REVIEW SUMMARY: A terrifying apocalypse for monster fans and survivalists that loses reader interest through plot holes and a weak main character.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Red Rain creates a post-apocalyptic world for a bike-riding journalist to explore alone.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Offers a fresh take on post-apocalyptic fiction; appeals to survivalist fans; scary; quick read.
CONS: The implausibility of scenario and heroine’s survival tactics; passive conflict resolution.
BOTTOM LINE: The story has promise, but the poor execution and attention to detail may kill the series for some readers.
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Tagged with: book review • paul antony jones • post-apocalyptic • survival horror
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Book Review
Today is Geek Pride Day, a chance to showcase your inner geek without fear of reprisals. (Well, theoretically, anyway…the people not on the business end of the reprisal likely don’t know of the immunity you possess today. Plus, that immunity is imaginary, so….)
Anywho, Here’s a look at what science fiction and fantasy authors have done to get their geek on, courtesy of Open Road Media, who also helpfully shares 13 Novels to Satisfy Your Inner Geek This Geek Pride Day….
[Click below images for larger versions!]
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Books • Events
Man, the Empire simply does not like the Federation…
Some great imagery in this video set over the skies of San Francisco…
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Tagged with: Death Star • Enterprise • Star Trek • Star Wars
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Star Trek • Star Wars
Interviews & Profiles
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This week for Short Fiction Friday I review the first published work of one of our own SF Signal Irregulars, Timothy C. Ward.
MY RATING:
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Geoffrey is a high school student with a peculiar diet, made necessary because of the suspicion that within his make-up he may harbor the gene that will turn him from a young man into a monster. On what may turn out to be the most important day of his life thus far, will Geoffrey find answers to the questions plaguing his existense? And if the answers are revealed, will he like what he discovers?
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Strong characterization; interesting idea to merge faith and horror; good build up of tension; story ends on a satisfying note.
CONS: Cornhusker mythology could be more deeply explored; a couple of sentence structure issues;
BOTTOM LINE: Cornhusker: Demon Gene was selected for publication by A Flame in the Dark for a book featuring Christian horror with monsters. Timothy C. Ward has taken that premise to explore the struggles of a young man whose destiny may put him on a path to destruction. As his protagonist Geoffrey balances normal teenage angst against the pain of losing one’s faith, the reader gets to experience standard horror tropes used in a different way. There is a lot of potential revealed in Ward’s debut short story and it will be a pleasure to see where he goes from here.
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Tagged with: Short Fiction Friday • Timothy C. Ward
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Book Review
Carrie Cuinn is an author, editor, bibliophile, modernist, and geek. She writes speculative fiction – including science fiction and apocalypse stories and magic realism and fucked up fairy tales – and non-fiction on a range of academic and technical subjects. FISH is her third published anthology as an editor.
You can find Carrie on Twitter @carriecuinn. Links to her published work, and her writing blog, can be found at www.carriecuinn.com
CHARLES TAN: Hi Carrie, thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, Fish is a peculiar speculative anthology. How did you conceptualize it, decided to dedicate it to your son, and to have a children’s book atmosphere for the book?
CARRIE CUINN: Fish is meant to be the first in a four-part series. I wanted to do a set of anthologies that included a mix of genres but that all together would cover a huge range of stories. I thought that if I could choose themes that were wide enough, I could encompass the kind of variety I like in my own reading. Science fiction, magical realism, interstitial fiction, fantasy… you can find it all in Fish.
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Tagged with: Carrie Cuinn • Fish • interviews
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Interviews
In the future, love is complicated and death is not necessarily the end. Love Minus Eighty follows several interconnected people in a disquieting vision of romantic life in the century to come.
There’s Rob, who accidentally kills a jogger, then sacrifices all to visit her in a cryogenic dating facility, seeking forgiveness but instead falling in love.
Veronika, a shy dating coach, finds herself coaching the very woman who is stealing the man she loves.
And Mira, a gay woman accidentally placed in a heterosexual dating center near its inception, desperately seeks a way to reunite with her frozen partner as the years pass.
In this daring and big-hearted novel based on the Hugo-winning short story, the lovelorn navigate a word in which technology has reached the outer limits of morality and romance.
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Tagged with: "Love Minus Eighty • Book Trailer • Will McIntosh
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Books
Silvia Moreno-Garcia has just revealed the creepy-cool cover art and table of contents for her upcoming collection This Strange Way of Dying. The artwork is by Sara K. Diesel.
Here’s the synopsis:
Creatures that shed their skin and roam the night. Vampires in Mexico City struggling with disenchantment. An apocalypse with giant penguins. Legends of magic scorpions and tales of a ceiba tree surrounded by human skulls. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s short stories are infused with Mexican folklore, yet firmly rooted in reality; a reality that is transformed as the fantastic erodes the rational.
Spanning a variety of genres (fantasy, science fiction, horror) and time periods, This Strange Way of Dying is an exceptional debut collection that will not easily be forgotten.
