I’ve been relying more and more on Charles Payseur’s Quick Sip Reviews to point me towards the fiction that will interest me each month. Charles doesn’t just tell me why he enjoys each story… he gives me enough detail to let me know which stories will grab my attention right out of the gate. Here he is on Rich Larson’s 12,000-word novelette “The Green Man Cometh” in the latest issue of Clarkesworld, for example. This is a rather thrilling story…
One of sword & sorcery’s primary inspirations is historical adventure, like that of writers Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. That noble genre continues today in Tim Willocks’ insanely violent The Religion: Vol 1 of the Tannhauser Trilogy (2006), for one, set in the cauldron of the Great Siege of Malta. Into it, Willocks introduces the rogue Mattias Tannhauser, son of a Saxon blacksmith from Transylvania. At the age of 12, Mattias’ mother and sister are killed by Ottoman militia and he is taken…
Otto Penzler is a larger than life name in the mystery field. He is the man behind New York City’s ‘Mysterious Bookstore’ as well as the Mysterious Press (Nero Wolfe’s current imprint!). He’s a true mystery maven. You can read about his recent The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories here. From 1993 through 1995, under the Otto Penzler Books imprint, he reissued nine hard-to-find works of Sherlockiana. The Otto Penzler Sherlock Holmes Library consists of the following books, originally published between…
Black Gate had 1.26 million page views last month, very nearly a record. Much of that bump in traffic was due to a series of very popular posts. Derek Kunsken has long been one of our most popular bloggers — his interview with Christopher Golden was our third most popular article in October, and last month his piece on Rebirth: DC’s corrective reboot was #5. But he thoroughly dominated the charts in July, claiming both the #2 slot, with his look back at Marvel’s…
Looks like Fletcher has been working a lot harder than me in the back half of the month — I thought I was doing pretty well by covering three August magazines (Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Dark), but he’s managed detailed reviews of no less than six: Cirsova, GrimDark, Swords and Sorcery, Lackington’s, Weirdbook, and the newcomer, Red Sun. Here’s Flecher: It turns out there were lots and lots of really good horror and science fiction short stories published this summer… In its short life,…
A veritable torrent of potent heroic fantasy short stories came out of the interwebs this summer. So many, in fact, for the first time ever I have to break the roundup into two parts. This week I’ll tell you about Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Lackington’s, and Cirsova. All together there are twelve stories and three poems (including the nearly six thousand-word first part of an epic poem). Next week I’ll review Grimdark Magazine, Weirdbook, and newcomer, Red Sun. Swords…
It’s still a goto for roleplayers, you see the equivalent in movies, but extended dungeon crawls are rare in genre fiction. Even when you go back to Dungeon and Dragons‘ literary roots, you don’t really find proper dungeon stories! Conan generally offers up 1-2 room complexes, e.g. in Robert E. Howard’s classic tale “God in the Bowl.” Tolkien uses mega dungeons, but with narrative summary and — unless they are really just an underground battlefield — only limited denizens. Clark Ashton…
August is the month to try new things — and that’s exactly what we did, by sampling two promising new magazines: The Lorelei Signal, edited by Carol Hightshoe, and Strange Aeons, edited by Rick Tillman. I do sometimes wonder if we’ll ever run out of new fantasy magazines to try… and so far, the answer has been no. We also had a fascinating guest post from Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, editors of the World Fantasy Award-nominated Uncanny magazine, titled…
I sometimes wonder why, in this age where superheroes rule all media, pulp heroes haven’t made more of a comeback in popular fiction. I think the answer is that I’m just not looking hard enough. Case in point: Alyc Helms’s Missy Masters novels, in which Missy takes her grandfather’s place as the pulp hero Mr. Mystic, make a fine example. My friend Alex Bledsoe, author of The Sword-Edged Blonde and The Hum and the Shiver, sums up the first book:…
We had several significant firsts in the front half of July. We celebrated the launch of a brand new magazine, Blind Spot, edited by Julien Wacquez and René-Marc Dolhen and dedicated to bringing the best of French SF to English audiences. And just as monumental for me personally, Sean McLachlan covered issue #280 of Strategy and Tactics, perhaps the greatest wargaming magazine of all time. And Matthew David Surridge took a fond look back at Xignals, Waldenbooks’ in-house SF magazine…