Black Gate – Page 285 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Friday, October 25, 2019 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

The "42 Puzzle" cover — The “42 Puzzle” cover

The Ditmar Awards are named for Australian fan Martin James Ditmar Jenssen. Founded in 1969 as an award to be given by the Australian National Convention, during a discussion about the name for the award, Jenssen offered to pay for the award if it were named the Ditmar. His name was accepted and he wound up paying for the award for more years than he had planned. Ditmar would eventually win the Ditmar Award for best fan artist twice, once in 2002 and again in 2010. Primarily an Australian Award, for most years from 1969 to 1989, an award was presented for International Fiction. The International Fiction Award was one of the Ditmar’s original awards and the first one was won by Thomas M. Disch for Camp Concentration. In 1980, the Ditmar Award for International Fiction was presented to Douglas Adams for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at Swancon 5, held in Perth. The last time the award was presented was in 1989 to Orson Scott Card for the novel Seventh Son. On two occasions, in 1971 and 1984, no award was presented.

I bought my first copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at a small independent bookstore that, amazingly enough, still exists forty years later. When I bought the book, I had already heard the radio series and knew what to expect. Of course, the novel and the radio series are in no way the same thing. Adams was able to flesh things out a little more in the book and could add descriptive passages that weren’t possible in the radio show. In addition, jokes that had been in the radio series were dropped if Adams felt they didn’t quite work.

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Goth Chick News: Beating You to Halloween… Literally

Thursday, October 24, 2019 Sue Granquist Comments 3 comments

Blackout

Every year around the time of my favorite holiday season, reports make the news about “extreme” haunted attractions. This sort of thing is so far beyond your local Jaycee’s haunted house that putting them in the same category is just this side of dangerous.

Why, you ask?

Because around 10 years ago, someone decided jump scares and fake blood was no longer doing the trick when it came to getting one’s heart and adrenaline racing. Actually, the original someone’s were the proprietors of Blackout who launched their sadomasochistic experience in 2009 immediately attracting a very enthusiastic fanbase. For $50 and your signature on a waiver, you embarked on an hour-long odyssey which required a “safe word” in case you had enough of being screamed at, choked, blasted with a fire hose, and having all five of your rational senses otherwise assaulted.

I remain conflicted about what to think of this whole thing, mainly because getting scared — whether at the movies or attending an October event — is generally a safe version of escapism. I mean, the chance of zombies actually chasing you is relatively low in real life.

Relatively.

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Future Treasures: Novice Dragoneer by E.E. Knight

Thursday, October 24, 2019 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

I’m a huge fan of E.E. Knight. For one thing, he hosts the best board game nights I’ve ever seen. His Heroscape sessions, held annually in Chicago after the Windy City Pulp and Paper show for many years, were the stuff of legend. As he noted in one of his epic post-game Action Reports, they featured “Mohicans and British infantry and lizard men battling dinosaurs, giant spiders, dragons, and Atlantean robots in a jungle-choked ruin.” Don’t ask me to describe them, but they were life-changing.

He’s also a damn fine writer. You’re probably familiar with his 11-volume Vampire Earth series, which opened with Way of the Wolf, or his six-volume Age of Fire series. He’s also an occasional blogger here at Black Gate. And I was very proud to publish his Blue Pilgrim tale “The Terror in the Vale,” one of the very best stories in our Black Gate Online Fiction library (and reprint the first, “That of the Pit,” which first appeared in the underrated anthology Lords of Swords).

So naturally I was very excited to hear that he has a new novel arriving next month, the tale of an impoverished girl who enters into a military order of dragonriders. And if the buzz already building around Novice Dragoneer is any indication, it’s the beginning of a major new fantasy series. I asked Eric if he could tell us a little about it, and he graciously shared the following.

I’m very much looking forward to readers, both long-time and new, meeting our novice Ileth. She’s a little bit of each of my three kids spun around my own experiences at that age. I’ve even worked my first job, which I took on at twelve, into the story (although I was dealing with dog poop rather than dragon waste). I’ve been on a bit of a break from writing raising those three, so I’m excited to find out if I have any game left.

