Interzone 204 now on Sale

Interzone 204 now on Sale

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Interzone 294 (MYY Press, January 2023)

Last summer I reported that Interzone, the leading British science fiction magazine, had been sold. After 19 years and exactly 100 issues. Andy Cox at TTA Press brought his storied reign as editor to a triumphant close — though he does continue to produce his excellent magazine of modern horror, Black Static.

Interzone was acquired by MMY Press in Poland, and the new editor is Gareth Jelley. I ordered a copy of issue #294, the first with Jelley at the helm, for €15 (about $16.70 US, including shipping to the US), and was astonished when the massive 256-page issue arrived in my mailbox about a week later.

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Infected: The Last of Us, Episode Two

Infected: The Last of Us, Episode Two

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Good afternoon! Well, we’re currently well behind the actual airing of the show, so if you aren’t prepared for spoilers for episode two of this show, you should probably stop reading now and go watch the episode. It’s a good ‘un.

I should also note that other than this intro, much of this article was written shortly after the second episode aired, largely because I don’t want future episodes to influence what I write about each episode. So even though I am actually caught up, it will read like I’m not. Alright! C’est parti!

[Read about episode one here.]

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: I Know That Actor!

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: I Know That Actor!

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If you’re a FB friend of mine (and why wouldn’t you be?), you are aware that I like to play ‘I Know that Actor’ there. I even wrote this post about it for Black Gate. It started with my love of Columbo. I would snap a screenshot of a guest star, and talk about that character, and other roles I liked them in.

Other folks would often leave a comment about that actor. I’ve ‘played the game’ with many other shows I watch/re-watch, such as Monk, Psych, White Collar, Burn Notice, The Rookie; lots of shows have familiar faces pop in.

If you know me at all, you know that Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe is my favorite mystery series. And I LOVE A&E’s too-short TV series. Which I wrote about here. That show had a repertory cast. It was a Canadian production, and I often see folks on other shows (especially Murdoch Mysteries, and Hallmark Christmas flicks). So, I often do a variation of the actor game, over on the Wolfe Pack FB page. I gathered up the posts I could reasonably find and made today’s post!

As the pic to the left shows, Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton were the co-stars. I have posted Chaykin in Powers Boothe’s terrific Philip Marlowe series. I think that he’s best-known as the ‘No Southern gentleman’ testimony on instant grits in My Cousin Vinnie.

Hutton most notably (for me) starred in the terrific USA Network show, Leverage. Due to a rape allegation made 25 years after the alleged incident (the complaint was dismissed) he was left out of the reboot, Leverage: Redemption.  Season one of the reboot was good. Season two was a disappointment, as they turned Parker into comic relief. She was as big a doofus as Nigel Bruce’s Dr. Watson. Ruined the reboot for me.

But below are spottings of quite a few other faces from the show.

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Future Treasures: Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman

Future Treasures: Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman

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Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman. (DAW Books, July, 18th,  2023, 304pages). Cover art by Jeszika Le Vye.

 

Nightborn: Coldfire Rising by C. S. Friedman will be published this July by DAW Books. The stunning cover art by Jeszika Le Vye evokes and extends the signature covers of the Coldfire Trilogy crafted by Michael Whelan; the trilogy was released during 1991-1995 followed by a 2012 prequel novella, Dominion. Note that a revised version of Dominion, starring the Hunter himself, is in Nightborn!

Pre-order Nightborn: Coldfire Rising now from various retailers via the portal page on The Astra Publishing House page (DAW imprints).

But wait, there is more! Black Gate has an interview planned with C. S. Friedman leading up to the release. This is part of our “Beauty in Weird Fiction” series that focuses on the aesthetics of art in dark fantasy.  Fans of the Coldfire series will know that the mysterious, energetic fae is a beautiful and dangerous medium (see the astral blue entity in the cover above), and we’ll corner the author on her take on working visual, alluring magic. …

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New Treasures: Burrowed by Mary Baader Kaley

New Treasures: Burrowed by Mary Baader Kaley

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Burrowed (Angry Robot, January 10, 2023). Cover by Apostolos Gkantinas

We’re not that far into 2023, and there’s already been a fine crop of debut novelists. The latest to show up on my radar is Mary Baader Kaley, whose first novel Burrowed, a far-future tale of a genetic plague that splits humanity in two, was published by Angry Robot last month. I bought it the week after it came out at Barnes & Noble.

There’s lot of cool ideas in Burrowed (Booklist proclaims it “A great read for fans of postapocalyptic novels,” and Publishers Weekly says it “captivates with inventive science and adventure… [a] riveting thriller”), but the book didn’t really catch my eye until I read the author’s Big Idea post at John Scalzi’s blog, in which she explains that the idea for the novel arose out of the challenges of raising an autistic son.

