Grab Bag Sweepstakes

Our bookshelves are a little overcrowded right now and we need to make room for new books arriving soon. So, we thought we’d make room by offering up books and more to you! Comment below to enter for a chance to win this prize pack:

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 April 25, 2013 at 2:00 p.m. ET. and ends April 30, 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.

Memory of Light Backpack Sweepstakes

We are offering the chance to win one of five Memory of Light backpacks! Each backpack will include a copy of Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson, Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, Imager by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Farlander by Col Buchanan, The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe, Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear, and Shadow and Betrayal by Daniel Abraham.

And you’ll get this A Memory of Light iPhone cover too:

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 7, 2013 at 9:30 a.m. ET. and ends January 11, 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.

Memory of Light Backpack Sweepstakes

We are offering the chance to win one of five Memory of Light backpacks! Each backpack will include a copy of Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson, Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, Imager by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe, Elfland by Freda Warrington, and Shadow and Betrayal by Daniel Abraham. 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 November 14, 2012 at 10 a.m. ET. and ends November 21, 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.

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.

Creepy, isn’t it?

• We’ve always known the blogger behind Cake Wrecks was wonderfully geeky, but this is just fantastic: a collection of truly strange and messed up Darth Vader cakes!
• Over on Wired.com, there’s a collection of fun self-portraits from the Mars Curiosity rover. Also, NASA has officially named the rover’s landing site: Bradbury Landing. How perfect!
• Happy birthday, Kenny Baker (aka R2-D2)!
• There’s no such thing as inertia in space: io9 has a list of 10 myths about space travel from science fiction.
• You can read the first five chapters of Steven Erikson’s new novel Forge of Darkness on Tor.com!
• Speaking of Steven Erikson…he’s going on tour in the US in September! Check out the dates and locations to see if he’ll be near you.
• I would love to have one of these beautiful blown glass retro-style rockets.
• The Science of Allomancy series continues on Tor.com. This time, Lee Falin looks at iron and steel.
• A long, but incredibly interesting (and scary), look at the coming civil war over general purpose computing, from Cory Doctorow.
• Tor Publisher Tom Doherty remembers his friend Harry Harrison. RIP, Mr. Harrison. You’ll be greatly missed.

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

• Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson (Ends 8/28)
• The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan (Ends 8/29)
• Cory Doctorow Collection Sweepstakes (Ends 9/4)
• The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan (Ends 9/5)
• The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Ends 9/7)
• Ironskin by Tina Connolly (Ends 9/13)
• Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone (Ends 9/13)
• Merge/Disciple: Two Short Novels from Crosstown to Oblivion by Walter Mosley (Ends 9/14)
• Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow (Ends 9/14)
• Earthseed by Pamela Sargent (Ends 9/20)
• The Eye of the World: Graphic Novel, Volume 1 by Robert Jordan (Ends 9/21)

The Week in Review

 

• Mark, of Mark Does Stuff, reads John Scalzi’s story “Shadow War of the Night Dragons.” He has no idea what he’s in for, and the result is hilarious for all of us.
• The Suicide Girls have an excerpt up from Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’ upcoming book The Rapture of the Nerds.
• The blog She-Wolf Reads has an interview with artist Chris McGrath, who does the covers for the Dresden Files and D. B. Jackson’s upcoming novel Thieftaker.
• Mary Robinette Kowal is a reluctant runner (and so am I). But, she’s found an excellent way to motive herself: Zombies, Run!
• An interesting essay on colonialism from critic and genre fiction author Nisi Shawl.
• Tor.com’s Lee Falin continues his look at the science behind allomancy in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. This time, he examines pewter.
• Over on BoingBoing, there’s a lovely mash-up of the X-Men and Picasso.

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

• Kitty’s Greatest Hits by Carrie Vaughn (Ends 6/19)
• The Far Side of the Sky by Daniel Kalla (Ends 6/19)
• The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Ends 6/22)
• Earthseed by Pamela Sargent (Ends 6/22)
• Blackmail Earth by Bill Evans (Ends 6/25)
• The Lincoln Letter by William Martin (Ends 6/25)
• New Spring: the Graphic Novel by Robert Jordan (Ends 6/29)
• Summer Manga Sweepstakes (Ends 7/1)
• Kitty Goes to War by Carrie Vaughn (Ends 7/3)
• Seed Seeker by Pamela Sargent (Ends 7/6)
• Farseed by Pamela Sargent (Ends 7/6)
• An Echo Through the Snow by Andrea Thalasinos (Ends 7/9)

#TorChat November 2011 Sweepstakes

We hoped you enjoyed today’s #Torchat and look forward to your participation next month. Many thanks to our special guest, Brandon Sanderson, for joining us online today.

Five lucky winners will receive a signed copy of The Alloy of Law. Leave a comment below to enter for your chance to win.

