“The Dogs of Athens” by Kendare Blake is a dark story set before the events of the Goddess Wars series for young adults during the twilight of the gods. Greek goddess Artemis and her immortal companions have returned to modern-day Athens where a chance reunion with Actaeon, the mortal hero who fell prey to Artemis’ fatal wrath thousands of years ago, turns violent once again.
“That Seriously Obnoxious Time I Was Stuck at Witch Rimelda’s One Hundredth Birthday Party” is a seriously funny story set in the world of Seriously Wicked, a young adult fantasy novel by the acclaimed author of Ironskin. Get ready to embrace your angsty inner witch at a pool party teeming with krakens, hexes, and cursed banana bread.
“Adult Children of Alien Beings” by Dennis Danvers is a science fiction novelette about the emotional journey of a man seeking the truth about his heritage and his parents, who were always rather . . . odd.
Marty always believed the lab-grown foods he helped produce were miraculous. But in his childhood home of Lucban, real miracles are occurring: artificial food is being transformed into delicious, sustaining produce. As he visits the home he left behind, the vibrant and colorful festival jerks him into a past he both hungers for and wants to forget.
A Note from Liz Bourke: I’ve asked Fran to write this week’s Sleeps With Monsters column because I really like her novel Updraft. Let her tell you something about how she went about writing it.
“… in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events’ … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.”
Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, in her 1996 Nobel Prize speech about the work of poets, concluded the above paragraph this way: “It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.”
All writers do this work in some fashion, even if poets get to use the prettiest knives. Part of the work is a constant re-honing of language; making us think about its power, and the uniqueness of everything we use language to describe, lest its opposite deaden our response to the world around us.
This month I’m celebrating the release of Evolution, the conclusion to my young adult sci-fi series that began with my debut novel, Extraction. It’s an exciting and scary time for me, and probably also for my readers. So many of their questions have yet to be answered. So many of their favorite characters stand a chance of not surviving all the way to the end of the final chapter. (Spoiler alert: Some of them won’t.)
Trust me, readers, I know the beautiful torture of finishing a book series. I, too, have had my soul ripped to pieces by too many authors to count. I’ve cried reading the endings of these books in public. I’ve cackled in glee at villains finally receiving their righteous reward. I’ve wrung my hands over unanswered questions and sobbed over unbearable deaths.
[So, why do we keep reading books knowing they’ll probably rip our hearts out?]
The plot of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is built, appropriately, upon a foundation of causal loops, with the majority of the action propelled by prophecy. What I mean is: Information travels back from the future and the response to that information creates the events that generate that very same future information. An arbitrary man, Rand al’Thor, must fight the universal embodiment of evil not because he wants to, but because he has been seen as doing so in the future. Thus do the personal motivations of millions of people within this fantasy world bend towards this unknown sheepherder.
Considering how inherent the manipulation of time is to the story of The Wheel of Time, it’s interesting that we don’t see any of the characters directly utilize time travel to fulfill their goals. Or do we? Throughout the series we see four, maybe five, types of time manipulation demonstrated by the characters, but can any of them be used to travel through time? And more specifically, can any of them be used to travel back in time and undo a great wrong, like the boring into the Dark One’s prison?
The final episode of Under the Dome is here and in the first few minutes of this rushed finale we see how far this show has come from being the simple story of some minor league TV actors trapped under a dome. Barbie is digging a grave in the forest.
Barbie: Dr. Bloom deserves a burial.
Julia Shumway: I know how hard this is for you. She was our last hope of finding a cure for your daughter.
Daughter? Cure? Dr. Bloom? Whut? Just two lines reveal how far we’ve strayed, so let’s take a listen to the opening monologue the way it should sound now…
Stargate Universe Season 2
Executive producers: Robert C. Cooper, Brad Wright, Joseph Malozzi, Paul Mullie
Original air dates: September 28, 2010 – May 9, 2011
Mission briefing. Telford survived his shootout with Kiva, which is more than can be said for Kiva. Her replacement, Dannic, is nuts, and can’t even keep his own people’s loyalty. Johansen is wounded by gunfire, and loses her baby, though she experiences a vision of the baby being rescued by the crew who stayed on Eden. The stones are used to bring medical personnel on board to heal the wounded.
Harry Aspinwall, a Scottish actor living in Brooklyn, decided that he was tired of Human of New York’s human-centrism. So he created a Facebook page to celebrate an oft-derided subculture: Orcs of New York!
Welcome back to our reread of the Dragonlance Chronicles!
We hope you enjoyed the brief break—and our excellent guest Highlords—but enough faffing around. There are dragons to slay, lances to find, Gemstone mysteries to solve and love triangles to flatten out as we begin the second book, Dragons of Winter Night. Plus, we missed Raistlin.
