For a space opera, the Star Wars universe certainly delves into soap opera territory when it comes to the love lives of its characters. I’m not talking your typical star-crossed romances, though there are plenty of those. Because once you strip aside all the Force politics that propel most of the interstellar conflict, you still have people who are lonely and yearning for their soulmates.

Han Solo and Leia Organa have the purest love story, hands down. What can beat “I love you”/“I know” as you watch your beloved get frozen in carbonite? So when it comes to the love lives of the Solos’ kids, or Luke’s questionable dating life, writers in the Expanded Universe had to get awfully creative. As in, ghosts, pheromones, hatesex, and a love child or two.

[Read more]

See that? It’s over. Everyone hang up your aprons. We can never hope to attain the skills necessary to create this gingerbread Minas Tirith, so we might as well call it a day and let the real professionals get to it.

Still, since we’re here, you might as well look at some more mind-boggling genre gingerbread to get you revved up for some holiday cheer!

[Wah! That got ’em!]

The Tor.com store on Zazzle is open for the holidays! We’ve got Tor.com specific merchandise (t-shirts, etc.) plus holiday-themed items. What would the end of the year be without Cthulhu there to promise you naught but madness?

(The Tor.com crew can personally attest to the swankiness of having a t-shirt with an adorable rocket on it.)

New this year is the Santaman card; featuring the awe-inspiring deathbringing visage of Santa-with-a-sword, illustrated by GregManchess for last year’s Christmas story “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear” by Ken Scholes.

And nothing brings more joy to one’s fearful eyes than a zombie getting exactly what it wants in its stocking.

There are more cards and rocket-themed merchandise in the store, so head over and fill some stockings!

The Tor.com staff is about to pile into Stubby and take off for the Planet of Food and Not Being On The Internet For Once, but we’ll be around!

Check back with us for a gorgeous gallery of book-related art, The Hobbit reread, an update on the Doctor Who 50th anniversary, a new original story from Marissa Meyer, and a quick rewatch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in preparation for The Hobbit! Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

(If you find yourself bored, we suggest wandering through the On Our Radar tag for a delirious good time.)

I love to leap and, indeed, who doesn’t?

(Cthulu Christmas Brass Tentacle Ornament by RockLove)

Having trouble wrapping your arms around what to get your friends and family for the holidays? Turn to your favorite cephalopods for help. Who isn’t romanced by the squiggly arms of a squid or the suckers of a many-limbed sea creature? From neckties, to jewelry, to classic Christmas ornaments, tentacles are wrapping everything in holiday spirit. So embrace the Cthulu, the octopus and the giant, man-eating squid, and get Kraken on purchasing gifts that will inspire many two-armed embraces.

[More Lovecraftian gifts below]

I still think of this as Jon Singer’s Turkey Algorithm, because that’s the title under which I knew it for decades; but Singer says it was devised by the late Mike Fellinger, and must be credited to him. It goes:

“For a turkey of greater than ten pounds, the roasting time should be equal to 1.65 times the natural log of the weight of the bird in pounds, cooked at 325 F.”

If you’re not a person who normally calculates natural logs, go to Google. Say you have a 20-pound turkey. Type in natural log 20 and hit the search button. Google will tell you that the natural log of 20 is 2.99573227. Multiply this by 1.65. The result will be 4.9429582455, or five hours.

[Math will cook this turkey]

Many of you may have noticed that this Friday has the honor of being a special date, numerically speaking. It only comes once a century: 11/11/11.

The Geek to Me blog over at Chicago’s Red Eye paper, has made a simple declaration for all you Whovians out there: 11/11 is Eleventh Doctor Day. Break out your sonic screwdrivers, bowties and braces (that’s British for suspenders) and dress up as our favorite Time Lord, one of the most enduring characters in science fiction history.

