Black Gate 14 goes to press this month.  It’s a big issue — including a Morlock novella from James Enge, the sequel to “The Face in the Sea” (BG 13) from John C. Hocking, and great new adventure fantasy from Martin Owton, Matthew Surridge, Pete Butler, Michael Jasper & Jay Lake, and many others.

Of course, that’s not all. Contributing Editor Rich Horton delivers another great retrospective piece, this one a detailed look at your best bets for quality reprints of Classic Fantasy, with spotlights on Baen Books, Paizo’s excellent Planet Stories, the SF & Fantasy Masterworks line from Orion/Gollancz, the Science Fiction Book Club, the esteemed Haffner Press, NESFA, and many more. 

We’ll also have our usual generous review features, as well as a very special Knights of the Dinner Table strip, as Eddie, Sara and Patty visit their first science fiction convention, and Eddie confronts Neil Gaiman for stealing all his ideas.

I hope to post a complete sneak peek, with artwork and story excerpts, in a few weeks. Stay tuned for further updates.  Here’s a look at the wrap-around cover to tide you over, from the marvelous Bruce Pennington:

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Very much looking forward to this.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Tom Waits as the Devil and Heath Ledger, notwithstanding how they marketed Batman, in his last (albeit, incomplete, which the movie reportedly got around by casting multliple actors in the same role after Ledger died) screen appearance. Here’s the Wikipedia summary. Premiers November 2 and it is to be hoped soon at a theater near you.

On another note, despite my aversion to “dress-up,” I’m going to a party tonight in a t-shirt to which my wife has pinned my daughter’s old Barbie collection (which she never played with, I’m happy to report). I’m going as a “chick-magnet.”

Happy Halloween.

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When people ask me what I like to read I usually answer with a simple ‘everything,’ but of course that’s not strictly true. I don’t read trigonometry textbooks or Romance novels, celebrity memoirs or cookbooks, monographs on the evolution of sheep shearing or anything by Dan Brown (in fact, just give me that thing on sheep first). But when I say ‘everything’ I’m being figuratively if not literally honest, because my tastes — especially when compared to the average reader — are very broad. I don’t read only one kind of thing. I’m a generalist.

There are plenty of people — possibly even the majority of people — that have a wholly different approach to reading. They are the specialists, and they only like one kind of thing and that is what they read to the exclusion of all else. It is tempting for me to regard this alien species as outside the category of ‘reader’ as I understand it — you know, the sort of person that, as a kid, spent all his lunch money on books, who’s tempted to get rid of his furniture to make room for his library, and who would rather read than watch TV, play jai-alai, or attend model home open house events in the hopes of a buffet spread. To me, a real reader is a voracious omnivore; metaphorically a gaunt, hollow-eyed ghoul with ink-stained fingers