#tor.com publishing

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Review: Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah Baker

Series: The Up-and-Under #4Author: A. Deborah Baker (Seanan McGuire)Publisher: Tor.comReleased: October 17, 2023Received: ARC Find it on Goodreads | More Up-And-Under | More Seanan McGuire Book Summary: Avery and Zib are nearing the end of their journey. However, being near the end does not mean they are far from danger. There are still several quests they must wrap up, each less likely than…

[authortoberecognized]

            WRITER’S FORUM  SHORT FICTION

                        WEBSITES HELPFUL TO WRITERS This is a series of posts which, I think, will be beneficial to writers. But first, I would like to include my usual warning about using websites. Whenever you check a website you are, in my opinion and I talk from experience, being put on a list for sale. So, expect the possibility of being bombarded by ads from companies you, perhaps, have…

[veradune]

Me @ TOR rn:

To reiterate: Christopher Paolini, author of Eragon and other such books, blocked me on Twitter for calling him out about his AI-generated cover.

Tor has admitted he approved this cover and they have been consulting him every step of the way. He is complicit.

It’s honestly so fucking frustrating that this is going to go forward. That the cover to Fractal Noise is gonna be published with AI art that has ripped off other artists. And neither the author nor the publisher give one flying fuck about it.

I don’t think a lot of people really understand what this means. Book cover art is already nearly universally shitty. You go look at fantasy art covers, and they’re all photomanipulations, generally a single girl on the cover doing magic or looking into the distance. There’s no variety. But at least people get paid for them.

With AI art, artists don’t get paid. You know who does? The people who made the dataset. The people who sold the “cover.” Even though it took less than 20 minutes to make.

If this isn’t infuriating you, I don’t know what the hell else to say. Machine learning is coming for everyone’s jobs, and corporate wallets don’t care if it’s safe or not. Certain areas are already experimenting with AI Amazon deliveries, and it’s been hinted that long-haul trucking is next.

This is unacceptable. PLEASE. I’m not going to guilt you into sharing this, but it is CRITICAL that we take a stand now and STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING. If you follow me, I am asking you as a friend to share this, and to find it in your heart to put pressure on people who publish AI art without paying artists.

Tor could change the cover. They’re not, because they’re using Fractal Noise as a test run to see if they can get away with it. Don’t let them. I don’t care how much you like Paolini’s work (although I think Eragon was a boring slog, so I had no qualms about calling him out), you HAVE to do your best to make this stop.

[zenashapter]

It Isn't Over Until It's Over #2022

It Isn't Over Until It's Over #2022 – a post about external validation and love!

2022 was so much better than I thought it would be, both professionally and personally. Professionally, I’m of course ecstatic that my science fantasy YA adventure ‘When Dark Roots Hunt’ was signed by MidnightSun Publishing. It’s scheduled for release in May 2023 and I can’t wait! Woo hoo! I don’t write too much horror or dark fantasy, yet those genres seemed to top my short fiction releases in…

[torpublishinggroup]

“Two is for discipline, heedless of trial; Three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile; Four for fidelity, facing ahead; Five for tradition and debts to the dead; Six for the truth over solace in lies; Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies; Eight for salvation no matter the cost; Nine for the Tomb, and for all that was lost.”

8-74-13-18 13-343-25-111 8-269-16-10 15-386-33-34 9-209-9-25 14-131-22-34 7-283-11-34 13-283-27-55 9-453-6-17 14-508-25-65 7-212-10-17 14-172-21-153.

[vkelleyart]

Deal Announcement: WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON (Erewhon, Spring 2025)

If you've been with me on Tumblr for a while, then you may already be familiar with this title and been waiting for this particular update, and all I can say is thank you endlessly for patiently sticking it out with me! I am so incredibly pleased to announce that WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON has been acquired by Diana Pho at Erewhon Books/Kensington Publishing as an illustrated adult historical fantasy!

