New SciFi Series Features Female Strength
Via: Prnewschannel
Two young bodyguards escaping their war-torn pasts find new life on Vaeilor, a remote planet safe from the genocide the women witnessed back home. But when Vaeilor suddenly falls under siege from the Tichatican Empire, it’s up to the two survivors, Ayrien and Daerona, to protect their planet and High King from annihilation.
‘Yvohshihlan: The Guardian’ by JuleAnn Troutman is the first in the author’s ‘Yvohshihlan’ series. The ‘Guardian’ story highlights the ideological clash between two cultures. Troutman weaves a fantasy tale detailing how a pair of young warriors must work with their newly-adopted people to find a way to save their new world. The book boldly asks, “What is the true value of a human being? And what makes a human worthy of existence?”
Troutman tells the story through strong female characters who she describes as her inspiration for this series.
“What also moves me is the theme of selfless heroism and innocent beauty of spirit, and the ceaseless striving to be that which is considered the best in humanity,” says Troutman. “This is displayed in all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythology-based stories, in C. S. Lewis’ philosophical visions and even in the innocent simplicity of the ‘Star Wars’ series.”
More HERE
SFWA’s 2010 Nebula Award Nomination Period is Open
Source: SFWA
SFWA’s 2010 Nebula Award® nomination period is open from November 15, 2010 to February 15, 2011 23:59 PST. Active and Associate SFWA members are eligible to submit nominating ballots. http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-nomination
Nebula Facts
- Active and Associate members may nominate up to 5 works in each category of the Nebulas, the Bradbury and the Andre Norton Award.
- Members may change their ballot at any point during the nomination period.
- The 6 items in each category that receive the most votes go on the ballot. (The Norton Jury may add up to 3 works on the Norton ballot.)
- Active members only vote on the final ballot in March
- The Nebula Awards® will be presented at the Nebula Awards Weekend, May 19-22nd 2011 in Washington, D.C.
Works published between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2010, are eligible in the following categories:
- Short Story: less than 7,500 words;
- Novelette: at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words;
- Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words
- Novel: 40,000 words or more.
The Rest Can Be Found HERE
No Romance In This Dark Fantasy Novel
From: Omnivoracious/Amazon Blog
Nope. Nada. Not a smidgeon. Not a whiff, no sparkles, no glitter glamour mon amour, armored or knighted or knitted from a charm embedded with fingernail clippings and mud mixed out of soil, spit and blood….
(Not that I’m personally opposed to romantic love…. )
Half World is about a deep love and enduring ties, between a daughter and her mother. For a great many people, a mother, or a mother figure, has played an incredibly important part of her/his/their life…. But there’s a dearth of stories about mothers and daughters, especially in YA*. There are many, many, YA novels across the genres that focus on the teen-aged girl’s relationship with her peers and/or a love interest. These relationships are important rites of passage, but so, too, is the teen’s relationship with her mother…. A long legacy of stories of orphaned daughters since Cinderella and Snow White and “The Matchstick Girl”, The Secret Garden, and Dorothy of Kansas, and Anne of Green Gables and so on—at the story level, these characters would not have had the adventure they had, if they had had a mother. I concur. But what kind of story would have played out if they did? (Terri Windling has written thoughtful essays on fairy tales tropes and myths and orphans and other such things at Endicott Studios. I strongly recommend a visit to the site if you’ve never been!)
Wait a sec! Half World is about a girl’s search for her missing mother…. So, aren’t I taking a near-similar track? One of the many strands woven into the conceptual cloth of Half World was the mother/daughter story of Demeter and Persephone. Melanie’s search for her mother is an inversion of the Greek myth.
More HERE
Anything in books can become real, you should watch what you read
Via: Io9
We’ve seen stories about worlds where anything from a book can become real, but Jim Hines has a clever twist. In his new series, the popularity of paranormal and urban fantasy novels leads to a plague of book-spawned monsters.
Hines just sold Libriomancer, the first book in his Magic ex Libris series, to Daw Books, for publication in 2012. He tells us:
Basically, libriomancy is the ability to draw objects from a book. The idea started with a short story, which ended with my protagonist pulling a light saber from a book and going to town on the bad guy. In the book, you’ve got a group who are responsible for basically “locking down” the more dangerous books and keeping magic in check.
Naturally, things go wrong. There’s an attack against the libriomancers, which turns out to be the first blow in what could become an all-out supernatural war.
Actual vampires and werewolves aren’t bursting out of books and attacking people, however — in Hines’ world, you can only pull something out of a book that’s big enough to fit physically through its pages. Hines elucidates:
You can’t really pull a full-sized vampire out of a mass market paperback, for example. But someone with enough power could reach inside and be bitten. Likewise with werewolves and so on. So it’s not characters escaping from books, but people falling so in love with the books (::cough:: Twilight ::cough::) that they actually reach through the pages and touch that world long enough to be infected.
So there are actual vampires — some of whom are sparkly and/or sexy — and werewolves running around, as a result of people’s infatuations with these books.
The Rest HERE
I am all about female strength. The Guardian sounds like an interesting read. Hmmmm no romance? I don’t know if I can do it, every book I’ve read lately has had some kind of romance in it. But hey if any of you have read Half World, let me know how it is! Oh and with the of books coming to life, I have heard of a few books that have done this. The last series I tried to read that had the same premise I just couldn’t get in to.
What do you think of todays news? Have you or are you going to read The Guardian, Half World, or the Libriomancer? What about entering the SFWA Awards?
