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Month: May 2020

Another Childhood Classic Disappoints: Thuvia Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Another Childhood Classic Disappoints: Thuvia Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Thuvia of Mars paperback editions (Ace 1962, Ballantine 1969, Four Square 1962). Art by Roy Krenkel, Jr., Bob Abbett, and Roy Carnon

During confinement and adjusting to a new job (while writing a new novel!), I’ve been feeling like my bandwidth is restricted. To calm my brain at times, I’ve been rereading books I enjoyed. My reread of the X-Men is well underway (here’s post X in the blog series), and I’ve also relistened to R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing (covered here by Theo), Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children and the first two books of The Lord of the Rings. They were all good.

I’ve had rocky experiences on rereads before though. Dune aged poorly for me in some important ways (I detailed it here) and Anthony’s Spell for Chameleon had little redeem itself in my mind (the ways that reread fell flat are here).

I was optimistic about rereading my first novel experiences, Edgar Rice Burroughs though. I’d previously talked about Burroughs and the amazing biography written about him here. Princess of Mars, Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars were all too well remembered so I downloaded Thuvia Maid of Mars at Librivox.org, which does audio recordings of public domain books. This novel was also discussed by Black Gate blogger Ryan Harvey a few years ago, so if you want an alternate view, it’s here.

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Claim the Night in Terrors of London from Kolossal Games

Claim the Night in Terrors of London from Kolossal Games

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Terrors of London (Kolossal Games, 2019)

As of today, May 9, Gen Con 2020 is still on. I find it very hard to believe the nation’s situation will change enough in the next 82 days that 60,000 gamers from around the world will feel perfectly relaxed gathering in halls in Indianapolis, packed together like attendees at a rock concert. I’m fairly certain that the powers that be will face reality in the next few weeks, and postpone or cancel the event this year. And if not, I can’t imagine it will be well attended — not nearly enough for it to break even, anyway.

That’s okay, though. I’m still unpacking from last year’s con, sifting through all the great games I picked up, and sorting through the many hundreds of pics I snapped as I wandered the Exhibit Hall. If Gen Con became a once-a-decade event it would still pay off handsomely for me, as I suspect it’ll take at least ten years to track down all the fascinating games I glimpsed during my arduous three-day walk through the giant Hall.

Today I want to take a look at Terrors of London, a competitive fantasy card game from Kolossal Games with a very cool Victorian horror theme. I only got a glance at it during my marathon trek through the Hall, but it stuck out. The component art was fantastic, and the premise — players are arcane Overlords assembling hordes of monsters and undead to secretly tussle for control of the smoke-shrouded city — appealed to me immediately. The whole thing has an Underworld vibe, and I can definitely see a leather-clad Kate Beckinsale fitting right in.

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Vintage Treasures: The Fantastic Imagination Anthologies, edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski

Vintage Treasures: The Fantastic Imagination Anthologies, edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski

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The Fantastic Imagination, volumes I and II (Avon, February 1977 and December 1978).
Cover artist: unknown (left), Elizabeth Malczynski (right)

Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski were quite the dynamic pair in the late 70s and early 80s. They edited five anthologies between 1977-81, all but one paperback originals from Avon, and a sixth a decade later, from Academy Chicago specialty press. All are fine volumes well worth your attention today.

The Fantastic Imagination (1977)
Dark Imaginings (1978)
The Fantastic Imagination II (1978)
The Phoenix Tree (1980)
Visions of Wonder: An Anthology of Christian Fantasy (1981)
Visions & Imaginings: Classic Fantasy Fiction (1992)

It may be giving them too much credit, but for me at least Boyer and Zahorski defined fantasy and its related genres for a generation. With their popular and highly readable paperback anthologies they helped new readers explore Gothic Fantasy (Dark Imaginings), Mythic Fantasy (The Phoenix Tree), and Christian Fantasy (Visions of Wonder).

And with The Fantastic Imagination volumes in particular, they drew clear boundaries around the particular sub-genre that more or less defined English fantasy until Tolkien upended things in the early 20th Century: the fairy-tale, and the High Fantasy genre that grew out of it, rich with fairies, elves, dwarves, kings, queens, and knights.

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Weird Fiction at its Best From a Modern Scheherazade: We All Hear Stories in the Dark by Robert Shearman

Weird Fiction at its Best From a Modern Scheherazade: We All Hear Stories in the Dark by Robert Shearman

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We All Hear Stories in the Dark

We All Hear Stories in the Dark
by Robert Shearman
PS Publishing (Three volume set, 586/628/585 pages, £90.00, April 2020)

How can a reviewer comment meaningfully on a three-volume collection featuring 101 stories? (That’s right, you read correctly). Simply impossible.

Yet this huge, unusual  opus is worth a mention, and a recommendation. First, because the writer is one of the very best fantasists around, the author of excellent, critically acclaimed collections such as Remember Why You Fear Me and They Do the Same Things Different There. And second, because among these many tales you’ll find an exceptional variety of dark and strange genres, from horror to surrealism, black humor to fantasy to (even if only apparently) mainstream literature. Some of the stories collected here have previously appeared in anthologies and magazines, some are brand new.

