As Patrick Nielsen Hayden recently suggested at Crooked Timber, it looks like a couple of Tor’s novel nominees—John Scalzi and Robert Charles Wilson—are joining Charles Stross in making their nominated novels available as e-texts. Unlike Stross’s Accelerando, these texts will be available only to members of this year’s Worldcon in Los Angeles.
Instructions can be found at Whatever, Mr. Scalzi’s blog.
Via Publisher’s Weekly, we’ve learned that Eric Shanower—writer-artist on the multiple award-winning Age of Bronze, a fantastic retelling of Homer’s Iliad—is considering serializing new issues of the comic on the web due to poor sales of the single issues (the trade collections are both doing well). Linda and I both enthusiastically recommend the comic—Shanower is a rare talent.
We only discovered this today, but on the 24th of February Stephen R. Donaldson’s official site was updated with the news that he has finished the first draft of Fatal Revenant, the second book in the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. However, he expects that it will take about a year more of rewriting and editing before the final draft is delivered and a release date is set by the publisher.
Stanislaw Lem, the influential Polish science fiction of author of such works as Solaris and The Cyberiad, has been reported to have passed away today at the age of 84.
We are saddened to report that all those foolish rumors of the past have now come to pass, as Robert Jordan himself writes to Locus magazine to report that he has been diagnosed with a rare, likely-terminal blood disease. All the details can be found in the linked letter.
Our thoughts are with Mr. Jordan, his wife, and his family. We hope he gets the 30 years he wants so as to be able to write all the stories he wishes to write.
Like Linda, I picked up a book or two at SF Bokhandeln‘s sale. Among them was Jo Walton’s The Prize in the Game, a book (and, indeed, a setting) that I had long written-off, despite the subject matter being interesting; the only reason I picked it up now was that it was a hardcover and it was selling for 10 crowns (that’s a little over a dollar), and I supposed that if I didn’t like it I could chuck it or perhaps get a good price for it as a used bookstore. I can’t quite recall the reasons for why I wrote it off, now, but I can only say after reading it that I was being an idiot.
Yesterday, we went to SF Bokhandeln in Gothenburg to check out what they had on offer for the annual book sale. We picked up a few things from the sale, and then I couldn’t resist also picking up Anne Bishop’s latest offering, Sebastian, even though I knew it would mean getting no work done once we got home. A prediction that turned out to be quite accurate.
It has been sitting on our bookshelf for quite some time now, but a few days ago I felt the need for a break from my current assignments for my classes, and so I picked up Mary Gentle’s 1610: A Sundial in a Grave. I figured I could stretch out the rather hefty-looking volume for a while, reading a bit now and then. From reading her earlier novel Ash: A Secret History, I thought this might be another fairly tough read that I would need to take my time with.
Boy was I wrong.
Ellen Kushner, the writer of the brilliant Swordspoint and other related work, is offering to sell fans her few remaining copies of A Distant Soil #28, which contains a Swordspoint-world short story titled "King Alexander the Stag" illustrated by Colleen Doran. Information on purchasing the comic (or a second comic with a recently-republished story, also illustrated by Doran), can be found here.
Continuing Newsarama’s publication of recent first issues of Image Comics series, Fear Agent #1 is now up for perusal in full. This is yet another excellent comic, an old-fashioned sci-fi pulp adventure with a dose of cynical humor, and it’s extremelly well put together by Rick Remender, Tony Harris, and Sean Parsons.
Newsarama has put the whole of Warren Ellis’s Fell, published by Image, up on its website. The preview of this excellent little comic, written by Ellis with art by Ben Templesmith, is a good way to get hooked. The format is just sixteen pages of story, stripped to the bone to tell a tight, self-contained narrative following our hero Richard Fell (a young detective) as he tries to deal with the utter weirdness of his new workplace: the wintery, gloomy town of Snowton.
This year, Elio and I gave each other the Babylon 5: The Complete Universe box for Christmas, and we’ve spent the last week watching entirely too many episodes a day. We’re almost through the first season already, and I expect we’ll keep going at a brisk pace throughout January. Its really very good television, and this box is pretty darn good value for money.
On 41 disks it contains all five seasons of B5, all of Crusade, and the movies In the Beginning, The Gathering, Thirdspace, River of Souls, A Call to Arms and Legends of the Rangers. This particular box is the Region 2 release, and there isn’t actually a matching set for Region 1, just two separate collections of the five B5 seasons and of the movies (minus Legends of the Rangers) .
Among our Christmas presents this year was a copy of Shaman’s Crossing, the first book in Robin Hobb’s new trilogy, Soldier Son. This book marks a departure from the world made familiar by the Farseer and Liveship Trader books, and introduces a brand-new setting which by fantasy standards is relatively "modern", with guns, canons and a strictly traditionalist nation on a path to development and expansion.
The main character (who, like Fitz from the Farseer books, tells the story from a first-person point of view) is Nevare Burvelle, second son of one of the king’s "battle lords"; men raised to nobility for their deeds. As a second son, he is destined to become a soldier, and initially he rarely questions the rigid Gernian belief that one should never question the place in life allotted to oneself by the good god. But slowly doubts start to creep up on him, and he finds himself forced to accept that the simple, straight-forward rules that governed his life as a young boy cannot—and perhaps should not—always be followed.
Shaman’s Crossing starts out a little slow, but I soon found it quite impossible to put down the book (I started it on the eve of the 24th, and finished just a little while ago). Nevare may not be as interesting a character as Fitz as he is, at least initially, a far less troubled young man, but the story he tells soon had me firmly hooked. I wanted to know more about Gernian society, the cavalla Academy and, not the least, the strange, dappled Specks who seem to be seeking a way to repel the Gernian expansion that has already claimed the lifestyle of the once fierce and free plainspeoples. And now that I have finished, I am hoping the next one will be out soon.
I always find it frustrating when I am unable to effectively recommend great books to others because of them being out of print. Such as, for example, Judith Tarr’s brilliant Alamut and The Dagger and the Cross. These prequels to The Hound and the Falcon have been pretty impossible to get a hold off for years, but now Tarr is selling copies of older books of hers via her livejournal. Including hardcovers of the aforementioned titles, which I cannot say enough good stuff about. Oh, and they’ve both got gorgeous covers by Tom Canty.
The Dabel Brothers have provided Newsarama with a sizable preview of their upcoming adaption of Raymond E. Feist’s first Riftwars novel, Magician: Apprentice.