Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature is one of the most exciting things to appear in the fantasy genre in quite some time. It's not that there aren't plenty of venues in which to read short fantasy fiction, after all, there are a plethora of magazines, web sites and anthologies available, but in my opinion, most have become increasingly less interesting over the last two decades. This is, I think, a result of the genre's fundamental insecurity, which results from its rejection as a respectable literary form by the mainstream literary media.

Unlike other genre mags, Black Gate unapologetically embraces the pulp roots of the genre and returns the focus from self-conscious literary exercises, wherein one half expects to find a judge's score complete with degree-of-difficulty ratings, at the end of each story, in favor of what editor John O'Neill describes as adventure fantasy. In other words, its the storytelling, stupid! The magazine is a fat 208 pages of straightforward fantasy fiction, game reviews and book reviews almost entirely devoid of cultural or political clutter, much less news, rumors and gossip. It is, in short, exactly what one would want a magazine devoted to fantasy fiction to be. The production quality is high, the cover art is colorful and better than most fantasy novels published today and the fiction is entertaining, well-written and surprisingly solid from first to last.

Black Gate appears quarterly, runs just under ten bucks an issue, and is excellent value for the money. I haven't had a subscription to a fantasy or science fiction magazine since letting my subscription to Asimov's lapse, but I've not only signed up for this one, I've hunted down the first three issues as well.

Short Stories: I was just a little disappointed by The Loiterer in the Lobby primarily because there are few things I enjoy more than a light-hearted tale involving the Cthulhu Mythos. It's a good story involving a student at Miskatonic looking for a part-time job, but I've been a little too spoiled by Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archive which represents Cthulhoid hijinks at its best. The Loiterer was fun, but I thought the authors could have done quite a bit more with the university setting, I mean, no Campus Crusade for Cthulhu? Motto: It Found Me. Night of Two Moons was pretty good, although it was a little more passive than you might have expected for a tale of treachery in wartime. Far From Laredo was also good, an action-oriented story about a transdimensional gunslinger, and I was quite taken with A Prayer for Captain La Hire, by Patrice Sarath, which delves into some of the darkness and despair that surrounded the downfall of Joan of Arc. The characters are vivid and the story conveys a strong sense of history in playing it straight and largely avoiding historically anomalous attitudes, an all-too-common pitfall in this sort of fantasy fiction. It was, in my opinion, the best story in the magazine, except for the classic reprint, Scatheling, which has made me quite interested in reading more of Nancy Berberick's work.

Novelettes: These were a diverse collection, and while I much preferred Bill Johnson's Mama Told Me Not To Come to the other two pieces, all three were well-written and interesting in their own way. Cory Doctorow's Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar) is a post-Apocalyptic tale which is, considering its setting, rather on the light side and was moderately amusing in portraying an impromptu band as the sole vestige of civilization in a society dependent on scavenging for survival. Stranger Ev'rywhere, by Tina Jens, continues the musical theme with a story of a psychopathic lobotomized barfly, LSD and the spirit of the blues. It was a little lost on me, but then again, so are the blues. I have, however, always enjoyed stories in which there is a confluence of reality and game reality, and Mama is one of the best stories of this sort since Rosenberg banished his little party of gamers into their D&D world in the first Guardians novel.

Told from the point of view of a self-conscious non-player character, or Nipsy Combatant Aware, to use Johnson's terminology, Mama is a fantasy quest with thriller elements. The quest for freedom from external influence, as exerted by the Game Masters, is compelling and one finds it disturbingly easy to identify with the protagonist, trapped as he is in a world created and dominated by others and completely beyond his control. Miller, as a godlike Player, particularly stands out as an excellent portrayal of the immature gamer intoxicated with his power in the virtual world.

Non-fiction: The columns and reviews are uniformly excellent. Don Bassingthwaite writes one of the longest and best game review columns I've ever read, (13 pages!), concentrating primarily on RPG books. I don't play RPGs, but some of them do make for rather interesting reading and so does Bassingthwaite's column. The Comics Cauldron covers a world of which I know nothing and in which I have little interest, but Claude Lalumiere writes in an engaging style and I was surprised when I realized I'd read the entire piece. The book reviews, like most these days, primarily concentrate on the plots and which audience is likely to enjoy them - disappointing given the quality of the game and comic reviews - but that's book reviews for you. Kyla Ward's piece on role-playing in classic environments was interesting, as I had no idea anyone had ever developed an Amber RPG. Java Joint is one of the funniest comic strips I've ever read, I mean, for fantasists, it's up there with Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County and The Far Side.

"You've never read "Lord of the Rings"?
"My aunt bought it for me last month, but I usually don't like novelizations."

Presentation: Black Gate is thick, halfway between a trade paperback and a regular magazine. The covers are beautiful, both in terms of the art and the production. The paper is heavy, and I'm still of two minds about the font, which is quite readable but perhaps a little too Courier for my tastes. Then again, everytime I try to make something look pretty it turns out to be completely unreadable, so take this with a grain of salt. There are a few more misspellings than one would expect to see, but none terribly jarring and I suspect the authors were to primarily blame since the distribution was, shall we say, non-random. There is a lot of art inside, all black-and-white or grayscale, and while I'm not a fan of the illustrative style, it is nice to have the pictures. It is certainly head-and-shoulders above the cheap and miniaturized format of the Analog/Asimov/SF&F mags.

Text Sample: "What brings you to Vaucouleurs, old friend?"

La Hire held out his cup and de Metz filled it.

"Now that the Burgundians have come back to the fold and the goddons have fled to England, I've had to take on other commissions. Gilles de Rais sent me a message, asking for my help. He didn't say what for."

De Metz stared. "De Rais? Name of God, La Hire, do you know what you're getting into?"

"Oh, not you too, de Metz. Don't tell me you believe all those stories of werewolves in Brittany?"

"No, no, of course not." The Vaucouleurs captain shifted uneasily, just barely keeping from crossing himself. "But there are other tales with de Rais' name attached to them, stories of witchcraft and murder - you've heard them too, don't deny it. And what does de Rais want with La Hire? Ten years ago you were at each others throats."

- from "A Prayer for Captain La Hire" by Patrice E. Sarath, Black Gate Summer 2002

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