SF Signal – A Speculative Fiction Blog

Michaele Jordan‘s novel, Blade Light, is a charming traditional fantasy that was serialized in Jim Baen’s Universe and is now available as an ebook at Amazon or at iBooks. Her newest novel, Mirror Maze, is available now.

The other day we were hanging out with some friends, and my husband (who-bless his heart-is insanely proud of me) boasted to the gang that since I was a member of SFWA now, I was eligible to nominate for the Nebulas.

“Ooh, that’s cool,” gushed one of my friends who (like me) is a great admirer of Neal Stephenson. “Are you going to nominate Reamde?”

“Don’t be silly,” snorted another. “She can’t nominate Reamde; it’s not SF.”

A minor argument ensued. No hard feelings resulted, but neither was the disagreement resolved. In fact, they are probably still at the coffee shop, arguing. (My husband and I went home).

Is Reamde SF?
Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: guest post • Michaele Jordan

Filed under: Books

For a limited time, The Universal Mirror by Gwen Perkins is available as a Kindle platform eBook for the low, low price of free.

Here’s the description:

On the island of Cercia, the gods are dead, killed by their followers and replaced with the study of magic. Magicians are forbidden to leave their homeland. Laws bind these men that prevent them from casting spells on the living—whether to harm or to heal.

Quentin, a young nobleman, challenges these laws out of love for his wife. His best friend, Asahel, defies authority at his side, unaware that the search for this lost magic will bring them both to the edge of reason, threatening their very souls. The Universal Mirror shows how far two men are willing to go for the sake of knowledge and what they will destroy to obtain it.

Trailer follows…
Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: eBook • FreeFiction • Gwen Perkins • Kindle

Filed under: Free Fiction

One of the joys of reading science fiction is the chance to visit faraway worlds. This week at the Kirkus Reviews blog, I take a look at some of the Cool Worlds in Science Fiction.

Tagged with: Kirkus

Filed under: Books • Web Sites

[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

A lot of recent science fiction appears to take place on Earth, and only a minority of space-based science fiction taking place outside the solar system. Novels and stories involving travel to the stars and interstellar travel seems to be out-of-date or out-of-fashion, and even Hard SF treatments of interstellar travel seem as realistic as Star Wars.

We asked this week’s panelists:

Here’s what they said…

I think that like everything else, fads in science fiction run in cycles, and lately there’s been a big ol’ dystopian wave going on. But it’s not as if deep space science fiction, or SF featuring far-flung space civilizations isn’t still being written. Charlie Stross, Iain Banks, Dan Simmons, Greg Bear, Chris Moriarty, C.J. Cherryh–heck, I’ve written a couple of books dealing with far-flung space travel myself.

If you were to nudge the focus of the question over to whether near-future and near-earth SF has been getting more *awards* attention lately, I think you’d be more accurate.

But there are fads in criticism the same as everything else.

Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: bryan Thomas Schmidt • Daniel Abraham • Elizabeth Bear • Fabio Fernandes • Fred Kiesche • Jamie Todd Rubin • Karen Burnham • Karl Schroeder • Kay Kenyon • Kevin J. Anderson • Kristine Rusch • Michael Flynn • Mike Resnick • Rene Sears

Filed under: Interviews • Mind Meld

We are now including selected free eBooks as part of our Free Fiction listing. Please keep in mind that eBook prices can change without warning.

Also, be sure to check out the excerpt on Tor from Saladin Ahmed’s debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon.

And thanks again to Annie!

Written

• @Brain Harvest: “The New Phone” by David Erik Nelson and Fritz Swanson
• @Daily Science Fiction: “Visiting Planet Earth” by Eric Brown
• @Daily Science Fiction: “The Long Con” by Megan R. Engelhardt
• @Lightspeed: “Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring” by Brooke Bolander
• @Lightspeed: “War 3.01″ by Keith Brooke
• @Quantum Muse: “Duex Cerveau” by Michele Dutcher
• Weird Fiction Review – A Michael Cisco Troika: Selections from Unpublished Novels
• @Author’s Site: “Spirit Guides” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: Free Fiction

Filed under: Free Fiction

Hate superheroes? Yeah. They probably hate you, too.

‘There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.’

‘Thank you.’

‘For implying you’re powerful?’

‘For imagining those are two different groups.’

From Crawford Award nominee Deborah Biancotti comes this sinister short story suite, a pocketbook police procedural, set in a world where the victories are only relative, and the defeats are absolute. Bad Power celebrates the worst kind of powers both supernatural and otherwise, in the interlinked tales of five people — and how far they’ll go.