Here’s the publisher’s description.

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A Trip to Venus

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 Thomas Parker Comments 2 comments

The Uffizi Gallery

The summer of 2019 is in the books, and for me, the dog days just past were the most memorable of my life. As an elementary school teacher, I have June and July off and as I’ve shared here before, for my summer breaks I have a plan that I never deviate from – I hew my way through a big pile of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, just like I did during those long-ago vacations when I was a kid.

Why? I won’t deny that stoking the fires of nostalgia plays a big part in it. But beyond that, why do any of us read all this science fiction and fantasy in the first place, instead of, say, westerns or police procedurals or genteel comedies of manners? Your reasons may be different, but speaking for myself, in voyaging to another planet or to a realm of wizardry, I’m looking for some sort of transcendence, some intimation or even confirmation that this routine, workaday world is not all that there is. Ah, but how rarely does any work of fiction truly satisfy that deep desire.

This year was different, though. Instead of galloping through as many pages of pulp as my bleary old eyes could manage, I spent three weeks in Italy, seeing Rome, Florence, and Naples, wearing out my feet and my savings account as well as my eyes. Sorry, Edgar Rice Burroughs; I love you but I finally got a better offer. (I did manage to get some Jack Vance and Brian Aldiss read even in Europe, though.)

Not surprisingly, my trip was full of memorable sights and amazing moments, but there is one that stands head and shoulders above them all, because it supplied in spades that very glimpse into a world of deeper meaning that I’m always looking for in my reading.

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Robots! In! Space!

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 Steve Carper Comments 0 Comment

NASA The Power-Driven Articulated Dummy space suit tester 1963-5

Science fiction writers from Doc Smith to Robert Heinlein had their lone inventors hop into spaceships they built in their back yards. NASA had no such luxury. Space was the absolute unknown in the 1950s. A few rockets and satellites had poked their noses into the vacuum, but piloted craft were on the horizon and next to nothing was understood about how the rigors of space would affect human bodies. NASA had to worry about a million small details, using thousands of engineers at dozens of companies.

The pressure to learn grew more urgent in the early 1960s as the Americans prepped for a moon voyage. Project Gemini followed the just-get-‘em-in-space Mercury with the specific goal to understand space and “To demonstrate endurance of humans and equipment in spaceflight for extended periods, at least eight days required for a Moon landing, to a maximum of two weeks.” That put them into a quandary. The conditions of space couldn’t truly be duplicated here on Earth and starting tests on astronauts after they got to space defeated the whole notion of preparation.

Some bright – and at this distance unknown – engineer at NASA had the lightbulb idea: robot astronauts.

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Against the Darkmaster Kickstarts for High Fantasy Gamers of the World

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 Gabe Dybing Comments 0 Comment

Sword & Sorcery is a late attraction for me. My first and abiding love, ever since encountering Tolkien in the fifth grade, was and has been Epic High Fantasy, with its Heroes struggling against the Dark Lord in a battle of unequivocal Good versus Evil. I have said it before, and I think this present context makes it appropriate to say it again: when this thing called “fantasy roleplaying” first came to my attention, having no older siblings or neighborkids to introduce me to the more popular and recognizable Dungeons & Dragons, I spent my allowance at Waldenbooks on the red box set of Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP).

I was young, roleplaying was brand new to my friends and me, so, of course, we didn’t “play it right,” just as, as an adult, I learned that those other kids who were playing D&D at the same time weren’t running their games “correctly,” either. MERP is derived from the Rolemaster (RM) percentile system, which was first designed as modular additions to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1e), and has a reputation for complexity and lethality. I add this second characterization because RM’s critical hit tables might be its most famous feature. My young friends and I enjoyed many idle sessions simply reading descriptions out of the charts, language that evinced wry and gory humor in the spirit of 1980s slasher films. Here’s a favorite example: “Blast annihilates entire skeleton. Reduced to a gelatinous pulp. Try a spatula.”

