Before O.S.I.R.I.S, before the betrayal and the drinking and “the Incident at the Tower,” before Captain Commanding (that jerk!), before the new powers and the super suit, there was Rand, a teen boy with a few family problems and a gift for inventions . . . Then the Hero Bomb went off. For the first time, the Fabulous Foxman tells his own origin story in his own words.
“In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” by Lucy Taylor is a horror story about a woman with a rare form of synesthesia who can feel sound waves and the dangerous rescue mission she undertakes in a cave with a nasty past.
David Herter creates a modern reimagining Gene Wolfe’s “Island of Doctor Death.” Young Ballou lives alone with his mother in an old house on the shore. When the mysterious Wilson arrives, Ballou’s reality tips into a world populated with characters from his pulp comic books as he struggles to understand the adults around him.
At the right time, in the right place, words have the power to change the world.
Before a title, before the characters, before anything else, I know my first line.
Since my first attempts as a writer, I couldn’t embark on a new project without knowing that first line—as if a simple sentence was the embryo for everything that was to follow. In The School for Good and Evil, for instance, those opening words: “Sophie had waited her whole life to be kidnapped” became my guiding light through the Endless Woods of dark fairy tale fantasy. Indeed, that first line became the series’ entire DNA template; when in doubt, I’d ritually look back at it to see not just a ‘beginning,’ but tone, theme, character, inspiration.
To writers new and old, then, I offer this list as a gentle encouragement to keep our ambitions low and our boldness high. After all, embarking on a quest to write the perfect novel is a fool’s fantasy. But a perfect first line is within all of our reach.
As my fellow medievalists around the world will attest, telling people that you specialize in the Middle Ages (roughly dated from 500 to 1500 CE) is a decent way to start up a conversation with strangers. Few people that I meet aren’t fascinated with the medieval period, and they almost always have a question or two they want to ask an expert about the “real” Middle Ages.
These days, that means questions about Game of Thrones, HBO’s stratospherically popular television adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s staggeringly popular series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire. Millions of readers anxiously await Martin’s sixth volume in the book series, and millions more viewers recently wrapped up the fifth season of the television series. Combined, the works are now a cultural touchstone, one that is branded—both by its own advertising and by the media and mainstream popular culture—as a “medieval” series. So the question I’m asked more than any other these days is this:
So let’s see, what have we covered so far? Where to start with Brandon Sanderson’s many fantastic books, what kind of magic systems exist in each book and how they work… hmmmm… Ah, yes! The Cosmere!
I’ve been dropping hints about this topic along the way, but I didn’t want to delve too deeply, as I really thought it needed its own post. The Cosmere of Brandon Sanderson is a huge, overarching concept driving the narrative structure of his work, and while it may seem fairly straightforward on the surface, the deeper ramifications of these connections are going to be felt all across his books, especially going forward with the rest of his series.
The awesome fan and talented artist Brittney Williams has gone to the trouble of reimagining DC’s superheroes as though they stepped out of frames from your favorite Samurai movie. We’re swooning, everyone is so pretty heeeeeelp… [Bruce pulls off the facial hair surprisingly well…]
Entertainment Weekly has released a bunch of sharp close-up photos of the new X-Men cast from 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse. As if that weren’t enough, Yahoo! Movies got director Bryan Singer to talk about his ideas for an X-Men crossover with the Fantastic Four, as well! Take a look below. (Mild spoilers ahead.)
After breaking box-office records to become the number 3 top grossing movie, Jurassic World is getting a sequel. Just as the demand for resurrected dinosaurs was high enough to build a theme park in Colin Trevorrow’s fourth installment, the franchise finds a way. And we have some ideas where all of your favorite characters (yes, including Blue) will be in the next Jurassic installment.
It stands to reason that if giant marshmallow robot/caretaker Baymax is bouncy enough to cushion your fall when you jump out of windows, he would make a pretty sweet bed, too. If you agree, DeNA Shopping has got your number, with its “Baymax Stuffed Animal Sofa Sofa Bed BAYMAX Bed.” You can flop on it, lay it down flat or propped up against the wall to give you a hug… This is Baymax’s truest form.
In today’s Afternoon Roundup, Mr. Robot goes beyond stereotypical onscreen hacking, scientists review Ant-Man very literally, and Jar-Jar tells all!
