Black Gate – Page 969 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Black Gate Online Fiction: Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk

Sunday, February 9, 2014 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Blood and Iron by Jon Sprunk — a new novel of heroic fantasy that reads like a sword-and-sorcery version of Spartacus.

It starts with a shipwreck following a magical storm at sea. Horace, a soldier from the west, had joined the Great Crusade against the heathens of Akeshia after the deaths of his wife and son from plague. When he washes ashore, he finds himself at the mercy of the very people he was sent to kill, who speak a language and have a culture and customs he doesn’t even begin to understand.

Not long after, Horace is pressed into service as a house slave. But this doesn’t last. The Akeshians discover that Horace was a latent sorcerer, and he is catapulted from the chains of a slave to the halls of power in the queen’s court. Together with Jirom, an ex-mercenary and gladiator, and Alyra, a spy in the court, he will seek a path to free himself and the empire’s caste of slaves from a system where every man and woman must pay the price of blood or iron. Before the end, Horace will have paid dearly in both.

Jon Sprunk is the author of the Shadow Saga (Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure, and Shadow’s Master) and a mentor at the Seton Hill University fiction writing program. He is a regular blogger for Black Gate.

Win one of two Advance Reading Copies of Blood and Iron! Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the subject “Blood and Iron,” and we’ll enter you in the drawing. Entries must be received by Friday, February 28, 2014. No purchase necessary. Terms and conditions subject to change. Not valid where prohibited by law.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by 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.

Blood and Iron, Book One of The Book of the Black Earth, will be published by Pyr Books on March 11, 2014. It is 445 pages and will be available in trade paperback for $18.00 ($11.00 for the digital version). Learn more at Pyr Books.

Read a complete sample chapter of Blood and Iron here.

Self-published Book Review: Sorcerer Rising by E. Nathan Sisk

Sunday, February 9, 2014 Donald Crankshaw Comments 2 comments

After a month off, I’m ready to start reviewing self-published books again. I haven’t received many new books recently, so if you have a book you’d like me to review, please follow the submission guidelines here. The fewer submissions I receive, the better your chances of getting a review. Meanwhile, this month’s book is Sorcerer Rising by E. Nathan Sisk. A submission which I received in December, not coincidentally.

The titular sorcerer in Sorcerer Rising is one Virgil McDane. The word “sorcerer” can mean different things in different books. In some books, sorcerer, wizard, witch, and magician are all terms for the same thing. And in others, they’re very different. In Virgil’s world, a world a lot like ours, except that magic is real and public (and as a result technology is different but recognizable), the real difference is that wizards are part of the Guild, trained in its magic and responsible for following its rules, and sorcerers are self-taught. (I’m still not sure what the deal is with witches, just that Virgil considers them scarier than wizards.) Virgil is a sorcerer, but he used to be a wizard. When he was kicked out of the Guild for an act of desperation, he was Branded, and everything the guild taught him was taken away. He had to relearn magic on his own, and thus he is a Sorcerer, working outside the Guild, scraping together a living doing jobs that wizards won’t do.

At the beginning of Sorcerer Rising, that job is smuggling. Across the world are scattered clouds, mists of pure Aether, and in each cloud is a world. How the world is formed is not fully explained, but it seems that raw Aether can be influenced by the human mind and the first people to visit a world do a lot to shape what it becomes. The Guild controls access to most of these clouds, as they have the knowledge and magic to safely enter and return. They can also Inhale things in these clouds, storing them in their minds, later Exhaling them into the world. Most of the Guild’s wealth comes from trade with these clouds, retrieving rare and valuable materials and bringing them back to the mundane world.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Dreamwalker by C.S. Friedman

Sunday, February 9, 2014 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

C.S. Friedman is not a particularly prolific writer — but what she does write usually makes an impact. Her first novels, including In Conquest Born and The Madness Season, were science fiction; her more recent Magister trilogy (Feast of Souls, Wings of Wrath, and Legacy of Kings) returned to the sweeping epic fantasy of her popular Coldfire trilogy (Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows).

Her new novel, on sale this week, is something brand new for Friedman — a contemporary fantasy. Mixing a woman gifted with visionary dreams, gaming culture, and the very roots of mythology, Dreamwalker is an ambitious new novel with an intriguing premise.

All her life Jessica Drake has dreamed of other worlds, some of them similar to her own, others disturbingly alien. She never shares the details with anyone, save her younger brother Tommy, a compulsive gamer who incorporates some aspects of Jessica’s dreams into his games. But now someone is asking about those dreams… and about her. A strange woman has been watching her house. A visitor to her school attempts to take possession of her dream-inspired artwork.

Why?

As she begins to search for answers it becomes clear that whoever is watching her does not want her to learn the truth. One night her house catches on fire, and when the smoke clears she discovers that her brother has been kidnapped. She must figure out what is going on, and quickly, if she and her family are to be safe.

