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Month: June 2015

R.A. MacAvoy’s The Book of Kells

R.A. MacAvoy’s The Book of Kells

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MacAvoy KellsLately I’ve been exploring portal fantasies, and last time I talked about Charles de Lint’s The Little Country. This week I’d like to take a look at R.A. MacAvoy’s The Book of Kells.

John Thornburn is a Canadian artist living and teaching in Dublin. He’s a bit of a klutz socially and emotionally, and has a tendency to focus on his work to the exclusion of everything else. His friend and sometime lover Derval O’Keane is an academic historian. The story begins when a young, injured girl suddenly appears in  John’s bathroom, having come through a portal  he inadvertently opened while working on the tracing of an old Gaelic pattern. It takes a bit of doing, but John and Derval finally figure out that Ailesh is the survivor of a Viking attack on her village in the Ireland of 985, saved by her father’s throwing her through the portal.

John and Derval take Ailesh back to her own time, and find the injured poet Labres MacCullen among the dead. John doesn’t know how to open the portal from this side, or even if it can be opened, so they accompany Ailesh and Labres to Dublin, where they hope to get help and justice from the King. Though the King in Dublin is himself a Dane at this point in history, they also want to warn him that the Vikings seem to have come as invaders, not as mere raiders who, having struck, will now go away.

Unknown to them, however, these same Vikings offered the lives of all the villagers to Odin, and the fact that Ailesh and Labres escaped puts them in a bit of a quandary. The leader decides that they must find and kill those who escaped, or forfeit their own lives – and the success of their expedition – to Odin’s displeasure.

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Goth Chick News: Sometimes There Just Are No Words…

Goth Chick News: Sometimes There Just Are No Words…

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If you can’t remember the last time you were left slack-jawed and speechless then get ready.

Today is your day.

Steve Ramsdan is a London based filmmaker, editor and all around “behind the camera” sort of genius. To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of him until today, when I looked up his IMBD profile after someone sent me this.

Apparently he admired how Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick framed their shots in a similar way, and just got to wondering, “What if..?”

Go ahead – take a look…

Well? Do you agree? Genius?

Post a comment or drop a line to sue@blackgate.com, which goes for all of you except those who CAN remember the last time they were left slack-jawed and speechless – we really don’t need those details (you know who you are).

Fiction: Shieldwall: Barbarians (Chapter 1)

Fiction: Shieldwall: Barbarians (Chapter 1)

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Roman Cavalry Helmet
I originally wrote Shieldwall: Barbarians! for my son “Kurtzhau”. Why? Here he is at 10, utterly transfixed by the Sutton Hoo helmet.

I’ve been guest blogging over at Charles Stross‘s blog, a writer with so many rockets to his name  I joke about buying him a Tracy Island set. I did a three part piece In defence of Traditional (Eurocentric Quasi-Medieval) Fantasy which sparked some… lively discussion in the comments. I also talked about my writing process, and of course my YA Dark Age adventure,  Shieldwall: Barbarians! (UK, Amazon-free Epub), which I originally wrote for my son. Frankly, I’m a bit brain dead, so you’ll pardon me if I hit you with the first chapter of my book…

Shieldwall: Barbarians!
by M Harold Page
Chapter 1

AD 451, south coast of Roman Britain

A spear whirred past the ear of Hengest, son of King Fredulf of the Jutes. It thwacked into the door of his father’s mead hall.

Warriors appeared out of the shadows and charged across the moonlit courtyard towards Hengest. They came on in silence except for the sound of laboured breathing and the clink of mail.

Hengest stepped behind one of the posts holding up the porch roof and yelled, “We’re under attack!”

More weapons sailed through the night air.

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Unknown, September 1939: A Retro-Review

Unknown, September 1939: A Retro-Review

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Unknown September 1939 None But Lucifer-smallMy last post was a review of Galaxy’s September 1952 issue. So I’m jumping back more than a decade to an issue of another magazine I’ve wanted to get into for a few years.

At last year’s World Fantasy Convention, while John O’Neill was trying to set a world record for the number of books carried in a single stack (seriously, if you had seen it, you would have been impressed), I came across a dealer selling old issues of Unknown. Actually, I told my wife I was trying to find some, and she actually found a bin of them. While not impossible to come by, collecting issues of Unknown is somewhat more cost prohibitive than collecting issues of Galaxy.

