Honestly, the holidays can be a bit of a slow time here in the underground offices of Goth Chick News. Seeing I was looking a bit down, our Big Cheese John O. conceded to make the boys on staff move their D&D game out of the biggest basement room, so we could give our offices a bit of an upgrade. Though Bob and Ryan groused about being further from the fridge, John graciously explained we could not continue to expect Black Gate photog Chris Z. to work off a laptop in the disused lavatory under the stairs. So, once I get the smell of cigars and Cheetos out of the walls, we’ll be moved in with enough outlets for my blender and Chris’ Nespresso machine.
And just when I thought this would be about as much activity as I could expect at the Black Gate offices in December, this happened…
Three best friends turned filmmakers, Natalie Jones, Aaron Keeling and Austin Keeling, best known for their 2015 breakout horror film The House on Pine Street, just produced something even more entertaining. Probably feeling a bit down as well, these superfans got baking and created what is probably the greatest gingerbread house of all time.
When I first saw Edward Lazellari’s Awakenings back in 2011, I was struck by Chris McGrath’s cover. I’d never seen anything quite like it. Featuring a creepy-eyed dude in a hoodie and a square-jawed street cop, it looked like a cross between dark fantasy and a modern police procedural. Maybe? It sure made me pick up a copy, anyway, and the name Edward Lazellari stuck in my mind.
That doesn’t mean I’m top of things, of course. When I received a review copy of Blood of Ten Chiefs from Tor last week, it took a few days for me to realize it was part of the same series. In fact, I didn’t even knew it was a series. Probably because I missed the second book, The Lost Prince, released in 2013.
All three are part of what’s now being called the Guardians of Aandor. Without getting into specifics (because I’m too lazy to read all three book blurbs), a cop and a photographer who don’t know each other get stalked by interdimensional beings, find out they’re from an alternate reality with castles and knights and stuff, who came across to our world to hide an infant royal, but ended up with lost memories and no knowledge of the current whereabouts of the young prince. The first novel earned praise from fantasy master Glen Cook (“Read Awakenings and get in on the ground floor with a great new writer,”) and Library Journal (“Urban fantasy reminiscent of Jim Butcher in a hard knocks action tale,”) but I dunno, I think they had me with McGrath’s cover. I dug Awakenings out of limbo in the basement, and hope to settle down with it this weekend.
Here’s the back covers of the first two books, because they’ll do a better job explaining all this than I’m doing right now.
Nalo Hopkinson was born on December 20, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica.
Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the first Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1997 and led to its publication. In 1999 Hopkinson won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She won the World Fantasy Award for her collection Skin Folk and she shared the British Fantasy Award for co-editing the anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction with Krisitne Ong Muslim. Hopkinson’s novel Sister Mine won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. She shared the Aurora Award for co-editing the anthology Tesseracts Nine with Geoff Ryman and won her own Aurora Award for the novel The New Moon’s Arms. Her novel The Chaos won a Copper Cylinder Award and she won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for The Salt Roads. She has won the Sunburst Award twice, for the collection Skin Folk and the novel The New Moon’s Arms. She has collaborated on fiction with Nisi Shawl and his co-edited anthologies and magazines with Kristine Ong Muslim, Geoff Ryman, and Uppinder Mehan.
“Whose Upward Flight I Love” was originally published in Dark Planet Webzine in 2000, edited by Lucy A. Snyder. Hopkinson included it in her collection Skin Folk the following year as well as her late collection Falling in Love with Hominids in 2015. It was reprinted in the magazine Cicada in March of 2017.
Hopkinson writes about a crew whose job it is to secure trees planted in a public park against a wind storm. Their task seems prosaic enough and they work even as the wind threatens to uproot the trees, to the extent that one of the women has to catch an uprooted tree before it flies away. Despite her efforts, all she winds up with is a root, which she tosses to the ground.
As the crew members work, they call to each other, continuing conversations about their lives. The woman has a long-time relationship with Derek, which has its ups and downs and she is sharing the latest information about their lives with her crewmate to pass the time while they do their work to protect the trees. Everything is completely normal and there is nothing that sets this particularly day’s work apart from any other day.
Decisions, and actions, have consequences, even if they can’t be foreseen. Consequences also often can’t be traced back to the decision that caused them. The crewmember catching the tree and then dropping the root on the ground is one of those. While she and her crewmates are finishing their task, the dropped root begins to move on its own.
