Black Gate – Page 944 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

2014 Hugo Award Nominees Announced

Monday, April 21, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

The nominees for the 2014 Hugo Awards have been announced by LonCon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, and let’s not mince words: it’s a wacky ballot.

What’s so wacky about it? Well, to start with, the novel category includes The Wheel of Time. That’s right, the complete series. Which means that 2013 novels likes Parasite by Mira Grant and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie will be up against one of the great phenomena in publishing history, a series spanning more than 20 years with combined sales of 44 million (to put that in perspective, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which includes A Game of Thrones, has sold a paltry 24 million copies). Not exactly sure how that happened, but I wouldn’t want to be one of the other novel nominees this year.

There are additional surprises. Analog magazine, effectively shut out of Hugo nominations for many years, has surged back into the limelight with two nominations (both for Brad Torgersen), and the traditionally strong Asimov’s SF and F&SF both come away empty-handed. Some folks are laying the credit (or blame) for that on an organized campaign of bloc voting by nominee Larry Correia, which successfully placed as many as seven nominees on the ballot… but really, every year someone gets accused of bloc voting and it’s tough to blame someone for having enthusiastic fans.

It’s a triumph for Tor.com, with no less than four short fiction nods — more than all the print magazines combined. And the highly regarded Clarkesworld, which led the pack for short fiction nominations last year, didn’t make the ballot at all.

There are lots of people to congratulate, including several Black Gate contributors on the list, but I’d like to give a special shout-out to Scott Taylor, who acquired Dan Wells’s The Butcher of Khardov while he was an editor at Privateer Press. While I’d have to do some research to confirm it, I believe this is the first piece of licensed fiction to be nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella. Congrats on helping to make history, Scott!

The nominees for the 2014 Hugo Awards are:

Best Novel

Warbound, Larry Correia (Baen)
Parasite, Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Wheel of Time (complete series), Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson (Tor)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit)
Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross (Ace)

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Raised On Potter: Give the People What They Want?

Monday, April 21, 2014 markrigney Comments 6 comments

As I mentioned in a recent post, I just finished teaching a creative writing course. Most of my students were college sophomores. None were creative writing majors. To cut a successful swath through my class, they had to write a short story, a poem, and a short play — and then revise each one multiple times. In order to bring a proper perspective to their efforts, I forced them (at dagger point) to read a great many examples of each form.

Thus ends the exposition. Now for the drama!

At the tail end of the semester, I asked my students to rank each reading on a five point scale, with one being exceptional and five a yawner. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that without exception, it was the fantasy and horror offerings on my syllabus that drew the strongest responses.

What can account for this?

My answer: J.K. Rowling.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Playing the Game With the Master Blackmailer

Monday, April 21, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 6 comments

Far more than with any other character, Sherlock Holmes has been treated as if he had really lived. It’s not just that people believe in the character as they read the story. That’s usually the case in good fiction.

But there are hundreds of books that treat Holmes and Watson as if they were alive. Speculation about Holmes abounds. No other character’s life is explored in such detail, expounded upon and speculated about.

This treating Holmes (and Watson) as if he were a real person is called, ‘Playing the Game.’ And there’s no shortage of Holmes fans that have done it in new stories and scholarly writings about the great detective. An example of my own follows.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is one of my favorites stories of the sixty that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes.

If you haven’t read it before, I strongly suggest you do so before reading the rest of this post. It won’t take you very long. The fifty-six short stories are quick reads.

Milverton is a master blackmailer. No one is better at it. Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that Milverton is the worst man in London. For someone who seemingly knew about every type of depravity and ruffian in the city, that is quite a statement.

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Mashed Up

Sunday, April 20, 2014 FraserRonald Comments 2 comments

Firefly As might be expected from the guy who wrote Sword Noir: a Role-Playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery and is now Kickstarting Nefertiti Overdrive: Ancient Egyptian Wuxia, I love a good mash-up. I use the term mash-up to refer to a creative work that blends two or more apparently dissimilar genres. The mash-up most genre fans would know would be Firefly, mashing-up space opera and westerns.

Brotherhood of the Wolf Now space opera and western are not terribly dissimilar, but Firefly included many of the trappings as well as the tropes of the western. The characters carried six-shooters and lever action rifles, they had costumes that appeared quite close of 19th century American frontier clothing, and pseudo-frontier language dotted their speech – along with Mandarin. While I often hear Firefly referred to as sci-fi with some western aspects, I think it is more fitting to call it a western in space.

That’s kind of splitting hairs.

