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Category: Editor’s Blog

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

New Treasures: RuneQuest 6 by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker

New Treasures: RuneQuest 6 by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker

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Runequest Sixth Edition-smallIt takes a lot to get me to try a new role playing system. I’m fairly happy with the ones I already play — first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and Steve Jackson’s Melee and Wizards games — and I barely have time to devote to those at it is.

I’m not sure what it was that originally drew me to try RuneQuest. I think it might have been the promise of a wholly different flavor of fantasy. AD&D was medieval villages, magic users, and Gygax’s Against the Giants. RuneQuest was talking animals, bronze age warriors from strange ancient cultures, and Paul Jacquey’s enigmatic Duck Tower (“What? A tower of ducks? That’s so weird. What’s with all the ducks in armor? Seriously? Mike, come check this out.”)

So I dragged my brother Mike to a RuneQuest game on the campus at Carleton University in Ottawa, where we soon found ourselves in the thick of a fast-action melee. In our first exposure to critical hit tables, Mike’s grizzled dwarf fighter fumbled an epic axe hit at the height of the battle, and managed to slice off his own leg. To this day, I can’t mention the word “RuneQuest” without Mike growling, “Yeah. Best system in the world.”

Needless to say, Mike didn’t play much after that. But I kept up with the various incarnations. A big part of my fascination was the result of Chaosium’s support efforts, especially the amazing Pavis and Big Rubble boxed sets. I still consider them some of the finest gaming products ever created, and have been much impressed with the recent reprint editions from Moon Design Publications.

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Goodbye, Professor

Goodbye, Professor

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Gilligan's Island ProfessorRussell Johnson, who played the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, died yesterday at the age of 89.

The news reporter for WXRT here in Chicago, Mary Dixon, wryly noted during her morning show that the Professor was the only eligible male on Gilligan’s Island. Watching the show as a young girl, “it was all about the professor,” she said.

For me, a young nerd in Junior High, the professor embodied a little more than that (not that being a brainy sex symbol wasn’t a major accomplishment in itself). Everyone looks for role models at that age, and Russell Johnson’s good-humored, everyman brainiac was perhaps the finest role model on the airwaves in the mid 70s for young science enthusiasts — and I can’t help but wonder who will be cast in the role in the upcoming remake.

There was no shortage of smart characters on television at the time, from Spock to Bruce Bixby’s David Banner (The Incredible Hulk) to Peter Falk’s genius detective Columbo. But none of them was as likable — or as endlessly inventive — as Russell Johnson’s easy-going Professor, who could build a lie detector and a sewing machine out of coconuts. Johnson’s Professor wasn’t just smart… he was funny and charming, and week after week he showed that over-the-top enthusiasm for science didn’t have to be a social liability if you didn’t want it to be. You could be both smart and well-liked; it didn’t have to be a choice.

It was obvious that, in the microcosm of civilization that was Gilligan’s Island, the Professor was the one individual who kept everything running. His was a thankless role. He was constantly taken for granted, many of his ideas failed, and not a single one of his inventions ever got them off the island. But Johnson filled that role with a character who was noble, kind, and constantly upbeat. Here was a man of science who fit in; who was admired and, yes, loved.

Goodbye, professor.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy of Mick Farren

The Science Fiction and Fantasy of Mick Farren

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The Novels of Mick Farren-small

First time I heard of Mick Farren was when I opened a box of review copies from Tor in 1996 to find his novel The Time of Feasting, a dark fantasy concerning a hidden colony of vampires living underground in New York City. I flipped to the bio, where I read that Mick was the writer and singer for the punk band The Deviants, and that he also had several solo hits.

This was pretty cool. Here was a successful rock musician making a mid-career transition to dark fantasy writer. This just re-affirmed what I already knew: there were plenty of glamorous professions out there, but nothing as awesome as being a fantasy novelist.

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Vintage Treasures: Night Monsters by Fritz Leiber

Vintage Treasures: Night Monsters by Fritz Leiber

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Night Monsters-smallNight Monsters is an interesting case study in book collecting, as least for me.

It was originally published in 1969 as part of an Ace Double set, with a moody but otherwise fairly unremarkable cover by Jack Gaughan (see below). The subtitle Ace put on the collection was “A new collection of the weird, the wonderful, and the macabre,” which was certainly accurate, if a little pedestrian.

I bought a copy 25 years ago. Never read it. It shared a spine with Leiber’s early novel The Green Millennium (here’s John Schoenherr’s cover, just because I have a thing about uploading paperback covers), which I found a little more interesting. To be honest, after a few years I kinda forgot about the book on the back side of The Green Millennium.

Fast forward to early 2013. I’m surfing eBay and I stumble on a copy of Fritz Leiber’s Night Monsters, a Panther paperback published in the UK in 1975. I have no immediate recollection of a Fritz Leiber collection called Night Monsters, but that’s not necessarily a big deal; it could be a re-titled version of one of his collections I do remember.

