Goth Chick News: Christmas Spirits

Goth Chick News: Christmas Spirits

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As I enter the last leg of my doctoral studies, I couldn’t help taking advantage of my university’s very impressive library to take a bit of an intellectual detour. I did a search on the origins of modern-day Christmas traditions. Not unsurprisingly our current celebrations owe most to pagan winter festivals, and the rest to mid-19th century England; either way, very little has changed.

And because you’re here at Goth Chick News, you’ve got to know that I zeroed in on the association between Christmas and ghost stories. That particular practice, as it appears in American celebrations, is actually a Victorian tradition which was as much a part of Christmas to them, as Santa Claus is to us.

“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” wrote British humorist Jerome K. Jerome as part of his introduction to an anthology of Christmas ghost stories titled Told After Supper in 1891. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters.”

The most obvious example of a Victorian holiday ghost story is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has become such a ubiquitous part of the season that most people don’t even wonder why Dickens chose ghosts to bring about Ebenezer Scrooge’s transformation. So, what is it about Christmas and ghosts that go so well together?

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An Ode to Books and Writing: The Hell’s Library Series by A.J. Hackwith

An Ode to Books and Writing: The Hell’s Library Series by A.J. Hackwith

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Cover design by Faceout Studio/Jeff Miller

One of the delights of fantasy is its diversity. Good fantasy should always surprise readers with its inventiveness, and it certainly needn’t be confined to the mundane world we live in. Case in point: A.J. Hackwith’s Hell’s Library series, which opened last year with The Library of the Unwritten, is set in a library in Hell.

That’s intriguing enough on its own. But what really got my interest was the brief plot synopsis: Hell’s Librarian, a resourceful and determined woman named Claire, learns that pages from the Devil’s Bible have been found on Earth. Authored by Lucifer himself, the pages are so dangerous that Hell and Heaven are both hellbound to find them. Together with her small staff, Claire sets out to prevent an unholy war that would likely destroy her library. Library of the Unwritten received starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly; here’s a snippet from the former.

The Unwritten Wing in Hell is home to all stories unfinished by their authors. Claire is the head librarian. Sometimes she must chase down and return characters who have escaped from their pages. When one such hero heads to Earth to find his author, Claire, her current assistant and former muse Brevity, and the demon Leto try to capture him. The trio are attacked by the angel Ramiel, who thinks they are looking for the same tome he is: the Devil’s Bible. Deliberately lost on Earth for centuries, the Devil’s Bible could put the power of either heaven or hell in control. Claire and her companions must find it before the two realms decide to declare war… Elaborate worldbuilding, poignant and smart characters, and a layered plot make this first in a fantasy series from Hackwith… an ode to books, writing, and found families.

The Library of the Unwritten was published by Ace on October 1, 2019. It is 384 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. Sequel The Archive of the Forgotten arrived on October 6, 2020; it is 368 pages, priced at $16/$11.99 digital. The covers were designed by Faceout Studio/Jeff Miller. See all of our recent coverage of the best new fantasy series here.

Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: When History Gets in the Way of a Good Story

Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: When History Gets in the Way of a Good Story

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It’s been a little while since we visited. If you don’t recall, last time, I took to task G. Willow Wilson for writing a lovely tale in The Bird King, that at the same time it has been hailed for providing strong feminist and Muslim characters, did so by perpetuating centuries old stereotypes about the Spanish Inquisition and creating antagonists that literally could never have existed. In short, to tell the tale she wanted, Wilson mangles Iberian history, and doesn’t provide so much as a footnote to acknowledge it.

I ended that column with:

Wilson is one of a number of authors doing a beautiful job of mainstreaming and normalizing Muslim characters and settings in fiction. But it is problematic doing so while promulgating false historical narratives. Please, give us a more realistic presentation, a detailed Author’s Note at the end, or just make it a secondary world that is so obviously based on our own, but the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Guy Gavriel Kay has made an entire career at just this, and is probably blurring the line between Historical Fantasy and Low Fantasy. He’s absolutely one of my favorite writers.

Now, I get to have my Marc Antony moment: Friends, Readers, Countrymen, I come to critique Guy Gavriel Kay, not to praise him….

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Tony Curtis Goes Yonda

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Tony Curtis Goes Yonda

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Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie in The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951)

In the early Fifties, Tony Curtis was still honing his skills as an actor, but he was good-looking, athletic, and gosh, people liked him, so Universal decided to make him a star. Fortunately for us, for his first two swashbucklers Universal paired him with Piper Laurie, who was even more good-looking, athletic, and likeable than Curtis. And knowing that by the late Fifties Curtis would become a pretty decent actor, it’s interesting to watch him develop over his first few features.

