be an online classified ad at Locus Online, which claims that the “Current bid is $70,000+.”

R.A. Lafferty is the author of the novels Past Master, The Reefs of Earth, Fourth Mansions, and Sindbad: The Thirteenth Voyage, as well as the classic short story collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, and Lafferty in Orbit.

He won a Hugo Award in 1973 for the short story “Eurema’s Dam,” and was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Past Master.

He died in 2002.

900-grandReports have been circulating for some time that the Lafferty estate had withdrawn reprint rights to all of his work, including recent short story collections. While Lafferty’s novels have not generally drawn much attention in recent years, his short stories continue to be highly regarded.

Until recently Wildside Press had been keeping much of Lafferty’s best work in print, including Nine Hundred Grandmothers, The Devil is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, and many others. Those editions are now out of print.

While it’s not unusual  for literary rights to go to auction, I can’t recall seeing a bulk lot of an author’s entire output auctioned at once — especially one as large as Lafferty’s.

Interested bidders can contact the Lafferty estate.