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Author: markrigney

Mark Rigney is the author of numerous plays, including Ten Red Kings and Acts of God (both from Playscripts, Inc.), as well as Bears, winner of the 2012 Panowski Playwriting Competition (during its off Broadway run, Theatre Mania called Bears “the best play of the year”). His short fiction appears in Witness, Ascent, Unlikely Story, Betwixt, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Realms Of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Black Static, among many others. “The Skates,” a comic (and ghostly) novella, is now available as an ebook from Samhain Publishing, with two sequels forthcoming, “Sleeping Bear” (Feb. 2014) and the novel Check-Out Time (autumn, 2014). In non-fiction, Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical (Gallaudet University Press) remains happily in print one decade on. Two collections of his stories are available through Amazon, Flights of Fantasy, and Reality Checks. His website is www.markrigney.net.
The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

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Having returned the Eye of Rhynn and the Hand of Kwll to their rightful (quite frightening) owners, Sean CW Korsgaard and I sat down to conclude our Sword & Sorcery chat, and to focus once more on his upcoming magazine Battleborn. Thanks to a successful Indiegogo campaign, Issues One and Two are now fully funded, both digital and print.

Read Part One of the interview here, and Part Two here.

Battleborn is positioning itself as a sword & sorcery outlet. Speaking both as editor and fan, how is that different from epic or high fantasy? What elements or touches make a story S&S?

What makes the sword-and-sorcery subgenre are a combination of five factors. First up, the Protagonist. Unlike, for example, epic fantasy, which have large casts or changing points of view, a work of S&S typically follows a single protagonist, or the odd duo. I say protagonist instead of hero for a reason –– many of these characters are rogues, mercenaries, rebels, savages, and scoundrels, if not antiheroes or outright villainous. They are often underdogs or outsiders, and often on the road or far from home, akin to lone gunslingers of American westerns and the wandering samurai of Japanese folklore.

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The Battleborn Interview: Part Two

The Battleborn Interview: Part Two

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Having beaten back the kobolds (see Part One of this interview, here at Black Gate), Sean CW Korsgaard sat down again to talk Sword & Sorcery, and his editorial vision for Battleborn, his upcoming magazine.

With your editor hat firmly on, what’s something you nearly always respond to positively? Heroic animal companions? A romantic sub-plot? A surfeit of halberds? 

Given Battleborn‘s approach to sword-and-sorcery, it should surprise nobody that memorable characters and authentic, hard-hitting action scenes are right above home plate for me.

For characters, you follow in the traditions of heroes like Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric, Kane, Hanuvar, and more. So, even as you plot out your story, every detail you give your lead character matters. Are they distinctive in your mind’s eye? Do they have a few details that make them stand out, not only in the story, but as they stand beside a century of sword-and-sorcery heroes? Do you have an arc for them planned? Do you have some ideas for sequel stories where we follow that arc?

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Launching Battleborn: An Interview with Editor Sean C.W. Korsgaard, Part One

Launching Battleborn: An Interview with Editor Sean C.W. Korsgaard, Part One

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Deep in the underground tunnels of Black Gate’s vast Indiana Annex, I sat down with Sean CW Korsgaard and we embarked on a lively chat about his upcoming S&S magazine, Battleborn – what it is, where it’s headed, and how S&S fits into our contemporary literary landscape. The Indiegogo to jump-start Battleborn closes on September 30th, so read on to see if you’d like to join in on the action. 

Why start a new Sword & Sorcery magazine in 2025? Are you worried about competition from other S&S magazines? And what sets Battleborn apart?

First, we are very fortunate that after decades of being in the doldrums, sword-and-sorcery is seeing a genuine renaissance. We have the biggest group of talented writers the genre has seen since the 1970s. There’s an entire market starved for heroic, action focused fantasy, and we are building Battleborn on that! …

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The Suspension Bridges of Disbelief

The Suspension Bridges of Disbelief

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A friend and I have been watching The Wheel of Time adaptation on Amazon. Both of us expressed surprise not at the open casting, which we agree is wonderful, but at how that production choice plays out in small hamlets like Rand al’Thor’s “home town” of Two Rivers. After observing that every possible racial group is represented in this isolated, insular mountain community, my friend had an epiphany.

“I had to remind myself,” said my friend, “that if I suspend disbelief to accept that there’s magic in this world, then I might also have to suspend my disbelief in genetics.”

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A Locked Tomb Mystery in Space: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

A Locked Tomb Mystery in Space: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Gideon the Ninth (Tor Books, September 10, 2019). Cover by Tommy Arnold

The back cover of the hardcover edition of Gideon the Ninth features this assessment from writer Warren Ellis: “The author is clearly insane.”

Three things made me shunt Gideon the Ninth to the front of my TBR stack. First, both my older son and his girlfriend read it, and, once finished, they promptly named their cat Harrow after one of the two main characters. Second, the cover art jumped out like an All Hallows spotlight. Third, that Ellis quote grabbed me by the frontal lobes. A novel featuring skeletons and sword-wielding necromancers written by a writer five cans short of a six-pack? Sign me up, buttercup.

