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Category: Editor’s Blog

The blog posts of Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones and Editor John O’Neill

Gary Con IV Report

Gary Con IV Report

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gary-con2Yesterday I drove up to Lake Geneva, the birthplace of Dungeons and Dragons, for Gary Con IV, the annual gathering in honor of Gary Gygax, the father of role-playing games.

I really enjoy Gary Con. In both locale and tone it’s very much what I imagine the earliest GenCon gaming conventions — which took place in Lake Geneva over thirty years ago — were like.

Just like the early GenCons it’s small and very friendly, with a focus on vintage gaming and first edition D&D/AD&D, with many early TSR employees and industry giants from that era in attendance.

Just a few of the distinguished guests this year included Basic D&D boxed set author Frank  Mentzer; Knights of the Dinner Table creator Jolly Blackburn; author and Dragonlance co-creator Margaret Weis; long-time TSR employee Mike Carr, author of In Search of the Unknown and many others; Troll Lord Games CEO Stephen Chenault; classic AD&D artists Jeff Easley and Jeff Dee; founding Dragon editor Tim Kask; KenzerCo chief David Kenzer; Metamorphosis Alpha creator Jame M. Ward;  Snit’s Revenge creator Tom Wham; Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 co-creator Skip Williams, and many others.

One of the marvelous things about small conventions, of course, is that it’s possible to talk to the guests — unlike big cons where they are usually mobbed.

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New Treasures: The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction

New Treasures: The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction

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wesleyan-anthologyWow. This may be the finest SF anthology I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the best I’ve come across in many years.

Editing an anthology — especially a reprint anthology — is a delicate balancing act. You want to include the very finest stories you can, of course. But you’d prefer not to fill your book with tales your readers have seen a dozen times over.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a book that manages this as well as The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Starting with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (published 1844) and ending with Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” (2008) it spans 164 years of science fiction publishing, including some of the finest SF stories ever written — Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931), James Patrick Kelly’s “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995) — alongside dozens I’ve never read. Virtually every major SF and fantasy short fiction writer of the last 164 years is represented, from H. G. Wells, C.L. Moore and Stanley Weinbaum to Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe and Charles Stross.

The Wesleyan Anthology has a grand total of six editors, which tells you right off the bat it’s an academic endeavor targeted at libraries and school curriculum. All six are editors for Science Fiction Studies, DePauw University’s long-running critical journal, and they do a fine job of introducing the tales. Now, academic anthologies like this usually don’t appeal to me. They typically devote a considerable page count to proto-SF of the late 1800s or early 1900s, and that stuff puts my feet to sleep.

Not this time.  By the fifth tale we’re already into the 1930s, and the editors pay proper respect to both the Golden Age of SF — the Campbell authors of the 1940s like Asimov and Simak — and the earlier pulp writers of the mid-30s such as Hamilton and Leslie F. Stone. They’ve even plucked some tales from the pulps that I’ve never heard of, and that takes some effort.

I first laid eyes on The Wesleyan Anthology at Wiscon last year when SF author Richard Chwedyk showed me his copy with some wonder and amazement. Alice bought me my copy for Christmas, and I’ve been slowly (very slowly) making my way through it. The Wesleyan Anthology is $39.95 for 787 pages in trade paperback, and is published by Wesleyan University Press. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

March/April Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine now on Sale

March/April Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine now on Sale

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mar-apr-2012-fsf-coverI think I’m a little late with this one, as this issue has maybe been on sale for a few weeks. Tisk, tisk. That’s what one little game auction will do to you.

Well, time to catch up.  The March/April issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, for those of you who haven’t read it already, is packed full of great stuff, including a brand new novelette by the incredible Peter S. Beagle, and short stories from Robert Reed, Steven Utley, Richard Bowes, Geoffrey Landis, Robert Walton and Barry N. Malzberg, C.S. Friedman, and a lot more. Here’s the complete fiction TOC:

NOVELETS

  • “Electrica”  – Sean McMullen
  • “Twenty-Two and You”  – Michael Blumlein
  • “Greed”  – Albert E. Cowdrey
  • “Gnarly Times at Nana’ite Beach”  – KJ Kabza
  • “Olfert Dapper’s Day”  – Peter S. Beagle

