Around the Net

I have been out of the loop for the last few weeks as I was on vacation so I am slowly getting back into the book world. Here is what I found this week of interest:

Books

Orbit has had their interns crunching numbers and came up with some interesting results for last year. The first one is the Guide to Fantasy Art
The second and third are the trend in changing fashion in Urban Fantasy and the color trend of the North American dragon and the fourth is by far my favorite with the frequency of fantasy in 2009
To wet your whistle:

The hyper-talented folks over at Orbit Books have once again undertaken their yearly survey of recurring elements in fantasy cover art, comparing the covers of the bestselling fantasy novels of 2009 with those of the previous year. Last week, the Orbit team released a series of charts revealing the results of this year’s survey. The charts are spectacular, and the shifts in various trends are both intriguing and kind of hilarious. For example, Figure 1.1: Trends in Fantasy Cover Art uncovers a shocking lack of unicorns, a puzzling increase in mysterious hooded figures, and a highly encouraging new “Non-distressed damsels” category.

The charts alone are rather funny.

The full article can be read here.

Brent Weeks' 
The Black Prism Reviews

The Black Prism has had a few positive reviews already which is good news for me as my notification that my book was shipping is on the way.

Fantasy Book Critic's review by Liviu:

All in all The Black Prism is an A++ from me while the series has the potential to become one for the ages. The main flaw of The Black Prism is that it ends - despite 600+ pages and a reasonable ending point, I still wanted another 600 at least!

And our guest reviewer from not long ago John Ottinger from Grasping for the Wind writes:

I found that Weeks really did a good job of surprising me with the plot. When I expected him to zig, he zagged, and when I expected a character to be a certain type of person, Weeks would throw me for a loop. To tell you exactly how he did this would ruin some of the really awesome surprises of the novel, but suffice it to say that Weeks has written an epic fantasy unlike any of its contemporaries. It is a truly visionary and original work, and has set the bar high for others in its subgenre.

I look forward to reading this one soon, review will be up soon after that.

Digital Anthology

Editor Jason Sizemore has posted the table of contents for his upcoming digital-only anthology, Apexology: Horror:

"It Tasted Like the Sea" by Paul Jessup
"Summon, Bind, Banish" by Nick Mamatas
"To Every Thing There is a Season" by Dru Pagliassotti
"Life's a Beach" by Alethea Kontis and Ariell Branson
"Kusatenda Uroyi" by Gill Ainsworth
"Lottery" by Gene O'Neill
"Cerbo en Vitra ujo" by Mary Robinette Kowal
"The Spider in the Hairdo" by Michael A. Burstein
"The Dark Side" by Guy Hasson
"With the Beating of their Wings" by Martel Sardina
"Enough to Make a Devil" by R. Thomas Riley
"Flash of Light" by Jason Sizemore
"Transylvania Mission" by Lavie Tidhar
"Inside Looking Out (or: Falling Through the Worlds)" by Mari Adkins
"Powered" by Deb Taber
"Disturbing Things" by B.J. Burrow
"Eulogy for Muffin" by Jennifer Brozek
"Hands of Heritage" by Elizabeth Engstrom
"The Junkyard God" by M. Zak Anwar and O.M.R. Anwar
"Bessie Green's Thumb" by Fran Friel
"Big Sister/Little Sister" by Jennifer Pelland

The anthology is prefaced by his introduction Five Years and Counting.

Timothy Zahn

Timothy Zahn has always been on my radar every since he wrote three of my all-time favorite Star Wars novels.While not a huge Terminator fan it should be noted that his latest book to take on the metal menace has hit bookshelves. From Techland:

Excerpt: Zahn's Terminator Salvation: Trial By Fire

Timothy Zahn's Terminator Salvation: Trial By Fire hit both brick and mortar and virtual bookshelves this week. The latest installment in the Terminator universe picks up where the movie left off. Connor is on the mends and the Resistance is trying to figure out what exactly Marcus Wright is and how they can defend themselves against the undetectable hybrids.
Zahn's impeccable pacing makes for a quick read of Trial By Fire and anyone interested should pick it up. It's only $8 from Titan Books.
The fourth Terminator movie, Terminator Salvation, starring Christian Bale and directed by McG was a summer box office hit, grossing over $400 million worldwide. In this brand new spin-off novel which follows on from events in the movie, a recovering John Connor grants Barnes permission to return to the destroyed VLA lab and bury his brother who was killed in the explosive opening of the movie. At the ruins Barnes and pilot Blair Williams search through the debris for the remains of their comrade. During their hunt they uncover a half-buried cable, that was clearly a data transmission line, leading up into the mountains. The two Resistance fighters head northwest to investigate. Amid the forests on the slopes of the mountains, the pair uncover an entire village that appears to have been largely untouched by Judgment Day and its aftermath. Suspicious of the villagers, Barnes and Blair decide to dig deeper....
We'll be interviewing Zahn next week, so if you have any questions leave them in comments. Oh, and here's a one chapter excerpt from the book. Enjoy!

