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Month: May 2013

James McGlothlin Reviews Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice From the Pros

James McGlothlin Reviews Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice From the Pros

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Writing Fantasy HeroesWriting Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice From the Pros
Edited by Jason M. Waltz
Rogue Blades Entertainment (202 pp, $14.99, trade paperback, February 2013)

In recent days, Sarah Avery has been doing some excellent in-depth posts reviewing Writing Fantasy Heroes, a collection of essays from some of the best fantasy practitioners in the field. Having recently been one of the winners of a contest for this book, Black Gate has allowed me the opportunity to give my two cents concerning the book as well. I won’t pretend to improve on any of Avery’s review here. Rather, I’ll offer some comments on just a few of the essays that I reacted most strongly to.

For me, hands down, the chapter by Howard Andrew Jones concerning character development through dialogue was the best essay in the book. Jones, along with Saladin Ahmed and Ari Marmell (who also has a chapter in this volume), is part of a small but seemingly growing band of authors who are writing fantasy fiction in a Middle-eastern milieu — think 1001 Arabian Nights! In his essay, Jones shows how the discussions among characters in a story can go a long way towards fleshing out these characters. His examples were quite apt and I especially enjoyed the McCoy and Spock dialogue taken from the original Star Trek series.

Jones’s discussion reminded me of at least one reason why I enjoy books like George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series as well as, say, Quentin Tarantino screenplays. Both artists do an excellent job of making their characters multi-faceted, and thus compelling, by the use of dialogue in their stories. I think Jones’s essay shows how poor interchanges among characters do more to make a story feel artificial than the use of fantasy tropes!

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Vintage Treasures: The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber

Vintage Treasures: The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber

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The Girl With the Hungry EyesSometimes it seems that every time a new sword & sorcery novel appears, a publicist automatically slaps “comparable to Fritz Leiber!” on the cover.

I’ll tell you why: it works. When Karen Burnham at SF Signal noted that Tim Pratt’s latest Pathfinder novel Liar’s Blade had done “an excellent job of capturing the spirit” of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, I bought it immediately. A fantasy novel with the charm and style of Fritz Leiber’s great adventures? Where’s my credit card.

I think publicists must get tired of comparing new sword & sorcery to Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard. I know it’s annoying to their fans, and I don’t think it does a genuine service to most new writers — not in the long term, anyway.

And frankly, all the focus on Fritz Leiber as the poster child for exemplary S&S overlooks his success in a broad range of genres: science fiction, mystery, dark fantasy, supernatural horror, plays, and even a 1966 Tarzan novel. Ask anyone who’s read his 1965 Hugo Award-winning novel The Wanderer, about a rogue planet that drifts close to Earth — or his brilliant short story “A Pail of Air,” a post-apocalyptic tale of a family fighting to survive on a world grown so cold that oxygen has condensed out of the air, and the strange things they discover when the world has gone completely still — and you’ll find that Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales, as important as they are to the Sword & Sorcery canon, stand as only a small sample of a stellar writing career that spanned over 50 years.

As a paperback collector, it’s hard to pick my favorite Fritz Leiber book. I love Michael Whelan’s cover for Swords and Ice Magic (1977), and of course The Big Time (1961), Gather, Darkness! (1975), and the creepy Our Lady of Darkness (1977). But I think it would have to be a collection, possibly The Mind Spider and Other Stories (1961), Ship of Shadows (1979), or The Ghost Light (1984).

But I might just cheat and make it the 1949 Avon paperback The Girl With the Hungry Eyes.

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TAPE

TAPE

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TAPEJason Coffman wrote, directed, produced, and shot this thirteen-minute slow-burn nightmare. Jim Carston (played by Aaron Christensen) has a problem. He finds a business card for one Mr. Lake, who specializes in “Unusual Services.” Mr. Lake agrees to make Carston’s problem go away, but on one condition. After the job is completed, he will receive a videotape and, no matter what he does, he will have to possess that tape for the rest of his life.

Now, right off, it’s a little strange that a 2012 film should revolve around a videotape, but the medium is already so outdated that it has a strange nostalgic feel to it. And, as we see in the film’s surprising climax, there’s just things you can do with a tape that can’t be done with a disc.

This short film is already gathering critical acclaim and you can watch it now on Vimeo, as well as learn more about it at the Rabbit Room Productions website. And if you want to see more of the enigmatic businessman, Mr. Lake, there’s a sequel of sorts floating around the Internet titled, “Secret Cinema.”

Just be careful about picking up strange business cards.

Michael Penkas is the website editor for Black Gate. A collection of four of his stories, titled Dead Boys, is available for download through Amazon and Smashwords. You can learn more about his various publications on his blog.

The Hunger Games and Kids: When to Say When?

The Hunger Games and Kids: When to Say When?

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Mockingjay_PinOn a recent visit, my sister was shocked to discover that my boys had with them a copy of Mockingjay. At first, she assumed it was Corey’s (Corey is nearly thirteen), and was therefore even more horrified to learn that it was Evan’s book. Evan is eight.

