February 1, 2012
Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz
In the war that never ends, dreaming the future is a mixed blessing.
January 25, 2012
The Situation
There was nothing as strange as what we endure now.
January 4, 2012
Swift, Brutal Retaliation
You can't win a ghostly prank war with your dead big brother. Only survive it.
December 14, 2011
A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings
Courteous guys, bulletproof dolls.
You’ve worked hard this week (just go with us on that) and you deserve a reward. Please accept this illustration of a samurai Darth Vader, created by Clinton Felker, as your shepherd into the peaceful waters of the weekend.
Want more Star Wars characters reinterpreted as warriors from Japan’s feudal era? This request can be granted.
Now that you’ve taken a look at that sweet excerpt (and the review as well!) we know that you want a chance to read the book! We’ve got 20 copies for all you fabulous ladies and gents, and we’re ready to give them out to someone who will love them. So take a look below and enter!
Check below for the rules:
Take a look at this excerpt of Tempest by Julie Cross, out from St. Martin’s Press:
The year is 2009. Nineteen-year-old Jackson Meyer is a normal guy… he’s in college, has a girlfriend… and he can travel back through time. But it’s not like the movies – nothing changes in the present after his jumps, there’s no space-time continuum issues or broken flux capacitors – it’s just harmless fun.
That is… until the day strangers burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, and during a struggle with Jackson, Holly is fatally shot. In his panic, Jackson jumps back two years to 2007, but this is not like his previous time jumps. Now he’s stuck in 2007 and can’t get back to the future.
Desperate to somehow return to 2009 to save Holly but unable to return to his rightful year, Jackson settles into 2007 and learns what he can about his abilities.
But it’s not long before the people who shot Holly in 2009 come looking for Jackson in the past, and these “Enemies of Time” will stop at nothing to recruit this powerful young time-traveler. Recruit… or kill him.
Piecing together the clues about his father, the Enemies of Time, and himself, Jackson must decide how far he’s willing to go to save Holly… and possibly the entire world.
This week on BBC’s The Graham Norton Show, guests Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson were treated to a contest of their respective action figures, whether they wanted it our not! The deck was clearly stacked in Liam’s favor since we know for a fact that there are some sweet Picard action figures out there which also have the ability to talk. Either way, this clip will make you smile.
Stubby the Rocket is the voice and mascot of Tor.com. Stubby lost a lot of money when betting on that mud-fight between Jean-Luc and his brother.
Now that you’ve had a chance to read the review, enjoy this excerpt from Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole, out now from Ace Books!:
Lieutenant Oscar Britton of the Supernatural Operations Corps has been trained to hunt down and take out people possessing magical powers. But when he starts manifesting powers of his own, the SOC revokes Oscar’s government agent status to declare him public enemy number one.
“Ménage à Troi”
Written by Fred Bronson & Susan Sackett
Directed by Robert Legato
Season 3, Episode 24
Production episode 40273-172
Original air date: May 28, 1990
Stardate: 43930.7
Captain’s Log: The Enterprise is attending a trade agreement conference on Betazed, and hosting an end-of-conference shindig in Ten-Forward, complete with Algolian ceremonial rhythms. The Ferengi were invited for the first time, and one of their delegation, Nibor, loses to Riker at three-dimensional chess. Meanwhile, Tog, the DaiMon of the Ferengi ship, has the hots for Lwaxana Troi. Against the advice of his aide Dr. Farek, Tog approaches Lwaxana, who rips into him, making it clear that a) she’s not for sale and b) if she was for sale, she still wouldn’t allow herself to become his property. Her tirade — which gets the attention of everyone in Ten-Forward, most notably Troi, who looks very much like she wants to throw up — only makes Tog more exhilarated.
In order to understand Jack Womack’s first novel Ambient, I want to go back to the future that was the summer of the year 2000.
I’d become somewhat obsessed with an art exhibit; the Walker Art Center’s traveling exhibition of postmodern art entitled Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures. It ran at the Portland Art Museum from early July through mid-September, and I visited it often, bringing friends and family members back with me and introducing them to Jeff Koon’s penis, Takashi Murakami’s pornographic statue of an anime girl whose giant breasts gushed milk in a frozen action sequence, Dara Birnbaum’s Wonder Woman spin video, and a video reenactment of Elvis Presley’s vomitous death on his toilet. For some reason, I wanted everyone to see these things.
Welcome back to A Read of Ice and Fire! Please join me as I read and react, for the very first time, to George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.
Today’s entry is Part 5 of A Clash of Kings, in which we cover Chapter 9 (“Arya”), and Chapter 10 (“Davos”).
Previous entries are located in the Index. The only spoilers in the post itself will be for the actual chapters covered and for the chapters previous to them. As for the comments, The Powers That Be at Tor.com have very kindly set up a forum thread for spoilery comments. Any spoileriffic discussion should go there, where I won’t see it. Non-spoiler comments go below, in the comments to the post itself.
And now, the post!
Welcome to the Malazan Re-read 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. In this article, we’ll cover Chapter Twenty of Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson (MT).
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 forum thread has been set up for outright Malazan spoiler discussion.
Melanie Rawn makes an exciting return to epic fantasy in her new novel Touchstone, out on February 28! But we know you can’t wait. That’s why these 18 ARC copies are going straight to you! Enter to win and you might get lucky. And check back on Monday for a special exclusive excerpt from the book!
