Black Gate – Page 416 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Quatermass Experiment: The Shakespeare of Sci-Fi Television

Sunday, April 1, 2018 David Neil Lee Comments 4 comments

One of the most influential series in early television has actually made its way into science fiction history as a book. You can see my copy below: The Quatermass Experiment by Nigel Kneale, a plain 1959 paperback with the classic Penguin orange, cream, and black cover.

Ridley Scott’s Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing, the very existence of Doctor Who, not to mention 1980s-1990s films such as Life Force, Species, and The Astronaut’s Wife, and contemporary films such as Under the Skin, Life and The Cloverfield Paradox, where alien invasion takes the form of infection and transformation – all these are different faces of a genre that began with The Quatermass Experiment in the shaky, static-filled first days of black-and-white television – back with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the years after World War II.

In 1953, Nigel Kneale was a young writer and actor on the make. He had won an award for his 1949 short story collection Tomato Cain (a book which includes, among more naturalistic tales, portraits of vengeful nature and ancient supernatural evil that foreshadow his later works for TV and film). After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Kneale did some acting, but he had more success as a writer in the emerging field of television.

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Modular: Explore Starfinder’s Pact Worlds

Sunday, April 1, 2018 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 0 Comment

The Starfinder RPG allows for literally a universe full of original settings, giving Gamemasters the opportunity to create their own worlds and societies as the basis for their games. For those who like working with a framework of existing source material, though, the Starfinder development team has done a great job of presenting exactly the sort of rich, diverse system of planets, races, and societies that one could hope to find: the Pact Worlds.

Starfinder is set in the distant future of their Pathfinder RPG fantasy setting, after the dominance of magic and superstition has given way to science and technology (and, of course, technomagic). The planet of Golarion, the center of the Pathfinder fantasy setting, has vanished. In its place rests the massive Absalom Station, surrounded by the remaining planets of its solar system. No one knows what happened to Golarion or who built Absalom Station, due to a break in history known as the Gap.

The planets of the system have joined together with Absalom Station to form the Pact Worlds, a loose defensive alliance formed against external threats. These fourteen locations (not all are planets, as they include the Sun and an asteroid belt) get a couple of half-pages apiece in the Starfinder Core Rulebook, but the newly-released Starfinder Pact Worlds sourcebook (Amazon, Paizo) fleshes them out and provides a variety of related starship and player options for Starfinder characters. Both players and Gamemasters will find much to love about this newest installment in unfolding universe of Starfinder.

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Vintage Treasures: Copernick’s Rebellion by Leo A. Frankowski

Sunday, April 1, 2018 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I don’t know much about Leo A. Frankowski. But when I saw his 1987 novel Copernick’s Rebellion on eBay, I knew I had to have it. It belongs to that peculiar sub-genre of science fiction my friends and I used to call, “Explore the universe and meet strange new aliens. And then ride them like a pony.”

Frankowski was an engineer who sold his first novel, The Cross-Time Engineer, to Del Rey in 1986. It became the opening book in a 7-volume series eventually known as the Adventures of Conrad Stargard, which also included The Flying Warlord (1989), Lord Conrad’s Lady (1990), and others. His other novels include A Boy and His Tank (1999) and The Fata Morgana (1999), both for Baen. He died in December 2008.

Virtually all of Frankowski’s work is out of print, and there aren’t a lot of publishers who would take a chance on him today. On his website he claimed “males with military and technical backgrounds often approach me as though I were something holy… [with an] excess of almost worship,” and famously identified those who disliked his work as “feminists, liberals, and homosexuals.” And anyone who objects to riding aliens like a pony, I’m willing to wager.

Copernick’s Rebellion was published by Del Rey in April 1987. It is 202 pages, priced at $2.95 in paperback. The cover art is by the great Ralph McQuarrie. It has been out of print since 1989, and there is no digital edition. See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Birthday Reviews: March Index

Sunday, April 1, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Fantastic-Science-Fiction-Stories-June-1960-smaller

January index
February index

At the one quarter mark in our journey through the year, here’s a look back at the birthday reviews that appeared at Black Gate in March.

