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The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: Volume 1, 2009-2011 Compiled by the Editors of HFQ

The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: Volume 1, 2009-2011 Compiled by the Editors of HFQ

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oie_28203924eCuQXbPYRegular readers of my monthly short story roundup know how great I think Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is, ranking it the most consistent forum for the best in contemporary swords & sorcery. Some may think I’m laying it on a little thick, but The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly: Volume 1, 2009-2011, a distillation of the mag’s first three years, should prove that I’m not.

While we are living in a time when some magnificent S&S short stories are being written, most are confined to the ephemeral pages of the web. So I consider it important that Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and the rest of the HFQ crew have endeavored to preserve some of their very best in book form.

Before diving into the stories (and poems — never let it be forgotten that HFQ is one of the few places publishing heroic poetry), let me start with the cover. By the very existence of that “Volume 1” in the title you know to expect more. It implies that the editors know there’s an audience hungering for S&S right now, and that they have faith it will still be there in the future, waiting for “Volume 2.”

Then there’s the art by Justin Sweet. Eschewing either the violent moment of battle or the smoldering embers of its aftermath, we see the warrior and his companions as their adventure is about to begin. From a mountainous vantage they can survey the tower below ready to be plundered, or the prisoner within its walls rescued. Maybe it’s the squadron of ships in which they’re interested. Of course, the fact that all three seem to be looking at something just out of the frame to the left could mean the bounty hunters looking for them, or a pack of ghouls, has just broken from the forest. Whatever the specifics of the painting, for me it’s a picture from just before the events of the story. It promises there’s something coming that will get my blood pumping and transport me, if only for a dozen pages, out of the humdrum and into the extraordinary.

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Three Classic Books for Medieval Worldbuilders and Armchair Time Travellers

Three Classic Books for Medieval Worldbuilders and Armchair Time Travellers

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…this beautifully illustrated book covers everything

This time next week you’ll be contemplating a pile of Amazon gift vouchers and book tokens.

How do know?

Everyday Life
…a cosy oak-panelled read for fireside days while the rain batters at your window

You’re a Black Gate reader. Your muggle relatives can’t even guess your tastes. Your geeky friends know that your wishlist is too specific to second guess.

So book tokens.

I won’t try to guess your tastes either! However, if you are interested in the medieval world, or medieval-style worlds, some of the following old books from my research shelf might tempt you…

A History of Everyday Things in England (Archive.Org link) by Marjorie and CHB Quennell is a pre-WWI classic and part of a series that goes through to 1914 (Wikipedia).

Aimed at the older children of yesteryear — meaning it’s a fine read for a modern adult — this beautifully illustrated book covers everything from pottery to architecture, arrow loops to siege engines, and armour to aumbries, it drops in lots of quotes from original sources, and — written in a time of servants and country weekends — feels authentic when it explores the manor houses and castles of the time.

It also approaches the culture and economics from the inside, with sections on ships and merchants, and ground plans of typical buildings.

Though it pulls no punches — describing the English as acting like the Hun in 14th-century France — it’s a cosy oak-panelled read for fireside days while the rain batters at your window, but also a jumping off point for recreating medieval domesticity.

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Fantastic Reference and Non-fiction Books

Fantastic Reference and Non-fiction Books

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At the centre of all the fuzzy sets is a rough definition of what we mean by fantasy: a fantasy text is a self-coherent narrative which, when set in our REALITY, tells a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it (see PERCEPTION); when set in an OTHERWORLD or SECONDARY WORLD, that otherworld will be impossible, but stories set there will be possible in the otherworld’s terms. An associated point, hinted at here, is that at the core of fantasy is STORY. Even the most surrealist of fantasies tells a tale.

                                      — from the foreword of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy by John Clute and John Grant

oie_21313286sNQbIjqI like to think I have a fairly extensive knowledge of swords & sorcery and other fantasy sub-genres. While I never took courses on the hermeneutics of Conan, or Fafhrd and post-modernism, I do have about forty years of time on job reading the stuff. When I write I try to bring that knowledge to bear in a close reading of the story. But I know better than to rely just on my brain all the time, so sometimes I turn to my small but valuable collection of fantasy non-fiction titles.

I have always loved reference books. When I was little I pestered my mother to buy me several sets of books, starting with the Golden Book Illustrated Dictionary and followed by the Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. The latter was bought, one volume every few weeks, at A&P. Sadly, she didn’t get two of them:  Vol.14, ISRAE to LACCA, and Vol.21, RUSSI to SUMAL. Which meant I didn’t learn much about Kipling or rutabagas until I was older. I spent hours upon hours poring over those books, just reading about whatever was in front of me.

