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Month: December 2011

Goth Chick News: Animated, Severed Zombie Ears; It’s Gonne Be a Great 2012!

Goth Chick News: Animated, Severed Zombie Ears; It’s Gonne Be a Great 2012!

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image0042I’m so excited about this news that I almost don’t know where to start.

Back in the late summer I got wind of some tantalizing rumors about a new project from the companies who last combined animation with gothic themes; two of my favs.

Focus Features and LAIKA, the folks behind the Academy Award-nominated animated feature Coraline were rumored to be re-teaming for a new project, ParaNorman. Details were maddeningly scarce but the name, which went from “working title” to the actual title in early October, had me pulling out my best cyber-stalking techniques to learn more.

Now, just when it started to look like entertainment in my favorite genre was going to be disappointinly thin in the New Year, Focus Features opened the information floodgates and I’m spinning around the office like Julie Andrews on top of an Austrian hillside.

No, you don’t have to picture that if you don’t want to.

ParaNorman is currently in production and being directed by Sam Fell (The Tale of Despereaux and Flushed Away) and Chris Butler, storyboard supervisor on Coraline and storyboard artist on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.  So right there is enough reason to be quivering in anticipation.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Hand of Fu Manchu, Part Six – “The House of Hashish”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Hand of Fu Manchu, Part Six – “The House of Hashish”

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hand-original1sifanmys“The House of Hashish” was the sixth installment of Sax Rohmer’s The Si-Fan Mysteries. The story was first published in Collier’s on February 17, 1917 and was later expanded to comprise Chapters 22 – 26 of the third Fu-Manchu novel, The Si-Fan Mysteries first published in 1917 by Cassell in the UK and by McBride & Nast in the US under the variant title, The Hand of Fu Manchu. The US book title marks the first time that the hyphen was dropped from the character’s name, although it was retained within the text.

“The House of Hashish” starts off with a wonderfully atmospheric opening with Dr. Petrie keeping a lonely nighttime vigil in the now abandoned shadow-filled wharf-side Joy Shop with only the sound of lapping waves and the incessant squealing of rats to accompany him. From a window, he watches Nayland Smith approach an old beggar woman and overhears their conversation. The old woman claims to have twisted her ankle and begs Smith to help her to the rooms she keeps in a wharf-side warehouse. Smith obliges and, of course, walks into a ruse as a dacoit leaps upon his back and quickly wraps a cord around his neck and begins strangling him. Fearing he is witnessing his friend’s death and helpless to stop him, Petrie is flabbergasted to see Smith’s apparent twin arrive to the rescue. Smith’s double beats off the dacoit and hurls the man into the Thames.

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I ask for Black Ice, and all I get is Angry Birds

I ask for Black Ice, and all I get is Angry Birds

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It's like a how-to guide for living in the present!
It's like a how-to guide for living in the present!

The year which we have so long awaited is finally upon us. 2013. Finally, our dreams of a cyberpunk-style distopia can be fully realized. Let’s do a rundown, shall we?

Corporate personhood? Check! Finally, the mega-corporations have revealed the iron fists beneath their velvet gloves! Pharmaceutical companies are now pursuing legal actions allowing their salespeople to basically say whatever they want to under the premise that the corporations are exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech. Can Second Amendment rights be far behind? This is like manna from heaven to those of us longing to live in a cyberpunk-fueled future.

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Art of the Genre: Redheads hate clothes!

Art of the Genre: Redheads hate clothes!

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Nope... you're wrong, this is Jirel of Jory, but nice try.
Nope... you're wrong, this is Jirel of Jory, but nice try.

I walked into work today, a holiday themed hot chocolate in my hand and was greeted by Kandi as usual, although her normally blonde locks were now blazing red. Granted it was eye-catching, perhaps even stunning, but as I looked at her from my office I couldn’t help but wonder what the obsession was with redheads… especially in fiction.

I picked up my phone, buzzed Ryan next door and hear the distinctive Black Hole Soundtrack ringer.

“Hello?” says Ryan.

“Hey,” I reply. “Did you see Kandi?”

“Yeah, why?”

“What did you think?” I asked.

