Black Gate – Page 21 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Goth Chick News: Where We Drag Another Horror from the Vault

Thursday, May 16, 2024 Sue Granquist Comments 11 comments

The Fury (20th Century Fox, Release date March 10, 1978)

As I mentioned a couple weeks back, I am in the middle of some tedious travel and am amusing myself by streaming from a list of horror films I hadn’t thought about in ages. Some of these titles came from an archeological expedition to the back reaches of my crawl space. There, I have multiple storage bins containing VHS tapes, which I am certain will someday fund my retirement when a future generation becomes nostalgic for the good old days of movie viewing.

I must admit, it was fun to dig through these titles. Each tape is like a 7”x4” bookmark for a point in time in my personal history, reminding me of an evening sitting in front of a friend’s “projection TV” following a trip to Blockbuster, or a date night where I could pretend to be scared.

When VHS began its decline, I collected many meaningful titles from “$3 or less” bins at various stores, finally snagging the motherload when the local “Family Video” store had a going-out-of-business sale. In that case, I pretty much scored one of everything from their horror section allowing me to catch up on a lot of titles I was too young to see in the theater due to the R-ratings.

Which brings me to how I spent last evening; streaming The Fury.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Two-Thirds of a Miracle

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 Lawrence Ellsworth Comments 7 comments

The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line Cinema, December 2001)

Some of us waited a very long time for these movies — or at least, that’s how it felt. I grew up in the 1960s reading science fiction and fantasy; my father had read pulps like Weird Tales back in the ‘30s, and when those stories were republished as postwar paperbacks, he bought them and then passed them on to me. But I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy on my own in my junior high school library, which had pristine copies of the Houghton Mifflin hardcovers with those two-color foldout maps bound into the endpapers. I can still picture exactly where those volumes stood on those library shelves. I read them cover to cover… and then I read them again. When Dungeons & Dragons came along a few years later, giving us all the ability to tell such stories to ourselves, the course of my life was set. And here I am, 55 years after pulling The Fellowship of the Ring down from that shelf, still telling stories of heroic fantasy — and writing about them also, it seems.

So, to those of us who grew up treading in our imaginations the weed-grown paths of Middle-earth, a world to us almost as real as that of the asphalt roads and concrete pavement where we led our physical lives, the gift of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers was unexpected and kind of a miracle. Jackson was one of us, he saw the same visions we did, and he had the talent and drive to put them on the screen, in a depiction as vivid and real as what we saw in our minds when we read the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And if that act of respectful and dedicated creation isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what would be.

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A Paean to the Outsider: A Review of Neither Beg Nor Yield, edited by Jason M. Waltz

Tuesday, May 14, 2024 Greg Mele Comments 6 comments

Neither Beg Nor Yield (Rogue Blades Entertainment, April 2024)

I can’t say if Jason M. Waltz and his Rogue Blades Entertainment’s swansong is the largest collection of Sword & Sorcery ever published, but it’s damn close.

It’s also the most metal. From this over-the-top, blood-splash cover featuring an axe headed toward the reader’s face to the powerful black & white line art that runs throughout. there’s a Savage Sword of Conan-meets-Heavy Metal vibe to the layout that tells you exactly the feel of the prose within.

With all respect to my friend Dave Ritzlin at DMR Books (and the most metal *publisher* of S&S), who literally launched his press by bringing S&S-loving metalhead musicians together to create anthologies of tales, I don’t mean erudite, I can tell you the difference between symphonic metal, thrash metal, Viking metal, dark metal, and the White Christ help us, Troll Metal (which I just learned a few months ago is actually a thing): I mean working out with your buddies in your dad’s garage gym with the Judas Priest-cranked between rewatches on VHS of Conan (the Barbarian, we don’t talk about the sequel), and Beastmaster, or cackling to yourself while working on your killer dungeon to spring on your friends at Friday night’s game with Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden wailing metal.

