Browsed by
Month: September 2013

Vintage Treasures: The Lords of Underearth

Vintage Treasures: The Lords of Underearth

Comments 9 comments

Lords of Underearth-smallI’ve written before about the marvelously compact games from Metagaming that first introduced me to role playing, both in my editorial in Black Gate 12 and here on the blog.

It was the ubiquitous Metagaming ads on the inside cover of Analog and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the late 70s that first caught my eye. I carefully clipped out the order form (I bet you kids have never clipped an order form out of a magazine in your life. Bah! You don’t know what you’re missing. A gaping hole in the cover of your magazine, that’s what you’re missing) and mailed off my $2.95 for copy of Melee and $3.95 for the fabulously deluxe Wizard.

Both games were written by Steve Jackson — yes, the same genius designer behind Ogre, GURPS, Car Wars, Munchkin, and numerous others. For my money (all $6.90), those two early games still rank as perhaps his finest creations.

Steve Jackson left Metagaming in the 1980 to found Steve Jackson Games and his loss was keenly felt. But the rights to Melee and Wizard remained with Metagaming and its owner, Howard M. Thompson. Thompson supported the system with a series of excellent releases, including some of the best solitaire products this industry has ever seen, including Death Test, Death Test 2, Orb Quest, and Grail Quest.

I’ve been playing Grail Quest since 1980 — the last few years with my son Drew at my side — fruitlessly searching the treacherous woods and castles outside Camelot for the Holy Grail. It’s got to be in that damn game somewhere. I’m going to find it some day, I swear.

Anyway, Metagaming produced a total of 22 microgames before the company folded in 1983. Virtually all of them were science fiction and fantasy in theme, and they exhibited an imaginative range of settings and themes, from Rivets — the game of two dueling robot colonies — to Sticks & Stones, the first (and only) stone age RPG. I’ve gradually collected all of them over the years, and it was with some satisfaction that I finally completed my collection this year with the one that was the most difficult to track down: the fantasy game of subterranean warfare in an ancient Dwarven Stronghold, The Lords of Underearth.

…

Read More Read More

Frederik Pohl, November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013

Frederik Pohl, November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013

Comments 7 comments

Frederik PohlScience Fiction lost one of its brightest lights yesterday.

Frederik Pohl — award-winning writer, editor, agent, and fan — entered the hospital in Palatine, Illinois, in respiratory distress yesterday morning, and died that afternoon. He was 93 years old.

Pohl was one of the most important genre figures of the 20th Century. His first publication, at the age of 17, was the poem “Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna,” in the October 1937 issue of Amazing Stories. He followed it with over 200 short stories and dozens of novels, including the back-to-back Nebula Award winners Man Plus (1976) and Gateway (1977).

Pohl was equally lauded as an editor, starting with two pulp magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, in 1939 (when he was still a teenager). In the late 1950s, he took the helm at Galaxy and IF magazines as H.L. Gold’s health began to decline, and under his tenure IF won the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine in 1966, 1967, and 1968.

By the mid 70s, Pohl was editing novels at Bantam Books; his acquisitions were cover-labeled “A Frederik Pohl Selection,” a rare honor. They included Samuel R. Delany’s groundbreaking Dhalgren, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, John Brunner’s Web of Everywhere, and many others.

Pohl was a fixture in the field; well-connected and respected, extremely hard-working, highly talented, and good at almost everything he did. I can’t count how many times I’ve mentioned his accomplishments here on the blog; just in the last few weeks, I commented on his successful collaborations with Jack Williamson and C. M. Kornbluth. Rich Horton, who has been examining vintage SF digests for us, recently reviewed the July 1961 issue of IF, in which Pohl officially became editor.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Weird Detectives, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: Weird Detectives, edited by Paula Guran

Comments 10 comments

Weird Detectives-smallMan, this book is right up my alley. More than that, this book has backed up my alley, unpacked, and moved into my house.

The book in question is Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations, a fat anthology of modern fantasy reprints (nothing older than 2004) edited by Paula Guran, focusing on the new generation of occult detectives and paranormal investigators.

