Black Gate – Page 962 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

Monday, March 3, 2014 westkeith Comments 20 comments

The Wood Beyond the World
William Morris
Ballantine Books (237 pages, June 1969, $0.95)
Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo

With this installment in my reviews of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, we come to the first volume by a man who has one of the worst reputations for prose in the series.

I’m talking of course about William Morris. Lin Carter published four of Morris’s works in five volumes; The Well at the World’s End came in at two volumes. Carter appears to have had plans for another four volumes.

In his introduction, Carter makes the claim that Morris invented the modern quest fantasy. Personally, I think that may be stretching things a bit. Morris did invent a number of things, including the Morris chair, but I’m not sure he should get sole credit for modern fantasy.

I must admit I came to this book with some trepidation. After the Adult Fantasy line was canceled, the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library published 24 volumes, with five by Morris. I attempted to read one, the collection Golden Wings and Other Stories, about ten or twelve years ago. I didn’t get very far.

Fortunately, The Wood Beyond the World isn’t a long book. Furthermore, it’s broken up into short chapters, with a line break and a heading before every paragraph or two. Of course with Morris, paragraphs can be more than a page long.

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Humor, Evocative Images, and Just the Right Touch of Pathos: I.F Rowan’s Welcome To The Underworld

Monday, March 3, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There are many pleasures involved in running a magazine. But nothing like watching the talented young writers you’ve published and nurtured move on to even greater success and acclaim.

Iain Rowan is a fine example. I published four of his delightful adventure fantasies in Black Gate, all featuring the clever con man/accidental exorcist Dao Shi. Since those early days, Iain has gone on to great success as a crime novelist, with his debut novel, One of Us, shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger award. He followed that with the YA novel Sea Change, about haunted, folklore-ridden England, and two collections, Nowhere to Go and Ice Age.

He’s also published over thirty short stories, been reprinted multiple times in Year’s Best anthologies, and won a Derringer Award.

But his clever and funny Dao Shi stories — “Looking for Goats, Finding Monkeys“ (BG 6), “The Turning of the Tiles” (BG 8), “Welcome to the Underworld” (BG 10, selected for Rich Horton’s 2007 Best of the Year), and “From the Heart of the Earth to the Peaks of the Sky“ (BG 11, selected for Dave Truesdale’s 2007 SF & Fantasy Recommended Reading List) — remain my favorites. What can I say?

Now Iain has finally collected all four stories in a single volume, with an entertaining afterword discussing the tales. Published under the name I.F. Rowan — presumably to differentiate it from his crime work — Welcome to the Underworld offers a compact and economical way to read all four tales, nearly 40,000 words of adventure fantasy.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: The Alchemist’s Revenge by Peter Cakebread

Sunday, March 2, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from The Alchemist’s Revenge by Peter Cakebread, the first novel from the co-author of the role playing games Airship Pirates and Clockwork & Chivalry.

The first sign William noticed was the glowing, up on the ridge ahead.

Ralph and Belinda stared, transfixed by the bright white lights. The mules made a frightened, keening sound, seemingly ready to bolt. The lights ahead had begun to form up. To take shape.

Upon the ridge, there were ghosts. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands. They were formed up in fighting blocks, a veritable host of white translucent shape, spirits of the parliamentarian soldiers, who had lined up on that ridge, on the day of the battle. The sight was awe-inspiring, and terrifying.

On the ridge ahead, the spectral soldiers were fighting, locked together, struggling with each other. A vast white shape appeared on the horizon, crashing down through the struggling spirits, crushing and dissipating those in its path. It was an ethereal Leviathan, an opaque memory of the large metal landship. Then ghostly alchemists and riders joined the fray, sweeping in from the sides of the valley. Images of unearthly elemental forms and exploding potion flasks added to the chaos.

Peter Cakebread is the co-author and designer of various RPGs, most of which are published by Cakebread & Walton. They include the Kingdom & Commonwealth campaign; the Clockwork & Cthulhu Sourcebook; and the acclaimed Dark Streets sourcebook, which brings Lovecraftian horror to Georgian London. The Alchemist’s Revenge is the first volume in the Companie of Reluctant Heroes series.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Jon Sprunk, Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe, E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner, Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

The Alchemist’s Revenge was published by Delta14 Publishing on April 3, 2013. It is 224 pages and available in digital format for $4.99. Learn more at Delta14.

Read a complete sample chapter of The Alchemist’s Revenge here.

