Black Gate – Page 951 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Kick That Did Not Start

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 FraserRonald Comments 4 comments

Not all Kickstarters will fund. Farewell, Something Lovely didn’t.

That was unfortunate, but it was not a complete loss. Some of the backers hadn’t backed Centurion: Legionaries of Rome, my successful Kickstarter, so I had increased my network. I also learned some lessons which helped me prepare for my ongoing Kickstarter for Nefertiti Overdrive: Ancient Egytian Wuxia. Since I’m a generous guy, let me share my lessons learned with you.

1) Expect failure and you can expect failure.

I went into Farewell, Something Lovely with a strong suspicion that I would fail. I’m not saying that I created my own failure… actually, I am saying that, but not that I gave up on the Kickstarter.

I kept pushing until the end. I wonder, though, if that expectation of failure curtailed my efforts in some way. Perhaps I could have done more if I believed the Kickstarter would succeed.

It’s similar to an explanation of backer psychology I heard: backers will only pledge to a Kickstarter they expect to fund. Just as a backer will create a failure by expecting a Kickstarter to fail, I have a feeling that if you go in with your parachute on, maybe you’ll bail out of the plane before absolutely necessary. Maybe if I had put more effort into the Kickstarter, I could have saved it.

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Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds is Punch-You-in-the-Face Good

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 Kelly Swails Comments 1 comment

Fate wants what fate wants. No one knows this better then Miriam Black.

Miriam sees death every time she touches someone. A few seconds of skin-on-skin contact is all she needs to learn the exact date, time, and method of someone’s death. Over the past several years, she’s seen thousands of suicides and car crashes, violent deaths and peaceful ones. Miriam has long since stopped trying to save people, because it never works. Fate wants what fate wants; and when fate wants someone dead, it happens.

That is, until Miriam meets Louis and learns he will die saying her name, three weeks after they meet. Miriam knows she is present when Louis dies and that she must do everything she can to stop it.

Blackbirds is punch-you-in-the-face, miss-your-stop-on-the-train good. If it were a TV show, it would have an “MA LVS” warning — for mature audiences, language, violence, and sexual content. As such, this book isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s important to note, though, that all of this graphic content doesn’t feel gratuitous in any way. Wendig is masterful at characterization and he didn’t pull any punches when he wrote Miriam Black. She is foul-mouthed (once or twice I re-read a few sentences because I was simultaneously shocked, awed, and jealous), self-protective, and quite capable of holding her own in a bar fight. She might rub some readers the wrong way — especially after the visceral opening scene when she appears uncaring — but if you stick with her a bit, you’ll see her coarse, abrasive nature is nothing more than an armor that Miriam has had to acquire in order to keep her sanity intact.

The plot is fairly straight-forward and tightly constructed. There are no extraneous scenes or chapters. The “Interlude” segments serve to tell us Miriam’s backstory in an untraditional way. If I had one quibble with this book, it would be the ending. While it’s satisfying, completes the story, and is the expected ending, I felt Miriam could have been a little more proactive in carrying out the task fate had in mind for her. Still, that’s a minor complaint; I thoroughly enjoyed the book and look forward to reading the next in the series.

From the Celluloid Cellar: Star Wars

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 MichaelPenkas Comments 10 comments

Long-time science fiction fans will likely be familiar with Star Wars, if only by its reputation. Initially a flop at the box office, it survives today mostly as a midnight movie curiosity. Indeed, it took studios over a decade to invest in another big-budget science fiction film after the massive failure of George Lucas’s love letter to the movie serials of the 1930s. But an objective review shows that it’s not nearly as bad as word-of-mouth makes and, once the plot finally gets moving, is actually a lot of fun, despite (maybe a little because of) its many flaws.

So, the plot? In a distant galaxy, an evil empire rules the many inhabited worlds with an iron fist. Cue the ragtag rebellion trying to free the galaxy from the Empire’s control. First problem with the plot? The Galaxy, Empire, and Rebellion are unnamed in this film, each going simply by a definitive article.

The leader of the Rebellion is Princess Leia (played by Carrie Fisher, daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher), dressed all in white like a virgin sacrifice, but carrying a bad-ass ray gun. The main bad guy? There is an Emperor (mentioned, but never seen) and General Tarkin (played by Peter Cushing as a delightfully over-the-top space nazi); but the clear face of evil is Tarkin’s chief lieutenant, Darth Vader. A seven-foot tall wizard dressed in head-to-toe black armor, face covered by a black Shogun skull mask and voiced as pure hate incarnate by James Earl Jones, it’s hard to imagine this film was ever marketed to children with this walking nightmare engine chewing the scenery. The scenes between eighteen year-old wisp Fisher and this creepy heavy-breathing monster are especially disturbing.

