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Long Live the Physical Book–at least for now

Long Live the Physical Book–at least for now

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jp-holiday-articleinlineSo it would seem that the death of the physical book and the physical bookstore is greatly exaggerated. According to The New York Times, bookstores are having a banner year. In part this is because some of the competition (i.e., Borders) is no longer a factor in brick-and-mortar retailing, a number of popular books (ironically including the biography of Steve Jobs, the very guy who sought to digitize and commodify the object in question) and a desire among consumers in a slowly recovering economy to give gifts that are attractive in a way that bits on a screen don’t quite emulate.

Also, content owners are, as they are prone to do, shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to digital retailing. Despite the fact the e-book readers are more affordable than ever with a growing proliferation of titles in e-book format, pricing strategies are frequently rendering physical books as less expensive than their digital counterparts, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Long live the dog-eared book, if only for another few years.

On another note, and though it has nothing to do with the normal realm of Black Gate matters, I’m sad to note the passing of Christopher Hitchens.  Right up to the end, he was one gutsy bastard.  Here’s what I presume was his last piece of Vanity Fair.

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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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.

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Hand of Fu Manchu, Part Five – “The Zagazig Cryptogram”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Hand of Fu Manchu, Part Five – “The Zagazig Cryptogram”

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hand-titan1return-titan1“The Zagazig Cryptogram” was the fifth installment of Sax Rohmer’s The Si-Fan Mysteries. The story was first published in Collier’s on January 26, 1917 (two months after the fourth installment) and was later expanded to comprise Chapters 19 – 21 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 Zagazig Cryptogram” picks up two weeks after the last installment with Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie joining Inspector Weymouth at the River Depot police station to examine a corpse. A Burmese dacoit has been fished out of the Thames along the wharf where the Joy Shop sits. The coroner’s report reveals that the man was strangled rather than drowned as initially suspected. Smith spies in the Times’ personal column a mysterious message has been posted consisting of nothing more than the word Zagazig written seven times in a row. While Petrie dismisses it as nonsense, Smith points out that Zagazig is a town in Lower Egypt. He is convinced that the mysterious code and the murdered dacoit are somehow connected to the Si-Fan.

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Goth Chick News: The Best Book to Not Read on a Plane

Goth Chick News: The Best Book to Not Read on a Plane

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image0021Until recently, reading on a plane was one of my personal joys.

As an electronics geek (admitting it is the first step) it is a rare thing indeed for me to find myself in an environment where connectivity isn’t possible.  Okay, I know that some flights are now offering Internet in the sky, but I prefer to ignore this for the time being in the name of preserving the one place where I can guiltlessly escape email, IM and my cell phone.  And though it is still possible to “work” while disconnected, I generally ignore this as well and relish the opportunity to sink uninterrupted into a novel.

And this was precisely what I did on a recent getaway to my favorite US destination; New Orleans.  I boarded the American Airlines jet and settled back in my window seat with Chris Bohjalian’s fourteenth novel, The Night Strangers.

Things went all wrong shortly thereafter.

We had only just pushed back from the gate when the plane came to a rather abrupt halt and the engines shut down.  The pilot’s voice sounded a tad embarrassed when he explained our aircraft had just experienced an “electrical abnormality” and mechanics were being called to look into the issue before we would be cleared to take off.

Now, as someone who has clocked countless hours on airplanes, this “electrical abnormality” didn’t concern me all that much.  I imagined that some unexpected red light was blinking away in the flight deck that probably wouldn’t have meant much if it had occurred aloft, but as it had started up while we were still on the runway, the crew was obligated to halt our journey and have it looked at.

I went back to The Night Strangers.

In case you’re not familiar (I certainly wasn’t prior to picking up his latest book), Chris Bohjalian is a New York Times bestselling author, and his latest outing The Night Strangers is a ghost story inspired by both a door in his basement and Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River.

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