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Go Rogue!: Rogues in the House, the Ultimate Sword & Sorcery Podcast

Go Rogue!: Rogues in the House, the Ultimate Sword & Sorcery Podcast

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Rogues in the House

In 1934, Weird Tales magazine published Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “Rogues in the House.” Bob Byrne covered the story on Black Gate as part of his “Hither Came Conan” series.

Just a few years ago, in late 2018, Sword & Sorcery enthusiasts and content creators forged Rogues in the House – the Ultimate S&S Podcast (the link is a portal page to multiple listening Apps). This post spotlights it because it is more than just a source of perspectives. The crew genuinely wants to support a growing community. Their roundtable discussions always start with the “Bazaar of the Bizarre” round table, in which the cast shares recent events or learning opportunities (the session a call out to Fritz Leiber’s 1963 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story of the same name).

Beyond luring in S&S authors like Howard Andrew Jones, Scott Oden, John R. Fultz, and  Jason Ray Carney, they’ve got guests covering Movies, Video/Board Games, and Art. We embed three selections here:

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Dressed as People Available On Demand until June 27th!

Dressed as People Available On Demand until June 27th!

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Margo MacDonald in Dressed as People

When I was at Kelly Robson’s launch for Alias Space and Other Stories, she got the inevitable question, “What are you working on next?” And she surprised everyone (or at least me) by revealing she’d been working on a stage play with fellow Canadian authors A.M. Dellamonica and Amal El-Mohtar, to be performed by actor/playwright Margo MacDonald. Even better, it would premiere as part of this year’s Ottawa Fringe Festival – which is happening right now!

Full disclosure, I’ve known the three authors behind Dressed As People for years, so I went into this with the sort of jittery excitement you get in Writer Land when your friends announce cool things. And I was not disappointed. This “triptych of uncanny abduction” is so good, courtesy of the care and attention to detail Kelly, A.M. and Amal put into their work and Margo’s stunningly amazing performances.

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Goth Chick News: Sharpen Your Pencils, Here Comes Your Summer Reading List

Goth Chick News: Sharpen Your Pencils, Here Comes Your Summer Reading List

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The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Several members of the HWA were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA has therefore gone to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.

Any work of horror first published in the English language may be considered for an award during the year of its publication. The categories for which a Bram Stoker Award may be presented have varied over the years, reflecting the state of the publishing industry and the horror genre and the twelve current award categories are: Novel, First Novel, Short Fiction, Long Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction Collection, Poetry Collection, Anthology, Screenplay, Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, and Short Nonfiction.

On May 24th the HWA announced the winners for the 2020 Bram Stoker Awards.

Black Gate and Goth Chick News would like to congratulate the following authors and editors for their superior achievements and suggest you start loading up your Amazon wish list immediately.

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Startling Stories Returns

Startling Stories Returns

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The first issue of Startling Stories in 65 years, courtesy of Wildside Press and Douglas Draa. Cover uncredited.

Startling Stories was one of the grand old ladies of the pulp era. Published by Standard Magazines between January 1939 and October 1955, it was one of the few SF magazines of the 30s to outgrow its pulp roots and become a serious market of adult science fiction, eventually publishing stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Edmond Hamilton, Fletcher Pratt, and many others.

I’m delighted to report that Startling Stories has been revived as part of the stable of magazines at John Gregory Betancourt’s Wildside Press. The editor is Douglas Draa, who also helms the revived version of Weirdbook.

The first issue of the revived magazine — and the first new issue of Startling Stories in 65 years — was published on February 1st. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Goth Chick News: The Stoker Awards Are Back, And I Need One

Goth Chick News: The Stoker Awards Are Back, And I Need One

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Gather round friends – as we’re all still stuck at home, we can at least take consolation in the idea that writers all over the world continue to have plenty of time to create stories with which to entertain us. And as always, the end of January gifts us with the most awesome reading/watching list of the year: the annual preliminary ballot list for the coolest award ever.

The Bram Stoker Awards have been presented annually since 1987, and the winners are selected by ballot from the active members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Several members of the HWA, including Dean Koontz, were originally reluctant to endorse such writing awards, fearing it would incite competitiveness rather than friendly admiration. The HWA therefore went to great lengths to avoid mean-spirited competition by specifically seeking out new or overlooked writers and works, and officially issuing awards not based on “best of the year” criteria but for “superior achievement,” which allows for ties.

Which is lovely and all, but I believe I would not be above doing something mean-spirited — if not downright evil — to get my hands on the award itself; a haunted house whose front door opens to reveal the category and winner.