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Doctor Who and the Daemons – the Novel!

Monday, March 31, 2014 markrigney Comments 7 comments

More than once on Black Gate, I’ve heard that the seventies were a dead zone for science fiction and fantasy. For teens in search of readily available genre “gateway drugs,” I suppose this might have been true for many, but my particular experience of growing up managed, against all odds, to be different. Ohio was my home base, a vanilla environment for “culture” of the fantastical sort, but luckily I had a smorgasbord of British relatives. One especially perceptive and sibylline aunt started sending me Doctor Who novelizations.

Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, that was the first I tried. Next, one of the best offerings in the canon, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion. I was in third grade and after facing down those blank-eyed Autons and their Nestene masters, I was hooked.

Note that I wasn’t in any way watching the TV show. In Columbus, Ohio, it simply wasn’t available, not until the early eighties, and then, when PBS did pick up a few random episodes, it was Tom Baker’s roost to rule. The Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, and William Hartnell adventures I first encountered were absent entire.

What Tom Baker’s run taught me is that talented actors can be mired forever in substandard scripts and even worse special effects. This was a total and unpleasant surprise, because the novelizations were fast-paced genre gems, especially those penned by Terrance Dicks. (Malcolm Hulke was the other regular adapter for the Doctor Who franchise, with a rotating cast of fellow contributors including Gerry Davis, Ian Marter, and David Whitaker.) How could such pacey, adrenaline-filled books arise from such hokey, hamstrung screen material?

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New Treasures: Once Upon a Time in Hell by Guy Adams

Monday, March 31, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

You know, I try not to play favorites with these New Treasures posts. The whole point is to present a diverse sampling of the most intriguing fantasy crossing my desk every week. It defeats the purpose if I keep talking about the same writers week after week, so I don’t do it.

Unless your name is Guy Adams, apparently. I wrote up his novel of hidden laboratories, genetic engineering, and Sherlock Holmes, The Army of Dr. Moreau, back in August 2012, and his noir jazz club mystery Deadbeat: Makes You Stronger last October. But it was his gonzo fantasy-western, The Good The Bad and the Infernal, released last March, that really grabbed my attention and I’ve anxiously been awaiting the sequel. Now that it’s arrived, here I am talking about Guy Adams again. It’s not my fault, I swear.

A weird western, a gun-toting, cigarrillo-chewing fantasy built from hangman’s rope and spent bullets. The west has never been wilder.

Wormwood has appeared, and with it a doorway to the afterlife. But what use is a door if you can’t step through it?

Hundreds have battled unimaginable odds to reach this place, including the blind shooter Henry Jones; the drunk and liar Roderick Quartershaft; that most holy, yet enigmatic of orders, the Brotherhood of Ruth; the inventor Lord Forset and his daughter Elisabeth; the fragile messiah Soldier Joe and his nurse Hope Lane. Of them all, Elwyn Wallace, a young man who only wanted to travel west for a job, would have happily forgone the experience. But he finds himself abroad in Hell, a nameless, aged gunslinger by his side. He had thought nothing could match the terror of his journey thus far, but time will prove him wrong.

On the road to Hell, good intentions don’t mean a damn.

Once Upon a Time in Hell is Book two of The Heaven’s Gate Trilogy. It was published on December 31, 2013 by Solaris. It is 283 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes – Creation to Death and Back

Monday, March 31, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 14 comments

In 1882, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet “Sir”) opened up his own shop as a doctor in Southsea (England). Business was slow and his most notable triumph was marrying the sister of a patient who died of meningitis.

With some spare time on his hands, Doyle wrote fiction. Somewhere around 1886, he came to the conclusion that he could write detective stories better than the ones he was reading. He would create, “a scientific detective, who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.”

Putting the pen to the paper, he completed A Study in Scarlet (working title, The Tangled Skein) that year. Originally starring Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker, the names had settled into the now familiar Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

Doyle’s stories of Holmes owe a debt to Edgar Allen Poe that has been discussed by far better minds than mine. The now mostly forgotten Emile Gaboriau was also acknowledged by Doyle as an influence.

Mystery maven and Doyle biographer John Dickinson Carr stated that Holmes was clearly based on Doyle himself, which seems overly flattering.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

Monday, March 31, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Scott Taylor’s massive survey of the top artists working in the role playing industry since its birth — the latest in his popular Art of the Genre series — was our most popular article last month.

In second and third place were our reports on the latest fan turmoil inside the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), including a series of ugly personal attacks on ex-SFWA Vice President Mary Robinette Kowal.

