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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.

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.

Interzone November-December # 237

Interzone November-December # 237

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interzone-394The November – December issue of Interzone contains substantial new stories by Lavie Tidhar (“The Last Osama”), Jim Hawkins (“Digital Rites”), Douglas Lain (“Erasing the Concept of Sex from a Potobooth”), and Caspian Gray (Caspian Gray); artwork by Richard Wagner, David Gentry, Steve Hambidge; “Ansible Link” genre news and miscellanea by David Langford; “Mutant Popcorn” film reviews by Nick Lowe; “Laser Fodder” DVD/Blu-Ray reviews by Tony Lee; book reviews by Jim Steel and other contributors.

Interzone alternates monthly publication with sister dark horror focused Black Static, published by the fine folks at TTA Press.

You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static. Lifetime subscriptions are also available. What you’re buying, in essence, is a 10-year subscription at the current rate.  If you think you’re going to live for at least another decade, and you think Interzone will also be around for as long, this could be a bargain for whatever time you and the magazine have after that. If that weren’t enough, you can also opt for joint lifetime sub that gets you sister publication Black Static for a slightly reduced rate.  Sign your life away here.


Black Static #25

Black Static #25

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393The November Black Static features new horror fiction from Alison Littlewood (“About the Dark”), Christopher Fowler (“The Curtain Parts), Ray Cluley (“The Travellers Stay”). Nathaniel Tapley (“Best. Summer. Ever.”) and Barbara A. Barnet (“The Holy Spear”).  Nonfiction by the usual suspects, Peter Tennant, Tony Lee, and D.F. Lewis. The editor is Any Cox.

Black Static alternates monthly publication with sister SF and fantasy focused Interzone.

You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static. Lifetime subscriptions are also available. What you’re buying, in essence, is a 10-year subscription at the current rate.  If you think you’re going to live for at least another decade, and you think Black Static will also be around for as long, this could be a bargain for whatever time you and the magazine have after that. If that weren’t enough, you can also opt for joint lifetime sub that gets you sister publication Interzone for a slightly reduced rate.  Sign your life away here.


Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke

Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke

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lpw_smallChesya Burke’s new short story collection newly out from Apex Publications provides a take on the horrific and strange from, as you might expect from the title, an African-American perspective. The title comes from the opening story, “Walter and the Three-Legged King,” in which the down on his luck protagonist is advised by a talking rat, one that he’s maimed by tearing off its leg, that “let’s play white” is the only way for him to get a job and avoid getting thrown out of his apartment.  The notion that you have to “play the game” in a job interview is hardly the province of any particular race, however; moreover, the no-doubt low paying  job of doorman the protagonist hopes to land might actually have less to do with “playing white” than “playing subservient,” which is why ethnic minorities probably hold a larger percentage of these kinds of positions.

Of course, sf and fantasy have been a natural home for ethnic writers to explore the state of “otherness” in which alien creatures and societies symbolize the psychology of oppressed racial and sexual minorities.  Burke’s stories are more grounded in the everyday realities of the disenfranchised, realities that are disrupted by cultural myths such as the actually benevolent but of course misunderstood village witch (“The Teachings and Redepmtion of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason”), zombies (“Cue Change”) voodoo (“Chocolate Park”), diviner-healers (“The Unremembered” and “The Light of Cree”)  and the evil eye (“I Make People Do Bad Things”).  Some of the scariest, however, are the most realistic.

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Clarkesworld Issue #62

Clarkesworld Issue #62

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cw_62_300The November issue of Clarkesworld is currently online. Featured fiction: “A Militant Peace” by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell, “The Smell of Orange Groves” by Lavie Tidhar and part two of Catherynne M. Valente’s “Silently and Very Fast.” Non fiction by Nathaniel Tapley, Jeremy L. C. Jones and Neil Clarke.  The cover art is by Julie Dillon.

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

We last covered Clarkesworld with issue #55.

APEX #30 and Weird Fiction Review debut

APEX #30 and Weird Fiction Review debut

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issue31_mediumThe latest Apex Magazine is now available; the thirtieth issue is the first by new editor Lynne M. Thomas.  The issue features former editor Catherinne M. Valente’s “The Bread We Eat in Dreams” (who also contributes a farewell essay and a poem) and “The Leavings of the Wolf” by Elizabeth Bear.  This month’s revisited classic story is “The Creeping Thing” by Robert Shearman.  There’s also poetry by Tim Pratt and Bryan Thao Worra and non-fiction by Tansy Rayner Roberts, as well as several interviews.  For those who might fear change, rest assured that the new editor intends to carry on the Apex tradition:

Apex will continue to shove at the edges of the genre until they bleed. I will be publishing transgressive, visceral stories and poems that show us the best and worst of who we are, rendered with style and precision. Expect work outside of your comfort zone: thoughtful, experimental, emotional, and brave. Here you will find stories and poems that show us a heart, sliced out carefully, still beating in the writer’s hands, for all the world to see.

