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Month: August 2014

Introducing… Klingon Beer!

Introducing… Klingon Beer!

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Can-n-Pint-2With all due deference to responsible drinking, I find it my enviable (?) duty to inform Black Gate’s readership of a significant development in the parallel universes of Star Trek and craft brewing. Yes, I’m referring to Klingon Warnog, available from Tin Man Brewing out of Evansville, Indiana, and released just a few weeks back on July 26, 2014.

Tin Man’s own site has precious little to say on the subject:

Tin Man Brewing was contracted by the Federation of Beer to develop and brew Warnog, and we are exceedingly proud to brew beer for the Star Trek universe.  The Federation of Beer is responsible for distribution and marketing for the Warnog brand and can provide the most accurate information regarding availability.  For further information, please contact the Federation of Beer (www.federationofbeer.com)

As for the Federation of Beer, which one must suppose is where James T. Kirk spent most of his academy days, they claim their Warnog is available only in Alberta, Canada, which directly contradicts the news release provided by StarTrek.com, whose staff provided this write-up:

All we can say is… Qapla’! Klingon Warnog beer will at long last be available in the United States the week of July 28, via The Federation of Beer and Indiana-based Tin Man Brewing Company. The Star Trek-themed beer, a high-quality Roggen Dunkelweiss, or Danish Rye Beer, will be available at select liquor stores and bars in Indiana and Washington State. Klingon Warnog Ale is brewed to capture the warrior essence of the Klingon culture with its bold and unique taste.

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New Treasures: Lightspeed Magazine: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

New Treasures: Lightspeed Magazine: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

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Lightspeed Women Destroy Science Fiction-smallBack in February, John Joseph Adams’s Lightspeed magazine held one of the most successful genre Kickstarter campaigns of the year, raising money for a special Women Destroy Science Fiction! issue. With a modest $5,000 goal, the magazine ended up raising $53,136 before the campaign ended on February 15.

Ambitious Kickstarter projects frequently have a reputation for being late — and I’m not sure I’ve seen many as ambitious as this one. But the issue shipped right on time in early June, and we reported here on the details back on June 5th. Lightspeed is a digital magazine and, as you’d expect, this groundbreaking issue was first made available in digital format. I’m not much of a digital magazine reader, truth be told — I like to read magazines curled up in my big green chair — but I thought I’d eventually make an exception for this one.

But about a week later, on June 14th, I saw a Facebook post from contributor (and occasional Black Gate blogger) Amal El-Mohtar, showing off the print version of the magazine.

Wait, what? There’s a print version? I want it. How do I get it? Amal’s description was tantalizingly cryptic:

My physical copy of Lightspeed Magazine’s Women Destroy Science Fiction arrived! It’s gorgeous, and huge, and I love it so much and can’t seem to stop petting it. It contains “The Lonely Sea in the Sky,” my first (and hopefully not last) piece of science fiction… The print copy contains everything — the interviews, essays, editorials, reprints, flash fiction, and originals. You can’t quite tell from the photo but the book is about 2 inches thick. It really is more of an anthology at this point than it is an issue of a magazine. To reiterate: TWO INCHES THICK.

I knew that I had to have a copy. And as it turned out, it wasn’t very hard to get one: Amazon has them in stock, discounted to $12.77 — less than the cost of an average trade paperback. I ordered a copy on July 3rd and it arrived a week later.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Those Sweet Silver Blues: Garrett, PI

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Those Sweet Silver Blues: Garrett, PI

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Garrett_BluesLast year, John O’Neill wrote a post about the Garrett PI collections by Glen Cook. The talented Cook is best known for his excellent dark fantasy series about a mercenary group, The Black Company.

The Garrett books are light years away in tone and style from those of The Black Company. However, they are identical in regards to quality of writing. Garrett is the pre-eminent fantasy PI (private investigator).

Cook has written a series of books that appeals to fans of the hardboiled PI, notably practiced by Raymond Chandler, fans of the humorous fantasy world best typified by Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and to those who have read Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. The fact that Cook has masterfully combined all three of these elements is admirable in the extreme.

Garrett is a former Marine who spent five inglorious years serving in the seemingly endless war between his nation of Karenta, and Venagata. They battle over a region called The Cantard, home to most of the world’s silver mines. And silver is the resource that fuels sorcery. And since Karenta is ruled by the magic-using Stormwardens, no cost in human capital is too great to rule The Cantard.