Unknown (later retitled Unknown Worlds) was a speculative fiction magazine that ran from 1939 to 1942. It was published by Street & Smith, who also published Astounding. It was edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., who also edited Astounding. The early issues have art on the cover, like the September 1952 issue. These are also the more expensive ones. But if you don’t care too much about quality because you’re just going to rip it while reading it, you can find some inexpensive copies. Mine was $15.

What I find perhaps most interesting about this particular issue is that it contains a novel written by H. L. Gold and L. Sprague de Camp. Not only that, but I think (prove me wrong or right, Rich Horton) that this may have been the first time Gold used this particular pseudonym. He’d had stories published as Horace L. Gold but not the familiar H. L. Gold that he continued to use as his soubriquet at Galaxy. Am I the only one geeking out about this? Please tell me I’m cool in a Galaxy/Unknown/pulp sort of way.

None But Lucifer by H. L. Gold and L. Sprague de Camp — William Hale has realized the truth about Earth. It isn’t Earth, at least not in the sense people think of it. Everyone on Earth is actually living in Hell.

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Future Treasures: Queen of Fire by Anthony Ryan

Future Treasures: Queen of Fire by Anthony Ryan

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Queen of Fire Anthony Ryan-smallI first took notice of Anthony Ryan with the publication of Tower Lord (2014), the second volume in the New York Times bestselling Raven’s Shadow trilogy (why do I always discover series with the second volume?) The series began with Blood Song (2013); by the second book, Ryan was being called “David Gemmell’s natural successor.” In the final volume, Vaelin Al Sorna must help his Queen reclaim her Realm — despite the fact that his enemy has found a dangerous new collaborator, one with powers darker than Vaelin has ever encountered…

“The Ally is there, but only ever as a shadow, unexplained catastrophe or murder committed at the behest of a dark vengeful spirit. Sorting truth from myth is often a fruitless task.”

After fighting back from the brink of death, Queen Lyrna is determined to repel the invading Volarian army and regain the independence of the Unified Realm. Except, to accomplish her goals, she must do more than rally her loyal supporters. She must align herself with forces she once found repugnant — those who possess the strange and varied gifts of the Dark — and take the war to her enemy’s doorstep.

Victory rests on the shoulders of Vaelin Al Sorna, now named Battle Lord of the Realm. However, his path is riddled with difficulties. For the Volarian enemy has a new weapon on their side, one that Vaelin must destroy if the Realm is to prevail — a mysterious Ally with the ability to grant unnaturally long life to her servants. And defeating one who cannot be killed is a nearly impossible feat, especially when Vaelin’s blood-song, the mystical power which has made him the epic fighter he is, has gone ominously silent…

Queen of Fire will be published by Ace Books on July 7, 2015. It is 642 pages, priced at $28.95 in hardcover, and $14.99 for the digital edition.

Tin House 64 Now Available

Tin House 64 Now Available

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Tin House Magazine 64-smallWe cover exclusively fantasy magazines here at Black Gate… although our definition of “fantasy” can be pretty liberal. From time to time we’ve included science fiction magazines, horror zines, art and game publications, and others. If we think BG readers could conceivably be interested, we’ll give it a look.

Last week, more or less on a whim, I laid down $12.95 for the big Summer Reading issue of Tin House. Tin House is an American literary magazine, showcasing fiction and poetry from new and established writers. The magazine was founded in 1999, and has published fiction by Stephen King, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, David Foster Wallace, Aimee Bender, Richard Ford, Donna Tartt, and many others. The Summer Reading issue is huge — 224 pages — and filled with fiction. In his Editor’s Note, Rob Spillman gives us a sneak peek at the contents.

