The Wild Cards universe has been thrilling readers for over 25 years. In Carrie Vaughn’s “The Thing about Growing Up in Jokertown,” a group of teenage jokers yearn to explore outside the confines of their strange little neighborhood and get a real taste of the Big Apple.
[Read “The Thing About Growing up in Jokertown” by Carrie Vaughn]
Oona’s blood is a river delta blending east and west, her hair red as Tennessee clay, her heart tangled as the wild lands she maps. By tracing rivers in ink on paper, Oona pins the land down to one reality and betrays her people. Can she escape the bonds of gold and blood and bone that tie her to the Imperial American River Company?
[Read “The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage” by Alix E. Harrow]
“The Story of Kao Yu” is a new fantasy short story by the legendary Peter S. Beagle which tells of an aging judge traveling through rural China and of a criminal he encounters. Of the story, Beagle says it “comes out of a lifelong fascination with Asian legendry — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian — all drawn from cultures where storytelling, in one form of another, remains a living art. As a young writer I loved everything from Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries to Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of Japanese fairytales and many lesser-known fantasies. Like my story ‘The Tale of Junko and Sayuri,’ ‘The Story of Kao Yu’ is a respectful imitation of an ancient style, and never pretends to be anything else. But I wrote it with great care and love, and I’m still proud of it.“
After the collapse of civilization Nora and her family live a quiet life in the Midwestern Plains until a great fiery god of the sky descends and makes her an irresistible offer—an offer that will take her away from those she loves forever. “Dragons of Tomorrow” is a standalone story by the author of the Stranje House series, available now from Tor Teen.
Miss Pippa Kipling and her automaton companion, the Porter, exterminate pests of the supernatural variety. What should be a typical job in your average haunted cavern soon derails in an inconveniently undead fashion. Even with the aid of her gadget collection and the Porter’s prowess, this task may prove fatal for Miss Kipling—or worse, rip her petticoat.
Odds are that you’ve missed one of the best articles Tor.com has published this year.
Don’t worry; it happens! Tor.com publishes nearly 4000 non-fiction articles every year, ranging from quick news items to lengthy and unique features, so there’s bound to be stuff that heads downstream unnoticed.
That’s why this year we’re collecting Highlights From Tor.com’s Articles in 2016 into one handy list! Check out some great writing advice, read the personal stories that shook us up inside, and peruse some of the weirdest stuff that bubbled up onto the website this year.
This Christmas, the Robert Jordan estate is offering a special holiday treat for fans of the author’s epic Wheel of Time fantasy series: The English-to-Old-Tongue Dictionary!
The Old Tongue is a fantasy language within Jordan’s Wheel of Time that is typically used in the story to signify important aspects of the universe, the knowledge of which proves key in the series’ ongoing battle against the Shadow. While it is reminiscent of Tolkien’s ground-up creation of Elvish languages for The Lord of the Rings, The Old Tongue differs in that Jordan took a top-down approach, creating a dictionary of terms from which some basic suffixes, roots, and usage rules emerged.
Much has been said—over and over again and usually with well-intentioned sciolism—about those blasted Eagles in The Lord of the Rings.
There is actually precious little written about Tolkien’s imperious birds of prey, and I suppose that’s why it’s easy to armchair criticize the good professor for his use of them as eleventh-hour saviors. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some important distinctions to make. And what’s not to love about giant raptors? Since the rocs of Eastern legends and Marco Polo’s apocryphal adventures, everyone is fascinated by the idea of big birds, right?
Please enjoy this encore post on The Flight of the Navigator, originally published April 2016.
When you’re a child, you imbibe a plethora of entertainment that often helps shape the core of your personality. Some of that entertainment is wildly popular, but some, you find, doesn’t always stand the test of time. You know, like Street Sharks. (My spouse insists this was a thing. I have no memory of it whatsoever.)
Flight of the Navigator is one of those films for me. When I bring it up, I’m often met with vacant stares or vague recollections. There aren’t many people reaching out to grab my hands, screaming, “Oh my god THAT movie! I LOVE that movie!” But nevertheless, I will adore it with every breath in my body unto the end of time. And unlike most of those odd Disney live action films of the 70s and 80s, Flight of the Navigator seems to get better with age.
Please enjoy this encore post on The Hobbit from a horse-lover’s perspective, originally published March 2016.
A certain degree of affection for Tolkien and his works is almost a geek shibboleth, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time feeling bad about my almost total indifference towards The Lord of the Rings. I enjoyed Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party, but absolutely could not tolerate the Mines of Moria, or whatever it was they had to trudge through for, like, ever to get to I don’t even know where because I gave up. I never even tried the rest of the trilogy. I thought the movies were OK, but kind of long. I don’t think this makes me a bad geek. I’ve read Diana Wynne Jones’s description of Tolkien as a lecturer at Oxford, and I don’t think I’m missing that much.