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GEN CON WRITERS’ SYMPOSIUM AUG 1-4, 2024: SPECIAL GUESTS AND PROGRAM RELEASE

Monday, May 13, 2024 SELindberg Comments 0 Comment

Gen Con Writers’ Symposium

This post announces our 2024 Special Guests and reveals the Program. May 19th is the official registration day, but attendees can wishlist their events now!

Gen Con is the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America. In 2023, they welcomed over 70,000 unique visitors and offered over 19,000 events. By its nature, Gen Con attracts a large number of attendees who enjoy speculative fiction across formats. Gen Con 2024 will be held August 1-4 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The Gen Con Writers’ Symposium is a semi-independent event hosted by Gen Con. It’s focused on writers of games and speculative fiction of all experience levels, but with as much fun and interest for gamers, readers, and fans. All registration is handled through the Gen Con website. In the past 28 years, the Writers’ Symposium has grown from a small set of panels over a day or two of the convention to one of the largest convention-hosted writing tracks in North America, offering hundreds of hours of programming from 70+ authors, editors, agents, and publishers to nearly 3000 unique visitors per year on average. We’ll be on the second floor of the Indianapolis Downtown Marriott (i.e., not the adjacent JW Marriott ). Head to our event at 350 W Maryland St, Indianapolis, IN 46225. The Black Gate Convention report for last year’s symposium gives a good flavor of what to expect, and the planning committee’s website at genconwriters.org has all the details.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Haining)

Monday, May 13, 2024 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

Peter Haining was a notable Sherlockian who compiled/edited several useful Sherlock Holmes books.

Back around 2005 or so, an article in the Wall Street Journal was about Barnes & Noble’s in-house publishing imprint. They have been reproducing classic works for years and selling them at affordable prices. But they range father afield than that, and my Sherlockian bookshelf includes several of their titles, such as The Sherlock Holmes Companion, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The latter was the main source for the Doyle on Holmes series. The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of stories, plays, and essays about Holmes that are not part of the Canon but certainly make nice supplementary reading. An excellent addition to any Holmes library.

It is somewhat similar to the out-of-print and often difficult to find Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha by Jack Tracy. Both books include the “almost Sherlock Holmes” stories and plays that don’t fit in the Canon, but are certainly in the neighborhood. I wrote about that one, here.

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Roger Corman, April 5, 1926 – May 9, 2024

Sunday, May 12, 2024 Thomas Parker Comments 3 comments

Roger Corman, the Godfather of American independent film, is gone. He died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on May 9^th. He was ninety-eight.

Legendary both for his cheapness (no one could squeeze more out of a budget than he could) and for his generosity (he gave countless actors, directors, writers, and technical people their first chance in Hollywood), Corman began his almost seventy-year long career in the mid 50’s by directing extremely low-budget movies for the fledgling American International Pictures, most of which were shot in one or two weeks for less than 100,000 dollars. Corman’s understanding of the necessity of ruthless economy on the one hand and of the appetites of his largely teen-aged audience on the other made these films highly successful, and during those early years, that success was perhaps the major factor in establishing AIP as an ongoing concern.

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Vintage Treasures: Sandkings by George R.R. Martin

Sunday, May 12, 2024 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Sandkings (Timescape/Pocket Books, December 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Writing is a notoriously poor-paying profession. In 2017, after eleven months of work, I sold my first novel to Houghton Mifflin for $20,000 — about $10,000 below the poverty line for a family of five in Illinois. And I felt lucky to get it, believe me.

So when someone like George R.R. Martin earns $9 million a year as a fantasy novelist, it generates a lot of wonder and amazement. And in some corners, envy and resentment. For George — who’s dedicated his career to SF and fantasy, and was famous for hosting hundreds of fans every year at the genre’s social highlight, the Hugo Loser’s Party at Worldcon — I think the resentment culminated in 2021, when Natalie Luhrs’s essay “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun” was nominated for a Hugo Award. George, who was the Toastmaster for the Hugos in 2020, has not attended a Worldcon since.

