Black Gate – Page 491 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Monday, July 17, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Edgar Cantero is the author of The Supernatural Enhancements. His follow-up, Meddling Kids, continues in the horror-comedy vein with perhaps the most brilliant premises I’ve encountered this year: a group of young detectives, who foiled the plot of a small-time crook years ago, find themselves drawn back together as adults to pick up the threads of their original investigation… threads that lead to a much more insidious threat involving an interdimensional horror. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says, “For anyone who finds the triangle formed by Scooby-Doo, Lovecraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer a cozy place to be, here’s your beach book.” It’s on sale this month in hardcover.

SUMMER 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon’s Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster — another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

1990. The former detectives have grown up and apart, each haunted by disturbing memories of their final night in the old haunted house. There are too many strange, half-remembered encounters and events that cannot be dismissed or explained away by a guy in a mask. And Andy, the once intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, is tired of running from her demons. She needs answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the one-time kid genius and budding biologist, now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their team leader… which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.

The time has come to get the team back together, face their fears, and find out what actually happened all those years ago at Sleepy Lake. It’s their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.

A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids is a strikingly original and dazzling reminder of the fun and adventure we can discover at the heart of our favorite stories, no matter how old we get.

Meddling Kids was published by Blumhouse on July 11, 2017. It is the first Blyton Summer Detective Club Adventure, which implies there will probably be more. It’s 336 pages, priced at $26.95 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Michael J. Windsor.

Vintage Treasures: New Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy

Monday, July 17, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Raymond J. Healy is one of the most important editors in the history of science fiction. Although he has a scant four books to his credit, he did as much to popularize and establish the field as editors with dozens more. His first book, Adventures in Time and Space (1946), edited with J. Francis McComas, is arguably the most important SF anthology of the Twentieth Century. Although it wasn’t the first true SF anthology (that honor belongs to Donald A. Wollheim’s The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction, 1943), it was enormously successful, and that success paved the way for the SF reprint anthology market as we know it today.

Before Healy and McComas, no major publisher would take a risk on the unproven genre of science fiction, which at the time was the province of low-paying pulp magazines. Adventures in Time and Space, a massive 1,013-page survey volume which reprinted the best early science fiction from Astounding Science Fiction and other magazines, found its way into libraries and schools across the country, and remained in print for decades. Its success virtually created the SF reprint anthology, which brought countless writers into permanent editions for the first time, and introduced them to a host of new readers. In 1952 the readers of Astounding/Analog voted Adventures in Time and Space the All-Time Best Book, beating out Slan, The Green Hills of Earth, and The Martian Chronicles.

After his enormous success with Adventures in Time and Space, Healy made one more major innovation. Instead of filling his next book with reprints, he bought brand new stories from the top writers in the field — and in the process invented the original science fiction anthology. The result was New Tales of Space and Time (1951). He did it again three years later with 9 Tales of Space and Time (1954). Both books were successful… and needless to say, highly influential, spawning thousands of imitators through the decades.

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An Old-Fashioned Space Opera: The Transcendental Machine Trilogy by James Gunn

Sunday, July 16, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I settled in with the latest issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction last week, and noticed something unusual… it had two stories by James Gunn, both set in his Transcendental universe, the setting for his novels Transcendental, Transgalactic and the newly-released Transformation. In the comments on my Asimov’s piece Amy Bisson pointed out that it was Gunn’s birthday, and when I went to confirm that, Wikipedia casually informed me he was 94 years old… 94 and still writing cutting edge hard SF! The field hasn’t seen anything like that since Jack Williamson (who won a Hugo at the age of 92, and died in 2006 at the age of 98).

Interestingly, Gunn was one of Jack Williamson’s collaborators. They wrote Star Bridge together in 1955. Like Williamson, Gunn began his career in the pulps, selling his first stories to Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949. His first novels, including Star Bridge and This Fortress World, were published by Gnome Press in 1955. Carl Sagan called his 1972 novel The Listeners, runner-up for the first annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award, “one of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written.” In 1996, he novelized Theodore Sturgeon’s famed unproduced Star Trek script The Joy Machine. As an editor he’s best known for his monumental six-volume Road to Science Fiction anthology series, and he won the Hugo Award in 1983 for his non-fiction book Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He became SFWA’s 24th Grand Master in 2007, and he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2015.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in June

Sunday, July 16, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Photo by Liz Duffy Adams

June was a big month for interviews at Black Gate. Our top articles were interviews, and our roving reporter Joe Bonadonna placed two in the Top Ten — a lengthy conversation with Author T.C. Rypel (the Gonji series) at #2, and a free-wheeling conversation with two editors of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Adrian Simmons and David Farney, at #8. And the #1 article for the month was Elizabeth Crowens’s enchanting conversation with the First Couple of Fantasy, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman.

