Category: Books

Book of the Week: Red Storm Rising.

OK, look.

I picked Red Storm Rising because I was trying to remember a passage from it the other day, looked it up, and ended up reading half the book at one sitting. When Tom Clancy was on, he was on – and this was classic ‘conventional WWIII against the Soviet Union’ stuff. But: it is not a goram ‘Jack Ryan novel.’

Sheesh.

And so, adieu to Fugue State.

Remember: Deadline for the Unspeakable Oath is tomorrow, kinda.

Details here: I need to double-check whether they want the pitches for fiction tomorrow, or the actual submission. I have finally written it out (been thinking about it for a week), so I’m good either way. Still, the sooner it’s submitted the sooner I can get it either accepted, or rejected and thus ready to go out into the great wild world of the submissions merry-go-round.  This one’s never been published, too, so it’s nice and fresh and has a better per-word rate.

Book of the Week: Fugue State.

Fugue State is a John M. Ford novel that I’ve never heard of before!  …It’s probably a novella, at that.  Which means: Fugue State is a John M. Ford novella that I’ve never heard of, before.  Really, the only real difference here will be how long it’ll take me to read it.

And so, adieu to The Maker of Men and His Formula, which was frankly a little too disappointingly weird for my tastes.

…Oh.

From TV Tropes:

  • Interestingly, the surgical team who treated Terry Pratchett for a minor procedure – which after patient questioning on his part, turned out to have become somewhat more complicated and turned into a more urgent Situation – told him afterwards that he’d sat up during the operation, demonstrating the anaesthesia wasn’t quite working, and had a one-sided conversation with an unseen Other in the operating theatre. Pratchett had apparently asked that if he had to go at this point, could a packed lunch be provided? Ham sandwiches with mustard would be appreciated. Apparently he was only offered plain ham with no condiments, and had expressed dissappointment. Terry was both perplexed and oddly reassure by this, and this account of his own NDE – which he didn’t remember at all save through the doctor’s recollection – ended up in a Discworld novel as a discourse between an elderly witch and Death. This is recollected in A Blink Of The Screen, a collection of his non-fiction writings. Hopefully Death remembered the mustard, when the time did arrive.

There is apparently RAMPANT skulduggery going on with All Romance eBooks.

It’s the kind of skulduggery that, a hundred and fifty years ago, would have ended with somebody getting stabbed during a dinner party.  I’m not entirely joking.  Writers can get really intense over getting screwed over their publication rights:

On Wednesday, December 28, All Romance eBooks–a romance-specific ebook distributor and publisher that also distributes general fiction and nonfiction through its OmniLit imprint–dropped a bombshell. In mass emails to customers and authors, ARe’s owner, Lori James, revealed that her company was closing, and that in lieu of full payment, authors and publishers would be offered a fraction of what they were owed.

Continue reading There is apparently RAMPANT skulduggery going on with All Romance eBooks.

Book of the Week: The Maker of Men and His Formula.

This one is a bit of a self-indulgence: this edition of The Maker of Men and His Formula (by Jules Foche) comes across as exactly the sort of conceit where a modern writer (in this case, Brian Stableford) pretends that the book he’s written is actually a ‘translation’ or ‘adaptation’ of an obscure book from the last century.  It’s a harmless conceit, in my opinion, but in this case apparently Jules Foche was a real author of 19th Century French science fiction.  Which makes the whole thing rather meta.

And so, adieu to The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.