A special five story preview of Shawn Speakman’s epic fantasy anthology Unfettered will be released at Phoenix Comicon this Memorial Day weekend. This week, we’re taking a look at all five stories, many featuring new glimpses of our favorite fantasy worlds.

“The Sound of Broken Absolutes,” Peter Orullian’s contribution to Shawn Speakman’s fantasy anthology Unfettered, is a story inspired and informed by the loss of a loved one. This loss is not specifically Peter’s and it’s not specifically yours, but the unique—and eternally frustrating—hallmarks of mourning and grief are what propel it to its conclusion.

It’s a story that has been told many times before, but before you let that color your impression of “Broken Absolutes,” ask yourself: What would you write if you thought your friend was going to die?

[Read more]

Warner Bros. has released a new (possibly final) trailer for Man of Steel that essentially serves as a message from Zod to Kal-El and the people of the Earth. If we don’t surrender our greatest hero, he will destroy us. It’s... a little intense.

Watch the new trailer below! And check out our rundown of the new prequel comic, which reveals some of the backstory behind Krypton and how Clark discovers the legacy of his people.

[New Man of Steel trailer]

There’s a lot that has been written and said about the inspirational power of Star Trek. From astronauts to social workers, engineers and beyond, do-gooders galore have been borne out of Trek. Good for them! Surely, aspects of Star Trek may have taught me how to be a better person, but that’s not the most profound impact on my adult life. Instead, Star Trek is partially responsible in inspiring me to read great books and become a writer.

And it did this by sneaking classic literature into my silly sci-fi any chance it got. So, it is with a heavy heart I complain about the biggest oversight that I saw in Star Trek Into Darkness: it’s not literary!    

[Read more]

The desert space pants worn by Mark Hamill in Star Wars: Episode IV are up for sale if you want them. The opening bid seems to be $100,000 dollars. You wanna wear Luke’s hipster pants for $100,000 bucks? We wonder if you really care about anyone. (We care.)

Your daily collection of offsite links cares. A lot. Also, pizza is for some reason referenced in three different ways. We don’t plan these days, they just happen. 

[Read more]

Welcome back to the British Genre Fiction Focus, Tor.com’s weekly column dedicated to news and new releases from the United Kingdom’s thriving speculative fiction industry.

This week, image is everything—or so says John Dugdale, who in the aftermath of Inferno considered the significance of Robert Langdon’s Harris Tweed jacket vis-à-vis the visibility of Dan Brown’s protagonist. I want to know which figures from genre fiction have apparel even half as iconic.

Later on, in Cover Art Corner, we’ll look ahead to “a gothic fable for all ages” from Carlos Ruiz Zafon, alongside news of two new books Solaris plan to publish next spring, including the author of The Ultimate Dragon Saga’s long-awaited return to genre fiction.

Last but not least, Gollancz have announced that they’re currently undergoing a significant restructure, and I can’t decide whether to offer congratulations or commiserations, because I’m afraid I’ve heard this story before. Someone put my mind at ease, please!

I’ve got a few new releases up my sleeves for you this week as well, not least some previously unpublished poetry by J. R. R. Tolkien, Mur Lafferty’s first novel, and a promising chronicle of Life on the Preservation.

[Read more]

If, like me, you were introduced to the wonderful and somewhat insane world of Chuck Wendig via Blackbirds, eagerly lapped up its sequel Mockingbird, and then found yourself desperately looking for more, well, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news—I’m just going to go ahead and say it—is that The Blue Blazes is not the new Miriam Black novel. That would be Cormorant, due out at the end of this year from Angry Robot.

The good news is that, if you liked the Miriam Black novels (which I reviewed here and here), The Blue Blazes should be right up your alley: a dark contemporary fantasy that somehow manages to be fun and unnerving at the same time. (Bonus good news: another gorgeous cover by Joey Hi-Fi!)

[Below the mine shaft roads, it will all unfold]

And reviewed by yours truly.

