Black Gate – Page 231 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: The Obsidian Tower by Melissa Caruso

Friday, June 12, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Melissa Caruso is the author of Swords and Fire, a 4-book fantasy trilogy (there’s more of those than you think). I don’t know much about it, so that doesn’t tell me anything — although I note that the first book, The Tethered Mage, was shortlisted for the Gemmell Morningstar Award in 2017, and that’s definitely an asset in my book.

Her latest is The Obsidian Tower, the opening volume in a new series, and it’s been warmly received. Publisher Weekly calls it “no-holds-barred epic fantasy,” and James Tivendale at GrimDark magazine raves, saying:

Like Caruso’s previous trilogy, The Obsidian Tower is set in the world of Eruvia. The action takes place at least 150 years after the events of Swords and Fire… Ryx is a vivomancer but her magic is flawed and so twisted that it is dangerous. Anyone she touches dies, which, to her dismay, has happened a few times. At twenty-one years old, her role is to look after the castle in Gloamingard and at the beginning of the narrative, she is hosting a conference with neighbouring Alevar and the Serene Empire. Her castle is full of nooks, crannies, and secret passages, many of which seem only known to Ryx, as well as being host to a mysterious tower with a magical door which must not be unsealed….

Caruso is a terrific writer who weaves fascinating and intricate fantasy tales that are heavily focused on magic and politics. In The Obsidian Tower Caruso also introduces mystery elements to the mix which fit perfectly with her style…. [it’s] brimming with many well-crafted and colourful characters… My personal favourites were the formidable ruler of Morgrain The Lady of Owls, the mysterious Severin, the envoy from the neighbouring Alevar, the talking fox-like Chimera and castle guardian Whisper, and the loveable oddballs that make up the Rookery….

The Obsidian Tower is an entertaining, well-written, and expertly-paced novel with incredible magic schemes and a great cast of characters.

The Obsidian Tower was published by Orbit on June 2, 2020. It is 528 pages, priced at $16.99 in paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Peter Bollinger. Read a lengthy excerpt here.

See all our recent coverage of the best new SF and fantasy here.

Goth Chick News: Game Night Reinvented for the Horror Fan

Thursday, June 11, 2020 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

The Shining Board Game

I was once a digital game enthusiast.

In the ‘before times’ when we were allowed to physically be in the company of other humans, I often found myself far too immersed in humanity, however unthinkable a state that is today. I sat in an office with other people, ate with other people, sat for hours in traffic with other people and came home to other people. It was therefore a welcome escape to place that VR helmet over my head and get away from everyone, often doing very geeky alone-things like touring virtual museums or take a virtual climb up Mount Rainer.

Today, in the upside-down, we’re going to great lengths to create those human interactions which I, at least, used to try and escape. We now have video meetings and Zoom cocktail parties, and frankly, spending time alone as entertainment is no longer as appealing as it once was. Instead, virtual game nights have become so popular that there are now online services you can hire to host them for you. According to a May article in USA Today, Walmart has seen their sales of board games double since March, and Amazon sales are up 4,000% in the same timeframe. The article specifically called out the game publisher Ravensburger, as having seen a 370% jump in sales since March.

Which brings me to the topic du jour.

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Artifacts: SixMoreVodka’s First Rules Expansion for Degenesis

Thursday, June 11, 2020 eeknight Comments 1 comment

degenesis-artifacts-cover Degenesis, SixMoreVodka’s post-apocalyptic, Europe-and-North Africa-centered tabletop RPG, released its first rules expansion last month. Called Artifacts and featuring the new Degenesis black-and-gold look, it’s the first gaming supplement I’ve ever owned with gilt-edged pages.

But that’s SMV for you, a company “founded by artists and run by artists.”

As I said in my initial review of the game, you can look at Degenesis as an expensive art book which comes with a free game, or an expensive game book with the most lavish art design in the history of the format. So you can convince yourself that even at USD 60 you’re getting a great deal, FedEx shipping from Berlin included, using many of the same mental gymnastics car enthusiasts might when signing for a new BMW.

Degenesis is already a complete game. But one of the 4chan descriptions of it is “90% fluff and 10% crunch.” While I don’t think that’s near accurate – I’d put it at 70/30 — Artifacts adds plenty of crunch. It gives additional rules to build, motivate, and describe your avatar and player group. There are enhancements to your campaign and a good deal of new technology for the players to use and fight over and a bunch of imaginative new rules for clawing advantage out of the much-altered Earth. And of course there’s first-rate art.

Here’s a quick overview of the game enhancements. Artifacts is divided into twelve parts, and I’ll spend the rest of this review providing thumbnails of the contents.

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Exploring Post-Apocalyptic Poland in Twilight: 2000

Thursday, June 11, 2020 Patrick Kanouse Comments 3 comments

Twilight: 2000 (GDW, First edition box set, 1984). Click for bigger versions.

