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Month: November 2015

Vintage Treasures: The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann

Vintage Treasures: The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann

The Weirwoods-small The Weirwoods-back-small The Weirwoods 1977-small

We haven’t discussed Thomas Burnett Swann much here at Black Gate (a quick search pops up only one previous title, his 1972 paperback Wolfwinter). He is largely forgotten today.

His second novel, The Weirwoods, was serialized in two parts in Science Fantasy in 1965. It appeared in paperback from Ace Books in 1967 with a cover by Gray Morrow (above left, click for bigger version). The back cover of that edition is in the middle. It is a very slender novel, just 125 pages, with an original cover price of 50 cents. At right is the October 1977 Ace reprint, with a cover by Stephen Hickman.

Swann published some 16 novels, which together constitute a secret history of the magical races of classical mythology, starting in ancient Egypt in roughly 2500 BC, and the inexorable decline of magic in the face of the growth of Christianity and other world religions. The Weirwoods is set in the world of the Etruscans, the pre-Roman civilization that dominated Italy from 800 to 500 B.C., and tells the tale of nobleman Lars Velcha, whose city Sutrium sits beside the mysterious Weirwoods, home to witches, centaurs, fauns, water sprites, and far stranger things. When Velcha captures the weir-man Vel and makes him a slave, he triggers a war that brings disaster to his city.

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Clarkesworld 110 Now on Sale

Clarkesworld 110 Now on Sale

Clarkesworld 110-smallMark Cole’s nonfiction article “You Wouldn’t Be Reading This If It Weren’t For Buck Rogers,” in the latest issue of Clarkesworld, is a fond look back at one of the most important characters in the history of science fiction, and the famous comic strip he spawned.

Buck got his start in a singularly dull novelette by Philip Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 AD,” in the August 1928 Amazing Stories (its cover looks so much like the classic images of Buck that no one notices it illustrates E.E. “Doc” Smith’s story, Skylark of Space).

By now everyone knows the story: Rogers gets trapped in a mine filled with a mysterious radioactive gas and wakes up almost five hundred years later. But then it bogs down in endless descriptions of future technology, future history, and future language. Even the “exciting” action is told in a detached tone, more suitable for a history text than a pulp adventure.

Yet, within a year, it became one of the most popular comic strips ever.

Issue #110 of Clarkesworld has seven stories — five new, and two reprints — from Naomi Kritzer, Nin Harris, Sara Saab, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Xia Jia, Tim Sullivan, and Ellen Kushner & Ysabeau S. Wilce.

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October Short Story Roundup

October Short Story Roundup

oie_1703334C3k1rSDiJust because I’ve taken a turn toward epic high fantasy in my reading of late doesn’t mean I’ve forsaken swords & sorcery. In fact, here’s my latest look at short stories from a trio of magazines you can read for free every single issue.

I’m starting this month off with Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’ve written here before about my love-hate relationship with the magazine. Too often it just doesn’t print stories I’m interested in. Even when it does, its editors definitely have more literary taste than the pulpish flavor I prefer in my heroic fantasy. Issue #185 is a reminder of why I still look forward to BCS’s arrival every two weeks. Topped by a gorgeous painting by Feliks Grzesiczek that could easily pass for the locale of a Hammer film, the issue bills itself as “fantastically monstrous…for Halloween.” And it is.

Demons Enough” by Ian McHugh is a little like Underworld (if Underworld wasn’t awful), set a little to the left of Beowulf’s Geatland. In other words, you get a shapeshifter throwing down with vampires, and folks named Thorfinn and Freydis trying to kill the lot of them. When the component elements of a story have been played with by an untold host of other writers over the years, the author has a lot of work to bring something original to the mix. That happens here with McHugh’s vampires, or leeches as they’re called. Cloaked by night and magic, they take on a more human form. In the sunlight, stripped of most of their power, their true selpulchral nature is revealed. Gloomy atmosphere, gut-squishing violence, and apprehension are delivered with a more than adequate degree of skill.

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How I Used Steampunk to do George Orwell (But With More Sword Fights and Magic)

How I Used Steampunk to do George Orwell (But With More Sword Fights and Magic)

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“Holy ####! I’m a Steampunk author!”