Out of respect for the traditions of my people, I have read The Hobbit, and read it to my children. It’s an enjoyable enough piece of light entertainment. I understand that the work has found an audience of devoted fans. But I am a reader with different priorities—and JRR Tolkien is almost unforgivably bad at horses. Tolkien will go on to do a better job with horses in later books: Samwise and Frodo named their ponies, and Frodo tries to rescue his from some trolls; Shadowfax is pretty cool; the Riders of Rohan seem like they would pass muster with the Pony Club. The Hobbit, however, is an equine abattoir. [Read more]
Please enjoy this encore post on one author’s fundamental need to travel, originally published March 2016.
In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity!
There is a secret hidden in my writing, admittedly in plain view. I will call it a hobby, so that I don’t sound too obsessed. You see, there are things I like to do and there are things I have to do, things that keep my blood pumping. The only explanation I can come up with is that I must have been born with an excess of iron. My earliest memories involve planes landing and new landscapes flowing past car windows. My parents had wanderlust, but what I have is something more fundamental. My blood, infused with some abundance of magnetized iron, spins like a compass to point to the next destination and I have no choice but to follow. I have to travel.
Please enjoy this encore post on SFF movies with adult lessons, originally published April 2016.
When you’re a kid, the adult world is filled with mysteries. Adults talk about things that are literally and figuratively over your head. If the news comes on, you’ll catch fragments of conflicts that don’t make any sense. If you happen across films or books for adults, there might be scenes that baffle you, since you lack the context.
Sometimes the best way, or even the only way, to understand these huge ideas is through movies. Why don’t people want to live in a shiny new building? What is “light speed”? And how can responsibility ever be fun? Emily and I rounded up a few movies that helped us figure out these huge concepts when we were kids.
Please enjoy this encore post on this year’s science fiction, originally published August 2016.
Reading Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please,” which just won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, I was reminded of both John Varley’s 1984 “Press Enter” and Isaac Asimov’s 1956 “The Last Question”, as well as its direct call out to Bruce Sterling’s 1998 “Maneki Neko”. The narrator of “Cat Pictures Please” is consciously aware of its predecessors and engaging directly with them. That’s not to say it isn’t saying anything original. It could have been written at no other time and place and by no other person: it’s an original story by a terrific writer. But it’s adding another voice to an existing dialog, laying another story on the tower of work that precedes it, and in a way that shows how aware Kritzer is of all that preceding work. We’ve had a lot of stories about secretly emergent AI, all written with the technology and expectations of their times. This is one written now, with our technology, a new angle, a wider perspective, and a definite consciousness of what it’s adding to.
There’s a tremendous continuity within science fiction, where the genre constantly feeds on itself, reinvents itself, and revisits old issues in new ways as times and tech change. It’s fascinating to consider how today’s new stories are all things that could never have been written at any earlier time and simultaneously deeply influenced by everything that has come before. The old work of the genre is the mulch out of which the new work grows. A great deal of science fiction is about the future—a future fleshed out in the present, and built on the bones of the past. Every present moment has a different imagination of the way the future might play out, and that gives us constant novelty. But because many of the issues and tropes of science fiction remain relevant, there is also a constant process of reexamination, a replacement of old answers with new answers to the same questions.
Please enjoy this encore post on tribal nerdery, originally published October 2016.
Sometimes I wonder what color my vomit will be when someone tries to hold up Revenge of the Nerds as an important cultural piece of pop culture history.
That might sound crude, of course, but in my defense I didn’t specify what would cause the bodily ejection. I’ve just been at New York Comic Con, see, where I’ve been alternately drinking heavily and meandering through a crowd where we are all breathing heavily on each other and generally absorbed in the miasma of color and sound that is our beautiful pop culture landscape.
And it’s kind of hard to imagine going back to an era where nerds were persecuted.
Please enjoy this encore post on preparing for book events, originally published October 2016.
So now your book is being published and you’re overwhelmed in general about things, and in specific about this event, and WHEN WILL THE HELPFUL EVENT WIZARD SHOW UP AND HELP YOU?
The wizard is in, friends, and it’s time to roll for initiative.
First, as a shiny new author, you should rethink how you look at events. It’s not just a single blip on your calendar and done. It’s a continuum. Your book event is like the first date in a long and fruitful relationship with a particular bookstore. Many authors have their first book events at their local bookstore, so this is a vital relationship.
And much like dating, debut book events can be confusing and stress-inducing. So where does a new author start?
In honor of the 50th anniversary of both Star Trek and the 1966 Batman TV series, we’ll be spending this final week of 2016 looking at items that relate to one or both of those shows. We conclude with a 1964 pilot that wasn’t picked up for a series, though it was aired as an episode of the anthology Off to See the Wizard in January 1968 due to its stars becoming somewhat more famous in the intervening four years. (Ahem.)
