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Month: June 2014

A Shadow Falls Over Faerûn: Anauroch: The Empire of Shade

A Shadow Falls Over Faerûn: Anauroch: The Empire of Shade

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Anauroch The Empire of ShadeBack in April, I wrote a brief article on the Third Edition D&D supplement Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave, which I purchased for $7 at the Spring Games Plus Auction. While I was delighted with it, I soon discovered it was the first installment in an epic three-part mega-adventure known informally as The Forgotten Realms Trilogy. Bummer!

Fortunately, I also discovered the second installment buried in the second box of auction loot, apparently purchased during an episode of auction fever for just $6. I examined Shadowdale: The Scouring of the Land in a blog post last month.

That just left chapter three: Anauroch: The Empire of Shade, published in November 2007. While copies of Cormyr and Shadowdale are both still available online at relatively reasonable prices, not so for Anauroch — new copies start at around $60 at Amazon and eBay, and there wasn’t one in the boxes I brought home from the auction (I checked). The first two volumes cost me just $13, but it looked like I was going to spend five times that to get the third one.

Luckily, my house rests on top of a Cave of Wonders, a labyrinthine game repository containing thousands of D&D artifacts dating back to antiquity. I mounted an expedition — with a flashlight, a map, and water for several days — and before too long I unearthed a brand new copy of Anauroch: The Empire of Shade, which I apparently purchased some time in 2009. (Alongside it, covered in a light layer of dust, were brand new copies of both Cormyr and Shadowdale, which I hastily replaced and pretended I hadn’t seen. The fewer duplicate purchases I have to confess to my wife, the better.)

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New Treasures: New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird edited by Paula Guran

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New Cthulhu-smallMy birthday was last month, and one of the gifts my children bought for me (my children! That’s sweet. And a little disturbing) was Paula Guran’s 2011 anthology New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird. Yes, I do realize the book is very nearly three years old and a bit long in the tooth to be a “New Treasure,” but I’m still so touched that my kids got me a Cthulhu anthology that I’m going to overlook it.

Anyway, it’s a fine addition to any Cthulhu library. It reprints 27 Cthulhu Mythos tales from the 21st Century, including contributions from Neil Gaiman, Kim Neuman, Charles Stross, Marc Laidlaw, Laird Barron, Paul McAuley, William Browning Spencer, Holly Phillips — and even Michael Shea’s chilling novelette “Tsathoggua,” published online here at Black Gate. Here’s the book description.

For more than 80 years H.P. Lovecraft has inspired writers of supernatural fiction, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and gaming. His themes of cosmic indifference, the utter insignificance of humankind, minds invaded by the alien, and the horrors of history — written with a pervasive atmosphere of unexplainable dread — remain not only viable motifs, but are more relevant than ever as we explore the mysteries of a universe in which our planet is infinitesimal and climatic change is overwhelming it.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the best supernatural writers no longer imitate Lovecraft, but they are profoundly influenced by the genre and the mythos he created. New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird presents some of the best of this new Lovecraftian fiction — bizarre, subtle, atmospheric, metaphysical, psychological, filled with strange creatures and stranger characters – eldritch, unsettling, evocative, and darkly appealing.

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Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Draws Pearls Before Swine

Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Draws Pearls Before Swine

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Bill Watterson draws Pearls Before SwineBill Watterson, the legendary creator of Calvin and Hobbes, is one of the most famous cartoonists in the world. He’s also one of the most private. After he retired from comics in 1995, he vanished from public life. He made Time Magazine‘s list of Top 10 Most Reclusive Celebrities (at #7) a few years ago (and Time accompanied the piece with one of the only known photographs of him.) For years, fans have been wondering what his next project would be.

It turns out that it’s already been published — and, typical for Watterson, in a surprisingly understated fashion. Stephan Pastis, creator of the bestselling Pearls Before Swine comic, revealed on his blog this morning that Watterson has been co-writing and co-drawing the strip with him for much of the past week:

I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply. And what do you know, he wrote back. Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

But he was. And he had a great sense of humor about the strip I had done, and was very funny, and oh yeah… He had a comic strip idea he wanted to run by me…

What followed was a series of back-and-forth emails where we discussed what the strips would be about, and how we would do them. He was confident. I was frightened. Frightened because it’s one thing to write a strip read by millions of people. But it’s another thing to propose an idea to Bill Watterson.

You can see the entire sequence drawn by Watterson here, and this morning’s article by Michael Cavna’s  at The Washington Post that broke the story here.

Review: Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic Sagas

Review: Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic Sagas

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BerserkerKingSometimes it’s worth being a historical novelist just for the joy of the research:

The shieldwall halted just out of arrow range. A tall Viking—a chieftain, judging by his red cloak and the eyepieces on his helmet—took his place in the middle of the Raven Sisters. Whirling a spear in each hand, he stamped and stepped to the rhythm of the war chant.