March 1, Wyman Guin: “Trigger Tide”
March 2, Ann Leckie: “The Unknown God”
March 3, Arthur Machen: “The Coming of the Terror ”
March 4, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison: “The Last Voyage”
March 5, Mike Resnick: “The Evening Line”
March 6, William F. Nolan: “Starblood”
March 7, Paul Preuss: “Rhea’s Time”
March 8, No Birthday Review published.
March 9, Pat Murphy: “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away”
March 10, Theodore Cogswell: “The Wall Around the World”
March 11, F.M. Busby: “Tundra Moss”
March 12, Harry Harrison: “The Mothballed Spaceship”

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Birthday Reviews: Samuel R. Delany’s “High Weir”

Sunday, April 1, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Samuel R. Delany was born on April 1, 1942.

Delany won back-to-back Nebula Awards for Best Novel for Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. The second year also saw him winning a Nebula for Best Short Story for “Aye, and Gomorrah.” In 1970, his novelette “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award and he won a second Hugo for The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965.

His novel Dhalgren received a Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award and he received a Lambda Lifetime Achievement Award and a Pilgrim Award. Delany was the Guest of Honor at Intersection, the 1995 Worldcon. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002, received the Eaton Award in 2010, and in 2014 was named a SFWA Grand Master.

“High Weir” was first published in If by Frederik Pohl in the October 1968 issue. Delany included it in his collection Driftglass and Robert Hoskins reprinted it in the anthology Wondermakers 2. Brian Attebery and Ursula K. Le Guin selected the story for the collection The Norton Book of Science Fiction: American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 and Ellen Datlow published it on Sci Fiction on May 7, 2003. Delany included it in his 2013 collection Aye, and Gomorrah. The story was translated into French in 1970 for inclusion in Galaxie #76 and into German in 1982 when Delany’s Driftglass was published as Treibglas.

“High Weir” features a team of scientists and academics exploring a dead Mars and a ruin that indicates a high level of ancient Martian civilization. The story is told from Rimkin’s point of view. As the team linguist, there is little for him to do since the Martians did not appear to have any sort of written language. Furthermore, Rimkin exhibits signs that would now be recognized as autistic. He is a brilliant linguist, but his interpersonal skills are completely lacking to the point where he can’t identify his teammates when they are in their space suits, nor can he distinguish between their voices on the radio. Part of the team, he is entirely separate from it.

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Announcing the 2018 Hugo Award Finalists

Saturday, March 31, 2018 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Holy neutron stars, it’s the end of March, and you know what that means…. it’s time to announce the finalists for the 2018 Hugo Awards! Doubtless most of you paid close attention to Rich Horton’s suggestions for the best science fiction and fantasy of last year, did a lot of heavy reading over the last four weeks, and thoughtfully cast your nominating ballots. Or maybe not.

But either way, it’s time to see who all your fellow voters nominated. Ready? Here we go.

Best Novel

The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor)
New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)
The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

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Reading Alan Moore’s Halo Jones for the First Time

Saturday, March 31, 2018 Derek Kunsken Comments 7 comments

Talk long enough with people about the British comic publisher 2000AD and you’ll eventually get into a conversation about where The Ballad of Halo Jones fits in the ranking of Alan Moore’s work. A few people have said that Halo Jones is Alan Moore’s greatest work, and it is frequently called Moore’s unknown classic.

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The Late March Fantasy Magazine Rack

Saturday, March 31, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The big magazine news in March is the arrival of the first issue of the most exciting new adventure fantasy periodical in years — Tales From the Magician’s Skull, edited by our very own Howard Andrew Jones and packed with writers and characters familiar to readers of Black Gate, including a brand new Morlock tale by James Enge, a Gaunt and Bone story from Chris Willrich, a graveyard fable from John C. Hocking, “There Was an Old Fat Spider” by C. L. Werner, the start of a brand new fantasy series from Howard Andrew Jones, a tale of wharf pirates and deep-sea creatures from Bill Ward, and the story of a sorcerous tyrant by Aeryn Rudel — all under a beautiful cover by Jim Pavelec.

