Cinema of Swords Book Announcement!

Cinema of Swords Book Announcement!

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Cinema of Swords by Lawrence Ellsworth (Applause, June 15, 2023)

Hellooooo, Black Gate! If you’re a regular reader, you’ve seen my circa-weekly Cinema of Swords articles about swordplay adventure films, but this week we’re here to talk about the full Cinema of Swords volume coming your way this summer, 2023, from Applause Books. This happy event is thanks in large measure to your support and that of Black Gate’s esteemed editor John O’Neill, so thank you! For an author, every new book is an anxious roll of the dice, and it’s a thrill and a relief when your work actually makes it to publication.

So, what will you find in Cinema of Swords? The book’s mouthful of a subtitle is “A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes) from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.” Fully illustrated, it compiles 400+ informative short reviews of live-action movies and TV shows on those subjects up through the ‘80s, where I stopped because that’s all I could fit into one volume. I included only films and shows that an interested person can find on streaming services or disc without paying a fortune, so long out-of-print or otherwise unavailable titles didn’t make the cut.

Reviews are listed alphabetically, but in addition to a straight title index, the book includes genre indexes so you can easily find films related to a specific interest. Conveniently, that also provides a way to give you a fuller taste of the book’s contents. Let’s see what we’ve got.

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A Classic Returns: In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

A Classic Returns: In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

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In A Lonely Place (Valancourt Books, January 17, 2023)

Ah, Valancourt Books. You’re always full of delightful surprises. How well I remember that fateful day in 2014 when I first laid eyes on your table at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, D.C. Groaning it was (the table, not the convention), under the weight of uncountable literary treasures. Since that day I’ve kept a keen eye on your catalog, and you’ve never disappointed.

I’ve been extra-special not disappointed this week, since you saw fit to rectify one of the great publishing injustices of the last four decades: returning Karl Edward Wagner’s legendary first collection, In a Lonely Place, back to print, where it can delight and horrify a whole new generation of readers.

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Skybound Moves Forward With Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber

Skybound Moves Forward With Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber

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The Great Book of Amber, containing Roger Zelazny’s 10-volume
Amber Chronicles (Avon EOS, December 1999). Cover by Tim White

Molly Templeton at Tor.com is reporting that Stephen Colbert has joined forces with Skybound Entertainment to develop an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, bringing much-needed hope that the long delayed-series will finally be brought to the screen.

In 2016, Skybound Entertainment announced that the series was in the works, with The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman also on board. Though it’s been nearly seven years, this team is still in place, alongside Vincent Newman Entertainment and now Colbert’s production company, Spartina. Variety reports that Colbert said, “I’ve carried the story of Corwin in my head for over 40 years, and I’m thrilled to partner with Skybound and Vincent Newman to bring these worlds to life. All roads lead to Amber, and I’m happy to be walking them.”

Roger Zelazny was one of the greatest fantasy and science fiction writers of the 20th Century, and The Chronicles of Amber was his magnum opus. If you want to dip your toe into the original novels, Rajan Khanna has a splendid book-by-book reread at Tor.com.

New Treasures: Silver Queendom by Dan Koboldt

New Treasures: Silver Queendom by Dan Koboldt

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Silver Queendom (Angry Robot, August 23, 2022). Cover design by Alice Claire Coleman

Have you ever made a purchase decision less than halfway through the book description?

That’s exactly what happened to me on Sunday at Barnes & Noble, about ten seconds after I picked up Dan Koboldt’s Silver Queendom and read:

Service at the Red Rooster Inn leaves much to be desired. The innkeeper, Darin, has a scowl for every new face. The homebrewed ale seems to grow less palatable with each new batch. The barmaid, Evie, only seems to work when wealthy young men are around, and the old witch Seraphina ensures that’s not too often. As for Big Tom, well, everyone learns quickly to stay on the bouncer’s good side. There’s a reason everyone in the Red Rooster crew is bad at their job… by night, they’re the best team of con artists in the Old Queendom.

That’s all I needed to decide to take the book home with me.

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Retro Review: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1955

Retro Review: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1955

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1955. Cover by George Salter

By 1955 J. Francis McComas had resigned as co-editor of F&SF, and Anthony Boucher was sole editor. George Salter remained art director. Both Boucher and Salter left the magazine in 1958. This issue also has a cover by Salter — his last but one for the magazine — he did one more in 1966. I really enjoy Salter’s work, and I learned today that he did the covers for such significant works as the first editions of The City and the Stars, Atlas Shrugged, and A Fine and Private Place. He also shares a birthday with me.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Parson’s Son

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Parson’s Son

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I have been fortunate enough to contribute original stories to five volumes of the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories series. The brainchild of my Solar Pons buddy, David Marcum, there have been THIRTY-SIX volumes so far, and that will be over forty by the end of the year. The stories are all authentic Holmes pastiches, emulating Doyle’s writings. No modern-age fan fiction nonsense (like, say, the road BBC Sherlock went down).

