On June 12 the new album by veteran Canadian power-prog-rock trio Rush was released. I went out in pouring rain to buy a copy because I had to have it that day. In reading what follows (the first of three posts, with part two here, and part three here), understand that I’m a fan, and that this has been my favourite rock group for over two decades. But then there are few casual Rush fans: bassist and singer Geddy Lee’s…
I have a week-long break between summer movie reviews, the gap between Prometheus and Brave, so I have chosen to return to Ghosts of Summer Pasts. Not long past. Just last year. Ladies and gentlemen, Hyborians and Hyrkanians, the 2011 Conan the Barbarian! [Insert tepid Monty Python and the Holy Grail “yeah!” here.] Many movie websites do play-by-play reviews, essentially a one-post blog-thru of a film, providing comments along with time stamps. I’ve wanted to try my hand at this…
Saladin Ahmed‘s been very, very busy as his career takes off after the success of Throne of the Crescent Moon, the first novel in an exciting new Arabian fantasy series that received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, so I was lucky that he was able to take the time for an interview. I always try to fake up some confidence in an interview and not think of how famous or talented my subject is, so imagine…
With the publication of Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa, I thought I’d take the opportunity to give Black Gate readers a taste of the world of Khokarsa, which serves as the setting for Philip José Farmer’s epic series of adventure and historical fantasy. It’s a world I’ve been immersed in for the past several years as I worked to complete The Song of Kwasin, the concluding book in the Khokarsa trilogy, as well as other related projects set…
I’ve been writing a fair bit lately about Canadian fantastika, and I’ll be doing so again next week, looking at a trio of grand masters who’ve just released what may be one of the most accomplished works of their career. But there’s been a bit of news lately about another notorious Canadian fantasy epic, so I want to talk about that first. Late in May, Dave Sim began a Kickstarter project, trying to raise $6,000 to create a digital version…
Summer movies, like boxes of Crackerjacks (does anyone still eat those? I never see them for sale any more), come packed with surprises. And, like Crackerjacks toys, often they are lame surprises. Let-downs. Occasionally — and it usually happens only once per summer — the toy you dig out of the same-old same-old caramel and peanut glop is a Hot Wheels car with flame details and killer sci-fi spoilers that somebody in the Crackerjack plant accidentally dropped into the box…
Dark Jenny Alex Bledsoe Tor ($14.99, trade paperback, 352 pages, April 2011) Reviewed by Sean T. M. Stiennon Readers new to Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie LaCrosse series should brace themselves for culture shock, because while the book is set in a medieval world, all the characters have distinctly un-medieval names and mannerisms. Be prepared for Gary, Eddie, Liz, and Angie to appear in the first few pages. In keeping with their anachronistic names, all the characters speak in a modern conversational…
Red Moon and Black Mountain Joy Chant Ballantine Books (268 pages, $0.95, 1971) The shadow of The Lord of the Rings is long, indeed. In the 1960s Frodo lived and the reading public was hungry for more, and derivative works like The Sword of Shannara met that demand. This pattern continued into the 1980s with the publication of works like Dennis McKiernan’s Iron Tower trilogy, the series showing the clearest Tolkien “influence” of them all and one that literally provided…
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…