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

New Treasures: Black Bottle by Anthony Huso

New Treasures: Black Bottle by Anthony Huso

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black-bottle2I’ve been looking forward to Black Bottle ever since I read Matthew David Surridge’s review of the first volume in the two-book series, The Last Page (Tor, 2010) in Black Gate 12. Here’s what he said, in part:

The Last Page is a high fantasy steampunk novel, and a love story. We follow the sexually charged relationship between the improbably named Caliph Howl, heir to the throne of the northern country of Stonehold, and a witch named Sena. The two of them meet at university, go their own ways, and then come together again after Caliph has become king and Sena has acquired a vastly powerful magical tome. Unfortunately, Caliph is facing a civil war against a national hero, and Sena’s book has a lock which can only be opened at a fearsome emotional cost…

The first volume in a two-book series, it manages the trick of both providing a satisfactory conclusion and keeping the story going; in fact, the conclusion suggests the story has taken a turn, and perhaps is going to head in wild new directions. But what really makes the first book work is its language. The prose is strong, quick and dense in the best ways. The diction, the word choice, is inventive; the imagery is both original and concise. At its best, Huso’s language recalls Wolfe or Vance…

From the plot summary for Black Bottle, that twist Matthew mentions seems dark indeed:

Tabloids sold in the Duchy of Stonehold claim that the High King, Caliph Howl, has been raised from the dead. His consort, Sena Iilool, both blamed and celebrated for this act, finds that a macabre cult has sprung up around her. As this news spreads, Stonehold — long considered unimportant — comes to the attention of the emperors in the southern countries. They have learned that the seed of Sena’s immense power lies in an occult book, and they are eager to claim it for their own.

Desperate to protect his people from the southern threat, Caliph is drawn into a summit of the world’s leaders despite the knowledge that it is a trap. As Sena’s bizarre actions threaten to unravel the summit, Caliph watches her slip through his fingers into madness. But is it really madness? Sena is playing a dangerous game of strategy and deceit as she attempts to outwit a force that has spent millennia preparing for this day. Caliph is the only connection left to her former life, but it’s his blood that Sena needs to see her plans through to their explosive finish.

Sounds intriguing, right? But it was when I saw yesterday’s Facebook post from the distinguished Dave Truesdale, Black Gate‘s Managing Editor for our very first issue, that my interest in the book was truly piqued.

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Worldcon Wrap-up

Worldcon Wrap-up

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black-gate-booth
The Black Gate booth. From left to right: John O’Neill, Howard Andrew Jones, James Enge, and part of Donald Crankshaw’s head. Also, the back of Peadar Ó Guilín. Click for bigger version.

I was almost to Chicago last Thursday when I realized I’d gotten so wrapped up in the audio book of The Name of the Wind that I’d missed my turn. Fortunately, I found another way to Interstate 90 and the Hyatt Regency. And when I finally reached the dealer’s room, I was able to lodge a personal complaint with Patrick Rothfuss himself for writing so well that I got distracted.

It wasn’t long ago that I’d arrive at a convention and be surrounded by strangers or literary luminaries I was too nervous to approach. When I turn up these days, there are still a lot of strangers, but there are plenty of familiar faces as well. Before I’d even checked in, I bumped into Tom Doyle, and shortly after registering my complaint with Patrick Rothfuss, I was welcomed by Arin Komins and Rich Warren  to their used books booth, Starfarer’s Dispatch.

Rich showed me a rare Harold Lamb book, then, as I noticed it contained an insert about Lamb I had no knowledge of, he handed me a CD with scans of the material. That was incredibly kind of him. I then signed a complete set of the Harold Lamb books I’d edited and personalized Arin’s copy of The Desert of Souls, which she had liked so much that I gifted her with an ARC of The Bones of the Old Ones.

Purely by chance, I kept down the aisle to the left and came instantly to the Black Gate booth where John O’Neill, (now with beard) occupied a booth surrounded by old but well-cared for paperbacks and stacks of Black Gate magazines. The booth remained a gathering spot for friends, acquaintances, and staff members throughout the convention, which is why the talented Peadar Ó Guilín and Donald Crankshaw were manning the booth with O’Neill. I’d never had the chance to meet Peadar before, but his gentle humor put me immediately at ease. We chatted for a while and then James Enge wandered up with his brother Patrick. While the Mighty Enge was settling into the room we shared, I retrieved a box of The Desert of Souls hardbacks to sell at the Black Gate booth. (We sold ’em all before the end of the convention!)