To get lost in this literary ocean is very easy, so if you don’t feel like reading each piece in the order presented, you can follow the author’s indications and suggestions, and jump from one volume to the other according to a personal roadmap. Whatever you decide, Shearman, this modern Scheherazade, will entertain you and entice you with his uncanny gifts as a storyteller.

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Goth Chick News: The Greatest Sci-Fi / Horror Movie / Covid-19 Mash Up of all Time

Goth Chick News: The Greatest Sci-Fi / Horror Movie / Covid-19 Mash Up of all Time

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What do you get when creative people have a lot of time on their hands? Well, if you’re the Black Gate staff you start choosing obscure, pulp-SciFi paperback covers to use as Zoom backgrounds and then geek-shame your colleagues when they can’t name the artist and the year. But if you’re writer/director Michael Dougherty (Trick ‘r Treat, Krampus, Godzilla: King of the Monsters) and editor Evan Gorski, you get on the horn, fire up the iMAC Pro, and get to work creating the most timely and entertaining genre movie mashup ever delivered to a stir-crazy public.

Titled “Everything I Need to Know to Survive COVID-19 I Learned By Watching Sci-fi & Horror Movies,” this perfectly-strung-together, 3-minutes of clips from movies like Alien, World War Z, The Thing, I Am Legend, The Mist, Terminator, The Shining and Jaws seem eerily suited to the current mess we call reality. And what do they tell us?

Stay together.

Stay indoors.

Stay safe.

Wash your hands.

And hole up until spring when the rescue teams arrive…

A Scientist’s Science Fiction Novel: Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud

A Scientist’s Science Fiction Novel: Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud

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The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle First Edition: William Heinemann, 1957.
Cover by Desmond Skirrow (click to enlarge)

The Black Cloud
by Fred Hoyle
William Heinemann (251 pages, £1.50 in hardcover, 1957)

Fred Hoyle’s 1957 novel The Black Cloud was the first novel by the renowned, perhaps now forgotten (because his big ideas turned out to be wrong), astronomer of the mid-20th century. It’s still his most famous, and likely best, novel, out of some nearly 20 novels he would subsequently write, some in collaboration. Hoyle’s novels are significant because they are science fiction novels written by a real scientist, perhaps the most famed scientist to have ever written science fiction. Hoyle is remembered as an advocate, in the 1950s, of the “steady-state” theory of the universe, in contrast to the “big bang” theory that would eventually prevail. (Ironically, Hoyle created the term “big bang” as a derisive term for an idea he didn’t like.)

The Black Cloud is memorable for its depiction, more or less successfully, of a truly alien intelligence. But it’s as much a disaster novel, of the “cozy catastrophe” variety (i.e. most of the death and devastation occurs off-stage), and a novel of scientific manners, as a first contact story. We see the sharp contrast between how scientists understand the world with how politicians try to manipulate it, and we see a milder contrast in the rivalry between an American group of scientists and a British group.

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Death Reigns and Danger Abounds: The Toll by Neal Shusterman

Death Reigns and Danger Abounds: The Toll by Neal Shusterman

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The Toll CoverNeal Shusterman’s masterful conclusion to the Arc of a Scythe trilogy, The Toll, takes place on a future Earth where humans are immortal. To keep the population from overrunning the globe, professional scythes “glean” a quota of victims in one of the only forms of death that still sticks. Most scythes end human life with care and sorrow. But sadist Robert Goddard and his “new order” scythes enjoy mass slaughter.

In The Toll‘s opening pages, Goddard amasses more and more power, becoming the High Blade of MidMerica and then Overblade of North America. Despite the old regime’s continued opposition, he removes the traditional limitations on scythes, unleashing the new order’s bloodiest appetites. People start avoiding any activity that requires them to assemble in groups, for fear of attracting a grim reaper.

The book follows three main sets of characters who strive to end Goddard’s brutal reign. The first concerns secret agent Greyson Tolliver, who has been leading a criminal lifestyle as a cover while acting on behalf of the Thunderhead, the artificial intelligence that oversees and manages the world. Greyson is now the only human on the planet who can communicate directly with the Thunderhead, since everyone else – including the Thunderhead’s more legitimate agents – has been labeled Unsavory. When the Thunderhead’s former agents discover that this gangster is their only remaining link to the entity they still want to serve, they kidnap him.

When Goddard finds out Greyson exists, he sends an assassin.

The second set of characters are our teenaged heroes Citra and Rowan. As the island of Endura sank at the end of Thunderhead, Scythe Curie locked them in the airtight Vault of Relics and Futures. Curie knew that asphyxiation would only render them deadish. Someday, she reasoned, their bodies would be found, and they would be revived. There was no such hope for everyone else, doomed to be consumed by circling sharks. But Goddard has declared a Perimeter of Reverence around Endura and forbidden ships from approaching. Citra and Rowan’s lifeless bodies lay in the Vault, which has tumbled into a deep oceanic trench, without rescue. Until a hermaphroditic ship’s captain pulls them from the deep under the cover of night.

