Black Gate – Page 421 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Latchkey Revelation: An Interview with Nicole Kornher-Stace

Monday, March 19, 2018 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 0 Comment

Latchkey Nicole Kornher-Stace-back-small

O long, long have I anti…cipated (yes, just like that) the sequel to Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Archivist Wasp. A book about ghosts and girls, ferocity and friendship, catastrophe and cataclysm and katabasis and a whole badass bunch of other alliterative nouns, Archivist Wasp published in 2015 by Big Mouth House, an imprint of Small Beer Press.

So you see, that was ALMOST THREE WHOLE YEARS AGO! I’ve been WAITING and WAITING and WAAAAIIIITIIINNNGGG!

But fear not. That time of endlessly unfulfilled appetite has not been wasted. I have not waited in vain. For now — at last! — the day I have yearned for is AT HAND!

(*cues Phantom of the Opera synthesizers and a falling chandelier*)

Nicole Kornher-Stace has done her job, and done it well. And Mythic Delirium has abetted her by publishing it. Soon! In July! This year! And you can PRE-ORDER IT HERE!

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Future Treasures: The Sisters Mederos by Patrice Sarath

Monday, March 19, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Patrice Sarath’s story “A Prayer for Captain LaHire” appeared in Black Gate 4 and was reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy 3 (2003). She published the Gordath Wood trilogy (Gordath Wood, Red Gold Bridge, and The Crow God’s Girl) between 2008 – 2012. Her latest is something brand new, the tale of a once-great family that has fallen on hard times, and the two sisters — one who becomes a masked bandit, and another with secret supernatural powers — who set out to reverse their family’s downfall. Publishers Weekly praised it saying,

The young women, newly returned from boarding school to a fantasy version of a preindustrial European port city, are determined to restore their family’s fortune and revenge themselves on the corrupt Merchant’s Guild, whose machinations lie behind House Mederos’s downfall. Yvienne, “the smartest girl in Port Saint Frey,” provokes through newspaper editorials, takes a governess job as an entrée into the houses of the powerful, and eventually discovers the excitement of committing armed robbery. Tesara, who conceals supernatural powers that she blames for the shipwreck that ruined her family, ingratiates herself with the upper classes at gambling tables… [The] heroines are entertaining company, and the dynamic between the two sisters — occasionally contentious, often secretive, always loving — is the most enjoyable part of this effervescent tale.

Here’s the official description.

Two sisters fight with manners, magic, and mayhem to reclaim their family’s name, in this captivating historical fantasy adventure.

House Mederos was once the wealthiest merchant family in Port Saint Frey. Now the family is disgraced, impoverished, and humbled by the powerful Merchants Guild. Daughters Yvienne and Tesara Mederos are determined to uncover who was behind their family’s downfall and get revenge. But Tesara has a secret – could it have been her wild magic that caused the storm that destroyed the family’s merchant fleet? The sisters’ schemes quickly get out of hand – gambling is one thing, but robbing people is another…

Together the sisters must trust each another to keep their secrets and save their family.

The Sisters Mederos will be published by Angry Robot on April 3, 2018. It is 368 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Paul Young. Read an excerpt at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and a brief discussion at Patrice’s website.

Sublimity, Decadence, and Pulp: Venera Dreams, by Claude Lalumière

Monday, March 19, 2018 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

There’s magic in the linked short-story form. A series of interrelated short fictions can examine a setting from many angles, build a character through a range of perspectives, establish a set of overlapping histories, and create a whole world with multiple centres: many heroes, many protagonists, together making a world bigger than can live in any one of their stories. Claude Lalumière’s Venera Dreams is the most recent example of the form I’ve seen, an exploration of the past (and future) of a mysterious island in the Mediterranean not far from Italy that’s home to a range of powerful and subversive artists — as well as the mysterious sacred spice vermilion, and a variety of myths and goddesses including the fabled Scheherazade.

I know Lalumière well (so well I’d never normally refer to him by his last name, but such is the nature of a book review), and interviewed him for Black Gate seven years ago; as he was already engaged on the Venera Dreams project back then, the interview’s surprisingly relevant. He’s edited or co-edited seven anthologies, and had two collections of his own short fiction published (Objects of Worship in 2009 and Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes in 2013). In 2011 his book The Door to Lost Pages came out, a set of linked stories revolving around a magical bookshop. That store tuns up in Venera Dreams, notably in the opening story, but the first book is in no way necessary reading for this one.

The subtitle of Venera Dreams proclaims the collection “A Weird Entertainment,” and that’s accurate in just about every sense. It is strange and it is entertaining. But it’s weird in a more profound way; weird in the way of the pulps, in the way of Weird Tales. And it is an entertainment in the way the first English version of the One Thousand And One Nights called itself The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. It’s a series of reveries about storytelling and art, about ecstasy and myth, about cities and history and yearning. About Venera the venerable: about venery and veneration.

