Going West - Book Video

This is a book video from the New Zealand Book Council. From their website:

"Like no other human activity reading opens up our imagination. It enables us to understand those around us. It allows us to project the future and reach back into the past. Reading can entertain, challenge and educate. We believe that reading can transform people's lives."

The graphics are so cool I actually found it hard to pay attention to the story!

Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Coming in January 2010

Disclaimer: Normally I compile this list from the Chapters/Indigo website. Due to the new year, the search I perform did not bring up titles for January 2010. So I used my previous method, going one by one to publisher pages to see what is coming out. Unfortunately not all publishers have easy searches for this purpose. So I finished my list by using a search on Amazon.ca. What this means is this list is not as accurate as previous lists (I've already found, and removed, a few books added by error). In other words, I would double check titles if you're waiting for something on this list to come out. I simply don't have the time to double check this entire list myself. Also, there appear to be a higher than usual number of reprints coming, particularly from Neal Asher.

Hardcover:
Orbus – Neal Asher
The End of Eternity – Isaac Asimov
Player's Ruse – Hilari Bell
Mr. Shivers – Robert Jackson Bennett
Hastur Lord – Marion Zimmer Bradley & Deborah Ross
The Great Bazaar & Other Stories – Peter Brett
Iorich – Steven Brust
Veracity – Laura Bynum
Kingdom of Ohio – Matthew Flaming
The Sorceress of Karres – Eric Flint & Dave Freer
The Good, the Bad and the Uncanny - Simon Green
Starbound – Joe Haldeman
Through Stone and Sea – Barb & J.C. Hendee
Dragon Keeper – Robin Hobb
Brain Thief – Alexander Jablokov
Prince of Storms – Kay Kenyon
Catalyst – Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Book of Heroes – Miyuki Miyabe
Arms Commander – L.E. Modesitt Jr.
The Girl With Glass Feet – Ali Shaw
The Shadow Pavilion – Liz Williams
Shadowrise – Tad Williams
The Domino Pattern – Timothy Zahn

Trade Paperback:
Men of the Otherworld – Kelley Armstrong
The Skinner – Neal Asher
The Spirit Lens – Carol Berg
Shadowline – Glen Cook
Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy – Ellen Datlow, Ed.
Lone Wolf: Glory & Greed – August Hahn
Yukikaze – Chohei Hambayashi
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Termination Booth – Gareth Hanrahan
Podkayne of Mars – Robert Heinlein
Queen of Hearts – Daniel Homan
Darkship Thieves – Sarah Hoyt
City Without End – Kay Kenyon
Republic of Thieves – Scott Lynch
Spindle's End – Robin McKinley
The Jewel in the Skull – Michael Moorcock
Who Fears the Devil?: The Complete Silver John – Manly Wade Wellman

Mass Market Paperback:
The Trouble With Humans – Christopher Anvil & Eric Flint
Flight Into Darkness – Sarah Ash
Cowl – Neal Asher
The Gabble & Other Stories – Neal Asher
Gridlinked – Neal Asher
Prison Ship – Michael Bowers
Bone Crossed – Patricia Briggs
Horizon – Lois McMaster Bujold
Mean Streets – Jim Butcher, Kat Richardson, Simon Green & Thomas Sniegoski
Death's Mistress – Karen Chance
Regenesis – C. J. Cherryh
Unperfect Souls – Mark Del Franco
Spider's Bite – Jennifer Estep
Time Spike – Eric Flint & Merilyn Kosmatka
Shadow Blade – Seressia Glass
World of Warcraft: Arthas: Rise of the Lich King – Christie Golden
Keepers of Sulbreth – Susan Gourley
Hand of Isis – Jo Graham
Vampire Babylon: Break of Dawn – Chris Green
Arch Wizard – Ed Greenwood
A Madness of Angels – Kate Griffin
Killing Dance – Laurell Hamilton
In Shade and Shadow – Barb & J. C. Hendee
Brooklyn Knight – C. J. Henderson
Happy Hour of the Damned – Mark Henry
Blood Cross – Faith Hunter
Iron Man: Virus – Alex Irvine
Star Wars: Crosscurrent – Paul Kemp
War Hammer: Death & Dishonour – Nick Kyme, Lindsey Priestley & Alex Davis
Blood in the Water – Juliet McKenna
Dragon Lance: The Fate of Thorbardin – Douglas Niles
War Hammer 40k: Rynn's World – Steve Parker
Star Trek: Inception – S. D. Perry
Night Tides – Alex Prentiss
Hardcore – Andy Remic
Doppelgangster – Laura Resnick
War Hammer 40K: Dark Creed – Anthony Reynolds
Hallowed Circle – Linda Robertson
Wild Hunt – Margaret Ronald
Forgotten Realms: The Realms of the Dead – R. A. Salvatore & Richard Lee Byers, Ed.
Sea Glass – Maria Snyder
Armor – John Steakley
Coyote Horizon – Allen Steele
Eldin of Yashor – C. Tyler Storm
The Jennifer Morgue – Charles Stross
War Hammer 40K: Black Tide – James Swallow
Kitty's House of Horrors – Carrie Vaughan
The Mage in Black – Jaye Wells
Saint Anthony's Fire – Steve White
This is Not a Game – Walter Jon Williams

