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N. K. Jemisin Book Drawing Winners!
The N. K. Jemisin free books re-tweet contest is now closed. We had, in all, 54 entries. After copying all names into a spreadsheet and assigning each one a number, we used a random number generator to select our first and second place winners. For the record, the numbers we generated were 10 and 16. Congrats to our winners:
Jen Cook (@EnsCuddlesHuman) is our first place winner and has chosen to receive the Inheritance Trilogy, which means our second place winner…
Scott Spiegelberg (@MusicPerception) gets the first two books of the Dreamblood series.
Besides the books our winners will receive a commemorative set of 2012 Hugo bookmarks, one of which (incidentally) promotes Jemisin‘s Hugo nominated novel, The Killing Moon.
This is the first of many book drawings and author interviews, so stay tuned to this blog for future opportunities.
Thanks to Orbit Books for donating the prizes, and between you, me and the lamp post, I think we can expect more such freebies from the folks at Orbit.
Ask N. K. Jemisin Anything – The Interview
This is the first in our Ask an Author Anything interview series and we’re very excited to be kicking things off with N. K. Jemisin, which we are now publishing fresh off of yesterday’s Locus nomination. The way it works, as you may recall from our first post, is that we get questions from our members and visitors who then vote on their own questions. We take the most popular questions asked and send them off to the author. Our goal is to have around a dozen questions but in this case Ms. Jemisin is neck-deep in Deadline Hell working on her next novel so we cut it back to just 6 to ensure we don’t interrupt her work too much.
We arranged this interview through her publicist at Orbit who very graciously has sent along some books for us to give away. Check out the details at the end of the interview for your chance to win. Now for the interview!
WWEnd: First, congratulations on your recent Nebula Award nomination for The Killing Moon. You’ve been getting a lot of those. What is it like for the bulk of your accolades to come from fellow writers? Is it different than, say, the Hugo nomination you received, which was from fans?
NKJ: I don’t really think about it that way. Thus far I’ve had three Hugo nominations and four Nebula nominations, but I had to go look at my own bibliography to remember which was which. The bragging rights — if you want to call them that — don’t come from the number of nominations. They come from the fact of being nominated at all. That first nomination was the point at which my agent/publisher started putting “Hugo nominee” or “Nebula nominee” in my marketing materials (and when I won the Locus and the RT, this became “Award-winning author”), and that’s when I started seeing more sales to libraries and organizations that look for fiction of a certain quality and popular appeal. I don’t think they care how many nominations I’ve gotten, either! Just that nominations exist.
I do have to admit that the Nebula noms give me a little more of a shiny feeling, even though the Hugo award is better-known. I think every professional likes having the respect of her peers; I feel the same way about the World Fantasy nomination. But the Hugo noms mean I’ve achieved a certain level of name recognition with fans, and for someone who’s as early in her career as I am, it’s awesome for that to happen even once, let alone twice.
Google Hangout event with Jesse Bullington, Lauren Beukes, and Paolo Bacigalupi!
Next Monday at 2 PM Eastern, join Orbit author Jesse Bullington — and Hachette authors Lauren Beukes and Paolo Bacigalupi — in conversation with Jenn Northington of WORD bookstore! These three talented authors of fantasy and science fiction will be discussing their new books in an international event — Paolo and Jesse will be joining us from Colorado and Lauren from South Africa. RSVP to the event here: https://plus.google.com/events/cbnlcfem9s1fhiq69a2qjdabms4
If you’re unable to make the live event on Monday, keep an eye out for the YouTube video after the fact!
Jesse’s most recent book is The Folly of the World, a dark tale of the depraved and desperate that follows three conspirators — a deranged thug at the edge of madness, a ruthless conman on the cusp of fortune, and a half-feral girl balanced between them — as they sail into a 15th century Holland deluged with a flood of biblical proportions. It was named as one of the Los Angeles Times’s recommended holiday gift books for 2012, and PW said of it that “Every page is saturated with wickedness and mischief. Bullington’s fans will be happy to see him bring his trademark dark humor, gritty detail, and loopy characters into a new gruesome landscape.”
Ask N. K. Jemisin Anything
We will soon launch an exciting new monthly feature: an interview with some of the most celebrated authors in the SF/F/H genres. The questions will come from you, the WWEnd reader. We are thrilled to announce that our first author will be N. K. Jemisin, whose novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, made quite a splash in 2010-11, netting nominations for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. The final book in that same trilogy, The Kingdom of Gods, was also nominated for a Nebula, and the first book in her latest series, The Killing Moon, is up for the 2012 Nebula (stay tuned to see if she wins!).
