Goodreads First Reads: Solstice by P. J. Hoover

About Solstice: Piper’s world is dying. Each day brings hotter temperatures and heat bubbles which threaten to destroy the Earth. Amid this Global Heating Crisis, Piper lives under the oppressive rule of her mother, who suffocates her even more than the weather does. Everything changes on her eighteenth birthday, when her mother is called away on a mysterious errand and Piper seizes her first opportunity for freedom.

Piper discovers a universe she never knew existed—a sphere of gods and monsters—and realizes that her world is not the only one in crisis. While gods battle for control of the Underworld, Piper’s life spirals out of control as she struggles to find the answer to the secret that has been kept from her since birth—her very identity….

An imaginative melding of mythology and dystopia, Solstice is the first YA novel by talented newcomer P. J. Hoover.

Enter for a chance to win here!

(Ends May 29)

Also, don’t forget to check out our other sweepstakes!

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.

 

• Tor.com has announced the Way of Kings reread!

• Out of this world news: NASA has found that ancient Mars could have supported life.

• Can’t wait for Game of Thrones to come back? Check out this amazing artwork from Mondo’s Game of Thrones gallery show, on io9.

• Steven Brust loved his new Incrementalists cover so much, he wrote a song about it.

• Apparently, cats have been interrupting our reading since 1100 CE (via the Tor and Picador Tumblr accounts).

• Want to eat like Ender and the other Battle School students? Now you can.

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

• 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)
• Goodreads First Reads: Hell or Richmond by Ralph Peters (Ends 4/10)

Building the World of a Series

Written by Mindee Arnett

When I started writing the first book in my Arkwell Academy series, The Nightmare Affair, I had no idea what the prevailing themes of the series would be. Like most writers, I simply took my idea and ran with it. But by the time I finished the first book and started on the sequel, I began to recognize one of the major, underlying themes at work. And imagine my surprise when I realized that I’d laid the foundation for this theme all the way back in chapter two and quite without realizing it.

Even more surprising is that the theme centers on racial identity and racism—kind of weird for a story about magic and murder. But then again, maybe not. You see, when I was first figuring out the mechanics of my world and how my main character, Dusty, fit into it as a half-human, half-Nightmare, it made perfect sense to create a classification system for all the various types of magical creatures based on shared characteristics. I mean, that’s how the real world works, right? It seems every other day we’re asked to fill out an ethnicity/race data collection form. Self-identification is important to us as human beings (for reasons best not explored here), and I didn’t think magical creatures would be any different.

So I decided that the magickind of my story would identify themselves into one of three main groups based on the way they fuel their magic. There are Witchkinds, including wizards, witches, and psychics whose power is self-fueled; Naturekinds, such as fairies, dryads, and mermaids who derive power from nature; and Darkkinds, such as demons, werewolves, sirens, and Nightmares who draw their magic from other living creatures.

At first, this organization seemed rather harmless and downright useful from a storytelling standpoint. I soon discovered that the various groups feel pretty strongly about their identity and have historically harbored deep-rooted prejudices toward one another. Witchkinds tend to think they’re superior because their magic comes from within themselves, while Naturekinds think they’re better because nature and the elements are so ancient and powerful. And of course everybody looks down on Darkkinds because their magic is predatory. You can imagine the resentments such divisions have created.

Although I never had any intention of grappling with such a major theme as racism, as I move forward with the series, I’m very happy to have this source of external conflict and upheaval. It’s provided me with ways to layer my story and to put plenty of obstacles and challenges in Dusty’s way. And as a writer, it’s given me a path to follow as I traverse the dark and mysterious journey of crafting a series.

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

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More from the March Tor/Forge newsletter:

• Commuting Between Universes by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
• What is Gaslamp Fantasy? by Terri Windling
• Ignoring the Body in the Library: The World of Farthing by Jo Walton
• Sweepstakes

Book Trailer: Breaking Point by Kristen Simmons

 
Breaking Point by Kristen Simmons

After faking their deaths to escape from prison in Article 5, Ember Miller and Chase Jennings have only one goal: to lay low until the Federal Bureau of Reformation forgets they ever existed.

Near-celebrities now for the increasingly sensationalized tales of their struggles with the government, Ember and Chase are recognized and taken in by the Resistance—an underground organization working to systematically take down the government. At headquarters, all eyes are on the sniper, an anonymous assassin taking out FBR soldiers one by one. Rumors are flying about the sniper’s true identity, and Ember and Chase welcome the diversion….

Until the government posts its most-wanted list, and their number one suspect is Ember herself.

Orders are shoot to kill, and soldiers are cleared to fire on suspicion alone. Suddenly Ember can’t even step onto the street without fear of being recognized, and “laying low” is a joke. Even members of the Resistance are starting to look at her sideways.

With Chase urging her to run, Ember must decide: Go into hiding…or fight back?

Breaking Point, by Kristen Simmons, releases February 12th!

Goodreads First Reads: The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett

About The Nightmare Affair: Sixteen-year-old Dusty Everhart breaks into houses late at night, but not because she’s a criminal. No, she’s a Nightmare.

