Black Gate – Page 955 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

New Treasures: The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan

Friday, March 21, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Way back in Black Gate 13, the distinguished John C. Hocking contributed a feature review of Richard K. Morgan’s first fantasy novel and it alerted me to the fact that I was missing out on a major new work of sword & sorcery.

Here’s what he said, in part:

Richard K Morgan has made a name for himself with a chain of dark, slickly written science fiction thrillers… one might reasonably expect Morgan to continue in that style… Instead, he has written one of the most unusual, powerful, and daring sword & sorcery novels to see print for decades.

The Steel Remains follows a trio of characters, each of whom played a dramatic part in humanity’s grim battle with the Scaled Folk — reptilian invaders from the sea, defeated several years past…

As the three heroes are slowly drawn back together, a threat older and even more alien than the Scaled Folk moves into the world. Ringil and his friends will meet it with steel.

You can see why I was intrigued. Can that Hocking fellow write a review or what?

I’m a little late to talk about the sequel, The Cold Commands, especially in a column that ostensibly deals exclusively with the latest releases. But I just discovered it, so I’m going to do it anyway (I blame Hocking.)

The Cold Commands was released in in hardcover in 2011. It is subtitled Book Two of A Land For Heroes. You know what that means: now that there are two books, Morgan was forced to come up with a name for his series.

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It’s About Time

Friday, March 21, 2014 Violette Malan Comments 1 comment

We don’t tend to think of time as a literary device, but along with such other abstract concepts as the sublime, time is something that authors often use deliberately to create specific effects. What effects, specifically? Disorientation. Confusion. Dislocation. Even the feeling of something alien.

How is it that something as relatively simple as time can do all these things? The 17^th-century philosopher John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, said that humans don’t have a direct perception of time. We don’t actually perceive time at all. What we perceive is the passage of time, or what he calls “duration.”

Want something a little more modern? More physics, less philosophy? Einstein explained it in the form of a joke: When a pretty girl sits on your lap for an hour, it seems like a minute. When you sit on a hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour. That’s relativity. In other words, your perception of duration is subjective.

And that’s something writers can play with.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Island of Fu Manchu, Part Three

Friday, March 21, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 0 Comment

Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Panama Canal was first serialized in Liberty Magazine from November 16, 1940 to February 1, 1941. It was published in book form as The Island of Fu Manchu by Doubleday in the US and Cassell in the UK in 1941. The book serves as a direct follow-up to Rohmer’s 1939 bestseller The Drums of Fu Manchu and is again narrated by Fleet Street journalist, Bart Kerrigan.

The second half of the book gets underway with Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Sir Lionel Barton, Bart Kerrigan, and the local Panamanian police chief holding a council of war to discuss the enigmatic Lou Cabot. A meeting is arranged by Kerrigan and Sir Denis with the dancer Flammario, who is Cabot’s former lover. Cabot is involved with the Si-Fan and has run afoul of Dr. Fu Manchu. Both the Devil Doctor and Flammario wish to see Cabot dead.

Flammario is meant to recall Zarmi from the third Fu Manchu novel, 1917’s The Hand of Fu Manchu, but she is more bitter than seductive. The exotic dancer leads Smith and Kerrigan to Cabot’s apartment. Unfortunately, the Si-Fan had the advantage and arrived before them. The place is in a shambles and they discover Cabot’s hideously mangled corpse. Kerrigan spies Ardatha’s ring on a shelf and knows that his lost love has fallen back into the Si-Fan’s clutches.

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Goth Chick News: Walker Stalker Con Drags into Chicago

Thursday, March 20, 2014 Sue Granquist Comments 2 comments

“It’s some kind of zombie convention, did you know about this?”

This is GCN photog Chris Zemko calling me last Friday night with a hot bit of industry news. Apparently a very significant event in the Chicago horror scene had eluded us (let me show you my shocked face) and Chris had just done a diving catch.

A little bit of digging turned up the information that yes indeed, Walker Stalker Con was taking place in Chicago, at one of the larger convention centers, that very weekend.

Walker Stalker Con is the brain child of podcasters James Frazier and Eric Nordhoff, who at one point apparently road tripped to Senoia, GA, where they were able to view the set of The Walking Dead and meet the actors from the show. As a result of this experience, they began The Walker Stalkers podcast to discuss the show twice weekly during its seasonal runs – and from that sprouted the inspiration for a convention.

Kicking off first in Atlanta last year, the convention focused on recreating James’s and Eric’s original experience with The Walking Dead’s cast and crew, along with actors and artists from other zombie shows, movies, and art. Due to the overwhelming response it received in 2013, James and Eric decided to host an additional annual event beginning in Chicago this year.

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What’s the Point of Steampunk?

Thursday, March 20, 2014 Comments 25 comments

Over on Farcebook, I once posted an admiring link to Abney Park and got an irritated slapdown from a mate who is slightly more politically correct than I.

