The Week in Review

Welcome to the week in review! Every Friday, we comb through the links and images we found and shared this week, and pull the very best for this post. Consider it concentrated genre goodness from all around the web.

 

• Astronaut Chris Hadfield made a strong showing to be crowned King of Space before he returned to Earth earlier this week. Case in point? Check him out singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in space.

• Book Expo America is at the end of the month, and we’ll be there! Here’s our schedule of panels and author signings – come say hi!

• Tor.com is starting a reread of Glen Cook’s Black Company series! To get the ball rolling, the first ebook, The Black Company, is on sale for $2.99.

• There’s a new, longer trailer for the upcoming S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show! We’re really excited about this one. You?

• Congratulations to the nominees for the John W. Campbell Award! Especially to the Tor authors nominated: David Brin, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and Hannu Rajaniemi.

• Ta’veren Tees is currently donating 10% of the proceeds for its new Challenge Coin to the Wounded Warrior Project, in honor of Robert Jordan’s military service. A beautiful item that benefits a great cause. Thanks, Ta’veren Tees!

 
And, just to make Friday that much sweeter, here’s a list of sweepstakes and sales we have going on!

• The Ultimate Urban Fantasy Sweepstakes (Ends 5/31)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Navigator by Michael Pocalyko (Ends 5/22)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson (Ends 5/22)
• Goodreads First Reads: Sea Change by S. M. Wheeler (Ends 5/29)
• Goodreads First Reads: Solstice by P.J. Hoover (Ends 5/29)
• Goodreads Giveaway: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (Ends 5/29)
• eBook Sale: The Hum and the Shiver, by Alex Bledsoe, is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 6/7)
• Goodreads First Reads: Thieves’ Quarry by D. B. Jackson (Ends 6/12)
• eBook Sale: Lamentation, by Ken Scholes, is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 6/14)
• eBook Sale: Building Harlequin’s Moon, by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper, is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 6/21)

The Week in Review

Welcome to the week in review! Every Friday, we comb through the links and images we found and shared this week, and pull the very best for this post. Consider it concentrated genre goodness from all around the web.

 

• Tom Doherty in conversation with Harriet McDougal about Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time, and their long careers together.

• Brandon Sanderson is going on tour for The Rithmatist!

• Speaking of tours, if you missed Cory Doctorow’s Homeland tour, you can still check out this audio from his DC event, thanks to Thomas “Command Line” Gideon.

• We have a name for the first episode of Sherlock, series 3: “The Empty Hearse.”

• Looking forward to the Tor.com Way of Kings re-read next week? Here’s a fun post to tide you over: The Spren Theory of Disease: Unexpected Science in The Way of Kings.

• Because such skill should be rewarded: artist David Canavese created a mini paper Millennium Falcon. It took about eight hours to create.

 
And, just to make Friday that much sweeter, here’s a list of sweepstakes and sales we have going on!

• March #TorChat Sweepstakes: Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells (Ends 3/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: Immortal Trust by Claire Ashgrove (Ends 3/26)
• Goodreads Giveaway: The Gate Thief by Orson Scott Card (Ends 3/26)
• Tor/Forge Newsletter Sweepstakes: Win a collection of Tor Teen titles (Ends 3/28)
• eBook Sale: Hellhole eBook is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 4/3)
• Goodreads First Reads: Hell or Richmond by Ralph Peters (Ends 4/10)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson (Ends 4/16)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Human Division by John Scalzi (Ends 4/17)
• Goodreads First Reads: Mending the Moon by Susan Palwick (Ends 4/17)
• eBook Sale: The Way of Kings eBook is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 5/1)
• eBook Sale: Wide Open eBook is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 5/1)

The Week in Review

Welcome to the week in review! Every Friday, we comb through the links and images we found and shared this week, and pull the very best for this post. Consider it concentrated genre goodness from all around the web.