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Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag

Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag

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Clarion 85 shirtI actually once said to a fellow writer, “The best thing you could do for art is cut off your hands and bury your typewriter.”

Beyond the words themselves, it’s hard to know what’s worse about this: that I said it to someone I’m sure I liked or that I can’t remember to whom I said it.

I know it was at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in the summer of 1985, then held at Michigan State University in East Lansing. I knew it was someone I liked, because I liked every one of my fellow workshoppers. As I got to know the 16 other participants, I felt these are my people!

The context for the remark was a workshop session. For those unfamiliar with the format, everyone in the workshop delivers an oral critique of a manuscript handed out — and one hopes, read — in advance, then the author responds. Clarion workshops are machines for producing pithy one-liners — often put downs — the best (worst?) of which are memorialized on tee-shirts printed in the last week or two of the workshop.

So how was my comment received? With laughter, unbelievably. It was even graphically depicted in our year’s tee-shirt. (Image courtesy of Bill Shunn.)

I should say that my class was, according to our instructors, famously cohesive and collegial. Either they lied to make us feel good or other Clarion classes went at each other with lawn darts.

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A Wizard is a Wizard is a Wizard — Except When He’s Harry Dresden

A Wizard is a Wizard is a Wizard — Except When He’s Harry Dresden

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Skin Game Jim Butcher.-smallSkin Game, A Novel of the Dresden Files
By Jim Butcher
Roc Books (464 pages, May 27th 2014, $27.95 in hardcover)
Cover by Chris McGrath

Skin Game is the newest novel in the  Harry Dresden series, #15 in the series. I enjoyed it so much, I re-read it.

I’m a real Harry Dresden fan. He reminds me a little of Erle Stanley Gardner’s [aka A. A. Fair] detective, Donald Lam, a “brainy little bastard” who is always getting beat up, according to his boss Bertha Cool. Sounds like Dresden, but Harry has one up on Donald. Not only is Harry a detective, he is Chicago’s only professional wizard.

As if that’s not enough, he is also the Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Mab, who, in this book, loans him out to pay off one of her debts. Trouble is the group of supernatural villains he must help is led by one of his “most dreaded and despised enemies.”

Their target? They plan to rob the personal vault of the Greek god, Hades, and they need Harry’s help.

It’s action filled and lots of fun.

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Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, April 1960: A Retro-Review

Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, April 1960: A Retro-Review

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Fantastic Science Fiction Stories April 1960-smallI’d rank this as a determinedly minor issue of this magazine, from fairly early in Cele Goldsmith’s tenure. It has a bland cover by an artist I’ve never heard of, Jack Faragasso. The feature list is slim. Norman Lobsenz’s editorial, very brief, is about an idea to put a ring of dust around the Earth so that it is always light. (What a dreadful idea!)

There is also the lettercol, with no contributors I recognized – the names are Miles McAlpin, James W. Ayers, Wesley Sharp, Billy Joe Plott, Frank P. Pretto (perhaps a typo for Prieto), and Michael W. Elm – and their usual small “Coming Next Month.” Interior illustrations are by [Leo] Summers, Varga, and Grayam.

So, what about the stories?

The cover story is “Doomsday Army,” by Jack Sharkey, an entirely too long story about a National Guard captain who ends up being the main intermediary to a bunch of (as it turns out) very small alien invaders. He’s portrayed as a fairly ordinary suburban husband, prone to taking shortcuts in solving problems his wife brings to his attention: so of course his solution to the alien problem will be a dangerous shortcut. And so it is, with an implausible solution.

There’s joke enough here for maybe 3,000 words at the outside, and this drags terribly at some 13,000 words. (I wonder if it was written to the cover, which does portray a scene from the story but in a very generic fashion.)

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Future Treasures: The Midnight Queen by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

Future Treasures: The Midnight Queen by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

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The Midnight Queen-smallIn these post Harry Potter days, it takes a certain authorial courage to set a fantasy novel in a wizarding school. Sylvia Izzo Hunter has done exactly that with her first novel The Midnight Queen, the opening book in the Noctis Magicae series, released next month. I’m intrigued by the book blurb, which hints at an older target audience than Rowling’s series, as well as a hint of romance.

