Patrick Nielsen Hayden - Tor/Forge Blog

Short Story Collection Sweepstakes

December 8, 2014May 16, 2024torforge111 Comments

We’re offering the chance for one lucky reader to win this collection of amazing anthologies.

Comment below to enter for a chance to win.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States, D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 as of the date of entry. To enter, leave a comment here beginning at 11:00 AM Eastern Time (ET) December 8, 2014. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET December 12, 2014. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

Sweepstakes

Anthology Collection Sweepstakes

November 12, 2013May 16, 2024torforge

Sign up for the Tor/Forge Newsletter for a chance to win this collection of advance reading copies:

About our newsletter: Every issue of Tor’s email newsletter features original writing by, and interviews with, Tor authors and editors about upcoming new titles from all Tor and Forge imprints. In addition, we occasionally send out “special edition” newsletters to highlight particularly exciting new projects, programs, or events. Read a sample here >>

If you’re already a newsletter subscriber, you can enter too. We do not automatically enter subscribers into sweepstakes. We promise we won’t send you duplicate copies of the newsletter if you sign up for the newsletter more than once.

Sign up for your chance to win today!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States, D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 and older as of the date of entry. To enter, complete entry here beginning at 12:00 AM Eastern Time (ET) October 1, 2013. Sweepstakes ends at 11:59 PM ET October 31, 2013. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

What's New

Signature Review: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction

October 22, 2013May 15, 2024torforge

“Twenty-First Century Science Fiction will certainly be recognized as one of the best reprint science fiction anthologies of the year, and it belongs in the library of anyone who is interested in the evolution of the genre.”

David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Twenty-First Century Science Fiction got a signature review in Publishers Weekly!

Here’s the full review, from the September 9th issue:

In my more than 40 years working in the science fiction publishing industry, I’ve seen this notion crop up every 10 years or so: “Science fiction has exhausted itself. There are no good new writers coming along anymore. The genre is finished!” Tor editors Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden thoroughly refute such claims with their huge reprint anthology featuring 34 stories published between 2003 and 2011 by writers who “came to prominence since the 20th century changed into the 21st.” Here in the second decade of the 21st century, some of these “new” writers, like Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and Cory Doctorow, have become big names; others, like Elizabeth Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, and Hannu Rajaniemi, have multiple novels and major awards to their credit; and some, like Ken Liu, Yoon Ha Lee, Tobias S. Buckell, and Vandana Singh, are just starting out, but will almost certainly be among the most recognizable names of the next decade. Twentieth-century “Campbellian” SF—the sort published in John W. Campbell’s Astounding/Analog magazine of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—was often about space travel, colonizing other worlds, space warfare, contact with aliens, and the far future. By contrast, most of these stories stay closer to the present, and many don’t leave Earth at all. Common topics include posthumans, interrogations of the nature and existence of human consciousness, and the exponentially expanding possibilities of information-processing and virtuality technologies. There are also many robots and artificial intelligences, including human-mimicking dolls, companions, and sexbots. It’s worth noting that many of these authors would have been excluded from Campbell’s largely white, male, middle-class American stable of writers. The face of science fiction has changed as well as its subject matter. It’s hard to pick favorites with so many good stories on offer, but my personal selections would be Bear’s “Tideline,” in which a dying robot in a devastated war-torn future teaches some of the human survivors how to become more human; David Moles’s “Finisterra,” a vivid adventure in which people engage in internecine warfare among huge living dirigibles in a layer of Earthlike atmosphere on a Jupiter-sized planet; and Peter Watts’s “The Island,” in which a work crew building a series of wormhole transport gates across the galaxy encounters a living intelligent creature the size of a sun. I’d like to have seen something by Lavie Tidhar, one of the most exciting new SF writers of the last few years, as well as some work by Aliette de Bodard and Kij Johnson, and while the late Kage Baker certainly deserves to be here, I’m not sure I would have picked “Plotters and Shooters,” one of her minor works, to represent her. However, these are just quibbles. Twenty-First Century Science Fiction will certainly be recognized as one of the best reprint science fiction anthologies of the year, and it belongs in the library of anyone who is interested in the evolution of the genre.

Twenty-First Century Science Fiction will be published on November 5th.

What's New

Starred Review: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden

October 16, 2013May 15, 2024torforge

“Grab this book. Whether newcomer or old hand, the reader will not be disappointed.”

Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, got a starred review in Kirkus Reviews!*

Here’s the full review, from the September 15th issue:

A bumper crop of 34 stories from authors who first came to prominence in the 21st century, compiled by two of the most highly respected editors in the business.

