Black Gate – Page 948 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

A Writer’s Inspiration

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 Jon Sprunk Comments 5 comments

Something I’m often asked in interviews and by readers is what inspired me to write a book. Where do I get my ideas? It’s a difficult thing to pin down because there are so many elements involved, but I’m going to try to answer as fully and honestly as I can.

My source of first inspiration is myself. Not that my life is so very interesting, but what I mean is I’ve been a lover of stories for as long as I can remember. So when I’m brainstorming for a new book, the first person’s approval I seek is my own. What kind of story would I like to read? Because if I’m not writing stories I enjoy, then there’s no point.

My second inspiration is always my readers. This is the “performance” side of my writing. I’m not comfortable on stage or behind a microphone, but for some reason crafting a story to tell the world is my niche. In a way it feels safer than standing on a stage, all alone and vulnerable. Yet one of the first lessons you learn when you’re published is that not everyone is going to love your baby as much as you do. I always tell novice writers they better have thick skins because the world can be cruel. However, for all the slings and arrows lobbed in my direction from time to time, the experience of hearing from a happy reader is thrilling beyond words.

I’m also inspired by all the great writers who have come before me and those working now. I don’t think there’s ever been a time since I was eight or nine years old that I haven’t been reading fiction. I finish one book and pick up another. I also enjoy re-reading my favorite books/series. Glen Cook, Robert E. Howard, Robert Heinlein, Leo Tolstoy, H.P. Lovecraft, and many others — these are the foundations of my universe.

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House of Cards Kicked the Cat

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 1 comment

I mentioned Netflix’s wildly successful House of Cards in a recent Public Life of Sherlock Holmes posting. I’ve written a couple of screenplays that will be made into movies shortly before the Earth plunges into the sun.

Or more likely, sometime after that event. Just as I enjoy reading books on writing, I’ve also found lots to learn from books on screenwriting (which is a very different proposition).

A brief aside: Amazon (which should give me stock with the number of purchases I’ve made from them) includes screenwriting as a subcategory of “Humor & Entertainment.”

Not every screenwriting book is funny. In fact, the most useful ones generally aren’t! That said, we resume our normal programming.

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An Age of Random Portents and Incoherent Miracles – Echoes of the Goddess by Darrell Schweitzer

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 9 comments

The Goddess is dead. The Earth is very old. The fabric of time itself has worn thin. Who knows what might be glimpsed through it? — Opharastes, After Revelation

When the Goddess who reigned over Earth died her body shattered and the pieces, resonating with her power, rained down over the world. Wherever they settled they caused great changes in both the people and the land. In some places new realities were created. In others, images of the Goddess herself appeared and lingered on for years until the dawn of a new age and the emergence of a new deity.

Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder From the End of Time (2012) by Darrell Schweitzer is a collection of eleven stories written over the past thirty five years and set between the earliest days of the Goddess’ death and the last days before the new age.

One of the best things to come out of reviewing books is that I’ve finally read a bunch of the authors that I somehow managed to overlook for years, despite their large catalogs and great reviews. Steve Brust and Andre Norton are two of those recent “discoveries” as is today’s author, Darrell Schweitzer.

It’s hard to fathom that I’d managed to read only two stories (“Those of the Air” in Cthulhu’s Heirs and “The Castle of Kites and Crows” in Swords Against Darkness V) by a man who has written around three hundred of the things, several novels, and numerous works of non-fiction. Nonetheless, for most of my reading life, Schweitzer existed as little more than a name I knew.

Last year, I bought his The White Isle (1980) because it was cheap, there was some mention of a comparison to Lord Dunsany, and the cover looked cool. The novel is a dark (very dark!) take on the Orpheus and Eurydice story. It’s a powerful and bleak story of love and blind obsession set in one of the most despairing worlds I’ve ever encountered. I reviewed it last year at my site and promised myself to keep my eyes open for more of Schweitzer’s work. When Echoes of the Goddess showed up as an e-book, I snagged it at once.

