As I’ve noted before, if you neglect Scott H. Andrews and his magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies for more than 15 days or so, he’ll publish two issues, making you look out of touch and behind the times. So here I am playing catch-up, because Scott publishes magazines faster than I can write about them. In this post I’m going to cover the latest issue, #184, as well as their big Seventh Anniversary Double-Issue, #183. The cover art for both issues is “Sundown” by Feliks…
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Time flies when you’re having fun. My first post on Black Gate went up a bit more than five years ago, a piece about storytelling, role-playing games, and what happened when I ran a group of friends through the original Temple of Elemental Evil D&D module. A couple weeks later I began a run of weekly posts with a discussion of Arthur Howden Smith’s too-often-overlooked historical pulp adventure collection Grey Maiden. A couple weeks after that I finally got around…
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NOTE: The following article was first published on February 14, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text. It has long been my contention that pulp fiction not discovered…
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This is one section of a serialized novel presented by Black Gate magazine. It is offered at no cost and appears with the permission of Mark Rigney, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2015 by Mark Rigney. This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or current events is purely coincidental. Chapter One Once, it was said,…
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Back in January, I wrote a post on Terry Pratchett’s Cohen the Barbarian. It was primarily based on the short story “The Troll’s Bridge,” which was included in the anthology, After the King. That anthology was subtitled, ‘Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien.’ It included tales by nineteen fantasy and sci-fi authors, ostensibly all told in the style of Tolkien. The more cynical among us might view this as a cheap way to cash in on the Tolkien name (back…
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If you are in the Northumbrian town of Alnwick, chasing Hogwarts or visiting the Hotspur School of Defence, stop by Barter Books — it’s like that library in Name of the Rose, except all the books are for sale and the coffee’s better. Imagine a Victorian station turned into a used book store and you’re there. It’s where I get random stuff, or regret not buying it. For example, there was this 1930s book on WWI air warfare in Bulgaria…
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Many of George R. R. Martin’s legions of fans are unaware that, parallel to the epic storyline of A Game of Thrones, Martin has been quietly telling another tale of Westeros, featuring two unlikely wandering heroes. The story has unfolded in a series of novellas published in anthologies Martin and Gardner Dozois have edited over the past few years, and now at long last the stories are being collected in a deluxe volume, heavily illustrated by Gary Gianni, to be…
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Saturday, August 1, would start early for me at Fantasia. At 12:30 I was seeing a Chinese fantasy adventure called Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal. Then I’d head over to the screening room, where I planned to watch a documentary about the Turkish film industry, Remix, Remake, Ripoff: About Copy Culture and Turkish Pop Cinema. Then I’d go to the De Sève Theatre for a pair of films, the post-apocalypse art-house movie Orion and then the Korean drama Socialphobia….
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Three Task Force Games: Starfire (1979), Asteroid Zero-Four (1979), and Valkenburg Castle (1980) Task Force Games, based in Amarillo, Texas, was one of the very best board game companies in the business in the 80s, especially for science fiction fans. They published the majestic Federation & Empire (and its follow-up, Federation Commander), Kings Bounty, Godsfire, Battlewagon, Armor at Kursk, Musketeers, and the RPGs Crime Fighter, Prime Directive (based on Star Trek), and the glorious Heroes of Olympus — among many, many…
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Today, our ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series talks about my favorite REH stories: those featuring El Borak. David Hardy wrote the introduction to the Robert E. Howard Foundation’s The Early Adventures of El Borak and he also contributed what is essentially the afterward to Del Rey’s El Borak and Other Desert Adventures. There’s no one better suited to expound on Francis Xavier Gordon, so enough blathering from me. Let’s check out ‘The Swift.’ Francis Xavier Gordon, known from Stamboul to…
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