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Released This Week: Upside Down

Released This Week: Upside Down

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Upside Down, the French-Canadian science fiction romance starring Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess, finally gets a U.S. release this week.

The film is visually gorgeous — just have a look at the trailer below. It also has an intriguing and unique premise (although I had a tough time explaining it to my son Tim, whose high school physics required him to challenge just how separate planetary gravities might work. It’s Hollywood Tim, just go with it). The film does not have anything resembling a wide release, at least not here in Chicago, but it might be well worth tracking it down. Or at least waiting for the DVD.

Upside Down was produced by Millennium Entertainment and released on March 15. The website, with additional trailers, behind-the-scenes info, and photo galleries, is here.

Vintage Treasures: Was Morlock Night by K.W. Jeter the First True Steampunk novel?

Vintage Treasures: Was Morlock Night by K.W. Jeter the First True Steampunk novel?

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Morlock nightI have vivid memories of watching George Pal’s science fiction thriller The Time Machine — based on the classic novel by H.G. Wells — in a theater, even though it came out in 1960, four years before I was born. Likely I saw it in an auditorium during a Cub Scouts movie night, or something. In any event, I remember the Morlocks. Scary, scary dudes.

In the last ten years there’s been an explosion of sequels to classic fiction. You don’t have to look far to find examples; not with Oz the Great and Powerful playing in theaters, and shelves and shelves of Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austin sequels crowding bookstores.

Typically, however, K.W. Jeter — the man who created the word “Steampunk” — was there first, with the novel Morlock Night in 1979. Morlock Night explores what might have happened if the Time Traveler’s wonderful machine fell into the hands of the Morlocks and they used it to return to Victorian England and turn London into their new hunting ground.

Morlock Night is full of surprises, as the premise becomes the launching point for a fast-paced fantasy involving King Arthur and Merlin, Excalibur, an ancient Atlantean submarine, and the fabric of the Cosmos being torn to the ripping point by the paradoxes of time travel… standard steampunk fare by today’s standards, but that was pretty wild stuff in 1979.

In his now-famous letter to Locus in April 1987, Jeter was the first to use the word “steampunk” to describe this book, and the strange and exciting new sub-genre of retro-adventure fantasy also being written by Tim Powers and James Blaylock:

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term… like “steampunks,” perhaps…

Morlock Knight was out of print for over three decades, until Angry Robot reprinted it in a handsome new edition in April, 2011. It was originally published in paperback by DAW in June 1979, with a vivid (and very yellow) cover by Josh Kirby, who later became renowned for his Discworld covers (click the image for a bigger version). It is 156 pages, originally priced at $1.75; the new edition is $7.99 ($6.99 for the digital version).

New Treasures: Blood’s Pride by Evie Manieri

New Treasures: Blood’s Pride by Evie Manieri

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Blood's PrideI’m still reading the books I picked up over the weekend — including Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, and Karen Heuler’s fascinating collection The Inner City. Heck, I haven’t even finished the digital version of The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination I bought weeks ago. I suck.

Fortunately, sucking as a reader isn’t a crime (yet). And besides, it’s hard to stay focused when so many delicious new titles cross my desk every day. Titles like Evie Manieri’s intriguing first novel Blood’s Pride, which promises a tale of vengeance, conquest & rebellion, and long-buried secrets.

Rising from their sea-torn ships like vengeful, pale phantoms, the Norlanders laid waste to the Shadar under cover of darkness. They forced the once-peaceful fisher folk into slavery and forged an alliance with their former trading partners, the desert-dwelling Nomas tribe, cutting off any hope of salvation.

Now, two decades after the invasion, a rebellion gathers strength in the dark corridors of the city. A small faction of Shadari have hired the Mongrel, an infamous mercenary, to aid their fledgling uprising — but with her own shadowy ties to the region, she is a frighteningly volatile ally. Has she really come to lead a revolution, or for a more sinister purpose all her own?

The eye-catching cover art is by Kekai Kotaki — click on the image for a bigger version. Evie Manieri is a graduate of Wesleyan University with a double major in medieval history and theater — a promising mix for a career as a fantasy novelist. She lives in New York. According to her website bio this is the first novel in the Shattered Kingdoms trilogy; the next installment, Fortune’s Blight, is due out in the Fall.

Blood’s Pride was published on February 19, 2013 by Tor Books. It is 516 pages in hardcover, priced at $24.99.

Red Sonja 15

Red Sonja 15

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Red Sonja 15 coverI know I’ve gone on about this before, but cover spoilers can ruin an otherwise great story. Seriously, click the cover to Red Sonja 15 and tell me if you can guess the secret of the three dead kings. Honestly, even the title (The Tomb of Three Dead Kings!) practically gives it away.

So it is a little surprising when we open to page one and find … a mummy. Just some guy wrapped in cloth strips, surrounded by a circle of swords in the snow. Sonja stops at the sight of him and is about to take a closer look when she sees three men dressed like kings (spoiler, they are) riding in the distance. So what’s an adventurer to do? Investigate the mummy or the three kings riding together in the dark?

