hard SF - Tor/Forge Blog

This Wednesday, 5/18, at 4 PM Eastern, fans will have a chance to chat with author John Scalzi while he’s on tour for FUZZY NATION!

Tor Books is excited to announce that this month’s #TorChat will feature author John Scalzi! #TorChat is a monthly series of twitter chats, in which guest authors join fans in a lively, informative and entertaining discussion of all that’s hot in genre fiction, 140 characters at a time. The chat will take place on Wednesday, May 18th, from 4 – 5 PM Eastern.

This Wednesday’s #Torchat will be with New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi (@scalzi), who is currently on tour for his brand new novel, FUZZY NATION (May 10, 2011). John will be participating, barring any complications with travel, from his hotel in Salt Lake City. John will be available to answer fan questions and to talk about his new novel and its inspiration (the 1962 Hugo-nominated novel Little Fuzzy), his long running blog, Whatever, and what it’s like to be on tour.

The chat will be introduced and (loosely) moderated by Tor publicist Cassie Ammerman (@leanoir), with giveaways of advance copies of upcoming genre releases from @TorBooks following the 4 PM chat.

Keep an eye on the @TorBooks account, as well as that of the moderator, @leanoir, for updates on the chat’s start time, which is fluid due to the fact that John is on the road.

Our Author guest:

JOHN SCALZI is the author of several SF novels, including the bestselling “Old Man’s War” sequence, comprising Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. He is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and he won the Hugo Award for Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, a collection of essays from his wildly popular blog Whatever. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

About Tor Books
Tor Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, is a New York-based publisher of hardcover and softcover books, founded in 1980 and committed (although not limited) to SF and fantasy literature. In 2002, Tor launched Starscape, an imprint dedicated to publishing quality science fiction and fantasy for young readers, including books by critically acclaimed and award winning authors such as Cory Doctorow, Orson Scott Card, and David Lubar. Between an extensive hardcover and trade-softcover line, an Orb backlist program, and a stronghold in mass-market paperback, Tor annually publishes what is arguably the largest and most diverse line of science fiction and fantasy ever produced by a single English-language publisher. Books from Tor have won every major award in the SF and fantasy fields, and for the last twenty-three years the company has been named Best Publisher in the Locus Poll, the largest consumer poll in SF.

“Spectacularly and convincingly inventive, assured and wholly spellbinding: one of the most impressive debuts in years.”

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi gets a starred review in the March 1 edition of Kirkus Reviews!

Below is the full review:

A sort of paranoid-conspiracy, hard sci-fi whodunit: the Scotland resident, Finnish author’s jaw-dropping debut.

Notorious thief Jean le Flambeur serves an indeterminate sentence in the surreal Dilemma Prison governed by artificial intelligences, or Archons, at the behest of Earth’s ruling “upload collective” called the Sobornost. The Archons’ notion of rehabilitation is to compel the prisoners, incarcerated in infinitely repeating transparent cells, to play murderous mind games with infinite copies of themselves. Soon enough, though, along comes spacer Mieli in her alluring sentient spaceship to rescue le Flambeur—providing that he’s willing to work for her. The thief has little choice, it’s either accept or stay and be shot through the head over and over. And so they’re off to Mars, where the multi-legged city of Oubliette wanders the landscape, terraforming as it goes. Here, time itself is currency; memory, and hence reality, is held collectively, privacy is a fetish preserved by unbreakable encryption and enforced by powerful “tzaddiks,” but everybody’s strings are being pulled—even the string-pullers’—by hidden higher authorities. Mieli’s employer, known only as the pellegrini, wants le Flambeur to perform a particular if unmentioned service, while the thief has his own ulterior motives for cooperating: years ago he hid large chunks of his memories here, and now he needs to recover them to attain his own vengeful goals. Meanwhile, brilliant young detective Isidore Beautrelet, having just solved the murder of a prominent chocolatier, accepts another assignment—involving an arch villain named…le Flambeur. All this barely hints at the complex inventions and extrapolations, richly textured backdrop and well-developed characters seamlessly woven into a narrative stuffed with scientific, literary and cultural references.

Spectacularly and convincingly inventive, assured and wholly spellbinding: one of the most impressive debuts in years.

The Quantum Thief releases May 10th, 2011.

Tag: hard SF

Author Spotlight: John Scalzi on #TorChat!

The Quantum Thief gets a starred review in Kirkus!