Literally.

Being the only Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for magickind, and living in the shadow of her mother’s infamy, is hard enough. But when Dusty sneaks into Eli Booker’s house, things get a whole lot more complicated. He’s hot, which means sitting on his chest and invading his dreams couldn’t get much more embarrassing. But it does. Eli is dreaming of a murder.

Then Eli’s dream comes true.

Now Dusty has to follow the clues—both within Eli’s dreams and out of them—to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the killer learns what she’s up to and marks her as the next target.

Enter for a chance to win here!

(Ends February 13)

Also, don’t forget to check out our other sweepstakes!

Crying Bully

Written by J. A. Souders

“I know you are, but what am I?” Chances are you’ve heard this once or twice in your lifetime. This may be a simple child’s joke, but it’s no joke when it comes to bullying.

Bullying might seem like a new epidemic, but I’m sure most of us can think back to that person we’d call a bully from our pasts. Why the big fuss lately, then? It might be because bullying seems to be getting worse every year and I’m fairly certain that has to do with how connected we are, due to the Internet and smart phones. We can never get away from it. When, once, we could leave school, or work, or wherever and escape from our tormentors, now they can reach us through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and our phones push their messages straight into our hands the second they send it. There’s no safety zone.

Because of its prevalence and inescapability, bullying has become the new “hot-button,” much the same way drugs and smoking were back when I was in high school. Organizations have been founded. Politicians vow to change laws to prevent bullying. A quick Google search shows pages and pages of different schools’ initiatives to stop bullying. Most schools have a zero-tolerance policy for it and kids accused of bullying are often expelled, just as they would be if they were found with drugs.

This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s easier now for a bullied child to get the protection they need, but at the same time it may have become too easy to “cry bully.” Every time someone says something we don’t like, or when they disagree with us, or someone says something mean, we immediately yell bully. That accomplishes exactly what we hope it will—it gets that person in trouble and we feel better about ourselves.

So we keep doing it, but we take it one step forward. We strike back. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Other times? Not so much. Can anti-bullying become bullying itself? It certainly can look that way some times. There are entire websites devoted to “outing” the “bullies” who dare dislike our books. Some even go entirely too far and send death threats to the bully and their families.

However, no matter how many rules we pass or how we strike back at the bullies, stopping them is almost impossible. There have always been mean-spirited people in the world. Always that certain person who needs to put other people down to feel good about themselves. But, a lot of what they do is protected under free speech. And even when it turns to harassment and/or violence, punishing that one bully is like plugging a dam with your finger. Our leaders and teachers and those in a position to stop it, often find themselves impotent.

From my book, Renegade, Mother—the leader of Elysium—has addressed this epidemic in her own brand of leadership. Eradicate all differences. Remove the right of free speech, make sure punishments are so extreme no one would dare argue. And when all else fails, brainwash. It’s effective—in Elysium—but do we really want that here?

But more damaging than all of that is all the people who’ve been “crying bully” and turning bullying into just another word. Like the boy who cried wolf, the more time we cry bully, the less people are going to pay attention. And the real victims of bullying will get ignored again, but this time it’ll be even worse, because no one will care at all. It’s a type of brainwashing and punishment all in one. One Mother would be proud of. One of which requires no more effort than watching the masses becoming indifferent to the issue because of constant exposure. And like that boy who cried wolf, the victim will get eaten.

We really need to focus on educating people on what bullying really is and stop using it as a buzzword to get people to respond to us, because if we continue to call everything bullying, then eventually nothing will be.

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

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More from the December Tor/Forge newsletter:

• The Toughest Part of Writing Cold City by F. Paul Wilson
• A Letter from Harry Ransom by Felix Gilman
• What if? Two little words that created the world of S. J. Day’s Eve of Darkness
• Big Fat Books for the Holidays Sweepstakes

Goodreads First Reads: Homeland by Cory Doctorow

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 onetime girlfriend 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.

Enter for a chance to win here!

(Ends January 9)

Also, don’t forget to check out our other sweepstakes!

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.

 

• There was a total solar eclipse earlier this week! Sadly, it was only visible from Australia. Luckily, NASA and National Geographic, among others, have us covered for images.

• Sir Terry Pratchett, the insanely prolific author behind the Discworld series, has decided to pass his world on to his daughter when he dies. May the Discworld live forever, trundling endlessly through space on the back of a giant turtle.

• Have you seen the first two episodes of BSG: Blood & Chrome? You should! The next webisodes will be available at some point today, if they aren’t already. Great way to waste some time this afternoon!

• Oxford Dictionaries has named a U.S. and U.K. word of the year. Any guesses? Well, the American Word of the Year is. . . GIF. (I know, right?) And the British Word of the Year is. . . omnishambles. Interesting.

• And last, but definitely not least, our sister site Tor.com is looking to hire an in-house publishing liaison. Follow the link for details of the position.

