So it ends here, not with a climatic epic, but with a bit of house cleaning almost fifteen years after the author’s death. The final book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s career-spanning Barsoom saga is a slender volume containing two unrelated novellas. I’ve called this review series “Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars,” but that title is a smidgeon deceiving when discussing the two stories here. One doesn’t take place on Mars, and the other was not written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My…
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To my surprise, I got a bunch of emails asking for more details about the weird teaching gig I described in last week’s post. How exactly did it work, teaching creative writing while kicking a soccer ball around my student’s basement? This student was so blocked about writing in most areas of his life that, unless I was right there with him, he rarely wrote anything on his project–as much as he loved it. The first thing we did when we got…
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Just as an older generation recalls with perfect clarity where they were when they heard of Kennedy’s assassination, I know precisely where I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): perched on the floral-print sofa in my parent’s house, watching the film on a poor, weather-impacted PBS broadcast. I also remember falling right off that sub-par couch in paroxysms of laughter when the animator saved King Arthur’s band by conveniently suffering a heart attack. I’d never seen anything…
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The Trade Being the First Part of the Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer by Mark Rigney This is a complete work of fiction presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Mark Rigney and New Epoch Press, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2012 by New Epoch Press. Gemen the Antiques Dealer arrived in Andolin late in spring, the year after that nation’s disastrous civil war had lumbered…
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Back on Mars, and closing in on its finale, after my short sabbatical… What can I say? It seems Synthetic Men of Mars will suck out the desire to keep trudging forward from even the most dedicated ERB enthusiast. Llana of Gathol is the first of the two story collections that close out the published Barsoom epic: it contains four novellas chronologically linked together to produce an episodic novel… one that hopefully improves upon the failed previous book. Our Saga:…
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By Howard Andrew Jones This is an excerpt from the upcoming novel The Bones of the Old Ones by Howard Andrew Jones, presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Thomas Dunne Books and Howard Andrew Jones, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2012 by Howard Andrew Jones. Chapter One The snow banked knee-high against the walls of the narrow alley, and my boots sank into it as I…
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I think my favorite parts of Alexander the Great’s life involve his fight with the dragon, and the time he climbed to a mountain summit and saw the angel of death. Not to mention his conversation with the speaking tree. After that, his meeting with the Emperor of China was almost superfluous. I haven’t been dropping acid. I’ve been reading from the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings, an epic poem and a national treasure of Iran, written by Abolqasem…
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Well, as Rabbie Burns would say, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” I had all these wonderful, these glorious, these SUPREME plans to fly from Rhode Island to Chicago on Monday, October 29th, 2012 and spend a few days there among folks I hadn’t seen since I moved last November. But a little storm named Sandy had other ideas. Oh, I won’t go into the details. They’re not gory enough; besides, it would sound like I’m…
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By C.S.E. Cooney This is a complete work of fiction presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of C.S.E. Cooney and New Epoch Press, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2012 by New Epoch Press. Part One: Lector I was eight when I met Jaks. He was running away from home and I was trying to catch a fish in one of Viceroy Eriphit’s reeking public ponds. “Um, excuse…
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Return to Chapter V Chapter VI: The Awakening Seth had thought that he could follow the trail of destruction back to the entrance, but he’d somehow missed it. Not the destruction, as the dead bodies and damaged corridors were everywhere, but the hallway leading to the way they’d come in. In the meantime, he’d lost the other guardsmen. He had paused to look back, expecting Aulus or one of the other Domini to be following, and waited just long enough…
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