We last saw the party at Goldmoon and Riverwind’s wedding (wasn’t her dress fabulous?). Let’s see what they’ve been up to since then.
The folks at How It Should Have Ended have given us a twofer parody of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Taylor Swift’s star-studded, sci-fi-inspired “Bad Blood” music video with their new video, “Bat Blood.” Yep, this is about how we imagine Batman v Superman will go, with Bruce Wayne racking up the famous allies—Valhalla, Hocus Pocus, Fist-Bump, and The Scoundrel, among others—to face off against Supes and his crew.
Afternoon Roundup brings you lunar cautionary tales, why every game franchise should have a Super Mario Maker version, and animating Disney in virtual reality!
Born in the bush suburbs of Sydney to a Scot seeking inspiration and a passionate actress from Lancashire, Adrian J. Walker first found success as author when he self-published From the Storm in 2012. Last summer he followed it up with The End of the World Running Club, “a post-apocalyptic running fable about hope, love and endurance”—perfect, apparently, “for fans of The Martian”—which Del Rey UK recently acquired the rights to re-release.
At the time, Emily Yau, Assistant Editor of the aforementioned Ebury imprint, described The End of the World Running Club as “an original, exciting and powerful” piece of writing:
So much more than your usual post-apocalyptic novel, it takes you on a journey that’s full of twists and turns, breath-taking action and engaging characters. But ultimately it’s an uplifting story of what it is to be human, which will resonate strongly with readers.
And judging by the seven hundred odd reviews and ratings Walker’s second novel has amassed across Amazon and Good Reads in the year since the beast was unleashed, she’s not wrong.
Oh baby! It’s starting! The second chapter this week is like… the best. It’s the culmination of all the crap we’ve wondered about Bayaz. We learn the truth! Or something approximating it. I can barely contain my excitement, knowing I have to get through Jezal and Terez scratching at each others’ faces.
In the words of Big Moe, “It’s about to go down.”
The good news: George R.R. Martin survives the zombie apocalypse. The bad news: …Nope, only good news, because he’s still writing A Song of Ice and Fire!
Welcome to the Malazan Reread of the Fallen! Every post will start off with a summary of events, followed by reaction and commentary by your hosts Bill and Amanda, and finally comments from Tor.com readers. In this article, we’ll continue our coverage of The Wurms of Blearmouth.
A fair warning before we get started: We’ll be discussing both novel and whole-series themes, narrative arcs that run across the entire series, and foreshadowing. Note: The summary of events will be free of major spoilers and we’re going to try keeping the reader comments the same. A spoiler thread has been set up for outright Malazan spoiler discussion.
Cyberpunk may have been one of the 1980s’ most quintessential subgenre-movement-phenomena, and it also may have been one of the quickest to descend into self-parody. It was easy to get hung up on the aesthetics—chrome, casual violence, neon reflected in dirty puddles, mirrored sunglasses, neo-Orientalist imagery driven by fears of a economically dominant Japan—while only superficially engaging with the deeper themes of the technology-driven, corporation-dominated near-futures portrayed therein.
Then the Internet age proceeded to co-opt the vocabulary of cyberpunk, much as the world of espionage absorbed the lingo of John le Carré’s fictional spies. Brief resurgences via The Matrix and Snow Crash (which is more satirical than some people realize) notwithstanding, cyberpunk now seems like a quaint retro-future at best, and entirely moribund at worst.
At least it did until Sam Esmail’s television series Mr. Robot came along—and on the USA Network, of all places. In a recent Reddit AMA, Esmail stated that he “wanted to bring cyberpunk to TV,” and he has actually done it—and in the process, reinvented cyberpunk and made it valid again for the twenty-first century.
With the release of Brandon Sanderson’s new Wax and Wayne novel Shadows of Self just around the corner, we wanted to head back to the beginning and remember when we were first introduced to Vin, Kelsier, and the intricacies of Allomancy in Mistborn: The Final Empire…
For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the “Sliver of Infinity,” reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler’s most hellish prison. Kelsier “snapped” and found in himself the powers of a Mistborn. A brilliant thief and natural leader, he turned his talents to the ultimate caper, with the Lord Ruler himself as the mark.
But even with the best criminal crew ever assembled, Kel’s plan looks more like the ultimate long shot, until luck brings a ragged girl named Vin into his life. Like him, she’s a half-Skaa orphan, but she’s lived a much harsher life. Vin has learned to expect betrayal from everyone she meets, and gotten it. She will have to learn to trust, if Kel is to help her master powers of which she never dreamed.
Read the first chapter of this epic series below, and check out our excerpts from Shadows of Self, publishing October 6th!
