Browsed by
Month: December 2017

Goth Chick News: Christmas Is for Ghost Stories… Or At Least it Used to Be

Goth Chick News: Christmas Is for Ghost Stories… Or At Least it Used to Be

Comments 7 comments

Santa is that you

This week I came across a fascinating article at Smithsonian.com about the long-forgotten association between Christmas and ghost stories. Okay, maybe not that long forgotten as quite a lot of us indulge in some version of Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic, A Christmas Carol this time of year (Scrooged anyone?)

But mostly, that’s about as far as it goes.

For the last hundred years, we have kept ghosts in their place, letting them out only in October, but it wasn’t always this way. The holidays belonged to a once-rich, now mostly forgotten tradition of telling ghost stories. Dickens’ supernatural yuletide terror was no outlier, since for much of the 19th century the winter season was indisputably associated with the supernatural.

…

Read More Read More

Fantasy as Something Brighter: Peter S. Beagle’s The Overneath and Jane Yolen’s The Emerald Circus

Fantasy as Something Brighter: Peter S. Beagle’s The Overneath and Jane Yolen’s The Emerald Circus

Comments 0 Comment
The Overneath-small The Emerald Circus-small

The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications, 336 pages, $15.95 in trade paperback, November 14, 2017)
The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen (Tachyon Publications, 288 pages, $15.95 in trade paperback, $9.99 digital, November 14, 2017)

In 1900 Frank L. Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, arguably the first truly American fairy tale. Now, a century and counting along the Yellow Brick Road, what can be said about the current state of the fairy tale in America? We seem deep in the wilds of dystopias like Hunger Games and its darker cousin, The Walking Dead, captivated by the grim fantasies of American Gods and Game of Thrones. Is this the new reality for the American fable, for literary fantasy that aspires to be anything more than a Disney retelling?

Against this darker background, a pair of recent collections from San Francisco’s Tachyon Publications attempts to reestablish or at least reconfirm fantasy as something brighter, if no less compelling. The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle and The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen (both published November 2017) together provide a sample of American fantasy by two of its most enduring and cherished voices. Beagle and Yolen are both giants, with hundreds of publications and dozens of awards between them. They have won the highest accolades in the fields, and both now write from positions of something like legend. But do the unicorns of Beagle or the Arthurian retellings of Yolen have anything to give readers who have come to expect a heavy dose of grim realism or even grimmer apocalypse in their high fantasy?

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley

Vintage Treasures: Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley

Comments 2 comments
Red Dust Paul McAulley-small Red Dust Paul McAulley-back-small

Paul J. McAuley was the first book reviewer for Black Gate, way back in 2000-01. His first novel, the far-future space opera Four Hundred Billion Stars (Del Rey, 1988) won the Philip K. Dick Award, the sequels Of the Fall and Eternal Light appeared in 1989 and 1991.

His first standalone novel Red Dust, set on a far-future Mars colonized by the Chinese, was published by Gollancz in the UK in 1993 and AvoNova in the US in 1995. It was packed with big ideas and technologies that are still being explored in SF today, including personality downloads, biotech, virtual reality, nanotech, A.I, and a lot more. Kirkus Reviews raved, saying:

An extraordinary saga.. Seven hundred years hence, a depopulated Earth is ruled by the Consensus eco-fanatics who allow nothing to change; on Jupiter, a self-aware probe calling itself the King of the Cats broadcasts rock music and propaganda; various dwindling groups of dissenters inhabit the asteroid belt; and Mars, habitable but slowly reverting to dust and drought and populated mostly by Chinese, is ruled by a committee of ruthless old men called the Ten Thousand Years, who, in a secret pact with the Consensus, have agreed to let Mars die in return for personal immortality. Young technician Wei Lee, who believes himself beholden to his great-grandfather, one of the Ten Thousand Years, stumbles upon a spaceship crashed in the dust… McAuley’s Mars is at once satisfyingly familiar and disquietingly alien: cultural contrasts, persuasive inventions, and constant surprises are set forth with a weird yet compelling logic. Superb.

