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Year: 2021

Forbidden Magic, Murder, and Disco: The Carter Archives by Dan Stout

Forbidden Magic, Murder, and Disco: The Carter Archives by Dan Stout

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Dan Stout’s The Carter Archives: Titanshade, Titan Day, and Titan Song (DAW, 2019-21). Covers by Chris McGrath

Whenever an author wraps up a trilogy, we bake a cake in the Black Gate offices.

But what if it’s not actually, like, a trilogy? What if the third book is just a rest stop on a long and exciting journey toward five books? Or seven? Or, Wheel-of-Time like, a stupendous 12 volumes (or 14, or whatever the heck it is)?? If it’s not clear should we bake, or not bake?

Ha! You’re right, of course. Like we’d let nuance like that get in the way of cake. Fire up the oven, lads.

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Surviving World War III in Iran– Twilight: 2000

Surviving World War III in Iran– Twilight: 2000

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In the RPG by GDW released in 1984, Twilight: 2000, the action starts in Europe, specifically Poland. The players, members of the US Army’s 5th Mechanized Division, find themselves stranded in enemy territory when the last major offensive of World War III flounders and then implodes. The world inched across the line of nuclear holocaust. The American, Soviet, German, and Polish governments are hardly worthy of the name “government.”

The adventures and setting information that GDW published in subsequent releases favor heavily game play in Eastern Europe and then the war-shattered United States. While excursions to Greece and Norway are to be found, for the most part, players wander Poland, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps Ukraine in an effort to simply survive and find a way home — even if that is making a new home.

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Explore Jack Vance’s Rich and Dangerous Universe in The Gaean Reach from Pelgrane Press

Explore Jack Vance’s Rich and Dangerous Universe in The Gaean Reach from Pelgrane Press

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The Gaean Reach and The Gaean Reach Gazetteer (Pelgrane Press, 2014). Covers by Chris Huth

The great Jack Vance doesn’t get a lot of love from role players. Despite his huge influence on the field (Gygax based the fundamental cast-and-forget spellcasting system of Dungeons and Dragons on the Vancian magic system the author developed for his Dying Earth tales, just as an example), there aren’t a lot of ways to use dice to explore the wonderful worlds Vance created.

Twenty years ago Pelgrane Press released The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game by Robin D. Laws, which went a long to rectifying this artistic injustice. More recently Laws and Pelgrane Press took the versatile Gumshoe System, designed for running investigative games like Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars, and used it as the basis for The Gaean Reach, a science fiction RPG set in the lusciously detailed setting for much of Vance’s best science fiction, including The Demon Princes novels, the Cadwal Chronicles, the Alastor Cluster trilogy, and the Ports of Call novels.

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The Big 50! Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Issue #50

The Big 50! Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Issue #50

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly’s big 50th issue hit the world in early November and we’ve already had two rounds of great reviews! Tangent Online delves into our five fiction works, then Quick Sip Reviews follows it up reviewing both fiction and poetry

The pieces range but do manage a pretty good thematic cohesion, with issues of inheritance and theft being front and center in almost all of them. This might take the shape of a Shakespearean tragedy, an uncle usurping a throne, or might be more of a romping heist, but whatever the case, the stories keep things moving quickly, with plenty of action, a bit of humor, and a touch of heart. The poems nicely round out the offerings, and it’s a very strong issue worth checking out, and a wonderful celebration for a publication reaching its fiftieth issue! Cheers!

-Charles Paysuer, Quick Sip Reviews

With those accolades, I’m eager to point you in the direction of our offerings!

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Robert Silverberg

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Robert Silverberg

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The Best of Robert Silverberg (Pocket Books, February 1976). Cover by Alan Magee

Recently James McGlothlin wrapped up an ambitious multi-year review project at Black Gate, reading each of the 23 volumes in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series from the 70s, including The Best of Fritz Leiber, Edmond Hamilton, John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, C.L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and over a dozen others. Over the years many of our contributors have shared their love for these seminal volumes, including Ryan Harvey, Jason McGregor, and others.

Del Rey wasn’t the only publisher to pick up on the idea of promoting authors in their catalog with Best of volumes, however. Between 1976 and 1980 Pocket Books produced nearly a dozen weightily collections showcasing their own impressive stable of SF authors, including Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Harry Harrison, John Sladek, Keith Laumer, Damon Knight, Barry N. Malzberg, Mack Reynolds, and Walter M. Miller. Pocket (and others) did a splendid job keeping these fine books in print over the years, sometimes freshening up the covers in the process.

One of my favorites in the set is The Best of Robert Silverberg (1976), published no less than half a dozen times over the next decade by five different publishers. It’s a terrific volume that’s still easy to find to today.

