Black Gate – Page 1048 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Skyhorse and Start Publishing Complete Night Shade Acquisition

Tuesday, June 4, 2013 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

As we first reported on April 4th, Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing have been in negotiations to acquire the assets of Night Shade Books. As co-owner Jeremy Lassen explained in an Open Letter on April 5th, the sale would allow Night Shade to avoid bankruptcy and keep it operating as an ongoing concern.

After several authors expressed concern over the terms of the buyout, Skyhorse and Start sweetened the deal with a more generous royalty rate. Now the publishers have announced that they have completed the acquisition of Night Shade, and that the first post-sale book to be published will be Michael J. Martinez’s The Daedalus Incident on July 9th. Here’s part of the official press release:

Founded by Jason Williams in 1997, who was joined by partner Jeremy Lassen shortly after, Night Shade Books has over 250 titles in its catalog, including some renowned genre fiction — written by multiple nominees and winners of Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo awards. In 2003, Night Shade Books won the World Fantasy Special Award for Professional Achievement. Both Williams and Lassen will continue to be with Night Shade in a consulting capacity.

The agreement was reached following a spirited and public debate among authors, agents, fans, and publishers, which resulted in a deal approved by Night Shade’s authors….

“I am very excited to have found a buyer that is such a good fit for Night Shade, one that will be able to take us further than I was able to on my own. I look forward to building up Night Shade into the powerhouse of science fiction and fantasy for years to come,” said Night Shade founder Jason Williams. Night Shade had net sales of roughly $1.5 million for the 2012 calendar year.

Here at Black Gate, we’re very pleased to see that one of our favorite small press publishers will continue publishing great books.

Read the complete press release at io9.

Adventures in Bookselling: The Paperback Harry Dresden

Monday, June 3, 2013 John ONeill Comments 17 comments

Summer Knight first edition (2002, Roc Books). Cover by Lee MacLeod

Paperback collecting is an odd hobby. For one thing, unlike stamps or coins, virtually no paperback is out of reach for the determined collector.

Want examples? As I mentioned in Jack Vance’s obituary last week, the first edition of The Dying Earth is one of the rarest and most sought-after genre paperbacks — it had a tiny print run, and no one knew who Jack Vance was when it first appeared in 1950.

What does that mean to your pocketbook? I paid just under $20 for a copy in mint condition a few years ago. As of today, around half a dozen are available at Amazon.com, with Very Good copies starting at $10.

Think about that. A first edition of one of the rarest science fiction books, by one of the top authors in the field, a full six decades after it went out of print, will set you back… around the same price as a brand new paperback today.

Perhaps that’s just our genre, you think. Let’s face it, half of the folks who read science fiction and fantasy are anal-retentive fanboys. Probably 50% of the print run of The Dying Earth ended up in protective mylar bags by 1955.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Still, the situation for mystery and western fans is pretty much the same. If you’re a paperback collector, it’s a buyer’s market. Walk into the Dealer’s Room at the Windy City Pulp and Paper show (or virtually any paperback show in America) with a crisp $20 bill, and you can walk out with a heavy bag of paperbacks published before you were born.

Hard to believe? Just have a look at the gorgeous assortment of 103 vintage titles I bought for around $50 at Windy City just last year.

Perhaps it’s different if we look outside genre fiction entirely. What’s the rarest and most expensive paperback known?

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Weird of Oz Delves into Dungeon Masters’ Minds

Monday, June 3, 2013 Nick Ozment Comments 0 Comment

The way I see it, there are two types of Dungeon Masters — two archetypes, if you will: The Storyteller and the Rules Stickler. Of course, most game masters are some mix of both, but I’d like to try to describe these two different styles or approaches to RPG refereeing. And I’d love to hear from folks who are DMs as well as from players who have gamed with one sort of DM or the other.

In the comments section of this blog a few weeks back, an interesting conversation developed about these different styles of dungeon mastering (or game mastering, if you’re not talking exclusively about Dungeons & Dragons); specifically, the broad spectrum between the DM who is a rules stickler and the DM for whom the rules are, at best, optional suggestions. It was intriguing enough that I promised to revisit the topic in its own post.

