Download or read book An Informal History of the Hugos written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaged, passionate, and consistently entertaining, An Informal History of the Hugos is a book about the renowned science fiction award for the many who enjoyed Jo Walton's previous collection of writing from Tor.com, the Locus Award-winning What Makes This Book So Great. The Hugo Awards, named after pioneer science-fiction publisher Hugo Gernsback, and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Society, have been presented since 1953. They are widely considered the most prestigious awards in science fiction. Between 2010 and 2013, Jo Walton wrote a series of posts for Tor.com, surveying the Hugo finalists and winners from the award's inception up to the year 2000. Her contention was that each year's full set of finalists generally tells a meaningful story about the state of science fiction at that time. Walton's cheerfully opinionated and vastly well-informed posts provoked valuable conversation among the field's historians. Now these posts, lightly revised, have been gathered into this book, along with a small selection of the comments posted by SF luminaries such as Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, and David G. Hartwell. "A remarkable guided tour through the field—a kind of nonfiction companion to Among Others. It's very good. It's great."—New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing on What Makes This Book So Great At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book What Makes This Book So Great written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As any reader of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series. Among Walton's many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by "mainstream"; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field's many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Or What You Will written by Jo Walton and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Or What You Will is an utterly original novel about how stories are brought forth from Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winning author Jo Walton. He has been too many things to count. He has been a dragon with a boy on his back. He has been a scholar, a warrior, a lover, and a thief. He has been dream and dreamer. He has been a god. But “he” is in fact nothing more than a spark of idea, a character in the mind of Sylvia Harrison, 73, award-winning author of thirty novels over forty years. He has played a part in most of those novels, and in the recesses of her mind, Sylvia has conversed with him for years. But Sylvia won't live forever, any more than any human does. And he's trapped inside her cave of bone, her hollow of skull. When she dies, so will he. Now Sylvia is starting a new novel, a fantasy for adult readers, set in Thalia, the Florence-resembling imaginary city that was the setting for a successful YA trilogy she published decades before. Of course he's got a part in it. But he also has a notion. He thinks he knows how he and Sylvia can step off the wheel of mortality altogether. All he has to do is convince her. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Prize in the Game written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2004-05-16 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the world of Jo Walton's previous novels, The King's Peace and The King's Name, The Prize in the Game takes us to a shining era of dark powers, legendary heroes and passionate loves-all of them ruled by the hand of Fate. When a friendly competition leads to the death of a beloved horse and incurs the wrath of the Horse Goddess, the kingdoms of the island of Tir Isarnagiri are doomed to suffer. As the goddess' curse chases them down the years, four friends destined for kingship-Conal, Emer, Darag, and Ferdia-are forced into conflict as their countries build towards war. Matters are complicated when Emer and Conal fall in love, and dream of escaping together from the machinations of their respective families. But Conal and Ferdia are rivals for the High Kingship of the island, and Conal cannot simply leave. The contest between them will lead to a visionary quest on a mountain sacred to the gods-and terrifying to men. Yet Emer faces an even greater struggle. For when war finally comes, Emer has two choices: perform her duty to the homeland to which she owes everything, or protect the one she loves and be branded a traitor forever. The path she takes will become the stuff of legend, and forever alter the destiny of Tir Isarnagiri. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Tooth and Claw written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-12-12 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fantasy-roman.
