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Month: January 2016

Wizards of the Coast Unveils Self-Publishing Site for D&D Adventures

Wizards of the Coast Unveils Self-Publishing Site for D&D Adventures

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CC BY Janet Galore

Finally! A market for my Drizzt/Wulfgar slash adventure where the heroes discover the greatest treasure of all: love.

Wizards of the Coast has just announced the “Dungeon Masters Guild,” an e-publishing site for self-publishing D&D adventures and other content set in the Forgotten Realms. … The Dungeon Masters Guild seems similar to Amazon’s Kindle Worlds — a way that creators can be permitted to use licensed intellectual property and at the same time make a little money on it. In this case, the intellectual property is D&D‘s venerable Forgotten Realms setting. There are just a few restrictions on these adventures. The main restriction is that they must use the 5th Edition D&D rule set. Apart from that, they’re about what you’d expect — no offensive or pornographic material, no copyright or trademark violations, and nothing libelous.

Writers receive a 50-percent royalty, less than Amazon’s 70 percent yet recalling an earlier age when publishers regarded writers as partners and not grovelling slaves (halfsies was the same cut Melville received for Moby-Dick). The rest of the money is split between WotC and OneBookshelf, which runs the Dungeon Masters Guild site. Full story here.

Dungeons & Dragons has to be the most mismanaged IP in existence; its history is one long sitcom of bungling and idiocy. As the article points out, TSR spent much of the mid-90s sticking its fingers in the holes of the Internet spaghetti drainer, even going so far as to claim copyright over out-of-the-barn horses like “armor class” and “hit points.” It’s good to see WotC, in anno Domini 2016, finally join ’em instead of trying to beat ’em, even if they, like most publishers, continue to be the last across the innovation finish line.

New Treasures: The Library of America Publishes Elmore Leonard

New Treasures: The Library of America Publishes Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard Four Novels of the 1970s-small Elmore Leonard Four Novels of the 1980s-small

The Library of America has made a fine business of publishing archival quality omnibus editions of the most important novels of the 20th Century. We’ve covered several here recently, including:

A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, edited by Peter Straub

They’ve also published omnibus editions of Kurt Vonnegut, Dashiell Hammett, Philip K. Dick, Ross Macdonald, David Goodis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. I received several review copies in the mail from Library of America recently, including one of their Elmore Leonard collections. It’s been years since I’ve read anything by Leonard, but then again, it’s been a long time since I’ve held something as enticing as these collections. If you’re looking to put together an impressive genre library, this is the place to start.

Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1970s was published on August 28, 2014. It contains Fifty-Two Pickup, Swag, Unknown Man, and The Switch; it is 809 pages, priced at $35 in hardcover. Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s was published on September 1, 2015. It contains City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, and Freaky Deaky; it is 1024 pages, priced at $37.50 in hardcover. There are no digital editions.

Vintage Treasures: The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

Vintage Treasures: The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

WalkingDrum
I read this book so you don’t have to.

I read this book so you don’t have to.

Perhaps this review will make you want to read it.

Perhaps you shouldn’t.

It’s complicated.

The Walking Drum is the only medieval adventure written by Louis L’Amour, the mindbogglingly prolific author of a zillion Westerns. That alone makes it a retro must-read. A medieval romp by a horse-opera yarn-spinner who had also been a professional boxer and merchant seaman. How can we resist?

In actuality, the book is… odd. It fulfills expectations, both positive and negative, exceeds them, falls well short of them, and — ultimately — could have done with an edit before being released into the wild.

Reading it has made rethink my choice of reading matter (and also my strategy as a writer, but that’s for another article). Let me start from the beginning

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Patrick “Not the Starfish” Samphire on His Novel, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, Building a Career as an Author, and Supporting a Family in an All Author Home

Patrick “Not the Starfish” Samphire on His Novel, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, Building a Career as an Author, and Supporting a Family in an All Author Home

patrick-samphire-author-photo-3-col-290x406Patrick Samphire has already had a long and impressive career as a short story author. Now he’s got his first novel out, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. This pulp adventure is set in the Regency era, in a British colony on Mars. It’s got high adventure, action, mystery, dinosaurs, and of course, dragons. What more do you need?

These days both Patrick and his wife, Stephanie Burgis, work full time as authors and support their young family in Wales.

He and I sat down to talk over Skype about his new book, and also about building a life as an author. In this interview, he details his journey from his childhood in Africa, to his earning a doctorate in physics, to his being accepted to and attending Clarion West.

I’ve been reading Patrick’s work for over a decade, now, and highly recommend it to anyone!

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Clarkesworld 112 Now Available

Clarkesworld 112 Now Available

Clarkesworld 112-smallNeil Clarke uses his editorial this issue to announce the 2015 Reader’s Poll and Contest. Vote for your favorite Clarkesworld story and cover art, and you could win one of three copies of Clarkesworld: Year Eight (publishing this month). Voting is open now through February 23rd, and the results will be announced in the March issue. Cast your votes here!

Issue #112 of Clarkesworld has four new stories by Robert Reed, E. Catherine Tobler, Rich Larson, and Bao Shu, and two reprints by Robert Silverberg and Megan Lindholm.