(Abney Park, if you’ve just tuned in, are like Maximus from Gladiator: The Steampunk band that made an album that became a roleplaying game that became a novel. With songs like “Airship Pirate” and “Steampunk Revolution,” they push all the tropish buttons, but they are more than just a concept band; they can sing and play. I think of their style as Electric Urban Folk; they’ve taken all the sounds you’d hear in pre-WWII cosmopolitan cities — Jazz, ballad, sea shanties, gypsy fiddle, marching songs — then rocked them up using a mixture of traditional and electric instruments.)

My friend, however, dismissed them and Steampunk as something like; “socially retrodyne misogynist crypto-imperialist nostalgia”.

I am afraid that my off-the-cuff response was, “WHAT WAS THAT, SIR? I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY ZEPPELIN ENGINES.”

Afterwards, I wish I had mounted a more serious defense of the genre.

I guess this is it.

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Lucius Shepard, August 21, 1947 – March 18, 2014

Thursday, March 20, 2014 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

Multiple sources are reporting that Lucius Shepard, one of the most talented writers to emerge from the cyberpunk movement in the mid-80s, has died.

I first encountered him in the pages of Omni magazine in 1988, with his novelette “Life of Buddha.” I remember being astounded with the natural realism of his dialog, which captured the flow of modern speech in a way I’d never seen before. I read his brilliant Nebula Award-winning novella “R&R” — which opens with an artillery specialist in Central America getting a glimpse of a war map and wondering if he’s somehow caught up in a war between primary colors — and the novel it turned into, Life During Wartime (1987). His dark visions of the near future frequently involved inexplicable wars, and he wrote extensively about Central America, where he lived briefly.

Shepard won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1985. His 1992 novella “Barnacle Bill the Spacer,” which I read in the pages of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, was a vivid character study of a mentally disabled cleaning man on a troubled space station, and his unexpected actions during an attempted mutiny. It won the Hugo Award in 1993 and was eventually collected in Barnacle Bill the Spacer and Other Stories (1998) and Beast of the Heartland (1999.)

He won many other awards during his lifetime. Two of his early collections, The Jaguar Hunter (1987) and The Ends of the Earth (1991), won the World Fantasy Award; his novella “Vacancy,” from the Winter 2007 issue of Subterranean Online, won a Shirley Jackson Award (read the story here).

Shepard published his first short stories in 1983; his first novel was Green Eyes in 1984. For the first few years of his career, he was considered part of the cyberpunk movement, but quickly broke free of that market label with his horror novel The Golden (1993) and titles like Valentine (2002), Colonel Rutherford’s Colt (2003), Louisiana Breakdown (2003), and A Handbook of American Prayer (2004). His final novel, Softspoken, was published by Night Shade in 2007. His acclaimed Dragon Griaule stories, including “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” and “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” were collected in The Dragon Griaule by Subterranean Press in 2012.

Shepard was still very active in the field at the time of his death. He published Five Autobiographies and a Fiction in April of last year and he wrote a regular film review column (which I regularly enjoyed, although I seldom agreed with him) for Gordon van Gelder’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He died on March 18, 2014 at the age of 66.

Reenact Clash of the Titans on Your Kitchen Table With Mythic Battles

Thursday, March 20, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

When you’re a collector, your enemy is the impulse purchase. Unless you’re independently wealthy — or you collect caterpillars or something — you need to budget carefully, and make every purchases count. Your goals are ambitious, and one or two impulse buys can leave a carefully thought-out acquisition plan in ruins.

All this goes out the window at an auction. Auctions are all about the impulse buy. A tantalizing treasure is on the auction block for a scant 15 seconds — just long enough to think, “What the heck is that? Is that the guy from 300, or some kind of Spartan paratrooper? Man, I bet Drew would play this with me. Wonder if you can play the guy with the glowing forehead? Is there a Kraken miniature? It’d be worth the 10 buck opening bid just to get a Kraken miniature. OMG it-must-be-mine” — and then bang, the auction is over, you’re the proud owner something called Mythic Battles, and you’re out seventeen bucks.

Mythic Greece is in chaos: Athena and Hades are at war and have sent their greatest heroes to battle. Take on the role of these generals out of legend, leading fantastic armies and lead your troops to victory!

Mythic Battles is a game which simulates epic confrontations and battles that will take your breath away. Thanks to its innovative system – the Building Battle Board (BBB), which combines game mechanisms from miniature games, board games and card games – Mythic Battles offers you an experience the likes of which you have never seen. Recruit your army, play your cards to activate your units, roll your dice to resolve combat – reinvent your way of playing!

This box contains two complete armies to play with two or four players, an initiation campaign, as well as all that’s required to play as you wish. Other armies and units will periodically be released to flesh out your campaigns.

