Drift back in time to the eighties when swords & sorcery was preparing to die, at least as a force in fantasy publishing. Where once Andrew Offutt and Lin Carter as well as Robert E. Howard packed the shelves of your local B. Dalton, they were about to be crowded out by the rise of the Tolkien clones. Exciting authors like Charles R. Saunders who were leading S&S down new paths would see their heroic fiction production curtailed by sales numbers…
Last night I started a new Kickstarter campaign. For those of you who just asked “what’s a Kickstarter?” you can learn more here. Basically, it is a site that links together people interested in investing in projects with those who require funding. These are generally smaller projects, sometimes creative, sometimes technological. Explore the site. There’s lots to see. This is my second Kickstarter. I’ve mentioned my Kickstarter for Centurion: Legionaries of Rome, a role-playing game, here. I’ll have more to…
“Oh Fantasy,” says my friend. “It’s inherently conservative.” This debate flares up from time to time in author interviews, blog posts, and in the pub. (EDIT: Michael Moorcock essay here.) And it’s true that Fantasy looks conservative (with a small “c”) or even “reactionary” since in its most typical form, it deals with quasi-Medieval European feudal societies in which male characters wield agency through violence, power struggles take place within the matrix of unquestioned hereditary aristocracy, and often hinge on what…
It’s a time for looking back, as the old year ends. Now so it happens that on a Boxing Day sale I picked up a book I loved as a child; and therefore it seems fitting to write a little about it, now, glancing back down the vanished days of this and other years, and to try to again see the pleasure I once had. Will it come again, as I work through the text? If I work on the…
56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice. (From The Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord by Peter Anspach) We geeks love to laugh at the incompetent evil overlords of TV and cinema Fantasy. In the past we tolerated them because — like 1970s gays embracing their own particular reading of Batman —…
Last week, in a post about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I said that certain habits of Gaiman’s plotting reminded me of G.K. Chesterton. It seemed to me that I’d referred to Chesterton fairly often in my posts here, so I did a search of the Black Gate archive. I found that I had in fact mentioned Chesterton a number of times, but that neither I nor anyone else had yet written a post for Black Gate specifically about him or any…
The Blue Star Fletcher Pratt Ballantine Books (242 pages, May 1969, $0.95) Cover art by Ron Walotsky Lin Carter chose Fletcher Pratt’s novel The Blue Star to be the inaugural title in Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series. I’ve found nothing that explicitly says why this novel rather than another, but a remark in his introduction provides a clue. Prior to this publication, The Blue Star had only been published in an omnibus edition along with Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and James…
It is the time of year for presents. If you celebrate Hanukkah, I’m late on giving you any gift ideas, but for people rushing to get gifts for friends in the next few days, here are a few last minute gift ideas. Do you know someone who loves interactive fiction? Someone who digs webcomics? If you’re shopping for someone who would rather have a digital gift than a package to open, you might encounter some gifting hurdles — but it…
If you read my blog, you’ll know I’m not a great fan of authorial self loathing and all that angst. However, when I got the gig to write Historical Adventure tie-ins for the Paradox War of the Roses game, I was a bit terrified. Rather than angsting over my ability to tell a story — I’d signed the contract so it was bit late for that! — I was overwhelmed by the task of using a real world historical setting. Obviously, I was…
A couple of times this past summer I felt really old. Somehow the classic sci-fi/fantasy books I grew up reading weren’t well known to younger readers (really, you don’t know who Manly Wade Wellman is?!?) or even all that important anymore. In the forty-year span of my sci-fi and fantasy reading life, the genres’ audiences had changed. Now you could be a sci-fi reader without having read Dune or planning to ever read it. Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber was “shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to…