My sister accosted me later that night (with my boys and hers all tucked up in various beds, visions of Minecraft dancing in their heads) and asked how I had come to the decision to let Evan tackle The Hunger Games books. She did not approach on an attack vector ––“How dare you let him read this trash!” No, no. Opinionated my sister certainly is, but she’s a smart (and tolerant) cookie.

Even so, my answer took the better part of twenty minutes to deliver, because I myself am puzzled by why Evan is reading The Hunger Games and why I (having viewed The Hunger Games and read Catching Fire) am at least tacitly condoning his choice.

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Weird of Oz on the Art of Rating

Weird of Oz on the Art of Rating

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siskel-and-ebertAs a film and book reviewer for a number of periodicals and websites over the years, I have often wrestled with the art of rating. To some, the awarding of stars to a particular work might seem a simple matter, but there is a craft to it, and it is one of those tasks that can be as complicated as you care to make it — you can assign a rating on gut instinct, jotting down the first number that pops into your head, or you can (as I often do) vacillate back and forth over whether you should add that extra half star.

It is also one of the most subjective undertakings. It is one thing to decide whether you enjoyed a movie; it is quite another to assign it some value on a fixed scale. First off, you, the reviewer, must decide on what criteria and within what framework you are going to base your ratings. In fact, this varies so dramatically from one reviewer to the next that the best you can hope for is to be as consistent as possible with yourself.

Believe me, there is no set, agreed-upon code among professional critics to which you need worry about conforming; you just need to make sure your readers can understand your reasoning. It is also helpful to communicate your personal tastes and preferences insofar as they influence your assessments, so that readers know where you’re coming from. Here are some other considerations…

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “Niola’s Last Stand” by Vera Nazarian

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Niola’s Last Stand” by Vera Nazarian

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Vera NazarianA young woman waits helplessly in the streets for her grandmother as her city falls around her.

There was almost no one left in the streets now. The last to leave were the city militia forces and army units. As the sunset gave way to night, darkness-cloaked foot soldiers marched past Niola.

One of the unit captains paused “Why are you still here?” he said. “Don’t wait too long, girl. We are the last division, and as we leave this city you will be all alone.” Niola nodded, and thanked him in a parched whisper.

Night came, and with it came silence.

And suddenly it hit her, the terror.

Niola was all alone. The monolithic city lay around her like a blanket of black wool; no light, no respite. The wind swept alone in the silence, slithering and reverberating against stone and thatch and mud clay brick and empty marble, whistling in the structures and making the tree leaves whisper and crinkle… If anyone else was left here it was only the most criminal-minded, the looters, the infirm, the mad…

The ghosts.

Vera Nazarian is a two-time Nebula Award Finalist and a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She made her novelist debut with the critically acclaimed Dreams of the Compass Rose (set in the same ancient world universe as this story) in 2002, followed by epic fantasy Lords of Rainbow in 2003. Her novella, The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass, made the 2005 Locus Recommended Reading List. Her debut collection, Salt of the Air, contains the 2007 Nebula Award-nominated “The Story of Love.” Her recent work includes the 2008 Nebula Finalist novella, The Duke in His Castle, and Pride and Platypus: Mr. Darcy’s Dreadful Secret.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Robert Rhodes, Jason E. Thummel, Ryan Harvey, Steven H Silver, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Emily Mah, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

“Niola’s Last Stand” is a complete 7,000-word tale of adventure fantasy offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

New Treasures: Federation Commander: Klingon Border

New Treasures: Federation Commander: Klingon Border

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Federation Commander Klingon BorderIn honor of the US release of Star Trek Into Darkness this week, I found some of my favorite Star Trek games in the basement, and hugged them.

Took longer than you might expect. Turns out there are a lot of decent Star Trek titles. Over a dozen board games, for example — starting with West End’s terrific 1985 contributions, the paragraph-based Star Trek The Adventure Game and the more family-friendly The Enterprise Encounter, all the way up to Wizkids’ 2011 deluxe releases, Reiner Knizia’s solitaire/cooperative mission game Star Trek Expeditions and the strategic space exploration/ship-to-ship combat title Star Trek – Fleet Captains. Not to mention last year’s oddball Star Trek Catan from Mayfair Games.

Let’s not neglect the role playing games, starting with FASA’s classic 1983 Star Trek The Role Playing Game and the updated RPG from Last Unicorn Games in 1999. And of course, numerous card, deck-building, and collectible games, like Star Trek HeroClix from WizKids.

That’s not including dozens of computer and video games, starting with SSI’s unlicensed Apple II space-combat title The Warp Factor (1982), to the text-based The Promethean Prophecy (Simon & Schuster, 1984) and the classic adventure games from Interplay like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992) and Judgment Rites (1993). I could go on, but my fingers are tired already.