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Singularity & Co. use Successful Kickstarter to Rescue Out-of-Print SF & Fantasy

Singularity & Co. use Successful Kickstarter to Rescue Out-of-Print SF & Fantasy

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the-torch-jack-bechdoltThe ever-vigilant Jason Waltz has called our attention to this article on Singularity & Co., who are rescuing extremely rare SF and fantasy titles and bringing them back into print as e-books.

It began with a Kickstarter campaign by Ash Kalb, Cici James, Jamil V Moen, and Kaila Hale-Stern, which raised $52,276 (350 percent of their $15,000 goal). The campaign ended on April 2 and the team wasted no time setting their dream in motion. Each month they have carefully selected one out-of-print science fiction novel, tracked down the copyright holders, and re-packaged it in DRM-free PDF, Epub, and Mobi format for subscribers.

So far they have reprinted A Plunge Into Space by Robert Cromie (first published in 1890) and Jack Bechdolt’s 1948 novel The Torch. They have also opened a Brooklyn bookshop where vintage science fiction and fantasy paperbacks are filed chronologically by publication date, which I find weirdly compelling.

Tracking down old books — both rights and physical copies to scan — has proven more challenging than they expected. Their planned third book is Mr. Stranger’s Sealed Packet by Hugh MacColl, first published in 1889. But according to a Wired article about the group, locating a copy took some effort:

The team tracked down the lone copy [of Mr. Stranger’s Sealed Packet] out of university archives, and went on a thousand-mile drive just to scan it. Despite being out of copyright, none of the universities who owned a copy of [the book] permitted scanning.

Singularity & Co. currently don’t offer individual e-books for sale; titles are available only to subscribers. Subscription plans start at $29.99 for a year, or $129.99 for a lifetime subscription. Learn more at their website, savethescifi.com.

2012 Hugo Award Winners Announced

2012 Hugo Award Winners Announced

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Lynne and Michael Thomas show us the 2012 Hugo Award for SF Squeecast.
Lynne and Michael Thomas show off the 2012 Hugo Award for SF Squeecast.

If it’s seemed a little quiet here on the Black Gate blog for the past five days, it’s because many of our staff and bloggers — including John O’Neill, Howard Andrew Jones, Rich Horton, Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Joe Bonadonna, and David C. Smith — have been at Chicon 7, the World Science Fiction Convention here in Chicago, over the Labor Day weekend.

It was a 5-day party and convention, culminating in the Hugo Awards ceremony Sunday night. We’ll have more complete con reports right here in the next few days, but for now here’s the big news: The 2012 Hugo Award winners. Congratulations to all!

BEST NOVEL

  • Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

BEST NOVELLA

  • ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist,’’ Kij Johnson (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2011)

BEST NOVELETTE

  • ‘‘Six Months, Three Days,’’ Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011)

BEST SHORT STORY

  • ‘‘The Paper Menagerie,’’ Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)

BEST RELATED WORK

  • The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition, John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls & Graham Sleight, eds. (Gollancz)

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The Top 30 Black Gate Posts in July

The Top 30 Black Gate Posts in July

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best-of-robert-e-howard-grim-lands2Summer months are for sports, gardening, and getting together in the back yard with close friends. But apparently nobody told you people, because you spent the entire month on the computer, reading Black Gate blog posts.

July 2012 was one of the best months we’ve ever had, with solid traffic growth and nearly 70 new articles from writers such as Howard Andrew Jones, Joe Bonadonna, Patty Templeton, Patrice Sarath, D.B. Jackson, and many others. Here are the Top 30 most popular articles and links for the month.

And while I’m instructing you, don’t forget to go outside once in a while, maybe get a little sunshine. It’s good for you.

  1. New Treasures
  2. Under the hood with robert-e-howard
  3. Musing on villainy
  4. Six-sought-adventure-a-half-dozen-swords-and-sorcery short stories
  5. Art-of-the-genre-the-art-of-calvin-and-hobbes
  6. Confessions-of-a-guilty-reviewer
  7. How-I-met-your-cimmerian-and-other-barbarian-swordsmen
  8. Self-sabotage-is-easier-than-writing
  9. Black-Gate-goes-to-the-summer-movies-the-amazing-spider-man
  10. Vintage-treasures-henry-kuttners-the-graveyard-rats
  11. Leigh-brackett-american-writer
  12. Clockwork-angels-iii-hope-is-what-remains-to-be-seen
  13. Genre-prejudice
  14. Edgar-rice-burroughs-mars-part-6-the-master-mind-of Mars
  15. Art-of-the-genre-the-art-of-an-inspired-fake

    16. …

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The Bones of the Old Ones Inches Closer to December Publication Date

The Bones of the Old Ones Inches Closer to December Publication Date

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bones-of-the-old-onesThis week the most exciting item to arrive at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters, bar none, was the Advance Reading Copy of Howard Andrew Jones’s The Bones of the Old Ones, the sequel to his breakout fantasy novel, The Desert of Souls.

