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Month: October 2013

Its [It’s] Q: The Winged Serpent on Blu-ray!

Its [It’s] Q: The Winged Serpent on Blu-ray!

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Q Winged Serpent Blu-ray CoverQ (1982)
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen. Starring Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, Candy Clark, Richard Roundtree.

You want to know something that rocks? Actually, two things that rock, at least in my little world:

1. The Chrysler Building

2. Giant Monsters

So when you have a movie about a giant flying monster nesting in the Chrysler Building, you have something that rocks so hard it makes Van Halen sound like One Direction. Again, at least in my little world.

Video distributor Shout! Factory continued its stellar series of classic B-movie releases on Blu-ray in September with the HD debut of Q. This 1982 sleeper hit, concerning the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl (or a non-god of the same name) appearing in New York City as a humungous flying snake that likes to snap the heads off window washers and topless sunbathers, was always crying out for Shout! Factory to pluck it up.

The company has packaged the film with its alternate marketing title, Q: The Winged Serpent, and repeated the original tagline over the Boris Vallejo artwork: “It’s name is Quetzalcoatl… Just call it ‘Q’… that’s all you’ll have time to say before it tears you apart!” However, Shout! Factory fixed the original poster’s grammatical error, correcting It’s to Its. That is one of the few disappointments I have with their presentation of this nifty low budget flick; I know Shout! Factory doesn’t want to seem careless on the cover for their product, but that grammatical glitch adds charm to the story of a clueless low-life criminal/jazz pianist who holds New York hostage with a winged snake.

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Can’t Keep a Great Buncha Folks Down

Can’t Keep a Great Buncha Folks Down

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Writing Fantasy HeroesOr as Charlie Daniels sang, “RBE will rise again.” Or maybe not, but it is what he was thinking. Or maybe not.

It is, however, the truth. RBE (Rogue Blades Entertainment) has resurfaced online, finally putting up its first website in two years at Rogue Blades Presents.

It’s been a bit and then some, but the house is making strides and a comeback’s round the bend. The site is up, the books are all listed, the authors and artists are accounted for, and the future looks promising.

In recreating the site, I even discovered something spectacular: all of the old Home of Heroics posts! Granted, they’re buried in a mass of gibberish in an XML file, but it’s nothing a little elbow grease, good eyes, and lots of time won’t salvage. Volunteers?

Drop on by the new joint and share your thoughts of it; grab a book while you’re there.

Spotlight on Fantasy Webcomics: The Dirt on Ursula Vernon’s Hugo Award Winner, Digger

Spotlight on Fantasy Webcomics: The Dirt on Ursula Vernon’s Hugo Award Winner, Digger

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Digger Volume 1 Ursula Vernon
Cover of Digger Volume 1 by Ursula Vernon from Sofa Wolf Press

I read a lot of webcomics. Back when I was writing Cowboys and Aliens II for Platinum, I started reading a bunch of the comics that were up on the now-defunct Drunk Duck and I got hooked.

What happens when you start reading webcomics is that you often follow links to other webcomics, until your bookmarks bar is full of comics you’re following on a regular basis and your inbox is full of recommendations from friends of the comics you should be following. That e-mail from a friend is how I discovered Digger by Ursula Vernon, which was the Hugo Award Winner for best graphic story and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner, both in 2012.

It starts with an anthropomorphic wombat named Digger who, by page 6, has met a statue avatar of the god of wisdom Ganesh. Wombats being a race of logically minded architects and engineers, they don’t care much for gods and magic — but Digger is thrust into the middle of a story that has both. Magic has deliberately interfered with her tunnel, something no wombat takes kindly, and her sense of direction is askew, meaning she can’t get home until Ganesh helps her figure out just where home is from where she’s ended up.

While researching a trip home might seem like a harmless endeavor, it’s not as simple as it sounds, and soon Digger is up to her ears in strange characters: a young healer known only as the Hag, a shadow child who might or might not be a demon, an unnamed hyena exile who Digger calls Ed, a female warrior monk who is probably insane, and a whole tribe of hyena people who might want to eat her.

This might sound like a lot of silliness in one webcomic, and Digger has its share of humorous moments. But what happens between the words, the art, and the story is the stuff of magic — quite possibly the kind that Digger herself would approve of.

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Ancient Worlds: Waking the Dead

Ancient Worlds: Waking the Dead

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In spite of her name, the Witch of Endor was, in fact, five foot one, spoke comprehensible Aramaic, and was not furry.
In spite of her name, the Witch of Endor was, in fact, five foot one, spoke comprehensible Aramaic, and was not furry.

As we approach Halloween, I’ll be taking a little detour (appropriate!) from our trip through the Odyssey to highlight some of the more horror-centered elements of ancient literature. First up? How about a raising of the dead to chase our trip to the Underworld last week?

Necromancy is a staple of the fantasy genre. It’s also one of the oldest standards out there. Long before Mary Shelley put a scientific spin on the practice, raising the dead was a popular way to impress people.

