2010 World Fantasy Award Finalists Announced

by Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious

As reported by Locus Online, the 2010 World Fantasy Award finalists have been announced, including the five finalists for best novel, first published in 2009. The winners will be announced at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus OH, in late October.

Blood of Ambrose, James Enge (Pyr)
The Red Tree, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
The City & The City, China Miéville (Macmillan UK/ Del Rey)
Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland/Atlantic-Corvus)
In Great Waters, Kit Whitfield (Jonathan Cape UK/Del Rey)

The World Fantasy Award finalists in each category are comprised of the top two selections chosen by voters who attended the World Fantasy convention the year before, along with three to four selections by a panel of judges.

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Eoin Colfer’s 6 favorite books

via The Week

What keeps the Artemis Fowl author in thrall? Everything from Robert Lewis Stevenson classics to neo-noir comic books…

Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle (Del Rey, $8). The 1963 sci-fi novel that spawned a movie empire. A disturbing classic that makes the preposterous believable. Beautifully written and totally captivating. A short, sharp shock to the system. The father of all talking-monkey fiction—which is a bigger subgenre than you might think.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (Dover, $2). This is always on any list I compile. Scary, funny, and loaded with the kind of unforgettable characters that make all writers want to try harder. This novel has featured on best-of compilations for more than 100 years.

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The Chart of Fantasy Art Part 4: Title Trends and Fonts

via Orbit

Every year we ask our summer intern to do a survey of cover art elements for the top US fantasy novels published in the previous year. You can find more of our findings on the Chart of Fantasy Art, the Changing Fashion of Urban Fantasy Heroines, and Color Trends in Dragons. Today we look at book titles — both what the titles say AND how they look. Note: Words have been generalized into one form, so for example “death” and “dead” and “deadly” all count in “death.”

First off, lets look at the content of 2009′s fantasy titles. This was a new category of inquiry for us this year and there were many surprises in store once the data was collected and analyzed. In the chart above the size of the word is in proportion to the number of books on which it appears in the title (no subtitles or series titles this time). As you can see, there are some pretty predictable words in heaviest usage: “Dragons”, “Magic”, and “Shadows” were no-brainers. However we were surprised at how high “Death” rated — was fantasy turning dark and morbid? (or more dark and more morbid than usual, at least?) But no, there was a single culprit to blame. All the Sookie Stackhouse books were re-released last year because of True Blood’s success, and that accounted for the extra “Death” usage.

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David Goyer’s alien armageddon book series gets a movie deal

By Meredith Woerner at io9

The Dark Knight co-writer David S. Goyer just landed a movie deal for his still yet-to-be-published book trilogy about aliens careening towards the Earth, called Heaven’s Shadow.

According to Deadline. Goyer is writing the novel, which will be in stores in the summer of 2011, with Michael Cassutt:

The trilogy begins when an object is discovered heading for earth. Initial panic gives way to a competition between governments to be first to intercept what they believe is a breakaway meteor. What the astronauts discover leads to an encounter with alien forces that are a threat to humanity.

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Seasons of Wither: Is Science Fiction Dead?

by paulgoatallen at Barnes and Noble

“Is science fiction dying?” I posted a blog asking this same question last year – hoping to rile up some hardcore science fiction readers I know – but instead of sparking a firestorm, all I found were literally hundreds of readers who all but accepted the fact that science fiction was already dead and gone.

I’ve read some great articles on this topic since then – and talked with a lot of knowledgeable people – and I thought it would be a good idea to revisit this question, which, in my opinion, is hugely significant relating to the future of genre fiction.

As a longtime genre fiction book reviewer and a moderator for BarnesandNoble.com’s Fantasy/Science Fiction and Paranormal Fantasy forums, I’ve asked myself questions like this countless times over the last two or three decades: Is science fiction really dying?

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I think whenever Sci Fi has a resurgence in popularity, and then the media frenzy about it starts to die down, people start asking whether or not Sci Fi is going to disappear. But people have been thinking “Oh, this is the end” for decades, and sci fi remains on bookshelves. It’s just evolving, not disappearing. I hate hearing  that it’s disappearing, because it’s ridiculous. I thought the font chart was really interesting; I love seeing anything to do with the book making process. And they mentioned clichés, but that’s how marketing works–you can tell a lot about the type of  book based on the cover design.