Short stories featured this issue are:

The Algorithms of Value” by Robert Reed
The Abduction of Europa” by E. Catherine Tobler
Extraction Request” by Rich Larson
Everybody Loves Charles” by Bao Shu
The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale” by Robert Silverberg (from Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, 2009.)
Old Paint” by Megan Lindholm (from Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2012)

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Future Treasures: Medusa’s Web by Tim Powers

Future Treasures: Medusa’s Web by Tim Powers

Medusas Web-smallA new book by Tim Powers is a major event. Powers made a huge splash with his early novels, especially The Drawing of the Dark (1979), which Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed for us here, The Anubis Gates (1983), Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (1985), and On Stranger Tides (1987). His last novel was Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), a sequel of sorts to The Stress of Her Regard (1989). Medusa’s Web is a phantasmagoric tale of a man who must uncover occult secrets in 1920s Hollywood to save his family.

In the wake of their Aunt Amity’s suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline’s return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted “House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills” that is a conduit for the supernatural.

Decorated by bits salvaged from old hotels and movie sets, Caveat hides a dark family secret that stretches back to the golden days of Rudolph Valentino and the silent film stars. A collection of hypnotic eight-limbed abstract images inked on paper allows the Maddens to briefly fragment and flatten time — to transport themselves into the past and future in visions that are both puzzling and terrifying. Though their cousins know little about these ancient “spiders” which provoke unpredictable temporal dislocations, Ariel and Claimayne have been using for years — an addiction that has brought Claimayne to the brink of selfish destruction.

As Madeline falls more completely under Caveat’s spell, Scott discovers that to protect her, he must use the perilous spiders himself. But will he unravel the mystery of the Madden family’s past and finally free them… or be pulled deeper into their deadly web?

Medusa’s Web will be published by William Morrow on January 19, 2016. It is 368 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

December Short Story Roundup

December Short Story Roundup

oie_1234817JcS2DZHcIt’s time for the last roundup of stories from 2015. The year went out in fine fashion. For the second time in only a few months Beneath Ceaseless Skies published a batch of good heroic fantasy. And while we’re in that interim between new issues of of both Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Grimdark Magazine, genre stalwart Swords and Sorcery Magazine made its regular monthly appearance bearing a pair of new tales.

Before I get into the reviews, I thought I’d say a little about why I’ve made it a major part of my writing to review and publicize S&S short stories. While there have been good S&S novels (REH’s The Hour of the Dragon), okay ones (KEW’s Darkness Weaves), and bad ones (Lin Carter’s Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria), the beating heart of the genre has always been short stories. From that opening blast of thunder in REH’s “The Shadow Kingdom” — and through the decades in the works of authors as diverse as C.L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and Charles Saunders — it’s been in short stories that the genre’s been best displayed.

The hallmarks of swords & sorcery are adventure, dark fantasy, horror, and a narrow focus on only a few characters, bound together in a narrative that reads like a shot of mainlined adrenaline. In the very best stories — KEW’s “Reflections for the Winter of My Soul,” for example — they’re all present. Not that there can’t be structural complexity, finely detailed characters, or exquisitely tooled prose, but it must be exciting. Detours into side-plots, passages meticulously describing feasts, too many secondary and tertiary characters all put brakes on the action. Limited to fifteen or thirty pages, the focus is on the protagonist and his or her immediate situation.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Eight

In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Eight

In The Wake of Sister Blue Mark Rigney-medium

Linked below, you’ll find the eighth installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue. The battle for Vagen commences, but this ain’t your usual invasion, since just about nobody in this book knows how to fight. The desperation and derring-do come thick and fast regardless, with Chapter Nine to follow in two weeks.

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 (or perhaps my unexpectedly popular D&D-related post, “Youth In a Box,”) I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. Oh, and if you’re only now discovering this portal, may I suggest you begin at the beginning? The Spur awaits…

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

Read the eighth and latest installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

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The Goblin King is Gone. The Starman Has Returned to the Sky. R.I.P. David Bowie

The Goblin King is Gone. The Starman Has Returned to the Sky. R.I.P. David Bowie

labyrinthI’m not going to talk about his musical or cultural influence (which was prodigious), or his film career (he was possibly the best actor among those recognized first and foremost as singers). If you want to explore all that (as well you should), the papers and blogs will be inundated with it for days to come.

My own brief contribution to the media buzz is only this: I’m going to take a moment to offer another little reason why his passing warrants note here on Black Gate. And no, it’s not just because he was Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s wonderful fantasy film Labyrinth (1986) — although that alone might be reason enough. Nor that in other roles both in film (The Man Who Fell to Earth [1976]) and on stage (e.g. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) he often portrayed himself as an extraterrestrial, a man visiting our planet from the stars.

It’s in the music itself. The influence of fantasy and speculative fiction can be heard throughout his oeuvre, and some of his songs are themselves tiny gems of speculative fiction. I’ll quickly cite two examples.

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When the Ghost is Unseen: Finding Fantasy in Mainstream Fiction

When the Ghost is Unseen: Finding Fantasy in Mainstream Fiction

The Seance John Harwood-small The Vanishing Wendy Webb-small The Somnambulist Jonathan Barnes-small

When I browse the SF and Fantasy section at my local Barnes & Noble every Saturday, I usually return home with a handful of intriguing finds. There’s certainly no shortage of books to choose from, and more showing up every week.

One thing I miss in my book hunts, however, is the thrill of the unknown. When I settle into my big green chair with a new horror novel, I know there’s a monster hiding somewhere. That’s the one drawback of always shopping in the genre section: you know the ghost will pop out by chapter five.

That’s why I like to spice up my reading by browsing in the gothic mystery section (my wife Alice’s favorite section). Is there a spook, or isn’t there? Often you don’t know until the end of the book (and sometimes not even then), and that adds a delicious element of mystery. Here’s a quick rundown of three delightful gothic mysteries I recently added to my collection.

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