SHORT STORIES

  • “Repairmen”  – Tim Sullivan
  • “One Year of Fame”  – Robert Reed
  • “The Tortoise Grows Elate”  – Steven Utley
  • “The Queen and the Cambion”  – Richard Bowes
  • “Demiurge”  – Geoffrey Landis
  • “The Man Who Murdered Mozart”  – Robert Walton and Barry N. Malzberg
  • “Perfect Day”  – C.S. Friedman

The amazing Lois Tilton has already reviewed the complete issue at Locus Online. Here’s what she says about Beagle’s contribution, “Olfert Dapper’s Day”:

Dr Dapper, of no real medical degree, is forced to flee to the New World when his various frauds are revealed to the authorities of Utrecht. In the wilderness, among the comfortless Puritans, he has no alternative but to pose as a medical practitioner. Yet despite himself, he finds wonders and miracles in the wilderness.

A fine and moving fantasy. The author’s voice is quite engaging and his protagonist undergoes a memorable metamorphosis.

The cover price is $7.50, for a thick 258 pages. Cover artist this issue is David A. Hardy. More details at the F&SF website, including the complete text of book and film reviews by Charles de Lint, Chris Moriarty, Paul Di Filippo, and Lucius Shepard. We last covered F&SF here with the January/February issue.

A Time Capsule from 1983

A Time Capsule from 1983

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space-gamer-66Last month I wrote a lengthy blog post about Sword & Sorcery, a lavish fantasy board game published by SPI over three decades ago. In the comments section the topic soon turned, as it often does with us old-time gamers, to TSR’s purchase of the bankrupt remnants of SPI in 1983. Christian Lindke, a long-time reader, had some particularly astute observations:

While it is easy to blame TSR for what they did to SPI — and they deserve a lot of blame — one should keep two things in mind. First, when they purchased SPI it was in dire financial straights and would likely not have survived. Second, they had hoped to keep SPI’s staff, but those staff members refused to work for TSR — for varied reasons — and left to form the Victory Games studio over at Avalon Hill… A massive resurgence of publishing of SPI games happened under Lorraine Williams. We would never have seen the SPI monster TSR World War II game, or Wellington’s Victory, Sniper (including BugHunters), let alone the 3rd edition of DragonQuest…

There is an excellent issue of Fire and Movement, printed by Steve Jackson Games, that goes over the purchase of SPI.

I asked Christian if he could track the issue down, and he did more than that. He wrote an extensive and excellent blog post on the topic, and in a good bit of investigative reporting he tracks down a series of articles in Steve Jackson’s Space Gamer magazine that reveal more extensive details.

But it was this bombshell at the bottom of Christian’s article that I personally found much more startling.
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Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever

Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever

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Some of the science fiction and fantasy games up for bid at the Spring Games Plus auction (click for humungous version)
Some of the science fiction and fantasy games up for bid at the Spring Games Plus auction (click for supersize version).

Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL, is the finest games store in the Chicago area. Every spring and fall they hold a fabulous games auction.

Now, I don’t use that word lightly. I’ve been to some terrific games auctions in my time, starting with CanGames in Ottawa in the early 80s, then the friendly auctions at WinterWar in Champaign, IL where I was a grad student in the 90s.

And of course, for sheer quantity of items on offer, nothing beats the legendary GenCon auction, held over multiple days in Indianapolis every August.

But if you really, really want that rare gaming item, bidding against hundreds of hard core gaming fans from across the country at GenCon is a sure way to pay top dollar for it.

For real bargains, you need a small local auction. And I’ve never found one friendlier or more rewarding than the twice-a-year event at Games Plus, which is attended by perhaps a hundred gamers and collectors from the Chicago area.

It’s spread across four days and includes thousands of games of virtually every vintage and description, sorted into four categories. Occasionally I drop by Friday night for the Historical Games, especially when I’m on the hunt for hard-to-find Avalon Hill or SPI titles. But usually I save up for the main event: the Saturday Fantasy and Science Fiction auction, which starts at 10:00 a.m. and runs until early evening.

Knowing my lack of control in the past, my wife Alice gave me a strict budget this year. I was not to return home with more than $200 of auction loot. So you can imagine my measured apprehension when my winnings were totaled and the auctioneer handed me a bill for $1,667.75.

