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Month: June 2013

Stephanie Burgis on Scandals in Regency England, Magickal Bathwater, and an Illness That Is No Laughing Matter

Stephanie Burgis on Scandals in Regency England, Magickal Bathwater, and an Illness That Is No Laughing Matter

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Stephanie Burgis in The Pump Room in Bath, England
Stephanie Burgis in The Pump Room in Bath, England

Stephanie Burgis got her first short story published when she was fifteen, and hasn’t stopped since.

Now the author of over thirty published short stories and the Regency fantasy novel trilogy The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson (Atheneum – US, Templar – UK), she makes her home in Wales with her husband, Patrick Samphire (also a writer).

I had the opportunity to sit down with her and ask about her research process for her novels, the path she’s taken in her career, and on a more personal note, her life with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Stephanie and I also collaborated on some jewelry pieces I designed to tie in with her novel trilogy, and here we also share the story behind those pieces and the various hurdles we had to overcome to get them into production.

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Art of the Genre: Art of the Iconic Female #4: The Baroness

Art of the Genre: Art of the Iconic Female #4: The Baroness

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It seems to me the Baroness was made to be drawn by Adam Hughes...
It seems to me the Baroness was made to be drawn by Adam Hughes…

What isn’t to love about The Baroness?  Well, I suppose a great deal if you are on the side of ‘good’, but nonetheless she’s still a character that has captured the imagination of a generation of young men growing up in the 1980s.

I was a fan of action figures, and when Hasbro initially released their G.I. Joe A Real American Hero  line in 1982, I spent three days one weekend catching nightcrawlers (bait worms in southern Indiana speak) by hand with a flashlight at five cents a pop until I had enough to purchase the first run (rough calculation, I caught upwards of 1000 of the slimy little buggers).

At the time, I was eleven, and my G.I. Joe figures provided a great combat story to be told over and over again in the woods by my house, in my sandbox, on the riverbank, and on the floors of various friends living rooms, but I must admit a purely war-driven story can get tiresome without something more meaningful to fight for.

Enter Cobra, the G.I. Joe nemesis. But still, even after you could lay hands on villains to fight, there was something lacking until women were finally added to the story.  The addition of Scarlet was a turning point for me in my action figure storylines, and yet a great deal of imagination had to be used because to this point action figure manufacturing hadn’t really ‘figured women out’.  That is to simply say, female action figures weren’t all that alluring, mostly because you couldn’t effectively produce their hair.

Sure, there was Star Wars, of which I had a nice collection as well, who had Princess Leia, and that figure was fine, but they (the manufacturers) had a huge advantage because of Leia’s famous head-buns.  Those could be sculpted, but free-flowing hair was a much more difficult endeavor and so figures like G.I. Joe alums Scarlet, Lady J, and heaven forbid Covergirl (probably the ugliest figure ever created and based on a model turned soldier of all things!) never really made boys’ hearts go pitter-pat unless you were reading the Marvel comics or watching the animation.

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New Treasures: Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables

New Treasures: Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables

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Clockwork Fairy TalesLately I seem to be months behind when I finally get around to posting on the best new releases. It’s not my fault — books tend to get buried here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters (anything that can’t move under its own power gets buried, if you want the truth). Still, there are times when the releases are so old that I debate including them in my Vintage Treasures columns instead of New Treasures. You know that ain’t a good sign.

Well, not this time. In this column I talk about a fabulous new book that officially goes on sale today. Today, peeps! Well, yesterday, since it’s now after midnight here in Illinois. Crap.

Whatever. It’s still a victory, and I savor them when I can. Today’s subject is Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables, a handsome collection of novellas that combine classic fairy tales with steampunk settings.

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” New York Times bestselling author K. W. Jeter’s “La Valse” forges a fable about love, the decadence of technology, and a gala dance that becomes the obsession of a young engineer — and the doom of those who partake in it.…

In “You Will Attend Until Beauty Awakens,” national bestselling author and John W. Campbell Award winner Jay Lake tells the story of Sleeping Beauty — and how the princess was conceived in deception, raised in danger, and rescued by a prince who may be less than valiant.

The tale of “The Tinderbox” takes a turn into the surreal when a damaged young soldier comes into possession of an intricate, treacherous treasure and is drawn into a mission of mercy in national bestselling author Kat Richardson’s “The Hollow Hounds.”

