Black Gate – Page 965 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Sean P. Fodera Apologizes to Mary Robinette Kowal

Saturday, February 22, 2014 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Macmillan Associate Director of Contracts Sean P. Fodera, who attacked Mary Robinette Kowal in a series of public posts at SFF.Net, and recently threatened to sue individuals linking to a critical Daily Dot article by Aja Romano, has consulted with his attorney and been absent from the Internet for several days. Now, as noted by the folks at Reddit, Fodera has posted “a full and lengthy apology, beautifully written by his lawyer.”

First, I’d like to be clear that any statements I have made (or make hereafter) on this matter have been (or will be) my own opinions, and do not represent the opinions of my employer. I should have included a disclaimer to this effect in my regular posts on sff.net…

I fully accept and acknowledge that my statements about Mary Robinette Kowal were extreme and unnecessary… I want to apologize to Mary for doing that. Mary, if you are reading this, I really am very sorry for my inconsiderate and insensitive response to the question, and my later posts…

With regard to the articles and other posts that my comments inspired, I have spoken at length to legal counsel, who feel that I may have legitimate cause to bring suit against The Daily Dot and/or Aja Romano for defamation. However, this would be a costly and very lengthy endeavor… My attorney has also updated me on the legal status of linking to the Daily Dot article. I had not kept up on the recent rulings in this area, and was therefore referencing outdated information in stating that I believed linkers are also liable in defamation cases. This is why it was important to consult counsel, so that I could have reputable and up-to-date information about my options in this situation.

Mary, always a class act, responded immediately on SFF.Net.

Thank you. That is a deeply handsome apology. I accept without reservation.

You can read the complete text of Fodera’s apology here and Mary’s response here.

New Treasures: Reflected by Rhiannon Held

Saturday, February 22, 2014 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’m not sure why, but everyone on the Internet seems to be showing the wrong cover for Reflected. The artwork — a beautifully spooky silhouette of a woman reclining by a mist-covered, moonlit lake — is correct, but the text is wrong, and the title is at the top, instead of the bottom. Amazon’s cover is wrong; so is Barnes & Noble. Even Goodreads is showing the pre-release version. The correct cover, scanned from the hot-of-the-presses copy in my hot little hands, is at right.

Well, at least they’re all talking about the book. Reflected is Rhiannon Held’s third novel, the second sequel to her very popular debut Silver, an urban fantasy which introduced the Roanoke were-pack and the deadly monsters which threaten them.

The Were have lived among humans for centuries, secretly, carefully. They came to America with the earliest European colonists, seeking a land where their packs could run free. Andrew Dare is a descendant of those colonists, and he and his mate, Silver, have become alphas of the Roanoke pack, the largest in North America.

But they have enemies, both within their territory and beyond the sea. Andrew is drawn away to deal with the problem of a half-human child in Alaska, leaving Silver to handle the pack and his rebellious daughter just as a troublemaker from Spain arrives on the scene.

Reflected is the third in the series, following Silver (2012) and Tarnished (2013). It was published by Tor Books on February 18, 2014. It is 336 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Visit Rhiannon Held’s website here.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Madness of True Detective

Friday, February 21, 2014 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

So everyone in my office has been talking about the new HBO show True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

They talk in hushed whispers. “Hey, did you watch last night?” Suddenly, the volume drops and all I hear is a low buzz over the cube wall. I hear enough to know they’re taking about McConaughey and that new HBO show — and they’re obviously riveted.

I haven’t seen it. Did see the cool ad and noticed how vastly different McConaughey looked, all gaunt in a suit. He’s really turned into an Actor’s Actor, what with terrific recent performances in Mud and Dallas Buyers Club. Although my favorite McConaughey film is probably Sahara. Man, my kids still spout quotes from that movie. Every day I hear, “Sit down… I’ll get the check.” (And, “Of course I brought the dynamite!”)

Anyway. I’ve been seeing a strange flurry of articles about Robert W. Chambers’s brilliant collection The King in Yellow crop up on Facebook recently, and I saw the headline of that io9 piece, “The One Literary Reference You Must Know to Appreciate True Detective.” But I didn’t really make the connection until I saw this article at The Daily Beast, “Read The King in Yellow, the True Detective Reference That’s the Key to the Show.”

The key to understanding HBO’s enthralling series True Detective might be the references to the Yellow King and Carcosa, which the killer Reggie Ledoux talks about and the show hints at to be figures and symbols of a satanic cult of some sort. But the Yellow King is an allusion to The King in Yellow, an 1895 book of horror and supernatural short stories by the writer Robert W. Chambers…

Holy cow… True Detective is based on The King in Yellow?

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Spaghetti Westerns Go Kaballah

Friday, February 21, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 1 comment

I’ve known Ed Erdelac from New Pulp circles, but had never read any of his fiction before. Ed is a very talented author who has determined to carve out his own niche in the familiar sub-genre of spaghetti westerns.