We love occult detectives at Black Gate — witness all the recent attention to the classics of the genre, including Josh Reynolds’s encyclopedic Nightmare Men series, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki The Ghost Finder, the short fiction of Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman’s Complete John Thunstone and Silver John stories, and many, many others.

But it never occurred to me that people were still writing the stuff, despite the resurgence in urban fantasy over the last decade. This is why Paula Guran is a genius. She never lost sight of the thread connecting the pulp classics and the work being done in the same mold today by Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, Joe R. Lansdale, Carrie Vaughn, P.N. Elrod, Bradley Denton, Tanya Huff, Jonathan Maberry, Patricia Briggs, Faith Hunter, and many others. Here’s an excerpt from her excellent introduction:

Ghosts appear to Harry Escott in Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Pot of Tulips,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of November 1855… In 1859 Escott appeared again (in O’Brien’s “What Was It? A Mystery,” also published in Harper’s) and is attacked by a supernatural entity that is, itself, the mystery.

The occult detective had been born. Also known as psychic detectives or ghost hunters, they were more often portrayed as scientists or learned doctors than as true detectives. Rather than dealing with human crimes, these investigators were involved in cases dealing with ghosts, malevolent spirits, arcane curses, demons, monsters, and other supernatural events and entities… A number of these sleuths made appearances in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction.

…

Read More Read More

Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

Adventures in Horrific Fantasy Literature?

Comments 11 comments

fanlgTwo weeks back, my Black Gate post took a stab at identifying a handful of the most hair-raising, spine-tingling short fiction ever written (in Vintage Scares). The more I looked at the stories that I (and others) came up with, the more excited I became about them. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm only served to underscore a curious fact that I have not always been ready to claim: I have become both a consumer and a writer of horror fiction.

That’s not something I would ever have expected. My version of horror, my “elevator speech definition,” would for years have centered on the gross-out work of Clive Barker (Hellraiser) and the voyeuristic nastiness of the movies I saw growing up: A Nightmare On Elm Street, Evil Dead 2, and Friday the 13th. Horror to me meant attractive but stupid teenagers getting slaughtered and it was strictly low-brow. Not worthy of serious consideration.

Never mind that I’d already read Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle and a fair amount of Poe. By the time I’d been thoroughly eddicated by college, I’d relegated horror to a very distant cultural bayou. It was, at best, the literary equivalent of junk food.

But then a funny thing happened. I bought a copy of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 14th Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. As with all of those (sadly now defunct) collections, fantasy and horror were presented back-to-back and face-to-face, bumped up against one another as inescapably close kissing cousins. Confronted by the likes of Susanna Clarke, Esther M. Friesner, Ian Rodwell & Steve Duffy, Tanith Lee, and Kelly Link, it was time to re-evaluate.

…

Read More Read More

Blogging Arak: Valda Gets Naked on Christmas Eve

Blogging Arak: Valda Gets Naked on Christmas Eve

Comments 0 Comment

Arak_Vol_1_7Happy Labor Day! Here you are, (hopefully) enjoying a well-deserved break from labor to spend some time on the down low at the Black Gate.

For this Labor Day edition of Oz’s ramblings and my (if I’m counting correctly) thirty-first blog post, I’m going to kill two birds with one blog by covering issues seven and eight of DC Comics’ Arak, Son of Thunder. And I’ll keep it brief. My rationale? Series creator Roy Thomas penned neither issue of this two-part story. He provided the plots, but they were written by guest scripters Gerry Conway/Mike W. Barr (7) and Mike W. Barr (8). What I’m wondering is this: Will they be able to channel the sword-and-sorcery vernacular that is old hat for Thomas? Or will their dialogue veer into self-parodic melodrama? Will it fall flat? Will it feel too modern? Let’s find out.

Issue 7: “Behemoth from the World Below!”

The cover of issue 7 boasts the caption “Perhaps the Most Unusual Christmas Story of the Millennium!” Gotta love the hyperbole. Pope dragged into the underworld by a pale giant, then rescued from the Black Pope by a Viking Native American from the unknown New World across the sea? Pretty unusual, but perhaps not the most unusual one of the past thousand years.