Fourth was the first installment of Jon Sprunk’s Firefly retrospective, now up to seven chapters.

For fifth place it was back to the People-Behaving-Badly part of our program, with a report on Macmillan Associate Director of Contracts Sean P. Fodera’s threat to sue everyone who linked to the Daily Dot report on his attack on Mary Robinette Kowal (including Black Gate, presumably). We’re still waiting for that thick Fed Ex envelope from a legal firm.

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in February were:

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Urban Areas: The City, by Stella Gemmell

Sunday, March 30, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 5 comments

A little while ago, I stumbled on a book that seemed especially worth writing about here: The City, by Stella Gemmell. It’s Gemmell’s first solo novel; she also completed Troy: Fall of Kings, the last book by her late husband, David. David Gemmell was a widely-known heroic fantasy writer — those unfamiliar with his work can see his Wikipedia entry, a wiki dedicated to his books, an obituary from The Guardian, a retrospective of his life and career from this site, and a look back at his first novel, Legend. I’ve only read a couple of his works myself, his early novels Legend and Waylander, but knowing his background I found myself curious about The City.

It’s the story of a vast, unnamed city at the centre of a sprawling empire, engaged in an ongoing brutal war and ruled by a mysterious immortal. The novel begins with a disgraced general struggling to survive in the labyrinthine sewers that undergird the city, then begins moving freely through a large cast, most of whom are soldiers in the city’s army. It becomes clear that the Emperor’s a tyrant, who must be overthrown — but can any merely human conspiracy survive against his mysterious powers?

The fantasy element of the book’s fairly light, beyond the setting (which itself turns out to have its own secrets). The book’s main focus is on war, battle, and the experience of the individual soldier. It ably moves from plot strand to plot strand, character to character, and occasionally skips forward by years or months. It’s an intricately-plotted book, and I suspect benefits from being read in a short time. Luckily, the style’s clear and plain without being simplistic, driving the reader on quickly through a series of fights and betrayals.

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Vintage Treasures: Universe 13 edited by Terry Carr

Sunday, March 30, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Last Sunday, I was busy complaining about the apparent death of the original SF and fantasy paperback anthology series (as one does), when it occurred to me that I should probably read a few of the books I was talking about.

Nothing like waxing nostalgic and working up a good frothy indignation at the death of a vital part of American culture to remind you that your memories on the subject are actually kinda vague and unspecific. It’s a crime that Universe is no longer being published! It was a source of some of the most brilliant SF of the 70s! I think. Wait, which one was Universe again?

So I decided to start by reading Universe 13. Partly because Terry Carr really was a terrific editor and he knew how to put together a splendid anthology. But mostly because I found a copy in easy reach in a stack of vintage paperbacks and I didn’t have to get up out of my big green chair.

I’ve talked about Universe before, especially about Carr’s insight into the field. One of the most famous quotes about science fiction comes from his introduction to Universe 3, which I printed in 2012 and I’d like to reprint here:

When aficionados of this field get together, that’s a standard topic of discussion. When was science fiction’s golden age? Some say the early forties, when John W. Campbell and a host of new writers like Heinlein, Sturgeon and van Vogt were transforming the entire field; others point to the early fifties, to [editors] H.L. Gold and Anthony Boucher and to such writers as Damon Knight, Alfred Bester and Ray Bradbury. Some will lay claims for the late sixties, when the new wave passed and names like Ballard, Disch and Aldiss came forward. There are still people around, too, who’ll tell you about 1929 and David H. Keller, E.E. Smith and Ray Cummings.

The clue in most cases is when the person talking first began to read science fiction. When it was all new, all of it was exciting. Years ago a friend of mine, Pete Graham, tersely answered the question “When was the golden age of science fiction?” by saying “Twelve.” He didn’t have to explain further; we knew what he meant.

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The Top Five Differences Between HBO’s Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones

Sunday, March 30, 2014 Elizabeth Eckhart Comments 2 comments

It’s rare a show comes along that leaves readers wondering whether the book or screen version is better.

Generally speaking, film and television adaptations rarely live up to the complexity and depth of novels. In an effort to condense plot and keep things moving relatively quickly, and understandably, shows and films often act as the tip of the iceberg.

The original works, however, are more likely to reveal the underlying complexities (the rest of the iceberg, you might say) and true personalities of most of the characters. And, as expected, whole scenes are generally chopped from the film version due to lack of time.

So, of course, when a show like Game of Thrones comes along (the fourth season of which will be starting next week), that has some fans claiming the show is as good, perhaps even better, than George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, then we have no choice but to examine the merits of each.

In my opinion, the show lacks in several major areas. First: relationships.

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