If one is to be accurate, spaghetti westerns were westerns of the 1960s and 1970s made by Italian filmmakers in Spain with international casts and international funding. They offered an avant garde spin on westerns which were gritty, realistic, bloody, and notably laconic in contrast to the traditional Hollywood westerns which mythologized America’s past. Since the mid-1960s, Hollywood has occasionally offered up their own imitation spaghetti westerns, right up to Quentin Tarantino’s acclaimed Django Unchained.

Enter: Ed Erdelac. Ed wasn’t the first author to translate spaghetti westerns to the printed page. Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy inspired a Man with No Name literary series in the 1960s. However, he is, to my knowledge, the first author to put a Jewish spin on this very stylish sub-genre. While there was a tongue-in-cheek Jewish spy series in the 1960s, Erdelac isn’t interested in writing a kitsch genre spoof like Sol Weinstein’s Agent Oy-Oy Seven series. The Merkabah Rider series is as deadly serious as it is eccentric and the dramatic tone makes all the difference to the book’s success.

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Before and After

Friday, February 21, 2014 Violette Malan Comments 11 comments

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic Fantasy and SF, and something that’s come up a couple of times in the comments is the idea of a “precursor” civilization. On the one hand, we’ve more or less agreed that the existence of one doesn’t automatically mean that the present story is post-apocalyptic. On the other hand, unless we’re writing about Neanderthals, we’re pretty much always dealing with a pre-existing civilization, aren’t we?

In SF, the precursor society is easy to figure out. It’s us. SF is the fiction of change, and the social/scientific/technological world that it changes from is the one the writer/reader is living in. There seem to be two basic approaches to this concept, one in which the story is set in the near future, and one in which today’s society lies somewhere in the distant past.

With the exception of people like Isaac Asimov, and works like his Foundation Trilogy, most of the early SF writers were using the near future premise. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, for example, written in the 1950’s, was set in the 1970’s. The movie Blade Runner is set in 2017.

I know. As SF fans have been saying for years, “Where’s my flying car?” This gives you a hint as to why the near future premise isn’t used much anymore. The future got here a lot faster, and in many ways differently, than anticipated. We might have microwave ovens, but we’re not colonizing the moons of Jupiter.

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Goth Chick News: Comics Collector as Movie Hero; Or A Valentine From My Favorite Indy Film Crew

Thursday, February 20, 2014 Sue Granquist Comments 7 comments

As you well know, we here at Goth Chick News are mad supporters of the independent film industry. This is mainly because we’re obsessed with anyone who has the courage and determination to pursue their passion and are willing to let us watch.

That and I’m a sucker for brooding artistic boys…

And no one epitomizes these traits better than my friends at Pirate Pictures, who gave us a peek into the world of real movie magic by allowing us to ride along with their production of Shadowland. Now, Shadowland star Jason Contini and director Wyatt Weed have teamed up on a new project that isn’t exactly a typical GCN subject matter, but does involve a topic that is near and dear to most Black Gate fans… comics.

Four Color Eulogy is a drama/comedy revolving around the world of comic books and self-publishing. But rather that tell you any more, take a gander at this clip that not only explains the movie, but some of the process of getting a concept from script to big screen.

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The Series Series: The End Is Nigh: The Apocalypse Triptych, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Thursday, February 20, 2014 Sarah Avery Comments 6 comments

The end of the world turns out to be heartbreaking. Who would have guessed?

This anthology of end-of-the-world stories from two dozen big-name and up-and-coming writers is nothing like the Hollywood blockbuster apocalypse experience, all stirring music and flashy effects, tidily wrapped up with a life-affirming ending in under two hours. Nor is it much like the sprawling genre novels of cosmic disaster that we like so much. You could stack the dead characters in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire like cordwood and get a wall longer than Hadrian’s, but we keep reading because there are still characters to root for, and moments of hope for a world that hasn’t altogether ended.

Adams and Howey’s planned three-volume anthology series The Apocalypse Triptych opens with a volume of stories that cover the moment the old world ends. A second volume, The End Is Now, will feature stories set in the midst of the chaos between, and The End Has Come will focus on the beginnings of whatever gets built from the ashes.

The structure of The End Is Nigh shapes a very specific emotional rhythm and, if you try to read the book straight through over a few days, a reading experience unlike any other I’ve had. Each author has come up with a different take on how the world might end, and each story presents a different vision of what the world that’s ending is like.

The viewpoint characters are all deliciously different from each other and their predicaments grow increasingly extreme in their deliciously different and often absurd ways, until the not-so-delicious moment when the worlds and stories end. No matter how funny, juicy, or satirically entertaining the story has been up to that moment, the world’s end hits like a knife to the gut. You’re still reeling when the story slams into its last sentence and ejects you before you can find some way to ask, But what happened next?

And then, dear reader, you turn the page and go through it all again. You try not to get too attached to the main characters, whose odds of survival two weeks past the final paragraph range from pretty slim to definitely toast.

