Browsed by
Category: BG Staff

Mad Shadows, Book Three: The Heroes of Echo Gate by Joe Bonadonna

Mad Shadows, Book Three: The Heroes of Echo Gate by Joe Bonadonna

Comments 5 comments

Mad Shadows, Book Three: The Heroes of Echo Gate (Pulp Hero Press, February 26, 2021). Cover artist unknown

Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Dorgo the Dowser’ emerges with new content in Mad Shadows Book Three: The Heroes of Echo Gate. It is available now in paperback ($17.95 for the 332-page paperback; $2.99 Kindle). Under the recent charge of Pulp Hero Press, the first two books have been reprinted in glorious style (Book One: Mad Shadows by Joe Bonadonna and Book Two: Dorgo the Dowser and the Order of the Serpent). The release of Book Three: The Heroes of Echo Gate marks the tenth year anniversary of the first book’s publication. The official book blurb clarifies what to expect in the latest installment:

Dorgo’s Greatest Challenge

During an arduous and dangerous trek through the Scarlet Desert in search of the fabled Well of Tears, Dorgo the Dowser and his companions accidentally uncover an ancient artifact buried for eons beneath the blood-colored sand. After a harrowing, action-packed journey through the desert they find the Well of Tears, the repository of God’s tears, and there encounter the ghosts of the Sisters of the Blue Light, the Guardians of the Well. The nuns tell them about the relic of antiquity they found: it is a thing of cosmic evil — a thing not of their world, a thing which must be destroyed. But the answer to destroying that artifact is a riddle Dorgo and his companions must discover for themselves.

When the Spirit trapped inside the artifact is set free by one of their companions, Dorgo and the others learn that the evil now threatens not only their world, but all the Otherworlds of the multi-dimensional Echoverse. The key to destroying this evil is somehow tied in with the demons seeking to control Echo Gate — the master portal that leads not only to every world in the Echoverse, but through Space and Time, as well. As a great battle erupts on the island of Thavarar, where Echo Gate is located, Dorgo and his companions must unravel the mystery of the thing they found in the desert, and discover the means by which it can be destroyed.

…

Read More Read More

Sunken Realms and a Road of Bones: Tales From the Magician’s Skull #5, edited by Howard Andrew Jones

Sunken Realms and a Road of Bones: Tales From the Magician’s Skull #5, edited by Howard Andrew Jones

Comments 11 comments

Tales From the Magician’s Skull #5 (Goodman Games, December 2020). Cover by Sanjulian

I don’t think there’s a magazine out there I look forward to as much as Tales From the Magician’s Skull, edited by Howard Andrew Jones and published twice a year by Goodman Games.

Yes, partly it’s because it regularly features so many people I consider friends, including James Enge, John C. Hocking, Ryan Harvey, Violette Malan, Adrian Simmons, and of course Howard, who was Managing Editor here at Black Gate for many years. If you’re a Black Gate reader in fact, you’re guaranteed to find a great deal you’ll love about the Skull — and not just because all of those lovely folks have written for BG over the years.

But I think the real reason I enjoy it is because the magazine is a tremendous amount of fun, and everything about it radiates an abiding love of adventure fantasy and sword & sorcery. Want an example? Here’s an excerpt from Howard’s introduction to the brand new issue — beginning with the welcome news that the magazine is open to submissions for the first time!

We will throw the gates wide on a trial basis for a limited time…. The Skull has decreed that we shall accept electronic manuscripts beginning on the anniversary of the birthday of the sacred genre’s father, Robert E. Howard, January 22, 2021, and close upon that date sacred to mortal fools, April 1, 2021…

Get more details on the Call for Submissions here.

…

Read More Read More

Crimson Mists and Uncrowned Kings: Savage Scrolls, Volume One, edited by Jason Ray Carney

Crimson Mists and Uncrowned Kings: Savage Scrolls, Volume One, edited by Jason Ray Carney

Comments 9 comments

Savage Scrolls, Volume One (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Cover uncredited.

Last summer there was an ugly incident involving the long-awaited publication of Flashing Swords #6 from Pulp Hero Press, the spiritual successor to Lin Carter’s legendary sword-and-sorcery series from the 70s. Editor Robert M. Price’s introduction, which read to me like an incoherent right-wing rant against feminism, proved toxic enough that four contributors pulled their stories immediately, and publisher Bob McLain made the decision to de-list and kill the book before it even went on sale.

That left plenty of good tales without a home, though Bob did promise that some would find a home in “a new anthology series – no politics, no drama, just sword-and-sorcery! – that I’d like to release later this year.” So I was especially intrigued to see the first volume of Savage Scrolls, a new Swords & Anthology series edited by the distinguished Jason Ray Carney, arrive from Pulp Hero in November. I ordered a copy last month, and I’m delighted to say it’s a thoroughly professional production.