…

Read More Read More

The 2013 Hugo Award Winners

The 2013 Hugo Award Winners

Comments 6 comments

The Emperor's Soul-smallThe 2013 Hugo Awards were given out last night at LoneStarCon3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, Texas.

The complete list of winners follows.

BEST NOVEL

Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)

BEST NOVELLA

The Emperor’s Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon)

BEST NOVELETTE

“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity)

BEST SHORT STORY

“Mono no Aware,” Ken Liu (The Future Is Japanese)

…

Read More Read More

A Conversation with Mike Allen

A Conversation with Mike Allen

Comments 5 comments

Mike Allen author photoDo I really need to sell you on an adventure tale that has a riverboat, zombies, fox-men, music as magic, and epic mayhem? No. I don’t. That story sells itself. But to further your interest in Mike Allen’s first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, have an earful…

Erzelle plays harp on a riverboat full of ghouls…and people who eat ghouls because they think it will make them immortal. Idiots. Her parents were murdered and Erzelle’s being fattened up for feasting on. But Olyssa changes all that. Olyssa becomes the Roland-Yoda-Mother-Master that young Erzelle needs.

The relationship is mutually beneficial. Olyssa and Erzelle play music together that can murder you. If you deserve it. So don’t deserve it, eh? Add in Olyssa’s epic familial quest and you have Mike Allen’s dark fantasy, The Black Fire Concerto.

If you didn’t know of Mike Allen before, GD shame on you. He is the editor of the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies and of the recently webified magazine, Mythic Delirium. He publishes (and writes) mad crazy good poetry and fiction.

Black Gate loves talking to people. Yep. We do.

*waves to all you nice people in the interwebs*

We especially love talking to wild writer poet metalhead types who wear highly visible hats and spend equal time inking their own work as publicizing the work of others.

As such, Black Gate grabbed Mike Allen for a GChat. Yes, a GCHAT! Isn’t technology fabulous? We admit, it’s hard to get steady wi-fi, as Black Gate’s summer headquarters is at Camp Arawak (cheap rent due to some unfortunate murders)…but GChat it was.*

…

Read More Read More

Chapter Eight Changes Everything: Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle

Chapter Eight Changes Everything: Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle

Comments 0 Comment

The SandcastleYou never know when you’ll find something fantastical to write about.

A little while ago, I started an ongoing project of reading through the novels of Iris Murdoch. This came out of an appreciation of A.S. Byatt’s fiction, which led to me reading her study of Murdoch’s early novel, Degrees of Freedom. That book in turn led me to start in on Murdoch. I loved her first novel, Under the Net, which is something like what might have happened if P.G. Wodehouse had written a philosophical social realist novel. The next book, The Flight From the Enchanter, was well-written but sprawling and felt overly symbolically-determined. So I started on the third novel, 1957’s The Sandcastle, unsure of what I’d find.

It’s set in a town not far from London and deals with an extramarital affair between Bill Mor (known throughout the book as Mor), a teacher at St. Bride’s school for boys, and a young painter named Rain Carter, who comes to the school to paint a portrait of the school’s former headmaster, Demoyte, a longstanding friend of Mor’s. For the first seven chapters, the book unfolds much as you’d expect from a mimetic novel. The background of Mor and his family and his school is sketched in; his political ambitions are described; the implicit conflict with his strong-willed wife Nan is set up; the personality of Rain is implied; a set of accidents throw Mor and Rain into close proximity. The prose is direct, even simple, and on the whole without ornament.

Then we get to chapter eight and everything changes.

…

Read More Read More

Black Gate Online Fiction: Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos by Dave Gross

Black Gate Online Fiction: Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos by Dave Gross

Comments 8 comments

Pathfinder Tales King of Chaos-smallBlack Gate is very pleased to offer an exclusive first look at the latest Pathfinder Tales novel by Dave Gross, the acclaimed author of Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns.