Tor.com has published a blush-inducing article which features some insights from me about what inspired the story, reactions from Hugo Award-winning editor Diana Pho on what drew her to the book, a downright tear-jerking endorsement from the incomparable TJ Klune, and my original concept art of Benny & Río. I hope you'll take a moment to read it at the link below!

This project is the culmination of a lifelong dream to write and illustrate my own books, and there are no words to convey the depth of my gratitude to Diana for the gift of seeing it be delivered as an illustrated adult work. Infinite thanks must also go to my unstoppable agent Saritza Hernandez, my phenomenal critique partners Anna Racine and Mark Duplane, and the many experts who generously and enthusiastically donated their time and resources in the middle of lockdown to help me bring 1911 Brooklyn, NY to life, including:

Virginia Sanchez-Korrol –– Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, CUNY Brooklyn College

David Sharp -- President, The Waterfront Museum

Jamie Salen, David Favaloro, & Lana Rubin –– Marketing Director, Director of Curatorial Affairs, & Collections Manager (respectively), The Tenement Museum

Adam Realman -- Artistic Director, The Coney Island Circus Sideshow

More details about WTTHTM's release will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, thank you all again for believing in this story and supporting it when it was just a humble MerMay fic. I can't wait until you meet Benny and his beloved Río in print in 2025!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict

Today, Tor.com published my latest short story, "The Canadian Miracle," set in the world of my forthcoming (Nov 14) novel, The Lost Cause. I am serializing this one on my podcast! Here's part one.

The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won't voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage.

They're at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security's imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they've been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a "foundation" to peddle his disinformation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.O.U.S.A.

Peterson's go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they're paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they're still at it – in the pages of the New York Times, no less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html

The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to boomers, who will leave the cupboard bare:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/aging-medicare-social-security.html

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this latest rhetorical assault on Social Security is timed to coincide with the ascension of the GOP House's new Speaker, Mike Johnson, who makes no secret of his intention to destroy Social Security:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-10-31-debunking-latest-attack-social-security/

The GOP says it wants to destroy Social Security for two reasons: first, to promote "choice" by letting us provide for our own retirement by flushing even more of our savings into the rigged casino that is the stock market; and second, because America doesn't have enough dollars to feed and house the elderly.

But for the New York Times' audience, they've figured out how to launder this far-right nonsense through the language of social justice. Rather than condemning the impecunious olds for their moral failing to lay the correct bets in the stock market, Social Security's opponents paint the elderly as a gerontocratic elite, flush with cash that rightfully belongs to the young.

To support this conclusion, they throw around statistics about how house-rich the Boomers are, and how much consumption they can afford. But as Kuttner points out, the Boomers' real-estate wealth comes not from aggressive house-flipping, but from merely owning a place to live. America's housing bubble means that younger people can't afford this basic human necessity, but the answer to that isn't making old people homeless – it's providing a lot more housing, and banning housing speculation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

It's true that older people are doing a lot of consumption spending – but the bulk of that spending isn't on cruises to Alaska to see the melting glaciers, it's on health care. Old people aren't luxuriating in their joint replacements and coronary bypasses. Calling this "consumption" is deliberately misleading.

But as Kuttner points out, there's another, more important point to be made about inequality in America – the most significant wealth gap in America is between workers and owners, not young people and old people. The "average" Boomer's net worth factors in the wealth of Warren Buffett and Donald Trump. Older renters are more rent-burdened and precarious than younger renters, and most older Americans have little to no retirement savings:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2023/10/28/the-new-york-times-greedy-geezer-myth/

Less than one percent of Social Security benefits go to millionaires – that's because the one percent constitute one percent of the population. It's right there in the name. The one percent are politically and economically important, but that's because they are low in numbers. Giving Social Security benefits to everyone over 65 will not result in a significant outlay to the ultra-wealthy, because there aren't many ultra-wealthy people in America. The problem of inequality isn't the expanding pool of rich people, it's the explosion of wealth for a contracting pool of rich people.

