Posts published in: 2012/02

Audible.com 24-hour 2-for-1 sale

Posted on 2012-02-29 at 15:17 by Sam

Starting this morning and lasting until Thursday March 1 at 11 AM Eastern Time (US), Audible.com is promoting a 2-for-1 sale. This is one of the “special shopping cart” mini-site sales, and there is a tab for both Fantasy and (separately!) for Sci-Fi titles, though some titles of sf interest lurk on the Fiction, Young Adult, and other tabs as well. The titles include books from Fforde, Vonnegut, Tim Powers, Robert J. Sawyer, and more, and here are the ones which most caught my eye when scanning through this

Posted in regular

Release Week: TC McCarthy's Exogene, Michael Swanwick's Dancing with Bears, Sergey and Marina Dyachenko's The Scar, and Elizabeth Hand's Available Dark

Posted on 2012-02-29 at 03:49 by Sam

February goes out with quite a splash, with T. C. McCarthy’s Exogene: The Subterrene Trilogy, Book 2, Michael Swanwick’s Dancing with Bears: A Darger and Surplus Novel, Sergey and Marina Dyachenko’s The Scar, and Elizabeth Hand’s Available Dark.

EXOGENE: Read by Bahni Turpin for Blackstone Audio and released concurrently with the mass market and e-book from Orbit, Exogene sets up as a much more traditional military sf novel than did the author’s debut, 2011’s Germline. Germline was read by Donald Corren, an

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged available-dark, dancing-with-bears, elizabeth-hand, exogene, michael-swanwick, release week, review, sergey-dyanchenko, tc mccarthy, the-scar

A brief summary of Saladin Ahmed's "Throne of the Crescent Moon"

Posted on 2012-02-27 at 17:06 by Sam

Posted in conversation

Untitled

Posted on 2012-02-25 at 05:56 by Sam

Received: Three MP3-CD review copies from Blackstone Audio, including:

• EXOGENE by T. C. McCarthy, read by Bahni Turpin — to be published in CD, MP3-CD, and digital audio March 1, 2012 — sequel to last year’s excellent debut GERMLINE
• TO MARRY MEDUSA by Theodore Sturgeon, read by Stefan Rudnicki and directed by Emily Janice Card — published in CD and MP3-CD 2/1/2012, in digital audio 2/24/2009 — A work of classic sf from 1958: “Up until one minute ago, Gurlick was merely a specimen of homo sapiens, and a

Posted in photo | Tagged blackstone audio, received

Feature Friday: Open Letter to Audible: a DRM-free option.

Posted on 2012-02-24 at 15:50 by Sam

Dear Audible,

I love you guys. You’ve brought nearly 700 science fiction and fantasy books to audio, 43 so far this year, and we’re not even done with February yet. (And that’s just Audible Frontiers alone, not counting Audible, Inc. or Neil Gaiman Presents, or Brilliance Audio, or even just the beginnings of what you’re doing with ACX.) I love the narrator features and interviews, and I am really liking the ability to follow reviewers which was added last year, and the addition of individual ratings for

Posted in regular | Tagged feature-friday

Arcfinity: Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins. Out now.

Posted on 2012-02-22 at 15:13 by Sam

Link: Arcfinity: Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins. Out now.

arcfinity:

OUT NOW

For iPads and iPhones
For Kindle
For Android devices, Windows and Mac computers
As a collectible print edition

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL: Welcome to the future
Simon Ings and Sumit Paul-Choudhury

FORWARD: The object of posterity’s scorn (+)
Bruce Sterling

SHORT STORY:…

I’ve been anticipating this a long while, but… am very sad to see the price for the print edition ($30). There’s a pile of more cost-effective ways to print this, folks

Posted in link

Release Week: Eric Flint's 1632, Elizabeth Moon's Echoes of Betrayal, Larry Niven, and The Technologists

Posted on 2012-02-21 at 18:43 by Sam

Published in print by Baen in 2000, 1632 became a bestseller and spawned a bestselling series of alternate history and its own fanfiction magazine, its own track at Dragon*Con, and who knows what else. Synopsis: A small bit of

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged 1632, echoes-of-betrayal, elizabeth-moon, eric-flint, release week

The 2012 Audies finalists have been announced, with Neil Gaiman getting nods as author, publisher, and performer, and 3 nods for Wil Wheaton

Posted on 2012-02-20 at 21:40 by Sam

Via Audiobooker, a Booklist blog, the 2012 Audies Finalists have been announced. Here are some of the titles I thought my readers here would find the most interesting, with links:

FANTASY

• The Automatic Detective, by A. Lee Martinez, Narrated by Marc Vietor, Audible, Inc.
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor, Narrated by Khristine Hvam, Hachette Audio
• The Land of Laughs, by Jonathan Carroll, Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, Audible, Inc. (Neil Gaiman Presents)
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully

Posted in regular

Untitled

Posted on 2012-02-19 at 18:08 by Sam

neil-gaiman:

How to Write a Novel.

And you know, this is pretty much everything you need to know. The rest is detail, most of which is irrelevant…

(Stolen from http://www.nicalderton.com/blog/HowToWriteANovel/)

Posted in photo

Feature Friday: The regional digital divide cuts both ways (or: WHERE IS MY IRON COUNCIL AUDIOBOOK, WORLD!)

Posted on 2012-02-17 at 17:48 by Sam

Most times, as a reader and listener in the US, I don’t have to worry much about regional rights when it comes to the books I want to read, the films I want to watch, and so on. But as I find myself following the field more and more closely, those exceptions, generally UK and Australia (and sometimes Canadian!) titles which haven’t (yet?) made it to the US begin to gnaw at me.

Last year, it was (among other books, but most notably) Christopher Priest’s The Islanders which came out in the UK …

But not in

Posted in regular