I have vivid memories of receiving the boxed set of Twilight: 2000 in 1984, cracking it open, and diving into its dark and gritty world. Each generation that spent its formative years growing up during the Cold War has its memories attached to that long, usually dull, and occasionally terrifying epoch. The Korean War. Sputnik. The Berlin Wall. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuclear raid drills. The Vietnam War. The invasion of Afghanistan. The Olympic game boycotts. Fraught meetings between leaders of the USA and USSR. Numerous proxy wars and insurrections. Eventually, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies crumbled in a series of revolutions — some soft and some hard — and it all seemed then a distant memory.

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A Superior Confection: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Pursuit of the Pankera

Wednesday, June 10, 2020 Damien Broderick Comments 4 comments

The Pursuit of the Pankera
By Robert A. Heinlein
Caezik (503 pages, $29.99 hardcover, $9.99 digital, March 2020)
Cover by Scott Grimando

It’s almost impossible to discuss Robert A. Heinlein’s The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel about Parallel Universes without revealing and thus spoiling the plot devices of it and its 1980 prequel/sequel, The Number of the Beast—. Heinlein, first Grand Master of the SFWA, for decades acclaimed as the Dean of sf, no longer pleases everyone. Some readers, especially academic critics, have denounced both books as grossly self-indulgent and even worthless. Others, like the brilliant Marxist professor H. Bruce Franklin (in his important 1980 study Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction) catch the feel of Beast: “a cotton-candy apocalypse — frothy, sweet, airy, mellow, light, festive, whimsical, insubstantial” (199).

That final word is unjust, since many pages are devoted to an investigation of lifeboat rules, and what Algis Budrys termed “protocol,” capable of mutual acceptance by four genius-level libertarians, two of them women, one the daughter of crusty and irritable Professor Jake Burroughs used to having his own way. Oh, plus an increasingly intelligent and willful computer in the younger man’s flying car, uplifted to true personhood during a visit to… The Land of Oz. This jolly and quite necessary absurdity is a side effect of their discovery that the world is built of myth, of fictons, yielding a kind of “pantheistic multiperson solipsism” occasioned by the dreams, terrors and wishes (as it were) of writers and readers. (Regrettably, Heinlein’s term ficton is “corrected” to fiction in Pankera.)

Robert Heinlein, it follows, is the god (or demon) of the universes the four learn how to visit in Jake’s continua craft. Some of these worlds he had written himself (especially the history of near-immortal Lazarus Long and his incestuous mother and clone daughters, or would write later. Others are the creations of other major writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, John Carter of Mars), L. Frank Baum (Oz), Heinlein’s older friend E.E. “Doc” Smith, whose inaugural space opera sequence tracks the psionic Lenses gained by eugenic human warrior-saints, chess pawns in a cosmic war between aliens billions of years older than humankind.

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Stormbringer, Stargates, and Fighting Sail: Ten Classic Unplayed RPGs

Wednesday, June 10, 2020 James Davis Nicoll Comments 7 comments

Empire of the Petal Throne (PDF version of 1975 TSR edition), Bunnies & Burrows (Frog God Press, 2019), and Stormbringer (Chaosium, 2nd edition, 1985)

People seemed to like old RPG covers. Here’s a more pointless variation: the first ten interesting RPGs I acquired but never found players for.

Empire of the Petal Throne

Number one: that classic, M.A.R. Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne, one of or possibly the first complex, non-faux Medieval European settings for an RPG. Professor Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker’s world of Tekumel predated roleplaying games by decades. The synergy between a complete game world and early RPGs was obvious; as a result TSR was one of many, many companies to try their hand at publishing it. While it had (and has) its avid fanbase, the game never caught on in a big way.

I’ve owned a number of editions. Never played a one!

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Epic Fantasy on a Reliable Schedule: A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons

Tuesday, June 9, 2020 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Covers by Lars Grant-West

Bestselling fantasy dominates modern bookshelves in a way I could only dream about as a young reader. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle are the two biggest examples in recent memory. Of course, both are also unfinished, and the latest installments are both long overdue. Makes you wonder what they could have accomplished if the publishing magic that fueled them had also included a reliable schedule.

Tor is trying something impressive with their latest big-budget epic fantasy. If things unfold as scheduled, Jenn Lyons’ ambitious 5-volume series A Chorus of Dragons will be released in rapidfire sequence. Here’s what Lyons said on her website last year.

The series is on a nine month release schedule. That means that, should everything go to plan, Tor will be releasing a book in the series every nine months or so. Two this year, one next year, two the year after that (again, if all goes to plan.) Is this stunningly ambitious? Yes. Is this going to kill me? Quite possibly…

So far, Jenn (and Tor) have hit the deadlines. The Ruin of Kings was published in February 2019, The Name of All Things in October, and Book 3, The Memory of Souls, is now scheduled to arrive on August 25, 2020.