“I thought she was channeling some Christina Hendricks,” he answered.

Exactly! Kandi turned from Barbie to Firefly’s Saffron in the course of a night, but she still had something going for her that the bulk of fantasy redheads don’t… clothing.

You see, redheads don’t like clothes… At least that’s what I was brought up to believe. I’m really not sure why this is considering that in my forty years on this planet every single redhead I’ve known was intelligently required to wear clothes because their freckled skin would burn a nice shade of crimson in less than five minutes if exposed to the sun.

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Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island on Blu-ray

Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island on Blu-ray

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mysterious-island-title-cardMysterious Island (1961)

Directed by Cy Enfield. Starring Michael Craig, Herbert Lom, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Percy Herbert, Dan Jackson, Beth Rogan.

I have no qualms admitting that I enjoyed the 2007 Walden Media adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. It surprised me how much of Verne’s novel made it onto the screen in a contemporary setting. However, the prospect of a sequel, riffing slightly (at least from what I can detect from the first trailer) on Verne’s 1874 classic The Mysterious Island, does nothing for me other than as a reminder to read that recent translation of the novel from the Modern Library that has stared at me from my “to read” stack for over a year. The new film is called Journey 2: Mysterious Island, which explains exactly what the filmmakers intend: the same thing as the last film. Maybe some younger viewers will go find the book after watching the movie, although the novel is less child-appealing than some of Verne’s other works, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, which children should read first anyway because Mysterious Island is a sequel to it. Will Captain Nemo show up in the new film? Who cares.

However, the marketing for Journey 2 coincides with the Blu-ray release of an earlier adaptation, the Ray Harryhausen-Charles H. Schneer Mysterious Island released in 1961. A number of Harryhausen’s classics have reached Blu-ray already, but Mysterious Island makes its high definition debut in a limited edition from a small direct distributor, Twilight Time, that specializes in film soundtrack albums. This concerns me for the release of other of Harryhausen titles. Mysterious Island is a Columbia film, and Sony Home Video released The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts on Blu-ray. Apparently, they preferred to farm out Mysterious Island to an independent—and on the film’s fiftieth anniversary! I may never have learned about the Mysterious Island Blu-ray if I wasn’t a soundtrack collector on mailing lists for small labels. (If you want to buy the Mysterious Island Blu-ray, go here. It’s limited to 3,000 unit, and I have no idea how fast they will sell.) …

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The Enjoyment of Fantasy: Open Letters to Adam Gopnik, Mur Lafferty, and John C. Wright

The Enjoyment of Fantasy: Open Letters to Adam Gopnik, Mur Lafferty, and John C. Wright

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The New Yorker, December 5I’ve been a bit under the weather the past couple of weeks, which has been annoying for a number of reasons. For one thing, I was unable to get my thoughts in enough order to respond adequately to three pieces of writing I came across several days ago. Each piece on its own seemed to pose interesting questions, and collectively they raised what seemed to me to be related issues about how one reads, and why; and how and why one reads fantasy in particular.

Well, my head’s cleared a bit over the past little while, and, however delayed, I’ve been able to frame responses (however wordy and inadequate) to the articles I had in mind. I present them here as open letters to the writers of the various pieces: Adam Gopnik, Mur Lafferty, and John C. Wright.

I: To Adam Gopnik

Dear Mr. Gopnik,

I read your recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dragon’s Egg,” with some interest. I haven’t read Christopher Paolini’s work; my interest is less in Young-Adult literature than in fantasy fiction. From that perspective I found your piece intriguing for what was left unsaid, or what you chose not to investigate. Specifically, I thought there were two major lacunae in the thinking underlying your approach to fantasy.

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Steampunk Spotlight: Victoriana RPG update

Steampunk Spotlight: Victoriana RPG update

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jewelempireA couple of weeks ago, I began my exploration of steampunk – one of the most popular subgenres in speculative fiction today – with a review of the upcoming board game Kings of Air and Steam, currently being funded through Kickstarter. (There’s still about another day before the deadline to pre-order a copy at a huge discount.)