But the great-granddaddy of Star Trek games has to be Star Fleet Battles, which began as a 1979 pocket game released in a zip-lock bag by Task Force Games and has grown into one of the largest franchises in table-top gaming, with countless expansions and variants from a small handful of publishers over the last three decades.

The title which got the warmest hug during my basement walkabout, and likely the one I’d grab if I were to be marooned on a lonely asteroid with a group of fellow Star Trek gamers, was Federation Commander: Klingon Border, a Star Fleet Battles mega-game which challenges you to take the helm of a Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser and hold the border during a massive Klingon invasion.

Admit it — that sounds like fun.

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The 2013 Locus Awards Finalists

The 2013 Locus Awards Finalists

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The Killing MoonI consider the annual Locus Awards to be one of the major genre prizes, right behind the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been a subscriber to Locus, the magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy field, for over 20 years, and have noticed how reliable the award is at ferreting out really important work year after year. Maybe it’s because Locus readers tend to be older, and more committed to the genre, than the average fan. Or maybe it’s just that I’m eligible to vote, and so I’m less grumpy about the results.

Whatever the reason, there’s no arguing the fact that the Locus Awards have highlighted some of the most important genre publications in the last 40 years, since they were first given out in 1971. If you’re a fantasy fan, it’s worth your time to pay attention to all the nominees.

The top five finalists in each category of the 2013 Locus Awards were announced by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation on Wednesday, May 8. The nominees are:

FANTASY NOVEL

  • The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
  • The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
  • Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
  • Hide Me Among the Graves, Tim Powers (Morrow)
  • The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace)

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May/June Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine now on Sale

May/June Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine now on Sale

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F&SF May June 2013Gordon van Gelder’s Fantasy & Science Fiction is perhaps the magazine I most look forward to. He’s built a fine stable of regular authors, including Robert Reed, Dale Bailey, Ken Liu, Naomi Kritzer, and especially the prolific Albert E. Cowdrey, who’s had a story in every issue since Sept/Oct 2011.

But that doesn’t mean the magazine is predictable, and the May/June issue is even less predictable than usual. Here’s Michelle Ristuccia at Tangent Online:

F&SF isn’t a themed magazine, but if it was, this issue’s theme would be sex told in first person. Most of the stories mention infatuation or sex, and a few are explicit, bordering on erotica. Some of the writers are so good that they could win over all but the most prudish – and of those that didn’t wow me, most are still high quality writing. This issue is definitely worth the cost…

“Changes” by Rand B. Lee is an intriguing post-apocalyptic SF tale complete with chaotic time travel and talking monster dogs, told in third-person over the shoulder of Whitsun… When a pack of mutant dogs alerts him to the poisonous nature of a pocket of ominous mist, Whitsun feels that he must investigate… I love the idea of reality constantly destabilizing around the characters and I appreciated the mix of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that results.

The cover story is “Wormwood is Also a Star” by Andy Stewart. Here’s Michelle again:

“Wormwood is Also a Star” takes us to the heart of two mysteries set in the Ukraine in 1992. The macro mystery concerns the Angel’s Tear, a magical forcefield of unconfirmed origin that sprang up to protect part of the Ukraine from the fallout of Chernobyl. The more personal mystery is that of the death of reporter Mitka’s sister 20 years earlier, which is still shrouded in political secrecy… Andy Stewart put an incredible amount of work into this story and pulls it all off well, including the scenes involving borderline erotica and backstory reveals occurring simultaneously… I dare you not to be smitten.

The issue also contains fiction from Joe Haldeman, Paul Di Filippo, Ted White, Bruce McAllister, Dale Bailey — and yes, Albert E. Cowdrey.

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Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

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Brown Girl in the RingPublished in 1998, Nalo Hopkinson’s debut novel was Brown Girl in the Ring, the first winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. It went on to be shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree Junior Award, to win the Locus Award in the First Novel category, and to help Hopkinson (who had already published several short stories) win the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She’s gone on to write five more novels, along with two collections of short stories, as well as editing and co-editing several anthologies.

Born in Jamaica, Hopkinson has lived in Toronto since 1977, and a near-future version of that city is the background to Brown Girl in the Ring. In this dystopian imagining, the core of the city’s been abandoned by all levels of government. A young mother named Ti-Jeanne lives in the community that’s sprung up; she’s the granddaughter of one of the community’s leaders, Gros-Jeanne, a healer with apparently magical powers — and Ti-Jeanne herself has begun to see strange visions. When elements of the Ontario government reach out to a local boss, asking him to supply a human heart for an emergency organ transplant, both Jeannes become involved in the resulting violence.

The novel deserves the acclaim it got. On one level, it’s a strong adventure story with a fast-moving plot. But the book’s also notable for its language — specifically the dialogue, largely written in a Caribbean English. And for the story’s use of both science fiction and fantastic elements; as it works through a powerful family tragedy, played out in a dark future through the invocation of spirits and gods, it convincingly evokes the mythic.

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