Black Gate – Page 514 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Justin Cronin on Bringing The Passage Trilogy to Television

Tuesday, May 2, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Over at DGO, Patty Templeton interviews author Justin Cronin on bringing his bestselling horror trilogy to the small screen. Let’s listen in, shall we?

The Passage is a damn fine book. It’s a doorstopper of a read with deep characters and a full-tilt apocalyptic plot. The first in a completed trilogy, The Passage establishes a near-future world ravaged by a contagious virus that leaves its victims in a vampire-like state. From there, one world dies and another is born…

PT: THE PASSAGE TRILOGY IS COMING TO TV. WHAT EXCITES YOU MOST ABOUT THE PROJECT?

JC: I think TV is so good now. Film is a director’s medium and TV has become a writer’s medium. TV is natural for ensemble storytelling and for telling a big story. Television is also a very good way to bring people to the books. Television is around for a long time, assuming the show is successful enough to stay around. Movies come and go, now. Half the movies I want to see are gone from the theaters before I can see them. Whereas television is one of our great cultural pleasures. Good television is kind of like Dickens used to be. It’s episodic and we can all go down to the pier and await the next chapter of David Copperfield.

Read the complete interview at DGO!

Premiere issue of New Pulp Magazine Broadswords and Blasters, Now Available in Print and Kindle

Tuesday, May 2, 2017 Nick Ozment Comments 4 comments

Editors Matthew X. Gomez and Cameron Mount have launched a new sci-fi/fantasy magazine into the fray, touting it as a “pulp magazine with modern sensibilities.” The debut issue is available on Kindle for $2.99 or in a print edition for $6.99. They have also been posting regular mini-essays called “Pulp Appeal” on their website, spotlighting seminal pulp authors and characters like Conan, John Carter, Elric, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Here is the back copy from the first issue:

The editors of Broadswords and Blasters are proud to present the first issue in a new line of pulp fiction serial publications. The stories in this issue blew us away when we read them, and the overall response confirms what we’ve always suspected: Action-oriented short fiction is still a hot commodity in the 21^st Century.

In this, our debut issue, you will encounter subterranean horrors, time traveling lovers, two-fisted private investigators, space Mafiosi, and torturers turned political rabble-rousers, and that’s just a sampling of the great cast of characters you’ll meet along the way. Join us in celebrating the art that is pulp fiction. And tell your friends.

Here is the complete Table of Contents.

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Trader to the Stars by Poul Anderson

Tuesday, May 2, 2017 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 6 comments

I have no idea which Poul Anderson book I picked up first. It might have been The Winter of the World or Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. Whichever it was, I enjoyed it. It was enough to get me grabbing books at random from the big stack of his work my dad had bought. I’ve read a ton of his books, but with nearly seventy novels and sixty short story collections to his name, I still have plenty to go.

I’d venture a guess that Poul Anderson, multiple Hugo- and Nebula-winner, is probably better remembered for his fantasy than for his science fiction. Since his death in 2001, it seems his fantasy writing, the seminal swords & sorcery novel The Broken Sword in particular, has acquired a much greater reputation than his sci-fi.

While he wrote many standalone sci-fi novels, a large number were part of a specific future history. The Technic Civilization covers humanity’s spread across the stars, beginning, chronologically, with the story “The Saturn Game” set in the year 2055 and ending with “Starfog” in 7100. The majority of the stories take place during the second half of the third millennium and feature Falstaffian merchant prince Nicholas van Rijn, his agent David Falkayn, or Imperial secret agent Dominic Flandry.

Anderson’s future history stories are a mix of pulp space opera and hard sci-fi. At the heart of many of the stories is an explicit scientific conundrum that needs to be answered. Each puzzle, though, is couched in adventures with alien barbarians, enemy planets, or galactic empires.

Trader to the Stars (1964) collects three van Rijn adventures, “Hiding Place,” “Territory,” and “The Master Key.” Each features van Rijn working out evolutionary puzzles, usually in the face of some grave danger and always in hopes of making a profit. The first two throw the trader into the middle of danger, while the third lets him, Nero Wolfe-like, get to the bottom of a native uprising from the luxurious surroundings of his penthouse.

