Black Gate – Page 536 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Black Gate Online Fiction: Mouth of the Dragon by Tom Barczak

Tuesday, February 21, 2017 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Mouth of the Dragon: Prophecy of the Evarun by Thomas Barczak, published in deluxe trade paperback and digital formats this month by Perseid Press. Thomas Barczak’s short fiction has appeared in the award-winning Heroes in Hell anthologies edited by Janet Morris and Chris Morris; his previous novels include the epic fantasy novel Veil of the Dragon, and the Kindle serial Awakening Evarun.

Chaelus watched them fall, one by one, like cordwood; five Servian knights brought down to the bristling snow.

Crimson feathers stuck out against the pallor. Even from a half a league away he could see them, like the blood they let. The red fletching of the Khaalish. But Chaelus didn’t need the whisper of the Giver to drift through him to know it was a ruse. It wasn’t the Khaalish. It was something far worse.

It was the Hunters.

Idyliss bowed her head without his command and flew across the snow-covered plain.

They were still too far away for him to save them.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Researching the Tropes

Monday, February 20, 2017 Tina Jens Comments 2 comments

My Fantasy Writing Workshop (Columbia College Chicago) starts each semester by writing a shared private encyclopedia of genre tropes. Each week has an assigned category. The categories are: monsters or magical creatures; gods, demi-gods, or powerful spirits; magical artifacts or prophetic techniques/devices; and historical people. The students each write one entry per category, then the following week, all the entries in that category are part of their assigned reading.

For each category, I’ve compiled a list of at least fifty potential subjects with short descriptions taken from across the world cultures and mythologies to get them started. Many of the entries have alternate spellings, and some reference books contradict each other, so students are required to use more than one source in their research.

Here’s a list of a few of the monsters/creatures in the first unit.

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Future Treasures: The Vorrh Book II – The Erstwhile by Brian Catling

Monday, February 20, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Early last year, Matthew David Surridge reviewed the Vintage trade paperback edition of The Vorrh here at Black Gate, calling it:

A powerful, fascinating book that defied easy categorization; epic fantasy or epic horror, magic realism or magic surrealism, it seemed bigger and stranger than whatever one might think to call it. Set mostly in Africa and mostly in the years after World War I, it deals with a forest called the Vorrh, where reality and time and logic become confused. A hunter tries to cross the forest, another man tries to stop him, yet another man tries to stop the second. Meanwhile, in a colonial German city that exists inside the forest, a young cyclops is educated by peculiar automata…

Vintage has announced the impending arrival of the sequel, The Erstwhile, which will be released in trade paperback next month.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Mister Bean as Simeonon’s Maigret?

Monday, February 20, 2017 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

Georges Simenon wrote seventy-six novels and twenty-eight short stories about French police commissionaire Jules Maigret (May-gray) between 1932 and 1973. Maigret’s career paralleled that of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, who appeared in thirty-three novels and thirty-three novellas/short stories from 1934 to 1975.

There have been many film and television adaptations of Maigret in various countries over the decades. Rupert Davies starred in a popular British television series in the sixties and Michael Gambon played the policeman in a Granada series in the eighties. Now, I’ve never read a Maigret story or seen any of the films or television shows, except for the two I’m going to talk about in this post. So, I don’t have a frame of reference for the two new films, other than the actual movies themselves. They may be nothing like the original character, in the vein of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes; or they could be spot on: though that seems unlikely.

A British company cast Rowan Atkinson as Maigret and filmed a pair of television movies that were aired in 2016: Maigret Sets a Trap and Maigret’s Dead Man. Two more are on the way: Night at the Crossroads and Maigret in Montmarte.

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Get Reacquainted with the Gentlemen Bastards in Scotty Lynch’s The Bastards and the Knives

Sunday, February 19, 2017 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

I hear nothing but good things — really, nothing but great things — about Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. The opening novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and placed second in the Locus poll for First Novel, and became a bestseller in paperback. The Republic of Thieves placed third in the 2014 Locus poll for Best Fantasy Novel.

The series so far is composed of:

The Lies of Locke Lamora (June 2006)
Red Seas Under Red Skies (June 2007)
The Republic of Thieves (October 2013)

Next month Gollancz releases The Bastards and the Knives, an omnibus collection of two prequel novellas in the series, “The Mad Baron’s Mechanical Attic” and “The Choir of Knives.” Both are previously unpublished.

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Why Must Han Solo Die? Revisited

Sunday, February 19, 2017 Nick Ozment Comments 9 comments

[SPOILERS AHEAD! (But if you still haven’t seen the new Star Wars films yet, you probably don’t give a damn, right?)]

On July 28, 2014, right here on Black Gate, I predicted that in the new Star Wars film (Part VII: The Force Awakens, released December 18, 2015), Han Solo would die. I also offered some further conjecture about where this would take the plot.

I thought it would be fun to revisit my predictions and see how they panned out. You can read the original brief post HERE, so you can keep score with me.

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Vintage Treasures: The Novels of Lawrence Watt-Evans

Sunday, February 19, 2017 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

My introduction to Lawrence Watt-Evans was his brilliant short story “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” which originally appeared in the July 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and which I read in his 1992 collection Crosstime Traffic. It won the Hugo Award for best story of the year. And while the overall tone of the tale is downbeat, even melancholic, it is hands-down one of the most optimistic and life-affirming short stories I’ve read in any genre. Check it out if you haven’t had the pleasure already — it appears in a bunch of different anthologies, including The New Hugo Winners, Volume II (1992), The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of the 20th Century (1998), and a 2013 Escape Pod podcast.