What do you think of the World Fantasy nominees? Do you think Sci Fi is here to stay?

Garth Nix kicks off this year’s Book Festival

via The List

Garth Nix, the bestselling Australian author of young people’s fantasy fiction, is both honoured and alarmed that he’ll be kicking off this year’s Book Festival with its very first session. ‘I have a new one I’ve been working on.’ Nix will also be talking about how he goes about making stories up and how he then writes them down, and he’ll be reading from his latest book, Lord Sunday, the seventh and final book in The Keys to the Kingdom series, before taking questions: ‘Interestingly, it is often the younger members of the audience who ask the most sophisticated questions.’

Speaking of which, why does Nix think the current renaissance in young people’s literature has been focused on fantasy? ‘Much of this is down to JK Rowling and Harry Potter,’ Nix says. ‘But like most social phenomena it is impossible to work out why fantasy has become so attractive to readers, though one theory I have heard is that it is a reaction to the technological world we now live in; we seek out the wonderful and mysterious in fiction.’

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Random House CEO on the E-Book Age: ‘The Printed Book Will Still Dominate for a Long Time to Come’

via Spiegel

In a SPIEGEL interview, Random House CEO Markus Dohle, 42, discusses the world’s biggest publisher’s plans for the e-book age, his company’s tough negotiations with Apple and why the printed book will continue to dominate publishing.

SPIEGEL: The online retailer Amazon has announced that in June it sold 180 digital titles for every 100 hardcover books in the United States. Analysts estimate that in 10 years’ time only a quarter of all books will go to readers in printed form. Do you think that’s realistic?

Dohle: I don’t agree with that prognosis. I think it’s too aggressive, too much hype. The market share for electronic books, even in the United States, will more likely be between 25 and 50 percent by 2015. But this development still represents a huge opportunity for us. It creates new growth. I meet people in America who say: I started reading again because of my e-reader — and so did my children.

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I don’t think printed books will ever go extinct. There’s something cathartic (for me, anyway) about walking into a bookstore and picking something out and taking it home. I love just being in bookstores. And I like being able to see how far I am in a book, and that’s something you can’t do with e-books.

Why do you think fantasy is becoming so popular (again)? What effect do you think e-books will have on printed books?

Why Robin Sloan is the future of publishing (and science fiction)

By Eric Rosenfield at io9

Science fiction writer Robin Sloan tried to raise $3,500 from people wanting to read his novelette, but instead he wound up raising $13,500. It’s just one of the ways he’s successfully breaking all the rules of publishing.

[Annabel Scheme is ] just under 28,000 words long or a hundred pages or so (depending on the font). Conventionally, there’s just no market for a work of that length. Generally, it’s too long for magazines and fiction websites (which usually top out at 10,000-15,000 words) and too short for books (which start at 50,000 words). It’s not that someone might not want to read a 100-page work of fiction-why not?-but the infrastructure just doesn’t exist to get it into people’s hands. So Robin turned to the Internet, specifically Kickstarter, a website full of people trying to raise money for art projects, independent film, theatre, magazines and so on. He created PBS-style pledge levels, offering, for different levels of “membership”, PDF copies, print copies, surprise gifts, your name in the acknowledgements even behind-the-scenes peaks at his work on the novella (as he wrote it!). He said if he raised his goal of $3,500 for the work, he would release a PDF of the book free for everyone. Shockingly, he raised $13,942 dollars by almost 600 donors, more than most novelists get as an advance on a first novel. Not bad for a self-published, unpublishable novella.

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I AM LEGEND: THE DARKEST POST-APOCALYPTIC BOOK EVER WRITTEN?

by Terry DeHart for Orbit

What is it about early postwar sci-fi that makes its worlds seem so dark and realistically shabby? Proximity to nuclear annihilation? The poorly forgotten horrors of World War Two? The rote mediocrity of peace after the time of global death and flame ended, the famished beginning of the age of mass consumption? Or is it only that we’ve been conditioned by the black-and-white movies of that time?

Whatever it is, Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND is shot through with it. This book is wonderfully dark. Neville drinks. He sweats and laughs and cooks and eats and cries and, in between bouts of near-insanity, he kills people. It seems as if killing is the most rational thing left to do. And Matheson puts the reader right there with him.

