Browsed by
Category: Blog Entry

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in May

The Top 20 Black Gate Fiction Posts in May

Comments 3 comments

The Sealord's Successor Part OneAaron Bradford Starr’s latest tale of Gallery Hunters Gloren Avericci and Yr Neh — the 35,000-word epic fantasy mystery “The Sealord’s Successor,” which Louis West at Tangent Online called “A gripping tale of fantasy, mystery, murder and intrigue. A must read!” — was our top fiction post last month.

Coming in a close second was Robert Rhodes’s story of a time-traveling swordsman, “Devotion,” followed by Vera Nazarian’s tale of armies, gods and a city on the brink of collapse, “Niola’s Last Stand.” Also making the list were terrific stories by Michael Penkas, Howard Andrew Jones, Mary Catelli, Judith Berman, Joe Bonadonna, Jason E. Thummel, and many others.

If you haven’t sampled the adventure fantasy stories offered through our new Black Gate Online Fiction line, you’re missing out. Every week, we present an original short story or novella from the best writers in the industry, all completely free. Here are the Top Twenty most read stories in May:

  1. “The Sealord’s Successor,” by Aaron Bradford Starr
  2. “Devotion,” by Robert Rhodes
  3. “Niola’s Last Stand,” by Vera Nazarian
  4. “The Worst Was Yet to Come,” by Michael Penkas
  5. An excerpt from The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones
  6. “The Turtle in the Sea of Sand,” by Mary Catelli
  7. “The Poison Well,” by Judith Berman
  8. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
  9. “Assault and Battery,” by Jason E. Thummel
  10. An excerpt from The Waters of Darkness, by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna

     

    11. …

    Read More Read More

Barnes and Noble to Stop Manufacturing Nook Tablets

Barnes and Noble to Stop Manufacturing Nook Tablets

Comments 19 comments

Nook-ColorToday wasn’t a very good day for Barnes & Noble and its Nook e-reader business.

Yesterday, the nation’s top brick and mortar bookseller announced earnings for fiscal 2013 and they weren’t pretty. Sales plummeted in the last quarter, and the company’s net loss for the year more than doubled to $475 million.

Nook sales, which were tooted as the company’s salvation as recently as last year, fell to just 1 million units in the fourth quarter, down from 1.4 million in the same period last year. At the same time, sales of Kindle e-readers have kept growing at a robust clip. As part of its earnings statement, B&N announced it would discontinue tablet manufacturing in an effort to stop the red ink.

The headlines have been ugly. AllThingsD reported “Barnes & Noble Gets the Nook Ready for Its Dirt Nap,” BusinessWeek said “Barnes & Noble’s Nook Business Sees Fifty Shades of Red,” The Wall Street Journal announced “Barnes & Noble Throws in the Towel on Tablets,” and Motley Fool‘s read simply “Barnes & Noble Finally Gives Up.” Today the stock took it on the chin, dropping 17 percent to $15.61.

I finally bought my Nook HD tablet a few weeks ago. I know, I know. The very moment everyone else is fleeing the Nook, I figure it’s a good time to get around to that new tablet purchase. Maybe not the best timing. But hey, the price was great, and I wanted to support a quality digital reader while I still could. Reminds me of all those dumb hardware purchases I made in the late 90s, trying to single-handedly keep the Amiga alive.

B&N is not exiting the hardware business entirely. It will continue to produce the black-and-white versions of the Nook and look for a partner to take on the production of the high-end color tablets. Speculation is swirling around Microsoft as a possible white knight, but it’s all simply rumors at this point.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying my new $149 tablet. It really is a great little Internet appliance and a handy way to watch movies and read books. I have no idea how long they’ll be available at that price, so if you’re interested you might want to move quickly.

Richard Matheson, February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013

Richard Matheson, February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013

Comments 4 comments

richard mathesonRichard Matheson, the legendary author of some of the most famous science fiction and horror novels of the 20th Century, died Sunday at the age of 87.

