Search Results for: New Edge Sword

Art of the Genre: Tolkien in B/W

Comments 0 Comment

With all the news that The Hobbit has begun filming, my stalwart partner here at Black Gate L.A., Ryan Harvey, has been spending his days reenacting the Battle of Five Armies using mini-figs he’s collected since before the release of the LOTR trilogy. Although endlessly funny hearing him deliver Thorin’s final speech to Bilbo over and over again, I forced myself out on the seaside balcony to watch surfers and come up with this week’s blog. All the cinematic excitement…

Read More Read More

The Hobbit: The 1977 Animated Television Movie

Comments 7 comments

The Hobbit (NBC TV, 1977) Directed by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. Featuring the Voices of John Huston, Orson Bean, Hans Conried, Richard Boone, Theodore Gottlieb, Otto Preminger, Cyril Ritchard, Paul Frees, Don Messick. A few years ago, in my early posting days on Black Gate, I wrote a lengthy overview of Rankin/Bass’s strange but oddly likable animated television movie of The Return of the King. I intended to review Rankin/Bass’s other Tolkien TV movie, The Hobbit, some time…

Read More Read More

Dirty Words in Fantastic Fiction: A Writer Blogs About Process

Comments 16 comments

All writers, whatever their stripe, accomplish the bulk of their labor through the incisive, judicious choice of words.  Authors prone to world-building fantasy find themselves shackled in ways that most writers are not, limited to a surprising degree in their available terminology.  Consider, if you will, the following wonderful words: renaissance, Stilton cheese, bonobo, perestroika, taco, Hollywood, dim sum, tribologist, Ecuadoran, and haiku. The common element?  You guessed it.  Not one of the words in that list is likely to…

Read More Read More

Monstrous Post on Monsters II: Full Sequence

Comments 15 comments

When I first crawled to the surface to whisper of monsters in your ears — before pinching off those delectable auricles with my first layer of incisors — I said I’d be back in a month with a lowdown on the greatest monsters from the pages of heroic fantasy, maybe even with a Top 10. Sure, three of your months have passed, but why would a creature of the abyss even give a damn about human timetables? As for a…

Read More Read More

OF SECRET WORLDS INCREDIBLE: A Psychedelic Journey into Clark Ashton Smith’s Poetic Masterpiece

Comments 9 comments

What a TRIP… In the world of epic fantasy, poetry often gets a bad rap. In the world of legendary fantasists, one name that continues to be revered is Clark Ashton Smith. As one of the “big three” WEIRD TALES writers from the 1920s and 30s, Smith gained a reputation that rivaled that of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard for fantastic fiction. His superbly dark fantasies set in realms such as Zothique, Hyperborea, Atlantis, and Averoigne set a new…

Read More Read More

Art of the Genre: The Humor of Will McLean

Comments 10 comments

I’ve managed to do a couple of posts in a row on serious topics, and although there is certainly a place for serious things in fantasy [ask Joe Abecrombie as he is the current villain of all things serious in fantasy] I like the fact that fantasy can, and should be, funny. Now I’m not talking Terry Pratchett funny, who I don’t really find to be that funny, and I’m also not talking Robert Asprin funny, but more along the…

Read More Read More

Desert of Souls: A Review

Comments 6 comments

Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones. Thomas Dunne Books (320 pages, $24.99, February 15, 2011) As I write this, I’m listening to Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon, because sometimes Yo-Yo Ma’s cello just does things to a girl, you know? Anyway, it seems appropriate, so I thought I’d share. First of all: Spoiler Alert. Probably minor ones, but you never can tell with me, so if you don’t want to know a few plot points, some specifics of the…

Read More Read More

Charles R. Saunders Reviews A Desert of Souls

Comments 2 comments

Charles R. Saunders, author of the legendary Imaro books, has weighed in on Howard Andrew Jones’s first novel: What, then, is so special about The Desert of Souls? Well, just about everything. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East during the initial bloom of Islam’s ascendance, Howard brings to life the storied past of places such as Baghdad, Basra, Mosul… To this tapestry of history, Howard adds several threads of sorcery… The protagonists and the patron become involved…

Read More Read More

Chris Braak Reviews Turn Coat (Dresden Files #11)

Comments 2 comments

Turn Coat Jim Butcher Roc (576 pp, $9.99, April 2009 – March 2010 paperback edition) Reviewed by Chris Braak Private-eye wizard Harry Dresden returns in Jim Butcher’s Turn Coat though, in point of fact, he hasn’t been doing altogether that much investigating lately. Between wars with vampire courts and secret enemies finally getting the Black Council on the move, it doesn’t seem like Harry is going to have the opportunity to track down a missing person or provide evidence in…

Read More Read More

The Scar-Crow Men, Faustus, and Wizards: Three Posts

Comments 5 comments

This week I read an advance copy of the second book in Mark Chadbourn’s series of espionage-fantasy-adventure novels, Swords of Albion. The Scar-Crow Men begins with the first performance of Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and the story of the novel and the story of Faust end up connecting in a number of ways. It got me thinking about Faust, and why the story of Faust has flourished in the centuries since Marlowe wrote, and how many different ideas about…

Read More Read More