Black Gate – Page 465 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A City Eternal, Under Siege: City at the Edge of Time, by Janet & Chris Morris

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 Joe Bonadonna Comments 3 comments

City at the Edge of Time Morris-back-small

City at the Edge of Time
By Janet & Chris Morris
Author’s Cut Edition, published by Perseid Press
Book design: Christopher Morris; cover design, Roy Mauritsen.
Cover art: Corrado Giaquinto (1703-1765), The Birth of the Sun and the Triumph of Bacchus; oil on canvas, 1762; Museo del Prado.

“The city had yearned to live forever and, over the millennia, had learned how. It had not always been even so much as a city; it had not always known the magic of peace. Peace had come from wisdom; wisdom had come from the hearts of its rulers, and then from the hearts of its citizens. Greed had been banished first, then foul Fury had been driven from its gates. Vengeance had followed, with Spite slithering behind, hissing like a beaten cat. Envy and Prevarication went last, hunted from door to door and expelled like a contagion into the outer worlds. It was said that the city had spawned all the ills of humanity and loosed them upon the world as it cleansed itself. It was said that what had been driven out would someday return.”

And so it did, with a dark vengeance. This is a city of immortals, an eternal city now stuck in the muck and mire near the sea at the edge of time, where all things end. This is a city where death is so unfamiliar, so unknown, that animals slaughtered for a feast must be taken outside the city’s walls in order to be slain. Now the city stands poised to meet its own ending, and its immortal inhabitants face a doom they never imagined.

…

Read More Read More

November/December Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Now on Sale

Monday, November 13, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The star-studded November/December issue of F&SF contains some pretty big names, including a huge novella from Marc Laidlaw, a short story by Larry Niven, and a story by Kate Wilhelm who, at 89, has been absent from the pages of F&SF for too long (her last published short story, “The Fullness Of Time,” appeared in 2012). C. D. Lewis at Tangent Online gives an enthusiastic review to the issue.

Marc Laidlaw’s 19,000-word novella “Stillborne” continues a series depicting the fantasy adventures of Gorlen the bard and Spar, the gargoyle whose hand he was cursed to exchange with his own. Like the prior installment from Fantasy & Science Fiction’s [May-June] 2014 issue, “Sillborne” is set in the company of religious leaders whose values and priorities are calculated to entertain… Humor is definitely the story’s greatest strength, and it is on display best when Laidlaw pens conversation between Gorlen and his rediscovered lover…

“Attachments” by Kate Wilhelm follows a woman who finds freeing herself from a haunting ghost as much a problem as freeing herself from a controlling, abusive ex. Disturbingly, some of the ghosts have motives like those of her ex…

Larry Niven’s “By the Red Giant’s Light” is a short story about two characters who spend what turns out to be more than an ordinary human lifetime responding to a danger to the last human (albeit rather modified) in the solar system. It’s set at a time the Sun’s expanding diameter has engulfed Mercury’s orbit. The initial hook — the difficulty of telling the human from the robot from their exteriors — gets us into the story’s heart, which is the human’s plea for help against an asteroid due to destroy Pluto and, with it, the last intelligent life in the solar system… solid SF, worth reading, and [it] reminds us why we’ve loved Niven for decades.

Read C.D.’s complete review here.

If (like me) you’re intrigued by Marc Laidlaw’s tale of Gorlen the bard and Spar, editor C.C. Finley tips us off that there are more to be had.

Gorlen debuted in the October 1995 issue of F&SF with “Dankden” and has returned six times since, most recently with the cover story “Rooksnight” (May/June 2014). Marc Laidlaw tells us this new adventure may not be the conclusion of Gorlen and Spar’s story, but it is certainly a conclusion.

Gorlen and Spar have also appeared in Lightspeed, beginning with the September 2013 issue.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Glass Town by Steven Savile

Monday, November 13, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Steven Savile has written several Warhammer books, including Curse of the Necrarch (2008), and the Vampire Wars: The Von Carstein trilogy (2008). His novels include Moonlands (2012) and Sunfail (2015), and he’s written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Stargate. His US debut is Glass Town, a tale of magic and mystery lurking in London. It arrives in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press next month.

In 1924, two brothers both loved Eleanor Raines, a promising young actress from the East End of London. She disappeared during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s debut, Number 13, which itself is now lost. It was the crime of the age, capturing the imagination of the city: the beautiful actress never seen again, and the gangster who disappeared the same day.

Generations have passed. Everyone involved is long dead. But even now their dark, twisted secret threatens to tear the city apart.

