Black Gate – Page 546 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Read To Me

Friday, July 21, 2017 Violette Malan Comments 6 comments

Illuminated page In case I haven’t mentioned it before, my brother owns the last independent bookstore in Kingston, Ontario. Which goes to explain why it’s was only this week that I bought a Kindle. For the first time in my life, I’m reading in a different way.

Reading, and its broader form story-telling, has been around as long as history, and it’s been changing and evolving all along, with new ideas and new technologies.

Some think the first stories were told by shepherds sitting around on hillsides watching sheep. As exciting as sheepherding can sometimes get (wolves anyone?) there’s considerably more leisure time in this occupation than there is in farming, or fishing. The shepherds would come down from the hillside and tell their stories to the people in the village, and the marketplace storyteller was born. Or so reasons this particular school of thought.

What happened to the marketplace storyteller? Well, memorizing all of Homer et al (in case there were requests) and learning how to recite them in an entertaining way is really hard work. Then you have to come up with your own, original stories, or really, you’re nobody. You have to put literally years into learning all you need to know, and then you have to sit somewhere telling stories and hoping that people will pay you for it. If you’re very good, someone may become your patron and keep you on retainer to tell stories for them and their guests.

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Goth Chick News; The Girl (and the Movie) With All the Gifts

Thursday, July 20, 2017 Sue Granquist Comments 2 comments

The Girl With all the Gifts poster-small

Seeing that it now has a sequel, I finally got around to reading M.R. Carey’s first novel, The Girl With All the Gifts (2015).

I’m not sure what I was expecting. As the book has been out for over two years, I don’t think it is giving away too much to tell you the story takes place in a future dystopia, made such by a literal zombie apocalypse. And with all of us having lived through seven years of The Walking Dead, Brad Pitt in World War Z and slightly lighter takes such as Zombieland and Warm Bodies just to name a few, one might conclude that zombies, as a monster fad, might be played out both on screen and in print.

So if I was expecting anything at all, it wasn’t much. In fact, my local bookseller placed it in the YA section which meant I might either love it like A Series of Unfortunate Events or hate it with a burning passion, like Twilight.

Turns out, I definitely didn’t hate it.

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A Treasure Trove of Classic Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels and Stories from the Library of America

Thursday, July 20, 2017 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Here’s a delightful find: buried in all the usual news on forthcoming books and new releases I get every week was an understated announcement about this massive compilation of all of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hanish novels and stories, to be published in the attractive slip case above by the Library of America.

And I do mean massive. The two volume set is a whopping 1,921 pages. It contains 8 complete novels (include her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning volumes The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed) and 17 stories, including the complete story cycle Five Ways to Forgiveness, plus several appendixes. It will be edited by Brian Attebery, and both volumes include new introductions by Le Guin. It arrives in hardcover on September 5, 2017.

Now you know one of the reasons I’m excited about this book is that it contains the complete text of over half a dozen vintage paperbacks, including a pair of the most acclaimed science fiction novels of the 20th Century, in handsome archival-quality hardcovers. And you know what that means — I can’t resist showing you the original paperback covers (front and back). Here they are.

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Fantasia 2017, Day 1: The Bizarre Adventure Begins (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable)

Wednesday, July 19, 2017 Matthew David Surridge Comments 4 comments

Fantasia 2017 The body has a memory, memory activated by the time of year and the weather and the repetition of physical activity. Every year now as summer passes its midpoint, walking through Montreal evokes for me a sense of wonder and anticipation: a physical remembrance of the Fantasia International Film Festival. I’ve covered Montreal’s genre film festival for Black Gate the last three years, walking downtown during the days of the festival and then walking back at night marveling at the things I’ve seen. Last Thursday for a fourth year I set out for the Fantasia theatres at Concordia University’s downtown campus; and so here is the first installment of my Fantasia diary for 2017.

As always, I’m looking forward over the coming weeks to things I’ve heard of and things I’ve never heard of. I’m trying to figure out what movies I’ll have to pass on seeing in order to watch other movies scheduled against them, and then what movies I’ll be able to see on a computer monitor in the Fantasia screening room. This year the recipients of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Awards are a little outside my immediate areas of interest — B-movie auteur Larry Cohen, luchador and movie star Mil Máscaras, and Cüneyt Arkin, star of over 300 Turkish films including The Man Who Saved the World (Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, also known as “Turkish Star Wars”). But who knows if I’ll find myself sitting in on a screening of one or more of their varied works?

