PRESS RELEASES & NEWSLETTERS (See below for full text)
New Releases From Fantastic Books – Lou Atonelli & Tom Purdom
TOR/Forge Releases
CAUSES
Undermining the Patriarchy
The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto
More On Afrofuturism
Clips From Black SF Documentary
Time Again For 50s SF?
Cosplaying While Trans
Ms. Marvel Preview
Catholic Church Making Health Care Decisions For Many Americans, Whether They Know It Or Not
What’s Good For the Goose…Satanic Church Challenging Oklahoma’s Faith-Based Court Ruling
When Is Copyright Infringement Not Copyright Infringement? When It Is Art
Shebooks
Classic Female Fantasy Authors
Growing and Diversifying Genre Events
Win For Stay-At-Home Dads
ENTERTAINMENT
TangentOnline OTR: The Shadow! (audio)
What’s Happened To Movie Posters?
Paul ‘Peewee’ Reubens in Short SF Film
Stan Lee & Harlan Ellison Simpsons Teasers
Current Tech “Indistinguishable From Magic” (via David Brin)
The Golem & The Djinni on Islam & SF
Bradbury & Hitchcock Duke It Out via BoingBoing
NYRSF: On the Nature of Time and Tides
Monty Python Alum Teaches You How To Animate
The Making Of Alien (video)
Crazy Russian Hacker Makes Square Soap Bubbles (video)
Batman On Film Speculation Gets Picked Up As Fact
Upcoming 2014 Genre Films
New Doctor: First Takes
Tales To Terrify
Game Of Thrones New Season Teasers (video)
New HALO 5 Art
Chewie (Mayhew) Behind the Scenes Star Wars Photos
HASBRO Introduces Female Transformer
FANDOM
New York Review Of SF Up-Coming Readings
Open Casting Call For Feature Film Aladdin 3477
An Insane (yes, insane) Compilation of (almost) All of Futurama’s Characters
Three New Wave Classics That Changed SF Forever
Lost Roddenberry Interview
New Conrunning Discussion Group
Stan Lee To Appear in Agents Of Shield
Jamie Todd Rubin To Resume Vacation In the Golden Age
On ‘Vintage’ Science Fiction
On How To Recommend Science Fiction
Shelley Letters Cache Discovered
New Netflix SF Show From Wachowskis
WSFS Rules Updated
INDUSTRY
Grand Msster Delany Ebook Releases
Scribd: Profiting From Piracy?
Scribd Responds
Dirty Lies About Publishing
Premio Ignotus Award Winners
Hugo Award Nominations for 2014 Awards Now Open (All of our contributors are eligible for Best Fan Writer; Amazing Stories is eligible for Best Fanzine See our new Sunday Feature – For Your Consideration – for other potential nominees)
2014 Prometheus Award Nominees
2014 Critics Choice Nominations
Gravity Tops BAFTA Nominations
Manly Wade Wellman Award
Philip K Dick Award Nominations
Detcon1 (NASFiC) Offers YA Award
Nominate Wheel Of Time For A Hugo?
Scalzi on Adam’s Award Awareness Post
More On Award Season
Hugh Howey On Publishing’s Future
Writer Beware Year In Review
Daily Science Fiction Releases 2nd Year Anthology
Self-Pubishing: Excercise in Quality Or Quantity?
Is T.E.D. A Recipe For Civilizational Disaster? (David Brin)
Russian Language SF & Fantasy Releases
Rocky & Bullwinkle Comic Series
Image Unveils New Titles
SFWA’s Pacific Northwest Reading Series
Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest Open
Nature’s Future Short Short Contest
Digital Publishing Outlook for 2014
Darkhorse Comics Unveils Furious
Fresno Bee Profiles Ron Moore
Smashwords On Publishing In 2014
SFWA Alpha Writing Workshop Accepting Applications
Jim Freund (Hour of the Wolf) Now Podcast Editor For Lightspeed
Rejection Letters (Big Names Got Them Too)
SCIENCE
3D Printed Galaxy Maps For Seeing Impaired
High Energy Military Lasers: Arming Our Robot Overlords (video via David Brin)
Timeline of the Future (Infographic)
Hubble- Early Galaxies
AI Game Developers
Crash At the Galaxy’s Core
Robots For Humanity (TED)
Is That A Drone In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Surveiling Me?
Algorithm Determines A Book’s Saleability
Exercise App Used To Draw NSFW Maps
Super Earths May Be More Suitable For Life That Previously Thought
Men Not Going Away Anytime Soon According To New Gene Analysis
Ancient Chinese Multiplication Tables
?Science? L. Ron’s Grandson Reveals All
Commercial Space Travel In 2014
PRESS RELEASES & NEWSLETTERS
Lou Antonelli explores alternate worlds and secret histories in his newest collection: THE CLOCK STRUCK NONE.
