Edward Willett's Blog, page 15
August 19, 2018
Publishers Weekly calls Worldshaper a “rollicking” contemporary fantasy in STARRED review
Worldshaper, my ninth novel for DAW Books.Publishers Weekly, the bible of the publishing industry, has given my upcoming novel Worldshaper, Book 1 in my new Worldshapers series for DAW Books, its highest accolade, a STARRED review.
Highlights:
“This rollicking secondary-world contemporary fantasy opens with a bang…(the characters) grapple with the ethics of changing the world, the question of what makes people ‘real’ when the worldshapers can change everything about them with nothing more than a thought, and the need to save the universe. Willett…meticulously includes small details that make the constantly changing scenery feel solid and real…This novel sets up a fascinating, fluctuating universe with plenty of room for growth for the main characters, and readers will eagerly join their journey.”
Also, don’t forget you can now read the first two chapters of Worldshaper online!
First review: Publishers Weekly calls Worldshaper a “rollicking” contemporary fantasy
Worldshaper, my ninth novel for DAW Books.The first review of my upcoming novel Worldshaper, Book 1 in my new Worldshapers series for DAW Books, has appeared, in the bible of the publishing industry, Publishers Weekly. Highlights: “This rollicking secondary-world contemporary fantasy opens with a bang…(the characters) grapple with the ethics of changing the world, the question of what makes people ‘real’ when the worldshapers can change everything about them with nothing more than a thought, and the need to save the universe. Willett…meticulously includes small details that make the constantly changing scenery feel solid and real…This novel sets up a fascinating, fluctuating universe with plenty of room for growth for the main characters, and readers will eagerly join their journey.”
Also, don’t forget you can now read the first two chapters of Worldshaper online!
August 13, 2018
Lake in the Clouds audiobook released!
The audiobook version of Lake in the Clouds, Book 3 in my Shards of Excalibur young-adult fantasy series, published in print by Coteau Books, has just been released. It’s narrated by the fabulous Elizabeth Klett, who also narrated the first two books in the series, Song of the Sword and Twist of the Blade, and is in the process of finishing off Cave Beneath the Sea and Door into Faerie.
You can get the audiobook from Audible, on Amazon, or on iTunes.
More about Lake in the Clouds:
Ariane is on her own and on the run. Rex Major has swayed her erstwhile best friend Wally to his side. And when she finally hears the faint call of the third Shard of Excalibur, it’s on the other side of the world, in New Zealand! Wally, meanwhile, is discovering that life as Major’s “guest” isn’t all it promised, especially when he finds out Major’s plans for Ariane’s aunt. With Aunt Phyllis under threat, Ariane has no choice but to walk directly into Rex’s trap—and hope she can find a way to protect both the Shard and those she loves.
“Well written, and fast moving, with touches of humour, Lake in the Clouds will appeal to young readers who enjoy adventure as well as adults who might like a modern visit to the timeless story of King Arthur and his knights. Recommended.” – Ronald Hore, CM Magazine
“The overlay of the Arthurian legend on a modern Canadian context works surprisingly well. Merlin’s magical powers are invested in Rex Major’s spyware embedded in the internet. Wally’s loyalty and courage accurately reflect both Arthur’s strength and his fatal flaw. Ariane’s coolly calculated actions echo the dispassionate deeds of the Lady of the Lake . . . Readers who are invested in the series will eagerly anticipate the final two books.” – Patricia Jeremy, Resource Links Magazine
“By continuing to develop his characters so that they never remain good or evil or secondary, Edward Willett has ensured that the plot doesn’t stagnate…With Ariane and Wally both being affected by the shards and learning of new abilities, as well as other characters being drawn into the story in different ways, The Lake in the Clouds becomes a fuller story. The plot itself continues to evolve and the adventure is grand…The journeys are part of the quest but hold on because your travelling companions are switching places and your next seat mates may be a surprise in Cave Beneath the Sea…” – CanLit for Little Canadians
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August 8, 2018
Listen to my new podcast–interviews with major SF/fantasy writers about the creative process
I’ve thought about doing for a long time, I’m now actually doing: I’ve started a podcast, The Worldshapers: Conversation With Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors About the Creative Process.
In each hour-long episode, I explore how a particular author began writing science fiction or fantasy, and the go through their creative process, focusing on one of their titles they’ve selected as an example. We also talk about why they write and what they hope their writing accomplishes.
The first three episodes, with Robert J. Sawyer, Tanya Huff, and John Scalzi, were released August 8, 2018: episodes will follow biweekly (to start with), coming out every other Friday.
You can subscribe through various services, although as I launched, iTunes had a problem precluding adding The Worldshapers to their service. But it will happen!
Here are the first three episodes:
Have a listen, enjoy, and subscribe! Future guests already lined up include Julie Czerneda, Arthur Slade, Gareth L. Powell, Orson Scott Card, and Joe Haldeman.
August 5, 2018
Read the first two chapters of Worldshaper!