CHAPTER FOUR

They'd been flying for nearly three hours, and Blair Williams had watched the landscape sliding beneath the Blackhawk helicopter gradually change from forest to sparse grassland and finally to desert. Above her, the sky was mottled with a mixture of feathery white cirrus clouds and long dirty gray stratus ones, interspersed with occasional patches of blue sky. All around her the air was filled with the hum of the Blackhawk's engines and the rhythmic throbbing of its rotors.
Beside her, scowling in the copilot's seat, was Barnes.
Blair sighed to herself. She hadn't wanted to take on this mission, and it had been abundantly clear that Barnes hadn't wanted her along, either. But Connor had insisted,
and John Connor wasn't the sort of person you said no to.
Especially when the only reason Connor's dark eyes were even alive to gaze at, into, and through you was because Marcus Wright had given his life to save him.
Marcus Wright. The man who in a few short days Blair had learned to love.
Not the man, a bitter-edged corner of her mind corrected mockingly in Barnes's voice. The machine you learned to love.


Read more: http://techland.com/2010/08/20/preview-of-zahns-terminator-salvation-trial-by-fire-from-titan-books/#ixzz0xURCjVhN

Tor has an interesting take on what will become of books in the future according to Science Fiction:

A Fondness for Antiques: The Future of Books According to Science Fiction

A brief except:

In the past few years, media pundits and tech experts have been abuzz with variations on the question: “what is the future of the book?” Luckily, science fiction has been around a whole lot longer than Amazon, Apple, and Google, and as such, might be able to teach us a thing or two about the future of the printed word.

Books tend to be depicted in a few different ways in science fiction. Sometimes the medium by which people “read” is altered by technology. Other times, books are preserved in their exact form as today, either as antiques or for another reason. Sometimes, books don’t exist at all or are in the process of being destroyed. And other times, books barely even resemble themselves.

Back in the summer of 2000, beautiful women would walk past the little shopping mall bookstore where I worked and into a neighboring cosmetics emphorium. But I devised a way of getting them into the bookstore. I imagined a line of facial creams that were infused with the plots of classic novels. After a little rub and scrub customers would instantly absorb the works of Dickens, Melville, and Bronte directly through their pores. They would be “reading” books in seconds! Not much came of these plans, but I’m hoping some day, when I become a mad scientist, I’ll follow through.

To read more click here.

The last bit of new is that Amazon has inked a deal for exclusive rights to Odyssey editions of many of Wylie Agency's book catalogue for two years for the Amazon Kindle eReader.

The full article from Techland is here.

Amazon Inks Exclusivity Deal for Odyssey Editions Kindle Books

Amazon has hammered out a deal with The Wylie Agency to offer 20 of its Odyssey Editions books exclusively on the Kindle e-book platform for two years.

The deal also marks the first time the books-- from authors such as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, Hunter S. Thompson, and more--have been available electronically.

The complete list of books is as follows:

"London Fields" by Martin Amis
"The Adventures of Augie March" by Saul Bellow
"Ficciones" (Spanish Edition) by Jorge Luis Borges
"Junky" by William Burroughs
"The Stories of John Cheever" by John Cheever
"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
"Love Medicine" by Louise Erdrich
"The Naked and the Dead" by Norman Mailer
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
"The Enigma of Arrival" by V.S. Naipaul
"The White Castle" by Orhan Pamuk
"Portnoy's Complaint" by Philip Roth
"Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson
"Rabbit Run" by John Updike
"Rabbit Redux" by John Updike
"Rabbit is Rich" by John Updike
"Rabbit at Rest" by John Updike
"Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh

Each title costs $9.99, and all are available now.


Read more: http://techland.com/2010/07/22/amazon-inks-exclusivity-deal-for-odyssey-editions-kindle-books/#ixzz0xUT92qiH