John told me he doesn’t like to post naked excerpts on Black Gate. Well and good, I thought; it is after all a family site. Turns out though that it means I have to warm you guys up for the Prince of Thorns excerpt that follows. If you’ve seen many reviews or comments on Prince of Thorns then it’s likely you’ll have read somewhere that it’s the very darkest of fantasy writing, that it’s brutal in the extreme, that it’s…
The Thing (2011) Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen. A dialogue that occurs in the 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing, as scientist Blair (Wilford Brimley) explains the nature of the twisted dog-mass corpse on his operating table: Blair: See what were talking about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and imitates them perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs it tried to digest them, absorb them, and in the…
Strange Worlds, a new anthology of Sword & Planet stories edited and illustrated by Jeff Doten, is now available. And it sure looks like an attractive package. Containing all original fiction from Charles A. Gramlich, Ken St. Andre, Paul R. McNamee, Charles R. Rutledge, and others, Strange Worlds is fully illustrated with both full-color and black & white art accompanying each tale. Here’s the copy from the back cover: New worlds and new adventures. A sword and blaster at your side, the wind in…
“The Fall of Ming” was the fifteenth installment of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally published between January 19 and June 29, 1941, “The Fall of Ming” picks up the storyline where the fourteenth installment, “The Power Men of Mongo” left off with Flash having reached the gates of Ming’s concentration camp in a daring attempt to rescue Zarkov and the other political prisoners held there. Bulon is just about to assassinate Flash…
I’ve known S.M. Stirling, or Steve as his friends call him, for ten years now. He and I were in the same writers group in New Mexico, called Critical Mass, and I believe I’ve read exactly eight-five kajillion of his words. A rigorous editor and rewriter of his own work, he’d often dwarf the rest of our submissions for the month. It’s been my privilege to watch from this vantage point as he climbs the sales charts, from a well…
Last week, I described the neo-classical attitudes of the Age of Reason, which dominated English literature through most of the 18th century. This week I want to take a look at how and when things changed. In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry that some critics have pointed to as the start of Romanticism in English literature. In fact, you can fairly easily find precursors to one aspect…
I’ve been pretty hard on Greyhawk novels. They’ve been the butt of more than a few jokes — both mine and others — from those of us who enjoy reviewing and talking about the fantasy genre. I’m generally pretty forgiving, especially with novels of adventure fantasy. What can I tell you — I’m a fan. But when books can’t be bothered to clamber over the very low bar of my expectations, I’m as capable of a harsh review as anyone….
By Jon Sprunk Pyr Books (391 pages, $16, June 2011) Warning: Adult language Caim pitched forward as a stray root snagged his toe. With both hands bound behind his back, he would have fallen if not for the men holding him upright. They had been marching for some time now, first across snow-covered fields and then along a hunting trail through woods that turned out to be deeper and more extensive than he first assumed. The trees grew taller than…
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)….
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…