The Prince Who was a Thief

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1951
Director: Rudolph Maté
Source: ATI Entertainment DVD

This is the first of many sword-swinging starring roles for Tony Curtis, whom you really can’t avoid if you’re watching historical adventures made in the Fifties. Everybody mocks Curtis, and it’s somewhat deserved, since he didn’t have the smarts of a Burt Lancaster or even a Louis Hayward, but he wasn’t terrible so much as mediocre. Somebody was persuaded that he was movie star material, but it took Hollywood about ten years to figure out that he was best employed as a reliable second banana. Fortunately, he’s offset in this film by engaging performances from Everett Sloane and Piper Laurie, who even this early in her career knew exactly what she was doing.

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Vintage Treasures: Threats… and Other Promises by Vernor Vinge

Vintage Treasures: Threats… and Other Promises by Vernor Vinge

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Threats… and Other Promises (Baen, November 1988). Cover by E. M. Gooch

Vernor Vinge is one of our greatest modern science fiction writers. He’s widely credited with introducing the singularity into modern parlance with his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times, for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Rainbows End, and his novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” and “The Cookie Monster.”

His first short story collection True Names … and Other Dangers appeared in 1987; it was followed quickly by Threats … and Other Promises in 1988. Both were paperback originals from Baen, and both were nominated for the Locus Award for Best Collection. The latter is remember today chiefly for the novella “The Blabber,” the first story in Vinge’s celebrated Zones of Thought universe, setting for much of his most popular fiction. I first learned about it from Alan Brown’s insightful review at Tor.com, here’s the bit that grabbed my attention.

“The Blabber” describes a human colony world settled by emigrants from the American Great Lakes region. Both Earth and this new colony are located in the “Slow Zone,” a region where travel and communications are limited to the speed of light, and superhuman intelligence is impossible. Beneath this region, in the “Unthinking Depths,” even human-level intelligence is impossible… The fringes of the galaxy are the “Beyond,” where the speed of light is no longer a limiting factor, and superhuman beings and intelligences live.

In “The Blabber,” the human colony, located just within the Slow Zone, is visited by a trading expedition from the Beyond, looking to trade advanced technology for cultural artifacts from the humans. The story is a bravura effort, mixing thoughtful scientific extrapolation with wonders that would be right at home in the space opera tales of science fiction’s pulp era. Vinge found a way to escape the bounds of rigid extrapolation, but in a way that was internally consistent. There is a joy and sense of wonder in “The Blabber” that I had not seen in Vinge’s work before. So when I heard that A Fire Upon the Deep would be set in that same universe, I looked forward to it with great anticipation. Anticipation that was rewarded in abundance.

If you’re like me and you like to sample authors with short fiction first, Threats…. and Other Promises is a great place to start. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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The Frustrations (and the Surprising Successes) of Marketing Your Book

The Frustrations (and the Surprising Successes) of Marketing Your Book

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I’ve joined a new FB group called “Writers Helping Writers.” One of the members asked about marketing. This is what I said:

Marketing is easy. Effective marketing that actually sells books, however, is hard. My son works for Facebook, so he helped me with an advertising campaign on the platform. We had a $250 budget for one of my collections, The Experience Arcade and Other Stories. One of the ads reached 1,900 readers. 103 people clicked on it. We did sell books, but not enough to pay back our investment. We found the same pattern to be true on the other books we promoted on Facebook.

I have tried quite a bit with marketing: Facebook, Goodreads, advertising in convention bulletins and program books, signings, YouTube videos, readings, postcards, bookmarks, flyers, tee shirts. Also, my publisher has worked hard to get the books to reviewers (my latest book, The Best of James Van Pelt, received a starred review at Publishers Weekly! Hooray!). All of my attempts sold some books, but none of them profited more than I spent. I didn’t pay for any of the reviews, by the way.

The successful books I’ve had seemed to take off on their own. My first collection, Strangers and Beggars and Other Stories, was recognized by the American Library Association as a “Best Book for Young Adults” and has sold several thousand copies. I didn’t do anything to make that happen — I didn’t even know it was a thing.

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Cyberpunk Red: Style and Substance

Cyberpunk Red: Style and Substance

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IMG_0957

In 1990, R. Talsorian released Cyberpunk 2020, a revision to the original game from the 1980s. This was followed by many supplements and the gaming world had a tabletop RPG that enabled players to engage with a world with elements they saw and read in Blade Runner, Hardwired, Neuromancer, and Strange Days. The game proved so popular that many still play it today. When a third edition was released, it proved so unpopular that it is basically forgotten.

A few years ago the creators of The Witcher video game series, CD Projekt Red, reached out to R. Talsorian. See, they had played Cyberpunk 2020, and they wanted to create a new video game and thought it might be fun to use Cyberpunk 2020 as the basis. Thus, Cyberpunk 2077 — a much anticipated video game — was born.