If conservatives were serious about limiting the grip of these "undeserving" Social Security recipients on our economy and its politics, they'd advocate for interitance taxes (which effectively don't exist in America), not the abolition of Social Security. The problem of wealth in America is that it is establishing permanent dynasties which are incompatible with social mobility. In other words, we have created a new hereditary aristocracy – and its corollary, a new hereditary peasantry:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Hereditary aristocracies are poisonous for lots of reasons, but one of the most pressing problems they present is political destabilization. American belief in democracy, the rule of law, and a national identity is q function of Americans' perception of fairness. If you think that your kids can't ever have a better life than you, if you think that the cops will lock you up for a crime for which a rich person would escape justice, then why obey the law? Why vote? Why not cheat and steal? Why not burn it all down?

The wealthy put a lot of energy into distracting us from this question. Just lately, they've cooked up a gigantic panic over a nonexistent wave of retail theft:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/31/the-retail-theft-surge-that-isnt-report-says-crime-is-being-exaggerated-to-cover-up-other-retail-issues/

Meanwhile, the very real, non-imaginary, accelerating, multi-billion-dollar plague of wage theft is conspicuously missing from the public discourse, despite a total that dwarfs all retail theft in America by an order of magnitude:

https://fair.org/home/wage-theft-is-built-into-the-business-models-of-many-industries/

America does have a property crime crisis, but it's a crisis of wage-theft, not shoplifting. Likewise, America does have a retirement crisis: it's a crisis of inequality, not intergenerational conflict.

Social Security has been under sustained assault since its inception, and that's in large part due to a massive blunder on the part of FDR. Roosevelt believed that people would be more protective of Social Security if they thought it was funded by their taxes: "we bought it, it's ours." But – as FDR well knew – that's not how government spending works.

The US government can't run out of US dollars. The US government doesn't get its dollars for spending from your taxes. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

A moment's thought will reveal that it has to be this way. The US government (and its fiscal agents, chartered banks) are the only source of dollars. How can the US tax dollars away from earners unless it has first spent those dollars into the economy?

The point of taxation isn't to fund programs, it's to reduce the private sector's spending power so that there are things for sale to the public sector. If we only spent money into the economy but didn't take any out of the economy, the private sector would have so many dollars to spend that any time the government tried to buy something, there'd be a bidding war that would result in massive price spikes.

When a government runs a "balanced budget," that means that it has taxed as much out of the economy as it put into the economy at the start of the year. When a government runs a "surplus," that means it's left less money in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the beginning of the year. This is fine if the economy has contracted overall, but if the economy stayed constant or grew, that means there are fewer dollars chasing more goods and services, which leads to deflation and all kinds of toxic outcomes, like borrowing more bank-created money, which makes the finance sector richer and the real economy poorer.

Of course, most governments run "deficits" – which is another way of saying that they leave more dollars in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the start of the year, or, put another way, a deficit probably means that your economy got bigger, so it needed more dollars.

None of this means that governments can spend without limit. But it does mean that governments can buy anything that's for sale in their own currency. There are a lot of goods for sale in US dollars, both goods that are produced domestically and goods from abroad (this is why it's such a big deal that most of the world's oil is priced in dollars).

Governments do have to worry about getting into bidding wars with the private sector. To do that, governments come up with ways of reducing the private sector's spending power. One way to do that is taxes – just taking money away from us at the end of the year and annihilating it. Another way is to ration goods – think of WWII, or the direct economic interventions during the covid lockdowns. A third way is to sell bonds, which is just a roundabout way of getting us to promise not to spend some of our dollars for a while, in return for a smaller number of dollars in interest payments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

FDR knew all of this, but he still told the American people that their taxes were funding Social Security, thinking that this would protect the program. This backfired terribly. Today, Democrats have embraced the myth that taxes fund spending and join with their Republican counterparts in insisting that all spending must be accompanied by either taxes or cuts (AKA "payfors").

These Democrats voluntarily put their own policymaking powers in chains, refusing to take any action on behalf of the American people unless they can sell a tax increase or a budget cut. They insist that we can't have nice things until we make billionaires poor – which is the same as saying that we can't have nice things, period.