Thematically, all the entries are science fiction even though some are from writers better known for their fantasy. Some stories won or were nominated for awards, as were many of the authors. Dipping into the pool at random, readers discover Cory Doctorow meditating on the society that results from a handful of hyper-rich owning and running everything; intelligent warships that become infected with Asimovism (John Scalzi); Charles Stross’ amusing but rather gloomy glimpse of an all-too-possible future; Elizabeth Bear’s dying war machine that befriends a semiferal boy; Paul Cornell’s alternate world, where physics itself is different; a drug that brings dramatic psychological changes while some things are eternal (Daryl Gregory); and a robot existential crisis from Rachel Swirsky. Elsewhere, the brilliant Ken Liu offers another wrenching tale of a researcher into artificial intelligence who finds she can no longer distinguish between the artificial and the real; Neal Asher presents an Earth swarming with almost unimaginably advanced aliens; Ian Creasey writes of a not-so-distant future when humans adapt themselves to survive in alien environments; Karl Schroeder’s characters lose themselves in virtual realities; David Levine tries to sell computer software to aliens who have no need of it; Vandana Singh’s mathematician has a revelation; and the remarkable Hannu Rajaniemi again pushes the envelope farther and faster than anyone else. And all these are not necessarily the best on display here, just a sample.

Grab this book. Whether newcomer or old hand, the reader will not be disappointed.

Twenty-First Century Science Fiction will be published on November 5th.

Kirkus Reviews is a subscription-only publication.

Sweepstakes

#TorChat September 2012 Sweepstakes

September 19, 2012January 25, 2024torforge

Did you participate in today’s #TorChat? We hope you enjoyed it and look forward to chatting with you next month on October 17th!

In the meantime, here’s your chance to win a copy of Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’s new book! Ten lucky winners will receive a hardcover copy of The Rapture of the Nerds. Leave a comment below to enter.

And again we’d like to thank Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross for joining us on Twitter today for a fascinating discussion about genre fiction, technology, and the future of publishing. Also, special thanks to Tor Senior Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden for moderating, and adding his considerable insight!

Sweepstakes closes to new entries on September 26th at noon.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins September 19, 2012 at 4:30 p.m. ET. and ends September 26, 2012, 12:00 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

What's New

September #TorChat Lineup Revealed

September 17, 2012May 16, 2024torforge

This month, #TorChat is talking to award winning science fiction authors Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross! In addition to their new collaboration The Rapture of the Nerds, Cory and Charlie will discuss science fiction, technology, and the future of publishing with Tor Senior Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Come join us on September 19th, from 4 to 5 PM Eastern!

Tor Books (@torbooks) is thrilled to announce the September #TorChat, part of a monthly series of genre-themed, hour-long chats created by Tor Books and hosted on Twitter.

This month, #TorChat is looking at technology, both in science fiction and in the book industry itself. We’ll be chatting with two giants of the internet, science fiction, and geekery at large: Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Doctorow and Stross have co-authored the recently released The Rapture of the Nerds, about a post-singularity future in which Tech Jury Service members must decide about the suitability of gadgets for human consumption. Backing the technical insights and social commentary present in Rapture is the fact that these two men have their thumbs on the pulse of our internet culture. Doctorow is an author, blogger, technology activist and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, where he frequently talks about issues of copyright, hacking, and his own experiences in the publishing world. His novels are simultaneously published by Tor Books and made available for free online under a Creative Commons license. Charles Stross, author of the popular Merchant Princes series (amongst others) had a convoluted road to becoming an author including a stint writing a monthly Linux column for Computer Shopper. He now regularly writes articles for other online publications and keeps a blog at antipope.org/charlie. In 2009 he made a splash at WorldCon for his widely praised dialogue with Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman where they discussed the intersection of economics and Science Fiction. Together, Cory and Charles have a wide perspective on technology, both in publishing and outside of it.

The chat will be moderated by Tor Senior Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden (@pnh). Patrick has edited Cory’s novels since the very beginning, has worked with Charlie on a number of short-fiction pieces for Tor.com, and edited The Rapture of the Nerds for Tor Books. He is also a significant online presence himself. He and his wife, fellow editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden, blog about a wide variety of topics, including technology and publishing, at Making Light. We hope that genre fans as well as tech enthusiasts will follow the chat and join in using the Twitter hashtag #TorChat!

About the Authors
CORY DOCTOROW (@doctorow) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, and a contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. His New York Times Bestseller Little Brother was published in May 2008. A sequel, Homeland, will be published in 2013, and another young adult novel, Pirate Cinema will precede it in October 2012. His latest adult novel is The Rapture of the Nerds, co-written with Charles Stross, which published on September 4th.