The novel has never been reprinted in the US, but copies are still fairly easy to find online. I bought the brand new copy above on eBay for $4 two months ago. It was published by AvoNova in November 1995; it is 392 pages, priced at $4.99 in paperback. The cover is by Tim Jacobus. A digital edition was published by Gollancz/Orion in 2010. Our previous coverage of Paul J. McAuley includes his recent Choice Series and his Confluence novels.

Carl Burgos and Air-Sub “DX”

Carl Burgos and Air-Sub “DX”

Comments 1 comment

Amazing Mystery Funnies #6, June 1939, cover art by Bill Everett

Amazing Mystery Funnies #10, June 1939, cover art by Bill Everett

Twenty-two-year-old artist Carl Burgos entered comics in 1938. He almost immediately started creating  his own features as artist/writer, achieving immortality in the field when an android bizarrely named the Human Torch burst into flames in the legendary Marvel Comics #1 (October 1939), the same issue that introduced Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner. The Torch’s name got passed on to Johnny Storm when The Fantastic Four debuted and the original received one of the weirdest revivals in comics’ history as the Vision in Avengers #57 (October 1968). (No relation to a 1940s character called the Vision.) The Avengers’ brainier members quickly traced his heritage to that android created by scientist Phineas Horton in 1939, conveniently forgetting that Burgos himself stopped calling him an android after about three issues. For the next decade, the Human Torch seemed to be a regular human whose body was fire, or could be set on fire, or contained fire, or something else equally unclear. The Golden Age lacked continuity police.

Probably only a few comics historians understand how obsessed Burgos was with artificial people. Just before the Human Torch he created a cyborg or robot named Iron Skull whose origin story changed every couple of issues and a few months later he produced an unquestioned android, Manowar the White Streak. Despite the name, Manowar was a utopian who fought evil in the cause of peace. (And wasn’t white. And not the same as Paul Gustavson’s contemporary Man of War for the same company. Writing comics history is footnotes all the way down.)

Comic books were so new in 1939 that, like Leacock’s Lord Ronald, they rode madly off in all directions. Superman, the the sensation of 1938, spawned more of what we now call superheroes but they didn’t dominate. The 64-page comic books had already made a swift transition from reprinting newspaper comic strips, with 30 or more titles inside a single book, to all-new titles containing eight stories (seven pages each to account for ads and filler material) and eight different heroes. How they decided which contributed to sales is anyone’s guess, although letters from kids surely guided them, but tables of contents changed virtually every issue.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Steal the Stars by Nat Cassidy

New Treasures: Steal the Stars by Nat Cassidy

Comments 0 Comment
Steal the Stars-small Steal the Stars-back-small

Now here’s an interesting artifact. Steal the Stars is a new novel by Nat Cassidy, based on Mac Rogers’s podcast from Tor Labs. The entire project sounds interesting, but let’s start with the podcast.

Steal the Stars is the story of Dakota Prentiss and Matt Salem, two government employees guarding the biggest secret in the world: a crashed UFO. Despite being forbidden to fraternize, Dak and Matt fall in love and decide to escape to a better life on the wings of an incredibly dangerous plan: they’re going to steal the alien body they’ve been guarding and sell the secret of its existence.

Start listening to the new dramatic podcast from Mac Rogers, award-winning writer of The Message and LifeAfter. You don’t want to miss this 14-episode noir science fiction thriller, voiced by a full cast of experienced film, theater, and voice actors.

You can listen to the whole thing at Tor Labs, Tor’s new division devoted to “Bold experiments. Podcast theatre. New ways to experience fantastic fiction.” Or if you’re old-school like me and print is more your thing, you can buy Nat Cassidy’s book. Steal the Stars was published by Tor Books on November 7, 2017. It is 416 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Peter Lutjen.

Weirdbook #37 Now Available

Weirdbook #37 Now Available

Comments 2 comments
Weirdbook 37-small Weirdbook 37 Table of Contents-small

Cover by João Florencio

Weirdbook published a total of five issues this year — that’s roughly 1,000 pages of brand new weird fantasy. That’s an accomplishment worth celebrating.