Kings of Air and Steam focused on the more mundane aspects of the steampunk setting – shipping merchandise by airship and railroad. There’s certainly a lot more to steampunk than that and one game which embraces the more fantastic end of the spectrum is Victoriana RPG.

What is Victoriana?

Picture a traditional fantasy adventure setting, such as those made popular by Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, complete with elves, dwarves, sorcerers, undead, monsters, and so on. Now advance that world about 500 years, from the classic Middle Ages setting into the Victorian era. That is, essentially, the basis of Victoriana.

I favorably reviewed the Victoriana core rulebook and several supplement books in Black Gate #15 (now also available in Amazon Kindle format), but they’ve come out with three new sourcebooks since then. How do these new supplements stack up? If you really want to explore the world of Victoriana, these are definitely what you’ve been waiting for, although you will need at least the core rulebook to get started.

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Game Review: Castle Ravenloft

Game Review: Castle Ravenloft

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61sthemncpl_sl500_aa300_I recently received a copy of Castle Ravenloft and I wanted to take a moment this Saturday to talk about it. Not that I’m looking to pitch or anything, but I’ve had the chance to play several of the ‘big box’ games rolling off the presses this year and it’s been kind of fun to compare what I’m seeing with each.

To me, Castle Ravenloft is a bastion from my youth, a place where I went only because I was dragged there by my DM, Mark, as a particularly creepy and nasty torture for my Dungeons and Dragons characters.

When I had the chance to crack the seal on this newest piece of the Ravenloft legend I was immediately taken back to my youth while also being brought forward in time to the newest incarnation of D&D thought up by the creative minds of Wizards of the Coast.

First off, know that this is a HUGE box, and as I started pulling stuff out of it I kept getting flashbacks to GenCon 2011 when I was trying to put together a physical copy of King Snurre Ironbelly’s throne room for the climax of my current Against the Giants Campaign. As I walked that huge conference hall in Indianapolis I was amazed at the cost of creating a dungeon and the denizens that populate it. I mean, I could have spent my entire budget trying to do it, and yet this box held four times the quantity of stuff I would have needed to run a successful dungeon.

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Clarkesworld Issue #63

Clarkesworld Issue #63

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cw_63_300The December issue of Clarkesworld is currently online. Featured fiction: “Sirius” by Ben Peek, “In Which Faster-Than-Light Travel Solves All Our Problems” by Chris Stabback and the conclusion of Catherynne M. Valente’s “Silently and Very Fast.” Non fiction by Brenta Blevins, Jeremy L.C. Jones and Neil Clarke.  The cover art is by Folko Stresse.

All of this is available online for free; there’s even an audio podcast version of “Sirius” read by Kate Baker. However, nothing is really free. The magazine is supported by “Clarkesworld Citizens” who donate $10 or more.

We last covered Clarkesworld with issue #62.

R.I.P. Euan Harvey

R.I.P. Euan Harvey

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euan-harveyIn the decade or so I’ve been editing Black Gate magazine, I’ve been blessed to cross paths with a wide variety of talented writers, artists, and creators.

One of the most talented was Euan Harvey, a terrific short story writer whose career was just beginning to take off. His work appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Aoife’s Kiss, and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. I bought a story from Euan, “Kamaratunga’s Masterpiece,” and it is scheduled to appear next year in Black Gate.

In August 2009 Euan was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. He lived and taught in South East Asia for thirteen years, but that year he returned to the United Kingdom, where he lived just outside London with his wife and family.

Today his family posted the following announcement on his Facebook page:

To all of Euan’s friends who have been reading this. I am sorry to tell you all that his melanoma grew so fast that on Tuesday his state deteriorated and we were warned he might not have long. His brother and sister, cousin and parents were… all with him yesterday, and last night Alex and Fon stayed with him. He could hear but not talk. At 5.45 this morning [Friday 9th] his breathing changed, and he died very peacefully.

BG Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones, who discovered and first introduced me to Euan while he was editing Flashing Swords magazine, said this about him:

Euan Harvey was a fine man and father, and an excellent writer. He gave me great novel feedback, and I have enjoyed his stories for years. I was proud to call him friend. I am stunned and saddened by this news.

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