Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Black Gate, 2005
Black Gate published two issues, barely, in this its fifth year of publication -- its eighth and ninth issues. It remains a beautiful thick magazine, with a strong and successful focus on adventure fantasy. (A focus that is met in spirit all the time, but loose enough to allow the occasional SF piece.) These two issues included 19 stories, one a reprint novella, the new stories consisting of one novella, 5 novelettes, and 12 short stories (1 short-short). Over 150,000 words of fiction, over 130,000 words new.
Ob-disclosure -- I am a regular columnist for the magazine, and had articles in both issues.
The novella is Charles Coleman Finlay's "The Nursemaid's Suitor", a very enjoyable story derived from the first part of his 2005 first novel, _The Prodigal Troll_. The story concerns a loyal soldier who has been assigned to help the infant child of a lord whose castle has been overrun escape. The soldier is in love with the baby's wet nurse, but she does not return his affection. The story concerns their difficult escape, and his hopeless attempts to get her to notice him. It's actually almost identical to the novel's opening, except that the ending changes (rather radically) in a way that brings the story to a good close, but in a way that wouldn't have worked for the novel.
The best two novelettes were both from the Summer issue: James Enge's "Turn Up This Crooked Way", about the wizard Morlock Ambrosius and his response to a deadly challenge from another sorcerer; and Iain Rowan's "The Turning of the Tiles", in which his unwilling exorcist character Dao-Shi is hired to exorcise a scary monster and gets tangle in a political tussle at the same time.
The best short stories include Jay Lake's "Fat Jack and the Spider Clown" (Summer), set on the Ship, a strangely mutated generation ship (as experienced SF readers will gather), dealing with the ascendance of a new King and a lesson taught him by the title characters; another Morlock Ambrosius story by James Enge, "Payment Deferred", in which a foolish wizard hired Ambrosius to help him make golems and tries to get away without paying; "Seijin's Enlightenment" by William John Watkins, about a samurai who learns a better way; and "A Touch of Crystal" by Martin Owton and Gaie Sebold, in which real Elves -- biker Elves -- come to a New Age store and complain about the imitation elf merchandise -- they want to sell the real stuff.