The series has been a critical hit as well as a commercial one; the first novel scored a rare publishing quadruple crown, with starred reviews from Library Journal (“Stunning”), Booklist (“Dazzling”), Publishers Weekly (“intricate epic fantasy”) and Kirkus Reviews (“Un-put-down-able”). Tor has been leaking news about the third book since October. I’ll be very curious to see if the buzz built up after the release of the first two volumes continues once the third arrives.

Read the complete first chapter of The Ruin of Kings at Tor.com, and see all our recent New Treasures here.

As Close as We’ll Get to a Completed Big Numbers: A Glimpse of a Lost Masterwork by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz

Monday, June 8, 2020 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

Big Numbers issues 1 and 2. Mad Love, April and August 1990. Covers by Bill Sienkiewicz

It’s one of the great might-have-beens of comics history. First announced in 1988, Big Numbers was going to be a 12-issue series written and conceived by Alan Moore with art by Bill Sienkiewicz about a major American shopping mall being built in a small English town. It would be an intricate social-realist story touching on colonialism, gender issues, and more — all tied together by the symbolism of fractal mathematics. Moore felt it would be the logical follow-up to Watchmen in terms of complexity and formal daring, following characters in the town as the mall changed their lives in various ways, and depicting their various interconnections, large and small.

Unfortunately, it never saw completion. Two issues came out in 1990 and a third was completed before Sienkiewicz, feeling overwhelmed by the project, stepped away. The series never resumed publication, and later plans for a TV adaptation came to nothing.

But back in 1988 Moore had created a massive grid-like outline, outlining the related stories of the various main characters. Comics artist James Harvey has now put up a strikingly well-designed web version of that chart, along with annotations from transcripts of an extensive conversation with Moore about the series as preparation for the TV show. Well-placed links help bring out the connections Moore had planned. It’s an excellent, easy-to-use resource for Moore fans — as well as a good read. And likely the most complete version of Big Numbers we’ll ever see.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Bullets or Ballots (Bogart)

Monday, June 8, 2020 Bob Byrne Comments 4 comments

“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)

Humphrey Bogart worked his way up the ladder at Warner Brothers, frequently playing a bad guy who went up against James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson, who were big stars and a part of Warner’s ‘Murderer’s Row.’ I count seven times Bogie was pitted against one or the other, in a supporting actor role. Bogart was the star the eighth time, in Key Largo. It comes as no surprise that Bogart inevitably lost, up to that last time.

Bogart had failed twice in Hollywood before The Petrified Forest gave him the traction to stick on the west coast. He was so grateful to star Leslie Howard, who insisted that Bogart reprise his stage role as Duke Mantee, that Bogie named his daughter after Leslie. Bogart’s first film after that one is my favorite of his gangster flicks, Bullets or Ballots. It’s a typical thirties gangster film from Warners, which is a good thing.

Picking Lead (trivia) – The Petrified Forest was a smash on Broadway, and Warners bought the rights. Howard was the star and signed on to do the film. Warners wanted to use Robinson for the role of Mantee. Howard was determined the part be played by Bogart, saying he wouldn’t do the movie otherwise. Warners blinked and Bogart returned to the west coast, receiving strong reviews.

Picking Lead – Howard was killed in 1942 when the Luftwaffe shot down the Dutch commercial airliner he was flying on. His son, Ronald, also became an actor and starred in a British Sherlock Holmes television series. He played a younger Holmes and it’s an under-appreciated performance: in part because of poor scripts and low production values.

Edward G. Robinson plays Johnny Blake, a pipe-smoking cop finishing his career out-of-favor with the current leadership. He’s from the two-fisted school, and makes bad guys tip their hat to him. When one refuses to do so, Blake punches him out. When the thug takes a swing at him, he throws him through a glass door and has him arrested for destruction of property.

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Mysterious Islands, Giant Trees, and Reptilian Aliens: Cirsova Magazine Summer Special #2

Sunday, June 7, 2020 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Cover by Robert Zoltan

On May 22, Cirsova Magazine announced the release of their second Summer Special issue (full and very impressive title: Cirsova Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense: Summer Special #2). The first one was released last June and was a sturdy 293 pages; it contained tales by Misha Burnett, Schuyler Hernstrom, and others, including a big science fiction novella by Caroline Furlong.

This year’s version is a little most modest (143 pages), but it contains a full eleven stores by James Hutchings, Mark Pellegrini, Lauren E Reynolds, David Skinner, and many others. Not to mention a gorgeous cover by Robert Zoltan! Here’s the complete Table of Contents, with tasty story teasers.

“Just Don’t Open the Door” by Mark Pellegrini
Sean lives next to a weird house with bricked-up windows and an overgrown yard… One day, he sees the strange man living next door leaving in a panicked hurry, offering one brusque warning!

“The Greenery Has Come Again” by Paul Lucas
James’s childhood home is no longer his own, and returning proves an uncanny experience as the mystery surrounding the giant tree his mother named Yggdrasil blooms like the greenwood itself!

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