CHARLES STROSS (@cstross) knew he wanted to be a science fiction writer from the age of six, and astonishingly, nobody ever considered therapy until it was too late. Along the way to his current occupation, he has been a pharmacist and worked in the tech industry before becoming a freelance tech journalist. Implausibly, after fifteen years of toiling away in relatively obscurity in the fiction world, Stross’s work took off, and he now writes fiction full-time. He has sold around sixteen novels, has won a Hugo Award for his novella “The Concrete Jungle,” and a Locus Award for his novel Accelerando, and been translated into a dozen different languages. His most recent novel, co-written by Cory Doctorow, is The Rapture of the Nerds.

PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN (@pnh), our illustrious moderator, is a Senior Editor at Tor Books. He’s also a genre fiction fan, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, teacher, and blogger. He has won both the World Fantasy Award and the Hugo Award. You can find Patrick online at Making Light, where he and his wife Teresa Nielsen Hayden, also a noted genre fiction editor, blog about a wide variety of topics, from genre fiction to the state of the world.

About #Torchat
#TorChat is a genre-themed, hour-long chat series created by Tor Books and hosted on Twitter. Guest authors join fans in lively, informative and entertaining discussions of all that’s hot in genre fiction, 140 characters at a time, from 4 – 5 PM EST on the third Wednesday of every month. Each #TorChat revolves around a different genre topic of interest, often of a timely nature, and strives to provide a new media opportunity for readers to connect with their favorite authors.

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, 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. 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 paperbacks, books from Tor have won every major award in the SF and fantasy fields, and has been named Best Publisher 25 years in a row in the Locus Poll, the largest consumer poll in SF.

Author Features

Tor Back Then

April 5, 2010May 10, 2024torforge

By Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Senior Editor

I joined Tor full-time at the end of 1988. But I’d already been working in the office every day for several months, providing dogsbody editorial assistance to Debbie Notkin and Beth Meacham and occasionally helping the production department. Even before that, I’d done freelance copyediting and proofreading for Tor for around a year. So my becoming a full-time employee wasn’t so much a sudden change as it was like the completion of a lengthy merger.

Beth Meacham, then Tor’s editor-in-chief, hired me with the odd title “administrative editor.” My brief was to help Beth with editorial administrivia while also taking over the Tor Doubles, which had been launched under the editorship of Debbie Notkin the previous year. (Debbie, an experienced Bay Area bookseller, had been recruited to come to New York and be a Tor editor, but she had only committed to a year, and the time had come for her to move home.) I was sternly warned to not expect to acquire books of my own any time soon. My first day on staff was December 1, 1988. The date on the contract for the first book I acquired for Tor—Rebecca Ore’s The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid—is April 4, 1989.

My office was on the 24^th Street side of Tor’s premises at 49 West 24^th Street, across from the back door of the Masonic Hall. Our floor’s internal walls mostly didn’t go to the ceiling, so as I puttered away in my office, I could often hear Beth Meacham to one side of me, conducting high-octane negotiations with agents or expressing exasperation with someone else’s foolishness in the mild and low-key manner for which Beth is well known. And on the opposite side of my other wall, I could listen to the sagacious phone calls of Ralph Arnote, Tor’s silver-haired and terrifyingly experienced director of ID sales. Ralph was one of those indefatigable salesmen who had built the postwar mass-market paperback infrastructure in this country, a grizzled road warrior who’d worked with everyone, sold everybody’s books, and drunk them all under the table while never losing at cards. One never knew exactly how much to believe of Ralph’s stories—I recall one tale that ended with a speedboat in Havana crashing into a bar—but there was no denying his charm (every woman in the office had her Ralph name—Claire Eddy was Francine, Beth was Penelope), or his deep, devious understanding of the ins and outs of an industry built on the back of newspaper and periodical distribution. Between Beth and Ralph, I managed to overhear a pretty comprehensive education in book publishing.

What I miss most about those days was that there were so few of us, and we all spilled over into one another’s work. I commissioned and art-directed my own covers, two every month for the Doubles program plus any other books I was responsible for. I wrote press releases. I maintained mailing lists for SF-and-fantasy-specific marketing initiatives. I set type and fixed cover mechanicals. My wife, Teresa, was Tor’s managing editor, and I had some experience as a production freelancer, so naturally I wound up involved with production. Tor had departments, and we all had distinct jobs, but there was always too much to be done for anyone to be a total specialist. On at least one occasion I wrote cover copy for some other editor’s Western that I had never read and had no intention of reading. Not only did everyone on staff have a pretty good idea what was going on in the whole company, but it was hard to avoid knowing—once again, those walls didn’t quite reach the ceiling. It seemed like a natural and reasonable state of affairs. Now that we’re bigger and part of a much larger corporation, there are entire enormous Tor and Forge projects that I don’t know a thing about. That seems unnatural, and it’ll never stop feeling wrong.

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