When the designers of the forthcoming Against the Darkmaster (VsD) revisited this favorite childhood game of theirs, they, too, felt the desire to “play it wrong.” After awhile, they realized they had made so many tweaks and modifications to the core rules that they, essentially, had created a game of their own, a houseruled or hacked “retroclone” of MERP, reformulated to emulate specifically the works of Tolkien and his imitators, fantasy movies of the 1980s, and epic heavy metal music.

I was an early adopter of the VsD playtest, and a not infrequent critic of the VsD rules system. You can find the first in a series of these critiques here on The Rolemaster Blog. The designers aim to distinguish their game from others such as D&D through its emphasis on its source materials. In VsD, player characters are heroes, not “mere” adventurers of the Sword & Sorcery variety. The “plot” of a VsD campaign is intended to contain a high stakes struggle between Good (the PCs) and Evil (a force culminating in the person of the Darkmaster, played by the GM).

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How I Survive Conventions

Tuesday, October 22, 2019 S.M. Carrière Comments 1 comment

Portal

Conventions are portals into the wonderful. Like portals, though, they can be a little scary to step into. Image by alan9187 from Pixabay

Good evening, Readers!

As of the writing of this, I am coming off of a wonderful three day speculative fiction convention in Ottawa. I’m of course, talking about Can*Con. I’ve mentioned it before. It was a hectic, people-ly, wonderful weekend. As wonderful as it all was, conventions, even 2019 Aurora Award winning ones (I had to brag. I had to), can be tricky for me to navigate. I am an extreme introvert – hardly a unicorn in the spec fic crowd, I know. While I love to be around my friends, or even friendly people, it can quickly become exhausting and even terrifying. Here’s how I survive a three day stint of extreme peopleing.

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New Treasures: Salvaged by Madeleine Roux

Tuesday, October 22, 2019 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

When you’ve been reading and reviewing long enough, you grow a little numb to book blurbs. At least, I thought you did. But that was before I came across Madeleine Roux’s new science fiction-horror novel Salvaged, which has blurbs that didn’t just get my attention. They grabbed me by my collar and made me spill latte all over my shirt.

Christopher Golden calls the book “A breathless, claustrophobic twist on the SF thriller, full of deep space dread, conspiracies, and malevolent alien spores… This is the Alien we need right now.” And Seanan McGuire says it’s “The prose equivalent of playing a survival horror game… Beautifully written.” And Jonathan Maberry raves “Salvaged scared the hell out of me, and I write horror for a living! … a brilliant novel that any fan of Alien will simply devour. Brava!”

See what I mean? Anything with ” deep space dread, conspiracies, and malevolent alien spores” and which draws multiple comparisons to Alien definitely deserves my attention. Here’s an excerpt from the starred review at Publisher’s Weekly.

In a spacefaring future, Rosalyn Devar is a xenobiologist who takes a job as a salvager — janitor of dead space crews — to get away from her father, his business, and the man who hurt her. When caught drinking on the job, she’s given one more chance: clean up the Brigantine, a research ship whose crew is dead. But they aren’t. Aboard the Brigantine, she meets Edison Aries, the captain, and his undead crew. They are infected with a mysterious fungus, Foxfire, that has taken root in their minds, convincing them that it is their mother and that Rosalyn needs to join them. Stranded aboard the Brigantine, Rosalyn and Edison try to outwit the other crew members and Mother, while looking for a way to stop Foxfire from spreading.. This entertaining, deeply disturbing, and clever story hits all the right notes for those who like a little horror with their SF.