That initial love for reference books only grew as I got older, eventually extending into the various genres of fiction I read. I’ve got several good books on crime fiction and science fiction that have steered me toward books I might never have otherwise known about or been willing to give a chance. Writing about swords & sorcery for the past four and half years, though, it’s the fantasy references that I’ve drawn on the most for ideas and information.

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Fourth Time Around for Shortcut Man

Fourth Time Around for Shortcut Man

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Ipso Fatso-smallshortcutMy favorite contemporary author, P. G. Sturges, is back with Ipso Fatso, the fourth novel in his Shortcut Man series.

An intoxicating blend of comedy, social commentary, and hardboiled fiction, the series concerns Dick Henry, a fixer known as “the Shortcut Man.” Henry solves problems others can’t resolve and works quickly and effectively. Among his clients this time out is a college student being sexually harassed by her tenured professor and three generations of a Latino family living under one roof who are threatened with eviction by unethical bankers and with deportation by opportunistic politicians.

Obviously when one resolves to take on bankers and politics, one is aiming considerably higher than normal. The nice thing here is neither Dick Henry nor his author have bitten off more than they can chew.

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A Biography Worthy of the Creator of D&D: Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination

A Biography Worthy of the Creator of D&D: Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination

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Empire of the Imagination-small Empire of the Imagination back-small

Anyone who has grown up in a small town knows how much of an unrelenting pest, nay enemy, boredom can be. And if you grew up in the days before the internet, or before fairly inexpensive computers or game systems, and when cable television was just getting going, boredom was even more of a specter. However, my young friends and I had one constant respite from boredom: role-playing games (RPGs)! And like most from my generation, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was our starting point.

It’s hard to communicate just how new and different D&D was from other games that had previously been around. Before RPGs, most games were known for having a point or area of physical attention, e.g. a game-board with pieces, or playing cards. And most of these games had a “winner.” D&D had none of this. You had your player character (PC) sheet, pencil, dice, and graph paper to make a map. And though one’s PC could survive with treasure in a D&D adventure, there weren’t really any “winners,” meaning the game could go on and on and on… sometimes for days or weeks.

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Prehistoric Fantasy from the Days Before the Earth had a Moon: Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga, Part I

Prehistoric Fantasy from the Days Before the Earth had a Moon: Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga, Part I

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 The Quest for the Complete Series

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Pocket Books – art by Boris Vallejo
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Orbit / Futura – Artist Unknown

In my quest to revive interest in forgotten or overlooked fantasies, it would be remiss not to discuss Jane Gaskell, specifically her Atlan Saga. The fact that my past few posts about H Warner Munn also happen to reference Atlantis is purely coincidental, and I am by no means an expert on all things Atlantean.

I came upon Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga in the late 1980s. As a high school lad in South Africa with limited funds, the public and school libraries — as well as friends — were my main sources of fantasy material. While many folks I know seem to have been reading Heinlein and Tolkein by the time they were 10, I only started reading for pleasure as a pre-teen. Until then I actively despised it. That is not to say I didn’t enjoy a good story, just I was too lazy to read it myself.  My mother desperately tried to encourage me, but I recall thinking Enid Blyton (Secret Seven etc.) was really nyaff, and the Hardy Boys were too mainstream.

Fortunately I discovered Biggles by Captain WE Johns and my mind, at last, opened to the joys of reading. After moving through CS Forester’s Hornblower books and Alexander Kent’s Richard Bolitho series (both period sea adventure), I found myself looking for something different. I found it through friends who introduced me to Anne McCaffery’s Dragonflight and David Eddings’ Belgeriad books.

One of the factors hindering me at the time was that good material was relatively thin on the ground. I also had a juvenile dislike of second hand books, preferring to buy them new. Sure, the shops had a reasonable amount on their shelves, and there were a (very) few specialist shops with a plethora of gear to choose from, but most of it was out of my price range, or my sphere of travel. Fortunately the major chain store of the day, CNA (like a Borders I imagine) used to have an annual book sale just after Christmas where they moved loads of old warehouse stock. During one of these sales I encountered two slim volumes which, due to their awesome cover art, just had to be fantasy par excellence: The Dragon and The City, both by Jane Gaskell.

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November Short Story Roundup

November Short Story Roundup

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oie_14247554qbnAW5It’s been a lot of fun getting deep into epic high fantasy over the past few months, and I hope you’ve been enjoying it as well, but it’s good to remember what got me started writing at Black Gate in the first place: swords & sorcery. So without further ado, here’s the November short story roundup.

Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine Issue 46 hit the virtual stands with its usual pair of stories, one by Brynn McNab and another by Black Gate‘s own Nicholas Ozment. As John O’Neill wrote last week, Ellet is planning on putting together an anthology of the best of his magazine’s first four years. Coupled with Heroic Fantasy Quarterly‘s “best of” anthology, it’s a good time for short fiction readers.

McNab’s story, “The Gargoyle and the Nun,” is a somewhat formless story of Merek and Arabella, a soldier transformed by a witch into a gargoyle and the woman he loves. The story, in which true love conquers all, feels very much like a fairytale and has some good moments. It suffers in the end, though, from being only three short scenes featuring characters without much character.

“Last Stand at Wellworm’s Pass” is a perfect dose of old school storytelling from Ozment. “Tamalin, one of the most feared and powerful mages in all of Rilsthorn” is on the run from a pack of assassins on the dark streets of Ment City. Cornered, he is rescued by a cloaked man named Kor. His deliverer offers to help the wizard escape through the maze of tunnels that run beneath the city and on to ultimate freedom by way of a place called Wellworm’s Pass. It’s a quick-paced story that, while it doesn’t offer anything startlingly new, is delivered with all the brio and skill needed to create a successful S&S tale. Any S&S story that can stuff in werewolves, demons, and djinns is alright by me.

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Robert E. Howard: Peering Behind the Veil of Life

Robert E. Howard: Peering Behind the Veil of Life

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NOTE: The following article was first published on May 9, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

delrey-kullsubterranean-kull-limited“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” is Robert E. Howard at his most poetic.

His writing had taken a quantum leap forward in quality compared with his earlier Kull stories as he transitioned from working in familiar genres to blazing a trail none had attempted before him. More than his gift for well-turned phrases and evoking imagery so powerful, it literally sears itself in the reader’s mind; Howard reaches for a depth of character and achieves a work that is both psychologically and philosophically rewarding.

Sadly, as the author would later tell his friend, Clyde Smith he was disappointed in the result and resolved to never attempt anything so deep again.

The tale starts off with Kull, plagued with ennui and yearning for something more substantive than riches, power, and transient beauty. The brooding king rejects the company of loyal Brule, the Pict who won his respect and friendship in “The Shadow Kingdom,” but foolishly takes the advice of an alluring Eastern female.

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Poetic Witchery and the Strangeness in Ordinary Things: Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

Poetic Witchery and the Strangeness in Ordinary Things: Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

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The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories Algernon Blackwood-smallOf the many things Algernon Blackwood did in his lifetime the most notable is producing a substantial body of horror and weird fiction. He tends to be overshadowed by some other writers of yesteryear, but one of the best known of those writers, H.P. Lovecraft, offered high praise for his abilities:

Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.

The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories was the first of Blackwood’s many story collections. It first saw publication in 1906. The edition reviewed here was published in 1916.

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The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip

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“Who is the Star-Bearer, and what will he loose that is bound?”

                                             from the Riddle-Master of Hed

This week’s work of epic high fantasy, Patricia McKillip’s The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), the first volume in her Riddle-Master trilogy, is more restrained than those I’ve reviewed the past few weeks. In his book Modern Fantasy, David Pringle calls the series “romantic fantasies of a delicate kind” and in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy John Clute describes McKillip’s development of the series’ lead characters as “handled with scrupulous delicacy.” While I detect a slightly dismissive tone in those comments, neither is completely inaccurate. If The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are a great big Romantic symphony, then McKillip’s book is more like a piano sonata. There’s a lightness of touch, though not of tone, here, as well as a focus on the small details. So, though an ancient war is reignited, mysterious shapeshifting enemies appear out of nowhere, and the fate of the world is at stake, at the center of the story is a young hero and his struggle to refuse to submit to prophecies of which he wants no part.

My mother took these books out from the YA section in the St. George Library on Staten Island way back in 1979 for my dad. She thought he’d like them and she was right. He must have read them every other year or so between then and his death in 2001. Because he liked them so much I gave them a try and I was as enthralled as he clearly was. Like him, I was drawn into McKillip’s world of riddles, strange magics, and hidden and lost identities. I’ve probably read the trilogy four or five times myself, but this is the first time I’ve picked it up in over a decade. Having finished the first, I’m looking forward to the next two volumes, Heir of Sea and Fire and Harpist in the Wind, with great anticipation.

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