May 8, 2013
Fire Above, Fire Below
The dragon below our city has died. What is to be done?
May 7, 2013
We Have Always Lived On Mars
They've never seen the sky. Or the sun. Or the stars. Or the moons.
May 1, 2013
Jack of Coins
An amnesiac man is befriended by repressed teens.
April 24, 2013
The Ink Readers of Doi Saket
People send their dreams and wishes down the river, hoping they'll come true.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for May.
Check out Magician's End, the finale book in Raymond E. Feist's Chaoswar Saga, out tomorrow from Harper Voyager:
An uneasy quiet has settled upon Midkemia in the wake of a surprise invasion. But the land is far from peaceful. Leaderless, the Kingdom is on the brink of anarchy and civil war, unless Hal conDoin, Duke of Crydee, and his brothers can rally their allies to crown a new king. They must move quickly, for war has left the land vulnerable to an agency of horrific destruction not of this world. No one is safe, not even the Star Elves whose city deep in the Grey Tower Mountains has come under attack by an ancient darkness that seeks to extinguish every living thing in Midkemia.
Yet the bravery of determined warriors—brothers in blood and arms—is not enough to ensure the Kingdom's preservation without the magic of the Master Sorcerer Pug. A powerful spell has trapped him, his son Magnus, and two unlikely allies in an unfamiliar realm, and they must find their separate ways home—a journey of memory and discovery that will illuminate the truth of the destiny that awaits them. But to save Midkemia—and everything he has fought for and all he cherishes—Pug will have to pay the ultimate price.
Let’s face it: Captain James Tiberius Kirk has a reputation as a guy who will sleep with anything female—making him, in the pantheon of Star Trek, one of the least likable characters. In one of the trailers for Star Trek Into Darkness, Kirk confusedly says, “I have a reputation?” Yes you do, Kirk. And it isn’t a good one! And whether he’s in his Shatner or Pine guises, he is a difficult character to nail down in terms of cultural appeal. Does his “sluttiness” make him a creep? Do we even like this guy? And if we don’t, how do our brains find ways of continuing to root for him?
We've got a special sweepstakes for you today, just in time for the Nebula Awards this weekend—five copies of Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, edited by Catherine Asaro and featuring gorgeous cover art by Julie Dillon!
Out tomorrow from Pyr Books, this volume includes the winners of last year's Andre Norton, Damon Knight Grand Master, Rhysling, and Solstice Awards, as well as the Nebula Awards winners. It features stories, essays, poems, and excerpts from Geoff Ryman, Ken Liu, Jo Walton, Connie Willis, Delia Sherman, and Amal El-Mohtar, among many talented others.
I’ve only been playing video games for about a year, because I only recently got the memo that videogames had turned into something I would enjoy. I don’t like being told what to do and I don’t see the value in things like fan fiction, usually, because I don’t get off on playing with other people’s toys. But people I trust kept telling me videogames weren’t like that anymore, so I gave it a shot, and I haven’t looked back since.
The first thing I got really obsessed with was the Mass Effect trilogy, which is basically a story about the diplomatic moves necessary to create a community in the face of Apocalypse. Over three games—hundreds of hours of playtime—you build an army, out of a complex variety of factions, races, interests and centuries of nasty political history.
The big selling point of the game—some would say, dubiously fulfilled—is that every choice you make carries weight. People you mess with in the first game might still resent you two games later. Valued allies you allow to die won’t be around when you need them, and so on. But there’s one choice, early in the game, that has led to more fights around the story than any other.
Minor spoilers to follow—and plenty of opportunities to nitpick, I’m sure—but they’re not really the point.
Settings are sometimes the best and most memorable characters of a story, and of returning to YA literature in particular; revisiting Narnia is like seeing an old friend, and I won’t pretend not to have chosen a grad school based on its resemblance to Hogwarts. Ghoulish Song is William Alexander’s second book set in the city of Zombay, and though I’ve not read its sister novel, the National Book Award-winning Goblin Secrets, this fantastical port city—noisy and wafting with the smell of fresh bread—has secured its place on my map of fantastical places. Alexander paints a picture so vivid, readers can’t help but cheer on his protagonist as she fights for her home.
Kaile’s first quest, however, is to save her mother.
“Tough Love,” written by Rebecca Rand Kirshner
With Joyce gone and the weight of the Dawn on her shoulders, Buffy has conceded to the inevitable: she has to drop out of university. “Tough Love” opens as she’s expressing her regret over this turn of events to her poetry professor.
She’s not the only one racking up personal losses. Ben has been missing for two weeks, and his supervisor at the hospital seems to consider this a firing offence. Which: fair enough. He is a doctor, after all.
Ben only gets a moment to savor that sense of having been cheated of his dreams before Glory takes him over again. He fights the transformation, but fails. The Goddess is back and, she says, she is hungry.
Back in February, we reported on the first glimpse of the prequel movie Ghost in the Shell: Arise, will finally detail the story of how Motoko Kusanagi became a cyborg. Now, ahead of its Japan-only June release, here is a brand new trailer revealing some of the mysteries surrounding the origins of Section 9! Watch below.
The One-Eyed Man is a novel that was one I never intended to write. Some two years ago, my editor, the esteemed David Hartwell, approached me and several other authors and asked us to write a short story based on a painting by John Jude Palencar. I started writing, and I kept writing, and by the time I got to 15,000 words or so, and was just beginning to get into the story, I realized two things: first, that I was nowhere close to finishing the story, and, that, in fact, it wasn’t a story; and second, that I wasn’t going to finish the Imager Portfolio book I was also working on by the time I’d promised it to David. So… I put aside the story that had become at least the beginning of a novella, if not a novel, and wrote a much shorter story entitled “New World Blues,” which was published by Tor.com in February of 2012 as part of the “Palencar Project,” consisting of five stories, all based on the painting, by different writers.