The Gist, a novelette by Michael Marshall Smith, is the latest offering from Subterranean Press’s limited but honourable catalogue. To say it is by Marshall Smith—or at least, by Marshall Smith alone—is, however, something of a misnomer. Between The Gist’s covers are three novelettes and one novelette: Marshall Smith’s original, translated once into the French by Benoît Domis, translated again (without access to the original text) back into the English by Nicholas Royle. Two further recensions of the first text: three recensions of a single work.

Yes, I’m of the school that holds every translation to be a fresh recension. Every translation contains the translator’s idea of the text as well as the original author’s. If you’ve ever read translations of, say, the Greek classics from the 19th century and then compared them to a modern translation, the otherwise-invisible person of the translator becomes visible.

[Read more]

“The Passenger”
Written by Morgan Gendel and Robert Hewitt Wolfe & Michael Piller
Directed by Paul Lynch
Season 1, Episode 8
Production episode 40511-409
Original air date: February 21, 1993
Stardate: unknown

Station log: Kira and Bashir are returning from a medical mission in a runabout. Kira makes the mistake of complimenting Bashir on his work, which leads to Bashir saying he can’t hear Kira over the sound of how awesome he is. Kira’s snotty reply is cut off by a distress call. They respond to it and find a woman unconscious. Bashir revives her; she says that the pilot’s dead. She’s transporting a prisoner, who sabotaged the ship. Bashir tries to treat him, but he dies—after grabbing Bashir’s throat and saying, “Make me live.”

They return to Deep Space 9, where Bashir treats the woman, who identifies herself as Ty Kajada from Kobliad security, and the dead prisoner as Rao Vantika. She insists on checking the corpse, as Vantika has faked his own death more than once. Even after examining the body herself, she then stabs it in the heart, just to be sure. She’s been chasing him for twenty years, and she is cynical to say the least.

[Tricorders...very accurate with living people, not so accurate with dead ones.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a weekly column co-curated by myself and the inestimable Brit Mandelo, and dedicated to doing exactly what it says in the header: shining a light on the some of the best and most relevant fiction of the aforementioned form.

Last time I directed the Short Fiction Spotlight, we discussed two terrific novelettes in which image was everything. Both were nominated for a Nebula. By now, the winners of that award—and all the others on the roster, obviously—will have been announced, and much as I might have liked to look at those this week, these columns aren’t researched, written, submitted, formatted and edited all on the morning of.

So what I thought I’d do, in the spirit of keeping the Nebula news alive a little longer, was turn to a pair of tales whose authors were honoured in 2012 instead. To wit, we’ll touch on “What We Found” by Geoff Ryman in short order, but let’s begin this edition of the Short Fiction Spotlight with a review of “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu.

[Read more]

“Read My Lips”
Story by Alan Burnett, Michael Reaves
Teleplay by Joe R. Lansdale
Directed by Boyd Kirkland
Episode #064
Music Composed by Shirley Walker
Animation by Tokyo Movie Shinsha Co.
Original Airdate—May 10^th, 1992

Plot: Batman discovers the mastermind behind a string of perfectly planned heists is a ventriloquism dummy, Scarface

[Evil doll and evil dolls]

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: promises are made to be broken. In truth, trust exists to be tested.

We’re often called upon to give our word, for what it’s worth, but keeping it is never so simple. Of course it can be done, and indeed, we should endeavour to honour as many of the bonds we form as possible. But sometimes, circumstances arise; unavoidable, inescapable circumstances that require us to behave badly in service of the greater good. To do something we have sworn not to, or say what someone else would rather we wouldn’t.

I’m sure I sound like someone with a guilty conscience, and perhaps I am. I’d argue that we all are, to a greater or lesser extent. Thankfully, the consequences of betraying a vow in our world are in nothing compared to what we’d face if we came from Kharein, the capital city of Darhan.

[Read more]

In the lead-up to this year’s BookExpo America, BEA is publishing a series of author inteviews called “BEA In Your Space." We’re excited to reveal that one of the first ones is an interview with notable comics creator Paul Pope, author of the upcoming First Second graphic novel Battling Boy.