Keep your eye on our Facebook and Twitter where we will announce the next theme and our upcoming guests. We’ll see you all next month!

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 November 14th, 2011 at 5 p.m. ET. and ends November 20th, 2011, 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.

New Releases: 11/8/2011

See upcoming releases.

My 14-Year-Old Self Might Take Issue with The Alloy of Law

By Brandon Sanderson

As we get ready for the release of The Alloy of Law, I find myself wondering what the teenage me would think of what I’m doing in this book.  You see, I became a fantasy addict when I was about fourteen, and one of my mantras quickly became, “If it has guns, it’s not good fantasy.”

Now here I am, adding guns to my most successful fantasy series.

Despite the ways I’ve changed over the years, despite my belief that fantasy should be (and is becoming) something more than the standard “guy living in idealized chivalrous England leaves his farm and saves the world,” a voice inside of me is screaming that nobody will buy this book.  Because it has guns.

I don’t believe that voice, but I think it says something interesting about me and others like me.  Perhaps we fantasy readers sometimes mix up correlation and causation in our fantasy novels.  In fact, I’m more and more convinced that taste for a specific genre or medium is often built on shaky ground.

An example may help.  I have a friend who once claimed he loved anime.

Over the years, he consistently found anime shows superior to what he found on television.  But as he started to find more and more anime, he told me that he discovered something.  He liked the anime he’d seen at first because these were the shows that were successful and well made, the ones with the quality or broad appeal to make the jump across cultures.  He found that he didn’t like all anime—he only liked good anime.  Sure, the medium had something important to do with it—but his enjoyment came more from the quality of his sample than the entire medium.

Likewise, I’ve come to find that what I enjoy is a good story.  Genre can enhance this—I’m probably going to like a good fantasy more than a good thriller or romance because worldbuilding and magic appeals to me.  In the end, however, it isn’t the lack of guns (as my young self assumed) that draws me to fantasy stories.  It’s the care for setting, pacing, and character development.

This is actually a correlation/causation fallacy, and I wonder if I’m the only one to have made it.  Many of the books in the fantasy section we love (perhaps because of the setting attention or the types of writers attracted to fantasy and SF) have dragons.  Do we therefore make the assumption that we only like books with dragons?  These two things (the dragons and our enjoyment) are parallel to, but not completely responsible for one another.

On the other hand, maybe I just think about this kind of thing too much.

Either way, I present to you The Alloy of Law.  A look at the Mistborn world several hundred years after the events of the original trilogy, where the industrial revolution has finally hit and knowledge of gunpowder is no longer suppressed.  That means guns.  Lots of guns.  And magic too.

The young me might have been horrified, but the thirtysomething me finds the mix to be exciting, particularly in a world where the magic is directly related to metal.

The Alloy of Law (978-0-7653-3042-0; $24.99) is the new stand-alone novel by Brandon Sanderson set in the Mistborn Universe.  It releases from Tor Books on November 8, 2011, so strap on your guns, down a vial of allomantic metals, and dig in!

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

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More from our November newsletter:

• Q&A with Karen Traviss
• Oxen and Sociopaths: Writing Endurance by Jay Lake
• Life, the Universe, and the Large White Object by Caitlin Brennan

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Related Links:

• Brandon Sanderson’s Tour information
• Download the First Six Alloy of Law Chapters for Your E-Reader!
• Listen to an audio excerpt of The Alloy of Law
• Mistborn Fans: Don’t Forget to Pick Up Today’s Edition of The Elendel Daily

The Alloy of Law Sweepstakes

The Alloy of Law is almost here! To celebrate, we are offering a chance to win one of five advance reading copies. Comment below to enter.

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 12, 2011 at 10 a.m. ET. and ends September 16, 2011, 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.

Goodreads First Reads: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson

Enter for a chance to win a copy on Goodreads!

About The Alloy of Law: Fresh from the success ofThe Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson, best known for completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time®, takes a break to return to the world of the bestselling Mistborn series.

Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds.

Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history—or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice.

One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn, who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will.  After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs.

Enter for a chance to win here!

(Ends October 7)

More giveaways:

• Mistborn Prize Pack Sweepstakes (Ends 9/6)
• Terry Goodkind Prize Pack Sweepstakes (Ends 9/6)
• Vernor Vinge Prize Pack Sweepstakes (Ends 9/6)
• A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Ends 8/22)
• Laddertop Volume 1 by Orson Scott Card and Emily Janice Card, art by Honoel A. Ibardolaza (Ends 8/29)
• Ganymede by Cherie Priest (Ends 9/9)
• All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen (Ends 9/9)
• The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge (Ends 9/15)
• A Dublin Student Doctor by Patrick Taylor (Ends 9/15)
• Dear Creature by Jonathan Chase (Ends 9/15)
• Eyes to See by Joseph Nassise (Ends 9/15)