Check below for the rules:
Sorry for the delay, kids. As there was no new episode of Grimm last week, I decided to hold off on the column and take a break. You understand, don’t you?
In this week of the Battle of the Network Fairy Tale Shows, the characters on Once Upon a Time and Grimm are dealing with some heavy-duty Daddy Issues. On Once Upon a Time, Emma tries to help a homeless brother and sister reunite with their father so that they don’t get lost in the foster care system. That brother and sister? Hansel and Gretel. On Grimm, a man who’s spent his life being mousy under his father’s thumb discovers his true self after his father’s death. The only problem is, the self he discovers is crazy.
Imagine this meeting. Screenwriters Carlton Cuse and Jeffrey Boam pitch a series idea to producers. “An airplane crashes onto a bizarre island,” Cuse says. “There’s science fiction and romance and fantasy and big stunts and ghostly appearances of dead fathers and destiny and time travel and heroes and villains and wise cracking antiheroes and mystery. Or, wait… never mind the island or the airplane. All that stuff, only in the style of light-hearted old western serial adventures.”
“Will there be chairs broken over bad guys’ heads and lots of broken glass?” asks a producer. “And folks tied to railroad tracks? And a smooth talking saloon chanteuse?”
“Sure will,” says Boam. “And a crazy orb that causes super powers. And a hardheaded tracker with a fondness for fine crystal. And the secret origins of Levis, hamburgers and Dunkin Donuts. And a horse who knows Morse Code and plays chess and a mad scientist with goggles and an airship. Trust me, 19th century scifi is the coming thing!”
Your Friday Morning Roundup saw the Hill Valley of 2015 rebuilt in Lego and all it could think of was how it would fight every last one of you for the chance to live there. But it wouldn’t do that to live in Lego Hilldale. That place is nothing but a breeding ground for Lego tranks, lo-bos, and zipheads.
While we’re questioning the direction our life has taken, you should look at some offsite links detailing:
It looks like Disney has finally realized that no one understands what John Carter is actually about or who it’s for. They just released a featurette that lets us all in on a little secret: the movie’s actually a lot more goofy than they’ve been letting on. Complete with alien confusion over Earth names, plucky princess action and a couple of one-liners, this makes us us feel a little better about how silly the aliens looked in the earlier teasers.
What do you think? Fun or too far?
Need some recommendations? The Locus Recommended Reading List for 2011 has just been released. This list covers everything from SFF novels to short fiction to art books, and can help you get caught up on anything you might have missed in the last calendar year. Congratulations to everyone and a great big thank you to Locus Online for including some Tor.com stories in the mix!
Macmillan titles in general have a great showing amongst the recommendations. Full list below the cut.
Yesterday, DC Entertainment officially announced what has been rumored since last summer: sequels to the landmark Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons Watchmen series. Prequels, actually, bearing the collective banner Before Watchmen.
Neither Alan Moore or Dave Gibbons are involved in the project in any way, with the former taking a firm stance opposing the project and the latter giving a relatively weak endorsement in DC’s press release: “The original series of WATCHMEN is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC’s reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire.”
Groundhog Day has always been an odd little day. If the name of the day itself doesn’t make this apparent, imagine explaining it to someone from a foreign country, or an alien. (“It’s, um, this day where we pretend that a big ground squirrel can predict the weather?”) February 2nd has become, like Valentine’s Day or April Fool’s Day, a largely symbolic gesture, in this case representing our desire for winter to conclude.
Since the movie Groundhog Day came out, though, the day has also begun to remind one of the concept of time travel. So, starting with the premise that time travel is inarguably awesome, we wonder... should Groundhog Day become an appreciation of time travel?
Perhaps dissatisfied with the novels she had written about the children of Meg and Calvin O’Keefe, in 1978 L’Engle again turned to the Murry family for another novel featuring dazzling trips through time and space, this time on the back of a unicorn. A Swiftly Tilting Planet is simultaneously one of L’Engle’s most beautiful and poetic novels, filled with joy and despair, and also one of her most frustrating, a book that both celebrates her earlier books while completely contradicting some of their most important and fiercely argued ethical points. I find myself dazzled and irritated.
[Warning: one of my longer and more ranty posts ahead, with major spoilers for the entire book.]
And out of the mists of the internet came Space Stallions, the most amazing thing we’ve seen all week.
Space Stallions doubles as a school film project from The Animation Workshop and as a cartoon parody of any 80s kids cartoon you can think of. Space horse gods will be questioned. Horse power will be used against the forces of evil. And someone’s sword will turn into a keytar!
Experience the glory of Space Stallions in full by watching the above video. Then visit the Facebook page of the creators to show your appreciation. And try not to yell, “Answer me!” at any horses you see afterwards.
Stubby the Rocket will team up with the Space Stallions any day, any minute, any time.
Lionsgate has released a new trailer for The Hunger Games movie adaptation. As opposed to the first trailer, this one focuses more on the emotional connections Katniss has with her sister, Gale, Peeta, and the variety of characters she meets throughout the Hunger Games.
(Also, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it WALL OF FIRE.) Stick around for Rue’s haunting whistle at the very end.
Stubby the Rocket is the mascot of Tor.com and the odds are always ever in its favor. Maybe. Did it say that correctly?