Issues continue to get better as well. Issue #37 was released this week, and just look at the awesome cover by João Florêncio. This issue is a special treat, as it features four Black Gate authors — Darrell Schweitzer, Michael Canfield, Jackson Kuhl, and John R. Fultz — and 20 other contributors. Click the image above right for the complete Table of Contents. John provides more detail on his story at his blog:

I’ve started a new story-cycle starring Magtone the Poet-Thief, a lyrical lowlife who inherits a gift of ancient sorcery along with a sentient flying carpet. These stories are high fantasy meets sword-and-sorcery, with an ancient-world flavor and a heavy dose of magical weirdness. The saga of Magtone’s wanderings will run mainly in the pages of Weirdbook, but he may show up in a few other publications as well. The first Magtone story is “The Veneration of Evil in the Kingdom of Ancient Lies.” It appears in Weirdbook #37… This inaugural tale introduces Magtone and the fantastic city-state of Karakutas, a metropolitan Babylon built by the power of ruthless wizard-kings. As the Doom of Karakutas approaches, Magtone strikes a deal with the only person that can save him from the coming apocalypse – the same wizard who is about to bring civilization crashing down.

Weirdbook is published by Wildside Press, and edited by Douglas Draa. Issues are 200+ pages, and priced $12 for the print edition, and $3.99 for the digital version. Subscriptions are currently not available, but you can buy individual issues at Amazon.com and Wildside Press. We last covered Weirdbook with issue #35. The magazine’s website is here. Our December Fantasy Magazine Rack is here. See all of our recent fantasy magazine coverage here.

By Crom! New Robert E. Howard Pastiches Coming in 2018!

By Crom! New Robert E. Howard Pastiches Coming in 2018!

Comments 10 comments

Conan_FrazettaFrostgiantsOf course, you saw yesterday’s Black Gate post on Heroic Signatures, the new digital/gaming partnership, which includes the rights to about two dozen Robert E. Howard characters and stories. With the recent releases of Modiphius’ Robert E Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of RPG, Monolith’s Conan board game and Funcom’s in-beta Conan: Exiles video game, Conan is a very viable gaming brand these days. And Funcom’s Age of Conan MMO (which I play) is still going strong as it approaches the decade mark.

But fans of Conan’s creator, such as the contributors and readers of our recent Discovering Robert E. Howard series, are yearning for new pastiches featuring Howard’s characters. And not just Conan, but Solomon Kane, El Borak, Breckenridge Elkins and Steve Harrison, to name a few. Aside from some Age of Conan tie-in novels, the Conan pastiche market dried up when Tor finished its series in 2003 with Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium.

The Tor novels were a mix of varying quality, as I wrote about here. I quite enjoyed some, such as John Maddox Roberts’ Conan the Rogue (an homage to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest), Chris Hocking’s The Emerald Lotus and Leonard Carpenter’s Conan the Raider. But unfortunately, some were just simply bad fantasy books.

So, while we have been treated to quality reprints of Howards’ works from Del Rey and the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, new tales have not been forthcoming. Behold: that is about to change!

In 2018, new pastiches featuring Robert E. Howard characters will be forthcoming!!!!  

Cabinet Group LLC, the REH rights holders and 50% of Heroic Signatures (with Funcom) “have decided to curate a line of carefully picked novels and start a publishing program next year.” This will not just be Conan but other Howard works as well.

Black Gate will have a Q&A post with Cabinet Group head Fredrik Malmberg shortly. Updates coming from Cabinet Group with more information.

But to the many fans of Robert E. Howard, this is exciting news. Could we even see a new Steve Harrison tale? Asks the in-house mystery guy who writes Sherlock Holmes stories? (Hint, hint, hint, Cabinet…)

…

Read More Read More

From the Vaults: The Lands of the Earthquake by Henry Kuttner

From the Vaults: The Lands of the Earthquake by Henry Kuttner

Comments 0 Comment

landsoftheearthquakeOnce upon a time, Ace Books published hundreds of double novels. It’s a simple thing: a pair of novellas, often by two different authors, were joined back-to-back, done in such a way that you’d have to flip the book upside down to read the second once you’d finished the first. Black Gate has been posting Rich Horton’s reviews of many of these old books for some time now. Many times a newer author’s work was paired with that of an established author in order to garner more attention. It was a clever idea that allowed lots of shorter works to get in print.

