It’s Gonna Be One Helluva War: A preview of Monsters in Hell, volume 24 in the Heroes in Hell™ series

It’s Gonna Be One Helluva War: A preview of Monsters in Hell, volume 24 in the Heroes in Hell™ series

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Kindle and Paperback editions published by Perseid Press.  Copyright ©2024, Janet Morris. Book design: Marie Pitrat & Christopher Morris. Cover design: Roy Mauritsen.

Monsters in Hell just released this May 2024 (Kindle and Paperback editions published by Perseid Press).

Hell is a real place. Anyone who has broken a commandment winds up there. That’s pretty much everybody. Satan is the boss. You’re okay until you’re not. But never fear, all your friends are here. As well as everyone you’ve ever heard of. You are not alone and the party is in full swing. However, keep in mind: our Hell is unlike any other.

Picking up where Liars in Hell leaves off, Monsters in Hell continues existing plot lines and relates new stories with characters from all epochs of human history, as they struggle against torment and even more common problems derived from their own unique situations. But wait… things are changing, even for the Devil and his subordinates, in ways that will cause exciting variations, if not outright Liberation. The times, they are a changing…  As on Earth, so in Hell. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell where one leaves off and others begin.

Life and Afterlife, Earth and Hell… all mirror images of each other.

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Vintage Treasures: Frontera by Lewis Shiner

Vintage Treasures: Frontera by Lewis Shiner

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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, and especially Asimov’s Science Fiction.

His first novel Frontera, the tale of a high-risk expedition to a supposedly abandoned Martian colony, was published as a paperback original in what we used to call the Year of Big Brother, 1984 (that’s a George Orwell reference, for all you young folks). It was nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was followed by perhaps his most famous novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988), which garnered another Nebula nom.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

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A to Z Reviews

Jonathan Sean Lyster only has two published stories, the first appeared in 2020 and the second, “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” appeared in the  October 2022 issue of Analog. There is a strong resonance between “The Butcher of Darkside Hover” and the classic story “The Cold Equations,”  by Tom Godwin.

The story is set on a base located on the farside of the moon, although as the story progresses, it becomes clear that it is actually in orbit over the farside of the moon, which is one of the issues with the story. Lyster slowly provides details of his world, but never fully and in a manner that means the reader is putting together the pieces to get an idea of what his world looks like. The process means that the reader’s perception is constantly changing regarding the setting when it should be more focused on the problem presented for the characters and their solution.

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Goth Chick News: From Wolf-Lover to Wolf – kit Harington Gets Hairy

Goth Chick News: From Wolf-Lover to Wolf – kit Harington Gets Hairy

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It is no secret around the Black Gate offices that if the “King of the North” ever drops by asking for Goth Chick, I am absolutely, unequivocally always available. It’s true that Jon Snow could be a little too angsty at times, but it was never about his dialog and all about how he looked saying it.

So pairing actor Kit Harington with one of my favorite classic movie monsters had me watching this trailer for The Beast Within over and over when it dropped Tuesday morning.

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Worthy of His Hire: The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling

Worthy of His Hire: The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling

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The Day’s Work (Penguin Classics, October 4, 1988)

I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in a house with large built-in bookshelves, occupied by books passed on from my grandmother. Among the ones I read were multiple volumes by Kipling. One of the more memorable was The Day’s Work, which I recently added to my shelves of print fiction and which I’ve just reread: a collection of stories nearly all written during Kipling’s period of residence in Vermont, during the early 1890s.

A long time ago, I ran across a comment by some critic that if you wanted to read a conversation between a god, an animal, and a machine, Kipling would be the perfect choice to write it. The Day’s Work might be taken as evidence to support this; it doesn’t bring the three together, but it has one story with a conversation among gods, “The Bridge-Builders”; two with conversations among horses, “A Walking Delegate” and “The Maltese Cat”; and two with conversations among machines, “The Ship That Found Herself” and “.007,” the latter being about a locomotive newly put into service. Those five stories, out of a total of twelve, give the collection a strong feeling of fantasy, which must have been part of what appealed to me when I was in elementary school.

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The Double-Edged Blade of Social Media

The Double-Edged Blade of Social Media

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn!