The Calahorra tower, on the far side of the Guadalquivir River from Córdoba, protects access to the Roman bridge. It was originally built in the Islamic period and rebuilt in 1369
Last week I wrote about the magnificent mosque/cathedral of Córdoba. While that’s the city’s main draw, there’s plenty else to see in this historic place. In fact, the entire city center, where most of the old buildings are, is one big UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The area, next to the Guadalquivir River, has always been inhabited. Evidence of Neanderthals has been found, as well as all the major phases of prehistory. A small prehistoric settlement became a city under the Carthaginians, who called it Kartuba. When the Romans conquered it in 206 BC, the name morphed into Corduba. Under the Romans, the city thrived, becoming the cultural and administrative center of Hispania Baetica. Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, and Lucan all came from Córdoba. It was briefly under Byzantine rule from 552-572 AD before falling to the Visigoths.
It’s 1962. You are Irwin Donenfeld, executive vice president for DC Comics, the 800-pound gorilla of superhero comics. You are riding high on the Silver Age of comics, having revived superhero comics from their near-death experience at the hands of Fredric Wertham, the New York District Attorney, and Congress itself. A dozen new versions of 1940s legends have poured from your offices since 1956 along with brand-new successes. The secret? Showcase, a comic invented purely to give tryouts to comic concepts and get the fans, the readers, the buyers to write in insisting that one or another of them be given their own titles. The Barry Allen Flash emerged from Showcase #4, The Challengers of the Unknown in #6, Lois Lane in #8, Green Lantern in #22, Aquaman in #30, the Atom in #34.
Now you’re a victim of your own success. The Atom, after also appearing in Showcases #35 and #36, is a smash. He’s getting his own title. But he was supposed to appear in Showcase #37, March-April 1962, as well, which is due at the printer in two weeks, and you don’t want to use him again. What do you do?
Hutchinson’s novel Europe in Autumn was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British SF Association Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, as was its sequel, Europe at Midnight. The volume Europe in Winter was the only one of the three nominated for the British SF Association Award, which it won in 2017. His short story “The Push” had been nominated for the award in 2010. Hutchinson co-edited the anthology Strange Pleasures 2 with John Grant.
“The Trauma Jockey” first appeared in issue 117 of Interzone in March 1997, edited by David Pringle. In 2000 Thomas Haufschild translated the story into German for inclusion in Wolfgang Jeschke’s anthology Das Wägen von Luft. Hutchinson included it in his 2004 collection As the Crow Flies.
Hutchinson’s main character is a “Trauma Jockey,” someone whose job is to connect to a patient through a series of electrodes to take their emotional trauma away. Hutchinson opens the story by demonstrating how the process is supposed to work, with the trauma jockey siphoning the emotional pain away from Lucy Smith and then eventually downloading it into someone who has been so beaten down by the system that extra trauma doesn’t impact him.
Once Hutchinson has established the normal methodology, his character is visited by a Mr. Jones, who wants to hire his services. It turns out that Jones is a sociopath and the process doesn’t work the same way on him. Instead of downloading his emotions, he downloads images of people he has murdered. When the Trauma Jockey decides to go to the police, Jones threatens not only him, but his extended family, including his young nieces. Unable to turn to anyone for help, he must accept Jones’s continued visits and the horrific images he shares, which gives Jones as much of a rush as the actual murders and sexual crimes.
A few months back at GenCon, I stumbled across a well-placed demo area with a large cardboard display of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. As a child of the 1980’s, I wasn’t about to miss out on this … my introduction to Wizard of the Coast’s Transformers Trading Card Game.
There are two components to the game: double-sided oversized character cards and battle cards. The character cards are foil cards that represent various Autobot and Decepticon characters with one side having a Bot Mode and the other side having their transformed Alt Mode. The battle cards are a deck of regular-sized cards, consisting of single-use Action cards and Upgrades that can be attached to individual transformers to provide Weapon, Armor, and Utility equipment that (generally) stick with the characters they’re upgrading.
