Its that time of the year again, and we thought we’d compile a little (or not so little, actually) list of reading (and watching) recommendations for the holidays. We’ve included both some recent releases and some older favourites, and we think that most of them are great additions both to your own wish list and to your shopping list.
So we learn that Sky One is planning to remake The Prisoner. Well, it was bound to happen eventually, one supposes. But there’s catch.
As I managed to clear out some of my work earlier than expected, I decided to reward myself with a bit of reading from the rather large to-read pile that has accumulated of late. The book I picked up was Song of Unmaking by Caitlinn Brennan (a pseudonym for Judith Tarr ). This is the second in her series from Luna (Harlequin’s semi-new fantasy imprint), following on from last year’s The Mountain’s Call.
This is actually rather old news, because someone (cough) forgot to keep herself up-to-date via Louise Cooper’s website on the author’s efforts to get her older books back into print. And now, it seems, she has succeeded.
Mundania Press have begun bringing out some very nice looking editions of her first series, the Time Master Trilogy; The Initiate, The Outcast and the Master.
Via Whedonesque, we learn from the man himself that he’s going to be writing a brand new Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic for Dark Horse which will be canonical and set post-Buffy and Angel. And there’s more news beyond that.
Dabel Brothers Productions has released a preview for the forthcoming Woodboy/Burning Man graphic novel featuring adaptions of the titular stories written by Raymond E. Feist and Tad Williams.
Although the most important book that I have read of late obviously is A Feast for Crows (I leave the reviewing of that one to Elio, except to say that it is a very good book but also a very different book from the previous ones), I have also managed to take time out from my work to read the second half of Jacqueline Carey’s The Sundering;
Godslayer.
Via Steven Brust’s LiveJournal we learn many interesting things—such as that the man is silver (according to one test), that Vlad is presently wandering around in search of a plot, and that Brust is presently working on a media tie-in novel for Joss Whedon’s excellent Firefly.
From Newsarama we learn that Fallen Angel, an excellent creator-owned series by Peter David that was originally published by DC, has recently moved to IDW and will be restarting. In an attempt to gauge reader interest, PAD and IDW are offering for free the first half of the new first issue in PDF form to those who request a copy.
DB Pro has recently announced that they plan to package their graphic adaptions of Raymond E. Feist’s "The Wood Boy" and Tad Williams’ "The Burning Man" (both from Robert Silverberg’s Legends, which also containted "The Hedge Knight" which DB Pro later successfully adapted) as a single graphic novel. Some early preview art from "The Burning Man" can be found here.
Recent news on the Internet is that Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder is coming to a close—at least when it comes to printing single issues. The singles, according to McNeil, have acted as a "loss leader" for the trades, where the real profit has proved to be. The single issues had become a signficant enough money-eater that McNeil has decided to turn Finder into a free webcomic.
Anne Bishop (author of The Black Jewels Trilogy) has put up a tempting excerpt from her next book, Sebastian (forthcoming in hardcover February 2006), at her website.
J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, has announced that the scripts of all the episodes of the series that he wrote will be published in a series of volumes, which will include new material. Notable among the new material will be the outline he wrote for what would happen over the course of the series had the character of Jeffrey Sinclair remained on the show. The website offering the scripts is not yet live, but you can sign up to recieve an e-mail notification when that changes.
Via Emerald City, we learned that Jim Kelly—author of many excellent stories, including the 2005 Hugo nominee "The Best Christmas Ever"—has been experimenting with self-publishing audio versions of a number of stories.
The latest word is that he’ll begin serializing a reading of his forthcoming novel, Burn, starting November 1st.
As we’re on our second round of watching Buffy (we were snared by the addiction rather late, in fact only last year) at the moment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Chosen Collection looks terribly tempting. One of these 40-disc, seasons 1-7 collections was put out in the UK already, but that one a) was limited and sold out quickly and b) didn’t have any extra bonus material, as this one does. Looks like the perfect way to get a full collection of Buffy goodness.