There are damned good reasons to make billionaires poor. The legitimacy of the American system is incompatible with the perception that wealth and power are fixed by birth, and that the rich and powerful don't have to play by the rules.

The capture of America's institutions – legislatures, courts, regulators – by the rich and powerful is a ghastly situation, and to reverse it, we'll need all the help we can get. Every hour that Americans spend worrying about their how they'll pay their rent, their medical bills, or their student loans is an hour lost to the fight against oligarchy and corruption.

In other words, it's not true that we can't have nice things until we get rid of billionaires – rather, we can't get rid of billionaires until we have nice things.

This is the premise of my next novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14; it's set in a world where care and solidarity have unleashed millions of people on the project of maintaining the habitability of our planet amidst the polycrisis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

It's a fundamentally hopeful book, and it's already won praise from Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. I wrote it while thinking through and researching these issues. Conservatives want us to think that we can't do better than this, that – to quote Margaret Thatcher – "there is no alternative." Replacing that narrative is critical to the kinds of mass mobilizations that our very survival depends on.

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/2023/11/intergenerational-warfare/#five-pound-blocks-of-cheese

This Saturday (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

[dykegeology]

Mate at least 4/12 of the best novel/novella shortlist (haven't read them all so there could be more ) have lgbtq protagonists 😭 I promise they are not censoring the sandman for having some gay side characters

The conversation about the hugo awards stuff on tumblr has been absolutely unhinged. There are definitely big issues with the way it was counted this year (https://alpennia.com/blog/comparison-hugo-nomination-distribution-statistics) but that is not inherently linked to the issues with the stuff getting ruled ineligible and it's quite bizarre that like if you go into the hugo awards tag the majority is people going 'Clearly this is some Sinister Chinese Censorship. Xi Jinping clearly personally cares which tor.com book wins some random science fiction book competition so has decided to Censor it'. I'm definitely not an expert on this but both my parents do computer vote counting authentication stuff so it has been the default dinner conversation for most of my life and it is vastly more common for places to have a shitty vote counting program, get weird results, publish the results without verifying because they're not careful (no one thinks their counting algorithms have problems but basically all of them do), suddenly realise that their vote counting program had problems after announcing the results, then get embarrassed and hope that no one notices instead of announcing a correction. Which is obviously still bad!! But it is a completely different thing to intentional censorship lol

[gollancz]

Why I'm Not Allowed On Twitter Unsupervised Any More: A Photo Essay

Key Notes:

Since this was posted I discovered that the books had briefly been available in the UK under the name Peter Beagle rather than Peter S. Beagle in the mid-90s, which is why they didn't show up on the British Library search

The article by Tor.com @torbooks: Peter S. Beagle Has Finally Regained the Rights to His Body of Work

If you want our gorgeous limited edition, I believe there are still a handful left (except for the US and Canada, sorry lads), and you can get it here. I'm not kidding when I say I got a little teary-eyed when these showed up.

[Image Description: A tweet thread from the Gollancz twitter dated 20th July 2022, which goes as follows -

Tweet 1: You may have seen that we're printing a Brand New Edition of The Last Unicorn. We're very excited! I was asked to tweet about it. I wasn't asked to do it quite like this, but I also wasn't asked NOT to do it like this, and I have the twitter login so whose fault is that? (Thread emoji, and gif from the film Scream reading 'The Call is coming from inside the house!')

Tweet 2: Imagine, if you will, you are a small child in the UK during the late 80s/early 90s. You might look a bit like this, or you might have had parents who didn't choose suffering (ask my mum about The Saga of the Hat) (an image of a small girl approximately 3 years old wearing a blue dress and a big white hat)

Tweet 3: Imagine you have a cool older cousin, one who, as you get age, introduces you to fantasy films like Ladyhawk and The Princess Bride and has a post the whole family knows as 'the vampire and the naked lady'. She's extremely responsible for the way you turn out as an adult.