This year I began my Fantasia experience on the festival’s first night, Thursday July 13, with a viewing of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable. I arrived early, reaching the Hall Theatre at 8:30 PM for a 9:45 screening, and found a line-up of ticketholders already stretching a good 200 feet. The movie’s directed by Takashi Miike, a winner of last year’s Lifetime Achievement Award, with a script by Itaru Era based on the long-running manga by Hirohiko Araki. I happened to watch this showing in the company of the redoubtable Dave Harris of Pieuvre.ca; neither of us had any experience of the manga, but after the movie we were able to speak briefly with some friends of Dave’s who were fans of the comics. “11 out of 10,” said one, while another said that the movie was so faithful it replicated specific panels on the screen. So: if you’re a fan of the source material, you will like this movie. What about those who aren’t?

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El Castillo de San Gabriel in Lanzarote, Canary Islands

Wednesday, July 19, 2017 Sean McLachlan Comments 1 comment

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The fort as seen while approaching along El Puente de Las Bolas,
“the Bridge of the Balls.” Cannonballs, that is.

As I mentioned my last post on Lanzarote’s Piracy Museum, Spain’s Canary Islands are dotted with historic forts. As a stopover on the way to and from the New World, these islands off the west coast of Africa naturally became a target for piracy. Every port had at least one fort to protect it.

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The July Fantasy Magazine Rack

Wednesday, July 19, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’m trying something a bit different with our Magazine Rack this month. Rather than just recap the last eight magazines we’ve covered, I want to make this report a little more useful by actually focusing on magazines cover-dated July 2017. That means there are three magazines above — Back Issue, Grimdark, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies — that we’ve haven’t covered yet this month. But I’m including them here because they’re cool, they came out in July, and you should know about them. Plus, they look good.

As usual, you can get details on the other magazines above by just clicking on the thumbnail images. Our additional magazine coverage in the past few weeks includes Bookriot‘s entertaining post on on 5 SF and Fantasy Magazines You Should Be Reading, Fletcher’s May Short Story Roundup, Rich Horton’s Retro-Review of Amazing Stories, October 1963, and Adrian Simmons’ Retro-Review of Amazing Stories, November 1969.

Our June Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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A Page Turner with Cool Characters and a Hyperreal Asian Setting: Want by Cindy Pon

Tuesday, July 18, 2017 Elizabeth Galewski Comments 0 Comment

In Want (published by Simon Pulse on June 13, 2017), Cindy Pon transports readers to an unsettlingly believable but dystopian futuristic Taipei, where air pollution writhes in the sky and class unrest seethes on the ground. Society is divided into “haves,” the yous (pronounced “yos”), and “have nots,” the meis (pronounced “mays”). Encased in air-conditioned suits that protect the yous from smog, the wealthy lead long lives. Unable to afford these suits, the meis cough and wheeze until they die at the age of 40.

Enter our narrator, bad boy Jason Zhou. An orphaned mei who flips knives in one hand as a nervous habit, he’s already used up half his expected lifespan. Trouble begins for him and his friends when their mother figure, Dr. Nataraj, reports two attempts on her life in the past week. An environmental activist who advocates for legislation to combat global warming, she suspects that big corporations are behind these attacks. After all, these polluters bribe politicians to ignore her pleas all the time.

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The Best of Cordwainer Smith, edited by J. J. Pierce

Tuesday, July 18, 2017 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 3 comments

Do not read this story; turn the page quickly. The story may upset you. Anyhow, you probably know it already. It is a very disturbing story. Everyone knows it.

from “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal”

Where to begin with Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith? Son of a lawyer with ties to the Chinese Revolution of 1911, and godson of Sun Yat-sen, Linebarger, before World War II, was a professor of Eastern Studies at Duke. During the war, he served in the US Army and helped set up the first psychological warfare unit, and became an advisor to Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek. After the war, he was recalled to service to advise the British during the Malayan Emergency, and American forces during the Korean War. Later, he would serve in various intelligence capacities, calling himself “visitor to small wars,” though he avoided Vietnam, thinking it was a bad situation all around. Somehow, between the year 1950 and his death in 1966, he found the time and energy to create one of the most original, complex, and strange science fiction universes.

