Search Results for: New Edge Sword

The January Fantasy Magazine Rack

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In January the latest issues of Analog and Asimov’s SF hit the shelves in their new bimonthly, double-issue format. But the big new this month was the announcement that one of the most promising of the new crop of genre publications, Fantasy Scroll Magazine, has gone on hiatus after only 13 issues. I guess 13 really is unlucky, at least for magazines. Nonetheless, there’s still plenty of great reading for fantasy fans every month. Have a look at Fletcher Vredenburgh’s…

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December Short Story Roundup

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I hope everybody had a pleasant holiday and is off to a good New Year. For my inaugaral post 0f 2017, I’ve got a bag full of short stories for you from Grimdark Magazine and 2016’s standout newcomer, Cirsova. I’ve often dismissed grimdark as a marketing device. First, there’s always been cynical and gritty fantasy, and second, a lot of what’s billed as grimdark is not all that dark and grim. Leave it to Grimdark Magazine editor Adrian Collins to find one…

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Future Treasures: The Mammoth Book of the Mummy, edited by Paula Guran

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Paula Guran does interesting anthologies. She tends to focus on modern (21st Century) writers, which means she’s plowing a different field than all those vintage anthologies I love — and introducing me to a host of new writers. Her newest is The Mammoth Book of the Mummy, containing 25 new and reprint tales “that explore, subvert, and reinvent the mummy mythos” from Joe R. Lansdale, Kage Baker, Paul Cornell, Terry Dowling, Karen Joy Fowler, John Langan, Helen Marshall, Keith Taylor,…

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Vintage Treasures: Watership Down by Richard Adams

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“I announce,” read the Times of London’s review in 1972, “with trembling pleasure, the appearance of a great story.” This is not the typical language of a contemporary book review, but then the book in question, Watership Down, was not a typical book. It was and is a fantasy with wide crossover appeal, a mythic adventure with rabbits as the principal characters. That’s right, rabbits: those long-eared good-for-nothings whom we humans largely dismiss as being dumber than a box of…

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The December Fantasy Magazine Rack

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It’s a nice mix of winter reading this month (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere anyway…. for everyone else, it’s summer reading!) There’s a big double issue of Cemetery Dance, the annual (and always big) Weird Fiction Review, a new issue of GrimDark, and regular issues of Asimov’s SF, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, The Dark, and Uncanny. That’s not all we have for you, of course. For vintage fiction fans we have a Retro-Review of the November 1961 Amazing Stories,…

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Fantasia 2016, Day 21: Aiming Low to Hit a Silver Heaven (Judge Archer, If There’s A Hell Below, and On the Silver Globe)

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Wednesday, August 3, was the last day of the Fantasia International Film Festival. Three full weeks of genre films would wrap up here, and I was looking forward to the three last films of the year. The day would begin with the Chinese martial-arts film Judge Archer (Jianshi liu baiyuan). After that came the independent American movie If There’s a Hell Below, promising a paranoid thriller about whistleblowers and government surveillance. Finally came a movie I’d been eagerly anticipating since…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

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If there was a popular topic at Black Gate last month, it was Jeffrey Talanian’s role playing game Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. Gabe Dybing interviewed Jeffrey for us on November 11, and Bob Byrne wrote a brief feature on the runaway success of the Kickstarter campaign to fund a second edition of the rules — and both articles leaped into the Top Ten for the month. The number one post at Black Gate in November was our report on the…

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The Poison Apple: An Interview with T.J. Glenn

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TJ doubling The Toxic Avenger (photo by Robert Griffith) The Poison Apple is a new semi-regular Black Gate column. Interviewer Elizabeth Crowens will be talking with atypical authors with unusual backgrounds or passions in the speculative fiction arena, and sharing their stories here. The first “victim” to take a bite out of the Poison Apple is Teel James Glenn, known to most as T.J. Glenn, winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Best Author of the Year, Epic eBook award finalist, P&E…

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Last of a Series… For Now: The Sea of Time by P.C. Hodgell

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Earlier this year I promised myself I would finally finish all the volumes in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series so far. I did that yesterday, with my completion of The Sea of Time (2014). I’m really enjoying the series and book 7 is a blast. Regular readers will be shocked to read my one complaint: it’s too short. Before I explain that, let me fill you in on the book and tell you all about its good points. First, one more time, the setup:…

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The Late-November Fantasy Magazine Rack

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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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