Crowd funding is the in thing for obtaining money to fund a variety of projects, with Kickstarter being the most prominent of these sites. With new projects going live daily, it’s a chore to keep up with, let alone find, interesting genre projects. The Crowd Funding Roundup will be our effort to bring projects we think are interesting to your attention so you can, if you so choose, decide to help out. These posts are a collaborative effort between James Aquilone and JP Frantz.
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Crowd Funding Roundup
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the heck out the Star Trek reboot. It managed to cater to existing fans while being accessible to new ones — exactly what it needed to do. That said, the film did have it’s problems…as this spoiler-laden video easily demonstrates…
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Movies • Star Trek
What’s special about today’s free fiction?
- Daily Science Fiction has a magic realism story from Alex Shvartsman
- A good time to start reading: Keith Melton has the next installment of his serialized urban fantasy novel-in-progress, Spanner Jack
- Pseudopod‘s creeping us all out with a story by Ed Ferrara
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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
We reported this some weeks back, but the press release just came in now: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) has been sold in multiple six-figure deals.
Press release follows…
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Books
Interviews & Profiles
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Tidbits
The winners of our giveaway for Weird Detectives edited by Paula Guran have been chosen and notified.
Congratulations to:
- Rammer S.
- Jason B.
- S.K.W.
- Carl B.
- Andreas F.
You will be receiving your prizes soon!
Thanks to everyone who entered.
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Contest
By
JoshVogt | Friday, May 10th, 2013 at
12:29 am
What would you do to make yourself smarter? Take a mix of illegal drugs, preferably injected straight into the cerebral cortex? Implant your skull with all sorts of black market tech that might burn out your gray matter and leave you drooling on the upholstery? Total brain transplant?
Funny thing is, if any those dubious intelligence enhancement techniques actually worked and you were lucky enough to survive the procedure, you’d likely look back and think to yourself, “Well, that was dumb.”
But superior smarts do provide for a lot of fun and games, especially when it comes to dealing with alien overlords, tyrannical governments, and pranking tech support. Here are three stories where the main characters achieve superhuman IQs through various means and then go on to steer human evolution and generally make things difficult for the powers-that-be.
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Book Review • Books
Courtesy of Prime Books, SF Signal has 5 copies of Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee to give away to 5 lucky SF Signal readers! Here’s the best part: you get to pick your book format (physical or electronic). But wait — there’s more! There are no geographical restrictions!
Here is what the collection of stories is about:
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Contest
Now available is the ebook novella Cahill’s Homecoming written by none other than our own Patrick Hester!
Here’s the synopsis:
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Uncategorized
One of the interesting things that I came across recently was the story of the Futurians at the 1st WorldCon in 1939. The Futurians were a legendary group of fans – quite a few notable authors came out of their ranks over the years, and it looked like an interesting story, one that was far more complicated than I thought.
Go read about it at the Kirkus Reviews blog: The Futurians and the 1939 World Science Fiction Convention.
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Web Sites
By
JP Frantz | Friday, May 10th, 2013 at
12:15 am
What do you get when you combine documentary style film making with hard science and an assist by NASA? If you read the title to this post, you know it’s Europa Report, a movie about an expedition to the eponymous moon of Jupiter. Here’s the synopsis:
A unique blend of documentary, alternative history and science fiction thriller, EUROPA REPORT follows a contemporary mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa to investigate the possible existence of alien life within our solar system. When unmanned probes suggest that a hidden ocean could exist underneath Europa’s icy surface and may contain single-celled life, Europa Ventures, a privately funded space exploration company, sends six of the best astronauts from around the world to confirm the data and explore the revolutionary discoveries that may lie in the Europan ocean.
After a near-catastrophic technical failure that leads to loss of communication with Earth and the tragic death of a crewmember, the surviving astronauts must overcome the psychological and physical toll of deep space travel, and survive a discovery on Europa more profound than they had ever imagined.
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Movies
What’s special about today’s free fiction?
- Electric Velocipede has an interesting story from Jamie Killen
- WMG Publishing kicks off Free Fiction Friday (or did last Friday, actually) with a story from Kristine Grayson, aka Kristine Kathryn Rusch, aka Not Keyser Söze
- You’d better climb aboard the Mango Train. Seriously. I heard something about a plague that’s great.