From airships lost between universes, to golems winning the fight against racism, Lou Antonelli explains the many ways the world might have been in his newest collection, THE CLOCK STRUCK NONE. Dip into this collection of previously published tales, where you’ll experience:
* technology suppressing magic in an apartheid-like state
* ancient civilizations that succumb to their own nuclear holocausts
* alternate worlds in which Christianity is just one of many minor Earth-bound religions, and others where it rules and spans outer space
* how America’s westward expansion would have happened if the New Madrid earthquake had allowed the North American inland sea to reform
Here you’ll find Antonelli’s version of Brigadoon, and of the sinking of the Titanic and the Carpathia. You’ll visit alternate realities that have been hiding Neanderthals, and pick up the lost photos of what might have been. With cameo appearances by O. Henry, Robert E. Howard, and Rod Serling, join this wild ride and delve into demonic possession, immortality, and the infinite variety of other worlds.
Includes the 2013 Sidewise Award for Alternate History finalist short story “Great White Ship.”
Lou Antonelli is a modern speculative fiction author with classic sensibilities, honed by a long career as a newspaperman.
Fantastic Books is also the publisher of Antonelli’s first collection, FANTASTIC TEXAS (ISBN: 978-1-60459-911-4), which is available in both trade paperback and ebook editions.
For more information on Lou Antonelli, see https://www.louantonelli.blogspot.com/
The Clock Struck None: a collection of alternate and secret history short stories
by Lou Antonelli
$14.99, 274 pages, trade paperback
To be published by Fantastic Books on February 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61720-944-4
Contents:
Introduction by Scott A. Cupp
Great White Ship
Hearts Made of Stone
The Centurion and the Rainman
Meet Me at the Grassy Knoll
After Image
Double Exposure
Across the Plains
The Relic
Damascus Interrupted
Twilight on the Finger Lakes
The Goddess of Bleecker Street
The Starship Theodora
The Dragon’s Black Box
Tell Gilgamesh I’m Sorry
Re-Opening Night
The Hideaway
Airy Chick
Pirates of the Ozarks
Barsoom Billy
Ladybug, Ladybug
Black Hats and Blackberrys
Mak Siccar
The Quantum Gunman
Encounter in Camelot
My Ugly Little Self
The Amerikaan Way
Insight
Wet and Wild
~~~
Tom Purdom’s first collection, LOVERS & FIGHTERS, STARSHIPS & DRAGONS, features fascinating and psychologically complex characters, and intrepid investigation into the human heart.
When talking about writing, Tom Purdom likes to quote Frederik Pohl’s prescription for a good science fiction story: “interesting people doing interesting things in an interesting future.” Yet Michael Swanwick says that Purdom “adds a fourth quality, that the author should have an interesting point of view,” and by that accounting, “Tom’s work comes up aces.”
Purdom has been following that advice throughout a writing career spanning more than half a century. His first story appeared in the August 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe, and he quickly moved on to sell stories to legendary editors like Pohl, John W. Campbell, H.L. Gold, and Donald Wollheim. He amassed an impressive writing resume: short fiction, novels, non-fiction articles, weekly arts columns, and much more. There was, however, one thing lacking: a collection of short fiction. Fantastic Books is thrilled to fill that hole in his career by publishing Tom Purdom’s first collection: LOVERS & FIGHTERS, STARSHIPS & DRAGONS. Edited by Darrell Schweitzer, and with a foreword by Michael Swanwick, this volume brings together twelve of Purdom’s best portraits of all-too-human characters coping with the challenges of the future.
Over the decades, his stories have appeared in Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Analog, F&SF, and a string of original, reprint, and year’s best anthologies. For the last twenty years, Purdom’s been roving space and time with an acclaimed string of stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, including the one which finally earned him his first Hugo Award nomination, 1999’s “Fossil Games,” which leads off Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons.
In the introduction to this book, Michael Swanwick says “it is tempting to dwell upon Purdom’s longevity as a writer. But that accomplishment pales beside the fact that the stories he is writing today and the ideas that drive them are fresh and original. He notes that many writers get stale with age, but not Purdom: his new stories are written not by the firelight of the past but by the quiet glow of a computer screen filled with the latest developments in science and technology.”
“Fossil Games,” for example, is “a tale of posthumans whose intelligence is so highly enhanced that in conversation they’ll switch between machine-generated and music-based languages in order to convey nuances of mood and yet so outclassed by their contemporaries that they must flee Earth in search of a sanctuary for inferior minds. It is a cascade of brilliant ideas worthy of Greg Egan or Stephen Baxter at their best. On my first reading,” Swanwick says, “I could all but hear the plates of my skull creaking as my brain swelled with the effort of following his characters’ thinking. Yet the writing is smooth and the narrative flows naturally from beginning to end. It is a genuine tour de force and a terrific introduction to the pleasures of Purdom’s fiction.”