“Holy ####! I’m a Steampunk author!”

I was staring at the Amazon Kindle rankings and the first volume of Swords Versus Tanks had just crept into the top 10.

Actually, I like Steampunk, but the story was supposed to be Heroic Fantasy or even Sword and Sorcery. After all, swords is what I do for fun.

Back when I was planning what I hoped would be my début novel, I wanted to put magically-enhanced medieval knights up against tanks, but I didn’t want to involve a modern military — too sophisticated with too much tech; I would end up spending most of the novel finding magical ways to break drones and cruise missiles that didn’t also break the medieval setting.

If my tanks were going to be pre-modern, then I might as well pick the era with the coolest looking tanks — that gave me WWI, which also gave me Zeppelins.

So Great War tanks and Zeppelins and semi-automatic weapons. That made at least half the story Steampunk  (Decopunk actually)… not half the novel as in the first (or second) half. Rather half the genre. The other half is Heroic Fantasy. As a reviewer kindly put it:

…it’s like every fantasy, steam punk or alternative history novel thrust screaming into a thunderdome and told to fight for our entertainment.

But Steampunk provided more than just carefully calibrated tactical situations with nice aesthetics, it also let me write about big ideologies.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Four

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Four

In The Wake of Sister Blue Mark Rigney-medium

Linked below, you’ll find the fourth installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles, I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. In this latest installment, Maer decides on her next steps while Vashear suffers through the aftermath of an extrication. As for Belner, whom we’d met before but not by name, well he’s nothing if not on the run. Things are heating up, with Chapter Five to follow in two weeks’ time.

Bear in mind that this is a true serial. I haven’t written to the end; I couldn’t publish all at once even if I wished to do so. I do have the overall arc of the piece in mind, but as to how we get there? I predict it’ll be one complication at a time – minimum. I do promise this: I’ll dole out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.

Welcome to adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.

Tell your friends. Off we go — and if you’re just discovering this portal, don’t forget to begin at the beginning.

Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

Read the fourth and latest installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue HERE.

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New Treasures: Domnall and the Borrowed Child by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

New Treasures: Domnall and the Borrowed Child by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

Domnall and the Borrowed Child-back-small Domnall and the Borrowed Child-small

Click on the images for bigger versions.

Sylvia Spruck Wrigley’s short story “Alive, Alive Oh”, from the June 2013 issue of Lightspeed, was nominated for the Nebula Award. Her new novella Domnall and the Borrowed Child is the ninth title in Tor.com‘s novella series.

Domnall is a cranky old faerie, the only experienced scout left after the war with the sluagh. He remembers a time when his kind, the Scottish seelie fae, would dance fairy rings amongst the bluebells. Now the ruling council is too cowardly — and too afraid of humans — to do anything of the sort. But when a fae child falls ill, Domnall is the only one with the cunning and resources to get her the medicine she needs: Mother’s milk. But to get it, the old scout will face cunning humans, hungry wolves, and uncooperative sheep — and his fellow fae.

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Robert E. Howard, Exile of Cross Plains

Robert E. Howard, Exile of Cross Plains

NOTE: The following article was first published on March 21, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

subterranean-kull-slipcasesubterranean-kull-limitedThe transformation of literary genres in the early twentieth century was marked by a series of intriguing parallels and recurrences. When Raymond Chandler, displaced as much in England as California, started down the mean streets of writing pulp fiction, he used an Erle Stanley Gardner story as his template. Chandler prepared a detailed synopsis of Gardner’s story and then re-wrote the story himself, comparing the results to the original.

Chandler’s first published pulp story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) introduced the prototype for the hardboiled private eye who emerged six years later in Chandler’s landmark first novel, The Big Sleep in the form of Philip Marlowe. Likewise Chandler’s literary heir, Ross Macdonald, displaced as much in Canada as California, would use The Big Sleep as the template for his own first novel, The Moving Target (1949) and, in the process, introduced Marlowe’s successor, Lew Archer who would arguably represent the hardboiled detective realized to its full potential.

