Black Gate – Page 550 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Check Out the Serial Box Omnibus Collections from Saga Press

Friday, January 6, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Over in their own corner of the internet, Serial Box is conducting a quiet little revolution in modern fantasy. Tapping into the power and availability of digital readers, Serial Box has brought a very old concept — serialized fiction — into the 21st Century.

Although maybe television is a better comparison. Like TV, Serial Box offers multiple stories in a rich variety of genres, and they release new episodes every week. Each of their serials typically runs for a “season” of 10-16 weeks, and each is written by a team of talented writers. The stories are easy to jump into, the individual episodes are standalone (but contribute to a larger story arch), and each episode is available in both digital and audio formats. There are five ongoing series so far:

Tremontaine — The prequel to Ellen Kushner’s famed Riverside series (Swordspoint, The Privilege of the Sword, The Fall of The Kings)
Bookburners — A secret team of agents hunts down dangerous books containing deadly magic
ReMade — 23 teenagers all die the same minute, and wake up in a world of robots, space elevators, and dense jungle
Whitehall — An historical tale of Catherine of Braganza, filled with Intrigue, romance, and scandal
The Witch Who Came In From the Cold — Spies and sorcerers battle for home and country in Cold War Prague

Now Saga Press has created omnibus collections of Bookburners (coming January 31) and Tremontaine (May 2), as well as The Witch Who Came in from the Cold (June 13). Here’s all the deets.

…

Read More Read More

Modular: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About The Temple of Elemental Evil

Friday, January 6, 2017 Bob Byrne Comments 4 comments

Chainmail re-enactment of T1: The Village of Hommlet
at Garycon II, 2010 (click for bigger version)

Okay — maybe a bit of hyperbole there. About a month ago, I wrote about my favorite AD&D module, T1 – The Village of Hommlet. I mentioned that its follow-up, The Temple of Elemental Evil, was delayed for several years before Frank Mentzer completed it. Read on to learn about how Gary Gygax developed Hommlet and the Temple through play sessions and my deduction of why Temple was delayed for a few years.

Gygax and Rob Kuntz were constantly adding new levels and different environments to the dungeons under Castle Greyhawk as the players continued to eat up new content, always wanting more. Gygax began focusing his attention on developing a new region, with a campaign focusing on Hommlet and the Temple of Elemental Evil. With his game simply growing too big, Gygax split it, giving Greyhawk and its dungeons to Kuntz while he continued to work on Hommlet and the Temple.

Gygax’ son and a friend were starting to play, so Gary used the Hommlet campaign as a new, low level adventure for them, distinguishing it from the high level Greyhawk play. Gygax was busy developing TSR products and the Greyhawk Supplement (I) had come out for the Original Rules.

The Hommlet campaign was different than the Greyhawk dungeon delves. There was a village, with a smithy, an inn, a local elder, set in a rural environment. The party could role play in the village then move on to the dungeons of the Temple. It’s possible that Gygax ran players through some iterations of Hommlet and the Temple in late 1975 and into 1976.

…

Read More Read More

So, What Time Is It?

Friday, January 6, 2017 Violette Malan Comments 0 Comment

It’s not often that we in the Fantasy and SF community get two time-travel related productions – the movie Arrival, and the TV series Timeless – at once. Even better, we’re being served two different theories of time, and time travel. (There might be some spoilers for those of you who haven’t seen either film or TV show, so watch out.)

I’ve talked about time as a literary device before, and I’ve looked at time travel specifically as well. In the earlier piece I mentioned the 17^th-century English philosopher John Locke, and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), in which he suggests that humans don’t experience time (or any other abstraction) directly. What we experience is actually a sequence of events, which he calls “duration.” One thing follows another, in one direction, which give us the idea that time is linear.

Aside, Fun Experiment: ask someone to point at yesterday. As a general rule, they’ll do one of two things. They’ll point behind them, or they’ll point to the left (or maybe to the right, if their culture reads that way)

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Game Over Man, Game Over

Thursday, January 5, 2017 Sue Granquist Comments 9 comments

Having been exceptionally good this year, relatively speaking, Santa brought me the second-most-wished-for item on my list. I sort of understand why it really wasn’t in Santa’s power to bring my most-wished-for “Men of Black Gate” calendar, but the second item was almost as awesome – a Virtual Reality (VR) headset.

If you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing one of these such as the Oculus Rift, then you know how next-level-amazing it is for total immersion into movies and gaming; so much so that the units come riddled with all manner of warnings about motion sickness and disorientation.

Now, imagine the possibilities when considering using it within the horror genre.

Specifically something like the Aliens franchise.

…

Read More Read More

Writing Life: The Arrow Storm

Thursday, January 5, 2017 M Harold Page Comments 4 comments

We — well a mate and I — call it the Arrow Storm. It’s like Seth Godin’s Dip, but different. The experience looms large in the lives of professional creatives, but it’s not unique to us. Let me explain.

Imagine you’re a knight. Your enemies are a bunch of peasants on top of a hill. Once you get amongst them with your sword, they are almost literally mincemeat:

[The peasants] shouted out, and cried, “Put him to death.” When he heard this, he let his horse go; and drawing a handsome Bordeaux sword, he began to skirmish, and soon cleared the crowd from about him, that it was a pleasure to see.

Some [peasants] attempted to close with him; but with each stroke he gave, he cut off heads, arms, feet or legs. There were no so bold but were afraid; and Sir Robert [Salle] performed that day marvellous feats of arms. These wretches were upwards of forty thousand… he killed twelve of them, besides many whom he wounded. (source)

Whee! And that’s just one (doomed) knight without any armour or backup. In this scenario, you are advancing with your comrades and you have you armour.