Tweet 4: One year, for your birthday, this cousin buys you a video. It's the first video that is yours, not to share. It has a bright yellow cover. The butterfly scares you. But you watch it on a loop. You don't realise how special it is, but it's a seed that burrows into your brain. (An image of a VHS of The Last Unicorn)

Tweet 5: A decade or so later, in your teens, you rediscover it. None of your friends have heard of it, despite also being fantasy-inclined. That's odd, you think. Is this an outlandishly weird title? Then you get older and you realise: no, it isn't. (Principal Skinner meme reading 'Am I out of touch? No, it's the people who don't know about The Last Unicorn who are wrong')

Tweet 6: Time and tech march on, you get a DVD of the film. You realise it's got Christopher Lee in it! And Angela Lansbury! Your mum tries to get you to listen to songs by America other than the soundtrack, but the only one that really sticks is the other one they did about a horse. (Gif of Walter White from Breaking Bad singing along to Horse With No Name)

Tweet 7: You realise that the film is based on a book. Like The Princess Bride, which you've also read (after spending longer than you're proud of trying to find an unabridged edition). 'Neat,' you think, 'I'll have to read that!'

Tweet 8: And then you can't find it. Because, as mentioned previously, you're in the UK. The Last Unicorn was published for the first time in 1968. But, if you look at the British Library's National Bibliography (super neat resource btw), that was, uh, about it. (screenshot of the search results from the National Bibliography showing four editions of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, one from Gollancz in 2022, one from IDW in 2019, one from Tachyon Publications in 2018, and one from Bodley Head in 1968)

Tweet 9: The Tachyon edition is the unfinished first draft of the story. The IDW edition is a gorgeous graphic novel. But in terms of the novel? I don't know how many reprints it had (if anyone knows, I'd love to find out), but there's a good chance it went out of print in the 70s.

Tweet 10: The film, however, was released in 1982. Although it didn't make it to the UK until 1986. Conservative estimates could put that between 10 and 15 years since the book was last available in the UK. This gives you a generation in the UK who only know the story through the film! (A screenshot of the IMDB page showing the different release dates for The Last Unicorn around the world)

Tweet 11: The screenplay was written by Peter S. Beagle, and made by the legendary animation directors Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass. That's right, the guys behind Thundercats and 2 out of the 3 films based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Tweet 12: The Book has been in print in the USA (and possibly all of North America) constantly since its publication, so it seems baffling that people in the UK haven't heard of it. As the internet became more prominent, however, it became easier to just... import a copy of the book.

Tweet 13: But! This also isn't quite as simple as you think. You see, until last year the rights to The Last Unicorn were tied up in legal limbo. And the US edition of the book contained changes that Peter wasn't happy with. (Link to the Tor.com article about the rights)

Tweet 14: Back to you, the 80s/90s kid, who is now an adult, happy that unicorns are A Thing again and you're living your best life. You're very easy to buy presents for. Your partner despairs of unicorns. You get a job working in books about magic and space. (unicorn emoji and photograph of a collection of unicorn memorabilia, including three different versions of The Last Unicorn)

Tweet 15: You mention that one day you would like to publish The Last Unicorn. That if you did, you would like to do a really beautiful edition of it. And you would like it to be purple. Because since the film is what you know, you associate it with purple.

Tweet 16: And, after taking a very circuitous route, here we are! This is the original text, that was first published in 1968. Reading it after you have only seen the film is the strangest experience - like being introduced to a very dear friend that you have never met before.

Tweet 17: Peter's screenplay kept the voice of the story so well, you can hear the characters when you read the book. But now there's so much more depth, softness and warmth to it. The butterfly doesn't seem so scary any more. And, it's beautiful. And it's purple. (Image of a hardback edition of The Last Unicorn, with a black base, purple background, and a linocut image of the unicorn in her wood. On the black cover underneath is a foiled unicorn with the moon and butterfly, the page edges are sprayed purple, and the endpapers are black with silver butterflies)

Tweet 18: Anyway, I've taken you on a three day trip that could have been done in a single tweet, but that's what happens when you let me drive. This edition is the limited exclusive one only available through the Gollancz Emporium and you can preorder here: (link to Gollancz Emporium)

Tweet 19: But there is also a standard edition available through all booksellers! You'll be getting the author's preferred text, with an introduction from Patrick Rothfuss. There's also a brand new audiobook and it will be available in eBook for the first time ever.

