Black Gate – Page 259 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Let’s Get Diverted Together

Tuesday, June 2, 2020 S.M. Carrière Comments 1 comment

122577

This might work.

Good morning, Readers!

I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about my writing and my writing skills… or lack thereof depending on who you ask. I fall short in a lot of areas, particularly any story that is supposed to be short. My inability to keep things short has helped me with the whole novel-writing thing I love to do, but I’m slightly miffed at myself for being so inept at something creative. Short stories simply aren’t my forte. I mean, the last time I tried to write one, it became a two volume epic. So, there’s that.

It’s not like I’ve never written anything short. I was the short story champion in high school, and my short story writing ability got me one of the highest QCS (Queensland Core Skills) scores in my class back when I was exiting secondary school. My marks dragged down my eventual exit OP (Overall Position) score, because high school was hell and I didn’t cope.

Anyway, the point is, I stopped writing short stories and now I feel like I have simply lost the knack.

I would like to fix that. But, you know, without the pressure of it counting towards any kind of grade.

And, I’d like for us all to join in for a communal, no pressure, bit of shared creativity.

Let me explain.

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New Treasures: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Monday, June 1, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

May was a tough month for new releases. Many were pushed to the fall as a result of bookstore closure across the country — and the fact that Amazon dramatically slowed down shipping on all non-essential items.

But a few brave publishers stuck to the schedule, and virtual bookstore shelves weren’t empty last month. I think it’s all the more important to celebrate those books, and especially the ones that deserve special attention. Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s debut novel The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea is definitely one of them. Kirkus calls it “Absolutely enthralling,” and Alex Brown at Tor.com says “Every single character is as deeply compelling as the world they live in… a remarkable novel and hands down one of the best of the year.” Here’s the description.

In a world divided by colonialism and threaded with magic, a desperate orphan turned pirate and a rebellious imperial lady find a connection on the high seas.

The pirate Florian, born Flora, has always done whatever it takes to survive — including sailing under false flag on the Dove as a marauder, thief, and worse. Lady Evelyn Hasegawa, a highborn Imperial daughter, is on board as well — accompanied by her own casket. But Evelyn’s one-way voyage to an arranged marriage in the Floating Islands is interrupted when the captain and crew show their true colors and enslave their wealthy passengers.

Both Florian and Evelyn have lived their lives by the rules, and whims, of others. But when they fall in love, they decide to take fate into their own hands — no matter the cost.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s sweeping fantasy debut, full of stolen memories, illicit mermaid’s blood, double agents, and haunting mythical creatures conjures an extraordinary cast of characters and the unforgettable story of a couple striving to stay together in the face of myriad forces wishing to control their identities and destinies.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea was published by Candlewick Press on May 5, 2020. It is 371 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $5 in digital formats.

See all our latest New Releases here.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Johnny O’Clock (Powell)

Monday, June 1, 2020 Bob Byrne Comments 5 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)

And for the third year in a row, A (Black) Gat in the Hand makes a hardboiled reservation for Monday mornings. It’s a limited run, but for the month of June, I’ll look at some hardboiled/noir on screen efforts: Ones that you might not be quite as familiar with. Not totally off the beaten path, but not the big names, either. And we kick things off with Dick Powell’s follow up to Murder My Sweet, Johnny, O’Clock.

When you think of the hardboiled movie, or book, it’s usually a private eye that comes to mind. There’s Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer. Of course, there were also cops in movies, like Glenn Ford’s Dave Bannion in The Big Heat; and Frederick Nebel’s MacBride in print. Those stories were changed into seven Torchy Blaine movies, and quite different from Nebel’s hardboiled stories about MacBride, unfortunately.

Other occupations were covered, including reporters, and lawyers. Ex-soldiers of various stripes, like Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, were popular. A movie that I really like in this genre starred a gambler. Like Humphrey Bogart’s Dead Reckoning, this film doesn’t appear on any top ten lists, but it doesn’t feature a private eye, and it’s a ‘could have been really good’ film.