 

• Brandon Sanderson’s next Stormlight Archives book now has a title: Words of Radiance! Read his reasons for the title at Tor.com. You can also check out another video of Brandon writing the book on his blog.

• Congratulations to the Audie Award nominees! Particularly to our own Lev AC Rosen, the author of All Men of Genius.

• It must be awards season! More congrats to the nominees of the Bram Stoker Awards, including the author of Wide Open, Deborah Coates!

• Looking for some afternoon reading? Check out “The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown,” a short story by Jane Yolen, soon to be published in the upcoming anthology Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells.

• Cory Doctorow recently attended the Tools of Change Conference in New York. Check out his talks about piracy and copyright in the digital age.

• The Personal Demons trilogy, by Lisa Desrochers, has been optioned by Ineffable Pictures!

 
And, just to make Friday that much sweeter, here’s a list of sweepstakes and sales we have going on!

• Goodreads First Reads: A Time of Change by Aimée and David Thurlo (Ends 3/13)
• Goodreads First Reads: Code White by Scott Britz-Cunningham (Ends 3/13)
• Goodreads Giveaway: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (Ends 3/15)
• Goodreads First Reads: London Falling by Paul Cornell (Ends 3/20)
• Goodreads First Reads: Terror Red by Colonel David Hunt and Christine Hunsinger (Ends 3/21)
• Goodreads First Reads: Immortal Trust by Claire Ashgrove (Ends 3/26)
• Goodreads Giveaway: The Gate Thief by Orson Scott Card (Ends 3/26)
• Tor/Forge Newsletter Sweepstakes: Win a collection of Tor Teen titles (Ends 3/28)
• eBook Sale: Hellhole eBook is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 4/3)

YA Collection Sweepstakes

Sign up for the Tor/Forge Newsletter for a chance to win the following collection:

About our newsletter: Every issue of Tor’s monthly 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. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins March 1 at 12 a.m. ET. and ends March 28, 2013, 11:59 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. For Official Rules and to enter, go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Cory Doctorow at the Tools of Change Conference

Cory Doctorow attended the Tools of Change (TOC) in Publishing Conference in New York this month, to talk about copyright and piracy in the digital age, as well as his new novel, Homeland.

About Homeland: In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.

A few years later, California’s economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.

Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.

Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.
 

TOC: Cory Doctorow on how we’ll get beyond the piracy debate.
 
 

TOC: Henry Jenkins in Conversation with Brian David Johnson and Cory Doctorow.

The Week in Review

Welcome to the week in review! Every Friday, we comb through the links and images we found and shared this week, and pull the very best for this post. Consider it concentrated genre goodness from all around the web.

 

• Rumors are flying about new Star Wars movies, including the origin story of Han Solo. Tor.com wants to know: who do you think should play a young Han Solo?

• Because you needed more books to add to your TBR list: io9 has posted their list of books you can’t afford to miss in February.

• The Wheel of Time reread continues with the final volume, A Memory of Light!

• All young scientists start somewhere, and this girl has a great story – and video! – of where her future science career will begin. She sent a Hello Kitty doll into space.

• Are you following along with Ron Hogan’s read of The Human Division, by John Scalzi? They’re up to Episode 4, “A Voice in the Wilderness.”

• Flavorwire compiled a list of some truly amazing fictional libraries. What did they miss?

• Tor.com has announced that they’re expanding their short fiction program. Submit your stories now!

 
The Tor/Forge newsletter went out this week! Check out these fascinating articles from our authors:

• Cory Doctorow on Aaron Swartz
• An Interview with Lady Trent, Dragon Naturalist by Marie Brennan
• Speechless: Writing Dialogue for Characters Who Don’t Speak by Evie Manieri
• A Demented Labor of Love by James Frenkel, Senior Editor

 
And, just to make Friday that much sweeter, here’s a list of sweepstakes and sales we have going on!