Audible.com Free Audio Book Download

Just a heads up, until midnight tonight (November 26th), Audible.com is offering a free download. They have a couple good SF titles, so check them out.

Sorry, the link above takes you to their homepage. Here's the link for the free audio book:
www.audible.com/thanksgiving

Death Is Quite A Character - Reading List

I've seen several books with 'Death' as a character come in recently and decided to see how many titles there were (that I could find on our shelves). The list was large enough for a half display. I stuck to traditional western views of death, though things like Deathnote and The Anubis Murders did come under consideration. Feel free to suggest other titles in the comments. I also know that several of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics have Death as a character, but chose to use the spring off Death comics in the list instead.



Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather, Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett (I know Death shows up in his other books but these are the ones that focus on him)
A Dirty Job - Christopher Moore
Death With Interruptions - Jose Saramago
Death: A Life - Death & George Pendle
Death: Time of Your Life, Death: High Cost of Living - Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo & Mark Buckingham
On a Pale Horse - Piers Anthony
Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Death's Daughter - Amber Benson

The Dragon Book - Book Review

Penguin recently released a new short story collection centered around dragons. It's edited Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The table of contents follows along with my quick reviews for each story.

The author line-up in The Dragon Book is a bit unusual for a collection by "the masters of modern fantasy", especially considering that some of the authors in the book would likely not appreciate their works being classified as fantasy. The stories themselves are diverse and entertaining, with some completely unexpected takes on the mythos of dragons. Most of the stories are alternate histories, where dragons exist in the real world. A few at the end of the book have fantasy world settings. (My review code is as follows ^ = thumbs up, ^^ = 2 thumbs up, v = thumb down)