I bought my copy of Mythic Battles at the Games Plus Spring Auction and so far I’ve been very pleased with it. It was designed by Benoit Vogt and was published by Lello/Play & Win in 2012, with a retail price of $49.99. There have been two expansions: The Bloody Dawn of Legends (2013) and Tribute of Blood (2014). And no — there is no Kraken miniature (I know. What were they thinking?)

Firefly, A Retrospective — Part 6

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 Jon Sprunk Comments 4 comments

Hey there! I’m back this week with part 6 of my examination of the Firefly series. So far, we’ve covered the pilot in Part 1, episodes two and three (“Train Job” and “Bushwhacked”) in Part 2, “Shindig” and “Safe “ in Part 3, “Our Mrs. Reynolds” and “Jaynestown” in Part 4, and “Out of Gas” and “Ariel” in Part 5.

We’re into the second half of the season, where I really feel the show finds its stride.

First up, War Stories!

War Stories (Episode 10)

It starts with Simon and Shepherd Book (who was absent last episode during the hospital heist) discussing River’s condition. Simon thinks he’s closing in on what the Alliance did to her. River is struggling, though, because the treatments aren’t working all the time.

The crew is feeling good after their last job, though Wash gets irritated with Zoe for not backing his plan to cut out the middlemen when selling their loot. Instead, she takes the captain’s side in the discussion, and Wash feels Mal and Zoe are too close. Meanwhile, Inara’s attractive female client arrives on the ship. Jayne sees them and announces that he’ll be in his bunk. Classic Jayne!

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Future Treasures: The Silk Map, A Gaunt and Bone Novel by Chris Willrich, Due May 6

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

We published Chris Willrich’s gloriously imaginative sword-and-sorcery tale “The Lions of Karthagar” in Black Gate 15. I’ve been very curious about his popular Gaunt and Bone tales, which have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Flashing Swords, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other places. The first Gaunt and Bone book, The Scroll of Years — which contained a complete novel plus the very first published story, “The Thief with Two Deaths” (from F&SF, June 2000) — was released in September of last year and now we have the details on the sequel.

At the end of The Scroll of Years, the poet Persimmon Gaunt and her husband, the thief Imago Bone, had saved their child from evil forces at the price of trapping him within a pocket dimension. Now they will attempt what seems impossible; they will seek a way to recover their son. Allied with Snow Pine, a scrappy bandit who’s also lost her child to the Scroll of Years, Gaunt and Bone awaken the Great Sage, a monkeylike demigod of the East, currently trapped by vaster powers beneath a mountain. The Sage knows of a way to reach the Scroll — but there is a price. The three must seek the world’s greatest treasure and bring it back to him. They must find the worms of the alien Iron Moths, whose cocoons produce the wondrous material ironsilk.

And so the rogues join a grand contest waged along three thousand miles of dangerous and alluring trade routes between East and West. For many parties have simultaneously uncovered fragments of the Silk Map, a document pointing the way toward a nest of the Iron Moths. Our heroes tangle with Western treasure hunters, a blind mystic warrior and his homicidal magic carpet, a nomad princess determined to rebuild her father’s empire, and a secret society obsessed with guarding the lost paradise where the Moths are found — even if paradise must be protected by murder.

Chris Willrich is also the author of the Pathfinder Tales novel The Dagger of Trust.

The Silk Map will be on published by Pyr Books on May 6, 2014. It is 442 pages, and will be priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. Visit Chris’s website here.

New Treasures: Night Owls by Lauren M. Roy

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

I love fantasies about book stores. They already seem magical to me anyway, so they’re a logical setting for tales of strange goings-on and otherwordly adventure. Add a cast of quirky characters and a supernatural menace or two, and I’m sold.

Night Owls bookstore is the one spot on campus open late enough to help out even the most practiced slacker. The employees’ penchant for fighting the evil creatures of the night is just a perk…

Valerie McTeague’s business model is simple: provide the students of Edgewood College with a late-night study haven and stay as far away as possible from the underworld conflicts of her vampire brethren. She’s experienced that life, and the price she paid was far too high for her to ever want to return.

Elly Garrett hasn’t known any life except that of fighting the supernatural beings known as Creeps or Jackals. But she always had her mentor and foster father by her side — until he gave his life protecting a book that the Creeps desperately want to get their hands on.

When the book gets stashed at Night Owls for safekeeping, those Val holds nearest and dearest are put in mortal peril. Now Val and Elly will have to team up, along with a mismatched crew of humans, vampires, and lesbian succubi, to stop the Jackals from getting their claws on the book and unleashing unnamed horrors…

I can’t find much about author Lauren M. Roy — I eventually uncovered her website — but I did discover she is a bookseller, in addition to being a first-time novelist and a freelance writer for games such as Trail of Cthulhu, Dragon Age, and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. I also found a pic of her wearing a cool hat at GoodReads. I think all authors should be required to wear cool hats, so we can spot them in public. And buy them lunch.

Night Owls was published on February 25, 2014 by Ace Books. It is 296 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions. It is the first volume in the Night Owls series.