Those of you who were with us this time last year may remember Sean Bieri’s charming 12 Days of Zombie Christmas gag cartoons, which were linked around madly by countless people with even the slightest penchant for zombie humor. Now that the season is upon us again, it’s the perfect time to revisit the series—or make its acquaintance, if you haven’t.
But we’re not just reminding you of these comics because December has rolled back around. Rather, we are reintroducing them to mark the fact that, in addition to all the cool merch announced when we opened the Tor.com stuff store, we have also created seven cards based on our favorite Zombie Christmas comics. To see what’s on offer, you can go directly to the Sean Bieri section of the stuff store. Even better: for today (Thursday 12/3) only, you can get 50% off 10 or more cards (of the same type or a mix), by using the code 12DEALSCARDS.
Now, if only I could find a nice, juicy brain to send along with these cards...
Believe it or not, the zombie apocalypse is only Liz Gorinsky’s second favorite apocalypse.
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Steampunk Month Photo Contest! The entries (all of which can be viewed at the Tor.com Steampunk Photo Contest Flickr group) were so neat that it was nearly impossible to choose just eight.
But choose we eventually did. Your sneak preview is below...
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...but you'll have to click through to the entry itself for the full story.
Steampunk Month is over (boo hoo), but I wanted to remind everyone that one contest is still running: the Steampunk Month Photo Contest. You have a bit less than an hour left to enter, for a chance at some excellent prizes. There’s some fierce competition, but you can still get in the game: just take one of your awesome steampunk-y Halloween photos, slap on a Tor.com dirigible, and add it to our Flickr group. The full rules are at the original post. We look forward to seeing your contributions!
(Image courtesy of Donna Ricci. Just one of the many great entries so far!)
Liz Gorinsky is an editor at Tor Books. She is sadder than you are that Steampunk Month has ended.
As much as we like giving things to you with no strings attached, we also like making you work for your prizes. Consequently, we bring you the official Tor.com Steampunk Month Photo contest, which is…exactly what it sounds like: We’re giving some of our readers with a bit of costuming skill and a bit of photography-fu the chance to win fabulous prizes like:
 A gift certificate from Clockwork Couture |
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 Two passes to the Steampunk World’s Fair in March 2010 |
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 A gorgeous Victorian/Steampunk-style gold pocket watch |
 Perfumes from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Phoenix Steamworks series |
Keep reading to find out how you can throw your hat in the ring.
If you’ve been reading all of these Steampunk Month posts and wondering how you can get involved—or at least observe the phenomenon in its natural habitat—then you may be in luck: there’s a ton of exciting events already taking place or coming soon that will cater to your every desire. Check below the cut to see if there’s one near you.
If you’ve cleaned your goggles this morning, you may have noticed something a little different about Tor.com. Namely, there’s a shiny new logo and masthead at the top of this page. The fancy duds mark an exciting development for our little website: October 2009 is Steampunk Month on Tor.com.
I have a strong suspicion that this pronouncement has prompted some of our readers to sigh, “Steampunk! That’s so [1987/1990/2008]!” But there are just as certainly others who are saying, “Steampunk? What the heck is steampunk?” There’s no simple definition that works for everyone—at our staff meeting the other day, we wound up reverting to that old saw about pornography—but I usually start off with something along the lines of “a Victorian-influenced speculative fiction subgenre set in a world where steam power is still in common use; and the aesthetic derived thereof.” But for the full story, I strongly recommend you to Cherie Priest’s formidable “Steampunk FAQ.”
One thing that almost everyone can agree on is that steampunk is really damn cool. So cool, in fact, that a half-joking suggestion at a meeting several months ago has turned into one of the biggest events in Tor.com’s history, incorporating nearly a dozen new bloggers, original fiction, scads of giveaways, and So. Much. More.
While August is a dead period for most of New York City’s culture, NYC’s theatre scene tries to pick up the slack with the New York International Fringe Festival, a two week festival of immense proportions: There are 1300+ performances of 200+ plays in 20+ venues, and you can get into any show you choose for a mere $15. Luckily for devoted speculative fiction theatre enthusiasts, many of these shows seem to have science fiction, fantasy or horror elements. While I was reading through the Fringe guide, I made a list of these and other shows that may be of interest to Tor.com readers.