Like James Cagney and George Raft, Dick Powell was a successful song and dance man in Hollywood. Then, he was surprisingly cast as Raymond Chandler’s world-weary Phililp Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, and he nailed the part. That 1944 effort was the first of four hardboiled films he made in a five-movie span, of which Johnny O’Clock was the third.

Picking Iron (trivia) – This new side of Powell made him perfect for the singing, funny, tough radio PI, Richard Diamond (I love that series).

Powell plays the title character, and he’s manager of a fancy (and legal) gambling joint in NYC. He dresses well, knows lots of people, and lives in a fancy apartment with an ex-con named Charlie, who is his jack of all trades assistant.

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Voodoo, Sea Monsters, and Rebel Colonies: Rich Horton on Sea Siege/Eye of the Monster by Andre Norton

Sunday, May 31, 2020 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

Sea Siege/Eye of the Monster by Andre Norton. Ace Books F-147, 1962. 176+80 pages, $0.40. Covers by Ed Valigursky/Ed Emshwiller

During the months-long lockdown here in Illinois as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, I know I should be reading the massive TBR pile by my bedside. It’s filled with Nebula award winners, advance proofs of books coming out this fall, and all the new books my friends are talking about. But instead, I want to be reading Ace Doubles.

I blame Rich Horton. Like everyone else, I’m influenced by what I read, and what I’ve been reading recently is Rich Horton’s excellent blog Strange at Ecbatan. Like a superb DJ, Rich knows how to blend the old and the new, and in the past few weeks he’s reviewed The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe (from 2010), Avram Davidson’ acclaimed 2001 collection The Other Nineteenth Century, the brilliant Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories by James Patrick Kelly (1997), the overlooked novel The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter (1996), and a Mack Reynolds/A. Bertram Chandler Ace Double from 1967.

That Ace Double piqued my interest, of course. Like Rich, I have an enduring fondness for these peculiarly collectible science from the 1950s and 60s, although I don’t have nearly the reading muscles he does. I’m mostly familiar with the earlier D-Series, and recently I’ve been re-reading some of Rich’s reviews of those older books, especially the ones I first collected. One of the very first was Sea Siege/Eye of the Monster, a pair of Andre Norton novels issued as an Ace Double in 1962, which Rich reviewed on his blog back in 2017.

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Viewpoint Intimacy Through a Third Person Lens

Sunday, May 31, 2020 R. J. Howell Comments 10 comments

The Goblin Emperor Katherine Addison-small

Cordelia’s Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen 1996, cover by Gary Ruddell), The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor 2014,
cover by Anna Balbusso and Elena Balbusso), and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (Tor 2019, cover by Jaime Jones)

Since quarantine has brought an unexpected windfall of time for me, I’ve been beta-reading more than usual, and from sources beyond my immediate network of writer-friends. With these new novels, however, I’ve noticed this trend of a lack of intimacy with third person viewpoint characters.

I’m not sure if this is a discomfort with diving deeper into their character’s viewpoint, not knowing how to deep-dive into PoV, or taking the “show-don’t-tell” adage a step too far, to the point where the prose only “shows” action and all moments of interiority and reflection are seen as “telling.”

Or perhaps it’s that some writers watch more films, or play more video games, than they read, and recycle techniques borrowed from visual media that don’t have the same impact in prose? This is not to disparage visual and/or interactive entertainment, nor writers who learn how to tell stories in that media. However, visual media uses a different skill-set to convey emotion, and there are things that can be done with prose that can’t be done as well in film.

Whatever the root cause, I’ve read multi-viewpoint novels where the writers specifically stated that the plot was deeply character driven, and yet, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you anything about the characters that wasn’t directly tied to the plot. It’s as if the writer feared to bog down the narrative with character backstory, either as a result of excessive edits or an unwillingness to include it in the first place. By the end, all that was left was what was introduced in Chapter 1. The characters had no past, and their only future derived from events in the story. I felt so removed, like I was watching things unfold from a distance, and while the plot escalated and had the necessary dramatic beats, I simply didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t experiencing, I wasn’t sinking into the prose and being transported.