Here we are. So get your gear (if you’re a rules stickler, be sure to add up encumbrance values and calculate any penalties), pack your Bag of Holding (don’t forget those rations — unless you have a sorcerer who can conjure up food as needed), and get ready to delve into the depths of the dungeon master’s id.

For mapping out this subject, I’m going to focus on the two ends of the spectrum, recognizing that most game masters fall somewhere in between these two extremes. I’ll call them the Rules Stickler and the Storyteller. But first, an observation that applies to the whole lot of them that don the mantle of master…

One of the variables of tabletop RPGs, a fascinating aspect of its social (read: human interaction) nature, is that the rules are malleable and shaped to some extent by the personality of the person sitting behind that Dungeon Master’s screen. Unlike an online RPG controlled by a program that runs automatically at one remove from its programmers and cannot be reasoned with or tweaked (unless you’re a hacker), on the tabletop the DM calls the shots every step of the way.

Sure, the players, if they are conversant with the rules, know when they get to roll the 20-sided die and what bonuses they’ll get to add from their dexterity or their magic item or whatever. Nevertheless, the DM can add any offsetting variable he thinks appropriate. He can override the outcome and, unless he is faced with a player mutiny, so it stands.

So how does each individual DM choose to exercise this (fictional) life-and-death power?

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Black Gate Online Fiction: The Death of the Necromancer, Part One

Sunday, June 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

Black Gate is very proud to present Part One of Martha Wells’s Nebula Award-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer, presented online in its complete form for the first time.

Nicholas Valiarde is a passionate, embittered nobleman with an enigmatic past. Consumed by thoughts of vengeance, he is consoled only by thoughts of the beautiful, dangerous Madeline. He is also the greatest thief in all of Ile-Rien…

On the gas light streets of the city, he assumes the guise of a master criminal, stealing jewels from wealthy nobles to finance his quest for vengeance the murder of Count Montesq. Montesq orchestrated the wrongful execution of Nicholas’s beloved godfather on false charges of necromancy — the art of divination through communion with spirits of the dead–a practice long outlawed in the kingdom of Ile-Rein.

But now Nicholas’s murderous mission is being interrupted by a series of eerie, unexplainable, even fatal events. Someone with tremendous magical powers is opposing him. Children vanish, corpses assume the visage of real people, mortal spells are cast, and traces of necromantic power that hasn’t been used for centuries are found. And when a spiritualist unwittingly leads Nicholas to a decrepit mansion, the monstrous nature of his peril finally emerges in harrowing detail.Nicholas and his compatriots must destroy an ancient and awesome evil. even the help of Ile-Rien’s greatest sorcerer may not be enough, for Nicholas faces a woefully mismatched battle — and unthinkable horrors await the loser.

Martha Wells is the author of fourteen fantasy novels, including City of Bones, The Element of Fire, The Cloud Roads, and The Serpent Sea. Her most recent novel is the YA fantasy Emilie and the Hollow World, published by Strange Chemistry Books in April. Her previous fiction for us includes “Reflections” in Black Gate 10, “Holy Places” (BG 11), and “Houses of the Dead“ (BG 12). Her most recent article for us was “How Well Does The Cloud Roads Fit as Sword and Sorcery?,” which appeared here March 13. Her web site is www.marthawells.com.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Mary Catelli, Michael Penkas, Vera Nazarian, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

The Death of the Necromancer was originally published in hardcover by Avon EOS in 1998. The complete, unedited text will be presented here over the next four weeks, beginning tonight with the first four chapters. It is offered at no cost.

Read Part One of the complete novel here.

Tabitha Reviews The School for Good and Evil

Sunday, June 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The School for Good and Evil
By Soman Chainani
HarperCollins (488 pages, May 14, $16.99 hardcover/$10.99 digital)

The School for Good and Evil is a major summer release from HarperCollins, with a national marketing campaign and lot of pre-release buzz, and it’s already getting a lot of attention.

We know what to do with young adult books getting a lot of attention here at Black Gate – we give them to Tabitha, the thirteen year-old reviewer who covered The House of Dead Maids and All the Lovely Bad Ones for us, among others. We’re glad to have her join us again, even though she makes us feel old and out of touch.

Black Gate: Tabitha, welcome back to the Black Gate offices!

Tabitha: Thanks, I guess.

Before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself.

Didn’t we do that last time?

Yes but that was like a hundred years ago. All the people who read your last reviews probably got old and died.