Last week, in honor of Daniel H. Wilson’s short story “The Nostalgist,” we ran a Robot Overlord contest, which asked our readers to imagine that they were in the midst of a vast robot uprising and persuade our robot overlords why they should be allowed to live. We declared that there would be one winner each in the categories of poetry, visual art, and video, and that each winner would receive a robo-rific prize pack consisting of Daniel Wilson’s shiny, indispensable tomes (How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived and How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Alien Invaders, Ninjas, and Zombies)...
...and a shirt of their choice from charming design outpost My Robot Overlord:
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The entries rolled in, Daniel pored over them, and when the contest ended he sent us a list of his winners and assessed the community in general for its robot preparedness. His note begins:
Thanks to everyone who sent in entries to the Robot Overlord contest. Not all of you won, which is natural, considering that not all of you will survive when the robots come for us. But some of you did win, which gives me hope for the future of humanity. In either case, I’m flattered that my books could be considered prizes worth competing for and it makes me happy that you all chose to participate in this silly game.
When Daniel H. Wilson contacted us with a potential submission for Tor.com, which turned out to be his excellent story “The Nostalgist,” I had to confess that I was a huge fan of his books: particularly How to Survive a Robot Uprising—which instantly changed my idle-moments apocalypse scenario pondering to favor robots rather than zombies—but also his subsequent, indispensable tomes, which include Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived and How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Alien Invaders, Ninjas, and Zombies.
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I am of the opinion that copies of all three of these books should be in every SF fan’s reference library (I have extra copies for my bathroom library). To facilitate that, we have one copy of each book to give away to three worthy individuals.
But how do we ascertain worthiness in a field as changeable as robot preparedness? After advanced scientific study, we’ve decided that the best test would be to ask our readership to imagine that they are in the midst of a vast robot uprising and persuade our robot overlords why you should be allowed to live.
Through further scientific study, we have determined that there are three formats in which our robot overlords will accept your plea:
poetry
visual art
video
Daniel himself will be judging this contest on behalf of our future robot overlords. We have no idea what criteria he will use (unless he chooses to provide more information in the comments), but it’s probably a safe bet that creativity and sense of humor will be at least as important as production values.
As mentioned, the creator of the best entry in each format will win a set of Daniel’s glorious, shiny books. But wait! There’s more: While searching the web for inspiration about the sorts of things that please robot overlords (pandas; fishing), I came across the charming outpost My Robot Overlord. In order to commemorate the Glaswegian robot/human war of 2006, My Robot Overlord started making t-shirts in designs such as these:
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The proprietor of My Robot Overlord has graciously agreed to co-sponsor our contest and give each contest winner a shirt in the size and design of his/her choice so that the winner has an appropriate robot overlord shirt to wear while reading your robot survival tomes.
Woah, sorry: it’s been awhile, guys.* But I (selfishly) had to make sure I posted about this month’s KGB Fantastic Fiction because I (do or will) publish both of the authors involved: Mary Robinette Kowal, who you may know as the most recent winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a Hugo nominee for her story “Evil Robot Monkey,” or the author of many fine short fictions. Brian Francis Slattery, on the other hand, is best known for his novels Spaceman Blues and Liberation.
I must confess to egging on a bit of artistic one-upmanship this month, but I can’t say I’m sorry. Y’see, Brian barely ever does readings that are not backed by musicians (hear some previous examples here and here), so KGB cohost Matt Kressel graciously let him bring in violinist Kari Denis and upright-bassist Charlie Shaw to accompany him while he read. But Mary is a professional puppeteer, so when I “warned” her what Brian would be doing, she said, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to have to bring a puppet, then.” Score! So Mary started out the evening by doing a short monologue with an adorable T-Rex puppet, then read the first chapter of her Jane Austen fantasy novel Shades of Milk and Honey, forthcoming from Tor in Spring 2010; then Brian did three short “songs” from Liberation. The result was an enormously fun evening quite unlike any other KGB event I’ve been to. If you need more evidence, you can check out Matt Kressel’s photos from the evening, which include a short videos of each reader at the end of the set.