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A Sampling from an SF Grandmaster: The Silverberg Collections from Three Rooms Press

Saturday, May 30, 2020 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

First-Person Singularities Stories-small

Time and Time Again Sixteen Trips in Time-small

Alien Archives Eighteen Stories of Extraterrestrial Encounters-small

First-Person Singularities (2017), Time and Time Again (2018), and Alien Archives (2019), all published by Three Rooms Press

My 3,000-word article on The Art of Author Branding: The Paperback Robert Silverberg last week required a lot of research and reading, and all that generated a nostalgic interest in Silverberg. So this week I’ve been digging into his recent collections, and that led me to the pleasant discovery that Three Rooms Press has been issuing a brand new Silverberg collection each year for the past three years, beginning with First-Person Singularities, which gathers tales written in the first person, and Time and Time Again: Sixteen Trips in Time (which is currently available at half-price on Amazon, just $7.99 in trade paperback).

The most recent is Alien Archives: Eighteen Stories of Extraterrestrial Encounters, a generous collection of stories from 1954-1997. Booklist gave it a warm review:

The latest in a series of Silverberg’s collections from Three Rooms Press focuses on stories about alien–human encounters, ranging from the deadly to the benign. Multiple stories involve intimate inter-species contact, such as the Majipoor story “The Soul-Painter and the Shapeshifter,” about a romance between a psychic painter and a shapeshifting alien, and “Bride 91,” which depicts a future in which dozens of species participate in inter-species marriage contracts, but one alien bride desperately wants an authentic Terran marriage. There are also stories of aliens lost on earth such as “Amanda and the Alien,” in which a body-stealing alien falls prey to the interests of a bored California teenager, and “Something Wild Is Loose,” in which an invisible and good-natured alien telepath can only communicate with sleeping humans, accidentally giving them lethal nightmares… Alien Archives still shows that Silverberg’s reputation as a skilled storyteller is well-deserved; it is still worth a look for those interested in a sampling of the SF Grandmaster’s prolific short story work.

I was torn whether to quote from Booklist or Publishers Weekly, since they manage to praise completely different stories. So I decided to go with both. Here’s an excerpt from the PW review.

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Rogue Blades Presents: Who Was Your First Hero?

Friday, May 29, 2020 Ty Johnston Comments 6 comments

Do you remember your first hero? Any kind of hero. It could have been a hero from a movie or a book or a television show, even a hero from real life.

As a child of the 1970s, one might think Luke Skywalker was my first hero, but I would turn eight years old a month after the original Star Wars was released in theaters, and by then I already had plenty of heroes.

Re-runs of the original Star Trek TV show from the 1960s were still airing, and I watched every one of them. Of the crew of the Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk seemed the most heroic of the figures presented to us viewers, or at least he stood in the most traditional of the heroic modes.

Then there was the Six Million Dollar Man, starring actor Lee Majors from 1973 to 1978 on television. For those not familiar with the series, Majors played U.S. astronaut Steve Austin who was seriously injured in an accident. Not only did Steve survive his accident, but the government decided, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” And they did. Steve got some bionic legs and an arm and an eye. He fought crime. And Bigfoot. It was awesome.

Some might not consider Godzilla a hero, but by the time of my childhood in the ’70s, Godzilla was mainly a good guy, so he was a hero of sorts to many of us. For better or worse, my first Godzilla movie was Godzilla vs. Megalon, a film sometimes not remembered fondly by Godzilla fans. Either way, I was maybe five years old when my dad drug me into an old downtown theater to witness the spectacle of this movie, and again, I have to say it was awesome.

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Andrew Liptak on 15 New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Check Out in May

Friday, May 29, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I don’t know where John DeNardo vanished to this month. Ever since The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog shut down, taking their excellent monthly summary with tbem, I’ve grown to rely on John’s monthly SF book survey at Kirkus Reviews pretty heavily. It didn’t appear in May — but fortunately Andrew Liptak at Polygon came through, so I don’t have to wrap up the month dangerously uninformed. What does Andrew recommend for us in May? Let’s have a look.