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The March Fantasy Magazine Rack

Monday, March 19, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

It’s a bonanza of print this month… all the titles above are print magazines, with the exception of Kaleidotrope (top row, second from right), which is new to the list. Kaleidotrope was a recommendation from Rich Horton; I’d never heard of it, but it featured prominently in Rich’s 2018 Hugo Recs list, so I thought I would check it out this month. Rich is right — it’s a very impressive magazine, with brand new fiction by Mari Ness, Octavia Cade, and others.

But they don’t seem very web-savvy, especially for a web magazine. The site loads extremely slowly, and the culprit seems to be the beautiful but massive 1.26 megabyte (!!) PNG cover image. I was able to convert it to a visually identical 90 Kb jpeg file less than 8% the size in about 15 seconds on my machine. Doing that at their end would greatly speed up loading times, and cut their monthly bandwidth costs by about 90%. I hope someone helps them get that sorted.

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

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Birthday Review: John Gribbin’s “Something to Beef About”

Monday, March 19, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 3 comments

Cover by Tim White

John Gribbin was born on March 19, 1946. Gribbin has published both fiction and non-fiction, including non-fiction titles The Jupiter Effect with Stephen Plagemann, In Search of the Big Bang, and The Science of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials with Mary Gribbin. His own novels include The Sixth Winter with Douglas Orgill, Ragnarok with D.G. Compton, and solo works Timeswitch and Father to the Man.

“Something to Beef About” was first published in Interzone 49 in July 1991, edited by David Pringle and Lee Montgomerie. In 2016, a revised version of the story was reprinted in the anthology Existence is Elsewhen, published by Elsewhen Press.

Gribbin opens “Something to Beef About” by falling into the trap described by Mark Rosenfelder in his satirical “If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction.” He describes the mundane aspects of David Jenkins’s life in an attempt to set up a future society in which Jenkins lives, but for the most part it comes across as telling the readers something they should already know. Instead of setting the scene, it makes the reader very aware that the story is a construct.

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Vintage Treasures: A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson

Sunday, March 18, 2018 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

A Midsummer Tempest Poul Anderson-back-small

Cover by Luis Bermejo

Poul Anderson formed a pretty consistent part of my paperback SF diet in the late 70s and early 80s. Novels like Mirkheim (1977) and classic tales like the Hugo Award-winning “No Truce with Kings” (1963) made me an early fan. But I always thought of Anderson as an SF writer, and as a result I never paid much attention to his fantasy. It wasn’t until my fellow writers here at Black Gate educated me that I learned what I was missing:

Ryan Harvey on The Broken Sword
Fletcher Vredenburgh on The Whole Northern Thing: Hrolf Kraki’s Saga by Poul Anderson
Gabe Dybing on Poul Anderson and the Northern Mythic Tradition: An Introduction
Gabe Dybing on Chaotic and Lawful Alignments in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions
Gabe Dybing on Northern Matter in Poul Anderson’s “Middle Ages” of The Broken Sword and in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
Gabe Dybing on Sex and Violence in Poul Anderson’s Rogue Sword

I’ve recently started exploring more of Anderson’s fantasy back catalog, and last month I purchased a copy of A Midsummer Tempest, an alternate world fantasy in which William Shakespeare was an historian, rather than playwright, and the events he recorded were all factual. While the plot draws from multiple Shakespearean plays, as the name implies it is chiefly based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. It was nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and a Nebula, and won the 1975 Mythopoeic Award for Best Novel.

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Birthday Reviews: Marcos Donnelly’s “As a Still Small Voice”

Sunday, March 18, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Cover by Peter Stallard

Marcos Donnelly was born on March 18, 1962. He has published a handful of short stories, mostly dealing with religious themes and three novels, Prophets for the End of Time, Letters from the Flesh, and The Mostly Weird Chronicles of Steffan McFessel, the last in collaboration with Ted Wenskus.

Donnelly’s debut story, “As a Still Small Voice,” appeared in 1989 in Full Spectrum 2, edited by Lou Aronica, Shawna McCarthy, Amy Stout, and Pat LoBrutto. It has never been reprinted.

Father Jim is a priest at a small seminary where the rumors that one of the students, Danny, actually hears God’s voice. Jim has mixed views about Danny’s gift and sees him as an innocent child who needs to be protected, particularly from one of the other students, Bob, an older man who has come to the seminary after servicing in the marines. Jim can only see Bob as a bad influence on Danny, although the reasons for Jim’s mistrust don’t seem to be fully justified by anything aside from Jim’s own biases.

