Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our second (and final) note is from Brenda Cooper, about The Silver Ship and the Sea:

This is my first solo novel.  I started out wanting to write about difference and prejudice; The Silver Ship and the Sea also gathered a general anti-war theme as it went (one thing war represents is a superset of prejudice).  My heroes, Chelo and Joseph and their friends, are affected by a past they did not create, as are many of us.  They have to deal with a lot of choices that other people made for them.

I think we're going to spend the next few decades trying to determine what our boundaries are as a species.  How will genetic engineering affect our basic humanity?  What will we embrace, and what will scare us?  So that's part of what this book is about, too. I hope it is also fun.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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RevolutionSF reviews China Mieville's Un Lun Dun.

Ain't It Cool News reviews Peter David's novelization of Spider-Man 3, Justina Robson's Keeping It Real, Orson Scott Card's Space Boy, and Gradisil by Adam Roberts.

Bookgasm reviews Jeffrey Thomas's Deadstock.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sci Fi Wire talks to Ellen Kushner about her Nebula-nominated novel The Privilege of the Sword (also available in the SFBC omnibus Swords of Riverside).

John Scalzi interviews Alma Alexander for Ficlets.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The entity known only as akirlu asks the question no one else cared about: is John Scalzi really a fan, or just one of those dirty pros? (And the Internet erupts in argument.)

Once we get that ironed out, let's make it clear, once and for all, whether or not faanish writings count for Hugo nominations or just the important sercon stuff.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Stardust, the heavily illustrated novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, has been made into a movie which will reach US screens this summer. There's now a trailer for that movie online...and it looks pretty good, actually.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Locus Online has posted Russell Letson's review of The Jack Vance Treasury from the March issue.

Blogcritics reviewed Cassandra Clare's City of Bones.

Blogcritics also reviewed Cynthia Leitich Smith's Tantalize.

The Agony Column reviews two comics projects of SFF interest: Kim Deitch's Shadowland and The Secretary of Dreams, Volume One by Stephen King and various artists.

Strange Horizons reviews Alisa Libby's The Blood Confession.

Book Fetish reviews Camille Gabor's Nimuar's Loss.

Susan Palwick reprints a review from Don D'Amassa for her novel Shelter (and quotes a Publishers Weekly review for the same book).

Lynn "Paperback Writer" Viehl liked Rob Thurman's Moonshine.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chapter Feeds presents the beginning of L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s new novel, Soarer's Choice.

Heather Lindsley's "Just Do It" is featured on the Escape Pod podcast. [via BoingBoing]

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Toronto Star talks to artist John Picacio, in town for the World Horror Convention. (Picacio recently did a great cover for the SFBC omnibus On Her Majesty's Occult Service, by Charles Stross.)

The fifteenth installment of Adventures in SciFi Publishing interviews Tad Williams about his new novel Shadowplay, and talks to Paul Levinson about SF and the academic world.

Bookgasm talks to Gary Williams, author of Half-Red Skull.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Spring is here, spring is here. Spring is skittles, spring is beer.

But Spring is also an issue of the SFBC's magazine (which old-timers like me will remember used to be called "Things to Come," but goes without a magazine-style title these days), and that has new books in it. That Spring magazine started mailing yesterday, and the new books in it are...

Selections:

• Alien Crimes edited by Mike Resnick, another great SFBC original, with six new novellas that you won't find anywhere else
• Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson, fifth in the gargantuanly entertaining "Malazan Book of the Fallen" epic fantasy series

Alternates:

• Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle, a great but little-talked-about novel of strange magics and cities that we're bringing back as part of our 50th Anniversary Collection
• Star Trek: Vulcan's Soul by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz, an omnibus collecting a trilogy about Vulcan's mysterious past...and uncertain future
• The Silver Ship and the Sea by Brenda Cooper, the first solo SF novel by the co-author (with Larry Niven) of Building Harlequin's Moon
• Jack Knife by Virginia Baker, a time-travel serial-killer novel
• Into a Dark Realm by Raymond E. Feist, the newest tale from Midkemia
• You Suck by Christopher Moore, a humorous novel about vampires that's a sequel to Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends
• The Magic of Reason by Justine Larbalestier, collecting all three acclaimed, wonderful "Reason Cansino" novels into one handy volume

Other Places:

• Kissing Sin, Tempting Evil, and Dangerous Games by Keri Arthur; three books in a contemporary fantasy-romance series with supernatural creatures
• Hollow Earth by David Standish, a heavily illustrated guide to one of mankind's weirdest ideas, in all of its manifestations
• Space Invaders by Michel Van Pelt and Distant Worlds by Peter Bond; two books about robot space probes

And I hope you can find something of interest amongst all of that stuff.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The US Postal Service unveiled the upcoming Star Wars stamps yesterday; there will be a set of fifteen Star Wars stamps on a poster-like sheet released in May. Also, stamp fans can vote on their favorite stamp at that site. The winning stamp will them be reissued later in the year as "a single stamp."