Sonja opts for neither. Instead, she heads in the opposite direction to a sleepy little town where she finds a warm inn to relax in.

Of course, Red Sonja’s idea of relaxing includes beating everyone at dice until her satchel is full of coins and everyone at the inn is mad at her. She gets invited into the backroom by three of the losers, only to get attacked. Even though she’s expecting it, one of them gets a lucky shot and Sonja’s quickly stripped of her sword and purse, then thrown out in the snow.

Even with her cloak, that bikini isn’t helping much in the snow. And, honestly, why would she still be wearing a bikini in the dead of winter? In fact, a metal bikini would get even colder than a regular cloth one. Even her horse is wearing a blanket.

Fortunately, Red Sonja always keeps an emergency coin in her boot, so she has enough to cover a crappy inn on the other side of town. Before she goes, she manages to steal a sword by holding a passerby at knife-point. Near as I can tell, this is just one of the shlubs she beat at dice a few hours earlier. He’s not one of the guys who attacked her and he didn’t even try to hold out on what he owed. He just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and now Sonja has a new sword.

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Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

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White Buffalo One SheetWarner Archive has so far received all the attention in my recent veer into the world of the manufacture-on-demand DVD, a dazzling universe where the big studios serve the niche movie lovers with titles that would otherwise only surface in North America on bootlegs swiped off Japanese laserdiscs. (Yeah, you own a couple of those.) Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, The Bermuda Depths, and The Last Dinosaur all come from Warner Brothers’ MOD division. But two other studios have their own extensive MOD programs: MGM Limited Edition Collection and Universal Vault. It’s through MGM that we get the strange 1977 combo of Western and monster movie called The White Buffalo.

My first experience with The White Buffalo, aside from seeing ads on local television stations when it ran during “Charles Bronson Tough Guy Week,” was on an awful first-generation VHS tape I watched during college as part of an independent study of the 1970s Western. The movie was drab and a cruel disappointment considering how exciting the plot description sounded: “Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse team up to hunt down a giant, possibly supernatural, white buffalo on a rampage.” How could such a crunchy high-concept result in such a bland film?

Blame “VHS goggles,” which turned the movie’s photography into mulch. The difference in The White Buffalo experience between VHS and DVD is substantial. Although the MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD is rough compared to today’s Blu-rays, it is about as good as the picture could look in standard definition without undergoing hefty restoration. The movie isn’t a lost classic, but it wins in the realm of atmosphere: eerie and bleak. The artifice of the limited budget, which puts most of the nighttime and snowbound scenes against the Buffalo on obvious interior sets, contributes to the dream-like atmosphere. That may be an accident of filming, but it’s a positive creative accident. The White Buffalo never succeeds as an action thriller, but it remains a fascinating piece of odd Western cinema of the 1970s, a decade filled with plenty of oddness for the grand ol’ American genre. The current popularity of the Weird Western and steampunk subgenres gives the movie a freshness that moves it beyond being only a “Manifest Destiny” take on Jaws.

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Releasing This Week: Warhammer 40K: Relic From Fantasy Flight Games

Releasing This Week: Warhammer 40K: Relic From Fantasy Flight Games

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Game Designers Workshop and Fantasy Flight — the folks behind the superb Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy role playing games — have teamed up once again to release Relic, an intriguing new board game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Based on the streamlined (and well-honed) mechanics of the Talisman fantasy games, Relic allows two to four players to assume the role of powerful Imperial heroes, and bravely venture forth to protect the Antian Sector. By completing card-based missions and defeating dangerous enemies of the Imperium — including Nurgling Swarms, Fallen Inquisitors, Ork Vulcha squads, and even a Tyranid Hive-ship — characters compete to gain rewards and experience, increasing their chances to advance and ultimately be the first to defeat the evil that lies beyond the Warp rift. See all the details in the compact video run-through below.

Relic was published today, Mar 18, 2013, by Fantasy Flight, under license from Games Workshop. The game contains a game board, 10 plastic character pieces and character sheets, mysterious attribute and life dials, more than 300 cards, tokens, 4 six-sided dice, and a handsome rulebook. It retails for $59.95.

Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey

Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey

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Loincloths: love ’em or hate ’em, it’s a fact that Tarzan and Conan weren’t the only Wilde runningmusclebound men to model the style. For proof, we need look no farther than The Naked Prey (1966).

But first, let’s time-warp back to 1980. Required reading in my junior high meant immersion in Richard Connell’s short, “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which humans are both predator and prey. It’s an old idea, but rarely presented quite as starkly as in this story, wherein a big game hunter in the Colonial tradition seeks one final thrill before hanging up his boots. As in a few Dame Agatha novels and a great many summer camp slashers, the hunter’s weekend guests become his targets.