Westside Saints by W.M Akers (Harper Voyager, 304 pages, $27.99 hardcover/$14.99 digital, May 5, 2020)

W.M. Akers follows up his debut novel Westside with Westside Saints, a mystery set in an alternate, Jazz-era New York City. The city has been split into two zones, where the east side is a prosperous metropolis and the west an overgrown wasteland. In Westside, Akers introduced readers to Gilda Carr, a detective who specializes in “small mysteries,” and who ended up trying to solve the mystery of her missing father.

In this new adventure, Carr stumbles upon a new mystery when she’s hired by a group of street preachers from the Electric Church to recover the severed finger of a lost saint. They believe that this digit will bring about a resurrection, and Carr drawn in when her dead mother unexpectedly returns…

We covered the first book in the series, Westside, right here almost exactly a year ago. Read an excerpt from Westside Saints here.

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Goth Chick News: The Shining Opera. And No, I’m Not Joking…

Thursday, May 28, 2020 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

As much as I love the movie The Shining, I never thought I’d ever see that title in the same sentence with the word ‘opera;’ and yet here we are.

Turns out the Minnesota Opera, located in Minneapolis, has become known for showcasing rare and unusual operas. For instance, they’ve performed operatic versions of Where the Wild Things Are, Frankenstein, and The Handmaid’s Tale. They’ve even done one called Nixon in China. Admittedly, I’m not much of an opera fan. However, I understand there are those aficionados who make it a hobby of ‘collecting’ performances of strange operas and if this happens to be your thing, keep reading.

The Minnesota Opera’s head musical director, Eric Simonson and the artistic director Dale Johnson, came up with the idea to turn Stephen King’s novel into opera. They contacted Pulitzer Prize winning composer Paul Moravec, and Grammy Award winning lyricist Mark Campbell, and three years later The Shining opera premiered at the Ordway Music Theater in May 2016.

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Magical Odes and Mysterious Trilogies: The Poet King by Ilana C. Myer

Wednesday, May 27, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Covers by Stephan Martiniere

Every time a fantasy trilogy wraps up, we bake a cake in the Black Gate offices. (As you can imagine, our diet consists of a lot of cake. Man, we need a gym.)

Ilana C. Myer’s new novel The Poet King brings to a close the trilogy that began with Last Song Before Night. One of the reasons I love this series is all the mystery. Like, what’s the trilogy called, exactly? Amazon refers to it as the Tower of the Winds series. Unless you’re buying the Kindle version, in which case it’s called The Harp and Ring Sequence. The Internet Science Fiction database clears the issue right up by calling it, definitively, Last Song Before Night / The Harp and the Ring, and then listing all the books in the wrong order.

Well, no one said the life of a science fiction book blogger would be easy. Let’s move on the the Publishers Weekly review, because at least that’s straightforward. Hopefully. Here’s an excerpt; you can judge for yourself.

Myer concludes the Harp and Ring Sequence (after Fire Dance) with this opulent, ambitious fantasy. Political upheaval in Kahishi leads to Elissan Diar declaring himself the land’s first Poet King, capable of weaving magic into his odes. Embittered Lady Rianna Gelvan plots to kill Elissan before he takes the throne… Myer’s intricately braided plot strands culminate in a clash of supernatural Otherworld powers. Those new to the series will have no trouble connecting with the well-drawn protagonists but may struggle to untangle the history of this rich universe which draws from a welter of world mythologies. Still, readers will be blown away by the lush, lyrical prose and epic scale of this novel.

We covered the previous books in the series here and here. The Poet King was published by Tor Books on March 24, 2020. It is 320 pages, priced at $29.99 in hardcover and $14.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Stephan Martiniere. Read Howard Andrew Jones’ feature interview with Ilana here.

See all our coverage of the best new fantasy series here.