Also, in the one door closes, another opens category, outgoing Werid Tales editor Ann VanderMeer and spouse Jeff (who you may also have heard of) have launched on-line Weird Fiction Review. There’s a combination of fiction, non-fiction, comics, interviews and other, well, weird stuff.  As the editors describe it:

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This site is meant to be an ongo­ing explo­ration into all facets of the weird, in all of its many forms — a kind of non-denominational approach that appre­ci­ates Love­craftbut also Kafka, Angela Carter and Clark Ash­ton Smith, Shirley Jack­son and Fritz Leiber — along with the next gen­er­a­tion of weird writ­ers and inter­national weird. The emphasis will be on non­fic­tion on writ­ers and par­tic­u­lar books, but we will also run fea­tures on weird art, music, and film, as well as occasional fiction.
Still Not Ready for Prime Time

Still Not Ready for Prime Time

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6276241335_53830189a1_o1Well, just as everyone is remarking on how the new conversant iPhone is making science fiction true to life, one pretty big part of the science fiction imagination remains just that; while the 21st century has not only arrived, we’re a decade into it, but we won’t be taking any sight seeing trips to Mars in the near future.  Even a suborbital cruise will have to wait until 2013. The overly ambitiously and to-date technically impossibly named Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by British billionaire and all-around let’s do something fun and make some money at it guy Sir Richard Branson, has announced that commercial flights have been delayed for another two years.  But don’t start buying any tickets, as this is something like the fourth time the schedule has been bumped forward since flights were supposed to begin back in 2008.

If you did want to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, tickets cost $200,000, with a deposit of$20,000 required.  Not sure if that includes complimentary drinks.

Asimov on 21st Century Advertising

Asimov on 21st Century Advertising

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imagesBack in 1977, science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote a piece for Advertising Age predicting, among other things, that consumers would opt to receive ads personalized to their interests as well as the role of “persuasion techniques developed by advertology (sic)” to promote social change. While Asimov got the general idea right, he was wrong on the delivery channel for target marketing (he thought it would be television, having no notion of the Internet) and the evolution of political advertising (he thought it would be for the purpose of “battling ignorance and folly” as opposed to most political messages today that’d rather promote ignorance and folly).

Asimov was from a generation of SF writers who saw their avocation in part as to predict the future as a positive, better place to live. In the same article, Asimov conjectured that by 2000, “Energy will once more be relatively plentiful, and it will be used more wisely, we hope, by a world that has been taught by the events of these recent decades to cooperate for survival.” Good luck with that.

I was thinking about this after reading “Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy” by John Scwartz in The New York Times Sunday Review. He notes the range of predictions that have come to pass, ranging from Jules Verne staging moon launches from Florida to Arthur C. Clarke’s anticipation of satellite communications to Internet virtual realities envisioned by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, two of the founding fathers of the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s. But he fails to distinguish between those like Asimov who hoped they were right in promoting a future enhanced by technological development and those whose extrapolations of global corporate and media trends led to more decidedly dystopic premonitions.

193176591Alas, it seems as if the optimists who envisioned the twenty-first century as some sort of glittering technological utopia might have gotten some of the details right, but the award for getting right the overall picture of media and marketing malevolence goes to the more pessimistic cyberpunks. As the opening line of the archetypical cyberpunk novel — Gibson’s Neuromancer — describes it:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Gibson delineates a world in which industry, technology, and mass media dominate human existence, but not in good ways that Asimov thought it might turn out. Certainly not one in which we’ve all decided to cooperate for our mutual survival.

A Pleasure to Read

A Pleasure to Read

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bradbury-burn1Ray Bradbury’s A Pleasure to Burn is a collection of short stories that served as the basis for one of his novels (and what few novels he has written are based on his short stories) Fahrenheit 451. This is repackaging, recycling, and rebranding old stuff (really old, as the novel appeared in 1953 and the stories date back to 1947) to make it appear fresh. Now in his ninth decade, Ray has more than earned the right to let his publishers generate some cash for him the same way the Beatles (as well as a multitude of musical groups from the era) and their heirs keep coming up with repackaged versions of the same old catalog. But, just like repeated listening to the Beatles over the decades, anything that makes you reconsider some “old” notions in a new context still has value.

If you’re not familiar with Fahrenheit 451 (and you really need to rectify that), the premise is that of a dystopia in which television is the ruling order’s opiate to keep the masses content and placid; to that end, reading is literally outlawed as disruptive to social conformity. Firemen no longer put out fires but set fires to surreptitious libraries of the banned books. The protagonist is a fireman who begins to question his purpose and eventually decides to take a look at what he’s supposed to be destroying. Needless to say, his experience in reading books proves the authorities right. Which, of course, Ray wants us to understand, is actually a good thing.

Remember, this was written in the 1950s, back before anyone could even begin to imagine something as stupefying today as The Situation and Snooki, or the anti-intellectualism of the Republican presidential field, or 150 channels and nothing much to watch. This was also the era of McCarthyism, though Bradbury always maintained his novel was not about censorship, easy as it would be to interpret it that way, but rather a critique of American culture.

It still is.

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