Black Gate – Page 568 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

HELP! Author’s House Robbed

Monday, January 16, 2017 Patty Templeton Comments 0 Comment

Friday the 13th didn’t do so well for indie author and helluva-nice-dude, Zig Zag Claybourne, also known as Clarence Young. Why, you ask? Because Zig Zag Claybourne’s house got robbed.

Claybourne doesn’t deserve this crap. No one does. So why not help a fantastic writer out?

How can you help?

You can buy one of his books. My favorite is The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan. If you’re a fan of Buckaroo Banzai or The Hitchhiker’s Guide, you should read it. Now is the perfect time to buy it — or any of his fine books. (CLICK TO BUY!)

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The Omnibus Volumes of Cassandra Rose Clarke: Magic of Blood and Sea and Magic of Wind and Mist

Monday, January 16, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Angry Robot is one of the most innovative (and successful) new genre publishing houses in the last decade. Not every aspect of its journey has been equally successful, however. Its Strange Chemistry imprint, launched in 2011 to publish young adult SF and fantasy, shut down in 2014… but not before publishing highly acclaimed new work by Martha Wells, Jonathan L. Howard, and three early novels by Cassandra Rose Clarke: The Assassin’s Curse (2012) and its sequel The Pirate’s Wish (2013), and The Wizard’s Promise (2014). A fourth novel, The Nobleman’s Revenge, the sequel to The Wizard’s Promise, was never published.

Clarke was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award for her first novel for adults, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, in 2013, and late last year Saga Press reprinted the book in a new trade paperback edition. Now they’re doing the same with Clarke’s Strange Chemistry novels. The Assassin’s Curse series will be reprinted in a handsome omnibus edition, Magic of Blood and Sea, arriving in hardcover in early February. And The Wizard’s Promise and the previously unpublished The Nobleman’s Revenge will appear in Magic of Wind and Mist in 2018.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Let’s Talk About The Dying Detective

Monday, January 16, 2017 Bob Byrne Comments 3 comments

Last week I wrote about the season four opener of BBC’s Sherlock, which was an improvement on season three and the abysmal Abominable Bride. But the second episode was yet another huge disappointment, so I’m not going to bother with a negative post about it. However, I’m going to talk about the Canonical story it was based on.

It’s no huge surprise that The Lying Detective was based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale, “The Dying Detective.” As far as that goes, The Lying Detective was actually a decent adaptation of the original story. That’s damning with faint praise, however, as I consider “The Dying Detective” to be one of the weakest stories in the Canon.

Appearing in December of 1913, it was the forty-sixth Holmes story to be published. It was one of just eight stories included in His Last Bow.

THE STORY

SPOILERS – I’m going to talk about a story that’s been out there for over one hundred years. And it features the most popular fictional character of all time. If you REALLY don’t want to be tipped off, jump over here and spend fifteen minutes reading it. You have been warned!

Holmes starves himself, looks ghastly, lays in bed, insults Watson, the villain comes over, helpfully confesses, is arrested and Holmes reveals that the was faking it. Yep, that’s the whole thing. Holmes lies in bed for all but a few seconds of the story (he jumps up to lock Watson in the room). No deducing, no finding clues, no nothing. His work in trying to pin a murder on Culverton Smith all happens beforehand.

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Victoria II: When Peace Was Rare, and War Was an Old Friend

Sunday, January 15, 2017 eeknight Comments 0 Comment

While seeking an escape from the distressing politics of the early Twenty-First Century, I decided to plunge headlong into the distressing politics of the Nineteenth Century and picked up a game I’ve long been meaning to try: Victoria II. It was a good call. This civ-building game is quite an achievement. I find it a good deal more engrossing than the Civ series (admittedly, I have a tough time jumping the mental hurdle of Abe Lincoln building pyramids). Something about the era just hits the spot.

You might wonder how good a Civilization-type game can be if it covers just a hundred years from the 1830-1930s, but think about all the key stuff that happened then. Industrialization. Rise of the nation-state. Colonialism. Marxism. Revolutions in science and industry. La Belle Époque and the Great War.

The challenges in the game are quite convincing, and there’s all sorts of matters to juggle with everything from the immigrant balance of your population to your tech tree (“I’m going to rush Freudian psychoanalysis”). The game is both broad and deep, broad in that you can play just about any nation-state (some require a little jiggering — if you wish to play Poland you first have to control it as a Great Power, then free it. The game allows you to switch nations if you wish every time you do this) and deep in that it allows you to micromanage your economy, if your political regime allows it, that is.

