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Children of a Factory Nation Short Story Contest (Anarchy Books)

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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

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Gollancz and the SF Gateway — What do you think?

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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?

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The Alphas (Episode 2) of Warehouse 13 (Episode 3.2) in Eureka (Episode 412)

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Thank you, SyFy, for making Mondays something to look forward to!  My husband has completely stopped watching Warehouse 13 and hasn’t started watching Alphas, but it’s still a joy to share Eureka with him.. and we got to squee geekily together, which is always a great thing.  However, this week’s episodes of all three were a bit on the serious side (though the Eureka version of serious is never actually THAT serious). Spoilers Ahead!

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A Book by its Cover: Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer

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Back cover blurb: “By the author of “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” one of the great Midwestern marine horror novels of the 21st century, comes a novel so chilling that it comes with a wool blanket at the check out counter. Finnigan Mt. Belucci, estranged son of the famed Belucci Fishing Family, just wants to lead a normal, northern Wisconsin life with his wife, Margaret. He wants to get a few chickens, maybe a cow — lord knows enough of wild beasts roam the countryside — and a little shack on Bayfield’s idyllic coast. Everything is blue bonnet’s and walleye fish fries until a heavy fog rolls in February 14th. The Mt. Belucci’s, on a romantic ferry ride, get stopped half-way between Madeline Island and Bayfield. As strange noises begin to emanate from below deck, all semblance of humanity leaves the ferry goers. As the Belucci’s try desperately to escape the madness around them, one thing becomes immediately apparent: they’ll never look at candy hearts the same again.” Ann Packer made her name in Midwest Gothic, and this is a blissful return to form. Having taken a departure to study French Buddhism, Packer immediately began work on the fevered dreams that would become Swim Back to Me on her return to her native Green Bay. Six years and two dozen drafts later, this little masterpiece dropped on my desk. It’s a slim volume, and innocuous looking. The faded pastels of the cover betray the transgressive musings inside. Packer’s parallels between the color of prop churned seabed and human carnage are nauseating. The early decline of the Mt. Belucci’s relationship over a misinterpreted text message give Packer the opportunity to rebuild their relationship on the boat ride.  However, even though [spoiler alert] Finnigan gets his hand cut off in the second act, forcing Margaret to protect and coddle him back to health through the incredibly rapid onset of infection (one gets the sense that time is distorted on the ferry), we never get the sense that love will retake a hold in their relationship. They rely on the familiar in unfamiliar, and terrifying, surroundings, but, as in King’s 1408, the relationship never re-materializes. This would be my main criticism of the book: the rekindled relationship Packer sets up never comes about. I may have been misinterpreting the foreshadowing, but it seemed as if it was inevitable, and inevitability is a main theme of the novel; from the sense of foreboding that Margaret gets when she sets foot on the ferry, to the mutated fish that claw their way up the hull and begin disemboweling anything with a heartbeat, to the ultimate sacrifice of Captain Helena using her own body as a replacement prop shaft. It seemed out of sorts to have the most inevitable outcome of the book to go by the wayside, but, again, this could be Packer putting us on edge once again. In the end, this is a great example of old school horror done with a deft hand. Recommended. (A Book by its Cover is our new weekly column in which we review a book based solely on the cover, without any other knowledge of what it is about.  Any similarities in our review to the book are purely coincidental and proof that we are awesome)

Torture Cinema Polls

Torture Cinema Poll #3 Results

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We’d like to thank Eoghann Irving for launching a small, but not inconsiderable, campaign for our next Torture Cinema movie selection.  Without him, we’d likely be watching something like Jumper, which is only moderately bad as a movie.  In fact, after all the awful movies we’ve been forced to watch in the last year, we might have actually come to like Jumper.  Maybe. But such niceties are not in the cards, it seems.  Instead of Jumper, we get to watch this: Thanks, Eoghann.  Really.  You’ve just given us the much-needed rationale for committing homicide…

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