Well, another long, adventure-packed chapter, but for fear of driving everyone nuts, we’ll try and do it in one go. Now that Aelius is back (with all the Vesani gold in tow), Basso’s got a chance to handle a few domestic problems.

Chapter Ten: A good deal is where both sides make a profit.

The chapter begins with Aelius’ “official” return to the City. Since he’s already had one triumph in the last year, he’s not allowed another. Basso encourages the House to vote Aelius a rather cruel/prestigious honor, The Order of the Headless Spear. It is… demeaning.

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Just when you thought Doctor Who/Back to the Future mash-ups were going out of style, this awesome one showed up. We really like picturing Tennant with the crazy mind-reading hat on his head, and also the idea of Billie Piper playing lead guitar in The Pinheads. (Art via The Mary Sue. Artist: Sara Wheeler.)

Your collection of daily offsite links are a curious thing. They might make you weep and might make you sing. 

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Takahiro O’Leary is an ex-reality TV star with daddy issues and a melodramatic death wish. Samira Moheb is an Iraq War vet with PTSD, OCD, and a heart full of oppressive guilt and unrequited love. Judith Halford is a science prodigy with a conscious and a severe survival instinct. Charles Yates is a mad scientist with a god complex, endless financial resources, and psychopathic tendencies. One fateful evening, the ever-adventurous Tak is made an offer he can’t refuse, to work for the Axon Corporation and Yates exploring alternate realities. At first it’s all fun and games in a bizarre assortment of realities*, but eventually Yates’ sinister intents begin to ooze to the surface. When Tak discovers a timeline in which the company rules the world, he uncovers the truth about his work—that they plan to supplant the real world with the parallel one.

Trouble is, in that world Samira died in the war, and Tak won’t let that stand. Bigger trouble is, Yates, the inventor of the time machine, has his own evil plan afoot and doesn’t give a flying fart about Axon or anyone other than his own egotistical self. He’s using Tak to locate what he calls the Beautiful Land, a heaven-like personalized paradise, and when he finds it he’ll erase everyone and everything to keep it for himself. When Yates sets his scheme into motion, timelines are destroyed in horrific ways, and the only people left in all the universes who can stop him are a beleaguered explorer, a mentally ill vet, and a guilt-ridden scientist.

[“THEY ARE COMING”]

I was as surprised as anyone when Wizards of the Coast decided to release reprints of their old editions. It is a smart move, and one I’m glad to see them make, but personally the really interesting thing was the deluxe reprints of their Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition books. Nice paper, thick covers, ribbon bookmarks, the works. I’ve heard people complain that the shading is too dark, but to me it looks crisp, and captures some of the fainter lines that might otherwise be overlooked. The fact that they donate a portion of the profits to the Gary Gygax Memorial Fund is more than icing on the cake; it is credit where credit is due (though it would be nice to have a Dave Arneson memorial, too; maybe if they reprint the non-advanced D&D?). I decided the best thing to do with these books is to look at them both in historical context…and in comparison to what follows. So I re-read them with a critical eye and was happy to find that they have a lot of great things to recommend them, and plenty of opportunities to talk about the evolution of game design.

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Season 9, Episodes 1 and 2: “Nothing Important Happened Today” Parts 1 and 2
Episode Airdates: November 11 and November 18, 2001

This is a pilot, sort of. A pilot for a new show called Season 9 Of The X-Files, which is a bit of a cheeky title but then again, so is “Nothing Important Happened Today.” Just like a pilot would, these two episodes seek to introduce the show’s themes, characters, and ambitions. And in that respect, it’s a good pilot. We get the new characters, and the new themes, and the new ambitions. Unfortunately, it appears to be a good pilot for a lousy show.

[Would you like to get some air?]

Here in the UK, there’s no more prestigious prize for literature than the Man Booker, and to no-one’s surprise, British genre fiction fans have made an annual habit of bashing this very visible award for its seemingly superficial dismissal of the innumerable novels we believe to be deserving of such recognition.

I’d like to say rightly so, but if the truth be told... I don’t know. Having only read one of the last batch of shortlisted novels, I don’t feel particularly qualified to pitch in with my personal opinion. I mean, speculative fiction should certainly get a look in, and sometimes it does—Communion Town and The Teleportation Accident were both longlisted in 2012—but is it tenable to suggest a genre novel need be nominated every year? I honestly don’t think so, no.

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Despite getting a writer’s credit for Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl by all accounts hated the final film, to the point where he was reluctant to allow any of his books to be filmed at all. Aware of this, his family hesitated to allow the book to be filmed a second time unless they could retain creative control. This, naturally, delayed matters still further. It was not until several years after Dahl’s death that film producers and the Dahl family could agree on hiring director Tim Burton, whose previous work seemed perfectly matched to Dahl’s grotesque visions. It took Burton another few years to develop the film, now back to its original title, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Still more delays followed: British child labor laws limited the hours that the children could legally be on set; set design turned out to be a nightmare, and the crew had to figure out how to transform forty squirrels into movie stars. (And if you are wondering how to do this, the answer is, Squirrel Training Camp.) The final result was not released until 2005.