Firefly melded two genres, but there is a wonderful French movie that mixes at least four – period drama, martial arts, horror, and romance. The Brotherhood of the Wolf is one of my favourite movies and an inexhaustible source of inspiration. It might not be the finest movie of its age, but it was my favorite movie of 2002.

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The Best One-Sentence Reviews of Edmond Hamilton: The Winner of The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four

Sunday, April 20, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Last month, we invited Black Gate readers to send us a one-sentence review of their favorite Edmond Hamilton novel or short story.

In return, we offered to award a copy of the long-awaited fourth volume of The Collected Edmond Hamilton from Haffner Press to one lucky winner. The winner was randomly drawn from the list of all qualified entrants.

Before we announce the winner, let’s have a look at some of the entries. We can’t reprint all of them, but we can hit the highlights. (But fret not — all qualifying entries received before April 20 were included in the drawing.)

We left the choice of what novel or story to review up to you and we weren’t too surprised to find the most popular topic was Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings series. Robert James Parker kicked things off with this review:

John Gordon, suffering from an existential crisis, agrees to travel through time and space to the far future where he gets caught up in a sweeping space opera full of cosmic space battles, beautiful princesses, and bizarre monsters.

Andy Sheets gets bonus points for a completely à propos Alan Rickman reference.

How can you not be enticed by a story about an out of step WWII veteran getting mind-swapped into the body of a prince 200,000 years in the future, hooking up with a foxy future princess, and battling The League of Dark Worlds, lead by a guy who should totally be played by Alan Rickman in the movie, with a super-weapon called the Disruptor, all tightly packed into a fast-moving novel not even 200 pages long?!

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Open to Chance

Sunday, April 20, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 1 comment

Book sale poster Leaving the dark brick stairwells of the Lucien L’Allier métro last Sunday morning at 10, we found the rain was holding off: something not to be expected. Forecasts called for meteorological chaos in Montréal over the following days. Up to 24 degrees celsius, down to 2, thunderstorms, snow. But that was in the future. For the moment, Grace and I were looking for books to hold us through those unsettled days and more.

Not that we were lacking for books to read, truly. But the point of a used-book sale isn’t just to buy a title you could (if you don’t mind cheating) get from Amazon or Abebooks. It’s to find something you didn’t know you want, or something you never thought you’d find, at a price you can’t believe; to get a chance at something that happens to come around just at that moment. To be in the right place at the right time.

It had already been a busy weekend. I’d been to two book sales over the previous two days, with my girlfriend Grace joining me at the last one. I’d found some nice titles (Carter’s Nights at the Circus, the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, many more), but nothing too surprising. Both those sales were the most recent iteration of annual events, so we knew what to expect of them going in. The one we were approaching now, at the Hotel Espresso on Rue Guy, was more of a mystery. MonSFFA, the Montréal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, was holding what they promised would be a massive sale of sf and fantasy books. The books came from a fan who had to liquidate his collection and officially the sale started at 1; but I’d seen an appeal on Facebook for volunteers to come in early to help set up in exchange for first crack at the stock, so Grace and I had decided to lend a hand. We had no idea what kind of collection this was or what we’d find.

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Vintage Treasures: Men, Martians, and Machines by Eric Frank Russell

Sunday, April 20, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Last Sunday, I posted the latest article in my Ace Double series, this time focusing on Sentinels of Space by Eric Frank Russell and Don Wollheim’s The Ultimate Invader.

It made me realize that I’ve given precious little coverage to Eric Frank Russell over the years — really, a pretty serious oversight, considering what a fine writer he was. So I thought I’d remedy that here, starting with his 1955 volume Men, Martians, and Machines.

Men, Martians, and Machines is something of a problem child for catalogers. Wikipedia lists it as a novel, but it’s really not — it’s a collection of four linked stories, three published in Astounding during World War II, and one original. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry for Russell lists it as neither a collection nor a novel, creating a separate category for it.

In some ways the book is an early precursor to Star Trek. The stories follow the exploits of the rough-and-tumble crew of the solar freighter Upskadaska City, known more commonly as the Upsydaisy, who follow their Captain as he takes charge of one of the first faster-than-light starships, the Marathon. Captain McNulty leads his mixed crew of humans, jovial tentacled Martians, and one robot on voyages of discovery to far stars and strange alien planets.

Star Trek fans will certainly enjoy these proto-Trek stories and see how they influenced that seminal series two decades later. For me, these tales represent something even more primal. When I think of Golden Age robot stories, I think of Asimov; when I think of military science fiction, I think Heinlein. When I think of tales of brave exploration and camaraderie in the face of the vast mystery and terror of deep space, I think of Eric Frank Russell.