Salvaged was published by Ace Books on October 15, 2019. It is 368 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Faceout Studio/Jeff Miller.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

New Roads are Unfolding: The Last Road by K. V. Johansen

Monday, October 21, 2019 K.V. Johansen Comments 0 Comment

Cover art by Raymond Swanland (Blackdog, Gods of Nabban) and Jennifer Do (The Last Road)

The Last Road is the fifth and final book of Gods of the Caravan Road, a silk road fantasy full of gods, goddesses, demons, devils, wizards, and caravaneers. (Also camels.) Chronologically, the story begins with “The Storyteller,” which was published in Andromeda Spaceways quite a long time ago. You can find it now in my collection The Storyteller and Other Tales. I had Blackdog, the first novel, mostly written when I wrote “The Storyteller.” I’ve never been good at beginning at the beginning. I find that starting a story always raises questions about how it got to that point and I want to look backwards as well as forwards. In “The Storyteller,” the devil Moth — one of seven wizards who “in the days of the first kings in the north” bonded themselves with the souls of seven devils — is freed from her prison/grave and joins forces with the half-demon wer-bear Mikki to hunt for the devil Heuslar Ogada.

In Blackdog, a caravan-guard, Holla-Sayan, is possessed by the shapeshifting Blackdog, the obsessively protective, sometimes savage, guardian spirit bound to the goddess Attalissa, who must flee her homeland incarnated as a powerless child when her town is captured by a wizard warlord whom she believes intends to devour her. Holla takes her along as his daughter on the caravan road. Their story intersects with that of Moth, who has been set by the Old Great Gods to hunt and execute her fellow devils.

Marakand, which is published in two volumes as The Leopard and The Lady, is the story of the goddess-cursed assassin Ahjvar — who claims he died almost a century earlier — and his friend and would-be lover Ghu, as the city of Marakand rises in revolt against its goddess. With impressive bad luck, Holla-Sayan’s caravan comes to the city just in time for the civil war, and Moth and Mikki arrive on the trail of another devil.

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 3 Good Reasons – Murder is Corny

Monday, October 21, 2019 Bob Byrne Comments 5 comments

Alas – the home front is a bit…chaotic, with my wife halfway around the world on a mission and trip and the eleven-year old still needing school transportation – among other things. I didn’t get to finish editing this week’s A (Black) Gat in the Hand post – so, here’s the second entry in a feature which I hope will be part of a Nero Wolfe column next year. You can read my first try, covering “Not Quite Dead Enough.”

With a goal of eventually tackling every tale of the Corpus, I’ll give three reasons why the particular story at hand is the best Nero Wolfe of them all. Since I’m writing over seventy ‘Best Story’ essays, the point isn’t actually to pick one – just to point out some of what is good in every adventure featuring Wolfe and Archie (BTW – I got the idea from Hither Came Conan from this Wolfe series!). And I’ll toss in one reason it’s not the best story. Now – These essays will contain SPOILERS. You have been warned!

The Story

Today’s story is “Murder is Corny,” from Trio for Blunt Instruments. Nero Wolfe is upset because the weekly delivery of fresh corn is late. It finally arrives in the hands of Inspector Cramer, who got it from the scene of the murder of the delivery man. Archie had had a few dates with Susan McLeod, the farmer’s daughter, and she has unintentionally framed him for murder. Cramer arrests Archie, and to preserve his comfort level, Wolfe takes on the case, with Archie as his client.

3 GOOD REASONS

ONE – The Corn

This story contains one of my favorite openings. Every Tuesday, from July 20 to October 5, sixteen ears of just-picked corn are delivered to the brownstone from the farm of Duncan McLeod. Wolfe, of course, is very particular about the corn, including the requirements that it must be picked not more than three hours before he receives it, and that it must arrive between 5:30 and 6:30. Fritz prepares all of it for that evening’s dinner. But on this September Tuesday, the corn never arrives and Fritz has to make do with stuffed eggplant. Oh, the horror!

Wolfe is out of sorts and doesn’t engage Archie in their usual post-dinner conversation, over coffee in the office. He is standing at the giant globe, whirling it and scowling at it. This is unwarranted physical exertion on Wolfe’s part!

Inspector Cramer rings the doorbell and is admitted, carrying a carton with Wolfe’s name on it. He marches down the hall, deposits it on Wolfe’s desk and cuts the cord around the box. As Wolfe comes over to his desk, Cramer opens the flaps, holds up an ear of corn and says, “If you were going to have this for dinner, I guess it’s too late.”

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