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Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Four: The Maps

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 Scott Taylor Comments 11 comments

Have you ever designed a campaign and thought to yourself, ‘Damn, this is so good, I should build a company on it?’ Well, certainly you aren’t the only one, and dozens of game companies have been born from folk’s home brew campaigns, but it wasn’t until very recently that I realized that I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Role-Playing was born of the same ilk.

Now before you all go running off to Twitter about Tolkien being a RPG nerd, you have to have the full understanding of what I’m talking about. First and foremost, Tolkien WAS NOT a gamer, but that didn’t mean that his world wasn’t ripe for table-top role-players to want to explore in the mid to late 1970s.

One case in particular came out of the University of Virginia in 1977, when then student Pete Fenlon decided he wanted to create a role-playing game around Tolkien’s world for some friends on campus.

My first question upon finding this out was, ‘Why didn’t you just play D&D?’ and Pete’s answer was simple: D&D simply wasn’t Tolkien. As an avid camper and backpacker, as well as a member of the SCA, Fenlon understood way too much about Tolkien to throw a campaign into a world of negative integer armor classes and D20 to-hit charts.

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Ancient Worlds: Heracles and Hylas

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 Elizabeth Cady Comments 5 comments

Waterhouse_Hylas_and_the_Nymphs_Manchester_Art_Gallery_1896.15 — So, wait, I can move in with you, and your sisters, not live on a boat, and not carry hairy dude’s bow? SOLD.

As the Argonauts come closer to their destination, Apollonius finds himself with a problem that is familiar to many a DM: he has one character that significantly outclasses the other players. I refer, of course, to Heracles. A good adventure relies on tension and tension requires the possibility of real danger. A character that can Herc-smash every obstacle that stands in the party’s way is frustrating to both the writer and the audience.

In other scenarios, you can kill this guy off. But when your over-powered character is a well-known minor god with a well-established canon, you’re in a bit of a bind. So Apollonious does the next best thing and ushers Heracles off-stage by means of a side-quest. As mentioned before, Heracles is travelling on the Argo with Hylas, a boy who acts as his bow-carrier. At a stop for supplies, Hylas takes a jug and goes to fetch water. At the spring, his beauty attracts the attention of the nymphs, who seize him and pull him into their pool.

When Hylas fails to return, Heracles goes looking for him and, in the process, misses the boat. When the other Argonauts notice his absence, they accuse Jason of ditching Heracles on purpose and demand that they turn around to fetch him. This is when a sea god appears (yes, it is a literal deus ex machina) and informs them that Heracles has a destiny that does not include the quest for the Golden Fleece and that it is against the will of Zeus that they turn around.

Take THAT, character with suspiciously lucky dice.

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Black Hat

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 James Maliszewski Comments 2 comments

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I entered the tabletop roleplaying world in late 1979 at the ripe old age of 10. By that point, Dungeons & Dragons – and, by extension, the hobby it spawned – were already five years old. Consequently, I can’t be numbered amongst the earliest adopters of this new form of entertainment. Even by that date, there was a lot of water under the bridge of which I was very much unaware. Moreover, unlike many of my elders in the hobby, I wasn’t a wargamer (either miniatures or hex-and-chit) and I wasn’t all that well read in the fantasy literature that inspired D&D. I was most definitely a Johnny-come-lately, loath though I would have been to admit it. In fact, it rankled me a bit. I didn’t want to be one of “the kids,” as my friends and I were often called by the teenagers and college students who frequented the hobby shops. Besides, I reasoned, how could I be a kid when my beloved Holmes boxed set proclaimed that D&D was “the original adult fantasy role-playing game?”