The decision to use Real Squirrels was but one of many factors that Burton and his creative team, armed with far more money to spend, used to make a film that would be, they declared, closer to the original book than the earlier film had been. In some ways, they succeeded magnificently—perhaps too magnificently. In two major ways, they failed.

Did you know that this was the last film Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s production company worked on before their split? I didn’t. And with that pretty much entirely irrelevant aside, let’s plunge into further discussion!

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My obsessively detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles is over, but we want to keep on talking about the books. I’m going to post the occasional speculative summary of cool things posted since last time. Spoilers for all of The Wise Man’s Fear and The Name of the Wind—these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books, and frankly they won’t make the slightest bit of sense if you haven’t. But we welcome new people who have read the books and want to geek out about them. This post is full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.

[Read more: speculations, spoilers and human oddities]

Welcome back to the Way of Kings reread! With the end of part one we get to see the true evolution of a hero from the lowest point in his life. Kaladin shall rise from the ashes of who he was to become something greater. He won’t just be a polarizing warrior, but a great leader, ideal, and the resurgence of honor itself on Roshar. But before that Sanderson gives us the interludes, which are a sort of mini-tour to parts of Roshar we haven’t seen thus far. With the first set of interludes we meet a most unusual fisherman, visit with two of Shallan’s brothers, and see what Szeth has been up to since he killed a king.

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Unsurprisingly, the gaming news du jour has revolved pretty exclusively around Microsoft’s official Tuesday unveiling of the Xbox 360’s successor: the Xbox One. While there have been months of build-up for this next-gen console, including its fair share of controversy and leaks of system specifications and features dating as far back as last October, the general public has not been able to set eyes on the device itself until this week.

[So what’s new? Is the always-online requirement an official reality? Click and find out.]

According to what is generally upheld in Star Wars canon, there are only about six months to one year between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. On the other hand, a lot can happen in that time, and clearly has happened by the time Han’s friends come to his rescue. Luke has gone from Rebel grays to Jedi blacks, the Alliance is stepping up their game plan, and the Emperor is suddenly interested in what’s going on.

So how did all that happen? It was Shadow’s of the Empire’s job to tell us, thirteen years after Jedi hit theaters. And it was expected to fulfill that job in more than one medium. Now it’s time to talk about the book by Steve Perry. (And the soundtrack. I love soundtracks.)

[Behind the scenes of that two-way holo chat...]

Just shy of half a century since the young Michael Moorcock took the editorial helm of a long-running magazine called New Worlds and ushered in a new age of avant-garde science fiction, it appears that we might be in the throes of the birth of a new New Wave.

The original New Wave moved away from shiny futures and bug-eyed monsters and offered more experimental literature, both in technique and subject matter, perhaps best exemplified a couple of years later in 1967 when Harlan Ellison released his Dangerous Visions anthology, bringing new voices, new ideas and a new way of telling stories to take over from the rocket-ships and square-jawed heroes that had gone before. New Wave also brought to the fore many more female writers, such as Joanna Russ and James Tiptree, Jr.

But does the emergence of a new aesthetic in (largely) contemporary British SF signal a similar movement nearly 50 years on?

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John, we need to let Moriarty know this is our turf. Futher, did you bring my hat? I want to wear my fly hat so the honeys know the Sher-Lock is on Lock. You are my homey, John. Homeys are forever.

Your daily collection of offsite links includes Ackbar heads, David Tennant in your shower and more!

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Tor Books has just received word that Brandon Sanderson's first young adult novel The Rithmatist has debuted at #6 on the New York Times YA Bestseller List!

Congratulations to Brandon Sanderson and illustrator Ben McSweeney on the debut! Curious about the book? Read the first six chapters for free right here.

And read up on how Brandon Sanderson’s The Rithmatist Could Have Been an RTS Named ChalkCraft.

There’s nuts and bolts science fiction, and then there’s science fiction where the ideas are all drawn from some other field. In the case of the Merchant Princes, underneath the second world fantasy meets techno-thriller car-crash, there’s a science fictional examination of a topic that seldom gets air-play: the political determinants of economic development and industrialization.

The world of the Clan is mired in a classic development trap—a situation that prevailed for the vast mass of humanity until roughly 1800, and which we have no actual deep understanding of how to break out of. All we really know is that, prior to 1700 or thereabouts, Great Britain was economically not very far out of line with the rest of western Europe. But by 1860 the UK had achieved a mind-boggling industrial Great Leap Forward, becoming the first truly modern superpower: with naval basing rights in 130 other countries, a navy larger than the two next largest combined, and a staggering 60% of planetary GDP, it occupied much the position in the late 19th century that the USA occupied by the late 20th century.

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The first installment in Mark T. Barnes' Echoes of Empires series just came out yesterday from 47North, and we've got three brand-new copies for you to win. Take a look at the excerpt here, then comment in the post to enter!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of fifty (50) United States and the District of Columbia, who are 18 or older. To enter, comment on this post beginning at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) on May 22, 2013. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 p.m. ET May 26, 2013. Void outside of the 50 US, and DC where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.