BookScreening.com, a new site devoted to promoting and reviewing book trailers, recently featured the trailer for Seeds of Change. If you think it’s awesome, please drop by and give it a rating and/or leave a comment!
Political blog The Huffington Post recently started a book review section, and the redoubtable Jeff VanderMeer has just contributed a post which covers a few politically-oriented SF novels…including Seeds of Change! Drop by and leave a comment so that the Huff Post sees that SF books are worth covering!
I came home from Worldcon to discover that Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com, both have stock of my new anthology Seeds of Change, so I’ve now launched the website www.seedsanthology.com for it. The stories aim to confront some of the pivotal issues facing our society today, such as racism, global warming, peak oil, technological advancement, and political revolution. It features original fiction from Tobias S. Buckell, Ken MacLeod, and Jay Lake, among others.
You can read the complete text of three of the anthology’s nine stories on the website, in HTML, PDF, or Mobipocket format. There are excerpts available of the remaining six stories.
Other bonus features include interviews with the authors and further reading lists for people who’d like to learn more about the issues discussed in the stories. And finally, the site also features a book trailer which features a short dramatized excerpt of each story, along with original musical score (which you can also download as an instrumental MP3 track).
During Worldcon last week, I went on a VIP tour of the NORAD facility at Cheyenne Mountain, which is known in SF circles for its relevance to the plot of the film WarGames and the television series Stargate SG-1. A bunch of other great authors were along on the trip, including Plague War author Jeff Carlson, who was the reason the tour came to be in the first place. I wrote up a report about our trip to NORAD for SCI FI Wire. Annalee Newitz was also on the trip, and she wrote up a report for io9.com.
Worldcon itself was pretty good; not a great Worldcon, but lots of fun nonetheless–got to hang out with lots of cool people I knew already and met some new ones. More Worldcon musings may be forthcoming, but that’s all I have time for for now. So much work piled up when I was away!
I’m off to Worldcon in the morning. Will be back late on Monday. Probably won’t post much while I’m away…not that I’ve been posting much while at home, but just thought I’d post a notification. I might, however, be twittering up a storm. So if you gotta get your JJA fix, check out http://twitter.com/johnjosephadams. At the very least, I was planning to live-microblog the Hugos, so if you just can’t wait to find out who won, check my twitter feed on Saturday evening.
Random House’s Suvudu blog has a cool post on metal songs based on fantasy novels. Of course, I had to chime in with some additions in the comments, which I’ll duplicate here:
Can you think of any others not mentioned by me, or the original list?
FEDERATIONS
EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
From Star Trek to Star Wars, from Dune to Foundation, science fiction has a rich history of exploring the idea of vast intergalactic societies, and the challenges facing those living in or trying to manage such societies. The stories in Federations will continue that tradition.
What are the social, religious, environmental, or technological implications of living in such a vast society? What happens when expansionist tendencies on a galactic scale come into conflict with the indigenous peoples of other planets, of other races? And what of the issue of communicating across such distances, or the problems caused by relativistic travel? These are just some of the questions and issues that the stories in Federations will take on.
Genres: Science Fiction only. Original fiction only, no reprints.
Payment: 5 cents per word ($250 max), plus a pro-rata share of the anthology’s earnings and 1 contributor copy.
Word limit: 5000 words. (Stories may exceed 5000 words, but $250 is the maximum payment per story, and stories 5000 words or less are strongly preferred.)
Rights: First world English rights, non-exclusive world anthology rights, and non-exclusive audio anthology rights. See my boilerplate author-anthologist contract, which spells out the rights in detail.
Reading Period: November 1-January 1, 2009
Response Time: Most rejections will be sent out quickly, but stories that I like may be held until January 31 before a final decision is made.
Publication date: May 2009
Publisher: Prime Books
Submission Instructions: Email your story in .doc Microsoft Word format (preferred) or .rtf rich-text format to John Joseph Adams at [anthology now closed]. Include the title of the story and your byline in the subject line of the email.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
John Joseph Adams is the editor of the anthologies Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, Seeds of Change, and The Living Dead. He is also the assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and is the print news correspondent for SCI FI Wire (the news service of the SCI FI Channel). For more information, visit his website at www.johnjosephadams.com.
ETA 2/1/09:
Table of Contents