If you like Haven and Heroes, you’ll love Bad Power.

Twelve Planet Press has posted the table of contents for Deborah Biancotti’s new collection Bad Power:

1. “Shades of Grey”
2. “Palming the Lady”
3. “Web of Lies”
4. “Bad Power”
5. “Cross the Bridge”

Tagged with: Deborah Biancotti • TOC

Filed under: Books

Interviews and Profiles

• Tor.com (Peter Orullian) interviews Robin Hobb.
• Clarion Blog (Adam Israel) interviews Ted Chiang.
• Dead Robots Society interviews Myke Cole and Van Allen Plexico (podcast).
• Reddit interviews R.A. Salvatore.
• Lightspeed Magazine (Andrew Liptak) interviews Keith Brooke.
• Adrienne Kress interviews Professor Elemental.
• John Scalzi’s The Big Idea: Saladin Ahmed.
• The New Yorker (Deborah Treisman) interviews Michael Chabon.
• Gollancz interviews Jacqueline Carey.
• The Skiffy and Fanty Show interviews Michael Sullivan.
• Functional Nerds Patrick Hester and John Anealio interview Chuck Wendig and Daniel Polansky.

News

• Buy Under the Moons of Mars, Get a Free Issue of Lightspeed.
• New issue of Hyperpulp.
• James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons Coming in August.
• Chicon 7 Announces Second Deadline for Dealers’ Room Applications.
• StoryBundle – a collection of DRM-free eBooks for a low price that you choose. [via GalleyCat]

Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Tidbits

REVIEW SUMMARY:  Daniel Radcliffe’s first non-Potter movie is a listless, lifeless ghost story adapted from Susan Hill’s evocative novel.

MY RATING: 

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Solicitor and widower Arthur Kipps arrives at the Nine Lives Causeway and the home of the recently deceased Alice Drablow to settle her legal affairs, where he learns of a menacing spirit that is believed to be causing the death of town children.

MY REVIEW:
PROS:  Good use of atmosphere, with a couple of effective shock sequences; a refreshing nearly complete absence of CGI.
CONS:  Characters that never take on more than two dimensions; plodding pace; routine script and direction; far too reminiscent of other, better, more inspired ghost stories.

I’ve never been completely sure what it is about the Victorian Era that draws the ghost story.  Maybe the sudden domination of the Industrial Revolution dovetailing with Darwinism drove people screaming to spiritualists and mediums in order to reorient themselves—a reaction to progress, which E.E. Cummings dubbed “a comfortable disease.”  The characters in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, I’m sure, would have agreed with cummings, and so would the aristocrats in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, as well as those populating the tales of that other great James, M.R.  With society rapidly fleeing its agrarian underpinnings in favor of the urban, as progress’s disease spread, tales in which the dead interact with the living probably offered some small, unchanging foothold solace, even if the incidents were horrifying.  It explains not just the prevalence of such missives, but the large number of good ones.
Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Movies

“A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads…”

That’s the tagline for a new, independent film called Dimensions, a 1920s/30s SciFi drama that revolves around a scientist’s obsession with going back in time to revisit a moment from his childhood. It stars Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Camilla Rutherford, Olivia Llewellyn, Sean Hart, and Patrick Godfrey.

Stephen is a brilliant young boy who lives in England, in what appears to be the 1920s – but nothing in Stephen’s life is quite as it seems. His world is turned upside down upon meeting a charismatic and inspirational professor at a garden party, who demonstrates to Stephen and his friends what life would be like if they themselves were merely one, or two, dimensional beings. He then proceeds to explain that by manipulating other dimensions, time travel may actually be possible.

As Stephen’s life unfolds, events lead him to dedicate himself to turning the Professor’s theories of time travel into reality. Jealousy, love, obsession, temptation and greed surround him, influencing his fragile mind and the direction of his work.

Here’s the trailer:
Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: Time Travel • Trailer

Filed under: Movies

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu. They’re collaborating on their first novel.

Charles Tan: Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did you get into speculative fiction?

Ken Liu: Thanks, Charles. Glad to be doing this.

As long as I can remember, I’ve liked reading and writing fiction. I’d like to think that over the years I got better at writing. I also happen to think all fiction is speculative, and so that’s how I ended up here.

Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Interviews

Tagged with: Spider-Man • Trailer

Filed under: Movies

A recent SF Signal Mind Meld asked participants “what was your introduction to fantasy and science fiction?” I thought this was an interesting question because it illustrates the wide and varying entry points into the genre. But it also occurred to me that first impressions are not always good and a poorly suited book can just as easily turn a person off to the genre as a well-suited book might turn someone on. From there, my mind wandered a bit. I recalled a year ago when I’d just obtained the complete set of 1947 Astounding‘s for my Vacation in the Golden Age. I’d mentioned this acquisition to Barry Malzberg, who I think considers 1947 Astounding at its absolute peak. He suggested a I read T. L. Sherred‘s “E For Effort” right away. I told him that I would and he responded with something that has stuck with me ever since. It was something like, “I am envious that you are coming to this story fresh, that this is your first time reading it.”

You can read a story again and again, but there is only one first time. There is a moment before you start reading where you are holding a book that countless others before you have read and enjoyed and thought exceptional. You may even have some idea of what the book is about, but you have not yet immersed yourself in the story until you turn to that first page and begin reading.

And so I thought it would be interesting to share some of my own first-time experiences with classics of the genre. First-times can be uneven experience. Some are absolutely memorable, even life-changing events. Others can be somewhat disappointing. I’ve tried to list a mix of experiences.

Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: The Wayward Time-Traveler

It’s coming – it will steal your time, it will pick your pocket, and it will win your heart.

We can’t do it without you, so read on!

SF Signal is delighted to announce that we will be participating in a read a long of Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora along with you, in concert with the fine folks from:

• Little Red Reviewer
• Darkcargo Explorer
• My Awful Reviews
• and finally, SF Signal!

Who is Chains? Why should he find young Locke a bargain? Who, exactly, are the Gentleman Bastards?

You’ll find out on the first of March. Why do you need to know now? Well, you need the book, don’t you? Or you need time to dig it out of your TBR pile…(yes, I saw that!) Or your TBR again…(that would be MY pile) Kids, it’s going to be epic. Go forth to your book piles, library, or bookshop and get ready.

Your hosts will be reading the book and putting up posts at regular times, rotating around. Our posts will include our impressions of the story as it unfolds and questions zinging around in our heads.

What will you do? The possibilities are endless. What would you like to do? You can follow along and comment on our posts. If you would like to be on an email list for this adventure, email me at beinganashley [at] gmail [dot] com, replacing the [at] and [dot] accordingly. If you have a great idea, email me! Otherwise, pop in when you like and/or sign up to follow the other sites.

The Lies of Locke Lamora has wit, character, intrigue; and also violence, questionable language, and sex. What more could you ask for?

I can’t wait!

Tagged with: fantasy • gentleman bastards • read a long • Scott Lynch • The Lies of Locke Lamora

Filed under: Books • Events

The Eagle-Eyed Fred Kiesche informs us that the Library of America wesbite includes a look at their Summer-Fall 2012 catalog. There are noteworthy titles to be found, too:

Edited by Sidney Offit (May 2012)

• Player Piano
• The Sirens of Titan
• Mother Night
• Six stories

Edited by Gary K. Wolfe (October 2012)
Volume 1: 1953–1956

• Frederick Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
• Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
• Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow
• Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man

Volume 2: 1956–1958

• Robert Heinlein, Double Star
• Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
• James Blish, A Case of Conscience
• Algis Budrys, Who?
• Fritz Leiber, Big Time

I don’t know about you, but my mouth is watering…

Tagged with: Alfred Bester • Algis Budrys • C. M. Kornbluth • Frederick Pohl • Fritz Leiber • Gary K. Wolfe • James Blish • Kurt Vonnegut • Leigh Brackett • Library Of America • Richard Matheson • Theodore Sturgeon

Filed under: Books

Interviews and Profiles

• Maine Crime Writers interviews Elizabeth Hand.
• Tor/Forge Q&A with Claire Ashgrove.
• If You’re Just Joining Us interviews Paul Goat Allen (podcast).
• Gollancz interviews Sam Sykes.
• Weird Fiction Review interviews Michael Cisco and profiles O.L. Samuels.
• Suvudu (Matt Staggs) interviews Alan Lightman.

News

• Wizard’s Tower To Publish Juliet E. Mckenna.
• 2011 Kitschies Winners.
• John Carter Test Screening Gets An Overwhelmingly Positive Review.

Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Tidbits

REVIEW SUMMARY: A fun way to learn more about both superheroes and science.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Building off of his acclaimed university science course, James Kakaios uses superhero powers, trivia, and nerdy questions to explore the fantastic through the lens of science and physics.