In light of the fact that The Winds of Winter, sixth novel in the series, in now roughly a decade late, there’s also been a grumbling reevaluation of Martin’s magnum opus, Game of Thrones, with fans bitterly divided over everything from the final season of the HBO series to whether the series is worth starting at all.

To me, this whole exercise is misguided. Regardless of how you feel about the vast media franchise Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin’s reputation as one of the most vibrant and groundbreaking authors of genre fiction was irrevocably established four decades ago with a string of brilliant short stories, including the Hugo-Award winners “A Song for Lya,” “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” and, especially “Sandkings,” one of the finest SF stories ever written.

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A to Z Reviews: “Tank,” by Francis E. Izzo

Friday, May 10, 2024 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

One of the interesting things in this random selection of stories is how often the selected items share some unexpected and unintentional trait. The two stories that showed up for the letter I, Jack Iams’s “The Hat in the Hall” and Francis E. Izzo’s “Tank,” both reflect the only entry each author has in the Internet Science Fiction Database (although not, necessarily their only published story).

“Tank” was originally published in the March 1979 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and has since been printed in three anthologies of stories from that magazine, the reprint anthology Supertanks, and On Writing Science Fiction.

Izzo tells the story of Davis, a pinball wizard. While Davis loves pinball and trying to set the high scores on the machines in the arcade, he has also played the various video games that were making inroads into the arcades in the 1970s and found them wanting. From Pong on up, he would play them, beat them easily, and return to his beloved pinball, sure that no video game could ever give him the thrill of playing pinball.

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Goth Chick News: Please, Just No Flannel This Time…

Thursday, May 9, 2024 Sue Granquist Comments 7 comments

I have made no secret here of how I feel about Twilight; books, and movies. To be fair, I only made it through two of the books, understanding I was far from the target audience. Over the years since their release, I have managed to watch most of the movies piecemeal, taking them in ten-minute micro-bites, which is about all I could stand to stream in one sitting. Again, I realize I am not the target audience. But to lifelong devotees of vampires in literature, on screen, and in folklore, watching what Twilight did to our favorite monster was more than any fang-fan can be expected to endure.

I mean, would Bela Lugosi ever, EVER trade his cape for a flannel shirt? Or London for Washington state? Or (I can barely type this) sparkle…?

If you must imagine what vampires are doing in the 2000s, for crying out loud binge-watch What We Do in the Shadows.

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The Chronicles of Future Earth Player’s Guide – Out Now!

Wednesday, May 8, 2024 Sarah Newton Comments 2 comments

Way back in 2018, I wrote an article for Black Gate about the Kickstarter we were running for my science-fantasy roleplaying game, The Chronicles of Future Earth. Subtitled “Cosmic Fantasy Roleplaying in the Post-Historical Age”, it was a world of long-forgotten ancient technologies, strange mutated monsters, gods, demons, and weird intelligent species fighting against forces of entropy and domination threatening to destroy reality. Using a radical new version of the Fate Core rules system, it was a setting which had inspired me for over twenty years, I’d published a novel in the setting, written RPG adventures and supplements, short stories, and more. Now it was going to be a massive standalone roleplaying game in its own right. I was excited. The Kickstarter funded 225% of its goal. It was going to happen.

Then, my husband was diagnosed with cancer, died, and my life exploded. No warning, fast, brutal. For several years I wandered lost, unable to even read more than a few pages, let alone write. But time and the friendship of good people, the support of the fantasy, SF, and RPG communities, all worked their magic, and slowly I recovered. Last year I published a “superheroic swords and sorcery” RPG called The Lair of the Leopard Empresses. This year, at last, and with an entire new company, Typhon Games, I published the first book in The Chronicles of Future Earth RPG — the Player’s Guide. John and the Black Gate team have very kindly had me back to give you an update on how the far future of planet Earth is looking, almost six years on!

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