I haven't been able to find any credit for the stamp art -- I suspect it's Drew Struzan, from his long association with Star Wars and because it looks like his style, but that's only a guess. Hey, Lucasfilm and USPS! Please credit the people who do the work!

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The covers for the US and UK editions of J.K. Rowling's seventh and final "Harry Potter" book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, were released today. (I got them from Publishers Weekly, myself.)

Here they are:

(The US cover looks pretty good to my eye, but I can't say anything printable about my reaction to the UK cover.)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, it's not officially a SF novel. But the new Selection of Oprah's book club is Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a novel set in the near-future after an unspecified apocalypse, and it's hard to see that as anything but science fiction.

Welcome to the dark side, Oprah; we hope you like it here. If you're looking for more things to read over in our neck of the woods, may I recommend Ray Bradbury, Octavia E. Butler, James Tiptree, Jr., and Patricia A. McKillip?

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Fantasy Book Critic interviews Daniel Abraham, author of A Shadow in Summer.

Sci Fi Wire talked to Jeffrey Ford about his Nebula-nominated novel The Girl in the Glass (which is a fabulous book -- it won the Edgar for Best Paperback Mystery last year, and deservedly so -- but isn't actually fantasy or SF...)

SFF World interviews Hal Duncan, author of Vellum and Ink.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's start with a meta-comment: Paul Raven wants more negative reviews. (I myself miss the really nasty negative reviews from SF Eye myself; they were a formative influence on me.)

Fantasy Book Critic reviews Dan Simmons's The Terror.

Monsters and Critics reviews Jim Butcher's latest "Dresden Files" novel, White Night (also soon to be available in the upcoming SFBC omnibus Wizard Under Fire).

Monsters and Critics also reviews The Good Ghoul's Guide to Getting Even by (squinting at the bookshot) Julie Kenner (?). As usual, M&C doesn't list the author anywhere in the body of their review...

Sci Fi Weekly reviews Fiona McIntosh's Odalisque.

The Agony Column reviews Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind (coming soon to the SFBC) and David Anthony Durham's Acacia.

Strange Horizons reviews both recent Alastair Reynolds short-story collections: Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories.

Bookgasm looks at Jeff Rovin's new horror novel Conversations with the Devil.

Kate Nepveu thinks about Stephen King's entire "Dark Tower" series.

Blogcritics reviews Scott Nicholson's They Hunger.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist reviews Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Takes a Holiday (also available as the final third of the SFBC omnibus Long-Time Listener, First-Time Werewolf).

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday the Jet Propulasion Laboratory released several images, and a long article, about an odd rotating hexagonal feature that the Cassini probe witnessed at Saturn's north pole. The feature was also seen in images from Voyager 1 and 2, twenty years ago.

It's a good thing we're not living in a SF novel, or something would be coming out to kick our butts right about now...

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The list of artists with work included in Spectrum 14, this year's edition of the best-fantastic-art-annual, has just been posted.

Let's see, I'm going to pick a name at random, Google Image search, and slap in a random piece of art that almost certainly won't be in Spectrum 14. (But I can't do a post about SFnal art without a little eye candy, can I?)

Random name: Dermot Power

Random piece of art:

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Author, musician, and rabbi David M. Honigsberg died of a heart attack late on Tuesday; he was well-known in East Coast fan/pro circles for his stories and music, and had officiated at the weddings of a number of SFnal people. SFWA has an obituary.

I'm personally stunned; I saw David very briefly across a room at Lunacon a few weeks ago, and he seemed to have completely recovered from his heart attack last fall. I thought I'd be seeing him for many years to come. He was far, far too young to go like this.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Yesterday a big box arrived at the SFBC Fortress of Solitude, bearing hot-off-the-presses copies of our newest original anthology, Mike Resnick's Alien Crimes.

(We only publish three or four really original books a year, so I hope you'll forgive us if we get excited about them.)

Alien Crimes is a companion to Resnick's previous anthology, Down These Dark Spaceways; while Spaceways had stories about private detectives in SFnal settings, Crimes features police and other official investigators.