After a century of imprisonment, demons have broken free of the wardstones surrounding the Worldwound. As fiends flood south into civilized lands, Count Varian Jeggare and his hellspawn bodyguard Radovan must search through the ruins of a fallen nation for the blasphemous text that opened the gate to the Abyss in the first place-and which might hold the key to closing it. In order to succeed, however, the heroes will need to join forces with pious crusaders, barbaric local warriors, and even one of the legendary god callers. It’s a race against time as the companions fight their way across a broken land, facing off against fiends, monsters, and a vampire intent on becoming the god of blood-but will unearthing the dangerous book save the world, or destroy it completely? From best-selling author Dave Gross comes a new adventure set against the backdrop of the Wrath of the Righteous Adventure Path in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Dave Gross is the former editor of Dragon, Star Wars Insider, and Amazing Stories. His adventures of Radovan and Count Jeggare include the Pathfinder Tales novels Prince of Wolves and Master of Devils, as well as many novellas and short stories available at Paizo.com. His last novel for Paizo was the acclaimed Queen of Thorns.

We previously reviewed the Pathfinder Tales novels Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter, Master of Devils by Dave Gross, and Howard Andrew Jones’s Plague of Shadows, and introduced you to BG Contributing Editor Bill Ward’s Pathfinder Tales story “The Box, and “The Walkers from the Crypt” by Howard Andrew Jones. We recently covered the game releases Ultimate Campaign, Fey Revisited, and Chronicles of the Righteous.

Pathfinder Tales: King of Chaos is published by Paizo Publishing and is part of their Pathfinder Tales Subscription. It is a 400-page mass market paperback available for $9.99 ($6.99 ePub and PDF). “The Watchtower,” the complete first chapter of King of Chaos, is presented here at Black Gate.

Read Chapter One of King of Chaos here.

New Treasures: Knights of the Dinner Table #200

New Treasures: Knights of the Dinner Table #200

Comments 4 comments

Knights of the Dinner Table 200-smallI am thrilled to report that Kenzer & Company, publishers of the fine Hackmaster and Aces & Eights role playing games, have published the 200th issue of the world’s best gaming comic, Knights of the Dinner Table.

Knights of the Dinner Table is written and drawn by my friend Jolly R. Blackburn, with editorial assistance by his talented wife Barbara. If Jolly’s name is familiar, it may be because of last Saturday’s appreciation of his earlier publication, the much-missed role-playing magazine, Shadis, where KoDT first appeared. Or you may remember the last time I shone a spotlight on KoDT, with issue #191 last September. Or maybe you’re a fan of the KoDT spin-off The Java Joint, which appeared in every issue of the print version of Black Gate, and was finally collected (with one new strip) last April. Or perhaps you’re simply a fan of KoDT all on your own, and don’t need me telling you how brilliant it is.

The first issue of Knights of the Dinner Table appeared from AEG in the summer of 1994. With issue five it switched to its current publishers Kenzer & Company, and it has appeared regularly ever since.

I don’t think I need to tell you what an incredible accomplishment it is for a comic to reach the 200 mark in today’s market — especially with the same creator at the helm. It is, in fact, an almost unparalleled achievement (the only comparable example I’ve been able to come up with is Dave Sim’s Cerebus). To reach issue 200 under any circumstances is an amazing achievement for an independent comic.

I wrote a book review column in the back of Knights of the Dinner Table for four years, starting in the late 90s (the incredible series of coincidences that lead to that happy state of affairs are related in my introduction to the collected Java Joint). I got to meet and game with Jolly, Dave Kenzer, Steve Johansson, Brian Jelke, Barbara Blackburn, and the entire KenzerCo gang — and let me tell you, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

But it’s my contributions to and relationship with KoDT that I’m most proud of during that era. KoDT has survived not simply because it occupies a unique niche in the gaming community, but because it is a singularly brilliant work from a uniquely talented creator. If you haven’t tried it yet, the massive issue 200 is a great place to come on board.

KoDT #200 was published July 2013 by Kenzer & Company. It is $8.99 for a 96-page black & white comic. The cover is by Larry Elmore; more details and order instructions are here, or try the free online strips.