Editor’s Blog – Page 86

The Fantasy of 47North

Monday, April 8, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Over the last few months, 47North has become a publisher to be reckoned with.

Founded in October 2011 as the seventh imprint of Amazon Publishing, 47North — named for the latitude of Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle — publishes science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In just 18 months, they’ve created an extremely impressive catalog, including a lot of terrific fantasy.

Recent releases include Ania Ahlborn’s Seed, B.V. Larson’s Technomancer, Megan Powell’s No Peace for the Damned, the anthology Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen, all three volumes in Jeff Wheeler’s Legends of Muirwood trilogy, and many others.

One of their most ambitious endeavors is The Foreworld Saga, a multi-volume historical fantasy epic chronicling the birth of Western Martial Arts by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, and an ensemble team of authors. Begun as a series of online stories, the complete saga has been re-packaged in three handsome novels and an ever-increasing number of shorter works.

47North has also heavily supported Amazon’s Kindle with Kindle Serials, a group of serial novels instantly delivered to readers as they’re published. So far they include Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib by David J. Schwartz, The Outer Rims by Clint Morey, and The Scourge by Roberto Calas.

Near and dear to our hearts, 47North have also proven to be avid supporters of short fiction, publishes a fine assortment from a number of writers, including “Oz Reimagined: The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherland Story” by Tad Williams and “Seer: A Foreworld Sidequest” by Mark Teppo.

Their website also highlights some very intriguing upcoming fantasy, including Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders by Richard Ellis Preston Jr, the first volume in The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin: Ania Ahlborn’s The Shuddering: and Mark T. Barnes’s The Garden of Stones.

With all the recent bad news in the publishing world, it’s good to see some innovative and exciting work coming from relatively new publishers. Try them out, support the writers you like, and help 47North have a long and storied career in fantasy.

Disney Shutters LucasArts

Sunday, April 7, 2013 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Building on this week’s ongoing theme of death and dismay is the news that Disney has shut down legendary software house LucasArts.

LucasArts was founded in 1982, and released its first computer games in 1984. It published some of the finest and most admired games ever made, including Their Finest Hour (1989), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994), Full Throttle (1995), Grim Fandango (1998), and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003).

In an official statement the company said:

After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games.

LucasArt offices were closed Wednesday by Disney, and about 150 employees were laid off. All current projects, including Star Wars: First Assault and Star Wars: 1313, have been canceled.

The closure is no surprise for industry observers, after recent ominous developments. Its last few releases, including Kinect Star Wars, were disappointments, and most recent hit Star Wars titles were developed by outside licensees. Several recent titles (such as Star Wars Battlefront III) were canceled before release, and the company announced a freeze on all hiring and product announcements in September.

Fans became more optimistic when Disney acquired LucasFilm in October, but it’s clear new management was unable to turn the struggling software house around. Additional details are at GameInformer and Wikipedia has a complete list of LucasArts releases over the last three decades.

Altogether, it’s been a rotten week for fans of SF and fantasy.

New Treasures: Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal

Saturday, April 6, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

I attended the launch party for Mary Robinette Kowal’s Without a Summer here in Chicago this week. I don’t get to go to many launch parties — I tend to eat all the hors d’oeuvres, and word gets around.

The venue was fabulous, the company and conversation were marvelous, and everyone pretended not to notice when I pocketed the leftover cheese. Best of all, my review copy of Without a Summer had just arrived, and Mary told me it was the first copy she had ever autographed. (She wrote a tidy “#1” and “Thanks for being my first” on the title page, which is the kind of thing which makes up for every party you’ve ever missed in your life.)

Without a Summer is the third novel in the Glamourist Histories, which began with the Nebula nominees Shades of Milk and Honey and Glamour in Glass.

Regency pair Jane and Vincent Ellsworth go to Long Parkmeade to spend time with Jane’s family, but quickly turn restless. The year is unseasonably cold. No one wants to be outside and Mr. Ellsworth is concerned by the harvest, since a bad one may imperil Melody’s dowry. And Melody has concerns of her own, given the inadequate selection of eligible bachelors. When Jane and Vincent receive a commission from a prominent family in London, they decide to take it, and take Melody with them. They hope the change of scenery will do her good and her marriage prospects — and mood — will be brighter in London.

Once there, talk is of nothing but the crop failures caused by the cold and increased unemployment of the coldmongers, which have provoked riots in several cities to the north. With each passing day, it’s more difficult to avoid getting embroiled in the intrigue, none of which really helps Melody’s chances for romance. It’s not long before Jane and Vincent realize that in addition to getting Melody to the church on time, they must take on one small task: solving a crisis of international proportions.

Without a Summer was published by Tor Books on April 2, 2013. It is 364 pages in hardcover, priced at $24.99 ($11.99 for the digital edition). Josh Wimmer reviewed the first book in the series, Shades of Milk and Honey, here.

