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Year: 2021

Vintage Treasures: Maurai & Kith by Poul Anderson

Vintage Treasures: Maurai & Kith by Poul Anderson

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Maurai & Kith (Tor Books, 1982). Cover art by Thomas Kidd

Uber-editor Jason M. Waltz kindly invited me to write the introduction to his new anthology The Lost Empire of Sol: A Shared World Anthology of Sword & Planet Tales, co-edited by Black Gate blogger Fletcher Vredenburgh, a terrific new shared-world volume that contains new stories by Howard Andrew Jones, E.E. Knight, Mark Finn, Keith Taylor, Joe Bonadonna and David C. Smith, and many more. As I was putting it together I realized that my concept of Sword-and-Planet is probably a little displaced from the modern definition. Nowadays it refers very specifically to John Carter-like tales fantasy adventure on far-off planets, as Howard Andrew Jones and I explored in our 2019 column over at Tor.com, Five Classic Sword-and-Planet Sagas (written under my Todd McAulty pseudonym).

But I tend to agree with Gardner Dozois, who used the term far more broadly to refer to old-school science fiction, and especially pulp-inspired tales of adventures in exotic locales. One of my favorite anthologies is his 1998 volume The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition, which I reviewed for the SF Site way back in 1999, and which is packed with exemplary examples. Here’s what I said at the time.

“Old Stuff” refers here to the spirit of early SF — the grand Space Opera, the planetary romance, what Dozois calls “the lush sword-and-planet” tale. Collected here are a fine assortment of short stories and novellas which celebrated that tradition, and in some cases took it in significant new directions.

There are tales of far exploration into the vastness of the galaxy in the face of hostile opposition (A.E. van Vogt’s “The Rull”), unknowable ancient alien civilizations (“The Last Days of Shandaker,” by Leigh Brackett), mysterious and deadly inter-dimensional invaders (James H. Schmitz’s superb, and oddly pastoral, “The Second Night of Summer”), rites of succession for a Galactic Empire (Jack Vance’s “The New Prime”), and brave men and women faced with terrible peril (just about any of them, really, but most especially Poul Anderson’s swashbuckling novella of intrepid explorers on a post-apocalyptic Earth coming face-to-face with strangely advanced barbarians from the far continent of Nor-Merika, “The Sky People.”)

I’d been a Poul Anderson fan for two decades by the time I read “The Sky People,” but I’d never read anything like that story, and it sent me scrambling to find more. That led me to Maurai & Kith, a 1982 Tor collection that gathers all the short stories in the series, plus two tales in his semi-related Kith series of early interstellar explorers in the 21st and 22nd centuries. It’s a volume that belongs in the collection of every SF fan.

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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly … of Gunslinger

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly … of Gunslinger

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Avalon Hill has long been a company known for its war gaming roots, though it has also dabbled in roleplaying games. Then there are other games. Like Gunslinger. Gunslinger is a bit different. It’s not a war game. It’s not a roleplaying game. It’s sort of both. And neither. I suppose Gunslinger could be called an Old West gunfight simulation game. So, while not exactly a war game, it is a combat game, and while not really a rpg, it does have rpg elements and something of a rpg feel to it.

Designed by Richard Hamblen and released by Avalon Hill in 1982, Gunslinger is a board game (sort of) for up to seven players, with each acting as a character in a gunfight. The game includes stiff cardboard maps, tons of cardboard cutouts, cards upon cards for character actions and results, charts and charts and more charts, and more rules than names in a telephone book (they still make those, right?). It’s already starting to sound like a tabletop rpg. Except there are no dice.

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GOTH CHICK NEWS: ON THE ROAD TO THE HALLOWEEN & ATTRACTIONS SHOW

GOTH CHICK NEWS: ON THE ROAD TO THE HALLOWEEN & ATTRACTIONS SHOW

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Frankly, 2020 didn’t look all that different when viewed from the basement of the Black Gate office, which is home to Goth Chick News. The unisex bathroom walls are still plastered with Heavy Metal magazine covers from the 1980’s. The hallways smell like a combination of microwave pizza and Axe, and the furniture… I can’t. As most of my coworkers never got out much anyway, the quarantine was just the legit excuse everyone gave their spouses for hanging around John O’s D&D marathon. Black Gate photog Chris Z. went off to busy himself with whatever it is he does when he’s not sneaking pics of nearly naked cosplayers at our various events, and I hunkered down to write for a long, and frustrating year. The glaring difference of 2020, is that none of these activities were broken by GCN road trips to roughly a dozen conventions, tours and trade shows, which comprise the seasonal run up to the greatest holiday ever – Halloween.

