Ursula K. Le Guin Prize Pack Sweepstakes!

On October 18th, Saga Press releases two beautiful hardcover collections by Ursula K. Le Guin—The Found and the Lost and The Unreal and the Real—and we want to send you set of both books!

Ursula K. Le Guin has won multiple prizes and accolades from the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to the Newbery Honor, the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and PEN/Malamud Awards. She has had her work collected over the years, but never as a complete retrospective of her longer works as represented in the wonderful The Found and the Lost, which collects every one of her novellas and includes an introduction by the author. The Unreal and the Real collects some of her best short stories, selected by the author and representing a full range of her work.

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 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec). To enter, comment on this post beginning at 12:00 PM Eastern Time (ET) on October 15th. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET on October 19th. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

Black January Sweepstakes!

We want to send you an autographed copy of Douglas Wynne’s Black January, available October 21st from JournalStone! Read an excerpt here.

Two years after the Starry Wisdom Church unleashed their dark gods in Boston, Becca Philips is trying to put the events of the Red Equinox behind her when Agent Brooks tracks her down in Brazil. Becca has been summoned back to Massachusetts by SPECTRA, the covert agency entrusted with keeping cosmic horrors at bay. Her special perception and skills are requested at the Wade House—a transfiguring mansion of portals to malevolent dimensions.

Becca would like to refuse, but Brooks believes her estranged father may be lost between worlds at the abandoned estate. As Becca struggles with grief and forgiveness, she joins a team of explorers uniquely suited to decode the secrets of the strange house in the black snow. But what secrets do her companions harbor? And who among them will take theirs to the grave?

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 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec). To enter, comment on this post beginning at 3:30 PM Eastern Time (ET) on October 14th. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET on October 18th. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

This Week In the Arrowverse: We Need to Talk About Barry

Previously, on The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow: the good guys beat the bad guys—but at a heavy price!

I joke, a little bit, but it’s also true: all three of the Arrowverse shows start out their respective third, fifth, and second seasons with a lot of baggage. Some carry it better than others, but overall, I’m cautiously optimistic. Blame that caution on Barry Allen: Flash, what madness have you wrought?

Spoilers for all current episodes!

[Read more]

Alien Morning

Peter Holman is a freelance sweeper. The year 2030 sees a new era in social media with sweepcasting, a multisensory interface that can convey every thought, touch, smell, sight, and sound, immersing the audience in another person’s experience. By fate, chance, or some darker design, Peter is perfectly positioned to be the one human to document the arrival of the aliens, the S’hudonni.

The S’hudonni offer advanced science in exchange for various trade goods from Earth. But nothing is as simple as it seems. Peter finds himself falling for, Heather Newsome a scientist chosen by the S’hudonni to act as their liaison. Engaged to his brilliant marine biologist brother, Tom, Heather is not what she seems. But Peter has bigger problems. While he and his brother fight over long-standing family troubles, another issue looms: a secret war among the aliens, who are neither as benevolent nor as unified as they first seemed.

Peter slowly learns secrets he was never meant to know, about the S’hudonni, and about his own family. Realizing that he has been used, he can only try to turn his situation around, to save what he can of his life and of the future of Earth.

The fate of two civilizations depends on one troubled family in Rick Wilber’s science-fiction adventure Alien Morning—available November 8th from Tor Books.

[Read an Excerpt]

Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty Series to Be Adapted Into Films

Variety has reported that DMG Entertainment has grabbed the worldwide film and licensing right to Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, intending to turn the entire Dandelion Dynasty series into a film series.

The CEO of DMG, Dan Mintz, had this to say about the project:

“We are excited to bring Ken’s groundbreaking trilogy of novels to audiences around the world. Ken tells this spectacular story told in an ambitious and surprising way that flips the genre of epic fantasy on its head.”

The screenplay for Grace of Kings will be penned by Michael Ross (Fallen). Liu has expressed his excitement with the development, saying “I’m delighted that the film rights for ‘Grace of Kings’ are in the hands of DMG, a studio with a global vision and a worldwide reach.” There is no word as of yet as to when The Grace of Kings will go into production.

