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The Scariest Hour in TV History: Space 1999: “Dragon’s Domain”

The Scariest Hour in TV History: Space 1999: “Dragon’s Domain”

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What IS the scariest single hour of TV ever? Something out of Night Gallery, perhaps, or one of the space1999-07more high octane Twilight Zone episodes? Star Trek’s “The Devil in the Dark?” What about recent vintages like True Blood, or some modern-day zombie flick? Salem’s Lot was made for TV and that has chills aplenty, but it’s far longer than an hour.

What’s left?

Space 1999. That’s right. Not usually a rock ‘em-sock ‘em sort of program, and definitely relegated now to the “dated” category, but still… for one awful hour in 1975, Space 1999 changed my life.

Let me admit up front that I was a scaredy-cat kid. If a more frightened child ever existed, I have yet to meet him, her, or it. I was scared of the dark, terrified of the basement, and petrified of being alone: demonstrating fear of abandonment in all its forms, from sensorial to parental. For years, in watching TV broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz, I never once saw the Wicked Witch; at the least hint that she was to make an appearance, I’d flee the room.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “Assault and Battery” by Jason E. Thummel

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Assault and Battery” by Jason E. Thummel

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Jason E. Thummel 2Gunnerman Clap, the hero of “The Gunnerman,” returns in a tale of a daring night assault on a cliffside fortress:

Up they climbed, gusted by winds determined to knock them from their perch on the rock. Clap kept his mermaid’s tooth talisman close as he kept reminding Shullum that he was a sailor true, that it wasn’t his fault he was on land, that he really wished to return to the sea, to the ship, and that any protection the Great God of the Deep could lend would be much appreciated.

Ahead they could make out the flickering flame of a storm lantern, dimly illuminating a doorway that looked little protected by the overhang of a small roof. The same could be said of the drenched rat of a guard, huddled up in oiled skins with hat brim pulled to cover his face. Illsby gestured to several marines.

“Soon I be sending the souls I promised you, Great Shullum.” Clap tucked his talisman under his shirt and put a calloused hand on the worn hilt of his cutlass.

The guard’s head jerked up as the marines leapt into the small sphere of light and one clobbered the senses from him. One marine quickly searched the downed man as the other waved them forward; Clap and the rest jogged behind Illsby to crowd under the scant cover of the overhang.

The marines unpacked their rifles and affixed bayonets. The long lengths of steel looked thin and fragile to Clap, and he was thankful for the seaman’s sword that he carried. The buckler would have been nice, but he’d lost that when the boat went down. “Not that I’m in any hurry to be reunited,” he whispered.

Jason’s first story for us was “The Duelist,” published as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction line on September 30th, 2012. His work has also appeared in Flashing Swords magazine, Rage of the Behemoth, Magic and Mechanica, and other venues. Some of his sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy is collected in In Savage Lands and The Harsh Suns, and the first two novels chronicling the supernatural adventures of occult detective Lance Chambers, The Spear of Destiny and Cult of Death, are now available.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Ryan Harvey, Steven H Silver, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Emily Mah, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

“Assault and Battery” is a complete 5,200-word sword & sorcery tale offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

The Top 12 Black Gate Fiction Posts in March

The Top 12 Black Gate Fiction Posts in March

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bones-of-the-old-onesNovel excerpts were the top draw last month, as Howard Andrew Jones held the top spot for a third month in a row with tantalizing slice of sword-and-sorcery goodness from The Bones of the Old Ones, followed closely by The Waters of Darkness, the new supernatural pirate novel from from David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna. And Vaughn Heppner’s novel Star Soldier was not much further down the list.

Still, short fiction proved plenty popular, with stories by Aaron Bradford Starr, Joe Bonadonna, David Evan Harris, Judith Berman, E.E. Knight, Gregory Bierly, John R. Fultz, Harry Connolly and Vaughn Heppner filling out the Top 12.

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 Twelve most read stories in March, for your enjoyment:

  1. An excerpt from The Bones of the Old Ones, by Howard Andrew Jones
  2. An excerpt from The Waters of Darkness, by David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna
  3. “The Sealord’s Successor,” by Aaron Bradford Starr
  4. “The Moonstones of Sor Lunarum,” by Joe Bonadonna
  5. “Seeker of Fortune,” by David Evan Harris
  6. “The Poison Well,” by Judith Berman
  7. “The Terror in the Vale,” by E.E. Knight
  8. “A Princess of Jadh,” by Gregory Bierly
  9. “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” by John R. Fultz
  10. “The Whoremaster of Pald,” by Harry Connolly
  11. An excerpt from Star Soldier,” by Vaughn Heppner
  12. “The Pit Slave,” by Vaughn Heppner

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Ryan Harvey, Steven H Silver, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Emily Mah, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here. The most popular Black Gate fiction from February is here.

