by Alex Dueben
Dan Goldman is best known for “Shooting War,” a comic written by Anthony Lappe which he illustrated. It first appeared online at Smith Magazine before being collected into a book in 2007. Since then Goldman, a member of the online comic collective Act-i-vate, has crafted a number of comics for print and the web.
“Red Light Properties” is a project Goldman has been developing for years and since January he’s been serializing the book on Tor.com. It’s the story of a small Miami Beach real estate firm – with a specialty – taking on haunted properties and exorcising the ghosts before selling them on. This isn’t ghostbusters, though. The plot’s a lot stranger and more complex, as are the characters.
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by Blogbot
Titan Books are putting out a compendium of rare and recently uncovered photos of burlesque icon Dita Von Teese. The volume, entitled Fetish Goddess Dita, comes out on September 21, but the publishers have been kind enough to offer SG an exclusive advance viewing of some of the images, which are posted below for your delectation and delight.
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by Ryan Stewart
William Gibson will always be the cyberpunk prophet, the man whose Hugo-winning 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, about a future underworld dystopia where radically advanced computing possibilities exist in tandem with sex, drugs and political skullduggery, introduced the notion of “cyberspace” to the public and predicted the emergence of a world wide web, along with computers of ever-increasing intelligence and dubious motive. In the post-September 11th world, however, his attention has increasingly focused not on a new imagined future (the branch of Matrix-style cyber fiction his work spawned chugs along regardless) but on the complexities of the present. In a recent NYT op-ed about Google’s tightening grip on our lives, Gibson conceded that “science fiction never imagined Google” and characterized the search engine as a “coral reef of human minds” with an impact so potentially transformative that it should cause us to consider new ideas like “training wheel” identities for today’s minors, whose every stupid, impolitic thought is being cached to their potential future detriment.
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by Brett Warner
They call it “loss prevention”- an attempt to minimize shrinkage, shoplifting, and all other sorts of profit loss. Standing behind a computer screen, fake smiles all around, the word “Information” hanging like a halo over your head… it’s easy to start thinking about things you’ve lost along the way. A soccer mom asks for the Self Help section and like a prized show dog, you walk to her through the aisles, handing her a copy of He’s Just Not That Into You with a chipper “Have a good day!” the first of hundreds you’ll give out before closing time. The truth is that you silently hate this woman, and the next customer, and the next. You hate her because you never planned on selling books for a living. And each query, each title search, each cash register transaction is a blunt reminder of what’s gone missing, of what little there is left. Management worries about lost product – a bookseller worries about losing themselves.
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By Nicole Powers
In 1988 when Guns N’ Roses debut album, Appetite For Destruction, topped the Billboard 200 chart and the band’s seminal single “Sweet Child O’ Mine” did the same on Billboard’s Hot 100, being a member of the hard rocking Los Angeles band should have been a dream come true. But for the band’s drummer, Steven Adler, his fantasy reality was already turning into a nightmare. Guns N’ Roses muse, “Mr. Brownstone,” a.k.a. heroin had moved in, and by 1990 it had robbed Adler of his career, health and wealth.
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by Alana Joy
[Bloo Suicide in Like An Open Book]
➲ What are you reading right now?
by Ryan Stewart
Deep in the Congo, a scientist named Jenny Lowe is running for her life from the machine-gun fire of guerrillas when she comes upon the isolated cabin of a colleague who has always kept his distance despite their identical fields of study – primatology. Finding him dead in his doorway and his cabin ransacked for valuables, she is about to press on when a figure hiding inside catches her eye: a young girl. Acting on instinct, Jenny grabs the girl and they race through the darkness towards the safety of a helicopter: it’s not until the danger subsides that the girl, Lucy, is seen clearly. She is, in a word, different: dark, sleek, and muscular, with features that are proportional, yet very exotic. She proves to be startlingly well-educated – fluent in poetry and mathematics – yet culturally autistic, having been born and bred in the jungle. [..]