I read The Bones of the Old Ones the instant I could get my hands on it, and it was everything I hoped it would be. A rollicking adventure that follows our heroes Dabir and Asim in a daring quest across the landscape of 8th Century Arabia, Bones is packed with ancient secrets, underground lairs, dread pacts, mysterious sorcery, desperate heroism, and moments of laugh-out-loud humor. The cast is much larger than The Desert of Souls, and the stakes are higher, as Dabir and Asim race against time to prevent an ancient sorcerous cabal from plunging the world into eternal winter:

Combining the masterful fantasy of Robert E . Howard with the high-speed action of Bernard Cornwell, Howard Andrew Jones breathes new life into the glittering tradition of sword-and-sorcery with the latest tale of Dabir and Asim’s adventures. As a snowfall blankets 8th century Mosul, a Persian noblewoman arrives at the home of the scholar Dabir and his friend the swordsman Captain Asim. Najya has escaped from a dangerous cabal that has ensorcelled her to track down ancient magical tools of tremendous power, the bones of the old ones.

To stop the cabal and save Najya, Dabir and Asim venture into the worst winter in human memory, hunted by a shape-changing assassin. The stalwart Asim is drawn irresistibly toward the beautiful Persian even as Dabir realizes she may be far more dangerous a threat than anyone who pursues them, for her enchantment worsens with the winter. As their opposition grows, Dabir and Asim have no choice but to ally with their deadliest enemy, the treacherous Greek necromancer, Lydia. But even if they can trust one another long enough to escape their foes, it may be too late for Najya, whose soul is bound up with a vengeful spirit intent on sheathing the world in ice for a thousand years…

The Bones of the Old Ones will be released in hardcover and eBook by Thomas Dunne Books on December 11. It is 307 pages of non-stop action for $24.99 ($12.99 digital), and gets my highest recommendation. Place your advance order now.

Vintage Treasures: A Box of 1950s SF and Fantasy Magazines, and the End of the First Era of Space Exploration

Vintage Treasures: A Box of 1950s SF and Fantasy Magazines, and the End of the First Era of Space Exploration

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july-ebay-lot2

I bought a box of 1950s SF and fantasy digests in an online auction at the end of July, an assortment of chiefly lesser-known magazines such as Imagination, Worlds of Tomorrow, Fantastic Universe, and Imaginative Tales. The box has been sitting in my library for three weeks while I puttered around it, like an unopened Christmas present. I finally unpacked it this morning. Just as I’d hoped, it was filled with wonders.

Holding these the day after the death of Neil Armstrong gives me the powerful sense of the passage of history. Every one of these magazines was published before Armstrong walked on the moon — in most cases at least a decade before. The era of space exploration, with all its incredible promise and danger, was firmly in mankind’s future. Looking at them now, as the first era of space exploration draws to a close with the death of its most famous hero at age 82, I feel like I’m looking back through not one but two eras, to a time when landing on the moon was something that many still scoffed at. When the future was a place where robots carried guns, aliens were green-skinned and wore khakis, and housewives walked alien dogs who didn’t know what to do with a fire hydrant.

Even setting aside all the musings on history, there’s still a lot of wonder packed into these yellowing pages. Marvelous artwork, and even more marvelous stories, from some of the brightest lights in the genre. This box of 20 magazines, which I purchased for 48 bucks, is a splendid sampling of some of the best work of the decade.

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Josepha Sherman, December 12, 1946 – August 23, 2012

Josepha Sherman, December 12, 1946 – August 23, 2012

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the-shattered-oath2Reports are pouring in that prolific fantasy writer Josepha Sherman, author of The Prince of the Sidhe novels and numerous licensed tie-in books, died on Thursday. She had been in poor health and struggled with dementia in the final years of her life.

Sherman began her career writing for The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, the animated Space Western TV series that ran between 1986 and 1989. Her first standalone fantasy novel was Golden Girl and the Crystal of Doom (1986). It was followed by more than a dozen others, including the Compton Crook Award winner The Shining Falcon (1990).