Swanwick concludes his introduction by telling readers, “It perhaps says more about me than about Purdom that I love best the stories that have the highest idea content. But however you order them and whichever you prefer, there’s not a clunker in the lot. This is a book I have been yearning for, along with many more of Purdom’s fans, for a long time. It is a delight to read.”
For more on Tom Purdom, see https://www.philart.net/tompurdom/
Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons
by Tom Purdom
$15.99, 356 pages, trade paperback
To be published by Fantastic Books on February 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61720-943-7
Contents:
Introduction by Michael Swanwick
“Fossil Games”
“Haggle Chips”
“Dragon Drill”
“Canary Land”
“Research Project”
“Sheltering”
“Bonding with Morry”
“Sepoy”
“Legacies”
“A Response from EST17”
“The Path of the Transgressor”
“The Mists of Time”
A few comments on Tom Purdom:
“Very simply, Tom Purdom IS science fiction. His ever-inventive stories are cut from the cloth of it and sewn with the skill of a master.”
—Gregory Frost
“Tom Purdom made his first professional sale all the way back in 1957. It’s hard to think of any other member of his generation whose current work is frequently mentioned in the same breath with that of writers such as Charles Stross, Greg Egan, and Alastair Reynolds, many of whom were not even born when Tom started his professional career, but Tom’s is. In fact, for sweep and audacity of imagination and a wealth of new ideas and dazzling conceptualization, Tom Purdom not only holds his own with the New Young Turks of the ’90s and the Oughts, he sometimes surpasses them. And unlike some of today’s Hot New Writers, Tom’s work never fails to ALSO feature fascinating and psychologically complex characters, and intrepid investigation into the human heart.”
—Gardner Dozois
“Tom Purdom is the most underrated science fiction writer I know of. His short fiction delivers again and again with great plots, characters, and an imagination both cosmic and delicately complex.”
—Jeffrey Ford
“Purdom has created a major body of work. Thoughtful, humane, intelligent, extrapolative, involving, his stories are exactly the sort of thing our genre exists to make possible. If you don’t like Tom Purdom, you don’t like science fiction. Period.”
—Michael Swanwick
~~~
Books: I Like Them, Who Could Have Guessed?Building IlmatarGiant Hawks and Mountain Bikes: Alternative TrainingJanuary Grab Bag SweepstakesMore Stories…
We are currently offering the chance to win a copy of each of the following books on Goodreads:
| Tor.com has shared Michael Whelan’s endpapers for Words of Radiance, by Brandon Sanderson.The image is also available as a free downloadable wallpaper.Speaking of Words of Radiance, you can also read an excerpt!What are you looking forward to in 2014? Check out lists of anticipated January titles fromBuzzfeed and Kirkus Reviews.Vicious, by V. E. Schwab, isgoing to be a movie!Jo Walton muses on whether there’s a right age to read a book. |
Books: I Like Them, Who Could Have Guessed?
by Jo Walton
I’ve been interviewed a lot about my Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel, Among Others. Because Among Others is about a science fiction reader, one of the questions I’ve been asked a lot is which one classic science fiction novel everyone ought to read. It’s an impossible question-especially in the context of my novel, which is about the kind of splurging, indiscriminate teenage reading many of us experienced.
| Building Ilmatar by James L. CambiasSettings are one of science fiction’s fundamental strengths. Readers of SF and fantasy love to play tourist in worlds of the author’s imagination, and an intriguing setting is a great way to draw the readers in and keep them reading while you make them care about the characters and get them to worry about what’s going to happen next.When creating a fantastic setting, there are two approaches: crafting what you need to fit the demands of the story (what we’ll call “top-down”) and extrapolating a setting based on some basic scientific assumptions (what we’ll call “bottom-up”).Read more » |
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| Giant Hawks and Mountain Bikes: Alternative Training by Brian StaveleyThere’s a scene near the middle of The Emperor’s Blades in which a class of Kettral cadets, ultra-elite warriors who fly massive hawks into battle, are undergoing their final test: Hull’s Trial. People who have read the book ask about this scene a lot, and about Kettral training more generally. They want to know if I’ve served in the military – I haven’t – and then they want to know where in the hell all the training material comes from. The answer (aside from lots and lots of reading about military training) is adventure racing.Read more » |
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| January Grab Bag SweepstakesSign up for the Tor/Forge Newsletter for a chance to win this collection of advance reading copies:Sign up for a chance to win this collection!
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States, D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 or older as of the date of entry. To enter, complete entry here beginning at 12:00 AM Eastern Time (ET) January 2, 2014. Sweepstakes ends at 11:59 PM ET January 31, 2014. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010. |