What is a big deal is that I recognize the cover artist. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the work of the great Bruce Pennington, who provided some of the finest covers for Black Gate, for BG 12 and BG 14.

I’m a huge Pennington fan. Part of it is simple gratitude — the man was enormously gracious to me when I called him up in 2007, hoping to buy the rights to two of his paintings. He had no idea who I was, calling him from America with nothing more than high spirits and a meager budget. He very politely asked to see “a copy or two” of my little magazine, before making up his mind.

Twenty-four hours later I had two sample issues in the mail bound for England, with an enthusiastic hand-written note telling Bruce how much I admired his work. About a month later I received a marvelous letter from him, saying he had been very impressed with the issues, and that he would be delighted to provide us the art we wanted — and at the price I had offered.

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Universal Labels 47 Ronin a Flop less than 24 Hours After Release

Universal Labels 47 Ronin a Flop less than 24 Hours After Release

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47 Ronin poster-smallUniversal Pictures announced it would take a writedown on its $175 million fantasy epic 47 Ronin on December 26th, the day after the film entered wide release on Christmas Day.

While it’s routine for studios to write off projected losses for underperforming films, it’s highly unusual for one to announce that such a major project is a bomb so early in the film’s run, virtually killing what little hope it had to defy expectations and turn things around.

My teenage sons, oblivious to wider industry news, saw the trailer — packed with gorgeous fantasy landscapes; pirates; dark dungeons; and life-and-death swordfights against samurai, monsters, and flying dragons — and were sold immediately.

For myself, I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but I was astounded that Universal had dismissed the film so cavalierly, and my curmudgeonly nature immediately made me assume they were idiots. So we caught a matinee showing yesterday, in a nearly empty theater.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. Rinko Kikuchi does a marvelous job as the (literally) scenery-chewing, shape-shifting witch and veteran actor Hiroyuki Sanada (most recently seen in The Wolverine and the TV shows Lost and Revenge) carries the film as the leader of the legendary band of 47 disgraced samurai who avenges the death of their noble lord, against the direct orders of the Shogun.

Even Keanu Reeves delivers an entirely serviceable performance as Kai, the half-breed who leads the weaponless ronin into a demon-infested forest and wins them some cool samurai ordnance. The marketing has portrayed Reeves as the lead, but it’s really Sanada who has the most screen time.

The tale of the original 47 ronin, whose 18th century graves still stand today at Sengaku-ji in Japan, is perhaps the most famous example of bushidō, the samurai code of honor, in Japanese history, and is considered by some the country’s “national legend.”

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Read Isaac Asimov’s Predictions for 2014… from 1964

Read Isaac Asimov’s Predictions for 2014… from 1964

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Isaac Asimov 3Several sites around the Internet are making a big deal of Isaac Asimov’s predictions for 2014, originally written as an Op Ed piece for The New York Times fifty years ago.

Inspired by his visit to the New York World’s Fair of 1964, Asimov’s original piece wasn’t a science fiction story, but simply his predictions for what the World’s Fair of 2014 would be like.

Alexis Kleinman’s article at The Huffington Post is titled “Isaac Asimov’s Predictions For 2014 From 50 Years Ago Are Eerily Accurate,” and carefully categorizes the Good Doctor’s predictions as Correct (“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence”), Close, But Not Exact (“World population will be 6,500,000,000”), and Incorrect (“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords”).

Dylan Love at Business Insider takes a similar angle, with his post “In 1964, The Brilliant Isaac Asimov Wrote Some Predictions For 2014 — Wait Until You See How Right He Was.” Love grades Asimov much higher than HuffPo, noting that several predictions (“Men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better,” which clearly forecasts World of Warcraft, and “Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with ‘robot-brains,'” an obvious reference to Google’s self-driving cars) just need the right interpretation to be true.

Rebecca J. Rosen at The Atlantic takes Asimov to task for predicting an insufficiently grim future (“But he couldn’t have known the consequences of the development he predicted —- a planet whose climate is badly destabilized, whose inhabitants face mass extinctions in the years ahead”), and David Wogan at Scientific American clearly enjoyed the article, though he points out Asimov entirely missed the boat in at least one regard (“What we know as the internet is missing in these predictions, which is how we are all able to read this article and his thoughts decades later.”)

Good to see Asimov getting so much attention two decades after his death. You can read his original article here.

Sherlock Holmes Tiptoes into the Public Domain

Sherlock Holmes Tiptoes into the Public Domain

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Sherlock Holmes dang itAn American judge has ruled that Sherlock Holmes is in the Public Domain.