In tribute to our talented readers, and inspired in part by Liberation’s semi-apocalyptic plot, I asked our readers and attendees to tell us about their post-apocalyptic barter skill: what ability they’d rely upon to trade for goods and services in the absence of a traditional economy. And let me tell you, we had some very non-traditional talents in our midst. Theirs are below the cut. What’s yours?
It’s 7:26 p.m. and I’m sitting amidst a whole lot of hubub at the exhibitor opening reception for the MoCCA Art Festival, the first segment of a comics extravaganza that will bring comic and cartoon fanatics to New York City in droves. This weekend marks the eighth iteration of the Festival, a fundraising event for New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, a not-for-profit arts education organization. The Art Festival caters to comic book fans of all stripes (for example, the panel schedule includes an award ceremony for superhero legend Jerry Robinson), but the exhibitors list has skewed strongly toward the indie side of the comics market: think biography, webcomics, and bizarreness rather than tights and capes. Since the festival’s start it has become (probably) the largest such event in the U.S., with people flying in from as far as California and Romania to show their wares and meet with like-minded creators.
Full disclosure: I’ve been volunteering with the Museum for more than six years (and am the Volunteer Coordinator of this year’s Festival), so I’m as far from impartial as someone can get about this event. But you can consider it some kind of endorsement that I’m so willing to trade weeks or months of labor to see it proliferate. In fact, there’s so much great stuff to see—check out the panel schedule, exhibitor roster, list of premieres, and some of the festival-weekend parties—that every attendee will show up with a slightly different itinerary in mind. Personally, the few moments I can steal away from coordinatin’ are likely to be spent mooning over Kate Beaton, Tom Gauld, Ryan North, andTor.com’s own Emily Horne and Joey Comeau of A Softer World.
And what about you? If you’re coming to the festival, who are you most excited to see? If you can’t make it, who are you most forlorn over not seeing? What are your indie comics dreams made of?
The 2009 MoCCA Art Festival will take place on Saturday, June 6 and Sunday, June 7, from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on each day at the Lexington Avenue Armory (68 Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th street). Admission is $10 for one day, $15 for both, or $10 for MoCCA members.
We’re a few hours from the official start of WisCon, the world’s first—and largest—feminist science fiction convention, held annually in Madison, Wisconsin. WisCon is my (and many people’s) favorite convention of the year, but the concept can be somewhat baffling to anyone who’s never thought about how one might combine activism with science fiction fandom. I can’t explain it much better than WisCon’s already has on their homepage:
WisCon encourages discussion and debate of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class. WisCon welcomes writers, editors and artists whose work explores these themes as well as their many fans.
If you’re still baffled, a look at this year’s programming slate will go a long way towards explaining where the discussion will be starting off this year, but it can’t really convey the way that WisCon’s social system functions. Like any convention, WisCon leads to the Brigadoon-like effect where it feels like no time has passed between annual iterations. This is undoubtedly amplified by the deliberately constrained size of the convention (a thousand people max) and the self-selecting pool that it draws. This leads to a vibrant, dedicated, and very interconnected community.
I doubt I’ll be be blogging from the convention because I’ll be too busy learning, having fun, and attending fabulous readings; but I do wish that the social agenda that WisCon focuses on was better represented on Tor.com. To that end, I’d like to invite all members of the WisCon community to a Tor.com mini-meetup at Michaelangelo’s Coffeehouse (enter at 114 N. State Street or 114 N. Carroll Street) from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 23, 2009. Stop by at any point during that time frame, I’ll buy you some coffee, and we’ll chat about what Tor.com has been up to and where we should think about heading in the future. You can also talk to me about this at any time throughout the WisCon weekend (especially at the Tor party, which will be from 9:00 p.m. to who-knows-when in room 629), but Michaelangelo’s will be your best shot at a lengthy and lively discussion.
Spread the word! I hope to see some of you there.
