We had lots of great coverage for magazine fans this month, including Doug Ellis’s look at 1930s-era letters from famed editor and fan Julius Schwartz on A. Merritt, Amazing Stories, and the First Worldcon, and Derek Kunsken’s report on Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine‘s 40th Anniversary Celebration in Manhattan. For vintage magazine fans, we had Rich Horton’s retro-review of the October 1968 Galaxy, and Allen Steele’s new take on the classic pulp hero Captain Future. We also added no less than…
Read More Read More
Okay – hopefully you read Part One of my look at Mount and Blade/Warband. If so, you’ve got an idea of what the game is about and got a taste of the combat portion. Now it’s time to look at the shiny parts of the game: selecting, fighting with and leading your band of warriors to conquer your foes! Troop Combat I LOVE troop combat. Throughout the game, you are building up your band with cavalry, infantry and/or archers. You…
Read More Read More
My first encounter with C.J. Cherryh was in Merchanter’s Luck, a short, action-packed story set in Cherryh’s super-dense Alliance-Union Universe. While the plot could have been drafted by any number of skilled space opera purveyors, I’d never before encountered one who wrote with Cherryh’s level of near contempt for explaining things to the reader. She writes in what she’s variably called “very tight limited third person” and “intense internal voice.” This means characters only think or talk about what actually interests them. Descriptions will not be…
Read More Read More
We covered the first three novels in Brian Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne right here last year. Skullsworn, the new standalone novel in the same world, features the adventures of a priestess-assassin for the God of Death. It will be published by Tor Books this week in both the US and the UK. Although the US and UK editions have similar publishing dates, that’s pretty much all they have in common. The descriptions for each book are markedly different — and…
Read More Read More
Lots of great reading for short fiction fans in the back half of March. As usual, Michael Penkas did most of the heavy lifting on our magazine coverage, with in-depth reviews of recent issues of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (two issues), Nightmare, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Asimov’s Science Fiction (two issues!). Fletcher Vredenburgh checked in with his regular February Short Story Roundup, plus reviews of two vintage SF novels originally serialized in Astounding SF/Analog: H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking…
Read More Read More
Erika M Szabo is both a prolific author and artist, and owns Golden Box Books Publishing Services. Her numerous children’s books, such as MeToo, The Annoying Little Sister, A Basketful of Kittens, and Look, I Can Talk with My Fingers, are delightful and very successful, and many of them have been translated into Spanish. A nurse by profession, she has written Healing Herbs for Nervous Disorders and Keep Your Body Healthy. She also writes Young Adult Fantasy, such as Chosen…
Read More Read More
Unplug the phone and cancel my Netflix subscription. The Digest Enthusiast #5 is finally in the house. Okay, maybe it seems strange to some of you that there’s a magazine out there devoted to collectors of vintage digest magazines. (But it can’t have escaped you that a healthy percentage of Black Gate‘s contributors are obsessive digest magazine collectors, right? Right?) Though I think the thing that might really surprise you is just how fascinating this magazine is to anyone with an interest…
Read More Read More
Back in December, Derek Kunsken’s enthusiastic review of Star Wars: Rogue One, “I Am One With the Force and the Force Is With Me,” shot up to #2 on our monthly traffic chart. Last month he claimed the #1 slot, and he didn’t need a blockbuster film to make it happen — he did it the old fashioned way, with a book review. The book in question was Thrill-Power Overload: A History of the British Comic 2000 AD, a detailed history…
Read More Read More
By Richard A. Knaak This is an excerpt from Black City Demon by Richard A. Knaak, presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Pyr Books, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2017 Richard A. Knaak. I’d failed her. I’d promised to keep her safe, and I’d failed her. Now, I could do nothing but stare down at her grave again and murmur a prayer in which I only…
Read More Read More
By Roy A. Mauritsen This is an excerpt from Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder by Roy A. Mauritsen, presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Roy A. Mauritsen, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Shards of the Glass Slipper: Queen Cinder is available in trade paperback, digital, and audio editions. Copyright 2012 Padwolf Publishing. Art by Roy A. Mauritsen “So what has the piper revealed?” asked the…
Read More Read More