Search Results for: New Edge Sword

Greer Gilman and Cloud & Ashes

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I recently finished reading Greer Gilman’s second novel, 2009’s Cloud & Ashes. I’ve never come across Gilman’s first book, Moonwise, but I’m now looking forward to tracking it down. Cloud & Ashes is a complex, powerful work. It repays careful attention, attentiveness to patterns of imagery, and readiness to work out unknown words from context (this is less a book to read alongside an open dictionary than alongside an open internet connection, which can find obscure, archaic, and dialect words)….

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Dorgo the Dowser and Me

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When John O’Neill invited me to write article about my collection of sword and sorcery stories, Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser, for the Black Gate blog, I was naturally thrilled and honored. I was also somewhat uncertain. Where do I begin? What should I say? So I asked myself… why not first tell readers something about your book — the world of Tanyime, the kingdom of Rojahndria, the city of Valdar, and its main character — and…

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Ruminations on Ice and Fire

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I recently had the chance to review George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons for my hometown newspaper, The Montreal Gazette. Looking at both the new volume and the previous four installments in his Song of Ice and Fire series, I found myself wondering what it is that makes the books work so well both with critics and a mass audience. A Dance With Dragons reached the top of the best-seller lists in its first week of release, and had…

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The Black Coats: An Introduction

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Les Habits Noirs is a series of seven landmark novels in pulp fiction history that have sadly been neglected outside of their native France. A fair degree of skepticism among modern readers is to be expected. Translations of obscure French novels can be a spotty affair and the verbose literary style of Victorian literature with its lengthy philosophical or historical passages are often wearying for a 21st Century audience. For every Fantomas that still captures modern imaginations, there are countless…

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Estate Your Business Part II: A Writer’s Guide to Organizing a Literary Estate

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First of all, let me say hello and introduce myself. I’m an author of about half a dozen published short stories, one of which has just come out from Black Gate. I also, once upon a time, went to law school and for six years I worked as an attorney, first at a large firm, and then as a solo practitioner in northern New Mexico. I did real estate, contracts, and estate planning. Northern New Mexico is crawling with writers…

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Pulp RPG Action with Dicey Tales

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Anyone whose been reading the Black Gate game review column knows how much I loved Jeff Mejia’s Legends of Steel, in a large part due to his love for (and obvious knowledge of) the sword-and-sorcery genre. Jeff knew how to present the game material, provide atmospheric and plotting suggestions, and in general wrote a book so useful to sword-and-sorcery gaming that it should be picked up even by those GMs working with fantasy adventure who have no interest in the…

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Art Evolution 2011: Russ Nicholson

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Yes indeed, there’s yet another addition to Art Evolution! Now you didn’t think I’d sit idly by after the success of my 2010 Art Evolution Project wrapped up did you? No, certainly not, and although I’d managed to hit twenty artists in that mighty collaboration, I wasn’t satisfied because I knew there were many more artists still out there who deserved spots in what my project finally materialized into. Still, I must admit I was pretty burned out after the…

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Board Games Don’t Have to be Boring

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While my last few columns have focused on solitaire games, I thought I’d take a look at some relatively new boardgames with surprising themes and game play. In the first, Defenders of the Realm, you and your fellow players cooperatively work to defeat evils invading your kingdom. The second, Dominant Species, is set in the moments before the ice age and enables you and your fellow players to jockey for position to see who will best weather the coming climate…

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A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

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Curse of the Necrarch Steven Savile BL Publishing (410 pages, $7.99, 2008) Reviewed by Bill Ward The world of Warhammer Fantasy borrows heavily from many sources, everything from Tolkienesque dwarves and Da Vinci-inspired machines, to Moorcockian chaos creatures, a Renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire, and monsters straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. But, maybe because it’s been around for so long or because it’s been so successfully added to over the years, the Warhammer world blends all these outwardly derivative elements…

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Entering the Lists in Defense of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe

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There’s a school of thought that views the Middle Ages as a dark gulf between the Classical Age and the rebirth of reason known as the Renaissance. The Middle Ages were, to paraphrase science fiction author David Brin, an unhappy time of small-mindedness and fear, marked by the squabbles of petty nobles, ignorance, superstition, and religious persecution. Thus, any historical fiction that dares emit a whiff of romanticism of the age is viewed by some as anathema, a whitewashed but…

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