Black Gate – Page 339 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Real Tartan Tat Army! A review of Better is the Proud Plaid by Jenn Scott

Thursday, November 15, 2018 M Harold Page Comments 5 comments

At least half looked like soldiers draped in tartan tat. — **Regular soldiers draped in tartan tat**

What if I told you that the Highland army at Culloden in 1746 wasn’t really a “Highland” Army?

What if I also told you that apart from a few front-ranking testosterone-poisoned sword and targe men, it fought like any other 18th century European army and that at least half the men looked like regular soldiers draped in tartan tat — sashes, tartan trews, a better quality version of the kind of stuff tourists still pick up in Edinburgh’s gift shops — to show which side they were on?

Yes, I’ve been reading Jenn Scott’s new Better is the Proud Plaid: The Clothing, Weapons and Accoutrements of the Jacobites in the ’45. (UK, US)

It’s so far out of my normal period that I’m in danger of doing that thing where I age before your eyes and turn into a puddle of steaming goop.

However, every Scot grows up with the tale of Bonny Prince Charley, the ’45 Rebellion, and the tragic Battle of Culloden. Me being an Anglo-Scot, my ancestors, if involved, wore red coats and cursed in Nottinghamshire accents while they fought for Good King George. No wonder, then, that I’ve always been suspicious of the noble-savage-fighting-for-Scottish-freedom-while-swiving-time-travelling-American-nurses narrative that has wrapped itself around the rebellion. This book promised to debunk some of that — which it does, but in doing so replaces it with something perhaps more impressive.

And, also, I was expecting to be impressed. I’ve been hearing about Jenn’s research for years.

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Birthday Reviews: Catherine Wells’s “The Sea-Maid”

Thursday, November 15, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Catherine Wells was born on November 15, 1952.

Catherine Wells was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award for her novel Mother Grimm in 1998. Her other novels included Beyond the Gates and the Coconino Trilogy. While almost all of her novels were published in the 1990s, she published several short stories beginning in 2000.

Wells based her story “The Sea-Maid” on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” going back to Andersen’s original story rather than the Disney version that appeared in 1989. The story was published in the February 2002 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy.

The story begins with Wells giving a good indication of what is to follow. Paul talks about “The Little Mermaid” and explains the difference between Andersen’s tale and the Disney version Wells knows most people will be familiar with. According to Paul, the mermaid’s fate was sealed by the fact that the Prince she fell in love with was a jerk. He then explains that the same thing happened to him and he, too, was a jerk, which he says not only influenced his relationship with the mermaid, but also with every woman he has ever dated, most recently with Diane, who broke up with him shortly before his encounter with the mermaid.

To get over Diane, Paul attends an engagement party on a yacht thrown by his long-time friend Jenna. Set in the 1970s, sex and drugs are rampant on the yacht and Paul is the only one who realizes that there is a huge squall coming in that could potentially sink the ship. He manages to get the yacht moving back to port, but in the process falls overboard and is rescued by a mermaid, who shows up again weeks later, unable to speak, and with legs. The story becomes a retelling of Andersen’s tale in a modern venue.

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The Death of the Classical World: Reading The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey

Wednesday, November 14, 2018 Sean McLachlan Comments 4 comments

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The destroyers came out from the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness had been terrorizing the east of the Roman Empire.

Thus starts the controversial new history of the pagan/Christian transition by Classics scholar Catherine Nixey. Making a deliberate parallel between the early Christians and ISIS is a bold move, intended to shock and turn our historical and cultural presumptions upside down.

It’s only the first of many. For 250 pages, Nixey makes a full-on assault against the dominant narrative that Christians were brutally oppressed by the Roman Empire, before peacefully taking over by winning the debate against an exhausted and decadent paganism.

In Palmyra c. AD 385, a horde of black-robed monks swarmed out of their desert caves and crude shelters to break into the city’s temple of Athena. There they came upon a graceful, larger-than-life statue of the goddess. They hacked the head from its shoulders, then battered at the head where it lay on the ground. When they left, their rage satiated, the head lay where they had left it for centuries until uncovered by modern archaeologists.

All across the Late Roman Empire, this scene was played out again and again with increasing frequency as Christians grew in number and confidence.

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Dark Evil and Atlantean Gods: Stygian: A Dark-Hunter Novel by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Wednesday, November 14, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

When I received a review copy of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s new novel Stygian, I noticed the subtitle A Dark Hunter Novel. I know Kenyon is the author of multiple ongoing series (including the Deadman’s Cross historical fantasies featuring curses, pirates, and a sentient ship on the Spanish Main), but I wasn’t prepared for the scale of this one.

Depending on how you count, this is the 22nd novel in the Dark Hunter series, a saga of dark evil and the Atlantean gods that began way back in 2002 with Fantasy Lover.