…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Murder on the Orient Express

Monday, November 13, 2017 Bob Byrne Comments 9 comments

While I have read a lot of mysteries by a lot of different authors, I’d never cared for Agatha Christie. When I began watching David Suchet’s masterful performance as Hercule Poirot (which I’m SURE you read about here at Black Gate), I had never finished a Christie novel. I just didn’t like her stories and there was way too much out there that I’d rather read. However, because Suchet was simply amazing, I became a Poirot fan and I read all of the short stories. By picturing the actors and settings from the television show while I read, it worked for me.

My frame of reference for Poirot is episodes of the Suchet television show, not Christie’s original stories. Unlike Doyle, Stout, James Lee Burke, Tony Hillerman, Frederic Nebel and many others whose work I admire, I still am not interested in Christie’s writings. So, I like Poirot, but not Christie.

I wasn’t sure what to think of the new big screen Murder on the Orient Express, which I saw at 10:50 AM on opening day. On the one hand, I thought that Kenneth Branagh’s moustache was completely ludicrous and a huge strike against the move right out of the gate (I mean, who in the world thought that was a good move? Did Mark Gatiss have a hand in this?). On the other hand, it was Branagh’s amazing Shakespeare films that made me a fan of the Bard. He is a wonderfully talented actor. And this film, which he produced, directed and starred in, was his labor of love.

…

Read More Read More

A Mashup Between 2001 and The Walking Dead: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Sunday, November 12, 2017 Elizabeth Galewski Comments 0 Comment

When you crack open the cover of Illuminae (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), the first thing you read is a memo to Executive Director Frobisher written by someone with a ghost ID. The memo explains that the rest of the book contains public documents exposing a secret corporate war. You don’t know who Executive Director Frobisher is. You also don’t know who’s using the ghost ID. But you will by the last page of the book, and this information will make you want to start re-reading the novel all over again.

But for now, all you’ve read is the memo. Turning the page, you encounter an interview filed with the United Terran Navy between an anonymous staffer and sarcastic teenager Kady Grant. Yes, Kady has a bad attitude. No, Kady isn’t a team player. But you’ll roar with laughter as she figuratively pies the interviewer in the face time and time again when he asks questions about her escape from the violent invasion of her planet. You’d be unwise to underestimate her. She might be short, but she’s good with computers.

Interspersed with Kady’s interview is another with Ezra Mason, the guy she broke up with the morning of the invasion. (At one point, Kady explains to her interviewer, she and Ezra were dodging explosions and ground troops when he says to her: “You picked a hell of a day to dump me, Kades.”)

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Above the Timberline by Gregory Manchess

Sunday, November 12, 2017 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

One of the most interesting review copies to land on my desk in the past six months is Gregory Manchess’ debut novel Above the Timberline, a postapocalyptic arctic fantasy with zepplins, lost cities, and a whole lot of adventure.

Manchess is best known as a painter. His work has appeared in feature and covers for National Geographic Magazine, Time, Atlantic Monthly, The Smithsonian, as well as numerous commissions for stamps by the US Postal Service. Above the Timberline, a 240-page hardcover, is his first novel, and it is gorgeously illustrated on every page. The art, in fact, is crucial to the tale.

And what a tale! In hi feature review at Locus, Paul Di Filippo calls it “A spectacular success… [a] postapocalyptic arctic dieselpunk love story with polar bears and a hint of Indiana Jones.” It was published by Saga Press on October 24. Here’s a closer look at some of that gorgeous interior art.

…

Read More Read More

Fantasia 2017, Day 14, Part 1: 78/52

Saturday, November 11, 2017 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

78/52 On Wednesday, July 26, I watched three movies at the Fantasia Film Festival. The first, which I’ll write about here, was a documentary about film itself. Or, more precisely, a single movie. Or, even more precisely, a single scene of a single movie. Directed by Alexandre Philippe, 78/52 is a 91-minute film that takes an in-depth look at one of the most famous sequences in cinematic history: the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Opening with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe — “The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” — the movie examines the scene from all angles. We hear about its place in film history, in the context of 1960, in Hitchcock’s career. We hear about its structural significance in Psycho, about its symbolic significance. We learn about the technical processes by which the scene was put together, its edits and sound cues and of course the soundtrack music. We hear an analysis of the acting. And we learn about the reaction of the first audiences to what was one of the most startling moments in film history.

The conceit of the black-and-white film is that we see interviewees in different greenscreen-composited rooms of the Bates Motel discussing different aspects of the scene. I didn’t find that really worked — the lack of interaction between the rooms and interview subjects means there’s no sense of connected space between them — but the material’s strong enough to make up for it. 78/52 presents an in-depth analysis of its subject without being dry or pedantic. Without making too many overstated claims, it effectively establishes the importance of the shower scene. Different perspectives bring out the subtexts at work. The complexity of the scene’s established, and also a sense of mystery, a sense that it has a kind of depth that can’t really be explicated however much it’s talked about.

