John Scalzi’s blog always makes for interesting reading and, while he needs no help from guest-posts, he generously shares his audience with other writers, well-known and not-so-well-known.
For those of you interested, here’s a Bureau42 contribution to The Big Idea at Scalzi’s blog.
How often does the Bureau get a shout-out in the acknowledgements of a novel?
The Con was released t Friday, November 13, 2020. The e-launch party will be streamed on Twitch-TV at 6:00 pm EST on November 14. Anyone can watch by clicking the link. If you create/have an account and log-in, you can participate. Has your favorite fan convention been canned due to COVID? Consider The Con: SF Fans meet the Jane Austen Society at a hotel that may also be hosting an actual alien presence. High tea, a robot battle, nerds gone wild, religious LARPERS, the Augur of Quaoar, and the quest to answer one of history’s great questions: does anything we do matter– or is it all just a con?
Hell Gate’s ominous white pavilion looked more like a church than a ride: a church with an enormous red devil perched on the roof… The devil was plaster and lath, but Pin’s mother still crossed herself every time she walked past.
A little late but fit for the season: this novel, released last year by much-lauded, cross-genre writer Elizabeth Hand manages to be a mystery, a postcard to Chicago’s long-gone Riverview Park, a tribute to outsider artist and writer Henry Darger, a coming-of-age story, and a tour of hell. If you don’t know Hand’s work, she has published fourteen novels, and won Nebula, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and International Horror Guild Awards. She’s also written several licensed works for the Star Wars, X-Files, Twelve Monkeys, and other franchises.
The night was mild and balmy and they walked; and as they approached the Bramford’s blackened mass they saw on the sidewalk before it a group of twenty or so people gathered in a semicircle at the side of a parked car. Two police cars waited double-parked, their roof lights spinning red (35).
Ira Levin’s influential novel remains quite readable, and makes a devilish companion piece to the Halloween season.
This book was first published in 2009, by a small publishing company that went under. It was republished in 2016 by another, more successful small publisher, and the author has since sold a story set in the same world and a sequel, Tinker’s Sea. The setting makes a review timely. A credible future world, recovering from environmental and social collapse, faces a plague.
The Were-Traveler has been running since 2011, with each issue featuring short fiction (usually quite short) related to a particular theme or topic in fantasy, SF, or horror. Their current issue addresses the problematic legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, the imaginative and monumentally influential author whose racism and xenophobia, extreme even for his time, frequently entered his stories. This were-issue’s weird fiction draws upon Lovecraft’s influence and tropes to examine and critique his less savoury side.
Among the contributors you may recognize a writer from our Bureau.
My favourite video game franchise has had numerous novel adaptations in the Japanese language, including a single book with adaptations of Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II, and Final Fantasy III released to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the franchise in 2012. Eight years later, we finally get that collection in English.
This year’s Hugo for best novel went to Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, which was also nominated for a Locus and a Nebula. Library Journal and the Guardian named it a Best Book of 2019, while NPR named it a Favorite Book.
How did your debut novel do?
If Harry Potter was the boy who lived, Peter Green was the boy who died. This initially feels like a Potter knock-off, but that changes quickly. In fact, it may only feel that way to me because the “magic boarding school” genre which I’m told is popular in the UK is not as popular where I am, so the Potter books were my first exposure to it. This is my second.
I was given the opportunity to read Auxiliary: London 2039 by Jon Richter, and now one of our readers will get that same opportunity.