Harper Voyager Books

SCENT OF SHADOWS contests

Vicki Pettersson's fabulous supernatural debut novel, THE SCENT OF SHADOWS, is on sale now, and there are not one but -two- contests running out there to celebrate this.

First, Sara Howe is offering the chance to win a collection of supernatural-themed perfume.   Details are here.

Second, Susan Adrian is offering the chance to win an astrological pendant. Details, again, here.

Book Two, THE TASTE OF NIGHT, will be out in April.

For more information on Vicki and these great books, check out her website.

-- Diana

Excerpts! Excerpts! Excerpts!

As we approach the last stretch leading up to the publication of FOR A FEW DEMONS MORE (it's FINALLY almost out!), Eos Books is pleased to announce we will be releasing early excerpts over the course of the next few weeks.

If you want to reconnect with Rachel and Ivy and Jenks before the official March 20th on sale date, you need to click HERE to sign up for Kim Harrison's Author Tracker list – every time a little more of FOR A FEW DEMONS MORE is released, we will notify you only through Author Tracker!

FOR A FEW DEMONS MORE is on sale MARCH 20th! Click HERE to pre-order your copy today!

GIRL IN THE GLASS Nebula Nominee

Jeff Ford's wonderful THE GIRL IN THE GLASS is on the final Nebula ballot! Congratulations Jeff!

And congratulations to all the nominees!

-- Diana

Wondercon Author Events

In the Bay area? Love anime/manga/media conventions but can't wait until Comiccon (and/or can't stand the idea of over 100,000 people in a convention center?). Eos will have a booth at Wondercon in San Francisco from Friday, March 1 through Sunday, March 3.  We've got some fun author events scheduled, so if you're in the area, stop by the Eos booth  (#809) and say hi! (Or don't say hi, but do attend our events, if you'd rather... <g>)

Our schedule:

Saturday, March 3rd, 12:00-1:00 pm

INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS MOORE

I interview Christopher Moore, the wonderfully funny (and San Francisco local) author of the cult bestsellers YOU SUCK and A DIRTY JOB. Join us for a hilarious hour of questions, answers, candy, taboos, minions, vampires, death merchants, and more.

Saturday, March 3rd, 12:00-1:00 pm: Wondercon, Moscone Center Room 236 (Signing afterward at Booth #809/908)

Saturday March 3rd, 5:00pm:

VICKI PETTERSSON reads and signs THE SCENT OF SHADOWS, the first sign of the Zodiac, at Borderlands Books.  Featuring reluctant heroine (and part-time vigilante) Joanna Archer, THE SCENT OF SHADOWS is an incredible supernatural fantasy debut.  Join us find out why Kim Harrison, Diana Gabaldon, and Charlaine Harris all love Vicki's work....and what drove a former Vegas showgirl to trade in her sequins for a laptop!

Saturday March 3rd, 5:00pm, Borderlands Books: 866 Valencia Street, 415.824.8203

Sunday, March 4th, Wondercon, 12:30-1:30pm: 

GIRLS KICK ASS: Female Protagonists in Print and Beyond

"It's not just Buffy anymore--from the big screen to the small screen, from novels to comics and
Anime, female heroes are everywhere, fighting evil, solving crimes, and more.  Join noted comic
book artists/creators JUDD WINICK (The Adventures of Juniper Lee) , PHIL JIMENEZ [Wonder Woman, Infinite Crisis], and LINDA MEDLEY (Castle Waiting) and science fiction/fantasy novelists
VICKI PETTERSON (The Scent of Shadows) and ELLEN KLAGES to discuss female heroines--How do you create convincing female heroines?  Is sarcasm (or at least witty banter) a necessary accessory (much like skintight outfits)? Are they becoming a cliché, or do we need more strong female characters in all media?  Who were the inspiration for their characters and what is the attraction to writing female characters? Moderator: Diana Gill.

Wondercon, Moscone Center, 12:30-1:30pm, Room 236 (Signing afterward at Booth #809/908)

-- Diana

Reviews for TIME'S CHILD

Scifi.com has a great review of TIME'S CHILD, giving it an A-:

"Too much fun to be taken seriously... Time's Child is fun, quirky and creative."

And SF Revu also takes a look: "Time's Child succeeds on many levels. The glimpses into Benedetta's past and her dealings with Leonardo da Vinci are fascinating. (Ore should consider writing a historical.) There are parallels to the future as Philadelphia, New York and other American cities have become independent city-states like those Benedetta knew in Italy. And Benedetta, Ivan, and Jonah are three very different--but real--characters."

If you're in Philadelphia, Rebecca is reading tomorrow night:

Friday, February 23rd, 7:30 pm

Barnes and Noble Booksellers

1805 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA.

-- Diana

On my desk

Since I'm trying to catch up, I'm going to just shamelessly give you a quick peek at what's on my desk, instead of a long, witty, erudite post on covers, sneak peaks at upcoming books, or any of the other posts that are half-done and saved on Typepad and waiting to be finished...

First off, some good news: I've bought two science fiction novels (starting with EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD) from Adam-Troy Castro, which brings an exciting debut author to the Eos list for 2008.

State of the desk: Kristine Smith has just delivered the revised version of ENDGAME, the fifth Jani Kilian novel, which I can't wait to read.  She's gotten better with every book, and I love the complex intrigue in these novels, the kickass heroine, and not to mention the seriously cool alien idomeni.

THE YEAR'S BEST SF 12, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, is also in, and Kathryn has the (very cool) table of contents here.

Kim Harrison's new mss. arrives next week, which means I'll be lost lost lost once I start until I finish the last page.  Then I'm working on edits for an anthology, and the action-packed start to a new Ian Douglas trilogy, among others.