The game plays out as a battle between two teams of Transformers, with victory coming to the player who is able to KO all of their opponents’ characters. Each character card has Attack, Life, and Defense stats, which alternate as you flip between the Modes. Some Modes also have powers of various kinds. Some of the powers activate when you flip the card into that mode. For example, when you flip the Optimus Prime card into its truck Alt Mode, you immediately draw a battle card. Other powers are always active so long as the character is in that Mode.
It’s always nice to see a well-made short film reach an audience. A short has a different structure and feel from a feature, and a good one is a very distinct pleasure. I get to watch a number every year at the Fantasia film festival; too rarely beyond. But one of the shorts from this past summer’s Fantasia has just been made available to a wider audience. “The Gaze,” written and directed by Ida Joglar, has been selected by the multi-platform horror brand ALTER for its YouTube channel. You can watch it there now. Here’s the film’s official synopsis:
After a late night in the laboratory where she works as a research assistant, Mayra has no recollection and suspects she has been sexually assaulted by her renowned boss. When she tells her friend about the incident, she is confronted with doubts. As time passes she becomes further distressed as she discovers she may have a power she never knew about. When she once again finds herself alone in the lab with her predatory boss, her power manifests itself to an explosive end.
When Molly Tanzer’s novel Creatures of Will and Temper was published last year, I confidently predicted that it would be huge.
Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper looks like a breakout book. It’s got all the classic elements — fabulous setting, swordplay, and the supernatural — while also being totally original. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Molly is poised for a break-out. Her first novel Vermilion received rave reviews (“A splendid page-turner of a Weird West adventure… hugely entertaining” — Publishers Weekly), and her most recent book was the anthology Swords vs Cthulhu, co-edited with Jesse Bullington. How cool is that?
I’m pleased to see that the book was very warmly received — it was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and critics praised it widely. Jeff VanderMeer said it was “A delightful, dark, and entertaining romp,” and Outlander author Diana Gabaldon called it “An artful, witty, Oscar Wilde pastiche with the heart of a paranormal thriller.”
Molly’s follow up, Creatures of Want & Ruin, arrived from John Joseph Adams Books last month, and was selected as a Barnes & Noble Best Science Fiction Fantasy Book of November 2018. Tor.com‘s Liz Bourke calls it “A measured, atmospheric novel, with compelling characters and a deeply disturbing undercurrent of horror,” and the B&N Sci-Fi Blogsays “Molly Tanzer does it all; from her debut novel, named best book of 2015 by i09, to the “thoughtful erotica” she edits at her magazine, Congress, she’s proven to be one of the most distinct voices in contemporary SFF.”
Moorcock’s novella “Behold the Man” won the Nebula Award in 1968. He has won the British Fantasy Award six times, for the novels The Knight of the Swords, The King of the Swords, The Sword and the Stallion, and The Hollow Lands, as well as for the short story “The Jade Man’s Eyes.” He won a special committee award from them in 1993. In 1979 he won the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Gloriana. His Elric saga won the Seiun Award in 1986. Moorcock received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Con in 2000, the Prix Utopia in 2004, and the Bram Stoker Awards in 2005. In 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 2008. Moorcock was guest of honor at the 2nd World Fantasy Con, held in New York in 1976 and at LoneStarCon 2, the 55th Worldcon, held in San Antonio, Texas in 1997.
“The Frozen Cardinal” originally appeared in the anthology Other Edens, edited by Robert Holdstock and Christopher Evans, in 1987. Moorcock included it in his collection Casablanca in 1989 and in 1993, it was included in the Moorcock collection Earl Aubec and Other Stories. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer selected the story for The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection in 2016. In 1990 the story was translated into French to appear in the anthology Universe 1990, edited by Pierre K. Rey.
While Moorcock may be best known for his epic fantasy about the Eternal Champion or his Jerry Cornelius novels, he has also written a significant amount of straight science fiction. “The Frozen Cardinal” is set in the polar regions of the distant planet Moldavia and takes the form of several private communiques sent back to Earth by a member of the first exploration team to the area of the planet, which is just beginning to come out of an ice age.
Moorcock manages to present his trip to a distant world as a tedious expedition. His narrator, as well as the entire crew, is just focused on the next tasks they must accomplish, most of which are the repetitive crossing of vast chasms, a dangerous activity, but one that has become routine as they use the same process at each crevice. Their monotony is broken when they discover a figure embedded in the ice on the side of one of the crevices and determine that it is a Roman Catholic Cardinal.