…

Read More Read More

MASHED: A Korean War MASH RPG

Saturday, November 11, 2017 Mark Plemmons Comments 2 comments

“Keep in mind that you can’t take that many well-educated, highly intelligent people and restrict them to live in an area the size of a football field and not expect some very odd and unusual things to happen.”

So said former Korean War helicopter pilot Ed Ziegler, in a quote that starts off MASHED’s early Gameplay section and gives a hint of what the following pages hold in store.

‘MASH’ is a historical acronym that stands for ‘Mobile Army Surgical Hospital,’ though it was popularized by the M*A*S*H film and television series, which may very well be where you first learned of it. The game acknowledges M*A*S*H as a good source of inspiration for your table, but is not based directly on it, thus avoiding any messy trademark or copyright issues. Instead, MASHED content comes from dozens of historical works and military manuals. Fortunately, since they are the same sources as those used by the M*A*S*H producers, the ‘feel’ of the game can be very much like that of the show itself, mixing light comedy, gallows humor, and mature situations.

The core rules are based on Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World (Meguey is also credited as a developmental editor on this book), and inspired by other Powered by the Apocalypse games such as Jason Morningstar’s Night Witches. If you’re familiar at all with the PbtA engine, you’ll have a good idea of how the rules work.

…

Read More Read More

Dark Osprey: The Shadowy Worlds of Cthulhu, Alien Bug Hunts, and a Nazi Moonbase

Saturday, November 11, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Cthulhu Campaigns Ancient Rome-small

Over the last forty years Osprey Publishing has built up a sterling reputation for its long running series of illustrated military history books. Role-players, wargamers, and even casual readers like me have enjoyed them, and used them as reference guides.

Black Gate author Joseph McCullough joined Osprey a decade ago, and since then Osprey has produced a growing volume of books of interest to gamers and genre fans alike, including Steampunk miniatures rules (In Her Majesty’s Name), the Frostgrave tabletop skirmish game, and the Osprey Adventures line. But most interesting to me is Dark Osprey, a series of marvelously imaginative and well-illustrated tomes that serve as excellent setting books for the RPG of your choice.

While Joe was written several, they’ve also recruited a handful of other top-notch authors, including Warhammer author Graeme Davis, Trail of Cthulhu scribe Kenneth Hite, novelist Mark A. Latham (The Lazarus Gate), and others. So far they’ve published over a dozen, including The Cthulhu Campaigns Ancient Rome by Mark Latham, Nazi Moonbase by Graeme Davis, and Bug Hunts: Surviving and Combating the Alien Menace by Mark Latham.

…

Read More Read More

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Savage Pellucidar

Saturday, November 11, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

Have we already arrived at the end of Pellucidar? It feels like I started examining this Edgar Rice Burroughs series only a few months ago — but it’s been almost a year since I drilled down to visit At the Earth’s Core. A year may have passed for me, but thirty has passed for Burroughs, and counting the time until the last unpublished novella was collected in Savage Pellucidar, the gap widens to fifty years. If you read At the Earth’s Core in the pulps as an enthusiastic thirteen-year-old, you’d be close to retirement age by the time you could buy the last book and have a complete Pellucidar set.

Wait, what am I talking about? This is Pellucidar. Time is meaningless here! I started writing this article series yesterday — or maybe a century ago, and the books were all published either over a span of one year or five hundred years. It’s all the same under the perpetual noonday sun.

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic … Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Savage Pellucidar (1963)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914), Pellucidar (1915), Tanar of Pellucidar (1929), Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929–30), Back to the Stone Age (1937), Land of Terror (1944)

The Backstory

I’ve told this tale before with Escape on Venus and Llana of Gathol, the sister works of Savage Pellucidar, but once more won’t hurt. At the start of the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs experimented writing novels in three of his settings — Mars, Venus, and Pellucidar — as sets of four linked novellas. Each novella was capable of standing on its own but could later fit together with the other three for book publication. The idea may have been the suggestion of Cyril Ralph Rothmund, business manager for ERB Inc., who first wrote a letter to the editor of Ziff-Davis Magazines with the format proposal. It was an experiment of necessity, since the pulps were turning away from serializations as more of the weekly magazines dropped to monthly publication. Burroughs approached the three books as a round-robin, changing from one setting to the next to finish all the novellas.

…

Read More Read More