Back in 2004, a friend and I decided to become role-playing game publishers, possibly for the wrong reasons – we wanted publish our stuff rather than wanting to be publishers. Given that, we still went forward in as professional a manner as possible. While we established Sword’s Edge Publishing as a business, I’m afraid I ran it as hobbyist. I made decisions based on my interests and enthusiasms. I should have been looking to build the brand and increase SEP’s…
Karl Edward Wagner was and remains the most qualified individual to weigh in on the issue of Conan stories penned by someone other than Robert E. Howard, given that he wrote arguably the best pastiche of them all (The Road of Kings). So it behooves us to listen to what he had to say in the foreward to the Berkley Medallion Edition of Conan: The Hour of the Dragon (August 1977): I have written Howard pastiches myself, so I can…
I was born in 1971, which makes me old, but not too old, at least in my mind. Although I was indeed a living creature on this planet during the bulk of the 1970s I didn’t really have much conscious thought that was dedicated to anything resembling fiction. Sure, I saw Star Wars at the local cinema, I had the action figures, but that was about as close to anything literary as I got, the bulk of my time sucked…
Michael Fierce writes: I just wanted to say that I really love Ryan Harvey’s article on Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. I’ve read the revised version many times and have always wanted to read the original, and now, after reading his article, am even more enthused to do so. Really excellent breakdown and the format was very reader-friendly with some visually pleasing colors that really grabbed me. I know many things about many great books but he definitely takes the cake…
Conan, King Kull, Cormac, Bran Mak Morn — characters often imitated, never duplicated. These creations of Robert E. Howard started the sword-and-sorcery boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Then there are the barbarian warriors inspired by Howard — Clonans, as one writer recently referred to these sword-slinging, muscle-bound characters. A fair observation, but in some cases, not so true. We prefer to think of these tales of wandering barbarian heroes as “Solo Sword and Sorcery” because the majority of…
The Heroes Joe Abercrombie Orbit (559 pp., $14.99, trade paperback) Reviewed by Brian Murphy “Who cares who’s buried where?” muttered Craw, thinking about all the men he’d seen buried. “Once a man’s in the ground he’s just mud. Mud and stories. And the stories and the men don’t often have much in common.” —Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes Although it’s classified as fantasy, don’t be fooled: Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes is every inch a war story, knee deep in mud and…
Nathan Long is a novelist best known for his work in the Warhammer universe, most notably for his Black Hearts series and Ulrika the Vampire series, as well as penning the new adventures of the classic Warhammer duo, Gotrek & Felix. Recently, Nathan’s Jane Carver of Waar has been released to some great reviews, and is getting a lot of attention in light of the recent big budget movie adaptation of the Burroughs novel that inspired it. Welcome, Nathan, and…
John Carter (2012) Directed by Andrew Stanton. Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong, Dominic West, Samantha Morton, Ciarán Hinds, Thomas Haden Church, James Purefoy, Darryl Sabara. Update: Thank you to all Black Gate readers who have shown the love for John Carter and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and who boosted me with positive comments and emails regarding my long-term project of reviewing all the Martian novels. I’ve never felt so much support from the Internet in the eight…
When I was invited to write a guest post, I immediately turned to manga. To my knowledge, Black Gate has never had a post dedicated to Japanese comics before, and I think that absence needs to be rectified. The series I am about to recommend to you are as good, as dramatic, and as entertaining as any American comic book or even fantasy and science fiction novel. What follows is a list of some of my personal favorites, as well…
When my associate and I created Sword’s Edge Publishing, we had a very limited goal – we were going to publish a collection of military adventures for modern d20, and then another series of adventures for d20 fantasy. In there, I intended to write a supplement for playing covert, special operations characters in modern d20 and my associate wanted the series of fantasy adventures to lead to a setting. We expected a relatively tight timeline and then we’d likely sit…