Realm Deepens Riftwar
The Power of Nuts
Holy crap. I can’t believe it–CBS gave in to fan demand and renewed Jericho after announcing it would be canceled. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen one of these fan organized “Let’s save the show” protests work before.
Clearly letter writing campaigns are not the way to go. You must bombard studios with legumes if you wish to effect change.
Faith, Science Clash In Witchfinder
June 6 —
Mutliple-award-winning SF and fantasy author James Morrow, whose novel The Last Witchfinder is a finalist for this year’s Locus Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award, told SCI FI Wire that the book was inspired by a mind-boggling sentence in physicist Edward Harrison’s Masks of the Universe.
LJ Problems?
Does anyone know if LiveJournal purposely disabled RSS feeds or something? It seems like none of my LJ feeds are working in my RSS reader.
Ragamuffin Has Caribbean Lilt
Best Buddies
Matt Kressel is Stephen Colbert’s “Geek Friend.” Don’t worry about Stephen, BTW; if you think he looks a little, well, flat, it’s just because he had a lot to drink before his BEA appearance to calm his nerves (being surrounded by all those books made him uncomfortable).
Celebrity Spooks Haunt No Humans
SF: A Non-Geek’s Guide
Speaking of BEA, at the Tor booth, I picked up an amusing item: a brochure designed to be an introduction to SF publishing jargon for the uninitiated. It’s called “Science Fiction and Fantasy: an Introduction from Tor.”
It begins with basic definitions of SF and Fantasy, then inside discusses conventions, the various awards, categories and sub-genres. One odd thing I came across in the pamphlet is a term I actually wasn’t familiar with:
Ruritanian: Witty, swashbuckling adventures set in imaginary European nations in the post-industrial era. (Overlaps with STEAMPUNK.)
Is that really a whole sub-genre? I’ve never even heard of that. Googling the term revealed that it is derived from the novels of late-19th/early 20th- century fantasist Anthony Hope. However, there seems to be some discrepancy between Tor’s definition of the term and what I found on the web. The Tor definition is spot on with other references I found, except for the post-industrial part.
Has anyone actually heard this term before? What are some classic examples of it?
Loot from Wiscon & Book Expo America
In my Wiscon post, I mentioned that I scored a bunch of free Prime Books from Sean Wallace. But since I had so little room in my luggage, I had to ship them back home. Now that I’ve got them, I can catalog my loot:
- The Grass-Cutting Sword by Catherynne M. Valente
- Best American Fantasy edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer
- Best New Romantic Fantasy edited by Paula Guran
- Science Fiction: The Best of the Year edited by Rich Horton
- Fantasy: The Best of the Year edited by Rich Horton
- The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia
- In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss
Prime has got some of the best designed books coming out lately. Best American Fantasy and The Secret History of Moscow in particular have really beautiful covers that kind of scream “Read me!”
As it happens, I probably didn’t really need to pick these up at Wiscon, as Prime was also at Book Expo America this weekend, which I also attended, so I could have picked these up then.
Although I was told BEA was a great place to score free loot, I actually found the pickings to be rather slim. It was probably because I didn’t go on Friday, and by Saturday most of the good stuff was already gone. But I did manage to pick up a few interesting things:
- Stardust by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess (I’ve read this, but only the book version; I’ve never seen this original illustrated version)
- The Anubis Murders by Gary Gygax (the first of a new pulp reprint book line from Paizo Publishing called Planet Stories)
- The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks
- Bloodline by F. Paul Wilson
- Heavy Metal Fun Time Activity Book (which is, strangely enough, exactly what it sounds like)