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Future Treasures: Shattered Warrior by Sharon Shinn and Molly Knox Ostertag

Tuesday, May 2, 2017 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Sharon Shinn is one of our favorite writers around these parts. I know, I know, we have a lot of favorite writers. But do we have fond memories of mobbing them at breakfast with the entire Black Gate staff, as we do with Sharon? No, we do not.

Sharon has published more than 25 novels over the past two decades, including the Samaria series, Twelve Houses series, and the Elemental Blessings novels. Her latest project is a graphic novel with award-winning webcomic artist Molly Knox Ostertag (Strong Female Protagonist), titled Shattered Warrior. Set on a world conquered by the alien Derichets, it tells the tale of Colleen Cavenaugh, who toils in a factory for her alien masters, until the day her home is invaded by an unlikely band of human resistance fighters.

Here’s a scan of the inside flap, and a few sample pages to showcase some of Ostertag’s colorful art and character design.

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Monsters, Magic & Mystery: The Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo

Monday, May 1, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I first discovered Leigh Bardugo with the bestselling Six of Crows and its sequel Crooked Kingdom, the acclaimed fantasy caper novels described as ““Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones.” And then I discovered Bardugo had a previous bestselling fantasy series set in the same world, The Grisha Trilogy, featuring monster hunting, mysterious magic, and a pseudo Imperial-Russia setting. That’s an irresistible combo right there.

The New York Times Book Review said, in their review of the opening volume Shadow and Bone, “Bardugo’s setup is shiver-inducing, of the delicious variety. This is what fantasy is for.” All three volumes in the series are available in paperback from a publisher called Square Fish (?), a Macmillam imprint.

There’s a lengthy excerpt from Shadow and Bone at Tor.com. While you chew that over, here’s the back covers for all three volumes.

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Thrilling, Startling, Futuristic: The Adventure House Pulp Reprints

Monday, May 1, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I acquired many fine treasures at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Show here in Chicago last week. And there were more than a few that escaped my vile clutches. One of the biggest mistakes I made was not spending more time in the Adventure House booth. I passed it several times — you couldn’t really miss it, they had an absolutely marvelous wall display with hundreds of colorful pulps — and just about every time my eye was drawn to a rack crammed full of high-quality pulp replicas. Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories. Captain Future, Startling Stories, all bright and crisp and brand new… it looked like a magazine rack from the 1930s, catapulted eight decades into the future.

Now, I’ve picked up one or two pulp replicas in my day. They’re not just reprints of the editorial contents of old pulp magazines, but photostatted replicas, right down to the ads. For example, Girasol Collectables in Canada does a brisk business in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and Spicy Detective replicas. Most cost $35 each, which is more than I paid for the original issues of Weird Tales I have in my collection. So I’m a little guns shy about replicas, and I didn’t stop to investigate that eye-catching rack.

But I thought about it after the show was over, and two minutes online showed me that Adventure House pulp reprints are broadly available — at Amazon and other online sellers — and that they’re much more reasonably priced than the Girasol variety, at just $14.95 each!

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Cthulhu in Metallica

Monday, May 1, 2017 Mick Gall Comments 3 comments

That Cthulhu is a cultural force is a truth self evident to the readers of this blog, as evidenced by his numerous movies, RPGs and plush dolls. But his ubiquitousness can still surprise when he appears in unexpected media. The most recent creative force to sing (literally) Cthulhu’s praises: Metallica.

Metallica’s recent album Hardwired… to Self Destruct dropped November 18, and I was surprised to find one of their songs directly singing about great Cthulhu, and what exactly his rising means for humanity. The song “Dream No More” opens with singer James Hetfield declaring “He sleeps under black seas waiting / Lies dreaming in death”, followed by the litany of horrors that follows as “He wakes as the world dies screaming / all horrors arrive.”