Unfortunately, these peasants are armed with longbows.

…

Read More Read More

Andrew Liptak Selects the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of 2016

Thursday, January 5, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Andrew Liptak, the weekend editor at The Verge, has produced his own list of The 11 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of 2016, and it’s a very fine list indeed — solidifying the consensus around some of the strongest titles of 2016 (Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, sequel to her Hugo Award winning The Fifth Season), and adding several overlooked titles to the discussion (Ken Liu’s The Wall of Storms, Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines, and one that’s not even a novel — Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Big Book of Science Fiction, one of my favorite books of the year).

Andrew’s list also makes fine reading for those, like me, who delight in the subtle art of the plot summary. Here he is on Malka Older’s Infomocracy (Tor.com, June).

In a year with a contentious election, it would seem that reading a book about a futuristic election might be a bit much. That’s not the case with Malka Older’s Infomocracy. Set in the indeterminate future, the world is divided into small districts, and the party that controls the most districts controls policy for the entire planet. Infomocracy is a intellectually stimulating thriller that follows a handful of characters who work for various political parties and election systems. The story hinges on how a voting public receives and interprets information — and how parties manipulate that perception. It’s a book that’s all too relevant in 2016.

Here’s his summary for Allen Steele’s Arkwright (Tor Books, March).

…

Read More Read More

Visiting the Two Towers in Bologna

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 Sean McLachlan Comments 0 Comment

The Garisenda Tower on the left measures 48 meters high.
The Asinelli Tower soars to 97.2 meters. Both now stand at a slight tilt

Happy 2017 everybody! I spent the last few days of 2016 with my family in Bologna, exploring a part of Italy I had never visited. The most prominent landmarks in the city are a series of tall medieval towers, the tallest of which you can climb to get a beautiful vista of Bologna and the surrounding countryside.

Rich families in Bologna began to build towers in the 12th century, both for defense and to show off their wealth and power. Bologna wasn’t the only city where people did this — Rome had some lovely examples — but Bologna may have had the most towers. Historians estimate that by the 13th century, there may have been as many as 180 of them. Others make a more modest estimate of “only” 80-100.

…

Read More Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 215 Now Available

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Issue #215 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now available, completely free on their website. It is dated December 22 and features fiction by Linden A. Lewis and Jordan Kurella, and a reprint by Erin Cashier.

Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews was enthusiastic about both new stories. Here’s the intro to his review of “The True and Otherworldly Origins of the Name ‘Calamity Jane'” by Jordan Kurella.

This story makes me want to know more about history. So mission accomplished on that! It also gets my blood pumping, as it’s an action-packed fantasy Western with a fast pace and a fun (slightly creepy) aesthetic. Seriously, this piece takes a fantastical look back at the Old West to look at Jane, a woman who’s tried to get out of the fairy-hunting game ever since Earl, her partner, disappeared. Of course, with fairies and deals and trying to get out of the game, there’s always something that pulls a person back in. So it is with Jane when a pair of fairies steals an entire town’s worth of people in an attempt to draw Jane into a bad deal…

Read Charles’s complete review here.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents for issue 215.

…

Read More Read More

Generation Ships and Martian Rebels: Rich Horton on 200 Years to Christmas by J. T. McIntosh and Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

In its 26-year history (1952-1978) the Ace Double series published over 520 SF novels and collections, including original work by some of the greatest SF writers of the 20th Century, such as Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, Fritz Leiber, Clifford D. Simak, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, and many others.

Of course, it also published writers who aren’t nearly as well remembered today, like Margaret St. Clair, Kenneth Bulmer, Robert Moore Williams, Charles de Vet, William F. Temple, Robert Lowndes, Jack Sharkey, Jerry Sohl, and others. As you probably suspect, not all of those books are winners, but there’s plenty of interesting stuff buried in the dusty nooks and crannies of the Ace library.

And Rich Horton is the guy to find it. He has an ongoing series of reviews of Ace Doubles at his website, Strange at Ecbatan. Recently he talked about a forgotten Ace Double from 1961 by two writers I’m unfamiliar with: the generation-ship tale 200 Years to Christmas by J. T. McIntosh, and a novel of forbidden genetic experiments and rebellion on Mars, Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya Dyer

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Thoraiya Dyer is an Australian writer who has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Apex, Cosmos, Analog, and multiple anthologies. Crossroads of Canopy, her debut novel, is set in a giant mythical rainforest controlled by living gods. It will be published in hardcover at the end of this month by Tor Books. Want to get in on the ground floor on a fast-rising career? Now’s your chance.

At the highest level of a giant forest, thirteen kingdoms fit seamlessly together to form the great city of Canopy. Thirteen goddesses and gods rule this realm and are continuously reincarnated into human bodies. Canopy’s position in the sun, however, is not without its dark side. The nation’s opulence comes from the labor of slaves, and below its fruitful boughs are two other realms: Understorey and Floor, whose deprived citizens yearn for Canopy’s splendor.

Unar, a determined but destitute young woman, escapes her parents’ plot to sell her into slavery by being selected to serve in the Garden under the goddess Audblayin, ruler of growth and fertility. As a Gardener, she wishes to become Audblayin’s next Bodyguard while also growing sympathetic towards Canopy’s slaves.

When Audblayin dies, Unar sees her opportunity for glory – at the risk of descending into the unknown dangers of Understorey to look for a newborn god. In its depths, she discovers new forms of magic, lost family connections, and murmurs of a revolution that could cost Unar her chance… or grant it by destroying the home she loves.

Crossroads of Canopy is Book One in the Titan’s Forest Trilogy. It will be published by Tor Books on January 31, 2017. It is 333 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Marc Simonetti. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.