What we teen readers were supposed to glean from “The Most Dangerous Game,” I have no idea, and I might well have forgotten the entire piece had it not been for my stumbling onto The Naked Prey a few years later. Watching this celluloid take on man hunting man transported me sharply back to the Connell story and even, if my failing memory serves, prompted me to re-read it.

In The Naked Prey, Cornel Wilde’s wily explorer-hero is actually credited as “Man.” If he has another name, we never learn it. He doesn’t really need one, although a nickname might be helpful. If I were his parent, I’d call him Determination Personified.

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Fantastic, January 1965: A Retro-Review

Fantastic, January 1965: A Retro-Review

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Fantastic Stories of Imagination January 1965Now an issue of Fantastic from very late in Cele Goldsmith Lalli’s tenure. I’ll note first that the subtitle of the magazine is “Stories of Imagination.” What this means, it appears, is that Fantasy is allowed, but not required.

I had a notion that Fantastic at this time was a Fantasy magazine, but that’s not the case yet. (It was, pretty much, by the time I was subscribing, during Ted White’s era in the mid-70s.) It should be noted, however, that  from September 1959 to September 1960 the subtitle was “Science Fiction Stories” – so certainly “Stories of Imagination” implies a more wide range of stories.

I suppose that in 1965, Fantasy was not yet a self-supporting category – Tolkien’s books were just about then exploding in popularity, and I guess it was with those that a separate category was born. Indeed, the “standard history” places the origin of Fantasy as a truly separate category in the mid-60s, pushed not only by Tolkien, but the success of Lancer’s Conan reprints – in a sense, the deal was sealed with Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series in the late 60s, and things were confirmed with Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara and then Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series in the mid-to-late ’70s.

The cover is by Ed Emshwiller, illustrating John Jakes’s short story “The Girl in the Gem” (who for once doesn’t look like his wife Carol). Interiors are by Emsh and Schelling. Besides house ads, there are full page ads for the Rosicruans, and for the Consumer Service Company (purveyors, it seems, of flashlights and such). Also, there are spot ads for C.A.R.E., Hollywood Music Productions (looking for songwriters), and for G. P. Putnams (advertising Farnham’s Freehold)).

The editorial, signed as usual by Norman Lobsenz, discusses the character of Brak the Barbarian (hero of the Jakes cover story), comparing him to Conan and Fafhrd, to Brak’s advantage. (I can hardly agree.)

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Weird of Oz Revisits Fighting Fantasy

Weird of Oz Revisits Fighting Fantasy

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0426111757Rogue Blades Entertainment continues to put out fine new projects — though, I lament, with far less frequency than in days of yore.

Also in those days of yore (about two years ago, to be precise), for a brief, shining, halcyon period of time (a few months, to be precise), RBE hosted a website that ran regular blogs under the banner “Home of Heroics.” It was my good fortune to be invited into HoH’s stable of bloggers, and I made a couple contributions before that heroism-vaunting home vanished like the fabled city of Xanadu. I only got in two or three posts, mind you, because I was on a monthly rotation rather than the weekly slot I enjoy here on Black Gate.

One of those posts that I wanted eventually to follow up on was an account of my experience revisiting Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. My report touched off similar nostalgic reminiscences from several readers.

Since, as far as I can tell, the material that ran on HoH is no longer accessible, I’d like to use this St. Patrick’s Day edition of Weird of Oz to resurrect that post here — with an eye to reviewing other single-player gamebooks down the road.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “Seeker of Fortune” by David Evan Harris

Black Gate Online Fiction: “Seeker of Fortune” by David Evan Harris

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David Evan Harris2John Sherman has a gift… a gift that’s brought him to the attention of the wrong people. Getting out will take a lot of luck — and some very quick thinking.

John had never tamped anyone into the black before. He had seen Ronnie do it, twice. The first had been a young guy on a motorcycle, maybe nineteen or twenty. Veronica had tucked her long black hair behind her ears, then focused on the target. The kid had looked right at them, a puzzled look on his face, sweat suddenly pooling on his forehead, and then something had come out of the bed of a pickup heading the other way, something small and sharp that struck the kid squarely in his left eye.

For a second it seemed he would keep the bike from toppling, even as his hand flew to his face. Then he lost it, not even laying the bike down, a skid morphing into a tumble, and John thought or imagined he could hear his neck snap when he hit the pavement. Veronica, utterly calm, had looked at John, who was open mouthed and shaking.

“So now you’ve seen,” she’d said, and they had never spoken of it again.

David Evan Harris’s first fiction sale, “The Mudslinger,” was published in Black Gate 11. It was one of the most acclaimed stories in the issue, and Grasping For the Wind said, “Harris has the makings of an epic fantasy… I look forward to more.” He is a lawyer in California.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Aaron Bradford Starr, Mark Rigney, C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, E.E. Knight, Jason E. Thummel, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.

“Seeker of Fortune”  is a complete 7,300-word short story of contemporary fantasy. It is offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.