And terrify them.

And, given the methods involved, probably gross them out.

Why is necromancy so popular? Maybe it’s because something in us sees crossing that line between life and death as the ultimate power. Maybe it’s a kind of remnant of ancestor worship from an ancient past. Or maybe it’s because we all harbor the hope that once we shed the mortal coil, there will be answers.

(Although, as a magician friend of mine once said, “If your Uncle Jimmy was a dumbass when he was alive, why do you think he’ll be any smarter now that he’s dead?”)

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Appendix T

Appendix T

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aljUnless one considers charts, tables, and mathematical formulas to be “illustrations,” the original edition of GDW’s science fiction roleplaying game Traveller (1977) contains only one piece of genuine artwork: namely, the portrait to the right. That portrait, by an uncredited artist, depicts Alexander Lascelles Jamison, the example character whose career is detailed in the first volume of the classic SF RPG. Like all Traveller characters, before he starts seeking his fortune among the stars, Jamison has already had a career, in this case in the merchant service, where he mustered out with his own ship and the rank of captain.

Looking at that portrait, I found myself remembering a quote from “Margin of Profit,” a story by the late Poul Anderson, first published in the September 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That story, too, depicts an interstellar merchant captain:

He was a huge man, two meters in height and broad enough to match. A triple chin and swag belly did not make him appear soft. Rings glittered on hairy fingers and bracelets on tawny wrists, under snuff-soiled lace. Small black eyes, set close to a great hook nose under a sloping forehead, peered with laser intensity.

Anderson’s merchant is, of course, Nicholas Van Rijn, president of the Solar Spice & Liquors Company, and one of the more famous characters from the period between the end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction and the rise of the New Wave.

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Sword & Sorcery for the Girl Who Wants to be Conan: Gaie Sebold’s Babylon Steel

Sword & Sorcery for the Girl Who Wants to be Conan: Gaie Sebold’s Babylon Steel

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Babylon Steel-smallI can’t keep up with all the fabulous fiction rolling off the assembly lines of the great factories of modern publishing (I can just barely stay on top of the story-a-week we publish here at Black Gate, truth be told). It’s amazing… I spend all day – and most of the night – reading and writing about this genre, and still can’t encompass it all. Either we live in amazing times, or being hopelessly clueless is just an intrinsic part of my nature.

Eh. Probably a little of both.

Fortunately, there are other bloggers out there to help me out. Liz Bourke’s “Sleeps With Monsters” column at Tor.com helped me out this week, by pointing me to Gaie Sebold’s debut fantasy novel, Babylon Steel.

Now, anyone can miss a novel or two, but I have no excuse for not being on top of this one. For one thing, Solaris has been putting out terrific fantasy recently, and obviously deserves more attention; for another, I’ve had my eye on Gaie Sebold ever since I bought her brilliant and funny “A Touch of Crystal” (co-written with fellow Brit Martin Owton), the tale of a shopkeeper who discovers some of the goods in her New Age shop are actually magical, for Black Gate 9. Here’s Liz:

Gaie Sebold’s Babylon Steel (Solaris, 2011) is a remarkably entertaining debut. It’s as though someone took the best bits of Robert E. Howard and the fantasy noir city of Simon R. Green’s Hawk and Fisher novels, threw in some more Cool S**t ™, and reimagined them through a lens that foregrounded female perspectives. This is sword-and-sorcery pulp wish fulfillment for the kind of girl who wanted to be Conan… And that? That makes one of the most awesome things I’ve read this year…

Sebold evokes mood and atmosphere — and character — very well. And the climactic BOOM LIKE THAT is an earned one.

An excellently entertaining book. Give me more like this. MORE I TELL YOU.

Babylon Steel was nominated in two categories for the Gemmell Awards: The Morningstar (best newcomer) and the Legend (best novel). It came out so long ago now that there’s already a sequel (dang! I really am clueless). Dangerous Gifts appeared in January of this year.

Babylon Steel was published in December 2011 by Solaris. It is 544 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

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oie_6554332ckBTZkt Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979) by Lynn Abbey has been sitting on my swords & sorcery to-be-read pile for a long time. One of the main goals I set for myself when I started blogging was to read all the classic era S&S I could. Not only does DotBM date from S&S’s golden age in the 1970s, its hero, Rifkind, is one of the earlier sword-swinging women. This was a book that demanded a look.

Even with all that going for it, I didn’t get to it until last week. Every now and then, I felt like it was staring at me, admonishing me for not having read it already. I mean, I’ve known about it since I read a fun write-up on Rifkind in the Giants in the Earth column in Dragon Magazine #57 and my dad actually had a copy in the attic.

I even started it last year, but stopped after a chapter or two. I don’t know why… I liked it, but maybe something shiny caught my eye.

Warrior women characters have been around forever. There are the myths of the Amazons and the valkyrie. In real life, of course, there was Joan of Arc.