I eventually got my own turn to look down my nose at D&D players younger than myself when the multi-colored boxed editions written and edited by Frank Mentzer started to appear in 1983. I loudly proclaimed those “kiddie Dungeons & Dragons” and didn’t want anything to do with them – except for the Companion Rules released in 1984. I had expected the Companion Rules since 1981, when they were mentioned in David Cook’s original Expert Rulebook. Despite my disdain for these new editions, with their Larry Elmore covers and Bowdlerized presentation of D&D, I nevertheless furtively bought a copy of the Companion Rules, hoping it would live up to my expectations. It didn’t–I’m not sure there’s any way it could have – but I liked it anyway. I liked it enough that I still have my copy of it to this day and frequently pull it off the shelf to read.

I did this the other day and read its preface for the first time in many years. In it, Mentzer says the following:

This game is like a huge tree, grown from the seeds planted in 1972 and even earlier. But as a plant needs water and sun, so does a game need proper “backing” – a company to make it. As the saying goes, “for want of a nail, the war was lost”; and for want of a company, the D&D game might have been lost amidst the lean and turbulent years of the last decade. This set is therefore dedicated to an oft-neglected leader of TSR, Inc; who, with Gary Gygax, founded this company and made it grow. The D&D Companion Set is dedicated to

BRIAN BLUME

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The Fantasy of Lucius Shepard: The Dragon Griaule

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Lucius Shepard died last month and, to commemorate his profound contributions to the genre, we are surveying his fantasy books here. Today, we continue with one of his most famous books, The Dragon Griaule.

The point could be made that Shepard made his greatest contributions to fantasy at short length and certainly this volume supports that theory. A collection of six linked stories, including two of his most famous — “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” and “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” — The Dragon Griaule collects all the tales of the massive corpse-dragon Griaule, including a new story, “The Skull,” which connects the mythical world of the Carbonales Valley to one of Shepard’s most prevalent literary concerns, 21st Century Central America.

More than twenty-five years ago, Lucius Shepard introduced us to a remarkable fictional world, a world separated from our own “by the thinnest margin of possibility.” There, in the mythical Carbonales Valley, Shepard found the setting for “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” the classic account of an artist — Meric Cattanay — and his decades long effort to paint — and kill — a dormant, not quite dead dragon measuring 6,000 feet from end to end. The story was nominated for multiple awards and is now recognized as one of its author’s signature accomplishments.

Over the years, Shepard has revisited this world in a number of brilliant, independent narratives that have illuminated the Dragon’s story from a variety of perspectives. This loosely connected series reached a dramatic crossroads in the astonishing novella, “The Taborin Scale.” The Dragon Griaule now gathers all of these hard to find stories into a single generous volume. The capstone of the book — and a particular treat for Shepard fans — is “The Skull,” a new 40,000 word novel that advances the story in unexpected ways, connecting the ongoing saga of an ancient and fabulous beast with the political realities of Central America in the 21st century. Augmented by a group of engaging, highly informative story notes, The Dragon Griaule is an indispensable volume, the work of a master stylist with a powerful — and always unpredictable — imagination.

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Bazaar of the Bizarre: Sci-Fi Creeps and Horror Crawlies for a Quarter

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 0 Comment

Because I don’t collect enough crap already, I’ve kinda started a new hobby collection. A few months back I shared about my childhood affinity for rubber critters, plastic spaceships, puffy-sticker monster faces, and a myriad of other pocket-sized products that could be had for a quarter from the supermarket vending machine. Well, why buy them individually when you can have the whole vending card?

You may yourself fondly recall the windows of enchantment that lured you to plunk your silver into the slot and eagerly turn the crank: displayed behind the glass were all the amazing things — artfully arranged and shrink-wrapped to a colorful cardboard backing — that might plop into the palm of your hand in an acorn- or bubble-shaped plastic capsule.