In “The Kings of Mount Golden,” Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee Paul Di Filippo tells the story of a young man’s search for his heritage and a mechanical marvel that lies at the heart of a sinister pact in this fascinating take on “The King of the Golden Mountain.”

The volume also includes tales from Steven Harper, Nancy A. Collins, G. K. Hayes, Gregory Nicoll, and Pip Ballantine. One of the most intriguing elements of this anthology is story length: all of the contributions except the Jeter are novellas, averaging around 40 pages each. I consider novellas to be the ideal length for most fantasy, and you don’t see many markets for them

Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables was edited by Stephen L. Antczak and James C. Bassett. It was released on Tuesday by Roc Books. It is 325 pages in trade paperback, priced at $15 ($9.99 for the digital version).

Coming Soon from Osprey Publishing: Blackbeard, Tombstone, The Nazi Occult, Steampunk and Horus and Set

Coming Soon from Osprey Publishing: Blackbeard, Tombstone, The Nazi Occult, Steampunk and Horus and Set

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Blackbeard's Last FightOsprey Publishing is best known for its long running series of illustrated military history books. Over the last forty years, Osprey has covered every era of warfare from the earliest recorded battles in Ancient Egypt right up to today’s Special Forces.

Modellers, role-players, wargamers, authors, and even professors have all used our books as reference tools.

For the last seven years, I have been lucky enough to work for Osprey Publishing, and although my job has changed greatly over the years, my enthusiasm for our products has not.

Even for someone like myself, that comes out of a fantasy role-play and writing background, I find Osprey has a lot to offer. So, when John suggested I write a blog about some of the interesting books coming up from Osprey, I jumped at the chance.

Now, Osprey has over 100 books coming out this year, so there isn’t time to talk about them all.

Instead, I thought I might just highlight a few that I thought would be of particular interest to Black Gate readers. So here we go…

Probably my favorite series from Osprey over the last few years has been RAID. These books tell the story of small unit actions and aren’t necessarily limited to the strict confines of military history.

For example, two titles coming up in the next few months have really caught my eye.  The first is Blackbeard’s Last Fight: Pirate Hunting in North Carolina 1718.

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Skyhorse and Start Publishing Complete Night Shade Acquisition

Skyhorse and Start Publishing Complete Night Shade Acquisition

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The Daedalus IncidentAs we first reported on April 4th, Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing have been in negotiations to acquire the assets of Night Shade Books. As co-owner Jeremy Lassen explained in an Open Letter on April 5th, the sale would allow Night Shade to avoid bankruptcy and keep it operating as an ongoing concern.

After several authors expressed concern over the terms of the buyout, Skyhorse and Start sweetened the deal with a more generous royalty rate. Now the publishers have announced that they have completed the acquisition of Night Shade, and that the first post-sale book to be published will be Michael J. Martinez’s The Daedalus Incident on July 9th. Here’s part of the official press release:

Founded by Jason Williams in 1997, who was joined by partner Jeremy Lassen shortly after, Night Shade Books has over 250 titles in its catalog, including some renowned genre fiction — written by multiple nominees and winners of Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo awards. In 2003, Night Shade Books won the World Fantasy Special Award for Professional Achievement. Both Williams and Lassen will continue to be with Night Shade in a consulting capacity.

The agreement was reached following a spirited and public debate among authors, agents, fans, and publishers, which resulted in a deal approved by Night Shade’s authors….

“I am very excited to have found a buyer that is such a good fit for Night Shade, one that will be able to take us further than I was able to on my own. I look forward to building up Night Shade into the powerhouse of science fiction and fantasy for years to come,” said Night Shade founder Jason Williams. Night Shade had net sales of roughly $1.5 million for the 2012 calendar year.

Here at Black Gate, we’re very pleased to see that one of our favorite small press publishers will continue publishing great books.

Read the complete press release at io9.

Adventures in Bookselling: The Paperback Harry Dresden

Adventures in Bookselling: The Paperback Harry Dresden

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Summer Knight first edition (2002, Roc Books). Cover by Lee MacLeod
Summer Knight first edition (2002, Roc Books). Cover by Lee MacLeod

Paperback collecting is an odd hobby. For one thing, unlike stamps or coins, virtually no paperback is out of reach for the determined collector.

