Black Gate – Page 588 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Vertigo-Inspiring Fantasy of Pain Magic, Corruption, and Murder: Francis Knight’s Rojan Dizon Trilogy

Monday, November 14, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

I’m a sucker for a great setting, and Francis Knight’s Rojan Dizon trilogy — which takes places in a towering city built layer upon layer, ascending to dizzying heights and ancient, shadowy depths; a city in the grips of a strange magic system based on pain — has a great setting. Knight has used the city of Mahala, which Library Journal says “recalls the vibrant, urban-based fantasies of China Miéville, Jay Lake, and Glen Cook,” as the setting for a complex and ambitious fantasy noir trilogy. It was published in trade paperback by Orbit in 2013, and I’ve been picking up the entire series for a couple bucks each at online remainder outlets this month.

Fade to Black (349 pages, $14.99 in trade paperback, $9.99 digital, February 26, 2013)
Before the Fall (384 pages, $15 in trade paperback, $9.99 digital, June 18, 2013)
Last to Rise (351 pages, $15 in trade paperback, $9.99 digital, November 26, 2013)

All three covers are by Tim Byrne.

The trilogy grew in acclaim as it progressed. Kirkus Reviews called the opening volume “Intensely realized and gripping,” and Booklist said it was “powerfully written, with a beautifully realized dystopian world and some thoroughly engaging characters.” And Publishers Weekly praised the closing volume, saying “The series, which has grown in complexity since the beginning, reaches a profoundly moving conclusion that is both unexpected and entirely satisfying.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Basil Rathbone & The Secret Weapon

Monday, November 14, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 2 comments

It’s reported that in early 1939, movie mogul Daryl Zanuck was at a party when a friend suggested that someone should make movies out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective stories. Zanuck liked the idea, but wondered aloud who should play Holmes. The friend, writer Gene Markey, replied “Basil Rathbone” without hesitation. He then added that Nigel Bruce would make a perfect Watson.

Shortly thereafter, the duo began filming The Hound of the Baskervilles, followed quickly by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Rathbone’s Hound is still considered the standard, nearly seventy years later. Both, released in 1939, were set in Victorian London, as opposed to the popular Arthur Wontner films of the thirties, which were Edwardian in design.

Surprisingly, Fox decided to pull the plug on the series. Rathbone kept his magnifying glass handy, however, as he and Nigel Bruce were starring as Holmes and Watson in a very popular radio series.

The first three Holmes films at Fox were Word War II thrillers. This isn’t a huge surprise, as the planet was aflame. While the two Fox movies could be seen as reassuring, British escapist fare, a money-focused studio could also look at them as quaint and irrelevant. Holmes fighting evil and bucking up nations entrenched in the good fight made commercial and patriotic sense.

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The November Fantasy Magazine Rack

Sunday, November 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Woof. It’s tough keeping up with all the great fantasy magazines on the market these days. But somebody’s got to do it, and it might as well be us.

Our tireless freelance reporters this month included John Linwood Grant, who told us about the (now successful!) Kickstarter for Occult Detective Quarterly, the new journal of supernatural sleuths and psychic investigators, and Rich Horton, who gave us a Retro-Review of the May and June 1965 issues of Amazing Science Fiction, with stories by Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak, Roger Zelazny, David R. Bunch, and many others. We also revisited the Summer issue of Lackington’s, containing a new sword & sorcery story by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly editor Adrian Simmons.

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

As we’ve mentioned before, all of these magazines are completely dependent on fans and readers to keep them alive. Many are marginal operations for whom a handful of subscriptions may mean the difference between life and death. Why not check one or two out, and try a sample issue? There are magazines here for every budget, from completely free to $35/issue. If you find something intriguing, I hope you’ll consider taking a chance on a subscription. I think you’ll find it’s money very well spent.

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Reading Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Eight

Sunday, November 13, 2016 Derek Kunsken Comments 0 Comment

Despite me not being a horror writer (or much of a reader, or a movie watcher), it surprises me that about a quarter of my posts end up touching on horror in some way. That being said, I am trying to crack to horror code, to see what makes it work, mostly because I’d love to have additional tools in my writerly toolbelt, and partly because I just like to figure stuff out.