Then take some pictures! Geek to Me will be on the lookout for your photos: you can send them via email or put them on Twitter. Don’t forget to use the #doctorwho and #eleventhdoctorday hashtags so everyone can find them. Let’s make it a once-in-a-century holiday that we’ll never forget! (Yes, we’ll be dressing up in the office. As if you even had to ask.)

[via Red Eye Chicago]

Stubby the Rocket is the mascot of Tor.com and dresses up as a lot of things. You’ll see.

Neil Gaiman is out to start a new holiday tradition, All Hallow’s Read. You can read the particulars on his site but the idea is simple: give friends and family scary books (new or old) around Hallowe’en time, in addition to the sugar high goodness of trick-or-treating. It is a gracious and inspirational idea, one that embodies the fun of gathering together on holidays to share stories, tell old tales and make up new ones....

Tor.com will be participating in All Hallow’s Read in a number of ways leading up to Hallowe’en. We will run our book sweepstakes in pairs: winners will get one prize to keep and one to give away. On Hallowe’en itself we will will run a 24 hour sweepstakes marathon, giving away books every o’clock from witching hour to witching hour. Lastly, we’ll be publishing free monster stories on Tor.com every day from October 24th through the 28th, so everybody wins!

Of course, new traditions grow stronger, better, and faster when people join in the fun and start taking part, so take some pressure off your book shelves and give away a couple books, or support your local bookstore and buy some new ones to share. It’s more filling and less caloric than candy corn, we promise!

A season of feasting is again upon us, and Tor.com has decided to, in the interest of promoting geeky frivolity and whatnot, collect my Science Fiction Cuisine posts. Not only will I revisit the glory of homemade Popplers and Spoo, I’ll also include, at the end, a few “leftovers,” miscellany of the edible variety.

Before we get into all that, I wanted to give a few general pointers for making food more science fictional, at least in a cosmetic sense. While my posts deal with the trills and tribble-ations of re-creating food from SF sources, I want to share what I’ve learned about how to make any dish a little weirder. With a little extra effort, you can make well-known dishes into visually arresting, delicious oddities fit for a Klingon.

[Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn bork! bork! bork!]

Many of us celebrate some kind of winter holiday around this time of year. If you don’t, or if it’s summer where you are, I hope you’re having a lovely calm December.

The Montreal Gazette, my local daily newspaper, really annoyed me with a feature in Saturday’s “Books” section. They’re normally a pretty good local paper, covering local and national and international news the way North American papers do. They have a terrific restaurant column, and a great little thing on Wednesdays that tells you what fruit and vegetables are in season, in town, and good value for money. Their book coverage is normally pretty good, too—but not this week. This week’s “Books” supplement is headed chirpily “Dozens of reviews grouped by theme to help gift shoppers buy books for the readers on their lists.” It might as well say “Remember those scary rectangular things with words in they made you read in school? If you’re unfortunate enough to know someone who inexplicably likes them, while you’re rushing around like crazy finding something for everyone, even the weirdos, we can help you choose an unobjectionable one.” Their lists are bland and boring and full of bestsellers. If anyone had any interest in these books they’d already own them. My sympathies are with the poor readers on Christmas morning who tear off the paper thinking “Oh good, a book!” only to find disappointment.

But have no fear of strange rectangular objects with words in them! I can suggest something for everyone who loves books.

[Read more]

I’m at the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis this weekend. (Pre-registration is closed, but there are still at-the-door memberships available, if anyone wants to spend the weekend hanging out with me and Steve Brust and Sarah Monette and Catherynne Valente and Lois Bujold and Pat Wrede etc...) I’m going on my favourite system of transport, the train. You may not be aware that North America has an excellent selection of comfortable and economical trains—they’re not fast, and they don’t really co-ordinate terribly well as a system, but they’re otherwise wonderful. I went to Flagstaff on the train in 2004 and to Denver last summer. Anyway, on the train, I’ll have plenty of time to read, but everything I read I’m going to have to take with me. Now this isn’t entirely true, as Minneapolis has excellent science fiction bookshops, and even New York, where I’m calling on the way home, has Borders. But as far as re-reading for you goes, I have to decide now what I’m going to want to read over the next twelve days.