Matheson wrote over 25 novels and nearly 100 short stories, but is probably best known for his many works adapted into popular movies — including I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, Hell House, Trilogy of Terror (based on three of his short stories), What Dreams May Come, Somewhere in Time (based on his novel Bid Time Return), A Stir of Echoes, and Real Steel (based on The Twilight Zone episode “Steel.”)

He also wrote one of the most famous episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which starred a young William Shatner. He adapted his 1971 short story “Duel” into the TV movie of the same name, launching the career of its young director, Steven Spielberg. Matheson later noted the story’s inspiration came from a trip he took with Star Trek author Jerry Sohl (“The Corbomite Maneuver”), when they were dangerously tailgated by a large truck.

Matheson was scheduled to be the Guest of Honor at the upcoming World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, England. The convention committee has announced that the convention will now be “dedicated to his memory and stand as a tribute to one of our genre’s greatest storytellers.”

As Matthew Wuertz wrote on the occasion of his 87th birthday in February:

Even if you haven’t read his stories, Matheson’s writing has undoubtedly influenced something you’ve read or watched. His work will leave a noticeable impact for many years to come. Perhaps he should reuse his novel’s title I Am Legend for an autobiography.

Matheson received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984, and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010. He won the World Fantasy Award twice, for novel Bid Time Return (1975) and his collection Richard Matheson: Collected Stories (1989). Read his Entertainment Weekly obituary here.

ARAK Issue 1: The Sword and the Serpent!

ARAK Issue 1: The Sword and the Serpent!

Comments 2 comments

araksonofthunder1In the summer of 1981, DC Comics proudly presented “the coming of a great new hero who stalks the fear-haunted shadows of an age of darkness” — Arak, Son of Thunder!

Arak was brought to life by Roy Thomas, who’d cut his sword-and-sorcery eyeteeth launching the most successful S&S comic-book franchise ever over at Marvel (the line of Conan titles), and penciler Ernie Colon. It had all the earmarks of such titles — swashbuckling action, magic, monsters, and mayhem — but Arak was not just another generic brute barbarian among the sundry pale imitations of Robert E. Howard’s iconic character. No, Thomas seems to have had bigger ambitions for this epic tale, both in its historical moorings and its complexity.

Thomas uses the back page, the one later reserved for a letters column, to explain what he was up to, in an editorial entitled “A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD, DC-STYLE!”

The editorial begins with the observation “They called them the DARK AGES — but we hope to make them blaze with the light of adventure and heroism.”

What follows that intriguing lead line is a brief history lesson of the “latter half of the first millennium A.D.,” during which this series is set. Of course, Howard himself used a quasi-historical background for his famous barbarian, but the “Hyborian Age” was set so far in the shadowy past that he had a good deal of leeway. By conceiving his story as historical fantasy set in a more recent era, Thomas does create more work for himself, although, granted, there probably weren’t too many medieval historians who would be reading the comic and calling him out (I certainly wouldn’t know if he got some minor detail wrong about the court of the king of the Franks).

Where his leeway lies — and where he really gets to have fun and play — is in the fact that he clearly defines this as alternate history, predicated on this premise: “Ah, but what if there were another earth somewhere — a parallel planet, existing but a heartbeat away from our world yet forever separated from it — an earth on which events and names and geography were much like our own, but with one all-important difference: What if, on that world…MAGIC WORKED?”

…

Read More Read More

Pathfinder RPG: Fey Revisited

Pathfinder RPG: Fey Revisited

Comments 4 comments

FeyRevisitedMagic permeates fantasy settings, but even in these realms, there is a type of creature that typically embodies these magical forces in a more fundamental way than anything else. I am speaking of the ubiquitous fey, creatures who are often depicted as being born of magic .

Now many of the major fey races have been collected together into the Pathfinder Campaign Setting supplement Fey Revisited (Paizo, Amazon). The fey creatures in Pathfinder are natives to the First World, which was the gods’ first draft of reality, and as such they have only a tenuous grasp on mortality … and, often, on morality, for that matter.

