Twilight Sector & Astra Titanus

Twilight Sector & Astra Titanus

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astraWith Black Gate 15 just around the corner I thought I’d start devoting some time to some products that arrived too late for us to cover, or that just didn’t fit into an issue nearly as large as issue 14.

I was particularly taken by two science fiction titles. The first is a campaign setting, and while it utilizes the Mongoose Traveller rules, it’s in a completely different universe from Traveller itself.

The other is a solo tactical board game. If, like me, you name “The Doomsday Machine” as one of your favorite classic Star Trek episodes, it’s a must have, but it’s pretty darned cool even if you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about.

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Chris Braak Reviews Turn Coat (Dresden Files #11)

Chris Braak Reviews Turn Coat (Dresden Files #11)

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turn-coatTurn Coat
Jim Butcher
Roc (576 pp, $9.99, April 2009 – March 2010 paperback edition)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

Private-eye wizard Harry Dresden returns in Jim Butcher’s Turn Coat though, in point of fact, he hasn’t been doing altogether that much investigating lately. Between wars with vampire courts and secret enemies finally getting the Black Council on the move, it doesn’t seem like Harry is going to have the opportunity to track down a missing person or provide evidence in a divorce dispute any time soon.

Butcher jumps right in with his trademark wit. The characters in Turn Coat are, by now, so familiar that they provide a little thrill of recognition just by being mentioned. Waldo Butters, for example, has next to nothing to do with the story, but I can’t help but be pleased to see him again because I like Waldo Butters. That is something that plays to Butcher’s strong suit: the dialogue and relationships are so easy and natural that they cannot help but be compelling, even when no one is doing anything.

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Art Evolution 20: Keith Parkinson [1958-2005]

Art Evolution 20: Keith Parkinson [1958-2005]

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Art Evolution turns twenty, and in so doing fades from this prestigious stage provided by Black Gate, but as the name contends, art is ever changing, and so I will never say never where the process and these articles are concerned. Still, if you’ve missed any of these wonderful works, the journey’s beginning can be found here.

After the addition of last week’s ‘Demented Lyssa’, I’ll take a step back to the place where the true power of this article first struck me.

dragon-mag-106-254In late 2009 I’d just signed Larry Elmore and Wayne Reynolds, my spirits flying high as I spent my nights searching the web for artwork that might also apply to art evolution. It was during this process that a distinct sorrow assailed me in regards to the passing of Keith Parkinson.

To me, Keith represented my youth, so many of his images galvanized in my mind along the way it was difficult to think of this article without him. For the first time I regarded this journey as a thing not involving me, but instead the artists, and the lives they’d touched along the way.

Having heard so much about Keith from his fellows, I couldn’t help but feel that it would be selfish not to include him in the article because he couldn’t do a rendition of Lyssa. Lyssa was secondary to the art, after all, and the mission statement I now followed pushed for a thing greater than my ego.

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New Treasures: Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan

New Treasures: Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan

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engineerOriginal science fiction and fantasy anthologies have had a tough time of it over the past few years, with some of the most promising and rewarding series — including Lou Ander’s excellent Fast Foward, and George Mann’s ambitious and highly readable Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and Solaris Book of New Fantasy — being discontinued.

One of the best of the new anthologists is Jonathan Strahan, whose acclaimed Eclipse series returns this May with Volume 4.  While we wait, Strahan treats us to a terrific standalone volume of original short stories:

The universe shifts and changes: suddenly you understand, you get it, and are filled with a sense of wonder. That moment of understanding drives the greatest science-fiction stories and lies at the heart of Engineering Infinity. Whether it’s coming up hard against the speed of light and, with it, the enormity of the universe, realising that terraforming a distant world is harder and more dangerous than you’d ever thought, or simply realizing that a hitchhiker on a starship consumes fuel and oxygen with tragic results, it’s hard science-fiction where sense of wonder is most often found and where science-fiction’s true heart lies.

This exciting and innovative science-fiction anthology collects together stories by some of the biggest names in the field including Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross and Greg Bear.

Engineering Infinity was published in paperback by Solaris for just $7.99; my copy arrived in early January.

As a raging blizzard  turns St. Charles, Illinois into a winter wonderland around me, this is the book I choose to cuddle down with for the evening.  Check it out when you get a chance.

The Mystical Viking: Valhalla Rising

The Mystical Viking: Valhalla Rising

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valhalla_rising_poster_dkValhalla Rising (2009)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Starring Mads Mikkelson, Jamie Sives, Gary Lewis, Ewan Stewart, Maarten Stevenson.

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn went into his film Valhalla Rising right as he was wrapping up post-production on Bronson, the bizarre biopic about British prisoner Charlie Bronson that turned into his biggest success and pushed star Tom Hardy into the front lines. But Bronson surprised many viewers, going against expectations of what a biopic about Charlie Bronson would be like. In the same way, Valhalla Rising flips around the conceptual idea of “Viking movie” and is unlike anything viewers might expect from an historical epic about skull-crushers like the medieval Norsemen. Valhalla Rising had its festival premiere in 2009 and a theatrical release in mid-2010, but it sits defiantly outside the mainstream. If El Topo is an “Acid Western,” then consider Valhalla Rising an “Acid Viking Movie.”

