Black Gate – Page 957 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

March/April Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

Sunday, March 16, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

I’m so far behind reading Fantasy & Science Fiction. Seriously. I need to take a long vacation just so I can catch up.

Now, I know reading F&SF is ultimately a time-saver. When I did have time to keep up, it always pointed me towards the hottest new fantasy writers on the market. Believe me, considering all the bad fantasy novels I’ve read (or tried to read) in the last few years, if I’d just spent half that time reading F&SF, I would have known which writers to try instead.

Well, I suppose I’ll have a nice stack of magazines to read when I’m retired.

Jamie Lackey at Tangent Online is more disciplined than I am… not only has she read the latest issue, she had time to write a lengthy review. Here’s her thoughts on Sarah Pinsker’s contribution:

“A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide” by Sarah Pinsker opens when Andy wakes after a farming accident to find that his arm has been replaced by a prosthetic. As he works at getting used to his new appendage, he realizes that the arm thinks that it’s a stretch of road in Colorado. It’s a unique concept, and the prose is beautiful. As Andy deals with his new arm’s sense of self, he also gains more understanding and acceptance of his own place in the world.

This issue contains stories by Gordon Eklund, Ron Goulart, Albert E. Cowdrey, Ted White, and many others.

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Caught Between Rebels and the Empire’s Blackest Magic: Beyond the Veil: The Revised and Expanded Author’s Cut by Janet Morris

Sunday, March 16, 2014 Joe Bonadonna Comments 18 comments

I continue with my review of the 5-star, Author’s Cut editions of Janet Morris’s classic of Homeric Heroic Fantasy, the Beyond Sanctuary Trilogy, of which Beyond the Veil is the second book. Once again, she does not disappoint in this stirring novel of political and religious intrigue, dark magic, gods and men, witches and mages, and the price of love and war.

This is a pivotal book in the trilogy, where foreshadowing and story threads begin to weave in and out to form a tapestry, telling a tale of friends who become foes, enemies who become allies, and what fate lies in store for certain demigods and mortals.

Now, after the battle to win Wizardwall that took place in book one, Beyond Sanctuary, Tempus, Niko, and the Sacred Band are caught between the local rebels and the empire of Mygdonia’s blackest magic. Once again, “War is coming, sending ahead its customary harbingers: fear and falsity and fools.”

It begins with the murder of a courier on his way to meet with Tempus, and the arrival of a young woman named Kama, of the 3^rd Commandoes, (a unit of special rangers originally formed by Tempus) who seeks audience with Tempus, who is also known as Riddler. Her mission is to take 11-year old Shamshi, the young wizard-boy, back home to Mygdonia.

Shamshi, once a pawn in the game played by the late sorcerer Datan in the previous novel, is still under the spell of Roxane the witch, but is now being held as a guest-hostage by Tempus and the Sacred Band. Though he may be a child in the eyes of men, Shamshi is already plotting against Tempus and Niko.

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Vintage Treasures: Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak / Cosmic Manhunt by L. Sprague de Camp

Sunday, March 16, 2014 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Clifford D. Simak was one of the first science fiction writers I ever read and, in discovering him, in a very real way I also discovered science fiction.

Simak would probably be marketed as a Young Adult writer today (if any of his work was still in print.) One of his first novels, Ring Around the Sun, also became one of the first Ace Doubles, and it was a significant success.

The New York Herald Tribune called it “Easily the best science-fiction novel so far in 1953,” and in the highly-regarded survey Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove labeled it his best book, alongside Simak’s better-known classic City.

More recently, Ring Around the Sun featured prominently in Stephen King’s 2001 bestseller Hearts in Atlantis. When eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield gets an adult library card for his birthday, it’s one of the first books he checks out. The mysterious dimensional traveler Ted Brautigan, on the run from the minions of the Crimson King and renting the upstairs apartment, approves of Bobby’s choice.

“I have read this one,” he said. “I had a lot of time to read previous to coming here.”

“Yeah?” Bobby kindled. “Is it good?”

“One of his best…In this book,” he said, “Mr. Simak postulates the idea that there are a number of worlds like ours. Not other planets but other Earths, parallel Earths, in a kind of ring around the sun. A fascinating idea.”