Following clues left behind on Tommy’s computer, determined to find her brother and bring him home safely, Jessica and two of her friends are about to embark on a journey that will test their spirits and their courage to the breaking point, as they must leave their own world behind and confront the source of Earth’s darkest legends – as well as the terrifying truth of their own secret heritage.

Dreamwalker was published Feb. 4 by DAW Books. It is 400 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover, and $10.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Least-Expected Trumpet of Apocalypse: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet

Sunday, February 9, 2014 Matthew David Surridge Comments 7 comments

The Hearing Trumpet A little while ago, I followed a retweeted link to a blog post by writer Sofia Samatar, presenting the syllabus for a class on weird world fiction she’ll be teaching this semester. It was an interesting list. Some names were new to me, so I set about looking them up. And found a library near me had a book by one of these writers: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. Which turned out to be a constantly surprising read, a short book that opened doors to places I didn’t expect.

Carrington died in 2011 at the age of 94. She was primarily known as a painter; as a young artist she left school to live with Max Ernst, and with him became a part of the Surrealist movement. When the German Ernst was arrested by the French government in September of 1939, Carrington suffered a mental breakdown and, after fleeing France, was institutionalised in Spain. She ultimately fled to Mexico, where she lived for the rest of her life, producing paintings, sculptures, novels, plays, and short stories. (You can see a selection of her works at her page at wikipaintings.org.)

The Hearing Trumpet may have been first written in 1950, or perhaps in the early 1960s; it was first published in French in 1974, then in Engish in 1976. It’s a story about a 92-year-old woman, Marian Leatherby, given a hearing trumpet by her friend Carmella (a character widely believed to be based on Carrington’s close friend, the surrealist painter Remedios Vero — see more of her work here). The trumpet sharpens Marian’s hearing to a fantastic degree and she at once hears her family planning to put her in a home for old women. This institution turns out to be marked by strange architecture — buildings in the shape of “toadstools, swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boot, [and] another like what I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy,” with the main building a castle at the centre — and is run by highly idiosyncratic Christians. A picture of a one-eyed female saint seems to grin mockingly in the dining hall. Strange things follow: one of the other inmates dies, perhaps murdered; Marian is given a peculiar book outlining the history of the painted saint and her quest for the Holy Grail; and then things get much, much weirder.

…

Read More Read More

Alien Horror Fun with Level 7 [Escape]

Saturday, February 8, 2014 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 1 comment

Ever have one of those days where you wake up disoriented in an underground government laboratory, surrounded by military guards and alien clones? Yeah, me neither … that is, until I got the cooperative board game Level 7 [Escape] (Amazon) from Privateer Press.

I’ve reviewed several Privateer Press games before and one of my favorite things about their games is the strong emphasis on story. Level 7 [Escape] is no exception to this trend, as between 1 to 4 players (Yes, it can be played as a solo game.) use cunning, speed, and brawn to negotiate their way through 7 levels of terror in the hopes of reaching the surface before the base goes into full lockdown. What’s up with the alien clones? Why were they released from their cryogenic chambers? Who is orchestrating all of this? Will the escaping prisoners be able to work together and make it to the surface in time?

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: A Touch of Infinity/ The Man With Nine Lives by Harlan Ellison

Saturday, February 8, 2014 John ONeill Comments 21 comments

I enjoy collecting vintage SF and fantasy paperbacks of all kinds. But I get the most pleasure out of the Ace Doubles.

The Ace Doubles have a lot of things going for them in terms of raw collectibility. They were edited by Donald A. Wollheim, one of the most accomplished editors our genre has ever seen, and the authors in their stable reads like a Who’s Who of major talent of the era. Best of all, they had some really terrific covers, including some truly iconic SF images.

Of course, even among the Ace Doubles, some are more collectible than others. Certainly the early novels of Philip K. Dick are near the top of the list, as are novels by Asimov and Dean Koontz. But speaking as someone who’s bought and sold Ace Doubles for many years, I think Harlan Ellison’s A Touch of Infinity (paired with The Man With Nine Lives) may be the most in demand.

Lots of reasons for this. Ed Valigursky’s classic cover, featuring a spacesuit-clad future person hiding in the rubble from invading flying saucers, clearly didn’t hurt. 54 years after this book went on sale, I still want to find out what that’s all about. A Touch of Infinity is also Ellison’s first short story collection and that alone makes it remarkable. And the novel on the flip side, The Man With Nine Lives, has never been reprinted… so if you’re an Ellison collector, this is the only way to get it.

On top of all of that though, this little book is simply a pure slice of 60s nostalgia. It’s a way to transport yourself back half a century, to a time when science fiction was still fresh and new; when Harlan Ellison was an unknown name, a hotshot young writer with only two previous books to his name; and when a mainstream publisher still tried their best to package his singular voice as typical paperback SF.

It wasn’t long before books by Ellison became a major event in the genre, so his first humble releases have a unique appeal to collectors — almost as if he were appearing in a secret identity.

