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Game of Thrones Trailer #2 – Vengeance
Don’t think there’s much to say except I can’t wait for April!
Roll-Your-Own Reading Challenge: January Review Poll
Well, this is more than a few days late in coming but finally it’s time to vote for the best Roll-Your-Own Reading Challenge reviews for January! We had well over 100 reviews submitted last month for the RYO and it took a little more time than we thought to get through them all and pick our 12 featured reviews:
- The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – Stephen Poltz (spoltz)
- Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan – Wendy B. (nightxade)
- The Forever Machine by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley – Megan AM (couchtomoon)
- The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov – Val (valashain)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – Rae McCausland (ParallelWorlds)
- The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan – Charles Dee Mitchell (charlesdee)
- Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link – Alexandra P. (everythinginstatic)
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie – Alix Heintzman (alixheintzman)
- Hell House by Richard Matheson – Maureen Mulinda (dustydigger)
- Abarat by Clive Barker – Bethe Besse (badseedgirl)
- The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle – Rhonda Knight (RhondaK101)
- A Gift Upon the Shore by M. K. Wren – Dale Sheffield (HRO)
There are 3 prizes awarded each month for the best reviews: $25, $15 and $10 Amazon.com gift cards. The poll will stay open until February 26 so get your votes in now and please help us spread the word! Voting is open to all WWEnders not just those taking part in the RYO.
Happy voting and good luck to our contestants!
RYO Review: A Gift Upon the Shore by M. K. Wren
Earth is nearing the End – a deadly new strain of flu, cataclysmic natural disasters, overpopulation, famine, wars. Mary Hope, a 20-something aspiring author, flees the city hoping to find refuge and solace at the beach house she inherited from her aunt. But disaster is everywhere and Mary nearly dies when the bus she is traveling on is attacked by a gang of road rovers.
She is rescued by Rachel, a reclusive artist who gives Mary a home when she learns that her aunt’s home is a derelict ruin that has been overtaken by squatters. Not long after, the End does come – in the form of a nuclear bomb. Over the next decade, Mary and Rachel struggle to survive in a devastated wasteland ravaged by nuclear winter. And together they embark on a project to preserve the thousands of books that Rachel owns because they believe that these may be the only books available for future generations (if there are any other survivors out there).
Tales From High Hallack – The Collected Short Stories of Andre Norton, Volume: 1 Contest Winners!
Our Tales From High Hallack – The Collected Short Stories of Andre Norton, Volume: 1 contest has just concluded and we have the results! We had 79 re-tweets, 10 comments on the blog and 9 Facebook likes.
We put all those names into a spreadsheet and used a random number generator to pick our 5 lucky winners:
Melissa(@karmic9)
Dennis Menard(@da_deman)
The Critic(@iamthecritic)
Rhonda(Rhondak101)
Jarrod Bolin
Congrats to all our winners! If you are one of our prize winners please send your full name and snail-mail address to us at “info [at] worldswithoutend [dot] com” so we can send you your prize right away. Be sure to mention High Hallack in your email so we know which prize you’re claiming.
Our thanks to Premier Digital Publishing for making the contest possible. We’ll be back with another giveaway soon so keep one eye open.
Works Eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: For Free!
If you’re interested in nominating authors for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2014 Campbellian Anthology will be an excellent resource! Stupefying Stories has put together a free anthology that contains works by most of the authors eligible for this year’s prize.
The anthology contains works by 111 authors, for a total of more than 860,000 words of fiction. It appears that short fiction is contained in entirety, while excerpts are included of novels. The anthology is available for free until the end of April (or 30 days after the announcement of the Hugo/Campbell ballot), so it’s a good idea to get it as soon as possible!
