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

The Top Black Gate Posts in November

The Top Black Gate Posts in November

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Sean McLachlan was the Black Gate MVP for November, with two articles in the Top 5: “Happy Halloween! Here’s Some Nightmare Fuel” at #3, and “Ten Ways You Know Your Evil Empire Is Doomed,” which scored the #5 slot. Hot on Sean’s heels was Ryan Harvey with two Pellucidar posts, his review of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Savage Pellucidar (#6) and the Series Wrap-Up (#10).

The most popular article last month was our survey of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress anthology series, which has been published semi-continuously since 1984. The post spawned at least one follow-up, a more personal look back on the series by Elizabeth Cady, to be published here in the next next few days. Coming in at #2 was Bob Byrne’s review of the film Murder on the Orient Express. Rounding out the Top Five was our look at S. A. Chakraborty’s new novel The City of Brass.

An update on Beneath Ceaseless Skies placed seventh, followed by Fletcher Vredenburgh’s review of Robert E. Howard’s The Road of Azrael. And Steven H Silver nabbed the ninth slot on the list, with his Michael Moorcock re-read “Elric and Me.”

The complete list of Top Articles for November follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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Alfred Bester on “My One Demented Meeting with the Great John W. Campbell, Jr.”

Alfred Bester on “My One Demented Meeting with the Great John W. Campbell, Jr.”

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Alfred BesterI’m a long-time student of science fiction history, and I enjoy reading it whenever I can. On the train yesterday I read “My Affair with Science Fiction,” a delightful bit of memoir by the great Alfred Bester, author of The Demolished Man and The Stars Our Destination. It contains one of the most revealing tidbits on John W. Campbell I’ve ever read.

I wrote a few stories for Astounding, and out of that came my one demented meeting with the great John W. Campbell, Jr. I needn’t preface this account with the reminder that I worshipped Campbell from afar… I sent off another story to Campbell, one which no show would let me tackle. The title was “Oddy and Id” and the concept was Freudian… Campbell telephoned me a week later to say that he liked the story but wanted to discuss a few changes with me. Would I come to his office?….

Campbell arose from his desk and shook hands. I’m a fairly big guy but he looked enormous to me, about the size of a defensive tackle. He was dour and seemed preoccupied by matters of great moment. “You don’t know it,” Campbell said, “you can’t have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished…”

“Oh come now, Mr. Campbell. Surely you’re joking.”

“I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time. Dianetics… Come and have lunch.”

We sat down at a small table while he continued to discourse on dianetics, the greatest salvation of the future when the world would at last be cleared of its emotional wounds. Suddenly he stood up and towered over me. “You can drive your memory back to the womb,” he said. “You can do it if you release every block, clear yourself and remember. Try it.”

“Now?”

“Now. Think. Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You’ve never stopped hating her for it.”

Around me there were cries of “BLT down, hold the mayo. Eighty-six on the English. Combo rye, relish. Coffee shake, pick up.” And here was this grim tackle standing over me, practicing dianetics without a license. The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter. I prayed. “Help me out of this, please. Don’t let me laugh in his face. Show me a way out.” God showed me.

“My Affair with Science Fiction” originally appeared in Harry Harrison’s 1974 anthology Nova 4, three years after Campbell died. It’s been reprinted a handful of times, including in Hell’s Cartographers (1975), and Bester’s collection Starlight (1976). The Stars My Destination is included in the Library of America’s gorgeous boxed set American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, and you can read “My Affair with Science Fiction” online at the Library of America here. It’s long but well worth the read.

A Return to Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year

A Return to Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year

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Terry Carr Best Science Fiction of the Year-small

My taste in science fiction — like my taste in music and film — was shaped early. What I learned to love as a teen I largely still enjoy… with some exceptions. One of those exceptions is Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year. I picked up my first one in 1977, at the age of 13, and I discovered pretty quickly that they weren’t for me. I went back to reading pulp SF in books like Before the Golden Age, and was blissfully happy to do so for many years.

I’ve returned to Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year recently, and discovered why I didn’t connect with them four decades ago: unlike many of his contemporaries, Carr brought an adult eye to SF, and the fiction he selected spoke to adults. It still speaks to adults today, clearly and with no loss of voice, and I now consider Carr’s Best volumes — especially the ones he did in the mid-70s — to be some some of the best SF anthologies ever printed. Here’s what I said last year about #3, published in 1973.

How incredible was The Best Science Fiction of the Year #3? It contains some of the finest science fiction stories of all time, packed into one slender volume. Like “The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree, Jr… perhaps her most famous story, and that’s saying something. And Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula Award-winning “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” which became the basis of her 1978 novel Dreamsnake (which swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards the following year.) And Harlan Ellison’s classic “The Deathbird,” the Hugo and Locus Award-winning title story of his celebrated 1975 collection Deathbird Stories. Plus Gene Wolfe’s famous “The Death of Dr. Island,” winner of the Locus and Nebula awards for Best Novella.