Like you, we where all here and nowhere else – and it sucked.

Bad.

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LET’S KEEP THIS SIMPLE, SHALL WE?

LET’S KEEP THIS SIMPLE, SHALL WE?

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Too many layers, or 100% necessary? Let’s examine this together, Friend!

100: Well, howdy there, Friend! Let me ask you a question. Do you or a spouse struggle with Character Development Mania, known more commonly as CDM? Oh, I hear you, Friend. It’s not easy to admit it when you have a problem and need help. But you can trust me, I’m in sales!
This sounds serious. Tell me more about CDM! Continue from 230.
This doesn’t sound like a real thing. Continue from 350.
I’m mostly here for the fiction and game stuff, not the writing advice. Continue from 410.

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Exploring Degenesis Rebirth: Primal Punk

Exploring Degenesis Rebirth: Primal Punk

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Degenesis Rebirth is an RPG that keeps calling me. It’s an ear worm of the imagination. The developer, SIXMOREVODKA, has launched a fabulous website that features an interactive map, timeline, stories, audio clips, and more. It is as rich and in-depth as the books themselves and also, like the digital copies of the game, all free. The world is so rich, in fact, that one struggles at times to deal with it all.

Degenesis Rebirth is a post post-apocalyptic game. In 2073, Earth was bombarded by a number of asteroids that was as close to an extinction event without quite doing the human species in. The people of this world call the event the Eshaton. For hundreds of years, humanity struggled with the new reality and sudden shifts in the world. The game focuses on Europe and North Africa, so we know that the plummet in temperatures set off another ice age. The drop in sea levels cut the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic. The Adriatic Sea between Italy and Croatia largely disappeared. The Sahara has bloomed with vegetation and life.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Rejecting Bushido (Part One)

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Rejecting Bushido (Part One)

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Chushingura: The Loyal 47 Retainers (or 47 Samurai). Japan, 1962.

After militant nationalism in Japan during the Twenties and Thirties led to the disaster of the Forties, many Japanese blamed the country’s march to war on an excessive reverence for bushido, the samurai’s martial code of honor. Media that glorified Japan’s military history was prohibited during the American occupation, but in the 1950s movies and TV shows featuring heroic samurai began returning to the mainstream. However, a significant segment of Japan’s creative community regarded this as a woeful development, and nonconformists opposed to the innate conservatism of Japanese society began making alternative samurai films that, subtly at first and then openly, accused bushido culture of oppression and cruelty. Let’s take a look at how this played out on the screen starting with two films from 1962: Chushingura, which extols the virtues of samurai honor, and Harakiri, which is a virtual mirror image of the first, examining the same themes through a different lens and reaching diametrically opposite conclusions.

Chushingura: The Loyal 47 Retainers (or 47 Samurai)

Rating: ****
Origin: Japan, 1962
Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Source: Image DVD

The tale of the 47 ronin is sometimes called Japan’s national epic, as it epitomizes the samurai virtues of courage and loyalty unto death. In Japan it’s been filmed at least six times, with countless other dramatic adaptations, but Inagaki’s sumptuous 1962 movie is probably the best-known retelling to Westerners. The film’s subtitle for its English language release was “The Loyal 47 Retainers,” but in the original Japanese version it’s “Story of Blossoms, Story of Snow.” Not blossoms as of budding flowers, but the fluttering petals whose day is over, and that fall as a harbinger of the death symbolized by the coming of snow.

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I Watched the New Mortal Kombat Movie So You Don’t Have To (But You Might Want To)

I Watched the New Mortal Kombat Movie So You Don’t Have To (But You Might Want To)

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Last weekend, I splurged a little and bought myself a ticket to see the new Mortal Kombat film. Film is giving it a bit much, to be honest. I saw the new Mortal Kombat movie. Here is my review:

Silly nonsense that was nonetheless very entertaining. I do not regret the splurge.