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Looking at the Density of Comic Book Page Layouts

Saturday, March 17, 2018 Derek Kunsken Comments 7 comments

I may have picked the most boring blog post title in history, but this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

I was listening to Kieron Gillen’s excellent podcast Decompressed. Decompressed is a look under the hood at the craft of comic book creation and in the 4th one, he interviewed Matt Fraction and David Aja, the creative team behind Marvel’s Hawkeye from 2012. During the episode, Matt Fraction mentioned that Hawkeye was meant to feel different from most of the mainstream comics at the time, especially with respect to how much compression there was.

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New Treasures: First-Person Singularities by Robert Silverberg

Saturday, March 17, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

A new book by SF grandmaster Robert Silverberg is a cause for celebration. It took a while for the cake and balloons to arrive, but we’re now ready to celebrate his collection First-Person Singularities. It gathers stories spanning the last six decades, all told in first person singular. Here’s Kirkus Reviews.

The sheer diversity of storylines is nothing short of extraordinary. In “House of Bones,” a time traveler is marooned more than 20,000 years in the past and is forced to assimilate into a tribe of nomadic cavemen. “Ishmael in Love” chronicles a bottle-nosed dolphin’s attempt to woo a human researcher with whom he’s fallen in love. The Nebula Award–winning “Passengers” tells the tale of a man living in a future where aliens have invaded Earth and can temporarily take possession of human minds and hijack their bodies. “Going Down Smooth” is told from the perspective of a computer, designed to help psychoanalyze troubled human patients, that finds itself slowly losing its sanity. “Caliban” chronicles a normal man’s plight in a world where everyone looks like a model. But arguably the most memorable story is “The Reality Trip,” about an alien spy — a beetle-ish creature living inside a humanlike body made of synthetic flesh — who must deal with an amorous woman who lives, as he does, in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel and is bent on seeking an intimate relationship with him…. this book [is] a master class in first-person narrative for aspiring writers. Additionally, each story is preceded by a short introduction by Silverberg that offers invaluable insight into the cultural landscape, the publishing industry, and the author’s personal life at the time of writing.

Decades after being originally published, most of these stories are still just as entertaining and powerful as they were when first released. A singularly unique collection.

The collection includes multiple awards winners and nominees, including the Hugo Award-nominated “Our Lady of the Sauropods,” the Nebula Award-winning “Passengers,” and the Locus Award-winning novella “The Secret Sharer.”

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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The Complete Carpenter: Prince of Darkness (1988)

Saturday, March 17, 2018 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

This is where I came in. I’ve reached the point in my John Carpenter career retrospective where I’m writing about a movie to which I’ve already given a full Black Gate article. In fact, it was writing about Prince of Darkness for its 2013 Blu-ray release that planted the idea in my head of surveying the full Carpenter filmography. I’ll make my best effort to offer new insights on Prince of Darkness, but overlap with the previous article is inevitable as I look at the second of John Carpenter’s self-proclaimed “Apocalypse Trilogy,” which starts with The Thing (1982) and ends with In the Mouth of Madness (1994).

Prince of Darkness was Carpenter’s return to indie filmmaking after a series of financial disappointments and general aggravation with the big studios. Carpenter made the movie as part of a multi-picture deal with Alive Films that would also include They Live. Universal picked up Prince of Darkness for distribution, and in the fall of 1987 it achieved that rare distinction among Carpenter films: it was a financial success during its initial theatrical run.

The Story

An English priest (Donald Pleasence) discovers a secret that for centuries has been under the protection of an enigmatic monastic sect called the Brotherhood of Sleep: a giant cylinder of swirling green energy held in the underground vault of a church in downtown Los Angeles. The priest calls on his professional acquaintance, physics professor Edward Birack (Victor Wong), to investigate the bizarre phenomenon, which the priest believes is beginning to “awaken.” Birack gathers a team of his graduate students and other researchers for a weekend camp-out in the church to make observations.

To make a long and often baffling story short and perhaps more baffling … The team learns from a medieval volume filled with Latin, Greek, Coptic, and quadratic equations that the cylinder contains Satan, an energy entity that is the son of the Anti-God from an antimatter dimension. The Catholic Church kept the physicality of the evil disguised for two millennia behind religious symbolism. Satan’s essence escapes the containment cylinder and possesses members of the observation team, while a horde of zombified homeless people encircles the church to prevent escape. Nightmare visions possibly sent from the future through tachyon particles portend an apocalyptic nightmare if the Anti-God isn’t prevented from crossing into this reality. Alice Cooper impales a tech nerd on a bicycle and it only gets stranger from there.

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