A Book By Its Cover: Grave Dance by Kalayna Price
Book Cover Blurb: Darla Onomatopoeia is an amateur Grave Dancer, one of the few people in Manhattan who still practices the ancient, misty art. But unlike her mother, who once made a cemetery of Civil War veterans come to life and do the cha cha, Darla can barely raise her recently deceased grandmother long enough to teach the old bitty to line dance. And with the 3,000th Annual Grave Dance Competition coming in two months, she’s desperate to spruce up her skills to show all her Grave Dancing friends that she’s not a loser after all… Enter Alex Craft, dance instructor extraordinaire. Having out-danced the Grave Witch of Brooklyn, Alex might be the only one who can turn Darla into an effective Grave Dancer. A half-immortal, half-fae wererabbit, Alex has the skills and determination Darla needs to teach the dead how to dance the “Thriller,” which hasn’t been done…ever. But Darla has another problem: an unexpected sexual tension between her and Alex. Can she resist Alex’s misogynistic charm and rustic good looks? Or will she let her baser instincts take over and sweep her wererabbit dance instructor off his furry little feet? Grave Dance is a dark tome which hides a great deal of its world in misty obscurity. Price has created a remarkable piece of curvaceous eye-candy here, cleverly placing character traits at just right angle to direct the reader’s attention to the truly interesting aspects of Darla’s character. But she has also attempted to hide Darla’s past in a shroud, leaving a great deal to be discovered by the reader in future books. One of the interesting aspects of the book is the fact that it is actually set on an alternate Earth. Many readers may find
Feed the Machine: Genetic Time
Clicketh You all should realize now the the Long Now blog has some of the best story starters on the web, especially if you’re into concepts like time. This one is about the different times scales in our body, and what controls them, and what would happen if we could control them. What would happen if we could slow down our metabolism to barely above hibernation? Could we live for hundreds, thousands of years? When we got old, could we reverse our reproductive cycle to regress our bodies to their pubescent or even pre-pubescent state, rendering us immortal? Could we reverse this and make infants adults? What sort of cultural consequences would this have on issues such as marriage and sex? What sort of economic benefits would this reap for the creators? What would religious do in the face of legit immortality? Go explore young ones, old ones, and transitioning ones.
Episode 59 — Torture Cinema Meets War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/www.archive.org/download/TheSkiffyAndFantyShow4.6–TortureCinemaMeetsWarOfTheWorlds2The/Sandf–Episode4.6–TortureCinemaMeetsWarOfTheWorlds2theNextWave.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSWhat could be worse than a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake of an adaptation of a remade adapted adaptation remake based on a book? A sequel… The title says it all. We spend the whole episode trying to desperately to make it through our 5-by-5s. Tune in to see if we succeeded. (We have Eoghann Irving to thank for this month’s awful movie selection. Thanks, jerk.) Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below): Episode 59 — Download (MP3) Torture Cinema Meets War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (0:00 – 47:05) War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (IMDB) (Burn in hell, mutant movie!) You should also check out our friends at Adventures in Scifi Publishing. The end of episode 4.6 has the new promo for their show, which you should listen to! Our new intro music is “Time Flux” by Revolution Void (CC BY 3.0). That’s all, folks! Thanks for listening. See you next week.
Book of Interest: The Office of Lost and Found by Vincent Holland-Keen
We’ll be posting about things like this every once in a while (i.e., promos for interesting books). Since we’ve already read one book from Anarchy Books (Serial Killers, Inc. — we loved it!), we figured it wouldn’t hurt to let you all know about another monstrosity to appear from their wicked coffers (of wickedness, no doubt)! Here you go: Thomas Locke can find anything. You know the hurricane that hit a while back? Word is he found the butterfly that started it. So, when a desperate Veronica Drysdale hires Locke to find her missing husband, it makes perfect sense. Except the world of Thomas Locke doesn’t make sense. It puts monsters under the bed, makes stars fall from the sky and leads little children to worship the marvels of road-works. This world also hides from Veronica a past far darker and stranger than she could ever have imagined. To learn the truth, Veronica is going to have to lose everything. And that’s where Locke’s shadowy business partner Lafarge comes in… FOCUS ON –
Children of a Factory Nation Short Story Contest (Anarchy Books)
The deliciously twisted Andy Remic recently brought this contest to our attention, and now we’re bringing it to yours. Make sure to spread the word: Jordan Reyne’s new album, Children of a Factory Nation, is being released September 2011 and follows a family who lived in Wales in the late 1800s during the Industrial Revolution. Like many alive in their time, they faced problems relating to difficult working conditions, poverty, and the tyranny of circumstance. This album constructs stories from facts known about Johnathan, Mary, their children Molly & Thomas, and grandchild Wynne. The competition is to write a short story surrounding any character or sets of characters from Children of a Factory Nation using Jordan Reyne’s lyrics or the facts about their real life counterparts as a starting point. The competition will be judged by Andy Remic, SFF author and co-owner of Anarchy Books, John
Gollancz and the SF Gateway — What do you think?
Folks have been talking about the big news all day: Gollancz is creating a new imprint designed to published ebooks of author’s backlists. It’s called the SF Gateway (they’re also on Twitter). One part “social network” and one part back list publishing scheme, this is probably a step in the right direction for Gollancz (and Orion Publishing Group). Here’s the text from the press release (the PDF can be found here): Gollancz, the SF and Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, announces the launch of the world’s largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway, which will make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks. Building on the remarkable success of Gollancz’s Masterworks series, the SF Gateway will launch this Autumn with more than a thousand titles by close to a hundred authors. It will build to 3,000 titles by the end of 2012, and 5,000 or more by 2014. Gollancz’s Digital Publisher Darren Nash, who joined the company in September 2010 to spearhead the project said, “The Masterworks series has been extraordinarily successful in republishing one or two key titles by a wide range of authors, but most of those authors had long careers in which they wrote dozens of novels which had fallen out of print. It seemed to us that eBooks would offer the ideal way to make them available again. This realization was the starting point for the SF Gateway.” Wherever possible, the SF Gateway will offer the complete backlist of the authors included. The SF Gateway will be closely integrated with the recently announced new online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which provides an independent and definitive reference source of information on the authors and books included. Direct links between the Encyclopedia and the Gateway will provide easy access to eBook editions, for sale through all major online retailers. The Gateway site will also act as a major community hub and social network for SF readers across the world, allowing them to interact with each other and recommend titles and authors. The site is planned to include forums, blogs, regular promotions, and is envisaged to become the natural home on the net for anyone with an interest in classic SFF. Authors featured in the launch include such names as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Alice B. Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr), Robert Silverberg, Kate Wilhelm and Connie Willis. A full list of authors so far under contract is appended to this announcement; negotiations are in an advanced state for many more. There’s much more to be read in the PDF if you’re interested (it includes the impetus behind SF Gateway’s creation and other fun stuff). The project is set to take off in September, which is mighty soon! Personally, I think this is a pretty cool thing to do, and it’s something I said should have been done years ago when POD publishing was taking off. Why would publishers ever let books go out of print when they have the tools necessary to keep things in print for as long as they have the right to print the books? Not doing so means lost revenue, even if author back lists only sell a few books here or there. So, I’m quite fond of the idea! What do you all think about the new project?
