The Best of his Macabre Tales – Edgar Allan Poe
Crows Nest Allen & Unwin, 2009
652 pages
RRP: AU$29.99
ISBN: 978-1-74175-850-4

Reviewed by Russell B. Farr

It should have been an easy, quick review. Get in, talk about how great it is to have a big, hefty, fine looking volume of Poe, collecting so many fine stories, including all the big ones. Talk about how great it is to have them all in one place, complete and unabridged (I always wonder how much of my childhood was abridged). If I felt like putting myself into the review, I could throw something in about the merits of reviewing the work of someone who has been in the ground for 160 years, after all, it’s not like he’ll really care what I say.

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2012 – edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Ben Payne
Twelfth Planet Press, 2008
118 pages
RRP: AU$20
ISBN 978-0-9804841-0-6

Reviewed by Russell B. Farr

Where will we be in 4 years’ time?

If 2012 is anything to judge by, very unhappy. In the debut anthology from Twelfth Planet Press, 11 writers give a pretty bleak vision of the future.

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Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth – Ben Peek
Wheatland Press, 2006
152 pages
RRP: US$14.95
ISBN 0-9755903-8-3

Reviewed by Russell B. Farr

This book bills itself as an “autobiography of a man who has been nowhere, done nothing and met nobody”, and with such a low goal to aspire to, accomplishes this. It consists of a number of short pieces, sometimes arbitrarily grouped around the alphabet, that overall form several plot lines. Thrown into the mix are examples of literary fraud.

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Welcome back to the glamorous and sexy world of publishing!

The hiatus, from March 2007 to now, has been entirely because of me. Without boring with details, in this time I’ve been diagnosed with a fairly common and rather debilitating illness, and started treatment, and had some ups and downs. I can’t rule out future breaks in transmission, but I’m happy to say, right now, that ticon4 is back.

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Is online reading replacing hard copy publications for reading pleasure?

Russell Farr

Barely a year goes by without someone, somewhere, proclaiming the death of publishing hard copy books. If it isn’t the internal machinations of the publishing industry causing this talk, the endless merging of publishing houses seemingly in a quest to form an Uber-Publisher, then it’s usually the words of a doomsaying geek on Slashdot or Boing Boing proclaiming the newest technological marvel that will replace books within the decade/ year/ month/ hour/ nanosecond.

Science Fiction fans the world over seem to be well placed among the harbingers of this movement, readily embracing PDAs and laptops and e-books if only to discard them for this year’s fad.

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