The different nations do have some realistic flavor built into them. You can take Japan out of feudalism, or try to hold Russia together, wake the sleeping giant that is China, unite Germany, or be those miserable fat Belgian bastards in the Congo.

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New Treasures: Lords of Dyscrasia by S.E. Lindberg

Sunday, January 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

I met Seth Lindberg at the World Fantasy Convention back in October. He co-moderates the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group, one of the rare groups that pays a lot of attention to genre magazines, like Cirsova and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He also maintains a fairly active (and excellent) blog — check out his recent reviews of Joe Bonadonna’s Mad Shadows II, and Skelos issue #1.

He’s also an acclaimed S&S author in his own right. Joe Bonadonna wrote a rave review of his first novel Lords of Dyscrasia here at Black Gate last year. Here’s Joe.

Lords of Dyscrasia (an abnormal or disordered state of the body or of a bodily part) is touted as “Graphic Sword and Sorcery,” but to me it has more in common with the dark fantasy of Clark Ashton Smith and the gothic tones of Mervyn Peake’s first two Gormenghast books. There is some nice Lovecraftian shading to this novel, as well, with a touch of Edgar Allen Poe to lend it a feverishness of tone, and even a psychedelic flavor in style.

While Lindberg channels his influences with a deft hand, he has mapped out a beautifully grotesque world that is truly his own unique creation. This book was described to me as being part of the Grimdark subgenre of dark fantasy, and it is indeed a grim, dark tale….

This is a complex and well-written novel, very difficult to describe. The settings and the atmosphere are rich in color and texture, and story’s pace is almost relentless: it rushes along like a bullet train, with very few stops along the way. Although Lysis Endeken is the main character, it is the weird and wonderful Doctor Grave who really rises above all others.

I bought a copy of this novel from Seth at the convention, and I’m glad I did. It’s become the foundation of a popular new S&S series, and the second volume, Spawn of Dyscrasia, was published in 2014.

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Download Some of the Best from Tor.com 2016 For Free Before January 17th!

Sunday, January 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Some of the Best from Tor.com 2014-small

Every year since 2011 Tor.com, one of the top short fiction markets in the industry, has compiled a collection of some of their finest short fiction into a digital anthology. And this year they’re making the latest edition completely free on their website — but only until January 17th. Act now to grab your free copy today!

We are very excited to offer a free download of the 2016 edition of Some of the Best from Tor.com, an anthology of 25 of our favorite short stories and novelettes from the last year. The ebook edition will be available as a free download here until January 17th, it will also be made available wherever ebooks are sold for the duration of 2017.

Of course, you can always enjoy all of our free weekly short stories by visiting Tor.com’s fiction index.

These stories were acquired and edited for Tor.com by Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, Carl Engle-Laird, Liz Gorinsky, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Justin Landon, Diana Pho, and Miriam Weinberg. Each story is accompanied by an original illustration.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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A Detective With the Mind of a Criminal: The Casefiles of Mr. J G Reeder, by Edgar Wallace

Sunday, January 15, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Wordsworth Editions published dozens of titles in their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural imprint (or, as we like to call them, TOMAToS), featuring classic tales of detection, horror and ghostly doings from Robert E. Howard, Rudyard Kipling, Sheridan Le Fanu, William Hope Hodgson, W.F. Harvey, Edith Nesbit, Oliver Onions, E.F. Benson, and many others.

Wordsworth has revamped the entire series (see their website for the dramatic redesign), and they’re letting all the older titles gradually go out of print… which means it’s definitely time to snatch up those I still don’t have. Like The Casefiles of Mr. J G Reeder, an omnibus collection of three pulp-era books by popular British thriller writer Edgar Wallace.

How on earth did you piece together all this? he asked in wonder. Mr Reeder shook his head sadly. I have that perversion, he said. It is a terrible misfortune. I see evil in everything. I have the mind of a criminal.

Let us introduce you to the enigmatic J. G. Reeder, a timid, gentle middle-aged man who carries a furled up umbrella and wears an old-fashioned flat-topped bowler hat. He is one of the great unsung sleuths of mystery fiction, created by the prolific Edgar Wallace, the King of Thrillers. Despite his insignificant appearance, Reeder is a cold and ruthless detective who credits his success to his criminal mind which allows him to solve a series of complex and audacious crimes and outwit the most cunning of villainous masterminds.

This volume is a rich feast for crime fiction fans, containing the first three volumes in the Reeder canon: two novels, Room 13 and Terror Keep; and the classic collection of short stories, The Mind of J. G. Reeder.