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Keep up with the Black Gate Staff with the BG Staff tag

Keep up with the Black Gate Staff with the BG Staff tag

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bg-patty-claire
Two members of the Black Gate staff, having more fun than you.

How is it that we have so much fun here at Black Gate? How are we so well connected to the very heartbeat of modern fantasy? How is it that so many incredible and exciting people stop by every month, to guide you towards the literature, art and music that will change your life?

Don’t look at me. I have no idea either.  I just pay the bills, and shut down the parties when the police show up.

But you don’t need me to tell you. The talented and rambunctious staff of Black Gate magazine bare all their secrets right here each week. And to help you keep up, I’ve finally added a BG Staff tag to the Categories section of our navigation menu at left.

What’s a BG Staff tag? You’re not paying attention, are you? You just drop by once a week hoping Scott Taylor will post more pics of near-naked redheads. All right, look. See that narrow column on the left, with the Search box at the top? About halfway down the page is a CATEGORIES section. That’s how we sort the thousands of blogs posts we’ve done here at Black Gate. Now you can just click “Art of the Genre” and ogle all the art you want, without all those pesky posts about books and stuff. You’re welcome.

And right below that link is the new BG Staff tag. It collects about 250 articles from the last few years covering news, interviews, and embarrassing personal revelations from the people behind Black Gate, including the many authors, artists and editors who’ve contributed to our pages over the years. It’s your one-stop-shop to discover the latest books from Devon Monk, John R. Fultz, Martha Wells, James Enge, Jonathan L. Howard, Harry Connolly, Peadar Ó Guilín, C.S.E. Cooney, Shawn L. Johnson, Rich Horton, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others.

You’ll find all the news about Ryan Harvey’s Writers of the Future Award; Harry Connolly on making his first book trailer with a hot model; how Howard Andrew Jones introduced C.S.E. Cooney to C.L. Moore; Bud Webster’s advice on book selling; which Black Gate author reached #1 on Amazon sales list; which BG staffer interviewed his own daughter, and a road trip to clone a woolly mammoth.

All that plus numerous convention reports, book excerpts, reviews, award news, self-publishing advice, agent hunts, first novel sales, online comics, zeppelins, and sadly even a few obituaries. It’s the entire circle of life here at Black Gate. Enjoy.

Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Deserter on sale Today

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deserterIf you’re a long-time Black Gate reader you know the name Peadar Ó Guilín.

His first story for us was “The Mourning Trees” (Black Gate 5), followed by “Where Beauty Lies in Wait” (BG 11) and “The Evil Eater” (BG 13), which Shedrick Pittman-Hassett of Serial Distractions called “a lovely little bit of Lovecraftian horror that still haunts me to this day.”

Peadar’s first novel The Inferior was published to terrific reviews in 2008. School Library Journal called it

[An] epic story of survival, betrayal, and community… intriguing at every turn, The Inferior will hold readers from page to page, chapter to chapter, to the very end.

After nearly four years the sequel has finally arrived, and it promises to be everything we’ve waited for. Here’s the book description:

The humans are weak and vulnerable. Soon the beasts that share their stone-age world will kill and eat them. To save his tribe, Stopmouth must make his way to the Roof, the mysterious hi-tech world above the surface. But the Roof has its own problems. The nano technology that controls everything from the environment to the human body is collapsing. A virus has already destroyed the Upstairs, sending millions of refugees to seek shelter below. And now a rebellion against the Commission, organized by the fanatical Religious, is about to break.

Hunted by the Commission’s Elite Agents through the overcrowded, decaying city of the future, Stopmouth must succeed in a hunt of his own: to find the secret power hidden in the Roof’s computerized brain, and return to his people before it is too late.

The Deserter is on available today in hardcover, and in digital format for the Kindle and Nook. It is 448 pages, and published by David Fickling Books.

To promote it, Peadar has released Where Beauty Lies In Wait, a free e-book collecting a dozen of his short stories, including all three from Black Gate. It’s available in Kindle, ePub and PDF versions, and you can get it here.