When Robert E. Howard, an outcast in his native Cross Plains, started down the path that would eventually give the world the genre now known as Sword & Sorcery, he used Paul L. Anderson’s story, “En-ro of the Ta-an” as the template for his various “Am-ra of the Ta-an” story drafts. Anderson would likely be a completely forgotten literary figure but for the efforts of Howard scholar, Rusty Burke. Even without Anderson as a reference point, Howard’s first attempts at creating a noble savage are instantly familiar to the modern reader as being works that are highly derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, Pellucidar, and Caspak novels. Just as the seminal Black Mask writers took the western and successfully brought it to an urban setting creating modern detective fiction in the process, so Burroughs and those he influenced took Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales and laid the foundation for modern myth-making by cross-breeding jungle adventures with the lost worlds tales of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard.

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Future Treasures: A Daughter of No Nation by A. M. Dellamonica

Future Treasures: A Daughter of No Nation by A. M. Dellamonica

Child of a Hidden Sea-small A Daughter of No Nation-small

Child of a Hidden Sea, the first novel in A. M. Dellamonica’s new fantasy trilogy The Hidden Sea Tales, was published in hardcover last June. It introduced us to twenty-four-year-old Sophie Hansa, who found herself transported from a San Francisco alley into the warm and salty waters of Stormwrack, the magical world where her birth parents met. Stormwrack is a world of island nations with a variety of cultures — and where a hidden conspiracy could destroy everything she has just discovered. With the help of a sister she has never known, and a ship captain who would rather she had never arrived, she navigated the shoals of the highly charged politics of Stormwrack… until she found herself effectively deported from Stormwrack. You can read an excerpt at Tor.com, and the digital version is available now for just $2.99.

The second novel in the trilogy, A Daughter of No Nation, will be released from Tor Books on December 1. Here’s the plot synopsis, and a link to a brand new excerpt.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

Terra Incognito A Guide to Building the Worlds of Your Imagination-smallWith his very first article for Black Gate, Richard C. White shot right to the top of the charts with the most popular article for the month, “World Building 101: The Village.” Here’s a sample:

Just because you have water doesn’t mean you can put any number of people in an area. The Cahokia Mounds in Illinois were believed to have held up to 40,000 people which would have made it the biggest city in North America until the 18th century. However, archeologists now believe the reason that Cahokia was abandoned was not due to warfare but because they had so many people that the water became too polluted to support the population. Even pioneers in the 19th century soon learned you can only dig a well so deep before it doesn’t provide enough water. An overabundance of people/livestock/ irrigation can cause a drought as easily as Mother Nature. So, when planning your village for your story, think about how do your people get their water and how they deal with waste water.

Coming in second was Fletcher Vredenburgh’s look back at one of the most popular fantasy novels of the 20th Century, “You Can’t Go Home Again: The Annotated Sword of Shannara: 35th Anniversary Edition by Terry Brooks.” The third most popular article last month was Derek Kunsken’s interview with Christopher Golden, Co-Author of Joe Golem, Occult Detective.

Rounding out the Top Five for the month were Goth Chick, with her look at Sony Pictures’ Freaks of Nature, and M Harold Page’s catalog of tips for those trying to write a novel this month, “NaNoWriMo is coming!”

The complete list of Top Articles for September follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles and blog categories for the month.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Edgar Smith’s ‘The Implicit Holmes’

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Edgar Smith’s ‘The Implicit Holmes’

Implicit_GasLampBy sheer numbers, Sherlock Holmes is more popular than he has ever been. This is in large part due to the massive success of BBC television’s Sherlock, which is an international sensation. The Robert Downey Jr. movies also contributed to a revival of interest in Holmes before that.

Anecdotal evidence isn’t as good as objective, but it can still be valid. There are Holmes fans that have never actually read any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty stories (the Canon) about the great detective. This used to bother me, but I’ve gotten over it: they’re the ones missing out, and they’re the ones who don’t have real knowledge of the world’s first private consulting detective: just some parody on screen. So I’m good.

There is a VAST body of work that has been written about the Canon; including my own free, online newsletters, Baker Street Essays. As the great Sherlockian, Christopher Morley said, his tongue planted in its accustomed place in his cheek, “Never has so much been written by so many for so few.”

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