When the Gregorian Calendar drops a shiny, magical 24-hour bonus in our laps, we feel compelled to make the most of it. So, if you’re going to be in or around Manhattan on Wednesday the 29th, please join us for our first official Leap Day Meet-up at Professor Thom’s (219 2nd Avenue between East 13th and 14th Street). The whole Tor.com crew will be at the upstairs bar from 6 through 11 PM, and there should be plenty of snacks, free books and swag onhand, as always. All in all, it should be a fabulous shindig the likes of which may never be seen again…at least for another four years!

Please save the date and come on out (and if you follow Tor.com on Facebook, you can check out the event page and RSVP here). Hope to see you all on the 29th!

Kirk/Spock DJ illustration by Chris Whetzel

The special February double-issue of The New Yorker (on stands now) contains a short-story from the only author to have won both the Hugo Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Michael Chabon. Though much could be written about Chabon’s genre-bending career, and love of science fiction, fantasy and its related subjects, this piece of short fiction is brand new and quite poignant. In “Citizen Conn†Chabon explores the notions of old friendships forged out of the love of the fantastic, and how those creators effect the lives of fans, and even people who’ve never heard of them.

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To be honest, when I picked these three slim volumes up yesterday I wasn’t expecting them to be as good as I remembered them. The Prince in Waiting, (1970)  Beyond the Burning Lands (1971) and The Sword of the Spirits (1972) were books I read first when I was ten at most, and which I read a million times before I was fifteen, and haven’t read for at least twenty years — though they’ve been sitting on the shelf the whole time, though the shelves have moved. I was expecting the suck fairy to have been at them — specifically, I wasn’t expecting them to have the depth and subtlety that I remembered. I mean they’re only 150 pages long — 450 pages didn’t seem enough space for the story that I remembered. It barely seemed enough for the world.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. These really are good books. They’re not much like children’s books and they’re not much like science fiction as it was being written in 1970, but my kid-self was quite right in adoring these books and reading them over and over.

[Read more: No spoilers. They’re set in a world generations after a catastrophe]

“Premiereâ€
Written by Rockne S. O’Bannon, directed by Andrew Prowse
Season 1, Episode 1

1st US Airdate: March 19, 1999
1st UK Airdate: November 29, 1999
1st Australian Airdate: May 20, 2000

Guest Cast: Kent McCord (Jack Crichton), Murray Bartlett (D.K.), Lani Tupu (Cpt. Bialar Crais), Christine Stephen-Daly (Lt. Teeg), Damen Stephenson (Bio Isolation Man #1), Colin Borgonon, (PK Weapons Officer)

Synopsis: While testing a theory of slingshot space travel John Crichton’s Farscape module is transported through a wormhole into the middle of a space battle on the other side of the galaxy.

[Read more]

Welcome to the Uncharted Territories, where nobody is exactly what they seem, everybody wants to get inside your head or your pants — that is when they’re not trying to kill you — and your best friend probably has tentacles.

It seems like good timing for a Farscape rewatch since the series has just come out on Blu-ray. And considering the enthusiastic response to Emily’s eloquent blog about the show late last year, Farscape fans are definitely out there in numbers!

[How the structure of it will work]

To this day, I feel that The Great Hunt is the best self-contained story in The Wheel of Time. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite (that distinction belongs to book four) but it is remarkable in that of all Wheel of Time books, it feels the most focused and direct.

It’s always hard to pick a favorite section of a book like this, as my moods and interests have changed so many times while reading the series. However, most recently, I think I like the scene of Rand learning the Game of Houses the most. This scene is responsible for the first time in my life that I can remember being directly influenced by a book I was reading to create a magic system.

[Read on]

Voting has opened for the Locus Awards, a yearly vote-in award poll held by Locus Magazine, itself an excellent resource for anyone with serious interest in the field of SFF.

Subscribers and non-subscribers alike can select nominees in a variety of categories ranging from Best SF Novel all the way to Best Fan Artist. (Tor.com itself has appeared in the Best Magazine category in the past.) Five votes can be cast in each category and subscriber votes count double against non-subscriber votes.

The deadline for these ballots is April 15 2012. Full details are available on the Locus site.

Welcome to the Malazan Re-read of the Fallen! Every post will start off with a summary of events, followed by reaction and commentary by your hosts Bill and Amanda (with Amanda, new to the series, going first), and finally comments from Tor.com readers. In this article, we’ll cover Chapter Twenty-Three of Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson (MT).

A fair warning before we get started: We’ll be discussing both novel and whole-series themes, narrative arcs that run across the entire series, and foreshadowing. Note: The summary of events will be free of major spoilers and we’re going to try keeping the reader comments the same. A forum thread has been set up for outright Malazan spoiler discussion.

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The word Forerunner means a lot to you if you’ve read much Andre Norton. Even if you haven’t, you can probably extrapolate a lot of the implications: the ones who came before, who did great deeds and made great wonders... and about whom we know almost nothing. In the far-flung galaxy whose corners are the setting for much of Norton’s SF, the Forerunners are the species whose archaeological remains and artifacts, incomprehensible to the average person but capable of near-miracles, are sought after and fought over throughout the stars. Forerunner means power, dread, adventure, and the vast deepness of time.

It’s appropriate, then, that the book simply titled Forerunner was the first novel ever released by Tor Books: it came before a lot of other things, and has been out of print until this week and almost forgotten for most of the last twenty-five years. How does it hold up on re-read?

[Very well, actually. This is not the sort of book which can be spoiled by in-depth plot discussion.]