And an unassuming little story by a young writer named Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and is considered by many (me included) to be one of the finest short stories ever written. And lots more — including a Jack Vance novella, plus stories by Philip José Farmer, Alfred Bester, R. A. Lafferty, Robert Silverberg, and F. M. Busby. All for $1.50!

Last month I purchased a fine collection of six Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes (pictured above) on eBay for the criminally low price of $7. They arrived a few weeks ago, and I’ve stolen a few minutes here and there to dip into them. It’s been an enormously rewarding experience.

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True to the Specters of the Dead: The Big Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

True to the Specters of the Dead: The Big Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

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The Big Book of Ghost Stories-small The Big Book of Ghost Stories-back-small

Two weeks ago I wrote a quick piece on Otto Penzler’s latest anthology, The Big Book of Rogues and Villains. I dashed off a list of the previous Penzler books we’d covered over the years… and I realized to my dismay that we’d somehow overlooked one of my favorites, The Big Book of Ghost Stories, an 836-page treasure trove released in 2012. I figured the time was right to rectify that oversight.

Michael Dirda gives a great summary in his Washington Post review.

Otto Penzler’s The Big Book of Ghost Stories largely focuses on classic tales. No one should go through life (let alone death) without experiencing W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” Perceval Landon’s “Thurnley Abbey,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Moonlit Road” and M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad.” But Penzler also includes many stories that should be equally well known. This year, for instance, I read for the first time Ellen Glasgow’s “The Shadowy Third,” a wonderfully ambiguous tale of a nurse hired by a charismatic doctor to care for his apparently demented wife. Yet Mrs. Maradick is strangely afraid of her handsome husband, and there is something odd about her silent young daughter. Glasgow’s narrative is deeply haunting, in more ways than one.

Penzler stresses that he has “tried to remain true to the notion that ghosts are spirits or specters of the dead. Some stories that frequently have appeared in other ghost story anthologies have nothing at all to do with ghosts. They may be trolls, or evil plants, vile fungi, monsters, or other creatures of that ilk. Rightly or not, I have attempted to be a bit of a narrow-minded purist about it all.” This means that there is nothing here by Arthur Machen, who specialized in ancient and malignant races lurking in the Welsh hills, while Algernon Blackwood is represented by “The Woman’s Ghost Story” instead of his masterpiece, “The Willows.”

The book contains tales by HP Lovecraft, Conrad Aiken, Rudyard Kipling, Ramsey Campbell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Donald E. Westlake, Fritz Leiber, Albert E. Cowdrey, Wilkie Collins, Manly Wade Wellman, Saki, Edith Wharton, and many others. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Read Black Gate in Italian!

Read Black Gate in Italian!

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Black Gate in Italian

Black Gate has partnered with Heroic Fantasy Italia (HFT) to translate and post some of our most popular articles in Italian. Here’s Editor Alessandro Iascy, from his original e-mail.

I’m Alessandro Iascy and I am the publisher and editor of the Heroic Fantasy Italia portal, heroicfantasyitalia.altervista.org. I’m contacting you because I always read Black Gate with great pleasure and I would like to start a sort of joint venture with you. Heroic Fantasy Italia is the most important heroic fantasy divulgation portal in Italy, and I would like to be authorized to translate and publish some of your articles on our pages… I am writing to you on my friend Mark Lawrence’s suggestion.

Although BG articles have frequently been reprinted (sometimes without our permission), this is the first time we’ve partnered to present some of our content in a foreign language. The first article to get the multi-lingual treatment was Steven Silver’s November 24th post “Elric and Me.”

Alessandro and his team did top-notch work reformatting and presenting Steven’s article; check it out here. Thanks to Alessandro, we look forward to offering more BG articles to our Italian readers.

Exploring the Subterranean

Exploring the Subterranean

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I founded Black Gate in 2000, and we published the first issue at the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas in October of that year. We produced the print magazine for 11 years (the last issue, #15, was published in May 2011), and during that decade-plus I was keenly observant of other print magazines, especially new ones. A handful of new zines popped up during that period, but I think my favorite was William Schafer’s Subterranean magazine, which produced eight print issues between 2005-2011 before transitioning online.

I only managed to come across a handful of issues during the print era, but that’s okay. I keep an eye out for back issues at conventions, and occasionally snag one or two (as I did with Subterranean #2 at the 2015 Windy City Pulp & Paper convention). They’re hard to come by, but they’re generally not expensive. I have an eBay saved search that alerts me when new lots are listed, and a few months ago I got a ping about the set of three issues above.

Subterranean #4 – 2006
Subterranean #6 – January 2007
Subterranean #8 – October 2011 — the last print issue

They were in pristine, unread condition, and offered for $16 total. I was the only bidder, and took the whole set home for less than the original cover price. It’s lonely being an obsessive magazine collector, but sometimes it has its benefits.

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Remembering Frank M. Robinson’s Legendary Pulp Collection

Remembering Frank M. Robinson’s Legendary Pulp Collection

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William F. Nolan pointing at the Hammett Black Mask

Frank M. Robinson lived an incredible life. He was drafted into the navy in World War II, wrote his first novel The Power in 1956, and saw three of his books transformed into major motion pictures, including The Power (1968),  The Towering Inferno (1974), and The Fifth Missile (1986). His other novels include Blow-Out! (1987, with Thomas N. Scortia) and The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991). He wrote the Playboy Advisor column from 1969 to 1973, and played himself in the 2008 film Milk, as one of Harvey Milk’s political inner circle.