And what a list on contributors! In addition to two tales salvaged from Flashing Swords (Adrian Cole’s Elak of Atlantis tale “The Tower in the Crimson Mist,” and Steve Dilks’s sword & sorcery “Tale of the Uncrowned Kings”), Savage Scrolls includes names that will be intimately familiar to Black Gate readers, including Howard Andrew Jones (with a new Hanuvar tale), James Enge (a new Morlock the Maker story), David C. Smith (a new Oron adventure) and D.M. Ritzlin (with a tale of Avok the Cytheran). In a Publisher’s Note at the back, Bob McLain teases readers with a promise that

The cover art will tell a story, spread over four volumes of Savage Scrolls. On the cover of this volume we have our characters on the cusp of battle: the barbarian, the cultist, and the sorceress. On the cover of the next volume we will have those same characters, with the barbarian, well, you’ll just have to wait and see.

A bold promise! Though why he’d draw such attention to the intriguing cover and then completely neglect to credit the artist, I have no idea. The artist isn’t credited anywhere, far as I can find. Maybe that’s part of the mystery.

Jason Ray Carney’s first blog post for Black Gate was Bran Mak Morn: Social Justice Warrior, and he’s promised us a behind-the-scenes peek at Savage Scrolls in the coming weeks.

Vintage Treasures: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Vintage Treasures: Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley

Comments 0 Comment

Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley. Cover by Bruce Jensen

Paul J. McAuley was one of our earliest contributors, with a book review column in the very first issue of Black Gate magazine. His writing career was taking off at the same time — his debut novel Four Hundred Billion Stars won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988, and Kirkus Reviews raved about his 1995 novel Red Dust, calling it “An extraordinary saga… Superb.”

But his breakout book was Fairyland, an early nanotech novel set in a ruined Europe where bioengineered dolls are used as disposable slaves. It won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel, and was eventually reissued as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series. In his SF Site review Matthew Cheney wrote:

Fairyland was first published in 1995; it dazzles still. Though some of the props of its future have been churned into clichés by many subsequent novels and movies, few of those props have gathered dust in the intervening years… even more remarkable is that, at least for its first two thirds, the novel succeeds as much on the strengths of its structure, characters, and themes as it does on its whizz-bangs and gosh-wows…

The basic plot is a simple thriller-quest: a man goes in search of a woman who bewitched him with something he considers love (though it might be the residual effect of being sprayed with nanobots)… Along the way, McAuley gives us a vision of EuroDisney that is as disturbing as the visions of its American counterparts in Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom and Carl Hiaasen’s Native Tongue. The chapters set here are among the most compelling and vivid in the book, a posthuman primordial ooze fueled by excesses of capital and biology in the ruins of a labyrinth built by corporate “Imagineers”….

It is a story propelled at its best moments by ideas, and yet it doesn’t neglect to present characters who are, more often than not, individual and unpredictable, and so it helps break down the supposed barriers between the novel of ideas and the novel of psychology in the same way that it breaks down the more intractable barriers between hard science fiction and high fantasy.

Fairyland was published in the UK by Gollancz in 1995, and reprinted in mass market paperback in the US by Avon in July 1997. The Avon paperback is 420 pages, priced at $5.99. The cover is by Bruce Jensen.

See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

A Heist in a Sword and Sorcery World: A Hazardous Engagement by Gaie Sebold

A Heist in a Sword and Sorcery World: A Hazardous Engagement by Gaie Sebold

Comments 0 Comment

Cover by Duncan Kay

I’ve had my eye on Gaie Sebold ever since I bought her brilliant and funny short story “A Touch of Crystal” (co-written with fellow Brit Martin Owton), the tale of a shopkeeper who discovers some of the goods in her New Age shop are actually magical, for Black Gate 9.

She’s been well worth the watch. Her debut novel Babylon Steel (described as “Sword & Sorcery for the girl who wants to be Conan”) kicked off a successful 2-book series at Solaris; you can get both books in a giant 1,000-page omnibus, The Babylon Steel Adventures. Her 2014 effort Shanghai Sparrow was a Far Eastern steampunk tale of Espionage, Etheric Science, and Murder.

Her latest is A Hazardous Engagement, volume #6 in the NewCon Press Novellas line, a prestigious imprint that has published Alastair Reynolds, Tom Toner, Kari Sperring, Adam Roberts, Hal Duncan, Liz Williams, Simon Clark, Alison Littlewood, and loads more. My friend Arin Komins reviewed it on FB this week, saying:

A Hazardous Engagement novella from Gaie Sebold… Delightful heist story in a sword and sorcery world. From NewCon Press. Excellent and swift read, and quite good. Would make a good series of novellas or stories.