Although it clocks in at a lean 92 minutes with credits, Refn’s film moves at a slow pace and contains vast silences within a harsh landscape. The first twelve minutes contain only a single line of dialogue, and this sparse style remains consistent throughout the running time. Red-hued violence occasionally breaks out, done with no modern stylization, but there are no “action set-pieces.” This is a movie concerned with its tone and texture, telling an oblique story through implication. And for what it attempts to do, it succeeds: this is a transcendent film that creates an authentic sense of what Nordic life in the eleventh century must have felt like. Its taciturn introspection says an enormous amount about early Christian and late Pagan mysticism.

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The Scar-Crow Men, Faustus, and Wizards: Three Posts

The Scar-Crow Men, Faustus, and Wizards: Three Posts

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Marlowe's FaustThis week I read an advance copy of the second book in Mark Chadbourn’s series of espionage-fantasy-adventure novels, Swords of Albion. The Scar-Crow Men begins with the first performance of Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and the story of the novel and the story of Faust end up connecting in a number of ways. It got me thinking about Faust, and why the story of Faust has flourished in the centuries since Marlowe wrote, and how many different ideas about wizards there really are.

So this post breaks down into three posts, offering ruminations on the book, on Faust, and on wizards.

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“My Firefly Atonement” or “Get Cheap RPG Books Today Only!”

“My Firefly Atonement” or “Get Cheap RPG Books Today Only!”

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When a show with a large fan base – especially a large SF fan base – ends, the fans have some small amount of solace, because there’s usually a rich bounty of “extended universe” materials to keep the fix going for a while. Often the avid fan, deprived of new episodes of the show, can enjoy exploring the novels, comic books, and, yes, even role-playing game supplements which are created through license with the show … but all good things must end.

Last Chance to Buy Serenity & Battlestar Galactica RPGs

In recent years, one of the publishers that’s been dominant in the field of licensed RPG materials from such show – including Smallville, Supernatural, Serenity, Leverage, and Battlestar Galactica – is Margaret Weiss Productions, founded by (and named after) the legendary co-creator of the Dragonlance D&D setting and co-author of most of the relevant novels that established that setting, notably the Chronicles and Legends trilogies. These have been some great games, all built around MWP’s proprietary Cortex Rule System (reviewed in Black Gate 14). Serenity RPG was reviewed back in Black Gate 10 and my own review of the Supernatural RPG is slated to come out in Black Gate 15.

The problem, of course, is that both Serenity and Battlestar Galactica are based on franchises that have been over for quite some time. The licenses may have expired or MWP may have just decided it wasn’t profitable to keep the lines going, but the result was the following message in my e-mail today:

You have one day left to purchase The Serenity and Battlestar Galactica RPGs from Margaret Weiss Productions!

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Charlene Brusso Reviews Magic in the Blood

Charlene Brusso Reviews Magic in the Blood

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magic-in-the-bloodMagic in the Blood
Devon Monk
Roc (360 pp, $6.99, May 2009)
Reviewed By Charlene Brusso

Urban fantasy walks a fine line between engaging the reader with magic that feels real, while operating in a gritty modern setting that seems as far from magical as possible. Devon Monk’s series (starting with Magic to the Bone) is set in gray, yet somehow inviting, Portland, Oregon, offering many repurposed old buildings, and lots of colorful characters in addition to the incessant rain.

Our heroine, Allie Beckstrom, is a Hound, a magically gifted person who can sniff out the caster of any spell: really sniff, that is. Hounding can be a good way to make a living, but magic has its price since “using magic means it uses you back.” Cast a spell without deflecting the painful backwash means aches, pains, exhaustion, and worse, depending on the strength of the spell. There are rules. Legally, spells can only be cast on a person with their consent. And “Offloading” the bad side effects of magic onto another is strictly forbidden.

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Race Matters: A Writer Blogs About Process

Race Matters: A Writer Blogs About Process

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bgdancersNearly a decade ago, having spent four nights reading my story “A New Grave For Monique” aloud to a late-night workshop audience, I won an award for fiction from the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference.  The audience (and the conference in general) was uniformly Caucasian.

About a year later, I showed the story to my friend Ellie, who immediately noted that when I introduced the Haitian character, Monique, I stated in the text that she was black.  Not a foul in and of itself, except that I did not introduce any of the story’s many white characters as white, a fact Ellie was quick to note.  Had I read “A New Grave For Monique,” since published in Traps (Darkhart Press, Scott T. Goudsward, Editor), at a conference of African-American or multi-national writers, I suspect I would have won little more than a pie in the face.  And deservedly so.

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Mythpunk

Mythpunk

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inthenightgarden1Back at around the turn of the century when I first started writing reviews for various SF/F on line publications, there was a lot of heated discussion about something called “The New Weird.”  Some of it got a little silly, but, recovering English majors tend to like to categorize things as some kind of shorthand for what you might expect from a literary work.  In the academy, that means things like gothic,  romance and  post-modernism, among other designations. In genre, riffing off the rock music punk rebellion — a reaction to pretentious art-rock and boring corporate rock (see, you can’t get away from categorizing) — came a series of “punk” movements, starting with cyberpunk and then steampunk and splatterpunk and whatever you could stick “punk” onto similar to the way political scandals have become a “gate” ever since  Watergate.

The latest such entry appears to by “mythpunk,” more about which you can read in this interview with Catherynne M. Valente, who is credited with coining the term in 2006 (which goes to show how clueless I am, as this is the first I’ve heard of it).  For further discussion, visit the Strange Horizons blog.