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Flood of AI-Written Fiction Shuts Down Clarkesworld Submissions

Flood of AI-Written Fiction Shuts Down Clarkesworld Submissions

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Recent issues of Clarkesworld magazine, edited by Neil Clarke

If you’re active on social media, or if you follow the major science fiction magazines, you’ve probably seen the headlines. It’s not every day that Neil Clarke, Sheila Williams, and Sheree Renée Thomas (editors of Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, respectively) are quoted extensively in The New York Times. But that’s exactly what happened on Thursday.

It started with Neil, who reported on Twitter earlier this week that a sudden flood of AI-generated submissions, likely triggered by get-rich-quick schemes “making claims of easy money with ChatGPT,” had caused him to temporarily close submissions to Clarkesworld. (ChatGPT is the most popular of the new crop of chatbots capable of rapidly creating long-form text based on short prompts from users.)

As you can imagine, the news that a leading science fiction magazine had to close submissions because it was overwhelmed with AI-generated subs captured enormous attention, and that tweet garnered over 8 million views and, within a matter of days, national attention from press outlets like The Guardian and NYT.

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Goth Chick News: Please Do Not Talk About the Contents of This Post…

Goth Chick News: Please Do Not Talk About the Contents of This Post…

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If you’re wondering why I’m giving this whole thing any additional oxygen, that makes two of us. But sometimes the universe deals up such general absurdity that I can’t let it pass.

Case in point, the latest buzz-generating horror flick, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.

First, I need to point out (if it wasn’t obvious) that the said buzz isn’t good; though Hollywood has always maintained all publicity is good publicity. In general, even hardcore horror types are expressing outrage that director Fyse Frake-Waterfield has crossed the line. If you didn’t see my original write up on this gem back in November, let me get you caught up.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai with a Twist

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Samurai with a Twist

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Samurai Spy (Japan, 1965)

By the 1960s, the tropes of chambara films, i.e., samurai adventures, had become through endless repetition standardized and over-familiar. As with the Western film in America and Europe, it was time for variations on the theme less they lose their audience, and so antiheroes raised their unfeeling heads and genre crossovers appeared, such as the samurai-meet-kaiju Daimajin movies. This week we take a look at a couple of interesting antihero adventures plus a crossover with the then-popular secret agent genre, Samurai Spy. Let’s dive in!

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Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Future Treasures: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

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The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
(Harper Voyager, February 28, 2023). Cover by Ivan Belikov

I met Shannon Chakraborty at the 2018 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, where she conducted a delightful reading from her second novel The Kingdom of Copper, the sequel to her bestselling debut The City of Brass. Back then she went by the very cool name “S. A Chakraborty.” For her new book The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, she has changed her name slightly to “Shannon Chakraborty,” which is much easier to shout at somebody when you’re trying to get them to hold an elevator.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi will be published by Harper Voyager next week, and I’m going to go on record here as recommending you clear the end of the month for this one. Publishers Weekly calls it a swashbuckling adventure with “playful plot twists and thrilling action sequences [with a] charmingly crooked cast and dry humor,” and BookPage sums it up as “A swashbuckling high seas quest that’s rousing, profound and irresistible.” This sounds like the book I need.

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Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Hercule Poirot visits Nero Wolfe

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Hercule Poirot visits Nero Wolfe

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Been writing and reading a lot of Nero Wolfe lately (when I’m not re-watching Columbo before bed).

Just to channel Archie, I like to have favorite detectives visit Wolfe’s office. For some fun, I’m well over 5,000 words into a story with Groucho (Rufus Flywheel) and Chico on a case with Archie (and Wolfe) at The Big Store. I’ve tinkered with Dirk Gently (my favorite Douglas Adams character) using Zen navigation and Archie confronting him in front of the Brownstone.

I have toyed with a solo Poirot adventure, based on a non-Poirot story written by Agatha Christie. My Poirot is very much David Suchet’s portrayal, and it’s fun to write.

So, I had Poirot visit the Brownstone. I may add a scene during lunch, with them talking about another subject; the conversation mildly annoying Archie. That could be fun.

The fussy little Belgian was so far forward in the red chair that it barely qualified as sitting. His back was perfectly straight, and there couldn’t have been a centimeter of space between his shoes. I had never seen a man take off a pair of gloves so deliberately. I don’t know how he could possibly be comfortable, but he didn’t seem to be bothered at all. It’s as if that were the only natural way to sit. And I’m telling you, it definitely wasn’t natural.

I had received a call three weeks before from a Captain Arthur Hastings, in London. Wolfe had used a competent operative named Ethelbert Hitchcock over there. And I’m not making that first name up. I started calling him Geoffrey to keep from laughing as I typed these little accounts. I don’t think he’d mind too much.

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