Rounding out the Top Five for the month was our report on the ongoing back issue sale at Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog magazine (still one of the best bargains in the industry), a Vintage Treasures piece on the 80s fantasy paperbacks of E. Hoffmann Price, and Nick Ozment’s think-piece “When Fantasy and Theology Collide: Some Thoughts on Satan.”

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Future Treasures: A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon

Saturday, July 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Jeff Noon is something of a legend among SF fans, chiefly for the breakout success of his audacious Vurt trilogy (Vurt, Pollen, Nymphomation). His latest is completely different, a science fiction noir thriller about a PI who takes on the case of a missing girl in an inverted city. I doubt any description I can come up with would do it justice… instead, here’s Noon’s comments on the Q*bert-inspired cover by Will Staehle.

I was truly excited when I first saw the cover design for A Man Of Shadows. Will Staehle has caught the essence of the novel: the noir atmosphere, the loneliness of the characters, the nature of the invented city with its mirrored images of light and dark, and the Escher-like labyrinth that my private eye hero is trapped within. The story is set in an alternative 1959, and the cover captures both the period feel as well as the more fantastical elements of the book. I couldn’t ask for a better design. It’s perfect!

See the complete cover reveal at Tor.com. Here’s the book description.

Below the neon skies of Dayzone – where the lights never go out, and night has been banished – lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna.

As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city’s fate. In the end, there’s only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk.

A Man of Shadows will be published by Angry Robot on August 1, 2017. It is 352 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Will Staehle (and you know I’m right about Q*bert). It is the first book in the John Nyquist series.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming fantasy and SF here.

July 2017 Issue of Shimmer Now on Sale

Saturday, July 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I think of Shimmer primarily as a magazine of contemporary fantasy. While they also publish science fiction (and “a dash of literary horror,” according to their guidelines), I generally consider them a home for fantasy with a decidedly modern spin.

They’re certainly not my go-to publication for sword & sorcery or adventure fantasy, anyway. So I was surprised and pleased to find them stake out some more familiar terrain with their latest issue. Here’s the description for the July 2017 issue, now on sale.

Sometimes, especially now, you need a dash of the old-fashioned adventure story. You’ll find a couple of those herein, but we’ve also thrown old-fashioned out the window, because we’re Shimmer, and that tends to be what we do.

I first heard about it from Martin Cahill, whose new adventure fantasy tale is in this issue.

My new short story, “Salamander Six-Guns,” is now live at Shimmer Magazine! If you like queer, weird westerns of desperate men fighting anthropomorphic alligator people on the shores of a terrible swamp, then this is the story for you! Special thanks to my Clarion Class of ’14, who critiqued this as the last story of our six weeks together, and without whose help this wouldn’t be the story it is. Werecorgis for life! Please give it a read, and let me know what you think.

Shimmer #38 also contains new fiction by Andrea Corbin, Heather Morris, and Victoria Sandbrook. I looked all over the website but couldn’t find any mention of who did the cover, but I’m pretty sure it’s Sandro Castelli.

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Peplum Populist: Short Takes on Three Streaming Titles

Saturday, July 15, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 2 comments

When I first set out to write articles about Italian peplum (sword-and-sandal) films, my intention was to excavate for worthwhile titles available from the quarry of low-quality streaming options. But my intention started to skid, and now I’m turning into the skid. I’ve already dealt with a quality film you can only get on DVD (Hercules, Samson & Ulysses) and a high-quality streaming film you shouldn’t watch (Colossus of the Stone Age). The more I sort through the archives of sword-and-sandal flicks on Amazon Video, the more limited I find the options for movies in even the most modestly acceptable presentation.

So while I continue to sift through streaming choices and look into DVDs from boutique labels, here are three short takes on films in the Amazon Video library (all free for Prime members) that don’t pass my normal picture quality threshold, but may be interesting to the Black Gate readers who can grit their teeth and struggle through blurred, pan-and-scan transfers.

