Search Results for: book club

“When things fall apart, they are going to fall apart in L.A. first”: LOSCON 37

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Only a few months ago, I would never have believed that I would end up writing two convention reports within the space of a month. Yet here I am bringing you news of LOSCON 37, the 2010 installment of the long-running Los Angeles-based science-fiction, fantasy, and horror convention. This year’s World Fantasy Convention was an almost overwhelming experience—not only was it my first convention and my first time meeting some of the core Black Gate mavens, but WFC is one…

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Dr. Mabuse: An Introduction

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Like Fantomas before him, Dr. Mabuse is criminally unknown in the United States. The master villain was introduced in Norbert Jacques’ 1922 novel, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (also published as Dr. Mabuse, Master of Mystery). Jacques was a French journalist who had immigrated to Germany and wrote the novel as a scathing indictment of the corruption prevalent in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. Dr. Mabuse is a practicing psychiatrist. He is also an avid occultist who conducts séances…

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Yesterday Was A Lie, A Film Review

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“Yesterday Was A Lie” is an indie film that indulges in experimental exposition right out of the gate. The story unfolds in a purposely non-linear fashion, and the unwary viewer can easily lose track of what is happening. The blurbs identifying the film as a “metaphysical mystery” do little to suggest how different is this film from what one might expect a mystery film to be. The subscriber reviews in Netflix and Blockbuster seemed to generally pan it, although those…

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Goth Chick News – Shadowland Part Deux: Thirteen Questions for Actor Jason Contini

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In case you hadn’t noticed, and I’m pretty sure you did, the Black Gate webmaster got a little worked up by my last post. Though I was telling you about my latest indy-horror obsession, Shadowland, one might have gathered from the choices of accompanying pictures, that I was instead bringing you a story about lead actress Caitlin McIntosh and her former life as a beauty queen. Somewhere, wedged between those images was my interview with Wyatt Weed, Shadowland’s writer and…

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Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

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The most interesting title waiting for me when I returned from our adventures at Dragon*Con was Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages, the latest in his Twenty Palaces series and the sequel to his first novel, Child of Fire. We’ve been big fans of Harry since his first story appeared in Black Gate 2, and his “Soldiers of a Dying God” (BG 10) is one of the finest short pieces we’ve ever published. It’s been great to finally see him get some well-deserved…

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part II)

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This is the second post in a series trying to answer what looks like a simple question: who wrote the first fantasy set entirely in another world? As I found in my first post, to answer that question you first have to decide how to define a fantasy otherworld. I came up with a list of four characteristics: whether the world has a distinct logic to it, such as the use of magic; whether the people in the world are…

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Goth Chick News: Pass Me the O-Positive Please

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Back in 2005 I had the pleasure of lunching with Charlaine Harris, who was on a book tour celebrating the release of her fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel Dead to the World. It was a major milestone — not only was it her first hardcover release but the cover was embellished with gold sparkly bits; naturally Ms. Harris and her publicist were thrilled. Frankly, being a novice contributor to Black Gate at the time, it was really hard to say which one…

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Original Fiction: “THE WEIRD OF IRONSPELL” by John R. Fultz

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  In the grand tradition of the heroic fantasy pulps comes “The Weird of Ironspell” — a serialized novella of original Sword-and-Sorcery adventure coming to you over the next few weeks. Catch a new self-contained chapter every Wednesday right here at blackgate.com. The saga continues…    “The Weird of Ironspell” by John R. Fultz Illustrations by Alex Sheikman    2. The Moon God’s Bride They marched out of the wasteland, where the bones of dead cities lay smothered beneath a sea…

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IMARO: The Naama War by Charles Saunders

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Back when Black Gate‘s editor John O’Neill lived in Ottawa in the early 80s, he was a member of a small SF fan club.  His first meeting featured a reading from the editor of an excellent local fanzine, Stardock, who had just completed his first novel.  The author was Charles Saunders, the novel was Imaro, and the reading he never forgot. DAW released the first three Imaro novels between 1981 and 1985, then dropped the series for reasons arising from textbook bad…

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Short Fiction Review #22: Interfictions 2

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What’s interesting about a collection of “interfictions,” aka “interstitial fictions,” is that this isn’t just another descriptor  (e.g., new wave fabulism, new weird, slipstream, paraspheres, fill-in-the-blank) made up by an editor or a marketing department or critic that subsequently becomes blogosphere fodder about how inaccurate and/or stupid it is. Rather, interfictions is the self-proclaimed terminology of an actual organization that sponsors not only this second volume of what presumably is an ongoing anthology series, but promotes all kinds of “interstitial” literary, musical,…

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