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The Controversy over Nebula Awards Showcase 55, edited by Catherynne M. Valente

The Controversy over Nebula Awards Showcase 55, edited by Catherynne M. Valente

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Nebula Awards Showcase 55 (SFWA, August 2021). Cover by Lauren Raye Snow

I’m hearing some grousing about the latest Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by the distinguished Catherynne M. Valente.

This is the 55th volume in the long-running series, and the second to be published directly by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. As is customary, it contains the complete Nebula award-winning stories, as selected by that august body, as well as a tasty selection of the other nominees, as selected at the whim of the editor.

Well — not exactly. And that seems to be the crux of the problem. For the first time I can remember, the Nebula Awards Showcase contains only one of the winners from last year, A. T. Greenblatt’s short story “Give the Family My Love,” originally published in Clarkesworld. All the others — including the winners in novelette, novella, and novel category — are represented only by brief excerpts.

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Now Streaming: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension

Now Streaming: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension

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The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension

On August 10, 1984, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension made its first appearance in theatres the United States. The film did not do well in its initial box office release, but over the years it has amassed a cult following based on its subsequent releases on home video. In addition, the two graphic novels have been released to follow the story of its protagonist, Buckaroo Banzai.

In an article I published in World Watch One, a Buckaroo Banzai zine, earlier this year, I argued that one of the issues with the film is that it is so different from anything else, people who go in with any expectations (or even none), have a tendency to bounce off the film, wondering what it was, exactly that they had just watched. A second viewing, in which the basic outline of the film is known, however, allows the viewer to fully appreciate the weirdness which interlaces every moment of the film.

At one point in the film a thoroughly confused President Widmark (Ronald Lacey) comments, “Buckaroo, I don’t know what to say. Lectroids? Planet 10? Nuclear extortion? A girl named ‘John’?” which, I imagine, is how many viewers feel about the movie.

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Future Treasures: Sword & Planet edited by Christopher Ruocchio

Future Treasures: Sword & Planet edited by Christopher Ruocchio

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Sword & Planet (Baen Books, December 21, 2021). Cover by Kieran Yanner

Sword & Planet is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. Jason M Waltz and Fletcher Vredenburgh edited the fine The Lost Empire of Sol just this year, and even George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois dabbled recently with the genre in the acclaimed S&P anthologies Old Mars and Old Venus. Inspired by all this love for classic space fantasy, Howard Andrew Jones and I (under my ‘Todd McAulty’ moniker) chatted happily about Five Classic Sword-and-Planet Sagas over at Tor.com a while back.

Christopher Ruocchio, co-editor of Star Destroyers and Space Pioneers, presents his latest big anthology this month, and it looks like a treat. Sword & Planet has stories by Tim Akers, Susan R. Matthews, D.J. Butler, Jody Lynn Nye, Simon R. Green, Christopher Ruocchio, and many others. Weighing in at a generous 352 pages, it lands in less than two weeks — just in time for your last-minute holiday shopping.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords – The Barbarian Boom (Part 1)

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords – The Barbarian Boom (Part 1)

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Hawk the Slayer (1980)

The Eighties Barbarian Boom didn’t start with Conan the Barbarian (1982), though its long pre-release hype train certainly primed the pump. In truth, the market was ripe for such films, and by mid-1981, a number of other sword-and-sorcery movies were in production or pre-production. The genre had been bubbling its way up in other mass media throughout the Seventies, Dungeons & Dragons co-designer Gary Gygax had come to Hollywood talking it up, and the largely heroic fantasy Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks were selling millions of copies.

It was time. The barbarians were here, and they would rule the next decade. But they had a bit of a rocky start.

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Indecent Exposure: The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

Indecent Exposure: The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

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Muriel Spark

Everyone is looking for something, and the things that most people are seeking are the easily identified, common currency of life, everyday ambitions like love, security, peace, wealth, happiness. But a certain select few are looking for… something else. That something else is the subject of the Scottish writer Muriel Spark’s 1970 novella The Driver’s Seat.

Someone once described being guillotined as experiencing “a short, sharp shock.” Leaving aside the question of how anyone could possibly know, that phrase is a perfect description of Spark’s novels and stories, each of which is as brief and cold and merciless as the nip of what the French once called the National Razor.

To name just a few examples, in Memento Mori an aging group of silly, self-obsessed men and women receive a series of mysterious phone calls in which an unfamiliar voice says one simple thing before hanging up: “Remember you must die.” Eventually some of them come to believe that their caller is not a prankster or a blackmailer, but is in fact Death himself.

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