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In 500 Words or Less: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

Friday, July 14, 2017 Brandon Crilly Comments 0 Comment

Red Country
By Joe Abercrombie
Orbit (480 pages, $16.00 paperback, $9.99 eBook, October 2013)

One of my earlier reviews here focused on Best Served Cold, the first standalone novel in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world (but the fourth overall, for anyone playing the home game). You might remember that I was a little disappointed, but I still gave Abercrombie’s second standalone, The Heroes, a chance and was pleasantly surprised. Recently I cracked open the third (and most recent) of these standalone novels, Red Country – and though I was a little nervous at the beginning of the novel, I’ve decided this might be the best First Law of them all.

Since it was stated in a lot of promos for the book, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Red Country presents the return of Logen Ninefingers, the conflicted and half-mad barbarian who was among the First Law trilogy’s stars. Presumed dead, the “Bloody-Nine” is living under an assumed name, though if you’re reading closely enough (and didn’t read the back cover) you’ll figure out in the first chapter who the cowardly “Lamb” really is. This was where I started to get worried, and decided that if Abercrombie was going to play some game at trying to be subtle with Lamb’s true identity, my review here would be very different.

But Abercrombie isn’t that kind of writer. Instead, Logen’s attempts to keep his past and his worse nature at bay becomes a key focus of the book, elegantly constructed in his interactions with the novel’s other characters, as the reader wonders when his loved ones will get the full story. The brief mentions of characters and events in previous books, and the moments when other characters admit that they know exactly who Logen is, are woven in expertly without certain names ever being mentioned.

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A Kick-ass Female Perspective on Comics That’s Disturbingly Close to Real-Life: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

Friday, July 14, 2017 Soyka Comments 4 comments

The Wonder Woman movie has received considerable buzz for depicting an interesting lead female character who actually has a personality, is not dependent on some guy to come to her rescue and truly is the star attraction; it even has a female director. It’s enough to make you forgive the silly and at this point yawn inducing CGI pyrotechnics between good and evil ending that is apparently sacrosanct in these sort of flicks. Look, I enjoyed the movie, but for all its merits it’s still a sad commentary of our times that Wonder Woman is considered somehow ground breaking. Problem is, compared to the latest crop of superhero movies (maybe even movies in general) the bar isn’t set very high.

You want some real kick-ass female perspective on the comic book world that’s disturbingly close to real-life? Check out The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente. This is a series of short stories set in shared alternate comic book universe (with characters such as Grimdark and Kid Mercury and Doctor Nocturne evoking various Marvel and DC Comics personages) linked by a sort of AA session in which deceased women (with one exception who for her own reasons hangs out among the unliving) take turns explaining how they ended up in Deadtown, i.e., thanks to some male superhero or supervillian exploit.

The title of the collection is a take-off of The Vagina Monologues — the Eve Ensler play about sex and body image told from the perspectives of a variety of women representing different ethnic, sexual and class identities — and comic book writer Gail Simone’s observation that comic book women are typically hypersexualized for a male audience and often end up “refrigerated” — killed, disabled, or otherwise rendered marginalized or powerless in order to advance a male character’s storyline. Indeed, in “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane” the title character literally ends up in a refrigerator. (And, by the way, is just one of many great comic book kind of names that Valente invents for her cast of characters. Also by the way, it’s worth noting that in Wonder Woman a male character dies to advance our heroine’s story — perhaps an intentional inversion of the refrigerator motif?)

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New Treasures: An Oath of Dogs by Wendy N. Wagner

Friday, July 14, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Wendy N. Wagner is the Managing Editor for Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines, as well as an editor for the fabulous Destroy series of anthologies, including Women Destroy Science Fiction, Women Destroy Fantasy, and Queers Destroy Science Fiction. She’s had short stories in Nightmare and Fantasy Magazine, as well as the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Armored, and Shattered Shields. She’s also published two Pathfinder novels, Skinwalkers and Starspawn, the latter of which has been described as “Pathfinder Meets Lovecraft.”

Her latest is something very different, an “exoplanetary colony sci-fi trip riddled with mystery and conspiracy” (Jason LaPier). It’s the tale of Kate Stadish, an investigator on an alien world of strange sentient dogs, mill towns… and murder. Ferrett Steinmetz (author of the ‘Mancer series, which we covered here), says “An Oath of Dogs nails the rough-hewn feel of a frontier town, then mixes it up with intergalactic corporate intrigue and alien biology. It’s like Lake Wobegon mashed up with a Michael Crichton thriller.”

An Oath of Dogs was published by Angry Robot on July 4, 2017. It is 430 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Joey HiFi. Read Chapter One at Wagner’s website.