There are various considerations. Firstly, weight. No hardcovers! When is Anathem due out in paperback? Seriously, it’s been ages, I’ve read it twice, it would be ideal for this trip, and what do I have? A brick that weighs half a ton.

[Read more...]

In case you somehow forgot to mark it on your calendars, today (March 3, 2009) is Square Root Day–a rare occurrence on which the day and the month both represent the square root of the last two digits of the current year. The unofficial holiday is the pet project of California high school teacher Ron Gordon, who began observing Square Root Day on 9/9/81, to the great delight of nerds everywhere. Today represents the third SRD in a decade (following 1/1/01 and 2/2/04), but the next chance to celebrate won’t be coming around again until April 4, 2016. And that’s assuming we all make it past 2012, which may very well involve the Apocalypse or Singularity or some amazing combination thereof (the Apocularity? the Singulacolypse? Either way: fun!).

And who knows? By then, our Esteemed Robot Overlords may have converted our entire conception of time into a binary-based system, or maybe we’ll just be caught in the ever-spiraling decadence of the Fibonacci Carnival (which I plan to kick off right after the post-Pi Day-lull sets in, using a worn copy of Liber Abaci and A LOT of rum). So grab your slide rule and let’s make this year count...

The traditional means of celebrating Square Root Day involves the consumption of radishes, potatoes, and other root vegetables cut up into (yeah, you guessed it) little squares, and possibly washing them down with root beer. Technically, you can drink regular beer, but only if you’re doing so while watching all nine-and-a-half hours of Roots, bracketed by a few episodes of classic Hollywood Squares…otherwise it’s cheating (the rules are very clear). Alternately, you can just check out the Facebook page started by Gordon’s daughter for more information on Square Root Day (there’s even a contest, open until March 18th, for the most people involved in a SRD celebration). Just remember, in the words of the venerable Huey Lewis, it’s hip to be square…at least for today. So get out there and have some good, clean, math-inspired fun!

I own three illustrated copies of The Night Before Christmas, one pop-up, one with windows and one with little tags you pull to get special effects, like St Nicholas’s belly shaking like a bowl full of jelly. My son Sasha is now eighteen, but we’ve had these books since he was very young. The other day I spotted Jan Brett’s version and almost bought it. We own Jan Brett’s Twelve Days of Christmas, a truly beautiful book with wonderful details in all the pictures, and this was in the same style. I managed to restrain myself because it was quite expensive and, as I just said, he’s eighteen. He won’t even want to read the three versions we already have, I thought. As I unpacked the books with the other Christmas things, I mentioned that I’d been tempted. “Why didn’t you get it?” he asked, disappointed. So this is clearly a book one never grows out of. Good.

[More Christmas books below the fold...]

Tomorrow, the Sci Fi Channel, home of Mansquito, is gifting us with a Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon! Below, a quick guide to help you decide when to switch off your fireplace DVD and turn on the tube.

8:00 AM The Arsenal of Freedom

“The name of my ship is the Lollipop.”
“I have no knowledge of that ship.”
“It’s just been commissioned. It’s a good ship.”

Never before has an away team been so needlessly large (or so totally ineffectual)! Never before have they had to pull up a Lieutenant from Engineering to cover the bridge! (He’s not even the highest-ranking officer, as it turns out; favoritism is part of the New Order, I guess.) Plus, Vincent Schiavelli creeps his way through yet another franchise, proving he’s the savviest character actor of them all.

9:00AM Skin of Evil

“I find my thoughts are not for Tasha, but for myself. I keep thinking, how empty it will be without her presence. Did I miss the point?”
“No... no, you didn’t, Data. You got it.”

Subtitles: The One That Made Young Genevieve Cry A Lot, or, more scientifically, The Five-Dollar Oil Monster. Bid farewell to the female security chief, who quit for a career in the movies. We’re still waiting, Denise! Did you break my heart for nothing?

