Blog Posts

Torture Cinema Polls

Torture Cinema Poll #4: Pick Our Next Movie

It’s time to pick another movie.  We hope you make the right choice, because the last one you all picked as awful… And don’t forget that you can always suggest new movies to add to our larger list.  We don’t watch anything you don’t let us know about!  After all, we watch bad science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies so you don’t have to…

Blog Posts

Lit Bits: Arctic Rising Cover and Blurb (Tobias S. Buckell)

You all remember Tobias Buckell, right?  He wrote some really awesome books and finally came onto the show for episode 3.0 after we begged him for years and years.  We even sent him stuffed bears with his face on them to convince him to grace us with his presence… Okay, so none of that is true (sadly), but he did come on the show all those episodes ago.  If you haven’t listened to that episode, you probably should (because it’s awesome, obviously). In any case, we finally have some news about Arctic Rising, his latest book.  First, the back cover blurb: Global warming has transformed the Earth, and it’s about to get even hotter. The Arctic ice cap has all but melted, and the international community is racing desperately to claim the massive amounts of oil beneath the newly accessible ocean. Enter the Gaia Corporation. Its two founders have come up with a plan to roll back global warming. They plan to terraform Earth to save it from itself—but in doing so, they have created a superweapon the likes of which the world has never seen. Anika Duncan is an airship pilot for the underfunded United Nations Polar Guard. She’s intent on capturing a smuggled nuclear weapon that has made it into the Polar Circle and bringing the smugglers to justice. Anika finds herself caught up in a plot by a cabal of military agencies and corporations who want Gaia Corporation stopped. But when Gaia loses control of their superweapon, it will be Anika who has to decide the future of the world. Sounds interesting, right? Now for the cover:

Blog Posts

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

Blog Posts

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.  

Blog Posts

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 –

Blog Posts

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

Scroll to Top