DMR Books, publishers of the Swords of Steel anthologies (reviewed here), has revived the format with the release of Howie Bentley’s Under a Dim Blue Sun backed with a reprint of Henry Kuttner’s 1947 Lands of the Earthquake. I reviewed the former this past August but neglected the latter, so I’m back with a look at a seventy-year-old tale of cross-planar travel and alien wizards.

Henry Kuttner is one of the greats of golden age sci-fi and fantasy. Under his own name as well as over a dozen pseudonyms, on his own and in collaboration with his wife, C.L. Moore, he wrote hundreds of stories. They range from Lovecraftian pastiches he crafted in his youth, to early additions to the annals of swords & sorcery, to classic sci-fi tales such as “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and “The Twonky.”

There are several published discussions regarding which Kuttner stories are solo creations versus written as joint efforts with Moore. If the second, the question then is how much was done by one or the other. According to one review of Lands of the Earthquake, it was written not by Kuttner at all, but by Moore. I don’t know, and I freely admit that I haven’t enough experience with either to make a claim one way or the other.

…

Read More Read More

Heroic Signatures: REH Digital Rights Part of $10 Million Deal

Heroic Signatures: REH Digital Rights Part of $10 Million Deal

Comments 6 comments

Conan_HeroicSignatures-small

Funcom is the developer of the Age of Conan (AoC) MMORPG. They’ve currently got a resource/action RPG, Conan: Exiles, in beta, scheduled for a May, 2018 release. I’ve played quite a few hours of AoC and think it’s a very good MMO, mixing elements from Robert E. Howard’s original stories and some of the pastiches. I haven’t tried Exiles yet.

Cabinet Group LLC owns the rights to Robert E. Howard’s non-public domain works. Cabinet Group and Funcom each will own 50% of a new venture entitled Heroic Signatures. Heroic Signatures will control the interactive (gaming) rights to 29 properties — most of them based on the works of Robert E. Howard. REH characters and stories included are:

Conan, Solomon Kane, El Borak,  Dark Agnes, “Children of the Night,” Bran Mark (yes, they spelled it incorrectly!) Morn, James Allison, Cormac Mac Art, Black Turlogh, Kirby O’Donnell, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, Steve Harrison, “Black Canaan,” Almuric, Steve Costigan, “The Black Stone,” “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” “The Cairn of the Headland,” “The Horror from the Mound,” “The Dead Remember” and “Pigeons from Hell.”

The announcement said that Funcom will be focusing on partnerships and third party developers, indicating they want to license the properties to get games made. Funcom isn’t a mass-producer, so this may well be a way to leverage the REH property. As part of this move, Funcom got a $10.6 million investment from a Swedish company.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The King of Bones and Ashes by J.D. Horn

Future Treasures: The King of Bones and Ashes by J.D. Horn

Comments 0 Comment
The King of Bones and Ashes-small The King of Bones and Ashes-back-small

J.D. Horn is the bestselling author of the Witching Savannah series (The Line, The Source, etc.) His newest is the tale of a young witch’s quest to uncover her family’s terrifying history. It arrives next month from 47 North, Amazon’s publishing imprint, which has jumped into genre fiction in a big way but has yet to make a significant splash. It does tend to take chances with new and emerging authors, however, which I heartily approve.

The King of Bones and Ashes is the first volume of a new series, Witches of New Orleans. Publishers Weekly says “Sparkling magic and creepy villains bolster the narrative… The terrifying conclusion will have readers looking forward to the next installment.”

The King of Bones and Ashes will be published by 47North on January 23, 2018. It is 354 pages, priced at $24.95 in hardcover, $14.95 in trade paperback, and $4.99 for the digital edition. No sample chapters online that I can find, but I’ll keep looking.