Mark’s Comments (group member since Apr 13, 2012)

Mark’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

World Fantasy Award winners were announced today.

https://www.tor.com/2019/11/03/announ...

Best Novel awarded to Witchmark by C.L. Polk

The very lasery illustration on the inside front cover of the UK paperback (same artist as the cover) looks a little like Tom?

Has anyone read the Bladerunner sequels by K.W. Jeter? Are they worth investigating?

https://www.goodreads.com/series/5372...

Trike wrote: "Just noticed I wrote “I’ve has”. 😂 Me talk gooder."

Pandemic?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/t...

Here are a couple of educational Twitter threads on Bladerunner and PKD from @PulpLibrarian

https://twitter.com/PulpLibrarian/sta...

https://twitter.com/PulpLibrarian/sta...

32% on the first test and human on the second test. I guess that's a good thing?

Does anyone ever try out the publisher samplers?

https://www.tor.com/2019/05/16/downlo...

Tor.com just came out with Tor.com Publishing 2019 Debut Sampler with sample chapters by many authors, including C.S.E. Cooney, Katharine Duckett, Jennifer Giesbrecht, Kerstin Hall, Vylar Kaftan, Scotto Moore, Tamsyn Muir, Lina Rather, Priya Sharma, and Emily Tesh.

How are your dogs?

The Snow Queen was in print from 1980 to 1990, reprinted in 2001 and 2005. Tor reissued the book in 2015. It hasn't been continuously in print, but it's had a good long run.

Longest trailer ever?

Everything that's coming to Disney+, a three hour and 17 minute trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0FRD...

For readers who like their books without distracting cover art...

Artist for the UK pb is Peter Andrew Jones

http://www.peterandrewjones.net/iacg.htm

I couldn't find this cover on his website, which has an extensive archive of his artwork, but is incredibly difficult to navigate. Maybe someone else will have better luck ;-)

Marisa wrote: "My library doesn't have it, and there's no chance I'm giving Macmillan my money, since November 1st is when they start their ludicrous 'Libraries only get to but 1 ebook for the first 8 weeks of a ..."

Lots of used copies of this book available. Check out a used bookstore.

Cover art for the British paperback goes in a different direction...

Michael Whelan's cover art for the paperback edition is pretty well known. Prints used to be available at his website. Sold out now.

https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleri...

I attended a book signing with Scalzi and Sykes a few years ago. The younger Sykes was an amusing speaker so I picked up his first book and eventually read the entire Aeon's Gate trilogy ( https://www.goodreads.com/series/5874... ).

Until this S&L pick, I hadn't read more of his books, but he's in my Twitter feed.

In some respects, SBiB resembles his rambling Twitter feed. Like William, I kind of enjoyed the ride, but there is a layer self-loathing to Sal the Cacophony that makes the story a little difficult to read sometimes.

Google Play store has three dozen free exclusive horror audio shorts

Prepare your ears for a world of ghosts, zombies, serial killers, and many more dark characters. Nightfire, exclusively on Google Play Books, has harnessed the talents of your favorite masters of horror including China Miéville, Paul Tremblay, Carmen Maria Machado, and more to bring you terrifying tales you're sure to enjoy.

https://play.google.com/store/books/t...

I opened up a new thread at https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I opened up this thread to move a discussion out of the Kindle deals thread at the Roberator's request.

The latest Tor free ebook is The Tiger's Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera. The book has garnered good, indifferent, and bad reviews. The bad reviews focus on the fact that the book features Asian characters in a world which mirrors real Asian history, but Rivera is not Asian. Some of the complaints wonder why Tor editors didn't use sensitivity readers to review the book. Who knows if they did or didn't?

We recently had similar discussions about Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse who wrote about Navajo society and religion, but is only married to a Navajo.

I understand that reviews are meant to inform, but I begin to feel unreasonably irritated when a review seems to be suggesting that I shouldn't read a book because it offends the reviewer. As ignorant as I am about other people and cultures, I feel like I should make my own decisions about a book.