James Enge Marches Through the Black Gate

This week the SF Signal Podcast has an interview recorded live at WorldCon with John O'Neill, founder of Black Gate magazine, and two of the brightest feathers in his cap, Howard Andrew Jones and our own James Enge. Both sold stories early in their career to O'Neill and went on to sell novels based on those characters. James' of course, are the novels of Morlock Ambrosius, his sword and sorcery hero (the latest of which, A Guile of Dragons (A Tournament of Shadows, Book 1), just came out last month.

Podcast host Patrick Hester talks with the three about Middle Eastern culture and fantasy, Tolkien, European-centric fantasy, Sinbad, Disney movies, the history of Black Gate magazine, sword and sorcery, being a short story editor, critiquing, Worldcon and much, much more. It's well worth checking out - funny and informative as the best podcasts are.

Nice Words from Black Gate

Black Gate, Issue 14

I woke up this morning to discover that Black Gate publisher and editor John O'Neill had written a post about Pyr books, picking up on my earlier post last week highlighting our sword and sorcery titles. John says some very kind things about our line, and about our presentation at Dragoncon, and proclaims that ""I haven’t been this intrigued by so many books from a single publisher in a long time," calling Pyr "one of the most exciting publishers in the business." Thanks!

Robert Silverberg on “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?”

Science Fiction Grandmaster Robert Silverberg (whose Star of Gypsies and Son of Man we reprinted), at the Black Gate blog:

"Now we are back to the same situation that obtained in the golden era of the Fifties — s-f is mainly a field for hobbyist writers, with just a few able to earn a living writing just the real stuff and nothing but. (It is different, of course, for those who write pseudo-Tolkien trilogies, vampire novels, zombie books, and other sorts of highly commercial fantasy.) For a while, in the late 70s and early 80s, the money flowed freely and all sorts of people set up in business as s-f writers full time. I remember Greg Bear, president of SFWA somewhere back in the mid-80s, warning the writers at the SFWA business session not to quit their day jobs, because the good times were just about over; and was he ever right!"