Check out L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s new novel, The One-Eyed Man, out on September 17:
The colony world of Stittara is no ordinary planet. For the interstellar Unity of the Ceylesian Arm, Stittara is the primary source of anagathics: drugs that have more than doubled the human life span. But the ecological balance that makes anagathics possible on Stittara is fragile, and the Unity government has a vital interest in making sure the flow of longevity drugs remains uninterrupted, even if it means uprooting the human settlements.
Offered the job of assessing the ecological impact of the human presence on Stittara, freelance consultant Dr. Paulo Verano jumps at the chance to escape the ruin of his personal life. He gets far more than he bargained for: Stittara’s atmosphere is populated with skytubes—gigantic, mysterious airborne organisms that drift like clouds above the surface of the planet. Their exact nature has eluded humanity for centuries, but Verano believes his conclusions about Stittara may hinge on understanding the skytubes’ role in the planet’s ecology—if he survives the hurricane winds, distrustful settlers, and secret agendas that impede his investigation at every turn.
The Doctor had a full house for this episode: the Cybermen came back, and Warwick Davis was one of the special guest stars, so... did “Nightmare in Silver” do as promised? Did Neil Gaiman make the Cybermen scary again? Did the Cybermen need to be scary again?
And why do those things on everyone’s faces look like Borg implants?
The first images for NBC’s sexy TV reboot of Dracula have emerged, along with a new synopsis and I think (against conventional wisdom) that it might not (pun intended) suck. Here’s why.
“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.”
—Roland Deschain, of Gilead
Welcome to A Read of the Dark Tower series. Join me each week as I, Constant Reader, tackle the magnum opus of Stephen King’s career for the first time. If you want to discuss in general terms or talk about these first sections, join me by commenting here.
We last left our story with Roland having a dramatic reaction to the little bit he could read from a book he found in the cave while Callahan was running around New York.
Over the weekend Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was reported as being picked up for a series by ABC and the network wasted no time in releasing a teaser, which aired during this Sunday's episode of Once Upon a Time.
Watch below and discover the name of Coulson's car! Also, who's the new superpowered person on the scene?
Each season of Game of Thrones has one episode written by AsoIaF author George R.R. Martin, and while we didn’t get the pyrotechnics of “Blackwater” or the surprise appearance of White Walkers as we did in “The Pointy End,” there were still plenty of memorable moments this hour.
And a ton of quotes that will have new meaning once the season’s over.
By now everyone has read or heard about the new buzz hitting higher education. MOCC’s. Massive Open Online Courses. All the cool kids are doing it. My friend Phil took a class on Artificial Intelligence. My friend Elliot took a class on poetry. So I thought I’d check and see if there was any course for me. And then I saw it. Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.
We’ve known for awhile that the sequel to X-Men: First Class would probably take place in the 1970’s, but now we’re sure at least part of it does. A recently released set picture from X-Men: Days of Future Past clearly shows a young Professor X in full-on 70’s mode as he waits for the Concert for Bangladesh benefit show to start. Is this Xavier’s “lost weekend” look? Is McAvoy Xavier hooked on the disco drug scene? Is that why time travel is going to be needed? To stop the endless bingeing? Is Xavier making other people disco-dance with his mind? (Picture via superherohype.)
Your collection of daily offsite links is stayin’ alive with stuff like the Star Wars kid, Edgar Wright and more S.H.I.E.L.D. info than you know what to do with.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield has been living onboard the International Space Station for five months now, and has been charming the world from 230 miles above. Hear him sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Is it the best thing ever? Stubby says, yes.
“...trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”—Jay Gatsby
I’m sorry, but I think we have to discuss the elephant in the room here. While Baz Luhrmann’s movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby looks gorgeous, and probably brings the novel to life in a wonderfully larger-than-life manner, at no point have I seen anyone discussing how Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby is obviously Jack from Titanic. And how the movie is obviously an alternate timeline where he survived the sinking of the ship and went on to build a life for himself in America in an attempt to reunite with Rose.
Not only that, but no one is discussing how this is the sixth Leonardo DiCaprio movie depicting an alternate timeline where Jack survived.
Take a look at Mark T. Barnes' The Garden of Stones, out on May 21 from 47 North:
An uneasy peace has existed since the fall of the Awakened Empire centuries ago. Now the hybrid Avan share the land with the people they once conquered: the star-born humans; the spectral, undead Nomads; and what remains of the Elemental Masters.
With the Empress-in-Shadows an estranged ghost, it is the ancient dynasties of the Great Houses and the Hundred Families that rule. But now civil war threatens to draw all of Shrian into a vicious struggle sparked by one man’s lust for power, and his drive to cheat death.
Visions have foretold that Corajidin, dying ruler of House Erebus, will not only survive, but rise to rule his people. The wily nobleman seeks to make his destiny certain—by plundering the ruins of his civilization’s past for the arcane science needed to ensure his survival, and by mercilessly eliminating his rivals. But mercenary warrior-mage Indris, scion of the rival House Näsarat, stands most powerfully in the usurper’s bloody path. For it is Indris who reluctantly accepts the task of finding a missing man, the only one able to steer the teetering nation towards peace.