The contributors donate their royalties, which goes to Undershaw, a school for special needs kids, which is in one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes. Over $100,000 has been raised so far. It’s just a terrific project in multiple ways.

Some of my favorite writers have participated, including Denis O. Smith, Hugh Ashton, John Hall, Will Thomas, and more. I’ve also discovered some new Holmes writers I didn’t know about, like Mark Mower, Mike Hogan, and Tim Symonds.

Plotting is my Achilles heel, but I’m working on getting back in the series with some new stories. Arthur Conan Doyle looked into several true crimes – often to try and thwart a miscarriage of justice. The case of George Edalji is probably the best-known. Not too long ago, a fictionalized account, Arthur and George, was made into a TV miniseries.

For MX, I took that case and had Sherlock Holmes investigate it as it occurred. “The Adventure of the Parson’s Son” appeared in third volume of this series, and was part of the initial three-part release. If you’d like to read a Doyle-styled Holmes story by yours truly, keep on going.

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Vintage Treasures: Moonheart by Charles de Lint

Vintage Treasures: Moonheart by Charles de Lint

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Moonheart (Ace Books, 1984). Cover by David Mattingly

I started reading science fiction and fantasy in the late 1970s, with authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Stephen R. Donaldson, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien. I learned an enormous amount from those early books, about astronomy, and space travel, and speculative physics and chemistry. And about adult relationships, and the US. military, and the kind of alien life that might exist on Venus (the kind that resembled dinosaurs, obviously).

But one of the most important things I learned was that fantasy adventures occurred elsewhere. In big cities in the United States, and small, magical towns in England. In underground government labs, and secret rebel bases on the ice planet Hoth. They certainly didn’t happen in my home town of Ottawa, Ontario, and the surrounding valley. At least, they didn’t until Chares de Lint burst on the scene with his own brand of fantasy in 1984, with books like the groundbreaking Moonheart, which helped launch the urban fantasy explosion of the 80s and 90s.

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The Modern Horrors of Ronald Malfi

The Modern Horrors of Ronald Malfi

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Black Mouth and Ghostwritten (Titan Books, July 2022, October 2022). Cover designs by Julia Lloyd

There’s nothing quite like a thoroughly unexpected discovery in a good bookstore.

I couldn’t find the last Dell Magazines at my local Barnes & Noble in nearby Geneva, Illinois. So before Christmas I made a snowy road trip to the B&N superstore in Naperville. I didn’t find the magazines I wanted (what the heck, B&N magazine clerks??), but the 20 minutes I spent browsing their Science Fiction & Fantasy section turned out to be enormously rewarding anyway.

Possibly the most consequential discovery I made was a small section of shelving real estate devoted to a horror writer I’d never heard of, Ronald Malfi. I ended up taking two of his books home with me, Black Mouth and Ghostwritten, and spending time this week tracking down the rest online.

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From the Golden Age of TV Anthologies: Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Season One

From the Golden Age of TV Anthologies: Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Season One

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William Shatner in “The Grim Reaper,” in Season One of Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1961)

The late fifties/early sixties was THE golden age TV anthology genre series. Best remembered, still wildly popular and influential today is The Twilight Zone, of course, followed by Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Outer Limits. There were others, including the interesting TZ precursor One Step Beyond, and a show hosted by one of the legends of classic horror cinema: Boris Karloff’s Thriller.

Like Outer Limits, Thriller had a short run — just two seasons. But TV production schedules were much different then. Those two seasons gifted us a whopping 67 episodes — equal to somewhere between six and TEN seasons now, in the streaming era. Sixty-seven hour-long episodes crammed into two nine-month production periods, each shot on a five-day schedule. It’s no surprise then that the episodes vary in quality, but the series contains some real gems — episodes that hold their own alongside the best Twilights Zones and B-movies of their era.

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A Valentine’s Gift for Lovers of Fantasy Intrigue: The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan

A Valentine’s Gift for Lovers of Fantasy Intrigue: The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan

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The Justice of Kings and The Tyranny of Faith (Orbit, 2022 and 2023). Covers by Martina Fackova

When I wrote about Richard Swan’s debut fantasy novel The Justice of Kings back in October, I got an enthusiastic response. Wayne Ligon called it “My favorite fantasy this year, so far!” and BG blogger Sarah Avery said,

I’m a sucker for fantasy novels that care about the rule of law. I loved Sebastian de Castell’s Greatcoats series, about badass itinerant magistrates in a recently failed state, to no end. This one looks likely to scratch the same itch.

Hot on the heels of The Justice of Kings comes The Tyranny of Faith, due from Orbit on Valentine’s Day. Kirkus Reviews tells us, “While The Justice of Kings was pretty dark, this volume gets even grittier.” I know that’s just what you bloodthirsty lot were dying to hear.

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