This week’s Bargain SF & Fantasy at Amazon.com

This week’s Bargain SF & Fantasy at Amazon.com

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batmanbeyond_s2Once again we report back from the deep-discount frontier, to let you know what Amazon.com is unloading on the cheap from the back of the warehouse.

This week’s selection includes over half a dozen top animated shows on DVD, including two seasons of my modern favorite, Batman Beyond. Season Two is marked down 81%:

halo_legends1

The last two books, Metatropolis and Mechanics of Wonder, also look pretty intriguing. As always, qualities for most of these titles are limited at these prices, so act fast. Shipping is not included, but for US buyers Amazon ships free if your total is above $25.

Many of last week’s discount titles are still available; you can see that list here.

Good luck, fellow bargain hunters!

Is John Carter a Flop?

Is John Carter a Flop?

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john-carterI’ve been enjoying Ryan Harvey’s enthusiastic review of the new Disney film John Carter, although I wasn’t able to make it to the local metroplex to see it myself this weekend. Apprently, I wasn’t the only one.

Entertainment Weekly, in assessing the weekend box office take, calls the film “one of the most high profile box office misfires in years.”

Carter really needed to open to $50 million at a bare minimum. Other films that reportedly cost around $250 million include Spider-Man 3, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Avatar, and those four movies debuted to an average of $99 million. John Carter, on the other hand, collected an estimated $30.6 million this weekend… a dismal showing for such a costly project.

Today’s New York Times, in an article titled Ishtar Lands on Mars, estimates the film’s total cost at closer to $350 million:

John Carter, which cost an estimated $350 million to make and market… took in about $30.6 million at the North American box office… That result is so poor that analysts estimate that Disney will be forced to take a quarterly write-down of $100 million to $165 million. The amount will depend on ticket sales overseas, where John Carter took in about $71 million over the weekend, a better total than Disney had feared…

Because of its enormous cost and the way ticket sales are split with theaters, analysts say the film needs to take in more than $600 million globally to break even. The only silver lining for Disney may be a dubious one: last March the studio’s Mars Needs Moms flopped so badly that it also required a write-down, making year-on-year performance comparisons less brutal.

Although the numbers look grim, $71 million overseas is nothing to sneeze at. With a combined weekend take over over $100 million, it may be too early to label John Carter a clear bomb. We’ll see what the future holds… and I still plan to see it this week.

New Treasures: Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine #5

New Treasures: Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine #5

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inhuman-magazine-5Allen Koszowski is almost supernaturally talented.

I first hired him more than a decade ago, when I was desperate to find an artist who could capture the eldritch horrors of Edmond Hamilton’s classic “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” a tale of ancient desert ruins and unlucky explorers from the August 1926 Weird Tales, which I reprinted in Black Gate 2. Allen’s work for Cemetery Dance, Whispers, and Weird Tales convinced me he was the guy.

He delivered three knockout pieces of art (see the first here). And the envelope they arrived in was stuffed with additional pieces which he offered for free. It was remarkably generous, and I was glad I was able to hire him again for Black Gate 3.

Since 2004 Allen has been publishing his own horror magazine, Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine. Every issue he assembles the top names in dark fantasy and horror, and he handles the art for each story personally.

The results have been consistently excellent, but with Issue 5 Allen has outdone himself. This issue Centipede Press has taken over production, and the magazine looks better than ever. To showcase other artists Allen has added a gallery, highlighting the Lovecraft Mythos work of Randy Broecker, Bob Eggleton, Jill Bauman, David Carson, and others, although Allen still handles the cover and interiors. Click on the image at left to get a closer look at his cover art for this issue.

This issue features fiction by Michael Shea, Darrell Schweitzer, Tim Curran, Tim Waggoner, James S. Dorr, Christopher M. Cervasco, John Pelan, and many others. The magazine is huge — 208 pages! — and copiously illustrated. It is perfect bound for the criminally low price of just $6.95, which makes it the single best buy you’ll hear about all week.

My thanks to my buddy Chris Cervasco for tipping me off that the magazine was available. Like many beautiful and precious things, copies can be hard to come by. I bought mine from the excellent online seller The Overlook Connection, who still have most issues in stock. There’s also ordering information on Allen’s website.

Support an excellent magazine, and discover a terrific source of quality dark fantasy. It’s a win-win. Buy your copy today!