Black Gate – Page 519 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Future Treasures: The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis

Monday, April 17, 2017 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Robyn Bennis’s debut novel The Guns Above, a steampunk military fantasy about a female airship captain, arrives in hardcover from Tor in two weeks. The book sounds interesting enough, but it’s Bennis’s riff on the cover at Tor.com that really got my attention.

Why do I love this cover so much? Let me direct your attention first to the badass lady jumping over a gondola rail with pistol in hand. That’s Josette, Garnia’s newest airship captain… let’s be honest, when a woman sees a job that needs doing, her first instinct is always to roll up her sleeves and do it herself. And sometimes that means leaping from your airship with pistol in hand. Back me up here, ladies.

Here’s the description.

They say it’s not the fall that kills you.

For Josette Dupre, the Corps’ first female airship captain, it might just be a bullet in the back.

On top of patrolling the front lines, she must also contend with a crew who doubts her expertise, a new airship that is an untested deathtrap, and the foppish aristocrat Lord Bernat, a gambler and shameless flirt with the military know-how of a thimble. Bernat’s own secret assignment is to catalog her every moment of weakness and indecision.

So when the enemy makes an unprecedented move that could turn the tide of the war, can Josette deal with Bernat, rally her crew, and survive long enough to prove herself?

The Guns Above will be published by Tor Books on May 2, 2017. It is 352 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Tommy Arnold, whose done several recent covers for Tor.com, including Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey, David Dalglish’s Fireborn, and Corey J. White’s upcoming Killing Gravity.

A Tale of Two Covers: Skullsworn by Brian Staveley

Monday, April 17, 2017 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

We covered the first three novels in Brian Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne right here last year. Skullsworn, the new standalone novel in the same world, features the adventures of a priestess-assassin for the God of Death. It will be published by Tor Books this week in both the US and the UK.

Although the US and UK editions have similar publishing dates, that’s pretty much all they have in common. The descriptions for each book are markedly different — and the covers are dramatically different. The US version by Richard Anderson (above left) has lush colors and and action scene, while the UK cover (above right), designed by Matthew Garrett, is heavily design-focused. In a guest post at Tor.com, Brian Staveley talks about the US cover.

This one hits all the right notes… it gives a feel for the city, but here Pyrre is in the shadows, close to the quotidian world of human affairs, but separate, unnoticed. She’s also motionless. Her knife is drawn, but the drama doesn’t come from the knife itself, or the imminent violence, but from what’s in her mind, from her struggle to understand her own motives and emotions, then to translate them into the life she wants to live. It’s not easy to fall in love, especially when you’re staying up late every night giving women and men to the god of death. That’s the book I’m trying to write… The final version of the cover is just perfect. The color, the claustrophobia of Dombang’s hot, narrow alleys, the fish-scale lanterns, Pyrre’s crouch, ready, predatory, but not yet committed — this cover captures everything I’d hoped about the book.

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A Cybernetic Detective in a Futuristic Japan: Ghost in the Shell

Sunday, April 16, 2017 Matthew Wuertz Comments 3 comments

I prepared myself before going to see Ghost in the Shell, expecting an overly simplistic story full of action that vaguely resembled the 1995 anime release of the same title. Fortunately, my expectations were wrong.

Just to set some background: the franchise began with a manga titled The Ghost in the Shell, written in 1989 by Masamune Shirow (a pen name for Masanori Ota). It was later adapted as 1995 film with the same name (directed by Mamoru Oshii) and a subsequent anime series (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, one of my all-time favorite anime series).

The 1995 film is a really intriguing story, taking a closer look at humanity and robotics in a gritty, futuristic Japan. It took me a couple of viewings to understand everything; the story comes fast, as do the fantastic action sequences. It inspired the Wachowskis with The Matrix film series, and you can see some direct correlations between certain scenes.

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New Treasures: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two, edited by Neil Clarke

Sunday, April 16, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume Two Neil Clarke-small

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume Two Neil Clarke-back-small

Neil Clarke has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor for each of the last five years (not including 2015, when the Puppies took over the ballot and nominated pretty much exclusively their Puppy-aligned pals), and has won three Hugo Awards for his magazine Clarkesworld.

But recently he’s been gaining more recognition as a highly-regarded anthology editor, for books such as Galactic Empires, the cyborg anthology Upgraded, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1. Volume 2 of his Best Science Fiction of the Year arrived earlier this month, with stories by Ian R. MacLeod, Nina Allan, Lavie Tidhar, Sam J. Miller, Xia Jia, Aliette de Bodard, Alastair Reynolds, Sarah Pinsker, Margaret Ronald, Robert Reed, Suzanne Palmer, Ken Liu, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and many others. Its arrival kicked off the Best of the Year season — nearly a dozen more Best of volumes are scheduled to arrive over the next few months.

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A Babe in the Woods: Derek’s Literary Adventures in New York

Sunday, April 16, 2017 Derek Kunsken Comments 9 comments

Sheila Williams speaking at Asimov’s
40th Anniversary Celebration in Manhattan

For those of you who don’t know, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine turns 40 years old this spring, and a celebration was held at a New York book store. Asimov’s invited its writers and I finally, finally used this as my excuse to visit New York!