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Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Saturday, March 15, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 5 comments

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts Amos Tutuola was born in Nigeria in 1920 to a Christian family. With six years of formal schooling, he served as a coppersmith with the Lagos-based arm of the Royal Air Force in World War Two, then worked at a number of of odd jobs. As he tells it, a government magazine he happened to read, with “very lovely portraits of the gods,” advertised books based on Yoruba legends. Tutuola remembered being praised as a storyteller in school and decided there was no reason he shouldn’t turn his hand to writing similar books. So he did. He completed his first book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, in only a few days.

It was a wild whirl of tales and motifs, inspired by West African oral storytelling traditions and The Arabian Nights. It was a kind of extended fable filled with magic and adventure, mixing myth and folktale in a seemingly endless procession of wonder. It was written in English, but a highly distinctive English — an informal, direct English, English as it suited Tutuola to write it.

Tutuoa didn’t do anything at first with the story, until he bought another magazine and saw an ad from the Lutheran World Press soliciting manuscripts. He sent them his work and got back a letter saying that the publisher only handled religious works, but that they were impressed with his story and would try to place it at another firm. After a year, Tutuola received a letter from British publishers Faber and Faber, asking about his novel. They published the book in 1952; it was well-reviewed, with especially glowing praise from Dylan Thomas, was translated into French, and generally established Tutuola as a powerful writer. He followed the first book with the equally fantastical My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1954, and went on to a long writing career before his death in 1997.

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Future Treasures: Lexicon by Max Barry

Saturday, March 15, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

At first I thought Max Barry’s latest novel was just another high-tech thriller. But a closer look revealed that Lexicon is a lot more than that: a glimpse at a secret war between rival factions of poets, where the weapons are words; the most feared agents have names like Bronte, Eliot, and Lowell; whole towns have been annihilated; and the most dangerous thing you can do is fall in love.

Lexicon was released in hardcover last June and Time called it “Unquestionably the year’s smartest thriller” and listed it as one of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2013. Over at Tor.com, Niall Alexander called it “Simply gripping from the get-go… Lexicon twists and turns like a lost language, creating tension and expectations… awesome,” and at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow said it was “Gripping… a pitch-perfect thriller, a jetpack of a plot that rocketed me from page one to page 400 in a single afternoon.”

At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics — at least not in the usual ways. Instead, they are taught to persuade. Here the art of coercion has been raised to a science. Students learn that every person can be classified by an extremely specific personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately controlled by the skillful and sometimes magical application of words. The very best will become part of a secretive organization of “poets” — elite manipulators of language who can wield words as weapons and bend others to their will.

Whip-smart orphan Emily Ruff is running a three-card Monte game on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization’s recruiters. She is flown across the country for the school’s rigorous and mysterious entrance exams. Once admitted, she learns the fundamentals of persuasion by Bronte, Eliot, and Lowell — master teachers who have adopted the names of famous poets to conceal their true identities. Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.

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Fiction Review: Francesca Forrest’s Pen Pal

Friday, March 14, 2014 alanajoli Comments 1 comment

This past month, I’ve not been playing much in the way of interactive fiction and my webcomics have fallen behind schedule–in part because I’ve been reading some great prose books. One of the most recent is the novel Pen Pal by Francesca Forrest, a self-published novel that began its life on livejournal and grew up into a full-fledged, completely remarkable fantasy. For those who have been looking for something different than fantasyland fare, this is definitely a novel you should check out.

As the story opens, young Em, a girl from the floating community of Mermaid’s Hands just off the Gulf Coast of the United States, is reaching for the larger world. She loves her community and trusts in the Seafather, the god worshipped by her small village of intertwined boats on the mudflats, but she wants to see more of the world. With the help of a friend, she tosses a message in a bottle into the sea, willing the Seafather to take it somewhere interesting, to someone who will write her back.

Whether through fate or the intervention of two very different gods, the letter ends up in the hands of Kaya, a political prisoner in the country of W–, near Indonesia, whose prison is a faux-temple suspended over Ruby Lake, a lava lake in the center of a volcano. Kaya is from the mountains, making her a minority in her own small country, and her people’s traditional religion, worship of the Lady of Ruby Lake, has been forbidden. Through writing to Em, she begins to examine how she became a political prisoner–she who had once embraced the lowland culture, attended college in America, and sought to advance in life. But her plan to hold a festival for the Lady, just as a cultural celebration, nothing to offend the government, crashes around her ears and sends her hanging perilously above the lava, in solitary confinement, but for letters from her mother and Em and a strangely intelligent crow companion.

