By ElizaBeth Gilligan Illustrated by Chris Pepper This is a Special Presentation of a complete work of fiction which originally appeared in Black Gate 3. It appears with the permission of ElizaBeth Gilligan and New Epoch Press, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2001 by New Epoch Press. Joan came to our village a hardy, unsmiling woman of no more than seventeen, young even for our folks to be setting up house….
By Harry James Connolly Illustrated by Chris Pepper This is a Special Presentation of a complete work of fiction which originally appeared in Black Gate 2. It appears with the permission of Harry James Connolly and New Epoch Press, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2001 by New Epoch Press. My prison cell stank like a bird cage. It was terribly dark, and I listened for the sound of rats. I despise…
By David B. Coe Illustrated by Chris Pepper from Black Gate 4, copyright © 2002 by New Epoch Press. All rights Reserved. When Ilias was directly overhead, his red glow mingling with Panya’s white to give a rose cast to the grasses and stones, Carthach climbed to his feet and started toward the southern edge of the camp. Apart from the sentries, few were awake. Yet the camp was alive with sound. Horses snorted and nickered. Some of the soldiers…
by John O’Neill It’s a good week to be a fan of fantasy series, with new novels from John Marco and Mark Anthony on the horizon, and a new collection from James Blaylock. After all the heavy hitters of October (Martin, Jordan, Salvatore, Hobb) checked in with 1000-page monstrosities, I’m having trouble keeping up. Oh, for a compact electronic reader… The Saints of the Sword Tyrants and Kings, Book 3 by John Marco Bantam Spectra, February 6, 2001 545 pp…
By Rich Horton from Black Gate 2, copyright © 2001 by New Epoch Press. All rights Reserved. Part One It has become something of a cliche these days to note that popular fantasy seems to be concentrated in novels, and indeed in very large novels, or series of novels. A common acronym is FFT, for “Fat Fantasy Trilogy”. Probably the best selling current fantasy series is Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, which now extends to 9 books, with the…
By Howard Andrew Jones Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. If you talk even briefly with Erik Mona it’s immediately apparent that he loves what he’s doing. I don’t necessarily mean publishing — though he clearly enjoys that as well — I mean ushering some talented and often overlooked fantasy and science fiction authors back into print. Even if the authors themselves aren’t neglected, some of their works have been, and Mona has ambitious plans for Paizo…
A Review by Ryan Harvey Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush by Charles Saunders Night Shade Books (214 pages, May 2007, $14.95) Let’s put the lie to a hackneyed advertising slogan: you do get a second chance to make a first impression. Imaro offers the proof. Charles Saunders’s sword-and-sorcery hero didn’t make a good first impression in paperback publishing during his inaugural go-round in the early 1980s. DAW Books released Imaro…
By Ryan Harvey Copyright 2007 by New Epoch Press. All rights reserved. In the influential anthology Sword and Sorceress (DAW 1984), editor Marion Zimmer Bradley dedicated the collection of fantasy with female heroes to C. L. Moore, “who gave us Jirel of Joiry, the first woman to take up her sword against sorcery. And to all of us who grew up wanting to be Jirel.” The red-haired, yellow-eyed, and lioness-fierce sword-wielding Jirel has an unassailable place in contemporary popular culture,…
Special Black Gate Feature by John R. Fultz All rights reserved. Copyright 2006 by New Epoch Press. When speaking of the world’s greatest writers of fantasy fiction, there is one name that continues to surface among the true experts, if not on the lips of the general public: Darrell Schweitzer. Most widely known as a long-time editor of the legendary Weird Tales magazine (along with George Scithers and John Betancourt), Schweitzer is a prolific fantasist whose mythopoeic stories and novels…
by Ryan Harvey All rights reserved. Copyright 2006 by New Epoch Press. When Robert E. Howard discovered the character Conan in 1932, his writing took on a feverish intensity as the barbarian warrior turned into a literary obsession that allowed his creator’s natural skills and inclinations as a writer to bloom. Likewise in 1932, when Clark Ashton Smith discovered the last continent of dying Zothique, he knew that he had found the ideal setting for his poetic and dark imagination…