Alien Crimes contains six brand-new novellas by some of the best writers in the business:

• “Nothing Personal” by Pat Cadigan
• “A Locked-Planet Mystery” by Mike Resnick
• “Hoxbomb” by Harry Turtledove
• “End of the World” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• “Dark Heaven” by Gregory Benford
• “Womb of Every World” by Walter Jon Williams

We're pretty busy right now sending Alien Crimes to the contributors and to reviewers, but, if you want your own copy, just click on that link and you can get it (and four other books) for a buck each by joining the SFBC. You're not going to see a deal like that anywhere else...and you're not going to see Alien Crimes anywhere else, either.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Strange Horizons updated this week with a column by Matthew Cheney (mostly a review of The Last Mimzy, the reissue of the '70s collection The Best of Henry Kuttner), and a story by Joanne Merriam, among other things.

Some Fantastic has put out an eleventh issue (link is directly to the PDF, which loaded surprisingly swiftly for me), with an essay on contemporary Japanese horror and lots of reviews of books and DVDs.

Niall Harrison at Torque Control lists the contents of the new issue of Vector (# 251), and has put several articles from the previous issue online.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

BestSF.net reviews George Mann's The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction.

SciFi Dimensions reviews S.M. Stirling's The Sky People.

SciFi Dimensions reviews Diana Wynne Jones's new novella-as-a-book, The Game.

Green Man Review has some new things:

• this one is for a new small-press YA novel from David Brin, Sky Horizon
• another review is for Juliet Marillier's Wildwood Dancing
• and a review for Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind (coming soon to the SFBC)
• a review of Jay Lake's Mainspring
• a review of Julie Phillips's biography James Tiptree, Jr.
• a review of Dan Simmons's The Terror
• and many more reviews, of books and music and whatnot.

Sci Fi Weekly reviews Carol Emshwiller's new short novel The Secret City.

Tangent reviews Interzone's issue #209, and also "Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Edward Morris, a story whcih accompanied that issue.

The Trades reviews Cassandra Clare's debut novel, the YA fantasy City of Bones.

Blogcritics reviews Jenny Nimmo's The Chestnut Soldier.

New reviews at Fantasybookspot:

• this one for Wayne Thomas Batson's The Door Within
• and this one for Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword (also available in the SFBC omnibus Swords of Riverside).

Neth Space reviews John Meaney's Bone Song.

SF Signal reviews Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic (also available in the SFBC omnibus Rincewind the Wizzard).

The Washington Post Book World reviews Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box. [via Locus Online]

The LA Times mulls the recent glut of apocalyptic novels. [also via Locus Online]

John Clute reviews Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown for SciFi Weekly.

Strange Horizons reviews Cormac McCarthy's The Road twice.

Bookgasm reviews Lucius Shepard's new novel, Softspoken.

Pyr-o-mania reprints a starred Publishers Weekly review for Ian McDonald's Brasyl.

The San Diego Times-Union reviews Kim Stanley Robinson's Sixty Days and Counting and Adam Roberts's Gradisil, with some short takes to fill up the column as well.

Lou Anders likes John Scalzi's The Last Colony (coming soon to the SFBC).

Locus Online has another one of their periodic Howard Waldrop/Lawrence Person movie reviews, this time for the Korean horror movie The Host.

Blogcritics reviews a new art book by Yoshitaka Amano (one of the Guests of Honor at this year's Worldcon, Nippon 2007), Worlds of Amano.

SFReviews.net features:

• a review of John Moore's latest funny fantasy, A Fate Worse Than Dragons
• a review of John Scalzi's The Last Colony
• and a review of Patrick Rothfuss's debut fantasy novel, The Name of the Wind.

(All three of those will be available from the SFBC when they're published...but none of them are published yet, so I can't quite link them -- but they will be up on the site within a few weeks, so you can buy 'em then.)

SFFWorld reviews The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2006: Nineteenth Annual Collection edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant.

SF Signal reviews Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent (for The Great Pratchett Reading Project).

Reuters reviews Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Spriggan Mirror.

The Agony Column looks at the first two books of Justina Robson's "Quantum Gravity" series (Keeping It Real and Selling Out) and Steph Swainston's The Modern World.

Strange Horizons reviews Tim Pratt's debut story collection, Hart & Boot & Other Stories.

Book Fetish reviews the SFBC original anthology (and World Fantasy Award-winner for Best Anthology of 2005) The Fair Folk by Marvin Kaye, newly available in the trade from Ace.

I Hope I Didn't Just Give Away the Ending absolutely loved Ian McDonald's Brasyl.

Bookgasm reviewed issue #10 of Dark Wisdom.

Visions of Paradise looks at Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon (also available in the SFBC omnibus Temeraire: In the Service of the King).

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is two days' worth, since I didn't manage to get through everything yesterday before I had to head out of the office to a meeting. So enjoy...

Jeff VanderMeer interviews Hal Duncan.

HardSF.net interviews Wil McCarthy.

The Capital Times (of Madison, WI) profiles Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind (coming soon as a SFBC Selection).

The UK SF Book News Network talks to Justin Thorne, whose debut collection, In the Shadows, will soon be published in the UK.