We’ve got plenty more fiction in the coming months, so stay tuned!

Read Last Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary in Speculative Fiction 2012

Read Last Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary in Speculative Fiction 2012

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Speculative Fiction 2012It’s no surprise that some of the best and most insightful writing in 2012 took place on blogs.

Blogging — with its immediacy and ease of public access — has attracted some of the most gifted writers we have, and fantasy and SF readers are increasingly turning to the blogs and writers they trust for news and opinion. For the latest evidence, look no further than Speculative Fiction 2012, a new collection of the very best online reviews, essays, and commentary from Jurassic London press.

Speculative Fiction 2012 gathers over fifty of the best articles published last year, from the top tier of bloggers and authors in science fiction and fantasy. The contributor list includes some of the most acclaimed writers in the field, folks like Christopher Priest, N. K. Jemisin, Joe Abercrombie, Daniel Abraham, Elizabeth Bear, Myke Cole, Kate Elliott, Niall Alexander, Rose Lemberg, Kameron Hurley, Adam Roberts, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Sam Sykes, and Lavie Tidhar.

I’m very pleased to say that it also includes one of our own: Matthew David Surridge, whose February 2012 Black Gate article “Tolkien and Attila” is in the Table of Contents. Here’s what Matthew tells us:

This is out now, and has one of my Black Gate articles in it — to paraphrase the Amazon blurb, a look at what Tolkien learned from Attila the Hun. Happy to have a piece of mine in a very strong line-up! And worth noting: proceeds from the sale of the book go to a charity promoting international literacy and education.

You can read the announcement, including the complete list of contributors, here, and Matthew’s original article is here.

Speculative Fiction 2012 was edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin, with a foreword by Mur Lafferty. It published on April 23, 2013 by Jurassic London. It is 380 pages in paperback, priced at $11.99. There is no digital edition.

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

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people-of-the-black-circleI may have more books by Robert E. Howard in my collection than any other writer.

I’m not certain, as I haven’t counted, and if you allow anthologies then he’ll be beaten out handily by folks like Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. But the venerable Mr. Howard occupies more than two shelves in my library, which is astounding for someone who died at the age of thirty.

I came to Howard early. The first story I read by REH was “Pigeons from Hell,” which Charles Saunders mentioned in a speech he gave to the Ottawa Science Fiction Society in 1981, the year his groundbreaking Imaro was released. “Horror doesn’t usually scare me,” he told us. “‘Pigeons From Hell’ scared me.”

I think the second REH tale I read was the Solomon Kane tale “Skulls in the Stars,” which I enjoyed even more. (I wrote about the two Bantam Solomon Kane collections, Skulls in the Stars and The Hills of the Dead, last year.)

But I wasn’t a Conan fan. Most of it was prejudice — in those days, all those novels with barbarians on the cover were considered the lowest form of fantasy, and I generally snubbed them. Oddly, I don’t think I even associated Conan with Robert E. Howard.

I surreptitiously tried a Conan book in my early teens, a collection of tales mostly by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, if I remember correctly. Didn’t impress me. That was all I needed to confirm that I was better than this stuff and return to reading books of quality, like Perry Rhodan and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.

All that began to change with The People of the Black Circle, a Christmas gift from my brother Michael.

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Intrigue and Dinosaur Beasts: Tangent Online on “The Sorrowless Thief”

Intrigue and Dinosaur Beasts: Tangent Online on “The Sorrowless Thief”

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Ryan Harvey-smallJohn Sulyok at Tangent Online reviews Ryan Harvey’s sword & sorcery tale, published here on April 7:

The narrator, a beggar nearly given up on life, spends what little money he has in dream-smoke-filled drug dens, indulging in the illusions brought on by the smoke of the mokkah flower. What wanders in one night is no illusion, it is the thief Dyzan Ludd. He seems immune from the smoke, and immune from what has brought so many into the den: the Sorrow. These facts stir the narrator. He and Dyzan find themselves in conversation about Dyzan’s upcoming plan to rob a caravan coming from the north. It is a fool’s errand, but Dyzan doesn’t listen to reason…

Ryan Harvey’s “The Sorrowless Thief” exists as part of a larger science-fantasy series. The world of Dyzan includes few guns and many (magically) tamed dinosaur beasts… These surrounding details thicken the setting and the plot, adding a lot of intrigue to the events herein…

Ryan Harvey won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2011 for his story, “An Acolyte of Black Spires,” part of the science-fantasy series on the continent of Ahn-Tarqa, which is also the setting for “The Sorrowless Thief,” his ebook novelette “Farewell to Tyrn,” and upcoming novel Turn over the Moon. He writes a regular weekly column at Black Gate. Read John’s complete review here.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Steven H Silver, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Emily Mah, David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, Aaron Bradford Starr, C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, E.E. Knight, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“The Sorrowless Thief” is a complete 7,000-word sword-and-sorcery tale. It is offered at no cost. Read the complete story here.