RYO Review: The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle
Technically, E. V. Odle‘s The Clockwork Man (1923) is not on my TBR shelf. However, if it had been in print during the last few years, it would have been. I’ve wanted to read it for several years, and just discovered that it was reissued in September 2013 by HiLoBooks in their Radium Age Science Fiction series (1904-1933). Because HiLoBooks are such good chaps, they are serializing each novel they release on their website. I just finished reading the twenty-installment serial, but I will support HiLoBooks’s fabulous efforts by purchasing the novel as well.
The unnamed Clockwork Man appears at a village cricket match in an England contemporary with the publication date. He is a time-traveler from the far future, but his clockwork mechanism is damaged, and he never meant to land in the 1920s. His coordination and communication skills are not functioning well, but he looks human enough that the people he encounters take him—at first — to be someone escaped from an asylum: “You had to laugh at the odd-looking figure, or else feel cold all over with another kind of sensation. Of course, this man was mad. He was, in spite of his denial, an escaped lunatic.” Yet when he tries to play cricket, he hits the balls three miles away, “spoiling other folks’ sport.”
RYO Review: Abarat by Clive Barker
I have found that there are certain things one can expect when reading a Clive Barker novel. Mr. Barker is not only an author, but an artist as well and he brings this artistic eye to his writings. His descriptions of scenes and characters are designed to create an artists’ picture in the readers mind. I have found this to be especially true in his Young Adult novel Abarat: The First Book Of Hours. Mr. Barker’s best skill is the visuals his writings create. He is able to breathe life into the creatures of The Abarat with this skill.
The heroine of our story is Candy Quackenbush, a young woman growing up in the Minnesota town of Chickentown. After getting in trouble for a project she did for a hated teacher, Candy feels compelled to run away from school. She finds herself in the middle of the prairie. There she meets the amazing John Mischief and his seven brothers, eight brothers on one body, and Mendelson Shape, an evil creature chasing John and his brothers. In the events that follow Candy calls forth the magical “Sea of Izabella” And thus begins Candy’s adventures in Abarat.
RYO Review: Hell House by Richard Matheson
When Emeric Belasco built his huge mansion in 1919 in a remote unhealthy valley, he systematically debauched friends over several years to the utmost reaches of depravity. He blocked the windows and locked the doors, till the horrible frenzy of degradation and every sort of vileness ended with 27 people dead, though Belasco’s body was never found. Now alcohol abuse, drugs, rape, incest, sexual abuse of every variety, suicide, cannibalism, starvation and murder are imprinted on the house. Various psychic investigations over the years have always ended in death, suicide or madness.
Now a dying owner of the house wants an investigation to probe the possibility of life after death, and offers a team $100,000 each to brave the dangerous house to eradicate the evil.
RYO Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Hype is an untrustworthy thing, which has led me astray before. It either ratchets my hopes so high that they’re bound to be disappointed (see: A Song of Ice and Fire) or it leaves me snarking condescendingly about popular opinion and the “masses” and how no one really understands empire (see: The Hunger Games). But sometimes, hype operates like giant flashing arrows pointing me towards a book that I never would have otherwise discovered, and my entire faith in popular opinion and my fellow genre-readers is restored. That was my experience with Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie’s 2013 debut novel. From the back-cover blurb, I would never have bought it: On a remote, icy planet (oh look, Hoth) the soldier known as Breq (oh look, an ex-military alias) is drawing closer to completing her quest (gee, tell me more). But it was a riveting, smart, and brilliantly composed novel, which has convinced me that the space epic is still alive and well.
RYO Review: Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
A collection of short stories that feature the weird and wonderful, mixing fantasy and magical realism with a touch of horror and the supernatural, Magic for Beginners is a good mix of humour and dread that at times made me regret my commute wasn’t longer (something that doesn’t happen very often at all).
From the turns of phrase to the worldbuilding, the stories in the book are at times, incredibly sad, very humorous, and full of a deep longing for normality. The stand outs for me, by far, were Stone Animals, Magic for Beginners and Lull, but I figure I could provide a few words about each. It’s not a long collection, and some stories are shorter than others, so it makes for some fairly quick reading.