Here’s the table of contents:
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Tagged with: Cover & Synopsis • Silvia Moreno-Garcia • TOC
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Interviews & Profiles
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MY RATING:
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Nikandr and his fellow Anuskayans struggle to keep both war and cataclysm from destroying their world.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Excellent ending; conflict and stakes clearly laid out and followed through; strong worldbuilding and character development.
CONS: Some characters are cheated out of a more definite denouement; takes a long time to gain momentum.
BOTTOM LINE: A fine and fitting conclusion to the Lays of Anuskaya Trilogy.
The war between the superpower Yrstanla and The Duchy seems destined to go Yrstanla’s way unless their superior strength of arms can be blunted, turned aside, or tied up somewhere else. The wasting disease continues to ravage populations old and new alike. And, of course, The Rifts threatening the Duchy, Yrstanla and the rest of the world continue to open. And the power that opened them seeks to finish the job. Nikandr, Atiana and the rest of the Grand Duchy, and beyond, have a War to stop, the possible solution to the Rift problem to find and rescue, and a world to save before it tears itself apart on both the social and the literal level. But what sacrifices are going to be necessary, and will they be enough?
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Tagged with: Bradley Beaulieu
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Book Review • Books
PROS: Excellent display; rich feature set; great battery life.
CONS: Awkward form factor; steep price tag.
Over the course of the past few years, I’ve warmed up quite a bit to eBook reading. Part of this was because it seems that eBooks have finally, after years of missteps, finally found a foothold as a viable product. Another reason is because eBook readers have come a long way and, well, I’m a bit of a gadget hound. So when kobo offered to send along the new Kobo Auara HD eBook Reader for review purposes, I jumped at the chance.
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Tagged with: ebook reader • eBooks • kobo • Kobo Aura HD
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Books • Science and Technology
Last year, I picked up and read The Stars My Destination for the first time. It’s an astonishing book, one that I alternatively wish that I’d read it earlier, and that I’m glad that I read it now, with the capabilities to really get how important of a book it is. I’ve been waiting to get to Bester for a while now.
Over on the Kirkus Reviews Blog today: The Nomadic Alfred Bester, Renaissance Man.
Tagged with: Alfred Bester • Kirkus
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Books • Web Sites
Ellen Datlow has been editing sf/f/h short fiction for over thirty years. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and is currently consulting for Tor.com. In addition she has edited or co-edited more than fifty anthologies, including the annual Best Horror of the Year, Naked City, Supernatural Noir, Hauntings, a reprint anthology of ghostly stories, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, an adult fantasy anthology (with Terri Windling) plus several middle grade and young adult anthologies with Terri Windling, the most recent a dystopian and post apocalyptic anthology titled After.
Ellen has won every award for editing given in the sf/f/h genres. She was the recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award for outstanding contribution to the genre and was honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association.
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro: Hauntings is a tremendous anthology, which now sits proudly on my shelf next to one of its older cousins, The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. One of the things I particularly enjoyed is the range of narrative approaches: from Joyce Carol Oates’ fragmentary, memory-driven chronicle “Haunted” and the straight-ahead descriptive simplicity of Michael Marshall Smith’s “Everybody Goes” to the story-within-a-story of Neil Gaiman’s “Closing Time” and the deconstructionism of Peter Straub’s “Hunger, An Introduction”. Did this range arise naturally, or was it something you looked for when picking stories, perhaps as a way of showcasing the versatility of this sub-genre?
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Tagged with: Alvaro Zinos-Amaro • Ellen Datlow • guest post • Hauntings • interview
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Interviews
It’s no secret I’m a fan of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series of reprints. Not only do they have great titles, but the cover art is excellent as well. Although I prefer the artwork of the print runs from several years ago, the new art style is still pretty darned cool.
Here’s a look at the upcoming SF Masterworks books from Gollancz for the rest of the year according to Amazon:
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Tagged with: Cover & Synopsis • SF Masterworks
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Books
Another glorious raid on the QuasarDragon. The not-so-brave Captain Tackett wept mightily as we swept away his audiobook booty.
What’s special about today’s free fiction?
- Nightmare has a story from Neil Gaiman
- Tor has a story from Kai Ashante Wilson
- Silvia Moreno-Garcia has posted Chapter Two from her upcoming (and currently crowdfunding) novel Young Blood. She’s had to put up with me at a convention panel so she could really use your sympathy and support.
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Tagged with: Amazon • audio fiction • fiction • free • free ebooks • free fantasy fiction • Free Fiction • free flash fiction • free horror fiction • free science fiction • serialized • serialized fiction
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Free Fiction
The winner of our giveaway for a signed copy of Generation V by M.L. Brennan has been chosen and notified.
Congratulations to: Bernie V.!
(Hmmm..suspicious initial for this particular giveaway, eh? 
)
You will be receiving your prize soon!
Thanks to everyone who entered.
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Contest
Interviews & Profiles
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Tidbits
