Call for Backers! Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastic Stories in a Sustainable World Campaign on Kickstarter, in Conjunction with a Video Interview with Sarena Ulibarri, Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press
The Kickstarter campaign for Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastic Stories in a Sustainable World is now live!
What is this, you ask? Well, let me explain the history. Solarpunk is an emerging subgenre that focuses on sustainable energy, and many believe the rest of the world has a head start on the solarpunk movement. This anthology, being funded by the Kickstarter, was originally published in Brazil, in Portuguese, and is known internationally as one of the earliest examples of solarpunk. World Weaver Press wants to bring it to the northern hemisphere and the English language.
I sat down with Sarena Ulibarri, the editor in chief of World Weaver Press, for an interview that explores who she is, what World Weaver Press publishes, and a brief history of solarpunk and this anthology.
Clank! is a deck-building, dungeon-delving, push-your-luck board game designed by Paul Dennen at Dire Wolf Digital. It’s also the most fun “throw caution to the wind” board game I’ve played in a long time.
Players are thieves heading into a dungeon, challenged to see who can come back with the most loot. Bonus points if you walk out instead of getting carried, but you won’t be allowed to walk out unless you have an artifact. (And if you’re too deep in the dungeon when you tip over, the locals won’t carry you out.)
The players each start with identical decks of ten cards. A player shuffles their deck and draws five. These provide movement points to delve deeper and skill points to buy additional cards to add to their deck. There are also stumble cards that force them to add their cubes to the Clank! pile. At the end of a player’s turn, the cards they played and any newly acquired cards are discarded. Once they’ve played through all their cards, the discard pile is shuffled, and those new cards enter play.
Thus the players are building up their decks in the hopes that their draw of five cards will give them an increasing number skill points to buy better and better cards, and also to start bringing combat points and gold into their hand on a turn. (Yes, there are shops in the dungeon.)
While I was strolling through the streets of my hometown of St. Charles, a mysterious traveler in black slipped me a tightly bound scroll. “Keep if safe,” he whispered. “And honor the pact of knowledge.” When I got home, I found it contained a copy of the latest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, plus a tasty-looking recipe for Canadian date squares. Looks like it’s my lucky week.
The latest issue of HFQ includes stories by Evan Dicken, Raphael Ordoñez, and Jason Carney, plus poetry from Andrew Crabtree, Kendall Evans, and Michael Tilbury. Here’s the complete TOC, with fiction links.
The winners of the 2017 Hugo Awards were announced on Friday at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, Finland. I wish I had been there! But since I wasn’t, let’s just get this over with. Here’s the complete list of winners. Congratulations, all you cool people. In Helsinki, eating pickled herring. I don’t want to hear about it.
Best Novel
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
Best Novella
Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
While I was debating on Tuesday whether to focus on writing about the Blu-ray release of Shin Godzilla or completing the next John Carpenter series installment, The Thing, the news hit of the death of one of the last surviving participants of the 1954 Godzilla, Haruo Nakajima, from pneumonia at age eighty-eight. It was a painful blow: that Nakajima was still out there and alive was a reassurance to any Godzilla fan, because he actually was Godzilla — the first performer inside the monster costume, back in the original Godzilla, and the one who stayed with the part the longest, playing the monster until near the close of the original Showa Era. He suited up as Godzilla in twelve films from 1954 to 1972, a record that’s unlikely ever to be beat now that even Japanese Godzilla films have switched to using CGI rather than the old fashioned suits.
We talk about how Japanese giant monster (kaiju) films are done with “man-in-a-suit” special effects, but we often don’t understand what that implies. Since we’re once again deep in the “Does Andy Serkis deserves an Oscar nomination for a performance-capture role?” debate that comes after the release of each of the new Planet of the Apes films, it’s appropriate to remember the great performances from the suitmation actors who long preceded CGI-assisted characters.
And among suitmation performers, Nakajima was one of the finest. He infused Godzilla with a personality that emerged stronger and stronger during the period he was inside the costume. Godzilla, arms stretched forward in an attack pose, daring another giant monster to charge with the slight turn of the head — that’s down to Haruo Nakajima. He influenced the way Godzilla is acted as much as Boris Karloff influenced the Frankenstein Monster.
We’re nearing the end of our Kickstarter for Mysterion 2, the second volume of our anthology of Christian-themed speculative fiction. With only a week left, we’re still a ways from our funding goal. Since Kickstarter is all or nothing, if we do not make our goal, we do not receive any money, and Mysterion 2 will not happen.
While that would be unfortunate — we believe that Mysterion is a unique market, paying professional rates for speculative fiction with Christian characters, themes, or cosmology — we decided to use Kickstarter for exactly this reason.
For the first volume, we used Patreon. Patreon’s normal campaign is as a monthly subscription, but it can also be set so that the patron pays for every post you mark as a paid post. You can put up multiple paid posts per month, or you can put up none. This allowed us not to charge our patrons anything until we delivered an anthology. We felt this was necessary since we were first time anthologists. My wife and I had no idea whether we would receive enough good stories to make a worthwhile anthology. Even if we did, did we have what it took to select the best stories, edit them, format them, put the book together in an attractive package, and deliver an actual book that we would be proud of? We thought we could, but given that we didn’t actually know, we decided not to take anyone’s money until we had the book ready.