The timing on this supplement is extremely good for me personally, since I’m running a campaign that is set in the Pathfinder world of Golarion, in Nirmathas. The forest in Nirmathas, the Southern Fangwood, currently has a situation going on where there’s a fungal disease that infects only fey. So having a sourcebook that outlines various different types of fey is extremely useful.

…

Read More Read More

Adventure on Film: Merlin

Adventure on Film: Merlin

Comments 1 comment

shot08Bad films reek, and at a distance, too.

Bad Arthurian films have a special odor all their own. John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981)  may be a mess, but it’s a glorious mess, chaos of the highest and noblest order; in retrospect, it smells remarkably sweet.

Sadly, where Excalibur rises above both its Wagnerian grand guignol and its elaborate and intentional eccentricities, the mini-series Merlin (1998) sinks beneath a morass of imitative, careless, and flashy choices. It’s like a pretty stone chucked into dark and thankless waters: for an instant, on its way down, it glimmers. And then, blessedly, three hours later, it’s gone.

The star-studded cast is jaw-dropping. A film that boasts John Gielgud, Miranda Richardson, James Earl Jones (voice only), Isabella Rossellini, Rutger Hauer, Billie Whitelaw, and Helena Bonham Carter shouldn’t be a failure –– such an outcome shouldn’t be possible –– but as with so many popular music albums featuring a glittering luminati of “guest stars” and “collaborators,” star power proves to be yet another form of lead weight. Without the grace of good storytelling and with far too many overwrought effects, even the best actors on the planet prove to be nothing more than celluloid cannon fodder.

…

Read More Read More

Art of the Genre: Looking Back at Old Readings with Neil and Fritz Leiber

Art of the Genre: Looking Back at Old Readings with Neil and Fritz Leiber

Comments 5 comments

neil_gaiman_f1Neil Gaiman and I have a strange relationship, that being that we have no relationship whatsoever. That said, I take full responsibility for our lack of communication as the first time I turned my nose up at speaking privately with Neil was back in 1993 at the Diamond Comic Distributors convention in Atlanta.

So there I was, two floors above the off-entry lounge and looking over a railing when Neil, in his usual black, walked into the empty square couches all alone, kicked up his feet, and just sat there for a full twenty minutes without a soul coming to disturb him. Sure, I could have gone to the elevator behind me, traveled down and taken a seat, asking Neil how it felt to have Tori Amos sing about hanging out with him and the Dream King on her Little Earthquakes album, but no, I just wasn’t that into doing so. [Perhaps the most intriguing part of this tale is that I timed his small respite from the convention crowds on my wristwatch, and neither he nor I had the use of a smartphone to keep our attention… ah, what a massively different world we once lived in!]

Fast forward to San Diego and the 2011 World Fantasy Convention. Again, fate would put me in Neil’s path, this time after he’d given a secondary non-sanctioned signing session when the convention had forced him to close his first one because it went too long. Between restaurants, Neil took a moment amid the palm fronds to collect himself as the convention broke down and people said goodbye around his private island unaware. Me, having said farewell to my Black Gate crew, witnessed this act of peaceful contemplation and decided yet again that Neil and I just weren’t in the right place for a confab.

…

Read More Read More

Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part Four

Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part Four

Comments 0 Comment

The Death of the NecromancerBlack Gate is very proud to present Part Four of Martha Wells’s Nebula Award-nominated novel, The Death of the Necromancer, presented complete online for the first time. On her blog, Martha describes the book thusly:

It’s basically about a Moriarty-like master criminal and his friends in an otherworldy version of La Belle Epoque Paris with magic, who get involved in a clandestine battle with a sorcerer who seems to be trying to raise the dead.

And Publishers Weekly had this to say about the novel:

The setting echoes with the lively sounds and sights of turn-of-18th-century France, with a mesh of dark magic woven throughout. In her third novel, Wells (City of Bones; The Element of Fire) continues to demonstrate an impressive gift for creating finely detailed fantasy worlds rife with many-layered intrigues and immensely personable characters.

