High Couch of Silistra (Bantam Books, May 1977) and The Golden Sword (Baen, November 1984). Covers by Boris Vallejo and Victoria Poyser Just after I put up my first Harold Lamb post I found out that an author I much admired and who has influenced my work, had died. Janet Morris. I’ll get back to Lamb next post but wanted to take a moment to comment on Ms. Morris. I only wish I’d done this before she died. I knew…
It’s not often that Black Gate Photog Chris Z and I experience sensory overload at a convention, so this is likely a first. Last weekend, August 16-18, Chicago played host to the Fan Expo in its third year taking over the event from Wizard World. The 2023 event boasted an impressive list of celebrities, vendors and artists. However, this year was closer to mind-blowing for a lot of reasons that I’m about to tell you. Before I wade in, this…
Qitongren offers a mix of fantasy and fairy tale with “The Spring of Dongke Temple.” Originally published in Chinese in 2007, it was translated by Liu Jue in 2019 for publication in the anthology of Chinese science fiction Ticket to Tomorrow and Other Stories. In 2020, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer selected the story for The Big Book of Modern Fantasy. “The Spring of Dongke Temple” opens with a cautionary tale of a woodsman who stumbled upon the isolated Buddhist temple…
I sincerely doubt any Black Gate reader needs an education in who Ray Harryhausen was or why his films, despite the sea-change in special effects technology, remain seminal classics (I’ve been making my way through a bunch of his swashbuckling adventures with my Zoomer son, who notes, time and again, how ‘cheesy and awesome’ the stop motion is, but also calls out how perfect at times the strange movements are at making monsters seem, well…strange and *monstrous* in a way…
Historical adventure and fantasy films tend to be straightforward genre pictures long on plot and action and short on deep themes and introspection, which is okay, you can’t have everything. Or can you? Some ambitious filmmakers want it all, and are willing to risk losing an audience who expects simple action and adventure by giving them ideas to think about or visuals that are striking but hard to parse. Films with such vaulting ambitions often fall into the category of…
July-August 2024 issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact. Cover art by John Sumrow (for “Sisters of the Flare”) and Shutterstock Might as well get the bad news out of the way up front. There’s still no new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but we hope for better news next month. Unfortunately, that’s the same thing we said two months ago, and two months before that. We’re now 2/3rds of the way…
The Doom That Came to Sarnath (Ballantine Books, November 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, was one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th Century. But horror wasn’t all he produced, as editor Lin Carter adroitly pointed out in the introduction to The Doom That Came to Sarnath. Those readers who know only the Cthulhu Mythos stories, know only a single side of Lovecraft… the Cthulhu Mythos, while completely his own invention, was…
The Kyrik novels by Gardner F. Fox (Leisure Books, 1975-1976) I’m getting ready to embark on a series of posts about Philip Jose Farmer, but got distracted looking through my shelves and decided to throw in a post about the Sword & Sorcery work of Gardner F. Fox, who I mentioned here a while back for his two book S&P series set on the planet Llarn. While my small hometown library didn’t have anything by Robert E. Howard, they had…
New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine, championed by Oliver Brackenbury, has emerged over the last few years to provide a market with “love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling.” Black Gate has featured the crowdfunding for and reviews of the initial volumes (link). Today we highlight a crowdfunding endeavor that is in progress now, set to end on July 20th: a collection of six stories called Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes. Starting with this new anthology, Oliver…
Frontera (Baen Books, August 1984). Cover by Vincent Di Fate I first discovered Lewis Shiner in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, where he was a regular, and one of my favorite contributors. His first published story, “Tinker’s Damn,” appeared in the fifth issue of Charles Ryan’s Galileo magazine in October 1977, and he followed that with dozens more all through the 80s and 90s in places likes The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone Magazine, Omni,…