Pass the Salt, Please

Pass the Salt, Please

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DinnerAccording to some people, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food. That’s right, I’m one of those people who start planning lunch while we’re still sitting at the breakfast table. But, see, there’s a reason for that: something might need to come out of the freezer, or come in from the garden.

I also have a good grasp on where my food comes from. As a child, one of my aunts kept chickens in her patio, and we kids used to flush rabbits for my uncle and his friends to kill with sling shots – real slings, by the way, not catapults.

Now that I live in the country, I buy meat and cheese from the people who produce them – my neighbours. I also have a very large garden where I grow my own produce, and as it happens, there’s not a lot about freezing, canning, and preserving that I don’t know.

One thing’s for sure: it takes up a lot of time. And in a pre-industrial age – the time period that most of us use for our secondary world fantasies – it took up almost all of the time. So why don’t we see more of it in our books? Well, it’s just that, for most of us, how to get dinner, where dinner comes from, how to pay for it, grow it, etc. isn’t the story we want to tell – nor the story our readers want to read.

But as I’ve suggested already (and no doubt will again), this is information we need to know. Not doing this right – or not doing it or at all –  is the mark of an amateur. Sometimes, in our modern technological world, we’re so far removed from how the food gets produced, that we can easily make serious mistakes – or worse, overlook significant motivation – by not understanding where food comes from, and how it was produced in a pre-industrial age.

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Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness

Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness

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waters darknessfrazetta pirate-smallWaters of Darkness is the new novel from David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, published by Damnation Books. Longtime readers of my column will recognize Bonadonna as the author of the well-received sword & sorcery title, Mad Shadows and the recent space fantasy, Three Against the Stars. David C. Smith will be familiar to Robert E. Howard fans for his series of Red Sonja novels in the 1980s.

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.

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Goth Chick News: Walpurgisnacht, or Those Germans Know How to Party

Goth Chick News: Walpurgisnacht, or Those Germans Know How to Party

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redrum2As you may (or may not) have noticed, there was no Goth Chick News last week. This was due to my need to spend a little quality time outside of the office with my blender and a bottle of Red Rum.

No I’m not making that up – Red Rum is for real and it’s my fav and so much for those of you who thought this was all an act and I really spend my vacations in Branson, Missouri drinking ginger ale.

Beyond just sitting around soaking up sun and exploring the many different uses for a quality bottle of spirits, I was also deeply engaged in researching an interesting phenomenon that I only just discovered. The impetus was a Black Gate chat with a charming German fellow, who shared it with me just before sliding out of his lounge chair and out onto the deck… where he was promptly collected and hustled away before completing his tale, prompting me to order up another Red Rum and research this intriguing bit of info.

Apparently, the Germans celebrate their version of Halloween on April 30th and unlike the American version, the German take is decidedly “adult” and the “candy” involved is largely a euphemism.

The Walpurgisnacht festival takes its name from Walpurga of Devon, England, an abbess from the 700’s who was canonized as the patron saint of rabies – yes rabies.

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New Treasures: Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna

New Treasures: Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna

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Dangerous Waters Juliet E McKennaI’m such a sucker for paperbacks. Seriously, put a rogue with a sword and a ship on the cover, and I’ve got that thing to the cash register faster than you can say, “Paper or plastic?”

I think it’s partly because I find paperbacks very inexpensive. That wasn’t always the case. When I  made my weekly pilgrimage to downtown Ottawa bookstores in my teens, clutching ten bucks of hard-earned babysitting money, that was barely enough to get 2-3 paperbacks — if I was selective.

I agonized over each choice. Keith Laumer’s The Time Bender, or Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Death? Edgar Pangborn’s West of the Sun, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth? These are the life choices that kept me up at night.

Today things are easier. For one thing, paperback prices haven’t budged in over 15 years. I paid $7.99 for a paperback copy of Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog in 1998, and I paid $7.99 for the copy of Juliet E. McKenna’s Dangerous Waters I bought last week.

That’s an incredibly long period for anything to be stable in publishing — look at how paperback prices quadrupled in the 15 years between 1965 (around a buck) and 1980 (around 4-5 bucks).

Paperback prices won’t stay this way for long. But while they do, I’m enjoying them. $7.99 (minus my 10% Barnes & Noble member discount) is still an impulse buy for me. Which means I can pick up a book based on nothing more than a cool cover, and take it home guilt free.

I have no idea what it says on the back of Dangerous Waters, but I think I’ll read it now and find out.

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