I recently finished reading Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8 and thought I’d put my musings to paper (or electrons). In the interests of full disclosure, I appeared in her Best Horror of the Year, Volume 6 and may have gotten an honorable mention in Volume 2. That being said, I’ve got no other interest in this book — I just wanted to read the anthology and talk about it. Make of that what you will.

Now, it doesn’t take much of a definitional search to find the totally intuitive statement that horror fiction seeks to provoke shock, fear, repulsion or loathing. A bit more searching unearths the definition of weird fiction, the cousin of horror, which blends horror, fantasy and science fiction. I’m not trying to be academic or coy with my thoughts on Datlow’s 8th Best of the Year. This kind of grounding was necessary (for me) to fully take in what I was reading.

Why’s that? Ask most anthologists (or for that matter magazine editors who put 8-12 stories per month in an issue) what their concerns are, very often you’ll hear balance.

When I read a Gardner Dozois Year’s Best SF, I know he will balance space opera, with near future, with far future, with alternate history, with literary SF, with military SF, etc, etc. That is to say, like SF, horror has its own sub-genres and each one comes with its own conventions. You may be very disappointed if you read a literary SF story expecting to apply the conventions of military SF to your reading. I didn’t want my inexperience with the horror field to detract from my read of this year’s best.

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New Treasures: The Gates of Hell by Michael Livingston

Sunday, November 13, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Michael Livingston’s stories for Black Gate made him a favorite among our readers, so I was looking forward to seeing how the wider world would react to him with the publication of his first novel, The Shards of Heaven, a historical fantasy that reveals the hidden magic behind the history we know. I was not disappointed. Library Journal called it “Top-noth,” and bestselling writer Bernard Cornwell called it “A brilliant debut.” And Sam Reader at the B&N SF Blog gave it this rave review:

The Shards of Heaven is breathtaking in scope. With the first volume of a planned series intertwining Roman history and myth with Judeo-Christian mythology, Michael Livingston has created something truly epic… He uses real events and characters as the backbone for a truly inventive epic fantasy like novel, a massive undertaking that launches a tremendously ambitious series.

The Gates of Hell is second volume in the series; it’s available in hardcover from Tor on Tuesday.

Alexandria has fallen, and with it the great kingdom of Egypt. Cleopatra is dead. Her children are paraded through the streets in chains wrought of their mother’s golden treasures, and within a year all but one of them will be dead. Only her young daughter, Cleopatra Selene, survives to continue her quest for vengeance against Rome and its emperor, Augustus Caesar.

To show his strength, Augustus Caesar will go to war against the Cantabrians in northern Spain, and it isn’t long before he calls on Juba of Numidia, his adopted half-brother and the man whom Selene has been made to marry — but whom she has grown to love. The young couple journey to the Cantabrian frontier, where they learn that Caesar wants Juba so he can use the Trident of Poseidon to destroy his enemies. Perfidy and treachery abound. Juba’s love of Selene will cost him dearly in the epic fight, and the choices made may change the very fabric of the known world.

Michael Livingston’s most recent blog post for us was his 2015 article on the challenges of writing longer fiction.

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Saga’s The Starlit Wood Sings!

Saturday, November 12, 2016 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 8 comments

The Starlit Wood is an anthology of new fairy tales edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, and published by Saga Press.

It is, first of all, beautiful.

Beautiful to look at (just LOOK!), yes, but also to touch. So much care was poured into the initial aesthetics here; it is a book to fall in love with on sight. It has the appearance of both a very ancient — possibly magical — tome in a wizard’s tower, and of a peculiar stained glass window.

Is the image in the glass a tree that is also a doorway? Or is it that, on the other side of the window, there is a tree that is a doorway? And through that doorway, gold and flame.

The people who will love this book will love it before opening it, for the cover keeps its promises.

It begins with the Introduction. They wanted, wrote editors Wolfe and Parisien, for their authors to “move beyond the woods” of a traditional fairy tale. Now, in some stories this means “removing a piece traditionally viewed as integral to the story,” and in others, “putting a character as geographically far as possible from his or her original setting, as Little Red Riding Hood in the desert.” Perhaps most exciting of all (to me, anyway), it still other stories it means “exploring lesser-known or even newly discovered fairy tales.”