Adelaide Now profiles Terry Pratchett, recently visiting those parts on tour for Wintersmith.

Fantasy Book Critic interviews Neal Asher.

Sci Fi Weekly interviews Ray Bradbury.

SFX interviews agent John Jarrold and his client Robert VS Redick, author of the upcoming novel The Red Wolf Conspiracy.

Shanghai Daily profiled Gail Carson Levine, author of Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg (part of a new series of books by Disney about fairies), on her visit there.

Bangor Daily News talks to Jonathan Lethem.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist interviews Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind (again, coming Real Soon Now to the SFBC).

SFFWorld also interviewed Rothfuss about The Name of the Wind.

Sci Fi Wire talked to director Eli Roth about progress on his movie adaptation of Stephen King's novel Cell.

Sci Fi Wire interviewed Megan Whalen Turner about her Andre Norton-nominated novel The King of Attolia.

The Times Record News interviews fantasy writer Nancy Jane Moore.

Locus Online has posted excerpts from the interviews from the March issue of the print magazine: Tim Powers, Ellen Klages, and Toni Weisskopf.

Velcro City Tourist Board has a short interview with Kevin J. Anderson.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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A SFBC member wrote in -- actually hand-wrote, on a piece of paper and everything -- to ask a question. He didn't give permission to run that letter in our Interface letters column, so I won't quote him or use his name. (But I hope he's out there, since I doubt I'll have time to send him a reply through the post.)

Our friend, who hails from the great state of Alabama, is a big fan of the 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing, and asked if there was a novelization of that movie, or a story similar to it. And I have some good news for him. First, the movie was based loosely on the John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?" (and also on the previous filmed version of that story, 1951's The Thing From Another World). Also, Alan Dean Foster wrote a novelization, published in paperback in 1982 as The Thing.

Foster's The Thing is out of print now, but trivially findable used (ABEbooks.com lists 26 copies, as cheap as $1.75).

"Who Goes There?" is one of the great and famous stories of the SF genre (originally published under Campbell's pen name Don A. Stuart), and has been reprinted many times -- here's a list from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

This has been the SFBC's free "What the Heck Was That Old Thing?" service; requests for service can be left as comments here or e-mailed to sfbceditors@sfbc.com.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Matthew Cheney has posted the list of stories that will be included in the first annual edition of Best American Fantasy; the series is edited by Cheney, and this volume was guest-edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

The stories are:

• "A Hard Truth About Waste Management" by Sumanth Prabhaker
• "The Stolen Father" by Eric Roe
• "The Saffron Gatherer" by Elizabeth Hand
• "The Whipping" by Julia Elliott
• "A Better Angel" by Chris Adrian
• "Draco Campestris" by Sarah Monette
• "Geese" by Daniel Coudriet
• "The Chinese Boy" by Ann Stapleton
• "The Flying Woman" by Meghan McCarron
• "First Kisses from Beyond the Grave" by Nik Houser
• "Song of the Selkie" by Gina Ochsner
• "A Troop [sic] of Baboons" by Tyler Smith
• "Pieces of Scheherazade" by Nicole Kornher-Stace
• "Origin Story" by Kelly Link
• "An Experiment in Governance" by E.M. Schorb
• "The Next Corpse Collector" by Ramola D
• "The Village of Ardakmoktan" by Nicole Derr
• "The Man Who Married a Tree" by Tony D'Souza
• "A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets" by Kevin Brockmeier
• "Pregnant" by Catherine Zeidler
• "The Warehouse of Saints" by Robin Hemley
• "The Ledge" by Austin Bunn
• "Lazy Taekos" by Geoffrey A. Landis
• "For the Love of Paul Bunyan" by Fritz Swanson
• "An Accounting" by Brian Evenson
• "Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot" by Daniel Alarcón
• "Bit Forgive" by Maile Chapman
• "The End Of Narrative (1-29; Or 29-1)" by Peter LaSalle
• "Kiss" by Melora Wolff

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The CG Society has announced the winners of its 20th annual CGChallenge; this year's Challenge was to create art for Greg Bear's classic SF novel Eon.

First prize for Film Trailer went to Emiliano Colantoni, Gianfranco Sgura, Marco Stellabotte, and David Bonelli; their winning entry can be viewed here.

First prize for 3D Scene went to James Kaufeldt (see below for sample).

First prize for Illustration went to Torsten Wolber (also see below for sample).

Full details of the contest, and more art from the winners and runners-up, is at the CGSociety's website.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Locus Online has posted another list of recently-published SFF books that they've seen, covering mid-March and including Brenda Cooper's The Silver Ship and the Sea and Kim Harrison's For a Few Demons More.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)