…

Read More Read More

Voices in Fantasy Literature, Part III

Saturday, February 8, 2014 Derek Kunsken Comments 1 comment

This is the third installment in a series of posts highlighting fantasy short fiction (here are Part I and Part II).

Over the course of the last eight years, I’ve read or listened to a lot of short fiction and the variety out there is astonishing. And I love to try to introduce new readers to some of the stuff that impressed me. This week, the three stories I picked were by Garth Nix, Nancy Hightower, and Daniel Abraham.

“Hereward and Mr Fitz Go To War Again,” by Garth Nix, appeared originally in Jim Baen’s Universe, then in Podcastle (where I heard it), and then in a collection by Subterranean Press (ebook available here). This is one of three Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz stories I heard and I absolutely fell in love with the weird swashbuckling world Nix created.

Hereward is a knight, artillerist, and swordsman, as able with gunpowder as with the blade. Fitz is an animated wooden puppet and dangerous sorcerer, whose sorcery is structured around sewing and knitting, with his accouterments being needles, thread, and sometimes a portable sewing desk. Their job is to enforce a treaty against rogue gods that is so old that some of the nations to the treaty no longer exist.

This is pure buddy picture story, a grand adventures against old gods. Loads of fun and the Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz stories are now available as an ebook, so no reason not to check it out.

…

Read More Read More

Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: More Superheroes!

Saturday, February 8, 2014 alanajoli Comments 0 Comment

Cover image from Heroes Rise by Zachary Sergi; art by Jason Wiser

Last week, I talked about superhero webcomics, and there was some fun discussion in the comments about superheroes and fantasy and where those genres meet. Fritz Freiheit also pointed me in the direction of his slightly out of date “A Brief Overview of Superhero Fiction,” which means I’m going to have a bunch of novels to add to my TBR pile. But prose and comics aren’t the only homes of superheroes: there are a handful of interactive fiction games that let you become a super yourself. Lest you think I play a vast majority of my interactive fiction games from Choice of Games (disclosure: actually, that’s true, but I do try to diversify for this column), in this spotlight, we have two superhero games to compare and only one is from Choice of Games.

Heroes Rise: The Prodigy is the first Heroes Rise game by Zachary Sergei. (The second, Heroes Rise: The Hero Project, I have yet to play.) In it, you are a beginning hero, just on the verge of getting your license to be an official hero in Millennia City. You live with your grandmother, who has a Power with plants, because your superhero parents were arrested for the accidental killing (the court said “murder”) of a supervillain. Your family relationships are fraught, but you’re getting ready to take Millennia City by storm.

…

Read More Read More

As Tartary Burns

Friday, February 7, 2014 William Patrick Maynard Comments 4 comments

As Tartary Burns is the debut novel by Riley Hogan and is newly published by Airship 27. Calling the novel pulp fiction isn’t completely accurate. Hogan finds himself in the same position as the standout talents of the pulp world of the 1920s and 1930s who were published in the pulps, but whose prose was more polished and literate than most of their peers to the degree that it seems an oversight they were passed up by the slicks. Many of those talents today are recognized as having lasting literary value. So it is with As Tartary Burns, an ambitious fast-paced historical adventure that presents an alternate history of the Cossacks, Ottomans, and Crimeans.

Hogan’s book has been likened to Robert E. Howard and Harold Lamb. One reviewer suggests comparison to the film Braveheart. I felt it read like a stream-lined Game of Thrones with the explicit sex and language excised. Hogan is possessed not only of an obvious passion for history, but a pride in the culture, folklore, and religion of these people to the degree that one wonders if it is his own heritage. His reshaping of world events makes one curious if he plans not so much a conventional follow-up, but rather an expanding alternate history of the world set in different epochs.

…

Read More Read More

Apocalypse Then, and Now

Friday, February 7, 2014 Violette Malan Comments 17 comments

Last week, I was talking about Paul O. Williams’s The Pelbar Cycle, which generated a comment about the changing nature of the apocalypse. After all, nowadays we hardly ever see that word without “zombie” in front of it. As my commentator noted, the idea of a nuclear apocalypse largely disappeared after the 1980s. Perhaps this is a natural outcome of the ending of the Cold War – with the two big nuclear powers no longer at odds with one another, the threat of nuclear war effectively disappeared.

Or did it? It’s not a plot point for any of the books, so it’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that the events of The Pelbar Cycle follow both a natural and a nuclear disaster. The (then) big two nuclear powers knew that an impending meteor strike would look like nuclear events and agreed not to react, but other, smaller nuclear nations either weren’t aware, or didn’t believe, and they did react, bringing about the world that Williams describes.

That didn’t happen in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s phenomenal Lucifer’s Hammer (1977). In their case (again, no real spoilers here), the apocalyptic event is a comet strike and the nuclear powers refrain from “mistaking” it for an attack. There’s plenty of politics in the story, but it’s the politics of survival and not so much the politics of war.

…

Read More Read More