v "Dragon's Deep" - Cecelia Holland (I liked the beginning of the story, about a village whose taxes have been raised and what the villagers must do in order to survive, but an ... unpleasant event occurs part way through that made the ending less plausible - and palatable - for me.)
^ "Vici" - Naomi Novik (I haven't read her novels, but if this story, set in ancient Rome, is an example, then I'll definitely be picking them up.)
^ "Bob Choi's Last Job" - Jonathan Stroud (An interesting detective story where dragons can cloak themselves to look like humans.)
^ "Are You Afflicted with Dragons?" - Kage Baker (Loved the premise, that dragons are small pests, kind of like pigeons, and need to be dealt with. However, I found the ending too abrupt.)
^ "The Tsar's Dragons" - Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple (Taking place just before the Russian Revolution, both Rasputin and Leon Trotsky make appearances.)
^ "The Dragon of Direfell" - Liz Williams (This story, about a magician called in to deal with a dragon, was cleverly written and had a great ending.)
^^ "Oakland Dragon Blues" - Peter S. Beagle (Another great story, a cop's called in to move a dragon who's obstructing traffic, not that he'd later admit that's what it was. Shows how reality is shaped by belief.)
v "Humane Killer" - Diana Gabaldon & Samuel Sykes (Two stories that intersect, one half tells of a magician and her knight protector, the other half tells of a knight in training and his scarred sister companion. Neither group is what they appear and both are sent to kill the same dragon. I found the story rather long and boring with rather unsympathetic characters.)
^^ "Stop!" - Garth Nix (A man walks onto an US army a-bomb test site. Sounds odd but the story works and is one of the best in the collection.)
^ "Ungentle Fire" - Sean Williams (A coming of age story where a boy is sent to slay a dragon, but is unsure whether following his master is still the correct course of action.)
^^ "A Stark and Wormy Knight" - Tad Williams (A fantastic tale of a dragon telling her son a bed time story. It uses dialect, but the tale itself is fun, not the least for being from the dragon's POV.)
^ "None So Blind" - Harry Turtledove (Colonial soldiers examine a mountain range inhabited by savages concerning rumours of dragons.)
^ "JoBoy" - Diana Wynne Jones (A strange but interesting story of a man whose father mysteriously dies and who, himself, falls prey to an undiagnosable illness.)
^ "Puz-le" = Gregory Maguire (Ellen's so bored from being stuck in the cottage due to rain that she decides to do a puzzle. Only the picture keeps changing. The character's aren't that likable, but Maguire writes them so well you don't really care.)
^^ "After the Third Kiss" - Bruce Coville (This story has the feel of a fairytale in that it's bizarre, has an evil step-mother and a relatively happy ending. There are some great twists in the tale of a girl changed into a dragon who needs her brothers kisses in order to become human again. It was another one of my favourites.)
^ "The War That Winter Is" - Tanith Lee (An ice dragon terrorizes those living in northern climes, freezing whole villages with his breath, until a hero is born. A tale about discovering your own purpose in life rather than doing what others want you to do.)
^ "The Dragon's Tale" - Tamora Pierce (A second story told from a dragon's POV, this time a young dragon who wants to help a woman and her child.)
^^ "Dragon Storm" - Mary Rosenblum (Tahlia of the 'bad-luck eyes' has a way with dragons, but a bully from the grove where she lives threatens her life, and the role she might play in keeping the groves safe from the Kark. A highly enjoyable story, with interesting characters.)
^ "The Dragaman's Bride" - Andy Duncan (Mountain youths are disappearing and Pearl, a magician stumbles onto the reason for the mystery.)

The book has, in my opinion, 5 exceptional stories and 2 bad to mediocre stories. The others were fun reads and did show originality in dealing with dragons. Ultimately, this is a great collection for anyone who loves dragons or who wants to know more about them.

Runaway - Movie Review

I remember seeing this film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, as a child. I remember it as the only movie that scared the daylights out of me and gave me nightmares. So I decided to rent it as an adult and see WHY it scared me so much as I only remembered a few scenes from the film.

Tom Selleck plays police sergeant Jack Ramsay, whose job is to stop machines that have circumvented their programming and become dangerous. Runaways. In the process of investigating a few runaways, he discovers that the machines aren't runaways at all. A chip has been inserted that turns them into killing machines.

While the acting is often over the top (or, in the case of Ramsay's son, underacted), and the special effects cheesy by today's standards, the plot holds. As does the creepiness of seeing spider like robots jump on people and stab them in the throat with needles (the scenes that creeped me out as a kid).

Crichton had no problem killing characters either, which made watching this a real edge of my seat experience.

Here's the movie trailer:

Mark Teppo - Author Interview

Novels:

LIGHTBREAKER

HEARTLAND

website: http://www.markteppo.com/

Q: Pitch The first novel of your series.

A: LIGHTBREAKER is a Dan Brown thriller written by Aleister Crowley, wherein everyone who is after the mystical secret key of the universe actually knows how to use it. And they're willing to break things in order to get it. It's the first book in a longer series, the CODEX OF SOULS.

Q: What are your favourite three books ?

