You may remember me blogging about the cool Wastelands business cards I ordered from OvernightPrints.com. Well, now they’re having another special offer. This time, you can get 100 one-sided postcards for free (you only have to pay for shipping). Enter coupon code FREEPC08 to redeem the offer, which ends February 29.

I haven’t seen the quality of their postcards yet, but as I noted previously, I was quite happy with the business cards. This seems like a great thing to buy to help spread the word about your books at conventions, etc. But a word of caution: resist the temptation to print on both sides of the postcards. I think if you use up all the real estate on the card, people will be much less likely to take them. If, however, you actually leave space on the back to write, people might take them and then use them as postcards, which will then actually market your book to two people instead of one.

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New review of Wastelands on the Bison Survival blog. He seemed to like the book, but was annoyed that it didn’t sufficiently focus on the survivalist aspect of life after apocalypse. Which is fair enough–I didn’t put the book together with that being a factor in my mind at all.

My favorite line from the review: "Killers by C. Emshwiller was clever and a great story. Along the lines of ‘femi-Nazis protect town from male hobos.’"

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SF Crowsnest just published a nice review of Wastelands by Tomas L. Martin. Here’s a snippet:

In this, his first anthology, he collects together an impressive array of post-apocalyptic short stories. […] There’s some really great stories in here from the likes of Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Tobias Buckell, Cory Doctorow and George R.R. Martin. Before I move on to my pick of them, I’d like to mention how excellent John Joseph Adam’s editorial comments are both in the introduction and before each story. His comments on the authors and how they came to write the stories add weight and interest to each one and dramatically added to my enjoyment of the anthology. […] Stands out as one of the best short story collections I’ve read in a while.
 

The whole review can be found here.

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The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings and the South Street Seaport Museum present: Readings from Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

Carol Emshwiller
John Langan
Guest Curator: John Joseph Adams

Tuesday, February 5th — Doors open 6:30 PM
Free Admission — $5 donation if possible
South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery
213 Water Street

Newton Minnow’s ‘vast wasteland’ has never been a problem within literary science fiction, so don’t let the title of John Joseph Adams’ anthology of post-apocalyptic tales put you off. With 22 writers ranging from Octavia Butler to Cory Doctorow, Wastelands has already earned starred reviews. Two of its finest writers will perform readings for us, introduced by the editor.

Carol Emshwiller is the author of six novels and more than 100 short stories. Her short work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and has been collected in several volumes, most recently in I Live With You. In her career spanning five decades, she has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2005, she was presented the World Fantasy Award for Life-Time Achievement. Her most recent novel, The Secret City, was published in 2007.

John Langan has published several stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, two of which–"On Skua Island" and "Mr. Gaunt"–were nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. A collection of his short work, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, is forthcoming from Prime Books. Langan’s reviews and essays have appeared in Dead Reckonings, Erebos, Extrapolation, Fantasy Commentator, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, The Lovecraft Annual, Lovecraft Studies, and Science Fiction Studies. An adjunct instructor at SUNY New Paltz, he is in the process of completing his dissertation on H.P. Lovecraft.

John Joseph Adams was born in 1976. He is the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was guest-editor of Shimmer Magazine’s special pirate issue. He is also a freelance writer whose work has appeared in: Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Kirkus Reviews, Locus, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Publishers Weekly, SCIFI.com, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, and Writer’s Digest. He lives in Perth Amboy, NJ and at www.johnjosephadams.com.

Books will be available for sale at the reading.

The New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series is in its umpteenth season (we’ll specify after Gordon Van Gelder tells us when it all began) of providing performances from some of the best writers in science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, etc. The series takes place the first Tuesday of every month at the South Street Seaport’s Melville Gallery, 213 Water Street. Admission is free, but $5 donations are encouraged to offset costs and buy dinner for the readers. The producer and executive curator is radio producer and talk show host Jim Freund.

WHEN:
Tuesday, 2/5/08
Doors open at 6:30 — readings begin at 7

WHERE:
The South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery
213 Water Street (near Beekman)
http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=213+Water+Street,+New+York,+NY

LINKS:
http://www.hourwolf.com/nyrsf
http://www.southstseaport.org
http://www.nyrsf.com

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Another new review of Wastelands today, this time from The Book Swede. He claims to be a bit of a newbie when it comes to short fiction, and I’m happy to say that Wastelands seems to have inspired him to try more:

For some reason, I’ve always shied away somewhat from short stories — perhaps I thought there just weren’t enough words to do any "proper" story justice, or that somehow I was being cheated out of a really good read … and as a result, this anthology is the first I’ve ever read. Perhaps I thought … well, whatever I thought, I was wrong. Very, very wrong. […] A very good anthology, and, for a short story newbie like me, a good taster of what it’s all about. A very high 9/10. [whole review]

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Okay, one more Wastelands publicity post for the day, and then I’ll quit. I see that as of 11:30 today, Wastelands’s Amazon sales rank is up to #919, the highest I’ve ever seen it. And perhaps more startling, not only is it the #1 seller in books by George R. R. Martin, but it’s also #1 in books by Stephen King!

All this translates to it being #44 on Amazon’s science fiction best-seller list.

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I appeared on Jim Freund’s radio show Hour of the Wolf on Saturday morning to promote Wastelands. If you’d like to listen to the show, the radio station, WBAI, has it up on their archives page. For a direct link (which will start the audio streaming), click here.

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Daniel W. Powell, on his blog, The Byproduct, posted a nice review of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:

I can’t recommend this anthology enough. It stands as a definitive collection in the sub-genre, and I have to say that Night Shade Books did an impressive job with the project. Editor John Joseph Adams has a nice eye for strong writing and clearly has read widely in the field. [whole review]
 

And the Books Anonymous blog had this to say:

I love a good tale of the apocalypse so this book was like a trip to Camden Park (before it became old, dangerous, and creepy). […] I can only give this collection 2 thumbs up because I only have 2 thumbs. [whole review]

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The Fix has a great, very detailed review up of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:

There’s a wry, fatalistic charm to Dale Bailey’s “The End of the World as We Know It,” an unusual and highly self-conscious tale of the apocalypse. It begins with a brief description of the Bubonic plague, and interspersed throughout the subsequent narrative are a number of digressions reflecting on the conventions of the “end-of’the-world” story to which, as Bailey observes, his protagonist fails to conform. Alongside these dissections of the mechanics of the sub-genre, Bailey also cites a number of real life apocalypses—Pompeii, Krakatoa, 9/11, the extinction event that did in the dinosaurs, the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda. One event he mentions—the death of Elvis Presley—hints at the real point of the story, which is that for both victims and survivors, the apocalypse is largely a personal event. [whole review]
 

It’s really a well-crafted review, and considering it’s written by several different reviewers, the overall result is remarkably cohesive.

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Joe Sherry, over at Adventures in Reading, has posted his review of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:

The bottom line is that collectively the stories John Joseph Adams has put together here in Wastelands shows off the range of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre of fiction. Wastelands is an excellent anthology of short fiction and one that would easily fit on any collector’s shelves. [whole review]

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