New Treasures: Immortal Muse by Stephen Leigh

Sunday, March 2, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I bought my first Stephen Leigh book, Slow Fall to Dawn, the opening volume in the epic tale of the space-faring Hoorka assassins, way back in 1981. Since then, he’s published some 20 novels and over 40 short stories, including six volumes in Ray Bradbury Presents, and The Woods (2012). The most recent was the omnibus Assassin’s Dawn, which collects all three books in the Hoorka Trilogy: Slow Fall to Dawn (1981), Dance of the Hag(1983), and A Quiet of Stone (1984).

He also writes fantasy under the name S.L. Farrell, including three volumes of the Nessantico Cycle and The Cloudmages Trilogy.

His newest novel features the famous alchemist Nicholas Flamel, who’s also featured prominently in Michael Scott’s bestselling The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, just to name some recent examples. I wonder if we’re witnessing the birth of the new genre of Nicholas Flame literature. Could happen.

Immortal Muse is an unforgettable tale that sweeps readers from 1300s Paris to modern-day New York — with interludes in the 1635 Rome of Bernini, the 1737 Venice of Vivaldi, the French Revolution in Paris with Lavoisier and Robespierre, 1814 London with William Blake and John Polidori, fin de siècle Vienna with Gustav Klimt, and World War II France with Charlotte Salomon.

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Confessions of a Reluctant Self-Publisher — Now with extra Giveaways!

Sunday, March 2, 2014 peadarog Comments 14 comments

I’ll be giving away copies of my mini-ebook-collection Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories to the first five commenters who ask for one. But why should you bother? Read on!

Here is a list of things I want to do: Write; make a living with my pen.

And a list of the things I don’t want to do: marketing; selling; formatting; cover design; manual reading; forum perusing; guru worshipping; elbowing my way through the pack; self-publishing…

And yet, here we are.

Once upon a time, it was all so very different. I wrote a book and the first agent I sent it to loved it. So did a large number of publishers and in no time at all, they were clawing each other’s eyes out to get access to my manuscript. Then, exactly as it had happened in all my dreams, editors were engaged in an auction for the right to publish me. Me!

My agent used to ring me once or twice a day, cackling with glee over the latest rise in the price and the shameless favours being offered, until finally, we had hitched ourselves up to a brilliant and famous editor. How could it go wrong?

Oh, it didn’t! Not yet! Because, next came foreign language publishers from every corner of the globe. They too pledged undying love for a li’l ole book called The Inferior, and what they said about the story and the characters made me blush in parts of my body that few cameras have ever seen.

I’m sick of this boasting. Can we get to the bad part?

Yes, let’s start the dive now. Or “death-spiral,” if you prefer.

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Aaron Allston, December 8, 1960 – February 27, 2014

Saturday, March 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 7 comments

Aaron Allston, one of the most creative and prolific creators in the early adventure gaming hobby, died Thursday.

I first encountered his name in the early 80s, on the masthead of my favorite gaming magazine, Space Gamer, where he seemed to do just about everything — circulation manager, assistant editor, and eventually editor. When the magazine split in two in 1983, he also served as editor of the spin-off Fantasy Gamer.

By 1983, he was also an accomplished freelance game designer with a number of impressive credits, including Autoduel Champions, a mash-up of Hero Games’ Champions and Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars. His many later credit included the Hollow World box set (TSR, 1990), Rules Cyclopedia for Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, 1991), The Complete Fighter’s Handbook (TSR, 1993), and the Fifth Edition of the Champions rules (Hero Games, 2002).

By 1990, he was working in the computer gaming industry at Origin System, publishers of Ultima and Wing Commander, where he co-wrote the acclaimed Savage Empire, named the Best PC Fantasy RPG of 1990 by Game Player magazine.

He eventually found his greatest success in fiction, beginning with the Baen novel Galatea in 2-D in 1993, followed by the second Car Wars novel Double Jeopardy (1994), Doc Sidhe (1995), and two Bard’s Tale novels co-authored with Holly Lisle. In 1998′ he published his first Stars Wars novel: Star Wars X-Wing: Wraith Squadron. He wrote four more in that series, and a total of 14 Star Wars novels, including three volumes each in the Fate of the Jedi, Legacy of the Force, and New Jedi Order series.

In April 2009, Allston suffered a heart attack and underwent an emergency quadruple bypass surgery. On Thursday of this week, while attending VisionCon in Springfield, Missouri, he collapsed and later died of apparent heart failure. He was 53 years old.

Announcing the Winners of Advance Reading Copies of Jon Sprunk’s Blood and Iron

Saturday, March 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Last month, we announced a contest to win one of two advance reading copies of Jon Sprunk’s highly anticipated fantasy epic Blood and Iron, compliments of Pyr Books. What’s that? You don’t recall the announcement? Strange — it was in the third paragraph of the post on our exclusive fiction excerpt of Blood and Iron, which we debuted right here.