A: Gene Wolfe's BOOK OF THE NEW SUN series (it's all one book, really, and one of them by itself doesn't bake your brain like the whole quartet does), Grant Morrison's THE INVISIBLES (again, the sum is mightier than the parts), and James Elroy's WHITE JAZZ. No one packs more degradation, guilt, and despair in a single sentence fragment than that man.

Q: What made you want to be a writer?

A: Huh, I can't remember, actually. Couldn't be that school-wide writing competition I won back in sixth grade, mainly because I didn't know there was one until my English teacher submitted the piece I had written for my creative writing class. Though, it probably has something to do with Lloyd Alexander-esque story I wrote as my final paper on T. S. Eliot for my Survey of English Lit class in college. When you manage to convince the grad student running the class that such a story will, in many ways, display more effectively one's understanding of "The Wasteland" than a mind-numbing ramble—with footnotes--that's a pretty clear sign that you'd rather be making things up for a living than anything else.

Q: In the books you’ve written, who is you favourite character and why?

A: I really like my version of Rudolph in the Christmas stories, which, alas, no one other than the people on my Christmas card list (three years running) have seen. Of course, should someone like to publish them…

I do like Markham, the protagonist of the CODEX books, quite a bit. He's been in my head long enough that he's become somewhat emo from all that time of waiting for something to happen, but I think I'm breaking him of that habit fairly quickly. LIGHTBREAKER and HEARTLAND have been "works-in-progress" for so long that there's a certain amount of psychic baggage attached to them, and it's been nice to finally be done with them. I'm actually excited about ANGEL TONGUE (book 3) and the ones that follow, as they're books which have no previous drafts floating around. It'll be new ground for me, and I think that'll reflect pretty clearly in Markham's attitude.

Q: If you could, would you change places with any of your characters?

A: Oh, dear, no. I try very hard to break them--psychologically and physically. It wouldn't be much fun to be on the receiving end of a capricious deity's whims. Though, they do surprise me, which is part of the fascination with being a writer. You have these creatures whom you think operate on very specific rulesets--ones that you've given them--and they always break free and find their own path. It's when the characters start pushing back on the outline that I feel like I've got a real book on my hands.

Q: If you could live in your fantasy/sf world, would you? Would you live in somebody else’s?

A: I'm trying to ground the CODEX enough in reality (especially in books 3 and 4) that it's only fantasy by a stretch of my imagination, and some days, I wish it were more true that it is. It would certainly explain a lot of things. Given the opportunity, though, I think it'd be fascinating to live in some of the worlds of the French graphic artists: Moebius, Druillet, or Schuiten.

Q: What was the first novel (published or unpublished) that you wrote and how long did it take to write it?

A: It was called SOULS OF THE LIVING and I wrote it in a sixty-day spurt at the beginning of 1995. All that remains of it are the framework of a few scenes and a handful of characters, but it was the first draft of what became LIGHTBREAKER.

Q: What was the hardest scene for you to write?

A: The first one on an otherwise blank page. It may not be the first scene of the book, but it's the first scene I write of a new book. I hate getting started.

Q: Share an interesting fan story.

A: Someone, who I've known for a very long time, recently finished LIGHTBREAKER and gave me a strange look the day after. "Are you," she asked, "You know, one of them?" I played dumb. "One of who?" "One of those guys. A…Traveler?"

For a second or two, I thought about saying yes, but I could tell it took a lot for her to even ask the question, and to mess with her would have been mean. Though, it may be like the old maxim about the Rosicrucians. If you say you are a Rosicrucian, you aren't. If you deny it, you probably are.

Q: What was the most fun book signing, convention, etc. you’ve attended and why?

A: I still get a kick out of being able to publicly point to the book and say (in a loud voice), "Why, yes, I wrote that. Why do you ask?" LIGHTBREAKER has only been physically on the shelves for about six months and so people are still discovering it. So any opportunity I have to do some sort of promotion or event has been a hoot. It's not work yet. It's not the grind of "Oh, drat; a sixteen city tour this month." It's: "Oh, look! A stack of books I've not signed. Who has a pen?"