Want examples? As I mentioned in Jack Vance’s obituary last week, the first edition of The Dying Earth is one of the rarest and most sought-after genre paperbacks — it had a tiny print run, and no one knew who Jack Vance was when it first appeared in 1950.

What does that mean to your pocketbook? I paid just under $20 for a copy in mint condition a few years ago. As of today, around half a dozen are available at Amazon.com, with Very Good copies starting at $10.

Think about that. A first edition of one of the rarest science fiction books, by one of the top authors in the field, a full six decades after it went out of print, will set you back… around the same price as a brand new paperback today.

Perhaps that’s just our genre, you think. Let’s face it, half of the folks who read science fiction and fantasy are anal-retentive fanboys. Probably 50% of the print run of The Dying Earth ended up in protective mylar bags by 1955.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Still, the situation for mystery and western fans is pretty much the same. If you’re a paperback collector, it’s a buyer’s market. Walk into the Dealer’s Room at the Windy City Pulp and Paper show (or virtually any paperback show in America) with a crisp $20 bill, and you can walk out with a heavy bag of paperbacks published before you were born.

Hard to believe? Just have a look at the gorgeous assortment of 103 vintage titles I bought for around $50 at Windy City just last year.

Perhaps it’s different if we look outside genre fiction entirely. What’s the rarest and most expensive paperback known?

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Weird of Oz Delves into Dungeon Masters’ Minds

Weird of Oz Delves into Dungeon Masters’ Minds

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200px-DungeonMasterGuide4CoverThe way I see it, there are two types of Dungeon Masters — two archetypes, if you will: The Storyteller and the Rules Stickler. Of course, most game masters are some mix of both, but I’d like to try to describe these two different styles or approaches to RPG refereeing. And I’d love to hear from folks who are DMs as well as from players who have gamed with one sort of DM or the other.

In the comments section of this blog a few weeks back, an interesting conversation developed about these different styles of dungeon mastering (or game mastering, if you’re not talking exclusively about Dungeons & Dragons); specifically, the broad spectrum between the DM who is a rules stickler and the DM for whom the rules are, at best, optional suggestions. It was intriguing enough that I promised to revisit the topic in its own post.

Here we are. So get your gear (if you’re a rules stickler, be sure to add up encumbrance values and calculate any penalties), pack your Bag of Holding (don’t forget those rations — unless you have a sorcerer who can conjure up food as needed), and get ready to delve into the depths of the dungeon master’s id.

For mapping out this subject, I’m going to focus on the two ends of the spectrum, recognizing that most game masters fall somewhere in between these two extremes. I’ll call them the Rules Stickler and the Storyteller. But first, an observation that applies to the whole lot of them that don the mantle of master…

One of the variables of tabletop RPGs, a fascinating aspect of its social (read: human interaction) nature, is that the rules are malleable and shaped to some extent by the personality of the person sitting behind that Dungeon Master’s screen. Unlike an online RPG controlled by a program that runs automatically at one remove from its programmers and cannot be reasoned with or tweaked (unless you’re a hacker), on the tabletop the DM calls the shots every step of the way.

Sure, the players, if they are conversant with the rules, know when they get to roll the 20-sided die and what bonuses they’ll get to add from their dexterity or their magic item or whatever. Nevertheless, the DM can add any offsetting variable he thinks appropriate. He can override the outcome and, unless he is faced with a player mutiny, so it stands.

So how does each individual DM choose to exercise this (fictional) life-and-death power?

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Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part One

Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part One

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The Death of the NecromancerBlack Gate is very proud to present Part One of Martha Wells’s Nebula Award-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer, presented online in its complete form for the first time.

Nicholas Valiarde is a passionate, embittered nobleman with an enigmatic past. Consumed by thoughts of vengeance, he is consoled only by thoughts of the beautiful, dangerous Madeline. He is also the greatest thief in all of Ile-Rien…

On the gas light streets of the city, he assumes the guise of a master criminal, stealing jewels from wealthy nobles to finance his quest for vengeance the murder of Count Montesq. Montesq orchestrated the wrongful execution of Nicholas’s beloved godfather on false charges of necromancy — the art of divination through communion with spirits of the dead–a practice long outlawed in the kingdom of Ile-Rein.