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Neverwhens: Where History and Fantasy (Careers) Collide — an Interview with Christian (and Miles) Cameron

Neverwhens: Where History and Fantasy (Careers) Collide — an Interview with Christian (and Miles) Cameron

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Christian Cameron as a Hoplite

Christian Cameron, a well-known historical fiction author who writes espionage novels under the pen name Gordon Kent and fantasy under Miles Cameron, is a Canadian novelist who was educated and trained as both an historian and a former career officer in the US Navy. His best-known work is the ongoing historical fiction series Tyrant, set in Classical Greece, which by 2009 had sold over 100,000 copies. But in recent years he’s not only chronicled ancient Greece, but 14th-century European history — military, chivalric, and literary — in England, France, Italy, and Greece and roughly in parallel with the career of Chaucer’s knight (the Chivalry series). And, as Miles Cameron, he also writes fantasy with the Traitor Son tetralogy and Masters & Mages trilogy.

Cameron is a passionate reenactor, and uses the experiences of reenacting, including knowledge of the material culture and the skill sets required to recreate any portion of life in the past as essential tools in writing his novels. Cameron helps organize and direct military and non-military reenactments in the United States, Canada, and Europe. In addition to recreating the life of an early 5th-century BCE Plataean Hoplite, Cameron also runs a group dedicated to the role of rangers and Native Americans in the American Revolution, and participates in tournaments as a knight of the late 14th century. One such tournament is the Deed of Alms, an annual HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) charity tournament hosted in Toronto to combat homelessness.

GDM: So you’ve had a long and very successful run as an historical fiction writer before adding fantasy to your repertoire. Which genre was your first love?

CC: Fantasy all the way.  Except Dumas’ Three Musketeers, which is to me the greatest adventure novel ever written. I had a friend who was seriously in to ‘Old School’ fantasy; Lord Dunsany, Tolkien, E.R. Eddison, Robert E Howard… etc.  Amazing stuff.

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Future Treasures: Unreconciled, Book 4 of Donovan by W. Michael Gear

Future Treasures: Unreconciled, Book 4 of Donovan by W. Michael Gear

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The Donovan series: Outpost, Abandoned, Pariah, and the forthcoming Unreconciled. Covers by Steve Stone.

W. Michael Gear knows his way around a science fiction series. He wrote the Way of Spider trilogy in the late 80s, the Forbidden Borders trilogy in the early 90s, and some, what, 20 novels in the First North Americans series, co-written with his wife Kathleen O’Neal Gear? This is a man who knows how to plot for the long haul.

His latest is the Donovan trilogy, which next week turns into the Donovan quartet with the arrival of the fourth novel, Unreconciled. The Dononvan trilogy (er, quartet) is a favorite here in the Black Gate offices. It opened with Outpost in 2018, which Brandon Crilly raved about right here.

I had a blast reading Outpost, the start of W. Michael Gear’s Donovan trilogy… The setting is very Deadwood meets Avatar, set on a frontier colony that hasn’t been resupplied in almost a decade, on a planet filled with bizarre creatures and plants ready to kill the careless or unfortunate. Add in a bunch of new arrivals when the next resupply ship finally shows up, and what you get is an immediate clash of cultures between the freedom-loving colonists and the representatives of the Corporation, which basically runs Earth back home (maybe there’s some Firefly in here, too). Overall, the running idea with a lot of the main characters is the possibility of either losing yourself or remaking yourself in the frontier, with arcs that are diverse and often surprising…

The world-building is amazing, there are echoes of contemporary political and economic conflicts, and an air of mystery that doesn’t take away from a story that feels complete. I really want to find out what’s going to happen on Donovan in Gear’s next book, which is slated for November 2018.

Mystery! Monsters! Freedom-lovin’ colonists! Killer plants! Evil corporations! An alien frontier! This series checks so many boxes it’s ridiculous. I may have to buy it twice.

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The Stories We Tell: Bias in Research and Its Effects on Fiction

The Stories We Tell: Bias in Research and Its Effects on Fiction

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Hadrian’s Wall, from the ruins of a Milecastle. Image from publicdomainpictures.net.

Good morning, Readers!

Last week, I was watching a lecture on Hadrian’s Wall, as you do, hoping to learn something new about the situation in Britain during the Roman occupation. I did not, incidentally, learn anything I had not already known (if money was no object, I would have a doctorate in archaeology, specializing in the British Isles, and probably a few extra degrees in archaeogenetics and archaeolinguistics. I am fascinated by these things). The lecture did, however, serve as a stark reminder of the frustrating presence of bias that permeates even intellectual pursuits. This lecture, in particular, veered hard towards a Roman bias, something that has been so prevalent in the field I am so interested in, that I’ve often shut books and thrown journals across the room.

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