Forces Beyond Human Control: Mercedes Lackey’s Storm Rising

Storm Rising is the second of Mercedes Lackey’s Mage Storms trilogy. Although it takes place over a thousand years later, it’s publication date in 1995 was between the final two books in the Mage Wars series, creating an overlapping reading order for these temporally disparate trilogies that both deal with the magical fallout of the war between the great Mages Urtho and Ma’ar.

This portion of the Valdemar blog series is only nominally a reread. I have read these books before, but I don’t remember them at all well—this is more of a rediscovery. Storm Rising returns to the story of Karal, the young Karsite Priest who has become Karse’s ambassador to Valdemar following the assassination of the mentor, Ulrich, by an agent of the shadowy and mysterious Eastern Empire. Karal has been working to help forge a defensive alliance between a loose coalition of Valdemar’s neighbors and to deal with the magical storms that have been battering the region. Storm Rising also continues the story of Grand Duke Tremane as he abandons his quest for the Wolf Throne to focus on surviving storm-related magic-outages and scary mutant creature attacks in rural Hardorn.

[Read more]

Series: The Valdemar Reread

Wesley Chu Pits Roen Tan Against Rand al’Thor in Battle

“I’m a member of the Screen Actors Guild, a Kung-Fu Master, and a former vice president at a bank,” Time Siege and The Lives of Tao author Wesley Chu introduced himself in his recent Reddit AMA on r/books. “I summited Kilimanjaro last year and now have a 3 month old baby who thinks sleep is for the weak, so I’m a little delirious from not having more than four hours of sleep at a time in over three months.” Perhaps that deliriousness is what provided him with the perfect answer for one Redditor’s question, about which fictional character he would put up against one of his own in battle.

Chu gave this a lot of thought.

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Malazan Reread of the Fallen: Assail, Prologue and Chapter One

Welcome back 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 (with Amanda, new to the series, going first), and finally comments from Tor.com readers. Today we’re launching into Ian Cameron Esslemont’s Assail, covering the prologue and chapter one.

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.

[Read more]

Series: Malazan Reread of the Fallen

Local Library Encourages Readers With Banned Book Trading Cards!

Supporting Banned Books Week (which ran from September 25 to October 1 this year) is always a great excuse to read a multitude of excellent literature, but the Chapel Hill Library has created another fun way to enjoy the spirit of the season–Banned Book Trading Cards! They’ve created a pack of these each year for the past three years, making them available in the library, and then online following the week.

This year’s pack included Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, and the proceeds go toward maintaining the trading card project itself–allowing the library to have a hand in promoting local artists while simultaneously encouraging folks to read banned books!

We think this is a pretty spectacular way of shining a spotlight on reading and art all at once. So cool.

Mary W. Shelley: Life After the Monster

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley will always be linked to the novel Frankenstein and those who know her name might think of her as having had her life defined by that single iconic work. But when the book was first published in 1818, Mary was a girl of twenty-one. Many other endeavors became important to her as she grew in maturity.

Frankenstein was merely the first major accomplishment. In her lifetime, she wrote six more novels, numerous short stories, two dramas, travelogues, biographies, and she compiled collections of poems by her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley that brought him international attention.

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Five Episodes of The Librarians You Need to Check Out

The third season of The Librarians television series begins on TNT on Sunday, November 20th. “But wait,” you say, “I want to check out season three, but I haven’t got my Library card yet. What episodes should I watch to bring myself up to speed?”

The good news is that the basic premise of the series is easy to catch onto. There’s this mystical Library that’s been around for ages, storing ancient magical knowledge and relics, and a crack team of expert Librarians (and their appointed Guardian) who strive to protect the world from whatever supernatural menaces aren’t securely shelved in the Library yet. That’s all you really need to know, but if you want a crash course in Library studies, these five episodes can serve as your card catalog.

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Saga Press and Gollancz to Publish Elizabeth Bear’s Space Opera Ancestral Night in 2018

In 2014, Gollancz revealed that it had acquired a space opera duology from Elizabeth Bear. The author described the first volume, Ancestral Night—inspired by the works of Iain M. Banks, Andre Norton, and C.J. Cherryh—as full of “sprawling conflicts, politics, and ancient alien technologies, all wrapped up in a package of gritty, grounded personal drama.” According to an announcement from Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi this week, Ancestral Night will be published in 2018; Gollancz will partner with Saga Press to publish the book simultaneously in the UK and the US in summer 2018.

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