It’s his unique voice, I think, and the poetry and humanity of his prose, mixed with all the marvelous ray-gun trappings of pulp science fiction, that makes him such a joy to read. Here’s a snippet from the first story, “Jay Score,” as our unnamed narrator meets with the imposing new emergency pilot shortly after blast off.

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Future Treasures: Mirror Sight by Kristen Britain

Saturday, April 19, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

One of the most rewarding things about running a pair of fan sites for nearly two decades — starting with SF Site in 1996, and continuing with the BG blog in late 2000 — has been being on the scene when a major new talent debuts. Those are the books you remember: Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, Martha Wells’s ‘The Element of Fire, Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, James Enge’s Blood of Ambrose, Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora… and Kristen Britain’s Green Rider.

Green Rider made a huge splash with my small staff when it arrived in April 2000. Even my sister-in-law called me to complain, because I’d handed my niece a copy and now she wouldn’t budge from her room until she’d finished it. It was fast-paced, exciting, and everyone was asking me if there was going to be a sequel. (How the heck should I know?)

Well, there was a sequel — First Rider’s Call, in 2004 — followed by The High King’s Tomb (2008) and Blackveil (2012). And now the long-awaited fifth volume of one of the most popular fantasy series of the 21st Century is scheduled to arrive next month. My copy arrived this week and it looks fabulous.

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Ed Greenwood and Tattoos and Geek Inked at Ad Astra in Toronto

Saturday, April 19, 2014 Derek Kunsken Comments 1 comment

I last blogged from the Saturday morning of As Astra, one of Toronto’s premiere fan conventions. While I was there, I had the good fun of running into Ed Greenwood, Ad Astra Special Guest, and one of the early D&D legends.

Ed and I breakfasted and chatted, which seems to be turning into an annual thing because we both get up early. Ed is still super-busy, turning out lots of new game tie-in novels.

Later on, he was interviewed by Geek Inked magazine and spoke on not only his experiences with early D&D, some of his current projects and hints at some of his others, but also tattoos! Geek Inked is an online magazine that obviously specializes in Geeks and Tattoos, so the conversation, as it says in the mandate of Geek Inked, goes interestingly sideways.

I wanted to share these two segments of the interview because the conversation relates back to some of the themes I touched on in my interview with module-writer Geoff Gander, especially about some of the opportunities opening up with crowd-funding.

That interview with Geoof, incidentally, also encouraged me to pull out my old Basic and Expert rules and look at the free common source Basic modules available online and start introducing my son to D&D. It turns out his interest is 100% on the dungeon crawl and 0% on the role playing. 🙂 Check it out here.

Major props to Rob at Geek Inked Magazine for an excellent interview.

Derek Künsken is a writer of science fiction and fantasy in Ottawa, Canada. You can find out more about him at www.derekkunsken.com or @derekkunsken.

New Treasures: The Raven’s Shadow by Elspeth Cooper

Saturday, April 19, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Elspeth Cooper is a British fantasy writer whose first novel, Songs of the Earth, appeared in February 2012. It kicked off a new series, The Wild Hunt, with the tale of Novice Church Knight Gair, a man sentenced to death — and ultimately exiled — for his magical abilities.

The sequel, Trinity Rising, appeared in February 2013. Gair has proven himself to be the most powerful Guardian, but he’s still bound by grief over the loss of his home and his beloved. Gair and his mentor Alderan are being hunted by those who seek to extinguish the power of the song, and Gair quickly discovers he’s hurtling towards a conflict greater and more deadly than either of them expected. The third volume, newly arrived in March, finds war brewing on both sides of the Veil between the worlds.

The desert of Gimrael is aflame with violence, and in the far north an ancient hatred is about to spill over into the renewal of a war that, a thousand years ago, forged an empire. This time, it may shatter one.

Wrestling with his failing grip on the power of the Song, and still trying to come to terms with the horrifying events he witnessed in El Maqqam, Gair returns to the mainland with only one thing on his mind: vengeance. It may cost him his life, but when everything that he had to live for is being stripped away from him, that may be a fair price to pay.

Old friends and old foes converge in a battle of wills to stem the tide of the Nimrothi clans as they charge south to reclaim the lands lost in the Founding Wars. If they succeed, the rest of the empire may be their next target. And with the Wild Hunt at their head, the overstretched Imperial Army may not be enough to stop them.

Elspeth Cooper’s website has book trailers, summaries, and the first three chapters of all three books — including a sneak peek at her next book, The Dragon House. Check it out here.

The Raven’s Shadow was published by Tor Books on March 11. It is 567 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Dominic Harman.