This week the HWA announced the preliminary ballot for the 2020 Bram Stoker Awards. And whatever you do, do not call these folks nominees (yet). Only works that appear on the Stoker Award’s “Final Ballot,” to be formally announced on February 23, may be called nominees.

Therefore, the preliminary ballot achievers are…

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Today is Jack Vance’s 104th Birthday

Today is Jack Vance’s 104th Birthday

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Jack Vance-smallToday, just 104 years ago, Jack Vance was born in San Francisco. Or, actually, John Holbrook Vance. He grew up to live on a farm, suddenly become almost destitute and have to leave junior college, work in a cannery, as a bellhop and on a gold dredge. Later, at UC Berkeley, he studied mining engineering, physics, journalism and English, and wrote his first science fiction stories. Still later, he worked as an electrician in the naval yards at Pearl Harbor, but left a month before the Japanese attack. During the war he worked as a rigger and a merchant seaman, after faking his eyesight test. A jazz musician, a carpenter, a surveyor and a ceramicist he was a sailor throughout life, building his own boats and dreaming of vast oceans and rivers on distant planets.

He began publishing science fiction in 1945, had his breakthrough with The Dying Earth in 1950, became a staff writer for the Captain Video TV show in 1952, had further breakthroughs when his first crime novel under his own name, The Man in the Cage, had a 1961 Edgar Award for best first novel, and again when his novellas “The Dragon Masters” and “The Last Castle” won Hugos and Nebulas in 1963 and 1966. But his real and lasting breakthrough was as one of the finest, most bitingly satirical and ironic, most stylistically intransigent and most unforgettably original science fiction (and, by all means, also fantasy) authors of the 20th century.

In 1976 I and Per Insulander, who co-chaired that year’s Swedish national SF convention, invited Jack to be our guest of honor. He accepted, stayed for a week in Stockholm, and called us his friends; I think we were. A year later we sailed with him in San Francisco bay and stayed at his house in Oakland; for many years, I kept in touch with him and continued to publish him in Sweden. When Jack grew almost totally blind in the 1990s, he kept writing. If you haven’t already read his work, you must. It is sui generis; nobody else has written science fiction as Jack did, and you either love it or just can’t see what he was doing. Nobody else has written science fiction that to the same extent bares our souls, satirizes our most cherished idiocies, heckles the hypocrisies and nonsensicalities of our religions, social codes, moral codes and pointless squabbles. Read the five novels in his Demon Princes series; read his wonderful and absurd Tschai novels (published in the US as the Planet of Adventure books); read his subversive Lyonesse fantasy trilogy; read him. Thanks to his son, John Vance, all of Jack’s books are in print. I hope they remain so. Jack Vance was a writer for the ages, and of the enlightenment.

Jack died on May 26, 2013. I mourn him still, but more importantly I still read him. So should you.

Undertow Publications Announces Weird Horror Magazine

Undertow Publications Announces Weird Horror Magazine

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Weird Horror Issue 1-small

Weird Horror issue 1, coming in October. Cover art by Sam Heimer

Undertow Publications is one of the finest small presses in operation today. We’ve covered several of their excellent recent releases, including Shadows & Tall Trees 8, the hardcover journal The Silent Garden, Simon Strantzas’ Nothing is Everything and All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma.

The mad genius behind Undertow is Canadian Michael Kelly, editor and publisher extraordinaire (and a mean writer in his own right). Last month Michael made this announcement on Facebook:

Friends, am very happy to announce the contributors to the inaugural issue of Weird Horror, coming this October.

David Bowman, Shikhar Dixit, Steve Duffy, Inna Effress, Tom Goldstein, Orrin Grey, John Langan, Suzan Palumbo, Ian Rogers, Naben Ruthnum, Lysette Stevenson, Simon Strantzas, Steve Toase.

We’re bringing you a 7″ x 10″ glossy pulp fiction magazine of fun and terror. Pricing and final specs coming soon.

Cover art by Sam Heimer.

This is fantastic news indeed. Michael has proved his editorial acumen time and again in the horror field — with Shadows and Tall Trees, five volumes of the highly acclaimed Year’s Best Weird Fiction anthology series, and anthologies like Apparitions (Undertow, 2009). Having Michael at the helm of a major new magazine of weird horror is tremendously promising.

The second issue of Weird Horror is promised for March 2021, and issue 3 in October 2021. Read all the details here.