[We have all day!]

Following our recent foray into the world of The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus, which crosses the powerful streams of L. Frank Baum’s patented bizzaro-vision with unsettling Rankin and Bass puppets, I’ve received some requests for further freaky gems from my random stash of holiday oddities. Just in case the usual holiday fare is starting to wear a little thin this season, please consider the following alternatives to whatever terrible things the networks are attempting to inflict on us this year:

• The Year Without A Santa Claus: While there’s nothing else quite as patently strange as The Life & Adventures in the Rankin/Bass holiday canon, this little doozy certainly has its moments. You have to love any premise kicked off by a whiny, chronically depressed Santa who just doesn’t give a damn about Christmas anymore. Plus, the Heat Miser and Snow Miser are the catchiest duo to ever hit holiday animation, mommy-issues and all; if you need a quick fix, you can catch their campy little number right here.

• In terms of campy nonsense, the notoriously awful Star Wars Holiday Special is a perennial contender for the What. The Hell. Were They Thinking? Award. From the Boba Fett cartoon to the sight of an elderly Wookiee visibly aroused by the disco stylings of Diahann Carroll to Bea Arthur serenading the Mos Eisley cantina, the Special is a tragic experiment in kitsch which continues to wreak havoc in the back alleys of our pop culture consciousness. While it has never been released—in fact, George Lucas has reportedly stated, “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it”—the SWHS is surprisingly easy to hunt down if you use The Force. And know how to perform a Google search. I may have heard somewhere that Antimatter Multiverse puts out a pretty nice bootleg edition with lots of fun extras. Also, the gang from RiffTrax, whose patented snarky commentary may provide the only way to make it through all two hours with your sanity intact, suggests a copy “you can Get frOm yOur friend Greg, in LakE VIDEO, Illinois.” However you want to go about it, if it’s weirdness you’re after, you won’t be disappointed. Scarred, possibly. Deeply traumatized? Most definitely. But not disappointed.

[Below the fold: creepy Claymation, Dolly Parton Fights a Witch, the Krampus, Killer Santa-bots and more!]

Just a quick shout-out to everybody for helping to make the first annual Tor.com Holiday Meetup an unqualified success. Thanks so much to everyone who came out for drinks last night: it was really great to see all the new faces as well as the old friends, and we hope everyone enjoyed themselves as much as we all did! For those of you who require photographic evidence of what a swingin’ good time it was, you can check out Irene Gallo’s pictures here and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s pics here...see? Fun! Thanks again, happy holidays, and remember to keep an eye on the Events Calendar for more happy-fun-time activities throughout the new year...

Feliz Navidad! Mele Kalikimaka! Klaatu barada eggnog! Whatever...

Fellow New Yorkers, it’s almost time for holiday drinking with the Tor.com team! We’re getting together for Happy Hour upstairs at Revival, 129 East 15th Street, tomorrow night from 6 p.m. until the sexy, proverbial Question Mark...aw, yeah. We’re just going to be hanging out, probably toasting to Misfit Toys, wing-less angels, freaky deaky Red-Nosed Reindeers, scraggly-ass Charlie Brown-style Christmas trees, and other holly-covered rejects, because that’s what the holidays are all about according to TV, and who are we to mess with time-honored televised traditions? You can check out all the details on our shiny new Events Calendar (which you can reach by clicking on the new “Events” link up on the top navigation bar). If you're in the area, please come on by and join us for fun and booze and possibly free stuff, including books, buttons, shirts, and the Terrifying Predictions of The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Well, not so much that last one, but it will be a good time nonetheless...

Also, for Tor.com fans in the Montreal area, the fabulous Jo Walton and friends will be throwing a simultaneous soirée at Les Gateries, 3443, rue St-Denis, Montreal, around the corner from Sherbrooke metro (more info available on the Events Calendar). That’s right: we’re making the party international (if not interplanetary) this year! Because we’re awesome.