Download or read book Farthing written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-08-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One summer weekend in 1949—but not our 1949—the well-connected "Farthing set", a group of upper-crust English families, enjoy a country retreat. Lucy is a minor daughter in one of those families; her parents were both leading figures in the group that overthrew Churchill and negotiated peace with Herr Hitler eight years before. Despite her parents' evident disapproval, Lucy is married—happily—to a London Jew. It was therefore quite a surprise to Lucy when she and her husband David found themselves invited to the retreat. It's even more startling when, on the retreat's first night, a major politician of the Farthing set is found gruesomely murdered, with abundant signs that the killing was ritualistic. It quickly becomes clear to Lucy that she and David were brought to the retreat in order to pin the murder on him. Major political machinations are at stake, including an initiative in Parliament, supported by the Farthing set, to limit the right to vote to university graduates. But whoever's behind the murder, and the frame-up, didn't reckon on the principal investigator from Scotland Yard being a man with very private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts...and looking beyond the obvious. As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out—a way fraught with peril in a darkening world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book My Real Children written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know-what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev. Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War-those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles? Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives...and of how every life means the entire world. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Perhaps the Stars written by Ada Palmer and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 854 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best Writer, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars is the final book of the Hugo Award-shortlisted Terra Ignota series. World Peace turns into global civil war. In the future, the leaders of Hive nations—nations without fixed location—clandestinely committed nefarious deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could only last so long. The comforts of effortless global travel and worldwide abundance may have tempered humanity's darkest inclinations, but conflict remains deeply rooted in the human psyche. All it needed was a catalyst, in form of special little boy to ignite half a millennium of repressed chaos. Now, war spreads throughout the globe, splintering old alliances and awakening sleeping enmities. All transportation systems are in ruins, causing the tyranny of distance to fracture a long-united Earth and threaten to obliterate everything the Hive system built. With the arch-criminal Mycroft nowhere to be found, his successor, Ninth Anonymous, must not only chronicle the discord of war, but attempt to restore order in a world spiraling closer to irreparable ruin. The fate of a broken society hangs in the balance. Is the key to salvation to remain Earth-bound or, perhaps, to start anew throughout the far reaches of the stars? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Just City written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here in the Just City you will become your best selves. You will learn and grow and strive to be excellent." Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future—all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past. The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer's daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager for knowledge, ready to strive to be her best self. The teacher Maia was once Ethel, a young Victorian lady of much learning and few prospects, who prayed to Pallas Athene in an unguarded moment during a trip to Rome—and, in an instant, found herself in the Just City with grey-eyed Athene standing unmistakably before her. Meanwhile, Apollo—stunned by the realization that there are things mortals understand better than he does—has arranged to live a human life, and has come to the City as one of the children. He knows his true identity, and conceals it from his peers. For this lifetime, he is prone to all the troubles of being human. Then, a few years in, Sokrates arrives—the same Sokrates recorded by Plato himself—to ask all the troublesome questions you would expect. What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Lifelode written by Jo Walton and published by Jo Walton. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lifelode is the Mythopoeic Award Winning novel from Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning author Jo Walton. It was published in hardcover in 2009 by NESFA Press and is now available for the first time as an ebook. At its heart, Lifelode is the story of a comfortable manor house family. The four adults of the household are happily polygamous, each fulfilling their ‘lifelode’ or life’s purpose: Ferrand is the lord of the manor, his sweetmate Taveth runs the household, his wife Chayra makes ceramics, and Taveth’s husband Ranal works the farm. Their children are a joyful bunch, running around in the sunshine days of the harvest and wondering what their own lifelodes will be. Their lives changed with the arrival of two visitors to Applekirk: Jankin the scholar and Hanethe, Ferrand’s great grandmother and the former lord of the manor, who has been living for many generations in the East, a place where the gods walk and yeya (magic) is so powerful that those who wield it are not quite human.