Alexander the Great
Written by Robert Pirosh and William Yates
Directed by Phil Karlson
Original air date: January 26, 1968
The first three title cards tell you everything you need to know: Alexander the Great. Starring William Shatner. Co-starring Adam West. Two years before both men would go on to star in TV shows that would become such a major part of the pop-culture landscape that some long-haired hippie weirdo freak would be writing about them every week for a web site, they starred in this pilot for a sword-and-sandal epic.
Welcome back to the Warbreaker reread! Last week, Vivenna was repeatedly sent spinning as she tried to cope with mercenaries and the death of Lemex. This week, we return to a decidedly bored Siri, as she attempts to find something interesting to do with herself—since kneeling naked on the floor for hours is definitely not at the top of the list.
This reread will contain spoilers for all of Warbreaker and any other Cosmere book that becomes relevant to the discussion. This is particularly likely to include Words of Radiance, due to certain crossover characters. The index for this reread can be found here.
Click on through to join the discussion!
[“I’ll have to eat quickly. After all, I wouldn’t want to be late for the evening’s ogling.”]
Please enjoy this encore post on the love lives of Jedi, originally published January 2016.
When we talk about the fall of the Jedi during the Republic Era, it’s common for people to cite the Jedi Order’s many flaws as at least part of the reason why they were wiped out. After all, they did wind up participating heavily in a galactic war that was specifically designed to lead to their destruction while a Sith Lord operated right in front of their Force-sensitive faces. Perhaps stagnation led to this unfortunate short-sightedness—we’re led to believe that tenets of Jedi “culture” (for lack of a better term) have been in place since their relative inception, thousands of years ago.
But what baffles me is how everyone usually translates this knightly code into an adamant certainty that Jedi never knocked anything more than their lightsabers together.
Never-before-read Star Wars secrets! Stormlight Archive Book 3! A Nutella-loving space spider? Here are just some of the books coming out in 2017 that we would really like to read right this second.
Please enjoy this encore post on Jason Denzel’s magical road trip, originally published August 2016.
Greetings witches, wizards, and muggles! (Or, No-Maj’s, if you prefer) With the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, along with early buzz for the upcoming film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, I’ve recently felt Potter fever consuming me again. Hyping my excitement even more is the fact that my 11 and 8 year old boys are enjoying the books for the first time, which makes everything new and special again in its own way.
So when I flew across the country, from California to Massachusetts, to conduct some business for the company I work for, I knew I had to take an afternoon off and check out the summit of Mount Greylock, the supposed location of Ilvermorny, the magical American school modeled after Hogwarts. What follows is an account of my road trip across the state of Massachusetts, culminating at the peak of the state’s highest mountain. What I found there was, well… unexpected.
Large Gothic letters on the front cover of Robert Nye’s 1978 novel Merlin announce the book as “A Very Adult Fantasy.” To underline the book’s adult credentials, the book’s designer has set the “Very” in “Very Adult” in scarlet. The prospective reader can be forgiven for imagining a tediously bawdy assault on Arthurian legend, a story where “swords” are rarely ever swords, where rescued damsels are always willing, and where the repeated jokes get old fast. I love Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but I have no desire to see the Castle Anthrax scene crammed between covers and stretched into a novel.
If all I knew of this book were what I saw on its front, I would have left it on the shelf.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of both Star Trek and the 1966 Batman TV series, we’ll be spending this final week of 2016 looking at items that relate to one or both of those shows. We continue with two shorts that William Dozier made. The first was made between the second and third seasons to convince ABC to add Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl to the show’s opening credits. The second was a five-minute promo Dozier put together to pitch a Wonder Woman TV show.
“Batgirl”
Unaired promo short
The Bat-signal: Barbara fetches a book on butterflies for Bruce, who doesn’t recognize her at first, until she explains that she’s Gordon’s daughter. He and Dick are there chatting with another millionaire, Roger Montrose, the lepidopterist (the book she fetched for Bruce is to settle a bet).
Please enjoy this encore post about religion in SFF, originally published November 2016.
Of all the genres, science fiction and fantasy are the ones where humans can tackle their deepest societal problems and thought experiments. Because of this, it’s a natural place for people to explore ideas about religion, faith, and the meaning of life…
Religion can also be an emotional and contentious topic for people. For people who choose to leave a religious tradition, science and science fiction can become the home they didn’t find in a church or temple, and can also provide a way to critique the life they left. For others, the flexibility of the genre allows them to express their faith, or their questions about their faith, in deeper ways than any other medium would allow.
I thought it would be interesting to look at some examples of books and short stories that have tackled religious questions in respectful and positive ways. While these stories sometimes go to uncomfortable places, they each take faith seriously, and would be worthy additions to the TBR stacks of believers and non-believers alike.