Lawrence’s most significant contribution to the genre, however, has been his novels — and he’s written a lot of them. His first, The Lure of the Basilisk, appeared in 1980; since then he’s produced five novels in The Lords of Dûs series (which Bob Byrne wrote about here), The Worlds of Shadow trilogy, The Obsidian Chronicles trilogy, thirteen novels set in the world of Ethshar (originally developed as a role-playing game setting), beginning with The Misenchanted Sword (1985), The Annals of the Chosen trilogy, The Fall of the Sorcerers series, and many others. Under his Nathan Archer pseudonym he’s produced a pair of Star Trek novels, Spider-Man: Goblin Moon (1999), two Predator novels, and much more.

I tend to like my SF and fantasy dark and gritty, and Lawrence’s work — especially his early novels — had a reputation for being light hearted and fun. So for much of his career I tended to ignore his work, which I’ve recently come to realize was a significant oversight. So when I found the lot of vintage Lawrence Watt-Evans novels above for sale on eBay for just $7.95 (shipping included), I found it irresistible. It arrived last week.

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Thrill-Power Overload: A History of the British Comic 2000 AD

Saturday, February 18, 2017 Derek Kunsken Comments 3 comments

I love comic book history. I’ve got a few books at home of the golden and silver age of American comics I reread every so often.

I recently got the chance to check out Thrill-Power Overload, the history of the British comic book series 2000AD in honor of their 40th anniversary.

I usually read only American comics, but over the last two years, I’ve been reading 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics, both the recent ones, and some of the their collected volumes, so this was a timely discovery for me, and a fascinating one.

2000AD was an experiment when it launched in 1977. British comic books were weekly publications, and not glossy, and until the launch of 2000AD, they were very much targeting younger readers with pretty tame, conservative stories with production and artistic values that didn’t even credit the creators.

2000AD‘s editorial and creative team had a vision of a far edgier anthology science fiction comic book, one whose tone I can best describe as punk rock sensibilities seen in sequential story, or an anti-authoritarianism giving the finger to the world. The creators of the time call the tone comedy and violence.

It featured genetically-engineered soldiers, robot fighters (and fighting robots), soldiers, assassins, and most importantly, Judge Dredd, a futuristic police officer of centuries in the future, stopping crime in the combined roles of police, judge and executioner.
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One Million Years B.C. on Blu-Ray—Because You Love Dinosaurs Too

Saturday, February 18, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 9 comments

One Million Years B.C. was released this week on Region A (North America) Blu-ray for the first time, drawing us one step closer to a complete set of Ray Harryhausen movies on Hi-Def. We still need The Valley of Gwangi, which Warner Bros. owns — and they’re stingy about catalogue titles, especially if they’ve already released them as part of the Warner Archive MOD series. (Edit: Warner Archive is releasing a Blu-ray that will be out in a few weeks! So never mind. Thanks to Joe H. in the comments for pointing this out. Yes, there will be a review on March 18.)

But no more of that. I’m here to celebrate the stop-motion dinosaurs of 1966’s One Million Years B.C., which is a crossover of two of my main movie loves: special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen and Britain’s Hammer Film Productions.

Hammer and Harryhausen

I once read a customer review on Amazon for the One Million Years B.C. DVD that remarked at the end, “If you’re buying this, you’re buying it for Raquel.” I wonder if the reviewer nodded off during stretches of the film and somehow failed to notice that there are dinosaurs all over it? Dinosaurs created by special effects legend Ray Harryhausen!

I’m not casting aspersions on the appeal of Raquel Welch; she has a enough screen presence to fill in a rock quarry and was a massive part of the movie’s marketing and initial global success. She adds a tremendous amount to the film and helps hold up the human action between stop-motion sequences. Yes, she is stunningly gorgeous on screen to the point that she almost seems unreal. But Raquel Welch has never been as popular as dinosaurs. Sorry, there’s no contest.

Let’s be honest: if One Million Years B.C. had no stop-motion Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs, it would be remembered today for the famous Raquel Welch image and that’s it. People wouldn’t still be watching the film or buying new releases of it more than fifty years later. The film itself would be a side-note, something discussed in terms of Welch’s career and popular 1960s sex symbols, but not anything viewers today would sit down to enjoy in full. Harryhausen’s effects make One Million Years B.C. a perennial.

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The February Fantasy Magazine Rack

Saturday, February 18, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

A lot of exciting changes in the magazine industry this month. Let’s start with the bad news: Warren Lapine’s Fantastic Stories of the Imagination closed up shop. The Good News? We added two brand new magazines to our tracking list: Obadiah Baird’s sharply designed The Audient Void, and the stellar first issue of Occult Detective Quarterly, edited by Sam Gafford and John Linwood Grant.

Fans of vintage magazines had lots of fun material to choose from this month. Rich Horton looked at the June and July 1962 issues of Fantastic, and Nick Ozment riffs off Knights of the Dinner Table from 2008, asking the burning question “Who Would Win? John McClane and James Bond versus a Tribe of D&D Goblins.” In addition to all that, Tangent Online announced their highly-anticipated 2016 Recommended Reading List, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed a trio of magazines in his January Short Story Roundup, and Michael Penkas started a brand new magazine review column for us, kicking off with reviews of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the January issue of Nightmare, and the most recent issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Check out all the details on the magazines above by clicking on the each of the images. Our late January Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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