Download or read book Ha penny written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-10-02 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1949, eight years after the "Peace with Honor" was negotiated between Great Britain and Nazi Germany by the Farthing Set, England has completed its slide into fascist dicatorship. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb. The brilliant but politically compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists, of staunch King-and- Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen, to murder Britain's Prime Minister and his new ally, Adolf Hitler. Against a background of increasing domestic espionage and the suppression of Jews and homosexuals, an ad-hoc band of idealists and conservatives blackmail the one person they need to complete their plot, an actress who lives for her art and holds the key to the Fuhrer's death. From the ha'penny seats in the theatre to the ha'pennies that cover dead men's eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl around one another, spinning beyond anyone's control. In this brilliant companion to Farthing, Welsh-born World Fantasy Award winner Jo Walton continues her alternate history of an England that could have been, with a novel that is both an homage of the classic detective novels of the thirties and forties, and an allegory of the world we live in today. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The King s Peace written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-08-19 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sulian ap Gwien was only 17 when the Jarnish raiders came. Had she been armed, she could have defeated them. It took six to subdue her--and she will never forgive them. Thus begins the tale of a woman who rises to become the strong right hand to the great king who will reunite his people. (August)
Download or read book Putting the Science in Fiction written by Dan Koboldt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and technology have starring roles in a wide range of genres--science fiction, fantasy, thriller, mystery, and more. Unfortunately, many depictions of technical subjects in literature, film, and television are pure fiction. A basic understanding of biology, physics, engineering, and medicine will help you create more realistic stories that satisfy discerning readers. This book brings together scientists, physicians, engineers, and other experts to help you: • Understand the basic principles of science, technology, and medicine that are frequently featured in fiction. • Avoid common pitfalls and misconceptions to ensure technical accuracy. • Write realistic and compelling scientific elements that will captivate readers. • Brainstorm and develop new science- and technology-based story ideas. Whether writing about mutant monsters, rogue viruses, giant spaceships, or even murders and espionage, Putting the Science in Fiction will have something to help every writer craft better fiction. Putting the Science in Fiction collects articles from "Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasy," Dan Koboldt's popular blog series for authors and fans of speculative fiction (dankoboldt.com/science-in-scifi). Each article discusses an element of sci-fi or fantasy with an expert in that field. Scientists, engineers, medical professionals, and others share their insights in order to debunk the myths, correct the misconceptions, and offer advice on getting the details right.
Download or read book Good Guys written by Steven Brust and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A snarky, irreverent tale of secret magic in the modern world, the first solo standalone novel in two decades from Steven Brust, the New York Times bestselling author of the Vlad Taltos series Donovan was shot by a cop. For jaywalking, supposedly. Actually, for arguing with a cop while black. Four of the nine shots were lethal—or would have been, if their target had been anybody else. The Foundation picked him up, brought him back, and trained him further. “Lethal” turns out to be a relative term when magic is involved. When Marci was fifteen, she levitated a paperweight and threw it at a guy she didn’t like. The Foundation scooped her up for training too. “Hippie chick” Susan got well into her Foundation training before they told her about the magic, but she’s as powerful as Donovan and Marci now. They can teleport themselves thousands of miles, conjure shields that will stop bullets, and read information from the remnants of spells cast by others days before. They all work for the secretive Foundation...for minimum wage. Which is okay, because the Foundation are the good guys. Aren’t they?
Download or read book Have Space Suit Will Travel written by Robert A. Heinlein and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-02-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A high school senior wins a space suit in a soap jingle contest, takes a last walk wearing "Oscar" before cashing him in for college tuition, and suddenly finds himself on a space odyssey.
Download or read book Half A Crown written by Jo Walton and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-12-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1941 the European war ended in the Farthing Peace, a rapprochement between Britain and Nazi Germany. The balls and banquets of Britain's upper class never faltered, while British ships ferried “undesirables” across the Channel to board the cattle cars headed east. Peter Carmichael is commander of the Watch, Britain's distinctly British secret police. It's his job to warn the Prime Minister of treason, to arrest plotters, and to discover Jews. The midnight knock of a Watchman is the most dreaded sound in the realm. Now, in 1960, a global peace conference is convening in London, where Britain, Germany, and Japan will oversee the final partition of the world. Hitler is once again on British soil. So is the long exiled Duke of Windsor - and the rising gangs of “British Power” streetfighters, who consider the Government “soft,” may be the former king's bid to stage a coup d'état. Amidst all this, two of the most unlikely persons in the realm will join forces to oppose the fascists: a debutante whose greatest worry until now has been where to find the right string of pearls, and the Watch Commander himself.
Download or read book The King s Name written by Jo Walton and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The warrior Sulien ap Gwien and her lord King Urdo have finally united the land of Tir Tanagiri into a kingdom ruled by justice under a single code of law. But where many see a hopeful future for the land, others believe they sense the seeds of a new tyranny. Soon Tir Tanagiri faces the blight of civil war, and Sulien ap Gwien must take up arms against former comrades and loved ones, fighting harder and harder to hold on to Urdo's shining dream. Continuing the epic begun in The King's Peace, this new novel brings the story of Sulien ap Gwien to a rousing and moving conclusion. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