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After much arduous deliberation, and a whole lot of giggling, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve got a winner for our Naughty Apocalypse contest. It was really hard for all of us to settle on just one of these—my long list was 27 entries long!—but we eventually picked the one that we felt had the best combination of an actual dystopic basis for the pun (as opposed to generic fantasy-ness or sci-fi-osity), naughty-ness (as opposed to flat-out raunchiness), and actually being #local. And that entry was:
4. Carol Pinchefsky
Your Mom Is a Harsh Mistress
(eligibility confirmed at comment 34)
Congratulations to Carol for coming up with both the winning entry and an immortal insult that we'll be hurling around the Tor.com offices for weeks to come. Carol, please get in touch with Torie at (torie dot atkinson at tor dot com) to confirm your acceptance of the prize, and we’ll get your name on the VIP list at Casa de Pinchbottom.
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Last week we told you about Pinchbottom Burlesque’s newest science fiction show, “THE MORNING AFTER: Post-Apocalyptic Burlesque,” which will take place on Saturday, May 16 at 10:30 p.m. at the Bleecker Street Theater in New York. Our primary source of information about the show is the following garbled dispatch from the future, which has been decoded as follows:
INCOMING - FINAL TRANSMISSION FROM EARTH ... it is THE MORNING AFTER the apocalypse ... A small band of burlesque performers, under the leadership of Nasty Canasta, has survived .... but “Protector” Jonny Porkpie’s provisional government has banned all forms of nakedness and forced us to become outcasts in a world we never made ... we are attempting to rebuild society the only way we can: by taking off our clothes ... if anyone out there still believes in the principles of truth, justice, and striptease, find us ... find us now ... the future nudity of humanity is at stake ... find zzzzzzzzxqz .... MESSAGE INTERRUPTED
In order to cultivate a finer appreciation for dystopia (and nudity) among Tor.com’s readers, Pinchbottom kindly offered us a pair of tickets to give away, and John Joseph Adams is sweetening the pot with a copy of his Night Shade Books anthology Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse.
But such cool prizes must exact a toll, so we're asking our readers to shock and amuse us with naughty puns based on titles or famous lines from dystopic or post-apocalyptic cultural artifacts.
[Cut for details, legal mumbo jumbo, and some (NSFW!) entries.]
Yeah, you heard me right: science fiction burlesque.
“Surely,”—you must be thinking—“beautiful people who take their clothes off in public are awesome enough. How could I dare hope that those rare creatures could also be nerds like me?”
That’s what I thought, too, until the summer of 2006, when I discovered that a relatively unknown outfit called Pinchbottom (albeit one co-run by Jonny Porkpie and Nasty Canasta, rising stars of NYC’s neo-burlesque scene) was putting on a sci-fi burlesque show called “Naked Planet.” It was almost as if Pinchbottom had read my mind, combined two of my favorite things, and built the show I’d been waiting for my whole life. But how could it possibly live up to such high expectations?
Shockingly, this “themed burlesque entertainment”—which turns out to mean a full-length comedic play in which performers take their clothes off in every other scene—did all that and more. In the three years since then, Pinchbottom has produced nearly thirty excellent shows, some explicitly geeky in theme (comic books! Indiana Jones!) and others that are geeky takes on “normal” topics (French circus farce! sex!). If you’re not impressed yet, consider the fact that Pinchbottom has staged a new full-length show—which means a script, publicity, costumes, rehearsals, and production design—approximately ten months out of every year for the past three years. It would make the most hardened Off-Broadway producer faint.
As with all of my SFnal obsessions, I’ve wanted to talk about Pinchbottom on Tor.com for awhile. Their next show has finally given me the perfect excuse: on May 16th, Pinchbottom will be debuting “THE MORNING AFTER: Post-Apocalyptic Burlesque,” which will bring all of your favorite dystopic fantasties—plus a whole lot of stripping—to life on the New York stage. In honor of their return to hardcore nerd territory, Nasty and Jonny were kind enough to answer some questions about their artistic process and their geeky underbellies.
It is possible that you are scouring our events page every day for new cool things to do in your area. But it’s also possible that you have not yet noticed that our buds at io9 are having a meetup in New York City tomorrow. Some of the tor.com crew will be there to show their support, and we hope our New York-based readers that also follow io9 will join us—and i09’s excellent editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders—at the event. After all, the more great science fiction sites there are in the world, the better the world is. Please let us know if you’re coming so we know to look out for you!