Kenyon has made a name for herself as a paranormal romance writer with a string of #1 New York Times bestsellers under her belt, but Stygian isn’t just the latest in a long running series. It picks up the tale of the Dark-Hunter leader Acheron and his twin brother Styxx, told in the #1 bestselling Acheron and Styxx, to tell the story of Urian, Styxx’s son. Here’s the description.

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Birthday Reviews: Daniel Abraham’s “Pagliacci’s Divorce”

Wednesday, November 14, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Daniel Abraham was born on November 14, 1969.

Daniel Abraham won the International Horror Guild Award for his story “Flat Diane” in 2005. The story was also nominated for a Nebula Award. His story “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” was nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Seiun Awards. Abraham has two additional Hugo nominations in collaboration with Ty Franck using the pseudonym James S.A. Corey for their novel Leviathan Wakes and for ther series The Expanse, which has been turned into a successful television series. Abraham has also published using the names M.L.N. Hanover and Daniel Hanover. In addition to his collaborations with Franck, he has collaborated with Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, Susan Fry, Michaela Roessner, Sage Walker, and Walter Jon Williams.

“Pagliacci’s Divorce” was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon van Gelder in its December 2003 issue. The story has never been reprinted.

Although “Pagliacci’s Divorce” is built around a sting operation based on Pagliacci’s ability to help create fake phenotype cards of illicit purposes, it really focuses on the relationship between Pagliacci and his ex-wife, Carly, whose current husband, Damon Weiss, is the target of the sting. Law enforcement uses people like Pagliacci as informants in return for letting them continue to run their scams and in this case has found a connection to a larger fish.

Abraham builds a complex relationship between Pagliacci and Carly, which points out that a divorce, even when children are not involved, does not necessarily sever the couple or their relationship. Yes, Carly has married a new man, but she and Pagliacci still have a relationship that can be leveraged, even if she is unaware of the way she is being used. However, even as Pagliacci realizes that he has to permit law enforcement to use him to get to Carly’s husband, he also knows that there are ways he can subvert the process because of his own attachment to her, the same attachment they are so adamant to use.

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Stan Lee, the World’s Greatest Comic Book Writer: 1922-2018

Wednesday, November 14, 2018 Thomas Parker Comments 6 comments

I never really thought Stan Lee would die. I’ve been saying for years that as long as there was a single nickel to be squeezed, Stan the Man would be making his cameo and taking his executive producer credit and raking in the long green.

I guess we now live in a nickleless universe, and there will be a blank spot somewhere around the margins of the next Marvel cinematic blockbuster. Stan Lee took a last intrepid leap into the Negative Zone on Monday, November 12. He was 95.

As W.S. Gilbert wrote long ago, “I often think it’s comical/How nature always does contrive/That every boy and every gal/That’s born into the world alive/Is either a little Liberal/Or else a little Conservative!” Gilbert and Sullivan never wrote a comic opera about superheroes (oh that they had!), but the observation applies as much to comic books as it does to politics. It’s certainly possible to appreciate both, but at the end of the day you’re either Marvel or you’re DC.

When I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s, in the prime of my comic book buying and reading years, I was DC all the way. I had hundreds of comics, but very few were Marvels. There was something about them that I just didn’t trust. The combination of self-mockery and over-the-top rhetoric put me off. The goofy syntax and leather-lunged self-promotion that screamed from a thousand Gil Kane-drawn covers proclaimed that unlike the solid, stolid DC products, these weren’t serious comic books. (You know what I mean — titles like “Whence Comes the Werebeast!!” and banners proclaiming that the story is “Another Mighty Masterpiece in the Munificent Marvel Manner!!” and stuff like that.)

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A Tale of Alchemy and Magic in Gilded Age New York: The Last Magician Series by Lisa Maxwell

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I received a review copy of The Devil’s Thief a few months ago. It’s the second volume in Last Magician series by Lisa Maxwell, and I didn’t have a copy of the first one, last year’s The Last Magician.

But The Devil’s Thief still managed to capture my attention. Man, I hate that.

We covered Lisa Maxwell’s previous book, the Peter Pan homage Unhooked, back in 2016. But it was The Last Magician that really put her on the map, becoming an instant New York Times bestseller. The tale of a girl who travels back in time to find a mysterious book that could save her future, The Last Magician was called a “twisty tale of alchemy and magic in Gilded Age New York” by Cinda Williams Chima.

How do I know all this? Because I shelled out for a copy, because I’m a sucker. Here’s the description.

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Ouroboros: The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 3 comments

I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food (as the Ascian would have said) are all the work of the Increate. Thus, stories are small things indeed in the scheme of the universe, but it is hard not to love best what is our own—hard for me, at least.