Tweet 20: It's like going from famine to feast, and I wasn't able to talk about this for months so now I am able to talk about it, I'm going to make the social media team cry. UNICORNS. SPECIAL EDITION. PURPLE. The End.

Tweet 21: Additional behind the scenes bonus detail - I did take this cover to the art meaning while wearing a unicorn onesie.

Tweet 22: The comms team wrestling me away from the twitter account: (gif of Ross from Friends shouting 'Stop typing! Stop typing!')

End ID]

[jods-duplicitous-sluts]

Alecto the Ninth News

Part One

Alright friends. We are all chomping at the bit for any Alecto news at all. So here is what I've compiled from interviews, podcasts and AMAs. Sources are linked and screenshots have alt. text.

I've also included a little commentary or speculation on some points but ultimately that's not the focus of this collection.

Under the cut because I feel like it's going to get long.

So many screenshots, it turns out I'll have to split it into 3 posts.

If you enjoy this post please reblog so more people can see it!

Jump to part ■ Two of the post

Jump to part ■ Three of the post

I'm making this post on mobile, so forgive any wonkiness. Also tumblr ate this post once already *screams into the void*

• The book starts with Harrow in Hell. A reference to the Harrowing of Hell. Based on the presence of a porn mag I'd guess it's her own little river bubble inside Alecto but still just speculation.

Source: Tamsyn reads to us! Video with written description

• There is a wedding of some sort. Possibly other excuses to dress up the characters in formal ware. Some people have expressed concern that this was referencing the N- and C- wedding in Nona, but nope. We have confirmation that it is in book 4.

Source: Twitter

The next series of screenshots are all from the same tor.com interview: TM on Lyctorhood and Genderfuckery.

• This first one again confirms allusions to the harrowing of hell/ the decent of Christ. For those out of the loop the tldr:

The harrowing of hell is an Old English and Middle English term referring to the period of time between the Crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection. In triumphant descent, Christ brought salvation to the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world.

A lot of speculation has gone on around about Harrow and her role in freeing the souls trapped in the river/reviving the river from whatever is poisoning it. [ *cough*JOD*cough*].

Also another reference towards formal outfits for the cast. So at least the wedding if not multiple formal functions.

• The question of Harrow and Gideon's souls will continue into Alecto. Looking forward to info on how enmeshed they've become and/or if they can be separated.

• I mean this quote is infamous by now. Which of our faves is it in reference to? All of them?

•I feel like we haven't seen enough about the differences between rebirth [a la Paul and Nona] vs Resurrection [Gideon/Harrow?! Someone else?] So while not a direct promise of anything in Alecto, I feel like the implication is there.

•The next two screenshots are about the Alecto cover, which is complete[the first from the above interview:]

•and the second is from an AMA from Aug. 5 2020

• The cover is definitely done since she was talking about it in 2020 and reaffirmed right before Nona’s release. I feel like they are waiting until they have a better idea of a publishing date before release. Maybe we'll get news in Q4 after the Nona paperback release and excitement dies down?

• From the same 2020 AMA. As this is pre-Nona, it could be possible that the heist mentioned deals with Gideon's body [either the Houses heisting it from BOE which happened off screen or the heist of Gideon's body from the barracks]. But I included it just in case that isn't what is being referenced.

• Same 2020 AMA: Again this could be covered in Nona as being what the John chapters were about, but also maybe not.

Source: TazMuir tumblr post from April 2020

• Another infamous quote at this point. Definitely feels like this is about the 'Third Most Toxic Polycule' of Harrow/Gideon/Ianthe and maybe Alecto is in this loop as well. With all the references to weddings and relationships I'm wondering who out of these four is marrying who...[maybe it's someone totally different, but my money is on someone in this situation]

Click to see part two!

