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SFF Holiday Sweepstakes

SFF Holiday Sweeps Collections

Want to make your shelves the envy of genre fans everywhere this holiday season? We’re offering the chance to win your choice of boxes of sci-fi or fantasy novels, from authors like John Scalzi, Brandon Sanderson, Elizabeth Bear, and more. Sign up for the Tor Newsletter for you chance to win now!

And don’t forget to let us know which collection you’d like to win below.

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On the Road: Tor/Forge Author Events in July

Time Salvager by Wesley ChuThe Unnoticeables by Robert BrockwayThe Suspicion at Sanditon by Carrie Bebris

Tor/Forge authors are on the road in July! Once a month, we’re collecting info about all of our upcoming author events. Check and see who’ll be coming to a city near you:

Carrie Bebris, The Suspicion at Sanditon

Friday, July 24
Books & Co.
Dayton, OH
7:00 PM

Saturday, July 25
Ohio State Barnes & Noble
Columbus, OH
2:00 PM

Tuesday, July 28
Joseph-Beth Books
Cincinnati, OH
7:00 PM

Thursday, July 30
The Booksellers at Laurelwood
Memphis, TN
6:30 PM

Alex Bledsoe, Long Black Curl

Friday, July 10
Arcadia Books
Spring Green, WI
6:30 PM

Saturday, July 18
Parnassus Books
Nashville, TN
2:00 PM

Sunday, July 19
Eagle Eye Bookshop
Decatur, GA
3:00 PM

Robert Brockway, The Unnoticeables

Thursday, July 16
Mysterious Galaxy
San Diego, CA
7:30 PM

Friday, July 17
University Bookstore
Seattle, WA
7:00 PM

Saturday, July 18
Copperfield’s Books
Petaluma, CA
7:00 PM

Sunday, July 19
Borderlands Books
San Francisco, CA
3:00 PM

Wednesday, July 22
Powell’s City of Books
Portland, OR
7:30 PM

Wesley Chu, Time Salvager

Tuesday, July 7
The Last Bookstore
Los Angeles, CA
7:00 PM

Sunday, July 12
Mysterious Galaxy
Also with Carrie Patel and Scott Sigler
San Diego, CA
2:00 PM

Wednesday, July 15
Elliott Bay Book Company
With Ramez Naam
Seattle, WA
7:00 PM

Thursday, July 16
Powell’s at Cedar Hills Crossing
Beaverton, OR
7:00 PM

Saturday, July 18
Borderlands Books
San Francisco, CA
3:00 PM

Sunday, July 19
Uncle Hugo’s
Minneapolis, MN
3:00 PM

Monday, July 20
A Room of One’s Own
Madison, WI
7:00 PM

Tuesday, July 21
Boswell Book Company
Milwaukee, WI
7:00 PM

Thursday, July 23
Schuler Books and Music
Lansing Charter Township, MI
7:00 PM

Friday, July 24
Book People
Austin, TX
7:00 PM

William S. Cohen, Collision

Wednesday, July 1
Books-a-Million
South Portland, ME
7:00 PM

Thursday, July 2
Politics and Prose
Washington, D.C.
7:00 PM

Carolyn Ives Gilman, Dark Orbit

Wednesday, July 15
Barnes & Noble
Washington, D.C.
6:00 PM

Saturday, July 18
Fountain Bookstore
Richmond, VA
2:00 PM

Max Gladstone, Last First Snow

Tuesday, July 28
Oxford University Press Book Club in Bryant Park
New York, NY
12:00 PM

Neal Griffin, Benefit of the Doubt

Sunday, July 26
Carlsbad City Library
Carlsbad, CA
7:00 PM

Kristen Simmons, The Glass Arrow

Thursday, July 23
Sundance Books and Music
Reno, NV
6:30 PM

Anne A. Wilson, Hover

Saturday, July 25
Payson Book Festival
Gila Community College
Payson, AZ
9:00 AM

Also, don’t miss the Big Summer Road Trip Tour! To celebrate the 2015 releases from some of our Northeastern authors, Tor Books is excited to send Elizabeth Bear (Karen Memory), James Cambias (Corsair), Max Gladstone (Last First Snow), and Brian Staveley (The Providence of Fire) on tour in the New England region. Check out the dates and locations.

JulyRoadtrip

Presenting the Big Summer Road Trip Tour!

JulyRoadtrip

To celebrate the 2015 releases from some of our Northeastern authors, Tor Books is excited to send Elizabeth Bear (Karen Memory), James Cambias (Corsair), Max Gladstone (Last First Snow), and Brian Staveley (The Providence of Fire) on tour in the New England region!