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The Chronicles of Amber: Nine Princes in Amber

By Rajan Khanna at Tor

Welcome to a look at the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. Be aware that beyond the jump there are spoilers, lots of them. If you’re interested in reading the book, please do so first. This will be here when you’re done.

I’ve always admired Zelazny for the way he opens Nine Princes in Amber. We start off with an unnamed protagonist waking up in a hospital, with no memory of who he is and how he got there. We are carried along by the sheer charisma of the narrator’s voice and because of his lack of memory, we’re starting out on similar footing. As he figures things out, so do we, and this carries us through the majority of the novel.

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I love seeing the way the internet is changing the way we read books. It’s nice to have the option of getting books instantly, and allowing authors to gain readership who never would have seen the light of day before.

Have you read I Am Legend? Do you like post-apocalyptic books? What do you think the internet will do to reading in the future?

A Vampire Novel with Literary Chops: Justin Cronin Talks “The Passage”

Justin Cronin, author of the post-apocalyptic vampire epic The Passage, will be at BookPeople Saturday, and his breathlessly hyped page-turner is likely to be the book of the summer. A reference to Twilight and current teen-driven vampire craze seems obligatory, but it isn’t all that apt; set in a near-future North America in which Jenna Bush is governor of Texas (a dystopic setup in and of itself, some might say), The Passage stars undead that are vicious, animalistic, mindless—more akin to speedy, glowing, gravity-defying versions of Romero zombies or the viral monsters of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain.

And at 766 pages, with two more books to follow, the scope of The Passage is broad, encompassing a global catastrophe, and garnering more than a few comparisons to Stephen King’s plague classic The Stand. King, in fact, provided a glowing blurb for The Passage’s jacket, calling it a “novel-reader’s novel.” Indeed, this isn’t necessarily a book for genre fans only. Cronin—a Rice University English professor, Harvard grad, and Iowa Writers Workshop alumnus—is the previous author of two well-received literary novels, one of which won a PEN/Hemingway award.

Read more HERE

Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Bree Tanner’ sells 700,000 copies in the U.S.

Just a few hours ago, it was announced that Stephenie Meyer’s The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella had sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United Kingdom – positioning it to be the number one book of the year there – and now, Entertainment Weekly reports that the Bree Tanner novella has sold over 700,000 copies in the United States.

Another interesting piece of information brought forth by EW’s report is the staggeringly low number of people who have taken up the opportunity to read the book in its entirety online (at BreeTanner.com).

“Little, Brown, Meyer’s publisher, estimates that only 75,000 people have read the book in its entirety on the website,” EW reports.

Read more HERE

With a dozen titles forthcoming this summer, the Indian Young Adult novel has finally arrived

Before the advent of modern publishing for the teen market, two novels, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and Lord of the Flies (1954), drew the attention of adolescent readers. Unlike more recent fiction classified as Young Adult (abbreviated as YA), these were written primarily for an adult audience. The American author S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) made definitive shelf space for the coming-of-age novel. And in one of those moves that go down in history as a stroke of genius, a clever suit eventually branded the category that publishers are now flaunting as one of their hottest selling.

Through the golden age of YA fiction internationally (1970s to mid-1980s) and till today, these books have been largely imported or republished for the Indian market. One can credit Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series juggernaut for a new phenomenon: Indian publishers, having recognized the immense potential of the savvy adolescent readers’ market, are now commissioning original YA fiction.

Read more HERE

Turning pages or touching screens, vacationers have lots of good reads

One of the more pleasant dilemmas of summer vacation is figuring out what to read in whatever off-time you have.

Maybe it’s cheap thrillers or torrid romances, perhaps a foray into adventure, fictional or biographical.

Illustration by Shane McDermott
Nowadays, there’s yet another related choice: Do we read using the comforting, centuries-old paper books or go high-tech like the Kindle or iPad?

The idea of summer travel makes the revolution in portability wrought by the e-reader appealing. It’s taking hold with many readers, although you will find some people firmly in the camp who believe books don’t run on power supplies.

But whether it’s on paper or embedded in plastic, there are new titles galore for the summer of 2010.

“There are a lot of regular best-sellers that are coming out with books this summer like James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, Nelson DeMille, Anthony Bourdain, Janet Evanovich, Nora Roberts, etc.,” says Meek.