It’s likely that Toby Whithouse anticipated fan concern following the almost too-epic season 4 opener. The future! A prophecy! New characters! It all might have seemed a bit too much to your average viewer, and perhaps we were in need of a little reassurance. After all, the initial premise of Being Human was elegantly simple: a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf try to achieve some sense of “normalcy†by starting a life together.

And the show is still about exactly that. Well, baby makes four. What’s intriguing is how it all comes to pass this time around….

[Spoilers!]

Welcome to Wednesday! If you survived Valentine’s Day, congrats! If you didn’t, then how are you reading this? Have you heard of the other TOR? The Old Republic? All these pretty lightsabers are from that Star Wars game. Love them. And then take a look at the perfectly curated offsite links.

Highlights include:

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Ready for the story? George R.R. Martin is ready to read for you. This perfect parody comes from a sketch comedy group called The Big Honkin. We couldn’t have done it better. Enjoy.

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/oLMydhMqWDQ ]

Stubby the Rocket is the voice and mascot of Tor.com. Stubby’s storybook titled The Little Rocket That Could contains the refrain; “I know I can, I know I can, because I just did.â€

I initially learned of the existence of Dave McKean’s erotic graphic novel project, Celluloid, because Neil Gaiman tweeted about it for nearly a week straight some while back, and I figured what the hell—that sounds really interesting. McKean is a fabulous, fantastical, thought-provoking artist, whether he’s doing the covers for Sandman or children’s books; seeing what he had to say visually/narratively about sex and sexual art seemed intriguing.

So I did what most of us do when curious about something we’ve seen mentioned on Twitter: I whisked into the Google-mines to find out what people were saying about the book before I decided whether or not to pick it up. The first thing I came across—and the thing that decided me on the purchase—was an interview in which McKean discussed what it was, exactly, that he was doing with a project that was both a “dirty comic book†and a surrealist art-journey. Which also gives me, looking back on it now, an inroad past my initial roadblock in reviewing Celluloid: what the hell do I talk about when reviewing an erotic comic?

[Onward. And, just to be sure, probably a bit NSFW.]

Star Trek: The Next Generation Third Season

Original air dates: September 1989 – June 1990
Executive Producer: Gene Roddenberry
Co-Executive Producers: Rick Berman & Michael Piller, with Michael Wagner

Captain’s Log: This was the season when Star Trek: The Next Generation really came into its own. It started with a simple wardrobe decision, changing the uniforms from the ugly skintight spandex to the more flexible (and comfortable!) uniform jackets. Gates McFadden returned as Dr. Beverly Crusher, and the characters of Worf and Geordi La Forge were given promotions to full lieutenant and lieutenant commander, ranks they’d maintain for the rest of the series. By the end of the season, Wesley Crusher’s contributions to the ship were rewarded with a field promotion to ensign (and allowing poor Wil Wheaton to wear something other than gray pajamas that looked like a rejected uniform from Star Trek: The Motion Picture).

[Resistance is futile...]

If you’re in the mood for a science fiction romance, we have just the novellete for you. From io9 editor and all-around science fiction pop-guru Charlie Jane Anders comes “Six Months, Three Days,” a great story originally published by Tor.com in June 2011, also available in our new free ebook anthology:

Doug and Judy have both had a secret power. Judy can see every possible future, branching out from each moment like infinite trees. Doug can also see the future, but for him, it’s a single, locked-in, inexorable sequence of fore-ordained events. Obviously, these are the last two people in the world who should date. Naturally, they do.

Read “Six Months, Three Days” by Charlie Jane Anders

Interested in advance copies of forthcoming novels by N.K. Jemisin or John Scalzi? Rare books and signed books by authors such as Vernor Vinge, Lois McMaster Bujold,  Neil Gaiman, and Brandon Sanderson? Indian speculative fiction in English translation? How about snacks from Hawaii, Israel, or the UK; homemade candy and cookies; knitted goods? Or, perhaps, a print of one of the new Wheel of Time ebook covers?

They’re all currently being auctioned online at Con or Bust, the assistance fund I run that helps fans of color/non-white fans attend SFF cons.

[Learn more]

Happy Valentine’s Day, Wheel of Timers! In lieu of vaguely poisonous-tasting chalky candy hearts, please accept the Re-read as a token of my undying affection!

Today’s entry covers Chapters 34 and 35 of The Gathering Storm, in which we have comedy tomorrow, and tragedy tonight.

Previous re-read entries are here. The Wheel of Time Master Index is here, which has links to news, reviews, interviews, and all manner of information about the Wheel of Time in general, including the newest release, Towers of Midnight.

This re-read post contains spoilers for all currently published Wheel of Time novels, up to and including Book 13, Towers of Midnight. If you haven’t read, read at your own risk.

And now, the post!

[Nothing with gods, nothing with fate/Weighty affairs will just have to wait!]

Once upon a time, the Wizards made a Golem, which served them well for a time, tending to their Dragon and their Dungeon, until the Wizards finally set the Golem free. These Wizards had also made a Grimoire, full of all their secrets, and left it open so anyone could use their spells. The Golem learned the magic of the Grimoire and soon grew to rival the Wizards.

And that is the story of Pathfinder, the roleplaying system that seems to be falling through the cracks in a lot of this discussion about the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Paizo (whose logo is, of course, a golem) was licensed by Wizards of the Coast to publish the Dungeons and Dragons periodicals, Dragon and Dungeon, and then pulled the plug on that licensing agreement when they decided to pursue an online pay-wall strategy with Dungeons and Dragons Insider. The grimoire I mention is the Open Game License and the System Reference Document, that wonderful tome that defined the Third Edition, and ushered in a golden age for the hobby. The OGL let third parties write their own sourcebooks for the Dungeons and Dragons system, and the d20 ruleset flourished.

[Read more]