A key component of the new interview series is the Urtak poll, embedded at the top of this post. Just read the questions and tell us whether you want each one to be asked. To vote, click “Yes” if you would like to see her answer the question or “No” if you don’t care (please don’t select “I don’t care,” though. I’m told it messes up our metrics. If you don’t care, then answer “no”). When you have voted on all submitted questions, you will be able to add your own questions. You may also click on the green “Ask” button at the top of the Urtak survey, but please do all of the voting first, in case someone else has already asked your question. It need not be a yes/no question. It’s just that WWEnders will then vote yes/no on whether they like the question. Got it?
The most popular questions will be asked first, so don’t split your vote by asking the same question twice!
Free Books: The Taker Trilogy by Alma Katsu
Alma’s books are obviously eligible for the WoGF and, if you win, you can use her as your random author pick. Schweet! Be sure to let her know you saw the giveaway on WWEnd!
John Milton, WWEnd author?
Occasionally, we at WWEnd find ourselves debating the same topics. The fact that we can’t come to any resolution is interpreted by some to mean that we shouldn’t debate these topics at all. To us, it’s precisely the reason we have so much fun discussing them. One such topic is the perennial “Who was first?” question. Among those, the most heated tends to be “Who was the first SF author?” I, like many fans, have long argued that Mary Shelley ought to hold that distinction, while Dave (our fearless leader) holds that H. G. Wells deserves the title for actually sustaining a career in the genre over his lifetime.
We now have a new candidate for the for first SF author: one John Milton. Katy Waldman, over at Slate says that “the text of Paradise Lost is saturated in science.”
Milton met Galileo, for the first and only time, in a 1638 visit that Jonathan Rosen compared to “those comic book specials in which Superman meets Batman.” The “Tuscan artist” appears in Paradise Lost more than once. Book I compares Satan’s shield to the moon seen through a telescope. And the poem is studded with scientific details—“luminous inferior orbs” churning through outer space, descriptions of sunspots and seasons, creatures that evolve (according to divine plan, but still). Through it all, Milton, a storyteller, comes off as entranced by the laws governing the universe. (His mouthpiece in this regard is Adam, who cannot get enough of the angel Raphael’s disquisition on celestial motions in Book VIII.) There’s something very sci-fi about anyone who, while taking care to present his era’s astronomical theories as speculative, still likes to spin that speculation out into long descriptions of cosmic phenomena. Arthur C. Clarke would surely be proud.
Intrigued? In that same article, Waldman quotes a passage describing Satan’s journey through the cosmos on his descent from Heaven to Earth, where he flies past “other worlds,” but does not stick around long enough to find out “who dwelt happy there.” Perhaps Milton left those worlds unsung so that all the great authors we know and love could populate them one by one.
[Slate via Andrew Sullivan]
2012 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Awarded to Gene Wolfe
In news that will surprise absolutely no one on the planet, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America have named the legendary Gene Wolfe as their 2012 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master.
The award is given, more or less annually, for contributions to the literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Check out the official press release for some nice comments from last year’s recipient, Connie Willis, and others.
If you’re a participant in WWEnd’s 2012 Grand Master Reading Challenge you can add Mr. Wolfe to your challenge list if you’ve read him this year. If you’re a fast reader you have a couple weeks to get him in under the wire!
Our congratulations to Gene Wolfe!
Jim Butcher on Sword & Laser
I’m one of the many fans impatiently waiting for the release of Jim Butcher’s 14th Dresden Files novel, Cold Days. The YouTube genre show “Sword & Laser” recently featured Butcher’s work in an episode, including an extended interview with Butcher himself. He doesn’t spoil much about the new book, but he does tease the “apocalyptic trilogy” he plans to write to close out the series in the near future. Check it out:
OffWorld SF Reading Group
OffWorld is a new science fiction reading group sponsored by WordSpace, a literary organization based in Dallas, Texas. Rather than taking the traditional book club route and reading a single book per month, we are choosing an author to read and discuss over a four-month period. We’ll be meeting as a group locally for discussion, to watch author videos and, from time to time, we’ll bring in outside speakers in addition to holding forum discussions here on WWEnd. If you are in the Dallas area, we would love to have you join in our regular meetings, but it’s with these forum discussions that we hope to bring in as many different voices and opinions as possible.
Our first author is Neal Stephenson. We are setting up discussions on the books we know members are reading, but feel free to request that we add any book that you have read and would like to discuss. You can also follow our postings on the WordSpace Blog. There we will have links to Neal Stephenson material on the web as well as updates about events in Dallas. Search for OffWorld in the list of topics for all related postings.
Three WWEnd Listed Authors Go Cheap!