Q: If you still have one, what’s your day job?

A: I still have the day job, where I do a variety of technical things for a biotech company in Seattle. Most of the time the job involves taking data from one system, massaging it, and giving it to another system, but doing it all through the magic of "middleware."

Q: What is your university degree in and does it help with your writing?

A: I had enough science for a B.S. in the Arts and Letters, but I couldn't say it with a straight face. It was a generalized liberal arts degree, but we were expected to declare a focus and write a thesis. I did mine on Creative Mythology, and wrote about the use of mythological tropes and sacred elements within both popular fiction and literature. Clive Cussler's TREASURE was actually a cornerstone to my thesis. I think my advisor was appalled on some level; more so because I made it work. Has it helped? Yes, I'm still milking the research I did back then. Every time I mention Mircea Eliade or use the phrase 'in illo tempore' in the books, I'm just validating my college degree.

Q: Do you think it is easier to write fantasy or science fiction?

A: I used to think fantasy was, because you could make everything up and no one would be able to call you on the places where you got things wrong (unlike science fiction), but I've come to realize that making things up--on such a global level--is probably more work. None of it is easy, I think, the trick is to make it fun, and both have their pluses and minuses.

I just finished a 21st century corporate espionage piece for Electric Velocipede (in issue #19; www.electricvelocipede.com) that was the first real "science fiction" that I've written, and I think I managed to not embarrass myself on the tech side of things. But it was an entirely different set of mental peregrinations than the sort of thing I do for the fantasy. In fact, now that I think about it, I made everything up for that story, whereas a lot of the fantastic elements in the CODEX books are researched fairly intently. Apparently, I'm doing it backward.

Q: When and where do you write?

A: I write on the train or at the coffee shop, mostly. I finally admitted to myself recently that I don't really write at home. Partly it is because the way my day is structured, the commute is set aside as my writing time, and I guard it religiously. As I became more accustomed to being a mobile writer, working at the coffee shop became the obvious extension of that.

Q: What’s the best/worst thing about writing?

A: I used to think it was the editing, but now I really enjoy the process of fixing a story. First drafts tend to be fragmentary (not surprising, based on how I write them), and so there's a real sense of satisfaction in putting this awkward, jagged thing together. The worst part is how isolating the work can be. By the time someone reads a book you've written, it may be several years--and several projects--later for you, and it can be hard to share in a reader's excitement about the work. At the same time, all the things you find fascinating RIGHT NOW are meaningless to anyone else because they're not as involved in them as you are.

Q: What is something you didn’t know about the publishing industry before you had your first book published?

A: Nothing happens overnight, even when it looks like it does. A writer has to be stubbornly determined in order to get a book done; they also have to be Zen masters of patience while they wait for something to happen.

Q: Do you have any advice for hopeful authors?

A: Write every single day. Doesn't matter where or how or how much. Do it. Do it long enough, it gets easier. Do it more, and it becomes part of who you are.

Q: Any tips against writers block?

A: Writer's block is mainly an issue of you over-thinking what needs to go on the page. Usually, I do something else as I've found that whatever I manage to eke out during these periods is usually so bad that it all gets cut anyway. There's always reading to be done, so that's what I go do. Eventually, the knot dissolves itself and the flow starts again. Or if you stack up enough projects, when one stalls out, you switch to something else. I don't get writer's block much anymore, really, as my writing time is broken up enough that any trouble I'm having with a scene is usually worked out in my subconscious between sessions.

Q: How do you discipline yourself to write?

A: I have two forty minute blocks in a day. I need to do 30,000 words a month. I typically write 1000 words an hour. My schedule only has six days a week of writing time on it, so…(doing the math)…yeah, I'm always behind in the word count. That does wonders for disciple.

Q: How many rejection letters did you get for your first novel or story?

A: SOULS OF THE LIVING was shopped for two years before we shelved it. I got about a dozen rejections during that iteration. When we tried again with it a half-dozen years later (after a page one rewrite to make it LIGHTBREAKER), we had one rejection before two houses went to the mat for it.