It’s just six weeks until the release of Worldshaper, my ninth novel for DAW Books, on September 18 in trade paperback and ebook. What with When Words Collide coming up this weekend, and the World Science Fiction Convention after that, and DragonCon after that, and then SaskExpo after that, all of which I’ll be at to talk up the book before the release, it’s time to post the first two chapters!
And here’s the general information one more time:
Amazon U.S. | Amazon Canada | Indigo | Barnes & Noble | Penguin Random House
From an Aurora Award-winning author comes the first book in a new portal fantasy series in which one woman’s powers open the way to a labyrinth of new dimensions.
For Shawna Keys, the world is almost perfect. She’s just opened a pottery studio in a beautiful city. She’s in love with a wonderful man. She has good friends.
But one shattering moment of violence changes everything. Mysterious attackers kill her best friend. They’re about to kill Shawna. She can’t believe it’s happening–and just like that, it isn’t. It hasn’t. No one else remembers the attack, or her friend. To everyone else, Shawna’s friend never existed…
Everyone, that is, except the mysterious stranger who shows up in Shawna’s shop. He claims her world has been perfect because she Shaped it to be perfect; that it is only one of uncounted Shaped worlds in a great Labyrinth; and that all those worlds are under threat from the Adversary who has now invaded hers. She cannot save her world, he says, but she might be able to save others–if she will follow him from world to world, learning their secrets and carrying them to Ygrair, the mysterious Lady at the Labyrinth’s heart.
Frightened and hounded, Shawna sets off on a desperate journey, uncertain whom she can trust, how to use her newfound power, and what awaits her in the myriad worlds beyond her own.
July 19, 2018
Five-star review for I Tumble Through the Diamond Dust
Jim Bennett, who reviews poetry for KBR (The Kindle Book Review) and is himself a poet, liked I Tumble Through the Diamond Dust rather a lot, giving it five out of five stars:
“Willett writes speculative fiction, so these poems are unusual. They are also a lot of fun. Willett’s illustrator, Wendi Nordell, has added to our enjoyment of this book with an amazing full-page drawing accompanying each poem. That makes this an even more unusual work…”
He singles out five specific poems, “The Telling,” “Saint Billy,” “I Remember His Eyes,” “I Will Ride Off the Horizon,” and “Emily Alison Atkinson Finds God,” and ends with:
“My personal guidelines, when doing an ‘official’ KBR review, are as follows: five stars means, roughly equal to best in genre. Rarely given. Four stars means, extremely good. Three stars means, definitely recommendable. I am a tough reviewer. I try hard to be consistent. I rate this work on literary merit and enjoy-ability, and I think it is five star material. Highly recommended.”
Best way to get the book? Buy it directly from me, in either print or any ebook format.
It’s also available in print through Chapters/Indigo or the publisher, Your Nickel’s Worth Press, and as an book from Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Kobo, or the Apple store.
There’s also an audiobook, narrated by me, available through Audible and iTunes.
July 10, 2018
New short-story collection Paths to the Stars now available!
My new short-story collection, Paths to the Stars: Twenty-Two Fantastical Tales of Imagination, has just been released by Shadowpaw Press. The stories in it span my writing career–the oldest is one I wrote at age 19 (or possibly 18, I’m not sure) at Harding University; the newest just came out earlier this year. They’re roughly fifty-fifty young adult and adult stories.
Where can you get it? Well, you can buy it in all popular ebook formats or get an autographed directly from me through my new online shop.
You can also buy it at any of these links:
Shadowpaw Press| Amazon.com| Amazon.ca| Chapters/Indigo| Barnes & Noble
Here’s the official description:
From Edward Willett, Aurora Award-winning author of Marseguro, The Cityborn, and Worldshaper(DAW Books), among many others, comes twenty-two tales of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, drawn from a long career of telling fantastic tales.
A young musician dreams of playing his songs among the stars…A Broadway performer on the lam is forced to direct aliens in The Sound of Music…Strange vegetables with dangerous properties crop up in small-town Saskatchewan…A man with a dark secret gets his comeuppance on a windy night on the prairie…An elderly caretaker on the Moon preserves the memory of the millions who died on Earth’s darkest day…A woman and a bat-like alien must overcome their own prejudices to prevent an interstellar war…
From the far future and the farthest reaches of space to the Canadian prairie, from our world to worlds that have never existed to world’s that might some day, rich realms of imagination and the fascinating characters and creatures that populate them await within these stories, some previously published, some seeing print for the first time.
Time to go exploring…
And the first review…
“From exploding fruits and vegetables to a shrine on the moon, dedicated to the memory of a devastated Earth, these stories will not disappoint. If you’re a Fantasy and Science Fiction fan like I am, you’re sure to enjoy this rollercoaster of stories every bit as much as I did. I can sum my thoughts up in two words: ‘READ THEM!'” – Lorne McMillan, Author of Isaac’s Blood
July 8, 2018
My interview on “The Writer’s Block” on L.A. Talk Radio
I had a great time on “The Writer’s Block” program on L.A. Talk Radio last week; as they describe it on their webpage, the conversation was “fun, educational, and occasionally, somewhat nonsensical.”