For this issue, five New Voices caught our eye… We admired the confidence and precision of the prose in the short stories of Sarah Elaine Smith and Matthew Socia — Smith’s “Pink Lotion” following a problematic addiction recovery, Socia’s “American Tramplings” being the tale of a stampede epidemic. While discovering emerging writers is always a thrill, it is a different excitement reading the work of masters who are in full command of their powers. For readers unfamiliar with the latest Nobel Laureate, Patrick Modiano, his “Page-a-Day” (beautifully translated from the French by Edward Gauvin) is an ideal introduction, wherein the author explores his favorite subject — Paris — and obsesses on time, memory, and the legacy of World War II. In “Forgetting Mississippi,” Lewis Hyde revisits the brutal 1964 murder of two young black men. Hyde, who was a civil rights activist at the time, not only puts the crime in context but also does the seemingly impossible — searches for forgiveness.

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Faces of Iraq

Faces of Iraq

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Proud dad in Nasiriyah
Proud dad in Nasiriyah

The Iraqis we see in the news almost always fall into three types–The Evil Fundamentalist, The Useless Official, and The Wailing Victim. The media have a hard time dealing with a broad range of characters, so they tend to fall back on these types again and again.

Of course the reality is more complex. While there’s no shortage of bloodshed and corruption, most of Iraq’s 33 million people go about their day-to-day affairs trying to live a normal life.

Back in 2012 I traveled to Iraq to write about it for the now-moribund travel blog Gadling. Click the link to read the series. Sadly, the photo galleries have been taken offline, but you can still read the articles for the moment.

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New Treasures: Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, edited by Paula Guran

New Treasures: Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, edited by Paula Guran

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Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep-smallPaula Guran edits The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror every year, and her most recent anthology was Blood Sisters, packed full of vampire stories by women. So it’s good to see her deliver something outside the horror genre… or, perhaps, it’s good to see her keen eye for dark fantasy brought to bear on a subgenre that’s usually associated with The Little Mermaid. 

In Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, Paula has assembled a wide range of fiction by Tanith Lee, Peter S. Beagle, Samuel R. Delany, Neil Gaiman, Delia Sherman, Gene Wolfe, and others. Here’s a brief snippet from her introduction:

Powerful and incomprehensible, the oceans were thought to be the home of many monstrous creatures — sea serpents and dragons; the Norse Kraken, Greek Charybdis, Japanese Isonade, Biblical Leviathan. Rivers have monsters, too, like the Yacumama of the Amazon River or the malevolent zin, who live in the Niger River. As for lakes, even if you’ve never heard of the Welsh afanc, you know the Scottish Loch Ness monster.

The waters of the world were also believed to contain mythological creatures whose behaviors were as inconstant as our feelings about the mysteries of the deep. As Jane Yolen has said, “It is the allure of the beautiful, unattainable, mysterious Other. In every culture in every clime, there are stories of such creatures in the oceans, rivers, ponds, wells. Water is such a mutable, magical substance itself, the human imagination simply cannot believe it’s not peopled as the earth is. We want there to be such underwater civilizations and — not finding them — we invent them and then turn around and believe in our own invention.”

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Venture, July 1957: A Retro-Review

Venture, July 1957: A Retro-Review

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Venture Science Fiction July 1957-smallI’ve written about Venture before, a short-lived companion to F&SF, first in the late ’50s, then again in the late ’60s to early ’70s. It tried to be a bit more adventure-oriented, and also (at least in its first incarnation) seemed to try to have a sexier image.

The feature list is pretty thin – most significant is the first book review column by Theodore Sturgeon, whom the editor proudly introduces as “the discoverer and distinguished proponent of that basic maxim known as “Sturgeon’s Law.” He reviews only one book, Martin Greenberg’s collection of non-fiction of SF interest, Coming Attractions. The inside back cover has a feature called “Venturing,” short bio-ish pieces about a few of the issue’s authors (Sturgeon, James Gunn, and “Paul Janvier”). The cover is by Ed Emshwiller (in my opinion, not one of his better efforts), and the interior art is by John Giunta and by Cindy Smith.

The stories are:

“Not So Great an Enemy,” by James E. Gunn (17,500 words)
“And Then She Found Him,” by Paul Janvier (6,900 words)
“Aces Loaded,” by Theodore R. Cogswell (6,500 words)
“The Keeper,” by H. Beam Piper (8,700 words)
“The Education of Tigress McCardle,” by C. M. Kornbluth (3,700 words)
“Seat of Judgment,” by Lester Del Rey (7,700 words)
“The Harvest,” by Tom Godwin (800 words)

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