Nova
By Margaret Fortune
DAW (320 pages, $24.99 hardcover, $7.99 paperback, June 2015)
My first time at the Nebulas weekend in May, I was given this massive bag of complimentary books (apparently this is standard, but hey, I’m new) – so many books, in fact, that my friend Derek Künsken and I were detained by Canadian Border Services on our way back to Ottawa. It’s taken me time to go through the bag and see what appeals to me, but I’ve finally been able to start reading them so I can review a few here.
I started with Nova, the first novel in the Spectre War series by Margaret Fortune. The back cover description piqued my interest: a former prisoner of war is returned home, except that she’s not actually a former prisoner of war – she’s a genetically-engineered bomb that’s supposed to explode in thirty-six hours.
The first few chapters lived up to my expectations, as the character Lia mentally prepares to “go Nova” and destroy a massive space station operated by her designers’ enemies. That in and of itself is a neat concept, especially when things obviously go wrong (if they didn’t, this would be a short story) and Lia faces the fact that she’s going to be around for a lot longer than she expected.
Unfortunately, after about 100 pages of Nova … I just got really bored. Every encounter sees Lia struggling to understand emotions she was never meant to feel, and connect with people who knew the person she’s designed to imitate. That sort of slow character development can be really effective, but in this case it got old really quick as Lia’s reactions became too repetitive.
I’ve been a huge fan of Tom Pomplun’s Graphic Classics comic anthologies for years, ever since I received a copy of the first one, Volume 1: Edgar Allan Poe, in 2001 (back when they were Rosebud Graphic Classics, a spin-off of Rosebud magazine). Some of my favorites are Volume 4: H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 14: Gothic Classics, and Volume 23: Halloween Classics (back cover here). But I hadn’t seen a new release in over three years, ever since Volume 25: Canine Feline Classics back in 2014. So imagine my surprise when I accidentally stumbled on a copy of Graphic Classics Volume 26: Vampire Classics, which snuck into bookstores on June 28. Here’s the description.
Vampire Classics features a unique adaptation of the 1922 silent film, Nosferatu. Plus a horror-western by “Conan” creator Robert E. Howard and Ray Bradbury’s “The Man Upstairs.” With “The Strange Orchid” by H.G. Wells, “Olalla” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and a short story by famed horror writer and co-editor Mort Castle.
Our previous coverage of Graphic Classics includes:
Graphic Classics Volume 26: Vampire Classics was published by Eureka Productions on June 28, 2017. It is 144 pages, priced at $19.95. See all our recent Comics coverage here.
Goth Chick News: Halloween Fun or Pay-to-Play Sadism – Your Call
It is a fact that Black Gate photog Chris Z and I spend just about every free moment of every September, getting pre-opening night looks at all the haunted attractions within a 50-mile radius of Chicago. It is also a fact that doing so makes the two of us the absolute worst people to ever take with you to a haunted attraction in the month of October.
Why?
Because by then our cynicism and snark have reached their annual pinnacle, fueled by countless hours of walking through dimly lit corridors while the great, the good and the truly awful professional haunters (there’s very little in between) take their best shot in exchange for a bit of free press. In other words, we’re the perfect people to utterly torpedo your willing suspension of disbelief.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that we, or more specifically I, long for a bit edgier October experience. It was way back in 2012 that I first discovered Blackout, which at the time was only in NYC but has since created a traveling version that came through Chicago. Either way, Chris Z adamantly declined to join me, saying he could think of far better ways to spend $135 then attending an event requiring him to sign a 30-page injury waiver.
A good proportion of exponents of German longsword might have bought this.
Greetings academic editors, writers and publishers! I am an educated lay reader of academic history books.
I hear academic publishing is… differently profitable at the moment, so perhaps you want to have a think about how to engage more people like me.
Really there must be a lot of us — people who want to get at the detail, the evidence, the debate, and so find ourselves buying weighty academic tomes.
We’re military history buffs who want to get into not just of equipment and tactics, but logistics and administration and sooner or later get dragged into context. You can’t, for example, be fascinated by Count Belisarius without wanting to know more about Byzantine History. Take a look at Osprey, an entire publisher devoted to satisfying that need !
We’re architectural history hobbyists — people who tick off castles and great houses the way twitchers do rare birds — who want to put flesh on the crumbling bones of some corners of history not covered by reliable mass market books. And we’re local historians trying to make sense of musty documents, mounds in fields, and half forgotten traditions.
We’re also Historical Reenactors looking for very specific information on how things were or might have been. We’re Historical European Martial Artists (yes, HEMA is a thing! Modern people do study Medieval Martial Arts!), looking to contextualise the original martial arts manuals around which our lives revolve.
And we’re writers, looking for inspiration, or just building a storyworld for our characters to inhabit.
Many Black Gate readers must fall into at least one of these categories, and we sometimes get a million hits a month…
I am, of course, all of the above with the exception of “local historian” (since all of western history is my backyard). I’m also a former technical author — conveying technical information to novices used to be my trade — and an author who thinks about writing. So it might be worth your while — O mighty academic editor, writer or publisher! — to hear what I have to say.
Upfront, you don’t need to dumb down or jazz up. The whole point of academic books is that they are academic! Rather you need to stop shooting yourself in the collective feet. Working from the outside in, here’s how…
