“Pfundstein tried several times to get his work published, but it seemed there wasn’t a market for the genre he was writing. Pfundstein writes sword and sorcery books. Sword and sorcery is a sub-genre of fantasy some may call the “dark side.” There wasn’t a market for sword and sorcery until 2005, when a new [...]

Continue reading about University professor doubles as fantasy author after class – Danae King

“A growing number of Black Gate authors have moved on to book deals, and some were published novelists before they appeared in the magazine. Two of us, James Enge and myself, landed book deals featuring recurring characters that had appeared in Black Gate short stories. They were the Dabir & Asim stories for me (”Whispers [...]

Continue reading about Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal – James Enge and Howard Andrew Jones

“You know that guy, Austin Tappan Wright, who spent his entire life writing a massive utopian novel Islandia, a fantastic work in every sense, which only saw print after his death? I hate that guy. Not because there was anything wrong with him, a fine person by all accounts, or his masterpiece, a cleanly written [...]

Continue reading about R.I.P.: Enge Unicorns etc. – James Enge

“Virginia: Please snap out of it. The world is drenched in things that don’t exist. I could mention the evergreen genre of “what I shoulda told him was…” conversations, or all those stories about “the fish (or the mastodon or the mating prospect) that got away.” But just because it’s fresh in my mind–and seasonal, [...]

Continue reading about Killer Trees with Icy Fangs Roasting on an Open Fire – James Enge

“I recently reread Le Guin’s Language of the Night, and for a while I thought it might be a mistake. The book is a hodge-podge: printed versions of short speeches, introductions to her earlier Hainish novels, full essays with footnotes to provide that added kick, and a light frosting (in the edition I was using [...]

Continue reading about Night Thoughts: Rereading Le Guin’s The Language of the Night – James Enge

“Here’s Horace’s advice to the apprentice storyteller: lie like a rat-bastard. I wish more young people would take it to heart.” 3.5 out of 5 http://www.blackgate.com/2009/02/18/back-away-from-the-egg-or-getting-straight-to-it/#comments

Continue reading about Back Away from the Egg! Or: Getting Straight to It – James Enge

“I thought I was done with this series of posts on planetary romance, a.k.a. sword-and planet, at least until the new edition of Kline’s Outlaws of Mars comes out. But then I came across a reference to James Blish’s Sword of Xota (a.k.a. The Warriors of Day). I had a hard time believing it was [...]

Continue reading about The Blish Is Back: James Blish’s The Warriors of Day – James Enge

“As to the “perfect book”–the new issue from Paizo Press’ Planet Stories line, Henry Kuttner’s Robots Have No Tails, may not be perfect in some absolute sense (although it comes pretty close) but it’s certainly one that I and others have been looking forward to for years. And it’s only the latest (hopefully not the [...]

Continue reading about Robots Have Tales: Henry Kuttner’s Gallagher Stories – James Enge

“Don A. Stuart’s “The Elder Gods” is a fantasy novella from the late 1930s that reads a lot like the science fiction being written around the same time. That’s no accident: the author behind the pseudonym is John W. Campbell, once a leading light in the “super science” stories of the 1930s, later a pioneer [...]

Continue reading about Who Gods There?: The Elder Gods by Don A. Stuart – James Enge

“Blood of Ambrose has been out for a while now and it’s starting to be reviewed, rather generously on the whole (a not-uncommon reception for first novels, so I’m trying not to be an egomaniac about it). The reviews somehow make the publication more real to Enge-the-reader (as opposed to Enge-the-writer; these guys aren’t usually [...]

Continue reading about Views Re Reviews – James Enge

“I thought I got off easy this year, as the Bunny brought me something I’d often thought about getting myself: the complete Spider-Man (complete at least through 2005). I haven’t been reading a lot of comics lately, but the Sam Raimi movies reminded me of how much I liked Spider-Man as a kid, and I’d [...]

Continue reading about Shadow of the Bunny – James Enge

“Everyone who loves imaginative fiction should raise their voice, frequently, in praise of NESFA, the venerable fan group whose press has been doing great work, putting out archival collections of classic sf in hardcovers. I was reminded of this earlier this week when reading Frederik Pohl’s pleasant reminiscence of his onetime collaborator Cyril Kornbluth (the [...]

Continue reading about The Good the Brown and the Kornbluth – James Enge

“The cross-genrefication of all genres has produced some interesting work. It’s true that if someone describes a book as “steampunk slash horror slash fantasy slash splatterpunk slash slash with a pinch of oregano” I’m likely to quietly sidle away,” 3 out of 5 http://www.blackgate.com/2009/05/20/there-wolf-dreadful-skin-by-cherie-priest/

Continue reading about There Wolf! (Dreadful Skin by Cherie Priest) – James Enge

“Dreams with Sharp Teeth was more than a quarter of a century in the making; the first footage was shot in the early 1980s and was used in a PBS special; the film-makers kept coming back for more until they had a feature-length documentary (including lots of older material) which premiered in April 2007. It’s [...]

Continue reading about Tooth without Consequences: Dreams with Sharp Teeth – James Enge

“This is a strange book about a strange event in a strange time. In the summer of 1835, the first successful penny paper in New York published a series of articles documenting an extraordinary series of discoveries by the most famous astronomer in the world, John Herschel (son of the even-more-famous William Herschel). With the [...]

Continue reading about Moonbats and Penny Papers: The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman – James Enge

“But without question the novel that addicted me to serial fiction was Analog’s summer serial from 1974, Stargate by Tak Hallus. Except it wasn’t really by Tak Hallus at all: eventually the author dropped his false whiskers and started publishing under his real name, Stephen Robinett. The word “takhallus” is apparently used in Farsi and [...]

Continue reading about Brass Tak: Stargate by Stephen Robinett – James Enge

“If genre fiction wants to go on being creative, productive of new ideas and new dreams and new stories, it should steer clear of the respectable. That way blandness lies.” 3 out of 5 http://www.blackgate.com/2009/10/08/sff-field-or-dangerfield/#more-3618

Continue reading about SF/F: Field or Dangerfield? – James Enge

“Fantasy is most effective when it acts through symbols that rest pretty deep in the awareness (or beneath the awareness, if you buy into the whole subconscious thing). At the center of every adult’s emotional life is a struggle for autonomy that occurs in adolescence. One may be struggling against well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) [...]

Continue reading about Caliban and His Mirror – James Enge

In a double act with Matthew Sturges, in multiple parts. 4 out of 5 http://bordersblog.com/scifi/author/jamesenge/

Continue reading about Babel Clash – James Enge