Edgar Wallace was an enormously popular mystery and thriller writer of the 20s and 30s. More than 160 films have been based on his work, and The Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine was a popular digest magazine in the mid-60s. But perhaps his most famous creation was the script for King Kong (1933); he died of complications of diabetes while working on revisions with director Merian C. Cooper.

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Shimmer 35 Now on Sale

Saturday, January 14, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Shmmer magazine has one of those Browse Stories by Tag! options at the bottom of their website. Clicking individual tags will take you to all the tales in their inventory with those tags. Some are a little headscratching (What’s the point of the awesome tag? Are some stories not awesome? Or maybe it’s awesome birds?), but overall, I’m enormously pleased to see that the most active tags this month are death ghosts haunted monsters. Shimmer, you’re all right.

Shimmer #35, the latest issue, is cover-dated January 2017, and it comes packed with new fiction by L.M. Davenport, Malon Edwards, Emily Lundgren and Mary Robinette Kowal. It’s been far too long since we’ve covered Shimmer, so let’s get down to it.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Pellucidar

Saturday, January 14, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 9 comments

Welcome back to the concave world of Pellucidar and the second novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series of adventures within the globe: the eponymous Pellucidar. ERB left readers in suspense about the fate of hero David Innes at the close of At the Earth’s Core, but only a year later delivered audiences from the tension and closed out a duology about the Imperial Conquest of the Pellucidar. (And we still have five more volumes to go after this.)

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic… Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Pellucidar (1915)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914)

The Backstory

During the mid-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs frequently wrote with the aim of creating two-part novels. The books we know today as The Mad King, The Cave Girl, and The Eternal Lover are combinations of an original novel and its closely connected sequel. The Pellucidar series might have gone the same way. The sequel to At the Earth’s Core was written at this time and serves as an immediate follow-up that brings the story of its first novel to a conclusion. If Burroughs hadn’t returned to the setting fourteen years later and continued writing more about Pellucidar, it’s possible that At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar would be considered a single novel today — probably simply titled At the Earth’s Core. (My title choice would be Conquest of the Earth’s Core.)

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Modular: Three Viking Age Supplements and One Role-Playing Game

Saturday, January 14, 2017 Gabe Dybing Comments 8 comments

When I first discovered the Yggdrasill roleplaying game, I had the understanding that that Vikings-specific system existed in near-isolation. Oh how wrong I was! As I have purchased, downloaded and read Norse-themed rpg materials from DriveThruRPG and other sites, I have discovered that interest in the Northern ethos has been quite lively for some time. When, either out of mere curiosity or out of design to add to my home game, I first thought to collect Viking Age supplements, my mind naturally went to I.C.E.’s Vikings supplement for both Rolemaster and the Hero System: this was because, in my coming-of-age in the late 80s/early 90s, I was an ardent GM of MERP (Middle-Earth Role Playing, a scaled-down version of the Rolemaster rules set) and passionate about the Hero System in the form of Champions, a super-hero roleplaying game. But in those years, a young gamer with limited funds, I never could justify a pragmatic purpose for purchasing the I.C.E. Vikings supplement.

That situation has changed, now that I’m older and I have extra cash, but I still don’t have that I.C.E. supplement. The reason? Because it’s out of print and only available in hard copy via third party purveyors. The process of obtaining this seems like needless trouble when there are so many instant-gratification products available as immediate PDF downloads.

Today I will be reviewing, in the order in which I discovered and read them, three of these: GURPS Vikings, Troll Lord Games’s Codex Nordica, and Vikings of Legend for the Legend RPG System. All three of these seek to evoke a Viking Age roleplaying experience while using an existing rules set, the second type that I outline in my last post. I’ll say at the outset, though, that Codex Nordica read a lot like Vidar Solaas’s Vikings RPG, and I’m certain this is because of the similarity of the two systems that were being adapted for the Viking Age feel. Both Solaas’s D20 system and Brian N. Young’s Castles and Crusades engine have their foundations in Dungeons & Dragons, which has enjoyed so many iterations now that most of them aren’t even called Dungeons & Dragons anymore. Last post I allowed Solaas the distinction of having created an “original” Old Norse game, since he had to “hack” the D20 system so much. I’m tempted to award Young this same distinction, since in my view he visibly wrestled with many of the inflexibilities that I perceive in D&D games. But ultimately it belongs in the rpg supplement group; the following observation shares only one reason for this designation.

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