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Review: The Keeper's Six by Kate Elliot

Author: Kate ElliotPublisher: Tor.comReleased: January 17, 2023Received: NetGalley Book Summary: Esther hasn’t set foot in the Beyond in years – literally. She and her team have been banned from doing so. Yet that ban won’t be enough to stop Esther once this latest bit of news hits her: her son has been kidnapped and dragged into the Beyond. No ransom note, just the cryptic clues he could leave…

[charliejaneanders]

Hi! I have a question related to your blogpost “here’s what bugs me about comics.”

In it, you talk about comic discoverability, and I cant help but think that novels have a similar discoverability problem. Is this a real thing?

I’m sure there are good blogs or websites for this—your Washington Post column is actually one of the few places I know I can get good, thoughtful recommendations online—but I don’t know how to find those, either! Do you have any recommendations for places to find out about books?

(I know the obvious one I’m leaving out is going to indie bookstores and libraries, which *is* a great strategy, but sometimes going in-person isn’t possible. Goodreads and the Barnes and Noble website used to work for me, but seem to have gotten much worse, but maybe that’s just me.)

Oh yeah, that’s a totally valid question!

I think that prose novels, in general, are about as discoverable as single issues of comics. You know, publishers put out a lot of promo stuff when the first issue of a new comic is coming out, and you’ll see lots of stuff about it, but the trade doesn’t get that level of hype most of the time — which still feels sad to me. I think just like with a random issue of a comic book, you might need to be tapped into some networks.

Places I recommend for finding out about new science fiction and fantasy books... the Transfer Orbit newsletter by Andrew Liptak is *great*. Also, Reactor.com (formerly known as Tor.com) will have some great recommendations of brand new books. And Locus Magazine is always super useful. Hope this helps!

[elucubrare]

tor.com published an 'article' that took about 500 words to say "I don't like ice world settings....but maybe i should be a little more open-minded" & i'll take all the ice worlds he doesn't want

[librarycomic]

Three Novellas!

The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond. Tordotcom, 2024. 9781250290311. 167pp.

I love the cover of this book, and there seem to be shelf talkers praising it at every bookstore I visit (and it holds up to the hype). It's the story of a female knight, Maddileh, out to regain her honor by claiming a legendary sword, the Fireborne Blade, from the lair of a dragon. Accompanying her is a page who seems a little…off. This is a quick, original take on the dungeon crawl (though it's a cave here); alternating chapters recount historic encounters between knights and dragons.

We Speak Through The Mountain by Premee Mohamed. ECW, 2024. 9781770417335. 145pp.

This sequel to Mohamed's post-apocalyptic novella The Annual Migration of Clouds follows Reid as she enrolls in a university filled with technology and resources (and hidden from the rest of the world). Her relationship with the parasite that infects her changes because of the university's medical tech. I loved seeing her and other students from the outside deal with the realities of life with technology and enough to eat, though it lacks many things, too.

I really hope there's another book or three coming in this series. This is my favorite novella of the year, but if it sounds good to you, start with the first book in the series.

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht. Tor.com, 2019. 9781250225689. 160pp.

This book has so much I enjoyed: a murderous immortal, an outlaw wizard, a polluted coastline straight out of Miéville's New Crobuzon, dark legends, mutant sea creatures, bloody violence, and a fallen city that's either about to rise again or is where the end of the world will begin. There's an unlikely "romance" of sorts, too, if that's your thing, as well as a horrific plague. I enjoyed every page of this novella, and I can't believe I missed it when it was published.

[cristinabencina]

Illustration I made for Kerstin Hall's novelette, "A Heart Between Teeth" published online by Tor.com! You can read it for free here! Follow the artist, Cristina Bencina, on her instagram!

[torpublishinggroup]

Love is in the air…and it’s about to be on your shelves

We are thrilled to announce the launch of BRAMBLE, a new romance imprint from Tor Publishing Group! Launching this fall, Bramble is about to take you on an extraordinary journey of love Check out the full story via Tor.com and follow Bramble on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @brambleromance for updates!