Finally, in the interests of truth-telling or perhaps over-sharing, I must add that a fourth element convinced me to delve into Gideon the Ninth, and that was when I spotted a copy on the shelves at Chaucer’s Books in California, and cracked the cover to explore the opening paragraph. It reads as follows:

In the myriadic year of our Lord –– the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! –– Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

I was hooked. There’s nothing like a practical protagonist. Sword and shoes, check. Dirty magazines? Clearly a must. Next stop, adventure!

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T.H. White’s Legacy on Contemporary Television

T.H. White’s Legacy on Contemporary Television

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Ted Lasso (Warner Bros. Television/Apple TV+, 2020-2023)

I recently re-watched Ted Lasso, and as I took in the final episode, I was reminded quite forcibly of The Queen’s Gambit. The question was, why? I quickly cued up The Queen’s Gambit, and sure enough, my memory held true: both shows employ what I like to call — what I am going to call, starting here, with this essay –– the T.H. White Stratagem.

If I may explain. The T.H. White Stratagem (a clear misnomer, since to my knowledge he deployed it only once) stems from the climax of The Sword in the Stone, book one of The Once and Future King. If you haven’t read this wonderful masterwork, please skip the remainder of this essay, and come back later. For those that have read TOFK, recall that in London, at the great tournament, (Sir) Kay dispatches the Wart to run back and get his sword, which Kay has foolishly left back at the hostel.

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Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

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The 23rd Hero (Castle Bridge Media, August 13, 2024)

Hybrids are hardly unknown in the long history of fantasy and science fiction literature. It could easily be argued that the genre itself is a hybrid. In the case of Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s The 23rd Hero, this mixing of literary media is an essential element, baked in from the ground up.

The story begins by wearing its dystopian stripes firmly on its sleeve. The characters we meet in near-future Vancouver, including our hero, Sloane Burrows, live in a world of ecological collapse. Outdoors, everyone wears a filtration mask, and the last working farm in Canada closed just months before when the last of its livestock died from drinking tainted water. The handbaskets of hell, if I may mix a metaphor, have most definitely come home to roost.

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Howard Andrew Jones’ Lord of a Shattered Land and the Serious Business of Swords, Sorcery, and Comedy

Howard Andrew Jones’ Lord of a Shattered Land and the Serious Business of Swords, Sorcery, and Comedy

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Lord of a Shattered Land (Baen Books, August 1, 2023). Cover by Dave Seeley

At about the halfway mark in Howard Andrew Jones’s Lord of a Shattered Land, the excellent opening volume of The Chronicles of Hanuvar, the author shifts gears. “Against the run of play,” he opts for comedy.

Lord of a Shattered Land is set up in episodic form, such that each of the chapters can be read independently. The first eight unfold through tightly plotted escapades that firmly position Hanuvar, the refugee general, as a heroic figure. His journeys bring him face-to-face with enemy soldiers and more than a few gruesome creatures.

As ever, the line between horror and S&S remains thin –– but that’s a discussion for another post. For today, I’m sticking with Chapter Nine, “The Autumn Horse,” in which Jones signals that he’s ready for a change of pace. To accomplish this, he has a single tool, the same one employed by every humble scrivener, and that, of course, is prose.

So how, exactly, does Jones haul Hanuvar, however briefly, into the realm of the comedic?

Let’s find out. Nuts and bolts, look out below!

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It’s Only a Matter of Time

It’s Only a Matter of Time

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The human mind daydreams its way around certain specific topics with exceptional regularity. We fret about personal security, we hope for love (in its innumerable forms), and to round out the likely top three, we focus on death. This last in particular invites a speculative element: we can hardly help fantasizing about an extended or perhaps immortal life span.

But not far down the list comes the earnest desire to travel in time. Backward, forward, sidelong –– “over, under, sideways, down” –– any shift in our current path will do. We want to zip back in time to visit places now impossible to see, or connect with loved ones we’ve lost. We want to zoom forward to get a preview of what is to come.

The urge is powerful, atavistic. It’s as if our very cells, so prone to decay (a driving force of time as we experience it), insist that here lies a field that demands investigation.

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Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media,
June 25, 2024). Cover uncredited

Some months back, I was toiling away in the vast Indiana compound of Black Gate, when I received a text from publisher John O’Neill, who had just finished reading my new novel, Vinyl Wonderland. He told me how much he enjoyed it –– don’t take my word for it, ask him –– and then he told me how sorry he was.

“What for?” I asked.

“Well,” said John, “if you had to live through even half of what your main character went through, then you’ve had one hell of a rough ride.”

I thought about what John had said as I made my nightly rounds of the massive server farm that houses all of Black Gate’s backlogged posts (including over one hundred of mine). Eventually, I crawled off to bed, feeling hopeful that the local kobolds wouldn’t stage another uprising until next month, so that I could get a good night’s rest.

The morning brought clarity, as it often does, and I sat up in bed like a shot. “A liar,” I declared, quoting Quintilian, “should have a good memory!”

Fiction is a lie, after all, spun from gossamer truths, and therefore I, as a writer of fiction, must be a liar. It follows that to succeed in my craft, I must cultivate an excellent memory. Logic (and Quintilian) demand it.

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