As part of their “Best of” series, Ballantine published The Best of Cordwainer Smith in 1975, edited by J. J. Pierce. I picked it up in around 1984 at the Forbidden Planet in Manhattan, based on something I’d read recommending the story “Scanners Live in Vain.” Strange as I found it, “Scanners” was nothing compared to the mad, almost hallucinogenic stories that followed it. It contains twelve of of his most important stories, all set in the future history which he called the Instrumentality of Mankind. The Instrumentality is the group of supremely powerful humans who rule over humanity.

Cordwainer Smith (as I’ll call him from now on) first appeared in 1950 with the publication of the story “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950). Its frenetic start warns readers they are in for something strange.

Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci’s face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg was broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.

“I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch It’s my worry, isn’t it?”

Foremost from this opening is the word cranch. What can it possibly mean and why must Martel do it?

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New Treasures: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Monday, July 17, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Edgar Cantero is the author of The Supernatural Enhancements. His follow-up, Meddling Kids, continues in the horror-comedy vein with perhaps the most brilliant premises I’ve encountered this year: a group of young detectives, who foiled the plot of a small-time crook years ago, find themselves drawn back together as adults to pick up the threads of their original investigation… threads that lead to a much more insidious threat involving an interdimensional horror. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says, “For anyone who finds the triangle formed by Scooby-Doo, Lovecraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer a cozy place to be, here’s your beach book.” It’s on sale this month in hardcover.

SUMMER 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon’s Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster — another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

1990. The former detectives have grown up and apart, each haunted by disturbing memories of their final night in the old haunted house. There are too many strange, half-remembered encounters and events that cannot be dismissed or explained away by a guy in a mask. And Andy, the once intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, is tired of running from her demons. She needs answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the one-time kid genius and budding biologist, now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their team leader… which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.

The time has come to get the team back together, face their fears, and find out what actually happened all those years ago at Sleepy Lake. It’s their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.

A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids is a strikingly original and dazzling reminder of the fun and adventure we can discover at the heart of our favorite stories, no matter how old we get.

Meddling Kids was published by Blumhouse on July 11, 2017. It is the first Blyton Summer Detective Club Adventure, which implies there will probably be more. It’s 336 pages, priced at $26.95 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Michael J. Windsor.

Vintage Treasures: New Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy

Monday, July 17, 2017 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Raymond J. Healy is one of the most important editors in the history of science fiction. Although he has a scant four books to his credit, he did as much to popularize and establish the field as editors with dozens more. His first book, Adventures in Time and Space (1946), edited with J. Francis McComas, is arguably the most important SF anthology of the Twentieth Century. Although it wasn’t the first true SF anthology (that honor belongs to Donald A. Wollheim’s The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction, 1943), it was enormously successful, and that success paved the way for the SF reprint anthology market as we know it today.

Before Healy and McComas, no major publisher would take a risk on the unproven genre of science fiction, which at the time was the province of low-paying pulp magazines. Adventures in Time and Space, a massive 1,013-page survey volume which reprinted the best early science fiction from Astounding Science Fiction and other magazines, found its way into libraries and schools across the country, and remained in print for decades. Its success virtually created the SF reprint anthology, which brought countless writers into permanent editions for the first time, and introduced them to a host of new readers. In 1952 the readers of Astounding/Analog voted Adventures in Time and Space the All-Time Best Book, beating out Slan, The Green Hills of Earth, and The Martian Chronicles.

After his enormous success with Adventures in Time and Space, Healy made one more major innovation. Instead of filling his next book with reprints, he bought brand new stories from the top writers in the field — and in the process invented the original science fiction anthology. The result was New Tales of Space and Time (1951). He did it again three years later with 9 Tales of Space and Time (1954). Both books were successful… and needless to say, highly influential, spawning thousands of imitators through the decades.

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