MY REVIEW:
PROS:Fun and light; never dwells on a single topic long enough to wear out its welcome; eases you into the science and the math; James Kakalios knows an awful lot about comics.
CONS: Easy or not, the math might put some people off.
BOTTOM LINE: A wealth of information about superheroes, science, and physics. A fantastic way to introduce someone to science who thinks they aren’t interested in the topic.
Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Book Review • Science and Technology

REVIEW SUMMARY:  A “found footage” superhero movie that shows a good deal of craft, skill, and intellectual and emotional honesty.

RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: After encountering a mysterious artifact, a trio of high school students must learn to cope with newfound superpowers before their lives spin out of control.

MY REVIEW:
PROS:  Effective use of documentary techniques; believable cast of unknowns; strong special effects; exceptional direction (and on occasion use of misdirection); intellectual and emotional honesty of the benefits and costs of acquiring superheroic powers.
CONS:  Filmmaking techniques that are, by this point, bordering on cliché; sometimes predictable; distinct lack of women.

Part of the appeal of superhero movies comes from the idea that somebody would use their powers in a way that most of us would not.  Superman’s alien heritage makes him ideal as a savior of humanity because, as Jor-El reminds him in Superman: The Movie, even though he was raised as a human being, he is not one himself.  Peter Parker initially uses his powers to make a quick buck, only to find that his own immediate goals have accidentally and indirectly killed his uncle.  Tony Stark becomes Iron Man out of necessity, using his scientific knowledge to escape from Wong-Chu.  Compare these to Josh Trank’s Chronicle, which, like Pat Cadigan’s “Two,” suggests that adolescents gifted with incredible strength and the ability to fly might behave in exactly the way most adolescents would.
Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Movies

In episode 105 of the SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester asks the SFSignal.com Irregulars to chime in with the books or stories they’re looking forward to in 2012.
Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: 2012 • anthology • books • fantasy • John Carter of Mars • list • podcast • science fiction • scifi • short story • small press • stories • television • tv

Filed under: Podcast

Sad news…

Locus Online is reporting that Samuel Youd, who wrote genre fiction under the name John Christopher, passed away at the age of 89.

As John Christopher he wrote the Tripods YA trilogy as well as the classic catastrophe novel The Death of Grass (UK, 1956, published as No Blade of Grass in the US in 1957).

Tagged with: John Christopher • RIP • Samuel Youd • trippods

Filed under: Books

In the interest of full disclosure, here are the books we received this week.
Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: Books Received

Filed under: Books

Interviews and Profiles

• Samantha Clark interviews Cynthia Leitich Smith.
• Lisa L. Hannett interviews Stephen Jones.
• Cult Den interviews Jeff Noon.

News

• Now posted: The February 2012 isue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.
• Reminder: Analog’s Readers’ Award Ballot is online through February 14.
• Modern children ‘lack the attention to read Dickens’.
• Ebook sales are being driven by downmarket genre fiction.
• Harrison Ford in Early Talks for Blade Runner Sequel. False!

Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Tidbits

The winners of our giveaway for DVD copies of Ancient Aliens Season 3 and Frozen World have been chosen and notified.

Congratulations to:

Barry H. – Panama City
Toni A. – Santa Monica

You will be receiving your DVDs soon.

Thanks to everyone who entered!

Tagged with: Contest • Giveaway

Filed under: Uncategorized

Guy Haley’s novella The Nemesis Worm, which takes place in the world set forth in his novel Reality 36, is now available as a free eBook for the Kindle device and software.

Here’s the description:

A standalone novella featuring the 22nd century’s greatest detectives, The Nemesis Worm sees Richards & Klein involved in another high stakes investigation. Corpses are showing up all over Old London, and the finger of suspicion points right at Richards himself. Forced to clear his name, Richards and Otto uncover a fanatical group whose actions threaten the relationship between human and AI with destruction.

Tagged with: eBook • free • Guy Haley • Kindle

Filed under: Free Fiction

Max Landis’ “educational pardoy” The Death and Return of Superman may be nsfw, but it’s too entertaining to miss.

It stars Elijah Wood, Mandy Moore, Ron Howard, Chris Hardwick, Simon Pegg and more.
Read the rest of this entry

Tagged with: Chris Hardwick • Elijah Wood • Mandy Moore • Max Landis • Ron Howard • Simon Pegg • Superman

Filed under: Uncategorized

There is still some time left for you to enter our A Wrinkle in Time 50th Anniversary Edition giveaway, but hurry, time is running out!

See the original post for details on how to enter.

Tagged with: Giveaway

Filed under: Contest