— Severian

With The Citadel of the Autarch (1983) the story ends where it began: Nessus, the great city of the Commonwealth. Severian is no longer a young torturer exiled for an act of mercy, but a figure of incredible power and importance. Realistic depictions of peace and war are interwoven with excursions into phantasmagoria. Severian encounters old friends as well as enemies, experiences mass combat, and meets the strange soldiers of the Commonwealth’s Orwellian enemy, Ascia. Told in Wolfe’s often elliptical style, there are the familiar hints of Clark Ashton Smith, the stench of Wolfe’s time during the Korean War, and a solid whiff of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

At the end of the previous book, The Sword of the Lictor, Severian’s great sword, Terminus Est, was broken. So too, seemingly, the life-restoring Claw of the Conciliator he means to return to the religious order, the Pelerines. Searching for the blue gem’s pieces, he discovered that at its shattered heart was a simple thorn. The gem itself was mere glass.

Citadel begins with Severian continuing northward in search of the Pelerines and the front between the Commonwealth’s and Ascia’s armies. He soon meets the trailing edge of the Autarch’s armies: supply trains, cavalry patrols, and the scattered remains of the killed. As he pilfers supplies from one dead soldier he is struck by the callousness of his actions and by the contents of a letter written by the dead man to his beloved. He restores the corpse to life with the thorn from the Claw. Whether unable or unwilling to speak, the resurrected soldier travels with Severian until they finally come to a great field hospital run by the Pelerines.

Severian, it turns out, is suffering from a fever and is taken in by the ministering sisters. He strikes up a friendship with several fellow patients, a woman and three men who wish to marry her. And here, Citadel takes a storytelling detour. To choose a husband from among her suitors, Foila decides that whomever can tell the best story will win her hand. She asks Severian to act as judge. Each story has its own strengths, but it’s that of the Ascian prisoner I found the most interesting.

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Birthday Reviews: Stephen Baxter’s “The Twelfth Album”

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 3 comments

Stephen Baxter was born on November 13, 1957 in Liverpool.

Baxter’s novel The Time Ships won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Preis, the Seiun Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the British SF Association Award. He won a second Dick Award for Vacuum Diagrams and has also won the BSFA Award for “War Birds,” Omegatropic, and Mayflower II. He has also won the Seiun Award for Timelike Infinity. He won the first Sidewise Award for Short Fiction for “Brigantia’s Angels” and the next year won the Long Form award for Voyage. Baxter eventually joined the Sidewise judge’s panel for a decade. On rare occasions, Baxter has used the pseudonym Jim Jones. He has collaborated with Alastair Reynolds, Arthur C. Clarke, Terry Pratchett, Simon Bradshaw, and Eric Brown.

“The Twelfth Album” was originally published in the April 1998 issue of Interzone, edited by David Pringle. David G. Hartwell included the story in his Year’s Best SF 4, which was translated into Italian as well. The story was also translated into Polish for inclusion in the magazine Fenix. The story was reprinted in Baxter’s 2002 collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere and in 2014 was translated into French for the anthology Alternative Rock.

There are several stories and novels which postulate an alternative history for the Beatles and “The Twelfth Album” is one of them. In this story, the narrator and his friend Lightoller are sitting in the bowels of a long-serving ocean liner which has been turned into a berthed hotel in Liverpool. A friend of theirs known as Sick Note, has died and they are sitting in his apartment in the hotel listening to some of his old vinyl records and reminiscing about him. However, they come across an album called God which has no other label or indication of tracks. When they play it, they hear eleven songs they know were recorded by the Beatles post-breakup, but on the album it is clearly all four musicians playing together.

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Pyr Sold to Start Publishing

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Publishers Weekly is reporting that Pyr, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Prometheus Books, has been sold to digital publisher Start Publishing.

Under Editorial Director Lou Anders, who founded the line in March 2005, Pyr was one of the most dynamic and exciting independent publishers in the industry, acquiring books from Michael Moorcock, Ian McDonald, Kay Kenyon, Sean Williams, Alan Dean Foster, Adam Roberts, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Tim Lebbon, Paul McAuley, Brenda Cooper, Jack Dann, Ken MacLeod, Robert Silverberg, and many others. Pyr launched numerous talented new writers as well, including Black Gate authors James Enge, Chris Willrich, Jon Sprunk, and others. Lou left Pyr in 2014 to pursue his own writing career, but under new editor Rene Sears Pyr has continued to be a force in the industry, with a backlist of over 170 titles. Recent releases include K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit, Tracy Townsend’s Thieves of Fate series, and the excellent Nebula Awards Showcase anthologies; its forthcoming titles include K.D. Edwards The Hanged Man.

I’m not sure what this means for Pyr, and especially their print editions. But PW claims Start Publishing will continue the print versions, and retain at least two editors from Pyr and their sister crime fiction imprint Seventh Street Books.

Start Publishing began has an exclusively digital publisher but, through a series of acquisitions, now releases print editions as well. Start will publish both print and digital editions of the newly acquired titles. Jarred Weisfeld, president of Start, told PW two editors from Prometheus will stay on to continue to release frontlist titles under both imprints. Start will also hire a new public relations/marketing person to promote the two imprints.

Read the complete announcement here.