“That would be Ivar the Boneless, king of Dublin,” said Jarl Vithserk.

“I see him,” said Hardacanut, marking every detail. Slaying such a great chieftain would make it worthwhile coming to this muddy, rain-blighted island.

Viking warriors stepped out of the front line, shook out their long hair and, bobbing their heads, flicked and whirled their manes in time to the chant.

Jarl Vithserk chuckled. “I have not seen that for a long time.”

(From my War of the Vikings: Berserker King.)

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Blogging Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, Part Two

Blogging Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, Part Two

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4b19b9961e944_71847n861809-superdicklib_3The strongest scenes in Bulldog Drummond (1920) are the ones that show off Sapper’s strengths as a humorist. While it has since become commonplace to see Bondian heroes tossing off quips while being menaced by an unfailingly polite villain, it hardly compares to the way Hugh Drummond handled himself in similar scenarios. Drummond regularly displays a self-deprecating humor when it comes to his features and his intellect, yet his ability to needle villains by refusing to treat them as a serious threat displays an intelligence and understanding of the criminal mind that provides a constant source of amusement to the reader.

Drummond may start off as an independently wealthy and very bored veteran of the First World War seeking adventure, but the character soon transforms into the head of a gang of vigilantes determined to right wrongs as they see fit. He and his gang view meting out justice without resorting to the law as their right as recently demobilized soldiers. The wartime ability to kill without fear of criminal punishment continues into their clandestine civilian activities, although they take the precaution of hiding behind masks and hoods to protect their identities when doing so.

Drummond’s gang includes his fellow World War I veterans Algy Longworth, Peter Darrell, Ted Jerningham, Toby Sinclair, and Jerry Seymour, as well as New York police detective Jerome Green. Later dubbed The Black Gang, the vigilante squad was clearly inspired by Edgar Wallace’s bestselling Four Just Men series. The secret war they wage is aimed squarely against the forces of socialism and communism to an extent that was matched only by Harold Gray’s original version of Little Orphan Annie. The anti-foreign sentiments in the first book are rooted in the perceived threat of foreigners altering the course of England’s political identity and economic status.

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Future Treasures: The Return of the Discontinued Man by Mark Hodder

Future Treasures: The Return of the Discontinued Man by Mark Hodder

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The Return of the Discontinued Man-smallI hear good things about these Burton & Swinburne adventure novels by Mark Hodder.

The series opened with The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Sept. 2010) and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man (March 2011). Come on, you have to love them just for the titles. Book #3, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon, arrived in January, 2012, and #4, The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi, in July of last year. In regards to that last book, Steampunk godfather KW Jeter noted, “Mark Hodder vaults to the front of the new steampunk writer’s pack.” Time for me to jump on board now, I think.

SPRING HEELED JACK IS JUMPING BACK!

It’s 9 p.m. on February 15, 1860, and Charles Babbage, the British Empire’s most brilliant scientist, performs an experiment. Within moments, blood red snow falls from the sky and Spring Heeled Jack pops out of thin air in London’s Leicester Square. Though utterly disoriented and apparently insane, the strange creature is intent on one thing: hunting Sir Richard Francis Burton!

Spring Heeled Jack isn’t alone in his mental confusion. Burton can hardly function; he’s experiencing one hallucination after another-visions of parallel realities and future history. Someone, or something, is trying to tell him about… what?

When the revelation comes, it sends Burton and his companions on an expedition even the great explorer could never have imagined-a voyage through time itself into a twisted future where steam technology has made a resurgence and a despotic intelligence rules over the British Empire!

The Return of the Discontinued Man will be published on July 8, 2014 by Pyr Books. It is 339 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition.

Welcome To The Club

Welcome To The Club

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BW TalesEvery now and then I get reminded that there’s a whole group of people out there who think of Isaac Asimov as a mystery writer. It’s not that they don’t know he’s a famous SF writer, it’s just that they’re familiar with his work through the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Asimov wrote “main stream” mystery novels, of course, such as Murder at the ABA, or A Whiff of Death, and SF mysteries like Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun (known along with others as The Robot Novels). But it’s his Ellery Queen stories that fit the topic I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks, the bar story.

A quick review: bar stories are a series, using as a framing device the setting of a bar or a club. A group of people are “regulars” and tales are told. These are not usually the same thing as stories set in bars, but the lines can blur a bit.

Asimov’s tales are club stories, in that while drinking is definitely going on, the setting is, in the case of the Black Widowers, a dinner club’s private dining room, and in the case of the Union Club, the club library.

