“Dreadnought” by Cherie Priest (Reviewed by Robert Thompson)
Source: fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Cherie Priest is the author of numerous novels including the Blooker-Award winning Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Fathom, Wings to the Kingdom, Not Flesh Nor Feathers, and Boneshaker which was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. She is also the author of the novellas Dreadful Skin, Those Who Went Remain There Still and Clementine published by Subterranean Press, as well as numerous short stories and nonfiction articles that have appeared in Weird Tales, Publishers Weekly, and the Stoker-nominated anthology Aegri Somnia from Apex Book Company. Forthcoming releases include the urban fantasy novels Bloodshot and Hellbent through Bantam Spectra.
PLOT SUMMARY: Nurse Mercy Lynch is hard at work at a war hospital in Richmond, Virginia when she receives the news of her husband’s death. To make matters worse, a telegram from the west coast declares that her estranged father is gravely injured, and he wishes to see her. With nothing tying her down, Mercy sets out west toward the Mississippi River. Once there, she’ll catch a train over the Rockies and into Washington where she’ll be greeted by the sheriff, who will then take Mercy to see her father in Seattle.
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Top ten children’s books by Roald Dahl
Source: litlists.blogspot.com
Children’s author Philip Ardagh won the upper age category in last year’s Roald Dahl Funny Prize for the first of his Grubtown Tales, and his Eddie Dickens adventures have been translated into 34 languages. This year, he is a judge for the Roald Dahl Funny prize.
For the Guardian, he named his top ten children’s books by Roald Dahl.
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The New Vampire: Evolve Anthology Envisions a New Breed of Bloodsuckers for the 21st Century
Source:bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com
To say that vampires are a hot literary commodity right now would be an understatement. This is the Golden Age of paranormal fantasy and vampires are the Kings and Queens of the genre: bloodsuckers are prominently featured in some of the best paranormal fantasy sagas out there—Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan series, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Adrian Phoenix’s The Maker’s Song, and the Southern Vampire novels from Charlaine Harris, as well as blockbuster mainstream fiction bestsellers like Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s Strain trilogy (The Strain and the soon-to-be released The Fall).
And it’s not just in contemporary literature, vampires are everywhere: on television, in movies, in video games, featured in music, there are even vampires on children’s television shows (Sesame Street’s The Count) and pushing breakfast cereal (Count Chocula).
We are obviously fascinated with vampires—the way they dress, the way they seduce, the way they exist—so it comes as no surprise that one of the year’s most anticipated anthologies is Evolve, a collection of 24 vampire stories penned by some of Canada’s biggest and brightest dark fantasy and horror writers. Featuring stories by Kelley Armstrong, Tanya Huff, and Claude Lalumiere, the cool thing about this compilation isn’t so much that all of the writers are Canadian—frankly, I couldn’t care less where an author lives, as long as the stories are good—it’s that the stories all envision a new breed of bloodsucker, one that has evolved from Bram Stoker’s archetype: a vampire for the 21st Century.
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Zombie Hand-to-Hand Combat: A Defensive Primer
Source: tor.com
When it comes to surviving an attack of flesh-hungry corpses, we’ve heard this simple instruction over and over again: Fire one into the skull. Blast them in the brain. Shoot them in the head. Unfortunately, the reality of such a feat is far different from what we see on film. Let’s ignore the fact that a head shot on a moving, albeit slow, target is not an easy one to make, and address the detail that, depending on which statistic you read, anywhere from 34-48% of US citizens own a firearm. That leaves more than 50% of us SOL when the dead rise. The rest of the world, with its stricter gun ownership restrictions, would fare even worse.
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Undead Existentialism: Joan Frances Turner’s Debut Novel Breaks New Ground in Zombie Fiction
Source: bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com
Even though there have been some wildly innovative and brilliantly written zombie-powered novels released recently—Mira Grant’s Feed, Amelia Beamer’s The Loving Dead, Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall’s Night of the Living Trekkies, Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, etc.—the majority of these storylines have featured zombies as shambling, mindless, rotting corpses in a never-ending search for fresh meat… Brains!
Joan Frances Turner’s much publicized debut novel offers up a refreshingly different take on zombies—in Dust, the undead are simply deceased people who have been mysteriously reanimated with their personalities and memories still in tact. The stereotypes of zombie fiction are challenged—zombies don’t just see humans as meat and humankind doesn’t look upon the undead as just mindless monsters.
Set near the Illinois/Indiana border close to the shores of Lake Michigan, the story revolves around Jessica Anne Porter, who tragically died at the age of 15 in a car accident. An indeterminate time after she was buried—“days or weeks or months”—she woke up inside her coffin and eventually made it to the surface where she joined a misfit group of similarly afflicted (don’t call them “zombies,” it’s racist) who call themselves the Fly-by-Nights. Now, nine years later, she has come to terms with her new life, which revolves around going on hunting outings for wildlife, guarding her gang’s turf from other zombie groups or wayward “hoos” (humans) lost in the wilderness, and sleeping.
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Japanese scientists find new way to scan books
Source: news.com.au
JAPANESE researchers say they have developed technology to scan a book as fast as a person can flip through it.
A prototype ultrafast scanner capable of digitising a book in one minute will be built within two years, said the chief researcher of the team at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Information Science and Technology.
The “book-flipping scanning” system works with a camera that can take up to 500 photographs per second, enabling it to record about 170 book pages in 60 seconds as a person thumbs through them.
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