This month Fletcher Vredenburgh pulled double duty with his Short Story Roundup, reviewing the latest issues of Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine and the team-edited Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, plus the first two issues of Dave Ritzlin’s Scrolls of Legendry. Tony Den also looked back at the pulp magazine appearances of H. Warner Munn, including Weird Tales, Weird Terror Tales, and Famous Science Fiction. For our modern readers, we reported on the news that Asimov’s SF and Analog Magazine have switched…
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Time to come clean! When I published Part 1 of my review of Merlin’s Ring last year, it was not because the article was so massive that it had to be broken down into smaller parts. Rather, it’s because I was unable to finish the book promptly, and soon enough unforeseen circumstances left me deprived of my copy, wondering what happened to Gwalchmai and Corenice. John O’Neill suggested I proceed with what I had, and commit to completing the review later. A…
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10th July 1460, near Northampton, England. Battle of Northampton. It’s the Wars of the Roses. King Henry VI — well His Grace’s advisers, anyway — the Lancastrians, if you must — versus the Yorkists led in this case by the Earl of Warwick . The King’s forces have fortified themselves into a bend in the river. They’ve got a ditch, wooden stakes, perhaps carts, certainly cannon. They’re gearing up for a rerun of the Battle of Castillon (an English defeat so…
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Here at Black Gate, we take great pride in our meticulous research, passionate reporting, and thoughtful analysis, especially on fantasy writers who are being criminally overlooked. None of that stuff gets read, of course. What does get read? Articles like Nick Ozment’s “An Experiment in Gor: What Are John Norman’s Books About, Really?”, the runaway most popular post at Black Gate last month — by a wide margin. We love our readers, but boy, are you ever predictable. (Also: Ozment! Five…
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By Ken Liu This is an excerpt from the novel The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu, presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Saga Press, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2016 by Ken Liu. Chapter One: Truants PAN: the second month in the sixth year of the reign of four placid seas. Masters and mistresses, lend me your ears. Let my words sketch for you scenes of…
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Woof. It’s tough keeping up with all the great fantasy magazines on the market these days. But somebody’s got to do it, and it might as well be us. Our tireless freelance reporters this month included John Linwood Grant, who told us about the (now successful!) Kickstarter for Occult Detective Quarterly, the new journal of supernatural sleuths and psychic investigators, and Rich Horton, who gave us a Retro-Review of the May and June 1965 issues of Amazing Science Fiction, with…
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One warm French afternoon in AD 1176, William the Marshal and the Young King found themselves without their comrades on the main street of the little village of Anet. At the other end stood a local knight, intent on capturing them, plus infantry archers and spearmen. “What shall we do?” asked the Young King (Henry, heir to the throne of England, who I always imagined played by Rick Mayall at his brattiest). “Charge them by God!” said the Marshal (I…
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Can you tell I really like P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series? Not once have I followed up a review of an author’s book with a review of her next one. And in three weeks I’ll review the next one as well. In between there’ll be a short story roundup and then, provided the Canadian mail runs well, Chris Carlsen’s Shadow of the Wolf. Last week, I wrote that Bound in Blood (2010) was essentially a story where just a bunch of stuff…
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Iain Banks, the Scottish science fiction writer, established himself as a major presence in the genre with his Culture series, the first of which, Consider Phelebas, appeared in 1987. Set in a far future, post-scarcity universe teeming with human and alien societies, the Culture books are wide screen space operas with a decidedly sociological-political perspective. Banks wrote a new Culture book every few years until there were ten volumes. The final one, The Hydrogen Sonata, appeared in 2012, shortly before…
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With Bound in Blood (2010), P.C. Hodgell continues to blow me away with her talent for telling tales. It’s the fifth book in the Kencyrath series, and the second one about our heroine Jame’s time at military school, the randon academy at Tentir. It’s not the most compelling novel so far. In fact, it’s more of a collection of stuff that happens to Jame or stuff she does. That the book manages to hold a reader from cover to cover proves just…
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