I like details. Little things tell me everything about people, their society, their hopes and fears, the sky above them, the rock beneath them.
When I began writing Luna, I knew I would be building a world from scratch, but also one that adhered to the constraints of the physical realities of the moon. The Moon may have been Heinlein’s Harsh Mistress but we’ve learned a lot about Lady Luna since and she’s got leaner and meaner. A lot meaner. I wanted those facts to shape the world and lives of my characters, from low gravity to moon dust, which is seriously nasty stuff. I suppose it’s a “hard science fiction” book—though that’s an expression I hate. Hard science technically shapes the lives, loves, jealousies and ambitions of every one of my moon’s one point seven million citizens.
Tor.com is seeking an in-house publicity coordinator. This person will work with publicity and editorial departments and contacts throughout all of genre publishing, developing plans for comprehensive book coverage on Tor.com and assisting with publisher and author outreach. They will also be responsible for encouraging and moderating conversation between readers on the site and on social media.
This is a full-time position working in our New York office. Ideally, we are looking for a candidate with at least 2 years of publishing experience, who is outgoing, extremely organized, and detail-oriented. Applicants should be both highly enthusiastic and knowledgeable about science fiction and fantasy across a range of media.
Hey, Chris.
…
HEY.
What is it, Tor Books?
You wanna read some stories with dragons?
Not right now, thanks.
Okay, well how about these they’re not about dragons at all.
Sakimichan has done lots of interpretations of Disney and fairy tale characters, but we especially love this breathtaking Jack and Sally genderswap. While flipping gender scripts has become a standard strategy in art, this interpretation really spoke to us. Plus, if everyone else is going to talk about pumpkin spice everything already, we can start breaking out The Nightmare Before Christmas images, dammit.
Morning Roundup brings you Metal Gear Bowie, updates on American Gods and Miracleman, and fantasy writing that breaks all the rules!
The Harry Potter Reread has reached the penultimate offering! It took the reread far too long to understand what “penultimate” meant, though. What a sad truth.
This week we’re starting in on The Half-Blood Prince! Chapters 1 and 2—The Other Minister and Spinner’s End.
Index to the reread can be located here! Other Harry Potter and Potter-related pieces can be found under their appropriate tag. And of course, since we know this is a reread, all posts might contain spoilers for the entire series. If you haven’t read all the Potter books, be warned.
In fiction, religion is often cast as technology’s dark other: irrational, tradition-bound, and baroquely complex. Speculative fiction writers can’t look away. If technology represents humanity’s transcendence through reason, religion implies its eternal submission to mystical entities. But SFF tends to be conflicted about its imaginary religions. Fictional religions are often anti-science, they attract charlatans, they prey on ignorance—and yet there’s usually a kernel of real mystery at their heart, and the workings of the religion are often the coolest things about a book. Perhaps it’s no surprise. After all, sci-fi and fantasy writers create entire worlds; many of them feel that no imaginary world would be complete without an imaginary religion.
Cecelia Holland has a lengthy career behind her, including the acclaimed 1976 science fiction novel Floating Worlds. Most of her works are historical fiction, but Dragon Heart, her latest, marks a return to the SFF genre. It is also the first of her novels I’ve read, and her easy, engaging style is effortlessly readable: impressively clear. I admire it wholeheartedly.
My emotional engagement with Dragon Heart, on the other hand… oh, that’s going to be complicated to explain.
“The Devil in the Dark”
Written by Gene L. Coon
Directed by Joseph Pevney
Season 1, Episode 26
Production episode 6149-26
Original air date: March 9, 1967
Stardate: 3196.1
Captain’s log. In the pergium production facility on Janus VI, a group of miners are engaged in an armed search, trying to find the thing that has already killed fifty people. Chief Engineer Vanderberg leads a team to relieve one guard, leaving behind another, Schmitter. Schmitter is understandably nervous, though Vanderberg reassures him that the Enterprise is on its way.
Only a minute after Vanderberg and the others walk away, Schmitter is attacked by something, and burned to a crisp.
[Kiss it, baby it, flatter it if you have to, but keep it going!]
Friendly mice—both talking and non-talking—had become a staple of children’s fiction by the 1950s, featuring in everything from historical parodies (Robert Lawson’s Ben and Me), wistful and mildly irritating stories of contemporary New York City (E.B. White’s Stuart Little), secondary fantasy worlds (the Narnia series), and even films (Cinderella). Friendly, comforting, non-talking rats and mice were also a staple of fictional prisons and solitary confinement, played with even in novels where the prisoners are not exactly prisoners (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess). In The Rescuers, Margery Sharp decided to combine both ideas, taking a look at friendly prison mice from the mouse point of view.
Talking mice, of course.
[In which a mouse must choose: love, or a career? Spoilers.]