Tuesday, July 14
Harvard Book Store
Cambridge, MA
7:00pm

Thursday, July 16
Pandemonium Books and Games
With a special live game of Pathfinder, with GM David Montgomery!
Cambridge, MA
7:00pm

Friday, July 17
Odyssey Bookshop
South Hadley, MA
6:00pm

Saturday, July 18
Friends of the Simsbury Library
Simsbury, CT
1:00pm—3:00pm

Sunday, July 19
Bank Square Books
Mystic, CT
1:00pm

Monday, July 20
Ferguson Library
Stamford, CT
7:00pm

Wednesday, July 22
Towne Book Center
Moderated by Chris Urie from Geekadelphia
Collegeville, PA
7:00pm

Friday, July 24
Northshire Books
Saratoga Springs, NY
6:00pm

Saturday, July 25
Everyone’s Books
Brattleboro, VT
6:00pm

Sunday, July 26
Phoenix Books
Burlington, VT
Hosted by Geek Mountain State
2:00pm

Tor’s Finalists for the Compton Crook Award

A Darkling Sea by James CambiasExpiration Day by William Campbell PowellCopper Magic by Julia Mary Gibson

Tor Books has three finalists for the 2015 Compton Crook Award for the best debut science fiction, fantasy or horror novel of the year!

The members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Inc. (BSFS) created the Compton Crook Award in 1982 to honor the best first novel of the year written by an individual author in the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror genre. Since its inception, the award has been presented at Balticon — the four-day annual Maryland regional science fiction convention produced by BSFS, currently held on Memorial Day weekend in the Baltimore, MD area.

Here are the 2015 Compton Crook Award Finalists:

See more details about the award here. Congratulations to all of the finalists!

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Building Ilmatar

A Darkling Sea by James Cambias

Written by James Cambias

Settings are one of science fiction’s fundamental strengths. Readers of SF and fantasy love to play tourist in worlds of the author’s imagination, and an intriguing setting is a great way to draw the readers in and keep them reading while you make them care about the characters and get them to worry about what’s going to happen next.

When creating a fantastic setting, there are two approaches: crafting what you need to fit the demands of the story (what we’ll call “top-down”) and extrapolating a setting based on some basic scientific assumptions (what we’ll call “bottom-up”).

Hal Clement was probably the most famous exponent of the pure “bottom-up” method. His landmark 1953 novel Mission of Gravity was inspired by some data about a planet orbiting the star 61 Cygni (in the end the data turned out to be spurious, but that doesn’t matter). Armed only with the mass of the planet and its orbital motion, Clement built his planet Mesklin according to the state of the art of planetary science at the time. Once he had his world, he invented beings to live there, and then crafted a story about them.

In my own novel A Darkling Sea, I took a mixed approach. I was inspired by scientific discoveries about Jupiter’s moon Europa, and speculation about life in its subsurface ocean.

But I didn’t want to write a story which might go obsolete before I could even sell it. Scientists are sneaky bastards like that. Even with no probes bound for Jupiter in the next few years, they could find a way to squeeze more data out of existing observations, and discover things about Europa which would invalidate my story. I hate getting things wrong, so I moved Europa to another star system thirty light-years away and gave it a different name: Ilmatar, a goddess in the Kalevala. I made Ilmatar a little bigger and more massive than Europa, giving it more rock and less ice.

A planet’s not very interesting unless someone lives there. When I created the inhabitants of Ilmatar I used a mix of half top-down demands-of-story design and half Clementian bottom-up extrapolation. I made them blind (a very defensible assumption for creatures living in a lightless ocean) yet intensely curious, because that fit my theme. Beings absolutely incapable of perceiving the outside universe would have interesting reactions to first contact with aliens. I wanted them to be tool-using beings, which dictated bottom-dwelling crustacean-analogues rather than free-swimming fish-analogues.

An underlying theme in A Darkling Sea is how many of our “rational” motivations are no such thing. Both the human characters in the novel and their interstellar rivals the Sholen are motivated by status, sexual desire, and ideology. To throw those things into sharper relief, I made the Ilmatarans effectively sexless (they spawn, an act of about as much emotional significance to them as sharing a taxi), and largely un-social. While both my human and Sholen characters are haunted by history and worried about the future, the Ilmatarans live in an environment nearly devoid of time.

All of this had to come out in the scenes written from the point of view of Broadtail, my main Ilmataran character. Since I hate long passages in italics, I relied instead on language. The Ilmataran scenes are all in the present tense, with no time clues and no visual metaphors. The Ilmatarans can’t say that something happened, but rather that they remember it happening.

I liked Ilmatar and its people, and I liked spending time there writing the book. As I mentioned, settings are one of science fiction’s main strengths, but that’s not why I do it: world-building is fun. Who else but science fiction writers get paid for making up planets? I hope the readers enjoy reading about Ilmatar as much as I enjoyed building it.

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From the Tor/Forge January 6th newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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