Jirel of Joiry was the first swordswoman to star in her own stories. C. L. Moore created her kick-ass French noblewoman in 1934, but for decades after that you really had to dig to find fighting women as the lead protagonists.

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New Treasures: Ghosts Know by Ramsey Campbell

New Treasures: Ghosts Know by Ramsey Campbell

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Ghosts Know-smallLook at that, it’s October already. And you know that that means, don’t you? It’s spooky reads season, when all the major publishers inundate us with the year’s best creepy fiction.

I like to try new authors every October. Ramsey Campbell is hardly new, but I know him almost exclusively through his short fiction. I’ve been wanting to try one of his novels for years, and this appealing new hardcover from Tor will fit the bill nicely.

Graham Wilde is a contentious, bombastic host of the talk radio program Wilde Card. His job, as he sees it, is to stir the pot, and he is quite good at it, provoking many a heated call with his eccentric and often irrational audience. He invites Frank Jasper, a purported psychic, to come on the program. He firmly believes that the man is a charlatan, albeit a talented one. When Jasper appears on his show, Wilde draws upon personal knowledge about the man to embarrass him on air, using patter similar to that which Jasper utilizes in his act.

Wilde’s attack on Jasper earns him the enmity of his guest and some of the members of his audience. He next encounters Jasper when the psychic is hired by the family of a missing adolescent girl to help them find her. Wilde is stunned and then horrified when Jasper seems to suggest that he might be behind the girl’s disappearance.

Thus begins a nightmarish journey as circumstantial evidence against Wilde begins to mount, alienating his listeners, the radio station, and eventually, his lover. As Wilde descends into a pit of despair, reality and fantasy begin to blur in a kaleidoscope of terror….

Ghosts Know was published by Tor Books on October 1st. It is 285 pages, priced at $25.99 for the hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

A Return of Pacesetter RPG Style Horror

A Return of Pacesetter RPG Style Horror

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You are about to enter the world of CHILL, where unknown things sneak, and crawl, and creep, and slither in the darkness of a moonless night. This is the world of horror, the world of the vampire, ghost, and ghoul, the world of things not known, and best not dreamt of. CHILL is a role-playing game of adventure into the Unknown and your first adventure is about to begin — CHILL Introductory Folder

In 1984, a group of former TSR Employees that included Mark Acres, Troy Denning, and Stephen Sullivan formed Pacesetter Ltd. Games and ambitiously published four role playing games: Chill, Timemaster, Star Ace, and Sandman. The rights to these games now belong to a diverse list of small publishers. Phil Reed owns the rights to Star Ace, Goblinoid Games own the rights to Timemaster and Sandman (as well as the Pacesetter brand), and Mayfair Games owns the rights to Chill.

Chill wasn’t the first horror role playing game, nor is it considered the best by the majority of gamers.  However, it has long held a place as a “cult” favorite in the role playing game world. While it is a cult favorite, that cult status has not enabled it to garner a reprint in recent years. In 2009, Otherworld Creations attempted to do a Fundable campaign (a Kickstarter before Kickstarter was cool) and failed to raise the necessary money to do a new edition.

Chill was different from other horror role playing games that often sought to capture the dark nihilistic material horror of H.P. Lovecraft or turned monster-hunting into an action movie. Chill tried to capture the tone of Hammer and AIP productions. Because of this four-color focus, and I believe also because its creators were former TSR employees, Rick Swan reviewed the game quite negatively in Dragon magazine and in his Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games. Swan wrote that the game was:

A horror game for the easily frightened… While most of Chill‘s vampires, werewolves, and other B-movie refugees wouldn’t scare a ten-year-old, they’re appropriate to the modest ambitions of the game… Chill is too shallow for extended campaigns, and lacks the depth to please anyone but the most undemanding players. For beginners only.

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The Horror: Oz Meets the Scarecrow

The Horror: Oz Meets the Scarecrow

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dark harvestAs Stephen King once observed, horror has a short shelf life. What scares us today will lose its impact tomorrow. The shock of the new will wear off, the fear of the unknown dispelled by our having come to know it.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be a literary classic, and it is still required reading in high school and college classes the world over. But when was the last time anyone was actually scared by Frankenstein’s Monster, I wonder? Or by Dracula, or any of the other classic monsters that now grace the sides of cereal boxes?

Familiar, tried-and-true monsters suffer from overexposure just as surely as vampires exposed to too much sunlight. After the umpteenth new Hollywood film, movie of the week, and YA book series, they “jump the shark,” so to speak. They lose their ability to produce chills and instead become the butt of parody or — worse — a love interest.

Until, that is, they come creeping back in an altered guise, rendered frightening and unfamiliar again by the latest horror maverick. Oh, they keep coming back, these perennial terrors. After all, there is a reason they are iconic: they have so aptly embodied so many human fears throughout the ages. We will likely be spooked — genuinely frightened — by a vampire again, hard as that is to imagine now, somewhere down the road.

In this macabre dance, venerable monsters take turns in the blacklight; their popularity waxes and wanes and waxes again, like the cycles of the moon.

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