Wow. Okay, in that case, I turn 114 this year. I’m going to high school next year. On the introvert scale, I’m beyond “vampire.”

“Beyond vampire.” What does that mean? Explain it for old people.

I scream in agony whenever I set foot outside my house.

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The Dying Earth: An Appreciation

Sunday, June 2, 2013 Matthew David Surridge Comments 7 comments

Tales of the Dying Earth Last Sunday, May 26, veteran genre writer Jack Vance died at the age of 96. John O’Neill posted a fine overview here of his career; testament to Vance’s influence on other writers can be seen in remembrances by Christopher Priest and George R.R. Martin. Prolific and talented, Vance was a significant figure. I thought I’d do my humble bit to mark his passing with a look at perhaps his best-known series, books which named a subgenre of speculative fiction: The Dying Earth.

The first book in the sequence, The Dying Earth, was a collection of linked short stories published together as a novel in 1950. The second volume, 1966’s Eyes of the Overworld, ties together a half-dozen short stories (of which five had been previously published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) into a sprawling picaresque adventure. After Michael Shea wrote and published an authorised sequel in 1974, A Quest for Simbilis, Vance returned to his setting and lead character in 1983 with Cugel’s Saga. Parts of this book too had been previously published as short fiction, but again the episodic structure worked, creating the sense of an unwinding yarn, a shaggy-dog story — a feel similar to the previous book while still highly individual. The final book, 1984’s Rhialto the Marvellous, was a collection of longish tales featuring new main characters; one story, the last in the book, had been published in 1973.

All four books are set in the unimaginably far future, when a red sun wearily makes its way through the skies of Earth and the moon is no more. Powerful magicians memorise spells based on obscure mathematics and command otherworldly entities. The world is nothing we recognise: not only has every culture and civlisation we have ever known passed away unremembered, but the basic geography of the planet has changed. There are fewer people on the planet, it seems, though far more quasi-human entities; technology’s mostly regressed to pre-industrial levels, except for rare magical artifacts. If ‘magic’ is the right word. What seems to be magic may only be forgotten technology. Who, this far away in time, can recall?

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New Treasures: The Mist-Torn Witches by Barb Hendee

Sunday, June 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I remember when I first saw Dhampir, the opening volume of Barb and & J.C. Hendee’s Noble Dead saga, back in 2003.

A supernatural medieval fantasy packed with vampire hunters, assassins, ancient castles, and mysterious guilds? That went right on my to-be-read pile. It was still there when Thief of Lives arrived twelve months later. And the third volume, Sister of the Dead. There are now a dozen, and I’ve surrendered all hope. Those two write faster than I can read.

So that’s why I was pleased when Barb Hendee’s solo effort, The Mist-Torn Witches, arrived in May. It’s the first in a brand new series, but it has many of the same elements that attracted me to The Noble Dead. In one volume, I can be on top of everything and not have to hang my head in shame when we talk about Hendee at the Black Gate reading club. Big green recliner, here I come.

In a small village in the nation of Droevinka, orphaned sisters Céline and Amelie Fawe scrape out a living selling herbal medicines in their apothecary shop. Céline earns additional money by posing as a seer and pretending to read people’s futures.

But they exist in a land of great noble houses, all vying for power, and when the sisters refuse the orders of a warlord prince, they must flee and are forced to depend on the warlord prince’s brother, Anton, for a temporary haven.

A series of bizarre deaths of pretty young girls is plaguing the village surrounding Prince Anton’s castle. He offers Céline and Amelie permanent protection if they can use their “skills” to find the killer.

With little choice, the sisters enter a world unknown to them — of fine gowns and banquets and advances from powerful men. Their survival depends on catching a murderer who appears to walk through walls and vanish without a trace — and the danger grows with each passing night.

The Mist-Torn Witches was published by Roc Books on May 7. It is 326 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions.

See all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

The Nightmare Men: “The Phantom Fighter”

Saturday, June 1, 2013 Josh Reynolds Comments 7 comments

‘He was…rather under medium height, but with military erectness of carriage that made him seem several inches taller than he actually was. His light blue eyes were small and exceedingly deep set and would have been humorous had it not been for the curiously cold directness of their gaze. With his blonde moustache waxed at the ends in two perfectly horizontal points and those twinkling, stock taking eyes, he reminded me of an alert tom-cat.’