It’s easy enough to postulate a psychological motivation behind this new pursuit of hounding down vintage vending cards. Surely you experienced the same disappointment I often did: you’re looking at a rubber monster or a plastic tank with swiveling turret or a metal cap-gun; you go through the rigmarole of begging your mother to spare some change from her purse (this was often quite a feat requiring a great deal of persuasion — sometimes called “throwing a tantrum” — and it didn’t always pay off; in fact, the more you put into it, the greater the odds that you’d be denied on principle: “Well, I can’t give it to you now, because then you’d get the impression that you can throw a fit and get rewarded for it” — a line of reasoning that, as a new parent, I now find myself paraphrasing quite frequently); you succeed in scoring the quarter and feed the machine — crank crank crank — (anticipation) — the clank of the metal trapdoor — the popping of the lid…

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Tribulations Herculean and Tragic: Beyond Wizardwall by Janet Morris

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 Joe Bonadonna Comments 4 comments

Woe betide the soul who loves too much, wants too much, dares too much.

I finish my reviews of the 5-star, Author’s Cut editions of Janet Morris’s classic of Homeric Heroic Fantasy, the Beyond Sanctuary Trilogy, with the third and final book, Beyond Wizardwall. This was the toughest of the three to review because there is so much that happens and so much ground to cover. This is also the most dramatic, tense and emotionally powerful of the three books. Let me begin with a little recap in Janet’s own words:

Heavy snows had put the war against Mygdonia and its Nisibisi wizards into hiatus. Niko’s commander, Tempus, called the Riddler, had employed magic to bring his mixed cadre of shock troops (Rankan 3^rd Commando rangers, Tysian ‘specials,’ hillmen of Free Nisibis, and Niko’s unit of Stepsons) back to Tyse for the winter. Fighting had ended inconclusively, with the Mygdonian warlord Ajami still at large.

They ride into Tyse triumphant and settle in to wait for spring, content with the season’s work. All except Niko. Everything in this excellent novel revolves around Niko (who is also known by his war name, Stealth), for what trials he endures and what tribulations he suffers are Herculean and tragic and form the core of this novel.

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New Treasures: Crack’d Pot Trail by Steven Erikson

Monday, April 7, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

It was Jason Waltz, the hard-working mastermind behind Rogue Blades Entertainment, who first introduced me to the twisted and entertaining adventures of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, the famed necromancers from the Malazan Book of the Fallen. With little in the way of redeeming qualities, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach — and their hard-drinking manservant, Emancipor Reese — are the unlikely protagonists in a series of short novels that mix comedy and horror in equal measure. This time they find themselves on the run from a group of skilled hunters determined to bring them to justice for their foul misdeeds.

It is an undeniable truth: give evil a name and everyone’s happy. Give it two names and… why, they’re even happier.

Intrepid necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, scourges of civilization, raisers of the dead, reapers of the souls of the living, devourers of hope, betrayers of faith, slayers of the innocent, and modest personifications of evil, have a lot to answer for and answer they will. Known as the Nehemoth, they are pursued by countless self-professed defenders of decency, sanity, and civilization. After all, since when does evil thrive unchallenged? Well, often — but not this time.

Hot on their heels are the Nehemothanai, avowed hunters of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach. In the company of a gaggle of artists and pilgrims, stalwart Mortal Sword Tulgord Vise, pious Well Knight Arpo Relent, stern Huntsman Steck Marynd, and three of the redoubtable Chanter brothers (and their lone sister) find themselves faced with the cruelest of choices. The legendary Crack’d Pot Trail, a stretch of harsh wasteland between the Gates of Nowhere and the Shrine of the Indifferent God, has become a tortured path of deprivation.

Will honor, moral probity, and virtue prove champions in the face of brutal necessity? No, of course not. Don’t be silly.

Bauchelain and Korbal Broach previously appeared in Blood Follows, The Healthy Dead, The Lees of Laughter’s End (all previously collected in a single volume, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach: Three Short Novels of the Malazan Empire, Volume One), and The Wurms of Blearmouth. Crack’d Pot Trail was published September 13, 2011 by Tor Books. It is 204 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. I bought mine remaindered from Amazon.com for just $5.20; a handful of copies are still available at the discounted price.