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Month: September 2016

New Treasures: The Gentleman, by Forrest Leo

New Treasures: The Gentleman, by Forrest Leo

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The Gentleman Forrest Leo-smallWell, we’re heading into fall (at least, for those readers in the Northern Hemisphere), and that’s reading season. Time to snuggle down with a good book or three, as the weather turns foul outside. My choice for Labor Day weekend is the debut novel by Forrest Leo, a Monty Pythonesque fantasy about a poet who accidentally sells his wife to the devil — then assembles a band of adventurers to rescue her. BookRiot labels it “a delight,” and Locus calls it “Wonderfully demented and comical… as if Tom Holt and Oscar Wilde got together and decided to do up a steampunk novelty… a robust, riotous romp.”

When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they’re broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him.

Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil — the polite “Gentleman” of the title — who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party’s over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord.

Newly in love with Vivian, Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell that includes Simmons, the butler; Tompkins, the bookseller; Ashley Lancaster, swashbuckling Buddhist; Will Kensington, inventor of a flying machine; and Savage’s spirited kid sister, Lizzie, freshly booted from boarding school for a “dalliance.” Throughout, his cousin’s quibbling footnotes to the text push the story into comedy nirvana.

Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, anarchist-fearing bobbies, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history, and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny, The Gentleman is a giddy farce that recalls the masterful confections of P.G. Wodehouse and Hergé’s beautifully detailed Tintin adventures.

The Gentleman was published by Penguin Press on August 16, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $26 on hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.

Joe Bonadonna Reports on Weird Tales

Joe Bonadonna Reports on Weird Tales

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Weird Tales 360 back cover-smallBack in May I wrote a brief post asking “Is Weird Tales Dead… Again?”

Since then there’s been no shortage of rumors, grumblings, and premature death announcements… but not a lot of facts. But this week, Black Gate roving reporter Joe Bonadonna checks in with the latest news.

In spite some talk concerning the possible demise of Weird Tales, I’m happy to report that it is still alive and well. I spoke with editor Marvin Kaye and he told me plans are in the works for the future. They had some financial issues, but all is well. The publisher plans to do an “unthemed” issue, followed by a “Halloween Edition” before all else.

I am hoping that the planned “Sword and Sorcery Special Edition” will follow after that. I was not given any specific timeline for the publication of these issues, but let’s hope they’ll all see the light of day within a short amount of time, without too much time-lag between issues. I keep checking Weird Tales websites for updates, but so far haven’t been able to learn anything. Let’s all hope for the best, and I’ll try to keep you all in the loop when and if I learn anything more.

As for new submissions, they are overstocked with fiction. No need to submit. That is all.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.

Andre Norton: Are Her Men Really Women?

Andre Norton: Are Her Men Really Women?

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Norton Star RangersIt’s been my experience that Andre Norton is extremely popular among women of my generation, those who grew up reading SF when there were few women writing, and even fewer female protagonists. When I was looking at Norton’s Witch World last time, I found myself wondering whether this popularity was due to how Norton feminized her male protagonists, making them easier for female readers to relate to.

By feminizing, I mean that Norton gives her male protagonists the same kind of “otherness” that is normally associated with the female. Women have long been defined by how they aren’t men, and similarly Norton’s male protagonists are almost always defined by how they’re not the standard socially/politically accepted norm.

Even the positive qualities they may have are somehow the very things that set them apart, and define them as “other.” These are invariably qualities that the standard norm don’t wish to have, even though they’re demonstrably useful.

In Star Rangers Kartr, although a member of the Patrol, is a second class citizen, as are all of the Ranger class of combatants. In fact, he’s excluded from the class of regular Patrol in a number of ways. Even though he’s human, he’s from a frontier world, and is therefore a “barbarian”; he’s a “sensitive” in that he has certain mental abilities which can include telepathy – and it’s significant that this valuable ability is either distrusted by those who believe in its existence, or simply denied by those who don’t. Lastly, he’s a “bemmy lover”* in that he doesn’t join in excluding his nonhuman comrades from social or political status.

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Goth Chick News: What a Beautiful Time to Be Obsessed with LEGOs

Goth Chick News: What a Beautiful Time to Be Obsessed with LEGOs

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Lego Addams Family

Come on admit it – you still love to occasionally get your Lego fix.

In a world full of VR and 3D anime games, and Pokemon Go (insert eye roll here) – the Danish idea from 1932 of making little colored bricks that snap together not only still holds up with the kiddies, but has gained full on cult-status with the grownups.  And to their credit, Lego has continued to evolve to meet the needs of these adults sporting expendable incomes and a bad case of nostalgia.

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Heavy Metal Lyrics, Sword & Sorcery Fantasy and Video Games: A Cultural Synergy by Dr. Fred Adams

Heavy Metal Lyrics, Sword & Sorcery Fantasy and Video Games: A Cultural Synergy by Dr. Fred Adams

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Fred_SpaceInvadersLast year, Dr Fred C. Adams, Ph.D., joined our parade of writers in the Discovering Robert E. Howard series with an entry on Esau Cairn, REH’s classic science fiction character. Dr. Adams is back for another guest post here at Black Gate. Put on your headphones and go!

The parallel (and almost simultaneous) ascensions of heavy metal music, video game technology (which later migrated to personal computers), and sword and sorcery fantasy to mass popularity from the early 1970s forward are not coincidental. Rather, they are synergistic. All three draw from the late 20th century youth culture’s fatalism and nihilism, honed to a fine edge in the fin de siècle era of the 1990s.

Consider the aesthetic of the Ur-arcade-video game of the 1980s, Space Invaders: ranks of grotesque aliens march across the screen as space ships fly overhead firing missiles. You, represented by a screen icon, scuttle back and forth, trapped in a small area firing and dodging missiles while trying to destroy the oncoming ranks of invaders before they reach you and symbolically stomp you into the earth.

The more you destroy, the more ranks appear, starting closer and advancing more quickly. You can forestall death for a time, but the denouement is inevitable. You will lose; the programming foreordains that you will die no matter how well or how long you fight. Other games of the era, like Missile Command, and Asteroids followed suit.

An occasional arcade game like Dragonquest allowed victory, but most reduced play to a life-and-death struggle the player will never win. The kill tally represents the only satisfaction—how many of them do I take with me? As the Time Traveler of Wells’ famous novel says of fighting an impossible number of Morlocks in the darkened forest, “I will make them pay for their meat.”

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What No Man’s Sky Can Learn from SFF Worldbuilding

What No Man’s Sky Can Learn from SFF Worldbuilding

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If you follow video games, you likely have heard the hype surrounding No Man’s Sky, the space exploration game with a decided pulp science fiction aesthetic that promises a universe with a whopping 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets to discover.

Beautiful planetary vista number 976,234,501--but then, there are billions just as beautiful.

If there’s one thing in this game you’ll never be short of, it’s alien, picturesque vistas

Years of anticipation culminated in the game’s release on August 9, and on that day I, along with legions of frothing gamers, lit up my Playstation, grabbed the nearest 3-liter of Mountain Dew, slid my buttcheeks into the grooves of my favorite easy chair and settled in, happily anticipating a few hundred hours of wonder-stuffed fun.

Only. Well. The game. I mean. It’s. Well.

This video sums up what millions of gamers suddenly felt at once, and were suddenly silenced.

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