Paul Pope will be autographing and speaking at BEA courtesy of First Second Books. Check out when and where, and see what other creators from the MacKids stable will appear! You can find them at Macmillan’s booth #1557.

[MacKids BEA schedule]

The power of the Wheel of Time Re-read compels you! Hopefully!

Today’s entry covers Chapter 14 of A Memory of Light, which features unexpected villainesses, unsolicited movie reviews, and surprisingly lethal applications of standard cartoon gags.

Previous re-read entries are here. The Wheel of Time Master Index is here, which has links to news, reviews, interviews, and all manner of information about the Wheel of Time in general. The index for all things specifically related to the final novel in the series, A Memory of Light, is here.

Also, for maximum coolness, the Wheel of Time Re-read is also now available as e-books, from your preferred e-book retailer!

This re-read post, and all posts henceforth, contain spoilers for the entire Wheel of Time series. If you haven’t read, read at your own risk.

And now, the post!

[“Behind every wall, every window. The world behind the world, and we’re smack in the middle.”]

DC Comics recently debuted a prequel comic for the new Superman movie Man of Steel, in theaters on June 14, which focuses on Krpytonian society and its efforts to explore the galaxy and better itself as a species. It also offers some overt and thematic hints about what we might ultimately see in Man of Steel.

[Man of Steel prequel comic]

A special five story preview of Shawn Speakman’s epic fantasy anthology Unfettered will be released at Phoenix Comicon this Memorial Day weekend. This week, we’re taking a look at all five stories, many featuring new glimpses of our favorite fantasy worlds.

There’s something incredibly engaging about the Arthurian story of the knight-errant. I always perk up when I know that a knight is leaving court, the location of his target unknown, with the commandment to quest, to do right, to slay evil and maintain his honor. I grew up on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and have long loved the mystique of the isolated knight questing through less civilized lands. That’s the structure Kevin Hearne chose for “The Chapel Perilous,” his new short story in the Unfettered anthology. Although it stars Atticus O’Sullivan, the star of Hearne’s urban fantasy Iron Druid Chronicles, “The Chapel Perilous” sees O’Sullivan looking back on days long gone in Britain, days when there were more knights, and more druids, too. Indeed, he looks back to the most Arthurian tale of all, the quest for the Holy Grail. Apparently that was O’Sullivan’s quest, he’s the one who found the thing. Who knew?

[Read more. Some spoilers for the story below.]

It occurs to me that this year I’ve spent plenty of time on fantasy, while neglecting science fiction. A trend likely to continue until 2014 at least....

So for today, let’s spend a little time redressing the balance, and talk about hard SF by women.

Defining hard science fiction, rather like defining epic fantasy, is a tricksy business. (Or hobbit.) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction itself acknowledges the potential impossibility of any rigorous definition, concluding only:

“[T]the most important thing about it is, not that it should include real science in any great detail, but that it should respect the scientific spirit; it should seek to provide natural rather than supernatural or transcendental explanations for the events and phenomena it describes.” [Link.]

[Read more]

Good news! The new trailer for The Wolverine, which hits theaters on July 26, is all about being driven insane by your own life while having to fight huge samurai robots and snake women anyway. In fact, we hear that the working title for this movie was Wolverine: Goin’ Crackers.

Seriously, the premise is that X-Men: The Last Stand was so bad that it drove him crazy, which actually sounds like a pretty solid premise. Check out the trailer below.

[New trailer for The Wolverine]

Tor.com’s ongoing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey-esque attempt to define Neil Gaiman and/or his work has read his most well-known epic, made a mixtape out of another, and looked at his habit of creating his own world inside of the worlds of others. Now, we look at his penchant for constant collaboration with other artists, writers, and musicians. Collaborations that more often than not end up further honing the author’s unique style.

They say that behind every great writer, is that writer’s bro. And by “bro,” we mean an artistic equal whose work brings new definition to yours and a friend who otherwise has your back. A bro can be any gender and the bonds between you can feel like they were always meant to be. Neil Gaiman has a lot of bromances, and though we love the man and his writing, where would he be without these seven essential bros?

[Read more]