TFtSK isn’t the only magazine worth reading in March. Far from it. Locus has an excellent tribute to the great Ursula K. Le Guin, and the regular crop of fiction mags include brand new stories from Kij Johnson, Juliette Wade, Xiu Xinyu, E. Lily Yu, Rachel Harrison, Cassandra Khaw (twice!), Adrian Cole, Bryan Camp, Ken Liu, and lots more.

Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in late March (links will bring you to magazine websites).

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Godzilla Acid Trips Thru Tokyo: Godzilla ‘77, a.k.a. Cozzilla

Saturday, March 31, 2018 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

Do you remember the time Godzilla dropped the brown acid while watching Mothra’s colored wings, and then Raymond Burr joined him and they tipped back a few cases of wine from Burr’s personal vineyards, while Burr told the plot of Perry Mason episodes backwards, where Mason would undo a court decision, Paul Drake would put evidence back in place, and at the climax a dead body would return to life?

None of this actually happened — but something close to it did. It involves the Italian film industry (doesn’t it always?) and the director of Starcrash and the Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies. It’s called Godzilla il re dei mostri (“Godzilla the King of Monsters”), a.k.a. Cozzilla after its creator, Luigi Cozzi — and it’s one of the strangest and least known chapters in Godzilla history. Not as much an acid trip as Godzilla vs. Hedorah, but in that ballpark.

It starts with the 1976 King Kong. The Dino De Laurentiis remake of the ‘33 giant monster classic may not be much good (I’ll give composer John Barry a hand for his score, and I like Jeff Bridges’s beard), but it took in such a big overseas haul that it triggered a mini-monster boom in Europe and Asia. We can thank its success in Japan for getting the momentum going to restart the Godzilla series, resulting in The Return of Godzilla in 1984 and the better Heisei movies that followed.

But King Kong ‘76 also shocked into life an Italian take on Godzilla that most people are unaware exists. Godzilla il re dei mostri isn’t exactly a “new” film. It’s an Italian colorization and re-edit of the 1956 U.S. reshoot and re-edit of the 1954 Japanese Godzilla, only now with tie-dye colors, a mishmash of stock footage, and Tangerine Dream-esque electronic music. Because that’s what those two earlier versions of Godzilla were missing.

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Birthday Reviews: Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “Far and Deep”

Saturday, March 31, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 0 Comment

Alaya Dawn Johnson was born on March 31, 1982. She began publishing in 2005 with her story “Shard of Glass.” Her first novel, Racing the Dark, appeared in 2007. She was a Guest of Honor at Wiscon in 2015 and the convention published the guest of honor book, Metamorphosis, containing works and interviews with Johnson and her co-guest of honor Kim Stanley Robinson.

In 2015 Johnson won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i” and the same evening won the Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Novel for Love Is the Drug. The year before, she also had nominated work in each of those categories. Johnson’s fiction has been nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Carl Brandon Award.

“Far & Deep” was published in the March-April 2009 issue of Interzone, edited by Andy Cox, Andy Hedgecock, and David Mathew. It has not been reprinted.

The story is set on an unnamed Polynesian island and opens with Leilani discovering that her mother, Pineki, has been murdered. In her mourning, Leilani approaches the Council of Elders, of which her mother was a member, and is told that she will be denied a traditional funeral because of unspecified crimes she had committed.

It is clear that Pineki was not well liked on the island, although she didn’t care. Leilani must not only come to terms with her mother’s death, but also the way the other islanders perceived Pineki. In the few thousand words Johnson uses to tell the story, she manages to briefly tackle the questions of people who commit taboo behavior in a small community, the sense of filial love and duty, and the need for individuality in a society which demands at least of modicum of conformity. Despite Pineki’s position on the Council, she was seen as an outsider by the Council, who viewed her murder as the opportunity to get rid of a problem, rather than a crime that should be explored and punished. Leilani, who lost her parent, challenges the Council, an act worthy of her mother.

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