An Open Letter from Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books

Friday, April 5, 2013 John ONeill Comments 14 comments

There’s been a great deal of debate among authors and editors over this week’s announcement from Night Shade Books regarding a sale to avoid bankruptcy.

SFWA sent an advisory note to members, advising them that the settlement is “likely in the best interest” of writers. Respected authors such as Michael Stackpole strongly disagreed, pointing out that the contracts offered by Skyhorse/Start cut ebook royalties in half and demand audio and second serial rights — whether or not NSB originally purchased them.

It’s a painful situation for all involved. For readers anxious to see Night Shade’s future releases — including several volumes of popular ongoing series — this sale is the only way to avoid the rights to those titles ending up in bankruptcy court (where the majority may well simply die).

There’s no question that Night Shade made mistakes and burned a lot of bridges over the past few years, and that this latest unpleasantness has brought out more than a few writers with an axe to grind. As a publisher who ran a fantasy magazine as a labor of love for over a decade, until the mounting losses simply became too great to bear, I know well the kind of pain owners Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen are experiencing now. Night Shade was one of the most dynamic and exciting publishers in the genre, willing to take extraordinary risks buying and promoting work from many new writers, and it’s undoubtedly painful to see so many of those writers apparently delighted to dance on their corpse.

Jeremy Lassen has written an open letter to his writers, and the industry at large, articulating just what’s at stake with this offer from Skyhorse and Start. The complete text of Jeremy’s letter follows.

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Dominate Your Desktop with an Eye of Sauron Lamp

Thursday, April 4, 2013 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

It’s not that I need a new desk lamp. It’s just that, when you discover that there exists a desk lamp crafted as a scale model of Sauron’s fortress at Barad-dûr, your life is not complete until you have one.

ThinkGeek is offering these beauties, designed by Richard Taylor as 21-inch replicas of the 9-foot tall model used to film The Lord of the Rings.

The lamps are sculpted from polystone and finished with a protective layer of polyurethane. They weigh 22 pounds and, yes, include a roving eye mounted at the top. They are priced at $299.99.

You can order yours from ThinkGeek today.

One final detail: note that these went on sale on April 1, and be sure to click on the “Buy Now” button to see actual availability.

Night Shade Attempts to Avoid Bankruptcy with a Sale to Skyhorse Publishing

Thursday, April 4, 2013 John ONeill Comments 16 comments

Word has begun to spread this morning that Night Shade Books is in negotiations with Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy.

Night Shade has contacted authors to explain the situation, and excerpts from those letters have been posted online:

As you probably know, Night Shade Books has had a difficult time after the demise of Borders. We have reached a point where our current liabilities exceed our assets, and it is clear that, with our current contracts, sales, and financial position, we cannot continue to operate as an independent publisher. If we filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or liquidation, the rights to your books could be entangled in the courts for years as could past or current unpaid royalties or advances. However, we have found an alternative, which will result in authors getting paid everything they are due as well as finding a future home for their books, subject to the terms and conditions stated in this letter.

The deal is not yet finalized and, in fact, hinges on how many authors approve changes to their existing contracts.

Some, including Jeff VanderMeer, have asked the publisher to revert rights back to authors prior to declaring bankruptcy. That’s not likely to be an option however, as its existing publishing contracts are Night Shade’s most valuable asset. As Harry Connolly points out on his blog, bankruptcy courts generally frown on publishers who do that, and such revisions are routinely overruled in court during bankruptcy proceedings.

The loss of Night Shade would be a real blow to the field. Known for taking risks on new writers, they’ve also published some of the most celebrated authors in the genre, including Paolo Bacigalupi, Iain M. Banks, Martha Wells, Manly Wade Wellman, Greg Egan, Glen Cook, Kage Baker, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepard, and many others. But there have been omnibus signs for the past several years, including a deep sale last April, authors leaving their stable, and others. Publishers Weekly has more detail on the potential sale here; io9‘s report is here.

The Top 50 Black Gate Blog Posts in February

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

February is cold here in Chicago. Stay-at-home-or-you’ll-die cold. A good time to gather inside with friends and family, put hot cocoa on the stove, slip a movie in the Blu-ray player, and then forget all of that because there’s something fascinating on the Internet.

We had plenty of fascinating things to offer here at the Black Gate blog in February. Scott Taylor took at serious look at the downside of collecting in “The Weight of Print,” Matthew David Surridge examined Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Mark Rigney revealed the surprising results of the John Piece Experiement as applied to fantasy, author Violette Malan explained How to Put the Sword in Sword & Sorcery, and Sarah Avery offered up another installment in her popular Teaching and Fantasy Literature series with “Weird Things My Students Have Been Told About Writers.”