• Waiting on Wednesday: The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett (Ends 2/12)
• Goodreads First Reads: Deep Down by Deborah Coates (Ends 2/13)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett (Ends 2/13)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Six-Gun Tarot by R. S. Belcher (Ends 2/15)
• Goodreads Giveaway: Eve of Destruction by Sylvia Day (Ends 2/26)
• Goodreads First Reads: Pandemonium by Warren Fahy (Ends 2/27)
• eBook Sale: The Damage Done by Hilary Davidson is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 2/28)
• Goodreads First Reads: Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal (Ends 3/1)
• Goodreads First Reads: Kitty Rocks the House by Carrie Vaughn (Ends 3/1)

New Releases: 2/5/2013

See upcoming releases.

Cory Doctorow on Aaron Swartz

Written by Cory Doctorow

On January 11, a young hacker, hacktivist and entrepreneur named Aaron Swartz took his own life. He was 26, and I had known him since he was 14. He was facing 50 years in prison. His crime was to walk into an unsecured computer closet at MIT, near the Harvard campus where he had a fellowship, and plug a laptop into the campus network, with which he proceeded to download a large amount of paywalled academic journal articles from JSTOR, an online repository of scholarly works. It is widely speculated that he planned on making these available for free, though it may be that no one will ever know what he really intended.

Here’s what we do know: Aaron didn’t care about the freedom of information. Aaron cared about the freedom of *people* to make use of information. When I met Aaron, he was already someone extraordinary, a 14 year old programmer who’d made key contributions to the RSS 1.0 standard, part of the foundational infrastructure of the Internet, designed to facilitate the sharing of information between different sites. He went on to be part of the founding team of Creative Commons, then went on to help create a website called Reddit, which is now one of the most rollicking, thriving communities on the Internet.

Aaron used his Reddit money to become a full-time, full-tilt, reckless and wonderful shit-disturber. Offended that the US government was charging for access to public domain case-law, Aaron paid to download 20% of US law, and then put it in the public domain. This earned him his very own FBI file and the everlasting enmity of the DoJ, who were frustrated that this punk kid had had the gall to give the public free access to its own laws, and had gotten away with it.

The DoJ threw the book at Aaron over the MIT stunt, even though JSTOR publicly disavowed any further prosecution of Aaron (MIT was more lukewarm on the subject, which gave the DoJ the excuse it needed to press on). They asked the court for a 50 year sentence for “computer crimes.” Even if he won, Aaron was looking at well over $1,000,000 in legal fees.

Aaron hanged himself two years, to the day, after his arrest. Make of that what you will.

I have often been asked whether M1k3y, the adolescent hero of Little Brother and Homeland, is a version of me. He’s not, I always say, because I was never as cool as that. I don’t think Aaron was “cool” in the way M1k3y aspires to be, but the two of them share a passionate, visceral response to injustice; they share a preternatural technical ability; and they share a charm and humor that makes the people around them want to follow them and listen to them.

Aaron read an early draft of Little Brother and called it, “The most subversive piece of fiction I can think of. I imagine armies of kids out there nuking frozen grapes.” When I started work on Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, I knew I wanted it to turn on a next-generation political campaign. Aaron’s activist group, Demand Progress, had been at the vanguard of the fight against SOPA and PIPA (the sure-thing, oppressive Internet/copyright bills that collapsed in the face of absolutely unprecedented public protest). I knew he’d have good ideas.

He did. I sent him an email about it at 5:57AM on the morning of Dec 22, 2011. Aaron answered with a full-fledged, brilliant high-tech political campaigning strategy at 8:23AM. It was so good I basically just pasted it straight into the book, except for the last line: “i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this.”

Aaron wrote one of the two afterwords to Homeland. I asked him what he would say to his own 14-year-old self, what advice he’d give. He wrote an outstanding call to arms, which includes lines like:
“I know it’s easy to feel like you’re powerless, like there’s nothing you can do to slow down or stop ‘the system.’ Like all the calls are made by shadowy and powerful forces far outside your control I feel that way, too, sometimes. But it just isn’t true.”

and

“The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won’t win every time—this is real life, after all—but we finally have a chance.