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Where Preposterous Dreams Meet the Raw Edges of Reality: Islam, Science Fiction, and Extraterrestrial Life by Jörg Matthias Determann

Where Preposterous Dreams Meet the Raw Edges of Reality: Islam, Science Fiction, and Extraterrestrial Life by Jörg Matthias Determann

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Islam, Science Fiction, and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World
by Jörg Matthias Determann
I.B.Tauris, Bloomsbury Publishing (269 pages, $115.00 in hardcover/$103.50 digital, September 17, 2020)

Science fiction and ETs in the Muslim world? Why, yes. Ask Professor Jörg Matthias Determann, a faculty member in the Liberal Arts & Sciences program at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (the world’s richest country), and Associate Editor, Arabian Peninsula, of the Review of Middle East Studies. He is a historian who worked at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Freie Universität Berlin, the University of London, King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, and was a visiting scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. He is fluent in Arabic, making him a useful guide to the sciences and mythologies of what are called “Muslim-majority countries,” which includes far-flung territories such as Indonesia and Pakistan, plus Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, etc. — in all, a quarter of the world’s population. These in turn are torn by often ferocious enmity between Sunni (about 90%) and Shi’a (about 10%). A bit like Catholics versus Protestants five centuries ago — and they didn’t even have sf to worry about.

I’m fairly sure hardly anyone native to the western centers of science fiction, especially North America, UK, France, Germany, Australia,  has a clue about sf or fantastika in those Islamic lands. Perhaps it’s assumed that reading or writing the usually godless worlds of sf imagination is forbidden or even attracts death threats (p. 148) by excessively devout Muslims. To some extent, as Determann shows, this is so. In 1999, a Syrian-born scholar “issued a fatwa about the permissibility of reading science fiction… ‘If these stories contain lies, such as Darwin’s theory (evolution), and other things that are contrary to the facts stated by Islam… then the Muslim should avoid them” (p. 7). Darwin’s lies, eh? Sigh.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam from Hard Case Crime!

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam from Hard Case Crime!

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I say Erle Stanley Gardner, and you say…Ed Jenkins? Lester Leith? Paul Pry? Stop that!! All correct, but we were looking for Perry Mason. Probably the most famous defense lawyer in fiction, Mason made Gardner the best-selling author in the world at the time of his death. Raymond Burr is forever linked in minds as the picture of Mason.

But my favorite books from Gardner are those featuring his duo of Cool and Lam. And Hard Case Crime has released their fourth and final volume featuring the mismatched pair. Top of the Heap, Turn on the Heat, and The Count of 9, were all previously reissued. And as I wrote about here, Hard Case published the previously unreleased second novel, The Knife Slipped. William and Morrow Company had objected to the content and declined to publish it upon completion. Gardner moved right along and wrote Turn on the Heat, which became number two, released in January of 1940. There would be twenty-seven more books, with the final, All Grass Isn’t Green, hitting shelves in 1970. And The Knife Slipped joined the list in 2016.

Kudos to Hard Case for getting some of this series back in print. The paperbacks from Dell and Bantam can be found used, but not always on the cheap. And getting them in good condition can be a bit difficult. I myself don’t even have all 29 yet, and I’m a C&L fanboy. It’s good that Hard Case has made it easy to buy a couple of these books. And of course, it was FANTASTIC to find a lost Cool and Lam title.

If you’ve not read Cool and Lam, the widowed Bertha Cool runs a detective agency, and she hires the disbarred, down on-his-luck Donald Lam: at slave wages. His cunning and sneakiness produce results and he pushes his way into a partnership in book five.

Bertha LOVES money. She basks in the fees that Donald brings in, but she incessantly complains about the razor-thin line he walks with the law. And about his expenses, which are not at all unreasonable. She’s just so cheap she makes Scrooge look generous.

This constant friction makes for an entertaining duo. As Donald writes,

‘At that, our partnership would probably have split up long ago if it hadn’t been so profitable. Money in the bank represented the most persuasive argument in Bertha’s life, and when wit came to a showdown where the dissolution of the partnership was threatened, Bertha could always manage to control her irascible temper.’

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The Season of Gaming: Pathfinder

The Season of Gaming: Pathfinder

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Since its release at 2019 GenCon, the RPG Pathfinder Second Edition has been growing in popularity. With a character creation system that allows for immense character customization, it has won over many converts among the scores of existing fans of the game’s first edition, even with all of the difficulties involved in getting those fans together to play the game during a global pandemic.

It’s worth a quick recap of what Paizo has put out to support and expand this game in just a little over a year:

You can get the harcopies of these gaming resources through pretty much any game shop, but digital copies (as well as the hardcopies) are available directly through Paizo.com. If ordering Paizo products – including First Edition Pathfinder, Pathfinder Adventure Card, or Starfinder products – through their website, there’s a one-time promotional code of “holiday21” good through January 17, 2021.

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