Tonight’s episode of Under the Dome is brought to you by Prichard Farms Vienna Sausages: opening hearts, cell doors, and carotid arteries since 1963. At Prichard Farms, we make our smoked pig lips taste…mmmMMM…good! UtD used to have sponsors like Prius and Microsoft Tablets, but it looks like the show is finally running out of money and is resorting to sponsors like Prichard Farms to make ends meet.
Tumblr user robinsontheroof has officially come up with our new favorite game, by imagining what social media would be like if you lived in the DC universe.
And the answer is the #OnlyInGotham hashtag.
Gollancz had good reason to crow about its acquisition of Occupy Me on Thursday: it’s Tricia Sullivan’s first new novel since Lightborn in 2010, and it promises to outstrip everything else the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner has written.
An extraordinary, genre-defining novel that begins with the mystery of a woman who barely knows herself and ends with a discovery that transcends space and time, Occupy Me follows Pearl, an angel who works for the Resistance—an organisation dedicated to making the world a better place one incremental act of kindness at a time—as she attempts to track down a killer in the body of another man.
And at the centre of it all, a briefcase that contains countless possible realities…
Simon Watson lives alone in a house filled with memories of the family he no longer has–his mother, a circus mermaid, drowned not far from their home and his sister, Enola, ran off to read tarot cards in a traveling carnival. He can deal with the loneliness, but when Simon receives a mysterious book that speaks of a curse on the women in his family, he has to act. July 24 could bring an end to his sister if Simon can’t discover a way to stop the curse once and for all. You can start solving this mystery with Simon now by reading or listening to an excerpt from the book!
We want to mark Drowning Day by giving two lucky winners a chance to win a prize pack containing a copy of Erika Swyler’s The Book of Speculation, out now from St. Martin’s Press, and a deck of tarot cards!
Comment in the post to enter!
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Part of the joy of rereading Dragonlance is realising how influential and far-reaching they are. Everyone’s read Dragonlance—and, if not, isn’t now the perfect time to start? It is no wonder this series is so influential; it had its sticky claws in all of our childhoods. To demonstrate this, and to give us the occasional week off, we’ve asked some authors and artists and general figures of the fantastic to chime in with guest posts. They’ll take the reins for a post, and talk through what Dragonlance means to them.
This week we take a break from our regular transmission (and to add to the suspense of course) to welcome Guest Highlord Damien Walter, who writes about Raistlin, the wizard we all wanted to be.
Snow globes are such a naturally innocuous artistic medium! Whether it’s an ironic Florida-themed one swirling with sand instead of snow, or a vision of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, they’re the sort of knickknacks that just screams “stocking stuffers for Grandma.” Which is why we were excited to find a pair of artists who were trying to revolutionize the form! Over the course of a 22-year-long collaboration, Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz have created many great pieces together, but our personal favorites are the series of horrifying snow globes they’ve made for their “Travelers” series. (Like the Black Mirror Christmas special, they see the opportunity to creep us out with an innocent childhood treasure.) We love the snow-Shelob they’ve created above, but all of the globes raise questions we may not want to answer. Come take a break from the heat with a deeply unsettling celebration of winter!
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn’t expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one’s peers and families.
But now they’re both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who’s working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world’s magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world’s every-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together–to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.
A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse, Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky is available in January 2016 from Tor Books. Read chapter four below, or head back to the start with chapter one!
Publishers have learned to be indulgent when their bestselling authors get bitten by the sports bug. In 2004, John Grisham published Bleachers and three years later he released his football novel, Playing for Pizza. In 1993, Tom Clancy became part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles. And in 1999, Stephen King suddenly decided that he wanted to publish a slim (for King) 244-page book called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
At the time, Gordon was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, and his new publisher, Scribner, probably decided that this was just a sports itch their new acquisition needed to scratch. “If books were babies, I’d call The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon the result of an unplanned pregnancy,” King said in a letter to the press, and Scribner decided to roll with it, eager to release anything from their new star, who definitely had some blockbusters in the pipeline once he got this Tom Gordon nonsense off his chest. Expecting something forgettable, instead they wound up publishing a small miracle.