She began a lengthy and productive career writing tie-in novels for popular television and computer gaming properties in 1986 with The Invisibility Factor (Find Your Fate Junior Transformers, No 9). She produced licensed novels for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek, Bard’s Tale, Highlander, Mage Knight, and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. She also published All I Need To Know I Learned From Xena: Warrior Princess (1998), Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood (with T. K. F. Weisskopf, 1995), Mythology for Storytellers (2002), and more than 30 other non-fiction titles.

Sherman was also a prolific editor with eleven anthologies under her belt, beginning with A Sampler of Jewish-American Folklore (1992) and including Trickster Tales: Forty Folk Stories from Around the World (1996), Urban Nightmares (with Keith R.A. DeCandido, 1997), Merlin’s Kin: World Tales of the Heroic Magician (1998), and Young Warriors: Stories Of Strength (with Tamora Pierce, 2005).

Sherman frequently wrote in collaboration, producing more than a dozen books with a variety of talented partners including Susan M Shwartz (5 Star Trek novels), Laura Anne Gilman (2 Buffy novels), Mercedes Lackey (Bard’s Tale and Bardic Choices), Keith R.A. DeCandido (one anthology), Tamora Pierce (one anthology), T K F Weisskopf (one non-fiction book), and many others.

Writers including Pat Cadigan, Keith DeCandido, Theodora Goss, Nick Pollotta, Vera Nazarian, Ellen Kushner, and David B. Coe have been leaving testimonials on her Facebook page.

Vintage Treasures: The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner

Vintage Treasures: The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner

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the-startling-worlds-of-henry-kuttner2I have fun with these Vintage Treasure pieces. For one thing, they’re a great excuse to shine some light on interesting items that cross my path.

Take Henry Kuttner’s paperback collection, The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner. Published in 1987, nearly 20 years after his death, it’s unusual in several respects. For one thing, it includes only novellas. And all originated from a single source: the long-dead pulp magazine Startling Stories.

I think this is a neat idea. The best writers of the pulp era — and Kuttner certainly qualifies — have seen most of their short fiction studiously reprinted. In fact, we’ve covered four generous collections of Kuttner’s pulp fiction just in the last few years: the weird-menace collection Terror in the House, the first volume in The Early Kuttner series; Thunder in the Void, gathering his early space operas; Detour to Otherness, the massive retrospective of his collaborative work with C.L. Moore; and none other than the distinguished James Enge reviewed his Gallagher stories for us, collected in Robots Have No Tails.

But short novels, 40,000-word epics printed in a single pulp issue, rarely (if ever) get reprinted. They’re too long for most collections, and generally too short for a standalone novel, so most of them have slipped through the pages of history. The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner rescues three such wonders and puts them under one cover.

But that’s not even the most interesting thing about The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner. Since all three novels appeared in a single source, this isn’t just a collection of Kuttner’s work. It’s an anthology that celebrates Startling Stories. Just as most collections give us insight into the recurring themes in an author’s work, this book offers us a  generous sampling of the kind of fiction that appeared in that grand old pulp.

The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner collects The Portal in the Picture (originally published in 1949), Valley of the Flame (1946), and The Dark World (1946). It’s one of the most intriguing collections I’ve come across in the past year. At press time, there are 23 used copies available on Amazon.com, ranging in price from $2.25 to $9.99.

Weird Tales Pulls Novel Excerpt Following Fan Uproar

Weird Tales Pulls Novel Excerpt Following Fan Uproar

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weird-tales-359aIt’s been an interesting day for Weird Tales, the oldest genre magazine on the market.

It began with the abrupt resignation of Ann VanderMeer as a senior contributing editor, “due to major artistic and philosophical differences with the existing editors.” As reported here last year, VanderMeer was replaced as editor by Marvin Kaye as the magazine transitioned to new Publisher Nth Dimension Media, run by John Harlacher. While Ann commented that her resignation “has been in the works for several months, ever since I was removed as the editor-in-chief,” it was apparently hastened by Kaye’s decision to publish an excerpt from Victoria Foyt’s novel,  Saving the Pearls: Revealing Eden. The “Pearls” in the title refer to whites, who find themselves a persecuted minority after an ecological disaster. In praising the book, Kaye wrote:

Weird Tales seldom prints SF, but this story is a compelling view of a world that didn’t listen to the warnings of ecologists, and a world that has developed a reverse racism: blacks dominating and detesting not just whites, but latinos and albinos, the few that still survive of the latter are hunted down and slaughtered.

[Kaye’s post, and the comments it generated, have since been removed from the WT site; a Google webcache of the page is here.]

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