Sorry the blog’s been quiet! Not because nothing’s been going on… just that it’s been going on in other forums. One day I’ll get around to updating the bibliography and other pages, but in the meantime they’re like a peek back. Hard to believe the first posts are nearly 10 years old, moved here when I switched to WordPress all the way back in 2008!
RSS supporting our friends at Black Gate- Viewpoint Intimacy Through a Third Person LensCordelia’s Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen 1996, cover by Gary Ruddell), The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor 2014, cover by Anna Balbusso and Elena Balbusso), and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (Tor 2019, cover by Jaime Jones) Since quarantine has brought an unexpected windfall of time for me, I’ve been beta-reading more than […] […]
- A Sampling from an SF Grandmaster: The Silverberg Collections from Three Rooms PressFirst-Person Singularities (2017), Time and Time Again (2018), and Alien Archives (2019), all published by Three Rooms Press My 3,000-word article on The Art of Author Branding: The Paperback Robert Silverberg last week required a lot of research and reading, and all that generated a nostalgic interest in Silverberg. So this week I’ve been digging […]
- Rogue Blades Presents: Who Was Your First Hero?Do you remember your first hero? Any kind of hero. It could have been a hero from a movie or a book or a television show, even a hero from real life. As a child of the 1970s, one might think Luke Skywalker was my first hero, but I would turn eight years old a […]
- Andrew Liptak on 15 New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Check Out in MayI don’t know where John DeNardo vanished to this month. Ever since The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog shut down, taking their excellent monthly summary with tbem, I’ve grown to rely on John’s monthly SF book survey at Kirkus Reviews pretty heavily. It didn’t appear in May — but fortunately Andrew Liptak at […]
- Goth Chick News: The Shining Opera. And No, I’m Not Joking…As much as I love the movie The Shining, I never thought I’d ever see that title in the same sentence with the word ‘opera;’ and yet here we are. Turns out the Minnesota Opera, located in Minneapolis, has become known for showcasing rare and unusual operas. For instance, they’ve performed operatic versions of Where […]
- Magical Odes and Mysterious Trilogies: The Poet King by Ilana C. MyerCovers by Stephan Martiniere Every time a fantasy trilogy wraps up, we bake a cake in the Black Gate offices. (As you can imagine, our diet consists of a lot of cake. Man, we need a gym.) Ilana C. Myer’s new novel The Poet King brings to a close the trilogy that began with Last […]
- Vanguard Dream! A Sampling of Bushiroad Media, Part IIRAISE A SUILEN Part I of this 3-part survey was an introductory overview of the Bushiroad titles Cardfight!! Vanguard and BanG Dream!, and a look at how how the band Roselia was a feature of both projects. This time we examine how the newer female rock group RAISE A SUILEN is involved in both as well… RAISE […]
- Adventure and Tragedy on a Far Future Earth: Keith West on Zothique by Clark Ashton SmithZothique by Clark Ashton Smith. Ballantine Adult Fantasy #16, 1976. Cover by George Barr Some years back Keith West wrote a series of articles for Black Gate on the legendary Ballantine Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter. In fifteen pieces between 2013-2015 Keith covered the first fourteen or so titles, including The Blue Star […]
- Future Treasures: The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley by Carrie VaughnThe Ghosts of Sherwood and back cover, and The Heirs of Locksley. Tor.com, June and August 2020 Carrie Vaughn is the author of the bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, the superhero saga After the Golden Age, The Bannerless Saga from John Joseph Adams Books, and Martians Abroad. Her latest, The Ghosts of Sherwood, arrives in two […]
- The Mechanics of a Post-Apocalyptic World: Degenesis Rebirth and KatharSysDegenesis Rebirth Six More Vodka In early January, I was at my local game shop (Hero’s Emporium) chatting with a clerk. I was there to run a game and was awaiting the players to show up. As gamers do, we talked about all the games we wanted to run, and he brought up Degenesis Rebirth. […]
- Viewpoint Intimacy Through a Third Person Lens