Such is the stout Dr. Trowbridge’s description of Jules de Grandin, late of Paris, the Surete, and the Sorbonne, upon first meeting the irascible little French physician in the 1925 story, “Terror on the Links”. Cat-eyed and ebullient, de Grandin is the epitome of the phrase ‘it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.’ He defends Harrisonville, New Jersey, and by extension, all of mankind, against the spawn of Satan, using forbidden knowledge and firearms alike.

Jules de Grandin and his ever-present companion, Dr. Trowbridge, were created in 1925 by Seabury Quinn for Weird Tales and went on to feature in close to a hundred stories, with the last, “The Ring of Bastet”, appearing in 1951. Quinn, in the introduction to the 1976 Popular Library collection, The Adventures of Jules de Grandin, says that de Grandin is ‘…a sort of literary combination of Topsy and Minerva, that is, he just growed.’

It’s hard to imagine it being otherwise, given the sheer vibrancy of de Grandin from the start. De Grandin, like his more passive predecessor Dr. Hesselius, is a physician, and approaches the supernatural as an illness to be confronted. Unlike the kindly Hesselius, however, de Grandin is no amiable general practitioner, but a surgeon — flamboyant, precise, and ruthless.

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Black Gate Online Fiction Presents the Complete The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells

Friday, May 31, 2013 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Black Gate is very proud to announce that we will be presenting the complete fantasy novel The Death of the Necromancer, by Martha Wells, as part of our Online Fiction series, starting this Sunday, June 2.

The Death of the Necromancer is one of the most important fantasy novels of the past 20 years. When I ran SF Site, we received an advance proof in 1998, and it electrified our entire office. In his review, senior editor Wayne MacLaurin wrote:

Take a great Sherlock Holmes novel, mix in a heavy dose of Steven Brust’s Jhereg, and you’ll have some idea of what you can expect… Martha Wells’ first two novels, The Element of Fire and City of Bones, were praised for their rich detail and original concepts. The Death of the Necromancer raises those two points to new levels… It’s a stunning achievement.

When we polled all 40 regular reviewers for our “Best of the Year” awards, The Death of the Necromancer topped more ballots than any other book, and to no one’s surprise it was nominated for a Nebula Award.

Martha Wells has a long history with Black Gate. We published three long novellas featuring her heroes Giliead & Ilias, starting with “Reflections” in Black Gate 10; followed by “Holy Places” (BG 11), and “Houses of the Dead“ (BG 12). Her stories are fast-paced mysteries, filled with deeply human characters on a splendidly realized stage, and her appearance in BG brought us a whole new audience. Her most recent article for us was “How Well Does The Cloud Roads Fit as Sword and Sorcery?,” which appeared here March 13.

The Death of the Necromancer was originally published in hardcover by Avon EOS in 1998. The complete, unedited text will be serialized as part of our Black Gate Online Fiction line, starting this Sunday, June 2.

Is This a Kissing Book?

Friday, May 31, 2013 Violette Malan Comments 5 comments

Let me get one thing out of the way immediately: It’s my belief that the increase in the numbers of female protagonists in the last thirty years (yes, it’s been that long) is directly related to the increase in the numbers of female authors (yes, it’s that simple). Female readers have been here all along. You can trust me on that one.

Last week I was talking about dual heroes, when is a pair a true pairing, and when a hero/sidekick combo? I mentioned Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, for me the original hero pair, and some of their literary descendants. But I left it until this week to talk about a much more recent phenomenon, the female/male hero pair.

Now, just to be clear, I don’t mean a book with a male protagonist, and his female companion – until recently known as a “regular book.” Nor do I mean a book with a female protagonist and a male second lead – until recently known as a “romance novel.” What I mean is the same kind of dual hero I talked about before, where both main characters are equally important to the story, but where one happens to be a woman, and one happens to be a man.

Having established the usefulness of a pair of protagonists (each brings a unique perspective and different skills to the problem-solving; the presence of a “friend” establishes the emotional accessibility of both characters; the chance to reveal character through conversation [thanks to Alex Bledsoe for some of these ideas], and, especially, the usefulness of a country/city pair) does having a female/male pair do anything in particular for us?

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