You’re right. Perhaps that was a little sneaky. But plenty of readers fans did spot the contest, and we received a surprising number of entries. Attentive folks, those Sprunk fans.

The deadline for entries was February 28th. And so, early this morning, we carefully inscribed the names of each entrant on a numbered clay tablet, and then used the only scientifically-proven method of pure random number generation to select two random winners: D&D dice. Without further ado, we’re very pleased to announce the winners of two rare advance reading copies of Blood and Iron:

Travis Bingaman
Shauna Kosoris

Congratulations to the winners! It’s too late to enter the contest, but it’s not too late to discover Jon’s unique brand of heroic fantasy. Visit his blog here or stop by Black Gate every Wednesday to read his regular column.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and to Jon Sprunk and Pyr Books for sponsoring the contest. Blood and Iron will be published by Pyr Books on March 11. Read an exclusive excerpt here.

Travel the Magic Highways with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

Saturday, March 1, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Last February, I wrote about how excited I was to find a copy of Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two in the Dealer’s Room at Capricon. I had purchased Volume One, Hard Luck Diggings, when it was released in 2010; it is now long out of print and new copies start at around $450 at Amazon.com. Dream Castles is now sold out as well and prices are already starting to creep up, so I was pretty jazzed to find a copy when I did.

When I wrote enthusiastically about Dream Castles last year, I said:

Jack Vance, who at 96 years old is still with us, is one of the last remaining writers from the Golden Age of Science Fiction (the only other one I can think of is Fred Pohl). He is the author of some of the most celebrated SF and fantasy of the 20th Century, including “The Dragon Masters,” “The Last Castle,” and The Dying Earth novels.

Jack Vance died on May 26th of last year, and Frederik Pohl passed away less than four months later, robbing us of two of our genre’s brightest lights.

Still, their words are still with us — and what words they are. I have no idea how many volumes are projected in The Early Jack Vance (Volume Four, Minding the Stars, is scheduled to be released this month), but every one is a delight.

Part of that is the gorgeous covers by Tom Kidd; part is the high quality production and design from publisher Subterranean, and of course part of it is simply finally having the early pulp fiction of one of the greatest fantasy writers of the 20th Century collected for the first time.

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An Origin Story Mashed With a First-Contact Story: A Review of The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu

Friday, February 28, 2014 Kelly Swails Comments 4 comments

The Lives of Tao is the rare science fiction book set in modern times. No space exploration here, unless you mean the Quasing, the alien race that’s been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) orchestrating human events since… well, since there were humans to orchestrate.

Quasing are beings so ethereal that they must live within a corporeal host to survive. Once inside a host, the Quasing can only leave if the host organism dies. In essence, Quasings are immortal as long as there is a living host nearby.

The Quasing’s main goal used to be to get humans to create interstellar travel so they could get to their home planet. Now, however, the Quasing are split into two factions (the good-guy Prophus and the bad-guy Genjix), whose main goal seems to be defeating the other. Tao is a member of the Prophus faction.

When Tao’s host dies during a mission against the Genjix, Tao needs to find a new host, pronto. Enter Roan Tan: an overweight programmer with low self-esteem who’s never run a mile, let alone held a gun, in real life. The next few months finds Tao whipping Roan into some semblance of a covert operative so they can thwart the Genjix’s secret project.

There’s plenty here to enjoy. Chu choreographs vivid action scenes, he injects humor seamlessly into dialogue, and he makes the world-building fun. Chu had all of history at his disposal, after all, and he took full advantage.

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Unearthing Solomon’s Vineyard

Friday, February 28, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 1 comment

Jonathan Latimer is sadly forgotten today. There was a time when his screwball private eye series featuring the rarely sober Bill Crane were bestsellers and even made the transition to the silver screen in the late 1930s, courtesy of Universal Pictures, in a fun trio of B-movies. Latimer was a respected Hollywood screenwriter of the 1940s who crossed over to television from the 1950s through the early 1970s, writing for such series as Perry Mason and Columbo. He also achieved instant notoriety as the author of the hardboiled detective novel, Solomon’s Vineyard, which was banned almost upon publication in 1941 and remained unavailable in its original form in the U.S. for decades.

The general consensus is with Solomon’s Vineyard, Latimer turned up the heat on hardboiled detective fiction and blurred the line between pulp and pornography. Most critics will claim that even today, readers would be hard-pressed to find a tougher or more shocking private eye novel. While public domain copies riddled with typos are easy to come by, I finally tracked down an affordable copy of an earlier edition and read the book for myself. I was shocked as well, not by the content, but to learn the book is clearly intended as yet another of Latimer’s laugh-out-loud farces, despite its reputation.

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