Stephen Colbert is easing himself back into America’s consciousness with a series of lunch break conversations! To inaugurate the webseries, he posed as Galactus, as one does. Not content with distracting you from your work in only one way, he’s also released a text-based adventure game! Your character is a handsome gentleman named Stephen Colbert, and you are trapped in a closet…or is it Narnia?
Morning Roundup brings you an alternate insect, a glimpse of the future, and facts about the unicorns of the sea!
The Harry Potter Reread could very easily fit itself into a parody of the Wells Fargo Wagon song from The Music Man. Why this is relevant, it has no idea.
We’re about to get some new Divination lessons and get an uncomfortable look into the past. It’s Chapters 27 and 28 of The Order of the Phoenix–The Centaur and the Sneak, and Snape’s Worst Memory.
Index to the reread can be located here! Other Harry Potter and Potter-related pieces can be found under their appropriate tag. And of course, since we know this is a reread, all posts might contain spoilers for the entire series. If you haven’t read all the Potter books, be warned.
When Charles Yu did me the inexplicable kindness of writing a blurb for my first novel, Notes from the Internet Apocalypse, I’m ashamed to say I had not yet read his How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe. That’s OK. I had a good excuse, I was working on my novel when it came out, and, besides, lots of other more important people had read it. According to Mr. Yu’s blurb, my book was “witty, profane, and entertaining” and, most notably, a “thought experiment.” I wondered how this stranger could so graciously itemize my literary ambitions as if he knew me.
And then I read How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, and it became obvious. Charles Yu had already achieved what I’d set out to do: he’d written a book best described as a “witty, profane, and entertaining thought experiment.”
After the expensive financial flop that was Sleeping Beauty, Walt Disney seriously considered shutting down his studio’s animation division. Fewer than half of his animated films had been financial successes, after all, and although World War II could certainly be blamed for some of that, it could not be blamed for the financial failures of the post war Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty, or the only middling financial success of Lady and the Tramp, which for technical reasons had been issued in two versions, adding greatly to the film’s budget—and cutting into profits.
But Walt Disney had also picked up Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians and loved it. It had everything needed for a major Disney hit: a grandiose, over the top villain, a tight, simple plot, adorable puppies, and a happy ending. Oh, a few things would need changing – that almost but not quite doggie threesome between Pongo, Missus and Perdita would just not work for a children’s film aimed at an American audience, in his opinion, and some of the characters would have to go. And the final scenes needed something more. Maybe a car chase. An over the top car chase. That could work.
That left just one problem: how to animate 99 puppies. With spots. Without repeating the financial issues of Lady and the Tramp and the outright disaster that was the gloriously detailed work of Sleeping Beauty.
We’re just five weeks away from the launch of our first books, but we couldn’t wait to share with you some of the fabulous new authors we’ve signed recently!
We were already onboard with Instagram artist Ghidaq al-Nizar making #nowastecoffee art, transforming the grounds and stains into tiny masterpieces. But then he had to go and make Hogwarts, complete with tiny Hagrid and tinier Harry! (Hat-tip to PopSugar for spotting this.)
Afternoon Roundup brings you your new Arthur cuddling Excalibur, Brian Michael Bendis gushing over AKA Jessica Jones, and Batman v Superman v Facebook!
Welcome back to A Read of Ice and Fire! Please join me as I read and react, for the very first time, to George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.
Today’s entry is Part 30 of A Dance With Dragons, in which we cover Chapter 50 (“Daenerys”) and Chapter 51 (“Theon”).
Previous entries are located in the Index. The only spoilers in the post itself will be for the actual chapters covered and for the chapters previous to them. As for the comments, please note that the Powers That Be have provided you a lovely spoiler thread here on Tor.com. Any spoileriffic discussion should go there, where I won’t see it. Non-spoiler comments go below, in the comments to the post itself.
And now, the post!
Welcome back to the Words of Radiance Reread on Tor.com! Last time we were together, Kaladin went out for drinks with the guys and met some decidedly problematic patriots. This week, Shallan continues her researches into Urithiru and Lightweaving, with dubious help from Pattern.
This reread will contain spoilers for The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and any other Cosmere book that becomes relevant to the discussion. The index for this reread can be found here, and more Stormlight Archive goodies are indexed here.
Click on through to join the discussion.