And that’s only the Top Five. The complete list of the Top 50 posts in February follows. Enjoy — but not so much that you neglect your houseguests, please. Or let hot chocolate overboil on the stove.

Gardner Dozois on the 2013 Hugo Nominations

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Gardner Dozois, editor of the upcoming The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (and about a billion other science fiction and fantasy anthologies), offered some astute and telling observations on the 2013 Hugo Awards nominations this week.

In case you haven’t noticed, I thought that I’d point out that this year’s Hugo Award ballot represents a historic shift in demographics. This has been coming on for a couple of years now, but this year a tipping point has been passed.

In the fiction categories, only Nancy Kress, Pat Cadigan, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lois McMaster Bujold come from the literary generation that came to prominence in the ’80s. Everybody else is from a younger literary generation (which doesn’t always mean that they’re younger, although that’s usually the way to bet it; literary generations are different from actual generations). There’s only one story, Jay Lake’s, from a traditional genre market, Asimov’s, and only one story from a trade SF anthology, Cadigan’s. Only six out of the thirteen shorter works even come from PRINT publications, and four of those were novellas published in chapbook form by small presses; all the rest are from online publications. Only two of the five people nominated for Best Editor, Short Form, work at traditional print magazines; the rest edit online publications. ALL of the nominees for Best Semiprozine are online publications.

This is not going to change back. This is the way things will be from now on.

We discussed the complete Hugo ballot here on Monday.

Vintage Treasures: The Blind Spot, by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

Tuesday, April 2, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

All right. Listen up, all you young fantasy punks. I know you’re out there, devouring contemporary fantasy by the truckload, while I’m trying to school you on the forgotten classics of the past. I know you’re not listening, because I rarely paid attention to the crotchety old-timers who tried to get me to read forgotten fantasy classics 30 years ago. I was too busy with Lord of Light, Bridge of Birds, Watership Down, and Swords Against Death.

Eventually, of course, I learned the error of my ways. I began to listen to my elders, and appreciate the glory of the pulp era of fantasy. I read the books they passed to me, and gradually became wiser, more worldly, healthier, and better looking, with fuller and more lustrous hair and better posture.

Mostly. I didn’t read, like, everything they foisted on me. Because Star Trek was on in the afternoon, and Dr. Who in the evenings (the Tom Baker episodes, naturally), and a lad needs some down time.

Now, these Vintage Treasures articles are my vehicle to pass along the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of a fabulously well-read generation (i.e. old people) to the eager and outstretched hands of the readers of tomorrow (you lot). That’s admittedly harder to do with the great classics of fantasy I haven’t read yet. Theoretically though, it might be possible to duck some of my personal responsibility by passing them along instead.

In short, skipping a generation and cutting out the middleman. Now pay attention, because this is where you come in.

I am tasking you with a sacred undertaking, upon which the very future of our beloved genre rests: to read, appreciate and evangelize the great works of 20th Century pulp fantasy. The ones I never got around to, anyway. So I can get back to that Season Two Star Trek DVD which arrived last week. Appreciate it.

Let’s start with The Blind Spot, by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint. What’s it about? I have no idea. If you were paying attention, you’d have clued in to that. But right there on the cover Ace Books calls it “The most famous fantastic novel of all time,” and the esteemed Forrest J. Ackerman shouts out the word “Fabulous!” That should be good enough for you.

The Blind Spot was published in 1921 as a serial in Argosy-All Story Weekly, and reprinted by Ace Books in 1964, with a doubtlessly fascinating and informative introduction by Ackerman that would have made writing this post a lot easier if I’d known about it 15 minutes ago. It is 318 pages in paperback for 50 cents. Finding a copy is left as an exercise to the reader (I got my copy on eBay for under a buck.) And get a move on, the cultural heritage of fantasy is at stake. But no pressure.

2013 Hugo Award Nominees Announced

Monday, April 1, 2013 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

The nominees for the 2013 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend. There’s a lot of great reading on this list and, if you’re like me, you’re still planning to get to most of it.

It’s not too late — and if you finish your reading before voting closes, you can help decide the winners. Voting is open to all attendees of LoneStarCon 3, the 2013 World Science Fiction Convention, and the winners will be announced at the convention on Sunday, September 1, 2013.

One odd thing about this year’s ballot? There are only three nominees for short story (usually there are five). The adminstrators state this is “due to a 5% requirement under Section 3.8.5 of the WSFS constitution.” No, I don’t know what that means either. I’m sure it will be much discussed, and somebody will explain it to me.

The nominees for the 2013 Hugo Awards are:

Best Novel

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Blackout by Mira Grant (Orbit)
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi (Tor)
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

Best Novella

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, by Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
On a Red Station, Drifting, by Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, by Mira Grant (Orbit)
“The Stars Do Not Lie,” by Jay Lake (Asimov’s SF, Oct-Nov 2012)

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