That a metal band would sing about the end of humanity at the hands of an alien entity is not surprising; the genre has a long history of dabbling in the imagery of the occult, pseudo-satanic and even Lovecraftian. That Metallica would do it, however, is unusual. The band’s songs have catalog struggles and personal pains, exploring human themes like contemplating suicide (“Fade to Black” from 1984’s Ride the Lightning), drug abuse (“Master of Puppets,” 1986’s Master of Puppets), the horrors of war (“One” from 1988’s …And Justice for All) and the fear engendered by nightmares (“Enter Sandman” from 1991’s Metallica).

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The Verge on 39 SF, Fantasy, and Horror Novels to Read in April

Sunday, April 30, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Here we are on the last day of April. Setting aside the obvious question How the heck did that happen so fast?, it’s clear we need to take drastic action on our reading plan. We have about three weeks of reading to do and, uh, about two hours to do it in.

Well, best we use those last two hours productively. Over at The Verge, Andrew Liptak has some useful suggestions. Let’s see what he has for us.

Brimstone by Cherie Priest (April 4th)

During the First World War, Tomás Cordero wielded a flamethrower, and left the battlefield a broken man. He discovers that his wife died of the flu, after returning home, and he’s haunted by dreams of fire whenever he sleeps. In Cassadaga, Florida, Alice Dartle is a clairvoyant who also dreams of fire, and seeks out Cordero, trying to bring him some peace. However, the flames that bind them were started centuries ago, from someone whose hate extends beyond the grave.

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April 2017 Lightspeed Magazine Now Available

Sunday, April 30, 2017 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I’ve fallen into an odd routine with a few online fiction magazines. Instead of reading them as they come out, I hang out at Tangent Online and use their reviews to point me towards interesting stuff. It works out pretty well, and for the most part the TO reviewers keep on top of the flood of online fiction a lot better than I do. Victoria Silverwolf’s review of the April issue of Lightspeed magazine appeared on Tuesday, and it’s got several stories that sound right up my alley.

“Infinite Love Engine” by Joseph Allen Hill is a lightning-paced tale of a cyborg sent on a mission to save the universe from a thing which causes all lifeforms to love it. Along the way she encounters a wide variety of bizarre beings, from a dangerous “braincube” to a planet-sized entity known as the Drowning King. Narrated in a highly informal style, this wild and woolly space opera doesn’t seem intended to be an out-and-out comedy, although it’s hard to take it too seriously with characters called Beeblax and Zarzak…

Much more intimate is “Seven Permutations of My Daughter” by Lina Rather, although its scientific content is no less fantastic. The narrator is a physicist who has built a device which allows her to journey to parallel universes. For story purposes, this might as well be magic. She uses it in an attempt to find a world where her estranged, heroin-addicted daughter is safe and happy…

“Remote Presence” by Susan Palwick seems at first to take place in our own mundane reality. We soon find out, however, that the characters all accept the fact that ghosts are real, and that sometimes they must be helped — or forced — to move on to the next world. The protagonist is a hospital chaplain. In addition to his many other duties, he also has to deal with an elderly woman who has died in the emergency room and who continues to haunt it, only because she is lonely and wants someone to talk to….

Read Victoria’s complete review of the April issue here.

This month’s Lightspeed offers original fantasy by Susan Palwick and Jess Barber, and fantasy reprints by Genevieve Valentine and Charles Yu, and original science fiction by Joseph Allen Hill and Lina Rather, plus SF reprints by Paul Park and Nancy Kress. The non-fiction includes an editorial from John Joseph Adams, author spotlights, Book Reviews by Andrew Liptak, a review of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter by Carrie Vaughn, and an interview with Aliette de Bodard by Christian A. Coleman.

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Breaking Into Comics as a Writer: Mucho Opportunities

Sunday, April 30, 2017 Derek Kunsken Comments 5 comments

I knew I wanted to be a writer basically when I learned how to write in English. That might have been as young as grade two, but certainly by grade three (I was in immersion school so we learned to read and write in French first).

My mother gave me my first four comic books in the summer between grades four and five, and I remember making plans with my best friend Eric (who liked to draw) about us making comics together.

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