July 2, 2018
The Space-Time Continuum: How a small-town Saskatchewan boy launched science fiction’s Golden Age
My most recent Space-Time Continuum column for Freelance , the magazine of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild.
The Golden Age of science fiction, many say, began with the publication of A.E. van Vogt’s story “Black Destroyer” in Astounding in 1939.
Isaac Asimov’s first story for Astounding appears in that same issue; the next contained the first story by Robert A. Heinlein, and the next the first by Theodore Sturgeon. But A.E. van Vogt’s story started it all—and van Vogt was a Saskatchewan boy.
Although Alfred Elton van Vogt was born April 26, 1912, on a farm in the Russian Mennonite community of Edenburg, near the border town of Gretna, MB, his family lived in Neville, south of Swift Current, at the time: his mother had gone home to Edenburg for the birth.
Van Vogt’s father, Henry Vogt, had moved to Neville around 1910, when his mother, Judith, stepfather, Abram Schmidt, and siblings had relocated there. Henry graduated from the Indianapolis College of Law the year after Alfred was born, becoming (along with his brother David) among the first lawyers of Mennonite background in western Canada.
Henry returned to Neville to practice (he was also elected the first mayor), and Alfred started school there. The year he turned ten, the family moved to Morden, MB. In 1926 they moved to Winnipeg, then, in 1929, to Swift Current. In 1931 they returned to Winnipeg.
Van Vogt graduated from the University of Ottawa, and it was in Ottawa, while working as a census clerk and representative of Maclean Trade Papers, that he began writing fiction: not science fiction, but “true confessions.” In the process, he honed a style influenced by Canadian John Gallishaw’s 1928 book The Only Two Ways to Write a Story. For example, he was a proponent of what he called a “hang-up”—some piece of missing information that the reader’s imagination had to supply.
(To cope with story problems, van Vogt would force himself to wake up every hour to think about a solution. He found his subconscious often had the problem figured out by morning. I figure his subconscious was so irritated by the process it solved the problem just to get some rest.)
Sometime during the 1930s van Vogt returned to Winnipeg. He wrote radio plays for a while…but then, in 1939, the same year he married E. Mayne Hull, he sold “Black Destroyer,” and began an astonishingly productive and influential decade.
In “Black Destroyer” an expedition to a distant planet is almost annihilated when an apparently friendly cat-like alien turns out to be, not only not friendly, but able to exert considerable control over matter and energy. “Black Destroyer” instantly cemented van Vogt as a major science fiction writer, and its influence stretches to the modern era, inspiring, among other things, the Alien series of films (in fact, van Vogt collected an out-of-court settlement of $50,000 from 20th Century Fox).
Between 1939 and 1947 van Vogt published at least thirty-five science fiction stories in Astounding alone, and many others in other magazines. Over his life, he would also write thirty-eight novels. Some were “fix-ups” of his short stories: “Black Destroyer,” for example, became part of his novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
His first novel, Slan, dealt with a persecuted race of human-bred mutants and attempts to bring peace between “normals” and their physical and mental superiors—another well-mined trope in the decades since. Other novels include The Weapon Shops of Isher and The World of Null-A, which, when it was published in 1948 (by then, van Vogt was living in the US, having emigrated in 1944), was the first science-fiction magazine serial to appear in hardcover from a major publisher. Its French version, translated by surrealist Boris Vian, created a market for science fiction in that country.
Van Vogt was prone to latching on to various forms of pseudoscience (the Null-A books, for example, were based on something called “General Semantics”). After he became fascinated by Dianetics, invented by fellow science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and the basis of Scientology (although van Vogt never became a Scientologist), he quit writing for several years. When he resumed in the early 1960s, his work no longer had the same influence.
In 1995, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) presented van Vogt with its Grand Master Award. In 1996 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. By then, sadly, he suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s: as Robert J. Sawyer recounts on his website, the night of his induction van Vogt told someone that while he remembered being a writer, he no longer remembered anything he had written. He died in 2000.
In the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Canadian author and critic John Clute writes: “Although van Vogt catered for the pulps, he intensified the emotional impact and complexity of the stories they would bear…The hauntingly whited-out wilderness venues, so typical of his work…in their very absence of human detail impart a deeply Canadian chthonic frisson to otherwise jumbled plotlines…Van Vogt’s space operas…are at heart enacted dreams which articulate deep, symbolic needs and wishes of his readership.”
Clute calls van Vogt “the first Canadian (science fiction) writer of real importance.”
Not a bad legacy for a small-town Saskatchewan boy.The
June 23, 2018
Audiobook of I Tumble Through the Diamond Dust now available!
The audiobook of my collection of science fiction and fantasy poetry, I Tumble Through the Diamond Dust, which I narrated myself, is now available through Audible and iTunes.
Of course, when you buy the audiobook, you don’t get the wonderful illustrations by my niece, Wendi Nordell (except for a small portion of the cover art), so I recommend getting both.
The print book is available through my bookstore, as well as through Indigo and from the publisher, Your Nickel’s Worth Press.
Here’s one of the poems, “Saint Billy”:
https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/06/Saint-Billy-without-preamble.mp3