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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 Internet has way too much time on its hands…
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Star Trek
Interviews & Profiles
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Tidbits
REVIEW SUMMARY: A satisfying conclusion to the Chaos Knight Trilogy.
MY RATING:
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Vidarian rallies his allies to oppose the monstrous plans of the Alorean Import Company, with the world’s fate in the balance.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Worldbuilding; well-conceived ending to the series; well done reveals of major aspects of the world.
CONS: Pacing issues, although less problematic than previous books, persist; some character motivations remain murky; some elements from earlier in the trilogy seem lost.
BOTTOM LINE: A conclusion to the Chaos Knight Trilogy that pays the promise of the first volume.
In Lance of Earth and Sky , Vidarian Rulorat, the Tesseract, found himself with new challenges and a burgeoning adversary — the Alorean Import Company. A corporation powerful enough to shape a world, the Company set in motion some truly horrible plans, even as Vidarian struggled with his own nature, his relationship with Ariadel, and more. Now, things have gotten only more complicated. Two kingdoms still stand perilously close to the brink of war. The return of magic to the world is still disrupting everything and everyone, unmaking old social structures and upending long held traditions and beliefs. It’s not easy for Vidarian to be the Chaos Knight, the Tesseract. And even greater sacrifices might be needed on the part of him and those who would follow him, to stop the truly monstrous plans of the Alorean Import Company from coming to pass.
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Book Review • Books
By
GuyHasson | Thursday, May 9th, 2013 at
10:00 am
Guy Hasson is an SF author and a filmmaker. His latest books are Secret Thoughts by Apex Books and The Emoticon Generation by Infinity Plus. His 45-minute epic SF film, The Indestructibles, which he wrote and directed, will be released on the web in a few weeks, and his start-up New Worlds Comics will go live in July.
Keep It Stupid, Simpleton
A New Trend In High-tech, Gpo Analysis, Labels Sf Readers As Stupid
A Guest Post written by Guy Hasson
A few days ago, I got a phone call from an unknown caller.
“Am I speaking to Guy Hasson?” The woman was cordial.
“Yes,” I said, wary.
“I read your guest post in SF Signal,” she said as if we’re old friends. “The one about the zombies.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Strangers don’t usually call me about these things. There’s a reason God created email.
“And I saw no one left any comments,” she continued.
“Yeah?” I said, warier and warier.
“We can help you with that.”
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Science and Technology
“It is unfortunate to me that we have to classify reading fiction as anything other than what it is. Why must it be escaping “from” something? If it has to be escapism, aren’t we escaping “to” something? Does the distinction matter? I’m not sure.” Carl V. Anderson
“Escapism is a social practice and a cultural stereotype, not an inherent characteristic of the fantastic. It is an exaggeration of the word escape itself, which does not mean ‘to lose oneself in another world,’ but to elude something that constrains you.” from “The Inevitable Reduction of the Imagination and its Opportunities: A Brief Exploration“
The last time I wrote about escapism I was trying to get a better handle on the term and its implications. As a response to that column, Carl V. Anderson asked a very pertinent question about the literary idea of escape: what are we escaping to? I’ve thought about this on and off but it wasn’t until I read Foz Meadows’ article at A Dribble of Ink last week that something clicked in my thinking about this idea. Or, more to the point, altered my perspective on the dynamic aspect of this idea. Meadows’ piece starts slowly but builds to a very incisive conclusion:
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The Bellowing Ogre
The finalists for the 2013 Locus Awards have been announced!
SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
- The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
- Caliban’s War, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz)
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Awards
Fantastic Books has cut prices on their ebooks.
Check out the following press release for the juicy, money-saving details…
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Books
Editor Roberto Mendes has sent in the table of contents for the new issue of International Speculative Fiction Magazine:
FICTION:
- “The Astronomer” by Zoran Živkovic
- “The Bird Catcher” by S.P. Somtow
- “Algorithms for Love” by Ken Liu
NON-FICTION:
- The Metaphysical Fantasias Of Zoran Živkovic — Michael A. Morrison
- Fantastika And The Literature Of Serbia: A Conversation With Zoran Živkovic — Michael A. Morrison
- Reviews By Jorge Candeias And Sean Wright
It will be available for free download from 10 May forward as epub, mobi and pdf.
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Books • Free Fiction