But a few titles are being vouched for by members of Davis-Kidd staff, Meek says. Those include:

“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” by Steig Larrson. A big best-seller, and maybe deservedly so. “War” by Sebastian Junger, “Backseat Saints” by Joshilyn Jackson: Described as an ideal summer read from a great contemporary Southern storyteller.

“My Name is Memory” by Ann Brashares: “A book for adults but has crossover potential from her young adult crowd who grew up on the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” series,” Meek says.

“The Marrowbone Marble Company” by Glenn Taylor: “Several staff members love this book,” Meek says, “which follows a man from WWII up through the Vietnam War.”

“How Did You Get This Number” by Sloane Crosley: Witty essays for the age 20-30 demographic. “Mockingjay” by Suzanne Collins: A sure young-adult bestseller.

Read more HERE

What did you think about today’a book news? Did you read about any books that interested you, that you will check out? Have you read ‘Bree Tanner’ yet, if so what did you think? And does it make you want more of the Twilight Saga?

Through the Lands of Fantasy: A Conversation with Lev Grossman, Author of The Magicians

By Christy Corp-Minaniji at Seattle Pi

When not in the hallowed space at the front of the store, The Magicians leads a dual life from one bookstore to the next – sometimes residing with fantasy, sometimes with literature. The split life of this novel relates directly to its creator’s crusade against the cultural ostracism of genre fiction from the realm of literature. Though the literary critic for a bastion of mainstream intellectual thought, Lev Grossman rails against the view of popular fiction as lowbrow or unworthy to be classed with literary fiction. “It shows how bizarrely inverted our literary culture has become that this is controversial…There’s been such a stigma with popular fiction that it wasn’t appropriate at Time, before I came to work there, to review the type of book that readers of Time actually read.” Though Grossman’s careful, modulated voice never raises, indignation laces his words. “Fiction that emphasized plot fell into disrepute… we’re finally seeing a reversal of that trend.” Grossman cites authors such as Clarke and Neil Gaiman as leading this reversal. “They write novels that confound attempts to classify them. Seeing them do that made me feel that I could and should write The Magicians.”

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Justin Cronin dissects vampire lore

By Lauren R. Harrison at The Chicago Tribune

There were vampires. Scientists. A virus. A father-daughter relationship. And endless narrative possibilities.

“I kind of want to write outside of a category because I can. … I’ve always tried to do more than one thing at the same time,” he said, adding that was true of his book “Mary and O’Neil” (2001) for which he won a PEN/Hemingway Award and Stephen Crane Prize, and of “The Summer Guest” (2004).

Taking from genres like gothic horror, Western and apocalyptic fiction, “The Passage” asks “what if all the vampire lore … actually had a scientific and historical reality in some way and what would it be like?”

Clever details about mirrors and crosses emerge as part of that answer by no mistake. “I’m not a writer who sits down and says, ‘Let’s see what the angels say today.’ I’m very much a planner,” Cronin says.

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Transworld Publishers Announce Exciting New Collaboration Between Sir Terry Pratchett And Stephen Baxter

via Book Trade Info

Sir Terry Pratchett first developed his vision of a chain of parallel worlds, The Long Earth, in an unfinished novel and two short stories in 1986, after writing Equal Rites, the third novel in what would turn into the hugely successful  Discworld series.  Now, at last, this long-gestating concept  is to see the light of day in two as-yet-untitled books written in collaboration with Stephen Baxter, author of Flood, Ark and the Time’s Tapestry  and Destiny’s Children series.

‘Our Earth is but one of a chain of parallel worlds, each differing from its neighbours by a little (or a lot) in an infinite landscape of infinite possibilities. And you can just step from one world to the next…’

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Blast from the Past: A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ

by Terry DeHart at Orbit Books

Summer is a great time for science fiction fans to indulge their inner Eeyores. After reading Mira Grant’s latest, what could be better than stretching out under all that depressing sunshine with a classic book of the post-apocalyptic genre?

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ covers a large swath of time as the human race attempts to put itself back together after a no-hold-barred nuclear war. It begins many hundreds of years after the game of fun with fusion was played, but the setting is still deliciously scorched and barren and humankind is poor and superstitious and still a wee bit mistrustful of science.