Say what? If you’re like me, you’ve had some trouble wrapping your head around the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective wasn’t already in the public domain. His first appearance, in the short novel A Study in Scarlet, was in 1887, and he appeared in a total of four novels and 56 short stories between then and 1927. To my mind that’s the pre-pulp era, roughly contemporary with the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Let’s review. If most of Robert E. Howard Conan tales, published between 1932 -1936, are in the public domain — and in fact, virtually all literary works published before January 1, 1923 are no longer covered by United States copyright law — what’s the deal with Sherlock Holmes?

Well. Near as I understand it, the Conan Doyle Estate bases their claim on the fact that the last Holmes story was published in 1927, and the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Irene Adler, etc. were not truly completed until then. The Estate has challenged any production that tried to make use of the characters — and indeed, popular TV series like the BBC’s Sherlock, and CBS’s Elementary, have paid a license.

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Vintage Treasures: Parlainth: The Forgotten City, an Earthdawn Campaign

Vintage Treasures: Parlainth: The Forgotten City, an Earthdawn Campaign

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parlainth-smallMany years ago, when I was unemployed and trying to get a new website off the ground, I made a lot of calls to publishers large and small. I’d introduce myself, talk fast about how many readers there were on the web, and try and sound a lot bigger than I was.

Didn’t usually work. This was the mid-90s, and there were lots of publishers who didn’t even have a website. But occasionally one would take a chance, and agree to send me some sweet review copies.

One such publisher was FASA, one of the leading RPG game makers of the day. I’ll always remember opening the first box they sent me, and gaping in surprise at the contents: every single Battletech supplement in print — nearly 1,000 bucks worth of premiere product. A treasure trove far beyond my expectations.

And a textbook bittersweet moment, because what I was really hoping for was material for Earthdawn.

Earthdawn was a fantasy role-playing game designed by Greg Gorden and first released by FASA in 1993. Over the next few years they produced 20+ supplements, all with gorgeous cover art by folks like Janet Aulisio, Brom, Les Edwards, and many others. Set on the same world as Shadowrun, but thousands of years earlier, the key theaters were where the nations of Russia and Ukraine exist today, in the gorgeously detailed land of Barsaive.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

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The Best of Fredric Brown-smallThe top article on the Black Gate blog last month was the 13th installment in our ongoing examination of Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line, a look at the 1977 paperback The Best of Fredric Brown. (Brown also showed up a little further down the list, in our take on the Brown and Weinbaum chapters of the Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D series over at Tor.com).

Second on the list was Alex Bledsoe’s appreciation of one of my favorite films of the summer, Pacific Rim, and his thoughts on where it fit on the sliding scale between rip-off and homage.

Third was our review of a surprisingly effective, 81-year-old pulp tale by Clark Ashton Smith, “The Vaults of Yoh Vombis.” Fourth was M Harold Page’s report on his trip to the Gemmell Award ceremonies at the World Fantasy Convention. Rounding out the Top Five was Keith West’s opening chapter in his ambitious attempt to review the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in November were:

  1. Vintage Treasures: The Best of Fredric Brown
  2. Pacific Rim and the Culture of Rip-off vs Homage
  3. Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Vaults of Yoh Vombis”
  4. The Sword Folk are Coming
  5. Lin Carter and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
  6. Goodbye, Blockbuster
  7. Revisiting the Scene of the Crash: John Carpenters Ghosts of Mars
  8. Magic: Let’s Ditch Clarke’s 3rd law
  9. Thank Politically Correct Parents for Sword and Sorcery
  10. Nobody Gets Out Alive: Writing Advice from the Cheap Seats

    11. …

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Announcing the Winner of the Autographed Set of John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper Trilogy

Announcing the Winner of the Autographed Set of John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper Trilogy

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Seven SorcerersTwo weeks ago we told you about the arrival of Seven Sorcerers, the third and highly-anticipated final volume in John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper trilogy. The trilogy opened with Seven Princes (January 2012), and Seven Kings (January 2013). To celebrate the publication of the concluding book, we announced a contest to win a complete autographed set of all three, compliments of Orbit Books and John R. Fultz.

It’s too late to enter the contest now, but it’s not too late to discover Fultz’s unique heroic fiction, which Barnes & Noble calls “flawless epic fantasy.” You can try some of John’s exciting stories right here at Black Gate, including “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” which appeared as part of the Black Gate Online Fiction line, or the three stories that appeared in our print version: “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine”(BG 12); “Return of the Quill” (BG 13); and “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15). And you can read more about John’s philosophy of fantasy in his recent article, “One Man’s Trash…”

We received a record number of entries, which just shows the high level of excitement among our readers for everything written by John. All the entries were recorded on a spreadsheet, and the winner selected using the office percentile dice.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the autographed set of John R. Fultz’s Books of the Shaper trilogy is Massimiliano Izzo. Congratulations, Massimiliano! We’ll be touch to let you know how you can claim your books.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and to John R. Fultz and Orbit Books for sponsoring the contest. Seven Sorcerers was published on December 10th by Orbit Books. It is 448 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Look for it in bookstores everywhere.