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

• How Many Syllables Was That Again, or “Can I Buy a Vowel?” by Melissa Ann Singer, Senior Editor
• Living in a Real Teenage Dystopia: The Classroom by Isamu Fukui
• The Care and Feeding of a Villain by Joseph Nassise
• On Taking Risks and Being Dead by Sharon Lynn Fisher

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

• Goodreads First Reads: Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson (Ends 11/18)
• November #TorChat Sweepstakes (Ends 11/21)
• A Memory of Light Backpack Sweepstakes (Ends 11/21)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: River Road by Suzanne Johnson (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman (Ends 11/27)
• Steampunk Collection Sweepstakes (Ends 11/30)

Living in a Real Teenage Dystopia: The Classroom

Written by Isamu Fukui

In recent years there has been some discussion about the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and about which model is more relevant to our society today. This discussion can be boiled down to Orwell fearing that we would become slaves to pain while Huxley proposed that we would become slaves to pleasure. A strong argument can be made for the relevance of Huxley—our society is increasingly driven by distraction and entertainment. A desperate news industry, whose original purpose was to educate and inform, has surrendered any claim to that cause in favor of punditry and ratings. Reality is now largely dictated by appearances.

Yet I believe that the nightmare of Orwell is alive in our time. It lives in our classrooms. I know what it is like to have much of my daily life dominated by an autocratic administration led by an egotistic man who neither respects nor represents those in his care. The story of my high school education is a tale of four years under a principal who saw students as unruly creatures who needed to be controlled as tightly as possible; ostensibly for their own good, but really for his. Each year brought new baffling security measures, new restrictions on where and when you could go, punishments for students suspected of exiting the building through the wrong door because their skin color was dark enough to match a figure on a grainy video. That principal has recently been disgraced and displaced for covering up a massive exam cheating scandal. I regret that that was what it took to remove him.

A couple of years ago I made a return visit to that school at the invitation of an old teacher. On the way out I was physically accosted by staff and detained against my will because I still look young and they feared I might be a student cutting class. My experiences beg the question: On what basis should students placidly accept that their handlers know what is best for them? What recourse do they have against injustice? Whatever accountability that exists comes from the top down, not the bottom up.

At the time it was written, Truancy was not intended to advance an agenda. It was nothing more and nothing less than the extended daydream of a frustrated teenager. But in hindsight I now see the world of Truancy as something uniquely authentic—the classroom dystopia viewed through the eyes of a confused and angry denizen. What if the rules of that classroom dominated an entire society? That is the question I had attempted to address at the tender age of fifteen, and in so doing I may have unconsciously sought to expose the fundamental absurdity of modern education.

For the truth is that I don’t believe that high school encouraged independent thought for me; I think it punished it. It didn’t exalt the democratic process; it paraded around a mockery of it with student council elections. It didn’t promote independence and responsibility; it made the former impossible and limited the latter to slavish obedience. Everything the system claimed to do, it actually worked to undermine.

We need not speculate what a dystopia might look like in the here and now. All we have to do is go back to school.

Don’t miss the third and final book in Isamu Fukui’s dystopian Truancy Trilogy, Truancy City, available now from Tor Teen.

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

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More from the November Tor/Forge newsletter:

• How many syllables was that again, or, “Can I buy a vowel?” by Melissa Ann Singer
• The Care and Feeding of a Villain by Joseph Nassise
• On Taking Risks and Being Dead by Sharon Lynn Fisher
• Steampunk Sweepstakes

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.

• Deviant Art user (and Whovian!) crazyfoalrus built his own TARDIS control room in his home. This is absolutely insane, and I desperately want one in my apartment.

• In Clarkesworld Magazine, author Lev AC Rosen has a heartfelt plea for genre fiction to include more queer characters: “I’m not saying every story needs a queer character. Or that it’s a writer’s responsibility to do more than tell a great story. But I do think it’s time for all of us—straight folks included—to think more about where queer characters fit into SFF.”

• Want to tour the United States without ever leaving your couch? Now you can, with this list of 50 young adult books, one for each state.

• Mary Robinette Kowal, the author of Shades of Milk and Honey and Glamour in Glass, is auctioning off a manuscript of her next novel, Without a Summer, for Hurricane Sandy relief. Check it out, and donate to a good cause. A lot of folks up here still need help.

• It’s time to start voting for your favorite books of 2012! Start with the Goodreads Choice Awards, a list of great 2012 titles to choose among, including several Tor titles, like Scalzi’s Redshirts and Card’s Shadows in Flight.

• Also announced are the nominees for RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Awards. In the science fiction category, we have Scalzi’s Redshirts; in fantasy, Tina Connolly’s Ironskin and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass; and in epic fantasy, Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts. Congratulations to all the authors nominated!

• Publishers Weekly and Booklist have also come out with the Best SF/F of 2012 lists, and they share a common book: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird!

• Finally, you can now download free wallpaper of The Gathering Storm ebook cover.

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

• Goodreads First Reads: Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson (Ends 11/18)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: River Road by Suzanne Johnson (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest (Ends 11/27)
• Goodreads First Reads: The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman (Ends 11/27)
• Steampunk Collection Sweepstakes (Ends 11/30)