“But it only works if you take part. And now that you’ve read this book and learned how to do it, you’re perfectly suited to make it happen again. That’s right: now it’s up to you to change the system.

“Let me know if I can help.”

Aaron signed it with his email address. He wanted the world to get in touch with him. He can’t answer their emails anymore, but he can still help. Aaron may have been hounded into a premature grave half a century before he should have gone, but he left behind a legacy and a consciousness of what can change, and how it can change.

The DoJ will never win their case against Aaron, now. And if we remember Aaron’s passion and conviction that wrongs must be righted; that information doesn’t want to be free, but people surely do; he will win forevermore.

Goodbye, Aaron. We miss you.

…………………………

From the Tor/Forge February newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

…………………………

More from the February Tor/Forge newsletter:

• An Interview with Lady Trent, Dragon Naturalist by Marie Brennan
• Speechless: Writing Dialogue for Characters Who Don’t Speak by Evie Manieri
• A Demented Labor of Love by James Frenkel, Senior Editor
• Grab Bag Sweepstakes

Homeland Sweepstakes

Homeland releases next month but we have a chance for you to win one of ten advance reading copies now. Comment below to enter for a chance to win.

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 January 14, 2013 at 10 a.m. ET. and ends January 18, 2013, 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.

The Week in Review

Welcome to the week in review! Every Friday, we comb through the links and images we found and shared this week, and pull the very best for this post. Consider it concentrated genre goodness from all around the web.

• Because we love tormenting fans (and ourselves, let’s be honest), check out this post from Irene Gallo of Tor.com, who went behind the scenes to watch A Memory of Light being printed at the bindery. Also: Tor.com is having a NYC midnight launch for the final Wheel of Time book!

• Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit comes out today! Over on io9, there’s a fun list of 12 things you probably didn’t know about the epic new movie.

• Looking for new reading material for the holidays? Tor.com has you covered. They’ve invited some of their regular reviews to share their favorite reads of 2012. The result is an eclectic list of books sure to please almost any genre fan.

• A well deserved award: SFWA has named Gene Wolfe the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award Winner for 2012. If you want to check out some of the award-winning author’s earlier works, we’ve just announced 19 of his backlist titles are now available as ebooks.

• Tor.com has launched a new series: Talking with Tom. In this initial conversation, the legendary founder of Tor chats with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

• In November, science fiction author Frederik Pohl made a rare appearance at Windycon, where he did an interview with ChicagoScope.

• Finally, io9 has their impressions of the first nine minutes of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Is anyone else ridiculously excited for this movie? I know I am, but I’m a bit of a Trekker, so…

The Tor/Forge newsletter went out this week! Check out these fascinating articles from our authors:

• The Toughest Part of Writing Cold City by F. Paul Wilson
• A Letter from Harry Ransom by Felix Gilman
• Crying Bully by J. A. Souders
• What if? Two little words that created S. J. Day’s Eve of Darkess by Sylvia Day

And, just to make Friday that much sweeter, here’s a list of sweepstakes and sales we have going on!

• Newsletter Sweepstakes: Big Fat Books for the Holidays (Ends 12/16)
• Goodreads First Reads: Impulse by Steven Gould (Ends 12/18)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Sixth Station by Linda Stasi (Ends 12/19)
• eBook Sale: People of the Earth by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
• eBook Sale: Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
• eBook Sale: Larry Bond’s Red Dragon Rising: Edge of War by Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
• eBook Sale: Imager by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. is on sale for $2.99 (Ends 1/2)
• Goodreads First Reads: Homeland by Cory Doctorow (Ends 1/9)
• Goodreads First Reads: Kalimpura by Jay Lake (Ends 1/9)
• Goodreads First Reads: A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan (Ends 1/9)