The protagonists of each of the three sections of the book are associated with the Abbey of Leibowitz, which has been charged with the preservation and interpretation of knowledge from ancient pre-war times—the wondrous times in which we now live. Much of the book explores the primary objective of people living in times “simplified” by lack of technology—to get the lights back on.

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Canticle for Leibowitz has been on my (long) list of stuff I want to read, but after this article reminded me what it was about, I may move it to the top of the pile. The new Terry Pratchett book sounds good too, I’ve read Good Omens (a collaboration with Neil Gaiman) and I just started the Discworld series, so I know I like his style. I’m still going to wait until The Passage comes out on paperback, but I am looking forward to reading it.

What do you think of fantasy and science fiction becoming more mainstream? What are your favorite vampire myths?

Straight from the heart

via The Sydney Morning Herald

Every week, hundreds of would-be authors try their luck. Of the thousands who send inquiries each year, perhaps one or two are asked to send in their completed work. It is rarer still for an unsolicited manuscript to be published. Until quite recently, the email system had never yielded a published book.

Then Lauren Fuge, a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Adelaide, sent a note about her 62,000-word adventure story, When Courage Came to Call. She gave a succinct synopsis of the plot (two teenage brothers caught up in a vicious war), added a line about her writing experience (one short story published in a magazine for high-school students) and included a 250-word excerpt.

The manuscript confirmed Fuge’s talent. Set on the fictional island of Zamascus, it opens with a bomb slamming into a public library. Walton started reading it on a train and was so engrossed she almost missed her stop. She wondered what 14-year-old could imagine such violence, tragedy and courage.

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The Best Literary Science Fiction Books?

by Jackie at Farm Lane Books

I’m getting bored of reality. The more books I read, the more it feels as though they are all churning out the same basic stories about love and loss. There are the odd exceptions, but I am increasingly becoming disenchanted with modern literary fiction.

I have always been wary of reading science fiction as I have had many disappointing reads. I blame this entirely on my lack of research. I would never walk into a book shop and just pick the top selling fiction title, so why did I ever imagine the best selling science fiction books would be to my taste? I’m a fan of literary fiction, so I should be looking at literary science fiction if I want to find enjoyable books. I didn’t realise this genre existed until recently, but a brief investigation has turned up lots of books that sound very appealing

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What Science Fiction Books Should Be In Every Fan’s Library?

via Daemon’s books

The folks over at SFSIGNAL.com had a great two-part post (Part 1 & Part 2) a few weeks ago when they asked a variety of panelists “What science fiction books should be in every fan’s library?” The panelists were allowed to recommend up to ten books, and could explain their selections to the readers. It’s a great read if you are a fan of sci-fi or are just looking for new ideas of what to read.

The article made me think of what works should be in every sci-fi fan’s library, and I compiled the list you see below.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) – Almost put this under classics, but I absolutely love this book and the rest of the series (even Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing). Adams does a great job providing a solid sci-fi story with humor and at the same time presenting characters the reader can relate to, even if they have two heads.

See the full list here

Why SF Fandom is Full of Romance Haterz

by Heather Massey at Galaxy Express

Stories blending science fiction and romance have existed for decades, but they were more likely to thrive in fan fiction communities rather than mainstream print books and magazines. Obviously, not everyone agrees that romance has no place in science fiction. But what drove these hybrid stories underground? And why, despite the significant number of romance-SF blends in existence, does it feel as though they are still there?

And for decades, romance, SF, and action-adventure were segregated along gender lines. That went a long way toward constricting the definition of a science fiction story, a romance story, and what were the “acceptable” elements to include in either one.

Is it any wonder that, in large part, SF authors were conditioned to avoid including romance in their stories, and that romance authors were conditioned to avoid including speculative/action-adventure elements in theirs?

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I know I try to avoid books that are marketed as “romance” because I prefer not to have descriptive sex scenes in my books. For me, they are distracting to the story. I don’t mind characters falling in love, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want that to be the main motivation driving the story. I never realized that Literary Sci Fi was it’s own genre, but I’ve read a few that would fall under that category and I do like them. That seems like a genre that would be good for introducing people to Sci Fi.

What books do you think every Sci Fi (or Fantasy) fan should read? Do you read Sci Fi or Fantasy Romance?