What they invite you into — that doorway through the tree, into flame? — is “an adventure that’s strangely familiar, and startlingly different.” And like the cover’s promises, Wolfe and Parisien make good their welcome.

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Fantasia 2016, Day 18, Part 1: Lunar Zombies (Train to Busan and Operation: Avalanche)

Saturday, November 12, 2016 Matthew David Surridge Comments 2 comments

On the morning of Sunday, August 1, I was in no particular hurry to get to the Hall Theatre. I planned to see the Korean zombie movie Train to Busan, but knowing it had already played the large room of the Hall once I didn’t anticipate I’d have difficulty finding a seat. I intended after that to go across the street to the De Sève Theatre, where I’d watch Operation: Avalanche, a found-footage fiction about filmmakers who’d faked the moon landing in 1969. Then I’d go have a bite to eat and come back for two more movies. It sounded like a nice well-spaced day, but when I got to the Hall ten minutes before Train to Busan was scheduled to start I found I’d radically underestimated the film’s popularity. As the doors opened to let the ticket-holders in, the line stretched around the corner, up to the next street, and then around the corner there. Luckily enough, I was able to find a good seat in the back of the Hall, where I watched the auditorium fill up with an enthusiastic crowd.

Train to Busan was directed and written by Yeon Sang-ho, whose animated zombie film Seoul Station I’d already seen at this year’s festival (some sources claim the two movies take place during the same zombie outbreak, but there’s no necessary connection between them — though it is interesting they both revolve around very different father-daughter relationships). The live-action film begins with a brief prologue mentioning a “leak at the biotech district.” Then we get to our main characters, Seok-woo (Yoo Gong), a callous divorced stockbroker taking his daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an) to Busan by train to spend her birthday with her mother. But something’s going on around them as the train starts on its way, and that something has made its way onto the train as well. This introductory section’s relatively slow, setting up characters and sub-plots on the train; and then the violence begins.

One zombie begets another. Characters begin to die. Slowly the survivors begin to understand what they’re dealing with, begin to work out the rules by which these creatures operate. Faced with horror, everyone does what they think they have to in order to ensure their own survival — and since this a Yeon Sang-ho movie, “pulling together for the common good” is off the table as an option. Some characters do learn to work as a team. Others use a knack for betrayal. Whatever it takes to live.

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The Grim Repercussions of Brotherly Love: Cornelia Funke’s The Petrified Flesh

Saturday, November 12, 2016 Damien Moore Comments 0 Comment

As you plunge into the into the depths of The Petrified Flesh, Cornelia Funke’s newly revised and updated first volume of her Mirrorworld trilogy, you start noticing things. Like that the two protagonists are named Jacob and Will and that they’re brothers with an undying love for one another. Unfortunately, that love has been thwarted by Jacob, the older of the two. For much of the time, he journeys through a treacherous and magical world which he inhabits with the help of a mirror located in their father’s study.

A shapeshifting vixen named Fox accompanies him on his journeys. His mother dies during one of his long forays into the world their father began calling home. When Will and his girlfriend, Clara, decide to follow Jacob into the unknown, a notorious Dark Fairy captures Will and leads Jacob’s band of friends into a perilous landscape conjured from the bubbling cauldrons of fairy tales. All the while, Jacob wrestles with his guilt over making his brother go through the same agonizing separation that he and his friends experience.

Funke does a masterful job at embedding her characters’ dark inner conflicts into the story. We feel for Jacob as he ruminates over his abandonment of his mother and brother. We feel for Fox, his shapeshifting companion, as she suffers through the agony of realizing she loves Jacob, while knowing he has nothing tying him down to her world. And we feel for Clara, who has her boyfriend torn away from her by a fearfully beautiful fairy for reasons beyond her comprehension. The fairy transforms Will into a jade goyl, which petrifies his flesh. The stone creature comes from a fairy tale, many of which are nestled into the story.