The Black Widower stories nod in the direction of Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart in that the characters belonging to the club are based on real people – in fact, they’re based on a real club of which Asimov was a member, called The Trap Door Spiders. The real-world club was started by Fletcher Pratt and if you’d like to have a complete list of the “real” members, as well as finding out which “fictional” member is which, have a look here.

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An Open Letter to Dave Truesdale

An Open Letter to Dave Truesdale

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Dave Truesdale 1997Dear Dave,

I wanted to applaud you for the exceptionally thorough review Tangent Online put together for Lightspeed #49, June 2014, the special “Women Destroy Science Fiction” issue. I was always deeply appreciative of TO‘s detailed reviews of Black Gate — starting with our print issues, and continuing without a hitch when we switched to publishing online — but we never enjoyed anything as elaborate as the 15,000-word round-robin review you assembled for this issue of Lightspeed.

Seriously, kudos. I’m certain it wasn’t easy to coordinate. I’m also glad you recognized just how important this issue of Lightspeed is. John Joseph Adams and guest Editor Christie Yant have assembled what is clearly a landmark issue of one of the most important publications in the genre. You and I have both seen the ridiculous claim that “women have destroyed science fiction”… watching a group of 109 talented women co-opt that phrase and make it their own is uplifting and frankly empowering to both sexes. I know you agree with me on that.

But I think you really put your foot in it with your closing comments, particularly where you say “science-fiction hasn’t a racist or sexist bone in its body… Not once have I personally seen a smidgeon of racism or sexism.”

I have to call bullshit on you, buddy. In those 18 months you were working for me as Managing Editor of Black Gate, from early 2001 to 2002, and while we were buying fiction together, we were blatantly, nakedly sexist — and I think you know it.

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The Mark of the Dragonfly is Middle Grade Steampunk Wrapped in Fantasy Clothing

The Mark of the Dragonfly is Middle Grade Steampunk Wrapped in Fantasy Clothing

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The Mark of the Dragonfly-smallThe Mark of the Dragonfly
Jaleigh Johnson
Delacorte Books for Young Readers (March 25, 2014, 400 pages, $16.99)

Thirteen-year-old Piper has two goals: make enough money to get away from her impoverished scrapper town and to see the world. She knows it’s unlikely to accomplish either by selling the trinkets that periodically rain from the sky. She’s never known anyone who got rich selling the assorted mysterious artifacts that found their way from other worlds to hers via unexplainable meteor showers. Instead, Piper earns money by working as a machinist. She can fix anything anyone brings her, even objects that other machinists deem beyond hope. She makes enough to survive by fixing mechanical oddities, but she knows that she won’t realize her dreams doing that, either.

When Piper finds a girl with a Dragonfly tattoo on her arm after a meteor storm, Piper believes she has found her ticket out of town. The tattoo signifies the girl — Anna — is protected by the King of the Dragonfly Territories, and so Piper assumes there must be a reward for her return. They escape the scrapper town by jumping aboard the 401, a train that Piper has always dreamed of riding. Once it becomes apparent that Anna isn’t who she seems, Piper must decide which is more important — living her own dreams or protecting a girl with dangerous enemies.

Full disclosure: Johnson and I are both members of the All Rights Reserved writing group. I’ve loved this book since it was nothing more than a map and a vague concept about trains and otherworldly treasures. I’m happy to report that reading Dragonfly in its published form is even more captivating as the first read through.

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Kidnapping, Murder, and Disrupting Traffic on Public Roadways: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Three: Time Bomb

Kidnapping, Murder, and Disrupting Traffic on Public Roadways: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Three: Time Bomb

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Adventures of Captain Marvel Part 3-smallToday, before the lights go down and our show begins, we have a brief public sevice message. No, it’s not about the YMCA car wash or the Friends of the Library book sale. It’s about where you can find The Adventures of Captain Marvel for your own viewing.

The serial was last released on DVD in 2003, but is now only available used — the Amazon marketplace has several copies available. They can be a bit pricey, however; the serial was ten dollars ten years ago, when I bought mine new, but now the cheapest copies on Amazon are twice that.

A true hero never despairs, though, and there’s good news for those who want to experience serial thrills first hand, instead of just hacking their way through my breathless prose descriptions. The Adventures of Captain Marvel is available to watch on YouTube, along with many other classic (and not so classic) serials. It’s a great place to get acquainted — or reacquainted — with this kind of storytelling.

If online serial watching whets your appetite for more Saturday matinee thrills, I enthusiastically direct you to the Serial Squadron, a great group of people who seek out and restore serials — many of them rare or even thought to be lost. You can visit them at www.serialsquadron.com. They make remastered copies (often with plenty of great extras) for sale on DVD and also make them available for free viewing on their own YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/serialsquadron.

Now, sit back and let the wizard Shazam transport you to a world of action and excitement where evil keeps things interesting but justice is bound to prevail!

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