It’s me again. Here to wax lyrical about social media and how it is both a boon and a bane for the creatives of the world. As it is for most everyone, I think. Let’s be honest, as a means of connecting people, finding community and disseminating information with incredible ease and speed, social media is absolutely unparalleled. Of course, on the flip-side, it is a vicious tool for deliberate bullying, polarisation, and the disastrous spread of misinformation. It seems that whatever the effect of social media, be it good or ill, there is something on the other edge that serves as to balance it out… more or less.

For a writer, or any creative, really, it is an incredible tool. It is also a terrible burden. Does the good outweigh the bad, or at least is the balance a net null? It seems that if we have any hope of being successful, we cannot escape social media (however much we may detest the need of it). But is that actually true? Is it really worth it for us to be there?

Let’s take a look at the positive and pitfalls of using social media as a creative.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Rex Stout’s ‘The Mother of Invention’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Rex Stout’s ‘The Mother of Invention’

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

If you read more than just this Pulp series of mine each summer, you know that I am a gargantuan Nero Wolfe fan. It’s my favorite mystery series, and I have written a lot of fiction and non-fiction about Wolfe, and Archie Goodwin.

Rex Stout wrote several novels and many short stories, before the first Wolfe novel dropped in 1934. Of course, there was no looking back after Fer de Lance.

He placed “A Professional Recall” in the December, 1912 issue of The Black Cat magazine. “Pamfret and Peace” followed the next month. There would be three more over the next few years.

The Black Cat was founded by Herman Umbstaetter in 1895. He had gained and lost a fortune before managing to fund his own magazine in Baltimore. It was not a Pulp, and was about the size of the Dime Novels of the day (about 6” x 9”). Umbstaetter encouraged new writers, and paid based on the quality of the story, not by the word. His wife did the early covers.

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Goth Chick News – It’s Never Too Early to Talk About Halloween

Goth Chick News – It’s Never Too Early to Talk About Halloween

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Let me start by saying yes, I know it’s only June, aka ‘summer’…

But here in the subterranean office of Goth Chick News we literally only hit pause on Halloween for the last two weeks of December, and then grudgingly. Aside from that we are either thinking about, planning for, or attending Halloween activities and we are definitely not alone.

For example, we were crushed this year to miss out on our annual February sabbatical to the Halloween and Attractions Show industry convention in St. Louis, which is the normal kickoff event of the Goth Chick year. Our incredible friends at Transworld who run that event also hold another event closer to home, and this is where Black Gate photog Chris Z and I spent last Saturday.

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The Wit and Wisdom of Connie Willis

The Wit and Wisdom of Connie Willis

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Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2011, containing “All About Emily,” and the Subterranean
Press hardcover edition (January 31, 2012). Covers by Duncan Long and J.K. Potter

Far too often, the best among us are roundly ignored. This can hardly be said of Connie Willis, who has collected an astonishing array of Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards, yet her name somehow doesn’t seem to ring from the battlements. Perhaps I’m simply attending to the wrong battlements, but when I hear discussions of the great women of science fiction, I tend to catch the names LeGuin, L’Engle, Butler, and, now, Jemisin. Willis seems to come up less frequently.

Better yet, let’s just leave gender entirely out of the equation.

Willis’s name deserves to come up front and center in any discussion of top-tier sci-fi, first and foremost because she is very funny.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Adventure of You,” by Paul La Farge

A to Z Reviews: “The Adventure of You,” by Paul La Farge

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A to Z ReviewsPaul LaFarge wrote five novels before his death in January 2023 from cancer. His essays and fiction appeared in a variety of magazines. Only a small portion of his work was within the genre, but the story “The Adventure of You,” which appeared in Gordon van Gelder’s original anthology Welcome to Dystopia in 2019 is one of those genre stories.

In an unspecified time and place in the future, John Arnold Arnold is working as a debris removal specialist for a company. The story is told through a memo from the company’s HR department, ostensibly to help Arnold’s mental health, but it quickly becomes clear that the program being offered is more for the company’s benefit than Arnold’s. The memos offer an explanation of the situation in the company town for the reader while providing indoctrination for the workers.

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