But for science fiction and fantasy collectors, Frank is chiefly known for an entirely different reason: he had one of the most valuable and complete pulp collections ever assembled. His collection was legendary for the incredible condition of most of the magazines, including some of the rarest pulps in existence. Last week Jason V. Brock posted several unseen photos of Frank’s collection on Facebook, and was kind enough to offer us high-resolution versions we could share with Black Gate readers.

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John DeNardo on the Best SF and Fantasy in November

John DeNardo on the Best SF and Fantasy in November

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Jade City Fonda Lee-small Ironclads Adrian Tchaikovsky-small The Overneath Peter S Beagle-small

I do a lot of work sifting though all the science fiction and fantasy releases every month to select those few that are worth highlighting. Sometimes it seems that I could save myself a lot of time if I just listened more to John DeNardo.

Over at Kirkus Reviews, John selects the most interesting new releases to showcase in his column, including new books by Rachel Neumeier, Tim Pratt, Mira Grant, Richard Baker, Brandon Sanderson, James Van Pelt, and many others. Here’s a few of the highlights.

Jade City by Fonda Lee (Orbit, 512 pages, $26, November 7)

What do you get when you set The Godfather in an Asia-inspired city and add some magic and kung fu? You get Jade City, set on the island of Kekon, where Jade is the lifeblood of society, a precious commodity that that is mined, traded, stolen, and a motivation for murder. The Kaul family have used it to enhance their magical abilities while becoming the dominant force on the island. They care about nothing other than protecting their own power and those within their family. But now it’s a new generation and when a powerful new drug allows anyone to wield the power of jade, the war between the Kaul family and their rivals explodes into violence.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

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Sword and Sorcery dominated the stage at Black Gate last month. The most popular topic in October was the new S&S magazine from industry pioneers Joseph Goodman and Howard Andrew Jones, Tales From the Magician’s Skull, which showed up twice in the Top Ten, first with a far-ranging interview with Joseph and Howard (and their undead overlord, the Talking Skull), followed by a report on the blockbuster Kickstarter that funded the first two issues.

Gaming and game news were definitely popular as well. The #1 article for the month was M. Harold Page’s review of Starfinder Alien Archive, followed by our look at the top-sellers at the semi-annual Games Plus auction in Mount Prospect. Goth Chick came in third with her trip report on the Cedar Point HalloWeekends event, featuring Midnight Syndicate’s 20th anniversary concert. Rounding out the Top Five were Elizabeth Crowens’ interview with horror master Nancy Kilpatrick, and M. Harold Page’s advance peek at the Elite Dangerous Role Playing Game.

Coming in at #7 for the month was Fletcher Vredenburgh’s touching reminiscence of his long-time gaming circle, “The Past Remembered.” Ninth was our feature on the very first piece of Greyhawk fiction, Gygax’s 1974 article “The Expedition Into the Black Reservoir: A Dungeon Adventure at Greyhawk Castle.” And closing out the Top Ten was our look at the popular Corpse-Rat King novels by Lee Battersby

The complete list of Top Articles for October follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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Vintage Treasures: Sword & Sorceress, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Vintage Treasures: Sword & Sorceress, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Sword and Sorcery has a rich history of anthology series. Lin Carter’s seminal Flashing Swords and Andy Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness are probably the most famous examples, but in terms of longevity and influence on the field I think they’re both eclipsed by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress anthologies. The first one appeared from DAW Books in 1984, and there’s been a new volume every year since, with a single three-year gap between 2004-07. Last year’s Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress, edited by Elisabeth Waters, was #31.

The series is critical to the history of the field for more than its longevity, however. Unlike Carter and Offutt, who invited established authors to fill their pages, Bradley and her fellow editors opened their volumes up to submissions, and the results were pretty extraordinary. Numerous young writers who would go on to great things, many of them women, were discovered or promoted very early in their career in the pages of S&S, including Emma Bull, Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Roberson, Diana L. Paxson, Laurell K. Hamilton, Phyllis Ann Karr, Rachel Pollack, Vera Nazarian, Deborah J. Ross, Elizabeth Moon, Janet Fox, Laura J. Underwood, Rosemary Edghill, Syne Mitchell, Devon Monk, Carrie Vaughn, and many, many others. You could make a pretty compelling case that Sword & Sorceress (together with its sister publication, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine) dramatically remade modern fantasy, and may be the single greatest influence on 21st Century American fantasy so far.

The first volumes of S&S came out just as I entered grad school and my reading time dropped precipitously. So I missed out on al the excitement, but it’s not too late to catch up. I found the above collection of the first nine volumes (plus VIII and XV) in great shape on eBay, and bought it for $20, about two bucks per book — about half the original cover price. That’s a heck of a bargain for a lot of great reading.

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