#Tor Science Fiction

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Review: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

Series: Zones of Thought #1Author: Vernor VingePublisher: Tor Science FictionReleased: February 15, 1993 (Re-released March 20, 2007)Received: NetGalleyFind it on Goodreads | More Sci-Fi Summary: In a distant future, myriad races populate a cosmos where mental prowess aligns with spatial coordinates, spanning from the sublime intellects of the Transcend to the rudimentary faculties of the…

[torpublishinggroup]

"Warning Signs Your Machines Are Trying to Kill You!" by TJ Klune

(Legally, I’m required to tell you that when smart phones first became popular, I bought one and then asked for the address of the app store because I thought it was a physical location I had to go to in order to download apps and not something already on your phone. Also, I was recently told I speak like an old person so as a warning, there will not be any slang you youths typically hear, especially on Tumblr. Any slang I’ve learned in the last five years has been against my will. I still don’t know what FOMO means, and I don’t care.)

1. Oh no! You and your family are trying to enjoy a movie night, but Overlord Prime (With Free Shipping) wants a sacrifice at the altar of their god, BeeZos. Should this happen, do not attempt to give Overlord Prime (With Free Shipping) a cantaloupe with googly-eyes on it and say that it is your baby. Overlord Prime (With Free Shipping) knows the difference between fruit and children. Instead, ask the machine to order dog food, and it will forget about eating humans for a little while.

2. If you own a very fancy vehicle that can drive itself, always make sure to carry a brick. That way, when the car locks you inside and attempts to drive you off a cliff into a gas station, you can break the window using the brick. You will then have to jump out, but make sure you do so in time so you can watch the wicked-ass explosion when the car hits the gas station, and you can revel in your victory over your car.

3. This one will hurt. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Chances are, you’re reading this on your phone right this second. To be safe, after you’ve finished reading this post and have clicked on the affiliated links to purchase my books, you should throw your phone into a volcano and then move to South Dakota where there are no machines, only wind and cows. That way, when everyone else gets the 5GZombieVirus that people on Twitter (I’m not calling it the other thing, shut up) seem to think is real, you’ll be safe with your cows on a windy day.

4. Get rid of your air fryer. Don’t ask me why, just do it. Red flags all around. Danger, danger.

5. Do you know of the Clapper? That thing first launched in the late 20th century (I wrote it that way to make me feel old) where the commercials showed cranky old people unable to reach their light switches, so they got a thing called a Clapper that turns your lights on and off when you clap? Guess what? Those will be the first things to try and kill you. If you love your gram-gram, save her from the Clapper. When she asks why you are destroying it with an ax, tell gram-gram it’s because you love her.

6. Do you live in a smart home? The kind where everything is connected to the internet, including your refrigerator? The refrigerator that holds your perishable foods? And oh, would you look at that: how many ice cubes have you kicked under it rather than picking them up when they fall to the floor? A dozen? A million? The refrigerator remembers. And it will spoil your food in seconds. What then? What are you going to eat? Canned food? Not if the refrigerator falls on top of you!

Unfortunately for you, this is where it must end. I hope this has given you enough information to help you survive the inevitable. If you do not heed my warnings, well. Who cares. I’m not in charge of you. Do whatever you want. Just don’t come complaining to me when gram-gram gets the clap.

[the25centpaperback]

Time Wars, edited by Charles Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, cover by John Pound (1986)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

It's been 21 years and 29 days since Tor Books published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the years since, Tor has published every one of my novels, sending me around the USA and Canada to talk about them. Now, they've teamed up with Humble Bundle to sell 18 of my ebooks on a name-your-price basis, with part of the proceeds going to benefit EFF:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books

I've been associated with EFF even longer than I've been published by Tor! My first novel came out while I was working EFF's first-ever booth at CES. I split my time between the booth and my motel room, where I paid $0.25/call to dial up to Earthlink's local number and manage the launch-day publicity. Over the years, I've benefited immensely from Tor's editorial and publicity departments, working with brilliant publishing people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Patty Garcia, Dot Lin, Laura Etzkorn, Elena Stokes, Sarah Reidy, Lucille Rettino, and of course, Tor founder Tom Doherty.

But I like to think that it was a two-way street. Tor and I have come a long way together on ebooks: most visibly, they allowed me to publish several novels under Creative Commons licenses (my first book was the first ever CC book, coming out just weeks after the licenses themselves launched). As my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden said at the time, "Ebooks have the worst hours-in-meeting-to-dollars-in-revenue ratio of anything in my publishing career. Why not?"