That’s all the endorsement I need…. I put it in my Amazon cart immediately. A Hazardous Engagement was published by NewCon Press on June 19, 2019. It is 120 pages, priced at $8.99 in paperback and $4.75 in digital formats. The cover is by Duncan Kay. See all the latest releases by Black Gate writers and staff here.

The Frustrations (and the Surprising Successes) of Marketing Your Book

The Frustrations (and the Surprising Successes) of Marketing Your Book

Comments 2 comments

I’ve joined a new FB group called “Writers Helping Writers.” One of the members asked about marketing. This is what I said:

Marketing is easy. Effective marketing that actually sells books, however, is hard. My son works for Facebook, so he helped me with an advertising campaign on the platform. We had a $250 budget for one of my collections, The Experience Arcade and Other Stories. One of the ads reached 1,900 readers. 103 people clicked on it. We did sell books, but not enough to pay back our investment. We found the same pattern to be true on the other books we promoted on Facebook.

I have tried quite a bit with marketing: Facebook, Goodreads, advertising in convention bulletins and program books, signings, YouTube videos, readings, postcards, bookmarks, flyers, tee shirts. Also, my publisher has worked hard to get the books to reviewers (my latest book, The Best of James Van Pelt, received a starred review at Publishers Weekly! Hooray!). All of my attempts sold some books, but none of them profited more than I spent. I didn’t pay for any of the reviews, by the way.

The successful books I’ve had seemed to take off on their own. My first collection, Strangers and Beggars and Other Stories, was recognized by the American Library Association as a “Best Book for Young Adults” and has sold several thousand copies. I didn’t do anything to make that happen — I didn’t even know it was a thing.

…

Read More Read More

Pulp Hero Press Re-releases Waters of Darkness by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna

Pulp Hero Press Re-releases Waters of Darkness by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna

Comments 5 comments

Waters of Darkness (Pulp Hero Press, October 19, 2020). Cover uncredited.

Pulp Hero Press has reprinted David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna’s classic sword & pirate novel Waters of Darkness. Joe and Dave are well known to readers of Black Gate, and their first collaboration was very warmly received when it first appeared from Damnation Books in 2013. Here’s a slice from William Patrick Maynard’s enthusiastic BG review, “Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness.”

The shade of Robert E. Howard lingers over every page of Waters of Darkness, the first collaboration by these two talented authors to see print.

The principal characters, Crimson Kate O’Toole and Bloody Red Buchanan, would have fit in nicely had this 17th Century swashbuckler first seen print in the pages of Weird Tales in the 1930s. A quest for fabled treasure sets these two buccaneers sailing for the Isle of Shadow in the far distant Eastern Seas. They find themselves combating an evil priest of Dagon and the sorcerer in his thrall along the way and most of the crew of the Raven pays the cost for their having crossed paths.

This book is extremely fast-paced and is perhaps the new pulp title that most closely rings with the authentic flavor of classic pulp. It is not surprising since David C. Smith was always among the top echelon of Robert E. Howard pastiche writers, and Joe Bonadonna has quickly established himself as a breath of fresh air in the new pulp world.

Together, the mixing of both men’s styles (classic pulp of the finest caliber with quirky and highly literate mixing of fantasy, hard-boiled humor, and an expansive cinematic vocabulary) produces what will doubtless be hailed as one of the finest new pulp titles of the year…. This has already been a strong year for new pulp, but this is one swashbuckler that isn’t likely to be equaled.

Waters of Darkness was published by Pulp Hero Press on October 19, 2020. It is 200 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $4.99 in digital formats. The cover art is uncredited. Read a generous excerpt as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction imprint.

See all our coverage of new releases by Black Gate authors here.

New Treasures: Daughter of the Serpentine by E. E. Knight

New Treasures: Daughter of the Serpentine by E. E. Knight

Comments 4 comments
Novice Dragoneer-small Daughter of the Serpentine-small

Novice Dragoneer and Daughter of the Serpentine (Ace Books). Covers by Dan Burgess

Happy Book Birthday to Daughter of the Serpentine, the second volume in E. E. Knight’s hugely popular Dragoneer Academy series!

Eric, of course, needs no introduction to Black Gate readers — his 11-volume Vampire Earth series and his six-volume Age of Fire epic are both perennial favorites in our offices, and Eric’s also a regular blogger for us. And I was very proud to publish his Blue Pilgrim tale “The Terror in the Vale,” one of the very best stories in our Black Gate Online Fiction library.

