I’m a bad person. I said I’d tell everyone about this on Monday. It’s now Friday. So be it. So without further delay, here’s the winner of a copy of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: Joseph Benincase His favorite science fiction novel was The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester! So, congrats!
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Daniel Ionson to talk about how his power of making nothing happen relates to After Life. In the game of Paper-Rock-Scissors, my superpower trumps all of the Supermen, X-Men, Whatever-Men, every time… in the most boring way possible. It’s the “Non-Event Sphere.” Wherever I go, there, nothing happens. How did I get such a plain cheese-sandwich superpower? Because the Universe and I made a pact: I decided that I was willing to forgo anything like an “adventurous life” so long as I can have an entire expanding series of multiverses in my head.
I buy quite a lot of comics — probably not as many as some, but enough that my collection has started to get a little overwhelming. There are currently two long boxes of comics in my closet. Full. And on top of those long boxes are two stacks of comics that are likely to fill a third long box. That’s a lot of comics to have collected in only a few months. Lucky for me, I am good at finding deals, and my local comic guy gives me a discount on new comics if I pre-order them.[1] On top of that, I easily read fifty or sixty comics a month when I’m busy. Right now, I’m 11 comics into Marvel’s The Ultimates, which I mostly read during the shortest third leg of my flight from Florida to California.[2][3] On a good month, I can go through a crossover event or two in a week — Flashpoint and Avengers vs. X-Men events took me less than a week each. [4] So not only am I buying the heck out of comics, I’m also reading them
In late 1930’s Rome, American archaeologist Martin Padway is having a holiday from his dig in Lebanon. Over dinner with his Italian friend Tancredi, a discussion of the nature of time and how a man might change the web of time becomes of eminently practical use when, a few hours later while studying the Pantheon, Martin finds himself cast back in time, to 6th Century Rome. In 535 AD Rome, The Roman Empire is a half century dead, in the West anyway. The Gothic Kingdom rules Rome and Italy. The Byzantines lurk to the East, dreaming of reconquering Italy for the Eastern Roman Empire. Martin himself is a stranger in a strange land, of competing Christian sects and ambitious nobles. Its going to take all of Martin’s wits to not only survive in an alien country, but to forge an even grander scheme. You see, at the cusp of the long slide after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Martin realizes he is at an important moment of history, and as per his old friend, might be able to tackle the greatest challenge of all: To keep the Dark Ages from occurring. Lest Darkness Fall is a classic time travel story by L. Sprague De Camp. In six decades of writing, L. Sprague De Camp, separately and in collaboration, wrote over 100 books and numerous stories. From straight historical novels like Dragon at the Ishtar Gate to time travel stories like Lest Darkness Fall to reconstituting Burroughs like Sword and Planet stories with the Viagens Interplantarias series, De Camp was a seminal figure of early science fiction and fantasy who quietly but inexorably influenced generations of contemporaries and successors. While the conceit and methodology of sending Padway into the past is clearly just a literary device, once Padway finds himself in Rome, the novel goes into a “hard alternate history” sort of mode. No more fantastic elements. Padway struggles with the language; his Latin is rusty, and it gives De Camp a
When you’re in traditional trade publishing, as I am, you quickly learn that there are a lot of people working on any given book. Not just the editor, the publicist, and the marketing manager, but sales reps, digital sales staff, warehouse staff, and more. Publishing with a larger press involves becoming part of a very large publishing effort. When you’re sitting in the place of the author, that is both exciting and terrifying. There are, on average, many people between you and the ultimate retail buyer, using the normal model. Having social media in place and attending conventions allows writers to connect directly, but in the normal publishing workflow, things go like this: You write a book. It’s awesome. Then you figure out how to sell that book to an agent — ‘sell’ here in terms of ‘convincing them it’s a project to get excited about.’ Then the agent sells it to an editor. The editor has to sell it to their Publisher and/or the editorial team. Then the team has to sell it to the sales, marketing, and publicity staff. Then the sales staff goes out into the field, to libraries, and so on, and sells the book to wholesalers and retailers. Then the retailers have to sell the book to readers. It’s a big chain, and in order to give the book the best chance to succeed, each person along the way has to be a bookseller — they have to learn how to
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Michael J. Martinez to talk about how his super-powered burrowing writer-mind relates to The Gravity of the Affair. The scene: a typical weekend, with my daughter and her friends running about the house, doing the inexplicable, strange and occasionally cute things girls do. My wife is reading. I’m in my favorite chair, laptop on lap, fingers flying through The Gravity of the Affair, my novella set in the Known Worlds of the Daedalus series. A ship is under attack by unknown privateers. Alchemical cannon fire lances through the Void into wooden hulls,