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Just as important – but less visible – was Tor's willingness to let me insist that all my books be published without DRM, meaning that anything you buy on say, Amazon, can be moved to any reader program if you decide to start getting your ebooks elsewhere. This worked so well that in 2012, Tor became the first major publisher in the world to ban DRM on all its ebooks, flying me, John Scalzi and Charlie Stross to New York City to announce it this at a big, splashy event at Book Expo America:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130512022634/https://tor.com/blogs/2012/06/tor-books-announces-e-book-store-doctorow-scalzi-a-stross-talk-drm-free

Tor's unique status as the sole major DRM-free publisher in the world was well timed! That same year, I curated the very first Humble Ebook Bundle, which was very top-heavy with Tor titles, and raised more than $1,000,000 for the writers, publishers and charities associated with it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121017215636/http://www.humblebundle.com/

That opened the floodgates to a series of Humble Bundles, tempting other major publishers to dabble with DRM-free, including Simon and Schuster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-I5QyAfglU

And Harpercollins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHMLfeCrCrE

Now, 12 years after that inaugural Humble Ebook Bundle, I find myself honored by being the subject of a bundle of my own (it helps that I've written a hell of a lot of books in the intervening years). Included in the bundle are (nearly) all of my Tor novels and novellas: The Lost Cause; "The Canadian Miracle" (a Lost Cause story); Red Team Blues; Radicalized; Walkaway; "Party Discipline" (a Walkaway story); Pirate Cinema; Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross); For The Win; Makers; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, Homeland, Attack Surface, and "Lawful Interception" (a Little Brother story).

(The sole exclusion is The Bezzle, which came out two weeks ago and is already a USA Today national bestseller!)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Also included in the bundle is Poesy the Monster Slayer, my 2020 picture book for the littlies:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627/poesythemonsterslayer

All these books are delivered as DRM-free epub files. The Bundle runs for the next three weeks, and the minimum buy-in is $18 – that's just $1/book (full retail value is $187). Of course, you can name a higher price, and, as with all Humble Bundles, you can adjust the final split to share out the money between me, EFF, and the Humble folks.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/03/humbly-bundled/#eff-too

[thehauntedrocket]

Plan 9 From Outer Space

Art by Francesco Francavilla

[suprsaturatd]

Gaea Station did not look outward. It had never bothered with windows.

Holy shit please read Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh that was probably the best book I’ve read in ages?!?!?!?!!!!! Anyways here’s the space hulk station made out of four crashed battle cruisers that would not get out of my head until i drew it.

[bitter69uk]

Ease into the Halloween festive season (or as we call it, “gay Christmas”) on Thursday 17 October with a FREE screening of an outrageous 1950s horror b-movie! Yes! Every October the monthly Lobotomy Room cinema club (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People) screens something “horror adjacent”. This time, we’re also commemorating the centenary of infamous filmmaker / twisted visionary Ed Wood Jr (10 October 1924 – 10 December 1978) with a presentation of his 1955 atrocity Bride of the Monster! THIS is the one starring ailing horror royalty Bela Lugosi (in his final speaking role in a feature film) as villainous scientist Dr Vornoff where he delivers the soliloquy “Home? I have no home. Hunted … despised … living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world!” You won’t want to miss THIS compelling hot mess on the big screen! Contact the venue (glittering cocktail lounge Fontaine’s in Dalston) by email to reserve your seat now on bookings@fontaines.bar Full details here.

[qosmiq]

[ellisnyeland]

Hey I'm trying to react professionally on Twitter but REACTOR MAGAZINE (FORMERLY TOR) JUST POSTED A VERY VERY POSITIVE REVIEW OF "REPAIR TECH" which will be free to read in July btw

[libraryspectre]

Reactor (formerly Tor) has two downloads available! They're bundles of short fiction published so far this year

[schlock-luster-video]

On October 17, 2006, The Beast of Yucca Flats was released on DVD by St. Clair Vision in the United States.

[horrororman]

Remembering Tor Johnson (October 19, 1903 - May 12, 1971).🕯

#scifi #sciencefiction #horror

[torpublishinggroup]

This advertisement is for In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune, a book about robots and what it means to be human.

"In The Lives of Puppets is glorious, a thoroughly entertaining and deeply stirring journey through a world of extraordinary robots. The characters here are so vibrant, and the story proves that love stretches well beyond the world of humans." —Chuck Tingle, Hugo Award finalist and author of Camp Damascus

WHAT IT'S ABOUT

Would you like a robot-filled book set in the future with asexual representation, humor, and found family? This may be the book for you. It’s the story of a human deciding whether he can accept love with strings attached while going on a journey to save his father with the help of an anxious vacuum, a sadistic nurse machine, and an android with a dark past.

[the25centpaperback]

Maurai & Kith by Poul Anderson, cover by Tom Kidd (1982)

[charliejaneanders]

A week from tomorrow, June 8 at 7 PM, I'm going to be at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn, with Mark Oshiro and Terry J. Benton-Walker. We'll be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Tor Teen!

If I get to read for a few minutes, what part of PROMISES STRONGER THAN DARKNESS should i read?

[womenusingwords]

Spotlight: New Release by  Kemi Ashing-Giwa

The details… Title: This World Is Not Yours Author: Kemi Ashing-Giwa Publisher: Tor Nightfire Publication date‏: September 10, 2024 Available formats: ebook, paperback, audiobook File size: 2131 KB Print length: 149 pages Audiobook: 4 hours, 11 minutes; narrated by Catherine Ho Genre: Science Fiction/Mystery & Suspense Themes: adventure, aliens, dark romance, loss, grief, marriage,…