In the hallowed halls of Oxford’s Merlin College, the most talented — and highest born — sons of the Kingdom of Britain are taught the intricacies of magickal theory. But what dazzles can also destroy, as Gray Marshall is about to discover…

Gray’s deep talent for magick has won him a place at Merlin College. But when he accompanies four fellow students on a mysterious midnight errand that ends in disaster and death, he is sent away in disgrace — and without a trace of his power. He must spend the summer under the watchful eye of his domineering professor, Appius Callender, working in the gardens of Callender’s country estate and hoping to recover his abilities. And it is there, toiling away on a summer afternoon, that he meets the professor’s daughter.

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What Would it Look Like to Pull a Watchmen on Planetary Romance? Part I

What Would it Look Like to Pull a Watchmen on Planetary Romance? Part I

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watchmencoverI’ve been musing lately about the conventions of the comic book form we’ve inherited from the past and how they match to the sensibilities of the present. They don’t easily fit without suppressing either the core superhero conceits or the realities of the modern world.

Perhaps the most famous crashing of the two was Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which slammed the conventions of the superhero genre into the hard, hard wall of modern, adult sensibilities. It made a pretty mess of the superhero genre.

Most of the traditions of the superhero genre were born in a very brief period between 1938 and 1945, a time which birthed Superman, Batman, the Justice Society, Captain America, the Submariner, and the Human Torch, as well as many other less memorable characters.

The idea of the secret identity, of defending truth, justice and the American way, of the repeated conflict with the nemesis villain, and of just relentlessly defeating crime, were all in those first seven years. The only idea I can think of that seems to me essential to the superhero genre that was not formed in those times is the idea that the characters never really die (except for Uncle Ben, Gwen Stacy, and Bucky, as the famous rule inaccurately goes).

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New Treasures: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Volume One, Adapted by P. Craig Russell

New Treasures: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Volume One, Adapted by P. Craig Russell

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The Graveyard Book Volume One-smallI’ve been a fan of P. Craig Russell’s comic work since his adaptation of Michael Morcock’s Elric: The Dreaming City first appeared in Epic magazine way back in 1979.

Russell did a lot of attention-getting work for Marvel, including Doctor Strange Annual #1 (1976) and a lengthy run on Killraven (1974–1976), before branching out as an independent artist. He returned to Elric several times, first with While the Gods Laugh (Epic, 1981), and Elric of Melniboné (1982–84), a limited series scripted by Roy Thomas from Pacific Comics.

He brought the character to First Comics with Elric: Weird of the White Wolf, and in 1993-95 he worked directly with scripter Michael Moorcock on Elric: Stormbringer (Dark Horse Comics). He also worked with my friend Mark Shainblum on The Chronicles of Corum, an ongoing series from First Comics, in the late 80s.

Russell’s first collaborations with Neil Gaiman were the famous “Ramadan” issue of Sandman (issue #50, 1992), which helped inspire Howard Andrew Jones to create Dabir & Asim, and a story in the Sandman graphic novel Endless Nights. That led to Russell’s first graphic adaptation for Gaiman, his novel Coraline (2008).

Now he’s produced his most ambitious collaboration with Gaiman yet: a two-volume graphic adaptation of The Graveyard Book, the tale of a boy who’s raised by ghosts in a graveyard. The first volume, just released, contains Chapter One through the Interlude, while the upcoming Volume Two contains Chapter Six through to the end.

Here’s the book description.

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Vintage Treasures: City Under the Sea by Kenneth Bulmer

Vintage Treasures: City Under the Sea by Kenneth Bulmer

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City Under the Sea Kenneth Bulmer Ace-small City Under the Sea Kenneth Bulmer UK-small City Under the Sea Kenneth Bulmer Avon

As you may have noticed if you’ve been following my Vintage Treasures posts since I returned from the Windy City Pulp & Paper show, I’ve been time-traveling back to the early 1980s in my big green chair, courtesy of some newly acquired vintage magazines, paperbacks, and fanzines.

Al those ads, editorials, and reviews have rekindled an interest in the forgotten books of the era. I find myself browsing my library, shopping for titles from the early 80s. Last night, I picked up a handsome Avon paperback from January 1980, the very threshold of the decade, and settled back into my chair to try it out.

Of course, when I finally bothered to look at the copyright, I discovered that City Under the Sea wasn’t written in the 80s. It first appeared three decades earlier in 1957 as an Ace Double, back-to-back with Poul Anderson’s Star Ways, and it was reprinted multiple times in the intervening years.

Above is a sample of some of the various editions over the years (click for bigger versions). If I owned these editions, I wouldn’t be the clueless reader you see before you. This is why a huge paperback collection is so essential.

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