The opening volume in his new series, Novice Dragoneer, was published last year to wide acclaim. The Bibliosanctum called it “Delightfully entertaining,” and Booklist proclaimed it “An excellent fantasy coming of age story.” Anticipation for the second book has been through the roof, and it looks like the wait was worth it — check out this snippet from the rave review at Library Journal.

Knight (Age of Fire series) continues the story of Ileth, a teen who comes from nothing and strives to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a dragonrider in the Serpentine academy. Ileth has matured since the first book and takes on new challenges, such as balancing two apprenticeships; one as a dragonrider and the other as a dancer. As she rises in rank, enemies threaten the republic, forcing her to take charge of her future sooner than she anticipated. Knight creates a marvelous character study of a young woman within the walls of a mostly male-dominated world… VERDICT: Highly recommended… Start with the first in the series or just dive right into this perfect adventure tale.

Daughter of the Serpentine was published today by Ace Books. It is 496 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Dan Burgess. Read an excerpt here. See all our coverage of the latest releases by BG Staff here.

Giant Spiders, Horrifying Plants, and Robots at the End of Time: The Best of James Van Pelt

Giant Spiders, Horrifying Plants, and Robots at the End of Time: The Best of James Van Pelt

Comments 3 comments
The Best of James van Pelt-back The Best of James van Pelt-small

The Best of James van Pelt (Fairwood Press, November 2020). Cover by Gabriel Gajdoš

If you’re a regular Black Gate reader, James Van Pelt needs no introduction.

He’s been a prolific contributor to all the major science fiction magazines we’ve covered for the past two decades. He’s also a part-time BG columnist, covering the short fiction beat for us with his occasional Stories That Work column. His latest book is sure to be of interest to all our readers — The Best of James Van Pelt, just released by Fairwood Press, is an enormous 700-page survey of James’ entire career, collecting 62 stories and nearly 300,000 words of fiction. Here’s a snippet from the starred review at Publishers Weekly.

Van Pelt showcases his mastery of short-form fiction in these 62 stories, all published between 1993 and 2018 and ranging from apocalyptic fiction to subtle daylight horror, Lovecraftian riffs, and speculation about future social policy initiatives. . . .Van Pelt’s superior combination of imaginative concepts with recognizable human emotions makes him a talent deserving of a wide readership.

Here’s the publisher’s description.

…

Read More Read More

On a Mission to Disable a Gigantic Robot: Tangent Online on “The Ambient Intelligence” by Todd McAulty

On a Mission to Disable a Gigantic Robot: Tangent Online on “The Ambient Intelligence” by Todd McAulty

Comments 0 Comment

Lightspeed Magazine Issue 125 October 2020-smallIt’s been a while since I’ve been reviewed at Tangent Online, so it was a delight to find a review of my Lightspeed story “The Ambient Intelligence,” written by Tara Grimravn.

Due to a mysterious government program called the Deep Temple Project, the water in Lake Michigan has been steadily boiling away. Its shoreline is now little more than a series of mudflats and interconnected stagnant pools that go on for at least a mile before one reaches the water. Barry Simcoe is on a mission by AGRT, an international peacekeeping organization, to disable a gigantic robot destroying large portions of Chicago and killing its citizens. According to his friend Zircon Border, it was spotted coming and going from the exposed remains of an old shipwreck. In order to do this, Simcoe must navigate the treacherous bog that is now the lakebed and try to disable his opponent before it can kill him.

McAulty’s SF story is a great read. It takes a little while to get to the more exciting bits, but that’s necessary to give the reader enough background to understand what’s happening and why. The ending doesn’t disappoint either. The characters are quite well-done, and I especially liked the interactions between Simcoe and True Pacific. Give this one a read!

“The Ambient Intelligence” appeared last month in Lightspeed magazine, and it’s free to read online. It’s published under the name Todd McAulty, the name all my stories appeared under in Black Gate magazine all those years ago. It’s the story of Canadian Barry Simcoe and his robot friend Zircon Border, who face off against a mysterious 60-ton killer robot hiding in a shipwreck on the shores of Lake Michigan… one that’s hiding a very big secret. It shares a setting (and two characters) with my debut novel The Robots of Gotham, but it’s not otherwise related to that book, and stands completely on its own.

Read “The Ambient Intelligence” in its entirety here. And if you enjoy it, why not help support Lightspeed with a subscription? Six-months subs will run you just $17.94, for more than 50 stories — a whopping 350,000 words of fiction. It’s one of the true bargains in the field.