But now Nicholas’s murderous mission is being interrupted by a series of eerie, unexplainable, even fatal events. Someone with tremendous magical powers is opposing him. Children vanish, corpses assume the visage of real people, mortal spells are cast, and traces of necromantic power that hasn’t been used for centuries are found. And when a spiritualist unwittingly leads Nicholas to a decrepit mansion, the monstrous nature of his peril finally emerges in harrowing detail.Nicholas and his compatriots must destroy an ancient and awesome evil. even the help of Ile-Rien’s greatest sorcerer may not be enough, for Nicholas faces a woefully mismatched battle — and unthinkable horrors await the loser.

Martha Wells is the author of fourteen fantasy novels, including City of Bones, The Element of Fire, The Cloud Roads, and The Serpent Sea. Her most recent novel is the YA fantasy Emilie and the Hollow World, published by Strange Chemistry Books in April. Her previous fiction for us includes “Reflections” in Black Gate 10, “Holy Places” (BG 11), and “Houses of the Dead“ (BG 12). Her most recent article for us was “How Well Does The Cloud Roads Fit as Sword and Sorcery?,” which appeared here March 13. Her web site is www.marthawells.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mary Catelli, Michael Penkas, Vera Nazarian, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

The Death of the Necromancer was originally published in hardcover by Avon EOS in 1998. The complete, unedited text will be presented here over the next four weeks, beginning tonight with the first four chapters. It is offered at no cost.

Read Part One of the complete novel here.

Tabitha Reviews The School for Good and Evil

Tabitha Reviews The School for Good and Evil

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The-School-for-Good-and-EvilThe School for Good and Evil
By Soman Chainani
HarperCollins (488 pages, May 14, $16.99 hardcover/$10.99 digital)

The School for Good and Evil is a major summer release from HarperCollins, with a national marketing campaign and lot of pre-release buzz, and it’s already getting a lot of attention.

We know what to do with young adult books getting a lot of attention here at Black Gate – we give them to Tabitha, the thirteen year-old reviewer who covered The House of Dead Maids and All the Lovely Bad Ones for us, among others. We’re glad to have her join us again, even though she makes us feel old and out of touch.

Black Gate: Tabitha, welcome back to the Black Gate offices!

Tabitha: Thanks, I guess.

Before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself.

Didn’t we do that last time?

Yes but that was like a hundred years ago. All the people who read your last reviews probably got old and died.

Wow. Okay, in that case, I turn 114 this year. I’m going to high school next year. On the introvert scale, I’m beyond “vampire.”

“Beyond vampire.” What does that mean? Explain it for old people.

I scream in agony whenever I set foot outside my house.

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The Dying Earth: An Appreciation

The Dying Earth: An Appreciation

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Tales of the Dying EarthLast Sunday, May 26, veteran genre writer Jack Vance died at the age of 96. John O’Neill posted a fine overview here of his career; testament to Vance’s influence on other writers can be seen in remembrances by Christopher Priest and George R.R. Martin. Prolific and talented, Vance was a significant figure. I thought I’d do my humble bit to mark his passing with a look at perhaps his best-known series, books which named a subgenre of speculative fiction: The Dying Earth.

The first book in the sequence, The Dying Earth, was a collection of linked short stories published together as a novel in 1950. The second volume, 1966’s Eyes of the Overworld, ties together a half-dozen short stories (of which five had been previously published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) into a sprawling picaresque adventure. After Michael Shea wrote and published an authorised sequel in 1974, A Quest for Simbilis, Vance returned to his setting and lead character in 1983 with Cugel’s Saga. Parts of this book too had been previously published as short fiction, but again the episodic structure worked, creating the sense of an unwinding yarn, a shaggy-dog story — a feel similar to the previous book while still highly individual. The final book, 1984’s Rhialto the Marvellous, was a collection of longish tales featuring new main characters; one story, the last in the book, had been published in 1973.

All four books are set in the unimaginably far future, when a red sun wearily makes its way through the skies of Earth and the moon is no more. Powerful magicians memorise spells based on obscure mathematics and command otherworldly entities. The world is nothing we recognise: not only has every culture and civlisation we have ever known passed away unremembered, but the basic geography of the planet has changed. There are fewer people on the planet, it seems, though far more quasi-human entities; technology’s mostly regressed to pre-industrial levels, except for rare magical artifacts. If ‘magic’ is the right word. What seems to be magic may only be forgotten technology. Who, this far away in time, can recall?

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