We are delighted to start off a brand-new year of Tor.com short fiction with three original stories written by Harry Turtledove featuring everyone’s favorite sasquatch governor of the Pacific Northwest state of Jefferson, Bill Williamson.
A Soviet political prisoner is ordered to use her unique talents to explore a strange scientific phenomenon. It could be a trap…or a way out.
The Devil made a mirror. A physicist broke it and shards fell through reality and changed everything forever.
A prequel to the magical novella Made Things, out now from Tor.com Publishing.
Salipa and Telo have perfect lives in the virtual reality world that humanity has retreated to after bacteria and viruses resistant to all medications take over the outside world. But when the robots that take care of their necessities in the dirty outside world start glitching, Salipa must figure out what it means to truly live if they can never return to the outside world.
Security through physicality. Security through redundancy. Security through obscurity.
How do immortal artificial intelligences defend themselves? With an air gap. With a security force that has no connection to anything that can harm them. With a young woman, trained to fight and to die who, along with her cohort must keep them safe. But In Xanadu things don’t always go as planned…
Howard: So, I recently pointed Todd to a nifty-looking Kickstarter for a deep space exploration expansion for Traveller, and it got the two of us talking about what is arguably the best-known science fiction role-playing game, and one of the first.
Todd: “Arguably” is right. We were arguing, because of how wrong you are.
Howard: Future generations will decide that, my friend.
A thing that often gets a bit lost in discussion of Star Wars is that the Empire and the First Order are, essentially, Space Nazis. Through all three Star Wars trilogies, the villains are members of an authoritarian regime that wants to conquer every world and culture in the galaxy, flatten any kind of rebellion or free thought, and crush individual liberty. Every other fandom argument aside, what the series is about is resistance to oppressive rule, sometimes through fighting and guerilla tactics, sometimes through non-violence.
I’m going to put my cards on the table and tell you I didn’t like The Rise of Skywalker all that much, mostly because I didn’t think it took enough time with that central theme. (Also FinnPoe, but that’s a whole other article.) However, there was one element that the film did quite well, and to talk about it I need to sidetrack us a little bit into Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.
Bear with me.
As we head into a new year and a new decade, let’s take a moment to consider the novella… These intermediaries between the disparate realms of the novel and the short story are experiencing a renaissance in the publishing world. But for readers and writers who are new to the medium, a brief look at the reviews for even popular, award-winning novellas reveal some common points of confusion over length, reader expectations, and classification, so let’s define our terms.
The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society has announced the latest batch of nominees for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award.
If you want or need to write about a character riding a horse, or are a reader curious about what riding actually feels like, the best way to find out is to do it. But that isn’t always easy to make happen, and even if you do, there’s a big difference between a first ride and a hundredth or a thousandth. With riding, experience really does count.
There are some parallels with other and maybe more familiar sensations. Riding a bike or a motorcycle requires balance and attention to the details of steering and terrain. Driving a car or truck over rough roads asks some of the same things of your body as riding a horse will—staying in your seat, balancing as the vehicle shifts. Riding in a boat can give you some idea of what riding a horse is like: a really good canter is remarkably like navigating a series of waves, and a trot can remind you of a sharp chop on a lake.
The Night Country is the highly anticipated sequel to Melissa Albert’s beloved, New York Times bestselling debut The Hazel Wood — and we want to send you a copy!
In The Night Country, Alice Proserpine dives back into a menacing, mesmerizing world of dark fairy tales and hidden doors. Follow her and Ellery Finch as they learn The Hazel Wood was just the beginning, and that worlds die not with a whimper, but a bang.
Robin is a YouTube celebrity gone-viral with her intensely-realistic witch hunter series. But even her millions of followers don’t know the truth: her series isn’t fiction.
Her ultimate goal is to seek revenge against the coven of witches who wronged her mother long ago. Returning home to the rural town of Blackfield, Robin meets friends new and old on her quest for justice. But then, a mysterious threat known as the Red Lord interferes with her plans…
S. A. Hunt’s Burn the Dark, first in the Malus Domestica horror action-adventure series, is available January 14th from Tor Books. Read an excerpt below!
The first trailer for Sony and Marvel’s upcoming Spider-verse movie, Morbius, is here, and while it nicely summarizes the titular vampire’s backstory, it also reveals quite a few intriguing plot details related to the main Spider-Man storyline.
