Search Results for: janet e. morris

Giving the Devil His Due: A Review of Dreamers in Hell

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Dreamers in Hell (Heroes in Hell, Volume 15) Created by Janet Morris, edited by Janet and Chris Morris, and written “with the diabolical assistance of their damnedest writers.” Perseid Press (478 pages, June 13, 2013, $23.95 in trade paperback) It is a place of swords and spears, revolvers and automatic weapons, sorcery and science, catapults and cannon, bows and arrows, computers and demons. It is a place where there is no Hope for the damned, merely the suggestion of it. Welcome…

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“A Great Place to let Your Imagination Run Wild:” Joe Bonadonna Reviews Rogues in Hell

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I’ve always been a fan of the shared-world universe of Thieves World. It’s sword and sorcery at its best: character-oriented, with great plots and stories. Janet Morris has been editing and writing stories for her Heroes in Hell shared-world universe for quite some time now, starting with Heroes in Hell in 1986. The most recent volume, the twelfth, was Lawyers in Hell (2011, co-edited with Chris Morris). And now, continuing with the series, she brings us Rogues in Hell, which IMHO is…

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Writing Fantasy Heroes

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I’m a few essays into Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros. The editor of Writing Fantasy Heroes, Jason M. Waltz, was being published in the pages of Black Gate back when Black Gate had literal paper pages and I was just a glimmer in the slushpile. The book has been mentioned on this site a time or three by others, and will certainly come up again, so I wanted to get a look at it for myself. It turns out there’s enough variation among the essays…

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Vintage Treasures: Chaosium’s Thieves’ World

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There was a time when shared-world fantasy was brand new, and taking the genre by storm. That time was 1979, and the man at the helm was Robert Lynn Asprin, a midlist novelist who had never edited anything before in his life. Robert Lynn Asprin was the guest of honor at one of the first science fiction conventions I ever attended, Maplecon 2 in Ottawa in 1979. He was a spirited and self-deprecating guest, telling stories of Joe Haldeman and…

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Rogue Blades Entertainment Reveals the Secrets of Writing Fantasy Heroes

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The distinguished Mr. Jason M. Waltz, occasional Black Gate contributor and stalwart road-trip companion, is rumored to be fairly highly placed in the global publishing mega-consortium that is Rogue Blades Entertainment. So when he leaked word to us of an impending major release this week, we dropped everything to check it out. RBE is no stranger to heroic fantasy. For the past few years they’ve been at the very forefront of the genre, with such groundbreaking anthologies as Return of…

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14 Questions for S.M. Stirling

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I’ve known S.M. Stirling, or Steve as his friends call him, for ten years now. He and I were in the same writers group in New Mexico, called Critical Mass, and I believe I’ve read exactly eight-five kajillion of his words. A rigorous editor and rewriter of his own work, he’d often dwarf the rest of our submissions for the month. It’s been my privilege to watch from this vantage point as he climbs the sales charts, from a well…

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