Look, this movie isn’t great. It’s barely good. I’d so so far as to say that it’s bad. However, it’s precisely because it’s bad that it’s good. Hear me out.

One of the best things about Mortal Kombat is that it leans heavily on its own silliness. It doesn’t shy away from the ridiculousness of the video game premise: that there are multiple realms, and every realm sends forth champions to fight in a high-stakes tournament. As part of the rules, if one realms loses enough times, another realm has permission to annex it. The film opens with Earthrealm (us) on the verge of invasion from Outworld. If we but lose one more tournament, it’s over for us.

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Strange Alien Invasions and Orbital Salvage Teams: May/June 2021 Print SF Magazines

Strange Alien Invasions and Orbital Salvage Teams: May/June 2021 Print SF Magazines

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Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact for May/June 2021. Cover art by Shutterstock.com

Sam Tomaino at SFRevu raves over the latest issue of Asimov’s.

The May/June 2021 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction is here and it has two Hugo-worthy novelettes!

“Reclaiming the Stars” by James Gunn. This is the fourth and final story in a series that features the adventures of Harry and Lisa George, who as of the previous story, were physically long dead but survived as personalities in black boxes on an Earth… The story begins with Harry and Lisa working at recreating human life with Lisa more comfortable with that than Harry, who has nightmares about a future Adam being killed by a sea monster. He wonders if there is something wrong with him. But when Lisa has a nightmare of her own about their progeny dying. They speculate that these visions are coming from an outside source. Who or what? Could it be a “ghost” of the AI that they defeated in the first story in this series?

Harry and Lisa have one last adventure and the series concludes in a perfect way. This story will be on my shortlist for consideration for a Best Novelette Hugo Award next year.

The issue concludes with the novelette, “Flattering the Flame” by Robert Reed. The Great Ship has two possible routes, the Prudent or the Impetuous. The Impetuous takes them through a very ancient developed system inhabited by the people known as the Flame. The Flame knows of the coming of the Great Ship and plan to take it for their own, led by their captain, Fierce. But Washen, the Great Ship captain, has other ideas. Another wonderfully rich tale from one of the genre’s most unique writers.

The May/June Dell magazines also contain stories by Neal Asher, Lettie Prell, Dominica Phetteplace, Ray Nayler, David Moles, and many others. Here’s all the details.

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What I’m Reading: May 2021

What I’m Reading: May 2021

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I’ve been taking advantage of listening to some audio books throughout the day – I only listen to unabridged versions, unless it’s a book I’ve read before, and know well enough that leaving parts out is okay. I don’t really care for abridgments – in addition to the usual reading. Helps the day pass faster, and lets me get to more things.

DORTMUNDER (Donald Westlake)

I think that Donald Westlake is one of those authors who is more respected than popular. He wrote a lot of good books, but he’s not generally well known. But people ‘who know’ like Westlake. I’m most a fan of his caper/heist books. I think he is to those what Ed McBain is to police procedurals.

Westlake can write over-the-top comedy, and understated funny. And he can mix the two in the same book. John Dortmunder appeared in fourteen books between 1970 and 2009, as well about a dozen short stories. Dortmunder is a pessimistic thief who continually runs into amusing (though not to him) obstacles. Exasperated, he continues forward, moving inexorably towards the next speed bump; or concrete wall in the road. The humor is not overtly screwball, but Dortmunder’s exasperation can be laugh out loud.

Dortmunder usually puts together a team, and the recurring characters add to the series. I love how Murch describes the route he is going to/did drive; even if it’s just coming from his house to a meeting. Dortmunder and group are after an emerald in the first book.

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Mad Shadows: Andrew Paul Weston reviews the series

Mad Shadows: Andrew Paul Weston reviews the series

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As the Black Gate watch warned you, Joe Bonadonna’s Mad Shadows series had a recent release (Book III: The Heroes of Echo Gate). So it is timely to review the entire series, and for that esteemed author Andrew Paul Weston steps up. Incidentally, Mr. Weston is no stranger to Black Gate, or Hell for that matter (check out his Bio below). So I pass the microphone over to him so he can recap each entry.

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