Wendy N. Wagner will Assume Editorial Reins at Nightmare Magazine with Issue #100

Wendy N. Wagner will Assume Editorial Reins at Nightmare Magazine with Issue #100

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Nightmare Magazine 84 September 2019-small Nightmare Magazine 89 October 2019-small Nightmare Magazine 92 May 2020-small

Recent issues of Nightmare Magazine. Covers by Alexandra Petruk / Adobe Stock Images

Nightmare may well be the best magazine of horror and dark fantasy on the market. In the last twelve months, under the skilled editorial guidance of John Joseph Adams, it’s published original fiction by Simon Strantzas, Adam-Troy Castro, Brian Evenson, Rich Larson, Ray Nayler, Senaa Ahmad, and many others.

However, JJA is a busy guy. In addition to Nightmare he also edits the acclaimed Lightspeed magazine, a line of popular anthologies, including the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the upcoming Dystopia Triptych, and — let’s not forget — John Joseph Adams Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published my novel The Robots of Gotham. I guess holding down three full time jobs starts to wear on a guy after a while, and on May 20 John announced that, effective with issue #100, Managing Editor Wendy N. Wagner would be taking over the reins at Nightmare.

Soon yours truly will be passing the editorial torch… although she will be newly minted in title, the editor has a name and face you already know: Our long-time managing/senior editor, Wendy N. Wagner. If you’re a diligent Nightmare reader, you’re already familiar with her editorial contributions: She was the guest editor for our Queers Destroy Horror! special issue back in 2015. But in truth if you’ve read any issue since 2014 you’ve seen Wendy’s input; she’s been my stalwart advisor and lieutenant for more than six years. I know that I’m leaving the magazine in the best possible hands…

Issue 100 will be my last issue as editor of Nightmare, but despair not, friends, for I honestly can’t think of a better person to take the reins . . . and I for one can’t wait to see where Wendy leads us next.

Wendy is a terrific choice, in my opinion. In addition to her editorial chops, she’s a fine author. We’ve covered two of her previous novels here, An Oath of Dogs (Angry Robot, 2017), and the Pathfinder Tales novel Starspawn (described as “Pathfinder Meets Lovecraft”). Garrett Calcaterra interviewed her for Black Gate back in 2013.

Read the full announcement here, and check out the latest issue of Nightmare, with fiction by Yohanca Delgado and Claire Wrenwood, Jarla Tangh, Adam-Troy Castro, and Steve Toase. You can purchase individual issues for $2.99 each, or subscribe for just $11.94 for six months here.

Goth Chick News: Stoker Winners Are Going to Need a Bigger Mantel…

Goth Chick News: Stoker Winners Are Going to Need a Bigger Mantel…

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Coyote Rage-small The Bone Weaver's Orchard-small Oware Mosaic-small

Each year around this time I experience a fit of jealousy for those lucky few individuals who receive a Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Not only are there far fewer of them than Oscars or Emmys, but let’s be honest, they are far cooler to look at. Interestingly enough, you will never find one for sale or auction, as clearly horror writers at this level are never hard up enough for money to sell their trophies (believe me, I’ve looked). When you Google “replica Oscar statues for sale” you find nearly 2 million hits… but can you guess how many hits you get when you Google “replica Stoker awards for sale”?

Exactly zero.

That’s right – no cheesy dollar-store models of this little gem. No inflatable, larger-than-life Stokers, no Stoker costumes, no Stoker greeting cards. And why is that? Because it’s rare and amazing and too incredible for words, in spite of the fact I’d pay big bucks, even one made by those ceramic Christmas house people (if any of those are listening).

Nope. Only the best of the best, of the best, get to take home a Stoker. Back in January I gave you the list of lucky nominees. Little did I know we’d all end up with plenty of time to read each and every one. This week the HWA dashed the hopes of most writers on that list to arrive at 12 winners and the subsequent “finalist nominees” who do not get to go home with the coolest award ever created. In fact, this year they are at least spared the agony of having their pictures taken next to the winner, standing near to, but not being allowed to touch the coveted Stoker award.

Sigh.

So, without further pontificating, here are the talented winners, and the finalists…

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SFWA Announces the 2019 Nebula Award Nominations

SFWA Announces the 2019 Nebula Award Nominations

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The Ten Thousand Doors of January-small Gods of Jade and Shadow-small Gideon the Ninth-small

It’s nearly the end of February. And that means that the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has finally put an end to all that suspense, and announced the nominees for the 2019 Nebula Awards, one of the most prestigious awards our industry has to offer.

This year’s nominees are:

Novel

Marque of Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (Tor)
Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley)

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