Spoilers ahead for Spider-Man: Far From Home.
One of the sad facts of life for fans of roleplaying games is that the number of campaigns one can fit into one’s life is smaller than the number of campaigns one might want to fit into one’s life. One can cope by seeking out novels that scratch much the same itch as one’s preferred RPG. Take for example, the venerable roleplaying game Traveller (discussed in this older Tor.com essay and also in this recent piece). Even if one cannot find a game, it’s not hard to find SF books that are Traveller-esque.
The essential elements of a Traveller-like novel are: a vast setting, some reason to travel incessantly, and a diverse cast. What recent books qualify?
Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris’ comic book series Ex Machina is getting a film adaptation! According to The Hollywood Reporter, Legendary Entertainment is titling it The Great Machine, after protagonist Mitchell Hundred’s superhero alter-ego, so audiences don’t confuse it with the Alex Garland movie from 2015.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets Stranger Things in award-winning author S. A. Hunt’s Burn the Dark, first in the Malus Domestica horror action-adventure series about a punk YouTuber on a mission to bring down witches, one vid at a time — and we want to send you a copy!
Robin is a YouTube celebrity gone-viral with her intensely-realistic witch hunter series. But even her millions of followers don’t know the truth: her series isn’t fiction.
Frank Herbert’s Dune is rightfully considered a classic of science fiction. With its expansive worldbuilding, intricate politics, complex and fascinating characters, remarkably quotable dialogue, and an epic, action-packed story, it’s captured the attention of readers for over half a century. While not the first example of the space opera genre, it’s certainly one of the most well-known space operas, and indeed one of the most grand and operatic. In recent years, the novel is also gearing up for its second big-budget film adaptation, one whose cast and ambitions seem to match the vast, sweeping vistas of Arrakis, the desert planet where the story takes place. It’s safe to say that Dune has fully earned its place as one of the greatest space operas, and one of the greatest science fiction novels, ever written.
Which isn’t bad for a work of epic fantasy, all things considered.
If The Witcher‘s pesky timelines are still making your head spin, you’re in luck: Netflix has released a handy interactive site that officially maps out all of season 1’s time-jumping shenanigans once and for all.
If the Apocalypse comes, text me.
Okay, so that’s not the exact line, but as beepers have become a relic of the past, it’s hard not to wonder what a Millennial slayer would be like. Buffy fans are lucky enough that the world of slayers is back. With New York Times Bestselling author Kiersten White at the helm, Slayer and Chosen are not about the Sunnydale you remember.
With around one week left before Star Trek: Picard premieres, CBS All Access has renewed the show for a second season! This shouldn’t be too surprising to fans: Back in December, eagle-eyed reporters noticed Picard season 2 on a list of shows getting tax credits in 2020. CBS, however, just made it official.
Daniel Polansky—author of Hugo-finalist novella The Builders—returns to Tor.com Publishing in Fall 2020 with The Seventh Perfection, a structurally innovative fantasy puzzle-box that uses a series of character interviews to produce a unique mix of fantasy and mystery.
As we head into a new year and a new decade, let’s take a moment to consider the novella… These intermediaries between the disparate realms of the novel and the short story are experiencing a renaissance in the publishing world. But for readers and writers who are new to the medium, a brief look at the reviews for even popular, award-winning novellas reveal some common points of confusion over length, reader expectations, and classification, so let’s define our terms.
When you have a fantasy series built around a multiverse of dragons, fae, and interdimensional Librarians who acquire books and texts to stabilize worlds, you can play in a lot of subgenres. From political intrigue to interdimensional rescue to murder mystery, the possibilities are diverse, also given the varieties of worlds and settings. So a straight up heist story is, in the end, delightfully and axiomatically inevitable as one of the forms a writer with such a canvas might want to try out. So it is with the latest Genevieve Cogman’s novel, The Secret Chapter, sixth in the Invisible Library series.
Briefly, the series centers around Irene Winters, an up-and-coming Librarian and her apprentice Kai, who just so happens to be a dragon. Their time- and world-hopping adventures see them face off against traitorous Librarians, duplicitous fae, overbearing and very dangerous dragons—and more—with Cogman dialing up the fun, wordplay, and humor. They tend toward similar basic structures that work—a first chapter where Irene gets herself caught into an adventure going wrong, extracts herself from it, and then moves on to the real story. It works for James Bond movies, it works for Genevieve Cogman.
