Black Gate – Page 654 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Cuenca: A Clifftop Medieval Town in Spain

Wednesday, April 20, 2016 Sean McLachlan Comments 2 comments

One of the famous “hanging houses” of Cuenca

An hour’s train ride from Madrid is a small medieval town that’s often overlooked by international visitors. Cuenca has been an important town since the 8th century and has heaps of historic sights as well as natural beauty.

Located in rough hills and on a spur between the deep valleys of the Júcar and Huécar rivers, it’s a naturally defensible position and was fortified by the conquering Moors in 714. There is little remaining from the Islamic era because after it was conquered in 1177 by King Alfonso VIII, the city was extensively remodeled by him and several later monarchs.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Wednesday, April 20, 2016 William I. Lengeman III Comments 6 comments

I’m not always the most attentive or detail oriented movie watcher. So, as I came to the end of The Voyage Home, the fourth of the original cast Star Trek movies, I realized that I still didn’t know exactly what was going on with those whales.

After movie three — The Search For Spock — the crew of the late starship Enterprise (watch the aforementioned for more details on that) are laying over on Vulcan, getting their commandeered Klingon ship up to speed when Earth finds itself menaced by a Big Dumb Object of some sort. It demands that it be paid a tribute of whales – or something like that — or it will wipe out the Earth in dramatic fashion. Our heroes enact that time honored SF convention of slingshotting around the sun to go several centuries back in time (with keen precision, I must note) and pick up a few whales, which they spirit off in a hastily built whale tank in the Klingon ship.

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Vintage Treasures: Inter Ice Age 4 by Kōbō Abe

Wednesday, April 20, 2016 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The recent success of foreign SF writers in translation in the US — including Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Hex), among others — seems like a modern phenomenon. But truthfully, our genre has been open to talented writers from around the world for decades. As far back as the days of Jules Verne, Americans have been warmly receptive to foreign SF writers, and over the decades that’s included authors like Stanislaw Lem (Solaris), Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities), Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths), Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic), Pierre Boulle (The Planet of the Apes) and Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher).

Japanese writer Kōbō Abe (the pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe, who died in 1993) isn’t as well remembered here as some others, but he had a considerable impact in Japan. In 1951 he received Japan’s most important literary award, the Akutagawa, for his novel The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma, and in 1960 his novel The Woman in the Dunes won the Yomiuri Prize. His 1959 novel Inter Ice Age 4 imagines a world slowly being submerged by melting polar ice, and the desperate race to genetically modify children so they can survive the coming underwater age — and the strange prophetic computer that attempts to guide mankind into a very uncertain future.

Inter Ice Age 4 was written in 1959, and published in paperback in the US by Berkely in March 1972. It is 223 pages, priced at 95 cents. The cover is by Richard Powers. I acquired the unread copy above for about 60 cents last month, as part of a collection of 42 vintage SF paperbacks on eBay I bought for $27. Click the images for bigger versions.

Kelly Link Collection Get in Trouble is a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Kelly Link’s sixth collection, Get In Trouble, was listed as one of two finalists for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday by the Pulitzer Prize Board, including the award for fiction, “for distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”

The winner was Viet Thanh Nguyen, for his novel The Sympathizer. The Board also recognized two finalists, the novel Maud’s Line by Margaret Verble, and Kelly Link’s short story collection Get in Trouble. In their commendation on the website, the Board described Get in Trouble like this:

A collection of short stories in which a writer with a fertile and often fabulist imagination explores inner lies and odd corners of reality.

Get in Trouble was published in hardcover by Random House February 3, 2015, and reprinted in paperback on February 9, 2016. It is 368 pages, priced at $16 for the trade paperback, and $11.99 for the digital version.

New Treasures: Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ron Rash is the author of Serena, a New York Times bestseller which was made into a Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper film with the same title in 2014. He’s also the author of The Cove and Above the Waterfall, and is a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize.

I was tipped off to his short story collection Something Rich and Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. Although the stories within are not genre fiction, there’s plenty here to reward readers of weird fiction. Entertainment Weekly said “This anthology of Rash’s earthy, often eerie short stories is like a forest you can get lost in for hours, small but affecting tales of poverty, addiction, pride, love, and despair threaded with life-altering acts of violence.” And NPR said “Rich and strange are two words that aptly apply to this book. I have two other words to continue with: Simply beautiful… some of the stories are so searing, it’s as if someone has taken a stick from a blazing fire and pressed it into your hand.”

Something Rich and Strange was published by Ecco on August 11, 2015. It is 448 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback, and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Jamie Heiden. Click the covers above for bigger versions.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 197 Now Available

Tuesday, April 19, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Issue #197 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies features a sword & sorcery tale by Tony Pi and a fanciful animal fantasy by Kelly Stewart, two podcasts by Tony Pi, and a reprint by Tina Connolly. Nicky Magas at Tangent Online liked the Stewart, and had mixed feelings on the Pi:

Ao has a fairly unique ability in Tony Pi’s “The Sweetest Skill.” Although he appears to be naught but a candy maker, Ao’s family has a long symbiotic history with the zodiac spirit animals that grant him the ability to form magical constructs out of simple materials. But absolute loyalty to the spirits is required for such power, and the penalty for disobedience can be awful, as Ao well knows. So when the spirit of King Tiger shows up one night with a request to rescue a divine tigress in need, Ao is more than a little wary. On the other hand, he owes a debt of gratitude to the injured spirit and all debts must be paid, even if that means going up against the sorcery of the Ten Crows gang… “The Sweetest Skill” is a neatly packaged sword and sorcery story set in a broader narrative world. The characters, the setting, and the plot are all decently constructed, but lack a stylistic charm to be truly eye-popping…