I’ve traveled lots of other places, but I’ve never been to the home of Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, Saturday Night Live, and *all* the crime shows ever!

Like a lot of non-Americans, I’ve also been hesitant to cross the border more recently, in part because I have friends who might not be able to do so anymore, and in part because I wasn’t sure how I’d be treated.

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3×3 Illustration Annual #13 Now Available

Saturday, April 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

One of my most cherished annual purchases is the Spectrum anthology of Contemporary Fantastic Art, which collects some of the finest SF, fantasy, and comic art created every year. It’s a gorgeous volume that’s well worth a leisurely browse on a Sunday morning.

Volume 23, edited by John Fleskes, was released last November. We’ve previously covered Spectrum 20, with a Donato Giancola cover that’s a companion piece to his Red Sonja cover for Black Gate 15, and Spectrum 16, which contained Malcolm McClinton’s cover to Black Gate 13.

I know that Spectrum is unique in celebrating the best fantastic art every year, but I also knew — at least theoretically — that there had to be other illustration anthologies out there. But it was still a surprise to stumble on a copy of 3×3 Illustration Annual #13 in the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble last week. It’s a thick magazine printed on heavy stock, 400 pages crammed full of full color art. And such art!

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Witches, Time Travel, and Enchanted Manuscripts: The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness

Saturday, April 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I’m not much of a fan of typographical covers — covers which feature the title, and not much else. I expect to be able to learn a lot about a book from the cover art and design, and typographical covers seem designed chiefly to keep a book mysterious. And they just don’t draw my eye the way a good piece of art does.

Mind you, that flaw didn’t seem to hurt A Discovery of Witches, the debut fantasy novel from Deborah Harkness which hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. She followed it with Shadow of Night and The Book of Life, which together comprise the All Souls Trilogy. The books are modern urban fantasies which feature reluctant witch Diana Bishop and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and their search for the legendary lost manuscript Ashmole 782. The actions roams across Oxford’s Bodleian Library, a fantastical underworld, Elizabethan London, and Matthew’s ancestral home of Sept-Tours, France.

I was curious enough to purchase all three books in trade paperback. They’re also available in mass market paperback and digital formats from Penguin. Here’s a look at the back covers for A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night.

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Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster: The Godzilla Movie to Rise Again in 2019

Saturday, April 15, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 14 comments

It’s been a month since Kong: Skull Island came out and grossed over half a billion dollars globally, so I feel safe in 1) discussing the post-credits stinger without a spoiler freak-out, and 2) predicting we’ll indeed see Legendary Picture’s planned Godzilla vs. King Kong film in a few years. Warner Bros. isn’t leaving franchise money on the table, especially with their DC pictures in a shaky place.

But the movie arriving before the Radioactive Terror and the Eighth Wonder smash heads is promised in Skull Island’s post-credits stinger. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, to be directed by Michael Dougherty and slated for release in March 2019, is the third installment in the Legendary Pictures Kaijuverse. Kong: Skull Island contains numerous references that it occurs in the same universe as the 2014 Godzilla, such as the presence of the monster-researching Monarch Organization and mention of the Pacific atomic test originally targeted at killing Godzilla.

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Smoke and Mirrors by Jane Lindskold Released as an eBook!

Friday, April 14, 2017 Emily Mah Comments 0 Comment

Jane Lindskold is in the process of re-releasing some of her out of print books as ebooks, and the first of these, Smoke and Mirrors is out now. Below I’ve included the cover copy, but if you want to read more about this re-release, check out Jane’s release day post.

How do you fight an enemy who can, literally, change your mind?

From the moment she first senses the whispers of the alien mind within the thoughts of her current client, Smokey – touch telepath, industrial spy, and high-end prostitute – becomes an unwitting player in a conflict that may be as old as humanity.

Determined to protect herself and her young daughter, Smokey soon realizes that the stakes are much, much higher.

After millennia of setting up the field, the aliens may be making their final move. If Smokey is to defeat them, she must win the respect and trust of people who despise her – perhaps at the cost of those she loves the most.

This reprint of the 1996 science fiction novel features an original afterword by the author.

The book is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo.

Emily Mah is a writer and the owner of E.M. Tippetts Book Designs, a company that provides formatting and cover design services for independent authors and publishers. Her last interview for Black Gate was with German author Emily Bold.

Cover to Cover

Friday, April 14, 2017 Violette Malan Comments 8 comments

Until relatively recently, I never looked at cover art. I bought books because of a review, or, more likely, because of a personal recommendation. There was art I liked, and some I didn’t like, and some that embarrassed me for one reason or another. But, the art in and of itself didn’t influence my purchasing of any book.

It was recently brought to my attention, however, that the style of cover art comes in and out of fashion, like anything else. Many of us can tell, just looking at the clothing in a photograph, in what decade the photo was taken. Hairstyle is a great indicator, as are necklines, width and length of collars and cuffs, of hemlines and sleeves. Shoulder pads anyone? Thirty years from now, someone looking at today’s photos are going to think of the 2010’s as “the decade of the beard.”

There are many people better qualified than I to talk about cover art as art. I just want to talk about it as covers. My examples are completely arbitrary, and usually come from my own shelves. Keep in mind that in order to look at changing fashion in covers over decades, I have to look at works that have been in print for that long.

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