This month, the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series welcomed Paul Tremblay, who read from his narcoleptic detective novel The Little Sleep, and Stewart O’Nan, who read from Songs for the Missing, an “unflinching look at an unraveling family.” Matt Kressel has already posted pictures from the crowded and lively event.
The stories were less fantastic (genrewise, not qualitatively) than what we usually hear at KGB, so it is entirely fitting that this month’s Ridiculous Survey centered around a very serious—and entirely hypothetical—scenario:
You are the marketing manager at a major science fiction television channel. You have been asked to rebrand the channel with a new name for the channel that will better appeal to today’s youth. What do you call it?
We got quite a range of responses, from the serious to the whimsical, and a whole lot of snickers—almost as if this was anything other than a collective examination of an entirely made-up thought question! Honestly, people. Check below the fold to see what everyone said and chime in with the name of your youth-oriented SF teevee channel.
As both a theatre geek and a hopeless robot fangirl, I’ve been obsessed with the fact that the word “robot” was coined in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots ever since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to see R.U.R., so I was thrilled to hear that Manhattan Theatre Source was staging Universal Robots, a play by Mac Rogers that was “freely adapted” or “inspired by” by R.U.R.
Thing is, I’m not sure I believe that Universal Robots is an adaptation of R.U.R. Mac Rogers makes no bones about the fact that barely any of the original play has made it into this production. What he’s created instead is a new creature, a unique amalgam of R.U.R.’s basic sentiments, stories from Čapek's life, Czechoslovakian history, and his imagination. The result is probably the finest piece of Karel Čapek RPS ever written. Since I have a hard time convincing even myself that that’s a legitimate compliment, let’s try this: Universal Robots is a complex and novel piece of work, vexing in parts, but invigorating enough on the whole that every science fiction fan and most mainstream theatregoers will find it rewarding.
A guilty confession: as much as one tries to be absolutely impartial until the final curtain falls, I didn’t go into Soul Samaurai expecting to like it very much. I’m not the kind of girl who thinks that theatre should be more like movies, nor do I have any particular fondness for Kill Bill or blaxploitation. As I’ve admitted here before, I hate fun, and this show looked suspiciously like it was trying to be just that. And the first ten minutes of the show confirmed my every fear: the cell-phone announcement (a pre-filmed racial smackdown between action figures of G.I. Joe ninjas Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow) was irritating, and a few early scenes seemed like by-the-book trash-talking fight sequences.
But I wouldn’t be admitting to any part of this story if it didn’t have a happy ending. To my surprise, by the end of the show I was completely taken in, to the point where I had to work to cover my childlike glee with a veneer of professionalism. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find two more frenetic and engaging hours of entertainment—live or otherwise—in this city.
The February edition of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series featured readings by Laird Barron, a relative newcomer, and James Morrow, one of the field’s most-revered fantasists. First, Laird—whose dark fantasy collection The Imago Sequence & Other Stories just came out in trade paperback—graced us with a real-live work in progress, a story called “At the Hatch,” which is being raffled off as we speak in the fundraising lottery for the Shirley Jackson Awards. After the break, Jim fought through waves of uproarious laughter to read the first chapters of his two newest publications: the trade paperback release of The Philosopher’s Apprentice and the standalone historical novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima.
Elsewhere in space, some of us are gearing up for Academy Award festivities on Sunday, while others are stewing about the Academy’s continuing lack of love for genre films (no, the animation ghetto doesn’t count). Consequently, for this month’s Ridiculous Survey, I decided to give KGBgoers the chance to talk up one of their favorite speculative fiction films that never got enough love, be it from the Academy, mainstream audiences, or even from genre watchers. Or, more succinctly:
What’s your favorite underappreciated genre film?
Check below the cut to see what everyone chose, vociferously agree (or disagree) with their choices, and add your own.
Gadgets and/or Words That Are Fun to Say by Caragh O’Brien
Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie by Mitch Wagner
Moffat’s Women #3 - Sally by Teresa Jusino