Martha Wells is the author of fourteen fantasy novels, including City of Bones, The Element of Fire, The Cloud Roads, and The Serpent Sea. Her most recent novel is the YA fantasy, Emilie and the Hollow World, published by Strange Chemistry Books in April. Her previous fiction for us includes “Reflections” in Black Gate 10, “Holy Places” (BG 11), and “Houses of the Dead“ (BG 12). Her most recent article for us was “How Well Does The Cloud Roads Fit as Sword and Sorcery?,” which appeared here March 13. Her web site is www.marthawells.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mary Catelli, Michael Penkas, Vera Nazarian, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

The Death of the Necromancer was originally published in hardcover by Avon EOS in 1998. The complete, unedited text is being presented here; it began on June 2 with the first four chapters here.

Part Four includes Chapters Fourteen through Eighteen. It is offered at no cost.

Read Part Four of the complete novel here.

Vintage Treasures: Tales of Outer Space, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: Tales of Outer Space, edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Comments 9 comments

Tales of Outer SpaceSometimes I think I owe Donald A. Wollheim for a big chunk of my childhood.

Today we’re looking at Tales of Outer Space, a collection of interplanetary adventure tales edited by Wollheim in 1954, a decade after he invented the mass-market SF anthology with The Pocket Book of Science Fiction in 1943 (the first book with the words “Science Fiction” in the title), and not long after he produced  the first original SF anthology, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, in 1947.

That’s some pioneering stuff. But Wollheim spent most of his career as a pioneer. From 1947 to 1951, he was the editor of Avon Books, where he introduced mainstream America to mass-market editions of some of the best fantasy from the pulp era — including Ralph Milne Farley’s An Earth Man on Venus (which I discussed last month), A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, and eighteen issues of the highly sought-after fantasy paperback magazine, The Avon Fantasy Reader, among many other accomplishments. He even published C. S. Lewis’s Silent Planet space trilogy.

In 1952, Wollheim left Avon to spearhead a new paperback imprint, Ace Books, where he remained for 20 years. While there, he added science fiction to their lineup for the first time and, in a stroke of brilliance which endeared him to future generations of paperback collectors, invented the Ace Double in 1952.

You may have heard of some of his other successes at Ace as well: he first introduced Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings to the US in 1964 (against Tolkien’s wishes, as it happened) and published Frank Herbert’s obscure hardcover Dune in a paperback edition that made it a bestseller in 1965.

That ought to be enough for anyone. But of course, as many of you know, it wasn’t enough for Wollheim. In 1971, he left Ace to found his own publishing company, which bore his initials. DAW was the first mass market publisher to specialize in SF and fantasy, and before his death in 1990, it had acquired and published over a thousand titles, making it one of the most successful genre publishers of all time.

Of course, most of that was in Wollheim’s future when he released Tales of Outer Space — but the seeds of greatness were already there for anyone who looked.

…

Read More Read More

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Circle of Enemies

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Circle of Enemies

Comments 1 comment

Circle of EnemiesCircle of enemies cover
By Harry Connolly
Del Rey (320 pages, mass market first edition August 2011, $7.99)

And so we come full circle. Circle of Enemies is the final novel in the Twenty Palaces series as it stands, and in some ways the most crowded with monsters, sorcery, and mysteries. If it has one major flaw, it’s that it whet my appetite for a sequel that will likely never be written.

The action moves south from the Pacific northwest hamlets of Child of Fire (my review here) and Game of Cages (review) to the sun-scorched sidewalks and shadowy mansions of Los Angeles, as Ray revisits the life he lived before his stay in prison. One of his old friends from his carjacker days — a woman named Caramella — arrives in Ray’s Seattle room with a cryptic message: “You killed me, Ray.” After delivering it, she vanishes into thin air.

Magic — and all the horrors that accompany it — have found Ray’s old crew. He drives south to his old stomping grounds in Los Angeles to find his old allies and save them before the Twenty Palaces society arrives to wipe them out. The world is once again in danger from a predator with the potential to annihilate all human life, one hapless victim at a time.

…

Read More Read More