Aril knows that you ought never invite Rabbits into the garden, in Kelly Stewart’s “Rabbit Grass.” There’s no getting rid of them or fixing the damage they do if you’re silly enough not to heed that bit of advice. All the same, there’s something about the little Rabbit Picket that Aril can’t ignore. And conversation never hurt anyone, did it?… But Picket won’t stop going on about the non-existent Rabbit Grass, and when he shows up at her window one night looking desperate and worried, Aril won’t rest until she’s aided her unlikely companion, even if it means venturing into the Rabbit warrens herself. Part Peter Rabbit and part Alice in Wonderland, “Rabbit Grass” is… a lovely pastoral fantasy.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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In the Wake Of Sister Blue: Chapter Fifteen (The End!)

Monday, April 18, 2016 markrigney Comments 0 Comment

Linked below, you’ll find the final installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue. Yes, you heard a’right. This, me hearties, do be the closing section. For now. This will be Book One of a pair (but no, not an ongoing, endless cycle), and you have reached the Continental Divide between the two.

As part of the work of laboring on to the end, I’ve also gone back to the beginning with an eye toward cleaning up typos, improving the prose as needed, and catching the odd mistake. Let’s face it, serialization (at speed) is an invitation to inconsistency. More on that another day, but for now, suffice it to say that the manuscript as a whole is now a good deal neater and cleaner.

A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles (or perhaps my unexpectedly popular D&D-related post, “Youth In a Box,”) I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. Oh, and if you’re only now discovering this portal, may I suggest you begin at the beginning? The Spur awaits…

Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

Read the fifteenth and final installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.

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Future Treasures: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Monday, April 18, 2016 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Last year Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt won a Hugo Award for his story “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” During my lengthy discussion with Tor editor Liz Gorinsky, who edited Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem (which won the Hugo for Best Novel last year), I learned that she was also editing Heuvelt’s first book to be published in English, the horror novel HEX.

Liz seems to have an unerring sense for foreign SF and fantasy that will appeal to an American audience. I trust her taste implicitly, and I find myself very intrigued by HEX. It was a bestselling novel in its original Dutch version; the English edition arrives in hardcover from Tor next week.

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay ’til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.

HEX will be published by Tor on April 26. It is 384 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. It was translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Tony Hillerman

Monday, April 18, 2016 Bob Byrne Comments 7 comments

Last week, I wrote about John Cleese’s Elementary, My Dear Watson. I’m struggling through my re-watch of his The Strange Case of The End of Civilization as We Know It (I thought it was bad on first viewing: nothing has changed my mind this time around), so that isn’t ready to go yet. So, here’s the first of several posts related to a Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster: the late Tony Hillerman.

“I was writing episodically because this short book stretched about three years from 1967 to 1970 from first paragraph to final revision – with progress frequently interrupted by periods of sanity – probably induced by fatigue and sleepiness. Most of my efforts at fiction were done after dinner when the kids were abed, papers were graded and the telephone wasn’t ringing.

Sometimes, in those dark hours, I would realize that the scene I finished was bad, the story wasn’t moving, the book would never be published, and I couldn’t afford wasting time I could be using to write nonfiction people would buy.

Then I would pull the paper from the typewriter (remember those?), put the manuscript back in the box, and the box on the shelf to sit for days, or some times a week, until job stress eased and the urge to tell the story returned.”

So did Tony Hillerman, decorated World War II combat veteran, former newspaper reporter and then-current university teacher, very slowly, write The Blessing Way. Hillerman is not a Navajo. He’s a Caucasian who grew up in a small Oklahoma village on land belonging to the Potawatomi tribe. He went to the local Indian school for first through eighth grade and from an early age had no prejudices against Indians. They were just kids, like him. It shaped the character that let him write about the Navajos in a realistic and sympathetic manner. They aren’t simply stereotypes in a mystery book.

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Sci-ficionados: Our Insatiable Hunger for Stories, and What it Means for the Human Race

Monday, April 18, 2016 Nick Ozment Comments 7 comments

Fans of science fiction and fantasy tend to have an innate curiosity, one that is not sated simply by day-to-day life and the world as it is. They cannot content themselves with the rote script written for them.

There are people all around who are content simply to go to school, get a job, have a family, raise kids to follow the same formula, retire. And some of these people are well informed — they read the news to see what’s going on. They have hobbies. They like to be entertained — they watch sitcoms to have a laugh at the status quo. They may even watch some of those movies with zombies and giant robots and superheroes to let a little bit of their imagination off the leash: what if this predictable old world were shaken up by something like that?

But the real sci-ficionados, they aren’t content with an occasional, half-winking excursion into the game of what-if before settling back down onto the landing pad of Reality. Because they recognize, deep down, that this is not the only possible world, and that this so-called reality is also utterly strange. They want to know about nano-tech and parasites and the Inquisition and how and why homo sapiens developed a larger prefrontal cortex and what the hell are dreams anyway? And a hundred, a thousand, a million other things. Why is this society the way it is, and is it foreordained that we must follow this script?

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