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Sean P. Fodera Threatens to Sue 1,200 Writers Linking to Daily Dot Article

Thursday, February 20, 2014 John ONeill Comments 21 comments

Macmillan’s Associate Director of Contracts, Sean P. Fodera, who used the ongoing kerfuffle inside SFWA as cover for a sexist attack on ex-SWFA officer Mary Robinette Kowal, has now threatened to sue all those linking to Aja Romano’s article on the topic at Daily Dot (including, presumably, Black Gate).

I have a very good case for a libel suit. I suppose no one noted that I work in the legal profession within the publishing industry, and have taught college courses on the subject… as of now, it looks like the article was “shared” 1,200 times already. That makes each of those sharers a part to the libel, and makes each of them equally culpable in the eyes of the law. I’ll speak to my attorney first thing tomorrow.

Macmillan owns Tor, the company that publishes Mary’s Nebula Award-nominated Glamourist Histories novels.

Earlier this week on his blog Whatever, ex-SFWA President John Scalzi invited Fodera to sue him first:

If you honestly believe you can sue me for libel for linking to this article, you are, in my opinion, deeply ignorant of how libel works in the US… But if you are determined to sue 1,200 people for linking to a newsworthy article, you may begin with me. You know who I am and I am very sure you know where I am, since many of my book contracts route through your office. I await notification of your suit.

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Vintage Treasures: The Spell of Seven, edited by L. Sprague de Camp

Thursday, February 20, 2014 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

It takes real effort to keep on top of even a fraction of the exciting new work in the fantasy genre every week. Between the print magazines, online outlets like Subterranean and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, paperbacks, hardcovers, and self-published and independent work from talented folks just outside mainstream publishing, it’s exhausting. Luckily, it’s also extremely rewarding, and I feel fortunate indeed to be part of such a lively and vibrant branch of literature.

Of course, there are also weeks when I say, “The hell with it,” and settle in with a great vintage paperback.

This was one of those weeks. And the book that lured me away from the latest crop of promising new writers clamoring for my attention was L. Sprague de Camp’s The Spell of Seven, a slender sword & sorcery anthology from 1965.

I’ll admit up front that I thought that The Spell of Seven was a standalone title. I’m a child of the late 20th Century; when a book is part of a series, I expect the publisher to sell me on that up front. (It’s easier to mug me for more money that way.)

Fortunately, I have the collective hive-mind of Black Gate to call upon. One of the great lobes of that mind is Brian Murphy, who pointed out that the book was a follow-up to De Camp’s seminal S&S anthology Swords and Sorcery, and part of a successful series that would eventually evolve into a four volume survey from Pyramid Books covering the most important heroic fantasy of the time.

Here are Brian’s comments, taken from his 2011 review of The Fantastic Swordsmen.

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Bioshock Creator Irrational Games Shuts its Doors

Wednesday, February 19, 2014 John ONeill Comments 12 comments

The tumult in the computer entertainment industry continued this week, with word that A-list game studio Irrational Games is shutting down, effective immediately.

Irrational Games was formed in 1997 from the wreckage of legendary Looking Glass Studios (Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief) by three ex-Looking Glass employees: Jonathan Chey, Robert Fermier, and Ken Levine. Never an exceptionally prolific studio, they nonetheless released three excellent games over the next seven years: System Shock 2 (1999), Freedom Force (2002), and Tribes: Vengeance (2004).

Irrational Games was acquired by one of the largest distributors in the industry,Take-Two Interactive (publishers of Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, among many others); for several years after that, their games appeared under the 2K Games label. They had perhaps their greatest hit in 2007 with the worldwide success of Bioshock, a first-person shooter set in the beautiful and mysterious underwater city of Rapture (which offered, incidentally, one of the finest and most touching endings I’ve ever seen in a video game). Bioshock eventually sold over four million copies and won almost universal critical acclaim, winning PC Game of the Year from IGN and the top spot on their Top 25 Modern PC Games list in 2012. Time magazine named it one of the greatest video games of all time in November 2012. The game inspired two sequels: Bioshock 2 (developed by 2K Marin) and Bioshock Infinite (from Irrational Games.)

In a message posted on the Irrational Games website yesterday, co-founder Ken Levine announced the studio was closing its doors. No explanation was given, although Levine did confirm that 15 employees (out of an estimated 150) will be retained “To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable.” It’s no secret that Bioshock Infinite‘s development was highly troubled, but the game was considered a major success, selling over 3.7 million copies in the first two months.

It’s been a troubled time for games studios — the much-loved LucasArts was shuttered by Disney just last year, and other developers have moved away from big-budget releases to focus on smaller games for mobile environments. It reminds me of the gradual move to consoles from PCs, which cost us such storied developers as Interplay, Origin Systems, SSI, Microprose, Sierra Entertainment, and of course, the brilliant Black Isle. I’m certain there will be plenty of great games on many new platforms in my future, but for now I’m still mourning what might have been.