Plus there are the many submissions on the desk, the floor, the window shelf, my living room table, etc. (The less said about the rest of the paper, the better.)

Soon I'll be able to preview the new Sara Douglass, THE NEW SPACE OPERA, the new Sheri Tepper, plus several other titles that are fabulous but don't necessarily have new in their description or title.

In the meantime, here's the very fun cover for Mario Acevedo's second book, X-RATED BLOODSUCKERS, the sequel to THE NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS.  (And yes, it's just as much fun as you might think to bring these books [and covers] up in launch meetings, to sales reps, etc. <g>).

-- Diana

Science is, of course, Experimental Literature, Rebecca Ore

       (after a conversation with Samuel R.Delany)

        The writing that explores edge conditions of language tends to attract people who want to move into Erza Pound’s Cantos (as did a schizophrenic friend of friends in NYC) or into a Robert Heinlein novel.   Fandom is our evidence that Science Fiction is as experimental as Allen Ginsberg, perhaps more so, since for other exploratory writing communities, science is a distant metaphor at best.

          Science fiction fans meet most of the criteria of an experimental writing fandom–a sense of alienation from the mundanes/squares/ bourgeois/straight world; an interest in marginal politic; and a sophistication about language that disconnects writing from attempted one to one mapping with the real world, or even the illusion of one.

         Words have characteristics that go beyond their denotative values.  They drag in associations, their evolutionary history, their sounds, and the visual impact they have in different typographies.  Science fiction novels frequently don’t follow conventional assumptions about character, plot (plot is just a way to move viewpoint around the Big Device/Complex structure).  The typical reader of mimetic fiction will complain of some s.f. that it’s just a world tour, without admitting that plot, as every science fiction reader knows, is as artificial and rooted in word rather than in the world.  And in reality, we’re often to pay more money to tour large complex structures from foreign cities to the Grand Canyon that we are to pay for a realistic novel. In those tours, a plot would be a problem.

Science as Metaphor, Science as Model, Rebecca Ore

Once, in a job back in New York City, a science editor told me I was a biologist manqué.  I’ve never had the math necessary to explore science from the inside by doing it, but I’ve always been fascinated by what confessions math, physics, and chemistry get from Mother Nature.  I’ve long been fascinated with the work with gene sequencing, the secret discoveries about lineages, who we were rather than who we thought we were (the largest surviving population of Celts is in the Midlands if we go by matrilines).  We reconstruct the past from fragments that we project ourselves onto backwards.  We take other fragments and imagine ourselves traveling faster than light forward.  The science in science fiction, like everything else, is “as if real.”  In science fiction, the science has been everything from attempts at vigorous extrapolation (actually rather rare) to trying to get the feel of having science yank a worldview out from under you or me, to trying to get the feel of science right.  We live in a technologically accelerating world where we can’t expect ten years from now to be like ten years ago, or even all that much like today, other than humans will still embrace and resist change.

Character Building, Rebecca Ore

Science fiction focuses on the ground as much if not more than the figure, but figure, our characters who figure out things and build new things for us can be as much as “as if real” construction as the Big Devices they’re crawling though, snagging their bra straps or chest hairs.

           For me, the fun is imagining someone who couldn’t exist in the present real enough world and then making that person real enough to interact with people who are the composites of various real people.  In Time’s Child, Ivar, my Viking adolescent male is trolled by the composite of several real Usenet trolls in an imaginary Philadelphia that’s become a city state in a world with way fewer people than present.

           Ivar sprang up from scraps of an Arab trader’s account of a Viking funeral, an Icelandic Saga about a murderous poet, reading the Usenet group, alt.religion.asatru, and W.H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland, plus someone’s description of a strip bar in Reykjavik.  My first image of him was a time traveler in a contemporary suit, in his forties, being very ironic about the past and present.   I didn’t know what he was going to do yet.

As if Real, Part Two, Notes for Time Travelers, Rebecca Ore

The typical time travel novel is “We go there; X happens; we return or die.”    The notable exceptions are from Joanna Russ in Picnic on Paradise with its tough woman survivor from the past knowing how bad the future situation was, and various military groups traveling into the future (I remember one of David Drake’s novels, remember reading descriptions of others.

The typical time travel novel assumes the past people are naïve about strangers.  We, or the future that we imagine ourselves to be, could fool the past and manipulate it with our special skills.  We could pass for citizens (in a world where the lower classes were extremely local and the upper classes quite cosmopolitan, I don’t think so).  We learn how to spin in two weeks and aren’t immediately stripped to see if we’re really male when we try our spinning on people who’ve been doing it since infancy.

Doing the perfect imitation of even people who are other varieties of contemporary European is seriously non-trivial.  Most spies study their target cultures for years, and have native informants to help them. Most spies aren't Gordon Lonsdale/Konon Molody, who lived in the US from age 10 to his late teens and who passed for Canadian in the UK. Vilyam Fisher/Col. Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, had lived in England as a child, but passed as an immigrant while the resident KBG agent in Brooklyn.Since s.f. writers only have to pass “as if real” in their fictive worlds, those who read it don’t generally bear down on the probabilities this hard, but I thought I’d like to try something that I could, as an undergraduate history major, find more plausibly “as if real.”

In Time’s Child, the rubberbandium stretches along the physics dimension, but my people are obviously from away and bite the hands that feed them, once literally.  The past immigrating to the future is what we all do all the time.   I just made the old countries older.

The other thing is the past brings its own tricks to the table and adapts them to the “as if real” future present.  The future is assimilated as much as the past is.

-- Rebecca Ore