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The Novels of Michael Shea: The Mines of Behemoth

Friday, March 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 15 comments

The last two Michael Shea novels we discussed, The Extra and Attack on Sunrise, took his career in an intriguing and very different direction. But I still admit a greater fascination with his Nifft the Lean novels, Nifft the Lean (1982), The Mines of Behemoth (1997), and The A’rak (2000). Baen Books published the last two in attractive paperback editions, with covers by Gary Ruddell, and I’ve always thought they were some of the most eye-catching sword-and-sorcery on the market.

We lost Michael last month, but very fortunately for us, he left a fine body of work behind to remember him by, including The Color Out Of Time (1984), In Yana, the Touch of Undying (1985); and his highly acclaimed collections Polyphemus (1987), The Autopsy and Other Tales (2008), and Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2010).

Nifft the Lean, and his companion-at-arms, Barnar Hammer-Hand, were often lucky. Enroute to working Costard’s sap mine — very dangerous, and sometimes nauseating work far below ground — they were shipwrecked. But this proved fortuitous, when they met Bunt, who had been seeking just such as they. If they would work the sap mine, but also bring back twenty gills of fluid, he would make them exceedingly wealthy. So it was settled. They would suck the sap from the servants of the monstrous insectile queen — and they would bring back some of the ichor that she alone exuded — and they would be rich. It seemed relatively easy. They wouldn’t have to go to hell at all, for instance.

Of course, the best laid plans sometimes do go a little astray.

The Mines of Behemoth was published in 1997 by Baen Books. It is 256 pages, with an original price of $5.99 in paperback. It is out of print and there is no digital edition.

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New Treasures: Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

Friday, March 14, 2014 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Rosamund Hodge’s story “Apotheosis” from Black Gate 15, was a brilliant and wholly original tale of three brothers who undertake a dangerous voyage to find a new god for their small village. She’s also been published in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed Magazine.

Cruel Beauty, her first novel, arrived in January, and has already received wide acclaim. I finally acquired a copy last month and it looks gorgeous. I plan to settle in with it this weekend and find out what just what wonders Rosamund has accomplished with her fairy tale source material.

The romance of Beauty and the Beast meets the adventure of Graceling in a dazzling fantasy novel about our deepest desires and their power to change our destiny.

Betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom, Nyx has always known her fate was to marry him, kill him, and free her people from his tyranny.

But on her seventeenth birthday, when she moves into his castle high on the kingdom’s mountaintop, nothing is as she expected — particularly her charming and beguiling new husband.

Nyx knows she must save her homeland at all costs, yet she can’t resist the pull of her sworn enemy — who’s gotten in her way by stealing her heart.

Cruel Beauty was published by Balzer + Bray on January 28, 2014. It is 352 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

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

Friday, March 14, 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 quarter of the novel begins with Ardatha phoning Kerrigan just before his planned departure for his mission abroad. She shares Fu Manchu’s itinerary with him in the hopes Kerrigan will arrange for the return of Peko, Fu Manchu’s pet marmoset. After hanging up, a confused Kerrigan learns Sir Lionel managed to abduct the animal during his liberation from the clinic in Regent Park. Sir Denis explains both he and Barton understand Peko’s value as a hostage.

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Goth Chick News: For Love or Money? Anne Rice Resurrects the Vampire Lestat

Thursday, March 13, 2014 Sue Granquist Comments 9 comments

Long before Edward, Angel, or Erik; before vampires owned bars, fell in love with humans, or (heaven forbid) sparkled in sunlight – there was The Vampire Lestat.

Anne Rice single-handedly catapulted vampires into vogue in 1976 with her debut novel Interview with the Vampire. Until then, vampires hadn’t been cool since Bela Lugosi brought Dracula to the Broadway stage in 1927.

Rice’s characters and subsequent novels spawned nothing less than a new vampire sub-culture in the early 80s, giving rise to clubs, music, clothing lines, and more copycat literary off-shoots than can easily be counted.

As a native of New Orleans, Rice made the city itself one of her main players, creating a tourism boom. To this day, and much to the chagrin of the neighbors, Rice devotees continue to flock to First Street in the Garden District to view Rice’s former house, which was the setting for several of her novels. Fans from around the globe follow top-hat-wearing guides around the French Quarter on “vampire tours” and come October, every corner tchotchke shop is sold out of plastic fangs and dental adhesive in preparation for the annual Vampire Ball.

And for many years, I too donned velvet and lace, making an annual pilgrimage to partake in the most interesting masquerade ball you could ever imagine. At that time, Rice herself participated in these events, reigning as the Grande Dame of Darkness over her loving throngs.

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