Fairy tale lovers will relish the generous references to beloved stories and the appearance of their characters. That the plot moves in the manner of a gorgeously realized fairy tale will not go unnoticed, either. Issues bigger than thwarted romance and revenge, such as prejudice, appear as well. The goyl and their struggle against humans comes off the page with a refreshing intensity and authenticity.

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Future Treasures: Clouds of War by Ben Kane

Saturday, November 12, 2016 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Ben Kane has been growing a rep for historical adventure novels. His Spartacus: The Gladiator was a bestseller in the UK, and his Forgotten Legion trilogy is a sword and sandal epic set in the late Roman republic ruled by the Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Clouds of War is the third novel in his Hannibal series, following Enemy of Rome and Fields of Blood. It tells the tale of the greatest war of the ancient world, as the legions of Rome clash with perhaps the greatest general of all time, Hannibal.

In 213 B.C., as the forces of both Rome and Hannibal’s army from Carthage are still reeling from the losses at the Battle of Canae, the second Punic War rages on. With more and more of Rome’s Italian allies switching allegiance to Carthage, the stakes continue to increase. When the major Sicilian city of Syracuse defects to Hannibal, Rome sends all that it has to retake the city. Now, outside the nearly impregnable city walls, a vast Roman Army besieges the city. Inside the city, tensions and politics are an even greater threat.

Two men ― once boyhood friends, through circumstance now find themselves fighting on opposing sides ― are about to face each other once again. Caught between them is a woman. All three trapped in one of the most famous and brutal sieges of all time.

Ben Kane’s Clouds of War is a vivid, exciting, and very human novel about one of the most defining conflicts in history, seen from the very top, where the generals make bold gambits, all the way down to the very bottom, where the people who are caught in the crossfire are trapped.

Clouds of War will be published by St. Martin’s Griffin on November 22, 2016. It is 486 pages, priced at $19.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent coverage of the best upcoming fantasy here.

Modular: An Interview with Jeffrey Talanian, the Creator and Publisher of Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea

Friday, November 11, 2016 Gabe Dybing Comments 4 comments

This November 3-5 I had the pleasure of attending the fourth iteration of Gamehole Con in lovely Madison, Wisconsin. At the con I had the additional pleasure of sitting down at Jeffrey Talanian’s table to play an Amazonian Fighter in Jeff’s Lovecraftian adventure “The Rats in the Walls”. I’m not going to give away spoilers here, but the creepy escapade had more to it than rats in walls! And, despite Jeff’s best attempts to kill us, our party overcame its antagonists in an epic last battle of first-level proportions! If you can’t tell from my exclamation points, it was great fun!

Jeff’s “The Rats in the Walls” takes place in the City-State of Khromarium. This is an area in Hyperborea, which is the official campaign setting for Jeff’s own roleplaying game that is published by North Wind Adventures. The second edition of Jeff’s game currently is 365% funded on Kickstarter with nine days left to go! After our game, Jeff graciously agreed to an interview with me. Here it is:

What is AS&SH?

AS&SH stands for Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, a role-playing game of swords, sorcery, and weird fantasy. It is a tabletop RPG inspired by the fiction of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Its rules are inspired by the works of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. AS&SH was released in 2012 as a boxed set. In 2013, it was nominated for several ENnie awards (Best Game, Best Production Values, Product of the Year), and in 2017 it will be rereleased in Second Edition hardback format.

Why did you create a game specific to the flavor of these writers and these genres? Did this grow out of what they call a “homebrew” game? If so, please tell us about that game and exactly how it resulted in AS&SH?

Growing up, I greatly admired fantasy, science fiction, and horror. I started reading genre fiction at a very young age (most notably the Conan paperbacks, The Hobbit, and The Chronicles of Narnia). I also got into comic books and magazines; Savage Sword of Conan and The Mighty Thor were my favorites. I also devoured sword-and-sorcery themed cartoons and films. I never missed an episode of Thundarr the Barbarian, and films like Conan the Barbarian, The Beastmaster, Hawk the Slayer, and Krull really captured my imagination in those halcyon days. I loved Tolkien, and read Lord of the Rings in the sixth grade, but for me it was always the grittier, more personal tales that I’ve loved most: Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Tarzan, John Carter, Carson Napier, Doc Savage, Gray Mouser, etc.

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